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."