"It's a cartoon. It's a cartoon about dinosaurs that take over New York and get sold to the circus, and then mean Dr. Screw-Eyes kidnaps their kid friends and makes them into circus monkeys with techno-magic, and I don't know, I watched it like, four hundred times when I was little."

There's a machine that stamps coins to look like flattened images of Thunder Mountain. Howard walks around it, presses his fingertips to the glass, blinks. Then he grabs a piece of metal from the ground and starts to unscrew it. There may be useful gears and the like in there. And if there's one thing Howard's good at, it's breaking things down and making something new out of them.

He doesn't really use the one hand that has a bandage on it. He's noticed in the last few days that he doesn't have feeling in two of his fingers, that while he can feel in two of the others he can't actually move them without the help of his other hand. Whatever impaling it did is serious, though he guesses he should have expected that for skewering his own palm.

"So you're like, some kind of nerd or something? I mean, all brainy and stuff." Howard could have been a nerd, but being small and awkward and unathletic and a minority in a white school, he decided at a young age not to try and attract any more negative attention from his peers. That meant slacking, and for many years it served him well.