She looked almost like a fictive, but she wasn't. That was just how she dressed. The black velvet, the silver ankh, the nose ring, the black-on-pale makeup--that was the front she presented most often to the world, the mask behind which she hid her most secret self.

"Emby?"

The redhead looked up and smiled. "Kombanwa, Miyae-chan. I thought you'd be the first to arrive." She slid aside to make room for the newcomer. "Douzo."

The tall, coltish-limbed woman sat gingerly beside her creator, tucking a lock of hair as red as the first woman's behind one ear. In the faint light, the fine knife-scar that traced one smooth cheek was barely visible. "The others will be here," she assured in her measured contralto. "You know they will."

"I know. I couldn't blame them if they didn't want to see me again after all this time, though. Some of them, anyway."

Miyae laughed, a throaty, almost masculine chuckle. "We never forget those who brought us here, didn't you know that?"

Emby looked Miyae full in the face, studying the wide blue eyes she'd always wished she'd had. "I know. It's just...I mean, I trashed a lot of stuff when I thought I'd grown out of it, you know?"

Miyae nodded, once. "And now you regret it."

"Yeah, sort of. I mean, I'd like to read some of it again...just for old times' sake..."

A shadow fell across the table. "It wouldn't be the same, you know." The new voice was very soft, musical--loud as a whisper. Emby looked up and brightened.

"Muriah!"

Emby's first avatar--her first personal character--smiled and sat with almost feline grace. She looked as though she'd just risen from her Weapons station on the bridge of the Enterprise; her gold Starfleet uniform was immaculate, her lieutenant's braid winking gold on her sleeve in the soft light. "It's good to see you again," Muriah smiled. "So you call yourself Emby now?"

"Long story." Emby waved her hand. "You know, this is starting to look like a redhead convention."

The others laughed. "I wasn't always a redhead, you know, " Miyae teased. "Still, I think I like this better than the long black hair you first gave me."

A small group entered, and Emby eagerly waved them over. "Here come the comic incarnations," she explained to the others. "Miry, Angel, over here!"

Behind Mirror and Angelica Harkness, Pearl Kenyon drifted in quietly and sat primly at one end of the booth, her long braid draped over one shoulder. She nodded greeting to the others without saying much of anything.

"Is this everybody that's coming?" Emby asked, looking around and taking a quick head count. A frown puzzled her features.

The five avatars looked at one another, then at Emby. They seemed equally confused. "Were you...expecting anyone else?" Miry asked finally.

"It's just that...I could have sworn there were more of you..."

A general chorus of gentle laughter greeted this.

"There may have been other masks, other names," Muriah, the first and oldest of all, explained. "But most of them were simply variations on a theme. For instance, you reincarnated me as Rihana Kane."

Emby blinked. "I...did?"

Rihana smiled at her from where Muriah had been sitting a moment ago. She wore a Next Generation uniform, and her hair was black and not red, and she was part Romulan and not Ilyrian...but the eyes were the same shade of green, the color of new leaves in spring. "You mean you never guessed?"

"I thought I'd based you on my friend Kim...?" Emby was completely dumbfounded.

"That's what you told yourself. You didn't want to admit that you had drawn on your memories of me as Muriah." Rihana shrugged, then reverted to her original appearance. "It didn't make any difference to me--though I would have thought the eyes would've been a dead giveaway."

Emby looked around at the circle of faces she thought she knew. Some of them had changed completely, yet were no less familiar...

Pearl Kenyon, her Jonny Quest fictive, was now her old Speed Racer avatar, Silver Starr. Again, the eyes should have been a giveaway, along with the white-blonde hair and the cultured British manner of speech...

"Not to mention the half-foreign heritage," Silver finished Emby's thoughts. "And the air of mystery. The *gymnastic* ability, for God's sake. Emby darling, you really should have known."

Angel Harkness brushed her hair back, and suddenly she was Luna--same appearance, same mystical abilities, with the sole addition of a glimmering soul gem on her pale brow. "Some of us are more obvious than others. Still, you can be forgiven for a bit of...selective forgetfulness?"

"It's a process called cryptomnesia," the psychologist who had been Mirror a moment ago explained carefully.

Emby gaped. "RHIANNON?!!?"

"Of course, being the most--subversive?--of the lot, I managed to hide myself best." The doctor who had once been a confidant of a band of space-faring rebels commonly known as Blake's 7 smiled. "Sometimes one forgets something so completely that, months or even years later, the old memory seems so foreign as to be a totally new idea."

"I'm pretty much the only one who maintained identity," Miyae explained gently, as Emby took a long pull of her Walk-me-down-sweet-Jesus. "Even I managed to sneak into other genres with a new face and name. Remember Xamra Vendhi? Amanda Wildstar? Lleyn Solo? Perra Dox? Tokoma Noki? Minami Chiba? And those were just based on *me*--"

"All right, all right, you've convinced me!" Emby said, half laughing. She looked around the table at each of them in turn: Muriah, Luna, Miyae, Silver and Rhiannon.

"Somebody who's tougher than she looks, but more vulnerable than she acts, the reluctant heroine and frustrated artist, the tough self-reliant female with a soft heart, the woman of mystery who secretly wants to fit in, and the woman who seems to have all the answers for everyone but herself."

"Your favorite archetypes," Miyae pointed out.

"Each and every original character you've ever created can be traced back to one of us," Silver said with a rare smile. "Just as each of us is part of you."

"Don't you see, Emby?" Rhiannon smiled. "You never left us behind, not really. You just kept reinventing us."

"It works for Madonna," Luna remarked, and was rewarded with laughter from the others.

"Then let me propose a toast." Emby raised a fresh glass. "To old friendships."

"To new discoveries," Muriah toasted.

"To the wonders of adaptability," Luna chimed.

"To survival," murmured Miyae.

"To changing with change," offered Silver.

"To variations on a theme," Rhiannon finished, and drained her glass with a smile.