Anna Deine was bored and frustrated, slumped in the narrow gap between her bed and her dresser. The boredom and frustration had cleaved together to form a sort of profound, sad desperation. She folded and unfolded her hands absently. As she did, a gentle flame coated her hands. She manipulated it with skilled fingertips into the soft visage of a sparrow before allowing it to dissipate.
She called it the flicker.
This was primarily for simplicity's sake. She had spent a good half hour at the library, looking up fire-related roots in Greek and Latin, but ultimately decided that her abilities were too interesting to bog down with polysyllabic jargon. "The flicker" was vague enough to sound mysterious, while subtly implicating itself. So, the flicker it was.
Her abilities were difficult to describe. It was like trying to explain what one's own tongue tastes like, or how to sweat. It was something she was simply able to do. She'd just concentrate and flex a muscle she could not place, and bam! Viscous fire would shoot out from her palms.
She was vaguely proud of her own ingenuity. For all she knew, she was the first and only person on the planet able to flicker. The internet was less than helpful, certainly, except for providing fireproof clothing and inconspicuously obtaining a gas mask. Comic books and movies gave her no feasible explanation, unless she had somehow been exposed to an absurd amount of radiation unknowingly.
Somehow, she doubted that.
But she was bored and frustrated. She checked the time on her phone, squinting as if the sudden light hurt her eyes. She sighed. It did not hurt her eyes. Her phone vibrated suddenly, and an alert from the local news station displayed. She was needed. Shit.
Anna braced herself and stood, teetering slightly from the lightheadedness. She recovered quickly though, and, after slipping off her school clothes as gracefully as one can, replacing each article with its fireproof replacement, a shoddy disguise if there ever was one: a black skirt, leggings, a yellow long-sleeved shirt, and an orange short-sleeved shirt with her logo hastily safety pinned to the front. From her bedpost, she grabbed her gas mask and school-issued safety goggles. She was ready.
Atta Girl, atcha service!
There were ants the size of school buses attacking Chicago.
It was the third direct attack on the city in two months, much to the terror of its citizens. As frightening as the ants themselves were, they couldn't hold a candle, so to speak, to the person who fought them off: a girl in her mid-teens who tossed around fire and flitted about through the air like a spark.
It freaked everyone the hell out, Anna could tell.
On the second attack, the Avengers were called to assemble, only to find that everything was over and done by the time they arrived. It was a little embarrassing for everyone, that day.
But this time, the Avengers hadn't even bothered, despite the fact that this was the most challenging fight thus far. Atta Girl fought long and hard,slicing open the thoraxes of ants with precise blue flames, running atop an enormous wave of red flame. It took an hour and a half, two hours tops to get it all over and done with. She had helpfully set the ants' carcasses on fire to save the highway department the trouble of figuring out how the hell to dispose of a school bus sized exoskeleton. The whole experience was an adrenaline high the likes of which could not be described.
She was glad when it was over, though. These fights always took a lot out of her. She mustered up the last of her strength to draw her sigil andalias with ash on a flat slab of concrete near one of the flaming carcasses. She had made up her mind since the beginning that she would have tomake a name for herself, literally and figuratively, before some dumbass reporter did it for her. They'd probably be calling her "Ashes to Ashes" or"Sparky" or something else stupid. Luckily for her, the entire city of Chicago seemed to have accepted the name she had chosen for herself, and dumbass reporters everywhere could go back to asking the general public if Captain America was gay or if Iron Man was secretly a space lizard, or whatever dumbass reporters do.
After she had finished, she simply left. Her kinds of fights didn't tend to attract crowds, mostly because it could kill them, so she could generally leave the scene of an attack without attracting too much attention to herself. She could always do a smoke ninja thing, but with fire, if peoplewouldn't stop hounding her or trying to take her mask off. This time, she didn't have to. She strolled away, feeling her adrenaline high start to the smoke had dissipated enough for her to see ten feet in front of her, Anna removed her gas mask, goggles, and short-sleeved shirt. Mostpeople were still in their basements or other emergency shelters, but they would be emerging soon.
She arrived home safe, sound, and unnoticed. She was still coated in a thin layer of ash, though. Anna doubted that Liesel would be suspiciouswhen she got home, so there was no need to shower yet. She stashed away the costume, changed into the most comfortable sweat pants she owned, and was about to fall asleep when she felt something on her foot. It was an ant.
She smiled when she saw it, cupped her hands around it, and took it outside.