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Around the home of the High Chancellor of the Science Division, there was an air of compressed excitement, the sort you might find in an aircraft carrier full of paratroopers. It was the kind of atmosphere that his mother despised, but Crowley couldn't pull his attention far enough away from the door to actually care. Today, his best friend Fish was coming over for the entire day. Crowley would show him parkour, and... there would just be so much awesome that he could not even describe it.

Not like he could even describe very many cool-but-normal things with words beyond awesome or cool or WIN!, he just didn't have much of an attention span for books beyond what he needed to do to keep his grades up enough for sports. There were so many things that just weren't IMPORTANT compared to the contest of Man versus everyone else.

Well, that and books tended to be about girly things like ponies and stuff. If there was a book about overthrowing authority and hacking computers and explosions, Crowley would be there like fungus on a dead log. But since no one had mentioned a book like that yet, parkour, soccer, and... well, parkour were his main activities.

He tapped his heel against the ground. To his back was the set of paintings Mr. Prosper had done for his mom. "Come on," he moaned, turning to face them. Why wasn't Fish here already? There was so much to do!

Antan opened the door, but it was Crowley who barreled through her cape and straight into Fish. They would have gone down on the path up to the door, but Crowley had performed an abrupt hairpin stop. He stood in place, rubbing his forehead where he'd run into his friend, for just a moment.

"OkaymomthanksforopeningthedoorBYE," he said, too fast for Antan to really decipher it, but he had already grabbed Fish's wrist and started to drag him off and apparently his mother decided it Wasn't Worth It to go asking where her son was going. Which was good, because he didn't really go far enough to justify following- it was just out of sight of the front door. "Okay," he said, all intense. "What do you want to do first, I can do backflips on tiny walls in my sleep." Which was not quite the truth, but he almost could, so he didn't find it TOO much of a lie.

He brightened, but even amazing parkour tricks had to bow to the necessity of being able to actually do the parkour without, you know, casts or splints or stuff. Yeah, that seemed pretty important.

"Basics," Crowley agreed, stopping at a wall that was maybe two feet high. "So anyway first you got to be able to balance, right?" He got up on the wall and practically ran across it. "Easy, right? Only not really." Crossing back to Fish, Crowley dropped down to the ground again. "It's really bumpy and a little slippery so don't slip," he said. That would kind of kill things.

"Yeah," said Crowley, feeling very authoritative. Having been practicing for a month, and having sustained his own bumps and bruises from trying to do too much too fast. He hadn't nailed everything yet, not even close, but hey, he could catch Fish up and then show him the one really cool thing he could do (backflips). "Landing is important too. I dunno if I do it right but when you jump, you gotta land sorta weird..." He clambered up onto the wall again, but this time he jumped right back off and this time, didn't land solidly; like a continuance of the same motion, he rolled right forward a few steps.

Sitting back on the wall, he thumped the ball of his foot for emphasis. "You have to land on this part of your foot, or you can't keep going like you should."

"Pretty much," said Crowley. "You definitely got to practice, though. It took me forever," by which he meant a week and a half. Now he just had to think about what they should do next- he kind of felt like his friend needed to practice the landing more, but he didn't want Fish to feel like he had to be a hardass later when they were surfing. So he got off the wall and walked back towards Fish. "There's all kinds of things," he said, "but jumping over stuff is fun."

He paused. "D'you think you can not break stuff, though, 'cause my mom doesn't know I'm doing this stuff." Crowley kicked at the wall halfheartedly. "An' it takes some doing, getting over the wall, even though it's so small," he said, pointing to a particularly nasty-looking scrape on his arm.

"It's good for sports," said Crowley, who would of course think of that first. He continued, with a slightly mystified air, "Mom says when I'm older I get to mow it." It was pretty big, so it would probably be an all-day activity if it ever happened, but he figured it would be great exercise and so he didn't really mind.

"Anyway, it's not just jumping over it. You gotta, I don't know, vault it." To demonstrate, he ran straight at the wall and in one movement, slammed both hands down and swung the rest of his body through the arch created. Unfortunately, due to the slight wetness in the grass, he miscalculated the landing and skidded a foot across the yard, sprawled in front of the wall. Despite the embarrassment of wiping out in front of his friend, he was grinning. "Even screwing up is awesome, if you do it right," he said, happily sharing his opinion.

"Push-ups," said Crowley wisely from his spot sprawled near the wall. He could see well enough, he just didn't feel like getting up at the moment. "That'll straighten off your wrist anyway." Whatever 'straightening off' meant, anyway; he sat up.

With a wicked grin, he said, "Wanna have a go at the tree?" Climbing it was fun. It was good for practicing landing if he fell out, which happened more often than it didn't. Crowley liked the tree.

At any rate, there was a ton of stuff you could do without the wall. He could try and vault it again, but he didn't wanna risk getting another scrape like the last one, it'd been hard to hide from his mother.

Crowley grabbed Fish's hand and pulled himself up, grinning just as widely. "Let's. Betcha I'll make it higher before I fall out." And he let go of Fish and started to speed-walk over to the tree. He got there and grabbed the lowest branch, pulled himself up easily, sprawled himself out along the thick branch like a satisfied cat. "Want to race to the top?"

It wasn't that big a tree, and it looked sturdy enough. "If you fall and land right, it doesn't hurt," Crowley testified confidently. Or maybe he was just sturdier than the average child.