So...

It turns out that if Hye-jin fucks up with her backlash she can hospitalize herself. Which she knew already, her week of awakening was mostly spent unconscious. What's really not fair, though, is that this happened while she was being guided! Her very recently ex-partner doesn't have great compatibility, but she'd been remarkably tolerant about Hye-jin wanting to science the everliving shit out of her power and get her flames to a level of precision where she can actually outclass a demolition squad on all axes. It's just that the handholding did not quite keep up, and she did not quite notice until she stupidly fell over. And woke up intubated, with a frightened partner holding her hand.

Hye-jin wasn't even offended that she wanted to break things off after that. Both of them are very apologetic towards each other, and wished each other well, and there is only minimal trauma and hard feelings. Hye-jin swears to everyone that cares about her that she is really really for sure going to be more careful now, yes really, look it's just legitimately hard to judge one's internal temperature without a thermometer or something. Yes she will consent to having a thermometer literally implanted inside of her so she can be better at it, it'll give constant updates to her phone and also her parents. Not that she will be doing any testing while she is currently partnerless. She will be good, and responsible, and careful, and definitely not end up in the hospital again.

(She does not want to face the horrors of The Tube again.)

But damn it, she was fucking on to something, and she was so close. She's absolutely certain she can get her - everyone calls it fire control, she'd term it more like exothermic control, though yes this does in practice mean she makes a lot of fire - her power to the point that she can incinerate matter with minimal leftover debris. Which is actually really important when one's power is causing exothermic reactions in strange situations! Half of the problem with demolition is the lack of precision inherent in just blowing up the interiors of all hostile dungeons, and the other half is the dangerous chemicals, the inhalation of them, and things being on some scale too destroyed, or not destroyed enough. Being able to push her power to the limit on breaking things down to their component chemicals would be a huge deal! Also really cool!! She wants it.

Since she does not have a partner, she's not allowed to work on it even a little. It's agonizing.