A More Cautious Adam

Understand; society as a whole hasn't decided how to react to us yet. Some civil rights activists declare we should have equal rights to normal humans and cultists who worship select mutants as deities, but there are also religious figures proclaiming we got our abilities from the devil and hate groups advocating for mutant genocide. Consequently, the vast majority of us hide our status as mutants, and even the ones who are open about being mutants hide the specifics of our powers.

The exceptions are the X-Men; a mutant superhero team who try to promote mutant equality by protecting humans from mutant supervillains and by advocating for common sense regulation. Among the regulation, they advocated for was a government registry of what abilities mutants within the states possessed, making it easier to track criminals and those that would **** their powers. Because the X-Men tried to follow their suggestions, at least some information was publicly available about the capabilities of their members.

It is through this registry I learn I am neither the only mutant in possession of mental abilities nor am I the strongest. Within the X-Men alone, three individuals outclass me.

The least interesting of those individuals is Professor Xavier, from whose name came the 'X' in 'X-Men.' The Professor can do everything I can, meaning he can view and edit memories, but unlike me, he can work on groups of people simultaneously. Besides outclassing me in the one arena I can compete in, Xavier has access to an array of abilities I don't, such as forming mental shields, launching psionic blasts, and general telekinesis. Consequently, I can definitively say that in a fight between Xavier and me, I would get my ass kicked to another state.

Despite this, I spend little time studying Xavier compared to what I spend studying the X-Men's other mental mutants; namely Psylocke and Phoenix. The disproportionate attention I pay them is due to their outfits. Psylocke's costume leaves her thighs bare and has a boob window. Phoenix's is skin-tight and has fantasy boob armor.

The reason I focus on the skimpily dressed women over the old man is both self-evident and misleading. While Charles Xavier is scary, he's only an intellectual threat. He's a reminder there are mutants more powerful than myself, whose attention I can't afford to attract. Simultaneously, there is no reason for us to interact and no possibility of me attracting his attention. With Phoenix and Psylocke, on the other hand, I can imagine two scenarios in which I get their attention, and neither ends well for me.

In the first scenario, they are dressed in their slutty costumes when I stumble onto them. I know they are heroes, but in this scenario, I don't know they have telepathy. I see Phoenix summon flames and Psylocke with her psionic powers, so I assume those are the limits of their abilities. Consequently, I try to rewrite their memories. I want to convince them I'm their lover and leverage that position to fuck them in the present. In the second, more realistic, scenario, I encounter Psylocke and Phoenix while they're off-duty. Because they're in civilian clothes, I don't realize they are mutants, never mind X-Men, and try to **** them. I reason I'll erase their memories of our encounter after I'm done.

In both scenarios, the situation doesn't end well for me. The ladies I am targeting have mental shields, so my changes don't take hold. The attempt alerts the girls of my intent, and from there, a cursory browse through my mind will reveal all I have done. If the heroes are feeling heroic, they'll hand me to the cops. If they're not, I can imagine Psylocke forming a psyblade, castrating me, and then handing me to the cops.

Avoiding the first scenario is easy. I just had to not use my abilities on superhumans. Avoiding the second, on the other hand, is impossible. It is statistically likely that if I use my powers on enough women, I'll eventually stumble into- and be caught by- a hidden mutant. To reiterate, most mutants try to hide their powers and live normal lives. There won't be any obvious signs my target is telepath until I try to ensnare her, at which point it'll be too late to backtrack.

The realization puts me in a quandary, one I resolve as follows: Mutants are a rare breed, and telepaths are only a small segment of the overall mutant population. For me to stumble onto a hidden one, I would have to roll the dice many times. I would have a lower chance of accidentally trying to ensnare a telepath if I only used my abilities on ten individuals than I would by attempting to ensnare a hundred. Rewriting a hundred individuals is still less risky than a thousand, and a thousand less than a hundred thousand. The best way to mitigate the risk of targeting a telepath pretending to be a civilian is to target as few civilians as possible.

Consequently, I decided to only pursue a handful of supermodel-level beauties. Using my ability on ugly and average women would swell my numbers with chaff, needlessly increasing the risk of my venture. A small harem filled with the most beautiful women in the world would be a low-risk, high-fun solution to my predicament.

The problem with my plan is that the dice has no memory. If you flip a coin, there’s a fifty percent chance it’ll land on heads, and a fifty percent chance it’ll be tails. If you flip the coin twice and it lands on heads the first time, that doesn’t guarantee it’ll land on tails the second. The coin doesn’t remember it landed on heads already, so the second flip still has a fifty-percent chance of being heads. You might end up with two heads, giving you a hundred-percent head result, despite the fifty-fifty odds.

Odds tend to come into play with large data sets; the more times you flip the coin, the closer you'll get to a fifty-fifty split between heads and tails. With small sample sizes, however, there's a much larger chance of wildly unrepresentative results, like hundred-percent heads or tails.

In my case, this means every woman I encounter has an equal chance of being a mutant. All it would take for me to run into one is extraordinarily poor luck, and as it turns out, I have the worst luck in the world. After all, what else could explain the first woman I target turning out to be…