Semolina Pilchard

Mochi was excited. "Are we ever going to get there?", she murmered to no one in particular. She and her companions had been on the jaunt for almost half an hour since they left New Chicago, and they still weren't in Shanghai.

Mochi looked out the window, with the earth below her like a big blue plate under the black sky. Like many of her peers, Mochi took high velocity jaunting for granted, not knowing or caring that it took her great grandparents almost a full day of travel to go as far as she was to go in less than an hour. The jaunt sailed high above the earth, much higher than the clouds or the airspace where the atmosphere would still make the sky look blue. Mochi could make out cities and civilizations far below her, for wherever humans gathered the cloud patterns would swirl and scatter.

"Can I get you anything, miss?" asked the flight attendant.

"No, thanks." Mochi answered. She always had ginger ale when jaunting, but she was looking forward to Dim Sum for breakfast and didn't want to throw off her appetite any more than it already was by the time change -- she had left New Chicago at around 6 p.m. and had purposely avoided having dinner there, even though JoJo and Karly both had had some pizza.

Finally, she heard the gentle whine of the engines decelerating and she could tell that the flight crew was preparing to descend back to the Earth. Shanghai awaited.