Capter 1

Four teens have been given a gift of super powers by four different occurrences that should have taken their lives. One burned, one drowned, one fallen, and one murdered. They all come from different places all over the world. They come from Canada, Australia, England, and Ireland. Three boys and one girl.

Tom - Canadian - Drowned - Male - 18

Blaine - Irish - Burned - Female - 19

Nicholas - English - Fallen - Male - 18

Ace - Australian - Murdered - Male - 21

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It is a rather unique story as to how the above mentioned characters found each other and discovered their powers, nothing like the X-Men or other classic superhero stories. These four lucky teens discovered their powers controlled things unimaginable to the normal people that crowded their everyday lives. They could control the very earth we walk on, the air we breathe, the water we drink or the fire that warms our bodies. I call them characters for that is what they are. They are fictional, but for our purposes, they shall live just long enough for me to tell you their extraordinary tale. If you, my faithful reader will hear these stories, I will guarantee you an enjoyable journey through life.

I will begin the individual stories in the order of characters you see above. (A/N: Some of the stories may be a bit weird. I'm trying to write this like the Quentin Tarentino movie Pulp Fiction. Several stories, which would normally be totally unrelated, are all somehow connected through small, timing problems in another. Does that make any sense? If not, then just read all the stories before you pass any judgements.)

Tom - Tidal Wave

Tom had spent most of his eighteen years living with his parents in Calgary, Alberta. There was nothing particularly noticeable about him. He went to high school, had a girlfriend or two, and graduated with above average marks and an acceptance to the University College of London to study English. Tom had a good life and he made his parents proud. His life was one you would call blessed. He had everything he ever needed and his family was never in want of anything.

There was only one thing that Tom still had to learn, how to swim. He had never really bothered taking lessons as he lived right near the centre of Calgary far from any body of water larger than the neighbour's swimming pool.

Only four hours before his plane was supposed to land in England and Tom's new life about to begin something horrible went wrong. The intercom went on and the pilot of the plane made a brief but terrifying announcement. They were going to have to make an emergency landing over water because some sort of obstruction had damaged the fuel line. What he didn't tell the passengers was that if they kept flying towards their destination there was a chance the plane might explode. Immediately, every attendant started helping people get out their life jackets and prepare for a rocky landing. When the plane was low enough six attendants immediately rushed to each emergency exit door, pushed it open, and released the inflatable slides that they would detach and hopefully use as makeshift boats until they were picked up. Many passengers had already begun to panic and one man had even knelt down to pray to god for the salvation of them all. Finally, the flight attendants had everyone in order, and were starting to send the ready passengers down the slides to wait in the water until the 'boats' were made available. Tom followed a woman who was screaming in fright and clutching on to her husband.

Twenty minutes after the evacuation began; everyone was resting safely on the inflatable slides. Now, all they could do was wait and hope that soon they would be found. The pilot had only managed to communicate half of their co-ordinates to England before he had to evacuate the cockpit.

This flight was lucky. The pilot had communicated enough to England for them to be found in less than two hours. There were no casualties. An airplane was brought directly above the floating people and lowered a ladder caring two navy officers with it. Slowly but surely they helped the injured people up the ladder and waited at the bottom while the rest made their way up into the waiting plane. Tom was one of the last to climb up. He was once again following the woman who had been crying all the way out of the first plane.

When Tom had almost reached the top a bitter cold wind swept the area like a frost. It pushed Tom's hands off of the ladder. As he fell he was grabbed by one of the navy officers who had stayed on the plane. Tom had two seconds to get his grip on either the plane or the ladder or he knew he would fall. He tried for the plane but as soon as the officer let go of his hand he slipped and fell into the open water. There was a sickening crack and Tom heard no more. When he awoke, he was lying, face up on a beach in the middle of the night.

Blaine - Fire Starter

Blaine lived alone, as far away from her mother and step-father as she could get. They lived in a disgusting apartment building covered with graffiti and she lived in an only slightly nicer apartment halfway across the city of Dublin, Ireland. She was 19 and had dropped out of school after finishing her 12th year, never bothering to move on to college. Despite her academic failures she had street smarts, and was still intelligent enough to start her own small book store right underneath her apartment. As long as she stayed open only during sunlight hours, and used as little electricity as possible her tiny story called the Raven's Nest would survive.

Blaine had made it a custom to light one solitary candle every day to help her remember the power of one small being in a world to big. She never pictured the candle as a metaphor for herself but it was a reason to light a candle. It stood right beside her on the counter and nobody ever questioned it.

One ordinary day after opening up shop, lighting her candle and turning on her fifteen dollar television set to check the morning news. The announcer came on and spoke briefly about the recent activist attacks on political figures in god knows what country before turning to something a little closer to home as he called it. An Air Canada flight had crash landed into the Atlantic Ocean on its way to London International Airport. Several passengers had received minor injuries and one Calgarian man drowned during the rescue operation.

She was so interested in hearing the entire story that she didn't hear a man approach the counter and place a gun to her right temple. The man quickly robbed her and ran out of the door making sure to take the dusty phone and hastily place a metal chair in front of the door locking it shut. When Blaine finally was sure that the man had left she darted to the door and desperately tried to open it. When it wouldn't budge she started banging on the door pleading for help. What she didn't notice was that while she was banging on the door the man had broken a window and thrown in a simple cherry bomb. Normally, she would have had a chance of survival from the blast but soon the books caught fire. The fire spread and spread surrounding her in the middle of the store.

Someone had heard the blast and had called the fire department upon seeing the blaze. When the fire fighters finally arrived at the store it was too late. A huge section of the store had collapsed and the fire was already out of control. Believing anyone inside would be dead they proceeded to extinguish the flame without any rescue operation. It was too dangerous to send any fighters into the fire anyway.

Blaine had heard a crashing sound in the back storage room and decided to make a run for it. Maybe the building had collapsed and she could manage to find a way out through all the rubble. It was better then standing around while flames licked at her ankles predicting her inevitable end. When she got far enough into the back room she discovered that there was a small whole in the pile of rubble. The hole was small, but large enough for her to squeeze her slight body out through.

Resting on the outside of the burning building Blaine collapsed. When she awoke, it was night and she was still lying on her back behind the pile of dust, rubble and the burnt remains of books that were once her store and home. Turning her head slightly she felt something cold in her left hand. She noticed that she was holding with all her might onto the candle that she had only lit this morning. Somehow, it had survived the blaze.

Nicholas - Earthquake

Nicholas, or Nick as he preferred to be called, lived alone with his father in the streets of London, England and was a volunteer fire fighter at the local fire station. He was still only 18 so he had to wait just one more year before he could become a full fledged fire fighter and take the test.

It was a relatively slow morning at the station. They had to report to one school because a third grader threw a fit and pulled the fire alarm in his classroom. After giving the kid a lecture and billing the parents everyone returned to the station to catch up on the morning news. Apparently a plane had crashed over the Atlantic Ocean. After the news was over, the first shift lunch bell sounded. Nick was part of the first shift meaning he did everything first. He arrived first, ate all three meals first, and was first to go home at the end of the day.

First shift was over and second was just sitting down to their lunches when a phone call was patched through. It was a distress call from Dublin. Apparently, Dublin's fire fighters were mostly busy at a factory fire and weren't able to get to a bookshop in time. They had enough trucks, just not enough people. Since their station was quiet, Dublin called them. In less than an hour Nicholas was fighting a fire in a place he'd never been to.

The fire was calming down substantially and some fighters were able to get a better look at the station. The idea of a rescue operation was far out of the question, the building could collapse at any given time and they couldn't risk it.

All of a sudden, a huge part of the building's back collapsed onto itself, helping to extinguish the flames for a little while. Both the British and Irish fighters took this opportunity to finally destroy the flames. What they didn't know was that the fire had caused the front of the building to weaken to the point of collapse. Nick and three other men were just a little too far under the overhanging balcony when it fell. All four men were buried underneath the building.

The next thing he knew, Nick was lying in a hospital bed, alone. That night, after the nurses had gone home and the lights had been shut off for the night Nick looked over his arms, legs and torso only to discover that there was nothing wrong with him. Not only that, something was nudging him. In the back of his head he felt this, something. Almost like a shout. Purely on instinct, Nick crept out of bed, donned his work clothes that had been left on the chair by the bed and made his way back to the scene of the fire. Nick may have been the third to receive his gifts, but he was the first to use them.

Ace – Hurricane

Ace was working for the summer in London as a part time mortuary clerk. He didn't need any previous experience, or skills. All he did all day was fill out paper work and watch the security cameras flip through the security circuit. Nobody knew the building better then him and he had only been there for two months. He was attending the university for medical school and if he was going to spend the rest of his working life around the dead, well, he might as well get used to the feeling, smell, and emotions that always surround it.

He was a medical student on his year abroad from Australia, and would be going home at the end of the school year. Life wasn't so bad here, he was used to living alone, and his grandfather always kept him well enough off financially. His parents were disgusting alcoholics but ever since he was ten he lived with grandpa anyway.

By now it was already late, the sun had set and Ace was ready to trade off with John, who took the graveyard shift. That job was bad enough at a corner store, why John agreed to do it at a morgue was beyond anybody. Turns out, John had a couple of screws loose in his head which set him off into fits, after the first time he almost assaulted one of the full time staff, he was warned and left alone with a camera always trained at him.

Now things had quieted down but that wasn't the case only an hour ago. Right after watching the news of a plane crash, and a burning, three fire fighters had been taken in. They had been working in Dublin during the fire but since they had died from the collapse, they decided to bring them home where their families could identify them and pick them up for their burials. All three had been killed in the fire that he had just watched on the ten o'clock news. Also, a special unit police officer had come in at about five o'clock asking if he had seen either a boy named Tom or a girl named Blaine. He would have given descriptions but nobody had come in all day so it was pointless.

Suddenly, the revolving doors starting moving causing all of the nearby cameras to swivel suddenly to the front doors. It was only John...wait, who was that man behind him? Ace picked up the telephone and was about to call the police when John put his hand down on the receiver and pointed to the boy, he was maybe only two or three years younger than Ace, and he watched with awe as the boy tried to spit something out, something about a plane crash earlier that morning.

Realization dawned on Ace as to who this boy was; he was the kid from the news, the missing one from Canada! While Ace was listening to the two he didn't notice a third man walk in behind them. This man carried a gun and wasn't pulling any tricks. John and Tom, the kid, ducked but Ace was just a second to late, the man saw his chance and jumped over the counter pointing the gun at his head while warding the other two against the wall.

Before he could do anything else the front doors suddenly began to shake, glass shattered, and in stepped two of the most unlikely people imaginable. Before anything else could happen the gunner let loose a bullet right into Ace's temple.