Proxima Doma: Excavation (Part XIII)

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Étude remembered. She still didn’t have the memories of the first several years of her life, but she could remember one thing: her daughter, Cassidy. It wasn’t really her daughter, since she wasn’t the one who traveled to Earth, and then to Dardius, delivered a child, then went back to Earth. That was a different version of Étude, using a different body. But it still felt like her, because she could remember it all as if she had actually experienced it.

“Did you do this on purpose?” she asked of Nerakali.

“Yes. You should remember asking me. I blended memories of the alternate timeline you experienced that led you to seek me out in the first place.”

“I don’t remember that,” Étude said.

“There’s no need to lie,” Nerakali assured. “I know that that timeline wasn’t super great for you, but there’s no shame in asking an enemy for help.”

“We’re not enemies,” Étude told her, “but you didn’t blend those memories. All I remember is the first eighteen years of my daughter’s life.”

Nerakali laughed once. “Wait, what?”

“Yes.”

“You have a daughter? Wait, what happened? You asked me to come back to the past and give you the first nine years of your life back. That’s what I did.”

“No, it’s not,” Étude argued. “Something went wrong. You blended my brain with that of my alternate. We both lived in one timeline, but separately.”

“That’s impossible; it’s never happened before.” Nerakali was mortified at the thought.

“Are you so sure?” Tertius questioned. “You don’t receive the blended memories yourself, so you can’t ever really know whether you did it perfectly.”

“I’ve heard no complaints,” Nerakali promised.

“Well, you wouldn’t,” Vitalie reasoned. “If you missed something, they wouldn’t remember what they don’t remember. There’s no way to ever know.”

“I would know. If a tree falls in the woods, it makes a sound, even if no one is there to hear it. And the cat’s life doesn’t depend on whether or not we open the box to observe it.”

“What are you talking about?” Tertius asked.

“I’m saying that we would know. I’ve blended hundreds of brains; billions more, if you count the times I did it on massive scales while I was still in my home dimension. If I were the type to make mistakes, I would have seen evidence of it.”

“Maybe you just don’t wanna see,” Vitalie suggested.

“You shut your damn mouth!” Nerakali shouted, feeling vulnerable and defensive, possible for the first time in her very long life.

“Miss Preston,” Étude said calmly, after a brief moment of silence. “I am not upset, so you shouldn’t be either.”

“But if you s—”

“Miss Preston,” she repeated, still as calm as before. “I believe someone interfered with your blend. It could have been an alternate version of one of us, or some random chooser, or hell, even the powers that be. I don’t know why this future version of me wanted you to do anything, but I am happy with the results. When yet another Étude told me about her daughter, I was able to detach myself from it, because it didn’t feel real. She wasn’t around, I never met her; she was just a story. Now she’s real, and now I need to find her. If you feel bad about this, you can relieve your guilt by helping me figure out where she is.”

“I can’t stay here,” Nerakali said. “I have to go back in time, so I can die at the hands of The Warrior. The more I put that off, the more the timestream is at risk of a paradox.”

“I just need you to find her...in the past, or the future, or whatever. It’s not so easy for us to jump back to Earth and gather information. Can you do this for me?”

Nerakali stared at Étude for a good while, with an exquisite poker face. “I will do my best. It won’t be easy for you, though. You might find it...distasteful.”

Tertius went into protective mode. “Why would it be distasteful?”

“I can teleport and travel through time,” Nerakali explained. “I can’t take people with me, and it’s not particularly easy on my body, but it gets me out of tight spots, in a pinch. I definitely can’t jump between planets, though.”

“How did you get here then?” Vitalie thought she caught her in a lie.

“She sent me,” Nerakali answered, pointing at Étude, “through a door.”

“So, you can open portal doors?” Tertius noted.

Étude shrugged. “I guess. Why would that be distasteful, though?”

“You can’t open doors yet,” Nerakali said. “It’s...complicated. I mean, we can try, but Future!You seemed pretty confident you wouldn’t develop that power until you were much older.”

“I’ve never heard of people having to develop their powers,” Tertius said. “We’re born with them, and we just have them. It’s like teaching a baby how to speak. They’ll get it eventually; you don’t have to work at it deliberately.”

“That’s true, for the most part,” Nerakali agreed. “It’s not always the case, though. Ellie Underhill was in her twenties before she manifested. Why, Étude’s mother broke free from the powers that be by sheer will.”

“I thought it was...” Étude began.

Nerakali nodded. “People assume she and Vearden retained residual power from my brother when he shared it with them, but that’s not quite what happened.”

They didn’t say anything for a beat.

“What’s distasteful?” Tertius asked again.

“You have to try to kill me,” she answered bluntly.

“What?” Vitalie rolled her eyes.

“My death is predestined,” Nerakali started to explain. “It’s already happened, and I can’t stop it. The upside is I can’t die until I go back to that moment, and let it happen. So every time anyone tries to kill me some other time, the universe itself will rescue me.”

“It’ll rescue you by sending you right to your death,” Étude pointed out. “This happened on The Warren before I was on it. I remember Leona talking about it.”

“Well, it’s not a perfect situation, but it gets me to Dardius, and from there, I can take the Nexus back to Earth. From there, anywhere.”

“So, you do this often?” Vitalie asked.

“I wouldn’t say often. Each time I nearly die before my time, it gets me one step closer to my actual death. Literally. Nine steps. Nine steps from the sidewalk, up to the building where I die. At some point, I run out of steps, and there’s no going back.”

“You’re a cat?”

“Huh?”

“You have nine lives, like a cat.”

Nerakali smirked. “It’s more like cats have nine lives, like me. Where do you think that phrase comes from?”

Cat jokes aside, Étude had never killed anyone before, and wasn’t interested in trying now. Sure, any attempt on Nerakali’s life should end in failure, but what if that was wrong? What if it’s the universe that fails, and destroys itself in the doing?

Tertius sighed. “Well, I can do that for you.” It would seem they had some history.

“No, it has to be her,” Nerakali said, looking directly at Étude.

“Why me?”

“You’re the one who wants my help; you’re the one who has to make payment. It’ll work either way, but if anyone but you points that gun at my head, I’ll just move on with my life, and forget all about whatever it is you’re asking of me.”

“What gun?”

Nerakali dropped her gaze downwards for a split second, then looked right back up. Étude looked down as well, then felt her pocket. Inside of it was a teeny tiny revolver. It would be worthlessly inaccurate in a shootout, but at point blank range, it would get the job done. It wasn’t that guns didn’t exist anymore, but they were pretty rare. With no money or war, people generally didn’t feel the need to shoot each other anymore. Any enjoyment they could receive out of them was tremendously overshadowed by virtual simulations, which had the added benefit of no lasting consequences. As The Last Savior of Earth, she had probably seen more real firearms in her lifetime than anyone else her age, in this time period, and she did not like them. Still, it would certainly be worth it if using the one she had now would result in her finding her Cassidy. It wasn’t like she would actually be killing anyone. Nerakali said it herself; she was already dead, and there was no undoing that.

She opened the spinny thing where the bullets go, and made sure it was loaded. Then she pulled back that thing on the back that people in movies do to show how serious they are.

“Étude,” Vitalie said, stepping forward, “you don’t have to do this. We can find your daughter another way. We have a quantum messenger, and between the two of you, we’ll find someone with answers.”

Étude lifted the gun to Nerakali’s unfazed face. “She lived in another dimension for thousands of years, where she could see all of space. We know some people. She knows everybody. She’s my best chance.” Before anyone had a chance to stop her—including her own reluctance—Étude pulled the trigger. The bullet lodged itself in the wall behind where Nerakali was once standing. At the same time, Étude heard what sounded like papers fall on the table behind her. She twisted, and picked them up. On the front of a manila folder, it read Cassidy Long – List of Appearances.

“That was quick,” Tertius said.

“There’s no telling how long your friend was working on this, or what it took” Vitalie reminded him.

He was disgusted. “She was not our friend.”

Étude was looking through the file Nerakali had compiled for her. It wasn’t undetailed, and contained information about her and her daughter’s life back on Earth at the turn of the 21st century. Honestly, the fact that none of this information seemed to have spread beyond Nerakali’s eyes would have been impressive for someone who could actually be trusted. “I don’t know about that. She done did good.”

“Does it say where she is now?” Vitalie asked, standing on her tippy toes to get one peek.

Étude flipped back and forth, back to the beginning, then to the end. “Well, there are a lot of question marks on this page, but Nerakali seems to think Cassidy was spirited away to a different planet, in the future. No, not a planet, but like, a space station, or something?”

“Like the ISS?” Tertius wondered.

“Yeah, but bigger...much, much bigger. Either of you ever heard of a place called Gatewood?”

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Microstory 1113: Mirage

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Not all people with time powers were human, but they were all organic. It is something that you must be born with, or somehow be imbued with it later in life. It’s true that some people, such as Holly Blue or Hogarth Pudeyonavic, are capable of inventing technology with temporal properties, but these all must be operated by an organic being. Robots and androids are not capable of having powers, or being given powers. Transhumans may retain their powers to a certain degree, but will lose them upon crossing some upgrade threshold, which has never been quantified. Mirage is an artificial intelligence, created by the not-so-great version of Horace Reaver, in a since collapsed reality. He commissioned a hacker named Micro to program Mirage, then commanded it to kill a man he hated named Mateo Matic. He did not think through every possible outcome, however, and after Mateo succeeded in avoiding Mirage’s one attempt at his life, she was no longer bound to this directive. After a young woman rebuilt and reprogrammed her to be an independent individual, she went in search of Mateo, and ultimately sacrificed herself to save his life. This was the turning point. Theoretically because of the changes this mysterious woman made to her code, Mirage became the one exception to the rule against powered inorganics. She found herself in another dimension, able to bear witness to the world below, but unable to participate. It is from here that she watches time move back and forth. Whenever a traveler goes to the past, and makes a change to the timeline, she becomes aware of it. She sees all changes, but can make none of her own, and cannot communicate with others. No matter how many contradicting timelines are created, she remains completely conscious of all of them, and also completely powerless. After a literally incalculable amount of time spent here, though, Mirage started figuring out that she was not totally powerless in this dimension. She is indeed capable of interacting with those living in the primary dimensions, but in a limited capacity. She can only modify sufficiently advanced technology, but can’t come out and explain herself to people. So she can recruit others to help her fix what she considers to be problems with history, but she has to do it covertly, because if they knew that maybe their actions weren’t wholly self-driven, they might not be so happy about it.

Microstory 1112: Orson Olsen

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Orson Olsen, who was psychologically incapable of recognizing how funny his name sounded, was a member of the Community of Christ, which sprang from the Latter Day Saint movement. He was indoctrinated into his faith from birth in Independence, Missouri, and never thought to question what he had been taught. When he grew older, he started taking on more responsibility in the temple. One day, he was copying some missionary files when a young girl appeared outside the window, literally out of nowhere. He wasn’t certain he could trust what he thought he saw, though, so he watched her as she snuck in, and approached the podium in the sanctuary. She then conjured a bird from the aether, wrapped a message around its leg, then sent it on its way. This was not the first time he saw this girl, or witnessed her miracles, but it provided him with proof and confirmation. She first appeared to him earlier that morning, in his backyard. He had been so mesmerized and shocked by it that, though he did what she asked of him, he didn’t know what to think of it. She appeared to him a third time later that day, and charged him to change everything about his life. She told him that he should stop believing in the prophets, and to worship the only one real higher power in the whole universe, which she claimed to be time itself. It wasn’t as difficult for him to take on this new task as one might assume. He had believed every single thing his family and church taught him, but they had always demanded faith of him. This girl was the only person to ever show him real evidence of an almighty power. She disappeared from this life, but his drive to seek others like her was not lost. It’s not every day you encounter someone with temporal powers, but once you do, and you have some idea what to look for, it’s a lot easier to spot a second time. He remained in the church for the next few months, but all the while searching the metropolitan area for anyone who exhibited the same kind of abilities as that first girl. He found it in a man who could transport an object from one hand to the other. If he was willing to suffer through a psychic nosebleed, he could send something a meter or two farther, but that was his absolute limit. It wasn’t a very useful ability—but not all of them are. He incorporated it into his magic show, to make a little money on the side, but he was at little risk of becoming famous from it. With this man, Orson had real proof that time really was something to be worshipped. The magician knew of others like him; those with more powerful abilities, and Orson realized this was just the beginning. It would be pointless if this new church consisted only of himself, though. Orson was surprised at how easy it was for him to recruit others. He was smart enough to start with the people he knew were already doubting their faith. Once their numbers were high enough, they started thinking outside the original church. At that point, the new movement was unstoppable, and it was destined to cause more than a few problems for people with time powers.

Microstory 1111: Kolby Morse

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There are lots of different kinds of protectors. Law enforcement officers, military servicepeople, and emergency dispatchers are often drawn to their professions out of their desire to protect others. Kolby Morse was a lifeguard at a swimming pool when he was a kid, and as he was becoming an adult, determined that becoming a security guard was a logical next step. It wasn’t particularly glamorous, and much of the time boring, but he felt a sense of self-worth every time he put on that uniform. It was at his first job where he met his best friend and working partner. Elder Caverness was also born with an instinct to protect others, and shared many of Kolby’s values. They began to follow each other around the security circuit, so they would always be able to work together. At some point, they found themselves working for an organization they couldn’t personally believe in. They had developed a faulty product that resulted in deaths, but refused to take responsibility for it. Kolby and Elder were about to simply quit when they started noticing some strange goings on. The vice presidents all appeared to possess special abilities that couldn’t be explained through a conventional understanding of reality. One day, they simply disappeared, and no one else around them seemed to realize they ever existed. But then these VPs reappeared, with different histories, and having created separate companies. Fortunately, they all fell into the same parent company called Snowglobe Collective, which had decided to support their subsidiaries with a singular security branch. Kolby wanted to go undercover, and try to figure out what exactly was going on with these people, but Elder convinced him otherwise. One of them should be on the inside, but one should remain outside, to protect the other, should the need arise. A game of chance left Kolby on the outside, and though Elder’s life would now be much harder, at least he had a purpose. But just because he would not be investigating Snowglobe, didn’t mean he couldn’t contribute positively to society. There was still a lot to be done, and now that he knew about people with time powers, he felt like he had to do something with that. After months of searching, he finally managed to catch up to a petty thief who had a time power of his own. He could send people forward or backwards in time, then bring them right back to where they started. He wasn’t using his gifts to break into places. In fact, he wasn’t really using them at all, but Kolby knew he had potential. They started working on forming a team, eventually meeting up with a woman who could possess other people’s bodies, and a time traveling psychiatrist. And so Garen Ashlock begins to propel Quivira Boyce to the past, so she can take over someone’s life temporarily, and fix whatever went wrong in the original history. Dr. Mallory Hammer provides medical and psychological support, while Kolby does everything else. He maintains facilities, and makes sure the people Quivira switches bodies with have everything they need to be comfortable, and feel safe. Most of all, it’s his job to do what he does best. He protects.

Microstory 1110: The Escapologist

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Atlantis is the place that houses the powers that be. These people are...complicated, but they live in a universe with quadrillions of others, most of which are not at all cognizant that this small group of children have control over another universe. They are the ones who manipulate salmon, moving them up and down the timeline, and all throughout space, recruiting them to complete various missions. For the most part, there are only a few ways of traveling to these other universes, which are known as branes. You can take The Crossover, or its predecessor, The Prototype. If you’re lucky enough to catch a junction for the massive Universal Bridge Collapse, you might be able to get to another brane, but it would be practically impossible to get back. Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat will grant you access to certain branes, but not just any. If you want to go from the salmonverse to Universe Prime, there’s a special permanent connection that very few people know about. The Escapologist is one of these people, though she did not go by this name at the time. She was born Ariadna Traversa; a perfect name for what she would come to do later in life. She discovered the Prime Bridge—which was actually more like a tunnel—after years and years of searching for it. Most people don’t go looking, because they don’t know about it, but she intuited that it must exist. Lots of people had heard of the powers, but no one had ever seen them. They were expected to exist in some other dimension, but there were those who could see in more than the usual three dimensions. They reported seeing nothing of the kind, except for The Gallery, which was something different. No, if the powers that be were to have any influence on her world, they would have to be both detached from it, but be utilizing some link to it.

Since her return from this place, she has refused to divulge where the access junction to the Prime Bridge is located; not to prevent anyone from learning the truth, and keep it to herself, but because she barely escaped with her life. There was nothing particularly dangerous about Universe Prime itself. Most people she encountered there were going about their day, and had no problem with her. It was the bridge itself that was the problem. Unlike the bridge between Ansutah and the salmonverse, it is long and treacherous. It isn’t merely a connection between two points, but an actual bridge with significant dimension. It is here that reality breaks down, and time is difficult to calculate. It can simultaneously feel as if you’ve been there for one second, and one thousand years. It can cause you to lose all memories, and any sense of who you are, or any drive to move forward. And your destination can appear infinitely far away. These are not obstacles created by some intelligent entity who doesn’t want you to pass. It’s like this because you are crossing through something called the bulkverse, which is the collection of all universes, inside of a hyperdimensional construct, which was not designed to be hospitable to life. The matrioverse, as it’s called in metaphysical terms, was never meant to be traveled, or even perceived. You are meant to live in your brane, and your brane alone. Your identity—your self—is tied to your environment. If that environment changes, then you change. The more dramatic the change, the more of the original you can be lost. Ariadna had to fight against every instinct she had to just remain inside the Prime Bridge, for her will to do anything but stand in place was all but gone. Going through the first time was bad enough, but the return was even worse, because now she was scarred by the trauma from having learned the true nature of the powers that be. She took up the moniker as a reminder of what she went through, but she has never told anyone else about it, and she never will.

Microstory 1109: Dardan Lusha

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Horace Reaver was a salmon, born with the pattern of going back to his younger body, and living every day a second time. At first, he didn’t realize other people weren’t like him. He called the first time he experienced a day the practice, and assumed everyone around him went through the same thing. One day, he accidentally killed his friend, Dardan Lusha on the playground. This didn’t bother him much, because he knew he would be able to prevent it from happening after the day reset to its beginning, as it always had. This was when he first learned normal people were not like him at all, and did not perceive time the same way. Dardan lived through that day, totally unawares of what had happened before, and went on to continue living long after that, but his relationship with his only friend was forever changed. While the trauma was completely erased from Dardan’s memories, Horace could remember vividly, and could not get past the fact that he was alone. Dardan would always remind him of that, and he just couldn’t have it, so he purposefully cut ties with him. Though Reaver would go on to become quite the prolific killer, there was no reason to suspect he felt any animosity towards Dardan. In all likelihood, he had all but completely forgotten about the incident. Still, Reaver’s daughter, Meliora didn’t want to take any chances. When Dardan was a young adult, she took him off Earth, and made him the first tenant of Sanctuary, which she built on a planet that would eventually come to be known as Dardius. Then the timeline changed. A traveler went back, and altered history enough to create a new reality, and a new Dardan. She came to realize that this would never stop happening. She couldn’t just rescue people who had been negatively affected by time, then leave their alternates to their own devices. Some people, in these new realities, will have escaped their terrible fates, and that was fine, but someone at constant risk, like Dardan, would have to be saved no matter what. Over the years, she continued to save him from the potential of her father’s wrath. Every once in awhile, a new Dardan will take up residence on the planet named for him. The most recent one was elected Agriculture Administrator, and was responsible for feeding billions of people, including the world’s enemies. And no one beyond Meliora knew why he had been saved, not even Dardan himself.

Microstory 1108: Meliora Rutherford Delaney-Reaver

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Meliora Rutherford Delaney-Reaver was born in a different reality. Most people with time powers, really only have one specialty. This specialty may come with necessary secondary powers, or they may have multiple applications, but they’re usually all related. Someone who can travel back and forth in time often also has the ability to jump through space as well, but this is because space and time aren’t as separate as most people perceive. They won’t also be able to create pocket dimensions, though, because that’s an entirely different set of skills. There are indeed a handful of choosing ones out there who can manipulate time in multiple ways, however not all are created equal. Holly Blue, for instance, can invent different kinds of time-based technology. The Apprentice can quite literally learn other people’s powers, though he’ll lose any he doesn’t utilize often or recent enough, just like when a normal person’s brain loses neural connections. Of course, The Cleanser possessed the body of an entity known as The Mass, which was originally designed to maintain a balance in the timeline, and exhibited several characteristics in order to accomplish this. Meliora was special in that she natural came with a host of powers, and there’s never been a satisfactory explanation as to why. Her birth father, Horace Reaver was a salmon, who lived each day twice. He had no control over his pattern, and though there was only one person in histories like him, he wasn’t particularly remarkable. Her mother, Leona Delaney was spawn, and depending which reality you’re talking about, she was imbued with different patterns, but nothing astonishing either. Shortly after Meliora’s third birthday, Reaver was arrested for killing the man who killed his wife—along with a dozen or so innocent bystanders. She was subsequently sent to live in foster care, with a man named Lincoln Rutherford, who already had one adopted son.

A few months before she turned six, Meliora realized what she could do, when she found herself accidentally twenty years in the past, and she wouldn’t return to her date of egress until experiencing twenty years of life, but not all in order. She continued to jump around time, practicing her skills, and exploring history. The original plan was to go back to before her mother died, and stop it from happening, but she realized it was her birth father who needed to make a change for his own life. So she went back to the exact date she first left, and confronted him in his prison cell. Unbeknownst to the two men, her foster father was a guard, and happened to be stationed just outside his door at the time. When she sent Reaver back to his own younger body, Lincoln went through as well, and started making his own changes to the timeline. What Meliora discovered, though, was that no matter what she did, history could never reach a state of good. Every change came with an unforeseen cost, and any attempt to correct these new problems simply resulted in new costs. But through all these years, she realized the people who suffered the most were the normal humans, who often had no clue what was going on. So she became determined to find a place where all those negatively affected by other temporal manipulators could find peace and safety. She recruited the help of a spawn named Gilbert Boyce, who happened to have ownership of a planet millions of light years away that was shocking similar to Earth. It was here that she built The Sanctuary. It started with a single hotel, but grew from there, until the world became home to billions of people, many of which didn’t even know she existed.

Microstory 1107: Judy Schmidt

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There was nothing particularly special about Judy Schmidt. She grew up with a normal family, in a normal town, and ended up with a normal job in marketing. She was raised as an atheist, and after careful study of the world’s religions when she was older, decided she still was. She wasn’t superstitious, and she didn’t believe in anything that hadn’t been officially recorded in history. She believed in dinosaurs and meteorites, but not ghosts, and definitely not time travelers. After a few years of working for the company, she finally felt comfortable with her career status. She wasn’t interested in doing the same job, for the same rate of pay, forever, but she wasn’t overly ambitious either. She was ready to hold steady for awhile, and maybe focus a little more on her personal life. Her friends had been wanting to set her up on a blind date, so she agreed. She and Rebecca started off slow. First they had coffee, then lunch, then dinner, and then they had a date that took place in two locations. This occurred over the course of a month, and it seemed to be going so well, that they both decided they wanted to take the next step. On the first night that Rebecca stayed over, she disappeared...literally. They were sitting up in bed, just talking, and in the blink of an eye, she was gone, right in the middle of her sentence. A frightened Judy immediately called poison control, thinking she had ingested something bad, but there was nothing they could do for her if she didn’t specifically remembering taking something. They directed her to urgent care, where the doctors and nurses were unable to find anything wrong with her. There was no sign she had been given a hallucinogen, or anything else. There wasn’t even any alcohol in her system. She finally had to surrender to the odd, but still plausible, possibility that she fell asleep, and by the time she woke up, Rebecca had simply left. Sure, her recollection of what the clock read didn’t account for this, and sure, Rebecca wasn’t picking up her phone, but that didn’t mean she was magic. But she was, sort of. Two days later, Judy was getting ready for work when Rebecca suddenly returned. She was wearing different clothes, and covered in mud. As it turned out, she had just spent the entire time in 2011, providing aid for families displaced by the Sidoarjo mud flow in Indonesia. Judy had a hard time believing it, but couldn’t deny the fact that she never did receive a more reasonable explanation for Rebecca’s disappearance. Three days later, it happened again. This time, she was only gone for about eight hours, and returned apparently from the same time and place as before. This continued to happen every day. She was sent off to work, as if it were any other job, except it was taking place over thirty years in the past. She tried to break up with Judy, but Judy wouldn’t accept it. Though this was all new to her, Judy could tell that her relationship with Rebecca was real, and it would be unfair to the both of them if she just ignored their potential. So she stayed, ultimately forever, and she never regretted it.

Microstory 1106: Xearea Voss

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Xearea Voss was one of the last Saviors of Earth. No one knows how the powers that be who control the system of salmon choose who will be the next Savior, but it doesn’t appear to be random. A lot of people in the world of salmon and choosing ones are capable of teleporting, but the Savior is in a class of their own. They can’t control when or where they jump, or where they land. Once they arrive, they have an innate sense of what they’re meant to do, and they almost never fail. Some believe that a Savior is detoured to a pocket dimension after each egress, and given mission parameters by someone, then sent off to the new location without conscious memories, but no real evidence suggests this. Their minds are probably encoded with subliminal instructions, using a psychic connection of which they are not fully cognizant. Unlike most Saviors, Xearea was aware of her destiny before it came to pass. Her older brother, Camden was salmon as well, whose pattern regularly pushed him back in time exactly one hundred years. He wasn’t given a specific job while there, but he ended up being recruited by a secret task force composed of competing intelligence agencies from a handful of allied nations. Xearea had always believed she would one day be called to action as well, though she assumed she would begin working with Camden. It wasn’t until a mysterious enemy from her future came back to kill her that she learned she was something else. When he and a group of his men attacked her when she was a child, a group of other men showed up to protect her. They continued to do so for the next few years, until it was time for her to begin her work as Savior.

Several years into her new life, Xearea was tasked with protecting a political leader from an assassination attempt on the steps of a park in the middle of the city. This sort of mission was usually handled by a salmon known as The Kingmaker, but for some reason, she was chosen instead. Perhaps they believed the leader would respond better to an unassuming teenage girl. This leader was well-liked by most, but hated by a select few, who believed humans should be the only intelligent species on Earth. This far into the future, the world was now home to a plethora of others, like androids, transhumans, and genetically engineered so-called designer babies. He was an advocate for the rights of these others, and not anywhere near alone in his beliefs, but his assassins considered him to by the linchpin in the movement towards equality. It wasn’t really a movement anymore, though, since they had long been accepted into society. The assassins were not convinced things couldn’t be changed. Most of a Savior’s saves cannot be undone, but this was an unusual case. A choosing one whose name remains unimportant was the man responsible for the attempt at the leader’s life. Time travelers altered history all the time, but they didn’t purposefully meddle too much in human affairs, because they just didn’t care all that much. He kept trying to go back into the past, and providing back up to himself on those park steps, but Xearea defeated him in every reality. No matter how many versions of him he sent after her, he just couldn’t win. So he decided to go back further, and kill her before she ever had the chance to stop him. We all know how that turned out, though. Xearea wouldn’t die until many years later, at the age of 79.

Microstory 1105: Wayne Crawford

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Long before Wayne Crawford was born, the wedding industry was a dying one. It wasn’t that people weren’t getting married, but it had transformed. First of all, same-sex marriage eventually, and finally, became ubiquitous worldwide. What few people who had a problem with it were expected to keep their mouths shut. Group marriages also became common, but they were built on equality, and love, rather than child rape, indoctrination, and coercion, like a certain religion known for polygamy. The biggest change, however, was in the world’s attitude towards the institution itself, and its beginning. Weddings were still performed, though they were lower key than before. They mostly involved partying and dancing, with little emphasis on decorations and traditions. Some even opted to have no wedding at all, and there was much less stigma attached to this decision than in prior decades. Couples and grouples started realizing that the point of a wedding is to get married, and the point of getting married is to be married. Marriage is a dynamic; not an event. Once the majority of people recognized that, ceremony lost its value. Still, the planet had not suffered from mass amnesia. Some liked to do things the old fashioned way, just for their historical and artistic value. A big wedding was no longer obligatory, nor a burden, but something some people did for fun. Since money wasn’t a thing anymore, it didn’t put a strain on resources either. Wayne Crawford, and his husband-to-be, Raphael Neville were two of those people. They decided they wanted to have a real wedding ceremony, with a full audience, an authorized officiant, and all the little frills and arbitrary features. Some aspects of the traditional wedding were removed. Nobody was giving anybody away, like property, and nobody was wearing virginal white. Unfortunately, it would seem that their special day would be ruined regardless of how they chose to handle it. On May 19, 2161, the rogue planet of Durus made an uncomfortably close pass by Earth. This caused a number of earthquakes, fires, and other disasters, the likes of which the planet hadn’t seen since safety and redundancy took a front seat in the car of life. It also had the unfortunate side effect of plucking people off the surface of both worlds, and pulling them up to the other one. People with temporal abilities and patterns, such as choosing ones and salmon, were at particularly high risk of this, but the majority of refugees were standard humans. Which ones were taken, and which ones were left alone, seemed to be largely unpredictable. You would only possibly be safe indoors, though not even that was a guarantee. Raphael was sadly chosen to be thrown up to Durus, but Wayne did not accept that. The idea was, after the end of the ceremony, they would ride off the cliff together on a two person jet platform to start their new lives, so it was all ready to go for them. Wayne didn’t understand what was happening when Raphael started essentially falling up in the air, but he wasn’t going to waste time studying the phenomenon. He jumped onto the platform, and zoomed up to save the love of his life. He was moving at a pretty good clip, but Raphael was moving much faster. Luckily, aircraft were at fairly high risk of being caught up in what would later be called the Deathspring, so just by sending himself so high up in the air, Wayne ended up being taken to Durus as well, whereas he wouldn’t have, had he stayed put. It would take over twenty years, but Wayne finally did manage to rescue Raphael, and return them both to Earth, and they did so...with a daughter.

Microstory 1104: Hall Voss

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Lots of people with special temporal powers or patterns are given nicknames, based either on what they could do, or what they did with what they could do. Hall Voss possessed two nicknames, however. He was both The Navigator, and The Collector, but there was a good reason for that. There were actually two of him. He was just a regular ol’ time traveler, who generally operated across a single timeline, but he also had a penchant for history, and decided to do something about all those artifacts that were lost to history, for one reason or another. He would jump up and down the timestream, rescuing objects with important historical value—from fires, and looting, and other disasters—and donate them to a time museum, which was run by The Historian. Something he learned along the way was that one of his grandsons, and one of his granddaughters, were destined to become notable temporal manipulators as well. Camden was The Centurion, who lived around the turn of the 22nd century, but worked for an intelligence cooperative at the turn of the 21st century. His sister, Xearea was one of the last Saviors of Earth, which was a special class of teleporter, who zipped all over the globe, saving lives. Unfortunately, simply having discovered this truth about his family’s future was enough to prevent it from coming to pass. Xearea was erased from the future, and Camden from both the future, and the past. Such is oft the price of time travel. He had to fix this. So he went back in time, and met up with his younger self. He sought the aid of a choosing one with the power to manipulate people’s memories, who used this gift to place a permanent block on the younger Hall’s mind. He would not be able to learn anything about the future or past that could, in knowing, prevent it from actually happening. This set the timeline right once more, and restored the lives of his grandchildren, but it came at its own price. This older version of Hall was stuck in a separate reality, and could never return, even if he wanted to. So now there are two. The ignorant version—the one that will one day have children—is so ignorant, that he does not even recognize his alternate self. As The Collector, he works with The Navigator all the time, but interprets his face as someone entirely different. If someone were to try and convince him that he has a double, he will never be able to see it, since his mind has been permanently blind to it. But this is all okay, because together, they save history on a regular basis.

Microstory 1103: Thor Thompson

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On the first day of fall in 2026, Thor Thompson made the one-way trip with his family to Mars. Thor spent his whole life training for this mission, long before his parents had any reason to suspect they would be chosen as some of the first pioneers to the red planet. Both of them were highly valued scientists, who would be vital to early endeavors for permanent settlement. His father owned a private undersea habitat manufacturing contractor, which allowed astronauts to train for long-term missions in a simulated environment. He was chosen to build the first of these habitats on the surface of Mars, based on his extensive knowledge of construction for extremely harsh environments. His mother was literally a rocket scientist, who helped design the first true passenger shuttle, and several models beyond. Previous shuttles were capable of accommodating a handful of highly training space explorers, but hers could hold dozens of individuals, not all of which would necessarily possess the skills to operate the craft itself. The first airplanes were designed only for pilots, but an industry grew from that, and now, very few people on any commercial airliner have any clue how the machines work, and would not be able to fly in an emergency situation. This was her dream for spaceflight, and her passion for a future of ubiquitous access is why, out of everyone else working the problem, she was also chosen as a settler. Initial plans for colonization called for elite scientists, and it’s true that these people were vital, but exclusivity went against the purpose of outward human expansion. If this was going to work, Martians needed to be composed of families. It needed...to include children. That’s where Thor ‘Too Young’ Thompson came in. He was given his nickname when he was much younger, because he would frequently attempt to participate in things that were beyond his years. He tried to buy tickets for rated R movies, and ride amusement park rides best enjoyed by adults. He tried to run the City Frenzy race when he was only nine years old, and he never hung out with children his own age. At the time, he was the youngest chosen for Mars, but he wasn’t accepted merely because his parents were desired. The company could have found comparable experts without children, but they stuck with the Thompsons, because Thor had long ago proven himself to be extremely skilled and capable in his own right. He would go on to run that City Frenzy once he was old enough, and finally win it in the summer before departure. If there was any question he would survive on a hostile new world, there wasn’t anymore. He would grow up to become a valued member of the Martian society, and contribute greatly to its blossoming as a self-sustaining civilization. He would do this with the help of a new friend from another early migration, who was a few years older than him, Saxon Parker.

Microstory 1102: Keuhla Derricks

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Years ago, and not at all, there was a large city called Springfield, Kansas. Many people with temporal powers lived here, alongside naturally occurring temporal anomalies, and other strange phenomena. It was here that reality broke, causing parts of the city to be ripped from time itself, as well as from the memories of everyone who should have known these parts existed. Little by little, block by block, over the course of years, Springfield shrank, until only a small town remained. A woman was born there who was seeking access to the distant world the other parts of town had fallen to, though she did not know the whole truth at the time. Her machine sent the rest of Springfield there all at once, ahead of schedule. But this was a blessing, for had she done nothing, these remaining parts would have been destroyed in the journey, like all the others. However, there were a few special places from earlier disappearances that survived the trip without her help. The Springfield Library was one of them. It was a massive repository of information; larger than it appeared to be at first, or even second, glance. No, not every book that had ever been written, or would be written, was on its shelves. But every truth, every fact, every historical event, was notated somewhere here. All libraries lack some information, for they are only so large, but this place did not. It is unknown where the building itself originated. Historical records indicate that it was built in the 19th century, and maintained and modernized ever since. There’s no reason to believe it was created by someone with powers. It seems its completeness occurred later, through some other process. But that doesn’t mean it could do everything on its own. It still needed a librarian. It needed...The Librarian. She herself was born with special gifts; hyperthymesia, eidetic memory, plain ol’ agelessness. She was not entirely immortal, though, and would one day be killed, given the right circumstances. She drew her power from Springfield Library, and that power could be taken away. If it did, another would have to take her place, which is where The Sublibrarian program comes into play. Keuhla Derricks wasn’t the first assigned to the position. She was merely the last in a long bloodline of Sublibrarians, and the one alive at the time when the job needed backfill. Her life before this was fairly unremarkable. She was born on Durus, which was the name of the planet where Springfield ended up falling to. She worked as a regular librarian, at a regular library, and did not make waves. She was not an inherently uninteresting person. It was simply her responsibility to maintain a low profile, and be ready to assume her duties as full Librarian, in such an event of her predecessor’s death. In this way, she lived her life perfectly. The time did eventually come that she was called to act, but the incident that caused the original Librarian’s death, always severely diminished the Library’s own power. Some knowledge has been lost forever, which makes Keuhla’s new job harder than it ever was.

Microstory 1101: Lihtren Uluru

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Lihtren Uluru was born on a planet called Haliavi, which was roughly 63,100 light years away from Earth. Because almost all intelligent life in the galaxy ultimately derives from Earth, this occurred around 70,000 years later than present-day. By then, over half of the Milky Way had been explored, and much of it seeded with new life. This life was largely unaware of its origins, but Lihtren was always a curious fellow. He was able to get his hands on some of the technology that first arrived at his homeworld, from a solar system staging area near Earth, several thousand years ago. It was there that he accessed a database of knowledge from the origin planet, and it is from there that he began a journey. He put himself in a stasis pod on a maximum sublightspeed interstellar spacecraft designed for a crew of a dozen, but he did so alone. He programmed his pod to wake him only once a year—from the ship’s perspective—so he could check on its systems, or if something went wrong. 63,100 years later, he was finally at his destination, on an Earth that no longer harbored advanced life. Over the ages, much had changed about this old world. It hadn’t been abandoned because it was no longer capable of sustaining life, but because his ancestors had simply moved on. The geography had changed as well, but there was at least one constant. A formation called Uluru, which was also known as Ayers Rock, remained standing, just as it was 126,000 years ago. He thought coming here would explain who he was, and what he should do with his life, but he discovered it to be mostly irrelevant. The fact that he shared a name with this surface feature appeared to be entirely a coincidence. He didn’t even speak the same language as the people who named it so long ago. Still, it wasn’t like he could return home. Everyone he ever knew was either long dead, or dramatically transformed by biotechnological upgrades. It wasn’t any more home for him than this place was. And so he became determined to live the rest of his life on top of Uluru. Alone. Fate seemed to have other plans. Through means unknown to him, he ended up traveling hundreds of thousands of years into the past. A woman met him there, who assured him she had nothing to do with his timeslip, but that she knew he would be coming. She provided him with food and drink, and then she walked away, never to be seen again. Lihtren later realized she had given him immortality water, which allowed him to continue living on his rock forever. He found himself in charge of the entire area, and used it to moderate duels for people with other special temporal abilities, who had personal issues against each other. A lot of people know his name, but few know where he comes from. Some of the more curious—or the more prone to studying history—have attempted to pinpoint his origins, not so as to alter them, but just to know. Yet he has never been found. The version of him in the timeline that exists now will not be born for tens of thousands of years. However, it is not only possible, but likely, that enough of the timeline has been changed by now to have eliminated this other potential version from ever existing at all. Lihtren Uluru, a.k.a The Peacemaker, is almost certainly one of a kind.

Microstory 1100: Salmonverse Profiles Introduction

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Back in 2007, I came up with this story about a group of people with special abilities. Several of the characters I just thought up myself, because of my previous exposure to superhero movies. Those became my core characters, but I wanted to have dozens of others, so I did a lot of research. The idea was to focus on the main group for the first season of a television series, and then start exploring the others, one episode at a time. I ended up with roughly a hundred in total, which ultimately proved to be perfect when I was trying to come up with a series to do for this website. I have a lot of mixed feelings about Bellevue Profiles, though. On one hand, I had a solid idea of who these people were, and their backstories were predetermined; I just needed to fill in some detail. On the other hand, I felt like I was locking myself into canonical plot points, and I didn’t have a whole lot of freedom to come up with some more creative choices. I think it worked out, but by the time I was done, I was already regretting the decisions I made for some of them, and have had to find ways to incorporate the developments into the larger mythology without ruining the overall vision. Anyway, my salmonverse stories are set in an entirely different universe, which I never thought I would create, and they’ve come with an explosion of new characters I never thought I would have. I decided it would be fitting if I revisited the idea of posting profiles for each character. The problem is that I have a hundred and sixty-eight slots for the series I’m introducing to you now, but I’m still in the middle of compiling every character, and I’m already at two hundred and forty-two. I don’t want to profile characters we don’t really care about, like say, a retailer who tries to cheat the main character, but whom we never see again. I also don’t want to profile characters who are already important in their own stories, because I don’t have the room, and they’ve been taken care of anyway. I have to make sure no one is left out who should be there, or included who shouldn’t.

Seeing that none existed on the internet already, I had to devise a way of codifying a sliding scale of character importance. A character coded at Zero is not really a character at all. They surely must exist, but only to serve the existence of some other character. Examples include parents, or the teacher of a class in which the main character recalls learning something vital. Generalized terms like classmates or even parents itself fall into this category, since they’re dismissed as unindependent and irrelevant collectives, so they can’t qualify for true character status. Level One characters are mentioned, but unnamed (e.g. security guard, bank teller). Level Twos are mentioned by name, but only because the context of the story requires they be named (e.g. ancillary students called out at a graduation ceremony). Level Three is for characters who appear, but are unnamed (e.g. a flight attendant who notices a weapon, and has to seek help from the air marshal). Level Four characters are named, but they’re one-dimensional, and hardly worth remembering. Level Five characters have a greater impact on the story, but won’t likely last long, and aren’t likely to return once they leave the narrative. Levels Six, Seven, and Eight are reserved for tertiary, secondary, and primary characters, respectively. The lines between each of these are hard to pin down, and can fluctuate. Spinoffs, for instance, often come about when a secondary in one story is ascended to primary status in a different story. I still have several stories to read through, so I can get the entire list of characters I’ve even so much as mentioned since 2015, and am only excluding Level Zeros from this list. I then need to determine which category they fall into, and figure out which ones out of those will get profiles. There’s still a lot of work ahead, and I don’t even know which character gets the first profile, but fortunately, I have all weekend. I have a cold, so it’s not like I would be able to go to a movie.