When she was five, Renata demanded to be addressed as "Your Royal Highness". She had read The Princess and the Pea and identified so strongly with its main character that she began acting like a royal; her parents complied with her finicky commands, assuming that her overactive child mind had just conjured another fleeting fancy. Two weeks later, they called her by her first name again, and she complained so much that they were forced to buy her an entirely new bedroom set, complete with an ultra-soft mattress and satin sheets, before she was appeased. Ever since, even the slightest lump in her bed, whether it be a small movement of the springs or a predestined pea, displeased her fine senses so much she couldn't sleep and had to call whichever local authorities were responsible for what she termed "emotional trauma".

Renata couldn't sleep.

She woke up with her muscles tense and slender tanned hands twitching, half-curled into a fist. "Cabron!" There was no pea in her mattress. In fact, there was no mattress at all.

She had been in New York, or Los Angeles, or some other smog-filled American city, marching through the streets (no doubt to attend a high-society function), and then a second had passed and she was unconscious and then she was here. Nowhere. Other than some life-weary trees, she had woken up to a flat plane of withered grass and an oddly clear sky.

And bodies. Not bodies in the sense she typically saw them; these people were clothed, not particularly attractive, certainly nowhere near famous, and unconscious.

Mouth pulled in a taut line, Renata stood up unsteadily, wiping off the dirt on her jeans and frowning at the streaks of brown and green on her bleached white blazer. Two others had woken up already. They looked like the type of people she would sneer at on the street - poor unfortunate souls. Renata withheld a low wail of desperation.

"You don't know where we are," she repeated, looking down at the most unfortunate looking of the lot (and certainly of the conscious lot). "This must be a sick joke!" Renata exclaimed, clasping the purse she only just realized was still wrapped about her shoulder. Who hated her enough to leave her stranded with these losers?

Nobody, she realized with a growing sense of dread.

She was perfect.