“You were right, this is a nice spot.” Kane admits to Minerva behind him, eyeing the isolated table.
“Right? Plus, it’s in the Romance section, so people rarely come here.” Minerva sits down and stretches her legs, and Kane follows suit.
“So, if we were following your plan, what’s the next step?” He lets a dumb smile cross his face for a moment.
“I’d start asking questions about you, try and flirt a little… It’s dumb, I know…” Once more she sounds defeated to Kane’s ears, which makes him frown internally.
“Be a little more confident in yourself, Minerva. Ask away.” Kane rests his chin on his palm and hunches over to look at the girl as she thinks.
‘Think’ is the wrong word, ‘examine’ might be better. ‘Check out’ is probably the best phrase for it, though. Now seated across from each other, he has time to make more concrete judgements on her appearance.
He finds her quite charming, but couldn’t place his finger on why until he finally matched her emerald-green earrings with her green colored contacts. Her makeup around her eyes is also green, so his current theory is that her look is very put together, with the green accents, pale skin, and black hair.
It’s a look he’d have liked on anyone, he convinces himself. Plus, she has a similar bust size, at least as far as he can guess, to Lucy, which probably helps that part of his mind. Put another way, Kane is wondering if she’d look good in a sports bra. It’s just as his eyes and mind begin to wander to such aspects of the girl’s appearance that she speaks.
“Ok. I think I’m mostly used to it by now, but you said even this is the suppressed state of your aura?” Kane refocuses on her before responding.
“Yeah. It was designed to have two modes. A low-output high efficiency mode that only absorbs the bare minimum to self-perpetuate, and a high-output mode to absorb as much as possible, efficiency be damned. ‘Suppressing’ it just means I’m forcing it into its low output mode.” Kane holds up his hand and spreads his fingers. “Press your hand against mine, but pull away quickly.”
“Eh? Uhm… ok…” Minerva does as told, though the confusion in her voice transitions into her hesitancy to actually do so. The moment her fingertips touch Kane’s he watches her shiver and pull away with great haste.
“How much of your psychic energy did it take?”
“Uh… about 4%...” Minerva shivers again and shifts in her seat to be further away from him. Kane makes a gesture of apology with his body before sighing and responding.
“What tier are you?”
“I’m a Delta… It really eats that much in just half a second? Even in its suppressed state?”
“Ah. No, when you’re touching me, you’re the easiest available source of psychic energy, so it switched from absorbing from the air around me to absorbing from just you until you pulled away. If it was unsuppressed, everything in what you call me aura would have that level of absorption applied to it.” Kane shifts in his seat and thinks to himself for a moment on how much is ok to reveal. Before he can continue, a confused and frightened looking Minerva speaks.
“So… What would happen if it absorbed all of mine?”
“Ah, it can’t. It absorbs based on the ‘current’ amount in the environment. It took 4% of yours in half a second… Meaning it wants 8% of your ‘current’ energy per second, hypothetically. Eventually, that amount becomes lower than your passive energy regeneration, and you become safe. Drained, but safe.” Kane drums gently on the table with his left hand, trying to think of a better way to word the ending of that statement.
“And if I was a blank?” Minerva’s voice is somewhat grim, and Kane does his best to match her expression.
“Same thing as when a psychic uses more energy than they have, it’ll eat your body in substitution.”
“That’s…”
“Incredibly deadly, yeah.” Kane sits back in his chair and looks up at the ceiling.
“No, I mean… Outside of combat usages… You can’t turn it off… doesn’t that mean you can’t like… hug or fistbump people?” The mention of hugging and fistbumping when talking about his condition is enough of a surprise to catch him off guard, and he barely manages to stop himself from slipping out of his chair while responding.
“No… Hmm… Kind of. You said you’re a delta, and you felt what, extreme discomfort? And you lost 4% of your energy at the time. You were touching me for half a second. If you want, try enduring that discomfort and energy drain for a bit, I won’t stop you. I’d like to take that nap, though.” Kane tries to wink and change topic, and Minerva just nods at him with a bit of red on her face. He doesn’t know if he has a similar look, but he puts his head down on the table. Slowly, he closes his eyes and tries to shuffle off to sleep, until he feels Minerva’s hand grabbing his own.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
“Eh… I want to ask one more question, Kane…” Even though she’s visibly fighting through being drained by his absorption, she isn’t letting go, but rather, she squeezes tighter for a moment before continuing. “People saw you talking to and sparring with No.5 Lucy the other day, how do you know her? Are you dating?”
“Ha… She’s a childhood friend, I guess. Though not really, we met when we were 7 or 8ish, and we trained in hand-to-hand combat together. She’s just the only person here I know. Also, you’re the second person today to think we’d be a couple.” Something about the way he worded his response causes the girl to blush and let go of his hand, so he assumes that wasn’t the correct way to make the girl feel more confident in her romantic endeavor. He’s proven wrong, though, when she in fact just lays her own head down on the table next to his.
“I see… Well… I set a timer for an hour, let's take that nap then… Here…” Minerva puts a phone on the table in between the two of them, and looks him in the eyes for a moment. Kane also takes the time to examine her face from this close. She still looks embarrassed, but between one of her cheeks being pressed against her hand and the other covered by her hair, Kane can’t tell if she’s still blushing, which he takes as a good sign.
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“Hey, timer’s off. Time to wake up…” Kane stirs to those words and the feeling of someone carefully poking his hand. Suddenly remembering the situation, he turns his head and sits up without opening his eyes.
“Ah… That was nice while it lasted… Thanks for showing me the spot.” Kane finally opens his eyes at the feeling of something paper-like being placed in his hand. He doesn’t feel like he needs to check, but a phone number is indeed written there, as well as an apartment number and a name. “Um… I don’t have a phone. I guess this is another reason to get one…”
“What… I thought I’d give that to you to make rejecting me easier, but that…” Minerva trails off as she stops in the middle of looking at her phone.
“Didn’t sound like one, because it wasn’t. Well, I just got here, and I just met you, but if I see you at this table, or you see me at it, feel free to say hi or sit down. I’ll text you if I get the chance.” Kane smiles as non-comitally as he can, before mouthing her phone number and putting the paper in his pocket. “See you around, Minerva.”
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Kane flinches as he sees a pair of women waiting for him at the entrance to the gym. They aren’t within his aura, but they will be in a moment. It doesn’t matter, that half-sadistic smile, the lightning between fingers… Lucy isn’t happy, and he doesn’t need to be a genius to figure it out.
“Four hours. Four hours I don’t see you, and you manage to become the talk of the student page in two different ways.” Lucy holds out her smartphone in his general direction, and Kane intentionally slows his walking pace down and turns his head away.
“Ah, hi again, Kane.” Amy’s notably softer voice gets him to look back and sigh.
“So, what am I ‘the talk of the student page’ for?” As he asks, he narrows his eyes to try and read off of Lucy’s phone, but she pulls it away as she speaks.
“Let’s see, falling asleep in Steiner’s class while using a strange technique, strike one. I’ll forgive that. But the second thing, ‘New student Kane Baelirus asleep with an upperclasswoman in the library.’ speaks for itself, doesn’t it?” Lucy’s face twists up even more, and Kane has to take a step back as she moves closer.
“That’s not necessarily meant in the way I think you’re taking it. I was just taking a nap. She said she had a good spot for that, and she did.”
“Who was it?” Amy asks while putting herself between Lucy and Kane. “The upperclasswoman, I mean.”
“Ah. Minerva Faust, she was pretty cute. I got her number.” Kane puts on a dumb face with a smile, and Lucy deflates a little.
“I haven’t heard of her, what’s her rank?” Lucy looks him in the eyes, then sighs. “Right, you didn’t ask. And you can’t ask now, because you have her number but don’t have a phone. Idiot.”
“Ah, I’ll look into her, Lu. Good for you, Kane, managing to seduce people on your second day~” Amy’s tone, and the way she pushes her arms together, the sheer bad acting of it makes him break face and laugh, which earns him a flick to the forehead from Lucy.
“Right. Now, I’ve got the rest of the day free, Amy too. Want to go shopping.” Lucy looks at his feet, then back up to his eyes. Kane spots Amy looking curiously at Lucy before the latter continues. “Right, you have no-”
“Actually, I came into some. It should be fine. Not much, but, enough.”
“That isn’t absolutely dubious or anything, sure.” Amy’s astute observation earns her a wink from Lucy, and a concerned glance from Kane.
“Lucy… what have you been telling her about me?”
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“... And that’s about all she’s told me.” Amy’s wrap-up of her Kane-knowledge leaves him a little bewildered. In the time it took them to walk from the campus to the subway, then the ride to the commercial district, Amy had recited just about every single story of importance from the time Kane and Lucy had met. Except for three notable absences, Amy might know more about him than anyone other than Lucy herself. Including Kane.
“That’s…” Kane finally allows his voice to check back into reality, only to find he doesn’t know how to respond. Of course, when he sees the smug grin on Lucy’s face, he finds the perfect counter. “Hey, Lucy, why didn’t you tell her about that April Fools day muh mmhmm-”
“No, absolutely not,” Lucy cuts him off while clamping her hand over his mouth. Once sure that he won’t continue, she pulls away and continues. “That is for much later in time. Got it?”
“Ah… yes.” Kane notes the obvious decrease in Lucy’s energy after that, and uses it to judge just how much she values that particular secret. Amy, for her part, looks at the two of them while lightly laughing to herself.
“See, I told you I’d be the third wheel here.”
Such banter continues until a lull in the conversation brings forth a more productive topic. It comes as Kane spots a sign for directions to the park he’d found himself at last night, and he decides to broach a certain subject to Lucy and Amy.
“Hey, what's the SPD? I met a few guys who claimed to work for it last night, so what’s up with them?” Lucy stops walking, and Amy and Kane both turn around to look at her.
“Did you talk to them? Tell them anything? Did you-”
“No, they introduced themselves and I kept walking, why?” Kane opts to cut off her questioning with a lie in order to calm her down, which succeeds, if momentarily.
“You misheard, it isn’t S P D, it’s Espid, and they’re a political group here. They want to go back to the days of psychics being a private thing.” Lucy starts walking again, taking her place between Kane and Amy. “They’re more like a radical group of ex-cons, though. They want Sanctuary to bias more towards psychics, and for psychics to no longer need to be on public record.”
“That’s… aggressively simplistic.” Kane’s honest thoughts on the matter
“And from what I’ve heard, they’re aggressively recruiting psychics off the streets. Sometimes by force.” Amy’s add-on wasn’t what Kane expected, but it tracks with what he experienced.
“As she said, you didn’t promise them anything or give them any time, right?” Lucy’s naked concern in her voice makes him consider telling the truth for a moment, but he keeps up the lie that seems to make her worry less.
“I didn’t talk to them, like I said. They introduced themselves and I kept walking. I don’t think they knew who I was, they just saw my aura.” Kane waves off Lucy’s attempt to respond. “Anyone who tried to kidnap would die, either to me, you, or my family once they found out. It’s ok. Let’s just have fun today, sorry for bringing it up.”