He turned to look at her, and she was looking at the wall. She was looking at the wall as Clyde looked at her, and her face was burning, and she wanted to sink through the floor. There was a horribly long silence; Margo might have been moving forward again, hoping that he would take the cue, go on, and they could somehow figure this whole zero gravity thing and then never see each other again, when he spoke.

“Hey, I'm just glad you've been nice about it.” he said.

That pretty much guaranteed a response. Albeit, a careful response.

"Have I been nice about it," she said, meeting his gaze evenly. "You wouldn't think- at least I wouldn't think- that is the case."

Honestly, she didn't know what to think of Clyde, or what to think of his response. He'd only spoken to break the silence, but it was...redeeming of him. The girl was shamed by her stupidity. She thought it worse that an older boy had caught her in the act, that he probably had formed an opinion of her already. But what if Clyde was shamed as well? It couldn't be an easy thing for him to admit his age- at first she had thought he might do it on purpose, but that clearly wasn't the truth. Life knew that with conflict, came a delusional, victimized attitude that ravaged both sides. Was that the case?

"I was dumb earlier," she said, "so, sorry. But it would be even dumber if I made fun of you for something you couldn't control, right? I'm just embarrassed because you didn't tell me before I made a complete fool of myself."

Clyde wasn't sure how he was supposed to respond. Margo seemed nice, but was overly apologetic and possibly insecure. That was the type of personality Clyde was afraid to step all over. He worried that if he said the wrong thing, he'd make her feel even worse.

“Sorry. I guess I should have said something earlier,” he told her, even though he didn't entirely agree with his statement. Going around and saying that to every person he met wasn't a great option in his opinion, but he hated tripping people up, too. What was he supposed to do?

“Anyways, maybe we should focus on our current situation,” he then spoke, in an effort to distract from the awkward topic.

"Sorry, I guess I should have said something earlier," he said.

She couldn't tell whether he really meant it or not, but she would have preferred that he did. She shifted her gaze uncomfortably. "Don't worry, I'm sure you just weren't thinking about it," she said. There was an awkward silence; she was glad when Clyde spoke again, clearly trying to move on from the topic.

"Anyways, maybe we should focus on our current situation."

"Good idea," said Margo, stretching out the words. She shifted her hand on the railing, or ladder, or whatever, waiting for Clyde to keep moving. If he was still up for that. "So, uh." She started, then realized she had no idea what to say. Gosh, she was bad at this.

It wasn't every day that Clyde met a person who acted this shy around him. While she seemed kind enough, it was going to be hard working with her if this awkward tension kept up. Jokes were supposed to help that, right?

Clyde stopped trying to scale the railing for a moment. “So, a guy walks into a bah,” he started with hesitation. “I mean, a pirate guy. And he has a steering wheel in his pants. The bahtendah asks why and he says, 'It's driving my nuts.'” Wait, that was not right. “Crap. I meant 'Me nuts.'”

And congratulations. He just failed at telling a basic joke and made himself look very stupid.

Clyde paused in his efforts to scale the railing, hesitating a moment before launching into a joke. "So, a guy walks into a bah. I mean, a pirate guy. And he has a steering wheel in his pants. The bahtendah asks why and he says, 'It's driving my nuts.' Crap. I meant me nuts."

"Oh," said Margo with a laugh, a little puzzled as to why he had decided to tell this joke now. Maybe he thought it would make the situation less awkward, an icebreaker of sorts? Well, then, two could play at this game.

"So, a kid asks his dad 'How were people born?' The dad tells him that Adam and Eve had babies, who grew up and had babies of their own, and so on," she began, hesitating slightly. "But when the kid goes to ask his mom, she says people were monkeys that evolved to become like they are now. The kid accuses his dad of lying, so the dad says, 'No, your mom was talking about her side of the family.'"

In Margo's defense, it had been funnier inside her head.

Clyde cracked a slight grin as he continued forward towards their target. Margo's joke was actually kind of clever, better than those dumb puns whose humor he could never understand. “That kind of sounds like my mom's side of the family.” The happy-go-lucky and somewhat slow-witted personality his mother had and his brother inherited seemed to run in her half. However much he hated his dad, Clyde was glad he instead received his serious, cynical attitude.

They were getting close to the supposed “gravity girl” now. The panic in her behavior was apparent, and Clyde was not sure how to go about helping her.

Margo shook her head but smiled at his remark. At least it seemed Clyde liked her joke, which, to be honest, was pretty lame. "I... wouldn't know," she replied, and would have gone on to ask further about his family, except that they were nearing the alleged gravity girl. So she wisely shut her mouth and paused to take stock of the situation.

Pulling Clyde to the side, she spoke quietly in his ear. "Say she," with a nod toward the panicked girl, who didn't seem to have noticed them yet, "is the one canceling the gravity. I could try to calm her down. I probably could. But do we want to just yet? It doesn't exactly look like she has a lot of control over what she's doing." Margo just didn't want anyone to get hurt, was all.

Unsure of what to do, she shrugged.

Clyde listened quietly. “Good point. We don't know what her powahs ah or how this gravity thing works,” he responded in a hushed tone.

He glanced to his side, where he could see several fellow students floating and struggling in the air, some several feet from the floor. From the looks of things, even a sudden switch to normal gravity would cause injuries. Crap. This was turning out to be more complicated that he'd initially thought. He placed his hand on his chin, trying to think.

“I don't know if asking her about this would hurt. What do you think?”

A nod at his suggestion. "That's a good idea."

She frowned as she swept her gaze over the room again. Shelves and other furniture stalled dangerously in midair, among a virtual minefield of floating books, magazines, pencils, and paper. From where she clung to the railing, Margo spotted more students stranded in midair. These people had really picked the wrong time to visit the library, hadn't they? The opportunity of a lifetime. All fun and games until gravity returned and somebody got killed.

"While you do that, I might as well try and get some of those guys to a slightly safer place," said Margo with a sigh. "Okay? I'll be right back."

Not really waiting for a response, she pushed off.

“Got it!” was Clyde's reply. After aiming himself at a column near the frightened girl, he pushed off of the railing and grabbed onto it. Now that he was closer, he could see that she was young – maybe seven or eight years old. Her hands were grasping her head in agony.

“So, ah you making the zero gravity field?” Clyde asked. The words were blunt, but he didn't want to waste time.

The girl nodded. “I can't control it...” she whimpered. Her eyes were fixed on the ground. “I want to go down. Too high.”

Well @%#$. Not only was she panicking about not being able to control her powers, but she was also afraid of heights.

“Maybe I could pull you down.” But after trying to reach out to the girl, it was evident that this wasn't going to work. “Crap. Yo too far away.”

He sure hoped Margo was returning soon. It looked like he could use her help.

For a couple of kids who couldn't be more than ten, the freckled twins sure were stubborn. They sat cross-legged in midair and wiggled their arms and legs and tried to out do each other, and it was hard enough to get them to stay in the same place long enough to hear Margo out. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes- it wasn't like she didn't get where they were coming from, but this was so not the time! "Look, we're going to turn the gravity back on in a minute, and you don't want to fall from up here, okay?"

In unison, "But-"

"Just hang on down here and be ready when the gravity comes back. Unless you want to go splat." That couldn't be a choice, right? At least Clyde seemed to be doing alright, judging by the fact that none of them had gone splat...yet.

A dozen or so carefully calculated jumps later, a slightly breathless girl found herself back beside Clyde and the still-freaking-out suspect. They joined hands and pulled her in, Margo with a curious expression. So, was that her...?

Now that Clyde and Margo had reeled the girl in, they were only one step away from reaching the ground. “Looks like we can just climb down. You ready?” he asked the girl.

There was no response. She was clinging to the column as if her life depended on it. He was beginning to wonder if her fear was a full blown phobia.

“It's all right, it's not that high,” Clyde assured her, starting to scale down the column to demonstrate. “It can't be more than seven or eight feet.”

Looking back, he probably should not have said that. Tears were forming in the girl's eyes, and she looked like she was ready to start bawling.

Now feeling really awkward, the age shifter turned to Margo. “Yo the empath. Maybe you'd be bettah at calming her down,” he whispered.

Clyde was not very good at calming little girls down, was he? Still, he would have been far more of an expert than Margo if not for one thing: her powers. For the first time in her life, she praised the heavens for being a sort-of-empath.

A detox of anti-fear wrapped itself around the three of them, and to her relief the kid took the sudden change in atmosphere rather well. Taking a shaky breath she began to climb down the column after Clyde, and Margo followed.

"See, you were doing fine. Kid needed a little change in attitude, was all." People had trouble listening right when they were scared, and seven or eight feet did seem like an awful height for someone not four feet tall. More quietly, she asked, "Did you find out if she's the one doing this?"

... That was when everything began to fall.

A strange, calmness overcame Clyde. The floating hazards, the possibility of falling, every worry somehow became more insignificant. It was when he saw the panicking girl relaxing that he realized Margo must have used her powers on her and gotten him as well.

“Yeah, it's her,” he replied. The sudden presence of gravity pulled him the rest of the way down the column, and he hit the ground with a small thud. “It's definitely her.”

As books and students alike hit the floor, the age shifter remained uncharacteristically unconcerned, not even jumping in surprise as a five inch thick dictionary crashed down right next to him. “This went well,” he stated simply to Margo, possibly due to the influence of her powers.