[Liem, with a faintly raised eyebrow, regards the borderline-guilty look that the man shoots his way and wonders if he ought to invest in a pair of clickier shoes. He wasn’t intending to sneak up on him, but this would be far from the first time he’d walked up to someone and managed unintentionally to catch them unawares. It’s not the most reassuring air to cultivate.

Well, that’s a shopping trip for another day. He drifts closer to observe the book’s open pages, which appear to be filled with unintelligible scrawlings. Perhaps they could be taken as the work of a mad cultist, but they do look rather more like the scribblings of a very small child.

He hums faintly.]

I was going to say that they probably hoped you’d just be polite about it. You know: graciously accept their rubbish and walk it to a bin when their back was turned.

[His assumption had been that this person had a whole trunk’s worth of garbage and didn’t care to pay the fine to have it all taken away by the city, so they needed to pawn it off on strangers.

But.]

In that case, though, I have to say that’s the most credulous con artist I’ve ever seen.