Microstory 1175: Tonya Keyes

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The powerful Prestons, originally living in a different dimension, were born to serve the timeline. They weren’t helpless salmon, but they were created for the purpose of protecting the timeline from paradoxes, and other inconsistencies, or just because certain butterfly effects were considered undesirable in the new timeline. Until Zeferino rebelled, they didn’t really have that much understanding of what it would mean to make their own choices, so they never tried. Tonya Keyes possessed similar abilities to loose cannon, Arcadia, but she was a choosing one, which meant she never had to do anything she didn’t want to do. The first few years of Tonya’s life were pretty normal. If any inconsistencies popped up in that time, she might have ignored them as a typical feature of reality, or simply didn’t notice. Once she was old enough to realize that people weren’t seeing things the way she saw them, she started to question this reality. She discovered that people were going back in time, and making changes to the timeline, yet her memory remained intact. If they, for instance, with knowledge of how a given company was going to do, shorted a company’s stock, she could tell how that impacted the market. She wasn’t the only temporal manipulator with what’s known as multi-real perception, but other than Arcadia, she was the only one who could do anything about it. It took some practice, but she developed the ability to access those old realities. Not only that, but she could extract parts of an old timeline, and splice it into the current timeline, without having to accept the entire thing. She wasn’t just undoing the changes the time travelers made; she was making more changes. She was picking and choosing which changes took hold. Let’s say, because of how terrible that stock did, the president of the company commits suicide. Well, there’s a reality out there where he didn’t do that, because some other time traveler created a reality where the stock did okay, which was only later negated. Remember, these people are making these changes all the time, and it’s almost impossible to track all of them. Tonya could retain the bad stock, but bring in the reality where the president survives. She could even alter the president’s perception, so he doesn’t question the disconnect between the current outcome, and his memory of it. She came to be known as The Stitcher, and she made a lot of pretty random alterations to the timeline before anyone approached with the idea to do something good with her power.