Jillian

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…

Dizonia was not fooled by the assorted spirits' blatant attempt to throw her off their scent…

Katharina, taking sweet, sweet revenge…

Lilith, listening carefully for the next instruction from the black ring…

Lucia preferred the tranquility of the underwater world to the hectic, more populated surface. She'd worked with the Ocean Reef Group, helping to maintain Nemo's Garden, an agricultural experiment off the coast of the Italian Riviera that grew samples of land-based crops in underwater greenhouses called biospheres. But after storms & the pandemic cut off access to the project for months, the team was pared back to a skeleton crew, & she was cut loose. Not long into her hunt for a new job, she was contacted by a company called Reprion & recruited to work on their research submarine, the Thalassa. Eager to get back underwater, she didn't ask as many questions as she probably should have…

Jolie observes an exhibit, and/or is herself an exhibit being observed…

Rosalia had never been a daydreamer. Nor had her dreams at night meant much to her or stuck with her through the days. She was fine with this, blessed with an innate talent to find fulfillment in the pragmatic. What life threw her way, she enjoyed tackling, even when it felt like life was throwing an abundance of pipe wrenches at her ankles…

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…

Zofya had long ago achieved a level of fame at which everyone knew her last name, but rarely felt a need to use it. She was a singular talent, a fact made all the more evident by the unprecedented scope of her interplanetary concert tour, and her insistence on traveling to perform in the flesh, rather than relying on the industry standard remote holographic projections. Still, by the last leg of her year-long journey around the galaxy, she was as ready as anyone would be to get home to Earth and take a break.

Fiola, visiting her favorite species at an otherworldly aquarium…