I. You're both married to other people, to start with, heavily entangled on the quantum mechanical level with other humans (?) who could marshal considerable resources to rein you both back in. But there was that time at tapas where the tempranillo got flowing and there might have been non-ritual skin-to-skin contact? Twice? and you think about this while waiting for the squat machine to free up sometimes.
II. This other person is long dead and for most of their life incarcerated or on the run. But oh what a daring string of desperate idealistic actions! It's easy to work around the gender assignments in this day and age, at least, if you could get past the temporal thing.
III. Record keeping reveals that the Mittelschmerz happens in months containing the letter R and it becomes apparent in time that the lady is producing pearls at a prodigious rate but you feel that cutting her open, even endoscopically, to retrieve the fortune would cause a power imbalance between so you must reluctantly part.
IV. Scientists take pains that to explain now that flux lines of what was previously known as dark energy link all living beings even those not of our Solar System and a trusted consultant traces yours to an exoplanet three hundred fifty five parsecs away, apparently to a young and vigorous sentient of indeterminate conformation which you are convinced manifests unearthly beauty that will last even up to the time when one of you will die, so you begin taking better care of your body so as to allow the link to endure.
264 words for Brevity Quest 2025