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Side benefit to making himself as busy as possible: he didn't have to see Persi's shirt hit the ground separate from his actual body. A slim benefit, to be sure, but still.

He was almost breathing again when Persi asked if he was okay, and he looked up with perfect timing. Well, perfectly bad timing. He watched Persi drop from the tree, almost in slow motion, and for a moment his face started trying to turn from red to white. Persi had fallen out of the tree? Oh no now he was going to get hurt and Aiden was going to have to deal with it and it was going to be so nasty and oh look a perfect landing. Persi wouldn't have landed like that if he had fallen. There was no way he had reactions like that.

And so Aiden relaxed. He even managed to say, "I'm fine," with only mildly horrendous awkwardness. And then he noticed that Persi's shirt was entirely missing now. He may have also set some kind of record for how fast his head dropped back down. Come on, he could deal with this. So his roommate wasn't wearing a shirt. No biggie. So he had outlined every single muscle for whatever stupid reason he'd given before. That was okay. It was just weird. Just weird.

Nope, not working. Okay, maybe a tiny bit. Or maybe he could breathe again because he'd only got a tiny glimpse of Persi's chest, not a big one. That could be it too. Except he just caught himself peeking sideways at Persi. Nope, internal pep talks were a no-go. That was one thing clarified.

"Mental help," Aiden said beneath his breath. Maybe Persi would benefit from another kind of mental help. Of course, at the rate things were going, Aiden was going to need mental help too. Maybe it would just be best if everyone got help. At the very least, it might filter out the dangerously crazy and the annoyingly stupid, as well as identify those with lesser forms of those most unfortunate conditions.

What was Persi getting up for? Was he going to be sensible and come back down?

... No, what was he thinking? This was Persi, after all. Aiden's second reaction was soon proved correct as Persi worked his way to the other side of the tree.

...

Now what? Ai felt very awkward sitting here by himself now. What was he supposed to do? Get up and go to the other side so he could still see Persi's face? Might seem a little creepy to do that, though. It wasn't as if Aiden particularly cared about Persi's face. It was just really awkward and rather rude to be talking to someone from behind them, even if they were the one who had turned around.

Well, at least now he was kind of facing Aiden agai---

"What are you doing?" he exclaimed, stunned. Why would he hang upside down? He must have slipped. It didn't look like he had slipped, but he must have. Why would he do that intentionally? He wouldn't have, would he? And why couldn't he at least keep his shirt o---

Undoubtedly now the brightest thing around, colourwise, Aiden stared at Persi another moment or two with only mild bug-eyedness (fortunately behind his sunglasses) before abruptly looking down to fumble with his backpack, trying to shove everything into it and not look at Persi not look at him not look not let him see how red his face must be because it felt like someone had shoved it into an oven and it was melting off his face with the heat and maybe even hopefully not hear the strangled squeak that had turned into a brief coughing fit from the overall abuse on his systems. Why couldn't Persi just be normal and go awaaaaaay?

A million dollars. An actual person with an actual million dollars.

Well, that explained why Allison could afford to give away sunglasses. Not why she lived in that place, but at least the sunglasses. Aiden belatedly realized he was staring at Cafas and looked back at his bowl. Just... wow.

"I think I'm safe from having to make that call," he said rather weakly. He was far too unknown (and uninterested in acting) to be asked to do something like that. Plus he'd probably be really, really bad at it. Seriously, he didn't know how to act around real, everyday people half the the time. What was he supposed to do if he was pretending to be someone else, while dealing with people he didn't know who were pretending to be people that didn't even exist? It would be horrible. But the money.

"Yeah, that was the place." Not much of a sanctuary if there were murderers there. More like a total death trap. Moving there would be suicide. Potentially of the Schrödinger's cat variety to anyone who knew him. Worrisome was also a bit of an understatement. "Personally, I think the good people are just a little bit insane, considering some of the, er, worrisome people." Maybe worrisome was the best word after all. He really didn't want to actually call Isabel or anything or anyone else, 'extremely disturbing,' 'scary' or 'terrifying enough to make him run away as fast as he possibly could...' much less all three at once.

A pinecone falling to the ground was Aiden's first warning that Persi was indeed in the tree. Well. He definitely wasn't going to be able to hide from Cafas. Ever. Not even if his life depended on it.

Okay, he really hoped it wouldn't ever come to that. No matter how messed up his life was, he didn't want it to end. There were usually enough high points, or potential for high points in some distant future (dim as they currently seemed) to make continuing on worthwhile. And he really didn't want to find out what happened after death or if people were actually judged. Plus there was the whole painful part of death. It was probably extremely painful. Unbearably painful.

Yeah, best to avoid the whole thing.

Oh, he wanted to deny it, did he? "Oh really? Then why is it torn now?" No, Persi wasn't going to get out of this one. "Did you think I wouldn't notice, or did you just not notice? The others I've lent you had better not be damaged too." He leaned back to stare up the tree. Wait, was that Persi? Aiden glared at him. Yeah. Persi. The roommate that had made his life so precarious by being enough of an idiot to make a teacher, specifically the teacher somewhere behind him probably thinking of ways to make one of them utterly miserable, mad enough to go looking for him in the woods. In the morning. In this heat.

Mouthing off at a teacher? Sounded like Persi, though Aiden wasn't entirely sure he believed his roommate had sufficient guts to actually do more than talk about mouthing off to a teacher. Persi not differentiating between a teacher and someone who'd bust his face for being an idiot? Considerably more believable. "He actually tried to hit you?" Now that was far less believable than Persi being rude, and Ai's disbelief showed. Seriously, the kid who jumped if Aiden so much as looked at him wrong (sure, he'd done most of his jumping in the first few days they'd lived together, but the impression had stuck)?

On the other hand... attempting to hit Cafas had clearly not turned out well for Persi. And Cafas now wanted to include Aiden in this 'self defence training.' His survival instinct suggested that finding a way out of this arrangement sooner rather than later might be beneficial to his health, if only until he could figure out how he was supposed to heal himself. He'd really rather not be bleeding to death before that. Or have broken bones. Or, well, anything more serious than a bruise or twisted ankle, and even that was a stretch, especially if it was inflicted by other people. Aiden could take it, sure, but that hardly meant he enjoyed it.

Too bad that pulling an apparent Persi and hiding clearly wouldn't work. Even if Aiden managed to get away from Cafas like he had from Isabel, Cafas now knew where he lived, and lived in the same building. There would be no escaping from him, and putting off impending doom only worked if you just needed the time to finish some über weapon or something. Nothing like that was going to help Ai, so it was looking like he would just have to suck it up and endure it.

And maybe do his best to stay on Cafas' good side. That was probably the smart thing to do. At the moment, that apparently meant doing his very best to lead Cafas to Persi before Cafas felt like getting annoyed with Aiden. Let Persi take the force of anything Cafas wanted to dish out, since this entire thing was his fault. Peering around as they walked, Aiden squinted to pull details out of the dark world. Footprints... scuff marks... Well, the ground had been dry enough that any real footprints wouldn't be from Persi, at least not on this trip. Maybe there'd be a bit of one in the dust, but there wasn't much dust here. Fresh scuffs? Possible, possible. Aiden wasn't familiar with actually tracking anything, but logic and common sense had their place in everything. And sharp eyes too - Aiden paused a moment before moving sideways past a couple of trees to a raised root that was mostly covered in moss. At least, it had originally been covered in moss, but there was a large scrape down one side that looked fairly recent to Ai. From Persi? Not necessarily. There were plenty of other people who came through here. He poked the fallen moss. At least it was still springy, and not dried up and dead. In this heat, moss turned to firestarter very quickly.

"That's not going to help you figure out how many you want to make, though," Aiden retorted. "Making more is going to cost more, and after a certain point you won't be making any more money by selling more prints, assuming that you can even sell more and that people aren't just going to get sick of seeing it or figure that it's so common it must not be worth much."

"Could you actually kill someone with a pin?" Aiden asked, suddenly concerned. "A normal pin, not one that's been messed up or modified by anything, and being used on someone who isn't insanely prone to dying from every little thing." His concern warred with curiosity, though, for from a story-making perspective, an interesting method for fighting effectively with pins could be useful. On the other hand, if Persi knew how to kill people with a pin and didn't just make up some random hot air farce of a tale, he was officially dangerous to be near and Aiden was going to strongly request a roommate change. Immediately.

"Other than tripping and falling on it, a knife isn't going to accidentally kill people. Mangle or remove fingers, maybe, if you aren't paying attention while you use it, but otherwise nothing serious is likely to happen. Certainly not anything fatal." The probability of that was most certainly extremely low. Aiden didn't want to think of the specifics - that was how low the probability was - but he knew that it was exceedingly unlikely to happen. "Just about anything and everything is capable of causing death anyway," Aiden said dismissively. "Brain someone with a chair or textbook. Shove animal fur in the face of someone seriously allergic to them. Make someone keep drinking water until they explode or turn to jelly or whatever it was that they turn into."

Cafas was looking for Persi? Just his luck. Get his nice, cool sleep interrupted because his roommate probably skipped class again and got noticed, and had to pay for it now. Served him right. "He went off to climb trees again," Aiden replied. Hesitation over ratting out his roommate to a teacher? Nope. Not one bit.

Wait, what? Staring at Cafas was now called for. How did he get himself signed up for remedial gym? He might do the bare minimum in p.e. classes, but he did the stuff, and it wasn't like he needed the exercise. And why self-defence training? "...What?" he managed to ask, dearly hoping that he had heard Cafas wrong. "What for?"

And he was not wearing a t-shirt in public. Maybe if he could find one that was only short-sleeved on the left, but that would probably just draw more attention. The point was to reduce attention. Still, if Cafas was going to make him exercise in this heat, this particular shirt was probably going to give him heat stroke. So, with a long, wary look at Cafas, he closed the door and dug around for some sort of compromise. A pair of long shorts would help, but he really didn't have all that many long-sleeved shirts that were lighter than the one he was already wearing.

Grimacing, he pulled out the one that would probably be his best bet, though once he had it on the sleeves felt a little too short for comfort and he had to keep tugging the right cuff down to make sure his wrist was still completely covered, and while it didn't feel any cooler than the previous shirt he felt that it looked cooler. Besides, he simply was not going out there in a t-shirt. He pulled the door open again, probably radiating abject misery. He certainly felt miserable about this whole thing. Remedial gym in this heat. When he wasn't even failing gym or anything.

This was all Persi's fault.