Burnscar had appeared just behind Gregor, Shamrock and Faultline.  Before they could notice and react, she drew a ball of flame into a condensed point between her hands and released it in a violent explosion of heated air.

Jeez.

Time to go flying again, I guess.

“No!” Elle screamed, banging on the window.

I don’t think that helps. In fact, it might cause Burnscar to notice you and attack.

Faultline wasn’t moving, and Elle couldn’t quite tell through the smoke that covered the street, but she might be burned.  Gregor… Gregor wasn’t moving either, and he lay in a patch of fire.  However fireproof the slime he’d coated himself in might be, he wasn’t immune to being roasted.

Yikes. How about Newter? Do we have a TPKO here?

Shamrock was limping away, limping towards the statue, and Newter was evading a fresh series of attacks from Burnscar.

Oh yeah, Shamrock too.

At least two of them are still up.

Her power was still so slow.  Only half of the statue had emerged.  Not enough.  She needed the entire thing.

Careful. I have a feeling overexerting yourself might be bad.

What are you actually going to do with the statue, anyway?

Burnscar had noticed the statue, and paused to pelt it with fireballs.

Well, at least it can be a distraction.

Elle winced as the head broke free, felt a momentary despair as one arm shattered.

RIP.

So does it retain this damage when it’s sent back to the other world?

But the rest was intact.  Just two or three minutes.

That’s a long time in a situation like this. Could easily be the rest of the chapter, even – just look at Parasite, when we had about 2-5 minutes pass over the course of two chapters, if I recall correctly.

Gregor caught Burnscar with a stream of slime, and the young woman disappeared in a swirl of fire.

WOO!

Gregor was hurt, but he was trying to control the spread of the flames, while protecting Faultline and Shamrock.

Faultline seems to be the one in most trouble against Burnscar, power-wise. I mean, look at this:

• Newter can easily dodge most of the fire, but suffers from having a touch range offensive ability against a ranged enemy.
• While he’s not dextrous, Gregor’s slime can be used to put out the fire or stop the fireballs in mid-air, and probably has the best shot at actually hitting Burnscar with anything useful. He’s also a tank, able to take some hits for the team.
• Shamrock is lucky, which ought to help in a lot of ways, at least as far as dodging goes.
• Spitfire has a fire-resistant costume, though she’s also Burnscar’s main target (by the looks of it) and Burnscar is immune to her offensive ability.

Faultline, however… she can cut through things. But cutting through fire doesn’t help, and the enemy can teleport so blocking the path is more trouble than aid as long as there’s a fire on either side. Her costume doesn’t protect her from fire, nor does her biology. Everyone else has defensive advantages, but besides basic armor, she doesn’t have defensive or offensive features that are particularly useful in this fight.

His skin glistened, which made Elle think he was covering himself in something that would protect him from being burned.

That on top of what I just mentioned? Gregor is definitely the MVP here as far as powers go.

The fire had spread across the street and to the wall of the building opposite Palanquin.  Burnscar was using it to travel great distances at a moment’s notice, simultaneously spreading the flames further with every attack or spare moment she had.

Being able to spread fire and teleporting from fire to fire are two powers that go very well together.

Newter was quick enough to avoid her attacks while hurling objects at her to attempt to distract and batter her, but he couldn’t approach to make contact with her and knock her out without her burning him, and his range of movement was quickly narrowing as the fires spread.

Yeeah, and her skin might just burn his skin oils away before they can take effect. I mean, her skin doesn’t seem to be burning, but you never know.

Not only were new patches of flame created when she attacked, but she frequently paused to will the existing fires to swell and extend further in every direction.

Oh jeez, she’s got range on the pyrokinesis too.

She found what she wanted.  An age-worn statue of a woman in a toga, holding a large urn.  Focusing on it, she pushed.

Interesting choice of verb there. I like it. It implies a sense of weight, of inertia, like the object is resisting her influence with its “mass”, “trying” to stay in its place, in its world.

It was agonizing.  Not the use of her power – that was easy, unavoidable.  Even on a good day like today, her power worked without her asking for it.  The floor under her feet was turning into a stone tile, grass and moss growing in the cracks, as if the ruins were leaking into the real world.  It was agonizing because the emergence of the statue was slow.

Yeah, like this.

Brick folded out of the way as it appeared from within the outside wall of Palanquin.  It slid forth at a glacial pace of a quarter-inch every second, and it wasn’t small.

Okay yeah that’s very slow.

Today was a good day.  She’d exhausted herself earlier in the week by taking on the Merchants on what she could easily mark as a bad day.

…makes sense. She was insanely powerful back there, and we know that scales with how bad it gets.

It seemed she was veering to the other side of things: she’d eaten, gone for a walk, even ventured to have a conversation with Faultline.

Nice.

She could only do those things because her mind’s eye, the gate to those other worlds, was nearly closed right now.  The drawback was that this also meant that the use of her power was slow.

We know there’s a correlation between how badly out-of-touch she is and how powerful she is, but it’s probably not quite accurate to say that that’s a one-way causation, regardless of which way we say it goes.

More likely, there’s a third element here that is the cause of the fluctuations in general. It might be something like what’s going on with Taylor and her occasionally doubled range, where it depends on how close of a situation or mindset she is in to her trigger event, but Labyrinth’s fluctuations seem far stronger and far more frequent.

It would be very interesting to find out what her trigger event was. Given how much talk there’s been about self-loathing sneaking into her worlds, it might have had something to do with that element of her personality. Maybe the Dandelions attempted to help her avoid her self-loathing and the conditions that caused it, by giving her an escape from reality? If that’s the case, though, it seems to have heavily backfired.

As though she were looking through a spyglass, trying to find a distant detail, she could only take in one scene at a time.

So then she’ll only be able to draw one thing into reality at a time, as opposed to all the simultaneously emerging effects we saw at the mall.

Elle clutched her arms to her body.  The lonely hallways… no.  The burning towers.  Definitely no.

Burning towers just sound like another advantage to Burnscar, provided they’re real enough for her to use that fire.

The barren ruins.  She’d almost forgotten.  It had been her first attempt at making a world outside of the bad place.  It had worked up until the moment negativity and self loathing crept in through the cracks, filling in details where she didn’t want them.  Ugly details.

Yikes.

So when a world is made up of someone’s self-loathing, does that mean it will be especially hostile to that someone?

What had resulted was a beautiful, solemn landscape rigged with traps and pitfalls, as if the landscape itself was eager to hurt or kill anyone who didn’t watch their step.

But I suppose if that someone is normally the only one who can access these worlds, then the hostility doesn’t need to discriminate.

Or maybe it’s just as simple as the loathing making it more hostile in general.

Anyway, I like the idea of this place. Deceptively beautiful, surprisingly hostile. It makes me think of fairy lands.

As she focused on that world, a small part of her consciousness flew over the landscapes, an image in a second mind’s eye.  Fields of tall grass, collapsed walls half covered in moss, the remnants of an old castle, a stone hut with a tree growing out of it.

Oh yeah, she did call it the barren ruins. I guess she hasn’t exactly maintained this world much.

She’d always had a soft spot for things that had once been beautiful but had transformed into a different kind of beauty as they aged.

That is pretty poetic. 🙂

She liked the look of a tree that had grown to splendor and then died, the statue worn by years of hard rain.  This was the aesthetic that had shaped the ruins.  Until everything turned ugly, unpredictable and dangerous. 

So it’s not that she hasn’t maintained it, it’s just that this was her idea of a beautiful landscape in the first place.

I like it.

It’s tomorrow, let’s go!