Cleo

Brandy had returned to the temple that she thought was her home, until she tried to leave again. Her main hall no longer led outside, but simply repeated itself, extending farther than she could see…

When Elyria found the black ring, she used it as an escape hatch from her own life, exempting herself from the toils of work & school & embarking on a vacation cruise around the world. She wanted a life worth taking pictures of, like so many others' lives she'd been following online. But after a few months at sea, & stops at more than a dozen tropical destinations, she found herself once again growing just as bored as she'd been at work & at school. She began to feel as if the very palm trees were mocking her, the rolling tides laughing at the flimsiness of her wishes.

Once Cherry finally gave in to its constantly whispered requests and wore the black ring to cheerleading practice, things escalated quickly…

Raven, aglow with job satisfaction at the Museum of the Odd…

Ether lived in a liminal space. Though her childhood had been Earth-typical, in her teens she'd begun to "phase out," not mentally (like every other high school student), but physically. From her perspective, her surroundings & everyone in them would disappear, leaving behind a bare scaffolding of wherever she'd started, seeming both under construction & on its last legs simultaneously…

Sonata rarely had cause to visit the main floor of her building, preferring to keep to her own rented office space upstairs. Like her patients, she generally preferred privacy. But her patients had been more distracted than usual lately, reporting a wide variety of confusing phenomena upon entering the building, ever since it had been purchased by the mysterious new owners, and the bank that used to occupy the ground floor became… something else…

Wren, wondering (or not wondering) what happened to her friend…

Talula had come to prefer hosting her own gatherings rather than visiting anyone else's home, as few other hosts turned out to be amenable to the trail of flora that sprang up from whatever surface she'd just stepped upon. She was gradually training herself to control the appearance and rate of growth of this vegetative trail, but for the moment it was still beyond her ability to stop it completely…

Krystal had spent countless hours in the woods around the cabin, silently stalking any prey she could track, gradually maturing into a fearsome apex predator undaunted by any kind of weather. It was what she'd always done when her mother would bring her up to the mountains and then disappear into the wilderness to perform her “rituals,” but this time felt different…