Birds chirped to herald the morning sun. The sparkling dew turned the grass a deep emerald. Outside the railway station, Doan sat on a bench and idly fed the birds a handful of the bread she had stolen from the Old House. Her suitcase, propped up against the bench, contained a few more items from the Old House so that she could remember her way back again.

Doan was on a mission. She was looking for Matthias McGynoug. She was going to guide him back to the Old House so that there could be a Reunion. From random conversations she had overheard, papers she had looted from Matthias's old bedroom, Doan had tracked him down. Now she was wandering through a strange town with a map. Her sense of direction was abysmal and this was the first time she had been this far away from the Old House for five years. Doan only left the Old House to go and visit Pan, who used to live in the Old House and who could see ghosts.

Yesterday morning, Lilia made breakfast for Devon Mogay. There was obviously enough food for three people, yet neither of them offered any to Doan! Enraged and hungry, Doan ate Devon's food before he could touch it and threw his plate across the room at him. Lilia screamed.

"Why did you throw a plate at me?" asked Devon.

"It wasn't me!" insisted Lilia.

"That isn't funny! You almost hit my head!"

"I'm serious too! I swear this house is haunted!" screamed Lilia, "Poltergeists are really powerful spirits. Powerful, angry spirits! We need to see an exorcist!"

Doan pulled a face. Poltergeist indeed... did people still really think that there were special ghosts that threw plates around? All the ghosts she knew could interact with any physical object, as long as it was in their haunting ground. They mostly chose not to because they didn't need to. Ghosts didn't need food, didn't sleep, couldn't get drunk and didn't get bored because they could do so many things mortals couldn't do, like fly, walk through walls and ruin the picture on a TV.

"Why don't you ask Vyviane?"

"Vyviane lives here! If she could see the ghost, she would have done something about it before now!" said Lilia, "I'm going to see Pan."

Doan ran out of the house. She didn't want to meet Pandora Anemos in a bad mood, the little psychopath would trap her in a phylactery or eat her or something. She huddled in the back alley, next to the spot where she had died. One good thing would come from this: Pan would come back home. Reunions made Doan feel good, and not just because it felt like the old days. Doan knew that it was the only way to save the Old House. If too many people left, everyone else would leave and the House would be sold. The House would have been sold a long time ago but they couldn't sell it because it was so obviously haunted. Doan could make whole rooms cool down to an icy chill, make spectral lights appear and throw plates around.

That was when Doan had the idea; she would go and find Matthias and bring him back. She would go on a train. She would travel far away to the land where Matthias lived. She would invite many Students, both living and dead and they would stay awake all through the night with her. There would be a proper Reunion.

The sun was just rising when she walked down the road. Instantly, she was reminded of the first day she had walked back from the Old House. Ghosts remembered everything in perfect detail. The world was shrouded in a soft mist then, like everything was still asleep except her. She was so completely healed, so at peace with the world. It had been so long since she was whole. She remembered how she had stayed up all night talking to the things that didn't sleep, even when students gave up and went to sleep. She talked to the computer, the television, even the fridge. The fridge had food in it. She discovered a machine that, when she switched it on, allowed her to play Chrono Trigger. It was a SNES - a machine of the Gods. An original one! It spoke to the other machines and they all healed her. There were sacred things all around her and, had it not been dark, she would have wandered over to see. Eventually she succumbed to exhaustion - the first time for almost a year now she hadn't been too afraid to let her guard down - and fell asleep on the sofa.

As she walked down the road, taking her time because there was all the time in the world, Doan remembered following a huge crowd of Students up the road, half dead as usual. She felt her muscles relaxing, her body healing as she walked into that area, the area protected by the powerful magic in the Old House. It was warm and bright and all the Students were happy, full of life. It seemed like the day would go on forever.

Slowly, under the ward of the Old House, she began to regain life. She learned magic, ways to keep herself alive and awake, ways to defend herself from the bad energy. She could borrow life energy from other Students. Sometimes Devon fed her. She didn't go to the place where she lived except to sleep and always with wards up. It was dead. It wasn't a real place to live, just a study with a bed and that was choking the life out of her. She soon grew as strong as a normal Student. She watched the Students and copied what they did when she didn't know how to be a Student. She remembered running down a long road in the dark with the other Students, so alive, running like the wind, watching the stars and the moon. That was the most vivid memory she had.

A year, maybe two years went past before something went horribly wrong. She noticed a small change at first, a lapse in the energy flow. She had grown adept at seeing the energy. She wanted to be a shaman when she was older. At first she thought it was just a bad week but it didn't get better. Next week the energy got slightly lower. The other Students said that it was always quieter during the Holidays because some of the Students went home. Doan waited patiently. The energy did pick up after a while. Then, just as she thought everything was back to normal, it plummeted. She was almost disconnected.

The spirits of the House sent for repairmen and it was closed for repairs for a few months. Doan stayed with other students until it was back to normal. She attended the reopening and spoke to the God machine all night. However, it wasn't the same. Something went wrong. The barrier was only at half the strength and she wasn't healing at anything like the same rate. She put it down to her growing personal strength and independence from the Students who brought her back to life. She was becoming her own person again.

When her life force started draining away, she was forced to admit that she was wrong. She could heal herself, keep herself something close to alive from other nodes of the Student's vast network. However, she would never get the rush she needed to stay at full health without the machines in the Old House. The gate was getting more and more difficult to open. When she did get in, she spent the entire night in a coma. She tried buying her own SNES but it didn't work. Worse, the rest of the Students were being affected. Some of them weren't even students any more, they had mutated into other things. It was only their own force of will and Doan's constant random healing magic that gave them some semblance of what they had been before. They didn't even go to the Old House any more, they just walked straight past, leaving Doan in the alley, casting opening spells on the wall and singing to herself to drown out the unnatural silence and stillness.

Soon she grew uninterested in keeping herself alive. She actively threw all her life energy into her magic, using it for anything from reducing the cost of a pint of beer, healing someone, opening the gates for five minutes or causing someone to not throw her out of the house. She cast magic just to feel the flow of it through her fingers. Another student had told her before to NEVER put life energy into magic but she just laughed. She welcomed the end. She was so weak now, her body racked with pain. She was surprisingly happy, though. She did what she liked; her life was already over. She was no longer a student, she had graduated, but she still spent all day in the University, as fiercely loyal as any Union officer. At night she mostly sat in the alley, projecting her thoughts through the wall to the Machine. It couldn't heal her body any more - she was too far gone - but it kept her sane. The Students didn't seem to care about the Old House any more. They went past it in taxis, as though they would even pay money to get away. Nobody even fed her any more.

They even threatened to leave the House. To sell it. Like cattle.

One final night, the doors opened for her. It was a winter's night and it was warm inside. There were so many Students, so much life. She hardly recognised most of them; they were either freshers or her old friends who had mutated. There was music playing. She took her usual place by the Machine and poured herself a drink. People weren't playing on the Machine so she switched on her laptop and used her SNES emulator. There was noise and light and that smell again, that smell only the Old House had. Someone was talking to her. She couldn't see or hear them. Everything was going grey again. Devon was swearing at the computer. He had been so nice before but now he just spent all day with Lilia and didn't even open the gate, even though he was in charge of it. Despite his best efforts, the computer refused to change the track it was playing, which was the Game Over tune from the game that looked like Home

It's time to let go, said the computer.

Can't you keep me alive?

I can't support you as a living being. I can support your soul indefinitely if you cease living. Then you can stay here. You always wanted to move in, didn't you?

Can't I even eat a pizza before I...

Before she could continue, the Machine flickered on and the title screen of Chrono Trigger appeared. She grabbed the controller from Devon and started playing. Her mind reached out to the game, acknowledged its presence and she simply surrendered. The controller slipped out of her hand and she fell to the floor, lifeless.

"...Absolutely sure you didn't phone me? It was definitely your number."

Student Ghost sat up, relinquishing the rest of the bread to the sparrows. There, in front of her, his life energy as bright as a glorious halo, was Matthias. His voice, his face, everything about him was exactly as she remembered him. Idly, she reached into his pocket and stole his wallet. Then she ran onto the train with it, watching while he swore and ran after his money that was mysteriously floating away from him. It would be a fun journey home.

That night, as she was busy rearranging the cables for the tenth time so they were forced to switch on the Machine in order to keep the fridge working, Pan spoke to her.

"Isn't this fun?"

"It's the best Reunion ever."

"You make life much more interesting for all of us." she noted.

"This is how it was meant to be, you've just forgotten."

"Oh, I never forgot."

"Then why didn't you fix it?"

"Because it's your quest, dear." said Vyviane, who was sitting next to Pan, sipping a glass of wine, "And now you've finished it, you're free to leave."

"Really?"

Vyviane nodded.

"Who are talking to?" Matthia asked her.

"The ghost." said Devon quickly.

"The ghost." echoed Lilia.

"But I don't want to leave. The place will be sold if I leave, won't it? It kept me alive, so I have to keep it alive now. That's the bargain."

"You won't, dear. You are the memories. You are this places' spirit. You will become this place. Every atom of it will contain your spirit. And you will fill it with light and life."

"And it won't be sold?"

"Not once you've made it beautiful."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

"Promise." added Pan.

"Okay." said Doan, then disappeared into the SNES through the cartridge slot.