"Oh! Hello. Congratulations. Fire, I see. There's a fair bit of paperwork. Are you eighteen yet? How were you empowered, and how recently?"

"I'm 17 for a few more months. I was empowered by a genie yesterday afternoon."

"Well, your parents or guardians will need to come by at some point - if I can dig up a report from the monster responders about the genie that'll get rid of one form - you'll need to interview with the head of this chapter at some point but that can be scheduled..." She starts producing forms. "Er... There's rather a lot of paperwork to be done. Sorry. It tends to accumulate. Of course we're very glad you want to join us, but I want to ask, what are you hoping to get out of the Spirit Association? Some join for the camaraderie and community, some for the job opportunities, some for the facilities and support we can offer."

"I want to use your facilities to experiment and practice with my powers, and get advice from people who have been doing this for longer, and maybe learn to fight monsters, and maybe get a job doing something else."

"Great. We can help with that. We don't have a formal power testing structure, but we have some specialty training equipment, other chapters might have more, and I know a few people who might be willing to help you try things out."

She is handed a form.

"You can take a look around as a guest with me in a minute if you'd like. Or if another spirit bearer comes along and wants to show you around."

"I'd love to take a look around with you, thanks." She'll start in on the form unless the tour is right now.

They do paperwork for a bit, then the secretary gives her a tour. There's a few offices, a rec room, unisex locker room with a few privacy stalls and separate showers, and two gym areas - one pretty plain and one clearly heavier-duty, metal and concrete. There's also a large meeting chamber, almost Congressional in style.

That heavy-duty gym looks extremely not-flammable! How much more paperwork does she have to do before she can use it?

"You could go use it now if you have an escort! I'll call my friend Marxie, she'll probably be up for that-"

He calls his friend. His friend would be delighted to come poke at a new spirit bearer.

"-She'll be here soon."

Awesome! Margaret will wait for Marxie, fidgeting by switching her clothes back and forth repeatedly.

Marxie drives up to the building and comes in, grinning wide. Her outfit is dominated by white. "You must be Margaret! Ooh, a new powerset! Tell me what you can do so far please." She has a notebook.

"Hi! I've just got fire and the spear so far, my first spell hasn't come in yet. The way my fire works is I can make a jet of it, sort of like a blowtorch, come out of my hand, and control the size and temperature . . . " she goes on to detail the various experiments she wants to do.

"Sounds fun. Yours sounds a bit more physicalist than a lot of 'em, maybe a one or a two, I want to see it in action. We good...?" She looks at the secretary. Secretary gives a thumbs up. "Come on, come on, to the gym!"

"What does 'maybe a two' mean?" she asks, eagerly following Marxie to the gym.

"Oh, so, I like to score powers on lots of things. How much cartoon logic is in 'em is one of the things. A blowtorch being the manifestation of your element sounds like a one or a two out of ten on that scale."

The gym: Exists.

Margaret goes and stands in the middle of the gym. "Here it goes!" And then: jet of fire.

"Hmm, interesting... Yes, it at least looks like a blowtorch. Have you made much progress with it? It's awfully close to your hands - heat resistance?"

She demonstrates how small she can keep it steady and how large she can get it up to (if there's room in here). She brings it from blue-hot to yellow-cool. "I do have some heat resistance, at least to my own fire, I haven't tried putting my hand near a non-magical flame yet."

There's plenty of room - her maximum is about six feet of fwoosh-ing flame. It noticeably heats up the room if she does it for very long. It's also pretty tiring at that level.

"Neato. There's a toaster in one of the rec rooms. Seems a bit safer than a real flame. If you wanna figure out how your fire works the plan is a little different than if you wanna stretch your magic and maybe get your first real spell. What do you think?"

"I want to do some science! I can stretch my magic on my own tomorrow. Toaster sounds like a good idea."

"Okay, if you say so. So, what I want you to do is-" she draws a big circle in the air with her fingertip. It fills in with a surprisingly solid looking off-white surface. "-Blast this, first as weak as you can make it stable, then slowly up and up and up until you can't push it anymore or have to take a break. I can tell what temperatures you're hitting. I can tell if you're doing anything other than pure heat - if there's magic or ash or water vapor or C-oh-two in there. Stop if I say stop, but you probably can't hurt me through it. Capiche?"

Marxie moves behind her big white disk.

"Got it." She starts out with a tiny flame and slowly works her way up to the six-foot tongue of fire. When she gets it as big as it'll go, she turns up the heat as high as she can for a moment before she has to stop.

She can barely reach the six-foot stage, stepping up like that. It's like straining a muscle - more and more effort - feeling like it's going to give out at any moment - and then she has to stop, it can't or won't respond to instructions to keep going. There's a slight ache in the back of her head now. It feels like she should be panting from exertion. She can't sustain a brilliant blue flame that large yet - it turns dull orange and yellow as it grows.

"Good run. Okay, so that hit maybe 900 at the end. It was more like 1600 in the middle. Celsius, that is. And as far as I can tell, you're just plain dumping heat into the air - no ash, no magical damage loaded in. Just lots of heat."

"That's really cool!" She's not sure if leaning on a wall helps with this kind of exhaustion, but she'll give it a try.

"Really gave it your all, huh? That helps a bit to grow your magic, but what you really wanna do is try new things, or get in fights, or ideally both at the same time. We can go find that toaster, give you a break and test heat resistance."

Marxie emits her own flame that looks a bit similar to Margaret's for a few seconds, then dismisses the disk of white, which sort of - bleeds - into itself and then into her finger.