[ She puts her hands on her hips. ]

Let's do that. I want to douse something in it and throw it in to see if it'll explode.

[ Otherwise she's just getting flashbacks to trying to start a fire in an alley trash can so she didn't freeze to death when she was younger. She doesn't sound super excited or anything, but she's putting effort in to try this. ]

Yeah. I'll try and find some rocks to make an extra barrier around here.

[ To help contain it.. she'll give it a wide breadth though so they can go to town but.. it's probably better to not make it really really easy to start a wildfire or something that gets out of their control. ]

[ Emerald managed to find rocks to put around it, though it's questionable how effective it will be because they're not really consistently sized- it's not always an easy task to find perfect rocks, especially in a city. Some of them are crystals she found growing, others are like, weird concrete chunks she found nearby or actual rocks. IT's a circle okay, she didn't have a long time to look. ]

Well, if nothing explodes, it'll be a bigger fire?

[ Or some wooshes maybe.. she's definitely not a pyromaniac. What she is is someone who is going to take one of those bottles and start dousing some junk with the intention of throwing it at the fire-- which is still going at about the same level as it was before. ]

Yeah. That's the plan.

[ What Emerald wants to do is decidedly not fire safety oriented. Once she has doused her item in the lighter fluid, she picks it up and does a jump shot to throw it into the current fire, which bursts into embers and bigger flames for the duration of the lighter fluid bring burned up. ]

[ Emerald's been in an entire city on fire so this weirdly doesn't seem like that bad to her, and she's got her aura to protect her from any immediate damage from the flames. But it feels like a rush-- her adrenaline is pumping, which is what she wanted. She gives a glance to Lio and then sighs and takes the outer layer of her top off, leaving her bandeau on, and uses it to smother and stomp out some of the flames. ]

The trash fire was depressing anyway.

Happy people piss me off anyway.

[ She's fine with that. It's not him that she's complaining about. After a couple of seconds she adds: ]

I used to set fires in barrels like that when I was younger. It's a good way to keep warm on the streets, but now it's just.. [ Not something she wants to go back to. ]

It doesn't matter. My heart's pounding, so at least that's not anger for a few minutes.

[ She looks at him for a moment, curiously. It's rare she meets someone who's from a similar circumstance to her, if not exactly. It's rare she can really talk about anything like this. ]

I didn't have a choice but to live in a city. Our world is infested with monsters that can sense negative emotions. Living outside of city barriers is a death sentence for anyone on their own, but especially if you're Grimm bait.

[ Being scared and starving and alone and hurt and angry didn't make Emerald the most attractive company. With most of the outer flames out she looks at her jacket and just tosses it into the barrel. Hers is decidedly not fireproof, so there's no sense in keeping it now. ]

Avoiding cops and stealing were my bread and butter though. [ She lets out a bitter puff of a laugh. ] I liked going for jewelry or things I could fence. That way the people with the food didn't have a reason to call the cops on me.

In other words, people suck and hate anything different or powerful no matter what planet you're on.

[ Emerald doesn't really seem bothered by him. The one person she believes loves her back home is turning into a literal monster and everything she knew about the world was a lie, worrying about if someone was part fireball part horror movie just sounds tiring. ]

I can make a person see and hear anything I want, but only one or two people at a time.

[ There's not much point in hiding it anymore. She's been outed to her enemies, and she's promised not to be a criminal anymore. It seems pointless now, but she isn't the type to back out of her word easily. ]

It's a lot easier to steal a little small thing worth a lot that way as long as a store isn't busy [ because she can't do more than that without seriously hurting herself-- two people is asking for a migraine as is ] but I also didn't have anyone else to steal for.

If I did it, it'd just look normal to you. I can't do anything that I can't imagine myself though, so if you want to see someone you have to show me a video or something. I don't mind spending chroma, I have lots.

[ She had two boyfriends until recently and gets chroma out of consensual fighting with people on top of that. She doesn't sleep alone. She's not balling like some of the super rich people here, but she's never super worried about using her semblance or aura. At least with just one person.

She's pretty sure she'd die if she tried to use 9 with chroma involved or something. It's not that she can't, after all, it's just... dangerous without chroma involved. One mind connecting to multiple minds doesn't go very well. ]

Uh.. [ How does she answer that? She never actually went to school, and she doesn't think there's really a known answer anyway. But she has thoughts. So she just starts with the base explanation. ]

In my world, people adapted to be capable of bearing our souls forward as an aura. Aura can be used as a shield or to add force into a weapon or an attack, and anyone who's activated their aura has a unique ability called a semblance. It's not super well-researched I think and like.. most of what's publicly known is a complete lie anyway, but my theory is that we're born with the capability, but as you grow up it becomes whatever defense mechanism you need to survive impending trauma.

[ She shrugs. ] That's the only way I think it makes sense anyway.. like, mine I needed to be able to hide and steal and create distractions because there was no one else to help me- so I could make people and things up. Someone else I know got struck my lightning and now she can absorb electricity and convert it to strength. I saw another person watch his friend run through with a spear and he could suddenly heal her.

[ Well, she doesn't know what the exact details of that one are. It wasn't healing exactly, but that's what it looked like to her. ] There's no proof, but that's what I think.

[ Her world isn't a place that she wants to think about, really. She doesn't want to go back there. Mercury is here, in Prismatica, and she isn't keen to show Cinder to anyone for reasons far too complicated to explain to someone she's just met.

That's the extent of the people she cares about from her world, and she's going to get upset if she shows him Akashi. She doesn't want to expose Mayuzumi to someone she just met while he's still at risk (she's protective) and while there are others she could show who she's come to like here, she ends up deciding to go with a slightly more playful solution.

Lio's own voice comes from behind him, plain as if he had been the one to say it, and when he turns around, it'll look like there's a clone of him standing right behind him, smirking.

"That's a pretty personal question. Her world's situation is complicated."

If he looks to Emerald, she doesn't really look like she's doing anything. Sometimes she'll touch her temple if she does something complicated, but it's not necessary beyond helping her focus. She doesn't need to focus much right now since she's just replicating what she sees in his head. It looks and sounds perfectly real. Though it does require concentration, so her response to what he says is a little shorter than it might've been otherwise. ]

One day I'm going to run into someone whose government isn't keeping world-breaking secrets.

[ It really is just a hallucination, so his hand goes right through it. Emerald lets it go a second later and everything goes back to normal. She's willing to do stuff like this and play around, but she's not really in the mood to play and the point was made. ]

It's fine. I'm a villain in my world and everything here is... exploding trash fire mood.

[ She knows she's on the wrong side of things but she doesn't think anyone's right really. She's watched the world burn and her partner and leader laugh and smile, and she couldn't. She doesn't belong there. But that's also a betrayal of that person she cares about enough to become a murderer, because she promised to go with Seijuro and Chihiro and put all of that behind her. Now Seijuro is gone, and it all feels like she's losing everything important to her bit by bit. Personal right now is.. a bit much. ]

Definitely. They're committing mass-kidnapping but acting like we're on some kind of sexy vacation and providing us with everything so we don't ask questions while asking us for free military support. It's suspicious.

Didn't you give up everything to save your world? That doesn't sound like a villain to me.

[ Emerald's villainy isn't something she can say is for a good cause. It's a completely selfish venture. ]

What are you thinking of doing?

[ Emerald.. wouldn't be against helping with something like that. She's not sure if it's just because it would be something to throw herself into to distract herself or because she genuinely thinks that it's unfair. Part of her just wants to follow someone else's direction right now so she stops feeling so lost. ]