Marcello looked a bit like an overstuffed sausage as he trudged toward the house from collecting eggs, head bent down against the wind, wrapped in nearly every spare bit of fabric that he could find, his free hand tucked up beneath his armpit for warmth.

Maalech was just as wrapped up, the browns and yellows of his clothing making him nearly indistinguishable from the dried grass that surrounded the path. Unfortunately he was not very aware of his surroundings where he crawled, on hands and knees, obviously very intent on the task at hand.

He never even noticed the approaching Marcello as he crawled over the path...

Marcello noticed the boy-- a moment too late. "Careful, Mal, I'm--" But that was all he got out before he got launched off his feet and fell face-forward, trying to hold the basket out away from himself to keep too many of the eggs from spilling.

"Ah!" Maalech squealed in shock as Marcello tumbled over him, turning just in time to see the older man tumble face-first to the ground, only to... stop.

For a moment Marcello would hover, basket and all, close enough to the ground so that the grass might tickle his face. Then whatever had held him there seemed to buckle, sending him crashing the last inches to the ground.

"Ah!" Marcello shouted. "Christ, I just--" And then he noticed that the eggs had all landed in the basket. Two had cracked from the jolt, but that was all. He sat up, brushing himself off. "Did you just do that?" he asked the boy interestedly. "That...thing? With the suspension in space?"

"Sorry!" Maalech did indeed look sorry, and a bit sheepish. "I didn't see you, and the wind makes it hard to hear anything. No wonder they don't build taller houses, they would have blown down." The boy's tan had faded a little, but it was hard to see since he had wrapped a shawl around his head, covering mostly everything but the eyes and nose. "I'm sorry I dropped you, but I kinda got a bit shocked there."

Marcello grinned back at him. "It's fine, Mal," he said. "It was better than falling the full height. That was-- that was really good," he said, sounding impressed. "You're-- I haven't seen you do anything like that before. Did you just figure it out?"

"Not really..." Maalech looked a little cautious as he spoke of it. "Just never with anything this big. It's... a bit like skipping stones. Sometimes I get it, sometimes I don't. I wanted to figure out why I didn't get it at times before I told anybody." One thing that Marcello would know by now was that Maalech was a perfectionist. He could sulk for hours over a mistake in his writing, or when he failed in something he had set himself to do. It was most likely lucky for everybody concerned that it didn't happen often.

Marcello checked the rest of the eggs, before looking back at the boy. "Maybe it has to do with predictability?" he asked. "The pattern of movement? A rough, misshapen stone is a lot harder to skip than a smooth, even one. You can, but you can't always predict how it's going to land, and that's the hard part."

"That's a thought" Maalech's face lit up as he tried to fit in this new idea with the ones he already had. "I like predictability, it's like numbers, they always makes sense and does the same thing every time. Not like people." While he really loved it here, it was becoming more and more obvious that Maalech worked best together with Meg, and in some ways with Marcello. People that could understand his at times rather odd obsessions. "But sometimes things that looks like chaos can behave like patterns, that's what I was doing right now. Checking the grass. For the wind" he quickly added, as if that would make more sense.