Macaria

Nona, waiting for a bullet train to 198X…

Despite having gone to the lake in the woods with a trunk full of costume changes and the express intent to be photographed, Arabella could not shake the eerie sensation that she was being watched by additional, unseen eyes.

The singular face of Xia, attending an eclectic gallery opening in several alternate dimensions simultaneously…

Most guests at an art opening, particularly one located in a sizable outdoor sculpture garden, showed up with maximum intent to schmooze. Kenise, on the other hand, became schmoozed out especially swiftly, and thus preferred to sneak away and absorb herself in sketching…

For as long as she could remember, Yarine had been able to lucid dream. Growing up with this inherent ability, for her, dreaming seemed like just another series of realities, and likewise, waking life often felt like merely her most persistent (and most obstinate) dream…

Tiziana knew by now that she was not really in a magical forest, but she still couldn't help frequently forgetting that fact, because the forest was very good at pretending to be a forest, and even better at pretending to be magical…

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…

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.

For her 21st birthday, Rǣlia (known to her friends as "Really") decided to organize a celebratory nighttime gathering at Multiversal City theme park. The evening, attended by a dozen or so of the aforementioned friends, included an expansive dinner and mixed drinks, and then more mixing of drinks, and had been perfectly festive and joyous right up until she'd snatched a random bongo drum (from a couch shaped like a boat) and announced that she wanted to start a drum circle. Suddenly, all of her laughing friends were nowhere to be found…

Viviana, reminiscing about the infinite sadness…