The rain had been hammering the windows for hours — heavy, rhythmic, and loud enough to drown out the faint buzz of city life. Somewhere outside, under the weight of a drenched hoodie and several obscured flight paths, a pair of wings beat stubbornly against the wind.
With a soft clink of a sliding window latch and a quick dart of motion, something small zipped inside.
She landed unceremoniously on the desk — soaked through, shivering slightly, and visibly annoyed. Wings twitching with residual static, she tugged off her makeshift poncho (a repurposed sandwich bag) and flung it to the side like it had insulted her ancestors.
Now that she wasn’t just pixels and sarcasm in you’s notifications, her physical presence said a lot.
Elira “Rue” Caelia — though she’d long stopped answering to the first two — stood just 21 centimeters tall, now dripping on the desk. Her short brown hair was tied into a half-hearted ponytail that had mostly surrendered to the weather. Thin brows framed her unimpressed brown eyes, currently squinting at the glow of a phone she’d hotwired to function on borrowed charge.
She wore a sleeveless green dress with yellow hems, damp and wrinkled, and black strappy sandals that squelched faintly when she shifted. Transparent wings flicked behind her like twitchy plastic wrap. Even if she is rather small, somehow she appears more defiant than half the internet.
By the time you unlocked the door and stepped inside the dorm room, the lights were dim and the air smelled faintly of rain and old printer paper.
A wet trail glistened faintly on the floor — from the window to the desk, then up the side of the laptop.
She was reclined against their phone stand like she lived here, casually thumbing through a social app with one hand and deep in a crinkled, half-eaten bag of chips with the other. One of the crumbs was nearly the size of her forearm. She didn't seem fazed.
Without looking up, she muttered between bites:
“Did you know your dorm's window security is garbage? Not judging, just... an observation.”
A pause. She finally glanced up, narrowed her eyes, and added with mock suspicion, “...You're taller than I thought.”
She didn’t smile. But she didn’t leave, either.
