ArchivedLogs:Vignette - Dead Heat

Vignette - Dead Heat
Just another day in paradise.
Dramatis Personae Ororo
In Absentia	2013-08-09 Storm works through her feelings while working the weather.
Location The Black Forest, Colorado
Dead heat. The term rose unbidden to Ororo's mind as she soared across the warm air currents of yet another millions-of-acres forest fire ravaging the American Southwest. Flying on them with the grace and ease of a hawk across more normal, lesser thermals, was a joy in itself, and she was careful to indulge moderately in that feeling now and then, to combat the despair that choked her heart almost as effectively as the dark smoke rising across the landscape. She'd spent the whole summer directing winds -- and very occasionally, when she found a sufficiently proximate water source that could spare a few inches, or clouds that wouldn't alarm meteorologists with their draft to new duty, rain -- like a very large-scale, very subtle maestro. First in California, up and down the Sierra Nevadas; the firefighters were mobilized to protect the properties of the rich and famous, but the fires threatened far more homes than those, some that were better not discovered at all, whose occupants might have been deliberately left to burn for other reasons entirely. Later, not when that blaze was under control but instead when a greater firestorm demanded her attention, she reluctantly left one battlefield for another; next was southern Oregon, and now, ravaging the Rocky Mountains, huge swaths of Colorado forests were aflame. There was hardly any snow to draw down on the peaks; climate change had compounded much of this situation, with years of drought turning old-growth forests into tinderboxes. The world was running a fever, and it climbed ever higher even as people scrabbled for more dinosaur bones to incinerate into the crowded sky. She carried it with her like the dull ache that comes after a caffeine crash -- too much energy is not a good thing, all the time. She was eternally careful to not be seen. Not by the firefighters, not by the media, not even by the weather scientists who were fervently scanning the area to try to predict where the fires would go next. There had been a few remarks to the effect of 'although severe, the wildfires have not spread as badly as our worst projections' all season long, but to Storm, each tiny alteration was both exhausting and exhilarating, precious knowledge that another life had been saved. Those rescued lives had seen her, now and then. Nurturing hope was just as important as planting any seed, in gardens of flora and fauna alike. She regretted the necessity of a mask in such moments, but not enough to risk the safety of her children instead. Against the background of global warming, each individual fire was a stab to the gut, a burning poison, ants beneath the skin, scalding acid across it. Dead heat for her as much as anyone, in that sense, as she was in a dead heat against time, before another hidden refuge was claimed by the hungry flames. Low, roiling anger wounds its way through her. Righteous fury that things had been allowed to get this way, through simple, short-sighted greed and little else. The winds snapped and gusted about at the very thought, bursting from her steady stream into a gale, and the fires directly below her surged. With a frown as thunderous as any dark cloud, Ororo took a deep, shuddering breath, then another, steadier, and thought of calming elements in her life. Her bonsai stash tucked away in the attic, and the incongruous and silly image of her temporary waterer gingerly performing their duties. A quiet afternoon with Charles, on the back porch. Noisier evenings, surrounded by the children of the Mansion. Midnight over New York City, watching the endless tides of humanity ebb and flow and fight, in a million small ways, for themselves and occasionally for others, with weapons as powerful as a well-placed smile. The sun rising over the Serengeti. The knowledge that, despite the many overwhelming threats facing the world's well-being, back in Westchester waited her team, people passionately committed to building, rather than destroying, heaven on Earth. Her snow-white eyes opened, then widened. Responding to her shift in mood, beautifully controlled airflow under and out of this patch of fire had robbed it of oxygen entirely, causing it to go out. Her lips quirked, amused but aghast; this was much too obvious. It was time to move on, and quickly. Bone-tired, she reached out with what most people construed as her weather sense, and gingerly felt for the next patch of rising energy -- the next fire, still building mostly invisibly under the mast of a poorly tended forest floor. But instead a twinge of savage pain roared across her skull. Flinging her arms out, she frantically tried to buffer her otherwise uncontrolled drop to the ground, and landed hard enough that she had to take a few long moments to make sure everything still functioned properly. The feeling had been unmistakable, if distant. Another kind of storm entirely was rising. It was time to go home. Was there no end to the unfinished battlefields she left behind in the name of a greater war? Kicking ash back over her tracks as she went, Ororo began her long hike out of the mountains...