Closed RP: Paintballs and Duct Tape FTW

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

Susan had been reading.

It was usually a bad thing, when Susan devoted enough time and energy to research--it very rarely ended well. On the Discworld it had been easy enough to tell a good idea from a bad one (not that knowing something was in fact a bad idea had stopped her), but at Hogwarts the line was rather blurred. There were all manner of fascinating things to play with here, and sometimes they were things best kept away from someone like Susan.

In this case, she’d discovered paintball guns. She had learned from her target practice with Stephen that she should not be given a real gun…well, ever, but paintball guns were far less lethal. She had an idea that, were paintballs to be replaced with some sort of pudding-coated ammunition, they could serve well against evil clowns, particularly in the hands of those such as herself, as they would be much less of a danger to innocent bystanders.

Shaun had written to his girlfriend, who had sent out a pair of the paintball guns they’d had in the garden shed (formerly occupied by Shaun’s zombie flatmate). Shaun, well aware that he was likely going to wind up with an earful of paint, had agreed to go with Susan and be a moving target.

The initial idea had been that they shoot at the provided targets, but that didn’t last long. Susan, frustrated to hell with Shaun’s well-meaning critique, turned on him and wound up shooting him right in the forehead.

“Ow!” Shaun staggered, pressing a hand to his yellow-splashed forehead, staring at her with a surprise that was almost comical. “What’d you go and do that for?” He could already feel a lump forming, a truly spectacular goose-egg. He very nearly tripped over his own feet, and Susan, appalled, nearly dropped her gun.

“I didn’t mean to hit you in the forehead,” she said, hoping she’d not concussed him or anything. “Good gods, I haven’t cracked your skull or anything, have I?” Susan stepped forward, chagrined, but before she could even try to make him let her have a look she staggered herself, pain stabbing through her ribs.

She pressed a hand to her side, and when she brought it up she saw it was sticky and bright blue, as was her shirt. Shaun snickered.

“Payback’s a bitch, isn’t it?” he said, hopping backward as she leveled both a glare and her gun at him. “Come on, it was only fa--”

The sentence was cut off quite effectively by another paintball, which managed--purely by chance--to thwack him square in the chest, exploding purple all over his ancient T-shirt. “It was an accident,” said Susan, with a small and rather vicious smile. “Now it’s war.”

She shot at him again, but missed, and took off over the uneven ground, headed for the cover of the hay-bale targets. She took a paintball in the back for that, before she could dart behind shelter, and there came a furious scrabbling as she climbed up onto one of the bales, taking sight through the scope (yes, Shaun’s paintball guns had scopes. He was a dork).

Shaun himself scrambled down behind a grassy hummock, turning it into an impromptu foxhole. “Oh, you feel lucky, punk?” He was a much better shot than Susan, and after a few rounds managed to hit her in the side of the head, knocking her off the hay bale.

She fired as she went down, and then held up a paint-covered hand. “Wait, wait, time out,” she gasped, laughing and wincing all at once. “I don’t know how to reload.”

“Oh, come on, I showed you,” Shaun grumbled, holding out a hand for her gun. “Look, see, you just pop the old shell-case out, right there, and jam the new one in.” He fumbled the first few tries, and shot Susan a glare that dared her to comment. She didn’t, but she did snicker.

“If you say so. All right, five minute break, then Round Two?” She gave him a paint-splattered smirk.

“Sit-down sounds like a great idea,” Shaun said, flopping onto the grass. “I’m too old for this.”

Susan quirked an eyebrow at him, pulling two bottles of water from the bag she’d dragged down and handing him one. “You’re what, thirty? You’re much too young to be too old.”

“Oh, shut up.” Shaun took the water, wishing vaguely it was beer and wondering if the hospital wing staff would laugh at him if he were to go in for bruise-balm like this. They probably would.

Comments

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

Professors be damned.

He'd played this game before. He'd had Susan right in the palm of his hand, pinned to the wall, telekinetically cutting into her head. God, he'd been so close. So close he could nearly smell it. Not anything weird. It wasn't like he actually ate his victim's brains. It was the running theory, and, really, vaguely flattering, with the Hannibal-esque themes to it. At least it would have been if he killed just for the sake of killing. But he didn't. He had a method to his madness. A purpose.

But Susan Sto Helit had powers far too tempting to pass up. Between what he'd seen so far - the phasing through objects, the power of persuasion - there was enough reason for him to remain interested in the woman. Not to mention what she'd brought up on the Secrets Board (http://community.livejournal.com/hogwarts_hocus/1384789.html?thread=70403669#t70403669). Powers up her sleeve that he didn't want to know? Oh, he was really fairly sure he did, and that little instance had just insured the obsession.

It wasn't hard to pick out Susan's voice from the rest of the school. Hundreds of faces linked to hundreds of voices and he could pick hers out with ease.

Paintball? He'd read about paintball. He'd never been much of a sports person to begin with. The appeal to the activity was entirely not apparent to him, but whatever she wanted to occupy herself with. It brought her out into the middle of nowhere. Inconspicuous. Away from Lily Evans and her bothersome body-binding hexes. And he was definitely going to succeed this time.

Sneaking through the woods became so much easier when one could create the illusion of no footsteps.

"Susan," he called out from the edge of the woods, taking a step into the clearing, about ten yards or so away from the pair. Black slacks, a long pea coat to match donned over the t-shirt. Sylar? Creepy? Never. "Long time no see." His eyes sidled to the man, with a narrowed look to his gaze. Who. Was that. He let his line of sight trail back over to the more appealing of the two, hint of a smile quirking up the corner of his mouth as he started in on the two. "I've been missing you. We should really have another chat, you know, since last time ended so abruptly.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

If Sylar recognized Susan's voice, she certainly recognized his easily enough as well. He didn't waste any time, did he? Bugger.

"Damn it all, Sylar, you need a hobby," she grumbled, glaring at him. She hadn't told Shaun about Sylar--the whole mess wasn't his business, after all--but she shot him a warning look now, a look that, knowing Shaun, would be utterly lost on him. "I don't know, I think I said pretty much everything I needed to say." She wondered if he tried to be that creeptastic on purpose. He probably did.

Shaun looked from one to the other. He'd never heard of this Sylar before, but that didn't mean a whole lot--he really didn't get out much. Shaun might not be the most perceptive guy on earth, but a blind idiot would have been able to tell Susan and this dude weren't on good terms. At all. "Aren't you broiling in all that?" he asked, chugging water. As he'd been running around like a fiend, he himself was roasting.

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

Oh, look. She was so happy to see him.

"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.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

((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."

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

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."

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

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.

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

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."

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

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.

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

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."

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

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."

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

They weren't seriously...

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.

[usethepoker.livejournal.com]

"...!"

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.

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

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?"

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

The whole 'sleep' command thing, of course, unfortunately, lasted for just as long as last time. And a few hours in the lake wouldn't have sat well with anybody, never mind a certain psychopath who'd just been pushed to the edge by someone he should have taken down days ago. Add to the situation some duct tape and... well. There was a very unhappy man clambering out of the lake right now.

It was lucky this was at Hogwarts... that there was The Rule. Because otherwise, he'd have died about nine times over.

At least getting out of the duct tape had been damned easy enough. to get out of. Kind of so much as a flick of the finger with that, really. And then it was climbing out of the lake, soaking from head to toe, hair dripping from its regular spikes into his eyes... His fingers clawed into the mud as he dragged himself up, and there was at least one thing that he was absolutely certain of: Susan Sto-Helit? Was definitely going to die.

[endless-del.livejournal.com]

Delirium couldn’t have said what she was doing out by the lake. She was only aware in passing that she was near the lake. All she knew was that Sad Guy had just clambered out of the water, and he looked even less happy than usual.

" ," she said, her habitual butterflies shifting to fish in sympathy.

Gravity was being treated as optional today, and as she made her way over to him her feet hit the ground only by accident. " " She poked him gently in the forehead, and though it did nothing to get rid of the fact that he was cold and wet and muddy, it would at least make him think he wasn't.

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

Drowning wasn't fun for anybody. That's right, kids, not even for serial killers. And even with all of his powers... none of them were going to relieve the effects of that, no matter how hard he tried. He was hacking up water just like anybody would be doing with their lungs filled with water. Nearly puking up lake remnants, just like any other Average Joe. ...Pitiful.

Mud-stained fist pressed to his mouth and his shoulders shaking with the effort to get up all that water, Sylar's eyes flickered up to the person towering over him through a blurry haze of drops. Just what he needed. Somebody to watch and point and... Wait.

That was the woman from his sorting. Delirium. ...The one who'd given him the bee, and told him not to be sad. ...He liked her.

He coughed again, sitting up a little on his haunches and eying the finger starting in for his forehead and... poking him? He blinked once, furrowing his eyebrows and... he wasn't all wet and soggy anymore! Except, well, he was, but as long as he didn't think about it, that was all that mattered.

Of course, all that left was the random, blind fury to have to slice Susan into as many little pieces as he could manage.

Sylar's eyebrows slanted downwards, and he automatically glided to his feet, so seamlessly that you would assume he wasn't even on the ground to begin with. "Susan," he mumbled under his breath, his voice gravelly and dark in wake of the situation. "I have to... destroy her."

[endless-del.livejournal.com]

((Third time's the charm, I hope))

That coughing couldn’t be a good sign, but Delirium wasn’t exactly up ons the needs of the average human body--the whole concept of oxygen eluded her at times. The force of his sudden fury hit her like a slap as he stood, and she stepped backward, the fish darting back into her hair.

" ” she said, reproachful. “ ”


She looked up at him, her mismatched eyes scrutinizing his face. “ ” Thoughgtfully she bit her lip, and her hair shifted colors like a psychadelic sea anemone. " ," she said decisively.

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

Oxygen? Who needed that? ..Oh, wait, Sylar did.

Not that even breathing was his top priority right now. Sylar wasn't one for full-out revenge, not without good prompt, and, dear God, had Susan given him worthy prompt. He was going to kill her. Maim her. Slaughter her. And he could do it in a myriad of different ways. Give her a pick as to which way he tore her limb from limb. She'd made him sleep. She'd shot him with a paintball gun. She'd duct taped him and thrown him in the lake. And now one of the few people at this school who might have given half a shit about him was here to witness the aftermath.

Kill her. Murder.

He could justify the means to her end. She had everything he wanted in one, neat little package.

Besides, he was angry. "I need to get to her. You can't fix it right now," he started to argue in turn, but his own words were echoing in his head and making him wince. He was broken. She was trying to fix it. It wasn't exactly something he couldn't sympathize with. "Ice cream," he repeated hollowly.

[endless-del.livejournal.com]

Delirium looked at him, her gaze flickering briefly to sadness. " , she said, "

She brightened again. " " The butterflies swooped out of her hair when she smiled, and the hair itself shifted into dozens of different shades of red and yellow and orange.

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

Could make it less... what? She just let the sentence dangle, and Sylar fixed her with a long stare, not really allowing himself to speak while she was trying to get her ideas across. She just left that flat, without explanation, yes, but... he was letting her.

He hadn't forgotten Susan. Like hell he was ever going to forget what she did unless he was brainwashed. But Delirium was proposing an idea that... huh. Ice cream. "I've never heard of ice cream with cheese," he commented in a flat sort of voice, letting his eyes wander to the butterflies that were flickering upward from her hair. His heart rate was slowing from its furious pound in his chest, and he paused for a few long seconds more. "It does help," he finally decided on, in a more quiet sort of voice.

[endless-del.livejournal.com]

Delirium was good at leaving things without an explanation, often because there really was no coherent explanation for what she said. " " she said, nodding. " "

She grinned at him suddenly, her mismatched eyes thoughtful. Idly and somewhat dreamily she drifted higher off the ground, until she was at Sylar's eye-level. " " Delirium could be somewhat motherly, in her own schizoid way, and Sylar, she had decided, needed a mommy. Or a Barnabas, but even she didn't have a Barnabas, so clearly he wasn't going to get one yet.

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

It was so crazy, though, that it made sense, in some odd sort of way. He wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad thing, really, at this juncture - the woman was talking about cake being a thing of evil and how great ice cream was - but he'd just ride this out for now... follow her and listen to what she had to say.

Susan was lucky. It wasn't often Sylar let himself get distracted.

Her floating up to his level was sort of... sweet? Any other person, it would have irritated him. Some kind of mental metaphor that he would have conjured about the person thinking they were just as good as him, to be able to rise to the same height. And with Delirium, it wasn't? Why was he so different around her? "What's Caketown?" he asked with furrowed eyebrows.

[endless-del.livejournal.com]

" " she said, drifting serenely in a seemingly random direction. " "

She reached out and poked his forehead, and the grounds of Hogwarts melted into tendrils of multicolored fog. There was the impression of being squashed flat, folded out, turned into a sock, and run through a tumble-dryer, all in the space of about three seconds, and when the fog cleared the grass had turned into a kind of melty rainbow, and the landscape into something normally only found in the weirder class of LSD hallucination.

[mmm-brainz.livejournal.com]

'Ice cream doesn't grow,' he wanted to correct her. So very badly. 'It's made, from dairy products, combined with sugar and sweeteners, then frozen.' It was on the tip of his tongue, even, right there to flatten her words and take her down a few notches, just to below him. That brief moment of being better than somebody was more than enough to please him, on a given occasion.

He could have corrected her. But he didn't.

Instead, he just watched her, that weird sort of look still flickering in his eyes as they fixated onto her own. Those multicolored shades that kept dipping into ever tone of the rainbow. A few seconds' pause, and he finally answered, with one, single, confident word.

"Okay."

It was then, of course, that she pressed her finger directly into the center of his forehead, and, God, he'd never felt anything remotely close to this before, what? It made him almost feel sick to his stomach, and incredibly pleased again when his feet touched back onto ground. ...At least until he opened his eyes. And... they were definitely not in Kansas anymore. "Where...?" Confusion. This was Sylar. Always on top of a situation. Always the first to know just what was going on. "Where are we?"

[endless-del.livejournal.com]

Delirium smiled, a happy, vague sort of smile. " ," she said. " ."

Still drifting about a foot above the ground, she led him along the psychedlic grass. A clump of vivid purple flowers shifted quite suddenly into a flock of iridescent birds, soaring up into the sky. The sky here was black, with no moon nor sun nor stars; most of the light came from the trees, their twisting, multicolored branches glowing with bright phosphorus. When they crested a hill she pointed to a particularly tall tree, its boughs blooming with--sure enough--ice cream. "," she said, " "