Elemental School of Hard Knocks

Chapter 2: First Look at the Spirit Realm

Kyra blinked back her tears as the piercing light of the clearing that she stepped into assaulted her eyeballs. Although it had been the middle of the night back on Earth, it was just her luck that the moment she would slip through the portal, it would sync to what appeared to be the middle of the day over here in the Spirit Realm.

Kyra cursed the erratic time dilation between the two dimensions that made it impossible to calculate exactly what time of day you would come through. As she tried to focus her vision, the first impression she got of this new land, was the uncertain feeling of her own weight. In a nutshell, she felt both incredibly light, and yet very solidly planted into the ground at the same time. Although she had been warned of the odd sensation, it was still fairly unnerving.

What more proof did she need that she was no longer on earth, than that the feel of gravity was no longer the same as what she had known, and had taken for granted her whole life.

Before she even had the time to get more of her bearings than that, Kyra heard a faint hissing as her bleary eyes made out a dark shadow flying towards her face. Her right palm came up and over from the left, diverting its trajectory as her left palm came up to smack into the ribs of what turned out to be a small cat like creature. It flipped over once in the air before landing, as she turned to face it once more and lowered herself into a battle stance.

Her right to practise Chen Tai Chi was the only argument Kyra had ever seen her mother win against her father. A feat that she had resented at the time, as she didn't even want to learn how to fight in any kind of way. But she had gone, if for no other reason than that she refused to give her father the satisfaction of seeing her mother's efforts go to waste.

As it turned out, her mother was right, because her ability to defend herself right now was the only thing that had given her the courage to leave Earth, to find new possibilities in this foreign place.

As such, Kyra refused to embarrass her mothers' memory by being knocked back into the portal mere moments after she had stepped through. And by some puny little Shadow-cat no less!

One thing was for certain though, she had changed her mind about her previous resentment of the time. With the sun high overhead, the Shadow-cat had no shadows to travel through. Thus its most frightening ability to slip through space was sealed, and it had to face her head on just like any other physical entity.

The Shadow-cat seemed to come to this realisation as well, keeping a safe distance as it hissed at her again.

The cat and the human stayed like this for several minutes as they each tried to find a weakness to exploit. Kyra especially, was trying to figure out a way to move the fight away from the portal, to force the Shadow-cat to back off, and to accomplish both things without endangering Ihaka in the process.

She thought of the knife hilt that was sticking out of the gap between the small of her back and her backpack. She had been training with the army knife in the last 10 months since she had joined the program, but she was far from proficient with it yet. Not to mention, she had also been warned against showing undo violence towards the smaller and less dangerous creatures. As doing so generally meant that the bigger and badder ones would feel the need to make their presence felt.

Finding out first hand exactly what her instructors had meant by that was so not something that Kyra needed right now.

Before Kyra could fully make up her mind on what to do, the Shadow-cat gave one more hiss in her direction before sprinting off towards the edge of the clearing.

Feeling both relieved and somewhat deflated by the anticlimactic fight, Kyra waited for a few moments before deciding that it probably wasn't going to come back, and lifted herself up out of her stance.

As she did, Kyra was able to take a good look around herself for the first time. Every colour that she saw, was far more vivid than most naturally occurring plants on Earth. The grass type plants that blanketed the clearing were a soft amethyst, as were the leaves of all the trees that she could see from where she was.

A slight tugging at her ankle snapped her out of her daze. Giving a tiny scream, she jumped nearly a foot in the air.

Looking down, she realised that she had been standing on the stem of a flower, and that the grass around it had been trying to tug her off. Kyra, however, barely had the where-with-all to mumble an absent-minded apology as her fright had woken Ihaka.

"I'm sorry to you too, baby. Shhh, go back to sleep. I'm sorry. Go back to sleep." She mumbled softly into his ear as she patted his back, and gently rocked him in her arms. Her face was flaming as she remembered a lecture about the different grasses in the Spirit Realm, and how every single one of them could move to a certain extent. She wasn't too worried about what she had been standing on, as the lecturer had also mentioned that none of the grasses surrounding the portals could exert more strength then what most humans could do with their pinkies. She was just mortified about her own reaction. Of how caught up she had been in taking in the scenery, that she had neglected to pay attention to her immediate surroundings.

Ihaka was not going back to sleep. Now that he was awake he seemed to have noticed their odd surroundings. Though he was not old enough to really understand or panic about it, it seemed that the odd sensation of the gravity here was enough to confuse him. Screwing up his face, he pulled up his feet and grabbed onto Kyra's hair with his hands. Tears filled his eyes as he seemed to search Kyra's face for answers and did his best to climb up her body.

Careful to avoid any of the flowers, Kyra placed her pack onto the grass and rummaged around for one of the milk fruits that she had packed, along with Ihaka's bowl and spoon.

In order to help the people in the programs begin to acclimatise their bodies to the Spirit Realm before they went, the military and researchers, who had had early access to the portal, had begun to send back food that they could eat.

The Milkfruit tree was a fruit that was found to be fairly abundant in the Spirit Realm, as many of the indigenous creatures would pick the fruit and bring it back to their young. Preliminary research had found that it should be safe for babies to eat. So when the instructors had come to Kyra and had asked if she wanted to try giving it to Ihaka, Kyra, who had been worrying about what she would feed him when they got there, had agreed to give it a try.

They had been taken to the most state-of-the-art medical facility for babies in New Zealand, and had spent six weeks there as they slowly introduced the fruit to his diet, then eventually switched over to it completely.

All the tests that the doctors could do had proven that the fruit had immense benefits for an infant's brain development, as well as their immune system, and just their development in general. Large scale trials had begun shortly after Ihaka had proven the viability of the fruit, and there was even talk of making it into a product available to the public in a year or so.

The milk fruit had a thin red scaly skin that could be peeled back fairly easily to reveal its green pearly insides.

Ihaka wasn't paying as much attention as usual as she mashed up his late supper/lunch into his bowl. Instead, he was fussing and pulling at the straps holding him in place. Kyra wasn't about to let him down to explore however, and after mashing up the fruit into his bowl, she tried getting him to eat.

Ihaka couldn't seem to decide whether or not he was happy that he was getting fed, or still upset about the strangeness of the new environment. As such, he made a comical picture as he switched back and forth between reaching for the spoon saying "Nom, nom.", and squealing and squirming as he generally made his dissatisfaction felt. Kyra tried to keep a straight face as she murmured reassurances to him and finished feeding him all of the solid bits in his bowl. By that time he had calmed down somewhat, and Kyra poured the rest of what was left, which was a considerable amount of liquid, into his bottle.

The juice of the milk fruit, despite its name, did not look like milk at all. It was a thick liquid, light green in colour, and had a pearly iridescence to it that if seen on earth, would have made you assume that it had mica or some other similar shiny substance mixed into it.

Ihaka finally settled down as he grabbed onto the large handles, and eagerly started sucking on his bottle.

Kyra wiped the remaining tears from his cheeks. "Alright, little man. First goal of making it in this place. Make it to the human base ... I swear that rhyme was unintentional."