When life gave you lemons, you made lemonade. What, then, did you make if life gave you pyrokinesis and a very flammable sketchbook?
Thalia, leaning against a wall, idly began shading in a sketch of a brick wall. It wasn't easy; shading had never been one of her strong suits. With a sigh of frustration, she flipped to a new page. She couldn't get the lines right.
This was all going wrong. She'd come to Serendipity as an artist's apprentice, eager to learn the arts of the trade. Then she'd burned down another apprentice's painting and got expelled, so to speak. It hadn't been her fault; it had been a reflex action. Hear a bell, get food. Get beaten up, burn something down. It hadn't been her fault, really.
She couldn't return home.. That meant humiliation. Everyone would recognize her as the girl who had left home months ago to pursue a career as an artist. They would realize that they'd let her leave home without teaching her self-control, and she'd have to sit through mind-numbing classes on self-control again, with children much younger than she was. If she stayed here though, there were far more opportunities for her. She could become a fire-eater; she was impervious to fire. She could enlist in the army, if she was very careful about not thinking about fire anywhere near wooden barracks. And of course, she could always steal.
She decided to begin working on a drawing of fire. Fire was easy for her to draw; she knew fire far better than she did some wall made of mud. She closed her eyes dreamily, thinking of all the things that fire meant to her: passion, life, destruction, warmth, and home. In her mind, she could see flames dancing. The elders called that heart's fire, the fire that gave her power to manipulate the element of fire, but she personally thought that it was just arcane rubbish. It was superstition that kept her race from becoming great. Well, that, hydrophobia, and a low birth rate.
If only she had paint, which would have worked far better than the pencil she had stolen. She could already see the colors that she would use to represent the fire-bright reds and oranges that would catch the eye. She loved the bright colors; they were just so vibrant and full of life. She envisioned the bold strokes that she would use with bright red and gold and orange everywhere. She would have to steal some paint later. For now, she would have to draw her fire in black and white.
Her sketchbook seemed to be heating up. Sudden panic filled her. Not again…Opening her eyes, she saw that the sketchbook was indeed on fire. The flames seemed to be mocking her, cheerfully devouring her drawings. She threw it down and began stepping on it, trying to quench the flames. She could summon fire, but she couldn’t banish it. This was proving to be a bit of a problem.
Finally extinguishing the flames, she picked up the burnt sketchbook, impervious to the heat. Her sketches were all ruined. She didn’t really mind that; she could always redraw them later, and anyways, they weren't very good sketches either. The problem was that this was her fifth sketchbook in three days. “Damn, damn, damn, damn…damn!� she snarled to herself. The supplier she knew was sure to be suspicious if he found her loitering around his store again.
She stuffed the burnt sketchbook into her backpack, wondering why she hadn't had the foresight to steal two.
