”I’m blind.” Had been her little white lie. It wasn’t exactly true, but as far as books went, it was practically true. ”If you could help me find some audiobooks? I haven’t learned braille.”

The librarian she had approached was exactly as friendly as Maya had hoped. They were between the stacks of the audio section debating how awkward it was or wasn’t to listen to steamy romance when they noticed shouting. Which fast escalated to screaming.

The librarian ran toward the door because it was her job. Maya ran because she was an X-man.

The librarian yanked Ghost back from something she couldn’t quite see until it hit and started licking hungry tendrils of what, to Maya, looked like hungry black void ate up the wallpaper next to the doorway.

Fire.

She was already there, otherwise Ghost would never had gone. She fumbled with her phone to call the Mansion, but voice dial wasn’t all that effective with all the screaming, as it turned out. Ghost worked to choke out the fire nearest to her and identify the culprit as her phone rang.

There was a good chance that it was someone at the Mansion even if she hadn’t managed to dial the Mansion itself.

When she heard the phone pick up, Maya didn't hesitate. "The Metropolitan Library is on fire. How fast can you get here?"

Serena's schedule was a little all over the place these days. As it so happened this afternoon she'd been doing some of the peer counseling for the university, just giving advice and checking up on some of the younger students that she was assigned to. She'd met this one in the afternoon at a very quirky looking coffee shop, with all kinds of impressionist art all over the place, with sofa's instead of normal stools.

Funnily enough, it was an art student who was complaining to her mostly about doing all this coursework, which Serena found amusing considering she had to do a similar coursework load, and study for exams for most of her years studying. She refrained from actually saying this aloud, subject bias would not go over well with an irate student. So instead she referred them to resources, heard them out and drank coffee.

She didn't usually go to this far into this part of town, especially for coffee. She stretched as she got outside, enjoying the warmer May temperatures meaning she only really needed a hoodie or thin coat to be outside. She was quickly jarred out of this reflection as her phone went off, being that she basically lived off her phone at this point, and it was her main source of conversation with her girlfriend she picked it up immediately to see it was Maya dialing.

She answered promptly thereafter, wandering what she needed from her. She blinked a few times and went over the words in her head. The library was on fire? How far away was she? After a little mental calculation she was just a couple blocks over.

But why would Maya be calling her? Accident? After very little hesitation she spoke into the phone. "5 minutes." Hung up, and then set off at a jog in the direction of the library, quickly dialing 911 on the way and hastily muttering into the phone about the fire to a attentive person on the other end before hanging up and picking up the pace.

"5 minutes," the voice on the other end of her phone said. A woman's voice. A familiar voice. Ghost wasn't sure who she'd called, but they were on their way. The other Maya? It hadn't sounded like Juliette. Serena? Maybe she'd called the social studies teacher. She wasn't an active duty X, but she would have come.

The super-suit clad villain was throwing fireballs with strategic precision at people and getting frustrated when they fizzled out before they hit home.

Ghost stood in the doorway between the stacks she had come from and the Harry Potter-like study room that was now partially in flames working to counter every new source of flame while desperately trying to manage what was already on fire. Civillians scattered, some foolish or desperate enough to try to salvage their work first.

The librarian that Ghost had been with ran to the closest fire alarm and pulled it which created a cacophony of sound, but no water or other means of fire suppression. It was to force evacuation of the building, only. The brave little librarian shouted at the villain.

"Please. There are books in residence here that are very old and irreplaceable!"

That, of course, brought the firemancer's attention to the librarian.

Serena was finding it a lot harder to breath as she turned the corner and saw the library, the windows starting to haze out. Some people hadn't noticed yet, but it was a clear sign of a brewing fire, and the smoke that followed it. She glanced over at the building's doors and quickly dashed over to them, glancing through the window and observing the scene.

She paused for a moment... Was that person wearing spandex and throwing fireballs? Okay, so the fire was being caused by a person who seemed to be a mutant. And was wearing spandex. Okay.

She pushed open one of the doors without a second thought, it was a little hot at the handle but not enough to burn, and slunk in as the spandex clad villain turned it's head to what appeared to be the librarian. Serena blinked and quickly decided that she needed to do something about it.

So she threw the nearest thing available to her, being her handbag at the back of the villian, who let out a grunt and immediately turned to the new comer to the fray, quickly creating and tossing a ball of flame at her. Serena however was already moving, quickly weaving behind a metal stand, with a bunch of pamphlets that were in varying degrees of validity and out of date, which immediately went up in a large amount of flames.

Okay. Enough was enough. Maya raised her hands preparing to just blow the entire room out the door so that she could deal with the fires only. Dump that bad guy outside and let him rage in the street where whoever "5 minutes" was, would deal with him. Hopefully.

And then a handbag hit him in the head.

He lobbed a fireball, which she was not prepared to snuff out since she had been readying to sweep as many of the people in the room out as possible with one gust. Instead she just had to trust that the feisty handbagger was okay. The fireball was gone. They were pretty difficult for her to track until they hit and started another black void of air.

Instead, Ghost changed tactics sending a sharp gust of wind at his feet and ankles.

A flurry of papers gusted past as the villain got his feet swept out from under him and he hit the table hard.

She saw the librarian flinch on his behalf.

"Please exit the building." Ghost turned to point, but she wasn't even sure where that was anymore.

"And you," Ghost turned on her mom voice with hands on hips as she addressed the firemancer. "Stop throwing a hissy fit. What's your problem anyway?"

Well! Distraction successful. Maybe a tiny bit too successful, fireballs flying at her face were noooot what Serena was expecting when she rolled out of bed this morning. Or... this afternoon.

Feeling the heat swelling up in the room she felt herself wishing that the AC was a little more effective in the library. To be fair, it was an old building. The weird thoughts were the ones that struck her during tense situations, not anything along the line of 'oh my god, I'm going to die' or 'my god, they are crazy!'. More often than not it was weird sudden cravings or something akin.

Thinking that another fireball was probably soon going to be flying at her face soon, Serena hugged the underside of a reception desk as the heat and smoke were turning up a notch. Risking a quick glance over the top of the desk there was a sudden crackle of energy as a fireball began forming again followed by a sense of foreboding.

Thank the gods that Ghost reacted quickly with a gust of wind, toppling him with another loud crack onto a table side. Sucking in through her teeth, suddenly thankful for the presence of the wind elemental, Serena glanced across at Ghost thankfully.

The mom voice... was not expected. The pyromancer had been getting to their feet, readying another missile to fire and stopped mid way, dumb founded at the voice for a few moments whilst the people in the library started to react and made for the fire exits in an even greater panic than before.

A metallic glint flickered in the haemokinetics vision, spilling from an object spilled from her handbag. Quickly surmising that this was the flask she kept on her, noting that the pyro was about to throw another fireball at Ghost her gaze hardened rapidly. Eerie blue glowing began to eminate from her as she flung her hand forwards, the flask bursting from the inside, a crimson liquid also surrounded by the same blue glow appearing from the remanents of the metallic flask.

Too busy getting ready to throw another fireball at either Maya or one of the fleeing people, with an almost animalistic scream, he fortunately didn't notice the blood hardening and forming into something akin to a baseball, swiftly flicking up towards his wrist, causing a yelp, along the the fireball to crash harmlessly to the floor. Accompanied by a fairly loud yelling of "NOOOOPE!" from Serena.

There was so much going on and what Ghost needed to pay attention to was subtle. It was difficult to pay attention to what amounted to a whisper while everyone was screaming.

Fire was her greatest enemy. She couldn't let it get too close to her or she would go up in flames. She didn't want it to get to the books either. Ghost tried to keep a handle on the fire situation so that it didn't grow too terribly out of control. That meant her attention to the people around her, but most importantly her attention to the bad guy had slipped a bit while the fires in the room dimmed.

So it was a complete surprise when Serena was there. Just. Suddenly there and also shouting.

Ghost had so many warm fuzzy feelings for her fellow mutant at that moment that her jaw flapped uselessly as she tried to articulate them all at once.

"You, ah. Ser- I!" Ghost shook herself. She could run over and hug her friend later. For now it'd be best if they could split duty. "Can you handle him?" She ignored the bay guy who was sputtering indignantly... or maybe that was pain since he seemed to be holding his wrist. What had she done?

Actually. That decided it. "Of course you can. You get him. I'll put out the fire." She coughed into her elbow from the smoke and turned her back to Serena and most of the room, implicitly trusting the other woman with her life so that she could turn her full attention to quelling the flames.

Barely having time to take in Ghost's reaction, and the upsurge of affection that was evident when she did so, Serena quickly had to duck another fireball as the creep drew his arm back and let another one sail towards her. It crashed into a bookshelf behind behind her, causing a flaming book charged with heat to drop near her. She stood back up, stepping to the side and looking the crazy fire starter dead on.

Some of the blood had dried out, but it wasn't evaporating fast enough before she could change it back to a liquid, though as this fight went on it would probably hit that point. She formed it into a small fist, slightly smaller than her own as she didn't have much and then as the man was rearing himself back to lob another orb of flame in her general direction the blonde swung her arm up, the blood moving to his lower chin and smacking him up into the air by a couple of feet before he came crashing down onto his back.

As he did so, he let loose his last orb of chaos in his last few moments of consciousness. The blonde did her best to duck out of the way, but inevitably she still got tagged by a small amount of it on her shoulder, leaving a mild burn on her now exposed shoulder. She glanced around, the room now filling with smoke much more rapidly she could feel it starting to interfere with her lungs.

She moved over the unconscious man, even though her eyes were beginning to water heavily, beginning to drag him towards the exit. She couldn't let him suffocate, regardless of whether or not he was responsible for it.

To say that Ghost was impressed was a bit of an understatement. The long time X-man hadn't ever seen her friend use her power, let alone fight. She wished that she could have seen it with her eyes, but the fire situation was not going to address itself.

The all at once suppression she had been attempting while Serena took care of Mr. Hot Pants was not working. There were too many factors and it was spreading too fast to account for. Plus, she still needed to breathe.

Ghost swapped tactics and tried to section things out for herself. Little by little, section by section the fires were choked out of existence.

By the time everything was extinguished, the fire marshal had arrived and Ghost had devolved into a seemingly unstoppable fit of coughing. Her normally alabaster skin was soot-streaked, but even worse she was looking rather polluted and greyish on the inside.

The X waved Serena over from where she seemed to be settling their injured firemancer with the police and she was guided to an ambulance for some oxygen and a debriefing with the local police.

She was told that she was lucky in about a hundred different ways and that smoke inhalation was dangerous. Maya assumed it would all be fine. Plus, she'd saved a lot of books.

The fire's raging around the building were causing the air to distort and heat even more so than the budding summer temperatures were already doing, and smoke was spreading from seemingly everywhere, Serena did her best to limit her inhalation and drag the unconscious man from the dangerous gauntlet. Truth be told, she was terrified. Her arms were trembling as she dragged him from the fire, there were a million ways this could go wrong and end badly, but she wasn't about to let someone potentially die when she could help it.

She managed to get the villain in question outside and moved towards the police, only now noticing how much spandex he seemed to be wearing. And one of those face masks. Strange. She'd been more focused on not becoming a deep fried Serena during the fight, in defense of her attention span.

She stammered out a response to the police between a few coughs, trying to take in a few gulps of fresh air as the fire marshals went to work checking things. The officers quickly hand cuffed the assailant and allowed the EMT's to check him over, confirming that he'd only been knocked unconscious and that he'd recover. All of this, obviously much to Serena's relief. She didn't want to kill someone like, ever.

As soon as Maya's waving was noticed, Serena quickly moved over towards her, asked questions by an EMT and checked over very briefly before she was aloud to see her friend. She moved close and grimaced. "Ghost you look..." she murmured, leaving that last couple of words hanging.

Truth be told, the fire marshall was giving her an earful about potential effects. Swelling of the airways and all that. "Sir, with all due respect." Ghost coughed into her hand, a full-body wracking cough before she resumed her rebuttal.

"With all due respect, I'm not sure that my body will be affected in the usual ways. It could be worse, it might be better. You just never know and," another wheezing fit made her pause. Her situation was unique. A human hospital wasn't going to give her anything she needed. She'd tried human science as a fix before and it'd let her down.

"I would like to get back to my teammates." She croaked, more glad than ever to see Serena checked over. If she'd called her friend into danger, only to have her get hurt... Ghost would never forgive herself.

> "Ghost you look..."

"About as good as I feel, I'd guess." Her voice rasped and grated with each breath as Maya slid off her gurney and fell into a hug. Only, it was difficult to keep together. It was difficult to squeeze. It was just difficult.

Where Serena had once been holding onto a mostly corporeal Ghost, the elemental's body began to dematerialize like fluffs of dirty cotton candy shedding from her core.