(Author's note: apologies for the delay! It was a long weekend in Canada, and yet I still had to go in to the office and work. When I wasn't working, it was kind of a Humiliation Conga of house repairs, and looking into options for a new-ish car, to replace the current car which is being held together with bandaids and faith. There will also be another author's note with the upcoming release of The Reserves, but don't worry, it's mostly positive!)

http://www.patreon.com/dissidentlove

. . . . .

"This way!" the gynoid chirped pleasantly.

Damian shouldered his luggage, a repurposed industrial laundry sack. It was large enough not only for his meager possessions, but himself as well, with room to spare (though he wouldn't be able to stretch out). On more than one unpleasantly chill night, he'd been forced to seal himself inside with his spare clothes, books and mementos, lulled into an uneasy sleep by the faded, cloying aroma of soaps and bleaches.

"Do you want me to carry that for you?"

His hand tightened reflexively. "No, thank you," he mumbled. He focused on her eyes, her feet, her eyes again.

The synthetic student giggled, a surprisingly... alive sound. "It's no trouble," she said. "But I understand. This must all be very new for you."

Damian looked around the 'campus', nervous and dizzy. Immaculately clean buildings of white marble and red brick stood proudly, wearing their networks of crawling vines and creepers like regal robes. Lush green grasses were clipped low, carved perfectly around beds of flowers. Paths wriggled and twisted between the buildings like cobblestone veins, connecting the untouched structures and giving no hints as to what their purpose might be, what strange activities took place within. He knew that, barely a quarter mile away, the school's walls were in a state of constant decay and surreptitious repair.

He looked down at himself, and realized the same could be said for him. His clothes were stained, torn, patched, threadbare, dog-eared, and not entirely pleasant-smelling. His hair was lanky and unkempt, though this would have been his day to use the showers at the Complimentary Economic Unit Maintenance Shelter And Involuntary Habitation Complex.

"Pretty new," he said softly.

The gynoid (augh, what was her name? you didn't even try to remember it!) laughed again and shrugged. Her skin, or perhaps her surface, was a gleaming polished chrome. Her blonde hair was clearly a wig, but it was quite stylish. She wore some kind of pleated miniskirt showing off artificially-toned legs, and a bright pink sweater that muted her angular figure but only drew attention to the fact that she had been designed and created with extremely ample mammaries. "We'll become fast friends, I'm sure. I don't want to rush you."

"No-one wants that," Damian agreed.

"Left!"

He stumbled slightly, turning onto a new path and following his guide up to a long brick building. Kalpa Dorm, read the bronze plaque set above the wooden double doors. His fingers lingered on the doors, marveling that they seemed to be real, genuine tree-wood, and not plaspress.

"This is where you'll be staying!" the gynoid chattered, leading him up wide wooden stairs to the second floor. "There's a public kitchen at the far end of the main floor there, and a coffee lounge. Do you drink coffee? You'll probably start, there's a lot of reading assignments here. Doesn't affect me, though. Coffee, I mean! Though I suppose reading assignments, either. I have a character recognition subroutine that allows me to internalize written language much quicker than you. There's a hot tub and a roof garden on the roof, of course!"

Free kitchens, Damian thought. Free water. Free bathing. Gardens? Did she say gardens? "You mean, with plants?"

"Hahaha, of course, silly! What did you think grew in gardens?"

Damian shrugged. "Nothing."

Somehow her metallic expression became sympathetic, though he saw it as pitying. "You've lived in some rough spots, huh?"

"I didn't know there were other ways to live."

"That's going to change for you, and if you choose to stay here, you can help change that for others! HALT! This is you!"

Damian nearly ran into her outstretched arm. The gynoid was pointing at another double set of wooden doors, each adorned with a small plaque. One read Damian Jabez, and looked exceedingly new. The other simply stated Gray.

"We were all wondering if shi was ever going to get a room mate," the gynoid whispered conspiratorially. "Like, a permanent one."

"Why?"

She shrugged. "Beats me. I never even got offered." She reached out and rapped her delicate armored knuckles against the door, loud enough that Damian was surprised she didn't take chips out of the wood. "I'm just doing this out of propriety. You won't need to knock, because you live here now!"

"Great," Damian winced, bracing himself for what strange apparition might dwell behind that door. Just Gray? What sort of name is that? Is it another robot? Automaton? Soulbound? Spiritkin? Ghoul? Something worse?!

The door marked Gray opened, revealing... well, Damian wasn't exactly sure what he was looking at. The figure was feminine, that much he knew. Damian placed his age somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one, and by all accounts he was just as preoccupied with intercourse as any other regular human. He could identify a feminine figure at a hundred yards with the merest glance, though that was usually his cue to head the opposite direction.

Firstly, the figure wasn't gray, but pink. Bright pink. Ferociously, violently pink, with a liquid gleam that even the chrome-like gynoid couldn't match.

Secondly, the figure was slightly translucent; Damian could make out the potted plant in the corridor beyond through what appeared to be an arm and shoulder.

Thirdly, the figure was naked.

"Gray!" the gynoid greeted loudly.

"Cheryl!" the pink entity responded, also in a distinctly feminine voice. Shi had a face, though its exact features were difficult to make out due to hir lustre and transparency. Gleaming pink hair tumbled down hir back, and that seemed to be nearly opaque. Shi was taller than Damian, taller even than the gynoid, which put hir exceedingly large but somewhat vague breasts right at the human's eye level. "Who is this?"

"This... is Damian!" Cheryl said grandly. "The Librarian got you a room mate!"

Cheryl gasped, though shi lacked any apparent lungs or vocal chords. "Really?!" Shi turned to face Damian fully, extending a hand in greetings. "Hi there! What's wrong with you?"

"Gray! You can't just ask someone that!"

"I'm saving time! Something needs to be wrong with him, if he's living with me!"

"Maybe something's really right with him! Did you ever consider that?"

"No!" Gray laughed, hir entire body bouncing with liquid ease. "Are you going to shake my hand?"

Cheryl coughed, a hint of static lurking on the edge of that sound. "Don't mind hir, shi's very blunt. Never got the hang of small talk."

"I'm excellent at small talk!"

"And shi also doesn't always get that clothes are a thing."

Gray stiffened, quite literally. Even the ripples in hir hair froze solid. Damian's eyes bulged when Gray's outline shifted, blurred, and changed. Clothes seemed to extrude from the middle of hir mass, composed of the same vibrantly pink substance as hir body. Soon shi was a translucent feminine figure wearing a long, shimmering sun dark pink dress and what appeared to be pink-and-purple striped socks.

"Better?"

"Uhm..." Damian said slowly. His free hand extended, taking hirs gingerly. Shi squeezed with surprisingly solid force, as though shi were made of warm, slick, dense rubber. "Hi. I'm-"

"Damian, I know! I heard Poly put your name on the door! Come on in! Look at me, leaving you standing in the corridor. Get in here!"

Cheryl waved. "Have fun, you two!"

Damian followed Gray into the enormous dorm room, which was a mansion as far as he was concerned. He examined his palm, excepting it to be damp from hir strange composition, but it was perfectly dry. The door clicked shut behind him, and he realized he was all alone with hir.

"So!" Gray said, a huge smile rippling hir face. "Do you want the empty room at the end of the hall, or are we sharing?"

. . . . .

It would take me way too long to explain the setting to you, but I tried to allude to a few things in this here introduction. I also couldn't organically get into Gray's backstory here in prose very easily, so I just decided to leave it to the end here. Consider this Appendix A.

Gray (formerly just Gigi, and nearly a bunch of other names due to Twitter poll) is my first googrrl OC. Long story short, shi is an entirely solitary monophyletic evolutionary branch of protist that was discovered in the depths of a prehistoric fission/fusion reactor. A sample was removed and returned to a laboratory, and before long it was clear that the sample was not only intelligent, but trying to communicate with the researchers. In time, the sample, nicknamed Gray, grew into a sizeable mass. After its first in-person meeting with one of the researchers (it had been kept in confinement thus far), the sample adopted the bilaterally symmetrical, bipedal shape that was mostly recognizable as human. As more interpersonal time was spent with the sample, it developed rudimentary speech and auditory sensory organs tuned to human speech frequencies.

By the end of its first year, it declared its wish for freedom on the premise that it was sentient, self-determined, and very bored.

How shi ended up at the Library, why shi can't keep room mates, and why Damian was assigned to hir, is a story for another day (hopefully!)