“That’s the interesting part.” Summer’s not concentrating very hard; she’s done this bit so often it’s almost a party trick now. She lifts her hands, turning them around, and the fire licks up her fingers and coalesces into a ball. “It doesn’t burn me. It’s entirely under my control. I call it, somehow, and feed it the emotions that aren’t mine. I can set things on fire, or not, as I choose. But if I stick my finger in a candleflame lit from a match, I still get burnt.” Without any apparent effort, the fire vanished.
“Can you use the power to defend yourself?” Is the first question that comes out of him. He leans forward in his wheelchair and looks at her hands. “These seem to be a different sort of flames then.. I’m not entirely sure, but it seems you have a power to turn emotions into energy in your body and use the friction between your fingers to cast it out.”
He watches how the flames vanish and his eyes go back to Summer. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but they disappear as you stop feeding them the emotions? I— I dare say.. if you could bring this energy through your entire body, you would have an armor.. made of flames.” The thought amazes him, a full body fire protection. That would indeed come in handy. “Do you know if these flames hurt others?” He asks politely, trying to hide the excitement of the new information.
“I’m not sure it’s friction. I mean, I can do this,” a pair of wings, shaped entirely of flame, appear from her back, “and I guess I could do like the Human Torch and surround myself with it.” The wings drop away to nothing. “Are you excited because this is new, or the … ” Summer looks away, trying to find the right words. “I’ve fought with them. I’ve hurt people with it. It’s … it’s hard, doing that, because I’m having to dump their pain right back out, really fast, or get caught up in it. I can choose if they burn someone else, but I have to think about it, focus on it. It’s only me that’s wholly safe.” That brought a twist to her mouth.