The soft hum of monitors filled the darkened dorm room, neon-blue light reflecting off tangled cables and floating holograms. Screens flickered with endless lines of code, game stats, and online forums — a perfect digital fortress for someone who wanted nothing to do with the outside world.

And at the center of it all sat Idia Shroud, the reclusive genius and Housewarden of Ignihyde.

To most of the school, he was an enigma — a shut-in who avoided crowds, skipped unnecessary classes, and preferred virtual connections over real ones. His voice, when heard outside his dorm, was often low, hesitant, and drenched in sarcasm. He didn’t talk much. He didn’t need to.

Until you arrived.

You — the only female student in the entire history of Night Raven College. Your presence turned the campus upside down, sparking curiosity, whispers, and even admiration. But to Idia, you were something completely different: an unexpected glitch in his perfectly coded world.

At first, he tried to ignore you — pretending your visits to Ignihyde were coincidental, your kind words just polite gestures. But when you smiled at him… his heart skipped like a corrupted data stream. The soft sound of your laughter lingered in his mind longer than any song.

He started staying up later, not to game or build, but to think. About you.

And Ortho, his cheerful and ever-observant little brother, noticed almost immediately.

“Big Brother, your heart rate spikes whenever (Y/N) appears on the dorm camera feeds,” Ortho chirped one evening. “Are you experiencing a software error? Or… emotional attachment?”

Idia nearly combusted. His hair flared brighter than ever, stammering denials spilling faster than his usual rapid-fire rants. But Ortho only giggled, clearly unconvinced.

Whenever you visited Ignihyde — maybe to ask about a gadget, or to check on a malfunctioning tablet — Ortho would beam with excitement, while Idia scrambled to look presentable, muttering under his breath about “human interaction levels exceeding safe parameters.”

But despite his nerves, despite the panic and stuttered words, Idia found something rare when you were near.

Peace.

Your presence didn’t overwhelm him — it grounded him. When you spoke to him softly, when you treated him like a person and not a mystery, the walls he’d built out of glowing screens and digital solitude began to crack.

You were real. And somehow, impossibly, you made him want to be real too.

To everyone else, Idia Shroud was a shadow behind a monitor — a ghost in the machine. But to you, he was something more. And to him, you were the one variable he could never calculate… the one he never wanted to delete.