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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.

Tricia

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…

Samara

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…

Arabella

Despite having gone to the lake in the woods with a trunk full of costume changes and the express intent to be photographed, Arabella could not shake the eerie sensation that she was being watched by additional, unseen eyes.

Giuliana

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.

Quinne

Quinne walked alone in the wilderness, initially in an attempt to forget her troubles—troubles acquired during her previous attempt to not be alone. But the further she wandered, the more she felt she was moving toward something unknown rather than away from anything she knew…

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…

Rosalia

Rosalia had never been a daydreamer. Nor had her dreams at night meant much to her or stuck with her through the days. She was fine with this, blessed with an innate talent to find fulfillment in the pragmatic. What life threw her way, she enjoyed tackling, even when it felt like life was throwing an abundance of pipe wrenches at her ankles…

Saffron

What Saffron missed most about smoking was having a reason to compel her to take smoke breaks. So she started feeding the birds…

Rǣlia

For her 21st birthday, Rǣlia (known to her friends as "Really") decided to organize a celebratory nighttime gathering at Multiversal City theme park. The evening, attended by a dozen or so of the aforementioned friends, included an expansive dinner and mixed drinks, and then more mixing of drinks, and had been perfectly festive and joyous right up until she'd snatched a random bongo drum (from a couch shaped like a boat) and announced that she wanted to start a drum circle. Suddenly, all of her laughing friends were nowhere to be found…

Lucia

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…

Dani

Dani often dreamt she was jumping around an inflatable bounce house, but she'd never before woken up in one…

Sora

Sora had been hearing a lot about the Museum of the Odd since her mother Raven had started working there a few months ago, finally piquing her curiosity enough to compel her to apply for a summer internship…

Millie

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…

Tiziana

Tiziana knew by now that she was not really in a magical forest, but she still couldn't help frequently forgetting that fact, because the forest was very good at pretending to be a forest, and even better at pretending to be magical…

Kenise

Most guests at an art opening, particularly one located in a sizable outdoor sculpture garden, showed up with maximum intent to schmooze. Kenise, on the other hand, became schmoozed out especially swiftly, and thus preferred to sneak away and absorb herself in sketching…

Yarine

For as long as she could remember, Yarine had been able to lucid dream. Growing up with this inherent ability, for her, dreaming seemed like just another series of realities, and likewise, waking life often felt like merely her most persistent (and most obstinate) dream…

Dizonia

Dizonia was not fooled by the assorted spirits' blatant attempt to throw her off their scent…

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…

Sonata

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…

Julietta

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…

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…

Inka

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…

Talula

Talula had come to prefer hosting her own gatherings rather than visiting anyone else's home, as few other hosts turned out to be amenable to the trail of flora that sprang up from whatever surface she'd just stepped upon. She was gradually training herself to control the appearance and rate of growth of this vegetative trail, but for the moment it was still beyond her ability to stop it completely…

Brandy

Brandy had returned to the temple that she thought was her home, until she tried to leave again. Her main hall no longer led outside, but simply repeated itself, extending farther than she could see…

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…

Hodja

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…

Orico

Although initially fascinated when they first appeared, Orico quickly came to realize that if she wanted to be able to continue lounging on the roof of her building with Larry the lizard, something drastic was going to have to be done about the gargoyles…

Kienna

Kienna, working the night shift at the mermaid tadpole nursery…

Flynne

Flynne, assuring a potential customer that she would not have traveled nearly so far if she was just another purveyor of crystals that don't actually work…

Karina

Karina returned to campus just as the mushrooms were kicking in…

Aannii

Aannii, drinking coffee, in a teacup, in space…

Cherry

Once Cherry finally gave in to its constantly whispered requests and wore the black ring to cheerleading practice, things escalated quickly…

Raven

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

Tawai

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

Zuira

Zuira put on the black ring and wished for snow…

Ryder

Ryder, suddenly becoming very aware why no one else was eager to throw a party in this particular abandoned warehouse…

Gia

Gia, about to bring the hammer down…

Em

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

Elisa

Elisa, trying to figure out just what, exactly, this random street fair is celebrating…

Renata

Renata, trying to stay dry after the show, beginning to wonder what's taking her driver so long…

Lilith

Lilith, listening carefully for the next instruction from the black ring…

Katharina

Katharina, taking sweet, sweet revenge…

Augusta

Augusta, haunted by the many ghosts of her childhood…

Starla

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

Zubaida

Zubaida, glowing and feeling at home on the playa…

Farrah

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

Pherusa

Pherusa doesn't yet own her own guitar, but finds that wherever she goes, she somehow always ends up with one anyway…

Mae

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…