Augusta

Dani often dreamt she was jumping around an inflatable bounce house, but she'd never before woken up in one…

Wren, wondering (or not wondering) what happened to her friend…

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…

Ryder, suddenly becoming very aware why no one else was eager to throw a party in this particular abandoned warehouse…

Brandy had returned to the temple that she thought was her home, until she tried to leave again. Her main hall no longer led outside, but simply repeated itself, extending farther than she could see…

For as long as she could remember, Yarine had been able to lucid dream. Growing up with this inherent ability, for her, dreaming seemed like just another series of realities, and likewise, waking life often felt like merely her most persistent (and most obstinate) dream…

Elli had been angling for an invite to the Gomiumi Genomics Compound for over a year, knowing from the get-go that adding her name to the waitlist would lead only to waiting. But armed as she was with confidence, knowledge, & several years of study in Berlin under a recent Nobel Prize winner, her nascent experiments with CRISPR had drawn the interest of numerous colleagues, to such an extent that she'd been able to secure her invitation before even having to consider resorting to less savory tactics…

Sonata rarely had cause to visit the main floor of her building, preferring to keep to her own rented office space upstairs. Like her patients, she generally preferred privacy. But her patients had been more distracted than usual lately, reporting a wide variety of confusing phenomena upon entering the building, ever since it had been purchased by the mysterious new owners, and the bank that used to occupy the ground floor became… something else…

Most guests at an art opening, particularly one located in a sizable outdoor sculpture garden, showed up with maximum intent to schmooze. Kenise, on the other hand, became schmoozed out especially swiftly, and thus preferred to sneak away and absorb herself in sketching…

Astraea, in her backyard, on Mount Olympus, presumably…