Velveteen vs. The Multiverse

by Seanan McGuire

  “Hey, bitch!” she shouted. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you to play nicely with other people’s toys?” The woman in black—God, would she just declare a code name already? No one went this long without monologuing—whipped around, and promptly answered Velveteen’s taunt with several flung spheres of solid darkness. No, not darkness; it glittered when it slammed into the walls, although Velveteen was really too busy dodging to appreciate its finer points. This was light, dialed all the way down the color spectrum to blackness. Not as subtle a distinction as you might think.

  Racing to keep ahead of the balled-up black light, Velveteen gritted her teeth and focused on sending a new command to her collection of planes and helicopters. They zoomed away, while the plastic soldiers and toy horses resumed their assault on the stranger’s ankles. She stopped flinging her spheres at Velveteen in favor of blasting the things that were actually hurting her, and Vel took advantage of that brief respite to call in one last support squad.

  The seemingly-innate supervillain fondness for dinosaurs means that every superhuman in the world, good or bad, has heard the hunting cry of the Tyrannosaurus Rex at least once in their lifetime. Velveteen’s T-Rex was only two and a half feet tall and made of vividly painted plastic, but he bellowed just like the real thing. He screamed and charged, the rest of the toy dinosaurs following closely on his heels. The woman in black whipped her head toward the sound, clearly startled, and Velveteen slammed her hands together, signaling the planes to finish their maneuver.

  All at once, the planes dropped towels, sheets, plastic garbage bags, and anything else they could find over the streetlights and shop windows surrounding the fight. Darkness slammed down like a sudden curtain. Velveteen stopped running, and listened. She could still hear the pop-pop-pop of the toy soldiers firing at the woman in black, but the faint rushing sound of the thrown domes of black light had stopped. You can’t manipulate light that isn’t there.

  “Do you surrender?” she called, before moving a quick few feet to the left. Just in case.

  “Ow!” replied the woman in black. “Ow ow—dammit, call off your weird little army! This stings!” Her voice was distorted by the full-face mask she wore, but still understandable; “mask lisp” was so common among the face-hiders that it just wasn’t considered polite to remark on it anymore.

  Velveteen wasn’t feeling particularly polite, but she also wasn’t feeling like taking another hit to the stomach. She waved a hand, signaling a cease-fire, and the sound of guns went silent. Only the scuff of pony hooves against the concrete and the sound of bank robbers running for their lives broke the stillness stretching between them, until she said, “That better?”

  “Yes,” agreed the woman in black, sounding faintly sullen.

  “We done fighting?”

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “Are you going to turn yourself in?”

  For a brief, terrible moment, it felt like a brick of ice had been dropped into Velveteen’s stomach. Barely aware that she was summoning toys from all over the town, teddy bears and baby dolls crawling out of their owners’ beds and starting to make their way toward her, she took a step backward. “What are you talking about?” she asked, and wished that her voice wasn’t shaking.

  “Your accomplices let you take the beating and ran. I don’t think they’re going to come back for you. So if you’ll just give yourself up and come quietly, we can avoid any more violence.”

  Velveteen blinked. All over Portland, teddy bears and baby dolls turned around and began trudging home as Velveteen started to laugh, slumping back against the brick wall in a vain attempt to keep herself from falling over. Laughter just made her stomach hurt more, which made her start laughing even harder.

  It was a vicious cycle, and it only got worse when the woman in black demanded, with increasing anger, “What? What’s so funny? Why are you laughing at me?”

  “You!” Velveteen gasped. “You attacked me! Because! You thought! I was here! To help the bank robbers!” It wasn’t a question. Still slumped against the wall, Velveteen put her hands against her knees and shook her head, trying to get her breath back. “Didn’t you check the city roster before you came here?”

  “I was just passing through,” said the woman in black, anger fading in the face of obvious confusion. “Weren’t you here to help them? I mean, you showed up, and they immediately started calling for you—”

  “Yeah, because I’m this city’s licensed hero. They thought I was here to save them.” Velveteen straightened up, breathing finally returning to something like normal, and reached up automatically to adjust her rabbit ears. “So you weren’t robbing the bank?”

  “What? No!” The woman in black shook her head in furious negation. “Absolutely no. I don’t rob banks. But I was in the area, and I’ve been on the road for days, and I thought that beating the holy hell out of some criminal elements would be cathartic.”

  “I totally share the sentiment. Just check who’s local next time, so you’ll know who not to hit. I’m going to have some really impressive bruises to show my boyfriend when he gets back from beating the holy hell out of the criminal element in Canada.”

  “You’re going to have some bruises?” The woman in black laughed. “Those little plastic bullets sting! I’m going to be a miniskirt no-go zone for weeks.” She extended her arm toward Velveteen, clearly intending to shake hands. “I’m Blacklight.”

  “Velveteen.” Velveteen took the offered hand and shook, firmly, flashing a smile at the stranger. “You’re a photon-manipulator, right? Really dense light?”

  “I thought you’d figured that out,” said Blacklight wryly, reclaiming her hand. “Most people assume I’m manipulating darkness. They don’t think to shut off my light sources, since that would just make me stronger if I were actually doing what they think I’m doing.”

  Velveteen’s smile faltered slightly. She managed to maintain it—early media-management training to the rescue once again—and said, “I used to do a lot of team-up work with a photon-manipulator. You learn to recognize the tells. Dark light is still light, and darkness doesn’t glitter.”

  “True, true,” said Blacklight thoughtfully.

  There were no visible eyeholes in the mask that covered her face, but Velveteen still thought she could feel the other woman looking her over—that probing, overly-invasive look that came right before a question she didn’t want to answer, usually one that started with some variation on “didn’t you used to be…?” She braced herself for the inevitable.

  “So when did Portland finally get its own superhero?” asked Blacklight. “I must have missed the announcement, or I wouldn’t have started poaching baddies on your territory. I swear, it’s so hard to keep up with things these days. If I don’t check Wikipedia six times a week, I can barely remember who my arch-enemies are.”

  “I qui—” Velveteen caught herself in mid-word as she realized that the question she was starting to answer had never actually been asked. “I, uh. Not that long ago. I’m only licensed within the state, and I don’t think the story got covered by any of the major magazines.” That was a lie; Vixens and Villains had contacted her three times for an interview, and when she turned them down, ran the story anyway, along with a selection of the most embarrassing pictures from her professional career, including her advancing angrily on the camera crews just shy of the Oregon border. Well. Vixens and Villains might be big, but it wasn’t like it was serious.

  “Well, good. This place deserves some standing protection. I’ve always wondered why Portland didn’t have a permanent hero.” Blacklight’s tone was chatty, all traces of her earlier fury gone. That’s Team-Up Rage for you. “I might’ve taken the position myself, if it was ever posted.”

  “The Governor of Oregon prefers to remain outside the Super Patriots network for personal reasons, and no, those personal reasons aren’t connected to her having a side career as a supervillain. She doesn’t.” Velveteen shrugged. “I showed u
p, I was clearly persona non grata with the current core team, she hired me to protect Portland. It’s been a pretty good gig, so far.”

  “That’s nice,” said Blacklight, glancing back toward the busted-out front window of the bank. “The police should be here soon. Do you want to hang around and tell them that the bank robbers got away, or do you want me to do it? I was first at the scene, after all…” She sounded understandably reluctant. Paperwork—especially the paperwork surrounding a failed capture—was the bane of every licensed superhero’s existence.

  Tempting as it was to run off and let Blacklight take the heat for letting the robbers get away, the fact was, she probably had the situation under control before Velveteen’s arrival went and mucked everything up. And it was her town. No sense in letting the new girl think Portland’s only official hero was some sort of a flake. “How about we both stick around,” she offered, amiably. “They’ll probably take it better coming from me, and you can help me fill out all the damn forms.”

  “It’s a deal.” She had the distinct feeling that Blacklight was smiling at her, even through the mask. “So if we’re going to stick around and play team-up for the police, can I ask you another question?”

  Here it comes… thought Velveteen. “Sure,” she said aloud. “What did you want to know?”

  “Don’t take offense, but…what is up with those rabbit ears? Did you buy your costume at the Halloween Store or what?”

  Velveteen’s laughter rang through the stillness of the city air.

  In the darkness of the bank vault, the shadows stirred. Just a little at first, barely a twitch or a tingle, but the movement spread quickly, thin lines of electric blue glittering through the dark until—at last—it flowed together into the shape of a hand, fingers outlined by that same glittering blue. It darted forward, vanishing into one of the safety deposit boxes, only to emerge clutching several necklaces and a bundle of unmarked bills. This same process was repeated five times, the hand moving through the metal like it wasn’t there at all, like there were no barriers. Each time, the spoils of the ransacked box were dropped into the shadows that had birthed the glittering blue lines, disappearing without a sound. At last, the hand snapped its fingers, making a “click” that was softer than leaves rolling across a dry riverbed, and just like that, the blue glitter was gone; the shadows were just shadows, and there was no one there at all.

  The thefts wouldn’t be discovered until the next day, when bank management performed their standard post-robbery check of all the bank’s valuable assets. Even then, review of the security recordings wouldn’t show anything conclusive; just the shadows, reaching out to empty the security deposit boxes.

  Just the darkness.

  An hour and a half later, after the damage report forms had been filed, the “failure to apprehend criminals due to superhuman intervention” papers had been filled out, the proof of superhero insurance had been provided, and the police were finally satisfied, Velveteen and Blacklight stood atop the highest building they could reasonably be troubled to climb, looking out upon the sleeping form of Portland, Oregon. Velveteen’s stomach still ached when she breathed in too deeply, or when she laughed, which she’d been doing quite a bit of since Blacklight showed up. It was oddly…nice…to have someone around that she could laugh with. Oh, she could laugh with Jackie and the Princess, but they had magical kingdoms to run, or at least, in Jackie’s case, to fail to destroy out of misuse of powers. They weren’t around enough to really hang out on rooftops, laughing.

  Blacklight’s power set proved to include short-range flight—not uncommon among photon-manipulators, but still impressive. She was actually “standing” a few inches above the surface of the rooftop, her toes pointed delicately downward in the standard “if I fall, I am less likely to face-plant” position most aerial heroes had drilled into them by the age of fifteen.

  Drilled…Velveteen stopped studying the city in order to cast a sidelong glance toward Blacklight. “Where did you get your training?” she asked.

  It was an innocent question, and she’d been expecting an equally innocent answer. What she wasn’t expecting was Blacklight’s abrupt landing, stumbling slightly, like she hadn’t realized she’d been relaxed enough to float, and her hurried reply of, “Oh, gosh, all over the place. Lots of different places. It was a definite ongoing process. Look, it’s been really awesome meeting you and all—sorry about that whole ‘attacking you’ thing, you know how it goes sometimes—but I should get going.”

  “Oh,” said Velveteen, disappointed and confused at the same time. “Are you on your way out of town already? Where are you heading?”

  “Um.” Blacklight hesitated before saying, “I’ll be in town for a few days. Maybe we can team-up properly before I need to go? Go out, bash some baddies, work a little of the aggression out on people that aren’t each other…”

  Despite the oddity of Blacklight’s initial reaction, Velveteen smiled. Hell, she probably would have reacted the same way if someone asked her where she’d trained, given how much she liked to remember her time with The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division. It had to be even harder for an independent hero, after all the crap they had to go through to get a license, rather than a mandatory training session with The Super Patriots, Inc. “I’d like that a lot,” she said. “We can remind people why super-teams are even scarier than superheroes. Meet you here around eleven?”

  “It’s a date,” said Blacklight, and waved before trotting to the edge of the roof and stepping off into the dark beyond. A few seconds later, she flew back into sight, turned toward the western edge of town, and soared off, leaving a thin trail of glittering darkness in her wake.

  Velveteen stood on the edge of the roof, smiling thoughtfully, and watched her go.

  “No, it was actually a lot of fun, once we got past the requisite ‘beating the living shit’ out of each other part.” Vel flopped down on the couch, relaxing into the warm comfort of her bathrobe, deliciously dry against her just-showered skin. “It sucks that the robbers got away, but that sort of thing happens. They’ll try to hit another bank or a liquor store or something, and we’ll take them down.”

  Tag chuckled, the telephone wires carrying his laugh across the miles and what felt like straight into Vel’s nervous system, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. Was this what infatuation felt like? It had been so long, she wasn’t sure that she remembered. “Basically, what you’re saying is that you’ve replaced me with a mysterious woman who dresses like there was a clearance sale at the ninja store. I think I’m hurt.”

  “Oh, so you want me to start grilling you about all those Canadian heroes the tabloids keep taking your picture with? Tell me, is Poutine ‘a really good friend,’ or is she the next entry on my arch-nemesis list?”

  “What are you going to do if I say ‘arch-nemesis’?” asked Tag, sounding genuinely interested. “Does it involve breaking through your house arrest and coming to join me in beautiful Vancouver? We have a ring of art thieves. Lots of flash, reasonably little danger. The perfect date night.”

  “I understand that people without superpowers think something similar, only when they’re talking about that particular scenario, they’re talking about some sort of caper movie.” A teddy bear walked over to the couch, carrying a Diet Pepsi clutched carefully between its paws. Vel took the can, mouthing “thank you” to the bear, and added, “They pay for tickets.”

  “And we pay for medical insurance,” Tag replied promptly. “It’s basically the same thing.”

  “It isn’t the same thing at all, and you know it.” She cracked open the can of soda, taking a long drink before she asked, “So when will you be coming home? I’d demand to-the-minute, but we haven’t reached that stage in our relationship just yet.”

  “Soon,” said Tag, and laughed, sending more of those delicious shivers across her skin. “Like I said, we have art thieves, and there’s just the four of us working here in town. As soon as they’re tucked safely
behind bars, I’m going to be all yours. I promise.”

  “You promise, huh? Pretty big words for a guy who hasn’t even reached the secret identities stage,” said Vel lightly. Then she realized what she’d just said, and froze. “Tag, I swear I didn’t mean that the way that it sounded.”

  “I know, but I’m still going to take it that way,” said Tag, suddenly serious. “When I get home, I think we need to talk about secret identities. You know. The sides of us that can have a picnic in the park without getting attacked by Mantor and his Army Ants.”

  “I’d like that,” said Vel. Her voice came out very soft, maybe because her throat was so very dry. “I think I’d like that a lot.”

  “Good. Now, in the meantime, you just be careful around this Blacklight person, okay? I haven’t heard of her, and she could be some kind of nutcase. I’ll start asking around, see if anybody knows where she came from, or what her track record is like. It’s good to team up once in a while, but…”

  “—but that doesn’t mean letting my guard down, I know. I can be careful when I have to be. Remember, I’m the one who actually went off the radar for more than six weeks. I don’t think you get to tell me about being careful.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “Just take care of yourself. I miss you.”

  Vel sighed, closing her eyes. “I miss you, too, Tag. I really miss you, too.”

  * * *

  The woman sometimes known as “Blacklight” sat on the roof of her cheap downtown motel, knees tucked against her chest, wind whipping her thin nightgown hard against her body. She wrapped her arms a bit more tightly around herself, shivering, but made no move toward the open window of her second-floor room. She’d get some sleep eventually. She could sleep all day, if she wanted to. That was one of the nice things about being in Portland; except for Velveteen, no one was going to come looking for her, and Velveteen would never know who she was without the mask. She was, for a little while anyway, completely free.