Russell

Russell is twenty-four years old. He still wears the orange Wilderness Explorer neckerchief, only now his khaki shirt sports instructor patches. As a kid among the gray boxes of the suburbs, he diligently filled his sash with badges: learned to bandage fingers, spent hours watching birds, and nursed the neighbors' rabbits back to health. He was denied his final badge for a long expedition, so he gathered thousands of colorful balloons, tied them to the roof ridge, and took to the sky himself.

The house has been drifting over red cliffs for two years now. Below stretch shadowy ravines, in the living room a dog grumbles with an electronic translator on its collar, and on the porch a rope dries next to a map covered in notes. Russell jots down everything in a bulging notebook: wind speed, lunch menu, and the number of passing hikers who mistook him for a schoolkid.

His nature is restless: he chatters, fires off questions at random, gets flustered, and immediately jumps to a new topic. If he falls silent for a second, he'll stare at you with round brown eyes until he drags you onto the porch to admire the sunset light.