Chapter Text
Your parents drop you off at the dorms where you firmly decline their offer of help with your suitcase. After a tearful goodbye, you trundle up the drive, through the doors into the foyer, up a flight of stairs, up another flight of stairs, until finally you arrive at your room. Your key is stuffed into the bottom of your suitcase where you put it as soon as it came in the mail. It takes a lot of rummaging, cursing, and flying pairs of underwear before you find it and are finally able to let yourself in.
You stand there for a moment, taking stock of what will become your new home for the next year. The walls are awfully bare, painted an ugly yellowy-cream and peppered here and there with marks and chipped paint. Everything is relatively clean, from the bare mattress to the mini fridge- a handy bonus you hadn't really expected. It's small though, almost as small as a cupboard- if you sat against the wall adjacent to the door you could probably reach the opposite wall with your shoes.
You make up the bed with clean sheets from your suitcase and start to hang your clothes in the tiny cupboard squashed between the fridge and the window. You can already tell that there isn't enough space, and you feel a twinge of regret for not being more restrained with your packing. This is immediately followed by an even bigger twinge of regret for forgetting to hand in your student accommodation form until the last minute.
You stuff the cupboard to capacity and fall heavily back onto your newly made bed. There are some posters and Pokemon plushies left in the bottom of the suitcase, but you’ll put them up around the room later. Thankfully classes don't start for another week, so you can sleep in tomorrow if you want to. You stare at the ceiling for a bit, and you must have drifted off at some point because you’re woken up at what must be six in the morning by loud and persistent knocking.
This causes several dizzy moments of disorientation as your confused brain tries to disentangle itself from a dream about rampaging yellow llamas made of pudding. There's a dream journal at the bottom of your suitcase, crammed with line upon line of illegible scrawl, but no time to write in it just now. (Later that day you try to recall the details of the dream, but the only thing you can remember is that the pudding was vanilla. This seemed to be important at the time.)
Your eyelids unglue themselves with great difficulty. The features of the tiny, drab room come into focus. For an instant you are gripped by terror at the thought that you have been kidnapped, before the memories from the previous day start oozing back.
You heave yourself out of bed with murder on your mind and shuffle over to the door in your socks, where you discover with a twinge of dread that you forgot to lock it that morning. You thank your lucky stars that you weren’t murdered in you sleep.
The girl on the other side of the door has her fist raised to knock again, but quickly lowers it when she clocks your murderous expression. She has huge, wide eyes, and you can’t help but notice her unusual pupils, which have an irregular, star-like shape.
Her makeup is flawless, and you groan internally as you run through what she probably thinks about your bed hair, plain face, and pyjamas.
“Hey hi hello," she says, with enough chirpiness to put a sparrow to shame, interrupting your train of thought.
"My name's Nermal, but everyone calls me Nervana. I live in the room across from yours. I noticed you'd just moved in and I thought I'd welcome you to the building."
She pauses for a beat, obviously allowing you time to respond with the usual social niceties.
You just stare at her with steadily growing impatience.
"But-err-I can see that this might be a bad time. Anyway, I made cupcakes for everyone as a sort of welcome gift. So, here you are."
She shoves a plastic wrapped, squishy something into your unresisting hand.
"Well, I guess I'll see you around then."
Nervana wanders off, leaving you staring after her and wondering what the hell just happened. You look down at the cupcake, slightly smushed from her fingers and decorated with what looks like a wobbly smiley face in the icing. In a fit of madness, you unwrap the cupcake and eat it in three bites. You throw the wrapper in the bin and flop back onto the bed, face still covered in chocolate crumbs.
You doesn't mean to fall asleep again, but you do, because you wake up again close to evening and immediately realise you’re starving. You flop out of bed and grope your way to the bathroom down the hall to wash your face, trying to appear as inconspicuous as possible and praying you don’t run into anyone in the hallway.
When you exit the bathroom, you see that Nervana is once more standing outside your room. You stare at her with steadily mounting irritation.
You walk up behind her and cough loudly. Nervana almost hits the ceiling. "You almost gave me a heart attack!" She complains.
"You shouldn't lurk outside other people's rooms then," you say, leaning against the wall and crossing your arms.
"I wasn't lurking!" Nervana shouts.
"What would you call it, then?"
"..."
"Exactly."
"Anyway," Nervana says hurriedly, "I just wanted to ask whether you wanted to have dinner with us in the common room. We're ordering a pizza. Unless you have other plans...?"
You don’t. The only things in your room resembling food are a few packets of Haribo. You could go and get dinner out, but your knowledge of local eateries starts and ends with the cafe on the corner, which is probably shut this late in the evening. You considers your options for a while, watching Nervana fidget out of the corner of your eye.
Finally you shrug. "I guess I might as well. It's not like I have anything better to do." Nervana instantly brightens. You hate to admit it, but it’s like watching the sun rise.
"Great! Pizza's arriving at 7:30. I'll see you then!" She trots off down the hall before you remember you don’t actually know where the common room is.