Twenty-three-year old Peter Foster is an only child who lives at home, where he constantly hears his parents arguing. Because Peter does nothing all day, the family goes to a clinic where a therapist videotapes them. After Peter watches his tape, he views the tape of a troubled Armenian family, who gave their only son away for adoption when they arrived in Canada. Peter decides to visit this family, and he pretends to be their son, Bedros Deryan. The Deryan family welcomes him with open arms, and Peter tries to patch up the poor relationship between George Deryan and his daughter Azah.

Every day is boring and the same to Amy, even her birthday. All the evidence her family puts forth that each day is different she rebuts with well-thought out responses of sameness. She is supposed to visit her Aunt Lucy to pick up her present from her, and instead meets weird characters who insist that her aunt has a beagle named Charlie and that she has turned into a butterfly. Eventually she encounters fairytale folk who thought their lives were normal before the events in their stories occurred.

In a post-apocalyptic world, a camp of Amazon women is raided by a gang of murderous bandits, who kill everyone in the camp except one small girl. She grows up to be a mercenary, and one day she takes a job escorting the two daughters of a powerful warlord across a river. She finds out that the job turns out to be more dangerous than she thought, and she runs into someone from her past she thought she'd never see again.