Once Cherry finally gave in to its constantly whispered requests and wore the black ring to cheerleading practice, things escalated quickly.
Cherry
Many girls in many dimensions, one mysterious piece of jewelry…
Zuira
Zuira put on the black ring and wished for snow…
Rosalia
Rosalia had never been a daydreamer. Nor had her dreams at night meant much to her or stuck with her through the days. She was fine with this, blessed with an innate talent to find fulfillment in the pragmatic. What life threw her way, she enjoyed tackling, even when it felt like life was throwing an abundance of pipe wrenches at her ankles…
Hodja
The few seconds between bungling her over-practiced landing and actually slipping the black ring onto her finger were the most precarious of Hodja's entire life…
Zubaida
Zubaida, glowing and feeling at home on the playa…
Arabella
Despite having gone to the lake in the woods with a trunk full of costume changes and the express intent to be photographed, Arabella could not shake the eerie sensation that she was being watched by additional, unseen eyes.
Dizonia
Dizonia was not fooled by the assorted spirits' blatant attempt to throw her off their scent…
Karina
Karina returned to campus just as the mushrooms were kicking in…
Elli
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…
Persephone
Persephone, enduring her least favorite part of the year…
Giuliana
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.