Rǣlia

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. The awful silence felt unusually swift: if every last one of them had decided to ghost her, they'd all made the decision to clam up and steal away at exactly the same time. Even if all of them were that firmly against drum circles, at least one of them would have hung around to poke fun at her about it. She sat alone for a few minutes, chewing on her lip, tapping absently on the head of the drum. Spacing out, gazing at her hand, she saw the black ring, which she did not remember putting on tonight. She must have hit the bongo with it. Oh God, she thought, where did I send them? Now, finally, the ring seemed to awaken, its voices humming and buzzing in her head, albeit providing no useful information or any answer to her question. Instead it told her to go swimming. Clear your head, it said, its very presence seemingly contradicting the possibility. The water will clear your head, then you'll know where they went. "But don't you know where they went?" she asked it out loud. Only you know, it answered. Only you.