Re: first floor somewhere
Hot tempers were a time honored family tradition for this one. Livewire violence and the kind of bad language that differentiated placement in the social order. If it made her trash or it made her cheap, she didn't give a fuck. There was something to be said about honor, and nobody pushed her or hers around -- if they did, they sure as hell didn't get away with it. Consequences, legal or life-threatening, didn't really factor into the game until after the fact. Almost always, there was something to regret, but doing nothing would have been worse. One had to be able to live with themselves, after all.
And how did this skinny bastard live with himself? Attacking on some teenage girl who would have otherwise been defenseless. Then again, it could be supposed that the girl whose body this truly belonged to might have had a better grasp on her powers. Maybe she'd have known what she was doing, maybe she could have taken care of herself and didn't need the help of rebellious brawling. Guilt cleaved and her eyes widened, worried and hateful and worried again. You're going to die. But she wasn't this body, she wasn't young or delicate, she wasn't even she.
This didn't seem right because the mind couldn't make sense of how death worked when the body was not ones own. She didn't want this girl to die. And even if it went against everything that the mind knew about their own worthlessness, she would have begged then. She'd have begged for the girl, but she couldn't get past the screaming. She couldn't even form a word past the heat and the fever and the burn. She'd thought that was a burn, anyway. The truth is that she didn't know burn until the fire came, until it consumed her like a witch on the pyre.
She clawed and thrashed, and despite the weakness of agony, pain also made her strong. Electricity surged, matching her screams volt for volt. Lightbulbs popped, glass rained. Everything went dark on this side of the mall when electricity overloaded, everything except for her body on fire. But then she stopped moving, and she stopped screaming, and the lights slowly blinked back on like they were waking up, no longer affected by anything inside of her.