Pherusa

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…

The few seconds between bungling her over-practiced landing and actually slipping the black ring onto her finger were the most precarious of Hodja's entire life…

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.

There was no universe in which Tricia was not obsessed with flight. In tandem with her obsession came its inevitable, plentiful opposition: a cavalcade of obstacles meant to prevent her ascent to the skies…

The first time Millie was suddenly cornered by several black SUVs, hooded and herded into one of them by burly men wearing suits, sunglasses and earpieces, she'd reacted as you might imagine anyone would…

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…

Viviana, reminiscing about the infinite sadness…

Wren, wondering (or not wondering) what happened to her friend…

Sonata rarely had cause to visit the main floor of her building, preferring to keep to her own rented office space upstairs. Like her patients, she generally preferred privacy. But her patients had been more distracted than usual lately, reporting a wide variety of confusing phenomena upon entering the building, ever since it had been purchased by the mysterious new owners, and the bank that used to occupy the ground floor became… something else…

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