. . . Not anything that she knows how to convey, apparently.

"Okay. I'm sure this will be boring but at least it will not be boring and freezing. I will see you in the morning."

And he departs.

Cyllene waves after him.

She drinks the herbsauce, which is hard to get out of its container and very flavorful, and eats the rice which is kind of bland, and drinks the cider which is still delicious even when it isn't warm.

The alcove she picks is unbelievably cozy, enough that she happily spends maybe an hour or two there, but she kind of used up all her tiredness earlier.  And it sounded like she's going to be alone for the entire time the whole surface is dark, and the naproom is much less interesting to look at than the hallway, and she wasn't told not to wander this time.

So she wanders.

It's quite dark in the school but there are some small lights that are on at night, or that activate when she walks by. She can find the bathroom, of course, and various classrooms with ensuite offices attached to them (locked, but some have windows in the doors), and the school library, and cubbies and filing rooms and the front office and the gym and the place where the blue dog sleeps.

- The library??

There are books in it!

- She had one of these!  Years ago, when she was smaller - it didn't hold up in the water very well - now she understands what it was for -

She runs back to the naproom (tripping twice) and collects the pencil and paper and runs to the library - what is this book here about, what words does it have?

It's really hard to read in the dark.

She takes the book with her to one of the motion-activated lights.

It's a novel about people who live on clouds and build a new cloud city in a windy area that makes this complicated.

Oh wow, she had no idea there were people like that!!

She writes down words and phrases she expects to be helpful as she comes across them, trying to balance making them legible but as small as possible.  'Thank you', 'I don't know', 'silence', 'heal', 'music', 'what', 'help', 'food', 'water', 'voice', 'person', 'sort of', 'when', and 'how'.

There is more paper lying around in the library if she looks for it!

That doesn't occur to her.  She reads the whole entire book (even though the area near the motion light isn't very comfortable) and puts it back just where she found it.  The most exciting thing in it - or, one of them, and the most potentially useful - was that it implied there are ways of making music without using one's voice?  Maybe that's only for cloud people, but since she needs to stretch out anyways she directs her wandering to look for anything that could even possibly be that.

If she opens enough cupboards in a gym she will find a clear plastic recorder.

- The book mentioned something that was maybe a little like this object!!  If so, she should be able to hold it like so and put her mouth here and - blow?

FWEET

It's not really as satisfying to laugh maniacally when you can't make any noise directly but Cyllene tries anyways.

It takes her maybe half an hour to become satisfied with the quality of her scales; the recorder has notes at different intervals than she's used to and its tone quality is much more difficult to wrangle than her voice.  And after that it takes another hour or so to work out a simple little song that calls a ball of light into existence, shifting with rays.  She directs it to hover this far above her and this far away from her and in this cardinal direction.  (If she had her voice it would be child's play, a project of twenty seconds, to make it stay in front of her as she turned any which way, but at this point she's perfectly grateful to take what she can get.)

She doesn't have a spot in mind to take the recorder to the way she did with the library book, and it's not hers, so she puts it back, memorizes the location of the relevant cupboard, and goes a-wandering again.  Now with added visibility.

Lunchroom. Auditorium with a projector screen. Cute little towers with reading nooks.

Oooooh.  Everything is so pretty, and - the purposes of all the things are pretty, she can tell, even when she can't tell what the purposes are.

At what would have been a reasonable hour on her previous sleep schedule, she makes her way to the bathroom, uses it without trouble, washes her hands, and moves all her objects over to an alcove that's positioned so that her little ball of light will hover outside it when she closes the door.  And sleeps.

The naproom doesn't get any brighter come morning. But students and faculty pile in.

One of the nooks has a glowy thing floating outside of it, about four feet up.  It has no obvious mechanism for staying at that height and is intangible, though slightly warm to the not-touch.  Sometimes it shifts or bobs a little.

The piling is mostly into other parts of the school, but there's often a couple students who didn't sleep well and need to crash after being dropped off at school. One doesn't even notice the light. The other finds it rather invigorating, though, and prods it.

It doesn't react.  It's just warm.

Batbatbatbat. The school has a no screen policy so he can't take a photo. He goes to get a teacher.

The light is still there when he returns.