Friday, October 18, 2019

Microstory 1215: Vidar Wolfe

It took a little bit of time for Vidar Wolfe to discover that he had temporal powers, or rather, it took some time for him to reason what they were. Alone, he was never capable of traveling through time or space. It was only when he interacted with others that he could do it. He realized when he was in his mid-twenties that he could sense the energy that other people left behind when they used their own powers. Not only could he siphon that energy off to use for himself, but also follow them through. If he gathered enough temporal energy, he could travel wherever he wanted, but he had to find that energy first, and it would dissipate eventually if he didn’t use it for something in time. He came to be known as Tracker, using his abilities in the most expected way, by tracking time travelers and teleporters wherever, and whenever, they might be. He was eventually hired by Beaver Haven Rehabilitation Center to hunt fugitives. He was one of the few choosers-for-hire to take cold, hard cash for their troubles. Other people wanted trips to times and places of their choosing, payment-in-kind, or other gifts and favors. Some didn’t require payment at all. They could always get their hands on whatever they wanted with no one’s help, so they didn’t really see any point in getting people to pay them. Vidar had ways of going wherever he wanted as well, but that was the extent of his exploitation of his gifts. He didn’t want to rob banks, or steal from others. He wanted money so he could live comfortably, using his real identity, in the time period that he was born into. When he wasn’t working, he was watching a sports competition, or reading a good book.

He wasn’t all that adventurous, and didn’t care much for exploring spacetime He didn’t have any particularly strong feelings about his work. To him, a job was a job, and it didn’t matter much who the prison was asking him to go after. He wasn’t uncaring, but he tried not to ask for too much information, so he could keep a healthy distance from his targets. Nonetheless, he had a strict code of ethics that he created himself, to make sure what he was doing was at least moral in a generic sense. He never wanted to hurt anyone physically, so if they were fighting against him too hard, he would let it go, and try again later. He avoided regular humans at nearly all costs. He didn’t want them getting caught in the crossfire, or being used as leverage. He also didn’t want his abilities to be exposed to the public, especially since it would be ironic, considering it was his job to apprehend people who were doing just that. Every day was a little different than the last, but he fell into a rhythm, and in later years, found the work to be somewhat tedious. One day, he was asked to capture a regular human; one who had been mixed up with salmon and choosers. She wasn’t a hundred percent innocent, and there were plenty of reasons to send her to a normal jail, which she avoided, because law enforcement considered her a necessary tool to alleviate the crime around Kansas City. Still, she didn’t have abilities, and she didn’t try to expose anyone who did, which meant she absolutely did not belong in Beaver Haven. He was disgusted when he learned that they had sent him to take her under false pretenses, and came to hold her for a whole year. That was when everything changed.

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