Obviously a spy wouldn't want to share why they were spying, but Sylar had simply been curious. Like a cat, he seemed to have a growing enjoyment of poking around into the various things he observed at night, but his level of caution was a bit more powerful. In this case, he wasn't going to pry, even if it was such an oddity. "Fair enough." Was his response to her wanting to keep her spying a secret. He crept forward a bit, circling around Kaitlyn's spot somewhat like a lion observing prey. "My name is Sylar. I'm the Predator of Manhattan, as the humans like to say." Sylar had come to like the titles the regular humans gave him, it felt like an accomplishment to be a monster fearful enough to have rumors.

He crawled up onto the edge of the building, perching like a grotesque looking down over the city. "I figured normal people, well normal looking people didn't need to do stuff like this. Shouldn't you just be studying for school or something?" Sylar was a bit bothered to see a child doing abnormal things, but he wasn't able to control others. He simply thought children should be children, urged on by the lack of his own parent's proper attention. Maybe she was spying for the Sanctuary, he'd been told it had some criminal elements to it. Maybe that was how you paid for your stay, by doing dirty work when asked for it. Sylar was a criminal himself though, so he couldn't really judge, or cared too.

Though Sylar wasn't always looking directly at Kaitlyn, his attention was always on her, making sure to know any movements she made. His hearing was a powerful ability, he could hear foot steps, movement of clothing, breathing, even her heartbeat at this range. Perhaps living in the underground was helping to shape his evolution, he didn't know. He wondered what power the girl had that made her so comfortable by herself, especially when a creature basically designed to prey upon humans like himself was right next to her.

“I’m Kaitlyn.” She felt lame, only being able to say that much to the guy who introduced himself as ‘the Predator of Manhattan.’ The only things the humans experienced from her mutation, they blamed on random terrorists, and it wasn’t common enough that they could give her a nickname. It probably would have been very bad if the humans had a nickname for her, but at least she would be able to introduce herself in a way that sounded cool.

Sylar had definitely earned that title, though. She could tell just by looking at him. The way he walked – or, rather, stalked – around Kaitlyn was unnerving. So was the way he perched on that little wall; he looked like he was ready to pounce on something.

“It’s still summer,” Kaitlyn explained. “School doesn’t start for a month. And uh…”

A faint knocking came from Kaitlyn’s headphones. A door opened. Several male voices shouted boisterous greetings to each other in rapid Spanish.

“…Crap.”

The Spanish dialogue continued, just as rapid, too fast for unlearned ears to catch anything substantial.

Kaitlyn sighed. Why did she think that the higher-ups of a primarily Hispanic street gang would speak English in their private lives? “I literally hate everything right now.”

Kaitlyn, a simple enough name. Sylar wondered whether mutants preferred their given names, or names given to them because of their powers. He was coming to appreciate the later. His eyes focused on the building across the street, unable to really make anything out aside from it being a large structure, and some faint bits of heat from various windows. His senses were strong, but his lack of eyesight meant that at a distance, he couldn't really discern anything from inanimate shapes and structures.

Ah, it was still warm. Sylar wasn't so good with knowing the season's till the weather changed. Summer and spring were quite similar for him depending on the weather. Winter was the easiest to recognize. Her voice cut off though, apparently distracted by her earpiece. Whoever she was spying on, something had just happened to garner attention.

Sylar listened in as well, but he couldn't make any sense of the sounds. It was some kind of gibberish, maybe a foreign language? Either way, he couldn't make out anything from the muffled noise except that activity had picked up. Kaitlyn seemed stressed by whatever she was hearing. Sylar didn't turn to look at her, but spoke loud enough to be heard by her. "Not what you were expecting?" He wasn't mocking her, but instead just calmly responding based on what he himself could hear.

Kaitlyn set her earpiece down. “Yeah. Pretty much.” She sighed again. All this trouble to find out about their soccer night, then figure out where the apartment was, then figure out how to listen in on them, just so it could go to waste because they spoke the wrong language.

…But it was still recording, wasn’t it? So she could get it translated. It would make everything a lot more complicated: she would have to make sure she trusted the translator, or at least made sure they never told anyone about Kaitlyn’s connection to the recording. And she would have to figure out a way to get it translated in the first place; she didn’t know anyone who spoke Spanish.

She could figure that out later. First, she needed to stay and get everything recorded. The redhead cheered up a little bit. “Actually it’s no big deal.” Setting her laptop aside, she sat on the wall next to Sylar and took another sip of soda. Even if Sylar was a total stranger who Kaitlyn had no reason to trust, it was nice to have company. Plus, he was a mutant, so he couldn’t be that bad.

As Kaitlyn removed her earpiece, the sounds became easier to pick apart, revealing that the language the people were speaking was probably Spanish, or something like it. Sylar didn't speak any foreign languages, so he simply chose to ignore the sounds. Though he spent alot of time studying and reading, Sylar had never delved into trying to learn another language. Braille was enough for him. The girl began to approach him, and Sylar tensed up, his body language immediately signalling he was nervous.

It wasn't so much fear of Kaitlyn, but just him being nervous when people came into his personal space. He inched away from her a bit, but remained on the wall. She had apparently figured out something that made the foreign language understandable, or figured out what she wanted to do with it, her mood improving quickly. His tail stayed a bit tense, but began to swish back and forth like a cat's. Sylar was nervous around other mutants, but did in fact enjoy the company and the attention he'd been getting recently.

"That was fast." He said in response to her mood swing. "Figure something out from the gibberish?" The situation had grown a bit stranger still, a little girl spying on foreigners had to be something rather complex. She was from Sanctuary though, so criminal activities were probably a normal thing for most people there, or at least Sylar was starting to think that place had more to it than being a simple home for mutants.

Much to Kaitlyn’s amusement, Sylar seemed nervous around her. She hadn’t even given him a good reason to be afraid of her yet, and he was some kind of terrifying super-predator. Smirk.

“You could hear them talking, too?” Well, he did mention superhuman senses earlier. Of course he could hear the sounds coming out of her earbuds. She nodded to herself. “Sylar, your mutation is awesome.”

Kaitlyn then spent a moment considering how much she would be willing to reveal about what she was doing. Was it even okay to mention that her laptop was recording all of it? “I guess I noticed that they call soccer ‘football.’ Or,” she tried to imitate the Spanish pronunciation, “Futbol.” Unless they were actually going to watch a football game and Kaitlyn’s intel was bad. Not that she cared what sport they were watching, so long as they did it in that room.

Sylar's anxiety was a remnant of his days as a normal boy, laden with social problems and a lack of friendship, now coupled with his instinctive caution creating a creature that had issues breaking the ice so to speak. However, Kaitlyn was possibly the least intimidating person he'd met after Serena, so he quickly calmed down, simply focusing his sense's on her to settle his urges. His tail flicked back and forth, the bladed tip glinting with each flip.

"It's difficult when the bud is in your ear, but yeah. I can hear everything, your movements, your breathing, even your heartbeat when we're this close." Sylar said these things as if they were entirely reasonable and normal, when in fact such acute hearing was a product of his super predatory mutation. "I change more each year, growing more and more into a monster, a hunter with an urge to feed." He didn't explain that his primary urge was slowly developing into a hunger for his fellow human beings, but the sentence would be enough to get across his inner desire. "Dangerous is more how I see it." He said in response to her fascination.

Seemed like one of the most boring things to hear if you were playing a spy game. "That's not the most interesting thing to find out. I'd expecting spying to be more exciting, like a mystery novel." Sylar did some spying himself, often observing and listening in on people as he crept about at night. His ability to observe while remaining so unnoticed did make people watching much more interesting than it might be for a normal person. He'd even learned to pick up on certain things just through body language and the pace of a person's pulse.

Kaitlyn smirked. “It’s not like I can actually tell you the interesting stuff.” Not that she had actually learned anything interesting yet. “But, yeah, spying can get pretty boring. You have to wait a long time sometimes before someone starts saying stuff you want to hear.” She remembered all those recordings of Sebastian and Ghost moaning about their adopted son Jude being lost and how upsetting that was for them. Those conversations got really boring after hearing them talk about it that often. She almost wanted to burst into their apartment and tell them to shut up about that stupid Jude kid already.

Another long sip of soda. “I kinda think my mutation is the dangerous one, though. I used to just blow stuff up on accident every week or so.” Sip. “And you said yours makes you need to feed? So you just need to eat a lot more? Or...?”

Sylar kept his gaze off the girl for the moment, his other senses more than enough to monitor her actions as they killed the time by conversing. Sylar spied on normal people mostly out of curiosity, but this was definitely spying for a different more serious reason, considering the equipment she'd brought for it. "I tend to observe normal people as I move around at night. Though I always thought of it more like people watching than spying. But you learn some interesting things when you can listen in and observe people from the shadows." For Sylar, most of these interesting things were gossip, sometimes about himself, or the way people acted in certain situations but were different in others. Though he was blind, his vision could pick up on certain types of body language, especially when peoples blood began to rush, or when they were stressed.

So her mutation involved some type of explosion power? Some kind of mental thing, like Serena had he guessed. Maybe the normal looking mutants all had mental powers, and only the physical ones like Sylar turned out grotesque looking. However when she asked about his comment about feeding, his head finally turned to look at her, his features half masked by the darkness of his hood, his eyes looking dead with their mutated appearance. "I don't really want to talk about it....but lets just say I shouldn't go hungry." Sylar turned back after his stern warning, his gaze falling back on the world before, the buildings and street beneath them.

Sylar had never consumed anything taboo...so far, he still didn't like to admit that his urges were sometimes on par with movie monsters and psychos.

Kaitlyn looked confused for a few moments. Then, she realized what Sylar probably meant by “feeding,” and breathed in sharply.

“Oh.”

Thus began an awkward silence. The redhead alternately sipped at her soda and glanced at her little surveillance setup, verifying that everything was still in place.

For a moment, she wasn’t thinking clearly. All she wanted to do was make Sylar feel less uncomfortable, and maybe even give him a little hope. “I… think my girlfriend used to deal with something like that. The feeding thing. In fact, the first time I met her -” Then, Kaitlyn realized that she shouldn’t be blurting Victoria’s secret out in front of strangers, even if they never went near the Mansion. She needed to be very vague. “Um… well, I found out about it,” so far, so good, “and later I ended up getting some blood packs for her, so we could keep her hunger in control.“

Crap. She might as well have just said ‘my girlfriend kills people and drinks blood please tell everyone and ruin her life okay thanks.’

“I guess I’m saying that people could help you. If you want. It’s cool if you don’t wanna talk about it though, but I won’t judge you or anything.”

Sylar's senses easily picked up on Kaitlyn's response to his words. Perhaps his usually threats and displays may have had no effect, but mention you might possibly feed on other people, and humans get very bothered. He didn't respond though, instead remaining silent as Kaitlyn collected her thoughts. The last thing Sylar desired was the pity of a little girl, he wasn't quite that low yet. However, the number of people who knew about his secret urge was growing a little too high for him. He was getting too comfortable around other mutants, or women? He wasn't sure, but either way he'd need to stop socializing so much.

His tail flicked in the wind, making a soft swishing noise as the blade cut the air as it moved. Kaitlyn began telling her own story, about a friend who had a bad habit. A mutant that consumed blood? Serena had a thing with blood, was Serena harboring a secret as well? Or was this a different person? "Blood packs? So you're friends with a vampire?" Sylar realized the term vampire was for a fictitious monster, but with mutants being a reality, maybe vampires, werewolves, and monsters weren't as mythical as children were lead to believe. Sylar himself was a whole new breed of nightmare, or at least he'd grow into one someday.

Kaitlyn mentioned controlling another mutants hunger, maybe a taboo hunger wasn't so out of the ordinary for physical mutants as he thought. "It's not so easy to control instinct. You should be careful around your friend." Sylar's words sounded harsher than he meant them to be, in the end he simply knew that one step too far into the hunger, and all the normal human emotions began to dull, to waver, and dark urges began to fill the mind. He'd nearly harmed a few women in the past few months, all because of his lack of ability to keep himself sated. If he spent more time focusing on food, and not on meeting other mutants, maybe he'd have never shown this side to anyone. He felt confused and a bit conflicted, just what did he want anymore.

"When you live alone for a few years, talking to others begins to seem like a crazy idea." He turned to let his gaze focus on the girl, the human face beneath his hood visible in the pale night light. Contaminated with mutation, but still clearly the face of a boy for now. "It's difficult to consider, but I am a bit happy to see that most mutants have a sense of compassion lost in the normal people." Sylar couldn't help but fear normal looking people, knowing they'd fear him. So maybe that's why he was developing a weakness for mutants and their urge to try and help their own kind. However, his gut continued to warn that trusting others would always be a dangerous gambit.

The word ‘Vampire’ made Kaitlyn shift uncomfortably. She felt like she had betrayed her. Even if nothing ever came of this, she felt like she had betrayed her.

And that thing about being careful around her… that didn’t really apply to Victoria, did it? That first night she helped Victoria feed, the vampire girl nearly died of hunger trying to tell Kaitlyn that she didn’t want to hurt her. Kaitlyn had to convince her. She had control, right?

…Unless that was all an act or something.

The redhead seemed distant for a moment, trying to get that particular thought out of her head. When she looked back at Sylar, she could see his face. He had a significantly more attractive face than she would expect from the typical sewer monster.

“Yeah,” Kaitlyn said, “The normals are a bunch of jerks. Kinda makes me feel bad about looking like one.”

At least Victoria had the fangs and the glowy red eyes. Kaitlyn had nothing to make her look inhuman. Once again, she thought about doing something to change that, like getting special contact lenses that would make her eyes look all black or something. Looking like a human kinda alienated her from some of the people in the mutant community.

Sylar didn't pry or press for more info as the girl withdrew for a moment. Sylar wasn't the type of person who noticed things like this, or had a way with social nuances to interact with others. A timid boy with a dark side, a complex creature, and yet a little slow when it came to socializing. She turned and observed his face for a moment, Sylar revealing his face for but a moment before turning away from her again, slightly uncomfortable. He imagined himself as quite inhuman looking, and that thought alone was enough to cause him to hide his slightly mutated visage.

Sylar had a moment of confusion over her statement. Looking like a mutant might help you better fit in with the mutant community, especially the ones like Sylar. But the world was still run by normal people, wouldn't looking like them be better? "Your appearance is better than mine, you can walk with them and not get caught." He said, not trying to question her thought, but merely stating how he perceived it. "Better to fit in than stick out." A lesson Sylar learned both as a mutant, and as a human. Being an outcast was never enjoyable, though the mutant community at least offered a place for freaks to fit in. At some point, he'd have to join them.

His tail curled behind him, it's blade pointing downward as Sylar let his mind wander a bit. Wondering what it would be like to live with other mutants, to interact with them like it was totally normal. A scary endeavor, at least for him.

“’Better’ is relative,” she said, proud of how smart she sounded by using the word ‘relative’ in a sentence like that, even if she wasn’t completely sure that she was using it properly. “I fit in with the people I don’t like, and stick out with the ones I do. Like, saying you like a human is kinda insulting, where I’m from.” Really, any kind of comparison to humans would be an insult in the Sanctuary.

“I kinda thought you would like not fitting in, though. ‘Cause of all that… scaring people at night and stealing food and stuff.” Since an option like the Sanctuary existed, Sylar's lifestyle choices would have to be on purpose.

Kaitlyn's words were almost funny to Sylar. He despised the way he looked, or at least imagined he looked. His curse to grow into what was basically the Boogeyman of children's nightmares, while she looked perfectly normal and could do anything she wanted. Sylar held no compassion for regular people with how they treated him, but he assumed the normal mutants liked looking normal. She pointed out his lifestyle, which had developed not out of enjoyment, but necessity. "I didn't start stealing food because it's fun Kaitlyn, I just didn't want to starve." He pointed out.


Sylar had sort of developed an odd enjoyment from scaring people, the loneliness hurt, but the fear fed his inner animal, creating a rush that wasn't very normal. "You though, make for quite the little spy. You fit right in with the normals and can hide your differences." He wasn't sure what made the girl prefer the monstrous to the normal, maybe it was because she was a child. He wasn't aware of the true nature of the Sanctuary, though he was starting to have some guesses after his visit there. "I'm surprised you dislike them so, when you aren't like me. Heck, even my parent's didn't want me like this. Something bad happen to you?"

He was slightly curious, his own experiences shaped by his physical form, where as Kaitlyn didn't seem to possess any deformity of her body.