Aannii

Flynne, assuring a potential customer that she would not have traveled nearly so far if she was just another purveyor of crystals that don't actually work…

Em, paradoxically feeling more than ever like a misfit toy…

Quinne walked alone in the wilderness, initially in an attempt to forget her troubles—troubles acquired during her previous attempt to not be alone. But the further she wandered, the more she felt she was moving toward something unknown rather than away from anything she knew…

Lucia preferred the tranquility of the underwater world to the hectic, more populated surface. She'd worked with the Ocean Reef Group, helping to maintain Nemo's Garden, an agricultural experiment off the coast of the Italian Riviera that grew samples of land-based crops in underwater greenhouses called biospheres. But after storms & the pandemic cut off access to the project for months, the team was pared back to a skeleton crew, & she was cut loose. Not long into her hunt for a new job, she was contacted by a company called Reprion & recruited to work on their research submarine, the Thalassa. Eager to get back underwater, she didn't ask as many questions as she probably should have…

Krystal had spent countless hours in the woods around the cabin, silently stalking any prey she could track, gradually maturing into a fearsome apex predator undaunted by any kind of weather. It was what she'd always done when her mother would bring her up to the mountains and then disappear into the wilderness to perform her “rituals,” but this time felt different…

When Elyria found the black ring, she used it as an escape hatch from her own life, exempting herself from the toils of work & school & embarking on a vacation cruise around the world. She wanted a life worth taking pictures of, like so many others' lives she'd been following online. But after a few months at sea, & stops at more than a dozen tropical destinations, she found herself once again growing just as bored as she'd been at work & at school. She began to feel as if the very palm trees were mocking her, the rolling tides laughing at the flimsiness of her wishes.

Paris, in Paris, albeit in an alternate dimension…

Katharina, taking sweet, sweet revenge…

Raven, aglow with job satisfaction at the Museum of the Odd…

Elisa, trying to figure out just what, exactly, this random street fair is celebrating…