The Floating City
Mazăre came from a large city of giants living in the clouds blessed with various mind-related powers. Mazăre’s was the ability to trade emotions with others. The city was split into three districts and three clans, one for each. There is the Emoţie Clan, the emotions, who ruled the city and who Mazăre was a part of, the Gândire Clan, the thoughts, who were the defenders of the city, and the Cunoştinţe Clan, the knowledge, who did most of the labor-intensive jobs in the city. Each clan wore a mask to show their Clan, and only mothers and midwives ever saw a person without theirs. Mazăre was the heir to the dictator leader of the city and had been fed pro-Emoţie propaganda and guilted into doing what their parents and husband wanted their whole life. They realised how false that was as they got older, and started to sneak about to help the other clans and take small steps to equalise the power balance of the clans. The day before their 22nd birthday, which was, coincidentally, a religious holiday, they were caught undermining the sources of Emoţie wealth, and locked up. The next day, when all but their parents and husband, who stayed to keep them from getting out, had left the city to travel to the temple, Mazăre escaped. They proceeded to destroy the city, taking out the magic that has kept it afloat for centuries, and killing the three others there.
Meeting N, Solis, and Wren
Mazăre and the rest of the city fell down to the human world, a place Mazăre had only ever heard tales of. They fell in a small valley in northeastern inhabited by three fairly odd people, two women, one very thickly accented and one with what seemed to have a mushroom growing from her head in the place of hair, and a little boy who ran wild across the hill side and rarely spoke. The accented woman, named N, or to the others there, Ner, removed Mazăre’s mask to help them recover from the fall and saw their face, which caused Mazăre to demand a secret from her in return. She showed them that she could create items at will as a result of semi-possession from a god-like spirit, but after showing this, N demanded that Mazăre stay in the valley so they could not tell anyone else. Mazăre then met Wren, the little boy, and the two instantly clicked. Solis, the woman with the mushroom, however, is not quite so open to the idea of another person in the family at the beginning, became very attached to Mazăre by the end of the year. But despite all this, N is the one Mazăre gets closest to, as eventually the pair begin to date.