...Renee regarded her friends with nauseating unease. Her insides roiled with apprehension. Instinctively she sensed something was about to happen, but she had no clue as to what that might be. They were three half-drunk women playing a stupid board game that Mina had seduced out the hands of an old gypsy woman’s adolescent grandson. What could happen?

She was about to suggest they just put away the dumb game when Candi yelled, “Look!” practically scaring her out of her skin.

“Look at the orb in the middle!” Suddenly sober with excitement, Candi reared up on her knees. With both hands firmly planted on either side of the board, she hovered over the game, her expression a mixture of awe and anticipation.

Mina inclined her head, squinting as the white swirling words within the orb’s center began to take shape. “What’s that say?”

Almost against her own will, Renee felt her upper body sway forward, too. Unable to deny her curiosity, she deciphered the hazy message. “It looks like…‘Do you three agree?’”

“Agree to what?” Candi asked as she deflated back against the couch, her momentary thrill in danger of expiring to her characteristic boredom.

“Well, to the adventures, of course,” Mina snorted. “What else could it be?”

They all fell silent, exchanging looks of agreement, excitement, and unease in a room that suddenly seemed void of all objects and sound. It was almost as though a vacuum had sucked away everything but the three of them and this game. Renee felt weightless and drunk, but she sensed her surrealistic state wasn’t caused by alcohol.

Something else was amiss.

Mina and Candi nodded in unison, their wordless affirmations a bold and persuasive declaration to her instinctive rebellion, which screamed at her to decline. Obligation weighed on her like a woolen cloak soaked by rain. Before she could rationalize her behavior, she felt her chin dip forward in consent.

The room started to spin in a fashion similar to times when she’d awakened in the morning after having far too much to drink. But unlike then, her mind wasn’t distorted; rather, everything around had begun to move. Shifting, turning, the colors melding together like they did on one of those spinning art trays that slug paint together in a fashion no human hand could create.

Renee’s vision strained against the ambiance, searching for her friends, whom she knew were seated a mere few feet away. Panic rioted her insides when she saw that Candi was gone. Before she even looked, she knew Mina would be, too.

Pressure surrounded her on all sides, making it near impossible to move. She fought the resistance, struggling to turn her head to the right. She managed an inch or two, enough to confirm her fear.

Tears blurred her already fuzzy gaze as her terror grew. They slipped from the corners of her eyes, but never reached her cheeks. The air around her sucked them from her skin and into the ever-growing vortex around her.

Renee opened her mouth to scream, but the words seemed also lost in the churning eddy. She felt herself being lifted off the ground and drawn forward, pulled toward the coffee table. And as her paralyzed frame hovered in the air above the game, her nose mere inches from the now-wordless orb, she realized how they would complete their turns.