Wind ripped through the building blowing everyone into the nearest wall. Everyone grabbed onto something to keep from being sucked up into the air.
“What’s happening?” Hailee yelled to everyone. No one could answer her because no one had any clue what to say. She turned to look at the others and saw that Parker slowly began to move away from the wall.
“Parker!” Alexis screamed as he started to move upwards toward whatever was outside.
Parker held his hand out as if to say that everything was okay. He continued to rise through the air and then started to spin in the opposite direction of the tornado. As he moved through the outer wall of wind he heard a piercing scream from the direction of the building they had been in.
He knew that it was Alexis’s scream. His gut twisted into a tight knot and he started to spin even faster. After a moment the tornado around him began to dissipate and he could see below him what looked like a small person that was exuding a bright, white light.
Parker lowered himself to the ground slowly, cautiously. Standing twenty feet from him was what seemed to be a small girl, crying profusely. He didn’t know what to think about this new scene in front of him. Had she caused the tornado?
Moving closer, step-by-step, Parker approached the tiny girl. She was wearing a white dress, had white hair and light gray eyes. Her skin was almost translucent and she looked like she was about ten years old. Tears streaked the dust on her face.
“Are you…” Parker started to say when the girl lifted her head and made eye contact with him. “Okay?” he finished timidly.
The little girl stared at him for a moment as tears continued to run down her face. Parker didn’t know what else to say so he stopped moving and just waited for a response.
After several long moments, Parker asked another question. “Are you an Imperial?” He figured she had to be with the tornado that she just made. But to be able to do something of that intensity at such a young age seemed impossible.
“What’s an Imperial?” she asked in a near inaudible voice.
“Could you say that again?” Parker asked.
She took a step toward him but he quickly took a step back still not sure what to think of her. She started to sob again as he took the step back so he stopped moving. Deciding to take a risk, he sat down to see what the girl would do. He watched as she bashfully walked toward him, each step getting bigger and bigger.
When she was a few feet away she took a seat on the street facing Parker. He could see his friends come out of the building behind her and stop in their tracks at the sight of him and some little girl sitting and talking to one another.
“What’s an Imperial?” the little girl asked again.
“That’s someone who can control the elements,” Parker said. He felt like he was talking to a toddler when he said it, but then he moved his hand out in front of him and made a motion that looked like he was picking something up off the ground and a chunk of the street rose into his hand. He held it out in front of him to show her and then fit it back into the hole that had been made.
The little girl’s eyes opened widely from shock. “Do it again!” she said excitedly.
Her entire demeanor changed after that. The others walked up, cautiously, to see what Parker was doing. When they got to them, they almost started to laugh seeing the pure, adolescent joy on this girl’s face as she watched Parker use different Imperials. He guessed it was a good thing that they found her instead of one of the other students who just had one Imperial.
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“Do you have a name?” Alexis asked in a soft, sisterly tone.
The small girl hadn’t noticed them approach from behind and the question scared her. She physically jumped and a burst of wind shot out from her body in all direction blasting everyone several feet backwards. After a moment, realizing what she’d done, she began apologizing to everyone faster than they could understand what she was saying.
Alexis began motioning with her hands to slow down her talking and to take a breath. The girl slowly calmed down and everyone stared at her to see if she would answer Alexis’s question. After a long, awkward moment of silence, Alexis asked again. “Do you have a name?” She repeated it in the same soft and sisterly tone she’d used the first time in hopes that it wouldn’t frighten her.
“I’ve had a lot of names. Pretty much whatever people want to call me.”
“How many names have you had?” Alexis asked.
The girl put her hand to her chin in thought. “I honestly don’t know. More than ten?”
“Wait, how old are?” Caleb asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, how long have you been alive?”
The small girl looked at Caleb and immediately gazed directly at his scar. “Oh! I’ve been alive for…” she said as she started to count on her fingers. “I think I’m like… forty. That’s the one after fifty right?” She looked to each of them for an answer but all she got were blank stares. “Sorry… I’m bad at the thing you call Math.”
“No…” Hailee muttered. “Forty is the one before fifty. Sixty comes after forty.”
“Oh, thank you. I’m sixty then.” She sounded so cheerful as she said it and proud that she was learning also. Everyone else just stared at her with their jaws hanging open.
“I’m sorry,” Parker said still blown away. “Did you say that you’re sixty?” The small girl nodded with a huge, beaming grin on her face. “How? You look like you’re only ten!”
She looked down and examined her own body for several minutes without saying anything. “This is the form that I like the most.”
Now everyone simply stared at her confused. “Form? You can change the way you look?” Alexis asked, not sure if she truly wanted an answer to her question.
Without saying a word, the girl spun in place creating a small tornado around her and within a few seconds there was a different girl standing in front of them. Still the same colored skin, hair, eyes, everything. But now she looked to be sixteen years old. “Is this better? Or perhaps…” she spun again creating another tornado and standing before them was now an older woman, whom appeared to be around sixty. She still had the same everything except she had aged and her height changed appropriately for her new age. Her eyes were still the same; her skin tone hadn’t altered in the slightest. It creeped everyone out that she could just change her physical appearance on a whim.
“Is this sixty?” Everyone silently nodded their heads. “Do you prefer this?” Everyone silently shook their heads this time so she spun once more returning to her ten year old state. “Better?” Everyone nodded once again without saying anything. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked sounding on the verge of tears again.
“No! No, no, no, no. We were just… shocked,” Alexis said searching drastically for words.
“Sorry…” the girl whispered as if she were in trouble.
“Don’t be,” Parker said with confidence. “That was amazing. I wish I could just change the way I looked whenever I wanted.”
“I don’t…” Alexis whispered under her breath but Hailee had heard her. Hailee laughed a little and Alexis looked at her with an embarrassed fear in her eye. Her heart raced knowing that she’d been heard and hoping that Hailee wouldn’t say anything.
“So, I don’t know any people or Imperials that can do that. What exactly are you?” Caleb asked bluntly. Parker felt like he probably should’ve been a little more gentle based on the amount that the girl had cried so far.
She thought for a moment, searching for the right word to use. “I think you would call me a spirit or something of those sorts. I’m essentially just the wind taking a form.”
“You’re a wind spirit? So, like, if I touched you… would my hand just go right through you?” Parker asked.
Alexis jabbed him with her elbow. “So, you’re just the wind?” she asked politely hoping that she hadn’t taken offense to Parker’s question.
The girl walked straight at Alexis unblinkingly. Alexis panicked and tried to jump out of the way, but the girl simply walked right through her. Then she poked Alexis in the back.
“Woah! How can I feel you poke me if you’re able to walk through me?” Alexis’s heart was racing, and everyone could hear it in her speech.
“I just use the wind to make it feel like a poke or a tap or whatever I need it to be.” Everyone just stared at her in disbelief of her existence. Caleb couldn’t keep his mouth closed even though he’d just gotten in a fight with a giant Earth monster.
They talked for a little longer before Parker pointed out that they needed to keep moving so that they could get his sister and return to the school. The small girl asked if she could follow them. They didn’t mind so much as long as she did her best to not cry. They also demanded that she think of a name for them to call her by. After some debate they all decided that Ava was the perfect name.