“Surrender?  Go to the birdcage?”

“They’d find me.  You don’t even know what these guys are capable of.

In the Birdcage?

I mean, sure, I’m guessing they’ve got people on the inside, but can they communicate with them in any way?

I guess if they got themselves caught too, that’d be one thing, but that’s not something I think they’d do on purpose.

Our newest member, she replaced Hatchet Face, though he’s still around… kind of.

…interesting. We’ve got a member replacement – meaning we can expect to meet someone in these Interludes who wasn’t on the list.

I should probably have seen that possibility coming, but I figured they’d fill the one spot before they got another.

So what happened to Hatchet Face, and does that mean we’re not going to meet him? Seriously, best name, I wanna know the character carrying it.

She can find people.  There’s no place secure enough to keep me safe until they took me to the Birdcage.

Ahh, right, the transitional period. I didn’t think of that.

I almost think they’d be able to get me in there, if they wanted to.  Siberian?  She’d be able to get me.   Even in the Birdcage.  She always gets her prey.”

Fair, but could she get out afterwards?

Burnscar shook her head.  “If you hadn’t put out most of the fire out there… I dunno what I would have done.”

Ohh… I didn’t think of that.

I wonder if that factored into why Labyrinth did it the way she did, on a subnarrative level.

I have a pretty good idea.

What did Burnscar do to you and/or people you loved, Labyrinth?

“So I burned the pimp to scare him, then I burned him to hurt him, for payback over his hounding me, and then I couldn’t really stop myself.  I burned him to death.  Fuck. That was the start of a bad few weeks.”

Whoops.

“Sorry.”

“I- before I knew it, the Slaughterhouse Nine had found me.  Shatterbird recruited me.  And now I’m stuck.  I’m trapped.

I see… I guess there’s no real quitting the Slaughterhouse, is there?

You know there’s a kill order out on me?  If I try to quit, either the Nine or the cops will off me.  So I keep going, I work for them, and it all just gets worse.”

Fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t… bit of a pickle, huh.

“Yeah.”  And you retreat into that state to avoid facing the guilt over things you’ve done.  You use it to hide from your own fears.  If I blame you for anything, it’s for that.

There’s clearly history here.

Before we got to Burnscar approaching Labyrinth, I characterized her as a confident woman who knows what she wants and takes it.

I think that’s true, but only when she’s high on fire.

Things are coming together: When not using her power, Burnscar is an apologetic, guilt-ridden girl who doesn’t want to be a bad person, but once fire gets involved, she turns into the kind of person the Slaughterhouse would want. She becomes a city blaze, a raging storm of fire that destroys anything in its path not because it cares about destroying those things, but simply so it can keep going.

High Burnscar is terrifying. Sober Burnscar has to deal with the guilt, the knowledge of what she did when high on fire, and apparently often becomes high Burnscar again to avoid that.

It’s a vicious cycle, and it’s actually pretty sad.

“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.

“The doctors,” Burnscar scowled.

“You?”

I guess Burnscar didn’t have a great experience at the asylum either.

Hell, was it even really an asylum? Maybe it was a front of some kind for shady parahuman research.

“I… did you know I escaped at the same time you did?”

Interesting. I think that implies the Crew are responsible, if I remember the story correctly.

Elle shook her head.

“I did.  But I had no place to go.  I had some bad days.  I was lonely, scared.  Some guy tried to convince me to be his whore, earn some cash, get fed… I refused, but he kept coming after me.”

Eesh, fuck off.

So that’s one major difference here – Labyrinth found a home with her rescuers. Burnscar didn’t.

In an alternate timeline, Burnscar could’ve been a Crew member all this time.

“I don’t want to talk about the weather!” Burnscar snapped the words, in a mixture of desperation and anger.  Her eyes flashed orange and flame flared around her hands, then it all faded.

Power tied to anger, sounds about right. Was I onto something with my anger management spitball?

“Sorry.”

“I… um.  How are you?  How have you been, since you escaped?”

Hm.

Maybe that’s how it all ties together: the asylum. Burnscar as a clingy fellow inmate?

“Been… been good.  Good people.”  So hard to articulate my thoughts, even on a good day.

She’s been good people.

Wait, no, that’s Regent’s job.

“They take care of me.  Faultline helped… more than any doctor I’ve had.”

This is one of the things I like about the Crew, besides simply the fun characters – they’re a bunch of misfits who, while outwardly all in it for the money, focus on helping each other with their various hurdles and mysterious backstories. They’re so inwardly supportive and it’s great. Elle is right to call them a family.

Either that, or she likes it a lot.

Old times.  Elle couldn’t help it.  Her thoughts turned to the bad place, the biggest of her worlds, the world she had spent the most time.

Ah, yes, old times weren’t all that great for Elle.

Is any of that because of Burnscar and her friends?

“Back when we were both having our good days?  We’d talk, and I really liked those times.  I look back on them fondly.  One of the few moments I treasure.”

Was that before your respective trigger events, or are you in denial about how bad things were for Labyrinth?

Elle nodded.  Behind Burnscar, the door to her room was changing to metal.  A tiny window was expanding, bars already closing down like teeth.  The wall around the door was growing tatters of cloth that rippled like they were blowing in the wind.

A metal door, a tiny barred window… is Labyrinth reflexively pushing a copy of her old asylum cell into reality?

“Fuck,” Burnscar said, “I don’t even know where to start.  Since I learned you were in this city, and the group wanted to come here, I’ve been looking forward to this, seeing you again, but now I don’t know what to say.”

It really sounds like Burnscar was very close with Labyrinth.

The other way around is up in the air at the moment.

“The weather?” Elle tried, lightly joking. The wrong thing to say.

Heh.

I bet Burnscar doesn’t like rain.

“I don’t think I did any permanent damage.  They’re alive.”

Ah, good. Thank you.

Let’s keep the Crew alive while we can. They’re one of my favorite groups at this point.

“Thank you,” Elle managed.  She couldn’t entirely suppress the bitterness in her voice.  Burnscar didn’t seem to notice.

“Thank you for not killing my friends, old pal. Very nice of you.”

“I- I wanted to talk.  Like old times.”

Alright? What about?

Also, I’m going to give Burnscar a bit of benefit of the doubt here: It’s entirely possible that her side of the battle out there was self-defense. She may have attempted to approach Palanquin mundanely, but then been recognized by the Crew, who decided to attack immediately to defend themselves and their home from the known person butcher they saw incoming.

Neither party would be really at fault in that scenario.

That said, even with this apologetic, meek attitude and that benefit of the doubt, I’m still wary. There’s gotta be a reason this girl would become and remain a member of the Fellowship.

“I’m… I’m sorry about your friends.  I didn’t come here planning to do that.  It’s just… you know.”

Are they all still alive, at least? It hasn’t escaped my notice that the last we saw of two of them was them going off-screen together with a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine.

I do find it more likely at the moment that Burnscar simply led them away and then abandoned them with her firewalking, but only slightly.

Anyway, Burnscar seems a lot more apologetic than I was expecting from any Slaughterhouse member. Is she like this usually, or is it just because of Labyrinth?

Elle nodded, trying to keep her outrage off her face.

“I- Fuck.  I’m really sorry, you know?  I can’t help it.”

Anger management issues? That would be very suited for a fire-themed character. As would not being able to restrain her power from going all out with every attack.

Fire is chaotic, passionate and deadly, after all.

You can.  You just don’t try hard enough.

This suggests Labyrinth knows her rather well.

Why was she so sure Burnscar was there for Spitfire?

But Elle didn’t voice her thoughts.  She nodded.

Yeeah, might not be worth the risk of burning the room down.