"....Is there anything I can do for you?  Like a task?"

"...it'd be makework but if that would help I can come up with something?"

"I don't want you to make up makework."

"Okay. I don't really have a task I non-makeworkly need from you. I've got books. We can put Cricket's TV show on the big screen. I think my mother owns board games. You have your phone, right? Does it need charging?"

"I don't have my phone."  Electronics are scary; ANYTHING could jumpscare him on one.  That's what they're for, showing different content.  "Screens are shiny and I could see myself in one by surprise."  (This is also true.)  Board games are... he's going to accidentally gamble and lose his soul if he tries to play one??  "I don't know about the rest."

"Do you want to go pick a book off my shelf to try?"

"...Do you have any that are going to turn me into a monster?"  If he lampshades the possibility of something horrible happening because of books then that would be a really lame time to do something horrible to him with books.  "Like the Necronomicon or whatever?"

"No. I don't think that's even a real book? I have some science fiction and various classics in French and English and also Banaag at Sikat if you happen to read Tagalog."

Uh-huh.  "...I know that espers don't - actually - turn into monsters."  (In real life.)  "But if there are ones that are - kind of at all related to, to that subject, then I don't want to see them.  Or really just scary things in general."

"Okay, so, no Jekyll and Hyde, no Kafka's Metamorphosis, perhaps no Midsummer Night's Dream. Dickens? Oliver Twist or something."

All he knows about that is from a vaguely-remembered referential segment on a kids' show and that maybe there's a musical that adapts the story with hippies??  "Isn't that about starving children?"

"Starving children feature but they are all completely human throughout."

"I... think I am also probably not feeling up to scathing social commentary about the horrors of the past.  Or present, or future."

"Okay. Uh. Hm. Austen? Verne, if you read French, I've only got the original French."

He does not read French very well.  From what Julien knows Austen sounds like also pretty scathing social commentary about the past, although maybe rich people have it better enough that it won't be bonus awful for him emotionally on top of the general situation.  Also he's like, not a girl, so, that probably helps, the not being able to completely empathize with The Woman's Plight.  - NO that's a GREAT way to get TURNED INTO A GIRL.  Or woman, whatever, and then sent to the past when things were really bad for them.  "Austen might be okay."

"Let's go get you, hm, Emma, and if that sucks we can swap it out for something. I'll stand up when you're ready?"

Julien disconnects from Haru.

Hup. "Do you want to come or should I just nip up and grab it?"

A thing Julien has learned is that there are just sooo many reflective surfaces, everywhere.  "I'll sit tight."

"Okay. Be right back."

Up the stairs he goes. Down them he comes. He's got Emma but has also found Anne of Green Gables, a Shakespeare sonnet collection, and a Dr. Dolittle omnibus. "Dr. Dolittle has the guy talking to animals but no characters transform into anything else," he says, "I don't know if that's okay or not at the moment but here it is."

Sounds bad.  Anne might have less bad stuff in it, but is about children in addition to girls, and he doesn't want to get turned into one of those either, and also from what he remembers it's kind of - lessony?  If he experiences lessons for children then he will probably have to be perfect at those in addition to everything else going on and that sounds like way too much to handle.  And he does like poetry.  "Thanks."  He reaches for the Shakespeare.

"I'm mostly more of a novels person but if poems are better I have a couple more booksful. I'm gonna sit down when you're ready."

"Yeah go ahead."  He's gonna sit over here for a minute, though.

Julien remembers enough to know that 18 is the really famous one that probably won't have anything that bad in it (or if it does he should find that very suspicious), and it's fine, and then he carries on to the next one from there.

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d phoenix, in her blood;

Nope nope nope nope nope.  He closes the book, and his eyes, and focuses on the feeling in his hands and mouth to catch it if they change.

"- Julien?"

"Hi."