Taylor relaxed in her bed, with the window and curtain open and the sun shining down on her. She didn't know why, but she felt far better in the sun ever since The Locker. Maybe it was a reaction to being locked in a dark, dank locker for several hours, but she found delight in the sun that made her relax and feel strong and she wouldn't question why.
Humming happily, she sat up and decided to go for a walk. She still had several hours until she had to start studying since she had been pulled out of Winslow by a very angry Danny Hebert after the administration at Winslow pulled yet another ostrich impersonation and buried their heads in the sand, pretending that nothing had happened to her.
'Ha. Eat it, Emma. I'm away from you and you can't do anything about it!' the bespectacled teen thought with a snort.
Taylor got ready to go out, grabbed the pepper spray that her Dad had bought her for self-protection and headed out to do a bit of window-shopping at the Broadwalk.
As she headed down the street, Taylor grimaced when she saw the Empire 88 and ABB gang tags at the foot of the street. This wasn't good. Whenever the E88 and the ABB started cross-tagging a street, it was only a matter of time before gang fights broke out between the low level thugs of each gang. It would then escalate until Oni Lee was called in on the ABB's side, which would make the E88 dispatch Purity or the Fenja/Menja duo to counter him. The next thing you knew, Lung was stomping down the street.
'I'd better tell Dad when he gets home.' She though uneasily as she walked past the tags.
Once she got to the Broadwalk, Taylor relaxed a bit. The Broadwalk was the civilised shopping area in Brockton Bay and was one of the few places she could go without getting an overprotective Dad chaperoning her everywhere.
After checking out the clothes (way too expensive and revealing), she bought herself lunch at Fugly Bob's before wandering over to the brick-a-brac shops and browsed them to see if there was anything cheap she could buy to replace the increasingly worn items at home.
She did manage to score a new cookbook at a second-hand bookshop, but nothing else was worth her money. At least she could cook something nice for her dad in the next few months.
On her way back home, Taylor noticed she was feeling…bloated, for lack of a better description. Not as in trapped gas, but something else. Something more troubling. Hurrying now, she got to her house quickly. Shutting the front door behind her, she slid to the floor as the sensation of being ready to burst started to come from within her.
'Wh…what's going on?!' Taylor thought in fright. She scrambled to her feet and looked around in a panic. No sign of her dad, which was good.
Making her way to the basement, so she'd do no damage to the house if she, for whatever reason, spontaneously combusted as it felt like she was going to do, Taylor tried to figure out what the heck was going on here. This had all started when she had gone outside for the first time since getting out of the hospital. Could her recent attraction to sunlight have anything to do with this?
A thought occurred to her, but she kept it locked up in case it proved to be wrong. Raising one arm and pointing it at the empty back wall of the basement, she reached inside of herself and pushed some of that pressure out of her via her hand.
A shining golden yellow beam shot from her hand and pierced the wall. Taylor yelped in shock and cut off the power to the beam, making it disappear at once. She stared blankly at the wall, which was black and charred around the point of impact, and absently tried to figure out how to conceal the signs of her first use of her powers.
Powers. She was a Parahuman.
A grin crossed Taylor's face as she muttered, "Well then…time to figure out what I can do…elsewhere."
Two Weeks Later
Taylor grinned as she blasted a ship's hull from the inside. The Boat Graveyard was a hell of a useful place to practice flashy skills in secret, and boy did she have a flashy skillset.
As far as she could tell, Taylor possessed the power to control solar energy. Just be having her bare skin exposed to the sunlight, even just her head and hands, she absorbed power like a sponge. The more she stored, the more she could use. If she didn't use the stored energy for about a week, it would start to demand to be used, resulting in that bloated feeling from two weeks ago.
She could, if she wanted, increase her reserves by 'refining' the solar energy she stored within herself, discharging the rest from her mouth. The downside was that the discharged excess energy was like a flamethrower on steroids, to the point that it melted through steel as if it was butter. She figured that the fact it didn't hurt her coming out meant that either she was immune to her own power or that she was immune to fire-type abilities.
The hand beam she had pulled off in her basement was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to her offensive abilities. She could surround herself in an aura of solar energy that disguised her, protected her and empowered her. While it was active, she was stronger and more resilient to damage and, as it was a blinding golden yellow colour, functioned as a very good disguise.
She still wore a balaclava, just in case.
A recent development had shown her that she had the ability to see into the ultraviolet range and even project UV light from her eyes. It did make killing insects rather easy once she figured out how to alter the spectrum that her eyes emitted. She could also see where blood and other bodily fluids had been spilled, which made walking down the streets where there had been a lot of gang-related violence somewhat queasy.
The only other thing she had discovered was that she could alter her gravity, allowing her to fly, which was seriously cool. She could even add extra weight to her punches and kicks using it, but that seemed to be the limit with gravity.
The most recent discovery was that she could covert her solar energy into a beam of healing energy. Taylor had fired it at a cat by mistake and been startled to see that the torn ear that it had had was restored almost instantly before the feline fled.
Taylor wanted to be a hero, so the fact she could heal was good. Healers were always in demand; Panacea was a good example as she spent almost every waking hour outside of school at the hospitals in Brockton bay, and the list of patients never ended.
Still, she had no idea if her abilities worked on herself. There was only one way to find out, so it was with great reluctance that she used a knife to cut the palm of her hand and then directed her healing ray at it. Much to her relief, the cut healed, shrank and scarred over almost instantly, disappearing entirely after a few more seconds of application.
Disposing of the knife, an old one she had found in one of the ship's cabins, Taylor now had two things to consider; namely what she should make her costume look like and what her name should be.
Running through her memory, there was one Cape, a villain, who had a name to do with the sun. She was called Sundancer, if memory served her correctly. She wanted to avoid sounding like that one then.
Fortunately enough, having a mother as an English Professor had a few advantages, a large vocabulary being among them. Taylor flipped through a book that talked about the sun and its effect on the Earth until she caught sight of a description of the area affected by the Sun's heat, the heliosphere.
Heliosphere…yeah, that sounded good.
It was as Taylor was walking home that she heard the sounds of a gang fight…right at the end of her street. Oh no. No way in hell was she going to let these gangbangers and skinheads tear up her neighbourhood.
Moving into an alley, she pulled her balaclava back over her head and her gloves onto her hands. Taylor 'felt' for the energy within her and felt that she had more than enough to take care of a bunch of gangers. She just hoped that none of the Empire's Capes showed up.
Clenching her fists, Taylor engaged her solar aura and Heliosphere soared into the skies on her first sortie as a Cape.
3rd Person Perspective
The ten gangers from the ABB had been jeering and taunting the ten thugs of the Empire 88 for a good ten minutes now and things were getting towards a good old fashioned street brawl. Members of the Empire were fitting knuckledusters and pulling out clubs, while the ABB were mostly unarmed, but the self-appointed leader of the group had a katana.
"Hold it!" a female voice shouted just before the first step was taken to start the fight.
All eyes widened as a figure clad in golden light floated above the street. Whoever it was, she was tall and was too bright to look at properly. There was one thing that the Empire thugs knew.
"Who the fuck are you?! You ain't Purity!" one shouted.
"Give the man a prize." The figure stated dryly, "Obviously I'm not Purity. The name's Heliosphere, and you boys caught my attention. Why don't you all mosey on elsewhere and not disturb the peace of this neighbourhood any more than you already have. If you do not, there will be…trouble."
There was silence as the ABB and E88 thugs eyed each other and Heliosphere before they all turned on the hero as one.
"I guess I should have expected this." Heliosphere sighed, "Too smart to be merchants, too dumb to know when to run away."
With a chorus of shouts of challenge, the two gangs charged at the floating Cape with their weapons raised. Heliosphere countered by blasting them with golden yellow rays that sent the first half-a-dozen guys flying into unconsciousness and the ground.
The ABB guy with the sword slashed at her, having used the front rank as decoys, but the blade couldn't pierce the radiance around her body. The flying Cape backhanded him, sending the sword flying and him knocked out.
"Bitch!" one man howled and unleashed a barrage of punches. Clearly he had experience with martial arts, but it did him no good as she didn't even flinch. He got a blast to the gut in reply that took him out of the fight.
The rest of the thugs and gangbangers saw how the tide was going and tried to run, but Heliosphere blasted them with her yellow rays, knocking them out.
"Whew…that took way more power than I was anticipating." Heliosphere muttered as she landed again, "Better tie up these guys and call this in."
As luck would have it, one guy had several coils of rope in his backpack, so she hogtied them all, using her energy rays set to a higher intensity to neatly cut it. She piled them up in two separate piled before grabbing a cell phone she had confiscated from one of the Empire thugs and dialled 911.
After telling the operator where several gangbangers and thugs could be found, including a pile of weaponry that was definitely illegal, she hung up and sped away to around the block and another alley where she shed her aura and balaclava to become Taylor Hebert once again.
"I'd better get home before Dad hears about the fight." she muttered. Slipping out of the alley, she started back to her street with a spring in her step. She had taken the first step on the path of becoming a hero AND she had stopped the two largest gangs in Brockton Bay from turning her street into a battleground.
Life was good.
I like this one. Not sure what you guys will think of it. And to The Halfa Wannabe, you can borrow my idea for Alexandrite. I would have told you in a PM, but you have them disabled.
Shaker: 7 (Is able to absorb sunlight to power her abilities. Is able to project two different types of aura; one made of solar energy and one made of plasma. Is able to negate all types of radiation, and convert that radiation into solar energy, which is then absorbed. The radius of effect is unknown.)
Blaster: 6 (Is able to fire solar beams with varying intensities. Is able to unleash a strong breath attack made from unrefined solar energy that can melt steel at the slightest touch. Is able to fire beams of healing energy. Can fire beams of UV light at varying intensity from her eyes.)
Mover: 3 (Is able to manipulate her gravity, allowing flight and increased running speed.)
Striker: 5 (Is able to add solar/plasma energy to her attacks, vastly increasing her attack power. Is able to manipulate gravity to increase the force of her punches and kicks.)
Thinker: 2 (Is able to perceive the UV spectrum. Is able to manipulate her vision to turn it on and off at will and can see various levels of the spectrum.)