Velveteen vs. the Junior Super Patriots (20 page)

“Hey, Vel!”

“WHAT?!”

“You know how you said you don’t fly?”

Realization struck Velveteen across the face like a flung flounder cold-cocking a fisherman. “No! No, that’s okay! I like flying! Flying is good! Let’s keep on flying for a little while lo—”

The Doppler Effect distorted her screams into something almost musical as the carpet dropped out of the sky.

*

The valet at the downtown Portland Embassy Suites was getting ready for the end of his shift when the pumpkin-slash-carriage made its second appearance, rattling up the driveway, still without any visible means of locomotion. Laughter and the occasional squeal were coming from inside the conveyance. Not for the first time, the valet seriously asked himself whether it might not be time to pursue another line of work.

“—don’t believe we
did
that!” said the brunette from before, now wearing a velvet-looking body suit, a rabbit-ear headband, and something that looked unnervingly like a tool belt. A bright pink plush bunny rabbit spilled out of the pumpkin after her. It was walking on its own. “It was all wham! Pow! Victory!”

“Totally old-school,” agreed the blue one, who was still glowing, but was wearing a sparkly, spangly, insufficiently street-legal ice skating costume with—were those ice skates? Those were ice skates. Apparently, she traveled with her own personal hockey rink. “They felt the justice of Portland today.”

“Especially the one who pissed himself,” said the blonde, stepping down from the carriage with a marginally more decorous air. She had changed her clothes along with the others, and the cotton candy pink dress she was wearing wouldn’t have looked out of place in a production of
Wicked
. She even had a tiara.

“Definitely time for a new line of work,” muttered the valet.

The blonde patted the pumpkin-coach-thing lightly on the side as she closed the door, saying, “Okay, sweetie. Thanks for the lift, but it’s time to park for a little bit, if you don’t mind.” The coach was immediately surrounded by a swirl of glitter, which closed in, expanded out, and burst, leaving a novelty-sized pumpkin in its place. “Thank you, dearest,” said the blonde, before picking up the pumpkin and tucking it into her purse. She looked back toward the others. “All done.”

“All right, team!” said Jackie. “To the mini-bar!”

“FOR JUSTICE!” shouted the other two, and followed the blue girl inside.

*

Three hours and several kamikaze runs on the mini-bar later, all three of the girls were pleasantly plastered, lolling around Velveteen’s hotel room and occasionally giggling at each other. Jackie was wearing Velveteen’s rabbit ears; Velveteen was wearing her own uniform top with the Princess’s skirt; the Princess herself was wearing a bathrobe. None of them were entirely clear on when the exchange had happened, but as they weren’t planning to go anywhere unless they ran out of alcohol, it didn’t really seem to matter.

“But why,” declaimed Jackie, “is the rum gone? There’s the real question.”

“Because you drank it,” said Velveteen solemnly. The room dissolved into giggles once again.

When things calmed down—after several more drinks, a pillow fight, and all the candy in the mini-bar—Velveteen was sprawled on the floor with her head on Jackie’s knees, idly directing a small flock of origami birds in formations that flew around the room. “I missed you guys,” she said, yawning. “I really, really did.”

“We missed you, too, Vel,” said the Princess, before finishing her drink. “You hadda . . . hadda . . . it was time to take a break. But this is what you’re good at. This is what you should be doing.”

“Yeah,” agreed Jackie. “Drinking heavily with your friends in a hotel room that somebody else is paying for.”

“Yeah,” said Vel, and yawned.

The others waited until she was fully asleep before sneaking out. The Princess closed the hotel room before humming eight bars of a peppy little song which rendered them both perfectly sober. Jackie gave her a sidelong look.

“Nobody expects a drunken fairy tale princess,” she explained.

They walked to the end of the hall, and were waiting for the elevator when Jackie asked, “So. . . do you think we helped?”

“I don’t think we hurt,” said the Princess. “If she decides to stay civilian, at least she knows that she’s still got friends who care about her. That’s worth a lot.”

“Yeah. It is.”

*

Velveteen woke up alone, with only the empty bottles, bruises, and glittery pools to commemorate the fact that anybody had been there at all. Squinting sleepily, she sat up. “Guys?” No answer. “Guys, did you go back to the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle?” No answer. “I guess so.”

Yawning, she slid off the couch and made her way to the bathroom. She was midway through her shower when she realized, without fanfare, that she’d made up her mind.

Besides. It was
really
going to get under Marketing’s skin.

*

“—and bearing this in mind, it is my pleasure, as Governor of the State of Oregon, to announce that Velveteen, formerly of The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division, has chosen to come out of retirement and turn her powers toward protecting this, her new chosen state of residence.” Celia Morgan looked entirely at home under the glaring lights of the gathered media. Velveteen gave serious thought to turning tail and running for the hills. Early training in how to behave during a press conference forbade her from doing so. It didn’t remove the temptation. “Velveteen will be operating out of Portland for the time being, but will be available for rescues, team-ups, and public events anywhere in the state.”

Still smiling, Celia ceded the microphone to an uneasy-looking Vel, who cleared her throat, leaned forward, and said the first thing that came to mind:

“Uh. Hi.”

The applause was thunderous.

*

Several hundred miles away, in the headquarters of The Super Patriots, Inc., an emergency meeting of the Marketing team was called to order. Field agents were recalled, leaving junior teams unchaperoned for the first time in living memory. Secretaries were brought back from vacation. Husbands and wives were informed that they wouldn’t be seeing their loved ones for the foreseeable future.

The little bitch wanted to have herself a war?

Well, she was going to get one.

VELVETEEN

vs.

Patrol

T
HE LIST OF THINGS
V
ELMA
had conveniently forgotten during her years of self-imposed isolation from the superhero community was long, and the more time she spent staring at the paperwork required to get a permanent license in the state of Oregon, the longer that list seemed to become. Catch-phrase registration. Code name revival. Even costume design protection. Luckily, she’d left The Super Patriots, Inc. before her eighteenth birthday, which made it illegal for them to refuse to let her use the name and persona she had supposedly “helped” to develop. Many former child heroes weren’t as lucky. They went freelance sometime in their twenties, when the pressure from Marketing got to be too much to tolerate, and had to give up their entire personas. That was why you got transformations like Liberty Belle’s, who suddenly went from red-white-and-blue girl next door to wearing black and gray and calling herself “Dead Ringer.” (Actually, even Velma had to admit that
that
change was for the better. Dead Ringer’s merchandise sales were ten times what they’d been when she was Liberty Belle. Her Hot Topic T-shirt sales alone were enough to drive Marketing out of its collective mind.)

After four and a half hours of filling out forms, signing waivers, and having her picture taken for the half-dozen photo IDs her new position required, Velma was beginning to believe that most supervillains chose their career based not on any real desire to break things, but simply to avoid the heroing paperwork. If she had to have one more blood test, she was going to punch something. Her lack of super-strength meant that it probably wouldn’t do any real damage to anything besides her knuckles. And that would be worth it for the catharsis.

“—free to go, Ms. Martinez.”

“Huh?” Velma shook herself out of a pleasant fantasy involving piles of paperwork, a flame-thrower, and a whole lot of glorious destruction. She blinked at the man on the other side of the desk. “What do you need me to sign now?”

“Nothing.” He offered her a thin-lipped smile before passing a piece of laminated plastic across the desk. Even upside-down, the official photograph of her in her official mask was officially awful, providing more support to Velma’s private belief that some supervillain’s machinations had been behind the DMV being hired to take the photos for superhero licenses. “Welcome to the state of Oregon. We’re grateful for your service.”

Velma took the license with suddenly-numb fingers, flipping it around to stare at it right-side-up. The picture was horrible; her signature was an illegible sprawl; her heroic name looked even sillier than usual when presented in a true-type font on something official, instead of being printed in Comic Sans MS on the back of an action-figure box.

She’d never had an adult hero license before. She had to blink surprisingly hard to keep herself from crying.

When she looked back up, the man who’d been assigned to shepherd her through the re-registration process was actually smiling. “Thank you for being willing to protect us, Ms. Martinez,” he said. “After this, no member of the state government will refer to you by anything other than your code name while you are in costume. Your paychecks will be delivered via coded transmission to one of three rotating bank accounts—and, of course, your state taxes will be waved for the duration of your time in the civic super-service. The state of Oregon owes you a debt of gratitude that we can only make these small gestures toward repaying.”

“Um,” said Velma—said
Velveteen
, because wasn’t that what sitting in this surreally ordinary little office was all about? Making the choice she’d always said she was never going to let them force her to make? Only in the end, it felt almost like she was making it entirely on her own. She blinked owlishly at the man who’d been assisting her through the registration process.

“Did you have any questions for me before the end of our meeting?”

Yes,
she thought, frantically.
What the fuck am I supposed to do now?
But she didn’t trust her voice, didn’t trust the words to come out the way she wanted them, and so Velveteen merely shook her head, clutching her adult hero license to her chest like it was some sort of sacred talisman.

“In that case, you’re free to go.” He reached across the desk and shook her hand before rising and leaving the room. He didn’t dawdle—few people dawdled in rooms with stunned-looking superheroes, even if those heroes had no recorded history of spontaneous explosions—but he also didn’t move with the hurried goosestep common in normal humans when dealing with the super-powered. He wasn’t afraid of her. He was just giving her some space. And oh, God, she didn’t even know how to feel about that.

Velveteen sat silently in the quiet little government office, staring at her license, and trying to suppress the burning urge to cry.

In the end, Velveteen lost the first real battle of her adult career.

*

“Your report, please.” Celia Morgan leaned back in her seat, leaving her hands folded on the desk in front of her. It was the only thing that would keep her from starting to fidget, one of the few bad personal habits that had managed to stay with her during her ascent to the state government. It looked bad when she folded origami cranes during meetings, and worse when she steepled her fingers against her chin like some sort of cartoon villain, so she’d learned to keep her fingers stiffly interlocked. It was the best of all possible evils.

“Her psychiatric profile is surprisingly stable,” said her assistant, who looked substantially less comfortable here, dealing with his boss, than he’d seemed when locked in a series of small rooms with a potentially dangerous super-human. He knew where the real risks were. “She’s been working among, ah, ‘normal humans’ since leaving her original team, and that’s left her with a much more balanced view of humanity than many powered individuals in her age range. She has some parental issues, and some issues with authority, but they seem largely focused on, ah, ‘authority that’s being stupid.’”

“So if she’s not ordered to go hand-to-hand with the Caldera, she’s likely to follow instructions?” Celia asked. Her assistant nodded, and she smiled. “Good. That’s very good.”

“Ah, Governor Morgan. . .”

“Yes?”

“What is the plan with Ms. Velveteen? She seems pleasant enough, but I’m not sure she can supply an entire state’s hero needs by herself, and as long as she’s here, The Super Patriots—” Too late, he realized what a dangerous train of thought he was riding, and tried to stop. Too late: the words were already out. All he could do now was wait and hope the blast radius would be small.

To his surprise, Governor Morgan shook her head, and said, “She’s not the only one they’ve disappointed. I’m not counting on her to supply all our heroing needs. She’s not a figurehead, but she’s also not here to be the new Majesty.”

“Then. . . what
is
she here for?”

Jennifer, twelve years old and so excited, so excited to have passed the membership exams for The Junior Super Patriots; Jennifer, who became “Jory,” who was going to save the world so many times that the supervillains would get disgusted and just go home. Jory, who died on some mission that was never fully revealed to the public, in some quiet little hell-hole where she should never have gone in the first place. Jory, who was never even mourned by anyone outside her family.

“She’s here to provide a choice, Arthur,” said Celia, voice dropped to a quiet, reflective register. “She’s here to show them that there’s another way, and that maybe the way they’ve been counting on wasn’t the right one.”

“You can’t force people to see sense.”