(Untitled)

[doyousmellfudge]

That... thing that happened in Dickinson's office has left Artie more rattled than he'd care to admit. Enough so that he packed up and left immediately afterward, without making any further attempt to track down his would-be hacker.

What the hell was that, anyway? A timeslip? A spirit manifestation? A psychic distress signal

Comments

[abar_starclog]

Carl's at another table, poking at his laptop. He's trying to figure something out for a job back home, and he thinks if he can do it on this computer, doing it on one that's about fifteen years behind it should be a piece of cake.
(Hey, you take your advantages where you can get them.)
But he's also got pretty good people-radar - you need it, in his line of work - and that's the guy who lost his box thing in here a while back.
"You all right?"

[doyousmellfudge]

"Hm?" Artie glances up. "Oh, uh, yeah, I'm fine, nothing to report."

[abar_starclog]

"You don't really look fine, is all."
But Carl is fluent in 'paranoid older man'; it's a language you learn fast, when you work with Mother. So he's not really expecting to hear anything else about it.

[doyousmellfudge]

"You've met me all of once," points out Artie. "How would you know?"

[puckishly]

Speaking of spirit manifestations ...

Well, there's one manifesting nearby, is all. This particular manifestation is short, slim, tousle-haired, and almost unimaginably sulky. (Also wearing somebody else's shirt; as it turns out, it's not always gnomes who steal your socks.) He has appeared rather out of nowhere at another table by the window, and is regarding it with great general moodiness until Artie catches his eye.

His expression at this time is, more or less, the politely baffled one of somebody who cannot understand what other forms of life are doing in his reality.

[doyousmellfudge]

Artie quirks an eyebrow back at the sulky person, as if to say 'Whatcha gonna do about it?'.

[puckishly]

The answer to this may well be an existential crisis.

However, Puck simply looks a little more alert (something that has not much to do with straightening up, but everything to do with the peering expression in his bird-bright eyes) and regards Artie as if attempting to determine whether he's worth being polite to.

... Around here, one is better off safe than sorry.

"God grant thee a good even," he says, with a slight quirking smile.

[doyousmellfudge]

"...you too," says Artie after a moment of blank bewilderment. (He shouldn't be as surprised as he is, really. He's met a dead woman from the 1930s, there's no reason there wouldn't be people from Elizabethan England. Or wherever.)

[aeons_crackshot]

"You look troubled," Annabelle remarks. "Is it anything I can help with?"

[doyousmellfudge]

"I--it--it's nothing, really," says Artie with a dismissive handwave. "Work issues."

[aeons_crackshot]

"I see," Annabelle replies, expression a bit skeptical. She's not going to press the matter though.

"I might be able to help with work issues too, you never know," she adds with a shrug.

"How have you been otherwise?"

[doyousmellfudge]

"Unless your version of the 1930s had Internet access, I highly doubt it," says Artie. "No offense intended."