The dead thing's body doesn't move.

Okay.

First step. Decide whether she wants to call the police. She doesn't. Second step. Since she's not calling the police she needs to figure out whether anyone else will. Probably they won't? She doesn't think anyone saw? And stopping something's heart with telekinesis doesn't look like a death a person caused. Third step. What is the third step.

If she's not reporting a dead body, which she's not, and nobody else is going to claim she did a murder, which they aren't, because to all appearances she didn't, the third step is to leave. Which doesn't have any steps, she can just do that. And then go... not continuing to the library, home, home is closer.

She's not moving. Why is she not moving.

Step three is to leave. Step three-point-one is to turn away from the body. Step three-point-two is to start walking. Step three-point-three is... she can figure out step three-point-three later.

Mechanically, Inaaya turns and walks away. Her dad is still at work and her mom is still at her aunt's house; she lets herself into the apartment without anyone seeing how shaky she is or asking questions she doesn't know how to answer. She makes herself tea, and then she curls up in her own room in a nest of blankets with her tea and her laptop, and she starts doing research.

The first three websites she finds are a REAL Wiccan love spell (GUARANTEED TO WORK!), an organization of vampires that turn out on inspection to be goths with a bloodplay kink, and someone who feels very strongly that the US president is a lizardperson who sacrifices children to create the world's greatest high.

Yes, that's about what she'd expected. It's also what she's gotten approximately every other time she's tried to look into what was happening to her. This time she has a grey rubbery thing with a face like a dog to narrow her search terms, that might not help any but it also might?

Five Reasons Your Dog Hair Is Turning Gray, The Ten Best Puppy Dog Faces Of Sam From Supernatural, and the Encyclopedia of Magick (scanned by Miskatonic University). 

The Encyclopedia of Magick is almost certainly going to turn out to be a kabbalistic philosophy book from the 1800s or similar, but it's neither conspiracy theorists nor Supernatural gifsets, and Inaaya is not exactly the sort of person who finds university scans available for free on the internet and doesn't at least bookmark them.

What's in it.

The Encyclopedia of Magick suggests that a gray-faced rubbery being with a face like a dog is probably a ghoul. Ghouls are universally female and enjoy luring people into their homes so that they can eat them. Ghouls are what happens when a devil tries to rise to the sky even though the heavens have been forbidden to them. The comets burn them and, if they don't die, they're deformed and driven to insanity so that they must roam the earth as ghouls.

...right. Okay.

Well. It's more helpful than anything else she has ever in her life found, which is not a very high bar but frankly she's happy she found anything at all. And— between ghouls and scanned and uploaded by Miskatonic University— she has somewhere to start.

It isn't much to go on but Inaaya has scihub and determination; let's see what happens if she tries hard, believes in herself, and looks for the rest of the Miskatonic University library catalogue.

Miskatonic University professors have been publishing a lot in business journals!

After reading four business papers Inaaya is ready to start crying out of frustration. She pulls away from the laptop, presses the base of her palms against her eyes until she sees spots, and gets up to make herself more tea before getting back to work.

Inaaya is ready, willing, and able to cold-email every single professor at the entire university if she has to. Even the ones who, from the university website, teach exactly one class and are only on the payroll because they have tenure and their one class is on Sumerian as a Root Language, or Discord as Music, or similar. Especially those ones.

She might email Louise Fauche, who has been on sabbatical for the past year and a half. She is allegedly a professor of medieval metaphysics but her last semester she taught Latin for Advanced Students, Mysticism: A Comparative Anthropological Approach, Secret Societies of the Post-Hellenic Period, and track. 

Inaaya absolutely does email Louise Fauche. She's friendly, professional, asks after Doctor Fauche's research, expresses interest in what she's doing on sabbatical.

She does not say "TELL ME WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON, SOMEONE HERE HAS TO KNOW" but you can kind of tell, if you're familiar with the sort of person who cold-emails professors of comparative anthropological approaches to mysticism, that she's thinking it.

Louise Fauche's out of office email informs Inaaya that she's on a dig in Ethiopia and can be expected to answer her emails once a week.

Inaaya's waited sixteen years. She can wait another week.

She curls up very very small for a few hours, and then gets up and figures out things to talk about with her parents at dinner and is not, to the outside observer, visibly vibrating.

Her days pass normally, insofar as "normally" is even a thing. She doesn't go back to the library. Her parents don't ask what she's studying; they rarely do. She reads everything Louise Fauche has ever published. 

Louise Fauche has published multiple papers in Latin. Do people even do that anymore?

Apparently yes! Inaaya doesn't understand them on account of not knowing Latin, but with determination, the ability to recognize root words, and several dictionaries she found on the internet, she still doesn't understand them.

Louise Fauche has published weirdly few papers. Probably in order to get tenure you're supposed to publish more than one paper every two years and more than half of them should be in English.

The English ones are unenlightening. There's a paper on a particular point of translation in the Summa Theologica, one on comparative medieval fishperson myths, and one tracing the genealogy of the Book of Eibon to earlier texts. 

She reads them anyway, and she attempts to do more research on ghouls, and she invents a research project to explain to her parents why she's spending so much time on scihub, and she waits.

A week later, Inaaya gets a very dense, nigh-incomprehensible email about fine points of Ge'ez translation. Halfway through three paragraphs are in Hebrew for no obvious reason.

That's very fascinating to the extent that she can parse it at all but it is also— especially when paired with the fact that Fauche is the only one who's responded at all— unbelievably frustrating!

Inaaya takes four days to draft a coherent response, but she does draft one, because somehow this is her most promising lead in sixteen years, and sends it. And resigns herself to another week of waiting.

Does Inaaya want to learn more about proclitic prepositions in Ge'ez because that's what she's going to learn about. 

She doesn't not want to learn about proclitic prepositions in Ge'ez. Learning things is fun. But it's not really the point, no. It's just—

It's just that this is her only lead in sixteen years. In her whole life. She is the closest she has ever been to actually being able to find out what might be happening to her. And she's not giving up on it, no matter how many incomprehensible emails about languages she doesn't speak or know anything about she has to figure out coherent and semi-professional-sounding responses to.

(This is the kind of sentence that one thinks, and then two incomprehensible emails later goes "FINE I WAS WRONG" about. Inaaya is aware of this. She thinks it anyway.)

Louise Fauche is happy to return as many emails as Inaaya is willing to send, and is stubbornly incomprehensible in all of them.

And when Inaaya's walking past a graveyard she sees another of the dog-faced people. This one is digging up a grave.

Inaaya doesn't walk past graveyards when she can avoid it; hasn't since before she figured out how to make the dead people she heard shut up.

She freezes up when she sees the— thing is rude, person is weird, ghoul is the best she has. It doesn't (they don't? inanimate pronouns also seem rude) look at her. She doesn't look away from them. Shakily, silently, she pulls out her phone and takes a photo, and then thinks better of it and takes ten seconds of video, and then she puts her phone away.

"Hey."