"It's not an emergency. Nobody's dying and nothing's on fire." But he will hug her again.

She doesn't have anything to say to that.

But she does have arms for hugging.

She's very good to hug.

Eventually she lets go. "Right, sorry. I'll let you eat while I start taking notes?" She gets up to go back to her laptop.

He nods and takes a twirl of ramen. Nomf.

She opens up her laptop and - 

- that's a lot of unread discord messages?

She opens her DMs with Risa and - oh wow, girl it has been three days, how did you - 

There's not, like, a telltale eye-glazing, or anything, to go by. But when she doesn't say anything for a while he has a guess.

After a while, she notices she's sitting across the table from someone and looks up in surprise! "...Sorry, I got so into something I don't think I even saw you sit down?" And then she frowns. She - she was about to do something, and it was something important, before Risa messaged her, and now she doesn't -

"I'm real stealthy. Don't worry about it."

He tosses the empty ramen cup and puts the spoon in the dishwasher.

Xeya is clearly worried about something! But he can successfully slip out her mind, if he wants.

He doesn't have the energy to try not to twice. He leaves.

She opens her mouth to at least introduce herself, but - 

RISA! I am serious you really should not sleep with a professor on your first week of class!!!!

Life goes on. He does another grocery run. There's chocolate chip and also blueberry muffins courtesy of the good people at Kirkland in this one.

Xeya gets settled in, does her best to meet and make friends with her roommates. There's lots of people to chat with. There's muffins, sometimes! She writes a big thank you note with a silly drawing of her devouring a muffin in a single bite and leaves it on the fridge with the text "to: whoever got those muffins 💙".

Weeks pass. She settles into a pretty reasonable routine - she keeps odd hours, sometimes, and talks with people a lot, but she's always in the common area at 10:30 pm to update her journal and chat with people about her day, if they're interested.

Her note disappears from the fridge the next day.

Sometimes people are around then, sometimes they're not. Today somebody's around.

(Xeya knows everyone who lives here, now. She made a map and labeled it! And she hasn't seen him around before.) She waves!

Wave wave. "Hey Xeya."

"Hi! Sorry, I am terrible with names, if I could get everyone to wear nametags around here I would..." She sounds embarrassed, but only a little. She has blue hair and a funny name - she's more memorable than average.

"It's okay. I'm Skip."

"Hi Skip!" Smile. "I'm just finishing up my journal, and then it's bedtime - can't be up late on Tuesdays, I've got early and long Wednesdays. How was your day?"

"Same old. Somebody got floss picks and a plastic ice cream cone beach toy in the same Amazon order but it's probably a coincidence, I haven't even come up with a joke explanation for why they'd go together."

Giggle. "Maybe they need to comb the beac- no, that's nothing, the gag doesn't even work with a floss pick. They... have kids, and also... teeth." She mock-whistles. "Damn, I'm good."

"It's a weird time of year to get a beach toy, though."