Microstory 1236: Sanela Matic

< > Table of Contents

Sanela Kolar was born in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929, though the borders and national identities were a little more complicated back then, so she identified as Croatian. She immigrated to the United States in 1941 with the rest of the Four Croatian Families: the Matics, the Petrićs, and the Horvatinčićs. Three of the families would settle and thrive in the Kansas City area for generations to come, while the Horvatinčićs pushed westward after a few years, and spread out along the coast. Sanela found herself drawn to a member of the Matic family who was a couple years younger named Marko. He was mysterious and broody, but it was another few years before young Sanela realized what was particularly different about him; he never looked anyone in the eye. His teachers would punish him for being rude and distant, but Sanela could tell that there was more to it. She did everything she could to make sure he knew he could trust her, and then one day, he apparently realized she was being sincere. He revealed that he had a special ability that he didn’t understand. He couldn’t see the future, per se, or witness people’s deaths, but he could sense when it was they would die. With one look, he could pick out the exact date someone would leave this universe, and he was never wrong. What Sanela came to realize herself was that Marko never decided he could trust her. It was just that he could see she was different too. He didn’t have much control over his time power, and accidentally making eye contact with other people was a regular occurrence. He evidently discovered, after having done this more than once with Sanela, that she was destined to die at different points in time. Sometimes she was going to die in the future, and sometimes the past, indicating that she wouldn’t always be experiencing linear time, like everyone else did.

After a little while, Marko grew used to being around his new best friend, and he stopped being able to detect her death date passively. If he wanted to know when it was at any given moment, he would have to concentrate on it. She taught him that he could come out of his shell, and exercise more control over his curse, so that it didn’t force him to avoid other people. They started courting each other, got married before too long, and had three children. But their life together could not last forever. Marko died of tuberculosis in 1968, soon after the birth of his daughter, Daria. However, things only got worse from there. The Petrićs had to step up when Sanela found herself jumping all through time; a bit of a late bloomer, really. She couldn’t change the past, but she could watch it unfold. With practice, she learned to control when and where she went, but not before witnessing her son and daughter grow up without her. They both became fine people in their own right, and were ultimately conscripted by the powers that be to save hundreds of people. Mario did this throughout time and space, while Daria was the Savior of Earth, who helped strangers all over the world. The two of them clearly had no control over their patterns, but Sanela’s situation was a little less clear. Did she have a power, or was she bound to a preset pattern? The funny thing was that not even Sanela herself knew whether she was a salmon, or a chooser. The Delegator had never asked her to do anything, but she also never traveled by her will alone. She always ended up wherever her instincts led her. She didn’t have that much interest in witnessing history herself, but she enjoyed helping others. She found it rewarding to let people see important moments in the past without risking changing these events. Though many others had the ability to access an observation dimension, she traveled exclusively in this manner, and was most famous for it, so they chose to call her The Screener.

Microstory 142: Tracy Wickham

Click here for the list of every Bellevue Profile.

All anomalies were the result of ancient genetic manipulation followed by centuries of evolution’s attempt at stabilizing their makeup. The fairies that ultimately created them performed each experiment deliberately, and in order to fulfill a specific purpose. Most of them were attaching properties of animals and various natural phenomena. The team that resulted in Tracy Wickham was interested in genetic memory. Genetic memory was usually responsible for instinct and intuition, but they wanted to figure out whether it was possible to encode more complex information. On the surface, Tracy displayed no special ability. Both of her parents were extremely athletic, with experience in archery, firearms marksmanship, foot racing, and parkour. Whenever they encouraged her to pursue an interest of their own, she showed impressive aptitude. She even presented skills found as far back as her great grandparents—however, there was a quantifiable decline in her skill according to how many generations that skill went back in her family. The worst side effect of this was the fact that she struggled with skills not found at expert level within the family. She received poor marks in the majority of her classes, and wasn’t even able to graduate from tertiary school. Her brain was so full of generational information that she had an inescapable failure to gather new ideas. Out of frustration, Tracy left home upon adulthood and fell into the hard-to-find world of drugs. She was eventually discovered by a small group of people who were aware of anomalies. They performed further experiments on her in an attempt to make her the perfect soldier; one who wasn’t intelligent enough to break from orders and form her own decisions. Most of their experiments failed, however, they managed to enhance her physique. They gave her superhuman speed and strength, and her most noteworthy feature was how high and far she could jump. Others, like Setsuko Kawaguchi, grew hateful and bitter as a result of these experiments, but not Tracy. After she and her partner, Phaedra Wirth escaped from the facility, she joined Bellevue, which later assigned her and her team to protect the entirety of Europe. They even eventually developed techniques that allowed her to learn at a more acceptable level.

The Advancement of Mateo Matic: March 23, 2016

« < » > Table of Contents

The time jump caused Mateo Matic to wake up. He heard footsteps running up the stairs. His father, Randall burst into the room. “Oh, thank God you’re back.”

“Has it been another year?”

His mother, Carol appeared in the doorway. “It has. This is not going to stop on its own. We already have an appointment set up for you. I don’t want to spend what little time we may have together at the hospital, but—”

“I know it has to be done,” Mateo interrupted. “We’ll have all the time in the world if we can figure out how to stop it.”

The appointment wasn’t until eleven in the morning. So after eating fourth meal, Mateo went up to the attic to look through some of the family belongings passed down through generations. He sat up there for hours, combing through everything he could find that had anything to do with his biological family tree. Most of the journal entries were mundane, and it wasn’t like his family kept records of absolutely everything they did. He had just gotten to a journal written in the mid-19th century by his great great great great grandmother when Carol called him down for the appointment. He stalled her, needing to learn more. The journal talked about when she first met her husband. He had appeared out of nowhere one day, dressed in outdated attire. Carol called him again, and he was forced to put the journal away for another time; perhaps for an entire year.

He spent the rest of the day undergoing medical tests. They drew blood, put him in machines, and asked him a lot of questions. Of course, he couldn’t reveal to them why these tests were so desperately needed. In the end, there was no conclusion. None of the preliminary results showed anything abnormal. It would be a couple weeks before they had all the information, which meant that his parents wouldn’t be able to discuss it with him for a year.

He was sitting in the waiting room for urgent care while his parents confided in a family friend who was a nurse in that department. A teenager came in with her father. He set her down in a chair across from Mateo. “Sit here while I check you in. Maybe you won’t drink after tonight.” The girl looked completely miserable. She was holding a plastic grocery sack, clearly filled with vomit. She was dry heaving and moving her head up and down, trying to find a comfortable position that didn’t exist. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were teared up, probably from the strain.

“First time?” Mateo asked.

She massaged her forehead. “No, but he was right. It’s probably my last. I think a guy put something—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Vomit rolled out of her mouth and into the bag. On the other side of the room, a guy vomited into his own bucket, as if it were a response to her. Illness was trending. As the girl tried to cough up more, the bag slipped from her grip and fell to the floor, spilling its contents. She instinctively pulled her head away from it. “Oh my God!” Before she could do anything else, though, more came up suddenly, much of it landing in Mateo’s lap. She just stared at him in horror, having no idea what she could say to him. After several days, and many years, it would turn out to be their meet-cute.

« < » > Table of Contents