Shir Scrabble has *NOT* had a nice life. Often residing in relatively cramped and bare apartments due to the rather exploitative and systemic setup of poverty traps and general lack of social mobility. While working social nets have kept hir from ending up homeless more often than shi'd like to admit, it's only because the rulers know from the various ruined ghost worlds abounding that failing to keep the lower classes from feeling they have nothing left to lose and potentially summoning worse things that keeps the social nets in place instead of letting their worst impulses of greed and disassociation with their fellow sapients in check. The Wyrd can be churned up by those more hectic and hateful feelings of a populace that feels that it has nothing left to lose instead of having that dangling of the Federal Dream like a cheap bait and lure.

And yet, as sometimes happens in hir most desperate moments, when shi's so utterly exhausted and ready to just find a Font to try and make a desperate pilgrimage somewhere... anywhere else, shi has these strangest flashes of somewhere else... somewhen else. There are times shi could swear that shi's been to a frontier world, one of many out there, beneath desert stars and seeing an Iron Star in the skies above. Usually before a searing pain in hir head as a migraine takes hold. Those times often inspire a near breakdown-fueled rush of writing as shi tries to capture the sensations, writing about a live shi never lived and getting ideas and concepts for worlds shi's never even heard of. Might be important some day.

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Done by the ever-lovely  flippin-rad but never actually published publically by them. Technically actually the second-ever piece of Hardscrabble ever done, reflecting my mental state at the time.