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Chaya was terrible at schedules. There was probably somewhere she needed to be right now, but she had forgotten where, exactly, or why, and since she had not yet scraped up enough seeds to replace the eyePhone she had dropped in the lake (who knew that the waterproofing app wasn't actually effective?), her usual reminders were not at hand. She had stopped at the edge of one of the commons to think, her brow furrowing with concentration.

Instinct homed in on the erratic wobble of another student's path before Chaya consciously noticed. Her ears came forward and her distant gaze snapped back into focus, landing on a ghoul in a long skirt. The ghoul broke into a run as Chaya spotted her, and Chaya's concentration on everything else snapped suddenly as the gleeful instinct to chase kicked into overdrive.

She broke into a bounding run, a quick sprint to start the chase. If her quarry continued to flee, she would slow to settle into a tracking pace, but perhaps she could catch first. It didn't occur to her that she shouldn't be chasing other students. The ghoul was running.

"Hello!" Chaya sniffed the ghoul's hair to get her scent. There was something completely fascinating about this new friend, and the half-moment of disappointment that the chase hadn't been longer was eclipsed by the satisfaction of having caught her. "I'm Chaya," the spectral hound offered, and sat up to let the sheep-ghoul up. "You were running, so I chased you. Nice to meet you!"

"I'm a spectral hound," Chaya said, as if this explained everything. Perhaps, to someone who knew her type, it did. "I chase things, and creeple, it's what I do. I'm a ghost," she added helpfully. "What kind of creeple are you?" Her tail kept up a steady metronome wag, friendly and interested.

"I made your sweater dirty," she observed a moment later, noticing the smears of mud. The tail slowed somewhat. "I don't have a clean one right here, should I go get one?"

"Only if I carry my bag! Where is my bag?" Chaya blinked. "I think I left it. Somewhere. It's okay I'll find it. You know, you have to wear a shirt," she informed Tink. "If you take it off around creeple they get upset sometimes. Even if they just complained about it being dirty. That's a bit silly, don't you think? Do you want to go get another shirt? I don't mind but if we go back to the dorm I can look and see if I left my bag in my room."

"I probably forgot it," Chaya answered cheerfully. "I don't have my eyePhone so I don't have my reminders, so I forget things a lot since I dropped it. We can go look in my room! Do you want to see my room? I have a lot of neat things, my mamas say I'm messy but I know where to find all my things."

She took Tink's hand and set off towards the ghost dorms at a determined trot. "Can I see your room too sometime? I bet it's neat."

"All kinds of neat things, toys, books, clothes, I find lost things and I keep them, and pictures, I like to printout pictures from the interwebs and put them on my walls, I have so many neat pictures, you're going to like it," Chaya promised. She had either not noticed Tink trailing off or not thought anything of it. "Where's your room at? Mine's by the corner with the big wall of dead flowers around the dead deer portrait, have you seen that? It's nifty. There's all these melted candles on the floor but I've never seen anyone burning any candles there, which I guess is good because the dried flowers would probably catch on fire, and that would be sad because they're pretty. Here we are."

They had reached the graveyard that formed the roof of the ghost dorms, and Chaya towed Tink over towards the mausoleum and the steps down into the building.

"I like bats," Chaya agreed, nodding thoughtfully as she made her way down the steps and through the cheerfully gloomy hallways. Her path was confident and unerring; unlike Tink, she rarely got lost. "I have a picture of a bat cave, I should show you that one, it's a nice picture with a whole flock flying. Do you mean the reapers had their heads ripped off in the picture or was the picture ripped off? Because that's an important distinction, it is, don't you think? I drew a picture of a bunny all ripped up once because I felt like it. I mean I drew it ripped up, not that I drew it and then I ripped it up, the picture is a whole picture but it's a picture of parts."

She turned a corner, then another one, and led Tink down a short hallway to the room at the end, which she unlocked with a key that she fished out of one of her arm wraps. She shoved the door open and announced proudly, "My room."

The room inside wasn't untidy, precisely; the stacks of things on the desk and the low dresser were sorted, clearly following some system of categorization that made sense to Chaya, and the profusion of photos and drawings and print-outs tacked, taped, and strung up all over the walls seemed chaotic at first, but if Tink looked more closely, she might notice a visual flow based on pattern, line, and shape. Chaya trotted over to the large, fluffy rug in the corner and plucked up a plushie from a pile of them. "Look," she chirped, and extended it in Tink's direction. "It's me!"