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"But calculus doesn't use decimals." This wasn't working. Even Aiden could see that. He didn't really know what part in particular was tripping Persi up, though, so he could hardly fix it. "What was the point of all this, again?" He rubbed his forehead, only to knock hair into his face and have to shove it back out of the way. Hair in the face or misidentification. What a wonderful choice. "How would you actually give up possession of part of a painting or whatever anyway? Sell timeshares, and pass it off to each part-owner for however long, then haul it to the next one? That'd probably break it pretty quick. And numbers are things when I feel like calling them things," he added sharply.

"Definitely by accident. These are school-people, after all. There's only so much intelligence they can scrape up in a year, and then they have to make sure no one ever finds it." Of course, he was kind of going off the assumption that, since the teachers and general school staff were theoretically human and not badly programmed robots with flawed personality programs, they did indeed have some level of intelligence. It was entirely possible that this was a flawed assumption, but if he couldn't believe that teachers were human, how was he supposed to believe mutants were? Anyway, one of the teachers at his previous school lived a few corners away from his parents, and was just as normal as anyone else living in that area.

And now Persi was actually climbing a tree. Aiden sighed and leaned back against his. "You can't plant trees in cement. They'd have to have dirt around them for the roots. Besides, think about how safety-minded they are. I had a teacher tell someone in my class not to run with scissors last year. Like they'd plant climbable trees and not have something planned for idiots falling out of them." He looked at his roommate pointedly, but with one of them wearing sunglasses and the other climbing a tree, its probability of effectives was even lower than, well, the probability that Aiden was going to be able to explain the usefulness of calculus to Persi.

Aiden did have to admit that most teachers probably wouldn't notice if he were missing. It wasn't as if he made much of an impact, if any, in any of his classes, except maybe in math if the teacher felt like tearing into the class for doing so poorly when 'it clearly wasn't a hard test, because someone aced it.' "It's still not right and probably won't work," he insisted, though his voice had dropped a little and he wouldn't look at Persi - though, to be honest, Aiden not looking at people even when speaking to them was hardly news.

"What, you want to caveman how your profits for every single possible scenario?" Aiden asked, his disbelief write large across his face. "You're going to waste a ton of time and effort doing that. Once you have the basic equation, it's just a matter of putting in the particular parameters of the situation and then running the calculation. Getting the equation isn't even an issue, since you can just look those up most of the time. They're pretty standard." He probably shouldn't be wasting the time and effort to try to explain this to Persi. Even with Conri, it had really just become a set argument for when he got too lazy and didn't want to bother with his work. English, though, well. That was far more personal, and Aiden raised an eyebrow sharply at Persi. "Of course they seem like that," he said drily. "Can you imagine a class that was actually openly useful and interesting? It'd get shot down and cancelled by the end of the first week. School has to be shrouded in uselessness to survive." And maybe he should stop reading that manga before class. Some of the characters' takes on school, while humorous, had a potentially unfortunate tendency to make him repeat their arguments.

"Why would any school grow trees in the hallways? Or were they mini trees or something, as a science project?" He'd had to grow a bean plant earlier in the year. Well, he'd been assigned to a group and told to grow some. Were his erstwhile classmates taking care of his ugly scrawny hairy plant thing? Probably not. They'd probably tortured it to death or something. Or, more likely, just forgot to water it and let it die without even noticing.

"You want me to lie?" Sometimes, Aiden just couldn't believe Persi and the things that came out of his mouth. "I'm sure that wouldn't work. They'd probably send me to the infirmary to get checked out. I mean, think about some of the people here and what might happen if everyone started coughing or sneezing. Bugs running around normal schools are bad enough. Even if they probably wouldn't ask or send me off, what if they did? I can't pretend I'm sick."

"There are worse things than calculus," Aiden said reprovingly. "Besides, you can use it to figure out where things will intersect, or what route to take, or the price that'll get you the most profit for something. It's plenty useful." Yeah, Aiden also happened to be good at math, good enough to help his brother with stuff his own classes were a full year away from covering. "Even an artist needs to be able to do more than just their art anyway. No one starts out rich enough to hire people to handle the marketing and editing and publishing, or whatever is needed for the particular field." He had to toss in a quick generalizer there, else he get too specific to his own old plans. Persi didn't need to know that stuff.

"English isn't about writing sonnets," Aiden retorted, having had this particular case drilled into his head whenever he needed help with something english-y - which was essentially every assignment. "It's about learning how to actually get all the information contained in some chunk of communication out and into an understandable form. If you don't get what people are trying to say - and it's everyone you don't get, not just one, because sometimes people are useless at giving out information clearly - then you aren't going to get anywhere in life." Not that that had actually helped Aiden do any better in the subject. It just kept him from quitting before ever starting.

"Why would there be trees inside?" Aiden asked, confused once again. "Trees need lots of space and light and dirt and water. If the gym had enough dirt to grow trees, there wouldn't be any space for them to grow, much less enough light to keep them alive. Besides, where would people run and stuff if there were trees in the gym, especially in bad weather? Gym classes need gyms."

Did Persi go out and get washable markers just for this? Somehow, they rather seemed like the sort of thing everyone knew about but no one actually had lying around. Then again, there was a bit of a wide range of ages at this school, since some mutants showed up early and ended up dumped here before others, so maybe there was a supply of them somewhere or other.

Quarter after? He had a little bit of time, then. It wouldn't take him long to walk back, and it wasn't as if he needed to be the first one in the room. Sometimes it was safer to arrive at the same time as the teacher, depending on the particular classmates and their... energy levels.

Aiden's thoughts of minimizing risk in the classroom were horribly disrupted, however, and he gaped at Persi. "What? Why not?" he said, bewildered. Students went to class. That was why they were students, and that was why classes existed. Besides, the rules said so. Skipping class was not allowed, and that was that. He eyed Persi warily. "Probably to the end of the month, then exams," he said. "Maybe a little later. I don't know this place's plan. For all I know, there's a full summer term to keep everyone from getting bored over the summer and blowing the place up. Besides, even if there isn't much going on, you still have to go to class."

Why? HE WAS COVERED IN SHARPIE. And he really hadn't thought that Persi was that crazy. Or maybe that kind of crazy. At any rate, he didn't normally seem crazy enough to just randomly cover himself in sharpie. "Because I don't recall that being your usual colour," he said after a moment, and then paused. What if it was related to his mutation somehow, and Persi had just become that colour in the however many hours since Ai had last seen him? What if it was his actual skin?

Maybe he shouldn't have stayed up most of last night trying to get to the centre of the Spore galaxy. Or started playing Spore again, because he never could go back to a file he'd put down for more than a day or two, and anyway he always made it from cell to space in one sitting. At any rate, if he was being so paranoid about what was clearly sharpie somehow being actual pigment in Persi's skin, he needed more sleep. He would leave the subject alone, then.

Persi seemed quite happy to help in that regard, much to Ai's sudden alarm. He shot a horrified glance at the sketchbook still open on his lap, then back at Persi, then back at the sketchbook. The quickly deepening flush from his forehead to his ears to the back of his neck set the unchanging white of his scars out in stark relief as he hurriedly fumbled to flip the sketchbook closed and shove it under the backpack as if it didn't exist.

Between the heat and the unignorable presence of another person when he wanted to be alone, it was really not surprising that Aiden had fled outdoors. He'd been doing a lot of almost-thinking lately, and as such his moods had been extremely variable, ranging from almost content to black misery sometimes several times in a day. For the moment, with a gentle breeze filtering through the trees, a wash of heavily dappled sun on his face, and a soft collection of japanese instrumental music, almost content was by far the more accurate end of the scale.

Ai was leaning against the sloping trunk of an old, moss-choked conifer of some type. He really wasn't feeling very particular about it, but it was probably a pine of some sort. He smelled pine, anyway. He liked the smell of pine too. It was a relaxing, secluded scent. Pine meant privacy and as much solitude as he wanted.

A battered backpack with re-sewn seams (and re-sewn re-sewn seams in places) sat beside him, the main pocket's pull-less zipper left mostly open. The fabric was stained with both greens and browns, though mostly browns, and the zipper was even missing teeth in places. It did its job, however, though it was currently empty. Its contents were currently resting on top of the bag: a similarly ancient manga book easily an inch and a half thick, with most of the pages showing signs of having been dog-eared at one point or another, the spine creased and faded, and the outer covers curved with use; and a small ziploc bag with a handful of pencils and erasers. It had also held a small sketchbook of plain paper; that was currently on Aiden's lap, along with one of the longer pencils, with the open page an incomplete stylized version of the scattered trees around him. One some he had begun to pick out new buds, or the candles showing bright green against the darker green of old needles. The image also held a rough sketch of a squirrel that had darted past earlier, its eyes heavily shaded in an attempt to capture their black brightness, and a fanciful swirling of leaves and wind eddies so that he wouldn't have to draw the ground.

The crunching of footsteps on fast-drying pine needles crackled unpleasantly between the faint wind and his quiet music. Aiden looked up, intending to see if whoever it was was just passing through (in which case he could stay where he was) or showed signs of wanting to stick around (in which case he was finding somewhere else to sit), but found his roommate, of all people. Covered in... was that sharpie? Aiden stared for a moment before enough of his brain gave up on trying to process the sight that he realized his sunglasses were hanging off the neck of his shirt. He quickly slid them back on before peering at Persi again.

"Uh, hey Persi," he called carefully. "Is, uh, is everything all right?" His expression was distinctly one of disbelief, despite his attempts to soften it from anything that might bother his rather jumpy roommate.