Backstage: Five Minutes (Patreon)

Backstage for Five Minutes. 

This story isn't actually wholly original to the Internet. Years and years ago, when I was deep within X-Men comics fandom in the 90's, there was a project called The Common People, about mutants who live ordinary lives, without being superheroes. Alannah Foster was one of five characters I came up with the day I first got into X-Men comics (the others included Meg Santoro and several other Cold Light characters). 

I was 15 when I created her and gave her godlike Mary Sue powers -- she could jump back through time to the start of her lifetime, and also project telekinesis back in time. This is not a workable character concept when you want a character to face challenges. So in my 20's, when I wrote her for the first time in a Common People story, I changed it so that, as a kid, she could jump back 5 minutes, and removed the telekinesis.

Her older brother was supposed to be a superhero, so does this even count as Common People? Well, in the X-Men fandom, he was an OC I'd never written about, so I thought it counted. When I removed all my early OCs from X-Men fandom to put them in my original Proxima universe, I moved Alannah too, and then it wasn't a Common People story anymore, but a Proxima universe story and I don't have to care that her brother is a superhero, or that by the time of my novel Cold Light, she is one herself. (By then, her timeframe has expanded to 20 minutes, but it's implied that that's the physiological upper end of her range, given the level of power she can employ. I actually have rules in the Proxima universe for how much power a given superhero can have, biologically. Like midichlorians except I came up with it in the 80's. In fact the entire Proxima universe is full of shit I came up with, didn't post publicly about, and then someone came along and did a very similar idea in a very popular work of media. I guess that's karmic revenge for the fact that the whole thing started as "Alara does X-Men and mutants, but does them her way.")

Alannah appears in The Cold At The Heart of the Light, in her 20's, as a hero called Nicky Time. Yeah, the name is silly, but you haven't met Breakfast Mix yet.