Welcome to Gaia! ::

That was...cute, albeit in a way that probably would have frightened anyone but Fred. He wiggled his fingers at the critter again, grinning a little stupidly, before returning his attention to Rowan. "Huh? --Oh, yeah. It's, uh, a real thrill to see them alive, y'know? Way better than dinosaurs." A hint of color crept into his face as Rowan mentioned sex, and he cleared his throat, like any proper heterosexual male would. "Well, uh, that's something that could, uh, be fix--oh, lemme help you with that."

Catching on to what she needed just as she asked, Fred took the offered end of the sheet in hand, holding it perhaps a little too tightly. "So just dunk it in and ask him to swim over onto it?" he asked. "I mean, I used to have goldfish and man they were hard to catch even if you needed to change the water or something..." Sidelong glance, darted at Equinox; a shadow of that same stupid grin as before at the trilobite.

The phone on his hip crackled again and he nearly dropped the sheet. Came Sajid's voice, out of breath and distorted: "Fred? Are you there?" A pause, before Fred could go for the phone, then, in Punjabi: "Don't answer. There's a man out here asking the wrong kind of questions. I moved the car. Come out the back way." Click.

Fred looked at Rowan over the sheet. "Uh," he said, then, "we need to go out the back way. Someone's out there."

Fred's pained expression mirrored Rowan's scowl. "Almost every time we do this," he said, morosely. "Somebody comes along to bug us about it." He followed her lead with the sheet, managing not to let his usual clumsiness catch up to him as they lifted Equinox out of the tank and swung him over to his temporary home.

"How, uh, heavy is it?" he asked, indicating the cooler with a nod of his head. "Are you gonna need help getting it back upstairs and outside?"

Was it safe? Fred looked a little nervous at that, chewing his lower lip and glancing down at the phone at his side. They hadn't gotten an all-clear--but on the other hand, no one had come down to batter down the door and kill all three of them, and that was definitely a good sign as to their safety. He turned back to Rowan, taking a couple of steps over to stand by the cooler and hunkering down enough he can loop his fingers through the nearer handle.

"Let's, uhm. Let's get this guy up the stairs into the hall, and I'll go out back and check with Sajid, okay?" he suggested, as a compromise. He hesitated a moment, a little distracted by her, before offering a vaguely worried little smile.

The gangster impression made Fred laugh--a little hysterically, but he seemed glad for it. He took on as much of the weight of the cooler as he could manage, now using one hand, now using both and trying not to slosh water over the edges. The sight of Cher made him perk up visibly, and the smile he gave her was goofy in its sheer relief.

At that very moment, the phone at his hip chose to crackle. It took all of Fred's mediocre will not to drop his end of the cooler and grab for it. Instead, he settled for bobbling it a bit before heaving a big sigh. "Okay. Let's, uh, get this show up the stairs and then I can check back in with Sajid; he probably just push the talk button on his phone or something..." The babble showed little sign of stopping, even as he began edging toward the stairs.