The Traveller Effect (LGBTQ+)

5 ✖ Abilities

Song of the chapter:

Kingdom Fall - Claire Wyndham

✖

They were not a doctor, they just had the luck of being born into a lucky species.

They had dragged me ashore, my clothes now drenched and sticking to my skin. The blood had at least washed off, but now the dirt was clinging onto my wet body and producing mud.

I will never be clean.

The Traveller knelt down in front of me, completely nude. I would have been more awkward at the situation if they had more human features, instead of a body resembling a sexless figurine template, not yet painted and designed to appear as a character.

They took my ankle into their hands, not caring at the pain it caused me. They had no sympathy to my aching expression, and instead run a single finger alongside my foot, digging painfully into my skin. It wasn't enough force to break the skin, but it definitely hurt. I winched.

"How does this help at all?" I gritted out.

"Patience," they ran their finger up and down my foot a few times, and it took a while for me to realise that the pain was actually slowly diminishing. The swelling was going down, the colour was returning to normal and the posture of my entire foot was stretching into its original position. I was astonished.

"Did you just... use magic to heal me?!"

"No," their eyes shot to me with displeasure. "I did not heal you," they stood back up when they were finished. I tested out my foot, rotating it side-to-side and wiggling my toes.

It was healed.

Completely healed.

"Then what did you do?"

"I turned back time," my eyes bulged.

"What?" it sneered at me. I had fully expected the limitations to the Traveller's incredible show of features applied to heightened versions of what a human can do, but now I realise how ignorant my way of thinking was. This was an entirely different species from across the universe. My way of thinking was atoned to what I was used to and nothing more. Earth was just my ground zero to where all my knowledge had been built up from, and here came along someone who broke the constraints of my understanding.

I wondered what they knew, what they had seen. What, if they could side with humanity, they could teach us?

They must be knowledgable beyond our understanding.

"Pitiful," they turned to pick up their bodysuit, heading to hand it up to dry. "My species can turn back time in a small area. It has its limitations. There is only a certain amount of time we can reverse," their eyes suddenly dart to me. "This is why I am flawless,"

"You mean your skin?"

"I have carried the same skin for my entire life," this bewildered me. They didn't grow new skin? They didn't regenerate cells?

"So your skin is the same as when you were a baby?" I questioned, but they only seemed more confused.

"Baby?"

"Yeah, newborn. Infant. Toddler," I shrugged, not knowing which word would sound familiar to them.

"I am not familiar,"

This was interesting. The Traveller's species had neither a digestive nor a reproductive system. Not a normal one anyway, I figured. They didn't know about babies.

But they had to have come from somewhere.

"How does your species expand then? You know, reproduce?" they stared at me with a stoic expression, seemingly deciding if they would share that information with me or not.