The room is definitely... striking. It's a glittering cavern of gem-studded black rock, some of it with an obvious lava flow pattern, some with flow patterns that are... weirder. Entire sections of wall look swirled and smeared in random directions, as though while still molten the room was found by some enormous cosmic child looking to play in a very warm mud pit. There's not much in the way of light, either, just a few dim and lonely lanterns hanging from the walls. Plenty of nooks and crannies to squirrel things away in, and some human-sized furniture for human-sized activities like writing at a desk or sleeping in a bed; speaking of which, there's a human-sized bathroom, too, with its door hidden behind a short curving tunnel to better fit in with the natural-cavern aesthetic. It too has dark stone walls and scant lighting, but the floor is flatter and the architecture is more... architected. There's a big round pool/tub set into that flat floor, and a smaller curtained-off nook on the far side containing further bathroom amenities.

(The room's main door opens a crack, and then closes again. Did a shadow slip through? It's hard to tell.)

Hard to tell with human eyes; is it hard to tell with hers, when she looks closely?

The shadow, if there is a shadow, is fleeting and ambiguous. It looks like it went toward the far side of the room, where the gem-studded stalagmites form a tight maze haphazardly strewn with furniture, in contrast to the more open space on Lucy's side. There are no lights over there at all.

Hmm. 

Well, Lucy isn't thrilled by the idea of rooming with someone she hasn't actually met to get the measure of, but she's not to the point where escalating by flooding the room with light makes sense. If her roommate hasn't come out and introduced herself by the time Lucy goes to bed, she'll light up then and break off some chunks to form a perimeter of light around her bed. Or she could skip sleep and hang out in the library all night but she doesn't want to do that all semester and leaving her secret stuff alone all night with a roommate who might not need to sleep either and, again, she has no idea the personality of, doesn't appeal much more. 

So Lucy does what she would do if it were a cat she was dealing with, and gets out a book to read, making sure she has the peripheral vision to detect movement but pointedly not looking at or for her roommate. 

For an hour, there's nothing but an occasional quiet rustle from within the maze. Then, movement again, this time peeking out from around a particularly thick stalagmite. The moving entity still has very little in the way of a definite physical form.

She is so absorbed in this book. Not even a little bit looking up at the entity.

Peeeeeeeer??

Sneak sneak sneak across the floor? ...and then startle abruptly for no reason and flee into the bathroom.

But soon it's peeking out again, and sliding cautiously along the wall—it's really very stealthy, even Lucy's eyes lose track of it a handful of times—to perch, eventually, on a bookshelf some distance away from her bed. The size of the creature was unclear from across the room, but at the moment it seems to be small enough to stand on the shelf and hide behind a book.

That book isn't about anything delicate so Lucy has no reason to object. She keeps her eyes glued to her book, but reaches into one of her skirt pockets for a packet of roasted chestnuts, nibbling on a few while leaving the packet out--by total coincidence--on the side of her closer to the entity. 

Tiny blurry barely-there shadow peeking out from behind the book. Not going for the treats, though, or at least not yet.

Lucy has out-waited the Duchess's cats. She turns a page in her book. 

The shadow stays there for a while, and then gets nervous and slinks back around the edge of the room to disappear into the maze again.

When it reappears, peeking around a different stalagmite, it's still tiny but starting to have visible attributes. A silhouette of a human, small enough to perch in the palm of a hand.

Cute??? Cute. 

Lucy turns another page and absently eats another roasted chestnut.

The silhouette slowly grows more and more defined, until there's a tiny person clinging to the stalagmite, wearing a ragged scrap of shadow as a dress. Her hair has tiny glimmers of light in it.

Oh that is extremely cute. Not that Lucy should make judgments based on only that, sight unseen. 

She disappears behind her stalagmite, and comes out again a minute later and slightly larger, tall enough that she would no longer be at home in a dollhouse. Still no bigger than the average cat.

This time she actually floats into the air—is that blur behind her back a pair of shadowy wings?—and approaches openly, slow and hesitant and clearly reluctant to leave the safety of her maze.

Lucy sort of wants to feed her rubbery lumps and pet her. This is not the most productive impulse ever. 

"Um. H-hello?" she says, very softly and sort of unsteadily, like she's having trouble making the sounds line up properly.

"Hello," Lucy says, putting a bookmark in her book and setting it down gently. 

"I'm, um—oh." She stutters to a stop, hovering in midair, looking lost and uncomfortable. "I forget my name. Sorry. I wanted to introduce myself but then—I'm sorry." She slowly drifts backward, as though propelled by the sheer force of her social anxiety.

"That's okay. You wouldn't be the first. Do you want a new one?"

She startles slightly at the question, hesitates, then shakes her head.

"Okay. I'm Lucy."

"Um," she says, and then she flees back behind her stalagmite, dissolving into shadow again in the process.

Lucy picks up her book again. Nibbles on another chestnut. 

"It's nice to meet you," says the invisible girl from behind her stalagmite. "Probably. I think. Sorry."

"It's nice to meet you too! You're very cute." 

The teeniest squeak.

Awwwww. 

She returns to her book. 

After a few minutes, she remarks, "I glow. If you'd like to set up blackout curtains between our sides of the room or something I bet it could be done." 

"I... think it's all right?" the shadow says uncertainly. "What do you mean, you glow? You aren't glowing right now..."

"I can control it." She holds up a finger, the tip of it lighting up to about a single candle's worth of light. 

She peers around the stalagmite.

"That's not so bad... where would we get blackout curtains? I wouldn't want to trouble you over nothing..."

"I'm deliberately keeping it at a low level right now because I don't want to hurt you. I can get very, very bright sometimes."

"I don't... know if light hurts me. I haven't... seen much of it. In a very long time."

"What if I get progressively brighter and you tell me when to stop?"

"Um, okay..."

She starts glowing, softly but all over. At first it just looks like she has a bright light pointed at her, but as the lumens increase it becomes obvious that she is the source of the light itself.

Tiny shadow peering nervously around a stalagmite.

The light ramps up until it gets hard to make out the details of her appearance through the glare. 

The tiniest squeak.

All the light vanishes instantly. 

"—sorry!" says the shadow.

"No, it's fine, this is what the experiment was about." 

"I think... I think it was okay? Just—sort of uncomfortable. But I could hide farther away when you're very glowy. Maybe in the bathroom."

"This is your room too," she points out. "I don't want it to be uncomfortable for you. I might put some glowy things around my bed if I don't want to be disturbed, but not that glowy."

"Okay. I don't... want to be any trouble."

"Well, I'm tons of trouble. So you'd be entitled." 

"You're—what? Sorry, I don't know what you mean..."

"I'm very disruptive to the status quo."

"Oh."

Quiet shadow.

"--Anyway, I just mean I won't mind if you bother me." 

"I think maybe... I mind if I bother you," the shadow says tentatively.

"Ahh, that's a different matter," she nods. "Well, it will bother me more knowing you're uncomfortable than it will setting up some kind of light-barrier, but," she glows up to about halfway to where her roommate squeaked last time, "does this make you uncomfy?"

"...I think that's fine?"

"Okay. If I set up glowing rocks around my bed it'll probably be a little less bright than this all told." 

"I think that will be okay."

"I'm glad." 

She lets her glow fade out. "Your side of the room is interesting. Is that what your home looks like?"

"...no. Sorry. It's—nice, though. Dark. Hidey. ...has air."

"Air is generally a good thing! My home looks pretty different from my side of the room too." 

"I... think our room is pretty," she says tentatively.

"I think so too! I bet everyone has rooms they think are pretty." 

"Oh. That makes sense..."

"I like your taste though. I wonder if roommates were assigned based on compatible aesthetic sensibilities."

"...maybe," she says, uncertain and thoughtful.

"I suppose we can ask the Dean about it later. Would you like a hug? You look like you could use a hug."

"...um?" she says, sounding confused and nervous.

"It's fine if the answer is no."

"I don't... know what the answer is? Sorry. Sorry."

"That's fair. Sometimes people don't. It was ages before Tutankhaten was able to formulate preferences more complicated than 'I don't want to be a snake.'"

..tiny face peering curiously around stalagmite. "Who?"

"He's a friend of mine. He was shapeshifted into a snake for a long time; he didn't like it."

"Oh."

Thoughtful pause.

"...what happened?"

"That's a long story...about five thousand years ago, he was bitten by a poisonous snake; his wife made a deal with a great power to save his life. But she was really trying to trick the great power, not save her husband, and she ended up using the power given her to prolong his existence as a giant and extremely poisonous snake called the Cantigaster instead of healing him properly. I don't know all the details; I'm only a few decades old, and what I know about what happened back then has been cobbled together from scraps from different sources."

"...is he okay now?"

"He isn't a giant snake anymore, or poisoned; I got him out of that situation. He's still recovering mentally, though."

"Oh."

"Honestly, given how long he was stuck as a snake, I'm impressed he's talking by now."

"... I see what you mean."

"He'll be okay eventually, though. He has the time he needs to heal."

"...is that... is it time, that helps?"

"Time helps. So do other things, but the other things vary more by person."