text | un: fotia

[burningfree]

[It was like, 3 in the morning, and Lio was laying in bed while restlessly typing this on his phone, the subject of the post laying next to him and almost certainly drooling in his sleep.]

To whom it may concern.

If you see an idiot firefighter running around the city shirtless at any point, look with your eyes, not your hands. Actually, I'd prefer if you kept your eyes above the chin.

He's mine.

[Happy first day of Sanguis!]

Comments

[burningfree]

If you insist.

In my world, we burnish started appearing thirty years ago. People attributed it to a mutation, but our fire wasn't truly our own. The core of our planet had some sort of dimensional rift, from what I understand, from which alien beings made of fire seeped through. Professor Prometh named them the Promare - and they would sync with humans on the surface, the burnish, allowing us to use their fire to help them burn.

I used to be able to communicate with them. They would tell me to burn hotter, wider.

At one point, when the both of us were in intense pain, they explained to me that as part of their life cycle, they need to fully combust at least once. They couldn't return to their own dimension until they did. And unless they did, they'd keep burning hotter until they destroyed the planet from the inside out.

Galo - the idiot firefighter - and I were able to help them complete their combustion and send them home. Once the Promare left, the burnish were no more.

That's the short version, anyway.

[starmark]

[...So the planet gave a bunch of people fire Stands but then their Stands were also parasites that were going to kill them if left unchecked so they had to do some shit to get rid of the Stands so that the Stands could go back to their Stand Universe and the people connected to them wouldn't die.

And also so the planet wouldn't blow up.

Please, that's not complicated at all, that's practically the plot of any given Jojo's Bizarre Adventure part straightforward as hell.]

so they got stuck in your planet's core
developed a symbiotic relationship with you and people like you
you helped them complete their life cycle
and then they went home

that's not that complicated

but i can see where this is going
people didn't know why the burnish had fire powers, right
i mean before the aliens were discovered
so they just got freaked out by some people suddenly having fire powers

[burningfree]

[Lio would have taken exception to calling the Promare 'parasites', but he was still impressed with this guy's ability to understand what had happened.]

Yes, and their existence had been kept a secret, even after their discovery. I imagine Prometh planned to reveal his research at some point, to try and help us, but he was murdered before he got the chance. Galo and I just stumbled upon it by sheer luck.

Before that, it was nothing but fear and discrimination.

[starmark]

did burning out make another dimensional rift open up

i mean the rift was in the center of the planet
and you don't know how it opened up
but burning out would either let them go back through it or open up a new one

so there must be a connection between that sort of rift and the completion of one of their life cycles, right

but it doesn't sound like one life cycle was it for them
since cycle kind of implies it keeps going around
and since they already knew that's what would fix the problem

that'd be kind of a weird evolutionary path
dimension jumping after every completed life cycle

...

what did they eat?

[burningfree]

[And here Lio thought Galo was obscene for falling asleep during Professor Prometh's explanation about the Promare. But this theory postulating was making his head hurt.]

I don't know. I just told you the guy who discovered and named them was murdered, and we didn't really have time to dive deep into the specifics.

I can tell you what I heard and saw through my connection to the Promare, but while they were sentient, they weren't exactly intelligent. Their desires were very simple, their drive very singular. They had voices like children.

And they didn't eat. Why would a fire need to eat?

[starmark]

fire can't burn without fuel
there's a triangle of needs
fuel oxygen and heat

if they were burning hotter they would've had to be consuming something to do it

i mean it's fine if you don't know
it's just something to wonder about

[burningfree]

[Triangle, eh? Lio thumbed at the triangle earring dangling from his ear. Probably just a coincidence.]

They used our bodies as fuel, but they would also regenerate our bodies as we burned. I don't know how, only that that's how it worked. I did once burn faster than I could regenerate, but that was due to being trapped in a machine forcing me to burn.

[starmark]

a machine forcing you to burn?

like to study why you were burning
or to try to make you burn out?

[burningfree]

To use me as a core in a warp engine.

I'd rather not talk about it.

[The trauma of it was still fresh.]