It had been a couple of days since Arik had gotten his apartment back. In that time, he was a man on a mission. He had bought new clothes, new art supplies, stocked his fridge, applied to as many jobs as possible, and even bought a new phone. Sure it currently only had four numbers in it, but he was working on that.

The job situation was rough and daunting, but satisfying and distracting all the same. He felt that as long as he was trying his hardest to find any job that he could work at, then he was doing his part in promoting his success. Taking life by the horns some would say. All Arik knew was that he had a moment of motivation and revelation when at Kilvio's house, and he was going to run that as far as possible.

His professional past was thin and flimsy, questionable even. His time as an artist for hire made income spotty and relatively under the table. At one point he had also worked on the side at a grocery store before getting fired for tardiness and repeatedly giving the customers too much cash back at the register. Both compliments from his terrible sleeping habits and rampant bouts of depression.

It wasn't until the self proclaimed "peak" of Arik's life that he landed a good job given to him by his girlfriend at the time, Celesti Mercurio, the number one journalist in Zoro County. The job was a cartoonist panel in the county newspaper, a job that allowed his creativity to flow and his name to float in the minds of those who enjoyed his weekly work.

But that job went down in penitent flames just like the relationship that raised it. Events that loomed over his conscience ever since.

But not all was lost. Arik's artistic fame had grown from that job and selling his art had become much easier for a time. Yet even that had crumbled away from his unfathomable lack of drive. A lack of drive that was rivaled only by his current abundance of drive.

Don't get it twisted, surviving that suicide and the cathartic venting to Kilvio along with the money loaned to Arik was very heartening and motivating, as if the world were showing signs to him that might as well have been plastered on billboards. But those alone weren't the reasons for his dogged new life. It was the flying.

Every day, after Arik would run around town applying to every job he could get his hands on, he would spend the second half of the day in the Woodstock Forest. The forest attached to his town was an emerald beauty that he felt he would protect with his life if need be. It bore no pollution, sheltered no belligerent citizens, and kept to itself in the way that only nature could. It was quite literally the epitome of a hidden gem.

He had spent so much time in the forest throughout his life, drawing and exploring its mossy overgrowth to find new treasures, whether items or settings.

The Woodstock Forest once encompassed an old logging town some time ago. According to legend and most likely half-true documents, the town was overrun by the forest's many wildlife, and the people working there were driven out to never return. These days, hidden structures of wood and brick could be found jutting out of the reclaimed soil like a final testament to man's stubbornness.

That dilapidated town was where Arik did his best art, and now, it was where he went to fly.

Deep enough into the forest for no one to comfortably hike to or see, Arik practiced this mysterious power everyday after job searching. And everyday he gained more control. At first he could barely manage the activation, floating only parts of his body into the air at a time, the rest of him dangling like a worm on an imaginary hook. No, an invisible hook, because this power was in fact real, not imaginary. But as the days went by, he gradually evened the rise of his body in unison, able to do what he had did days before on command.

The feeling was immeasurably heart-revving, made even more surreal by the fact that only he could do this. This was the stuff of fantasy, the stuff you would only read about in comic books or vividly dream about. It was a superpower for christ sakes! And yet, Arik did it nonetheless, as if his very existence didn't care about the restraints of scientific law or what was impossible.

The next obstacle was omni-directional movement: moving side to side, front to back, or diagonally in any other direction. It too was deeply tricky, being another action his body had never done before, therefore didn't know how to start. But who was to do it if not him? And so the unemployed man got to work on his aerial refinement.

Unsurprisingly, this took multiple days still. He had actually discovered the feeling for doing the movement early on, perhaps due to his prior foundation of flight knowledge. But the new task was harder, more complicated and troublesome than the last one.

After dozens of hours of floating in the air like a deflating balloon against the falling sun, Arik was getting the hang of it.

'If my theory is correct, doing these motions requires much more strength and control,' he thought to himself as he guzzled down a water bottle from his backpack. 'And the only reason I'm getting better at these movements in the air is because I'm building up strength in whatever it is in me that allows me to fly. Like working out I guess.'

Arik had also made a mental note throughout the last several days of one other feature that had been growing since the beginning as well. It was what visually appeared to look like a white river coursing through pure darkness. The river was rapid and jittery, like a stream of contained white lightning rather than water, and he could see it in his mind whenever he focused on flying.

But the curious thing was its increasing size throughout the last few days. It seemed that the more Arik practiced his flying the larger and more mentally visible the river became.

Perhaps that was the muscle that governed his flight. Maybe it had no physical existence at all, and was some kind of unique mental muscle. The theory was possible, seeming as how the impossible was possible these days. Plus, it would match and explain why Arik had always felt that strange pressure in his head whenever he flew.

"The mind really is stronger than the body, isn't it?" he murmured as he looked up to the top of a 30 foot tall concrete silo covered in moss and old graffiti.

'I'm gonna fly to the top of that by the end of this week,' he thought to himself.

In the meantime, Arik settled for the corner of a half toppled lone brick wall equally covered in moss and vines. The ascent up there was slow and steady. No faster than walking pace. He had his directions mostly down at this point, but speed was now of a concern. Any faster than what he was currently doing and he would begin to spin around like a floundering globe.

Arik landed on the top of the questionably sound wall with a less-than-elegant thud. Pulling out some food from his backpack, he feasted while watching the remnants of the sunset; his ritualistic wind-down after a long days work.

Before he had even taken a second bite of his protein bar, he was lost deep in thought about the contrasting life he has been walking this past week. Everything was moving so fast and so much different than he was used to. He had spent most of his current years sulking, drinking, and sleeping. Now he didn't even have time for sadness.

The little superpower that Arik magically discovered was nothing to be skimmed over either. It was big. Huge. So large that Arik couldn't even fathom the scope of what having an ability like that meant. He didn't know what questions to ask first or if it was even safe to look for questions.

As he had jester about before, if the existence of a flying human got out to the public, it could spell misfortune in more ways than one. The obvious blowback of course is the government hunting him down for their own agendas. But there was still the matter of what the public would think of him. Would they fear him? Love him? What would his parents think?

In a strange backwards way, it was kind of like Arik was alone again in the world, and he chose to see the comedy in that.

But was he truly alone?

It was entirely possible that there were others like him out there. People who could function like beings from fiction and appear to the public as perhaps fancy editing and the ramblings of crazy people. If Arik heard someone talk about a mysterious flying person, he knew he would probably be immediately dismissive, if not at least interested and amused.

But why stop there? Arik's flight was like a huge Plan B for the word impossible, and anything was on the table at this point. Any superpower from any of your favorite childhood superheroes could actually exist out there, tied to some random stranger walking down the street. And that was actually a bit daunting to Arik.

Would he even want to find others like him?

Arik spent much off time thinking over these sorts of questions. Even while trying to be responsible looking for work, the thoughts crawled their way to the front of his mind like a haunting addiction. And sometimes he entertained some of these thoughts.

Arik now had a phone, yes, but he didn't have a computer. For matters pertaining to that, such as job searches and resumes, he would take a stroll to the public library and use their computers. When the superpower thoughts started creeping in, temptation possessed him to research that topic as well.

He spent a small portion of time every day looking up cases and sightings of people having unbelievable powers that science could not permit. Most if not all of it was exactly what you'd think. The rambling of crazy people and over-imaginative kids. No solid evidence.

And that was the part that drove Arik mad. How could anyone be so sure though? Arik can literally fly. Why can't those people do those things?

Regardless, he had full confidence that if any of them were real, the government would get to them before a good camera would.

'And that's why none of the content online is too believable. Because the government doesn't want it to be,' he would think to himself.

Arik was comfortable as of current staying under the radar and just trying to get a normal life together. It was something that he always wanted the drive to do and, as unbelievable as it may seem, it may have been more important to him than the flying debacle before him.

Snap.

A twig broke in the distance and startled Arik out of the depths of his churning mind. It was a deer sniffing the ground and minding its own business, also a good sign that it was time to head home. While Arik was confident in his safety in the Woodstock Forest, it was very unwise to walk a forest in the dark. Even he knew that.

And so, he floated his way down from the wall and hit the ground softly, much to Arik's dismay. The deer hopped away into some thickets and the man walked the opposite direction back to town, a small boos of confidence acquired from the days job searching and flight practice.

It was friday night, and that meant that a lot of businesses wouldn't be accepting applications until the next work week. Plus, Kilvio made Arik agree to a hangout Saturday afternoon to catch up on all that's happened since they parted ways at the beginning of the week. And Arik was baffled to look forward to it.

He contemplated what he would tell Kilvio. Or more specifically, what he could trust Kilvio with.