"Clear the mind, accept your character, strengthen the will, attune the body." Pepper muttered to herself something that Tarble called the 'four cornerstones of true strength'. "Clear the mind, accept your character, strengthen the will, attune the body."
Pepper slowly backed away from the tree. Left foot back, toe then heel, plant, right foot back, toe, heel, plant. She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath, arms hanging loosely at her sides as she focused on every sensation running through her body at once.
The slight, almost unnoticeable strain of her legs as they held her entire body weight upright, the blood pumping from her torso to her limbs, and the air flowing into and out of her windpipe.
"Clear the mind… focus…" She murmured to herself.
"Accept your character…" This one was harder. Pepper thought through every single thing she'd said and done in the last three months, since their landing on Celatus.
As much as she loved fighting, training and sparring with her team, Pepper found that her happiest moments were when she was just playing around with her friends. Shoving Zeke's little pop-guns down his throat, having food fights with Tater, arguing with Lynn about cleanliness and hygiene, waking Tarble up a half-hour early, just because it was fun to irritate the guy, then throwing him into Mrs. Hyperion's garden when he tried to go back to sleep.
She liked her friends. For the first time since she was born, Pepper didn't feel hated, or out of place.
It made an ugly feeling well up in the depths of her soul, directed at the entire planet that she'd been born on. Why was a happiness that was so normal on Celatus and Namek completely unknown on Vegeta?
None of that was new information for Pepper, though. She wasn't good at shuffling through all of the conflicts in her brain, but she could accept it all. Even that ugly hatred for her birth world. That was fine by Pepper.
"Strengthen the will, attune the body." Honestly, Pepper didn't totally understand that part. She understood 'strengthen the will,' but she didn't really know how to do that, so she moved on to the final one. 'Attune the body'.
The wording went over Pepper's head, but the way Tarble described it, it basically meant unifying your ki, will, and body. Making them work in perfect harmony.
Pepper found herself moving aimlessly, slowly at first, stretching out her fists, then slowly snapping into a slow side kick, into a back handspring, landing on the palms of her hands, then the balls of her feet. It didn't matter how she moved, so much as the speed, and the fact that she kept moving, feeling the way her ki responded to every little action. Only once she was satisfied that it was flowing perfectly along with her body, exactly as she wanted it, did Pepper speed her movements up.
After hours, or days, maybe, on Namek, it was hard to discern, Pepper found herself moving faster than the eye could normally follow, a blur of red, white, and the black of her hair, a constant whirlwind of motion.
Then, it suddenly stopped, as Pepper's body fell out of her control mid-motion. She went flying three feet through the air, slamming onto the ground, her body skipping once, flying another foot, before landing in a roll that took her another two feet, until she finally stalled in something close to a fetal position, in front of one of the fruit trees, half-conscious from lack of nutrients and sleep as she finally came out of her strange meditative state for the first time in three days.
…
"I finally got it! This one'll really hurt, get ready!"
"You always say that, Zeck, and it never does." Tater replied, carrying a massive rock over his head as he watched the ten year old Celatian point a futuristic-looking rifle at him.
He wasn't exactly concerned. While Zeck was smart, and had recently switched from utilizing light in his guns to plasma-like bullets that burned, it still wasn't enough to actually do anything more than irritate the Saiyans, something that Zeck knew perfectly well.
"Zeck. put the gun down or it'll get shoved up your butt this time!" The gun clattered to the ground immediately, as Tater placed the boulder on the ground with a rumble,
"Pep! The first loser approaches!" Tater's little jeer got him a fruit slamming into his head at the speed of a bullet. Since he'd been unprepared, it knocked him off of his feet. When he got his bearings again, he found Pepper standing above him, her arm full of nearly a dozen fruits.
"...Did you get taller?" He wondered.
"...Don't think I'm there yet. You want a fruit? As a reward?" She asked, extending the offering. Tater's eyes narrowed as he accepted the fruit, which instantly rotted in his hand, covering it with rotten fruit juice. "Ohh, eww!"
As Tater tried to shake the stinky, disgusting juice off of his hand, Pepper smirked in victory, giggling a bit.
"What the- What is this thing?!"
"My test." Pepper replied, cheerily taking a bite out of one of the fruits.
"Huh. Mine was an egg." Tater muttered to himself as Pepper idly offered one of the fruits to Zeck, who shook his head, watching Tater still trying and failing to get the nasty smell juice off of his hand.
"Wonder what the others tests are?"