Elemental, My Dear

Summary: In which Taylor accidentally's a team of parahumans that might never have been humans in the first place and almost gets sued for copyright infringement.

The first time Taylor met a parahuman in the flesh, as far as she knew anyway, was that one time in Summer Camp, when she got super lost in the woods after deciding that it'd be a good idea to get away from the incredibly annoying kids making fun of her by hiding there for a while.

Now, mind you, the woods weren't a very big place, and they weren't very dense, so she wasn't actually even hard to find for anyone even making the slightest effort to track her. Especially because she wasn't exactly leaving everything untouched.

Still, it was rather strange to come to what appeared to be a glade, a circular opening of trees where the canopy opened up enough to let the sun shine through unimpeded. It seemed manmade, and at the very center of it was a gray rock, shaped not unlike a cartoonish rock, the kind that you sat in and somehow managed to be comfortable despite supposedly being a natural formation.

Sitting on it was a very, very tiny girl in a green dress, kicking her legs. She had fairy wings on her back.

Some would've instantly assumed they were seeing a fairy and wondered how much LSD they'd consumed. Taylor, being a parahuman geek in a world of parahumans, just assumed it was a parahuman. "Hi! My name's Taylor!" she said, giving the unknown parahuman a smile.

Let it not go unsaid that substandard parenting had resulted in Taylor not knowing that approaching an unknown parahuman is like approaching an unknown big dog.

So Taylor just walked up to the rock and offered the little fairy girl her hand.

"Hi!" she replied, grabing onto one of Taylor's fingers. "My name's Sylph!"

Fortunately for Taylor, she'd happened to meet a fairly friendly dog that liked getting petted.

As Taylor would discover later that night, from carrying Sylph back to the dorms on her hoodie, she really, REALLY liked getting petted. As a result, Taylor made a great new friend who liked playing with her.

Sylph became Taylor's only friend shortly after, when Emma Barnes decided that she was too cool for Taylor's friendship.

After telling the redhead to go play with her little girlfriend instead, Taylor ran back home and told Sylph, who'd taken to napping a lot of the time in bundles of Taylor's clothes, all about it.

Unfortunately, Taylor had learned over time that Sylph was... well, pretty airheaded. She insisted on keeping her existence a secret, but constantly forgot abou it. She was also supposed to keep her powers a secret, but she also forgot about that all the time. Admittedly, Taylor wasn't exactly complaining about Sylph bringing in warm or cold breezes when the weather was annoying, or insta-drying clothes with wind, or killing mosquitos by slapping them with wind buffets, cooling down food quickly, getting rid of smells...

Okay so they got a lot of utility out of it, maybe complaining about her use of her powers when she was trying to keep them secret was hypocritical.

It was in the middle of that discussion that Daniel Hebert entered into his house, and Sylph accidentally stumbled upon pretty good advice, as both of them relaxed on the bath tub after an annoying day.

"Why not just tell him? I mean your dad's smart, right?"

Taylor had not thought she'd wind up in Arcadia instead of Winslow. She had honestly thought her future was pretty set in stone.

Apparently Arcadia was willing to extend that scholarship to her even late in the game. It seemed that despite the fact that most people thought of others as uncaring monsters, they did actually understand that the Hebert family was pulling itself together after tragedy.

Taylor thought she might have missed Emma, but it only took them meeting up one time, at a Barbeque that the Barnes hosted, to rudely awaken Taylor to the fact that her once bestest friend forever was completely gone, replaced by Grade A Bitch, and not even the funny kind.

It would be okay if she wasn't obviously an outsider at Arcadia. Everyone around her had so much more money than she did. She was the poor kid, the charity case, the one nobody wanted to hang out with because of reasons that really went beyond her.

So Taylor was back to a single friend, even though she had a clean slate at Arcadia.

But it was okay. After all, Sylph had gotten so used to traveling around everywhere with Taylor that it just became second nature to take her everywhere, even to class.

Unfortunately, Sylph was still dumb as a rock, and trying to keep up with high school classes was frying her poor brain.

'Gnomey', as Taylor had been introduced to the short, purple haired parahuman girl, was about as different from Sylph as you could get.

While Sylph was loud and dumb and moved around everywhere and could only sit still when she was napping or playing, Gnome was quiet, intelligent and quite lethargic.

She also liked to make dolls out of mud. Which she could control. They were creepy as fuck, to say the least, but people's reactions to the creepy mud dolls chasing them around in the street?

Those were priceless. That had been the best halloween ever.

They even got to meet the Pelhams from New Wave! They were trick or treating, each of them wearing 'undead' versions of their costumes. Taylor still blushed when she thought of Manpower's massive muscles, easily visible through the ripped shirt he used to simulate having been in a lethal fight. Not even the wound make up could hide the man's Adonis-like physique.

Also it was one of the few times Sylph had been able to walk around. Unsurprisingly, she had wound up finding a costume somehow. She had her ways, she explained. Taylor would have expected something like that movie fairy, the name escaped her, but instead she got herself a white glowing costume and a huge pair of fly-like wings that were hilariously fake, and had been going around shouting 'Hey, Listen!' at people.

Almost late in the night, some guy in a green tunic ran away screaming when he saw her, causing Sylph to laugh.

Gnome had declined a costume, instead just using her cape outfit, which seemed to be the only thing either of the girls wore really. She did not, however, say no to any of the candy.

Later that night would be the first time Gnome slept on a bed.

"I prefer rocks", she'd said, "but this isn't bad."

"I'M ON FIRE!"

Sylph was on fire.

She was also zipping around so fast that she was little more than an orange and green streak of light.

A torrent of water, far larger and more excessive than it had any need to be, crashed upon her.

When Taylor first saw the mermaid that pulled her head out of the water, she looked like she was made out of toothpaste and seafoam. And because of Sylph's influence, she'd accidentally blurted it out. Prompting Sylph to rush in and actually taste the unknown parahuman, running her tongue over that girl's cheek.

"Hm... no, 'Diney tastes like saltwater, not toothpaste!"

Another torrent of water crashed onto Sylph, launching her back to shore.

Her name was Undine, she introduced herself as that at least, and then asked Taylor what was up with the people throwing trash at the lake.

As it turned out, that was illegal, and there was a massive kerfluffle, as per Roy Christner's words, until they wound up going through a bunch of shell companies. Medhall had been caught red handed, tossing medical supplies into the Lake that the summer camp Taylor attended was built next to.

This apparently resulted in the CEO firing like a dozen people and then stepping down. So that was a victory.

On the other hand, Taylor now had another freeloader, as Undine couldn't exactly live in the lake now that there were tons of people going through the effort of cleaning it up because of all the biohazardous waste. Fortunately, Undine could very easily just live in a bucket, and Taylor's dad was entirely too depressed to ask why Taylor kept a large bucket, more like a tub really, in her room.

Also Undine never left a mess, and even helped clean up the leftover mud from whenever Sylph played around in the mud that Gnome was using to make and remake her dolls.

"I'M ON FIRE! AGAIN!"

Sylph was on fire. Again.

This time, however, the fire wasn't put out, instead it just left her body and hit the body of a completely naked girl, who wore only white-line tattoos all over her body and flames licking at her skin.

With Undine, her nakedness hadn't been a problem, she was more like a toothpaste-slime looking person.

Unfortunately, the new arrival, her name being Salamander, was naked as the day she was born and more importantly, had very obvious exposed genitalia underneath the flames that covered it.

Taylor didn't even want to imagine just how she was going to acquire flame retardant underwear.

Fortunately, she could control the flames licking at her skin well enough to cover the important parts, enough to let Taylor calm down to the point that she could introduce herself, and explain that she knew the other three, and was curious over the kind of girl who would call all of their attentions at the same time.

As it turned out, Taylor didn't think she was very special, she was just in the right place at the right time. Sylph insisted Taylor was special, but then admitted it was probably just bias because she liked Taylor. Gnome just said Taylor was fun and didn't nag. Undine admitted that she was there almost entirely due to circumstance but liked Taylor well enough.

Salamander seemed satisfied, and decided to stick around. Mostly she stuck to the basement. Apparently sleeping on coal wasn't a new experience to her.

Fortunately for Taylor, her father was entirely too depressed to really question why their heating bills had gone down so much. Honestly, he was too out of it to really care about how all of their bills had gone down a lot, a great deal of details and damages around the house had been repaired, cleaned and a multitude of other things that he really should have noticed.

"Should I be more sad?"

Taylor frowned.

Emma Barnes had been in an 'accident'.

Apparently she'd been near to a scuffle between a cape and some thugs, and had apparently tried to jump into the fight to defend the cape when the fight turned against them. What was her name? She'd heard it... Shadow Snatcher or something like that? Some violent vigilante.

Undine had gotten good enough at using computers over a week of teaching to research a bit more into the situation out of curiosity.

"Apparently your former friend thought she was... how did Salamander put it..? Yes, hot shit," she said, chuckling lightly. "It says that they got lucky the Protectorate was already looking for Shadow Stalker to arrest her over some of her more brutal assaults."

Taylor frowned. Harder.

"That's bad!" Sylph remarked, with all the intelligence expected from her.

Shrugging in disinterest, Undine went back to playing her strategy game, simulating a naval battle. It was amazing how popular naval battles had become in videogames and fiction in the post-Leviathan world.

Salamander, meanwhile, was outside, in the back yard. She was cooking burgers. She had not been allowed to use her fire control to do so, instead being limited to doing it like a normal person. Beside her was Daniel Ebert.

Salamander was, ultimately, the most human-looking of Taylor's new friends, and so she had been the one chosen to present all four of them as a 'parahuman group' that Taylor had befriended.

It took the man like, a week to get over the fact that she didn't wear clothes, and couldn't because she was permanently on fire.

Salamander was enough of a tomboy that she took pretty well to Taylor's dad, who started treating her like the son he never had.

A resounding slap and a crash brought Taylor's attention to where Gnome and Sylph were playing their own 'game', in which Sylph would flit around Gnome while Gnome would try to slap, squash or crush her. It was good practice for both of them.

Taylor and her four friends lived quite quietly in the suburbs.

Of course, because Taylor is Taylor Hebert, she couldn't quite always avoid trouble.

Fortunately, most people who attacked her, only did so once.

At least she'd discovered that her friends were hard counters to pretty much all the Big Players in the Bay...

Now if only she could finally get the creepers to stop trying to perv on the team she was managing, that'd be great.

It really just went to show how much of a pervert Parian was, really.

"This is the only design I could think of" my ass, Taylor mused, there's no way she put Salamander in fireman-themed lingerie by accident! That shit was copyrighted, and the Playboy magazine's lawyers were hungry beasts!

I know what you're thinking.

No. Taylor never triggered in this story. She met the elemental spirits by complete chance.

The QA is too busy studying these impossible critters (literal embodiments of concepts) from a distance. It might grant Taylor powers related to understanding and better... interfacing with them later in life, but for now it's collecting data.

(Incidentally, the way I see it, the elemental spirits are basically concepts incarnate, which means that when it comes to manipulating their element, they vastly outperform the shards, and the shards aren't willing to waste the energy necessary to fight them on it because they're all operating on a limited quantity of energy while the spirits are not)