Alicornutopia

The Elements 'verse is based on Sapphire & Steel -- intended to be basically an extension rather than an AU of canon, but canon is sufficiently all over the place I've contradicted it in a few places.

The basic structure is a standard Earth-with-hidden-magic. Things can be decomposed into component elements in accordance with standard chemistry, but they can also be interpreted as being made out of Elements, which don't correspond to the periodic table (see: sapphire and steel being among them). (I have mathy feelings about this but not writing those down unless someone is particularly interested in them.) This interpretation also works on stuff from other worlds, unless those worlds have particularly science-breaking properties.

The ways that Elements 'verse is different from Earth-standard are twofold. First, Time is a weird malevolent thing, some combination of a force of nature and a separate universe and a malicious sentient being. Normally, there's a sort of time-fabric that keeps this under control, but certain sorts of things can weaken that boundary. These can be loosely described as "anachronisms." Canon examples include:

• An old nursery rhyme, based on historical events, being read aloud in an old house built on the site where some of those events took place
• An old railway station where a soldier died tragically
• Humans using technology to travel through time
• Old photographs
• A historical re-enactment

So in general, old things are dangerous, things that people have strong emotions about are particularly dangerous, and past events being echoed by current events is really, really dangerous.

When time breaks through, it can cause a variety of unpleasant effects. If left unchecked, these will get gradually worse as the fabric unravels, to the point of destroying the universe. Effects can include but are not limited to:

• Groundhog Day style time loops
• Objects or people drifting forward or backward in time
• What are effectively ghosts
• People coming into and out of pictures
• Historical events repeating themselves
• Objects or people becoming younger or older versions of themselves
• People being possessed by Time
• Objects or people being wiped from time altogether

Temporal anomalies occur all over the universe, but intelligent life makes them much, much more common (partly by nature but mostly by stuff people do). Earth by default has the only intelligent life in this universe, and anomalies on Earth occur at about the same rate as the rest of the universe put together, and tend to be significantly harder to fix.

Left to itself, this would destroy the universe. Luckily, there's a second difference from Earth-standard, which is the Elements. They've been around as long as the universe has, but their history before human written history starts isn't well-remembered. (Mostly because I haven't figured it out yet.) They look human and claim to be literally identical to/incorporations of their elements. (To what degree this is true is intentionally vague.) Their temporal powers allow them to fix time anomalies, and they consider this to be their mission in life.

There are 127 total Elements, although slightly fewer than that have their human forms up and running at a given time. When in human form, they have a home on a sort of parallel plane that I think of as Platonic Heaven. (It doesn't really have a lot of similarities to platonic heaven but it amuses me.) They have the ability to shift between Platonic Heaven and the "real world" at will. Platonic Heaven is more-or-less featureless plains, with a small compound where the Elements hang out, since there's not very many of them. There's also Yggdrasil, which is an enormous tree that grows bodies for the Elements in big pods like fruits.

Elements are physically basically identical to humans. They eat, they sleep, they can be injured, they age. Their technology is generally a few hundred years ahead of human technology at any given time, since they can hop forward in time and check it out, so they have some pretty nice life extension tech and can live a couple of centuries. They generally don't live much past a hundred, though, because their profession is pretty risky. When an Element's human form dies, a new one starts growing on Yggdrasil, and basically gestates on the tree. After nine months, the pod pops open and there's a baby inside. It's not always clear which Element the baby corresponds to, since there's generally a few growing at once and there's more variation in gestation time than there is with humans.

Elements insist that this is "reincarnation," and that the baby is essentially the same person as the corresponding dead person. It's not really clear that this is actually true, though. The new kid has no memories of the previous life, doesn't particularly resemble the dead Element, and has no particular tendency to share personality traits with them. There's no expectation that they stay in touch with the dead Element's friends or inherit their possessions. So while Elements will claim to be immortal and have been around since the beginning of time, it's actually kind of a dubious claim.

Elements aren't generally interested in raising kids, so they foster out the babies to human families, a la changeling legends. Traditionally this would be a mother who'd just lost her baby so she could wet-nurse; these days, that's less of an issue. The family is given a little bit of information about magic stuff and told not to ask for more, and then offered something in exchange for fostering. This can be money but is more often something like medical technology to save the life of an older child of theirs. The family is chosen to roughly match the kid in appearance, be from a geographical area the Elements want someone to cover (since learning languages and such is just as much of a pain for them as for humans), be healthy, wealthy enough to raise them, decently educated, relatively stable, not likely to beat them or neglect them or whatever. They're expected to basically handle the kid for the first three years or so. The foster parents are warned that they won't get to keep the kid forever, and that afterwards they'll be placed in a sort of witness protection program (to keep the kid from tracking them down later) and the Elements will keep an eye on them to make sure they don't go around announcing that magic exists.

Once the kid is old enough to be interesting, Elements start showing up and taking them to Platonic Heaven, generally as an after-school sort of thing. A few Elements at a time are designated to teach the children, of whom there's generally a dozen or so of varying ages. They're taught about Element culture, and also trained in using their powers.

Elements have an extra time-sense, which is pretty integral to them -- think of some combination of sight, touch, and proprioception. This lets them do things like know exactly what time it is, how old objects are, if there's any time anomalies around, and so forth. A lot of the early training is just about learning to interpret this. Around school-age, they start learning how to actually affect time; they need the time-sense for this in order to see what they're doing. A couple of years later, around seven or eight, they'll start to develop an affinity for their element. There's a little ceremony that goes along with this, where the kid sits in the middle of samples of various elements arranged in a circle and meditates until they know which is theirs, but they usually have a pretty good idea what it's going to be by that point. There's a couple of personality traits that stereotypically go along with each element -- for instance, Lead being kind of slow and dense -- but it's unclear whether that's actually a thing or just people conforming to expectations. There's definitely some special powers that go along with the elements. For instance, Steel gets extra strength and durability, and Sapphire gets an affinity for using certain kinds of "vibrations" in Time. They also develop telekinesis over their element, which is fairly weak and basically only works on the element in its pure form, and tend to just really like it (again, unclear if that's just an expectation or a real tendency). The big thing is that their time-sense starts to expand so that it covers all instances of that element everywhere, and the proprioceptive aspects insist at their brain that this stuff is Part Of Them. They also develop a telepathic ability; they can establish a connection with another Element, or a temporary one with a human, and communicate telepathically. At range this is purely verbal, it can't even convey intonation, but if you're touching it can convey the full range of emotions and sensory experience.

Now, Elements don't think much of humans. The general Element attitude towards humans is similar to the general human attitude towards animals. Some of them are cute, a lot of them are awful and annoying, they have some moral relevance but not a lot. Killing them isn't a big deal although you maybe shouldn't do it just for fun, it's bad to torture them unless you have a good reason, actually exterminating a whole species is bad. So while it's fine to let them handle the early child-rearing, we can't have the Element kids thinking they're humans. So they get taken away from their human families as soon as they're old enough to do this without totally traumatizing them and can handle themselves OK without an Element having to babysit all the time. This usually ranges somewhere from five to twelve, depending on the kid. A kid being taken away from their foster parents too soon and traumatized by it is a known Thing, and kids who don't recover and end up with severe issues are referred to as "transuranics." They're treated as erratic and dangerous (because they often are), but not really shunned; they're a part of society that everyone is used to, and they basically get accommodated in any way they ask for that's not absurdly inconvenient.

Once kids are taken away from their foster parents, there's a concerted effort to get them to integrate into Element culture. It's good that they've learned some human culture, because as adult operatives they'll need to be able to blend in, but now they need to learn who they really are. Once they have their Element that's their name, and they completely stop using their childhood name. They're strongly discouraged from talking about their foster families. They're taught a language I'm calling Runic, which is more or less a branch of proto-indo-european and is deliberately kept as a dead language, because Elements can end up traveling forward or backward in time and need to be able to talk to Elements from that time period. The kids have already encountered bits of it, of course, because the adults sometimes speak it to each other, and because it has lots of terms for time stuff that human languages don't so it gets used in lessons. They learn about human societies from various time periods and how to blend in. They're not generally taught standard school subjects unless it's particularly relevant to them or as an elective sort of thing.

The kids and teenagers are housed in what's effectively a small dorm, and outside of teaching hours are largely free to hang out with the adults or goof off or whatever. As teenagers they start getting sent out on easy missions with adults and then on their own. They're generally ready to graduate somewhere from 15 to 25; there's a final test of some sort, a graduation ceremony, and then they're considered an adult for all purposes. Elements don't do a lot of age distinctions besides "child" and "adult"; obviously they recognize there's a difference between a two-year-old and a twelve-year-old, but there's few enough kids at any given time they all have classes together and hang out together. Similarly, if a fifteen-year-old is officially an Adult, they can date a fifty-year-old and no one blinks an eye. Adults are all considered Time Agents.The ones like Sapphire and Steel who do most of the going out and detective-ing are Operatives. Others specialize in doing fiddly technical stuff and research and such; they're Technicians. Elements vary both in how accurate their time-sense is and how strongly they can affect time; these are both on bell curves and tend to be inversely correlated but are not necessarily. Someone who has an accurate time-sense but weak time abilities is called a Sensitive, and there's -- not quite a stigma, but a stereotype. Something like how human society can treat women.

Element society stuff! They have a strong tradition of oral storytelling, usually accompanied by someone playing on a stringed instrument they call a lyre because it's similar enough to one. (Of course the real names for things like this are all in Runic.) They also do a lot of dance as an art form. The traditional form for a dance performance is a sequence of dances over several nights in a row that represent all the objects in a set, titled "the X cycle." Famous examples include the Virtues Cycle, the Vices Cycle, the Weekdays, and the Phases of Matter. The popular sport is Ball, which is exactly what it sounds like and is famous for having absurdly complicated rules. Half the fun is arguing over which ruleset you're going to use, and of course if you lose you insist that your opponent is using the wrong rules.

Elements don't do human gender roles. Runic doesn't even have genders. There's no gendered expectations in Element society about anything really. New adults are generally sterilized anyway (can't have your female Operatives getting pregnant with a kid, especially since it'll turn out human) so reproductive stuff isn't an issue. Part of school is learning how to perform whichever human gender best fits your appearance in a way that'll blend in. As a result Elements are sort of pansexual-by-default; if you asked an Element if he found men or women more attractive, he'd have to think back to people he'd found attractive in the past, figure out which they were, and do a count. Having a strong preference for one or the other is kind of like a human having a strong preference for hair color or something. There's a nudity taboo but it's significantly weaker, and it's mostly about dressing or undressing in public, not about the actual state of wearing clothes. Everyone swims naked. Teenagers are expected to have casual sex with each other and be polite enough not to mention it to the adults. Adults can have sex with each other, and can marry one or more people if they want to. Cheating on your spouse is significantly less bad than in human society; it's rude but it would be weird to break up a marriage over it.

If you have a regular working partner or partners, that's expected to be your strongest personal bond, significantly more so than your spouse. These partnerships are taken very seriously and are generally lifelong. If someone has only one partner and that partner dies, the other very nearly always die within the year, either just by killing themselves or by requesting increasingly dangerous assignments and acting increasingly reckless. This is widely regarded as completely understandable and what anyone would do, and requests for dangerous assignments are accommodated.

Time is, unsurprisingly, very important in Element society. Times are given very precisely -- generally to the second or millisecond. You're really supposed to give error bars too, but that's like saying "it is I" instead of "it's me," basically no one actually does it. You're expected to arrive to an appointment exactly on time, not early or late. (Unless you're a Technician, in which case you're inevitably very late.) A standard conversational topic (along the lines of "the weather is awful") is complaining about too much or not enough vacation time.

There is a nebulous, semi-godly being called the Dispatcher who speaks in a booming voice out of the void to announce time anomalies that need fixing. The Council, a group of a dozen or so senior Elements, then make up a brief on the situation and assign one or more Operatives to it. The Council also handles things like finding foster families, assigning teachers, deciding when kids are ready to graduate, settling disputes between Elements, and so on. They keep an eye on the transuranics and assign them to cases they can't mess up too badly. They maintain some other stuff for smooth operations, such as keeping enough human currency that Elements can use it if necessary on cases, and importing food and such.

Very rarely, Element children can fail to develop a time-sense. They're referred to alternately as "time-deaf" and "time-blind" and, for Elements, it's the stigma to end all stigmas. It's also incredibly dangerous, because they can't see what they're doing when they manipulate Time, so once they get to full adult strength they're a hazard to everyone around them. Historically, a child who was found to be time-blind -- they can tell pretty conclusively that they're not just a late bloomer by twelve or so -- would just be killed for the general safety. Recently there's been discussion of whether they should try to let such a child live, but one hasn't actually shown up recently so it hasn't become an issue.

Elements do occasionally practice infanticide (by exposure, like the ancient Romans). If a baby comes out of the pod with obvious severe disabilities, they'll leave it to die and try again, since they figure it'll be reincarnated anyway. Their medicine and tech is good enough to compensate for most milder disabilities. As a result, and because their identities are so tied up in their work, their social model of disability is pretty different from ours. They generally only think of someone as relevantly disabled if they don't have good enough adaptive tech to do their job effectively. It wouldn't occur to them to think of, say, a human college professor in a wheelchair as disabled, because it doesn't stop him from teaching. Mental illness/neurodivergence also gets handled differently. The medical tech is good enough that someone with chemical depression or schizophrenia or something else that just stacks up to a straightforward brain malfunction can just get it fixed and be fine. Personality disorders and autism and so forth don't get handled super well; if it can be ignored/stacked up to "well he's a bit weird" they do, and if it can't they get lumped in with the transuranics and it's assumed that the issue was caused by being removed from their foster family too soon.

Elements don't generally do religion. Human religion is of course totally out of the question. There's the occasional bit of spirituality or "I think we're all part of something bigger than ourselves," stereotypically more common among Sensitives. They do celebrate the equinoxes and solstices, because of course they do, and there's a more recent tradition of celebrating leap days (and minutes, seconds).

Elements aren't supposed to have kids but it happens occasionally, either between two Elements or between a human and an Element. The kids are always perfectly ordinary humans, which is the main reason that this isn't an absolute nightmare to enforce; it feels kind of freaky to them, like giving birth to a kitten. (There's also the fact that Elements are generally super-dedicated to their jobs, which are not particularly amenable to children.) The most common cause is "teenage Element goes out on case, ends up alone with attractive human, fails at contraception." The Elements have this whole fostering system set up anyway, so they just run the kid through that and then never pick them up. If an Element really threw a fit about it they could (and occasionally have) pull off a set-up where the human parent keeps the kid and the Element stops in occasionally (see: demigod legends).

Death is not taken quite as seriously in Element society, because of the semi-reincarnation. But of course it makes people sad when one of their friends dies. Bodies are burned and the ashes scattered, since Elements aren't fans of keeping around old emotionally-charged things to cause time rifts. The friends of the dead Element hold a drinking session. The first drink is poured out on the ground, as a libation and to symbolize that everyone is less happy without the dead person. The second drink is a toast to "I'd rather be drinking with you, [name]," and the third is "Fuck Time." And then everyone gets very drunk. The dead Element's possessions are generally also burned, but a partner who survives them may keep a token. (No one else is supposed to.)

Element time-affecting abilities can include (vary by Element) but are not limited to:

• Moving an object backwards or forwards in time
• Aging or de-aging an object or person
• Moving an object or person forward or backward in time (small distances)
• Rewinding time (small amounts)
• Time loops (in a limited area)
• Slowing down or speeding up time
• Traveling through time themselves, especially in places where the fabric of Time is weak
• Sensing the history of an object or person
• Moving things in and out of pictures
• Viewing the past or future state of a location
• Creating an object that can affect time in various ways (weak effects from the list)
• "Pulling forward" a copy of an item they had in the past, especially close personal effects such as clothing
• Freezing time (in a limited area)
• Directly affecting the fabric of Time (usually to fix it; very hard)
• Dispersing ghosts

Various circumstantial things can be used to boost their abilities. For instance, anything that affects a limited area is easier if the corners of that area are marked by bits of the appropriate element. Moving a person forward in time might be easier if you reproduced the circumstances in the time you're moving them from. Dispersing ghosts is easier if you deal with whatever emotional effect is strengthening them. And so forth. Lots of things are easier to do if there's a rift in the fabric of Time nearby.