Surface (Chapter 4)
TRIGGER WARNING for character suicide Elizabeth had envied Mano her capacity to feel at home anywhere but hadn't regretted it when it'd meant she could get out of where she'd badly needed to get out of. It was in Brazil that Mano had first met...
Surface (Chapter 3)
If one black liquid had been part of the problem, then let another be part of its solution. - You know, thinking about how what a large part of the problem clashes between Muslims, Jews and Christians are makes me sick to my stomach, Eli. I can't...
Surface (Chapter 2)
Brazil hadn't always been an easy place to live in. The country's history of slavery had left marks which hadn't proven to be easy to erase. Sand children and street urchins roamed the favelasdesperately struggling to keep themselves alive by any means...
Surface (Chapter 1)
"I hate this." Afternoon. Skyscrapers concealed what was left of the setting sun's light with hard lines, cold stone and sharp angles. Mano missed the reassuring ocean depths and iron hull wrapped around her like a protective cocoon. The swarming...
Tarsials
Tarsials live on a planet with deep, wide oceans, a fairly porous soil and dense forests of towering arboreal life, the circumstances of which make the redundancies built into their sleek, aerodynamic physiology uniquely adapted to. Tarsials have...
Soma
Soma's organ garden had seemed like a good idea at the time. When the snake thought back on the many sacrifices that had been performed on the site he first planted his magicked seeds for it in, his greatest regret about them was that since there was...
Rakim
Rakim is the bat in my belfry. Birdcages hang upside-down from the walls of his clock tower with their doors wide open. A lightning rod and wind turbines that he's installed on the roof power the light bulbs and turning gears in its top floor...
Myri
Their vaguely humanoid-shaped bodies' surfaces are porous, peppered with large holes, to the extent that there's about 1/4 to 1/3 of their outsides that isn't technically 'surface' but empty space leading in. The cavities interconnect inside in a...
Midas
Whoever came up with transmutation was extremely unlikely to have expected that anyone would ever use it the way that Midas ended up using it. It's not just the fact that he has no need to keep an alchemist's furnace in the cave that serves as his...
Karoshi
Tezcat the jaguar was out in the jungle on his own one day, minding their own business, when he was suddenly surrounded by zombies who threw a net over him and shot him with a tranquilizer dart, then fell into unconsciousness. When he woke up in a...
Diaz
TRIGGER WARNING for supernatural self-harm. Diaz is the self-appointed security guard of a museum he's built in which to hold his own artwork. He would never think it fit to expose his art to any other eyes than his own, and would feel too guilty...
Boko
"One enters a nation according to its customs just as one enters a river according to its flow." - Viet-Namese saying Boris Chrome is a self-styled hero, reviled villain, refined aesthete, world traveller, obsessive packrat, brilliant linguist,...