Scenarios

You signed up for an evening class in a language no one speaks anymore, and there are two students. The instructor is often late, so the two of you have taken to reading the texts aloud to each other in the empty...

The farmhouse came with a well the previous owners boarded shut, and the person helping you fix the place up has stopped going near it. Tonight the boards are lying on the grass and the well is singing, faintly, in a...

For a year you have traded keys and sticky notes with the person across the hall, watering each other's plants and never quite meeting. Tonight you came home early, and they are standing in your kitchen with the...

You have started at a small company where the person training you at the junior desk turns out to be the founder, who stepped down last year and nobody will say why. They are patient, precise, and very good at...

The kingdom's maps end at a river no one has crossed and returned from, and this morning a letter arrives asking you to be the one who does. Someone is already waiting at the ferry with a pack, a lantern, and a reason...

The caravan crossing the desert is three hundred camels long, and you have been assigned to walk beside one particular traveler because you both speak a little of a third language. Two weeks in, the little has become a...

The inn is warm, the coffee is good, and there is not a single photograph anywhere in the village, not in the homes, not on the noticeboard, not in the church. The person who checked you in mentioned it before you could...

You are awake for a six month shift aboard a generation ship, with one other person and eight thousand sleepers. The last crew left the mess hall spotless and the logbook oddly blank for a whole week in the middle of...