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Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Microstory 1172: Annora Ubiña

When she was a little girl, Annora Ubiña discovered that she could create a very small pocket dimension. Her father called himself a traditionalist, which was really just a fancy way of saying he was abusive. He never physically hit her, but he did a lot of lunging, and towering over her with his huge body. He was loud, and demanded too much of her. He liked to intimidate people; not just women, but he held a high office in the Republic, so no one could do anything about it. She realized right away that she could not let her father, or anyone else, know what she could do, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t use it for protection. Whenever he was in the mood to literally throw his weight around, she would sneak away, and hide in her pocket. At first, there was nothing in there. It was really just a closet-sized space of listless energy. She could carry things with her, however, and leave them there, where they would remain. She became a little thief to furnish her hideout. Anyone who had the inkling that she was the culprit would have no evidence against her...until they did. Over the years, she was able to increase the size of the pocket; not indefinitely, but a little more every year. Unfortunately, this had a side effect of alerting others to its existence. She would later figure out how to shield the pocket’s energy from detection, but not before the authorities found her, and locked her away for her crimes. There was an engineering error in the design of the prison. The architect calculated how many cells he would need, and multiplied that by the width of each to see how wide the building would need to be. He failed to account for the width of the walls between each cell, and instead of correcting this, the construction workers just built fewer cells. This was still not perfect, however, and the last cell in each block ended up being only about twenty inches wide. Until this point, it had only ever been used for storage, but the warden decided it would be a fitting torture of Annora, since it was ironic that now her movements were limited to the extreme. The cell walls were lined with power dampening paint, so there was no escape.

She spent eleven years there before the phallocracy fell, and the Provisional Government took power. Many people, particularly women, had been treated unfairly since the fall of the Mage Protectorate, but their crimes against Annora were of the highest order. In an attempt at reparations, Annora was provided with a settlement that suddenly turned her into one of the wealthiest people on the planet. She lived comfortably for the next decade, not pursuing any further legal action, and just trying to put the whole thing behind her. After all, they had at least gotten her away from her father, and he managed to die of a heart attack before she was released, so she never had to see him again. When the crew of an interstellar ship arrived on a mission to rescue two inhabitants, they found others who wanted to go to Earth as well. Their ship, however, was not anywhere near large enough to fit even a few more of them, so they asked her if she was willing to come as well, and use her now considerably stronger powers to create some extra space. Annora was perfectly happy living on Durus. In fact, she would have quite liked to stay. Things were getting better by the year, and she wanted to be a part of that. But the people on The Elizabeth Warren needed her more, so she agreed to leave. This would turn out to be a fatal mistake, for when she discovered a stowaway on board, his cousin, Jarrett felt it was too risky to let her keep living.

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