Enter The Sandman

Beta, Strictly for those with skill

Sahve walks forward, still dimly glowing from his previous stunt. He turns around and raises his hand halfway, with his index finger pointing upwards.

"In order to gather Beta, first thing's first. You need to connect with your heart."

"Hold on, hold on" I interrupt. "Connect with our heart? What, do we reach inside our mouths, and look around for our hearts? Do we cut holes into our chest and poke our hearts, or something?" Sahve looks over at me with a really angry looking glare, and says, calmly, "Kiruh. You interrupt me again, and I will reach for your heart myself." I get scared half to death, gulp and stand still quiet in an aching fear. "Now let me continue on..." Sahve says. "In order to connect with your heart, you have to focus all of your attention on attempting to get your heart to beat fast. After you get it beating fast, you have to attempt to slow your heart rate down. In other words, you need complete control of your heart." Sahve looks over at Suiyomi.

"Suiyomi, since i'm pretty sure you already have this down, you should go over there near that tree and just watch some fancy holo shows or something." Sahve reaches in his pocket and pulls out a holo watch, a spare he was keeping. He throws it towards Suiyomi, and Suiyomi catches it without saying a word. He just walks away towards the tree.

"Now, Kiruh. Since Suiyomi already went through this part of training, you will be going at it alone. Then again i'm sure you were already planning on doing training alone since you didn't think you had an element about ten minutes ago." I am still standing in fear with sweat running down my face, afraid to say anything. Sahve looks at me with a confused face, then gets a surprised look at says "Oh! Yeah! Don't worry, as long as you do not interrupt me you can talk you know." I give a small sigh of relief and say,

"So-"

"So-"

....I interrupted him. Sahve gets a very angry look on his face and starts to glow with Beta surrounding him again. I start shaking uncontrollably and try to run for it. The second I turn around I feel Sahve's hand tightly grip my shoulder. I beg "Please Sahve! I didn't come here to get killed by my own teacher! I didn't mean to interrupt you, it was an accident I pro-"

"Doesn't feel so good to get interrupted does it Kiruh?" Sahve interrupts, with a smile on his face. "Don't worry... I was only kidding. I wouldn't go so far over a simple mistake. But it seems I went and scared you out of your little boots. My apologies" Sahve says with the same smile.

"Now go on Kiruh. You were going to say something." Sahve removes his hand from my shoulder keeping on the same smile.

"I uh... well... how will you teach me to... you know... reach my heart?" I say with a small sense of fear in my voice, still shivering slightly from the previous action Sahve attempted.

"Well, you seem to have forgotten what I mentioned earlier! We need to get your heart racing... but it seems like i've already accomplished that." Sahve was right... my heart was racing. And fast. "So that was part of his master plan..." I think to myself.

"Now, in order to calm your heart down, you need to take in a deep breath, and think of calming words."

I take a deep breath and think to myself "Calm down Kiruh... he is your teacher. Your captain. He is on your side. He will... or shouldn't... do anything that could ever harm his student." I take another deep breath. I could feel my heart slowing down.

"Is your heart calming?" Sahve asks.

"It is... I feel a bit relieved" I reply.

"Good, now let's see if you can manually get your heart racing again. This does not mean I will scare you like last time. No... you have to get your heart pumping yourself. By this, I mean you need to control your heart rate."

"But... how can I do that!? Control my heart rate? That seems... impossible!"

"Kiruh, you truly are naive. Impossible? It is obviously simple. All you need to do, is run around. If you run around, and get out of breath, your heart rate increases."

I get a dumb look on my face and say "Heh... I knew that! I was just testing you, you know, to make sure you knew your stuff! You really are worthy of a captain." Sahve just looks at me with a smirk on his face and continues. "After you get your heart rate going, you need to stand completely still, close your eyes, and try to feel out a cold flame pumping from your heart. If you can feel it, you need to grasp the flame and try to send it towards your hand. If you can do this, you can grasp the basics of elemental control.

"Alright!" I scream out. "I'm gonna do this! After this i'm one step closer to my goal! I start to run as fast as I can around in circles. Once i'm out of breath, I can feel my heart rate pumping. I quickly stop and stand still. I close my eyes and attempt to feel out for a cold flame. I feel a sensation, as if something was reaching for me. Something that wanted to get out, but I was having a hard time reaching for it. It felt as if I needed to let this out, or it would be trapped. "This must be the cold flame!" I think to myself. "But I can't see anything! Where is it? I can feel this sensation... and it feels as if i'm going to explode! I need to get this flame out now!" I feel something. But the feeling is dropping. I don't want to loose it. I quickly try to bring it back upwards. This only pushes it further down. "I'm loosing the flame! How do I get it back up!? Wait... I know!" I take deep breaths to slow down my heart rate. I think good thoughts. It feels as if I am grasping it. "I got this! I got this! Okay now lets-"

I let out a loud fart. "Oh... man... it wasn't a flame... it was gas."

Sahve stares in my direction with disgust. "Well well..." Sahve says. "I do believe that your Sand element has a few quirks to it. Seems like you can poison your enemies with toxic gas!"

I can only blush with embarrassment. This is going to take a while.