[Admittedly, Palamedes is not out on purpose to locate Shoyo. That's not a slight; Shoyo is on his List, the List of people he thinks deserve to know a) he's not dead! and b) he's really sorry he was dead, for way longer than people tend to be dead (in this place). What happens in the end is that he wakes up on the Emperor's own couch (weird) and most of his List lives in that house (convenient, and weird), and then a hundred other things happened and his List was briefly put on pause.
So he isn't, technically, out looking for anyone in particular, at this specific time on this specific day. He isn't even out looking for portals - he doesn't want anything to do with that shit, no thank you - and so it's utter coincidence that he's passing by under a portal out of which a ton of sports balls suddenly fall.
One of them lands in front of him at high enough speeds to crack the cobblestone it lands on, which is the first concern. The second (and many more) concern is how many balls are falling out of the sky, given that Palamedes and running are not exactly best friends - he scrambles, more or less, trying to flatten himself against the wall of the nearest building rather than be out in the open, in the path of Balls and under the bizarre cacophony of Game Sounds he has no context for.
It's inching around a corner that he hears shouting coming from here, and not in the portals, and he leans out in surprise to see who exactly is running around so gleefully in this very dangerous hailstorm—]
Hey, don't—
[And that's when a volleyball bounces off the ground and into the back of his head, cutting him off with a wheeze and then a litany of half-garbled swears, knocking his glasses off completely.
barrels in
So he isn't, technically, out looking for anyone in particular, at this specific time on this specific day. He isn't even out looking for portals - he doesn't want anything to do with that shit, no thank you - and so it's utter coincidence that he's passing by under a portal out of which a ton of sports balls suddenly fall.
One of them lands in front of him at high enough speeds to crack the cobblestone it lands on, which is the first concern. The second (and many more) concern is how many balls are falling out of the sky, given that Palamedes and running are not exactly best friends - he scrambles, more or less, trying to flatten himself against the wall of the nearest building rather than be out in the open, in the path of Balls and under the bizarre cacophony of Game Sounds he has no context for.
It's inching around a corner that he hears shouting coming from here, and not in the portals, and he leans out in surprise to see who exactly is running around so gleefully in this very dangerous hailstorm—]
Hey, don't—
[And that's when a volleyball bounces off the ground and into the back of his head, cutting him off with a wheeze and then a litany of half-garbled swears, knocking his glasses off completely.
Hey, bud.]