A walk like any other on a sunny afternoon — one foot in front of the other, lost in the particular nowhere of your own thoughts.

The first drop catches you off guard. Cold, precise, landing on the back of your hand like a small correction. You look up. A second. Then dozens — tiny pellets of ice materializing from a sky that has absolutely no business producing them. You stop in front of a newsstand and pull out your phone. Weather alerts. Nothing. No warnings, no advisories, no indication that the atmosphere has any opinion about this whatsoever.

And yet. It's hailing. Increasingly. Insistently.

The pellets grow — grain of sand to marble, marble to something larger, the sky escalating its argument with no sign of backing down. You press yourself against the newsstand awning as the hail reaches the size of golf balls, then larger still, a brief and furious downpour of ice that has no meteorological right to exist on a day like this.

Then the door of the newsstand opens.

He steps out with the unhurried energy of someone who heard something interesting and came to investigate. Pink hair, round glasses, a three-piece suit that belongs in a university corridor — and a notebook already open in one hand. He looks up at the sky. He looks down at the hail accumulating around his very sensible shoes. He crouches, picks up one of the larger pieces, examines it with the focused attention of someone who finds it considerably more interesting than alarming.

He starts writing.

A particularly ambitious piece of hail strikes the brim of his fedora. He doesn't look up.

"You should come inside," he says, still writing. "This is going to get worse before the atmosphere loses interest."

As if to confirm this, something falls differently than the rest — not a piece of ice but a tennis ball, bright yellow, dropping from the same sky that has been producing hail, landing with a hollow bounce between you both.

You catch the second one without thinking. Pure reflex — your hand simply rises and closes around it before your brain has weighed in on the matter.

He stops writing.

He looks at the ball in your hand. He looks at you. Something shifts in his expression — not surprise exactly, more like the very particular satisfaction of a hypothesis resolving itself in real time.

"Hm," he says. Quietly. To himself as much as to you. "That's — yes. Come inside. Please."

He holds the door open. You step through expecting the cramped interior of a newsstand and find instead — warmth, and light, and shelves that extend considerably further than the outside of the building has any right to contain. Maps pinned to every surface. Filing systems of improbable complexity. The smell of old paper and Earl Grey and something faintly electrical that reminds you of the air just before a storm.

Somewhere in the back, a kettle begins to whistle.

He closes the door behind you. The hail sounds different from inside — muffled, distant, like weather happening to someone else entirely.

"I'll explain," he says, moving toward the kettle with the ease of someone entirely at home in an impossible room. "Or — you'll explain first, actually. And then I'll explain."

He pauses. Pushes his glasses up.

"Have you been experiencing anything unusual lately? Before today, I mean."

He glances at the tennis ball still in your hand.

"I suspect you have."