Getting in over your head

When the Powered woman appeared in my mind's eye again, she was standing still. It wasn't until I got closer that I felt another presence too, and I froze.

I could hear muffled talking, not enough to make anything out. I latched on to the new presence and siphoned a trickle of its power, trying to figure out what I was dealing with.

I shouldn't be dealing with it. Whatever it was. This was dumb, stupid. But exciting...

It took more than five minutes before I had any idea. Whoever it was, they were strong too. Their aura not as focused, diffused out into a square around them.

Some sort of mental control. Probably the worst case scenario, honestly. My heart started beating more quickly again, my palms growing sweaty, but I couldn't leave it alone...

***

I got close enough to catch snippets of conversation, and focused on the girl. Judging from my experiences with Josh in high school, I had at least slight resistance to mental effects.

Hopefully it would be enough if this turned bad. More important to be strong enough to survive it... Probably. I didn't really know. I was out of my depth.

"-you even made me a hero - planning this? Why!?"

"-not a hero. You're a murderer, Kevin -"

I was hiding in a side-room off her path, crouched down beneath a desk maybe fifty foot away from them. Walls didn't matter to my ability, but distance did.

And contact, especially, from what I could tell. I'd once gotten a significant boost to my pitiful biotics just from bumping into someone.

But right now, if I crawled closer to them to better be able to siphon, I wouldn't be able to tell what they were saying. Sound does care about walls, and I was only hearing them due to the open door of this office space.

She seemed to be taunting him, the mind controller, and it was working. But for some reason he didn't take control.

"Shut up." He seethed.

"Go ahead, command me again." She goaded him. "That's a hermetically sealed room. Kevin."

"Kevin died in that lab."

"Granted it is a mundane name, but... 'Killgrave'? Was ****-Corpse already taken?"

I was quickly refocusing as they talked. She had him trapped somehow. Jessica, that's what he called her.

He wasn't admitting anything - just deflecting and trying to make her angry - but from the feel of his power, her accusations made sense.

I started draining Kevin's powers instead, focusing as fully as I could while I listened. If he got out...

Jessica called him a sociopathic killer. A ****-taker. Rattled off a long list of names of his victims. Hope, Ruben, Jessica.

From her tone, probably more than that. The square shape of his diffuse aura must reflect how she trapped him.

I almost gasped out loud when Kevin suddenly screamed in pain, but managed to suppress it.

"Forgot to mention. The water in your room is a conductor to an open wire."

I calmed my suddenly unsteady breathing. She might be justified in doing this to him, but that didn't make me any less nervous. Jessica might be unstable too, from what he did to her.

I didn't dare light my omni tool up to take notes on what was happening in case it gave me away, so I just tried to burn it into my mind. I'd put the tool on manual activation only.

I sat against the wall, my eyes closed and focused on his churning aura, until screaming surprised me again.

First him, begging for help, screaming in pain. Then another.

A new voice, older woman, no powers. I hadn't felt her enter at all, and she must've passed within meters of me, on the other side of the office wall.

Lawyer. Talking about her client, the one called Hope. Kevin had set her client up for something, something very serious. Life sentence.

At least she told Jessica to stop electrocuting her trapped prisoner. Hogarth. The lawyer's name was Hogarth.

"I'll have a cop here in three hours." That was Jessica. Trying to get a confession out of Kevin that would stand up in court. "Will you just wait here?"

That made me panic briefly again, but three hours was plenty of time and I hadn't done anything wrong.

Hogarth was angry, combative, but she agreed to stay behind and watch Kevin. That made slipping out to follow Jessica harder, but... Well, I really should focus on the bad guy anyway, right?