Manifestation

The year is 3891. Humanity has spread out and left Planet Earth, moving not just to other planets in the Solar System or to other stars within the Milky Way, but to entirely new galaxies. One thousand years ago, during an era known as the Progress, faster-than-light space travel was achieved, and humankind set a goal of colonizing the entire Universe, and then moving on towards other Universes, too.
With modern technology and modern medicine, humans now commonly live for 400 to 500 years, and a person is considered young until they reach age 100, and they are not old until they reach 400. The 100th birthday is a special occasion, which marks the passing into adulthood.
After the Progress, everyone uses they/them/theirs pronouns, and words for race are no longer used. It is a post-racial, post-gender future.
Asher is a 17-year-old person living in the only city on the surface of a small planet named G-L-73, a mining colony on a tiny, hostile world made too hot by the close proximity of two suns, where the air is thin, the machines groan and creak and sweat oil under their heavy burdens, and humans have little money.
Survival on G-L-73 is made possible only by the Daydream Folk, a type of person who, by genetic mutation, has gained the ability to take things in their imagination and make them appear in external physical reality, a process called "manifestation." The scientists and technologists do not yet understand how it works, although the human species has grown dependent upon it for survival, especially in recent centuries.
Asher comes from a family of Daydream Folk. The good work done by Asher's family is what keeps their mining colony alive. Asher is a Daydream Folk in Training, being taught with the assumption that they will assume their inherited role as a Daydream Folk when they turn 100, as did their parents and grandparents before them.
For now, Asher is in school, but they spend most of their time goofing off and making jokes and playing video games with their three best friends, Nicol, Sheldis, and Montgumerous. Asher is happy, and has no awareness of any problems or pain. While the AI robot teacher teaches classes at school, Asher is secretly watching their favorite show, the young adult horror series Scions of the Night, on an invisible pair of glasses the teacher cannot see.
That all changes one summer day. While the rest of Asher's family, and all of the planet's other Daydream Folk, are on a faraway planet for a much-needed and well-deserved vacation, Asher decides to host a party for all the high school kids at their parents' now-empty house. During the party, Asher sees Sheldis and Montgumerous kiss and make out. Asher is in love with Sheldis and has been for years. Devastated by learning that one of their best friends is dating the person they have a secret crush on, Asher goes mad with anger. Asher loses their mind, for a brief moment.
Unfortunately, when a Daydream Person loses control of their mind, their imagination will manifest whatever is in their thoughts. Including their worst fears.
In that moment, Asher manifested, as physical beings in external reality, all the villains and monsters from Scions of the Night. These evil creatures of fiction, now made real by Asher's manifestation, wreak havoc on the small mining community. With all the other Daydream Folk gone, there is no one to protect the humans. Certain doom for the colony, and a horrific death for all the people there, is probably mere hours away.
Unless Asher and their friends do something to save the city. Asher is a Daydream Person, and, with the power of manifestation, they have the ability to defeat these nightmares-made-real.
If Asher can recover control of their own mind. Which may require something even more scary than facing a real-life nightmare: facing their own feelings and being honest about their feelings to both them and to their friends.

Russell Hasan was born the son of a white Jewish mother and a dark-skinned Muslim father—and that isn't the strangest thing about him. His father had ties to the mafia—nope, not the weirdest thing about him. He thought he was a gay man for many years before realizing he is agender asexual—relatively normal compared to what truly makes him strange. Do you want to know what the weirdest, strangest thing about Russell is?
He's a WRITER.
Yes, that's right. He writes. Why? How? Why would he want to do that to himself? How could he allow this to happen to himself? He is still trying to figure that one out. Therapy can cure lots of things and alcohol and drugs can cure other things, but the only cure for being a writer is to write, so he writes. He's not into BDSM, yet for some reason he has chosen to punish himself by having a passion for writing and a need to write. Despite having made the huge mistake of choosing to be a writer, his books have sold over 10,000 copies, so perhaps it was not the worst mistake he ever made after all. He does not have one particular bestseller but has instead spread those 10,000 sales across many books he wrote. His magical journey of self-torture begins when he has the idea for a new book, and then continues when he wakes up at 6am to write from 6am to 8am before work every day (he has a day job—he's not insane! His day job is being a lawyer, the most boring, evil job in the world, by the way), and, after many cups of Starbucks matcha tea and Coca Cola (never Pepsi—yuck!) he somehow puts words onto a page. He has written 30 books, both nonfiction and fiction, but, as something of a twist on the traditional successful indie author model, he is known more for his indie nonfiction, not his fiction. But he does write fiction. Some of his fiction is good too, probably, he hopes.