Charles Austin Miller

Answer: While it's not unusual for musicians to try out new instruments (playing a few rifts and even entire compositions) in a music shop, Beethoven's extended sampling-keyboard performance went wild, drawing an enthusiastic mall crowd into the relatively small music shop. The shop manager no doubt felt overwhelmed and called in mall security to clear out the shop before any damage and/or theft occurred. Keep in mind that the security team was already scrambling to respond to several simultaneous disturbances throughout the mall, all caused by 7 strangely-dressed oddballs (more than half of whom only spoke obsolete dialects and ancient languages). The time-travelers were, thus, probably all perceived as one group of pranksters or escapees from a mental institution.

Charles Austin Miller

Chosen answer: It was critical to the storyline to keep all of the historical figures together, which is the primary reason they were all arrested at once. We might speculate that mall security received a number of reports of "odd" characters wandering around the mall. In addition to the shenanigans of Billy and Genghis, Beethoven was pounding out a raucous keyboard performance, Joan of Arc essentially hijacked a dancercize session, and Abraham Lincoln was accused of theft and fled from a vintage photography studio. Importantly, Socrates and Freud made rather strange advances on a couple of (probably underage) teenage girls in the food court, which would surely be enough to get two elderly men arrested in this day and age.

Charles Austin Miller