"Hobby?" he repeated, eyebrow quirked. "It's been suggested." Knitting. No, really. He'd think about it. After all, this had all started as a 'hobby', at one point. Repairing timepieces. Back before the hunger had taken over. He'd tried to fight it, but damn if this was too much right now for him to win against. Susan Sto Helit. Everything he wanted, balled up into one neat little package for his convenience.
He didn't bother with Shaun - only threw him an irritated sideways glance towards the comment. Shaun was not his concern. He hardly looked interesting. His gaze landed easily onto Susan's instead, that same, familiar sort of estranged hunger flashing in his eyes for a moment. Take her mind, kill the spare? It had definitely worked for him before. No guilt - Shaun was simply in the way. A casualty of war, if you will. "You know, that conversation I mentioned? It was just really enticing. I wish we could have hit a different point in it." He narrowed his eyes to her, fingers contemplatively itching with the want to just slam her to the ground there and take what he wanted. Now. "So you want we should skip the chit chat?"
((HAHAHAHAHA, YOU PUT IN 'BUTT'! YOU ABSOLUTELY WIN!))
Susan knew full well what he was on about. Shaun, on the other hand, did not, and his interpretation of the situation was horribly, horribly off. Who the hell was this guy, and was he out of his mind? Susan was freaking scary--the dude was either crazy, suicidal, or some combination thereof. He looked over at Susan, questioning, and caught her scowl.
"Are you really sure you want to do that?" she asked. He had no reason to think he couldn't catch her like he did last time, but still--he needed to learn a little respect. Before she could say anything else, though, Shaun piped up.
"Hey, man, I dunno what your deal is, but Susan's off-limits," he said. Jeeze, how had she acquired a stalker? And such a frigging creepy stalker, at that? He set his water bottle aside--both the poker and the cricket bat were not far away, and he had a feeling that between them they could totally take this guy out. Which showed how perceptive Shaun was, really.
Susan gave him a look that was at once confused and exasperated. "All right, Sylar, didn't you learn from last time? You can't beat me. I'm out of your league."
((SPECIFICALLY, HE WAS THINKING OF MOHINDER'S. It was hard to fit that in with his line of thought, though.))
God, who was this guy? No, really? Who did he think he was? Sylar resisted the urge to just roll his eyes at the man. He was going to... what? Smack him with a cricket bat? See if he could get within ten feet within his spin suddenly snapping in three places without prompting.
"You know," Sylar murmured under his breath, narrowing his eyes. "I really think I do." He suddenly flickered his fingers, and Shaun went flying backwards without Sylar even bestowing him so much as a sideways glance. Pest. He was ruining this plan, the one that was going to go SO smoothly, before he got in the way.
"You were so interesting last time, Susan," he continued in a hush of a voice, letting his eyes flash to Susan one more time. "I can't WAIT to talk again."
Smacking Sylar with the cricket bat was indeed the foremost thought in Shaun's mind--at least, until he suddenly found himself sailing backward, landing ass over teakettle on the uneven ground.
"What the--" He'd never seen telekinesis before, but he'd read about it, usually in the lower class of sci-fi comic books. Great, he thought. Creepy, stalkerish, and telekinetic. This...was going to royally suck. He staggered to his feet as Susan put a hand over her face.
"Was that really necessary?" she asked, sounding pained. "Picking on Shaun like that is kind of like picking on the little wheezy kid with glasses, you know." She stood, ignoring Shaun's indignant protest as she brushed off her skirt. "I think I speak for both of us when I say KNOCK IT OFF."
Shaun blinked, staring from one to the other. Susan's last words seemed to echo in his head without bothering to pass through his ears, and he wondered how she'd done it. He wasn't about to ask, though--Susan's expression was absolutely murderous, and it would take a dumber man than Shaun Riley to risk turning her attention on him.
Oh, what did he care what she had to say? He couldn't let her get the upper hand on him again, not like last time. Sylar had just rounded in on Susan, lifting his hand to let her follow suit when...
Shit.
His hand was stuttering to a halt before she could even finish getting her words out, before he could even really comprehend what she'd just done. She was using it again. Her Voice. The persuasion. And unlike the awe he'd shown last time, this time... he was just mad. She was not going to be defeating him. Not when he was so close. He had the other man out of the way, easily, and all he needed was to get her.
"You need to stop doing that," he replied in a slow sort of sing-song voice, eyebrows slanting downwards into a bit of a scowl. "Because, you know... It's kind of starting to get on my nerves."
Shaun blinked. Damn, she'd actually stopped him--that was pretty bloody impressive, even if he had no idea in hell how she'd done it. His first instinct had been to move, but the words had worked on him as well as they'd worked on Sylar, effectively rooting him to his spot.
Susan felt a certain grim satisfaction in watching him halt mid-action. "It's getting on your nerves? Well, at least I'm doing something right." She glanced at the poker and the cricket bat, and decided against them for now. "Look," she said, not unkindly, "you need to give this up. You can't win. We're balanced out too evenly." Technically she could probably kill him, if they weren't on school grounds, but as they were she didn't see the point.
Shaun watched the whole exchange, confused and increasingly angry. His highly erroneous assumptions were only being reinforced, and now that Susan's attention was no longer on him he started forward. He had no idea just what he could do against this guy, but he had to do something, even if that something amounted to little more than getting his ass kicked. It was the thought that counted, after all.
Cute. Really. Sylar's eyes followed her own to the poker and the cricket bat, gliding easily back over to hers with a narrowed sort of look to him in wake of his irritation. She was winning. That other man was coming towards him again, like a complete dolt. Like hell Sylar was just going to drop this. Apparently, Susan wasn't all too accustomed to just who the hell she was dealing with.
Sigh. He always had to be the villain, didn't he? "Unfortunately, Miss Sto Helit," Sylar replied carefully, as the poker and the cricket bat lifted without warning, the bat automatically launching out to crack Shaun upside the head with barely so much of a twitch of Sylar's finger. Didn't the guy know when to quit? Sylar didn't want to kill him. He really didn't. But if the guy got in the way... Well, he wouldn't be able to stop himself.
"I have tricks up my own sleeves that you haven't yet been introduced to," he finished with an icy tone to his voice, as the not-so-lethal end of the poker swung back around towards her stomach, hard enough to knock the wind out of somebody. Not that he was showing her said tricks yet, obviously - those came for later. Besides. This was much more fun. "Don't make this harder than it should be."
Shaun, caught almost wholly unaware, received the thwack straight upside the head. He staggered, swore, tripped, and almost fell over--how he didn't, he never knew. It didn't hurt as badly as the dart-to-the-head had, but it was bad enough, and it was going to bruise like hell later. The fact that his own cricket bat had been used against him bordered on sacrilege, and he fixed Sylar with a (slightly unfocused) glare.
"Here, what the hell are you on about, you twat?" he asked, rubbing his head. "Go find someone else to stalk, you creepy pervert."
He looked at Susan--she'd done her best to dodge the poker, but it hadn't quite worked, and rather than hit her stomach it had cracked hard against her ribcage. She herself was cursing in ways Shaun hadn't thought humanly possible, but she stopped short at Shaun's words.
"Wait, wait, what did you say?" She stared at him, comprehension dawning like a sunrise, and she couldn't help it--she sat on the grass and gave over to a fit of helpless laughter. "Shaun, you're an idiot," she said, shaking her head. "Bastard wants to steal my brain."
That brought Shaun up short--he glanced at Sylar, and at Susan, and groaned. "Well, how was I s'posed to know that?" he grumbled. "I mean, come on, you think I'm gonna see this whole thing and realize the twat's a Hannibal Lecter wannabe? Sorry I'm not a bloody mind reader." He scowled, embarrassment and annoyance temporarily superseding his unease. "I'm also sorry if I don't automatically suspect every stalker of wanting to eat someone's brain."
No. They were definitely arguing. In the middle of a perfectly good fight.
Sylar just sort of watched for a minute, as Susan sat on the ground and laughed, as they both let out long streams of swearwords, half of which Sylar had barely even known to exist before now - for example, just what was 'twat' supposed to mean? - and... they were joking right? They had to be joking. They couldn't possibly be trying his patience that much. Could they? They were, weren't they?
"Okay. This is going to stop," he replied in short, and with a twitch of his fingers, invisible fingers clamped around Shaun's throat, silencing his... GODawful quibble, at least for the time being, enough for Sylar to concentrate just on what the hell he was doing. "You. Need to not talk again. Ever." The poker lifted again, pushing Susan back down to the grass, firmly, the metal of it pressing hard against her own throat.
"Excuse me if I'm getting a little snippy here. Where are these surprises you keep warning me about, Susan? I'm a little UNIMPRESSED," he snarled, rounding in on her and looming rather ominously over the woman.
He couldn't talk. He couldn't bloody talk. Come to that, he couldn't breathe very well, either, though at least he wasn't actually being throttled. Shaun wheezed, rather unhelpfully, fighting against his invisible choke-hold and failing. He was expecting Susan to use...whatever the hell she'd used before, that voice that seemed to kick straight into the back-brain without bothering to consult conscious thought. He certainly wasn't expecting what she actually did, which was reach out and grab his ankle while she snapped her fingers.
The world froze. The faint hum of far-off bees, the scattered bird-calls and low rustle of leaves were all silenced abruptly, and Sylar himself was utterly still, pinned quite effectively outside Time.
Susan, grumbling, eased her way out from beneath the poker, scratching her throat as she went--she couldn't pass through things when Time was stopped; as she'd once told Lobsang, the power seemed to cancel out somehow. She also let go of Shaun's ankle; she only needed to touch him when Time first stopped; after that, he was in the same bubble she was.
She scowled at Sylar, even as Shaun stared, his eyes darting from her to the frozen world and back again. "What the hell did you do?" he asked, poking at a stationary butterfly. God, he'd thought she was scary before all this--the whole situation just reinforced his conviction that he never, ever wanted to piss her off.
"I stopped Time," Susan said, circling Sylar and appraising him much like a vulture. "Actually, that sentence is wrong in every particular, but it's enough to be getting on with. We're in a kind of closed time-loop, though even I don't fully understand how it works--it just does."
She frowned thoughtfully. Technically you weren't supposed to touch people when they were caught out of time, because it could potentially hurt them. In this case, however, she had absolutely no problem with that, so, with some difficulty, she pried the poker out of Sylar's motionless hand and took several steps back. Unimpressed, was he? Part of her knew that letting him in on her other powers was a stupid thing to do, but the other part knew that he'd come after her even if he didn't know, and at least this way he'd have some idea what he was really up against. Amateur.
She snapped her fingers, letting Time rush back with an almost-perceptible whoosh. The finger-snapping wasn't actually necessary, but it was a kind of focus, and it had become habit with her.
Augh! Sylar didn't even have time to react. Before he could figure out what had even happened, his hand was suddenly stinging, what the hell, neither Susan nor Shaun was within his grasps any longer, the poker was gone, and... Susan had it? What had just happened? Did she...
He stared at his hand for a few seconds, blinking, before his cool gaze slowly sidled to Susan, eyebrow arched. Oh, he knew exactly what had just happened. He had gone up against Hiro Nakamura, several times. The little pest had teleported away from him more times than he cared to count. "Stopping time, Susan?" he crowed under his breath, in a slow, dangerous sort of voice, rounding in for a second time and letting his eyes widen with the newfound interest.
She really did have more tricks up her sleeve than she was letting on. "Just what else do you have in the box of tricks, huh?" Suddenly his tone had delved into bitterness, his lips contorted into a snarl. "Can you read minds? Super strength? Regeneration? Flying? Can you shut your eyes and figure out just where anyone in the world is?"
She almost laughed--the expression as he looked at his hand was very close to priceless. As it was, she leveled the poker at him, giving him the Teacher Stare, the one that said, in no uncertain terms, that there would be tears before the end of the day, and they would not be hers.
"You might call it that," she said, evasive. As she'd figured, the whole thing made him all the more interested, but it had also gotten them the hell away from him. "Do you not get the point yet? You can't beat me. You just...can't. My brain is not on the menu."
Shaun, who was still reeling, raised a hand much as if he'd been at school. "Question," he said, somewhat woozy. "What d'you actually do with the brains? I mean, do you really eat them?"
Susan blinked, temporarily derailed. "Yeah, what do you do with them?" she asked. "How does it work? And do you need the actual brain, or just...messages within the brain? Knowledge by osmosis?"
Oh, for God's sake, why did everyone think that? Why was everyone so damned positive that he'd gone into full-on Hannibal Lecter mode? Like something straight out of Silence of the Lambs. He was looking for an answer. That evolutionary imperative he always spoke of. Just because he murdered did not make him a monster (except when it really did). It definitely didn't make him a cannibal.
"I don't eat them," he replied, in a rather snippy tone, narrowing his eyes between the two of them. Could he just kill them now? And get it over with? He almost made a comment about not playing with his food before he ate it, but he'd just finished talking about not eating people, for crying out loud.
This was totally off-subject. How the hell did they get to this? Nobody else was curious as to what he did with people's brains. They just assumed. They didn't actually ask. At least not ALOUD. "I missed the part where it mattered." Whatever happened to cutting into people's heads without protest? "The point here is that you have something I'd particularly like... and you're just dressing it up nicer and nicer."
Susan blinked, affronted. "Well, of course it matters," she said. "If you're going to try to steal my brain, I at least want to know what you intend to do with it." Who wouldn't?
Shaun put his hand up again, much to Susan's amusement. "Um," he said. "Are you sure you don't eat them? Because, I mean, they're probably full of protein and all that. Though I can't imagine they'd taste very good," he added reflectively. "Not unless you cooked them up with herbs and things, like chicken."
Susan made a face. "I'd think you'd be afraid of kuru," she said. "I know I would be." It didn't occur to either of them that deviating this far off-subject was at all an odd thing.
There was a look in his features, slowly sparking from his eyes and spreading across his face, contorting his jaw into a square line and knitting his eyebrows. Irritation was nigh. They weren't actually stopping this, right now, to discuss the fact of the matter if or if not he ate brains. Right? They couldn't possibly be doing that. Because that would just make Sylar mad.
He could have even put up with it, for a bit. He hadn't much mind for drivel, but... he could live with it. For a while. Even a man with such a small amount of patience as himself could deal with their bickering for a short while. But between that Shaun guy sticking his hand up every sentence, as if he were in a schoolhouse... comparing brains to chicken, talking about kuru? Oh, yes. His patience was most decidedly tried.
Sylar reflexively let his hand snap out, wrapping his fist around the poker so tightly that his knuckles popped to a bone white, snapping the thing away from its point towards him. Automatically, a blue tone glazed over his fingers, as a sheet of ice started caking up and down the shaft of the iron instrument. Within seconds, the thing was frail. Brittle enough for him to snap in two. Which he proceeded to do.
"Remember the part where I said that it didn't. MATTER?" Sylar snarled in a hiss of a voice, pointing the top of the poker right back at Susan. Damn his powers - he was just right-out jabbing it to her throat, right now. "Because I'd really like to get back to that."
All Susan's amusement died at once. Shaun, seeing the look on her face, backed away almost without thinking. "Whoops..." he muttered. Her expression had passed through murderous into outright deadly--if looks could kill, Sylar would be a small pile of dust already scattering on the wind.
"...You broke my poker," she said softly, the words laced with venom. "You. Broke. My. POKER." The poker was like an old friend--it was the same one she'd stabbed Teatime with, years ago; the one that had been the bane of monsters and bogeymen all over Ankh-Morpork.
There was a blur as her hand came around and slapped him upside the head, hard. Her hair was coiling angrily, her face flushed enough that her odd birthmark stood out like a livid white scar. She reached for the half still in his hand, so angry she could hardly see straight. She might not be able to kill him, but by gods she could make him wish he was dead.
"Oh, hell," Shaun said weakly. "Better you than me, mate."
"Hobby?" he repeated, eyebrow quirked. "It's been suggested." Knitting. No, really. He'd think about it. After all, this had all started as a 'hobby', at one point. Repairing timepieces. Back before the hunger had taken over. He'd tried to fight it, but damn if this was too much right now for him to win against. Susan Sto Helit. Everything he wanted, balled up into one neat little package for his convenience.
He didn't bother with Shaun - only threw him an irritated sideways glance towards the comment. Shaun was not his concern. He hardly looked interesting. His gaze landed easily onto Susan's instead, that same, familiar sort of estranged hunger flashing in his eyes for a moment. Take her mind, kill the spare? It had definitely worked for him before. No guilt - Shaun was simply in the way. A casualty of war, if you will. "You know, that conversation I mentioned? It was just really enticing. I wish we could have hit a different point in it." He narrowed his eyes to her, fingers contemplatively itching with the want to just slam her to the ground there and take what he wanted. Now. "So you want we should skip the chit chat?"
Butt.
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Susan knew full well what he was on about. Shaun, on the other hand, did not, and his interpretation of the situation was horribly, horribly off. Who the hell was this guy, and was he out of his mind? Susan was freaking scary--the dude was either crazy, suicidal, or some combination thereof. He looked over at Susan, questioning, and caught her scowl.
"Are you really sure you want to do that?" she asked. He had no reason to think he couldn't catch her like he did last time, but still--he needed to learn a little respect. Before she could say anything else, though, Shaun piped up.
"Hey, man, I dunno what your deal is, but Susan's off-limits," he said. Jeeze, how had she acquired a stalker? And such a frigging creepy stalker, at that? He set his water bottle aside--both the poker and the cricket bat were not far away, and he had a feeling that between them they could totally take this guy out. Which showed how perceptive Shaun was, really.
Susan gave him a look that was at once confused and exasperated. "All right, Sylar, didn't you learn from last time? You can't beat me. I'm out of your league."
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God, who was this guy? No, really? Who did he think he was? Sylar resisted the urge to just roll his eyes at the man. He was going to... what? Smack him with a cricket bat? See if he could get within ten feet within his spin suddenly snapping in three places without prompting.
"You know," Sylar murmured under his breath, narrowing his eyes. "I really think I do." He suddenly flickered his fingers, and Shaun went flying backwards without Sylar even bestowing him so much as a sideways glance. Pest. He was ruining this plan, the one that was going to go SO smoothly, before he got in the way.
"You were so interesting last time, Susan," he continued in a hush of a voice, letting his eyes flash to Susan one more time. "I can't WAIT to talk again."
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"What the--" He'd never seen telekinesis before, but he'd read about it, usually in the lower class of sci-fi comic books. Great, he thought. Creepy, stalkerish, and telekinetic. This...was going to royally suck. He staggered to his feet as Susan put a hand over her face.
"Was that really necessary?" she asked, sounding pained. "Picking on Shaun like that is kind of like picking on the little wheezy kid with glasses, you know." She stood, ignoring Shaun's indignant protest as she brushed off her skirt. "I think I speak for both of us when I say KNOCK IT OFF."
Shaun blinked, staring from one to the other. Susan's last words seemed to echo in his head without bothering to pass through his ears, and he wondered how she'd done it. He wasn't about to ask, though--Susan's expression was absolutely murderous, and it would take a dumber man than Shaun Riley to risk turning her attention on him.
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Shit.
His hand was stuttering to a halt before she could even finish getting her words out, before he could even really comprehend what she'd just done. She was using it again. Her Voice. The persuasion. And unlike the awe he'd shown last time, this time... he was just mad. She was not going to be defeating him. Not when he was so close. He had the other man out of the way, easily, and all he needed was to get her.
"You need to stop doing that," he replied in a slow sort of sing-song voice, eyebrows slanting downwards into a bit of a scowl. "Because, you know... It's kind of starting to get on my nerves."
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Susan felt a certain grim satisfaction in watching him halt mid-action. "It's getting on your nerves? Well, at least I'm doing something right." She glanced at the poker and the cricket bat, and decided against them for now. "Look," she said, not unkindly, "you need to give this up. You can't win. We're balanced out too evenly." Technically she could probably kill him, if they weren't on school grounds, but as they were she didn't see the point.
Shaun watched the whole exchange, confused and increasingly angry. His highly erroneous assumptions were only being reinforced, and now that Susan's attention was no longer on him he started forward. He had no idea just what he could do against this guy, but he had to do something, even if that something amounted to little more than getting his ass kicked. It was the thought that counted, after all.
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Sigh. He always had to be the villain, didn't he? "Unfortunately, Miss Sto Helit," Sylar replied carefully, as the poker and the cricket bat lifted without warning, the bat automatically launching out to crack Shaun upside the head with barely so much of a twitch of Sylar's finger. Didn't the guy know when to quit? Sylar didn't want to kill him. He really didn't. But if the guy got in the way... Well, he wouldn't be able to stop himself.
"I have tricks up my own sleeves that you haven't yet been introduced to," he finished with an icy tone to his voice, as the not-so-lethal end of the poker swung back around towards her stomach, hard enough to knock the wind out of somebody. Not that he was showing her said tricks yet, obviously - those came for later. Besides. This was much more fun. "Don't make this harder than it should be."
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"Here, what the hell are you on about, you twat?" he asked, rubbing his head. "Go find someone else to stalk, you creepy pervert."
He looked at Susan--she'd done her best to dodge the poker, but it hadn't quite worked, and rather than hit her stomach it had cracked hard against her ribcage. She herself was cursing in ways Shaun hadn't thought humanly possible, but she stopped short at Shaun's words.
"Wait, wait, what did you say?" She stared at him, comprehension dawning like a sunrise, and she couldn't help it--she sat on the grass and gave over to a fit of helpless laughter. "Shaun, you're an idiot," she said, shaking her head. "Bastard wants to steal my brain."
That brought Shaun up short--he glanced at Sylar, and at Susan, and groaned. "Well, how was I s'posed to know that?" he grumbled. "I mean, come on, you think I'm gonna see this whole thing and realize the twat's a Hannibal Lecter wannabe? Sorry I'm not a bloody mind reader." He scowled, embarrassment and annoyance temporarily superseding his unease. "I'm also sorry if I don't automatically suspect every stalker of wanting to eat someone's brain."
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No. They were definitely arguing. In the middle of a perfectly good fight.
Sylar just sort of watched for a minute, as Susan sat on the ground and laughed, as they both let out long streams of swearwords, half of which Sylar had barely even known to exist before now - for example, just what was 'twat' supposed to mean? - and... they were joking right? They had to be joking. They couldn't possibly be trying his patience that much. Could they? They were, weren't they?
"Okay. This is going to stop," he replied in short, and with a twitch of his fingers, invisible fingers clamped around Shaun's throat, silencing his... GODawful quibble, at least for the time being, enough for Sylar to concentrate just on what the hell he was doing. "You. Need to not talk again. Ever." The poker lifted again, pushing Susan back down to the grass, firmly, the metal of it pressing hard against her own throat.
"Excuse me if I'm getting a little snippy here. Where are these surprises you keep warning me about, Susan? I'm a little UNIMPRESSED," he snarled, rounding in on her and looming rather ominously over the woman.
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He couldn't talk. He couldn't bloody talk. Come to that, he couldn't breathe very well, either, though at least he wasn't actually being throttled. Shaun wheezed, rather unhelpfully, fighting against his invisible choke-hold and failing. He was expecting Susan to use...whatever the hell she'd used before, that voice that seemed to kick straight into the back-brain without bothering to consult conscious thought. He certainly wasn't expecting what she actually did, which was reach out and grab his ankle while she snapped her fingers.
The world froze. The faint hum of far-off bees, the scattered bird-calls and low rustle of leaves were all silenced abruptly, and Sylar himself was utterly still, pinned quite effectively outside Time.
Susan, grumbling, eased her way out from beneath the poker, scratching her throat as she went--she couldn't pass through things when Time was stopped; as she'd once told Lobsang, the power seemed to cancel out somehow. She also let go of Shaun's ankle; she only needed to touch him when Time first stopped; after that, he was in the same bubble she was.
She scowled at Sylar, even as Shaun stared, his eyes darting from her to the frozen world and back again. "What the hell did you do?" he asked, poking at a stationary butterfly. God, he'd thought she was scary before all this--the whole situation just reinforced his conviction that he never, ever wanted to piss her off.
"I stopped Time," Susan said, circling Sylar and appraising him much like a vulture. "Actually, that sentence is wrong in every particular, but it's enough to be getting on with. We're in a kind of closed time-loop, though even I don't fully understand how it works--it just does."
She frowned thoughtfully. Technically you weren't supposed to touch people when they were caught out of time, because it could potentially hurt them. In this case, however, she had absolutely no problem with that, so, with some difficulty, she pried the poker out of Sylar's motionless hand and took several steps back. Unimpressed, was he? Part of her knew that letting him in on her other powers was a stupid thing to do, but the other part knew that he'd come after her even if he didn't know, and at least this way he'd have some idea what he was really up against. Amateur.
She snapped her fingers, letting Time rush back with an almost-perceptible whoosh. The finger-snapping wasn't actually necessary, but it was a kind of focus, and it had become habit with her.
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He stared at his hand for a few seconds, blinking, before his cool gaze slowly sidled to Susan, eyebrow arched. Oh, he knew exactly what had just happened. He had gone up against Hiro Nakamura, several times. The little pest had teleported away from him more times than he cared to count. "Stopping time, Susan?" he crowed under his breath, in a slow, dangerous sort of voice, rounding in for a second time and letting his eyes widen with the newfound interest.
She really did have more tricks up her sleeve than she was letting on. "Just what else do you have in the box of tricks, huh?" Suddenly his tone had delved into bitterness, his lips contorted into a snarl. "Can you read minds? Super strength? Regeneration? Flying? Can you shut your eyes and figure out just where anyone in the world is?"
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"You might call it that," she said, evasive. As she'd figured, the whole thing made him all the more interested, but it had also gotten them the hell away from him. "Do you not get the point yet? You can't beat me. You just...can't. My brain is not on the menu."
Shaun, who was still reeling, raised a hand much as if he'd been at school. "Question," he said, somewhat woozy. "What d'you actually do with the brains? I mean, do you really eat them?"
Susan blinked, temporarily derailed. "Yeah, what do you do with them?" she asked. "How does it work? And do you need the actual brain, or just...messages within the brain? Knowledge by osmosis?"
Hey. It was for science.
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"I don't eat them," he replied, in a rather snippy tone, narrowing his eyes between the two of them. Could he just kill them now? And get it over with? He almost made a comment about not playing with his food before he ate it, but he'd just finished talking about not eating people, for crying out loud.
This was totally off-subject. How the hell did they get to this? Nobody else was curious as to what he did with people's brains. They just assumed. They didn't actually ask. At least not ALOUD. "I missed the part where it mattered." Whatever happened to cutting into people's heads without protest? "The point here is that you have something I'd particularly like... and you're just dressing it up nicer and nicer."
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Shaun put his hand up again, much to Susan's amusement. "Um," he said. "Are you sure you don't eat them? Because, I mean, they're probably full of protein and all that. Though I can't imagine they'd taste very good," he added reflectively. "Not unless you cooked them up with herbs and things, like chicken."
Susan made a face. "I'd think you'd be afraid of kuru," she said. "I know I would be." It didn't occur to either of them that deviating this far off-subject was at all an odd thing.
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He could have even put up with it, for a bit. He hadn't much mind for drivel, but... he could live with it. For a while. Even a man with such a small amount of patience as himself could deal with their bickering for a short while. But between that Shaun guy sticking his hand up every sentence, as if he were in a schoolhouse... comparing brains to chicken, talking about kuru? Oh, yes. His patience was most decidedly tried.
Sylar reflexively let his hand snap out, wrapping his fist around the poker so tightly that his knuckles popped to a bone white, snapping the thing away from its point towards him. Automatically, a blue tone glazed over his fingers, as a sheet of ice started caking up and down the shaft of the iron instrument. Within seconds, the thing was frail. Brittle enough for him to snap in two. Which he proceeded to do.
"Remember the part where I said that it didn't. MATTER?" Sylar snarled in a hiss of a voice, pointing the top of the poker right back at Susan. Damn his powers - he was just right-out jabbing it to her throat, right now. "Because I'd really like to get back to that."
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"...You broke my poker," she said softly, the words laced with venom. "You. Broke. My. POKER." The poker was like an old friend--it was the same one she'd stabbed Teatime with, years ago; the one that had been the bane of monsters and bogeymen all over Ankh-Morpork.
There was a blur as her hand came around and slapped him upside the head, hard. Her hair was coiling angrily, her face flushed enough that her odd birthmark stood out like a livid white scar. She reached for the half still in his hand, so angry she could hardly see straight. She might not be able to kill him, but by gods she could make him wish he was dead.
"Oh, hell," Shaun said weakly. "Better you than me, mate."
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