Wee Wayne Calhoun sat in one of the eaves near the gibbet and scribbled in his notebook. He chewed on the edge of his pencil as he thought hard about the things he wrote. He always did. The sun was a vaguely bright spot among the damp clouds, and Wayne had to stop and shake his fingers vigorously every so often to keep the damp out of them.
An observant passerby might have seen a scrawny kid with a dog-eared notebook half-hidden behind the scraggly vines with a look of bemused concentration, the look of a kid working out the world with his notebook, understanding one thing at a time. Often wrong, but hey, the day was young. And nobody had pulled him out and clipped him over the ear for wasting time yet.
Ezekiel had been waiting for a while. Brushing off a nonexistent speck from his coat, he stepped off the roof and into a nondescript alley.
Eventually Wayne finished his train of thought, and taking out a much abused leaf from his pocket, he marked his place in the book and tucked it within the recesses of his jacket. Looking to see if anybody was around, he jumped out of his not-really-a-hiding place, and started on the alleyways back. Looking at the telltale sun he hurried up, shoulders hunched and chin down against the wind.
Rushing along without really paying attention to the familiar surroundings, Wayne collided again't someone as he rounded a corner. For a moment a portion his brain told him that it was someone surprisingly heavy for a body so apparently thin, but it was overshadowed by the much bigger portion that screamed 'its a bloody posh bugger. oh, you're screwed now.' For the cut of the stranger's coat was unmistakably fine, especially to one trained in observation on the streets.
In blatant contradiction of both poshness and buggeredness, however, the stranger offered a hand to help Wayne up. Surprised, Wayne looked up, to see a pair of twinkling black eyes, framed by pieces of glass impossibly held together by a structure of twisted wire, under white, almost nonexistent eyebrows.
'What's going on? I ane't done nothin.', said Wayne. After the perfunctory, 'm'sorry, lor'.'
'Well', said the stranger brightly. 'I seem to be uninjured, and you seem to have all your pieces about you, so I guess that's all fine. Now, what day is it?' He fumbled for a watch in the recesses of his coat, and came out with a contraption that seemed to fit that description. 'Hm. Today, is it? Ah, well, that could work. I don't normally do this..', he said, looking in all probability like someone who normally did this, 'Young man, could you spare me a moment of your time?'
