Haresa

"You're telling me that you use a teleporting watch to travel to school and home and you just have those two locations?" I asked Sheldon.

"Yeah."

"You could use the watch to travel anywhere in the world and yet you only use it to get to and from school as fast as possible?"

"No, it cannot teleport anywhere I want. I would need to log in coordinates and that takes a bit of time since it can't be done on the spot. If I could teleport anywhere with a few taps of a button then there's the risk of being teleported somewhere on accident."

"But still."

"Still what?"

I used my fingers to smooth the creases of the bridge of my nose and exhaled. "Okay, you know what? Never mind. Just tell me how's the progress going with the box thing."

"I don't understand why it's so weird to you but fine," Sheldon held up the microchip for me to see. "See this?"

"Yes," I said.

"Do you know what it's called?"

"Yes," I sighed in exasperation. "We don't have to go through this step by step like I'm a four-year-old."

Sheldon leaned back onto the table and crossed his arms. His eyes scanned me up and down and I could feel his doubt radiating off of him.

"I'm not as dumb as you thought I was when we were kids," I said with my fingers an inch away from pulling my hair out.

"Nearly drowned."

"I'm a professional that's willing to take risks. Not an idiot."

Sheldon seemed to relent and went back to the table to tend to the device again. As he worked on it, he moved his head slightly to the side with a hint of a smile on his face. "Smeared blueberries on my stomach."

"Okay, now you're just teasing me."

He didn't deny or confirm my statement as he continued to put the microchip into his watch. "So, the microchip should have some security precautions to it if they weren't stupid. They might have certain geolocations blocked as well since it's harder to navigate this thing without it. I made this thing before I learned how to make a section where default locations could be chosen and the number of options on this gets super tedious when it has locations all over the globe. And I was meticulous so every possible teleportation location is one hundred feet from each other."

"Wouldn't so much data overload it?"

"A phone or laptop has more complicated coding than this thing. It's fairly straightforward and doesn't need to have any fancy displays, just the numbers that the locations represent. It was so easy that I decided that I might've used it to teleport to the middle of the ocean too so literally everywhere is possible with this thing," Sheldon explained. "It might be why it was only good for up to three uses and then it needs a full-out repair session which took me about a week."

"That sounds like a waste," I said.

"It was, which was why it was a prototype." Sheldon carefully placed the microchip onto a glass plate. "It makes sense that they reserved it for emergency escapes."

After he seemed to pick out specks of metal from the microchip before he inserted it into a slot in his watch. He fiddled with it for a few minutes and I just stood in silence as I watched him. He was really good at his job despite so many years of inactivity now that I thought of it.

"You don't have to be here for this part you know," Sheldon mumbled, his fingers still tapping on the screen. "It's going to take some time before I find anything on this thing."

My face began to warm up and I cleared my throat. "I know, I just want to be here for every step of the process. Do you want me to leave?"

His eyes flicked up to me and his fingers hovered over the watch for a split second before he went back to working on it. "I'm not used to an audience but it's not the first time you've seen me working so I suppose it's alright."

So, I stayed. He painstakingly went through the contents of the microchip and I watched him calmly. I shouldn't have been so calm but the underlying stress and urgency soon dispersed into nothing as he rhythmically moved his hand.

"Sheldon?" There was a rasp to my voice and I cleared it.

"Hm?" Sheldon responded without lifting his eyes off of his watch.

"Why did you become a villain?" I asked.

That seemed to have stopped his thought process as his hands dropped to his sides and he looked at me with a lost expression. His eyes scanned my face as if he was searching for something and I could only stare back with my own confusion. When he concluded he wasn't getting any answers from me, he looked away and went back to focusing on the watch.

"I just did."

"Did your creator force you into it?"

"No."

I felt myself shrink and worried I ruined the mood. He seemed tenser than earlier and I rubbed my arm. "I just was curious since I was thinking about how I became a hero."

His eyebrows twisted but his focus on the watch wasn't unbroken. "I see."

"Do you want to know why?" I offered.

"I think you want to tell me more than I want to know so if you want to monologue just do it."

I bristled. "Well, if it bothers you that much. You don't have to be mea—"

"It doesn't bother me," Sheldon said abruptly. "I'm just really focused on this. I'm not trying to be an asshole."

I let out a shaky breath and my foot tapped against the ground lightly. "Okay."

"Anyways, what were you saying?"

"Why I became a hero," I reminded him.

"Ah yes. Was it because you thought you were destined for greatness?"

"No, I don't know if you were aware but my existence was controversial. People shouldn't be having powers this young and the youngest known person to have gotten powers was nine at least," I said.

"I don't really remember that."

"Lucky," I said bitterly. "It surrounded me constantly. People thought I would be a danger to society without any proper action."

"How is this not a villain origin story?"

I laughed. "I think the reason why I didn't become a villain was because I desperately wanted people to like me. I knew people liked heroes so I begged my dad to become one at five."

"And then I came along."

"And you came along," I nodded solemnly. "Even though you seem to have fun spreading chaos when we were younger, you just don't seem really happy being a villain anymore. You could change career paths you know."

"It's familiar to me, I just know it."

"But why be a villain in the first place?"

"I don't know if you know, but being Shelly felt like freedom to me. I've been hidden away for so long that when I found a way to slip out, I forced my creator's hand and made myself known to the world."

I paused, cautious to form the question that appeared in my mind. "Are you okay with deadnaming yourself?"

"Deadname?" Sheldon asked.

"Your birth..." I began to say and he raised an eyebrow at that. "Your..." I wracked my brain. "The name was given to you before you transitioned."

"It's not my deadname. Not by a longshot."

"It's not?" I was surprised.

"It was my stage name. The name I chose for everyone to call me as a villain," Sheldon said. "I obviously changed names now but I still chose the name Shelly. It was a name I liked and nobody can change that."

"Oh, huh," I said, stunned. "What did you mean by forcing your creator's hand though?"

His lips pressed together in distaste. "I wasn't supposed to be recognized as a person. I didn't have a birth certificate or anything before I became a villain. Becoming a villain was the only way for me to gain some autonomy."

We lapsed back into silence while I absorbed the information. The only sound that could be heard was his light tapping against the screen while I could only imagine the hardships Sheldon went through as a child.

"It's done now," Sheldon said as he placed the watch onto the table with finality. "We can move on to the next step."

"Which would be?"

"Finding these idiots and punching them."