Liz Sherman (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
walking_napalm) wrote2008-07-22 11:34 pm
walking_napalm) wrote2008-07-22 11:34 pm
Entry tags:
BACKGROUND INFORMATION #2
Following the Pittsburgh incident of 2002 (on which Liz will say very little, mostly consisting of a painfully acerbic, actually, if you want to be specific, it was the Braddock Town incident of 2002), Liz didn't stay long with the Bureau. She was, for a short period of time, named as an arson suspect in the public case; this period of time lasted just about as long as she was in the hospital. (Her fire couldn't harm her; a steel foundry collapsing on top of her could. If Hellboy hadn't been there, the odds are long that she would have survived.)
When she was released, Liz returned to the BPRD but she couldn't go on living there as if nothing had happened. The charges against her may have been quietly dropped due to lack of evidence, but her conscience wasn't nearly so quiet, and neither were the looks that she received from some agents; the friends of the four who had been killed. A number of agents stood by her -- and no one said a word to her on the subject -- but she could see the fear in even her supporters' eyes. Only Hellboy, Professor Broom, and Abe still seemed comfortable in her presence. Everyone else was -- rightfully, she thought -- afraid to be around her. She came back from Pittsburgh a changed woman; quieter, and more lost than ever in guilt and self-loathing.
Liz had left the Bureau 11 times before, always in daylight with days' worth of notice and noisy, messy packing; always leaving a forwarding address. This time was different. She slipped out one night with her camera and one bag, and she didn't come back. She disappeared off the radar, despite the government's (and the BPRD's) increasingly nervous efforts to track her. Six months later, she turned up at Bellamie Psychiatric Hospital in New York City. After a phone call to Professor Broom, Liz was admitted to the mimimum security unit. The doctors didn't know how to help her with the fire (and were utterly astonished by it, and afraid of it), but the depression that had driven her to them? That, they could treat.
On a steady diet of lithium pills, antipsychotics, and therapy, numb to the world, Liz began putting her life back together. With the drugs keeping it sluggish, the fire was easier to control; she began cautiously experimenting with it in her fireproof room. She learned to call it to hand, for the first time in her life. She held onto that old dream of a normal life, and she sank into routine. She would be there for two years.
Hellboy, meanwhile, wasn't taking this lying down. He broke out every once in a while to go to New York to see her. Liz hated those visits. They tested her resolve more than anything; every time he told her that everybody missed her, that she needed to come back, and every time, seeing his face as he left without her -- it hurt. Seeing H.B. was harder than she could have expected; so was letting him leave.
She told him not to come back. She thought if she didn't see him, maybe, just maybe, she'd be able to resist the temptation to go back to the Bureau. (Back to him, if she was admitting it to herself, but she wasn't.)
And then, in 2004, she dreamed of fire.
When she woke up, it was in a strange bed; she knew the smell in the air (burned fabric, scorched drywall) even before the nurse told her that she had exploded in her sleep. She sat on a metal chair in an empty observation room for hours, staring determinedly at the wall with her back to the medical professionals who tried to talk to her from behind the one-sided glass, and she said nothing. (They told her that no one was hurt, but who the hell cared? Well, Liz did, but it didn't do much toward making her feel better. She had still lost control. She had still proved that, despite months of work and progress and seeming improvement -- this was never going to go away. She would never not be a danger to others.)
She said nothing til FBI Special Agent John T. Myers turned up, anyway.
He wasn't like the older agents she'd grown up around, all hardened cynicism. He wasn't patronizing, either, or condescending. He wasn't afraid of her.
Liz really did only plan to go back to the Bureau for the weekend.
Except then Abe was wounded and the professor was killed. Professor Broom had been Red's father, not hers, but he'd been incredibly good to her; always treated her with kindness, dignity, and respect, and with caring. If she was this heartbroken, she couldn't imagine how Hellboy was feeling. The BPRD was going to Moscow and Abe was still too hurt to go along. Red needed her. She couldn't abandon him.
Myers, meanwhile, had a thing for her. Liz knew that; you would have had to have been blind to miss it, and she had never been particularly blind. In a way, it was flattering. She'd had boyfriends before (while away from the Bureau), but never for long and not in years. There was something about knowing that she could still be attractive (and not just in a physical way) to a sweet guy she'd just met, especially a sweet guy she'd just met who knew that she was a freak -- it was nice. And maybe, in some other place or time, she could have fallen for John. She felt something, anyway; that much was clear.
But mostly, Myers complicated things.
Mostly, he had terrible timing.
In Rasputin's mausoleum, when Liz was in trouble, she did what came naturally: she called for Hellboy. He came to the rescue, like he always did, and as she watched him fight Sammaels in giant splashes and geysers of dirty water, as Myers had to hold her back from (somehow) going to help him, she knew. It was a moment of clarity, wild and terrified (for Red) as it was. She knew how she felt. She knew what she had to do. She told Myers to hit her.
It was the first time Liz had ever purposely created a huge explosion; the first time she'd controlled it enough that it wouldn't burn someone (John Myers, sheltered behind a rock) to a crisp. (It was all about thinking of someone other than herself and something other than panic; it was watching Hellboy as she stepped down into the stagnant water and it began to evaporate at the touch of her foot.) She would have almost been proud, afterward. If she'd been conscious.
Liz doesn't remember much of when Rasputin drew her soul out of her body. She has a vague idea of bright lights suddenly turning into something blacker than black; into terrifying, all-consuming nothingness. It was dark in a way that actual darkness couldn't begin to compare to. She waited in the dark, alone and colder than she'd ever been in life, and then she heard a familiar voice, too low and distant to make out the words.
The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was Hellboy's face. Near death experiences (or, in Liz's case, death experiences) were supposed to change a person, give them sudden insights, but not Liz. She loved him. She'd loved him for years. She'd admitted it to herself in the cavern. Folding into his arms, looking him in the eyes, kissing him -- it was the easiest thing she'd done in a long time.
Afterward, there wasn't much chance of Liz going back to Bellamie.
When the team returned to the Bureau, Liz moved in for good. She had her own room, small as it was, and that was good enough for her; she continued therapy and slowly stepped down the drug cocktail that had kept her fire sluggish at Bellamie. Some days are better than others, but she feels pretty okay, these days. Every once in a while, she starts to get the urge to bolt again, that she can't stay in one place this long -- but she's not skittish like she used to be, and she hasn't run in years.
Abe healed. Manning was Manning. Myers -- well, he fell deeper in love with Liz and everyone around them knew it, but the two of them carefully didn't acknowledge it. They became good friends, close friends; they still go out for coffee and talk life and J.D. Salinger; he still buys her boxes of rubber bands (and she still wears them, because she may be off the heavy antipsychotics, but the depression and the temper are still works in progress). Liz and Hellboy took it slow before they got to where they are now, and they had days where they wanted to kill each other a little (or, well, okay, they had days when Liz wanted to kill Hellboy a lot), but in general -- they were happy. Liz was happy. Life wasn't all puppies and rainbows and sunshine, not all the time, but she loved Red in spite of his faults, or maybe because of them (we love people for their faults, Myers had said months ago, and damned if he wasn't right), and he did the same for her, and despite every law of probability, they worked.
It's been somewhere between six months and a year, now. Liz regularly goes on missions both with and without Hellboy (but often with; the two of them, Abe, and Myers make a pretty good team, even with Red's lonely hero thing). Her dress sense is in the middle of a shift toward practicality, fitted T-shirts and long-sleeved shirts and pants and the ever-present stompy boots, away from oversized sweaters and long flowy skirts. (It is still, and will always be, all black.)
Life's pretty damn okay.
POWERS
General:
Liz can light herself on fire. This is an important distinction, as she can't yet throw fire or light anything else on fire without first touching it. At this point in time (nearly a year after the first film, and still quite some time before the second), Liz is fine-tuning her control. This means that she can light up on command and hold it back when necessary. Being able to call it to her hand is a big change from just a few months before the first movie; she learned that while at Bellamie.
She flares up when angry, threatened, injured, afraid, or very upset; it also happens when she's aroused, or when she's terribly content and she allows the fire out. Strong emotions set it off. The calmer she is -- and the calmer she can make herself -- the easier it is to control her power. Water doesn't extinguish her fire; effort or mood changes do.
Through training with Zuko through Milliways, she improved at not lighting on fire when she doesn't mean to or want to.In the near future, she's going to be able to control the temperature of her fire as well as its height and strength. For the moment, though, the flames are still white-blue and very hot, no matter what.
When she lights on fire (as well as directly before and after), her eyes change color to match the flames. That means that right now, her eyes go an eerieblue-white red-orange-yellow.
ETA, 7/4/09: Liz is beginning to learn to -- not quite throw fire, but to create, control, and direct explosions. Example: here, where she's exploding forward while protecting people behind her. Her control is still completely wonky and all over the place, but when it really counts, when lives are on the line and she's getting her mantras and her concentration right, her control improves dramatically. Her fire turns red-orange-gold rather than blue-white, then, and it's less hot and wild than the blue. Currently, she can't create the lower temperature flames besides inadvertently, in situations where she desperately needs the lower intensity flames and the higher degree of control, but she's working toward being able to regulate the temperature and size of her fire. END ETA
ETA, 2/29/12: She is totally able to bring the lower-temperature flames up on command now; in fact, her fire is now -- for the most part -- red-orange by default. It only goes blue when she starts losing control, which happens less often these days, but is still a definite concern. She's able to push and pull her fire to a certain extent.END ETA
Liz is fireproof. She can't control flames other than her own, and she has no power over fires that she has set once they spread, but she can't be burned by either her own flames or by fire on objects around her. If she could be, the scene in the first movie where she sets the bed on fire definitely wouldn't end with Liz sitting in a chair without a scratch on her. She is fireproof, but that doesn't mean that she's entirely insusceptible to smoke inhalation (though her lungs have a far higher tolerance than a lot of people's) or to the structural damage that her fires can cause (such as: buildings falling down).
Fireproof also means that she isn't scalded by hot water or superheated metal. She can't be burned. When she used to smoke, she would occasionally put out cigarettes on the back of her hand, just because she could.
What It Is Like for Liz:
The fire is a part of Liz. It's integral to her survival. In the Hellboy comic "Almost Colossus," Liz dies when the fire is taken, and the same would happen to this Liz if it were somehow stripped from her. She feels it all the time; it doesn't always want out, necessarily, and she isn't living a life where she's constantly tamping it down, but she always knows it's there.
If Liz gets too upset, too hurt, that's where she loses control. It burns beyond what she can contain. She's learning techniques to hold it back for as long as she can, when it happens, and to keep the inevitable explosion from being a Detroit or a Pittsburgh. Her explosions are extremely rare, these days, and usually happen on missions; to an extent, they're controlled. To an extent.
Liz blacks out after those explosions; depending on how large the explosion, she could be out for minutes or for hours. If she wakes up early, the fire is still recovering and she's shaky and freezing as hell.
ETA, 7/4/2009: If the explosion's big enough, she'll still pass out. More and more these days, though, Liz remains conscious after having an episode. The longer she held the fire back before finally letting it loose, the more exhausted she is, the more she struggles with simple things like speech and walking, and the more difficult it is to keep from blacking out. She'll usually need at least a couple hours' sleep, after an episode, in order to rest up and charge her metaphorical batteries. But she's getting better at this in leaps and bounds. Every time, she is less tired afterward.END ETA
It doesn't hurt when she burns (though it does when her fire wants to explode and she's holding it back as hard as she can; you can see it in her tortured face in the beginning of The Golden Army). She understands that there's heat and she can feel that it's warmer, but it doesn't burn her. She can feel when it's coming; the hair rises on the back of her neck and along her arms. I read a fic once where the line was "She felt like a match being struck, as if every inch of her was reactive, flammable, unstable," and I love that; it's stuck with me ever since, when it comes to Liz and her powers. The fire itself just tingles when it's touching her skin; she knows it's there because she can feel it (and see it).
Random Practicalities:
She owns a lot of specialized clothing made with Nomex and other hand-wavily flame-resistant materials; her clothes are as fireproof as you can make them. (Wisely, the sheets, blankets, and mattresses of both beds that she regularly sleeps in have been made of similar materials.)
In Milliways, Liz is sometimes exposed to something that she doesn't see through the B.P.R.D.: other people with fire in them or who can control fire. In Millicanon, her own fire responds to that of others, mostly by enthusiastically wanting to go whump and set her alight. It wants out in the most violent way possible.
Controlling it is slowly becoming easier. It's taking a hell of a lot of concentration and practice. Liz spent years trying to make it go away, then years more trying to force it to do her will; now she tries to work with it instead of against it. She doesn't understand it, where it came from, or how it works; not by a long shot.
FAMILY
Liz's parents were Robert (an efficiency expert) and Diane (a chef) Sherman. The family moved constantly, first for Robert's work and then because Liz kept accidentally lighting suspicious fires, so they weren't physically close to what little extended family they possessed. Robert was estranged from his small family, and Diane only had her mother and her sister, Stacey, who both lived in Chicago. There were phone calls and Christmas cards, and yearly visits; enough that they were faces to Liz rather than names or voices over a line, but not enough that she knew them well at all, especially as a quiet girl.
After the divorce -- in which Robert's inability to handle Liz's ability was a primary factor, despite both parents' assurances to Liz -- Liz went with her mom, who was fairly well shattered by the separation. They moved even more frequently than they had with her father; Liz was still more unhappy, which meant that there were more fires and more questions. She began taking pictures after her father gave her an Instamatic camera for Christmas when she was ten. Despite not being prepared to deal with a little girl who lit on fire (and not entirely sure of what to say to a daughter who didn't talk very much), Robert cared about his daughter; he and Diane did their best to make sure that he remained a part of Liz's life, even while they were half a continent apart, as they often were. There were phone calls and packages and letters, and once, they were both in Cincinnati for a few months.
In Detroit, living in a low-rent housing complex and being chased by stone-throwing bullies, 11-year-old Liz exploded. It took out most of a city block, a quarter of a mile wide, and wasted the courtyard that she was in; it destroyed the three surrounding six-story apartment buildings, with residents inside.
When Liz finally woke up, she couldn't understand why she was in a stark white containment room, why the people who brought her food were wearing haz-mat suits, and why no one would talk to her. It took days for someone to finally tell her that her mother was dead; weeks, for her to find out that her father had refused to come to see her, much less to take custody. He gave up his parental rights and transferred responsibility for her to the state.
Liz was shipped from institution to institution, breaking out whenever she could and taking care of herself, living on the streets. The first time, she made it to Chicago, where she found that her grandmother and aunt wanted nothing to do with her (and, in fact, considered her her mother's murderer). The second time, she was 13 and tracked her father to Boston, where she discovered that he had remarried and had one little girl with another on the way. He was terrified of her.
She didn't try to contact her biological family again.
When Professor Bruttenholm caught up with Liz, she was 15 and staying in a house for orphans and teenage runaways. It was winter in Portland, Oregon; she wanted out but had yet to figure out the halfway house's rhythms enough to make an escape plan. The professor offered her a place to stay, a home, tutoring; he promised that she wouldn't be a prisoner. He said that there were other people with the agency who weren't what other people might consider 'normal.'
Liz figured, what the hell. He was old and frail, couldn't possibly catch her if she bolted the second they got outside.
And then she stepped through the front door and there were legions of men in dark suits, and a fire-proof truck.
She moved to New Jersey, met Hellboy and Abe. Over the next few years, she studied for and received her GED (at the quiet insistence of Professor Broom) and spent most of her time hanging out with Hellboy, and also with Abe. She followed agents around, asking questions about the Sandinistas and U.S. involvement in South American politics; the older agents were annoyed, the younger ones thought it was hilarious and taught her to shoot. She is a deadly shot with a Beretta 9mm.
At 18, Liz had already been asking to go into the field for several years, and she finally trained and went out as a field agent. She was tired of waiting in the Bureau, wandering the halls, while Hellboy and Abe and the agents went after the things that went bump in the night.
Liz was a very good field agent; among the Bureau's finest. But she still wanted something more out of life. That was what would lead her to quit, and time and time again, she would come back, because in the end, she didn't fit anywhere so well as she did at the B.P.R.D.
When she was released, Liz returned to the BPRD but she couldn't go on living there as if nothing had happened. The charges against her may have been quietly dropped due to lack of evidence, but her conscience wasn't nearly so quiet, and neither were the looks that she received from some agents; the friends of the four who had been killed. A number of agents stood by her -- and no one said a word to her on the subject -- but she could see the fear in even her supporters' eyes. Only Hellboy, Professor Broom, and Abe still seemed comfortable in her presence. Everyone else was -- rightfully, she thought -- afraid to be around her. She came back from Pittsburgh a changed woman; quieter, and more lost than ever in guilt and self-loathing.
Liz had left the Bureau 11 times before, always in daylight with days' worth of notice and noisy, messy packing; always leaving a forwarding address. This time was different. She slipped out one night with her camera and one bag, and she didn't come back. She disappeared off the radar, despite the government's (and the BPRD's) increasingly nervous efforts to track her. Six months later, she turned up at Bellamie Psychiatric Hospital in New York City. After a phone call to Professor Broom, Liz was admitted to the mimimum security unit. The doctors didn't know how to help her with the fire (and were utterly astonished by it, and afraid of it), but the depression that had driven her to them? That, they could treat.
On a steady diet of lithium pills, antipsychotics, and therapy, numb to the world, Liz began putting her life back together. With the drugs keeping it sluggish, the fire was easier to control; she began cautiously experimenting with it in her fireproof room. She learned to call it to hand, for the first time in her life. She held onto that old dream of a normal life, and she sank into routine. She would be there for two years.
Hellboy, meanwhile, wasn't taking this lying down. He broke out every once in a while to go to New York to see her. Liz hated those visits. They tested her resolve more than anything; every time he told her that everybody missed her, that she needed to come back, and every time, seeing his face as he left without her -- it hurt. Seeing H.B. was harder than she could have expected; so was letting him leave.
She told him not to come back. She thought if she didn't see him, maybe, just maybe, she'd be able to resist the temptation to go back to the Bureau. (Back to him, if she was admitting it to herself, but she wasn't.)
And then, in 2004, she dreamed of fire.
When she woke up, it was in a strange bed; she knew the smell in the air (burned fabric, scorched drywall) even before the nurse told her that she had exploded in her sleep. She sat on a metal chair in an empty observation room for hours, staring determinedly at the wall with her back to the medical professionals who tried to talk to her from behind the one-sided glass, and she said nothing. (They told her that no one was hurt, but who the hell cared? Well, Liz did, but it didn't do much toward making her feel better. She had still lost control. She had still proved that, despite months of work and progress and seeming improvement -- this was never going to go away. She would never not be a danger to others.)
She said nothing til FBI Special Agent John T. Myers turned up, anyway.
He wasn't like the older agents she'd grown up around, all hardened cynicism. He wasn't patronizing, either, or condescending. He wasn't afraid of her.
Liz really did only plan to go back to the Bureau for the weekend.
Except then Abe was wounded and the professor was killed. Professor Broom had been Red's father, not hers, but he'd been incredibly good to her; always treated her with kindness, dignity, and respect, and with caring. If she was this heartbroken, she couldn't imagine how Hellboy was feeling. The BPRD was going to Moscow and Abe was still too hurt to go along. Red needed her. She couldn't abandon him.
Myers, meanwhile, had a thing for her. Liz knew that; you would have had to have been blind to miss it, and she had never been particularly blind. In a way, it was flattering. She'd had boyfriends before (while away from the Bureau), but never for long and not in years. There was something about knowing that she could still be attractive (and not just in a physical way) to a sweet guy she'd just met, especially a sweet guy she'd just met who knew that she was a freak -- it was nice. And maybe, in some other place or time, she could have fallen for John. She felt something, anyway; that much was clear.
But mostly, Myers complicated things.
Mostly, he had terrible timing.
In Rasputin's mausoleum, when Liz was in trouble, she did what came naturally: she called for Hellboy. He came to the rescue, like he always did, and as she watched him fight Sammaels in giant splashes and geysers of dirty water, as Myers had to hold her back from (somehow) going to help him, she knew. It was a moment of clarity, wild and terrified (for Red) as it was. She knew how she felt. She knew what she had to do. She told Myers to hit her.
It was the first time Liz had ever purposely created a huge explosion; the first time she'd controlled it enough that it wouldn't burn someone (John Myers, sheltered behind a rock) to a crisp. (It was all about thinking of someone other than herself and something other than panic; it was watching Hellboy as she stepped down into the stagnant water and it began to evaporate at the touch of her foot.) She would have almost been proud, afterward. If she'd been conscious.
Liz doesn't remember much of when Rasputin drew her soul out of her body. She has a vague idea of bright lights suddenly turning into something blacker than black; into terrifying, all-consuming nothingness. It was dark in a way that actual darkness couldn't begin to compare to. She waited in the dark, alone and colder than she'd ever been in life, and then she heard a familiar voice, too low and distant to make out the words.
The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was Hellboy's face. Near death experiences (or, in Liz's case, death experiences) were supposed to change a person, give them sudden insights, but not Liz. She loved him. She'd loved him for years. She'd admitted it to herself in the cavern. Folding into his arms, looking him in the eyes, kissing him -- it was the easiest thing she'd done in a long time.
Afterward, there wasn't much chance of Liz going back to Bellamie.
When the team returned to the Bureau, Liz moved in for good. She had her own room, small as it was, and that was good enough for her; she continued therapy and slowly stepped down the drug cocktail that had kept her fire sluggish at Bellamie. Some days are better than others, but she feels pretty okay, these days. Every once in a while, she starts to get the urge to bolt again, that she can't stay in one place this long -- but she's not skittish like she used to be, and she hasn't run in years.
Abe healed. Manning was Manning. Myers -- well, he fell deeper in love with Liz and everyone around them knew it, but the two of them carefully didn't acknowledge it. They became good friends, close friends; they still go out for coffee and talk life and J.D. Salinger; he still buys her boxes of rubber bands (and she still wears them, because she may be off the heavy antipsychotics, but the depression and the temper are still works in progress). Liz and Hellboy took it slow before they got to where they are now, and they had days where they wanted to kill each other a little (or, well, okay, they had days when Liz wanted to kill Hellboy a lot), but in general -- they were happy. Liz was happy. Life wasn't all puppies and rainbows and sunshine, not all the time, but she loved Red in spite of his faults, or maybe because of them (we love people for their faults, Myers had said months ago, and damned if he wasn't right), and he did the same for her, and despite every law of probability, they worked.
It's been somewhere between six months and a year, now. Liz regularly goes on missions both with and without Hellboy (but often with; the two of them, Abe, and Myers make a pretty good team, even with Red's lonely hero thing). Her dress sense is in the middle of a shift toward practicality, fitted T-shirts and long-sleeved shirts and pants and the ever-present stompy boots, away from oversized sweaters and long flowy skirts. (It is still, and will always be, all black.)
Life's pretty damn okay.
POWERS
General:
Liz can light herself on fire. This is an important distinction, as she can't yet throw fire or light anything else on fire without first touching it. At this point in time (nearly a year after the first film, and still quite some time before the second), Liz is fine-tuning her control. This means that she can light up on command and hold it back when necessary. Being able to call it to her hand is a big change from just a few months before the first movie; she learned that while at Bellamie.
She flares up when angry, threatened, injured, afraid, or very upset; it also happens when she's aroused, or when she's terribly content and she allows the fire out. Strong emotions set it off. The calmer she is -- and the calmer she can make herself -- the easier it is to control her power. Water doesn't extinguish her fire; effort or mood changes do.
Through training with Zuko through Milliways, she improved at not lighting on fire when she doesn't mean to or want to.
When she lights on fire (as well as directly before and after), her eyes change color to match the flames. That means that right now, her eyes go an eerie
ETA, 7/4/09: Liz is beginning to learn to -- not quite throw fire, but to create, control, and direct explosions. Example: here, where she's exploding forward while protecting people behind her. Her control is still completely wonky and all over the place, but when it really counts, when lives are on the line and she's getting her mantras and her concentration right, her control improves dramatically. Her fire turns red-orange-gold rather than blue-white, then, and it's less hot and wild than the blue. Currently, she can't create the lower temperature flames besides inadvertently, in situations where she desperately needs the lower intensity flames and the higher degree of control, but she's working toward being able to regulate the temperature and size of her fire. END ETA
ETA, 2/29/12: She is totally able to bring the lower-temperature flames up on command now; in fact, her fire is now -- for the most part -- red-orange by default. It only goes blue when she starts losing control, which happens less often these days, but is still a definite concern. She's able to push and pull her fire to a certain extent.END ETA
Liz is fireproof. She can't control flames other than her own, and she has no power over fires that she has set once they spread, but she can't be burned by either her own flames or by fire on objects around her. If she could be, the scene in the first movie where she sets the bed on fire definitely wouldn't end with Liz sitting in a chair without a scratch on her. She is fireproof, but that doesn't mean that she's entirely insusceptible to smoke inhalation (though her lungs have a far higher tolerance than a lot of people's) or to the structural damage that her fires can cause (such as: buildings falling down).
Fireproof also means that she isn't scalded by hot water or superheated metal. She can't be burned. When she used to smoke, she would occasionally put out cigarettes on the back of her hand, just because she could.
What It Is Like for Liz:
The fire is a part of Liz. It's integral to her survival. In the Hellboy comic "Almost Colossus," Liz dies when the fire is taken, and the same would happen to this Liz if it were somehow stripped from her. She feels it all the time; it doesn't always want out, necessarily, and she isn't living a life where she's constantly tamping it down, but she always knows it's there.
If Liz gets too upset, too hurt, that's where she loses control. It burns beyond what she can contain. She's learning techniques to hold it back for as long as she can, when it happens, and to keep the inevitable explosion from being a Detroit or a Pittsburgh. Her explosions are extremely rare, these days, and usually happen on missions; to an extent, they're controlled. To an extent.
Liz blacks out after those explosions; depending on how large the explosion, she could be out for minutes or for hours. If she wakes up early, the fire is still recovering and she's shaky and freezing as hell.
ETA, 7/4/2009: If the explosion's big enough, she'll still pass out. More and more these days, though, Liz remains conscious after having an episode. The longer she held the fire back before finally letting it loose, the more exhausted she is, the more she struggles with simple things like speech and walking, and the more difficult it is to keep from blacking out. She'll usually need at least a couple hours' sleep, after an episode, in order to rest up and charge her metaphorical batteries. But she's getting better at this in leaps and bounds. Every time, she is less tired afterward.END ETA
It doesn't hurt when she burns (though it does when her fire wants to explode and she's holding it back as hard as she can; you can see it in her tortured face in the beginning of The Golden Army). She understands that there's heat and she can feel that it's warmer, but it doesn't burn her. She can feel when it's coming; the hair rises on the back of her neck and along her arms. I read a fic once where the line was "She felt like a match being struck, as if every inch of her was reactive, flammable, unstable," and I love that; it's stuck with me ever since, when it comes to Liz and her powers. The fire itself just tingles when it's touching her skin; she knows it's there because she can feel it (and see it).
Random Practicalities:
She owns a lot of specialized clothing made with Nomex and other hand-wavily flame-resistant materials; her clothes are as fireproof as you can make them. (Wisely, the sheets, blankets, and mattresses of both beds that she regularly sleeps in have been made of similar materials.)
In Milliways, Liz is sometimes exposed to something that she doesn't see through the B.P.R.D.: other people with fire in them or who can control fire. In Millicanon, her own fire responds to that of others, mostly by enthusiastically wanting to go whump and set her alight. It wants out in the most violent way possible.
Controlling it is slowly becoming easier. It's taking a hell of a lot of concentration and practice. Liz spent years trying to make it go away, then years more trying to force it to do her will; now she tries to work with it instead of against it. She doesn't understand it, where it came from, or how it works; not by a long shot.
FAMILY
Liz's parents were Robert (an efficiency expert) and Diane (a chef) Sherman. The family moved constantly, first for Robert's work and then because Liz kept accidentally lighting suspicious fires, so they weren't physically close to what little extended family they possessed. Robert was estranged from his small family, and Diane only had her mother and her sister, Stacey, who both lived in Chicago. There were phone calls and Christmas cards, and yearly visits; enough that they were faces to Liz rather than names or voices over a line, but not enough that she knew them well at all, especially as a quiet girl.
After the divorce -- in which Robert's inability to handle Liz's ability was a primary factor, despite both parents' assurances to Liz -- Liz went with her mom, who was fairly well shattered by the separation. They moved even more frequently than they had with her father; Liz was still more unhappy, which meant that there were more fires and more questions. She began taking pictures after her father gave her an Instamatic camera for Christmas when she was ten. Despite not being prepared to deal with a little girl who lit on fire (and not entirely sure of what to say to a daughter who didn't talk very much), Robert cared about his daughter; he and Diane did their best to make sure that he remained a part of Liz's life, even while they were half a continent apart, as they often were. There were phone calls and packages and letters, and once, they were both in Cincinnati for a few months.
In Detroit, living in a low-rent housing complex and being chased by stone-throwing bullies, 11-year-old Liz exploded. It took out most of a city block, a quarter of a mile wide, and wasted the courtyard that she was in; it destroyed the three surrounding six-story apartment buildings, with residents inside.
When Liz finally woke up, she couldn't understand why she was in a stark white containment room, why the people who brought her food were wearing haz-mat suits, and why no one would talk to her. It took days for someone to finally tell her that her mother was dead; weeks, for her to find out that her father had refused to come to see her, much less to take custody. He gave up his parental rights and transferred responsibility for her to the state.
Liz was shipped from institution to institution, breaking out whenever she could and taking care of herself, living on the streets. The first time, she made it to Chicago, where she found that her grandmother and aunt wanted nothing to do with her (and, in fact, considered her her mother's murderer). The second time, she was 13 and tracked her father to Boston, where she discovered that he had remarried and had one little girl with another on the way. He was terrified of her.
She didn't try to contact her biological family again.
When Professor Bruttenholm caught up with Liz, she was 15 and staying in a house for orphans and teenage runaways. It was winter in Portland, Oregon; she wanted out but had yet to figure out the halfway house's rhythms enough to make an escape plan. The professor offered her a place to stay, a home, tutoring; he promised that she wouldn't be a prisoner. He said that there were other people with the agency who weren't what other people might consider 'normal.'
Liz figured, what the hell. He was old and frail, couldn't possibly catch her if she bolted the second they got outside.
And then she stepped through the front door and there were legions of men in dark suits, and a fire-proof truck.
She moved to New Jersey, met Hellboy and Abe. Over the next few years, she studied for and received her GED (at the quiet insistence of Professor Broom) and spent most of her time hanging out with Hellboy, and also with Abe. She followed agents around, asking questions about the Sandinistas and U.S. involvement in South American politics; the older agents were annoyed, the younger ones thought it was hilarious and taught her to shoot. She is a deadly shot with a Beretta 9mm.
At 18, Liz had already been asking to go into the field for several years, and she finally trained and went out as a field agent. She was tired of waiting in the Bureau, wandering the halls, while Hellboy and Abe and the agents went after the things that went bump in the night.
Liz was a very good field agent; among the Bureau's finest. But she still wanted something more out of life. That was what would lead her to quit, and time and time again, she would come back, because in the end, she didn't fit anywhere so well as she did at the B.P.R.D.