A 1908 manor advertises a haunting to conceal embarrassing plumbing, then finds that its invented ghost has started answering letters. The housekeeper and a sanitation engineer must identify the correspondent before a harmless fiction becomes a profitable reason to keep the household dependent on a lie.
A salvage crew frees a sentient planet from an abandoned control network. Its delighted attempt to follow them turns rescue into a negotiation about what freedom requires when one grateful guest can alter an entire system.
When new machines replace a valley's scarecrows, the discarded figures assemble outside the grain office demanding useful work. A warehouse clerk and a practical seamstress must discover what the valley is afraid of before its newest workers begin protecting entirely the wrong things.