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Quint looks briefly puzzled, until he sees what Ballade is toying with. He'll snatch the wallet away from his taller sibling to hand back to the stranger, and then start gently scolding. "Ballade, I said you had to behave if you came with me, and that means not taking people's wallets."

"I was just looking," sulks Ballade, and fiddles with the sunglasses Quint had made him wear instead.

What makes this look a little odd is that Ballade appears to be around sixteen, while Quint might be a rather small nine. But appearances can be deceiving, especially when it comes to the apparent ages of androids.

John takes the wallet back and looks the two boys over a bit puzzled. "Where are your parents lads," he asks gently, "you shouldn't be out here alone taking people's wallets."

Ballade will just give him as much of a confused look as the sunglasses allow. "He wouldn't be much help taking wallets. He's been dead for years."

"And you weren't supposed to be doing that, anyway," Quint reminds him again, tempted to facepalm and only held back because he wants to keep a close watch on the situation.

"Yeah, sorry... but even then you know the doc woulda sucked at picking pockets."

"When I find out who taught you, I'm going to have to have words with them," Quint grumbles.

John chuckles and shakes his head as he puts the wallet back in his pocket. "I would have broken your arm if you hadn't been children. I'm not a normal doctor."

Ballade will give a sympathetic smile in response to that. "That's ok. They say I'm not normal, too."

Quint gives in and just facepalms at that point. "We were just supposed to be going to the library..."

John fights a smile. "You wandered a bit off the beaten path, the library is two blocks the other way."

"Oh." Quint looks back the way they came. "I guess I should have checked a map."

"Dunno if I'd want to walk on a path that got beat up," Ballade says, after a moment of looking thoughtful about it. "It'd probably be all broken."

"Euphemism, Ballade," says Quint. "You know that's not what it really means."

"Yeah... but it'd be funny if it did. Then they'd have to have someone looking around trying to find who's been mugging paths."

John laughs warmly. "That is actually a pretty funny idea now that I think about it."

Ballade nods. "Funny to everyone except the poor beaten path."

"I'm really sorry about this, sir," Quint attempts.

"His name's John Watson," Ballade tells his smaller sibling, in attempt to be helpful. "It said so on the cards inside the wallet."

"... That's really not the best way to learn someone's name, Ballade."

"Your friend is right, it's both nosy and rude, but believe me you aren't the first people to learn my name that way,' John says.

"Can't really un-learn it," Ballade mutters.

All Quint can really think to do is try to make the 'introductions' a little less one-sided. "I'm Quint Wily, and that's Ballade."

"It's a pleasure to meet you too, mostly because you have no idea who I am."

"You don't know who we are, either," Ballade says with a grin. "It is kinda fun when people don't." He looks down to Quint, and adds, "Is that why you like doing this?"

Quint fidgets. "Well, part of it. It's nice to see new places, too."

John raises an eyebrow. "Am I supposed to know who you are?"

"Nope!" chirps Ballade. "Are we supposed to know who you are?"

"It's... more of a local thing, and we are far from home now," Quint tries to explain. He's really thinking the assignment would have been easier without Ballade. And while he does recognize Watson's name, he's thinking it has to be a coincidence... After all, this doesn't look like the Victorian era.

"Most people do," John says softly, "and no that is not a good thing."

"Do they run away screaming, try to scrap you, or try to get autographs?" Ballade asks. "We've had all three, and the last one's really creepy."

"A little of the first and last one," John admits, 'along with yelling nasty things at me."

Ballade just nods. "Uh huh. And they yell really stupid things sometimes, too. I'm not even 'sposta make toast without someone in the kitchen with me, and if I was a tin can I'd be smaller, and hollow... and made of tin."

"Ballade..," Quint tugs at the bigger boy's sleeve, something warning in his tone. He didn't want their 'cover' affected due to his younger brother making jokes about old slurs against robots. "Um, maybe we should be going to the library now."

"You mind someone like me walking along with you," John asks, "I've decided to head in that direction myself and I'd like to make sure you two get there safe."

Quint sighs. "All right." Then he looks up to Ballade and says something else... but it's in German, except for the last word that seems to be Japanese. If Watson understands that, what was said was 'If you'll be a little more careful not to blow our cover, younger brother.'

John's German is pretty good, he was posted there before being sent to the Middle East but he decides to humor the young bodies and play dumb. He's gotten very good at that. "Any time lads."

"You could stand on the corner of the street and say 'I'm a time travelling robot' and nobody here would believe you, Quint," Ballade points out, still in German.

Quint just sighs and shakes his head. "I'm sorry about this," he says to John in English, as he starts walking towards where he now thinks the library should be. "Ballade's just... kind of like this. I wouldn't have brought him with me," he adds a brief warning glance at the bigger boy, "but my older brother really needed a break."

"It's funny when Enker falls asleep at dinner, though," says Ballade, also switching back to English for now.

John fights a laugh. "Oh don't worry, my friend used to be just like your brother. If I can live with a head in my fridge I can put up with a strange but lovely pair of lads like yourselves."

Quint can't help blinking and making an 'eww' face at that. "Why was there a head in the fridge?"

"Well, if it had been anywhere else, it'd spoil," says Ballade, who didn't react as if it were odd at all.

Quint sighs. "Right. We're going to have to update the list of Things That Don't Go In The Fridge when we get home."

"There's already heads in the fridge at home."

"What?"

"Lettuce is called 'heads', and cabbage. It counts!"

John does laugh then. "He does have a point there," he says still laughing, "I meant a real head through and he put it in there because he was stripping it and experimenting on it."

"Just because it's not human doesn't mean something's not real," says Ballade, looking like he might get a bit sulky about that... for all of half a second until he adds, "Imaginary lettuce would make lousy salads."

"Would that even be proper lab conditions for an experiment?" queries Quint. The idea of a human head in a fridge might have icked him a bit, but now he's honestly curious.

"And what was he stripping it of? Was it wearing a hat?"

Quint's eyes go wide for a moment as he realizes the kind of 'stripping' that had crossed Ballade's mind.

"Uh no.....I was thinking more about stripping the flesh off of the skull," John says carefully.

"Huh. Then it's more like stripping the skull, not the head, because... wait, is it still a head when it's a skull? I ought to know that, the old man kept them everywhere... skulls, not heads. Most were just decorations."

Quint has to grab the back of Ballade's shirt to make sure the larger boy doesn't miss a corner and walk right out into traffic while he's thinking about that. It's a move that seems almost reflexive, as if he's done something similar many times in the past. "He really shouldn't keep that in with the food," is his comment. It seems the idea of a decapitated head doesn't really bother him, but a mess in the fridge does.

"I heard Pluto put rats in the fridge once," comments Ballade. "Terra made him get his own fridge."

"I'd thought of that," John says as if he's talked about this subject with other people before. "The flat was too small for much more than we already had."

"I hope he at least kept it in a storage container," Quint says, in a resigned tone that implies he expects the answer is no.

Ballade starts snickering at this, but it's a while before he can compose himself enough to mutter... "Headcase." Apparently this would be the proper name for said storage container.

John laughs. "He used one of my dinner plates and couldn't understand why I got mad at him."

"It's like Slash skinning rabbits indoors," mutters Quint.

Ballade's still snickering. "If he did that at our home, he'd be teased for weeks about 'zombie dinner'."

Quint can't help a snerk either. "Probably beginning with someone offering him silverware."

John laughs warmly. "I wish I had thought of that at the time maybe he would have understood better why I was cross."

"He's lucky there wasn't a house rule about having to eat anything you've put on your plate," says Quint, having the fuzziest memory of Roll insisting on something like that once.

"Maybe that's why he put it on someone else's plate," says Ballade.

"Mostly it was because we didn't have any containers at the time...I managed to stop him before he put plastic wrap on it."

"I thought most people tried to wrap their heads around things, not the other way around," says Ballade.

"... Wouldn't that maybe explode?" says Quint. "I mean, if he'd plastic-wrapped it and it started to decompose and the plastic wrap... I don't really know how much gas that would trap..."

Ballade gives Quint something between a hair-ruffle and a cuff to the head. "He put it in the fridge and then took all the squishy bits off, so it wouldn't have time to spoil."

"He even took the brain out," John says, "he put that on a separate plate just to be safe."

"Braaaaains," says Ballade, in goofy imitation of a zombie. He drops the act quickly and asks, "What kind of wine goes with brains?"

"Grey," says Quint, joking.

"Ewww."

John chuckles. "Don't know you you need red wine with brains, they are the only things that go together."

Ballade seems to give this serious consideration before he says. "Maybe we need to find someone from India and ask them. Isn't that where they were in that one really old movie where they had monkey brains for dinner? And humans are kinda like monkeys..."

"I don't think you should take anything in an Indiana Jones film too seriously... except for the 'don't bring a sword to a gun fight' bit." Quint snerks.

"I agree," John says, "after all cooked brains don't look like jello."

Ballade seems to think about that. "Yeah, cause jello's see-through. Blown-up brains are partly cooked, and that doesn't make them see-through, so cooking then all the way wouldn't either."

Quint starts to say something, changes his mind, and just hopes it's not much further to the library.

"... now I want jello," comments Ballade.

"I'll make some after we go home," says Quint.

John makes a face glad that Sherlock never made him look at cooked brains. He smiles as the library building appears ahead of them. "Looks like we are almost there."

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(sorry for late reply, real life got busy for a bit)

It's okay real life is busy for me too.

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