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!

There was the high temple.  Faultline and the hypnotist they’d hired had talked her through it, building a place that wasn’t so influenced by Elle’s negative thoughts and ideas.

High temple? Sounds like what she pulled out at the mall.

It was a place she associated with personal triumphs, with her inner strengths.  At the opposite end of the coin was also the bad place.

The low toe?

Also, this sounds like a healthy practice. Kudos to the hypnotist.

Of the worlds, it was the biggest by far.  Nothing she could use there, she knew.  She was intimately familiar with every aspect of it.  She had spent a long time there.

Ouch.

Her eyes snapped open as explosion erupted in the street.

She saw Faultline, Gregor and Shamrock tumbling through the air.

Yeeah, this ain’t ideal.

Her power was available to her, but the range was too small.

Ahh, I see.

She needed time to soak it into an area, and she’d gone for a walk earlier.  Two hours since she’d gotten back, and her power was limited to her room, the neighboring rooms, the upstairs hallway and the exterior walls of the building that surrounded these areas.

That is a very interesting mechanic. It might also explain the timing of the Crew’s intrusion on the Merchant get-together.

Not enough to reach the street where the fighting was happening.  And if she moved beyond the boundaries, she would be losing ground.  Any time she moved to a new place, beyond the limits of where her power was taking effect, her area of influence shrunk to a few feet around her, only to start gradually bleeding out once more, faster with each passing minute.

Huh. Which also means that the larger the area she has to play with, the more it takes for it to reset like this.

She tried using it anyways.  Closing her eyes, she reached for the other worlds.

Hm.

How literally is this what she is doing? We know there are other worlds, including our own, so I guess it’s not far-fetched that there’s one with moving pillars in the location of the ABB hideout, or one with a temple containing a maze in place of the Weymouth shopping center.

Or a temple in one world and a maze in another.

Pocket worlds, as she interpreted them.  Realities that were a blank canvas to be altered according to her thoughts, both conscious and unconscious.

Ahh. So then it’s somewhere in-between the world of Labyrinth’s imagination and real worlds.

Real worlds of her imagination, I suppose.

They were lucid dreams that were big enough, detailed enough, intricate enough to swallow her up, as they so often did.

I see.

I don’t know if I ever stated it explicitly, but it’s been pretty clear to me that Labyrinth being “in her own world” had her seeing some of the same sorts of things she can “create” in combat.

She could make new ones at a whim, but she found it better to build on what she already had.

Seems reasonable.

The same instant he turned towards her, the flame around her flared up, consuming her.

Aaand she’s gone again. Which flame did she go to now?

They turned to look for her, simultaneously trying to back away from the flames that spread with each of Burnscar’s attacks, and they missed seeing the crouching form in their midst.

Well, shit.

Only Elle, from her higher vantage point, was able to see Burnscar.

Would’ve been very helpful to have some sort of walkie-talkies or similar.

To say that Faultline and her crew were friends wasn’t meaningful enough.  Elle saw them as family.

Aw, that’s nice. 🙂

And she was helpless to do anything to save them.

That, not so much.

I’m not sure whether or not Elle is Labyrinth. She seems a bit more clear-headed than I would’ve expected, and Labyrinth does have powers that could be used to help out here.

But I do seem to recall Elle’s name being mentioned before, possibly in a context that heavily implied she was Labyrinth. I guess I should go and do a blog search.

…

Okay, so Elle is Labyrinth, but her lucidity fluctuates and her power is inversely proportional to her lucidity. Right now she’s the most lucid we’ve ever seen her, and thus weak powerwise, and that’s why she can’t help.

Things make sense now.

Like a flamethrower, twin streams of fire shot from Burnscar’s hands, striking Shamrock, Faultline and Gregor. 

Ouch.

Catching sight of the attack at the last second, Gregor did his best to shield Faultline and Shamrock with his bulk.

Woo, go Gregor!

Newter threw more trash and rubble towards Burnscar, and succeeded in interrupting her assault on his teammates.

And Newter too!

Faultline was on fire, her costume alight.

That probably ain’t good. Sounds a little uncomfortable.

Gregor slimed her to put it out, then wheeled on Burnscar.

“Oh, you have it coming now.”

She seized Spitfire and began dragging her toward an alley, one hand around her throat.

She hasn’t said anything yet, but it seems like this is someone who knows what she wants and takes it by force.

Wherever Burnscar stepped, she left burning footprints, and the flames slowly swelled and spread to join with one another, a trail of fire forming a path behind her.

Huh, that’s pretty cool. Kind of powerful too, if her power lets her teleport from fire to fire – she’ll automatically have fire under her almost no matter what, and just needs to put an exit fire somewhere.

Newter lunged forward, leaping over the flame that separated him from Gregor and then hopping to the nearest building to grab a bag of trash with his tail.  Twisting his entire body, he whipped the bag at Burnscar.

Nice!

It struck her, and she staggered back, losing hold of Spitfire.

Sweet.

Are we going to have a save like this from each Crew member? Except Labyrinth, maybe, who I’ve just realized doesn’t seem to be present.

Burnscar dropped into the flames that covered the pavement and emerged from the flames just behind the others.

Watch out!

Elle, from the second floor room of Palanquin, banged on the window, trying to alert her comrades.

Labyrinth?

Hang on.

We’ve been seeing things that should be behind Spitfire’s back, such as Burnscar coming after her when she turned to run. The narration has also been devoid of descriptions about how things felt for Spitfire, such as the throat grab hurting.

She’s not the POV character here. Elle is.