Some unknown but restful number of hours later, she wakes up and has a needlessly luxurious bath and gets dressed and trundles out to check on her garden, and finds that the metal flowers are putting out itty-bitty buds and the iron tree is nearly two feet high and the cherry branch is flourishing. It brings a smile to her face.

She puts her book of bad jokes back in her pocket, and returns to the bridge in the foyer, and realizes she's a little hungry, and detours to the kitchen to grab some bread, and returns to the bridge in the foyer again, and meditates through to the Academy.

White clouds puff along through a blue sky, offering occasional shelter from the bright afternoon sun. Just another idyllic day on the Planet of College Girls.

You know, among the many other things she's really looking forward to about eventually having a deep enough connection to this place, she thinks perhaps being able to properly enjoy the weather might be a big one. It's nice weather! But the constant unsettling feeling of emptiness really detracts.

Still. It's a pleasant afternoon and no one is currently around. She can wander around the environs of the gazebo, making sure to keep a line of retreat open at all times because she suspects afternoon on the College Planet is a time with a high risk of sudden floods of students.

No sudden floods of students yet.

But wait! Who's that mysterious shadowy figure?

Another one?

She squints.

It looks like... a person, just standing there, more indistinct than anyone should be under a sun this bright.

This is both moderately unsettling and really, really weird, and it's making her curious, and she actually starts to turn in that direction, and then she stops.

Because—no matter what the mystery of the shadowy figures is, she can't just go up and ask one about it now. They'll flinch away just like everyone else. She needs to wait several years before doing any such thing. The indistinct figure may look more approachable than the students, because the indistinct figure isn't flinching away yet, but that's no call to go asking for trouble.

...she does think, though, that she appreciates the existence of at least one person in this world who is capable of looking at her.

She makes sure not to go too close, and keeps strolling through the park until she has to hurry back to the gazebo because the students are coming.

Oddly, the students seem to stream around the indistinct figure without noticing that anyone is there at all.

That's so weird!!! Are they another Conduit?? No—she feels very sure that if they were another Conduit, she'd be able to tell. Her dream-instincts insist on that. This is some local phenomenon. Some maddeningly mysterious local phenomenon that she cannot investigate.

Well. She settles into the gazebo with her book.

Turns out: the jokes are bad.

It's kind of charming, though, to be reading through a book of bad jokes that told you upfront what to expect from it.

The chatter of the students as they flow past the gazebo is kind of nice to listen to now that she's mostly out of sight on a bench and no one is distressed by her presence. She thinks she could get used to this. She thinks this could be her life, for the next few years. Read her books, tend her garden, sit in the gazebo and walk along the paths and let herself absorb the Academy until it tolerates her. She thinks maybe that would be okay.

It's a wild and wonderful thing, almost beyond imagining, to look at the next few years of her life as she's planning to live them, and think that maybe they will be okay.