.... oh crap.

Had he been staring too hard? For too long, too, perhaps? Yeah, that was probably it, but he was busy being confused at the younger boy's confusion and there hardly seemed any time for artificial niceties when he was as bamboozled as a deer in a suburb. What was the child trying to do?

Oh, wait. Was the kid asking him? HIM, BRIAN WOODS, HIM?

Well. He asked for it. "It's a grammerphone - I think it was a grammerphone. Or was it gramophone?- record disk," he said, nodding at the thing in his new companion's hand. "Extremely old muggle technology. Decades before the stuff my grandparents grew up on, compact disks. Compact disks were basically this, only smaller - compact, y'see? - and playable on a slightly less bulky machine. The thing this disk does, though, is that it's put on a gramophone which kinda looks like the lovechild of a tuba and a table and they put a needle down on the surface."

Had he lost him? Yeah, maybe. "So what happens is the disk starts spinning and the different ridges you see on the top cause the metal of the tuba part of the gramophone to vibrate at different frequencies. So vibrations result in these mechanical waves that travel through the air - sound waves - which is basically what you hear in the end." Nod nod. "But nobody's used them in over a hundred years. It's extremely outdated tech. Now we've got digital versions which record sound much much more accurately."

......... too much information, maybe? "Lots of people keep them as collector's items, though." Please tell him the boy hadn't zoned out and gone to sleep. Brian just liked his ancient tech.