There was an abandoned meat packing plant just south of town that had never, actually, been abandoned. It closed a good seven years back for a few months, then was bought by a cartoonishly rich 20-something for her equally as cartoonish maid/best friend/sister for a birthday gift. While the outside of the plant had remained the same ever since, picking up a few ghost stories and urban legends along the way, the interior had undergone some rather dramatic changes.

Keying in the lock code, which then revealed a retina scan, Hestia felt a little wistful, not to mention guilty as she entered the huge concrete building. It felt wrong to come here and it felt wrong to have left it alone for the past couple years. In the first place, it was...well, dusty. Which she'd have to deal with soon. How could her secret training base be dusty?! Especially when that base was a gift from someone so important to her?

Past the entryway, Hestia couldn't help but smile softly as she saw the decorations. There were lots and lots of chains, and hooks! All dangling from the ceiling with elegant menace. In one corner was a lovey, if grisly tea set made of small bones and skulls. Ghostly swathes of silk were draped along the walls in exactingly symmetrical rows. After becoming Algol, charming hints of a gothic aesthetic had started to appear right alongside her also wonderful OCD, and it always made Hestia happy to see it. The extra touches really liven things up!

Along one wall was a giant fish tank, that once housed the progeny of one of their cute little high school experiments prior to her neglect. Now it was home to one, very large fish that slowly swam through piles of tiny bones, somehow still alive.

Most of the floor was taken up by a giant chessboard, which Miss Mindy had explained was for their future human chess match, but they'd never gotten around to organizing such a thing. And so the weaponry mounted along the wall had also remained unused. With a fond sigh for their girlish dreams and adventures, Hestia moved on, toward the stairs leading down to the basement.

While the first floor was mostly unused, the basement had seen a lot more action and resulting reconstruction. Most of it was pretty open, there were the typical sandbags, weight benches, even a fighting ring in the center. But the part Hestia loved most, was most proud of, were the figures standing in a neat line along the back wall.

They were humanoid. The smallest was about a head shorter than herself. The tallest was larger than Don Diablos. There were about a dozen in all. At one end the figures were much rougher in design and materials. but as one went down the line, leather replaced burlap, wood replaced hard plastic, roughly human-shaped bags turned into fully articulated dummies that stood on special weighted stands.

In school, Emily Moffat was really only good at two subjects: Home Ec and PE. And if she was a bit whimsical in her methods? Time and again, with the records to show for it - she was very good at physical training.

And so Hestia was too. Before trying to give herself over fully to the Keeping Hand, the martial art of Hestia, she'd still been invested in trying to become stronger through pure force. The ground of the gym was intentionally scattered with things like wooden planks, broken pipes, broom handles, ricks of all types and sizes. Trashcans, crates, and even manhole covers could be found around the place, looking like a mess no one would ever associate with the maid senshi. One corer of the room had an extra partition, creating a small avenue roughly the width of a standard Destiny City alleyway.

Each of the training dummies along the wall had colored spots along its body. At the base of the throat. The back of the neck. The kidneys. The groin. The solar plexus, the armpits, the eyes, right below the ears. Knees, ankles, nose. There was plenty of duct tape along the sand-packed leather sections of the bodies. There were cracks on the wooden sections, placed to represent where the hand would likely hit bone instead of the more forgiving fleshy bits. They were all very well-used and hard hit.

Sitting down in a metal chair near the ring, Hestia rested her chin on her fist and gazed at the training dummies, once again with longing and guilt. Sailor Hestia, the World Keeper of Hestia, should not fight to harm. Sailor Hestia should keep saving people and running away. Doing so diminished the harm on all sides. It gave everyone time and space to think about their actions. To take more positive measures for themselves. Sailor Hestia should use the gentle fighting style of the Keeper's Hand, not the dirty tactics of street fights and wrestling heels that were made to punish people into regretting their actions.

And she'd tried, she had really really tried. But it was almost laughable, how much more successful she was at being Hestian as a powerless civilian. That success felt good! Which made her failures as Hestia all the more confusing, unsettling even. It should be easier to default to the Keeper's Hand in a fight but she almost never did. The moment running away failed, she would always always dive in dirty, fast, and mean and then run away again, because she couldn't trust herself to stay and fight and do something permanent. Something that couldn't be taken back once the regret hit.

Fighting to hurt was, in its horrible truth, what felt good as Hestia. It's what felt right and powerful and in control. Why should she always be holding back? Why should she try to minimize harming people who were already harming other people? Who did that benefit? Who was really winning at the end of the day?

"I don't know what to do," she said softly, turning toward one last dummy sitting in the chair next to hers. It was built to be frailer than the others, and wore a ratty old bathrobe and slippers, a wooden cane across its knees. "What do you think, Mickey?"