To Lyger 0: Yeah, it is not fun what they are doing…

To Geft: You know what they say, if it sounds too good to be true…

"Ready for school to start next week, dude?" asked the Owl, gliding down the street on his new hoverboard, glancing back at Impact and raising an eyebrow at him under his cowl. The streets around them, mostly deserted in the dark this late at night, the quiet humming of his board reverberated loudly around him.

Impact shrugged. "As ready as I'll ever be, I suppose," he replied, springing into the air and pushing down with his hands to propel himself forward in a long jump. "It feels like it could be another major change, so soon after the last one." The Owl cocked his head to one side, eyeing him in confusion. Impact raised an eyebrow at him. "Moving back in with my parents."

The Owl nodded in understanding. "Sorry – I forgot that had happened already. How has it been going?"

"So far, so good," Impact allowed, giving a hesitant smile. Landing in a crouch, he threw his hands back to push himself forward, keeping pace with the Owl. "They have been pretty understanding of everything – I guess the Heroes of Paris were talking to them all along to let them know how I was doing, which is nice. Though they didn't explain anything about where I had actually been staying – my mom grilled me for an hour about who I had been living for the last couple months."

"You didn't tell her the specifics, did you?" The Owl gave him a nervous look.

"Of course not." Impact shook his head firmly. "I just told her that one of the Heroes of Paris had taken me in and let me stay with them. That satisfied her… almost. She still wanted to know what I had been eating, if I had been sleeping well…" He let out a breath. "It's… nice. To have my parents worrying about me. And to be able to see them and allay those worries!"

"Yeah…" The Owl looked off into the distance. He sometimes wished that his parents knew that he was a hero, that they knew what he was doing in the evening when he disappeared. But he knew that he couldn't tell his father any of it – not now, and probably not ever. If he ever found out, what would he do with that information? Maybe he wouldn't say anything intentionally… but who knew, when he started drinking. "It's not that I don't trust your parents," the Owl told Impact. "But we need to be cautious. Especially when it's not our own secret that's on the line."

Impact nodded. "I know. And I told my mom as much. I think she accepted it."

"I'm glad it's going well for you," the Owl told him, banking slightly in either direction and pushing his hoverboard to its limit. Behind him, Impact propelled himself forward even further, throwing himself higher and rocketing past the Owl in a tall parabolic arc. The Owl pushed his hoverboard to the side, toward the building next to him, and immediately turned the board toward the wall, propelling himself along it instead of the sidewalk. Above him, Impact let out a yelp and pinwheeled his arms before slowing his fall very abruptly, moments before he would have struck the ground. He stumbled slightly as the Owl whipped past him, bounced back down to the ground, and flared out, spinning around to face Impact as he skidded to a stop.

"You okay there?" the Owl asked, giving Impact a concerned look.

Impact held up a thumb and nodded, though he planted his hands on he knees as he did so, panting for breath. "Just… fine."

The Owl frowned. "Don't push yourself too hard with that," he warned him. "You don't want to get yourself into trouble, right?"

Impact rolled his eyes. "I'll be fine," he told the Owl. "If I don't push myself now, when it's fairly safe, how am I supposed to know my limits when I really need them? Besides," he added, nodding to the Owl's hoverboard, "it's not like I'm the only one playing with new toys."

The Owl hummed. "Fair. Though I still think my new toy is a little simpler and more intuitive than yours."

Impact arched an eyebrow at him. "So…" The Owl raised an eyebrow with a grin beneath his cowl. "What all can that thing do?"

The Owl grinned. "Just about everything – I convinced Pegasus to give it a bit of everything." Pushing down on the board, he increased its power level, sending it rushing upward into the air another two meters, placing him above Impact's head. The hoverboard wobbled slightly as the Owl shifted to find his balance, adjusting it to propel him forward. Spinning around, the Owl swung around in a loop and dropped a meter closer to the ground before pressing a button on his wrist control to fire a pair of grappling hooks out of the front of the hoverboard, which wrapped around the streetlight at the end of the block. The Owl held the cords taut for a long moment before pressing another button to detach the cords from around the streetlight and automatically rewind them. Finally, he dropped down to the ground and pressed a button to deploy normal wheels.

Impact nodded appreciatively. "Nice." He chuckled. "I wish I had one of those."

The Owl hummed. "Of course, you can just make yourself fly with your mind, so…"

"It's not exactly flying," Impact protested. "It's more like I can take hold of a bunch of pebbles sewed into my suit and propel them through the air by concentrating on them hard enough."

The Owl shrugged. "Whatever. The point is, you don't exactly need the mobility the way I do."

Impact grinned. "But if you get a new one sometime…"

The Owl rolled his eyes. "Fine. If I get a new hoverboard, you can have this one."

"Yes!" Impact pumped his fist.

As they continued down the street, the Owl furrowed his brows, thinking back on how much had changed in the months since he became a part of the Heroes of Paris. He had made new friends. He had learned to be a hero – and he'd even gotten to put his new skills to the test a few times to stop criminals who would have hurt innocent people. How very different this was from what he had expected his life to look like at the beginning of the summer.

They were just turning down the next street when the sound of breaking glass reached the Owl's ear. He cocked his head to one side, trying to trace the sound back to its point of origin. He could hear very little around him, beyond the sound of his own hoverboard and of Impact's heavy breathing. But he had heard something… Looking down the street in the opposite direction, his eyes widened in surprise. There, about two blocks away, a group of three or four people stood outside a two-story building. Concentrating on them now, the Owl could hear one of the people laughing. A second one bent over and picked something up, tossing it up and down in his hand.

"You see those people?" the Owl asked Impact, furrowing his brows in concentration.

"Yes…"

"You see what that one has in his hand?"

"Yes."

The man drew his arm back to throw.

"Stop them!" ordered the Owl, giving the command and launching forward as fast as his hoverboard could take him, leaning forward over the board as the wind picked up around him. He had only raced down a single block before the jet built into the back of the hoverboard kicked on, shooting him forward at twice the speed. He could just make out the four people more clearly now: a group of boys a few years older than the Owl himself. The one held a brick in his hand; one of the others held a bat. The one with the brick wound up and hurled the brick at a second-story window. Before the brick had crossed half the distance, however, it froze in place, hanging suspended for a long minute before dropping back down on the boy's head.

"What–?" The boys started to spin around, looking in all directions in confusion. One turned and spotted the Owl, barreling toward them on his hoverboard, and let out a surprised yelp. Spinning on his heels, he sprinted away, just as the Owl got in range with his hoverboard's grappling hook. The hook fired and looped around the boy's ankle, pulling him off his feet. He fell forward, barely avoiding landing on his face, and rolled over, fumbling to remove the cord wrapped around his ankle.

"Stop!" shouted the Owl, hitting the control to reel in the one he had hooked. "Stay where you are!"

"Let's get out of here!" shouted one of the boys – obviously the leader. The Owl fired his second grappling hook, but the leader veered sharply in the wrong direction just before the grappling hook would have looped around his legs. One of the others tried to throw a brick at the Heroes, only for it to clatter harmlessly away as Impact deflected it. As one, the group broke and bolted in all directions, just as the Owl skidded to a stop in front of the building. A small pile of bricks sat on the sidewalk outside. One of the ground-floor windows had been shattered – already a small crowd had started to gather inside, looking outside in confusion.

The Owl hopped off his hoverboard and pressed a button, unhooking the grappling hook from the board with the boy still wrapped up. Another button sent the board higher into the air to fly a quick pass around the building. "Everything is okay now," he assured the people in the building, holding his hands up in a reassuring gesture. "The police will be here soon."

A light had come on in one of the upstairs windows; a face looked out in confusion and fear. "H–hello?" called a fearful voice. "Wh–who's there?"

"Heroes of Paris, madame," replied the Owl, putting as much confidence into his voice as he could. "Are you okay?"

"Y–yes," she stammered. There was a pause. "What happened?"

"A group of boys tried to attack your building," answered Impact, landing beside the Owl. His eyes widened. "What is that?"

The Owl cocked his head, turning to look at what Impact had seen. He let out a breath. "Looks like they tagged the wall, too. Damn."

"There – actually the manager allows graffiti on the alley-side walls," someone called from inside. The front door opened, and an older woman stepped outside.

The Owl raised an eyebrow. "I somehow doubt they had this in mind," he pointed out, nodding to a picture of a foul symbol.

The woman gasped. "Why would they do something like that to a rehab center?"

The Owl shrugged. "I don't know," he told her. "But someone will have to find out."