still needing a map for this big place! (Open, NK)

Hysterio walked around the village. He had moved here recently to study to be a ninja but he still sometimes got lost in Tengakure. Becoming a genin had not helped him any with his sense of direction, rather unfortunately.

He saw one of the training towers, people sweating away all over it. He wondered whether it was ever cleaned, it would truly help because all that sweat could not be healthy, he was pretty sure he had seen something akin to algae on the towers once. He looked at that spot closely, it being about 5 feet off of the ground. Nope, it was gone now, someone must have noticed.

Well, it was time for his first training session since he became a genin, the first he could remember at all, frankly. The last while had been a whirlwind to him, everything had happened so quickly, he had trouble remembering what had happened sometimes. When he got home perhaps he would reply to his parents back in his home village.

He walked into the nearest training tower, the one which had seemed to have an algae issue before. He looked up the tower. Man, there was a lot of stuff. He seriously wanted to try the rock climbing wall, only thing being that it seemed that chakra would not be usable on this, if the sign was any indication, and the wall seemed to stretch literally all the way to the top. That would take some serious stamina and strength to pull that off, climbing all the way up. He would give it a shot some time.

He looked at the map of the tower. He had many things he wanted to do, including training any secondary elements he might have. He also wanted to learn a bunch of simpler basic techniques of other types of jutsu beyond the one he himself specialized in, which was genjutsu. Considering that the genjutsu he would be able to learn, were illusions, and nothing more, he would have to supplement them with other attacks. While he did not have any weapons on him, he would still learn some techniques, such as basic weaponry techniques, to give him an avenue for dealing actual damage.

He looked for a way up, having perused the map to his satisfaction. There were the stairs, and the elevator. He was about to take the stairs, when the elevator opened, and a bunch of exhausted looking ninjas fell out of the elevator, quite literally. He got a glimpse inside and saw there was only a button for the ground floor. Seemed that people HAD to do exercise to get to where they wanted to. Not that he did not need the exercise.

He began the long trek to the 33rd floor, which contained a general area for sparring, as well as places to aid in elemental training, importantly including free slips of chakra paper. Nobody stole that stuff simply because doing such was likely to get the SCARY Tenkage, and scary was indeed capitalized, on your tail for wasting supplies. This was aside from that they were not needed in most cases.

Man, there were a ton of floors here, his destination was nowhere near halfway to the top. This was going to take a while. He began dashing up the stairs, taking two at a time. Upon reaching his destination, he was glad to see that it was empty, most ninjas opting for something flashier for their place to train in.

Having arrived at his destination, huffing and puffing for breath, he fell to the floor. He had not trained like that in far too long, he truly was out of shape. He took a slow look around him at the open floor, which was largey empty of structures pertaining to the building itself aside from the occasional pillar. One large area, about 30 meters square, was pretty much a giant sand pit. Another area of similar size was a shallow pond. There were also 3 rooms of similar size, sealed off from the rest of the floor, one of which was empty and apparently intended for training wind element stuff, of low levels. Likewise there were some extremely electrically conductive items in the next sealed, room, and a huge pile of kindling, separated into neat little containers, that presented themselves in the last room.

He looked at the dispensers lined up on one wall. He carefully operated the lever, and collected several slips of chakra sensing paper. Awesome.

If anyone were to enter the floor, they would see him sitting on the ground near one corner, experimenting with his chakra and his newly obtained slips of paper.

***

(total word count: 780)

Mitako stared up at the massive construction known as the Tenkage Training Towers. Or as he liked to call them, the TTT's. (So creative) Anyway he had really had enough of this place, but he was sort of required to train here, as being a good ninja you had to be in good shape.

Noting all the sweaty people, he would soon be transformed into a puddle him self. He hadn't been quite sure what element he was born with and his family had only told him that he born under lightning, something he wanted to confirm for his self. Unfortunately for him, the only chakra cards in the city were in the thirty third floor of the tower. 

This was quite agitating, as stairs were a hindrance, so he took a shortcut. Leaping from rail to rail going up the tower, he would soon find his way up the stairs. The outcome however, was not what he had imagined. He figured that since he had been training with Youta and the other genin, he would be able to do such an athletic feat, he was wrong. Upon reaching the thirty third staircase, he would take a few steps and then collapse his chest heaving.

He was already that walking puddle of sweat mentioned earlier, which made him even more angry, and also disappointed. It also made the voice in his head angry too, luckily the genin had never actually heard it speak any thing intelligable, but he could feel the anger and hate coming from it, almost like it would run rampant if it could. After a few minutes he would start walking toward the element training room, still gasping. He muttered something about the stairs coming straight out of hell. He swung open the door, to his suprise a lone boy was sitting in one of the corners, and appeared to be fiddling with something. 

His first thought was to greet the boy, but he decided to leave him to his business, because he felt rather on edge today, of course, he would help him with anything he needed, so long as the boy made the effort. Mitako then waltzed on through the sand to the sensory cards. He had always thought it weird the way he was able to control sand, but he always thought of it as an interesting thing to do at a party, not once considering that it might be something important. Once he reached the chakra card dispenser, he pulled down the almighty lever, sat at the edge of the sand pit, and began to pump some chakra into that bad boy. 

At first, it began to wrinkle, like it should've according to his family, but then the paper started to take a rough, sandpaper like texture before crumbling away. This was somewhat alarming, but he would take it up with the Tenkage later.

[483 words, also sorry for going off track, I had to start the Bijuu stuff eventually.]

Hysterio heard a series of successive loud sounds, approaching from below. Then they stopped, and then were replaced by huffing and puffing. Slowly, the sounds, accompanied by an occasional drip, indicated someone had stopped at his floor, due to their volume. The huffing and puffing started to move away and Hysterio glanced at the source, which was a rather small boy. Small in many ways, it seemed, though not in heart, as he looked exhausted already, but had ascended so quickly without slowing down, at least as far as Hysterio could tell. That kid had some guts, he deserved respect for not giving up.

Having finished his feeble attempts to analyze the newcomer’s personality, Hysterio looked the kid over, physically. Not in a funny way, just to see what kind of person he was. The other person was a short boy, around a foot shorter than Hysterio himself. Kind of skinny as well. He seemed kind of sluggish for some reason, perhaps it was the way his arms dangled, or the general lack of energy he seemed to exude. Well, appearances could be very deceiving, he could be a jounin already from such an early age, and be far stronger than Hysterio. Besides, there was no point in making enemies needlessly. The slightly sloopy haircut did not help.

Hysterio watched the other boy get some of the chakra training stuff and began practicing with it. Interested to see what might happen, he watched intently. The other boy sat down about 20 meters away, without a word to Hysterio, who appreciated the lack of effort, so to speak, as he HAD been rather intently focused on his own training when the other boy arrived. The other boy began running chakra through, at first it crinkled, and then the slip of paper suddenly crumbled. Looked like he might have the earth element.

Hysterio spent a few moments trying an experiment out. He held one of the slips of paper in his hand, and began running chakra through it. However, as he already knew the earth element, he attempted to avoid running his earth element chakra through the slip of paper, so that any not as dominant or strong elements within him would surface. It took a while for the paper to do anything after he tried removing the earth element, especially since the paper started to crumble at first, but after a while the paper began to split. Interesting, so he had the wind element, huh?

That experiment seemed to be a success. Not wanting to start his next series of actions with an “h”, Hysterio walked over to the other boy. “Say, looks like you are also trying to unlock another element? I might be able to help you, what element are you going for?”

He heavily suspected that the other boy was going to acquire the earth element next but he could not be entirely sure.

*********
(total word count: 780+486=1266/4000 towards second element)
(Ooc: If you are learning the earth element I can help you since I started with it)

Hysterio was right about the low energy part of the other boy. The other boy stared at Hysterio, who shifted slightly unformfortably. He did not prefer being the center of attention even if it was a little hard to avoid when there was only one other person in the room, or in this case, on the floor. He listened to the other boy, taking his glasses off and cleaning them on the bottom of his shirt, wiping the cloth on both sides of the glass, carefully removing the smudges on it from his sweat. He was still a little winded from climbing all 33 of the floors to get here but he was not going to be stuck lying on the floor without doing anything. Thank goodness there were stations everywhere in the training tower for thirsty people to rehydrate themselves.
When the other boy was finished speaking, he put his glasses back on, having cleaned them sufficiently. “I can see the lightning element there. That much was definitely obvious from the way the paper you were holding crinkled up, that is a sign of the Lightning Element. Looks like from the reaction you also have earth element. When I first trained my earth element chakra my paper crumbled too, as it was my dominant chakra nature. It looks like it is one of your secondary elements. If you would like, I can help you learn train that element. At the same time I will be training one of my other elements, wind. Hope you don’t mind. By the way, my name is Hysterio, what is yours?”
Hysterio sat down next to the stranger, wondering whether the other boy would state his own name. He pulled out another slip of the chakra sensing paper, and began running his chakra through it, making sure to not use his earth element chakra. Almost immediately the paper split. It seemed that he needed to use something stronger then to try to split with his wind chakra. Right now it seemed a little easy.

He looked up at the other boy again, if he said anything, Hysterio would listen patiently. Meanwhile he would pull out some regular pieces of paper, normally used for drawing diagrams to aid in jutsu development. These were tough pieces of construction paper. He clamped his hands together over one corner of the paper, and tried running his developing wind chakra between his hands again. When he took one hand away, he saw a series of tears. That was good. That meant he was making progress. He gave it another try. If the other boy said something to him like his name, Hysterio would continue what he was doing, but look up at the speaker most of the time.

*********
(total word count: 1266+459=1725/4000 towards second (wind) element)

Mitako may have passed with a high score, but this kid was likely smarter than him. He wasn't afraid to show it either as he divulged his information on the elements with Mitako. Even if it was common knowledge it hadn't occurred to Mitako, because of the weird texture it gained. Then again, he had never seen a card under the influence of the earth element. He decided he would report on it if anything else strange happened, as it could have been nothing. The part where the boy said, "I can help you learn that element," sparked his interest, at least he wouldn't have to learn it from scratch. Finally, the strangers name was revealed, and in exchange he requested his name. "Mitako," he would half mumble. 

Hysterio appeared to be busy training, so Mitako stood and began walking backwards toward the card dispenser. Talking toward Hysterio, he would say "Sounds good to me, how do you start it out?" Right about now, he would be about three feet from the wall as the words found their way out of his mouth. He turned around, cranking the machine to pump out a few more cards before heading back to the other boy.

[203+776=979/4000, damn dats a long one.]

(if I am helping you that should halve your training needed for learning Earth Element I think)

Hysterio tried running the wind chakra again between his palms, through the paper. Depending on how he concentrated, he either could make a host of small tears in the paper, most not on the edge and instead directly between his hands. This indicated that he was controlling his wind chakra properly, not letting it go every which way. The other way also took a little bit of chakra control, making one big cut in the paper by running his wind chakra through the paper. He had to pay attention though or he would accidentally crumble the paper as he had already done a few times already. He pulled his hands apart. A myriad of cuts in different directions greeted his eyes, as he quickly grabbed the paper to prevent it from falling to the ground, so he could keep checking it out. That was not very good, he needed to focus more on his current task, whatever that was, in this case learning the wind element. He frowned, a little unhappy with his progress.

He got to his feet and walked over to the other boy. “Well, you want to just try running your chakra through the slip of paper. I should mention though, that because you already have lightning element, you probably want to try to avoid running the lightning element chakra, and instead run neutral, normal chakra through that paper instead, since that will give your earth element chakra space to develop instead of being suppressed by the dominant lightning element chakra. I have to do the same thing, as I am primarily of the earth element but apparently have an aptitude for wind element as well. Here, take a look.”

Hysterio held 2 cards out, each held in one of his hands, between the first two fingers. “In my right hand, I will run my normal chakra, all elements included.”

He ran his chakra through his right hand, feeling it course through the card. Slowly, the card crumbled away, a few pieces at a time. The remnants piled up on the ground in small heaps, as Hysterio spoke again. “So I think you can see Earth is my main element. It would be difficult to develop another element if that were the main one every time. Now watch what happens if I purposefully avoid running my Earth element chakra, which I have better control of, through my other piece of paper.”

Dropping his right arm, Hysterio raised his other arm, his left hand holding the second piece of paper at his eye level. He ran his chakra through this second piece of paper, purposefully avoiding using the earth element. This time the paper he was using split cleanly in two, being of the normal chakra paper type as opposed to the thick construction paper he had been using earlier.

“Then my secondary element, apparently Wind, has a chance to show itself. You can think of this all as being similar to a party of sorts. The party is your body. The primary element is the loudest guy in the room. Remove the loud guy by calling the police, and the quieter people, in other words, your weaker elements, the recessive ones, they have a chance to speak up, and you can train them without the other element interfering. Don’t know whether that makes sense or not to you. Anyhow, want to give ti a try?”

Hysterio watched the other boy carefully, curious how he would react, especially to his off key analogy. While he waited, he picked back up his large piece of construction paper, and clamped his hands together with an uncut portion of the paper in between them.

*****
(total word count: 1725+613=2338/4000 towards learning the Wind element)

The other boy appeared to be on top of his game, effectively cutting the paper, but he seemed disappointed with his work so far. Lesson time, the other boy began to go on about suppressing the main elements to let the others grow by using neutral chakra. He then held up a two cards, and let his chakra flow through the one in his right hand. Mitako payed close attention as it crumbled away, colleting in little heaps on the floor. Hysterio then went on to show a demonstration about avoiding the main element, and this time his card split in two. Hysterio then described it in a way Mitako had never heard of, and he began to wonder why this kid wasn't a teacher.

Having mentally taken note of every Hysterio said, Mitako took one of the cards he grabbed earlier and channeled his regular chakra through it, trying to gain some control in manipulating different types of chakra and this time the paper just crinkled, without the weird after effect of last time. He grab another card, now that he could at least tell the difference between lightning type and neutral, and began to pump the clear chakra throught. After a few seconds, the paper began to look like it was going to crumble, but it only got a weird texture to it and crinkled. He took the last card he grabbed and began to supress the lightning chakra to a greater extent, this time, it looked as if his lesser elements had decided to speak up. The card began to crumble away at the tips, but Mitako broke his concentration and the card began to wrinkle. He groaned a bit, because chakra control wasn't his strong suit, as to why he used weapons. He did however, want to learn Ninjutsu eventually, so this would aid him later on. 

He came to the sudden realization he hadn't said a single word to Hysterio, "Would you like anything in return." After Hysterio would respond, he would then walked over to the card dispenser, pump out a few more cards and get to work. 

[354+979=1,333/2000. Dayum, not as long as it seemed.]

Hysterio pulled his hands apart from the paper again and frowned.  The paper was not cut deeply enough at all, it was not cut through even, not even small tears. Maybe he was getting distracted this time and did not cut properly enough, as he WAS trying to help the other boy out at the same time. Hysterio thought of a new exercise that both he and the other boy could try doing.

“Hey, I just had an idea. A lot of this is about chakra control What if we try making the alphabet out of the paper, using our chakra to precisely destroy the paper in specific areas. It would only work with earth and wind though, I think, as the other elements, well, fire requires oxygen and your hands are covering it up, lightning only crinkles, and water makes things soggy. Those are going to be hard to control. But I think I can learn to cut paper in specific ways, and yeah, when you have better control over your earth element, you should go and try crumbling specific areas of paper.”

Hysterio paused, deep in thought, then he saw what the other boy had been up to. “Good to meet you Mitako, it looks like you are getting the hang of things, keep it up!” He would pat the other boy on the back cheerfully and then say “Don’t worry about me, I need to learn some very specific things, unlike most people my aptitude is for genjutsu.”

*****
(total word count: 2338+251=2589/4000 towards learning the Wind element)

Mitako sat down and crossed his legs as Hysterio made the proclamation of an idea. This is yet another thing Mitako wondered why it wasn't taught in the academy, and got to work using the concept. He decided to start with the letter 'O', placing his finger in the middle of the card he began to channel a minute amount of chakra through his finger tips. He over shot it a little, and the hole was larger than he liked it to be. The boy frowned slightly as he began doing the outer edges, ending the corners down and shaping it around the hole. Upon completion, he had it about as thin as it could be without breaking. 

The other boy praised his work, like an art teacher would a student who has potential, but ultimately failed. Mitako also felt bad that he had nothing to give back, but Hysterio was trying to learn genjutsu, something Mitako had only heard about, this being the first person he had met that had any skill for it. (At least as far as he knew.) "Good luck," he said as he grabbed the next card, attempting the letter 'o' once again. Placing the tip of his finger in the center, he started channeling chakra again. This time, he strained to keep it in as much as he could, and luckily a small hole in the middle of the paper crumbled out from the rest of it. He would of course, be paying attention to Hysterio in case he said anything else. 

[258+1,333=1,591]