Many thanks to Kirsten of E! Online for the following Heroes spoilers.

She has answered a couple questions and revealed some intriguing information about our favorite show’s second season…

Q: Can you tell us anything about the new Heroes?
Claire’s new boyfriend (Nick D’Agosto) can fly - and for one particular romantic getaway he picks her up and carries her to the Hollywood sign atop Mt. Lee. Also, according to our source, Claire is still very much a teenager and has been sneaking out of the house to hang out with her new fella.

Q: Anything good on Heroes?
If all goes according to plan, one of your favorite Heroes will appear in the third episode of Pushing Daisies. He (yes, it’s a he) even brings one of his “powers” with him.

That’s a new show on NBC, folks. But who do you think will be making this unique crossover? Our money is on Peter Petrelli because, well, he can do pretty much anything at this point.

Heroes fans who think Sylar is creepy should prepare themselves for the following: new characters on the show next season make this brain-eating monster friendly by comparison. Sort of.

According to Tim Kring, the main creative force behind Heroes, new villains are on the way that may make you forget Sylar.

Talking about season two of Heroes, Kring told reporters recently: “We’re doing 11 episodes in a row that start on Monday, Sept. 24. And somewhere in that run of episodes we’re going to introduce a very scary villain.”

He went on to say that Sylar (Zachary Quinto) is “tame” when contrasted with this fresh enemy.

In fact, clues have already been laid for at least one of the new baddies.

“At the end of last season we gave in the season finale a premonition of someone who is a very scary villain out there, who has invaded the dreams and nightmares of this character on our show named Molly Walker, who can locate people just by thinking about them,” Kring said.

“We teased the idea that there was another villain out there. And the audience can expect to see him somewhere in the first run of episodes.”

Kristin at E! Online recently answered a few Heroes-related questions about season two. Let’s get right to them!

Do you have any Heroes news? I miss that show!
The powers of new Heroes Maya (Dania Ramirez) and Alejandro (Shalim Ortiz) are connected. Dania told us this about her brother, “We need each other.” We also hear that despite reports the fraternal twins are from the Dominican Republic, they’re actually from Central America and will either be leaving from or at least passing through San Cristobal, Honduras.

Do you know anything more about David Anders’ role on Heroes?
We asked Masi Oka, “Riddle me this. White guy from Oregon. How is [David Anders] a samurai-type in feudal Japan?” He answered, “You will find out in the first episode. And it’s an answer that everyone will be happy about. Does he have any powers? Does he share any powers? We don’t know. Is he white? Yes.” Masi wins at life.

How is Sylar going to fit into Heroes this season?
We talked to Greg Grunberg recently, and he had this to say: “We’re still playing with some of the stuff from last year, but they’ve definitely introduced a new character, which I hope I have a big part in, that they alluded to last year. Remember, Molly said last year, ‘Every time I think about him, he can see me; he’s the bogeyman.’

There’s this character that is looming out there that’s bigger and badder than Sylar, so it’s going to be pretty crazy.” I ran that by Sylar himself, Zachary Quinto, and he said, “There’s definitely a dark new energy on the show, and it’ll be interesting to see how Sylar fits into that.”

Do you know what’s going on with the Petrelli brothers in season two?
So do we, so we asked Adrian Pasdar what was going on between Nathan and Peter, and we were sad when he told us, “Milo and I have not worked together in a long time…”

What’s happening with my boy HRG on season two of Heroes?
According to Jack Coleman, he’s moved the family to somewhere in Southern California. He says, “Los Angeles would not be accurate, but not far off.” He added, “Everyone survives, but the Bennets are a very dislocated but determined group that tries to make the best of it, but old ways and old ghosts quickly come into play very dramatically.”

Heroes, Heroes, Heroes!
There will be an upcoming storyline set in County Cork, Ireland. Separately, look for a dangerous new Francophone character named Sophie. She’s the employee of a powerful, mysterious group, and she’s “not afraid to use lethal force to accomplish her mission.”

Michael Ausiello of TV Guide recently responded to a pair of reader questions regarding Heroes. In them, he revealed that two major characters may have reduced roles in season two:

Question: Zachary Quinto as Spock? Love it!
Ausiello: Yeah, I think that’s been the general consensus. Even Heroes bossman Tim Kring is thrilled by the nifty piece of casting — although it probably means losing Sylar for a chunk of the season.

“I was actually involved with this happening,” he says. “Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams and I are friends, and we discussed this many months ago. There were a couple of behind-the-scenes phone calls and conversations and we were able to work it out.

Question: Got any Heroes scoop?
Ausiello: We’ll be seeing less of Ali Larter this fall as Niki takes off early in the season to, as Larter herself teases, “fix something. And once it’s fixed, it will be very shocking and exciting.”

The recent on-set tour with Masi Oka revealed a few more spoilers for season two of Heroes. Some of thee may be repeats, but they’re all still exciting…

• There was a spoiler of sorts on the set of Suresh’s apartment. In one bedroom, there was a dollhouse, several stuffed animals (including a gray horse and a purple rabbit) and the lampshade was decorated by a pink butterfly. It certainly looked like the living space of a little girl.

Could it be the home of Molly Walker (Adair Tishler), the girl with the ability to pinpoint the location of others?

• Leonard Roberts, who plays D.L. Hawkins, was not on the panel. Tm Kring would only say that we shouldn’t “draw any conclusions” from Roberts’ absence. But his bio was also missing from a press packet on the show’s 12 series regulars that NBC handed out on Tuesday.

• Regarding Ali Larter’s character, Niki, Kring said: “We have to wait and see what happens with Niki’s character this season. She’s going to be going through all kinds of changes as a character.”

• We first meet a new character, Maya Herrera, when she’s “on the run from the cops in Central America,” according to the actress who plays her, Dania Ramirez. Herrera also has a twin brother, Alejandro (Shalim Ortiz).

• Another new character, played by Dana Davis of The Nine, “with newfound special abilities would give up everything to help the people around her,” according to the Heroes press kit handed out Tuesday.

• James Kyson Lee, who plays Hiro’s friend Ando Masahashi, is part of the regular cast this season.

• The Heroes DVD comes out August 28. That’s the same day as a total eclipse. Coincidence?

• In Season 2, Heroes will travel to Central, Japan, Ukraine, Egypt (“for a second,” Kring said), Haiti, Mexico. All via the magic of special effects, set decoration and so forth, of course.

Michael Ausiello of TV Guide just back from the TCA-sponsored press event on the Heroes set. Here are the scoops he discovered for season two:

• Lyndsy Fonseca is out as Claire’s gay cheerleader pal. No, not out like T.R. Knight. She’s out as in, off the show. According to Heroes creator Tim Kring, Fonseca’s role had to be cut short after she landed a series-regular gig on Desperate Housewives.

“She wasn’t a pivotal character,” Kring says of Claire’s friend, who will now appear in just one episode. “The idea was that that part would grow, but it never got a chance to.”

• The entire cast was present with the exception of Leonard Roberts (D.L.), although Kring cautioned reporters not to necessarily “read anything into that.” But considering this is the second Heroes press conference Roberts has bailed on this summer, we’re guessing D.L. is a goner.

• New cast member Dania Ramirez revealed that when we first meet her character, Maya, “she’s on the run from the cops.”

• Zachary Quinto was neither confirming nor denying reports that he’s in line to play a young Spock in Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek pic. “I’m under strict orders not to say anything,” he said.

But Greg Grunberg was under no such gag order. “How exciting is that?” he enthused. “Now I’ve got to beg, plead and scrape to get in that movie! I mean, what’s wrong with me as Scotty? Down in the engine room, rotisserie chicken…. “

None of the Heroes ended season one on more of an obscure note than Hiro himself: the character played by Masi Oka was somehow whisked back to 16th century Japan.

How long will he stay there? Oka recently spoke with SCI FI Wire and said his character will remain in Japan for a while. He’ll enjoy have a parallel story separate from the rest of the show when the second season kicks off in the fall.

“Season two is going to begin with two parallel timelines going on,” Oka said in an interview at the Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif., on July 17. “One starting four months after the explosion and another-mainly Hiro’s storyline-starting 400 years in the past. And we’ll see how they kind of affect each other.”

According to Oka, Hiro will spend at least eight episodes in old-day Japan before returning to the present.

There, he will encounter some of the characters from the stories of his childhood, including the legendary samurai Takezo Kensei, who will be played by David Anders. The show is currently finishing the third episode of the upcoming season.

“There’s a princess,” Oka said. “Princess Iako, played by [Japanese pop star] Eriko Tamura, who’s going to be in that world, as well as David Anders, who plays Takezo Kensei. That was Hiro’s childhood hero that he’s always heard about these stories.

But David Anders, last time we checked, he was Caucasian. So there’s a mystery there.”

Tim Kring, creator of Heroes, recently sat down with Superherohype.com. Here’s what the writer had to say:

Q: Is everyone coming back for Season Two?
Kring: Well, I don’t want to spoil that for the fans. Clearly we left things up in the air with several of the characters and we want to make sure that the fans don’t know what’s going to happen so that it doesn’t spoil their [enjoyment].

Q: You said 24 episodes. Does that mean no one really died?
Kring: Again, you really just have to wait.

Q: But you’re keeping them available so you can bring them back?
Kring: Exactly, they’re all on retainer just in case they’re needed. [joking]

Q: You have at least eight new or recurring characters. How has it been integrating them in the writing?
Kring: A lot of it was planned for and felt fairly natural. So it’s a big cast. One of the things that we are doing this year, because we’re not asking the audience to start absolutely from scratch, we’re not so concerned about every episode having every single character in it. So we’re able to sort of pull back in the ebb and flow and let certain characters come to the surface for an episode and sit out an episode.

Q: Are you talking more about episodes like “Company Man” where it’s focused on one story?
Kring: Yes, exactly. The idea of being able to focus on a couple of characters is something that we really learned last year as a very valuable thing to do, but you had to have earned enough interest in those characters to be able to then focus on them.

Q: How are you creating feudal Japan in modern day Los Angeles?
Kring: Well, as we know, Los Angeles has doubled for many, many things. On this show it’s doubled for a lot of things. So it’s a fairly, I will say, rural view of feudal Japan which allows us to use a lot of the outlying areas like the Santa Monica Mountains and north of here.

Q: Are you going to do anything this season for fans who didn’t watch last season to be able to jump in and understand what’s happening?
Kring: Yes, that is a big part of what we’re doing. I mean, one of the things that I sort of learned in the first season was that we called season one Volume One and it was entitled “Genesis.” It just happened to be twenty three episodes long. Volume II is entitled “Generations” and it by no means has to be an entire season long. I wouldn’t expect it to be an entire season long.

In fact we’re looking at that volume to end in the middle of the season which allows us to wrap up certain stories and allows us to have new stories begin. So you don’t get a sense that if you jump on the train that you’re aggressively being pushed off of the train because you don’t know what’s going on. That’s a big concern with us.

Q: Do you see the second season as being two big archs or do you not know yet about the second half?
Kring: Well, it’s designed to be three. We’ll see how that works out.

Q: So will there be some kind of recap for people who didn’t see last season?
Kring: Only slightly because the actual episode itself, it’s an episode entitled “Four Months Later” and so we pick up the stories four months after we left off at the end of the season. There is tremendous mystery in what happened during those four months and that’s part of why you’re watching these first few episodes. They’re revealing what actually happened. So the recap, in a way, is sort of built into the story.

Q: How do you feel about the mixed fan reaction to the finale?
Kring: I didn’t really experience the mixed fan reaction. I heard anecdotally that people loved it and clearly on a show like this, again this is one of the problems with a big serialized show which is that by the time you get to twenty three episodes in you’re dragging a tremendous amount of story behind you. So when people wait that long for answers it gets very hard to satisfy people.

This is another reason why I think these volumes are really the way to go because it allows us to not have people build up expectations for so long as to how things are going to be resolved. When you build up for a whole year with a show like this it has an addictive quality to it and so it has to really pay off. Sometimes those expectations are too high for a mere television show.

To read the entire interview, click here.

With Heroes finally returning on September 24, the following couple of details about the second season premiere have been revealed:

• The first episode centers around Claire.
• The episode will feature a villainous Japanese warlord known as “White Beard,” various old Japanese villagers and Tuko, a West-African man working for Irish mobster Ricky.
• We’ll meet new series regular Maya, a Hispanic woman in her mid 20s, played by Dania Ramirez. The episode will also introduce Kane, a recurring character that may become a regular.
• Hiro Nakamura will remain in the past for a few episodes.

During the on-set press conference in which creator Tim Kring announced a Heroes global tour, sponsored by Nissan, other details about season two emerged.

Here is a summary:

• According to Greg Grunberg, he begins filming today. After realizing that he’d sort of let the cat out of the bag, he said: “Well, I could be on a hospital bed … or in a coffin.”

Hayden Panettiere tried to help by joking that the entire cast would be standing around, lowering him into the ground. Therefore, it’s a pretty safe bet Matt will survive those four bullets to the chest.

• Sylar (pictured) will be back.

• The end of season one, with Hiro in Japan wasn’t really the ending … it was a teaser of the first scene from the first episode of season two. Hiro will be in feudal Japan for “a handful of episodes,” according to Kring.

• Kring envisions season two as consisting of three big story arcs.

• Heroes: Origins is an “anthology show.” However, it’s not a midseason show; it will air after the season two finale, and not during sweeps. They have not yet begun writing or filming it.

• Adrian Pasdar was sporting a full beard, and Milo Ventimiglia had an extremely short haircut.