Maya

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…

Arae (and... Friend?) wishing you a smile-free (yet still happy) Halloween season…

The night before her 18th birthday, Giuliana fell asleep on Earth for the last time. Later, she realized it was far from the first time she'd been abducted. Numerous troubling occurrences—occasionally inexplicable happenings that had punched confounding holes throughout the continuity of her childhood & adolescent memories—suddenly all pieced themselves together into a coherent, canonical whole, for which her current situation, light years removed from Earth, became the only possible, inevitable adulthood.

Katharina, taking sweet, sweet revenge…

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…

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…

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…

Karina returned to campus just as the mushrooms were kicking in…

What Saffron missed most about smoking was having a reason to compel her to take smoke breaks. So she started feeding the birds…

Inka, aware of the Minders for several years now and long past cycling through self-doubt (am I dreaming? high? crazy?), had simply accepted their presence, and the fact that no one else seemed to be able to see them, as a novel fact of her life. For the most part, they just floated around, though it was clear from the get-go that they gravitated toward populated areas…