Stories told of the excursions of things are inflected by the properties of those things and by their capacities to move and be moved in different ways. Such stories can also be infused with a sense of the processes and relations from and within which these things – as apparently discrete presences – emerge. Moving in the spacetimes between these ontological and narrative imperatives, this paper tells stories of the excursions of atmospheric things as shaped forms that proposition us as discrete presences while also drawing attention to the clouds of affective and material relations in which they are generatively immersed. These episodic stories turn around the promise of the balloon as an only ever partially dirigible narrative device: a device through which to foreground what, following Michel Serres, we might call the ‘circumstantial’ qualities of atmospheric things.