Twenty-four Nineteen emerged from the shower in her gray cloak to discover Alexa applying pink “Dora the Terraformer” themed band-aids to her various scratches. Many band-aids were already decorating the girl, far more than what was necessary. Even the gaping bullet hole in her construction helmet was now covered up with a whimsical arrangement of bandages.

“Want a band-aid?” She offered, rattling a box of band-aids in the direction of the Equalizer.

“No.”

“Too bad. They would add some much needed color to that boring ass gray cloak of yours. I think you guys are doing equality wrong. See, if I was the Equalizer pope I'd give your cloaks a psychedelic rainbow pattern with some fractals or something. All the pretty colors and shapes of the fractal machinery of the universe sorta idea! Stylish and fun!”

“Well, it's a good thing you're not her Eminence Equality because I have no desire to look like a clown.” The Equalizer calmly readjusted her railgun beneath the cloak, small water spheres rolling off the fluid-impervious surface.

“Wait. Did you shower in your cloak… with your gun? Who showers fully dressed?”

“The safety of this shower leaves much to be desired.”

“Well, excuuuse me. I’m a supervillain, not a plumber!” Alexa threw up her arms.

“Also, the floor here is sloped at a 4.7-degree angle.” Twenty-four Nineteen tapped her steel reinforced boot on the uneven, warped floor. She noted that it was made from metal suitcases. She bent down to examine the suitcases, looking through the glass panels.

“Supervillain, not a carpenter!” Alexa yelled from what looked like a very shoddily made kitchen that featured a microwave and a freezer. She was digging bacon out of the freezer and shoving it into the microwave.

“And before you criticize my cooking skills - supervillain not a chef!”

The Equalizer had no intention of criticizing Alexa further. She looked at the floor and the walls of the treehouse in deep concentration, the tiniest micro-expressions of bewilderment breaking through her normally calm face.

“Sup dawg?” Alexa slammed the microwave door shut. The plate full of bacon started to spin behind her, highlighting her head with a yellow glow.

“Are these what I think they are?” Twenty-four Nineteen looked at Alexa.

“Yeppers. Super-designed hydrogen bombs. 100 megatons each or two Tzar Bombas per suitcase.”

“But… this is impossible. They’re exactly the same bomb suitcase! This is hundreds of bombs with the exact same id number!”

“Yeppers.”

The Equalizer’s neutral facade shattered, her face growing pale as she realized the implications of what the floor and the walls and the ceiling were lined with. “How many bombs is this?! How much uranium is in your walls?!”

“To be precise, there are exactly 444 hydrogen bombs in the walls, serial number 9838201.” Alexa picked up a detonator with wires leading into the wall.

"Now, Cottie..."

“My name is Verse Twenty-four Nineteen!”

“Wrong. Your name is Cottie or I flip this switch and we’ll have a lovely nuclear winter in very short order.”

The Equalizer blinked. “You would vaporize millions of people just so I would respond to you as Cottie?!”

Alexa nodded.

“You know what? Fine! Call me whatever you want! I don’t care!” Cottie said. “Why? Why would you do this?!” She pointed at the bombs.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“Safeties?” Alexa shrugged as if having the walls of her tree house lined with suitcase nukes was a very mundane thing to do.

“Safeties? What is wrong with you?!” Cottie advanced onto Alexa, her eye twitching.

“Ah, so I can make you angry,” the teenage supervillain grinned. “Projecting hearty emotions at someone is the first step towards a healthy relationship, you know. Or minionship, in your case. See, my goal is to make you more human. Break yourself outta that boring, square, Equalizer box! Spread your wings and fly, my pretty butterfly!”

Cottie froze, reestablishing her neutral facial expression. “I don’t understand,” she finally stated.

“You’re an Enforcer. I’m a villain. It’s a bit of an oddball companionship don’t you find? Enforcers are known to kill supervillains, often without provocation and then the evidence comes out that these villains were planning things that threatened the balance of global stability. It stands to reason that your Order has a super prognosticator. You prevent super-caused disasters before they happen.” Alexa said.

Cottie started to sweat. Alexa knew! She had somehow deduced everything! She was even making references to dying for her cause!

“Do you know of the `The rice and chessboard problem`, Cottie?” Alexa pulled out her bacon plate from the microwave, putting it onto an Egyptian-style golden table.

“What does that have to do with anything?” the Equalizer asked, staring at the coffee table that looked like it came straight from the tomb of Tutankhamun museum exhibition.

“It’s an exponential curve parable in which the inventor of chess tricked the King into giving him an absurd amount of rice. He asked the King to fill each chess square with twice the number of rice starting at only one grain. Basically, if the number of grains of rice doubles on every successive square of a chessboard, the sum of grains on all 64 squares is over eighteen quintillion. People underestimate the power of numbers. ”

“Okay?”

“My dear minion numero duo, the things you see around my treehouse are genuine items of rarity and great value that I brought back from the future. I go there a lot, as you can see.”

Alexa pointed at one of the paintings on her wall behind her. “That’s the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog painted in 1818. The original, not a copy. A quintessential masterpiece of French Romanticism. I stole it from the future because it reminds me of my own, personal struggle against... various elements.”

Cottie looked at the painting of the Wanderer that depicted a man looking over misty mountain peaks. Alexa turned around, matching the posture of the man in the artwork.

“When I was younger I simply took valuable items from the future, like this painting. Eventually, I realized something else - a new world is created with every jump. I don’t know what happens to the old one. Maybe it just keeps going. Maybe it is destroyed. The point is that the future changes with every action of mine and every new jump takes me to a NEW future.”

Alexa turned back to Cottie.

“Imagine if you could jump into the future several times a day. Now imagine that you could bring any item back, say… like a grain of rice. Now imagine that you buried this grain of rice somewhere safe, then jumped into the future again and dug it out, then came back to the present. You’d have twice the rice. Then four times. Then sixteen. Rinse and repeat. Over and over. An exponential curve. Now imagine that the object in question isn’t a grain of rice. It’s a super-designed hydrogen bomb in a small suitcase.”

Alexa pointed at the floor covered in hydrogen bomb cases.

“With only sixty-four trips, I can produce eighteen quintillion bombs. Obviously, I don’t have that many bombs as I’m limited by carrying capacity and other... things, but you get my mathematical point, yes?”

Cottie looked at Alexa, eyes wide. “By Equality!” Her hands started to tremble ever so slightly as she completely lost control of her feelings.

“Enforcers exist to equalize villains and heroes who go too far. I can bet you’re just waiting to shoot me with that gun for my future crimes against humanity or whatever. Well if you do that, all of these synchronized bombs, including ones I’ve buried all over this yard, all around town, and all over the country will all go off at the same time. You’ll never find them all and you’ll never disarm them all because there are too many. I have been jumping into the future and making copies of this bomb since I was twelve. Big bada boom.” Alexa made an imaginary nuclear explosion with her hands.

She grabbed a bacon piece and let Cottie process her words some more, then walked up to the Equalizer, looking right into her emerald eyes. “No matter what I do in the future, no matter what I am planning to do - you can’t kill me, Enforcer. If I die, these bombs will go off and the world will burn. It’s the ultimate dead man's switch. Checkmate.” Alexa booped Cottie in the nose.

Cottie’s mouth became dry as she flopped it open and closed like a fish, her eye twitching ever so slightly. The teachings of Eminence Equality did not prepare her for this sort of mindblowing insanity.

Alexa offered Cottie a hand. “So, you might as well protect me for all of eternity with that big, shiny gun of yours! Friends?”

The Equalizer returned the handshake, her palm sweaty. She had greatly underestimated the teenage supervillain during her initial analysis and was now paying the price.

No amount of cold showers or meditating would cure the terrifying dilemma Alexa had planted into her rapidly beating heart.