Hodja

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.

Jania (and her Prince) ready to receive visitors in the royal aquarium…

Lilith, listening carefully for the next instruction from the black ring…

Fiola, visiting her favorite species at an otherworldly aquarium…

Once Cherry finally gave in to its constantly whispered requests and wore the black ring to cheerleading practice, things escalated quickly…

Em, paradoxically feeling more than ever like a misfit toy…

Ariadne, navigating the labyrinth…

Quinne walked alone in the wilderness, initially in an attempt to forget her troubles—troubles acquired during her previous attempt to not be alone. But the further she wandered, the more she felt she was moving toward something unknown rather than away from anything she knew…

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…