Re: dock: atticus and mal
"I'll hold off. You go ahead." No gods, thank you. He'd seen enough of beings worshipped by bad people to bad ends. There would be no seeking of contacts for him, even in theory.
He winced at the idea of popping into a toddler's body in the middle of an abandoned military base. "I'm sure it's very rusty in there, and I hadn't had my tetanus shot then. I may need to hold off." He pulled his legs up from where they hung over the side of the dock, sitting cross-legged instead, cradling the puzzle in his lap once it was handed over. "Something to do with the crash? Or something that was happening at the base?" He absorbed the strangeness of people aging down at random in a haunted military base with a healthy touch of skepticism. He would need to do his own independent research.
"Does Shakespeare talk much?" Mal was starting to lean in the direction that Atticus was probably nuts, but a harmless kind of nuts that made it difficult to tell truth from fiction. It wasn't that the things he was saying couldn't be true, because they might be. He knew the world to be strange. But they were coming in thick and fast from a man he'd just met who wouldn't leave his rowboat.
The puzzle itself was an oddity, though. It didn't necessarily lend credence to his story, but this object, made of smooth dark metal unlike any he'd come across before, was compelling. It f it was really a puzzle, no seams were evident. He picked it up in his hands and turned it over - something felt off about it, but he wasn't quite sure what.
He busied himself with examining its sides. When he looked up again, Atticus was grinning. Mal smiled back at him a little, partially in surprise. That look reminded him of someone. "What's your favorite, then?"