"...It's hard to explain to someone who's never been there, but...if you're strong enough, your body doesn't limit you. If you're strong enough, you can see any part of Hell you have a connection too, and if you're strong enough then seeing it is for most purposes the same as being there."
"So, yeah. I developed some self-preservation habits." She crosses her arms and looks away.
"That's okay, I don't need to know his name right now. What does your pyrokinesis do exactly? Is it expensive?"
"As long as I maintain sufficient contact with angry humans, I wouldn't really describe much of anything I'm in the habit of doing as expensive. Like anything I can do, it could be if I did enough of it, but testing the convenient boundaries of that power would be...conspicuous."
"What's your conversion rate of anger to magic like?"
"Compared to what?" (No one has ever taught Edie battery math.)
"Like, what's an example of an angry person and how long you'd have to be near them being that angry and how much you could do with that?"
"That's...not really an intuitive question for me to answer. Like, if you ate a sandwich, how far could you run with the energy from that?"
"...Not at all, I can't really run. Hey, do you eat? Food?"
"Do you have to breathe? Sleep? Do you get sick? What would happen if nobody was angry anymore?"
"Not breathing gets uncomfortable as fast as it does for a human but it wouldn't kill me if it just kept on forever. I can go without sleep pretty much indefinitely, but I function best if I get at least a little sleep on a regular basis. If no one was angry anymore...well, it would depend on why that happened."
"People get angry. It's part of how they work. For that to change would require some kind of cause, and what that cause was would affect what it was logistically plausible and/or ethically permissible to do about it."
"Oh, I meant would it starve you, not would you go on a crusade to restore anger to the world."
"I'd have to operate pretty much like a human, without using my powers, and it wouldn't be fun, but it wouldn't kill me."
Nod, nod. "Does it feel about the same as being hungry for a human as far as you know?"
"...I've never been hungry like a human, but based on the descriptions, no. It's...to put it in the food metaphor, it's more like intensely craving the taste of one specific food."
"Huh! Okay. Do different kinds of anger taste different? What's your favorite?"
"...Protective rage. You shall not harm my loved ones even if I have to burn the world to make it so."
"There aren't any that are viscerally unpleasant on that level, but there are some that I just plain don't like. The kind people don't have a right to."