Masters

Chapter 7

He felt the eyes of ghosts all around him, but he was not afraid. It was a cloudy and moonless night with his only source of light was the Breath Torch, a scepter when blown on produces a stream of fire made from the remains of a small reptile beast called a sneeze dragon, he kept lit by holding below his nose. As the son of a Master, all the stories his father told him desensitized him to the violence of monsters, but he was a student of a school of self-improvement that every Master considered mortals' ultimate weapon against monsters.

It all started when he was nine years old. Nick's mom had taken him out on a picnic in the middle of one of the flower fields within Iaso's forests. Nick had wandered off while chasing a multichromatic butterfly, an extremely rare species whose scales glowed with all the colors of the rainbow. After he was a quarter of a mile away, it happened. A pack of neevils ambushed him, F rank mammal beasts with loose leathery skin, sharp rat-like fangs, beady eyes and curved sloth-like claws on their front, upright paws.

His father always told him that there were many differences between mortals, monsters, and animals. Mortals are highly individualistic, but monsters and animals all shared the same basic psychological principles. Mortals are capable of nearly infinite evolutionary potential within a single generation, but animals take multiple generations to evolve and individual monsters only evolve after being able to survive for long periods. Mortals and animals are both the products of nature, but monsters disrupt it. Mortals are irreplaceable, but animals become irreplaceable only after the last of an individual species dies and each monster will eventually resurrect after dying. But what all living creatures, mortal, animal, monster, and everything in between had in common was Aura.

By the time Nick made it back to the flower field, he had broken every neevil's neck and was completely inconsolable. He refused to leave his room for six days and burst into tears whenever his mother tried to get him to leave, which would drive her to tears as well. On the morning of the seventh day, his father arrived and his mother told him everything that had happened. His father managed to coax him out of his room and back into Iaso's forest.

"Nick, I want to show you something truly incredible." That statement got Nick's attention. Nick's father held his hands in front of himself and in between formed a steam-like mass of pure light that began to turn into a variety of shapes from a running rabbit, a swarm of butterflies, to a coiling snake.

"Nick, this is Aura. The most mysterious thing in the universe. It is both the product of all life and necessary for all life to exist. If dimensions have Aura, then they have the potential to develop incredible things, but Mortals are the most peculiar possessors of Aura because each one of us has the ability to become aware of it and use it in a completely different way." Nick's father's Aura suddenly took on the shape of his mother's favorite kitchen knife and he swept his arm out, sending the knife outward and chopping down five trees at one time to Nick's surprise.

"The method of manipulating one's own Aura is called PK, or Psycho Kinesis, and those that use it are called PK Masters. Like any skill, one's PK becomes stronger and easier to control the more they use it. With PK, every mortal has the potential to become a great hero or a terrible villain.

"Powers are abilities fueled by Aura that are formed by the Master's traits, experiences, and imagination. They can take an infinite number of forms and their Masters can train them to evolve them, develop new applications for them, or learn new ones. Many Masters also like to name the powers they use to better hold onto the necessary visualization to use it. Naturally, Powers used in ways that are larger in scale, highly complicated, or exert more force can consume vast quantities of Aura. Thankfully the more one uses their Aura the more they build the maximum quantity of Aura they can generate, kind of like training strength.