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. She was familiar with horror tropes about these spaces, focused on being trapped there, alone, but she found neither her transitions nor the emptiness of her destinations particularly frightening. In fact, she quickly realized she felt more at home "there" than she did "here," & so, at 18, she effectively moved in. She could still return to the so-called normal world at will, but found that her new space was, in relation to her base reality, practically suspended animation. Bodily functions were effectively on pause, including any sense of hunger or thirst or need to sleep, & only seconds seemed to have passed when she returned from it, no matter how long she'd been "gone." At first, she got a great deal of reading done. Then, when she got restless, she began to explore, drawing herself a map as she roamed. She soon discovered that when she ventured even a small distance from her arrival point, the layout of the space did not continue to correspond with the layout surrounding her earthly departure point. Furthermore, her map of the space would only remain accurate if she transitioned from roughly the same physical point again. Which meant it was not a single space, but an infinity of spaces, & when she learned this, she started traveling the Earth to explore more spaces. Years later (for her), she would find that not all such spaces were devoid of life. She would hear a voice whispering her name, a name that until that moment she had not known was her own.
