Zubaida

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…

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).

Samara was charged with protection of the sacred forest. Since early childhood, she had been trained by the Coven in the ancient ways of her peoples' magic. The Dozen Mothers took turns guiding her through the dark woods, each imparting her own share of esoteric knowledge, gradually imbuing her with the power required to hear the breathing of the trees, to communicate in birdsong, to summon lightning from the clouds. Eventually, she began to feel the forest as an extension of herself, or rather, that she herself was an extension of the forest…

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

Mae, honestly not all that surprised to confirm that giving herself an impromptu tarot reading at the behest of a whispered voice emanating from a black ring would have immediate and particularly harrowing repercussions…

Farrah, walking home alone from the only club that still stays open until sunrise, wearing the black ring…

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…

Inka, aware of the Minders for several years now and long past cycling through self-doubt (am I dreaming? high? crazy?), had simply accepted their presence, and the fact that no one else seemed to be able to see them, as a novel fact of her life. For the most part, they just floated around, though it was clear from the get-go that they gravitated toward populated areas…

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…

Fiola, visiting her favorite species at an otherworldly aquarium…