Curiosity Can Kill a Cat

No. Nope. Not starting there.

I'd started walking towards her, but as soon as I got close her eyes snapped to mine, and the look in her eyes had chilled me to my bones.

I'd diverted immediately, so I wasn't walking straight towards her, and looked away nervously.

I'd immediately started actively drawing from her aura, a sort of **** defense-mechanism that I didn't know I had until now, and come to a stop close, but facing away from her.

She was... Strong? Durable. Whatever she had, with just a taste of it my body felt lighter than ever. That just made me more nervous, but then again she'd only glared at me, not...

And I couldn't really say... The look in her eyes, it was full of rage, but more than that it was haunted. She might not be a bad egg.

I'd never run into anything like this, I didn't know what to do. People with powers were something I knew about intellectually, rather than in my presence.

I should probably just leave it be. That's what I told myself. Go back home, have dinner with my moms and my sister.

If this woman *was* a psycho, there was no way for me to defend myself. Not with an aura of slight friendliness and the small amount of biotic control I'd managed to passively leech off passersby.

Biotics were different from mutations, more uniform in how they functioned, and my absorption apparently worked on them too. But I'd never run into a strong one, and never had an amplifier installed in my skull.

If I could even use the ESP to erect a barrier, and that was about a fifty-fifty shot whenever I tried, it wouldn't stop more than a weak punch.

I knew the smart move was probably to leave it alone. Intellectually. But... This was a chance, too. To be something more than your average Joe.

So instead I stood there, entirely focused on her presence behind my back, siphoning off as much as I could.

Ready to bolt if she so much as twitched in my direction. I nearly did a couple of times.

I passed my stop. We left the city, passed out into Brooklyn. My heart had been beating hard from nervousness, but it eventually quieted.

It felt stronger. Everything did. I couldn't tell what power someone had when I felt them, when I just passively leeched off everything around me, but when I siphoned it off deliberately...

Enhanced strength, endurance, healing factor. Not S-grade, but it was the same sort of powerset I would expect from an S-grade. Probably C, or B.

The more I siphoned, the hungrier I felt for it. Minor enhancement to speed. Some sort of gravity control... Not quite flight.

I snapped out of my examination of myself, and her aura, when it started moving away from me at the next stop.

I didn't move, not at first, but... I glanced over my shoulder at her retreating back. I'd taken enough now that even if she was a psycho she wouldn't be able to just crush me, or -

The thought hit me that she might have a gun, if she was. Pretty sure the fraction I'd taken would definitely not make bullets bounce off of me.

But she still glowed brightly, and I was more attuned to it after taking some for myself.

I moved as late as I could, stepped off the train at the last possible moment, and followed the raven-haired meta in the leather jacket at a distance.

Slow and careful, barely in sight half of the time.

At that distance, I couldn't siphon much off at all, but she shouldn't realize that I was tailing her either. I'd never really tried this before, so I wasn't sure of my maximum distance yet.

My HUD told pinged with a message from mom, my birth mother Ava, asking when I'd get home for dinner. We were leaving the more crowded streets, passing out into what seemed to be a disused warehouse district.

I mentally typed out a message with my Omni-Tool, letting mom know I'd be home late, and I'd grab something on the way.

The girl, woman, whatever... She'd gone inside. I just barely saw her hair disappear into a building. Several windows broken, the place was basically falling apart.

I hesitated, shifting nervously from foot to foot as I looked around. Barely a person in sight.

Fuck. This was starting to feel more villain-y. Underground lair or something. They never told the full story in the news, so my perception of how super villains worked was a mix of movies and truth, but...

Her power aura disappeared from my senses, further inside the building, further down. And instinctively, I followed, swallowing back my nervousness.

I told myself that if she was a villain, well... Maybe I could do something good. If she touched me, I was fairly sure I'd be able to drain her dry. Maybe. Before she could kill me.

I wasn't much of a fighter - but I didn't suck either. Experimented with boxing, brazilian jiu-jitsu and tae kwon do when I was younger, but never really stuck with it, never got good at it...

The place was dusty and littered with broken equipment I couldn't quite identify the purpose of. Lab equipment? Medical, maybe. The trails in the dust really only went one way, and were easy to follow.