Distant Elemental

“Move your fat ass Fulgora, we need the couch.”
“I’m not fat,” Fulgora mumbled, her eyes blinking slowly as she rose into a sitting position. She rubbed away the sleep in her eyes before noticing the present situation.
“What’s he doing here?”
“Oh hi Fulgora,” replied Harrison with a grin.
“Hi. Guess you guys won’t be going to the movie.” Without waiting for a reply, Fulgora stood up and left the room.
Andromeda, Nayru and Blaise all sat down on the couch, offering Harrison an armchair close by. Sunlight peered in through a window nearby, reverberating from a million dust particles that floated through the air. Nova was standing in silence by the door leading to the hallway, his face masked in shadow as well as material. His turquoise flashed in the direction of Harrison, taking in his appearance. Harrison hadn’t seemed to have noticed Nova at all.
“Isn’t this much more comfortable?” smiled Nayru. She heard Blaise grumble something next to her but couldn’t make out the words. Andromeda and Nayru both grinned in triumph.
“So you guys all live here?” asked Harrison.
“We’re the ones asking you the questions, now what did you see yesterday?” asked Blaise.
“What I told the officer. I saw some metal monster thing, but only got a glimpse before I walked off to catch a bus.”
“Liar,” hissed Blaise. Nayru put a hand on his shoulder and he looked down.
“I knew Fulgora was a lightning sub, but I couldn’t be sure about the rest of you,” said Harrison slowly, ruffling his brown hair with one hand. “I could always sense her power, and that was confirmed when she knocked my arm away after I fiddled with one of our experiments earlier.”
“It’s funny you say sub,” laughed Andromeda.
Harrison’s blue eyes widened. “You don’t mean to say...?”
“What do you think I mean?” she asked. As she spoke, her eyes slowly transformed into miniature galaxies of swirling colours that were enough to transfix the weary observer.
“You guys... you guys aren’t the real elementals are you? You’re not sub-elementals, but the top ones?”
“That’s right,” said Blaise. As Harrison watched, Blaise’s eyes once more resembled molten lava and Nayru’s flashed to a dappled forest pool.
“Does that mean Fulgora is the ruler of my element?”
All three nodded at him. Andromeda, who was closest to the door, heard Nova shift slightly. Harrison seemed to notice this, but when he looked over, all he saw was the shadow of the door. He looked back at the three sitting on the couch.
“Okay, let me guess. You’re water,” he said, pointing at Nayru, “and you’re obviously fire,” he said to Blaise, “but you...” he said, his eyes finding Andromeda’s, “your eyes look like galaxies. Is that some sort of space power?”
“I’m the Cosmic Element,” she replied.
“Cool. Does that mean you shoot stars or something?”
“Not really. I mostly defy the laws of physics.”
“Such as?”
Andromeda smiled. “Gravity,” was her reply, before she leapt off the couch and floated in the air in front of him.
“Whoa, cool!” said Harrison. Andromeda blushed and sat back down again.
“Okay, so which one of you is the strongest?” he asked.
“Uhh... probably Blaise?” said Andromeda.
“Oh hell yeah,” he replied, flexing his muscles till Nayru squirted him in the face with water.
“You may be powerful, but water beats fire any day.” She gave him a grin.
“Wait, so... all of you have different effects on one another? So there’s no-one who would be the most powerful?”
“Nope,” said Blaise as he wiped the water off his face, “we all have our weaknesses.”

Fulgora walked in wearing jeans and a t-shirt, gave a small yawn and slipped on a shoulder bag before stopping near the elementals and looking around.
“Where’s Nova?” she asked them.
“I’m here,” he replied in his deep voice, coming out from the shadows behind her.
“Whoa,” said Harrison, “I didn’t know you were there. You should have said something!” He appeared quite startled. Nova seemed to ignore his remark.
“Well,” Fulgora said, giving the three of them an uncertain glance, “I’m going to the movies. Coming, Nova?”
Nova appeared surprised. “I thought we had cancelled that.”
“I never said I wasn’t going, I only realised that no-one else was in the position to go.”
“We’ll go!” cried Nayru at once.
“Aren’t you interrogating Harrison?”
“I’m right here,” he said, but she ignored him.
“Oh, well he knew about you because you’re his element, and he guessed about the rest of us. See? We’ve already interrogated him,” Nayru responded with a bright smile.
“Ah,” said Fulgora, “well I have a few questions you can continue with.” She turned to face him.
“How did you sneak away from the teachers when the explosion went off, and why? How did you know where the monster was and get a glimpse of it without knowing where we were and seeing us using our powers? Does that mean you followed us, and if so, why? If you were previously suspicious of me, did that not make you question who I was sitting with? How do we know you don’t work for an agency, or haven’t told others of our powers?” At that, Fulgora gave the other three a significant glance before leaving the house with a smiling Nova in tow.

Autumn called up a vine, which twirled around her arm. She smiled, and placed a hand against the trunk of a young sapling next to her. Around her, the forest crawled slowly to the sunlight, flowers blooming upwards and leaves stretching to reach the heavens. Autumn could feel the life of the tree throbbing next to her, like eddy currents pulsing through it. She closed her eyes and concentrated, and as the tree moved and the leaves rustled above her, so she heard the speech the trees whispered amongst themselves. She sighed, relishing in their ancient wisdom. The trees seemed to sigh with her as their leaves picked up in tempo, and a sudden alarm from the trees made her pause. She listened as news travelled from other trees to reach her, then she let out a growl and rolled her eyes skyward. The wind and the rustling intensified, and in seconds, Skye had reached her.
“Hello!” Skye called in her cheerful tone.
“Hi Skye,” Autumn replied, trying hard to sound friendly. She didn’t appreciate her peace being interrupted.
“Hey, you’ll never guess what I’ve heard!”
“What, have you been eavesdropping on people?” frowned Autumn.
“Well, how else am I supposed to learn things? Anyway, that is so not the point! The thing is, I heard these guys talking, right, and they sounded like they knew about elementals and stuff like that! So I kept listening and I heard them mention that their staff had been moved because of the latest explosion! So the guy he was talking to was all like oh where did they move to? And the other guys was like oh its this secret place far away across the ocean. It’s on an island!”
“Okay,” said Autumn, “so...? Do you have a point?”
“Well we’ve got to go and blow it up of course!”
“We what?”
“Yeah! Didn’t we blow up the last one?”
“No, we collapsed part of the wall, and a monster came and finished it off. Why would we blow it up? We would kill heaps of innocent people.”
“Oh. Well we’ve gotta do something! They’re hurting people and all that. I just feel that this is so right, you know?”
Autumn sighed once more and absentmindedly relinquished her hold on the vine around her that fell to the floor. Noticing this, she picked it up and twined it around the nearest tree. She then turned back to Skye.
“Alright, I see what you mean, but where is this island and what exactly do you want to do? We’ll have to tell the others.”

Hello everyone!
“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Harrison.
“That was Skye,” replied Blaise in an exasperated tone as she bounded in the door.
I can feel your emotions, you know. It’s not very nice.
“Sorry Skye,” he murmured in reply.
Autumn walked in behind her, black hair bouncing about her face. She stopped when she spotted Harrison, and then gave Andromeda a massive grin. Harrison glanced between the two, apparently confused, and Andromeda looked down at her feet, hiding her face behind her russet hair. Autumn cleared her throat.
“Hi Harrison,” she said as though nothing had happened.
“Hi Autumn,” he replied with a smile.
“So back to the previous question, why did you follow us?” asked Nayru. Autumn and Skye sat down; everyone was slumped into arm chairs and generally comfortable in their roomy lounge. The sunlight filtering through the curtains was tinged orange.
“Alright yes I did follow you, and it’s because I had been suspicious of you. My suspicions were confirmed when you disappeared right in front of my eyes. Don’t worry- I’m pretty sure I was the only one who saw you all disappear. That blast was quite something. I ran back to the school and saw you going out onto the road and confronting some metal thing, but I decided to leave then. You guys seemed to be handling it pretty well yourselves,” he laughed.
“Okay, and what were the other questions? I think the only important one was: do you belong to an agency?” asked Nayru.
“I don’t rightly know what you mean,” replied Harrison, “when you say ‘agency’, do you mean some sort of group of people with powers? Because I don’t know of anyone else with powers. I know others have them, but I don’t know who they are other than you.”
“Well that’s fine, then,” said Andromeda.

BOOM

The ground shook. Tables fell. Lights flickered to black. The final rays of golden light flickered through the window as the sun said goodnight, and a sudden rush of intertwining shadows brought about dark. Clouds obscured the sky, the stars and the moon. A wild howl chorused through the night.

The elementals rushed to the window and peered out into the oncoming black. A settling shape of shadow stirred somewhere in the grey street beyond.