"Flight plan to planet available. Do you wish to proceed?"

"Do it." She's going home.

She starts to move away from the moon, at a pace that's pretty fast by the standards of her jungle-dwelling ape ancestors, but slow enough that it's clearly going to take a while to get to Earth.

"How long will it take to get there?"

"Estimated time of arrival 4 hours, 34 minutes, given current level of Compassion."

She tries focusing on how her friends will worry if she doesn't show up for class. She doesn't want them to worry.

Her speed increases noticeably (if she looks backwards at the moon, at least; the Earth is still too faraway to tell).

Hmm, is it just relevant compassion... she tries focusing on how she wishes she could do more for the homeless people she sees sometimes. She often stops to talk with them. She wishes nobody was in that situation.

Well, she certainly can't do anything about that from here! She continues to speed up.

So the ring channels her compassion for others. Truly she has been blessed. She whispers a quick prayer of thanks for this opportunity to help others. She thinks more deeply about the homeless woman she talked to a few days ago, about how she's trying to feed her children and how she can't find work about all the details she shared and how grateful the woman was not just for the money Sapphire gave her but for being acknowledged as a person instead of passed by like a bit of trash by the side of the road.

By now she is moving dramatically faster than when she started, and is able to see the Earth coming closer. She's moving not in a straight line, but a slightly elliptical curve, and it looks like she'll reach the western hemisphere in five to ten minutes.

Wonderful. Does she slow down if she stops focusing as much?

Focus, per se, does not seem to have much of an effect, but the amount of compassion she's feeling does, and she may find it easier to feel compassion if she focuses on it deliberately. If she's paying close enough attention, she can feel what seems like some... force, moving through her and into the light surrounding her, which strengthens or weakens with the intensity of that feeling.

So it is the emotion. She tries just focusing on the feeling but it's indeed hard to sustain without thinking about a specific person. Maybe that's something she can practice. In the meantime she'll go through people she knows and use them as the focus for the emotion.

Several minutes later, she reaches the planet. She starts slowing down and enters the atmosphere.

"I want to go back to my dorm. Do you know where that is?"

"Affirmative. Flight plan modified."

She starts to move north as she enters the atmosphere, continuing to slow down. An indigo-colored transparent ovoid bubble forms around her, shortly before the air outside of it starts to glow orange and yellow.

Oh right, flying really fast makes things heat up. It's good that the ring knows to protect her.

Eventually she slows down enough that the air ceases to be on fire, and the bubble fades away. She is now above Long Island, approaching Connecticut. She hasn't previously seen the region from this altitude, but even so, it seems different than what she expected. New York City is noticeably smaller, and a city on the western coast of Connecticut—she thinks it's Norwalk or Bridgeport?—is much larger than she remembers.

That's strange. Maybe she's misremembering? How would a city get bigger or smaller?

"Will detected.", says her ring, shortly before—

A man in a green uniform, with a green, lantern-shaped sigil on his chest, wearing a glowing green ring on his right hand, glowing green, approaches her from below and begins to fly alongside her.

"Welcome to Earth. Identify yourself."

She wants to stop and talk to this person she's never seen anyone flying before. And he has a ring. "Hello my name is Sapphire Eyestone... Did you wake up on the moon with a ring on your finger too?"

"No, I got my ring when the last guy died. I'm not aware of anyone who's gotten a ring that way. That what happened to you?

"It is, I went to sleep last night in my dorm room at Wesleyan, or I think it was last night and I woke up on the moon. I don't think I've ever heard of you before though. Are the rings secret?"