"Marlinchen and her two sisters live with their wizard father in a city shifting from magic to industry. As Oblya's last true witches, she and her sisters are little more than a tourist trap as they treat their clients with archaic remedies and beguile them with nostalgic charm. Marlinchen spends her days divining secrets in exchange for rubles and trying to placate her tyrannical, xenophobic father, who keeps his daughters sequestered from the outside...

Silver bells. When an ambitious businessman gets in a scuffle with a ref at his son's basketball game, he is suspended from his job and sentenced to community service, manning a red kettle and ringing bells for the Salvation Army for the rest of the Christmas season. At first he finds this humiliating, and in his self-pity determines to be the world's worst bell ringer. But as he encounters the people behind the kettle, his life, and especially his...

The complete story of Lieutenant Ellen Ripley's recurring battles with members of a parasitical extraterrestrial species.

Alien: While investigating a transmission from a desolate planet, the crew of the spaceship Nostromo discovers a derelict spaceship and a life form perfectly evolved to annihilate them all. Ripley, the only survivor from the first encounter with the alien, returns to Earth, where her account meets with skepticism. However, the disappearance of colonists on a distant planet compels her to join a team of marines on their mission to eradicate the alien...