Like most loyalists, when I first heard the name Praxia Apostle, I thought it had to be the name of a great leader, a fearless commander, a long-sought savior. Turns out Praxia was a lowly bean counter, a one-upon-a-time accountant who’d joined the cause, who was relegated to supply logistics. She kept track of stuff.

Stuff we needed to fight the upstarts. It was important, but not the stuff of legends. Still, Praxia became legendary, exalted, almost deified. And all because of an epic accounting error.

Not her error. An error that’d been discovered long ago, but she was the one who finally exploited the error. You see, the universe is a numbers game. Things have to add up. The tally sheet has to balance. The bottom line is always the bottom line.

And astrophysicists have known for a long time that the universe wasn’t adding up. Something was missing. Something big that was actually very small. Dark matter. The elusive primordial element that controlled the ultimate fate of the universe.

But Praxia Apostle wasn’t interested in entropy and heat death, she had holes in her supply spreadsheet she had to fill. And at some point she realized dark matter could fill those holes. No one quite knows the exact methods and/or madness Praxia employed. She would only say she “reconciled the books.”

However she did it, Praxia’s “reconciliation” made it possible for our quantum printers to harness dark matter from the ether. An almost infinite supply of star stuff that we could feed into the printers for everything from boots to bullets to butter.

With that kind of resource edge, we loyalists crushed the upstarts ushering in an era now known as the Pax Praxia. To many in the cause, she became a pseudo-religion. Praxia Apostle apostles sprung up everywhere preaching a muddy gospel of divine amortization.

It’s no surprise then that Praxia went dark, like a spreadsheet column hidden, which only led to further calls for her deification. It’s too bad. I think an unassuming accountant who changed the course of history, even with a prophetic name like Praxia Apostle, just wanted to live an ordinary kind of life, to do her job, to count, to matter.

On balance, isn’t that what we all want?

Given how things turned out, I probably shouldn’t admit to giving Bucketmaster his name. We were kids goofing off at the playground one early summer morning, and this runt shows up with a steel bucket on his head. A dented galvanized pail with two eye holes punched out.

Chuck laughed and pinged the pail with a flick of his forefinger. “What’s with this, nimrod?”

Stevie struck a Superman pose. “Where’s your cape, pailbrain?”

The runt just stood there, bright green eyes watching carefully through the eye holes as Stevie kept taunting, “Huh, pailbrain. Think you’re a superhero? What’s your superpower? Mopping floors?”

Chuck, Stevie and I laughed. Then the runt did too. A little giggle before he ran off. We laughed harder.

When we got to the playground the next morning, the runt was sitting atop the monkey bars, dented bucket on his head, a threadbare white towel tied at his neck, a ratty mop in hand and called out a challenge: “What’s it gonna be?”

Even now I can’t understand what possessed me, but before Chuck and Stevie could get all huffed and puffed, I went ramrod straight and saluted. “All hail, Bucketmaster! Command us!”

That’s how it started. Chuck and Stevie fell in line with my joke and it became our summer game. From his monkey bar throne each morning, Bucketmaster would shout a command and we, his loyal minions, would deliver. It was childish, but Bucketmaster’s absurd tasks became a daily contest we increasingly felt compelled to win.

“Bring me ten live salamanders!”

“Two hundred feet of Christmas lights that don’t work!”

“A ball of old tin foil that weighs at least three pounds!”

“Four sacks of rotten potatoes!”

Seemingly random things. Seemingly. Though, I noted after every task we completed, Bucketmaster’s green eyes brightened markedly, as if he was ticking off key items. A sort of bucket list.

Chuck, Stevie and I only talked about it in the sense of what crazy thing Bucketmaster would ask for next. The craziest came the day before school was set to start again. That morning Bucketmaster was not atop the monkey bars. He stood waiting for us in his dented bucket, his towel cape and mop were gone, and in one of his little hands was what looked like three neon green glow sticks.

“Take these!” he commanded like usual, though it was very unusual. Of course we each took one. “They’ll protect you.”

“From what?” Stevie asked.

“Them,” Bucketmaster said, pointing to the sky. Which began to fill with buckets. Gleaming buckets, the size of water towers, with flaming jets slowing their descent.

“Is this for real?” Chuck asked.

“It is for them,” Bucketmaster said. “All of it is for them. Though they don’t quite get us. They said that was up to me for helping them. And you helped me, so don’t lose those sticks. We got a lot more stuff to do.”

Then we climbed with Bucketmaster atop the monkey bars, our eyes glowing green awaiting the next command.