Microstory 136: Zoey Attar

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There was no shortage of unusual births when it came to anomalies. One member was pregnant for years, another somehow gave birth to a clone of herself with no father, and Zoey Attar’s development was accelerated to an incredibly high rate. Her mother, Solange Attar, went into labor just weeks after conceiving with her gracer, Gaston. They had hoped that the rapid growth would stop, or at least slow, following the delivery, but it did not. By this time, Bellevue had gone public, and so they raced to Usonia to ask them for help. Fortunately, the organization had actually already dealt with a similar case, and were prepared with the treatment. Once Zoey began to age at a normal rate, she appeared to be around eleven or twelve years old. The problem was, however, that she still had the brain of an infant, and this was dangerous because of her ability to control the actions of animals. She could also make it seem like she was turning into an animal, but she was actually summoning one from another location, and then hiding herself in a lower dimension while maintaining control over that animal. The whole story was that she inherited this from her father’s ability to teleport, and her aunt’s ability to manipulate pheromones, proving that an anomaly’s lineage is responsible for the nature of their ability, even if none of them presents one of their own. Instead of being able to do one or both of what her parents could, she was the result of a perfect marriage of genetic traits that formed an entirely new ability, taking aspects from both. This was not abnormal in the rest of the animal kingdom. Half of a scion’s genes come from one parent, and half from the other. These genes are recombined and mutated into a new person, but the way Zoey turned out was still surprising. In order to bring Zoey up to a legitimate level of intelligence, Bellevue conscripted Mandy Alto and Claude Bonner as her instructors. Together, they were able to accelerate the learning process so that she could fit in with her peers. She quickly became best friends with Catriona Rice and Stephen Berg. All three were noted later members of the notorious missing children.