Pherusa

Tawai, arriving at a dinner party only to discover that not all of the guests appear to be strictly human…

Starla used to have a black thumb. Then she found the black ring…

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…

Nona, waiting for a bullet train to 198X…

Like any artist in her gallery's stable who desired to remain as such, Xerew was required to attend all opening night celebrations during which at least one of her works hung on the walls. But instead of schmoozing & selling herself or her paintings (as the gallery would obviously prefer she do), she tended to find herself more interested in determining who amongst the crowd was actually human (and if so, just how human).

Selene, aboard her spaceship, riding the hyperspace zipline…

The singular face of Xia, attending an eclectic gallery opening in several alternate dimensions simultaneously…

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.

Julietta was proud of herself for making it up into the tree without injury, though considerably less proud of the reasons that prompted her to climb it in the first place…

Raven, aglow with job satisfaction at the Museum of the Odd…