I was woken up in the middle of the night by an intense pain in my arm, as if someone had filled it with needles. It thankfully didn't last long, and when I looked, the reason it felt like I'd been stabbed by countless needles was readily apparent. It was because I had been. They'd just come from the inside instead of outside. Neat rows of blue-grey spikes had pierced through my skin, making my patch of arm look like some sort of short-haired pastel hedgehog.

My sleep disturbed, I tossed and turned, trying to drop back off. I only wished there was something I could do about the whole situation. The notes stressed the importance of relaxing. Was that really for my own good, or would getting worked up spoil their experiment? It would be worth a try.

I woke up once more the next morning, finding with alarm that the quilled area of my arm had grown overnight, as had my leathery patch of leg. At least neither itched now, although subtle tingling at several other points around my body suggested I'd have new outbreaks soon. Deciding that if I didn't do something soon, there wouldn't be much of my skin left to save, I tried starting my day in a decidedly unrelaxing manner.

I went for a strenuous workout, starting with push-ups. It quickly became obvious that something else was wrong; normally I struggled to do thirty, but today I made fifty without breaking a sweat. By the time I reached a hundred I was breathing heavily, but still felt I could do more. I switched to sit-ups, squats and the other simple moves that I could do without equipment, and in every case I found I could vastly exceed what I thought I was capable of.

That was not as alarming as having quills burst out of my arm, but was still obviously abnormal. What had they been doping me with to give me that sort of increase in endurance in under a week, when I hadn't even been doing exercise in all that time? Alas, the note about relaxing turned out to be at least partially true; by the time I'd finished, the tingling was noticeably worse. I did my best to ignore it as I ate my breakfast, unwilling to show my captors any weakness. I doubted it would help in the long run, and might even make things worse if they felt they could push me harder, but even in this state, I refused to sacrifice my pride.

By the end of the day, I was starting to think that my little protest workout had been a mistake. There hadn't been any notes complaining about it, but I now had three patches between my two arms, four more on my legs and two on my chest, all burning away with an itch that was far worse than the original one on my back. In the evening, another one had started up on my forehead, and I wasn't at all looking forward to finding what would happen to that one tomorrow.