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"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.

The relief Aiden felt at Cafas being diverted from his inadvertent comment was weak, but it was still relief. He ignored what seemed to be a momentary hesitation on Cafas' part, though, and let himself believe that what he had muttered had indeed gone unheard.

Now, if Aiden had sprung from a preachy-churchy family, rather than just a conservative one, he could have fired back with a few comments about evolution being a theory, a false theory, and how God had made everything perfectly to begin with and it didn't need changing, thank you very much, and so any modern mutation was just an insult to His work.

Aiden's family was just conservative. He didn't have that defence against Cafas' logic. As such, his expression as he shifted awkwardly in his chair was distinctly that of a kid who knew what he was being told was the intelligent thing, but really, really, really didn't want to agree with it, because that would require both a restructuring of his thought patterns and beliefs and the dismissal of everything he had been taught by his parents on the subject. What kid didn't trust his parents to do the right thing?

Even when they send you off without even going to your brother's funeral?

Well, what would the neighbours think? It would be very disruptive and lead to all sorts of nasty gossip.

Well... not that anyone in Aiden's family had actually ever shown all that much care for what the neighbours thought. Up until everything went wrong, they really had next to no dealings with their neighbours. It wasn't as if they saw them all that regularly, and as for gossip, well, people at school liked to talk anyway. They'd pick up a topic for a while, then they'd get tired of it and never bother bringing it up again.

Cafas was clearly waiting for an answer, so Aiden eventually glanced up, not quite realizing that his head was still lowered enough that there was a chance Cafas could see over his sunglasses a bit, and had to admit that Cafas just looked like a guy. A guy with pink hair, sure, as if that weren't weird enough, but just a guy. He shrugged. "No..." he said softly. Stupid logic.

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.

Aiden was used to being told to shut up. He wasn't used to taking it from random people he didn't know, but making a fuss over it wasn't going to help anything. After all, he didn't have to worry about accidental destruction.

He did pause over the last of his sorting, the few dozen manga and handful of game cases now neatly stacked in order, a scattering of writing implements and loose paper tucked into a drawer, and his headphone cord disentangled while his computer slowly shut off. Was the guy serious?

After a few long moments of disbelief, Ai risked a quick glance around his shoulder. Persi was dressed. Good. He dropped into his chair and spun it until he was facing him. "You can't be serious," he said, at a loss for other words. At least he wasn't dangerous. His mutation might be spectacularly useless, but at least he wasn't going to cause random havoc and disasters with every passing moment. "You get things stuck in people's heads?" Okay, fine. Aiden wasn't going to die by accident from his roommate. That improved the situation a great deal - so much so, that he found himself sticking his hand out in a sort of peace offering; even Ai could tell that Persi was kind of a wreck. "I can live with that," he said in what was (sadly) the most cheerful voice he'd found in the past.... three weeks? And it was only a little forced, because he had to live with the guy for at least a while and didn't want things getting too awkward.

Aiden blinked. Steel.... gas? Um... sure. Probably best to just go with that one and not think about it too much. He did his best to do just that and took a bite of Cafas' pasta. Hey, it was pretty good.

He was still chewing when Cafas went all backstory-monologue mode on him. Right off the bat, Aiden pulled out two major flaws with the story, if the purpose was to 'help' Aiden (like there was actually anything that could really help). One, nationality. Aiden was pretty sure that Australians were kind of crazy. Their ability to be online at insane hours, thanks to their geographical location, was particularly annoying. Two, knowing he was a mutant. Yeah no. Aiden had been quite happily normal, thank you very much.

Anyway, the story continued. At the mention of a car crash, though, his stomach churned violently and he set his fork down with mildly excessive force. This was entirely unrelated. Entirely and completely. He forced himself to scrutinize the texture of the pasta, but it didn't help; he reluctantly returned his attention to Cafas' words, willing to risk hearing worse things in order to keep the ultimate worst things from rolling through his brain. Run out of the house. Nearly killed by his family and friends. Probably the only thing that had saved Aiden from that - he bit down hard enough on the thought that he pinched the side of his tongue and tasted blood. Physical pain was okay. Even if it would go away soon enough, however his bloody life-saving power worked, for the moment it helped.

By the end of Cafas' story, though, despite the feel-good pep talk nature of his conclusion (which, honestly, Ai didn't really listen to all that closely, having far darker thoughts trying to claw their way into the light of his conscious mind and give themselves substance), the sting of his tongue had faded past useful distraction and he was resorting to digging the nails of his left hand into his thigh with all the force he could muster. Stupid story with its stupid reminders. He didn't want to think about car crashes, or specific car crashes, or people dying in car crashes, or people he knew dying in car crashes - stop. Just stop. He pushed his hand under his thigh to still it. He could hold the thoughts off. He'd managed it this long, even with stupid inadvertent reminders. He could.

Seeing Cafas filling two bowls equally, Aiden snagged a second bowl while Cafas was over at the table and dumped the other half of the pudding into it. With a spoon stuck in each, he carried them over to the table and hesitantly set one down near Cafas before taking a seat across from him.

Ai lifted his head at the distant sound of a ringing phone, though he felt absolutely no obligation to go try to find it. What would he do if he did? Nothing helpful, certainly. Cafas, though, made to leave before the ringing cut off. So he was more than just someone who lived here? He looked to old to be a student, anyway, but he couldn't possibly be old enough to be a teacher. Not that he had time to ponder the mystery; Cafas' question immediately had him staring at the table, his unused fork unsure if it should be clenched or held slack and so lost somewhere in between.

He really didn't want to talk about that. Things were going poorly enough without letting his thoughts run down that dark and rotten path. He found himself holding his breath, and managed to focus enough on making himself breathe that enough of the near-panic at the almost-reminder subsided and he could actually breathe again. Fortunately, Cafas' next words were odd enough to free his attention. "What happened?" he asked, confused by having not seen the spoon or its disappearance.

Like hell he was going to just go around with a silver eye for everyone to see. Sure, people might look at him a bit oddly for wearing sunglasses indoors, but that was still better than having them stare at him for his eye. He couldn't handle that. It was hard enough catching glimpses of it in the mirror out of the corner of his eye, or even catching sight of the scar that trailed from his shoulder to his wrist. He didn't want any of it.

"I still don't want people looking at it," he muttered beneath his breath, and then abruptly decided that the pudding was cooked enough. He moved the pot to a back burner, shut off the one it had been on, and tried to remember which cupboard had bowls. He pulled open a few until he found a stack, and started slopping chocolate pudding into it. He left the extra in the pot for the time being, planning on coming back for it once there was space in his bowl. Or the Cafas guy could have it, if he really wanted.

He did like cola... Torn between finishing his pudding as soon as possible and actually accepting the cola as something he honestly liked, he hesitated before eventually shrugging in vague agreement. "Better a bottle than a can," he said, trying to sound conversational enough to be polite and keep the situation from getting too awkward but not so conversational that it would actually encourage Cafas to hang around longer than necessary.