Microstory 1136: Elasy Taggart

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When the source mages took control over Springfield, Kansas, and the new society that was forming, they came up with a few rules. They could give anyone any power they wanted, but they knew doing so carelessly would lead to chaos. Still, they didn’t want to be too terribly controlling, because then they would be no better than their tyrannical predecessor. They would source powers for anyone who passed a series of tests. On the surface, these challenges appeared to be evaluating physical skill, but they were really more about psychological and emotional stability. The source mages needed to know who was worthy of being given powers, and be sure they would use them responsibly. To prevent bias, and other forms of inequality, each chosen town mage would receive a random time power. Whether or not they ended up with something useful, or something obviously useful, was entirely up to chance. Some were more powerful than others, but no one got to swap theirs out for something else, and no one was in danger of having whatever they received taken away. The source mages realized pretty early on, however, that this system would not work without a little bit of oversight. People often fail to apply their powers appropriately, because they don’t fully understand what it is they can do. To combat this risk, they came up with the Diagnostician Bloodline, so that no one’s potential went unrealized. A diagnostician is capable of, through various means, figuring out everything someone else with powers can do. It’s a relatively rare power in the universe, so the source mages couldn’t take the chance that there would always naturally be one around. This was unlike any other bloodline, however. Each child born would be primed to be a diagnostician, but would not necessarily be activated as one. There would only need to be enough to accommodate the needs of the world population. In the beginning, only one was needed, and his children were never activated, because they were not necessary. As time went on, however, and the population on the planet continued to increase, the source mages decided he would need two replacements, one of which was Defirnod Taggart, and the other, his sister, Elasy; the original’s grandchildren. She spent years training to be one of the new diagnosticians, and took her responsibility seriously, though she also noticed a deficit. Diagnosticians were not only capable of seeing people’s powers, but their whole selves. The proper term should have been holistic diagnosis, for they could interpret the inner workings of a patient’s entire body. She lobbied to expand the scope of their work, and possibly even increase the number of staff members, so that people’s medical needs could be tended to in all ways, in what would have probably been the galaxy’s greatest hospital. The world changed before her plans could be realized, but she did manage to help in one small way before it all fell apart. She and her brother figured out how to disable the blockers inside each other’s system that prevented them from passing on the full power of holistic diagnosis to their children. So the bloodline persisted unimpeded, and decades later, this gift would become an important one for a lot of people, in multiple universes.