Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Microstory 102: Jaklyn Simonds


Jaklyn Simonds was born into a fairly uninteresting family. The most exciting thing her parents did was spell their daughter’s name oddly. They went to work for their five hours everyday, they provided her with food and shelter, and they let her go to the movies. Nothing was expected of her, and they were never disappointed in her. The thing that Jaklyn wanted most was to be able to see far away lands. Her parents never outright told her that she couldn’t, but they never took her on vacation, and it didn’t really occur to her that she could ask them about it. One day, when she was even more bored than usual, she was looking at pictures of beaches. Suddenly, she was overcome with a bright blue light. She found herself, not only on a beach, but the beach from the last picture she was on. No one was able to see her, and she had a hard time interacting with objects there. There was some kind of protective force field around her that made it feel like she was trying to pick things up with oversized gloves. After some practice, and a little help from a new friend, she learned how to control her ability better. She could go wherever she wanted, whether she had seen it in a photo or not. She discovered that she could allow people to see her, if she so chose, but she was not able to remove objects from a location and take them back to her origin. And if she wanted to go somewhere else, she would always first have to return to her origin. She immediately enrolled in geography classes in college so that she could understand how to navigate. One time, she accidentally ended up on the moon, and was grateful for the force field. Having failed to even make an attempt to study anything but geography and a bit of astronomy, she ended up not attaining her degree. Her parents didn’t care, so she left home and spent the majority of her time exploring; stealing food from her origin as needed. It wasn’t until later that her abilities were enhanced so that they were less like projection, and more like teleportation. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing that changed about her. She grew—not evil—but hateful and envious. And she became dangerous.

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