The towering figure barreled through the crowd and into the former courier's shoulder. His eyes widened in surprise as he mumbled an apology, an accent heavy in his warm voice. "Sorry... I didn't... see you there. I was too busy thinking... I think. Can I make it up to you, Miss...?"
The heavy, wooden box in her hands didn't lend itself well to the action of falling over. Its contents had protested and rattled as her shoulder met concrete pavement, but thankfully leather caught the worst of the edges of the container. An involuntary squeak of lost air had marked her collision with the ground, but she was on her feet and crouching not a moment later, biting back initial shock to recover the item she had been holding.
Fingers closed around the old sides of the box, and as she moved to stand and address the klutz who'd crashed into her, it lost all integrity as first the bottom fell from place, and then the sides collapsed in without the reinforcement. Clearly the owner of the box didn’t use the contents enough to think of them as very useful.
Notebooks, textbooks. Ruler and protractor. Maps and a sextant - among other things. It left her speechless as the items tumbled onto the pavement. The whole event was almost graceful in how much failure it seemed to put forth.
Bewildered, she looked up at the boy -man, who had failed to pay any sort of due attention to his surroundings. Why was he mumbling? Did he not have the confidence to apologise to any degree of actual meaning? She huffed up at him, but her eyes flickered back downards, lingered upon the calamity in front of her. She spoke only as she was retrieving the items into a pile.
"You-.. You can tell me what's so important that it'd make you hurry like that, and what's so interesting as to take your thoughts from what's... uh.. actually, you know... kinda going on around you."
