One of them is a slightly translucent woman who is pretty sure she has a sense of her tablemates.

"Never have I ever cast a combat spell."

The green woman takes a swig from her beer.

The grey-haired woman looks at Clarinda. "What, really?"

"Really! Not even from a scroll!"

"Huh! Well, fair's fair." She has a swig.

"Do spell-like abilities count?"

The translucent woman gives a handwavey gesture. "Ehhhh…"

The butterfly shrugs and takes a very tiny sip.

Someone wanders out of the infirmary when the shift changes.

Cumin waves.

Imrijka has a look with Identify.

He waves back.

He seems to be protected against this spell.

That's fair. Still, she's keeping an eye on him.

"Hiya! Table's open if you have a drink first!"

"What exactly am I being invited to join?"

"We're playing a drinking game! It's called 'never have I ever'."

He orders "the thing you gave me time before last". The thing he got the time before last is nonalcoholic. He has zero intention of clarifying this.

"So, this game is normally played with beer? If you want a different drink I guess that works but I'm not sure the game makes much sense if there's no chance you'll get drunk."

"I can get a beer if you want." Is he going to get drunk from any amount of beer? No. Is he going to let them think they've won? Sure. Right up until he CRUSHES THEM ALL BY THE POWER OF CHEATING.

Imrijka nods.

Beer. Table. Also milk soda because it’s nice.

Once he gets closer he may notice there's a cake reading "HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAFFRON" on the table with a few slices cut out of it, so he's clearly not the only one here who brought a sugary snack.

"Never have I ever had a pet."

Clarinda sighs and has a drink. "Really, Imrijka, you have to remind me of my cat?"

"Should I never ask you questions?"

"No, no, I agreed to play."

The butterfly will also have a drink.

"What counts as a pet?"

"Let's say an animal you keep around because you like it, not just because it's useful, though it can be."

"What counts as an animal?"

"What sort of edge case are you thinking of, anyway?"

"More than one! For instance, carnivorous plants."

"I don't think most people think of Venus flytraps as their pets, but if you feel that way about yours then you should have a drink. It's just a game, don't worry too much about it."

He drinks.

Cumin glances at the table.

"Never have I ever frosted a cake."

Clarinda takes a drink.

"If you're the only one who's done it, you should tell us about it! Also, I should really do that sometime."

"Is that a rule?"

"Who cares?"

"Fine. I normally work with paint on canvas but even if I can't do cakes as well, I'm still pretty good. A couple wanted their portrait on a wedding cake and I was the Dornans' go-to for portraits, so I did it."

He also drinks.

"Oh, I spoke too soon. Do you want to tell us about it too?"

"Sometimes I try to make people happy. I was awful at it the first time but it made the person it was for happy - she’d been raised in a cult that didn’t allow unnecessary pleasures of the flesh and I got to introduce her to so many things."

"Aww, that's nice. It's sad when cults are like that, sometimes asceticism is good but people should have options."

Clarinda nods.

"Oh, it's my turn! Never have I ever eaten lobster."

Clarinda has a drink.

So does Imrijka.

Cumin does as well.

"You're just trying to get me to serve more snacks, aren't you."

"Is it working?"

"I'll do it if you'll have a drink."

"Sure."

Cumin closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, she has a trencher of stale bread with a bunch of small sandwiches on top of it.

Clarinda immediately grabs a sandwich.

The musical butterfly takes a drink, which looks normal, and then flies over to a sandwich and does something confusing to it. The end state does seem to involve the sandwich not being there, aside from a few oddly tetrahedral crumbs.

"You're good."

"She's kind of evil and I think you know it."

"I'm not an axiomite, how do you want me to speak? 'The person at this table presenting as a witch named Cumin, who appears to be of evil alignment, is capable of conjuring high-quality lobster sandwiches'?"

Imrijka shrugs.

"You're evil?"

"I'm retired."

"Yeah, either she retired or she's a really good illusionist."

Clarinda looks at the lyrakien. "I suppose it's fine if you're fine with it."

He drinks. He watches the conversation with interest but doesn’t ask if they’ve clocked him yet.

Cumin turns to the new person. "Your turn!"

"Never have I ever had a master I didn't hate."

Cumin has a drink. "I've got a good agreement with Saffron these days, and Thyme wasn't that bad."

Imrijka makes a face. "She absolutely was."

"What was wrong with her?"

"In general terms, she was compromising the structural integrity of the universe, getting innocents sent to Hell, et cetera. In terms of her treatment of Cumin, she really seemed to have been trying to set Cumin up to be killed or captured."

"She said anyone who thought through it would realize the usual air setup wouldn't cut it for harvesting giant tubeworms!"

(Clarinda and the lyrakien also don't drink.)

"That's not even the incident I was thinking of, there's another example?"

"The question is about whether I hate her, alright? I don't. If we're going to argue this much, maybe I should ask how you feel about Atropos."

"Atropos pays me to do work that I agree needs doing."

"You work for Atropos?"

Imrijka taps a pair of scissors on a necklace. "Yes. Did you think these were just a fashion choice?"

"That's not Atropos's symbol, I'm pretty sure she's got a hexagonal thing."

"Good of you to help kids' souls reach the right afterlife, though."

"Sometimes good. Not always."

"Anyway. Clarinda, your turn."

"Never have I ever gone skiing."

He drinks. He has done so many things.

The lyrakien also drinks.

So does Cumin.

Imrijka doesn't.

"Never have I ever gotten my ears pierced."

Cumin has a drink, but looks a bit startled. "I'm wearing earrings right now, is that really a fair question?"

The lyrakien doesn't drink. "I don't see the issue…"

Clarinda has a drink. "It turns out that if you're not wearing your earrings healing magic can sometimes screw with piercings, if you're not paying attention."

"What counts as getting your ears pierced?"

"You're really full of edge cases today, huh. Let's say … getting a hole made in your outer ear with something sharp? Has to be something you could put an earring in without it falling out, no 'I got a slash to the ear from a sword' nonsense."

He drinks. "Unrelatedly I’ve also worn earrings."

"Clip-ons?"

"Nope!"

"You got your ears pierced in an earring-unrelated way, and then still had piercings around later to put earrings in?"

"Oh, are you trying to guess? Still no."

"Magnets? People do some neat stuff with magnets sometimes."

"I’ve worn no-pierce ear jewelry but that’s not the answer."

"Did you wear the earrings in your ears?"

"Yep."

"Alright, I have no idea where you're going with this. Want to explain?"

He pauses in case someone else disagrees but then answers. "It's honestly not that interesting, I just shapeshifted holes into my ears when I wanted earrings."

"Pff. I should've guessed."

"Yep."

"Hmmm… Never have I ever used a microwave."

Imrijka has a drink.

Drink.

"I've emitted microwave radiation intentionally, does that count?"

"I wasn't really thinking of that case. Did you use it for heating?"

"Nope."

"I guess not, then."

"What's a microwave?"

"A microwave is a kind of oven, but instead of heating things with fire or such, it uses a special kind of invisible light."

"…so what's microwave radiation, then?"

"It's the kind of light. It's not actually invisible to everyone, some people can see it."

"I'm not really sure how cooking things with invisible light is supposed to work."

"Me neither!"

"So, microwave ovens work by sending microwaves at food. Microwaves are so low-energy that the wave/particle superposition collapses into a particle that's moving very fast - at the speed of light - which heats the food with very precisely-applied friction. It's the same reason sunburn happens."

"But microwaves are longer than red, and sunburns are from light that's shorter than blue."

"Wave-particle superposition?"

"A superposition is when there are two ways something could be, and no one is looking at it, so the author of the universe hasn't decided which it'll be yet. And - " (he turns to the butterfly) " - light wavelengths are actually a circle. Far infrared and far ultraviolet are the same color."

Four-or-so lights of shifting hue appear around the lyrakien, occasionally dipping out of the visible spectrum. "Really? Let me know when I hit radio then. Never have I ever lied to someone in this room."

He can't drink because he's laughing too hard. He keeps making little abortive gestures like he's going to, though.

"Need a hand with your mug?"

He's also laughing too hard to answer, apparently.

"Lying is rude, young lady. Treat this conversation with drunk strangers with the respect it deserves! And take a straw, if you're having trouble having a drink."

Cumin is also laughing a bit by the end of this sentence, but still manages to hand over some kind of rigid flour confection forming a hollow tube.

He doesn’t want the confection.

He gets it together. He drains his glass. "Do I win?"

"No!"

"Aw." He goes over to Bar for another drink.

Which he gets.

He returns to the table.

"You're up."

"Never have I ever not been mind-controlled while in my world of origin."

Everyone else

at the table

looks at him

and has a drink.

"I take it you're also planning to stay here indefinitely?"

"Till I can fundamentally alter the laws of physics that let that happen, maybe."

"Well, I wish you luck."

"Thanks. You folks all planning on going home?"

"Well, I'm going to go back to work, but after that I'll head home sooner or later."

"Same here."

"Yeah, I could probably afford to stay here but I don't really want to."

"I'm anticipating waking up into the stupid featureless void again but I tend to end up here from there pretty reliably. It's not really a plan. I don't really do plans these days."

"Stupid featureless void?"

"This jerk Raziela had her asshole minion do some obnoxious ritual with my soul and some other people's and put us in this stupid dreamscape thing because she wanted us to go on a quest for her. She got the bright idea that if she separated us and stopped letting us conjure stuff from the dreamscape we'd get tired of the isolation and cooperate. Unfortunately for her, I end up here pretty often. She says she's got time dilation, so she can outwait us, but for all I know that's bullshit and she might well lose her patience first."

"Do you think you’d be able to visit Milliways if you weren’t in the void?"

"No idea, sorry."

"Then I guess we can’t know whether to be glad she introduced us."

"I think that's a compliment, so if so, thank you."

He salutes her with his drink.

"Dreamscape, you say? I have some friends with experience with those, if we're from the same area you should tell me about the circumstances and I'll let them know. Dreams should be liberating. Good on you for holding out."

Clarinda nods in response to the salute, then turns to the lyrakien.

"I'm from Suaal, and we do have an Atropos who I don't think uses scissors, but the last time I was definitely in reality it was in Aiquzall and I'm told it's pretty hard for celestials and such to go there? Far as I know the person whose idea this was is safe and sound in Temda. Raziela Asatira, probably in the Iashil area, in the employ of Lord Edward Jass, who definitely spends a solid amount of time there."

"Doesn't ring a bell, but I'll look into it. No promises, sorry."

"Could someone get there to help you if they left through your door?"

"I wouldn't want to risk it if I were you, especially if I didn't have Plane Shift. I can open the door if you want a peek, but it seems unpromising to me. Plus I hear if you follow home someone who's dreaming you might get stuck even if they're not in a horrible void."

Shrug. "Maybe later."

"You're not missing much."

"Might be passing up a chance to fuck with Raziela Asatira, though."

"She's got a little shard of herself in there somewhere but the real her is not only outside the dreamscape but also on another continent. And we're not even near the coast of Aiquzall, meaning that you'd have to navigate a bunch of it to get there, which is an experience I would not recommend. Or, hmm, maybe you like seeing dinosaurs a lot more than you dislike magically depressing rain, I don't know."

"I might need to know more about the rain before I could say for sure."

"Apathy rain. It's grey, it makes you tired and makes everything dreary and pointless, kills you after around six hours of exposure, and unless you can work around the effects in your head promptly you'll probably end up lying there for six hours or until something else gets you."

Imrijka and the lyrakien will get Sendings. «I was having fun playing, do we want to remind them that there's a game on?»

Lyrakien can't reply in the same medium, but ey can whisper. "I'd like to let them talk? People who dream here can wake up at unpredictable times, she might be in a hurry."

«That's fair.»

«Alright. Anyone want to play a hand of cards or two while we wait?»

"Sure, I guess."

"Well, that's not a whole new category of problem but if it kills in six hours and I'd have to walk across a whole continent to escape it I might need some better solutions than what I've got." Shrug. Stretch.

"It's not that it covers the continent, it's more that it's a representative sample of the nonsense? There's the apathy rain, there's the storms of molten glass, there's the elemental absolute zones where what looks like earth might have the solidity of fire, there's the wandering colossi that destroy everything in their path, et cetera."

"...I will wait to visit until after I’ve gotten enough done with my life."

"Reasonable of you. If I'm still visiting here when you've done that Bar can probably pass along a message for me."

Thumbs up.

"You two done chatting?"

"I think so?"

Shrug. "I think so too."

"Yeah, alright, we're done. Never have I ever seriously thought about marrying someone."

Imrijka drinks and adjusts her clothing to make her ring clearer.

"Some people say I don't take anything seriously but I've at least considered it." The lyrakien takes a drink.

"Thyme was at one point considering having me marry a fairy prince and then kill him, does that count?"

"Let's say no."

"...Does thinking if a specific slave were to overthrow and imprison me it'd be hot and I'd be okay belonging to them forever count as contemplating marriage? Sorry, I did some really fucked up things while mind controlled."

"I don’t really think that counts as a marriage so I'd say no again."

He doesn't drink this time.

Imrijka grabs a stack of plates and forks and napkins from Bar to go with Cumin's cake, analyzes the cake, and serves herself a slice.

"Never have I ever been cheated on in a relationship, at least that I know of."

Sigh. "Bet you can guess what I’m about to say."

"I'll count it even if it was coercive, I have seen witches get mad at their enchanted boyfriends for nonmonogamy before."

He thinks about it and then just drinks rather than ask for further clarification.

The lyrakien drinks. "I would have been fine with sharing, but I don't like being extensively lied to."

"I'm not natively attracted to women and I don't like drama and I'm not sure I really want a love life enough to buy a potion for it."

"A potion?"

"The really upscale alchemists sell love potions, yeah. If two people drink the same potion they fall in love. Verrry pricey but if you want to date a witch and you're not a sapphist and you don't want to fight over boys it's one of the better options."

"Huh, I've only heard of much shorter-term love potions and not really the kind people take on purpose."

"Oh, those are cheaper, it's just that you really shouldn't use them on yourself or someone else unless you like drama. I used to sell them but that was before I cared about negative reviews."

"I have also had no real love life to speak of but not because I was specifically rejecting a lot of obvious plans, it's more that I never made time."

Clarinda pauses and turns to the lyrakien. "You're the kind of celestial who does relationships? How, uh, humanoid do you get? …I'm sorry, I don't want to make things weird."

"Are you the kind of person who'll get messed up if you never see me again?"

"Do I look not messed up? I want to do things that aren't about trying to win an unwinnable game for once in my pointless life. Afterlife. Whatever."

"That's fair. I'll think about it."

Cumin has a thought, and makes eye contact with Imrijka. "Never have I ever tried to kill myself."

Imrijka has a drink and rolls her eyes a bit. "Do you still hold it against me?"

Clarinda will also have a drink.

Cumin shrugs, then looks confusedly at Clarinda. "You said you've never cast a combat spell and I don't think we've met before today."

Clarinda looks a bit surprised. "I didn't mean you, did you mean you?"

He stops with his drink halfway to his lips and sets it down. "That’s cheating. Absolutely inexcusable cheating."

"What, bringing up something I know Imrijka did?"

"What if I had poisoned your drink, huh? Then you’d be putting me in a real pickle."

"Security would stop you and you've already lied to us at least once."

"And here I was thinking this was about what turned out to be an ambiguous statement."

Shrug.

"Never have I ever ridden a bicycle."

Imrijka has a drink. "Pretty hard to teach kids how to bike if you can't."

Clarinda doesn't. "I've been involved in a crash but I don't think landing on top of a unicycle counts. On multiple axes."

"Now, that sounds like a story," he tells Clarinda. He also drinks.

Cumin has barely ridden a bicycle but someone was doing a tech demo and she did try it. She has a drink.

"Maybe? I'm not sure where to start. I was heading home from a pretty long event, so it was kind of dark and the lighting was all greenish. And despite this, this guy kept checking his map rather than the path, even though there was Unicycle Roads signage around, and he ran into me. And, well. I did grab the ropes, so I suppose it was fine, I didn't get much worse than some scrapes and bruises, but it really ruined the night."

"I could use more context."

"Sure, one moment."

Clarinda closes her eyes and concentrates. After a moment she's holding something which looks like a painting, though the edges and back of the canvas are suspiciously low on detail and she doesn't really seem to be holding it like it weighs anything.

The painting shows a forest of massive trees with doors and the occasional window carved into them. A diverse and almost tangled array of bridges, cables, and platforms connects the doors. Sunlight filters in from above, but much of the forest is only lit by vines with glowing yellowish-green leaves, which trail out the doors, around trunks, and often along bridges. The primary focus of the painting is a palatial building of stone and ornately patterned tile embedded within a massive tree.

"This is where I lived. …not the Dornan building or right next to it, the city."

He flaps his hands. "I like that. Just need to figure out how to survive your world and get you out of wherever you're stuck and maybe I can see it in person."