Telepathy Aquired

Free, I gestured and he floated before me, a marionette with its strings cut.

A gesture, and a line of blood appeared on his skull, and I opened it in order to dig around. This was a power that was dangerous to me, and while Crawler's power was already changing my brain to resist it, I hadn't been exposed long enough to develop a strong immunity. I needed to look at his power and see if there was a counter to it, because the Fae might have minions with powers like that, and even if they didn't, there were others in this world that did.

There it was.

Checking an evolved brain was flawlessly easy now compared to the challenge of the parahuman parasite. He didn't even have a chance to bleed out before I gained access to his ability. I scanned his brain, looking for evidence of what he knew, and I was surprised to see that he was a good man, although his new powers of mind control were slowly leading him into darkness. A dyslexic cop from New York, he'd recently moved here along with his wife and baby, escaping the horrors of the East Coast.

Sighing, I reattached his skull cap and started the healing process, keeping his heart from giving out. He'd be low on blood, and I was going to have to do something about the blood in the room, but it didn't matter. I allowed myself to fall to the floor into slime form, with one tentacle around his leg as I absorbed the blood from the floor as a slime. They were the ultimate cleaners, after all, and it wasn't much different than eating any other biological matter.

It took me five minutes, both to heal him and to have several other bodies cleaning up all the blood off the walls and the floor. It was a lot harder to lick the blood off clothes, but I managed it, barely using a little telekinesis. I suspected that his clothes were going to fall apart a lot more quickly than he expected, but that didn't matter.


***

Nightmares