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"How did it happen?" Iosif echoed, turning to Lucrezia. "Is interesting story I tell you that! I am sitting, I am drinking the morning coffee that I usually drink in the mornings, and I have newspaper open, okay? Okay, men suddenly break my door! They say 'Iosif Zaslavsky you been knowing a little too much!' and I say 'Oh that is just silliness I know of practically nothing!' but they keep talking and I kept talking and they spill my coffee! So this, of course, makes me very angry so I say 'Hey that was good coffee!' and I roll up newspaper." Iosif paused briefly to roll up an invisible newspaper he was "holding" and take a few deep breaths. It wasn't long before the man was rambling again, however. "Okay! I take newspaper, and then I do this!" Another brief pause in his story as he mimed slamming his newspaper over Grete's head.

His voice grew suddenly quiet as Iosif attempted to build suspense. "So these men, eh? They take out the guns and go 'Iosif Davidovich Zaslavsky you is a dead man.' and they fire two shots into my chest! Right here." Iosif clapped one large hand over his heart and made a face like he had been stricken. "I fall down! Boom!" Rather than toppling like he likely had during the real event, Iosif lowered himself delicately to the floor and sat Indian-style, grinning broadly. "And the mens leave! Ah, but old Iosif knows the one thing these men do not, eh? You see, I was wearing special vest, yes? It uh - it stops bullets, it was very expensive, made of silk! So these men leave the place and I leave too and they think I am very dead man but I am not, thankfully. And that is end of story!"

Taking a deep breath, Iosif bobbed back on to his feet and took his gun neatly from Grete, placing it back in its pouch by his hip. "So you see? Guns aren't nothing to be a-scared of."

Fairly certain that she had understood the entire story, Grete smiled. She had flinched, just slightly, at the imaginary newspaper coming down on her head. She hadn't expected it at all, and Grete hoped that no one had really noticed.

"Really? That's exciting!" Turning to Lucrezia, Grete felt the need to explain, "Well, really, any world is violent, no? Depending on where you are, or your situation. I'd be more shocked to see one that wasn't."

Grete smirked, and glanced down at the ground. One of the orange feathers had fallen there, and she brushed her foot against it, just to see if it would take to the sky. It didn't, though, and Grete glanced back up at Iosif and Lucrezia.

"So, have you got any more exciting stories?" Grete asked, a half-smile spread across her face, "Either one of you, actually. This is entertaining."

Lucrezia shrank under his touch and glanced up at him, not so sure she really wanted to tell a story. After his wonderful tales, she wasn't sure she could really come up with anything to top it.

"Ah..." she murmured, wracking her brain for anything suitable. A particularly embarassing moment sprung to mind. "So I grew up in a circus, vrai?" she said, trying to imitate Iosef's storytelling method. "When I was nine, there was a week when the Pope visted Rome, and we all knew there was a chance he'd come see the show. But we didn't know when. So, it's the last show of the week, and the pope hasn't shown up yet, so we just do the show and figure he's not coming."

She shrugged for emphasis and continued.

"So, my father and I go on to do our act, trapeze and silks, like I do here, and halfway through there's this big hooplah at the back of the tent. I'm maybe... a fourth of the way up my ribbon at the point? I get distracted, try to figure what's going on, lose my grip, et paf! Je tombe. I fall."

She paused again.

"When I finally figure out what's going on about thirty seconds later, I'm flat on my face in front of the Pope with him trying to figure out if I'm okay and the ringmaster looking like he's going to kill me."

She shifted her weight back and forth, hoping that had been a satisfactory tale, and looked at Grete. "Your turn."

It took a bit of effort, but Iosif managed to remain respectfully silent throughout both stories, a crooked grin pasted on his face. Soon as Grete had finished her story, Iosif piped up, mussing Lucrezia's hair under his large palm. "Pope, eh? I did not know that these pope like circus! Is a very good story! Except maybe I hope you did not hurt yourself when you falls." He was chattering easily, gesturing every so often with his hand - despite his poor English, conversation really was something that came naturally to Iosif.

Grete's story piqued Iosif's interest, however. He raised his thick eyebrows in Grete's direction and stuffed his hands into his pockets, rocking back and forth on his feet as if he were some sort of guilty schoolboy. "Dancing, eh? I like the dancing! 'Cause you've got the music and you've got the lots of foots!" Iosif himself was no great dancer, but he knew how. His problem wasn't really in his rhythm or footwork besides, it was mostly in his short attention span - he'd get bored and try something stupid that inevitably ended with him and his partner in a sprawled mess on the floor.

Eh, that was why he was a pianist and not a dancer.

"In the place where I played piano, there were lots of dance competitions! Many other things as well." He trailed off for a moment, looking thoughtful.

Grete stared at Lucrezia for a moment. Maybe she was just being overly sensitive due to the nature of their last meeting, but Grete felt a little patronized.

"Yes, I suppose that you would've had to be there," She said flatly.

She then raised one eyebrow in curiosity at Iosif, and she smiled at him. Who have thouht of him as a person to enjoy dancing? Or, to play the piano, no less? The fact that Lucrezia didn't know what a piano was didn't quite register with Grete, as she took it as just surprise that Iosif knew how to play.

"You play piano? Really?" Grete asked excitedly, "I find that pianos are really, really lovely. So, did you play in a club, or something else?"

Lucrezia was quickly losing track of the conversation as it moved on to things that she was quite certain didn't well... exist... where she came from. She rubbed her eyes, trying to make sense of it all, and then looked back and forth between Iosif and Grete.

"What's piano? And why would you be playing it inside of a weapon?"

Iosif had absolutely no idea what Lucrezia was talking about. He raised an eyebrow in her direction, smile fading into something somewhat uncertain - had she said something funny and was he expected to laugh, or was she genuinely confused? The "club" reference was completely lost on Iosif (to him, a club was simply "a stick I use to hit things") and her whole question made little sense to him; thankfully Grete fielded the question, and Iosif sharpened his grin to its full brilliance in a matter of seconds.

"You not heard of pianos?" Iosif asked, somewhat incredulously. He found this almost hard to believe. Perhaps it was because a piano had always been present in his early life, but it was even more likely that Iosif simply wasn't that well acquainted with the concept of different worlds and the like yet. If he had heard it, he dismissed it only as a joke - as far as he concerned, everyone was from the year 1928, and if they acted strange then that was their own problem.

"Little hammers hit strings!" Iosif added, in a desperate attempt to properly describe a piano. He burst into a string of rapid fire Russian, attempting to pluck from his native language a means of describing the instrument that had shaped his youth. Eventually he came up with, "You hit a button and a hammer falls and it makes a sound and the sound is very pretty."