Elisa

Inka, aware of the Minders for several years now and long past cycling through self-doubt (am I dreaming? high? crazy?), had simply accepted their presence, and the fact that no one else seemed to be able to see them, as a novel fact of her life. For the most part, they just floated around, though it was clear from the get-go that they gravitated toward populated areas…

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

Pasithea, suffering from insomnia…

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…

Not quite alone in the woods, Sybil had an exceptionally clear vision of a very murky immediate future.

Arae (and... Friend?) wishing you a smile-free (yet still happy) Halloween season…

For her 21st birthday, Rǣlia (known to her friends as "Really") decided to organize a celebratory nighttime gathering at Multiversal City theme park. The evening, attended by a dozen or so of the aforementioned friends, included an expansive dinner and mixed drinks, and then more mixing of drinks, and had been perfectly festive and joyous right up until she'd snatched a random bongo drum (from a couch shaped like a boat) and announced that she wanted to start a drum circle. Suddenly, all of her laughing friends were nowhere to be found…

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…

Kienna, working the night shift at the mermaid tadpole nursery…

Nona, waiting for a bullet train to 198X…