Augusta

Cleo, performing a surprisingly effective creativity ritual in her studio…

Samara was charged with protection of the sacred forest. Since early childhood, she had been trained by the Coven in the ancient ways of her peoples' magic. The Dozen Mothers took turns guiding her through the dark woods, each imparting her own share of esoteric knowledge, gradually imbuing her with the power required to hear the breathing of the trees, to communicate in birdsong, to summon lightning from the clouds. Eventually, she began to feel the forest as an extension of herself, or rather, that she herself was an extension of the forest…

Zofya had long ago achieved a level of fame at which everyone knew her last name, but rarely felt a need to use it. She was a singular talent, a fact made all the more evident by the unprecedented scope of her interplanetary concert tour, and her insistence on traveling to perform in the flesh, rather than relying on the industry standard remote holographic projections. Still, by the last leg of her year-long journey around the galaxy, she was as ready as anyone would be to get home to Earth and take a break.

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

Gia, about to bring the hammer down…

The night before her 18th birthday, Giuliana fell asleep on Earth for the last time. Later, she realized it was far from the first time she'd been abducted. Numerous troubling occurrences—occasionally inexplicable happenings that had punched confounding holes throughout the continuity of her childhood & adolescent memories—suddenly all pieced themselves together into a coherent, canonical whole, for which her current situation, light years removed from Earth, became the only possible, inevitable adulthood.

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…

Sora had been hearing a lot about the Museum of the Odd since her mother Raven had started working there a few months ago, finally piquing her curiosity enough to compel her to apply for a summer internship…

Although initially fascinated when they first appeared, Orico quickly came to realize that if she wanted to be able to continue lounging on the roof of her building with Larry the lizard, something drastic was going to have to be done about the gargoyles…

Ether lived in a liminal space. Though her childhood had been Earth-typical, in her teens she'd begun to "phase out," not mentally (like every other high school student), but physically. From her perspective, her surroundings & everyone in them would disappear, leaving behind a bare scaffolding of wherever she'd started, seeming both under construction & on its last legs simultaneously…