The Leech

You feel a constant numb, uncomfortable sensation in the pits of your belly. It is alleviated when you spend time with other living creatures, so long as you are able to touch them. Whilst most experience no effects from this, the weak, very young or very old can waste away with prolonged contact. Your body cries out for contact like a starved infant, and you also find yourself occasionally afraid of being left alone; solitary confinement would be a torture. If you make skin to skin contact with a vampire for at least five seconds, some of their innate power flows into you.

Long Description: People aren't safe around you. The most vulnerable are the sick and weak of the body, even those recently taken ill; people who are bright with the first, tender stages of their recovery will stutter backwards, they will wither and instead die. Your touch strips people of their own wellness. Any plants you keep by a bedside or in your general proximity for too long curl over and shrivel. Life fades and things dessicate.

As a child you had visions of the infinite, usually when running a fever. You could sense the boundaries between people, and between you and they, you could feel the precise distance that people occupy on the thread of life. There are boundaries made by your own skin and hair and blood but other people have their boundaries too. Some people’s boundaries bleed out into the web. Their outline is less distinct and contained. This happens most when someone’s really sick - it’s as if their energy, or their life, is seeping out into the neutral plane around them, into the pulse and beat of the earth beneath them, or into the air, to be reused. They’re fading. 

There is a central core of power - of light - that remains whole and untouched during this process, but everything else, all that extra trimming that might be their aura or an excess or their personality or - you don’t know - but it begins to weaken. It lose the tight clinging latch that it had thus far enjoyed to that thing glowing core of being.

The first time you took it - not the light, but the excess, the stuff - you hadn’t meant to, or even knew you could. One moment you were looking at your friend, or sibling, or parent, or lover, your hand on their bicep, the next: the boundary between you and they touched - almost wetly - they stuck. Like a dimpling of surface tension on a bubble.

The moment has a tight, detailed quality. Their face went through a short sequence of expressions - surprise, confusion, fear - all in a second, then their spine straightened in a jolt.

They pulled back with a gasp, very stiff and wide-eyed, leaving you cold and exposed.

You felt shame and fear, not knowing how you’d done it but knowing you’d done it all the same. You could see a perforation in their boundary, things trailing out of now like tiny floating diamonds into the air - wasted - but even as you watched, mouth open and jaw slack, clearing your throat and trying to come up with something to say, that hole in them was repairing over, and sealing, their entire aura’s worth of energy tightly packed and awake. Threatened.

Vampires are a different matter. Different territory entirely, unseen, untapped. Their boundaries are black and thick, like walls or armour. There's no life in them to wither and strip. Instead, you get something far richer, through the cracks.

If you make skin to skin contact with a vampire for at least five seconds, some of their innate power flows into you. It is an intensely pleasurable experience for both parties akin to the Kiss, leaving you feeling far more substantial and confident. You gain access to one of their disciplines at its first level only. Disciplines such as thaumaturgy or necromancy still require learned knowledge to use, however, so you could not use them without teaching. You retain use of the discipline for five minutes, and the discipline is replaced if you perform the act on another kindred.

Mechanics: Touch a vampire for at least five seconds and say, "Off-game, Human Power: The Leach, may I have a Discipline please? ^_^" and have them describe to you what you get, at its first level. They lose the top level of that discipline, but it’s their choice which they lose, still.

For the "extreme" use of your power, make contact for at least five seconds with the victim and say "Off-game, Human Power: The Leach" and ask them what their greatest Discipline is. You gain the total amount of the Discipline that the vampire possesses, and they lose access to it (all of its levels) for one hour. Since this is an extreme use of a human power it follows the same restrictions for how often you can use it as listed in the Mechanics page. (On the first night you can only use it once; nights two and three you can use the power twice per night.)