The sun in all his glory   descended to give the maid a flower.   "Beloved,"   He declared.     There is this girl in quarantine section B.    She doesn't eat, she doesn't sleep; She just burns and burns and burns. Irene hears of her in the hallways, a girl who is solely and entirely made of fire. Caught just when the elementals began to form, they say, a blazing beacon to the world of the presence of all her kind.   They found her sitting in the middle of a field burnt completely down, standing amongst the debris of a town reduced to ash, chained to a cavern deep within the earth. A bastard terrorist and a threat, the eldritch creatures from the depths of the unknown.   She herself had seen her once -- passed by the containment facility fortified with thick walls of plexiglass, the smooth chrome doors to the room open just wide enough to reveal a figure of flame. The moment had been fleeting, but she remembers this: a figure sitting on an elevated surface in the corner of her glass cube, hands on her thighs and head tilted down. It lifts just the slightest when she had taken a look too long, amber gaze seeing none of her and all of her at once. She had remembered this and the ignition of something hot and foreign in her chest. Long-time friend Jennie ribs her with an elbow and gestures to another instrument located to her right, makes her eyes flick from embodied flame to the spherical centrifuge in the corner as her companion whispers a thought or two. Just as she finishes, the shuffle of feet continue and the initiates move on with the tour. Just like that, the first encounter ends.   It is impossible, once in the know, to forget about the girl perpetually on fire. The rumors about her come occasionally and pass quickly through the employees at the central quarantine facility in modern-day Daegu, contagious yet fleeting like fire itself, and Irene herself is a simple conduit for months before it begins.          -       At the beginning of her second year, they meet again.   Now permanent staff with access to higher levels of security, a supervisor guides a small cluster of them through the individual areas of research. It is pertinent, he says, to be well-versed with the stipulated areas in case of an emergency. Running to the wrong area could result in one becoming an… unfortunate expenditure. There are sections and sub-sections of the facility and plenty of locked doors. They pass by rooms with test-tubes and rooms with cameras, rooms with weapons and rooms with people. They see a small cart being transferred into a cargo elevator, within a small ball of bright green and the sound of cries. It is lowered down, down, down into the core of the facility, so far so the elevator seems to have dropped into the abyss, and upon seeing this none of the group dare utter a word.   They are motioned through the hallways and vaguely familiar chrome doors and suddenly there is glass and guards and flame.   “Hello,” A voice says, the small group turning to face her, and Irene meets sweeping eyes of molten gold.   The flames that make her figure dim the slightest and she is presented with the vague, thin form of a girl. Their supervisor, an older man in his late forties, observes them as her colleagues gasp and murmur.    The data file had been presented to them just before the beginning of the tour.  The first of all elementals they are to interact with and, if necessary, not the last. This one had recently been deemed safe enough for use in permanent-level staff introductions and by the observed passive attitude, Irene can almost see why.   “Hello,” She lets her voice blend with the rest as the murmurs of her grow louder, turn into cautious greetings and stuttered remarks. The entity's skin looks like fractured, translucent porcelain. Irene wants to talk to it. “How are you?”   Somehow, it hears. Pale lips twitch into the ghost of a smile. “I’ve been better," It responds, not unkindly, voice warm and slow as it echoes. The words capture their little group of seven. “Could be even better.” Its voice drops slightly, tone and expression dulling into quelled anger, and beneath the defeat Irene can see fire and carnage and a lab burnt to ashes.    It, it, it. In reports and formal speeches. Only on the ground do they have humanity. She's never heard anyone directly in contact with elementals refer to them nicely.   A body steps between the entity and the group. Their supervisor frowns and hums, thin brows coming together on his bespectacled face. “We have been working very hard to improve your quality of living, Seulgi.” He turns to the small group and clears his throat. “Our facilities have improved greatly from before, and the well-being of our subjects is just as a large a priority as employee safety.” A glance to the subject — Seulgi, she now knows, and he continues with authority. “As the next generation, you will be responsible for the future development of our studies.”    Subjects and studies and quality of life. Irene looks at the cube in the middle of the room, a mixture of hard transparent glass and cold unbending metal. The entity (girl, she challenges) now seated on her bed of steel watches her silently, gaze unrelenting. She looks far from the size of a small child.   “Seulgi here is an important permanent resident,” Said as if her glorified cage held any resemblance to a home, “And a vital component to many complex studies. You will undoubtedly interact with her during your time with us,” The haggard little man leans forward and lowers his voice. He looks each of them in the eye. “But it would do you all well to remember she is, if anything else, far from human."   Irene hates the way he says it.     Cold, cold, cold. The air around her is crisp and dry.    The window in front of her is fogged over on the inside and tinted a gentle shade of blue. She huffs onto the glass and briefly, fleetingly, a tiny patch of vapor appears.   "Are you cold?" A little girl is standing next to her, blonde hair swept into a neat braid and small hands tucked into the pocket of her coat. The way she is genuinely concerned makes her smile.   "I never am, Yerim." She pats her younger sister with wide brown eyes softly on the shoulder, watches her shiver just a little in the cold. The peak of winter is here but spring will come soon. "We can go inside if you are, though."   They turn and make their way to the front of the house, hand in hand as the snow continues to fall.       Ice and a village and a flurry of wind. Seventeen-year-old Bae Joohyun wakes to a thunderstorm and a world torn to shreds.  

 

 

 

"Hello," She says the next moment she can, doesn't pause to consider if she should. The device in her arms buzzes. "Seulgi, is it?"   Fire and gold and flame. The entity looks up from her folded form in a corner of her cube, glowing coals in a crackling hearth fire and surprisingly tame. She is both imposing and impossibly small.   "Hello," She replies softly, this time just to her, and Irene is struck by the urge to press her palm to hardened glass. Would it be warm?   She busies herself with the computer pad she had been given instead, dutifully filling in the papers for today. Vitals, organism behavior, facilitation of the various test processes. Her position as Resource Misc. Staff #47 (and soon to be Resource Assistant #7, if she could say so herself) has an efficiency rating of 9.7, and she intends to keep it that way. The government prides itself on internal organization and cutting loose ends when dealing with classified information and she refuses to fray.    When she looks up, there are already steady golden eyes on her.   "Who are you?” Seulgi does not look away. If anything, she seems to stare harder, imploringly, deeper.    “A resource assistant." The way Seulgi looks at her makes her skin crawl. “Irene. My nickname is Irene.”   “Irene.” the entity tilts her head. The flame in her flickers.     An hour later she walks into a different room with a different resident, a man encased in earth one level down. His cube is far less welcoming and so is he. He shouts and threatens and hurls boulders of stone from his palm until a single shot from a tranquilizer hits his grit-covered neck. He shudders and faints, and the creature of soil dissipates into the shell of a young man curled on the floor.   She stares, along with the other staff that have been promoted. The shutters roll down and a gruff man with a cigar in his teeth steps forward, a rifle strapped to his back.      --     Her full name is Kang Seulgi. It said so on her birth certificate, the only document she had. The chamber they keep her in is 10 feet by 10, enough for a metal bunk and table bolted into the floor. The section she is kept in is always full in the morning and usually empty by the evening -- Irene discovers this when she is promoted to Assistant and has to check on her.   Seulgi stands by the walls or sits on the floor, answering politely to the occasional question or test. Irene nods at her and she nods back. It takes a week for Irene to decide to stick around before closing, standing by for idle companionship or terse conversation. Seulgi is demure and so unlike what the rumors had proposed; The mystery surrounding her draws Irene in.     "I don't remember my human form." Seulgi draws out a string of light with the tip of her finger. It dissolves to a glow then nothingness over time. "And there are no mirrors for me to use anyway."     "I hear it is a skill one has to master," Irene muses. She knows by heart some of the stories. "Though it is hard to discover and one you rarely find."      "It would be nice to have a mentor," Seulgi agrees. "Or a family, or friends."       -     They let them meet a few more subjects, all referred to as hostile. It eats at her every day, watching them suffer, and their fighting spirit pushes her to work. A man made of wind is vacuumed up and executed on the news, the video slotted in between other noteworthy events.   "The outside world must be nice." Seulgi wonders one particularly irksome day and her tone sets Irene on edge. “I'm sorry you're stuck down here with me.”   "Stuck?" Irene