Back when we were kids, Dante and I used to play Little League. Actually, Dante played Little League while I would cower in the dugout and pray for rain so we wouldn’t have to play. I held the league record for strikeouts and even my team would move closer when I stepped up to the plate. Safe to say, baseball was not my sport – I was more of a battle-robots-and-Legos kind of kid.

But now that I’m “Vibe,” I gotta step up to the plate and improve my “sonic blasting” average. It was frakking awesome kicking butt with Barry and taking out the Rival, but I definitely need to practice my aim. So, I took a page from our Dr. Light days and converted our storehouse into a makeshift battlefield rigged with a bunch of targets so I could practice blasting ‘em.

It was a disaster. Every time a target popped out of nowhere, I jumped into a different trajectory and blasted the walls, the ceiling, and even myself (note: “Stop, Drop, and Roll” really does work when you accidentally set yourself on fire). I was striking out left and right and only managed to hit one target. But then I remembered what Dante used to say to help me out in Little League – fifty percent of hitting is the mechanics of the swing and fifty percent is your mentality. Baseball is really a game of intimidation – it’s a faceoff between the pitcher and the hitter. You gotta have confidence. You also gotta have patience. Dante told me to breathe deeply and count to three before stepping up to the plate, and that would help me tune out the taunts of the opposing team and really focus on what I needed to do – hit the ball. So I extrapolated his wisdom to the fighting of meta-humans and realized that I can’t just blast anything that jumps out at me – I need to focus, aim, and breathe before shooting something.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, right? I went back to the makeshift battlefield with newfound confidence from Dante’s old lessons and this time, I hit more than half of the targets! I upped my blasting average from 0.02 to 0.6 – take that, Babe Ruth! I’ve definitely got room for improvement, but having Dante’s voice in my ear really helped me out. As I test the limits of my newfound powers, there will be plenty of times I strike out. That’s life. Even Barry messes up sometimes, but he always manages to come through in the clutch. I don’t want to cower in the dugout anymore (or, S.T.A.R. Labs) – I want to be a player the team can depend upon. It might take awhile, but practice makes perfect, so I’ll keep working on my form so that next time we’re facing a meta-human, Barry can count on me to have his back.