Muscle Memory 🔗

In the movies, characters who body swap exchange consciousness but not experience. In reality, the body holds as many memories as the mind does. A body-swapped individual may find themselves with subconscious ticks, habits, and skills, all coming from the body that they inhabit. A talented swapper can bring those experiences up into their conscious memory, to apply once they are back in their own body.

Regeneration 🔗

On Earth, certain species of flatworm can regenerate if they are injured. Severing a worm at the right location will cause two fully-formed worms to regenerate from the halves. The Stygians on planet 8A35F-G have similar capabilities. Like worms, they are soft and harmless, but they can regenerate new brains when their body is split. However, these aliens live in a hostile environment, and individuals are clumsy. They now suffer from severe overpopulation, and Earth's astronauts must intervene to prevent complete self-destruction.

The Messenger 🔗

At the graduation ceremony for Courier training, the certificate is a truth spell. That truth spell is burned into the new Courier's forehead, representing a lifetime of privilege, commitment, and burden. Couriers spend their lives alone, performing one of the realm's most important services. They are afforded the utmost respect and confidence, not only because people can't lie in their presence, but also because they themselves cannot lie. To this day, no Courier has ever failed to deliver a message.

Windblown 🔗

It was the first thing I noticed when I arrived in Renaver: everything looked windblown. Walls listed sideways and thatching bunched leeward, giving the impression that the whole town was falling over. It was all because of an erratic wind that blew constantly through the streets. With time, I came to hate that wind. Like an overenthusiastic lover, it tugged at your skirts and stole away your breath, without leaving behind the comfort of human contact. Even inside, it scrabbled at the walls and moaned through the foundation, never letting you forget that it was there. Still, it took me two years of living in Renaver to realize that the wind wasn't a wind at all. It was breathing.

The X Team 🔗

As the Megalith got to the first skyscraper, a squad of superheroes appeared. At first, many people mistook them for the Power Rangers. But when they sprang into action, we realized we were mistaken. They may have looked the same, but their powers were very different. The biggest one became almost as big as the Megalith, while the smallest one shrank to the size of a mouse. The one who was still the size of a person gestured for us to stay back and said, "Leave this to the X Team!"

Downfall 🔗

The zombie apocalypse didn't happen the way we thought it would. Nobody even noticed it for years, and when we finally did, we thought it was a good thing. Birth rates were declining in third world nations. So were infant deaths and sexually transmitted diseases. Our humanitarian programs were working. Then infertility skyrocketed in the West. Doctors noticed it first and suspected something in the water. It took another five years to discover the virus, by which time the birth rate was down to a tenth of a percent. It was a cruel joke. Nobody felt sick, but people continued to get old and die. Meanwhile, nothing worked to conceive or even create babies. Humanity's last viable egg and sperm were used up in a desperate experiment. Now we are all growing old without the hope of a future. We aren't the only humans left, but we will be the last.

Lovesick 🔗

You've been sober for four months. As you receive your chip, you can't help but reflect on the journey it took to get here. You finally hit rock bottom when your last relationship crumbled into fear and resentment. That night, you locked yourself in your apartment for a week. If you couldn't see anyone, you thought, then you couldn't fall in love again. Once the shaking and crying was over, you dragged yourself to a Lovers Anonymous meeting. There, you met others who were still in love and trying to get out. One of them urged you to see a love counselor, and you did. You learned how to resist that first temptation of a crush, and how to satisfy the craving for companionship. You relapsed once, but you stopped yourself before there was even a kiss. After that, nothing could make you love again. Now you are who you always wanted to be, and stronger than ever before. Society is ready to take you back, now that you've sworn off love forever. With a smile, you accept your chip and hold it up for everyone to see.

Timewarp 🔗

We finally cracked the theory of relativity centuries after Einstein's death. Mastery over gravity did not have the intended effects: instead of manipulating mass and space, our machines changed the density of time. We only realized it when we discovered that the city of Los Angeles, where our research facilities were based, was seven seconds behind the rest of the world. If you drove from downtown to the desert, you wouldn't notice anything different. But if you stood in the desert and observed a clock in the city, it would look like it took about an hour and twenty milliseconds to complete an hour. Yet in the city exactly one hour had passed. Somehow, we were slowly falling behind in time. So we opened two research facilities, exactly five hundred miles away from each other, and began experimenting with time. We discovered that we could create a time gradient over as much as two hundred miles, or as little as three feet. But the latter had catastrophic effects on any living creatures caught in its field: their bodies were torn apart by the forces of time, down to individual cells. A lesser form of warping sickness affected those who frequently traveled across time gradients, causing cancer rates similar to those of pilots. Some sensitive machinery also suffered ill effects, such as precise seismometers. But otherwise, moving between time densities had no discernible effects other than to make regions of other densities appear faster or slower to a local observer. It also made timezones a nightmare until we finally got Los Angeles fixed.

Like You 🔗

You woke to unbearable pain. You couldn't see, breathe, or move. Burns covered 80% of your body, which felt like it was still on fire. Doctors worked around the clock for what felt like decades. When your breath returned, you still couldn't use it to scream. When your sight returned, you couldn't bear to look at your ravaged body. Your mobility did not return. You stared at the ceiling, mute and still, for what felt like centuries. Then a different sort of doctor darkened your door and hauled you into a wheelchair. She talked endlessly down endless hallways, filling in for your silence as much as your immobility. Finally you arrived in a room full of people like you, missing hair and faces and limbs. Everywhere you saw burned skin, raw pain, and hope. The doctor said these were people like you, hurt and grieving from all they had lost. They were survivors like you, found in the aftermath of the same terrible bombing. They were fighters like you, relearning how to live after the fire took their livelihood. The only problem was, they weren't like you. They were victims, and you were the bomber.