"Yeah, most people don't want to hear It's A Small World for hours." That refusal Persi wasn't offended by; it was absolutely true that most people didn't want anything stuck in their head. Not that he'd ever offered to anyone but Irri, but still. Most people didn't want anything stuck in their head even if it was mutation-backed.

The handshake was... a bit awkward, but more like Aiden was suddenly distracted than like he was angry. Which was confusing, but Persi would rather at least sort of get along, so he let it go and backed up once the handshake finished.

There was more awkward silence, and Persi glanced around to try and find a distraction. His eyes fairly quickly landed on what looked like... a comic book? Only novel-book shaped, except thinner, and the drawings were... odd. Stylized, which basically all drawings were, but this was not a style Persi had seen before, outside of art classmates that no one took seriously. "What's that?" And why does it look weird? he did not say. Getting along was a priority, after all.

Aiden got music in his head readily enough without outside help. Fortunately, it had been quite a while since he'd had anything as annoying as It's a Small World stuck in his head. He would much prefer to keep it that way.

And awkwardness continued. Aiden slowly turned himself and his chair back and forth, just a few inches, by planting the ball of one foot on the floor and rotating his ankle around it. Back and forth, back and forth - wait, what was Persi talking about? Ai twisted around to follow his attention. There wasn't anything spectacular over there, just the books and games he'd just sorted.

Well, he supposed there were plenty of people who didn't know manga, or at least not enough to recognize it. Aiden hesitated, torn between relief that they could stave off the awkward silences for a little while longer, shyness and general uncomfortability about explaining what manga was to someone who probably had a host of preconceived notions about it, and maybe just a little interest in discussing something that interested him. The relief won, more or less.

Stretching across the desk, Aiden pulled the first volume of one of the series out of the stack and offered it to Persi with only a slight breath of hesitation. "It's manga," he explained. "Japanese comic books. They're more like normal novels than english comic books thought." The particular series Aiden had passed over was an action-y story that followed a soldier on various dramatic adventures, though there was a bit too much blatant chess imagery to be Ai's favourite series.

Oh good, Persi wasn't in trouble for asking. He'd kind of wondered, especially when Aiden didn't answer immediately, but he wasn't, so it was okay. Asking what weird books were was fine, apparently.

"Why not just call them comic books?" Persi was pretty sure that European comics were just called comic books, with a note that they'd been translated from French or Spanish or whatever. He accepted the book, and immediately started turning it over in confusion. The front cover looked like the back and the back looked like a front, and both of them had a mix of English and probably Japanese writing, along with the weird style of art. "Do you have to learn Japanese to read them?"

He opened the book to the first page, and discovered that it was in fact translated to English. It still made no sense. He read over it twice before looking back at Aiden. "I don't get it." Why did the... girl? Probably? Why was a girl wearing armor? And why did armor girl's shadow have nothing to do with what she actually looked like and instead match a chess knight?

"What? Well, er, there are a whole lot fewer superheroes in manga," Aiden said, floundering a little. "It - well - uh. They're just different, okay?"

Belatedly noticing Persi's confusion, Aiden realized that a bit more explaining would probably be helpful. "Japanese is read from right to left, not left to right like english, so even translated manga starts at what would be the back of an english book. I don't read enough japanese to actually read the originals, though. These are all official translations." Ai, of course, also had an external hard drive for all of his scanlations. That would be the grey one on top of the larger black one, which was currently plugged into his computer and held his games.

Did he... have to explain the plot too? He twisted to check just what he had passed over. "That one's about a female soldier. Still not sure why the author went with all the chess stuff, but there're some pretty interesting battles in it." He shrugged. "Some of them do get a bit odd, but they're interesting enough for it."

"Okay." Persi still didn't get it, but that was not the sort of explanation you argued with. Comic books from Japan were not comic books from Japan, they were mangah. Got it. Persi was pretty sure he could remember that, definitely he could when he was awake. So it probably wouldn't be an issue.

"Oh." That... well, took some thinking about, but made sense. It explained the covers, anyway. And when Persi thought about it, he supposed it made sense that other languages would write weird, and their books would match them. "Why not just flip everything, if you're changing the writing anyway?"

Female soldier. Alright then. "So it's scifi?" That was normally where female soldiers showed up, with the aliens and laser guns. Persi closed the book, flipped it over, and reopened it to what was apparently the actual first page. "...Why is there a giant bubble gum bubble with a face?" And why was it talking, and why was the background apparently made of blurred ovals? At least what it was saying... well, didn't make more sense, but reading the next few pages started to.

"That.. would.." Aiden paused for a moment to gather his scattered thoughts. "Flipping everything around would take a lot more time and money than just translating it," he soon continued. "It'd lose some of the effect too, so it's really not worth it." Plus it would take even longer to get to the north american markets than it already did, and no one wanted that. Bad idea all around.

"No, medieval fantasy," he corrected. Where'd Persi get sci-fi? There weren't any robots or space-ships or guns - not even muskets. It wasn't even really heavy or high fantasy. There were just some weird animal-type things... not that that was anywhere near unusual for manga. Manga that didn't have any weird or mythical animals were far rarer than those that did. "Oh, that. It's, well. It follows the main character around and makes snide remarks." Seeing Persi starting to read, he shifted a little awkwardly in his chair. "You can borrow them, if you like," he offered, trying his very best to be friendly. "So long as they don't get messed up or anything. It'd be kind of hard to replace them." Well, if he had money it would only be an annoying hassle. Telling this near-total stranger that he was broke and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, if not the rest of his life, somehow didn't seem like the brightest idea. Besides, it was personal information. Persi didn't deserve that information. He was going out on a limb enough letting him borrow his books, but even that had a bit of an ulterior motive. If Persi were busy reading manga, he wouldn't be talking or prying or breaking things or being a potentially dangerous pest. Indeed, hopefully he would even go crash on his bed to read right now! Then Ai could be torn between getting the heck out of there for a while and keeping his stuff supervised.

"Okay." Persi could see that; he'd probably be a bit annoyed if someone flipped all of his drawings around, too. He didn't need to ask why not flip the order of the pages, so the pages were right to left and the book was left to right. That would just be too painful for his brain.

Fantasy? But there weren't female soldiers in the middle ages. Of course, there weren't in Europe; maybe there had been in Japan. That might explain it.

That did not explain the snark bubble, though. Nor did Aiden's answer. That might be because there was no explanation for a snark bubble, which would not particularly shock Persi. Because, you know, snark bubble. It didn't seem very explainable.

...Unless the author... artist... whoever, had just been high. That might explain it.

"Oh! Um." That... was also an unexpected offer. Persi really had no idea anymore if Aiden hated him or liked him or what. "If you don't mind? Thanks...." Once it was confirmed that the offer was actually meant (or at least, repeated), he glanced around, then backed over to the empty chair, perched carefully on the edge of it, and began reading. While being careful to open the book as little as possible, since opening books too wide was supposed to damage them, and Persi had no idea how wide too wide was.

So. Persi was still looking pretty confused. Well, either he'd get over it and start figuring things out or he'd give up on the book and probably find something to do that would make the rest of their time together even more awkward and annoying than it was probably already going to be. Ai was really going to have to work on his people-ignoring skills if he wanted anything to be at all normal, or maybe find somewhere that was actually private and never intruded upon. Maybe somewhere on the school grounds, once the weather had dried up and stabilized a bit. Computers and books didn't like wet, after all. For now, though...

Once Persi was moving over to his side of the room (even if Aiden was having a little bit of a hard time designating it as such, seeing as how up until now the whole room had been his own side of the room), Ai made up his mind. He swung around in his chair, booted his computer back up with a well-placed toe in the tower's power button, and within minutes had a new Dragon Age II file started - on Nightmare. He had yet to play seriously on the hardest difficulty setting, but now seemed like the perfect time. So, sound jacked and full noise-cancelling powers engaged in his headphones, Aiden set about doing as little dying and as much forgetting that there was someone else in the room as he possibly could.

The fact that just about anything could now kill him in-game without batting an eye probably helped with the concentration factor.