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om_mainEileen Pyro-sits during the party, in the hopes of mitigating property damage. The two manage to amuse themselves, and provide a moderately spectacular light show for the other students at the same time.
Now this was a party! Not that John really knew what that meant, but if he could create a perfect party, it'd look a lot like this. As in, there would be a massive fire. The fire didn't need him to keep going--he'd started it with his lighter and let it grow, adjusting it so it didn't burn through too much fuel too fast or spread too far--on pain of death, if the birthday girl's interfering big brother was to be believed. (It wasn't that John didn't believe Pietro would hurt him; it was more that he didn't care one way or the other.)
But it was still early in the night and people were getting food and drink and talking and dancing around. All John wanted to do was play with the lovely, lovely fire, watching it break down the wood into elements, managing the convection just for the sensation of his proverbial fingers pulling and weaving--moving in oxygen, taking away byproducts, clearing the air and feeding the fire. He made a few little shapes here and there, recreating famous sculptures (Venus de Milo, The Thinker) then melting them back into the larger whole. Oooh, Michelangelo's David! Very nice, that.
"Bit highbrow, don'tcha think?" Eileen asked critically, floating in the air just behind John's shoulder. "It's a party for a teenage girl, Pyro," she went on. "Can't you try something a little more, I dunno," she waved a hand, and idly stretched the light waves coming off the fire until it burned a rich crimson, "age appropriate?" Pietro had asked her to keep an eye on him--and more particularly on whatever games he decided to play with the bonfire, and she was familiar enough with the silver-haired mutant from weekend football in the rec room not to mind having been made a babysitter. Besides, it was his little sister's birthday. Seemed like the least she could do.
And hell, it wasn't like she really minded. All that much. "Just saying. Know your audience."
Ooooh, pretty! Yes, Eileen was always full of surprises, and that was just one reason why her company was always entertaining. Though John knew better than to point it out. She had trained him rather quickly, hadn't she? What a girl!
"Well, I am still awaiting Lorna's directives, since I've promised my services are hers all evening. And I like the look of the statues made of fire--like they're coming alive." His gaze was fixed on the dark red flames, though, eyes wide and flashing with it. "That's beautiful. It feels the same, you just made it look different."
"What about, I don't know, some dancers, or something," Eileen suggested. "Or some fall holiday stuff--Pilgrims or turkeys or Christmas trees. St. Nick in a fire sleigh. You don't have to play to the lowest common denominator, just a lower one." She waved her hand at the flames again, squeezing the waves together until they turned a brilliant, emerald green.
"And that's nothing, really. Just waves and harmonies. The fire's still a fire. All I do is change the color by lengthening or tightening the tempo of the light that comes off it naturally."
"Only way I could do something like that would be by adding something to the fire," he admitted. He'd done it with copper and magnesium before just for giggles and it was beautiful, but this was something else entirely. "It's brilliant."
He waved a hand and the fire burned hotter and bigger of a sudden, not painfully so, but just so the green light's circle of influence expanded gloriously in the dark. "Though I'll have you know that I don't believe in talking down to an audience. I do, however, believe in not alienating them, so I'll take your suggestion under advisement.
"Bit early for St. Nick, though."
She rolled her eyes. "That's right. I forgot you're an artist." The skepticism in her tone was meant less for John specifically than the idea of artists in general, though. As far as Eileen could tell, it seemed to be a whole profession devoted to the idea of coming up with the weirdest shit possible, then looking down on the people who admitted they didn't get it. She didn't get it, and she wasn't interested in particularly trying, because she wasn't convinced there was anything to get. Just self-congratulation and snobbery.
Why John would want to be part of that scene was anybody's guess. But the guy was weird, no question, so he had a leg up on the posers, at least.
"Anyway," she went on, slowly pressing the light waves into a bright cobalt color, "you're in America now. Here, people start putting their Christmas decorations up pretty much right after Halloween. I think it's so they can get a few minutes' worth of enjoyment out of 'em before holiday-related depression kicks in."
"Because there's no sun here for Christmas, or because it's a time of enforced joy and love, and that's bound to make anyone want to throw themselves off the nearest bridge?" He was used to Christmas being a summer thing, but then, wrong end of the world, wasn't it?
Anyhow, he changed the fire into a tall, round column now, wondering if she'd go with him, or if extending the thing above her influence would just make the flames orange again up there.
At first, the uppermost portions of the column did return to their natural orange color. But Eileen shot John a brief scowl, and quickly compensated. Her range had improved quite a bit, even in the short time she'd been here, as had her fine control; she used her powers as often as she could, and here, in a place where she could pretty much exercise them constantly without anybody freaking out, that meant she was practicing more or less every waking minute of the day. Sure, her grades weren't all the could be as a direct consequence ... but the results were worth it.
And if the firebug wanted to play games, she would oblige him. "I think it's more a psychological thing. People get to Christmas and wonder, 'What the hell did I do with my life? That's another year wasted, and I'm still as lame as I was last time I was hanging the fucking holly'. That kind of introspective bullshit." Eileen carefully attuned the amount of pressure she put on the harmonies now, letting it shrink to normal and then lengthening the wavelengths again near the top of the pillar. The result was a burning spectrum of violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red.
She smirked over at John triumphantly.
"Brilliant!" He cackled some more, clapping his hands in appreciation even as he mentally held the column steady for all to admire. "Yeah I don't go in for all that introspective bullshit either. I mean, I ask other people for theirs so I can use it, but it's dead boring on my own.
"Rather be doing this." He clapped his hands again and, with a much higher degree of concentration, split the column into seven balls of fire. Since he made certain to keep them steady, they each retained the color she'd assigned them. "Ha-HA! Oh, that is fantastic."
"This is real," Eileen said, though for once it sounded more like an agreement than a prelude to an argument. John was stepping up his game, which meant she had to do the same--like hell she was going to be outdone by anybody from the country that invented vegemite, and actually ate it. But this was going to take a lot more focus, so she reached out a hand toward the fire, and the purple glow pouring from her eyes intensified dramatically.
The colors of the fire began to shift, traveling upward from one burning globe to the next in a moving spectrum of vivid color and motion. Sure, it took a hell of a lot of concentration to keep it all steady and moving in the right direction, but light waves were relatively easy to manipulate, compared to other electromagnetic sources. It was just a lot to think about at once. Even so, she added, "And real is always more worthwhile than whiny, 'woe-is-me' navel gazing."
"Well, I like that okay, if it's in a book," John admitted, his eyes lit up and flashing with with the shifting colors and dancing fire. It was a weird kind of displacement--he thought he should feel any change in the fire, but the globes felt precisely as they had. "But I agree that it gets no realer than this. Or if it does, it's bloody boring.
"If I pull the balls out into a horizontal line, can you keep the color moving with them?" he asked curiously, holding out both hands before him.
Eileen thought about that for a second, then her expression resolved into a smile that was distinctly wolfish. "Of course I can. Show me what you got, Johnny."
John giggled and turned both palms upward, then slowly drew his fingers into tight fists. As they tucked inward, the balls began to spread out horizontally from where they'd been; John kept his gaze fixed on them, using all his concentration to make sure they were level and moving at an even pace so Eileen could keep her eye on the spectrum around them.
Okay, so he giggled a lot as well, but who wouldn't. This was amazing!
In contrast, Eileen only smirked, and kept just the one arm outstretched. It wasn't really necessary, from a mechanical standpoint; she could still use her powers freely without pointing at things. But it helped keep any distractions that might have otherwise interfered from drawing too much of her attention elsewhere. The startling violet glow pouring from her eyes intensified, and the colors maintained their steady pulse across the several globes John had created, and through all the colors of the visible spectrum.
Then, to make it a bit more interesting, she began alternating the direction of motion, first shifting the colors from left to right until she'd cycled through, then right to left, then left to right again.
"Oooh, cheeky girl!" Which, clearly, delighted John. Though it was perhaps hard to tell, his cackling had a certain warmth to it that was as near as he really came to sounding altogether affectionate. John used his hands too, raising the fists slightly as he brought the fire-globes into a horizontal line with each other. It wasn't so much moving them as it was creating them over and over, or parts of them, anyhow, but it had the desired visual effect--and then some, thanks to Eileen's magic!
"Right, perfect! Now... I say we go for an explosion. Colored fire everywhere!" He began drawing them together slowly enough that she could easily keep up, planning to make one giant fireball then blow it apart. Yesssss!
"A controlled explosion of colored fire everywhere," Eileen warned. "Or it will be a race to see whether Pietro kicks my ass for not watching you better or I kick yours for being a dumbass." Warning given, she continued to follow John's lead, the colors of the spheres of fire fluctuating regularly even as they began joining together into a single, burning, multicolored mass. Was it a bad idea? Hell, probably. But it was also fucking amazing.
"Understood," John said. Then he bit down on his bottom lip in concentration, because this was going to take some actual effort, to make it as intricate as he hoped. He settled into the fire, focusing for a moment on the almost involuntary standard process of feeding oxygen and sweeping away the combustion byproducts with convective efficiency. In order to accomplish what he wanted, he would have to do that over and over--in twenty or thirty different spots, each well planned out. A far cry from what he'd just been doing with seven fireballs, intricacy wise, but on a similar principle.
After about five seconds of ignoring the music and the voice and everything else in the world, John clapped his hands together, then pulled them apart. The fire seemed to shatter, flying apart in a multicolored fury. Or maybe it was more like a giant magical fire paintball hitting a wall.
John cackled as the whole clearing lit up with the glow from the rainbow fire explosion. Ahhhh yyyyyeah! Epic!
Eileen was also concentrating, as much due to the amount of her attention this level of electromagnetic manipulation required as because she was obliged to follow John's lead. The colors of the fireball blended, rippled, formed a banded vortex of colors spinning and whorling across the surface of the fireball like the striated cloud cover of some fantastic and far distant world. When Pyro's hands came together, Eileen radically expanded her range, causing a few minor discolorations to unrelated phenomena nearby, but sticking mostly to the fire. And though she did lose it a bit at the very edges--allowing the normal, orange color to return--for the most part John's kaleidoscopic fire blast went off without a hitch.
After a quick survey of the surrounding are to make sure they hadn't accidentally ignited any part of the lawn (or a fellow student), Eileen drifted down to about shoulder-level with the firebug and offered her fist. "Dude. We are awesome."
John bumped it immediately, barely managing to stop his mad cackling enough to say, "The fuckin' best!"
She grinned, but when she turned her face back toward the bonfire, her lips thinned into a thoughtful line. After all that, just watching the flames flicker and dance normally seemed kind of ... humdrum. "Question is, what do we do for an encore, Johnny?"
The fire had gone down to its natural state, and John was watching Eileen. It was funny, seeing her grin like she had been for a moment there. He'd almost missed it because he'd been so busy laughing. He wondered if he could get her to do it again--and didn't really bother to question why. "Technicolor phoenix?"
Eileen smirked. "Technicolor phoenix. Let's do this." She was already mapping out the alterations in wavelengths that would be necessary for the most striking visual effect, even before Johnny started working his magic. It was so easy to get caught up in what they were doing that she could almost forget why they bothered in the first place. But that probably didn't matter too much, in the long run. As long as they gave the audience a good show, it didn't matter if it was a birthday, Kwanzaa, or the Westchester Stop And Shop's One Millionth Customer.
The point was: it was a gift-wrapped opportunity to show off. And damned if she wouldn't take it.
Now this was a party! Not that John really knew what that meant, but if he could create a perfect party, it'd look a lot like this. As in, there would be a massive fire. The fire didn't need him to keep going--he'd started it with his lighter and let it grow, adjusting it so it didn't burn through too much fuel too fast or spread too far--on pain of death, if the birthday girl's interfering big brother was to be believed. (It wasn't that John didn't believe Pietro would hurt him; it was more that he didn't care one way or the other.)
But it was still early in the night and people were getting food and drink and talking and dancing around. All John wanted to do was play with the lovely, lovely fire, watching it break down the wood into elements, managing the convection just for the sensation of his proverbial fingers pulling and weaving--moving in oxygen, taking away byproducts, clearing the air and feeding the fire. He made a few little shapes here and there, recreating famous sculptures (Venus de Milo, The Thinker) then melting them back into the larger whole. Oooh, Michelangelo's David! Very nice, that.
"Bit highbrow, don'tcha think?" Eileen asked critically, floating in the air just behind John's shoulder. "It's a party for a teenage girl, Pyro," she went on. "Can't you try something a little more, I dunno," she waved a hand, and idly stretched the light waves coming off the fire until it burned a rich crimson, "age appropriate?" Pietro had asked her to keep an eye on him--and more particularly on whatever games he decided to play with the bonfire, and she was familiar enough with the silver-haired mutant from weekend football in the rec room not to mind having been made a babysitter. Besides, it was his little sister's birthday. Seemed like the least she could do.
And hell, it wasn't like she really minded. All that much. "Just saying. Know your audience."
Ooooh, pretty! Yes, Eileen was always full of surprises, and that was just one reason why her company was always entertaining. Though John knew better than to point it out. She had trained him rather quickly, hadn't she? What a girl!
"Well, I am still awaiting Lorna's directives, since I've promised my services are hers all evening. And I like the look of the statues made of fire--like they're coming alive." His gaze was fixed on the dark red flames, though, eyes wide and flashing with it. "That's beautiful. It feels the same, you just made it look different."
"What about, I don't know, some dancers, or something," Eileen suggested. "Or some fall holiday stuff--Pilgrims or turkeys or Christmas trees. St. Nick in a fire sleigh. You don't have to play to the lowest common denominator, just a lower one." She waved her hand at the flames again, squeezing the waves together until they turned a brilliant, emerald green.
"And that's nothing, really. Just waves and harmonies. The fire's still a fire. All I do is change the color by lengthening or tightening the tempo of the light that comes off it naturally."
"Only way I could do something like that would be by adding something to the fire," he admitted. He'd done it with copper and magnesium before just for giggles and it was beautiful, but this was something else entirely. "It's brilliant."
He waved a hand and the fire burned hotter and bigger of a sudden, not painfully so, but just so the green light's circle of influence expanded gloriously in the dark. "Though I'll have you know that I don't believe in talking down to an audience. I do, however, believe in not alienating them, so I'll take your suggestion under advisement.
"Bit early for St. Nick, though."
She rolled her eyes. "That's right. I forgot you're an artist." The skepticism in her tone was meant less for John specifically than the idea of artists in general, though. As far as Eileen could tell, it seemed to be a whole profession devoted to the idea of coming up with the weirdest shit possible, then looking down on the people who admitted they didn't get it. She didn't get it, and she wasn't interested in particularly trying, because she wasn't convinced there was anything to get. Just self-congratulation and snobbery.
Why John would want to be part of that scene was anybody's guess. But the guy was weird, no question, so he had a leg up on the posers, at least.
"Anyway," she went on, slowly pressing the light waves into a bright cobalt color, "you're in America now. Here, people start putting their Christmas decorations up pretty much right after Halloween. I think it's so they can get a few minutes' worth of enjoyment out of 'em before holiday-related depression kicks in."
"Because there's no sun here for Christmas, or because it's a time of enforced joy and love, and that's bound to make anyone want to throw themselves off the nearest bridge?" He was used to Christmas being a summer thing, but then, wrong end of the world, wasn't it?
Anyhow, he changed the fire into a tall, round column now, wondering if she'd go with him, or if extending the thing above her influence would just make the flames orange again up there.
At first, the uppermost portions of the column did return to their natural orange color. But Eileen shot John a brief scowl, and quickly compensated. Her range had improved quite a bit, even in the short time she'd been here, as had her fine control; she used her powers as often as she could, and here, in a place where she could pretty much exercise them constantly without anybody freaking out, that meant she was practicing more or less every waking minute of the day. Sure, her grades weren't all the could be as a direct consequence ... but the results were worth it.
And if the firebug wanted to play games, she would oblige him. "I think it's more a psychological thing. People get to Christmas and wonder, 'What the hell did I do with my life? That's another year wasted, and I'm still as lame as I was last time I was hanging the fucking holly'. That kind of introspective bullshit." Eileen carefully attuned the amount of pressure she put on the harmonies now, letting it shrink to normal and then lengthening the wavelengths again near the top of the pillar. The result was a burning spectrum of violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red.
She smirked over at John triumphantly.
"Brilliant!" He cackled some more, clapping his hands in appreciation even as he mentally held the column steady for all to admire. "Yeah I don't go in for all that introspective bullshit either. I mean, I ask other people for theirs so I can use it, but it's dead boring on my own.
"Rather be doing this." He clapped his hands again and, with a much higher degree of concentration, split the column into seven balls of fire. Since he made certain to keep them steady, they each retained the color she'd assigned them. "Ha-HA! Oh, that is fantastic."
"This is real," Eileen said, though for once it sounded more like an agreement than a prelude to an argument. John was stepping up his game, which meant she had to do the same--like hell she was going to be outdone by anybody from the country that invented vegemite, and actually ate it. But this was going to take a lot more focus, so she reached out a hand toward the fire, and the purple glow pouring from her eyes intensified dramatically.
The colors of the fire began to shift, traveling upward from one burning globe to the next in a moving spectrum of vivid color and motion. Sure, it took a hell of a lot of concentration to keep it all steady and moving in the right direction, but light waves were relatively easy to manipulate, compared to other electromagnetic sources. It was just a lot to think about at once. Even so, she added, "And real is always more worthwhile than whiny, 'woe-is-me' navel gazing."
"Well, I like that okay, if it's in a book," John admitted, his eyes lit up and flashing with with the shifting colors and dancing fire. It was a weird kind of displacement--he thought he should feel any change in the fire, but the globes felt precisely as they had. "But I agree that it gets no realer than this. Or if it does, it's bloody boring.
"If I pull the balls out into a horizontal line, can you keep the color moving with them?" he asked curiously, holding out both hands before him.
Eileen thought about that for a second, then her expression resolved into a smile that was distinctly wolfish. "Of course I can. Show me what you got, Johnny."
John giggled and turned both palms upward, then slowly drew his fingers into tight fists. As they tucked inward, the balls began to spread out horizontally from where they'd been; John kept his gaze fixed on them, using all his concentration to make sure they were level and moving at an even pace so Eileen could keep her eye on the spectrum around them.
Okay, so he giggled a lot as well, but who wouldn't. This was amazing!
In contrast, Eileen only smirked, and kept just the one arm outstretched. It wasn't really necessary, from a mechanical standpoint; she could still use her powers freely without pointing at things. But it helped keep any distractions that might have otherwise interfered from drawing too much of her attention elsewhere. The startling violet glow pouring from her eyes intensified, and the colors maintained their steady pulse across the several globes John had created, and through all the colors of the visible spectrum.
Then, to make it a bit more interesting, she began alternating the direction of motion, first shifting the colors from left to right until she'd cycled through, then right to left, then left to right again.
"Oooh, cheeky girl!" Which, clearly, delighted John. Though it was perhaps hard to tell, his cackling had a certain warmth to it that was as near as he really came to sounding altogether affectionate. John used his hands too, raising the fists slightly as he brought the fire-globes into a horizontal line with each other. It wasn't so much moving them as it was creating them over and over, or parts of them, anyhow, but it had the desired visual effect--and then some, thanks to Eileen's magic!
"Right, perfect! Now... I say we go for an explosion. Colored fire everywhere!" He began drawing them together slowly enough that she could easily keep up, planning to make one giant fireball then blow it apart. Yesssss!
"A controlled explosion of colored fire everywhere," Eileen warned. "Or it will be a race to see whether Pietro kicks my ass for not watching you better or I kick yours for being a dumbass." Warning given, she continued to follow John's lead, the colors of the spheres of fire fluctuating regularly even as they began joining together into a single, burning, multicolored mass. Was it a bad idea? Hell, probably. But it was also fucking amazing.
"Understood," John said. Then he bit down on his bottom lip in concentration, because this was going to take some actual effort, to make it as intricate as he hoped. He settled into the fire, focusing for a moment on the almost involuntary standard process of feeding oxygen and sweeping away the combustion byproducts with convective efficiency. In order to accomplish what he wanted, he would have to do that over and over--in twenty or thirty different spots, each well planned out. A far cry from what he'd just been doing with seven fireballs, intricacy wise, but on a similar principle.
After about five seconds of ignoring the music and the voice and everything else in the world, John clapped his hands together, then pulled them apart. The fire seemed to shatter, flying apart in a multicolored fury. Or maybe it was more like a giant magical fire paintball hitting a wall.
John cackled as the whole clearing lit up with the glow from the rainbow fire explosion. Ahhhh yyyyyeah! Epic!
Eileen was also concentrating, as much due to the amount of her attention this level of electromagnetic manipulation required as because she was obliged to follow John's lead. The colors of the fireball blended, rippled, formed a banded vortex of colors spinning and whorling across the surface of the fireball like the striated cloud cover of some fantastic and far distant world. When Pyro's hands came together, Eileen radically expanded her range, causing a few minor discolorations to unrelated phenomena nearby, but sticking mostly to the fire. And though she did lose it a bit at the very edges--allowing the normal, orange color to return--for the most part John's kaleidoscopic fire blast went off without a hitch.
After a quick survey of the surrounding are to make sure they hadn't accidentally ignited any part of the lawn (or a fellow student), Eileen drifted down to about shoulder-level with the firebug and offered her fist. "Dude. We are awesome."
John bumped it immediately, barely managing to stop his mad cackling enough to say, "The fuckin' best!"
She grinned, but when she turned her face back toward the bonfire, her lips thinned into a thoughtful line. After all that, just watching the flames flicker and dance normally seemed kind of ... humdrum. "Question is, what do we do for an encore, Johnny?"
The fire had gone down to its natural state, and John was watching Eileen. It was funny, seeing her grin like she had been for a moment there. He'd almost missed it because he'd been so busy laughing. He wondered if he could get her to do it again--and didn't really bother to question why. "Technicolor phoenix?"
Eileen smirked. "Technicolor phoenix. Let's do this." She was already mapping out the alterations in wavelengths that would be necessary for the most striking visual effect, even before Johnny started working his magic. It was so easy to get caught up in what they were doing that she could almost forget why they bothered in the first place. But that probably didn't matter too much, in the long run. As long as they gave the audience a good show, it didn't matter if it was a birthday, Kwanzaa, or the Westchester Stop And Shop's One Millionth Customer.
The point was: it was a gift-wrapped opportunity to show off. And damned if she wouldn't take it.
