“Hey, hey, calm down,” Isaac said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Not to mention the damage you’ll do to the walls,” Zac said.
“Oh you’re sooooooooo funny,” Tristan said, glaring at him. “They were about to burn someone to death, and you’re making jokes? Jokes!”
“Okay, so if I’m your dad in an alternate dimension, you should be used to me making jokes at inappropriate moments,” Zac replied.
“He does raise a good point,” Taylor said to Isaac.
“Must be a novel experience for him.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“Would you guys knock it off!” Tristan yelled at them.
“Whoa, calm down,” said Isaac. “Okay, yes, burning people at the stake is a rather nasty way to go, I’ll grant you, but we were trying to help. And I know it sounds callous, but they would have burnt her whether we had seen her or not.”
Tristan slumped on the paved ground.
“Why did my power had to kick in then? We could have saved her… we could have…”
Taylor knelt down beside him.
“Did you have a close encounter with a burning yourself?”
Tristan nodded.
“My shields would have protected me,” he said. “But there were others… I had been there for a couple of weeks, and we were friends and…”
“Oh, hey I’m sorry,” said Zac. “Not that that would have stopped me from making jokes, but -”
Their conversation was cut off by the appearance of a hover car at the end of the alley. There was a pause, the hover car stopped and two women got out. One of them was holding a strange, tricorder like device in one hand, and was inspecting the readout.
“I say, what are you kids doing out after curfew?” asked one women.
The boys looked at each other, but had no chance to reply before the woman with the tricorder piped up:
“They’re anomalies,” she said.
“Anomalies? In the human sector?” she looked at her partner, then sighed and looked back at the boys. “And I suppose that’s why you chose to take off your ID bracelets, right? Really, you kids need to stop playing pranks on the humans. It’s not their fault that they’re not talented like us. C’mon, let’s get you home. In the car.”
The two women herded the boys into the hover car. Zac had a hard time containing his excitement: a hover car! A real life hover car! And he was going to ride in one! Awesome!