“Sorry.”
“I… I really wanted to be good. I’d told myself I wouldn’t use my power. But I had to protect myself, you understand?”
Yeah, but there’s a big difference between that and Slaughterhouse.
Elle nodded. The cloth around the door had started to settle into a shape. Padded walls, lined with barbed wire and jagged rows of glass. There were stains of shit and blood on some of the cloth, now, growing and swelling. She tried to will it to stop, to focus on her high temple.
So is this copy of the asylum “the bad place”?
Her safe place. But looking at Burnscar, that place felt so far away. It was out of her reach.
Yeeah, Burnscar’s feelings about this reunion are… kind of one-sided. I don’t think she realizes that.
Is she going to force Labyrinth to be her nominee?
Burnscar went on, “So I used it to scare him off… but you know how it works. You know what happens with my power.”
It’s hard to restrain?
“I remember.”
“I… the doctors say that using my power, it adjusts the chemical balances and connections in my brain.
Ahhh.
It’s not hard to restrain, directly. It makes you want to not restrain it, or not want to restrain it.
It’s addictive.
This is super appropriate to the element. Fire wants to be free, to spread wildly and consume.
Empathy, impulse control, my emotions, they disappear as I use my power, and I can’t help using my power if there’s fire nearby.
I’ve speculated before on the idea of powers wanting to be used. This is an extreme variation on that, though one that is easily explained as being part of the specific power rather than a detail about powers in general.
Then again, there’s also the connection between fire and passion. It’s not out of the realm of plausibility that this power is especially passionate about some of the default features of powers. Maybe, for example, Burnscar’s trigger proximity power boosts are especially strong, too?
Incidentally, I wonder whether the TPPB applies to the addictive pull of the power, making it much harder to resist when she’s in a state of mind similar to during her trigger event.
Speaking of which, I wonder if she may have been trapped in a burning building or something? Giving total control over fire and the ability to teleport from fire to fire is one way the Dandelions could decide to help someone out of that situation. It’s almost reasonable, even.
It snowballs, because I use my power more when I don’t have that self-control, when I don’t care about the people I’m near, and when I’m in that headspace I don’t want to leave it.”
Yep. Textbook addictive power.
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