Mila & Milana loved nothing more than to scare the crap out of hotel guests, lingering in the long hallways for hours, waiting for one unsuspecting innocent after another to come around a corner and spot them. If their "victim" was not a Shining fan, and/or didn't immediately bolt in the opposite direction on general principle, the girls would then ask them to guess which one of them was wearing the black ring on the hand behind her back. For reasons that were not entirely clear to the girls themselves, no one had ever guessed correctly. When they revealed their hidden hands, the ring would always be on the hand the guest hadn't picked. But neither the guests nor the girls themselves had come close to guessing the real truth: Mila was always wearing the ring, and Milana would cease to exist if Mila ever removed it. So far, she'd been so engrossed in the sheer elation of actually having a twin sister that the idea of removing the ring had yet to even enter her mind…
Mila & Milana
Many girls in many dimensions, one mysterious piece of jewelry…
Lyssa
Ether
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…
Renata
Renata, trying to stay dry after the show, beginning to wonder what's taking her driver so long…
Ariadne
Ariadne, navigating the labyrinth…
Selene
Selene, aboard her spaceship, riding the hyperspace zipline…
Parker
Parker, in the future, on her scooter, readying to no longer be parked…
Zuira
Zuira put on the black ring and wished for snow…
Elyria
When Elyria found the black ring, she used it as an escape hatch from her own life, exempting herself from the toils of work & school & embarking on a vacation cruise around the world. She wanted a life worth taking pictures of, like so many others' lives she'd been following online. But after a few months at sea, & stops at more than a dozen tropical destinations, she found herself once again growing just as bored as she'd been at work & at school. She began to feel as if the very palm trees were mocking her, the rolling tides laughing at the flimsiness of her wishes.
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…
Sybil
Not quite alone in the woods, Sybil had an exceptionally clear vision of a very murky immediate future.