In the far future, a selfless woman helps a wary man flee from a destroyed Earth to the world beyond the solar system.

A merchant in Austria tells stories to customers about the former Emperor during the Great War and their unlikely friendship — one that he feels impacted the trajectory of the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A disgruntled college professor in Mississippi takes an interest in one of his students, a budding writer, and tries to find him a girlfriend.

After a young woman's ninety-nine-year-old neighbor peacefully dies, the old woman's family asks her to sort through her belongings for them. To her surprise, the young woman finds treasures the short-sighted family overlooked and her luck turns for the better.

After her family moves from Peru to Colombia, Lila develops an unlikely friendship with her disabled maid, Estrellita.

A mechanical creature is abandoned in a dystopian China, where he decides to take a journey to find a place of belonging for himself, with the help of a friendly bat.

When a young Jewish girl in Prohibition-era Brooklyn befriends a Black thirteen-year-old boy who claims he's dead, she thinks nothing of it and invites him and his father over for Sabbath dinner. Through the conversation between her father and the boy's father, the fates of their children are revealed.

Finally at peace after decades of war, the telepathic people of Gaant and the people of Enith can coexist, including a Gaantish military officer and an Enithi nurse. The two had become unlikely friends after being one another's prisoners during the war; they'd bonded over chess, and can now finish their game in peace.

A lonely, aging American man joins forces with a French street vendor to sell his goods as his own funds dwindle.

Ignatius, a young orphan, develops an unlikely friendship with his bully, Donny, and Donny's father.