Though she would not admit it to anyone, herself included, the unavoidable question of "did I make a mistake" crossed her mind on occasion. When it did, it was usually an absent thing, and passed as quickly as it arrived with as much concern as she normally gave thoughts of whether or not she left a light on.

Usually, this question had come up whenever she was successful. The last time it crossed her mind, she was examining her grade card for this past semester. Gender Psychology - A. Experimental Psychology - A. Abnormal Psychology I - A. Biology II -A. Film Literature - A. Reading her perfect, flawless record, a single word crept into her mind. Boooooooooooring.

And this was true, she was indeed bored. More exactly, she often felt the nagging suspicion in the back of her head that she was intended to be doing something other than this, but due to circumstance had nothing else to do. This time, however, just a little while after looking at her grades the question found its way into her conscious thoughts and forced her to truly reckon with it.

Thinking of her grades made her think of her time spent in the classroom, and what she thought of there when she was bored. Her pyrokinetic senses were becoming more and more acutely aware of the burning and melting points of matter. During class one week earlier, she felt the pull to set free The Burning and let it consume her pencil, the paper it was writing on, the desk beneath it, the plastic of her chair, until it continued on and made its way into the superstructure of the science building. She knew exactly how long it would take for each of these items to burst into flame, how much of a push she'd have to give it to make it happen instantaneously. When the chemistry class down the hall lit their burners, she was immediately aware that the little lapping tongues of flame had come into the world. She could almost sense them calling to her, perhaps pleading for her to free to them from their cages and let them eat everything, and let them grow into the infernos they all desired to be.

Ashnod had repeated this point ad nauseam: that the perceptions gleamed from quantum expression change one so utterly that it separated one from baseline humanity more assuredly than eruption itself did. She always felt that Ashnod was correct about that, but lately, she’d been wondering if she’d underestimated the full scope of what the Terat’s words meant. Most of the student body didn’t want to be around her any longer, and most of the faculty walked on eggshells when she was near. She’d always assumed it was because of what she did, that they were scared of her because taking her life into her own hands revealed a determination and recklessness that they all feared might one day be turned towards them. Maybe more existed, though. Maybe, they sensed how she had changed since her eruption, the small subtle ways The Burning had become part of her inexorably, and she was now alien to them. After all, she always appeared to be on fire herself, and her physical beauty had become disconcerting to look at. Alien was a good word for how people related to her, and indeed, as a hi no rei, she should be alien to them.

This line of thinking led her question her dual nature. On one hand, she was a hi no rei¸ a literal spirit of fire made flesh. The Burning was hers to create and command, and she was coming to know and understand it intimately. On the other hand, she was a member of homo sapiens novus, a race of beings descended from baseline humanity and a resident of the planet earth. She was attending the University of Alabama Huntsville, she aided the Huntsville Fire Department as a condition of her probation, and for a nova, had a very very low income.

In other words, she was hungry more often than she admitted to. Her father was furious upon learning what she had done, the risk she took to become one of the erupted, and the consequences she had to pay for her actions. His financial support of her became much lighter this semester, so she saved up what she could to begin selling “No Quantum Accident’ T-Shirts once her OpNet site began receiving requests for them. Recently Lemmy, the ice spirit nova from N!Prime, sent her the suggestion to make new shirts that said “Burnin’ Nation” (an obvious play off the word “burnination” that still circulated the ‘Net) and liking that immensely, she was currently getting those made to sell as well. Some weeks she sold more shirts than others. But that made her the equivalent of a net cartoon artist, something she found incredibly distasteful.

The real issue at hand, she knew, was whether or not a hi no rei had any purpose in the world of homo sapiens novus. Yes, she could control and command The Burning to the point of fine control, such as the intricate scarifications that often brought her a nice sum of money whenever someone was willing to meet her asking price. But, she knew, in the eyes of many she was little more than a supercharged flamethrower; someone who could be incredibly destructive and lethal when not holding herself in check, but not much more than a baseline when not using her quantum expression.

The only beneficial use of her abilities thus far had been in the killing of fires, stopping them cold before someone could be hurt or killed. The thought that a hi no rei’s only benefit was in ending the life of what it gave birth to angered and depressed her. She knew that if she broached this question to the quantum accidents at N!Prime, somebody would inevitably say that she had a very promising career working in an ironworks somewhere. (She would mention it in passing in a thread when someone else brought up something similar a few days later, and the quantum accidents responded in much the way she expected.)

Screw industrial work. Screw being an Elite and most certainly screw the XWF. She wasn’t a labor grunt, a hired gun, or a prize fighter and had absolutely no desire to be any of those things. Her choices were limited, even if she completed her psychology degree and went on to get her masters and doctorate, and she knew that. It was at this point, this point in her thinking that the question of “did I make a mistake” popped into her head. That this question surfaced into her conscious thoughts at all unsettled her, and she decided that she needed to meditate. She packed the items she required to meditate and left her dorm. No one would miss her. No one wanted to room with her.

She had a spot she went to for this purpose, one that was fairly secluded from casual passers-by and wouldn’t set off smoke alarms. The walk to the clearing in her favorite park, at night, went without interruption. She took the large steno cans from her backpack, placing them in circle wide enough for her to sit cross-legged in. She sat in the middle of them, and set the steno aflame one by one. With a little push, she amplified the flames around her to several times their limitation, creating a wall of fire that surrounded her on all sides. The heat from them washed over her body, both warming and calming her.

She had not been able to meditate before her eruption. Her best efforts had always left her frustrated; her mind was too full of concern and conflicting directions to ever empty sufficiently to achieve the relaxed state. This wasn’t something she placed much importance on, but nonetheless being surrounded her element, yes, her element, gave her a serenity that allowed her to achieve it.

For several minutes she simply sat cross-legged within the circle, emptying her thoughts by visualizing her body slowly transforming into the flames around her. That was something she wasn’t able to do just yet except when traveling through The Burning, bodymorph was the name of the ability given to that kind of transformation in the early years after N-Day, and part of her was very amused by the though that one day her meditation technique might end up becoming a facet of her elemental control.

When at last her mind was peaceful she returned to the question. Did she make a mistake?

Perhaps she did, but the mistake wasn’t in becoming a hi no rei; she was meant to become that and neither was the mistake in deciding when to try forcing the eruption. Now that she had felt The Burning, known the joy of being part of it, trying to imagine life without it was difficult. Nor did she want to.

No, the mistake was in her isolation. She was a nova stuck doing baseline things, a fire spirit living amongst mortals and forbidden from Burning. Not that there was anything wrong with some of the stuff she was doing; education was a noble goal and a valuable asset regardless of who one was. Snuffing fire in homes and business, however distasteful, did make a difference in the lives of many of the locals here.

She did as much research as was possible by someone unerupted (she would not think of herself as having been a baseline) on what being a nova was like before attempting to erupt. She read autobiography after autobiography, writings, psychology and sociology journals, essays, watched interviews, and whatever else she could get out of the libraries. And now, she was a nova, but she wasn’t doing anything other than what she did prior to her eruption. Excepting, of course, putting out fires as part of her probation. At least she didn’t have the Randal Portman problem of people starting fires so she could put them out. At least not yet, anyway.

Part of this situation, she knew, was her own fault. She was restricted in her travel by her probation, certainly restricted on any kind of relocation. Huntsville wasn’t exactly a bright and shining metropolis of nova life, and neither was Alabama for that matter. She violated it constantly, such as the excursion to the Ogala Pow-Wow to meet Schnookems, but only for hours at a time and she always had her emergency pager with her in case the Huntsville Fire Department needed her.

Her contact with other novas, the other spirits and elementals of the world (even if they chose to ground their visions firmly in the scientific), had been limited to the Ogala Pow-Wow, the stolen trip to Flint to have Stigmata Bloodwork her, and the electronic interaction on the OpNet. The banter on N!Prime had begun to annoy her; the place seemed to be nothing more than a common forum for infighting and bickering and she admitted to being as guilty as the rest of the novas there. She isolated herself from the forums, and in doing so her only ready contact with other novas. The Terat Bastian had also approached her desiring to meet, but that never happened. Again, that was her own fault; she got caught up with schooling and neglected to schedule a time with him.

This needed to be remedied. She needed to have contact with her own kind. Real contact, real friends whom she could speak to on a more intimate level than the N!Prime forums.

When she was staying away from N!Prime, she had been given an invitation by the nova artist Tarot in Ibiza to come represent her element in a series of paintings he was doing. Not checking her private messages, she hadn’t seen the invitation and it was only after she made the decision to try hooking up with some other novas did she come across it.

Ibiza was out of her transmit range, she knew, and she couldn’t afford the trip herself. There was the nasty bit about probation as well, but this wasn’t something she could turn down. Luckily, Jager of all people offered her transportation there, and if that wasn’t possible, Tarot mentioned that his patron would be willing to help out with the costs. Tarot later mentioned he planned on having an ice elemental there as well. Immediately, Lemmy had sprung to mind upon hearing that even though no names were given. Lemmy had the rock star aura about him, that quality that made her think of an adolescent boy that would never quite become a mature man. Even with that, she did feel drawn to him, perhaps because his element was the poetic opposite of hers. She didn’t yet know, and having spent so little time with him, had no way of knowing. When he was prancing about with Slattern, she figured that was the end of that. Perhaps things might go differently once she was in Ibiza.

But that trip was still a bit in the future. Not far now, a handle of days if she looked at it in the right perspective.

Thinking of Lemmy made her think of the Ogala Pow-Wow again. And thinking of that made her think of Schnookems. Apparently, she’d been in genuine, real danger that night and had not known it at the time. Not only from Schnook, but she’d taunted Ronin, whom if everything the people on N!Prime claim is true would have torn her limb from limb with little effort. A few days later, alone in her bed, she allowed the full scope of what did happen that night to creep into her thoughts and it terrified her.

Schnook might be fellow spirit, she felt even he recognized that, but he possessed a rage that she did not. A killer instinct, for lack of a better cliché, that predators feel and sometimes submit to, a true darkness that she didn’t feel any connection to even as a spirit whose element brought destruction. That animal quality disconcerted her, especially the mating urge that he’d almost carried out had it not been for Ronin’s distraction and the Professional Victim’s mindscrew. It was probably not Schnook’s normal way of thinking of her, but she didn’t like being thought of as a possession. Well, not in the sense of being a breeding animal.

He kept leaving subtle and not so subtle hints that he was still interested in her, but the Apep factor was something else that kept popping into her mind. The serpent woman’s path led to places her own path did not and in fact, could not, go. She didn’t know what his intentions were, but she believed that Schnook either desired Apep more than her or that he wanted some kind of “pride” of females for himself. Either way, she felt it was best not to get involved with him. At least not until he figured a bit more out for himself.

Was she being hypocritical in feeling that way? A lingering thought remained in the back of her head that the desire to set free The Burning she felt when feeling the presence of the Bunsen burners was part of the same instincts that called to Schnook. She didn’t honestly know, but she didn’t think that it was. Psimon’s recent post about the electrical nova that felt that electricity screamed behind closed circuits seemed more appropriate to her. She anthropomorphized fire in an attempt to make sense of the information gleamed from her quantum senses, and not actually feeling life from it. That, of course, was part of the scientific paradigm and not the magickal one, but as a psychologist in training she had to concede that was the more likely answer.

Perhaps psychology was not the best career choice for a hi no rei. That was something to meditate on later. For now, she had found the answer she needed. Nova friends, nova relationships, and perhaps even nova lovers were what she was lacking.

Reaching out, she pulled the flame from the steno cans and into her hands, giving herself this time to play with it. But she had bored of this kind of experimentation long ago, and it only amused her for a few seconds. She absorbed the tiny fire back into herself, packed her belongings, and headed back to her home.

Days passed, and she started posting on N!Prime again. On Valentine’s Day, she jokingly complained about not having been laid by a nova after her eruption. To her surprise, she quickly received an invitation to come to Boston from Craig Preston. She mistook it for a date, and declined. But then a genuine offer appeared, from Stigmata of all people.

She’d never accepted a proposition from a woman before, and seeing that invitation glimmering on her computer screen left her in mild shock. When she traveled to Flint to get her Bloodwork done, the two of them got along very well, so well that Stigmata asked only asked for a scarification in trade for the much more expensive and elegant Bloodworking she’d received in return. Well, it was possible that seeing what she was capable of, Stigmata simply felt body art for body art was an equal exchange. She’d always thought the Flint nova got the better end of the deal.

She gave the matter only a few minutes consideration before accepting. At the very worst, she’d learn that playing for the other team wasn’t something she liked, and at the best this could turn out to be something really genuine. Fantasies began spiraling through her thoughts of moving to Flint, or Stigmata down here, and the two of them opening a new business together. It would a nice life, wouldn’t it? Using her quantum expression as an art, people coming to the hi no rei and the hi no chi to have sacred marks places upon their bodies. She felt the two of them could survive easily and possibly quite comfortably that way, and it would be a much better option than industrial work, firefighting, or being a therapist. They didn’t even have to be lovers for that, just really good friends. Nonetheless, when their agreed upon day arrived, she dressed splendidly in a red, shoulder-less dress that cost her two-weeks worth of t-shirt sales, taking loss on the money needed to replenish her stock. She might have been overdressed, but she wanted to make an incredible second impression.

The night was, at least to her, wonderful. Initially, she was very nervous; Stigmata was seven or so years her senior, a fully adult woman in the eyes of most and she felt like a child in Stigmata’s presence, still being in college. She had nothing to fear, really. A few moments after arriving and talking they began getting on well again, just like during her first visit. The two of them went out to dinner and it was like they were celebrities from the attention they received; the crimson skinned and luminescent-veined artist and her constantly burning companion both dressed to kill, likely the only two novas in the entire city. Away from Huntsville and the University, where the news of what she had done and her take-no-crap for it attitude wasn’t in the forefront of their minds, the people of Flint asked for autographs and pictures. Wild and exciting, a far cry from her normal life.

She loved how they complemented and interacted with one another, and perhaps more importantly, how there was all the unspoken matters that she didn’t have need to talk about. All the little qualities that separate nova from baseline, which makes one nervous around the other, were completely absent for her with Stigmata. It was absolutely wonderful, and fun. All that stuff was pushed out of mind and just accepted as understood. She knew that later questions might come up, in how their quantum expressions differed, but for that night it was unimportant.

And playing for the other team wasn’t so bad, she decided. Definitely better in some ways and kind of lacking in others; she didn’t find it this preference-shattering experience where she’d forever go the Y-Chromosome from that moment on as so many of her former college friends swore she would, still it was enjoyable. One of her bi friends, who leaned more toward the straight side, once described it like Chinese food, in that it’s really a neat treat to have once and a while, but you wouldn’t want to make a full-time diet of it. She found herself thinking about that when the night’s passion had quieted and they simply lay snuggling, and decided it was better than Chinese food. A lot better, at least when it was Stigmata she was dining with. Perhaps with another the experience might not have been a good one.

In the quiet hours, she relayed her idea for a tandem body art shop to Stigmata. Nothing was decided then, but the nova woman told her she’d think it over for a while. Either way, regardless of what her decision on business was, Stigmata said it would be good to see her again. But at least the old adage of when two women date, on the 2nd date one of them brings a U-Haul wasn’t going to happen, she mused.

A great night, indeed, and a great start for her desire to branch out and get in touch with others of her kind. She felt connected again, a little bright and more alive than she had since she returned from the Ogala Pow-Wow. In the next few days, she would be Ibiza-bound, and then, she felt, things would really begin taking off.