Starla used to have a black thumb. Then she found the black ring.
High-Speed Making-Of
Starla
From a latent space containing billions of dimensions, clear voices ring out…
Gia
Gia, about to bring the hammer down…
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…
Maya
Maya, lost in illusion…
Mila & Milana
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…
Krystal
Krystal had spent countless hours in the woods around the cabin, silently stalking any prey she could track, gradually maturing into a fearsome apex predator undaunted by any kind of weather. It was what she'd always done when her mother would bring her up to the mountains and then disappear into the wilderness to perform her “rituals,” but this time felt different…
Viviana
Viviana, reminiscing about the infinite sadness…
Zubaida
Zubaida, glowing and feeling at home on the playa…
Lilith
Lilith, listening carefully for the next instruction from the black ring…
Raven
Raven, aglow with job satisfaction at the Museum of the Odd…
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.