Out Late

During the day, Makara could pass as perfectly human. He still looked like a half dead sickly human, but he was human. Flesh and blood. Solid. At night... well, at night no one was going to mistake him for anything other than some kind of ghost. You could see right through him, and while he didn't give off any light, he looked as if he was glowing just the same.

It was eerie, to say the least.

He made good use of his alarming appearance though. He wandered the halls at night, having no need of sleep, and joined the regular security staff in doing so. There was no downside to him, and no risk otherwise. It was just one more person keeping an eye on things.

For the most part he kept to the dorms, although he wandered through the classrooms themselves at times. More than once he'd caught an underaged student sneaking off to be up to no good, and ushered them back to their room. For the most part, he was kinder than the other guards. Touching things took too much focus to make writing up minor infractions worthwhile, so anything that was less than really serious went by with nothing more than a short lecture.

That was fine with him. He preferred his nights quiet, and he preferred not having to haul someone back to their room - or worse, the office.

The halls, for the most part, seemed empty. That was normal enough. People didn't often go out wandering so late, and for the most part his night patrols went by without any sort of incident.

This one seemed like it might be peaceful, right up until he caught a small laugh. It wasn't even a normal laugh - it sounded like the sort of laugh a supervillain might make.

Makara's face twisted in apparent confusion, and he stepped towards the noise. He didn't truly step - he wasn't actually corporeal - but he mimed it well enough, rather than gliding as some other ghosts did. It felt more comfortable to ask as if he was still alive, still flesh and blood. It made it easier to maintain his normal appearance, to not fray at the edges and start becoming things he hadn't been for a long, long time.

He didn't open the door. Things like opening doors were a hell of a lot of effort, and harder to do when he wasn't angry. Instead, he just slipped through the door into the room where he'd heard the noise.

"Hello?" It was dark enough he didn't see anything at the moment, but it wasn't hard to figure out which classroom had someone laughing in it.

A child, from the sounds of it. Someone young and lost - possibly new to the school. There were plenty of new students arriving at any given time, and while he thought it was a bit unusual that the boy had managed to get himself so lost he'd found himself in an empty classroom... well, he'd seen stranger.

"Come out. You don't need to hide." He called, and then abruptly realized that he sounded like a cheesy ghost from a movie. "My name is Makara - I'm a teacher here. I'll help you get back to your dorm." Although it was hard to tell if they were going to be in the elementary or the high school dorm just then. He wouldn't know until he could see them, and his night vision wasn't very good to begin with.

The stuttering made it a bit hard for him to follow, and he was just thankful that he didn't have to try and actually follow along in whatever language the boy was speaking. His grip on Khmer was fine, but on English? Barely at all.

"Of course." He said, tipping his head slightly and stepping back to let Cylthic head through the door and into the hallway. "Are you in the high school dorms?" He looked it, but it could be hard - or even impossible - to tell. Someone could look six and be three thousand, or look twenty five and be six months old. Even actual age didn't mean much. if a species lived to be two hundred years old, being twenty was like being ten for a human.

Makara had a hard time looking sufficiently surprised about the fact that his age needed an extra 'if you count in human years' addition. There were so many people in the school that weren't human that he couldn't even be properly phased.

If nothing else, at least his eyes were unnerving. Even for Makara, dead himself, they seemed alarming, like they weren't so much black as they were the very absence of light itself.

"Well, as long as you're in the dorms." He started down the hallway, leading the way with only the occasional peeks behind him.