by Louis IX
Check first chapter for disclaimer and global warnings.
Summer ChildSummer saw the light in the summer of ninety-seventy, right in the middle of a hippy encampment where people lived "naturally", in the woods between Philadelphia and Atlantic City.
Unassisted by doctors, her mother died in childbirth, and the baby, a little girl they called with the current season, was left to the care of the community… who often forgot about it. Due to the trauma of her birth, she seldom cried, even when suffering from pangs of hunger, and those "adults" stoned from too much psychotropic substances didn't feed her.
She almost died.
Groups of people living like them attracted all the kinds of attention, and students from nearby universities tended to spend their Spring breaks there, taking advantage of the freer mores. Some still had humane feelings, and one particular young woman noticed the abandoned child and took pity. She brought the little Summer with her… only to leave her to her own parents – as many youngsters, she railed at the world's cruelty and indifference, but when it was time to actually do something, they asked their parents. The already overworked parents of the ungrateful students (at a time where it was the parents who paid for higher education, not the banks) were left with some more things to do.
In Summer's case, it was the bare necessities. It wouldn't do to be accused of cruelty against a baby, right? So, Summer was kept alive and well-fed, and schooled, and taken to church. The aging parents, however, resented their uncaring daughter (the eldest, that is) through her, and Summer escaped as soon as she could – which, given her general frailty and small stature, didn't happen before she was legally an adult.
Of course, as most thin girls living by themselves, she was accosted by men trying to get into her pants, some of them even going the "extra mile" by having her recruited by a modelling agency – she did have the body type, without even needing to vomit regularly. What she didn't have, though, was the body type to lead a safe and healthy pregnancy. And with the people hovering around her, showering her with luxury and alcohol, it didn't take long for her to end up in a party which she escaped with a passenger – and I'm not speaking about parahuman powers, yet.
As some wise people once said: those who fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.
Despite paying quite a bit for a good hospital stay, Summer breathed her last when her daughter gave her first cry. Her name, written previously in the many documents the healthcare institute had her fill out, was Michaela.
"Michaela" is quite a mouthful for a small child, and it is as well for foster parents who only make ends meet by scrounging for every dollar and cutting every corner. She was promptly called Mimi. And Mimi, like those eponymous folkloric creatures from northern indigenous Autralia, was very thin. Like her mother, in fact, but her adoptive parents hadn't known her. Like her father, whom no one knows about, she was quite tall too.
Mimi, child of Summer, was quite naïve and unaware to the horrors of the real world. Her being in foster care didn't change that because her shape made her eerily capable of playing hide, and she was seldom picked upon.
She was even completely overlooked, and forgotten, when the house took fire, one day. With the doors locked to prevent the fire from escaping, she was trapped in a burning house. And she triggered in the only way she could imagine to escape: teleportation. Through fire.
She didn't realize that she brought fire with her, outside, actually burning her current family when she went to hug them in relief – her mind was already unstable before her trigger, and the shock of almost dying caused a shift that made her crazy the more she used her power.
The fire itself, before the trigger proper, gave her numerous scars, and that ended up being her cape name: Burnscar. And given that she killed her family, she was deemed too dangerous to keep free.
She ended up in the newly-constructed asylum for parahumans, in Philadelphia, where she spent years, and didn't learn much. She thought she made a friend, but wasn't completely sure – Elle, her name, was quite absent-minded, and didn't react much to what she said.
Besides, she wasn't even sure that Elle was her real name, or even a forename. Using her good behaviour as a bargaining tool (why would only the psychiatrists do that?), she obtained more, and learned that it was "merely" the last syllable of her full name. And the first, too. She was of an old European aristocratic stock, and was named Elsa of Arendell.
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Winter is ComingMimi's willingness to see Elle as a friend made her follow when the other girl was sprung out by Faultline's Crew. Only to find herself in the streets, without much knowledge of what to do. With honeyed words, she was recruited in a pimp's service, only to kill him when he got adventurous. Kill it with fire, of course.
Her state of mind staying psychotic as long as her fire burned, she spent quite a long time as a vengeful figure, spreading death and destruction in a path that spanned several towns. And intersected neatly another one, with Jack Slash at its helm.
Seeing her doing her shtick made Jack nominate her for joining her group, and she was subsequently "tested" by each member, as was their modus operandi.
The child of Summer ended up killing Winter, when the villainous Shaker thought herself safe from everything related to fire. In fact, her reduction of human will had the opposite effect on Burnscar, because the madness she exhibited when using her power was said power taking over her thought processes. With complete control over Mimi, the power was able to ignore Manton limitations briefly, and make the opponent explode.
Crimson, being in love with the recently-deceased Winter, attacked Burnscar out of turn and ended up killed by Jack, the next in line. Easily, too, as Crimson hadn't buffed himself beforehand – he needed to consume blood to become stronger.
With two members lost to their prospect, Jack recruited her easily, and sought another parahuman nearby. Not finding one, he ended up creating one, by making a young girl trigger into Bonesaw.
And Bonesaw had an unhealthy fascination with brains and parahuman powers. She was able to pick the structures granting powers and graft them elsewhere, even inside someone else's skull. Given that Jack ended up allowing her to rummage through the body of the less Brutish members, including himself, he unknowingly (although his power knew it) let her play with their brains too.
For some reason, when adding Winter's power to his, Bonesaw merely changed the expression of his "cutting edge": instead of needing a knife in order to extend its edge as far as he could see, he could now generate blades of ice from which to extend the same effect (he could still do it with his razor, but he wouldn't be disarmed too easily, now). For some reason, his eyes also glowed the same pale blue as ice. He almost changed his name into Jack Frost, at that point, only to realize that it was already taken. By a new Ward from New York, whose power created ice cream cones. There was no way in hell he'd take that name, now.
Meanwhile, Burnscar had descended from her high, and realized with horror that she had not only been recruited by a group of arch-villains, but that she had, like them, a Kill Order on her head. Way to keep them together, PRT!
She still tried to defect, and did so successfully… several times. As long as she stayed sane, she thought she would be able to argue her case in front of a judge. She even successfully reached one, after convincing the police force to let her pass. With words.
However, the judge was an old woman, set in her ways. In her last years of activity, effectively near retirement, she was almost the picture-perfect embodiment of the autumn season: still there, but quite inflexible.
After losing that war of words, the child of Summer fought another, with the young heroes waiting for her outside – or, for a particularly impetuous one, already inside, crossbows jutting from the wall. Being the polar opposite from the old woman set in her ways, the youngsters yearned for immediate gratification. Spring Breaks all the time. And since society didn't work that way, they wanted to change that. Change everything. Without learning at each step why the change occurred or why it didn't – or why it did, with the hippies, and died in the eighties.
Outnumbered, Burnscar pleaded for them to leave. They didn't comply. She ended up burning her way out and returning to the Nine.
Soon enough thereafter, Jack learned that Leviathan had attacked Brockton Bay. Eager to sow even more of the salt of chaos into that gaping wound, he led his group there.
Mimi was quite happy, because she had learned that Elle, the girl with whom she was playing princess in the asylum, was there. She didn't nominate her to join the group, because she thought they would kill her, but she still wanted to visit – it's not like Faultline would say no, right? What responsible parent would do that, when facing hardened killers asking for just that, and very politely?
But Elle wasn't her friend, not at all. In fact, seeing Mimi again cancelled much of the lessons in self-control the girl had had with Gregor the Snail. Instead of slowly altering her surrounding, Elle ended up switching violently, killing the fire Mimi had travelled through (after Faultline refused her visit) with a constant blizzard.
The change had been so sudden that a good part of the Palanquin had disappeared, exchanged with whatever was on the dimension Elle had chosen – those were always random, but still obeyed her wishes.
Also, and that was something else, there were people. While when she used her power slowly, people had time to see the changes happening and depart, they didn't have that luxury when the switch was near-instantaneous.
In the middle of the winter landscape was a single man, clad in heavy furs. "By the Seven!" he claimed, before unsheathing a honest-to-goodness sword and rushing towards Jack. "A White Walker!"
Jack was quite surprised by the accusation, especially coming from another person with the same skin colour, and almost didn't get his own weapon out in time. As it was, he only got a small blade out. It was still enough to activate his power and cut the man's wrist from afar. And then his head, because he was Jack Slash, and he didn't have to endure hearing the man's strange swearing (about a Stranger, of all things) if he could kill him.
And then, Mannequin came from one of his errands, slightly damaged, with the news about a pocket of resistance near the Docks.
The rest, as they say, is history.
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To be continued… somewhere elseAuthor's Notes: I'm not ready to write a full crossover with GOT, mostly because, to do it justice, I'd have to spend much of my free time at it. Since these ficlets are just ways to appease my muse so I can actually do my job, mostly, I leave that here for anyone to pick up.
Also, the Frozen bits took me by surprise, when they fell from my virtual pen onto this virtual paper. Thinking about it, they would mesh quite well with GOT: what if the Lands of Always Winter were ruled by an Ice Queen who didn't fear the cold? Looking through the crossover sections here, there are several already. Hmmm…