[01] City Sector FIGHT

[Ashe]

She didn't really have a choice, she decided while letting out some air. "This is bogus," she complained, setting her bag down on the ground beside her before pulling off her jacket to toss on top of it. Her scarf went with it as she freed her heavier clothing, feeling the cooler breeze passing through her thin clothes. Thankfully, it was at least a sunny day in the City Sector, enough to counteract the breeze, or else Kaden would have a hard time focusing on the task at hand given her light materialed shirt. "But yeah, we don't really have a say in the matter so might as well make the best of it, I guess," she finished, unable to shake her gloom.

Her first reaction was to tie her belongings to something to push people away from thievery, but the big stasis field think made that fairly unnecessary. "How is it that we have a lot of room, anyway? We are surrounded by buildings, street signs, power poles... I think I even see a bus sitting down there." She thought it was a fair question, given that she was pretty sure that any building walls caving in on her would promptly leave her a pile of shattered bones.

He scratched his head, looking around as if it was the first time he really noticed it. "Yeah, well, let's start at the beginning and worry about that later." He popped his neck for a moment before extending his palm out once more, as if holding an apple before him. "First you'll want to know how to even connect with your energy, so... I don't really know how to explain this part," he mentioned sheepishly. "Its almost a feeling that you have to acknowledge."

Her blank stare told him that he was doing a bad job of explaining it.

"Ok, how about this?" His hand began to shimmer a moment before a small but brilliant detonation took place, all contained within the grasp of his palm. Exploding into being, the crystalline orb grew to the size of a baseball as he held it out studying it. "Come here," he motioned.

She reached up and tucked her pink hair back into place behind her ears and stepped forward cautiously, eyeing the orb as if it would disentigrate her in a second. Surprisingly, he met her halfway and reached out suddenly, grabbing her by the wrist. She immediately resisted, pulling away from him before he hurridly apologized. "Hey, calm down, I'm not trying to hurt you," he explained. "I just want to show you something."

"I... I know," she hesitated, thinking back over things. "I just... freaked out a little, sorry. I didn't expect you to grab my arm, not that you are hurting me or anything," she quickly amended.

Even still, he slid his hand up her arm to her hand and pulled it closer to his other hand holding the orb. "Here, I want you to hold your hand over it for a moment." As he placed her hand gently into position, feeling her still slightly resisting, he worried that he was being too forceful. He supposed, on reflection, that he would probably be pretty uncomfortable if he were handling energy for the first time under another's direction as well. If he were anyone else.

His hand left her's as he pulled her other hand up to meet her first. "Hold them together as if you are warming your hands over a fire," he instructed. "Tell me if you notice anything at all."

She seemed to close her eyes for a moment, breathing slowly as her hands crept closer to the ball of luminescense. It took a moment of calm breathing, but her hands felt a strong tingle moving through them. Not enough to bother her, she decided, but definitely a sensation. Her eyes flickered open for a moment and she gasped in surprise as she saw the air itself shimmering around the ball.

Even more, it was like finally spotting the image in one of those 3D Magic Eye pictures. Everything looked the same as it always did, but it almost seemed as if it was in the background, an overlay of sparkling blue moving throughout everything around her. Kaden stepped back a bit in surprise and everything suddenly... vanished. It was weird, because she could still see things clearly, but it was as if a layer of her sight had been removed.

"What's wrong?" she gasped suddenly, looking around before staring back at him.

His hand had let the orb disperse and was resting on his forehead while he stared at her without a word. His brow furrowed in concentration and a small glow appeared over his eyes. His pupils were still visible as they seemed to scan over her from head to toe, but the spectral light emanating from them was haunting. She nervously pulled back into herself for a moment, crossing her arms and putting up her guard, flinching suddenly as he spoke up.

"Sorry about that."

"Were you just undressing me with your eyes?" she asked.

"What?" he jumped, quickly shaking away the question as he mentally heard it just a half second later. "No, sorry, didn't mean to give you that impression. Its just that... Ok, has that ever happened to you before?" he asked vaguely.

"Someone undressing me with their eyes?" she responded dryly.

"No," he answered, shaking his head strongly. "Your eyes. When you opened them while your hands were over my energy, they were all pure blue. Like, no pupils pure blueness," he tried to explain.

"That's..." she began, not really finishing. "When I opened my eyes, I saw everything kinda light up. Like I was looking at things differently, like when you could suddenly see an entirely new color that you've never seen before, and you realized that this color is now embedded into everything, and there are lines of it extending into the air and moving throughout your body like your veins and-"

He held up his hand to interrupt her long running sentence. She was pretty obviously uncomfortable - and a bit freaked out - by his sudden act of putting her on the spot. "Sorry again, I'm not trying to upset you." He pointed up at his eyes and they lit up again. "They did similar to this, but your entire eye just turned blue. Nothing inside, just blue. And light, I guess. But yeah, so while you were looking around, I think what you were seeing was ki energy flowing through things."

"You can see it?" she asked.

"Well, yeah, some people can. I think most people just feel it, or they can see it in short bursts, like when they are charging up an attack of some kind. But I haven't seen too many people that can just focus and see it in the detail that you are saying. Here," he prompted, holding his hand back out and another ball of ki appeared in its palm. "I want you to tell me exactly what you see happening, and not just with this ball, but all around me."

"I..." she began, trying to focus. She narrowed her eyes for a moment, then furrowed her brow, all to the point of giving herself a minor headache. "I don't know," she finally admitted. "I mean, I feel something happening, like some kind of pressure... Its not really strong or overwhelming or anything though. I barely feel it."

"Your eyes are still normal," he pointed out. "Here," he prompted again, stretching his glowing hand out towards her. "Put your hands over this again and this time... Don't focus hard enough to give yourself an anuerism."

Doing as he asked, she placed her palms over his energy and took slow breaths, decide to run through the routine meditative practices that her grandfather had her go through when practicing her martial arts. She tried to shut out everything, closing her eyes once more before opening them to reveal that her world had changed once more.

"There!" he suddenly burst out, nearly shocking her into losing it. "No, no! Hold onto that, just relax!"

It all flickered for a moment, fading in and out like a television with bad reception before the picture sharpened. Tuning in, she began to convey to Kaden what she was seeing. "I don't... really know how to explain it," she started, "but ok. I see the same thing you see when you see steam over a hot bowl of noodles, or when you look out onto the road on a really hot day. A shimmer type effect. Everything around seems to be flowing with it. Its concetrating on entering your body at certain points, I think what the books call chakra points, and I can even somehow see it flowing within you, moving along paths like blood streams."

Cocking her head to the side, she continued as she followed the sights with her eyes. "It then comes out of certain areas on your body, gathering up before spreading like a bluish fog across your skin and muscles. It flows all the way up until it gathers up into your palms. Some of the air itself seems to be getting sucked into the orb as well," she added.

"Excellent!" he expressed. "Try to hold onto that. I think you have the gift of sensing ki like I do. I really can't say for sure, though, since I don't exactly know the theory behind all this. I just kind of do it."

"Alright," she whispered, slightly mesmorized by the beauty of it all.

"So for this next part..." he warned her. He reached out once more with his free hand and turned her palms so that they both faced up instead as if to recieve a gift. Her vision of the ki around her flickered briefly, as if her very ki flow had been interrupted. He quickly moved his free hand over her palms, as if to clean off dust. In doing so, a small layer of ki seemed to trail out over her hands and linger for a moment like a coat of wax. Her vision strengthened once more and he took his other hand and turned it over, suddenly dropping the ball into her hands.

"I want you to hold onto this for me," he said smiling.

Ashe gasped a moment, watching as the ball began to dim in her hands. The part that he found amusing was that the ball seemed to become 'softer', losing its shape a bit and trying to overflow off of her hands and down to the ground. She panicked, trying to mover her palms wildly to either shape it back into an orb like ice cream or to get a hand underneath the other to catch it as it fell.

"You have to remember that this is ki," he coaxed her. "Its not solid, its not even part of this physical world as far as most people will ever interact. You can't try to physically do anything with it," he explained.

The gelatinous ball of amorphous energy finally just flowed all over her hands and dropped to the road, collecting at her feet before dispersing into the air around her again, taking her Sight with her. She slumped to the ground, staring at the place that she had lost it at and frowned. "It didn't leave any sign of it ever being there," she pointed out.

"Well, that's what I meant," he comforted, putting his arm up to squeeze her shoulder in hopes of rubbing the stress out of her. He could understand her getting frustrated. She seemed like she had a lot of potential inside of her, as best as he could See, but she just had no idea how to grasp energy for some reason. "And it might have left some kind of scratch on the ground if either of us had tried to make it harmful, but I deliberately did what I could to make it not."

She looked him in the eye and drew her knees in tightly while wrapping her arms around them. The cool breeze didn't seem to bother her all that much given the sun, and the buildings seemed to be blocking the strongest of it. "How can you even control if its going to hurt someone or not?" she asked. "That seems like it would take a lot of concentration," she pointed out.

"Well..." he mused, leaning back against the stoplight pole behind him and slightly mimicking her position. "I guess the best way to explain it is that it has to do with your intention. Some of this just comes with instinct and if you want to hurt someone, I think that's what your body will naturally do. I'm under the impression that given that our bodies can take this kind of power and use it, then it has to have some kind of subconcious control over it that we might not even know about on our own. I haven't exactly studied up on this stuff much," he admitted, "but I mean, your body does all kinds of things on its own. Your breathing increases when you want to really push yourself, and it sends adrenalyne into your system, helping your muscles push themselves beyond your normal limits. You feel a rush and all kinds of sensations seem to happen."

He looked at her to make sure that she was understanding what he meant. "None of that is something you really control."

Her nod helped him out a bit. "Like when you punch someone. If you are just joking, you don't really think about how hard you are hitting them, yet you still don't tend to hurt them. If you are pissed, you give them a black eye, even if you didn't mean to hit them that hard. But you can still control how hard you want to hit someone too, if you focus on it," she put foward.

"That's true," he acknowledged. "So do you want to try again?"

The mind was willing, but the body just couldn't take it. "I'm actually exhausted, Kaden. I think we'll have to continue at another time," she decided. "I'm just... I don't know why that was so tiring. Maybe I just don't have the strength for it."

"I think you do," he argued. "I think you've got just as much potential inside of you as I do, and that's saying something. I just think that your body hasn't been conditioned to use that pool of energy locked within you. It really does take a toll on you until you have done it for a bit. Using energy is like riding a bike though," he laughed.

"You never forget?"

He shrugged. "Well, that, and you are sore as hell for a while after doing it until you've worked those muscles out a bit. Even if you have the stamina for it."

"Thank you, Kaden," she said suddenly.

"Uh..." he began, surprised a moment as she looked at him seriously. "No problem," he answered.

Climbing to her feet, she found herself suddenly leaning on the pole for support. He rose quickly and got underneath her, helping her sit back down without crashing. "Whoa, you ok?" he asked with concern.

"Yeah... yeah..." she nodded, waving him back away from her until he complied. She leaned against the pole while sitting this time and looked back at him. "I don't think that I can stand long enough to actually fight. So either you'll have to take shots at me sitting here or we'll have to get down with some hardcore action."

His eyes widened. "Ha-hardcore action?"

Smiling, she suddenly extended her hands, one over the other. "Rock, paper, scissors! We'll go one, two, three, then shoot. Ready?"

He grinned.

"Rock, paper, scissors, GO!" they both screamed in unison.