Velveteen vs. The Multiverse

by Seanan McGuire

  “Anyway,” said Tad, before the pair could start flinging things at one another. “Since I wasn’t wearing a costume, and Jackie knew me already, she said I should just stay in street clothes and be the mundane boyfriend who knows about superhero stuff, and worry about the revealing myself later. I said that didn’t feel right, if you were helping Sparkle Bright get out of The Super Patriots. Long story short, I sort of gave up my secret identity to make your ex-best friend more comfortable.”

  “…whoa.” Velma crossed the kitchen in three steps, put her hand on his shoulder, and kissed him soundly. When she pulled away, she said, “You are the best boyfriend, and I will make it up to you. Possibly with dinner, unchaperoned by roommates or teammates or any other sort of people who aren’t us.”

  “Um, okay,” said Tad, looking stunned. “It’s a date.”

  “Great. Now I’m going to go put some clothes on,” she shot a glare at the seemingly oblivious Torrey, “before company gets here. Try not to burn down the kitchen?”

  “Doing my best,” said Tad, and kissed her again, quickly, before she turned and walked away.

  It was going to be a long day. She could already tell.

  Ten minutes later, the three of them were settled on the couch, eating breakfast, and waiting for something to happen. The doorbell rang. Velma stood.

  “That’s our cue,” she said, setting her plate aside, and moved to answer. A glance out the peephole confirmed that it was Jackie—whose naturally blue skin couldn’t possibly clue the neighbors off to this being the local superhero’s house—and a weary-looking Yelena standing outside. She undid the locks, opened the door, and stepped to the side. “Come on in, guys. There’s bacon.”

  “Yay, bacon!” said Jackie, and practically bounded inside, dragging Yelena by the arm. “Delicious, high-calorie, fatty bacon.”

  Yelena looked like she was about to throw up.

  Velma sighed. “Jackie. That’s not nice.”

  “What?” Jackie turned wide, calculatedly innocent blue eyes on Velma. “I’m just singing the praises of bacon.”

  “Yeah, in front of someone who’s been living on a diet plan designed to make her look good in skin-tight spandex for her entire adult life. Have a heart.” Velma moved to hug Yelena. “Hey, sweetie. How’d you sleep?”

  “Like the dead.” Yelena’s answering hug was a lot more like clinging than a simple embrace. Velma didn’t try to push her away. Yelena had earned a little clinging. “I didn’t have any dreams about photo ops or stock prices or anything.”

  “That’ll be the corporate brainwashing starting to wear off,” said Tad, from the couch. “Whatever they use on us can’t get to the holiday lands. Your subconscious is trying to purge.”

  Yelena pulled away, blinking at Tad. Then she smiled. “Tad, right? I mean, Graffiti Boy?”

  “It’s ‘Tag’ these days,” said Tad. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “You, too.” Yelena tucked a lock of long blonde hair behind her ear, gaze shifting to Torrey. The gear-draped redhead was staring at her with something that could only be described as unabashed longing, like she knew better, but couldn’t help herself. Yelena’s smile wavered, but held. “And you are…?”

  “Victoria Cogsworth, registered genius,” said Torrey, and put her plate aside. “I fight the criminal element as ‘Victory Anna.’”

  Yelena laughed. “Oh, like ‘Victoriana.’ Good one.”

  Torrey’s face fell, longing transmuting into something closer to grief. “Yes, I thought so, too, when it was suggested to me.” She stood. “I do beg your pardon. This many powered individuals in a room can only end with someone deciding we need to go on patrol, and I need to collect my pistols before I go up against any of the native ruffians.” Then she was gone, fleeing down the hall to her room.

  “I…” Yelena blinked. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “The situation with Torrey is complicated,” said Velma, rubbing the back of her neck with one hand. “She’s from a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and she’s been stranded in a timeline that never existed for the last several years, and right now, she’s my roommate. So just go easy on her, okay? She’s got a sort of super-science power set thing going on. I think you’ll like it.” Also she’s hopelessly in love with a version of you that’s pretty close to the real thing, and I don’t know how either of you is going to cope with that, so let’s just ignore it for as long as we possibly can, okay?

  It was going to end badly. But for the moment, this was maybe the best way to put that off.

  “Um. Okay,” said Yelena. Then she paused, putting a hand over her stomach, and gave Velma a hopeful look. “Am I really allowed to eat bacon now?”

  Velma grinned.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of Portland, strange things were afoot in the covered parking garage of a small residential building which had been converted, for a time, into a private dental practice. It was still a private dental practice, and would remain so for another forty-eight hours, at least, until the damned bank came with their closure notices and loan paperwork. As if it was his fault that a superhuman dental practice couldn’t find traction in this damp, mold-patched excuse for a major metropolitan area. All the precogs he’d consulted had assured him that this spot would be the site of major superhuman activity.

  Maybe he should have asked them for a timeline on that.

  But no matter! The men from the bank wouldn’t be arriving for days yet, and there was still time to put his final plan into effect. A plan which would, through its sheer daring, guarantee that the name of Dr. Walter Creelman, DDS, would not be forgotten!

  The good doctor (who was, by any reasonable measure, really well on his way to becoming the bad doctor) looked at his neat lines of carefully-designed robots and began to giggle. Then he began to chuckle. Finally, giving in to the inevitable, he placed his hands on his hips and began to cackle outright.

  Those fools. Those silly, ignorant fools. Someone had to show them. And he, Walter Creelman, DDS, was exactly the Doctor of Dental Surgery to do it.

  VELVETEEN

  vs.

  The Robot Armies of Dr. Walter Creelman, DDS

  VICTORIA COGSWORTH MANAGED NOT TO slam the door to her borrowed bedroom behind her, although it was a near thing; physical expressions of her frustration had always appealed to her. Usually, those expressions took the form of ray guns and flung spanners, but she was a woman of the world now, no longer a sheltered lab assistant, and she had long since learned that sometimes, you had to take your catharsis where you found it. And yet she knew, without question, that this version of Yelena—who looked so damned like her own, and how was that fair? Of all the worlds to be judged real and play the part of her prison, why did it have to be one where Lena would look at her, and smile, and not recognize her own jokes? —would be upset by the banging. So she closed the door with care, and closed her eyes, and wept.

  Meanwhile, in the living room, Yelena was sitting on a faded brown easy chair and staring at the plate on her knees like it was somewhere between the promised land and the temptations of Hell. On the plate was a single small pancake, without syrup, and half a strip of bacon.

  “Look at it this way,” said Tad, who had moved to crouch beside her chair. “Marketing doesn’t want you to eat the bacon. Marketing hates the bacon, unless you’re getting paid by a major sponsor to pretend you love it. Marketing would slap your hand for even thinking about the bacon. If you eat that bacon, you are taking another big step toward reclaiming your life. You get to eat whatever you want now. You’re free.”

  “Free,” murmured Yelena, and picked up the crispy piece of fried meat. “It still doesn’t seem possible.”

  “It will be,” said Tad. “Eat the bacon.”

  In the kitchen, Jackie and Velma stood next to the stove, speaking in low voices. “This is a shitty idea, Vel, and you know it,” said Jackie, shooting a poisonous look back toward the living room. “She’s not going to adjust. She’s going to go r
unning right back to The Super Patriots, and after they’ve had her for a few days, she’ll tell them anything they want to know.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Velma. “You don’t know Yelena like I do.”

  “Neither do you. You haven’t ‘known’ her since the day she tried to kill you with a light whip. Remember? When you decided to leave the team?”

  “Jackie…”

  “I’m just saying, maybe right after you start getting your life back together isn’t the day to decide it’s time for you to start hooking back up with all the people who fucked you over in the first place.”

  Velma sighed, picked up the frying pan, and dropped it into the sink. A cloud of steam rose from the dishwater. Jackie waved her hand, and the steam fell back down as a gentle layer of snow, which dissolved on contact with the still-heated water. “I don’t know what I can say to make you understand, Jackie, but this is important to me,” said Vel. “This is something I have to do. You’re the one who put me through that mirror world and made me understand how wrong everything is. Why are you the only one who doesn’t want to help me fix it?”

  “Because I’m the only one who had to watch you picking up the pieces.” Jackie’s answer was so soft that Velma almost didn’t hear it. She turned and stared at her friend, who continued, “Even when you stopped coming to the North Pole, even when you stopped talking back to the mirror…Mom yelled at me every time she saw me, and after a while, I had to stop because it hurt so bad. But I still watched you walk away. I watched you crying every night. I watched you…” She paused, taking a breath, before she said, “We all thought ‘okay, this is horrible, but maybe this is for the best. Maybe now she’ll pick a holiday, she’ll pick a season, and then we won’t have to fight anymore.’ And then all you picked was isolation. You left us alone—you left me alone—and it was all because of her. So you’ll excuse me if I don’t trust her right off the bat. She’s fucked you over before. I don’t want to see her do it again.”

  “I thought you believed in second chances.”

  “I do. I also believe in protecting the people I care about.”

  They were still glaring at each other mutely when the kitchen phone began to ring. Jackie turned toward the sound, and blinked like she’d just seen a spider.

  “What the sweet Claus is that?”

  “Secure landline,” said Vel. She tossed her dish towel onto the counter and crossed to the phone, snagging the receiver with one hand. “Speak.”

  There was a long pause as the person on the other end obeyed her command. Vel’s face became blanker and blanker as the moment stretched on. Finally, she nodded.

  “I understand,” she said. “My team and I will be right there.” She dropped the phone back into the cradle and started for the living room.

  “Wait!” Jackie ran after her. “What was that all about?”

  Vel kept walking until she was standing in the middle of the living room. Tad and Yelena both looked toward her. “The Governor’s office just called me,” she said. “Robots are tearing up downtown, and as Portland’s official superhero, I’ve been asked to stop them. Anyone who wants to help, suit up. Anyone who wants to stay here, please feel free to finish the dishes.”

  “I’m game,” said Tad.

  “You have no idea how much I want something to hit,” said Jackie.

  Yelena didn’t say anything. She just put her plate aside and smiled hopefully at Vel. That expression held a thousand team-ups, an infinity of fighting the good fight against the forces of evil…and all of it together. Vel smiled back, relieved.

  The sound of an electric rail gun powering up behind her pulled her attention back toward the hall that led to the bedrooms. Torrey—now Victory Anna, really, as she was in full costume, goggles, impractically small top hat, and all—was standing in the doorway, holding a gun so impractically large that it filled her arms completely. It was connected to an elaborate clockwork backpack. The backpack was ticking.

  “Well, then, you lazy bludgers, rise up and don your safety equipment, for the hour has need of both safety…and SCIENCE!”

  The others stared at her. Finally, Vel shrugged.

  “All right: you heard the dimensionally-displaced redhead. Get your costumes on, and meet back here in five minutes.” Vel pushed past Victory Anna, not bothering to conceal her relief as she headed for her bedroom. If there was one thing she understood, no matter how confusing the rest of her life became, it was putting on rabbit ears and going to fight robots.

  For justice.

  The first known superheroic team-up occurred when Majesty, Supermodel, and Jolly Roger—each of whom had been battling the forces of evil individually for more than a year—joined forces to fight back an alien invasion of unknown origins. Together, they were able to accomplish what none of them could have prayed to handle alone. They quickly realized that a team of super-powered individuals would inevitably be greater than the sum of its parts, able to compensate for internal weaknesses while also building on each hero’s unique strengths. The Super Patriots were born shortly thereafter. The Super Patriots, Inc. was a distant nightmare in those early, discovery-filled days. It was only later, when the cost of heroism became clearer, that the three would choose to incorporate, and The Super Patriots, Inc. that we know today would begin to form.

  It is interesting to note that virtually all team-ups consisting of three or more heroes not sanctioned by The Super Patriots, Inc. have either failed or been branded as supervillains in the eyes of the media and the public within seventy-two hours of their formation. It is almost as if, having discovered the winning formula, the original three wanted to guarantee that it would remain under their control. The question thus arises: if a super team were to form outside the bounds of The Super Patriots, Inc., how long would it be allowed to function before drastic action was taken?

  And who would have custody of the survivors?

  The first issue was getting them all to the scene of the robot rampage. Sparkle Bright could fly. Jackie could generate ice bridges strong enough for her to skate on them, providing she wasn’t worried about hitting people’s cars with chunks of falling ice (she wasn’t worried). Tag had a Volvo.

  The five of them stood in the driveway looking at the rust-speckled, powder blue vehicle. Finally, Victory Anna began, “I don’t suppose you’d allow me to—”

  “No,” said Velveteen hurriedly, before her trans-dimensional roommate could say the words “make it fly” or “turn it into a giant slingshot array capable of flinging us across the city.” Vel was reasonably sure that Victory Anna’s passion for science didn’t extend as far as accidentally killing her temporary teammates, but there was no need to prove it.

  “We’ll all fit,” said Tag, with forced good cheer. “I’ll even let you take shotgun.”

  “You have a shotgun?” asked Victory Anna dubiously, eyeing his skin-tight costume.

  “In the interests of getting to the robot throw down without turning this into a Saturday Night Live sketch, I am making an executive decision,” said Velveteen. “Everybody get into the car. I’m driving.”

  With relief (Tag) and grumbling (Victory Anna), the others complied. Velveteen shook her head, adjusted her bunny-eared headband, and turned to Jackie and Sparkle Bright.

  “I want you two to go on ahead, scout out the terrain, and wait for us, unless there are civilians in active danger,” she said. “If we’re going to be a team, we need to start acting like one, and that means fighting a common enemy instead of each other.”

  “Are we?” asked Jackie.

  “Are we what?”

  “Going to be a team.”

  Velveteen paused. Finally, she said, “I’d like it if we were. I think that, as a group, we have a lot of really good reasons to be opposing The Super Patriots, and at this point, even if we were to decide not to fight, they’re not going to let us just walk away. We’ll be stronger if we stand together. And if you don’t freeze Sparkle Bright’s lungs when you think I’m not lo
oking.”

  Sparkle Bright, who had been listening silent up until that point, burst out laughing. Both Jackie and Velveteen turned to stare at the multicolored glitter explosions this caused in the air around Sparkle Bright’s head.

  “Sorry,” she said, still giggling as she wiped her eyes. “I just…you guys have no idea how much I’ve missed you.”

  Jackie looked nonplussed. Velveteen smiled. “We’ve missed you, too,” she said. “Now let’s go beat the shit out of some robots.”

  “I love that we’re allowed to swear,” said Sparkle Bright, and launched herself into the air with a burst of electric purple light.

  “I’ll do my best not to murder her, but I make no promises,” said Jackie. She made a throwing gesture with one hand. An icy rampway materialized in front of her, and she skated away, rapidly following Sparkle Bright into the sky.

  “That’s good enough for me,” said Velveteen, and turned, walking back to the car. She plopped herself into the driver’s seat. “Okay, who’s ready to fight some crime?”

  “This dimension’s heroes are like school-age boys: all talking about the good bits, and never actually doing them,” muttered Victory Anna.

  “Am I offended right now?” asked Tag.

  Velveteen laughed, started the car, and drove away.

  Meanwhile, high above the streets of Portland, a photo manipulator and an elementalist were trying not to kill each other. At least, Sparkle Bright was trying not to kill Jackie; Jackie wasn’t exactly sticking to the “thou shalt not kill” part of the program. After the third time her ice ramp had abruptly intersected with Sparkle Bright’s trajectory, forcing the other heroine to adjust course or hurt herself, Sparkle Bright stopped flying. She hovered in midair, folding her arms, and glared at Jackie.

  “All right, let me have it,” she said. “We may as well stop pretending that we can put this off forever, so let’s just go ahead and get it over with before they beat us to the scene.”

  Jackie turned and skated back along her ice ramp to where Sparkle Bright had stopped. She angled her skates as she braked, making sure to direct a spray of ice chips in Sparkle Bright’s direction. “Funny, I was going to say something similar to you,” she said. “Only I was going to word it more like ‘stop faking, you fake faker bitch.’ Vel’s a nice person. She’s just now starting to unfuck her life. The last thing we need is for you to come in here and screw her head up again.”