Mask

Their collection was an odd one to put it mildly, though it was somehow appropriate given the collection of people that had brought it together. Jeremiah was a high school senior who was mostly just trying to skate by - his grades were mostly average, he had enough friends to not be bored in class, and he'd never really committed himself to a sport or club at all. He went to class, he did his work, and he went home. Samantha was one his classmates, though they hadn't really talked much before then. Samantha was the classic shy girl on campus, who tried not to speak up and silently got flying colors on all of her tests. Though she would never have admitted it, she had always watched Jeremiah from a distance, and even just being in the same room as him had her heart ready to beat out of her chest.

The other two, however, were where things got strange. Manda was the PR agent of a clothing company, and was highly talkative because of it. She was unafraid to get up in someone's face and start a conversation, and you could almost swear that she was constantly on a sugar high. She was bubbly, she was excitable, and she was way too good at her job. And Rolland was a sixty year old man with a family. He was retired, his children had families of their own, and his wife had passed away several years ago. He spent most of his days fishing or reading, living off of the retirement funds that he had accumulated in his time working as a computer repairman in the early days of the technology.

They stood in a circle around the table, four masks sitting in the center that they had brought with them to this meeting of sorts. It had been an accident that had brought them together. A complete crossroads, and it had been the intense paleness and bloodshot eyes that had linked them together. This wasn't your average kind of tired or sick. It wasn't often that you saw someone walking around, looking like they were already dead.

So they had talked. And they talked about their dreams. And they talked about their masks. And that's what had prompted them to bring them all together, into one space, to see if there were any kinds of similarities between them, other than their abrupt appearance and the shivers that they sent down the four's spines.

But they all looked vastly different, and they weren't even made of the same materials. Jeremiah's was stone and basic, Samantha's was paper and in the shape of an owl, Manda's was an exact gold replica of her own face, and Rolland's... They weren't even sure what the material was, but it certainly didn't look like anything that they had ever seen before.

There was still much to learn.