Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots Read online

  Nuh-uh. A little festival was a small price to pay to avoid the spandex set. And at least Isley was too small to rank a resident superhero. Velma sat on a bench in the town center, watching the little booths going up, and tried not to dwell.

  It wasn’t easy.

  As the hours ticked by and the smell of crawfish fritters began to drift across the river, it became downright hard.

  After a horde of small children thundered through, dousing her pants with genuine Isley Crawfish Punch—which she could only pray didn’t contain any genuine Isley crawfish—it became impossible.

  “That is it,” Velma snarled, surging to her feet. “I came, I stayed, now they can give me back my car and I can go.” She turned, intending to stalk off and find the Chief of Police, and nearly walked straight into a tall, almost regal man wearing what looked like a full-body lobster suit. He froze. So did she. For a moment, the two of them just stood there, staring at one another.

  Finally, in a tone that couldn’t decide between “delight” and “irritation,” Velma asked, “David? David Mickelstein?”

  The lobster-man’s antennae twitched. They were the only crustacean trait in an otherwise human face, making their motion seem even more out of place. “Velma?”

  “Oh, wow! You were just about the last person I expected to find here!” said Velma. (The actual last person was, of course, Sparkle Bright, the former leader of The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division, and the girl Velma had voted privately most likely to drive people to supervillainy, just so they could become Sparkle Bright’s archnemesis and squash her like the annoying insect that she was.) “I thought you were still fighting crime on the rivers with the Mississippi Queen. Vacation?”

  “Something like that,” said David “The Claw” Mickelstein, rubbing the back of his neck with one claw. “What are you doing here?”

  “Car got towed, waiting to get it back.” Velma smiled. “Gosh, you haven’t changed a bit. You’re still the same nice Jewish boy genetically combined with a giant crustacean by his scientist father in a vain effort to save him from the inexplicable genetic wasting disease.” The habit of recapping in conversation was hard to break, especially when dealing with other superheroes. “What have you been up to?”

  “Oh. This and that. Stuff. You know. Figuring out what I want to do with myself. You?”

  “Just temping. Secretarial work, mostly.”

  David looked increasingly uncomfortable. “Look, Vel, I know we haven’t really seen each other in a long time, but would it be okay if you, I don’t know, went to Starbucks for the next two hours?”

  “Are you asking me out?”

  “No, I’m asking you to leave.”

  Velma blinked at him. “You’re . . . what?”

  Screams erupted from the booths nearest to the river.

  David sighed.

  *

  Wave after wave of angry crustaceans poured up out of the Sacramento and swarmed through the Isley commons, clacking their claws and attacking anyone foolish enough to have worn sandals to an outdoor summer festival. There were a great many targets to be found. The screams increased, ringing through the night until they almost drowned out the constant susurration of the menacing crawfish now threatening to overrun the town.

  “Sorry about this,” said The Claw, and conked his former teammate on the head with one mighty chitinous claw before running off to join his crawfish army in their revolution.

  *

  Velma Martinez had always possessed a wide variety of positive attributes. Good knees, good vision, good teeth. . . and a very, very hard head. Picking herself up off the grass, she cast a furious glare after her former teammate—now clearly turned supervillain—as he went running off toward his little army of crawfish minions.

  Velma Martinez had always possessed a wide variety of negative attributes. Among them, her temper. Pledges about “retiring from the business” and “not using your powers for anything more obvious than sending teddy bears to the kitchen for a refill” were entirely forgotten in the wake of getting bonked on the head. For the first time in six years, Velma was ready to get her Velveteen on.

  *

  Twelve years ago . . .

  “This is just a fascinating hero name we’ve picked for you, Velma,” said the man from Marketing, smiling benevolently over his clipboard. Velma squashed the urge to send her Barbie to scratch the eyes out of his smug face. “And why do you think we chose that name for you?”

  “‘Cause I bring toys to life, and they said that ‘The Puppeteer’ and ‘Bride of Chucky’ had negative connotations,” she said.

  The man from Marketing laughed. “No, silly! You bring toys to life with love.”

  That was the exact moment when Velma knew that the man from Marketing was an idiot.

  *

  The Isley Crawfish Festival, like small town festivals everywhere, had invested in a small midway with toys and games for the kiddies to win. Sadly, none of the kiddies at this year’s festival had been given the opportunity to win so much as a stuffed bunny before the untimely invasion of the crawfish minions. Even more sadly, many of them would be denied the pleasure of soft toys for several years after their parents saw those same toys sprout teeth, fangs, and independent motion, climb down from the prize shelves, and wade gleefully into the fray.

  “KICK THEIR ASSES!” shrieked Velveteen, who, after a long day of driving, detours, and idiots, was glad to finally have something to smash.

  “DO YOU OPPOSE ME?!” demanded The Claw.

  “Oh, David.” Velveteen sighed, and slapped her palms together over her head. “Grow up.”

  And that’s when the bear-shaped bouncy castle kicked his ass.

  *

  The ruins of the hundred and sixty-third annual Isley Crawfish Festival glimmered in the first light of the morning as the Isley Chief of Police dropped Velma’s car keys into her hand. “Ah. . . sorry about this,” he said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “The tank of gas and the road provisions are worth it. And the promise that no one will ever, ever know what happened here. Because if one person breathes so much as a word. . .”

  The Chief went satisfyingly pale. Velma smiled.

  “Great party,” she said, and turned to head for her car. Along the way, she scooped up one last discarded stuffed bunny from the gutter, tucking it under her arm.

  Just in case.

  *

  “Hello? Yes, this is the Marketing Department. Really? Are you quite certain? Excellent. Send your proof right over. Yes, the bounty still applies. Thank you. Yes, we’ll be in touch.”

  The man from Marketing hung up the phone, leaned back in his chair, and tapped the button for the intercom. “Heloise? Contact Retrieval, if you’d be so kind?

  “It would appear to be rabbit season.”

  VELVETEEN

  vs.

  The Midnight Coffee Society

  AFTER GETTING OUT OF ISLEY, California—home of the Isley Crawfish Festival, the least helpful police department Velma had ever encountered, and oh, right, roughly ten thousand pissed-off crustaceans bent on getting vengeance for the years of oppression and butter sauce—the simple monotony of Interstate 5 had been something of a blessing. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of blacktop running straight the length of the West Coast, filled with drivers and roadkill and police speed traps and no crawfish. No crawfish at all.

  Unfortunately, I-5 also ran straight through the some of the hottest regions of California. If Velma had been driving a car with little amenities like “air conditioning” and “recent maintenance,” everything still might have been okay. But she’d been paying the bulk of the proceeds from her low-paying jobs to her parents for years, and automobile upkeep had just fallen by the side of the metaphorical road. Which led, perhaps inevitably, to the car breaking down by the side of a much more literal road, leaving Velma to kick the wheels and swear at it like she expected it to make a difference.

  It did not make a difference.r />
  “Fucked-up times five million,” she muttered, when her (rather impressive) stock of expletives was finally exhausted.

  One good Samaritan, a tow-truck ride, and a stop at the Red Bluff repair shop later, Velma was facing a two-thousand-dollar repair bill and another delay in getting to her increasingly delayed job interview in Portland, Oregon. The job interview that was supposed to save her from a life of temping and excuses . . . all assuming she could get there, of course. A trip that depended on somehow finding a way to pay a two thousand dollar repair bill when she was down to little more than the cash she needed for gas and convenience-store hot dogs.

  Six years of waitressing, working retail, and crappy temp jobs had left Velma with something verging on a sixth sense where job openings were concerned. Not the most useless superpower on the market—not even the most useless superpower someone had tried to build a hero career on—but at the moment, that was all she had. One of the coffee shops she’d passed on the way to the mechanic had a “Help Wanted” sign in the window.

  Begging. Pleading. Promises. And finally, she was set: she’d work at Andy’s Coffee Palace and sleep in the room behind the mechanic’s place until she’d paid off the cost of her repairs. Then she’d be free and clear and ready to grovel in Portland, far away from California, from Crawfish Festivals and engine trouble and The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division.

  Two thousand dollars. That was all that stood between her and freedom.

  *

  Ask the average man on the street “what’s it like to be a superhero?”, and all you’re going to hear is how amazing it is. Superpowers. Everybody wants superpowers, right? The ability to fly, so that you never have to ride another public bus with shitty shocks. The ability to read minds, so you never have to worry about people lying to you. The ability to walk through walls, to move things with a thought, to teleport, to change shapes, to control plants—at last count, the federally recognized list of superpowers filled over a hundred pages, and of those powers, maybe half were unique. Only one hero had ever demonstrated the specific power to control lamps. Only one heroine had ever appeared with the power to force people to speak in actual word balloons. The big powers had hundreds of entries, the little powers, maybe one or two. There was even a section for theoretical powers, the ones that should exist but hadn’t been verifiably documented yet.

  “Semi-autonomous animation of totemic representations of persons and animals, most specifically cloth figures, including minor transformation to grant access to species-appropriate weaponry” has been officially listed in the “animus powers” list under “unique.” For years, the entry contained no specific details as to the hero or heroine who originally displayed that power. This is entirely because the heroine who displayed it was under the age of eighteen when her powers were first identified, and did not choose to pursue a career in professional heroing when her majority arrived.

  Because there’s a dark side to superheroing, a side that’s actually worse, in its own fucked-up little way, than finding loved ones stuffed into refrigerators and having costumed supervillains constantly trying to kill you. It’s the side where most heroes don’t actually do anything to wind up with superpowers. When Velma was first sold—pardon, “recruited”—to The Super Patriots, Inc. to become part of The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division, she’d gone through the standard barrage of tests. The scientists determined that her powers were the result of cumulative mutation coming from both her parents, activated by exposure to a mysteriously irradiated stuffed bunny while she was home sick with the chickenpox. They figured the radiation from the television probably didn’t help.

  Most people who aren’t born superheroes wind up with great powers and the attendant great responsibility because they met dying aliens, or found magic artifacts, or were exposed to some sort of toxic waste. Velma got hers from a child hood disease and a thrift store bunny rabbit with one eye missing. If anybody had ever wondered why she wasn’t as committed to the cause of justice as some of her teammates, they should really have taken a look at her crappy origin story.

  *

  Tying her garish green apron around her waist, Velma bared her teeth at the mirror in what was intended to be a cheery smile. That was instruction number seventeen in the helpful Employee Handbook provided to her by Cyndi, the general manager. Cyndi dotted the “i” in her name with a little heart. As far as Velma was concerned, that actually told her everything she would ever need to know about Cyndi. Still, this was the only job in town, and she was determined not to lose it over something as simple as refusing to smile when she was told to. Even if smiling was hurting her cheeks and likely to frighten customers.

  “Ve-el-ma!” called Cyndi merrily from the front of the store. Cyndi did everything merrily. Cyndi probably vomited in a merry fashion, with cartoon birds helpfully holding her hair out of the splatter radius. (That was an unfair thought, and Velma scolded herself accordingly. The Princess was a very effective superheroine, and one of the nicest people she’d ever worked with during her own short career as Velveteen, in addition to being one of the few heroes to stick by her after she retired. Since the Princess’s powers largely manifested themselves as stereotypical icons of the “princessing world,” she was forever tied to cartoon birds in Velma’s mind. It was just that the cartoon birds in question were usually vultures.)

  “Yeah, boss?” called Velma, turning away from the mirror.

  “Come on, silly bunny! It’s time to meet your public!”

  Shrugging away the thousand horrible memories that came with the word “bunny,” Velma gritted her teeth, forced her smile to stay in place, and turned to meet her fate.

  *

  There was a single table in the darkest corner of Andy’s Coffee Palace, an otherwise pleasantly well-lit haven for the caffeinated, the cool, and those who just wanted free wireless access. At the table, there were two chairs, each of which seemed to be located in its own pool of slightly darker shadow. And in those two chairs were two dark figures, both casting shadows twice as dark as they should have been, both jittering with the slow, constant vibration of people who have consumed far more coffee than the human body is really equipped to deal with.

  “Everything moves toward r-r-r-readiness,” said the first of the two, voice dropped to an unnaturally low register that was probably meant to project an aura of menace. All it managed to project was the over-wired mania of a man who should really have logged off his MMORPG hours ago and given his body time to forgive him for the traumas of the day.

  “Our G-G-Glorious Leader has confirmed that the final shipment will be arriving tonight, ready to b-b-b-brew and consume at the very stroke of midnight.” The second voice was almost an exact mirror of the first. Only the most careful of listeners would have been able to hear the stutter for what it really was: not a speech impediment, but the slight delay of a speaker unable to process the amount of data it was receiving at a realistic rate. A listener that careful might also have had the perception to see the way the hands of the speakers trembled as they reached for their coffee mugs, fingers blurring in and out of visibility as they forced themselves to slow enough for those brief moments of contact.

  “And then—”

  “—at last—”

  “—we will have a sufficient quantity of the sacred fluid—”

  “—to baptize this Godforsaken town in the sacred name of the bean and the brew and the beginning of all things!” The two spoke faster and faster as their words began to overlap, until the artificial deepness had been shed entirely, replaced by a chittering buzz that sounded almost like a coffee grinder going into full deployment.

  One of the shop’s other patrons glanced over toward the table in the room’s darkest corner. The table where no one was willing to sit, since the air conditioning never seemed to reach into that corner—something about the air currents and the way the vents were configured—and the wireless didn’t really work. The table where cups would just spill for n
o reason anyone could see, where newspapers tore, where sugar packets disappeared at an unrealistic rate. Some of the coffee shop’s patrons said that the table was haunted, possibly by the spirit of the coffee shop’s missing owner, Andy. Andrew Patterson, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances immediately following the receipt of a rare new type of coffee bean from somewhere in Central America.

  Unseen, the two dark figures at the darkest of the shop’s tables cast longing looks toward the brighter tables around them, their eyes lingering on the coffee cups they were unable to reach.

  “Tonight,” they whispered, with a single voice consumed by longing.

  *

  After six minutes, fourteen seconds in Cyndi’s presence, Velma was starting to forget exactly why she had decided to quit the superhero business. Sure, the hours were crap, no amount of medical insurance would help you out after aliens from the seventh dimension removed your spine, and bulimia was such a part of the status quo that most superheroines were essentially supermodels in capes, but the pay was great. Merchandising alone could make a hero or heroine with a salable power a multimillionaire. Assuming they lived that long.

  They certainly didn’t work minimum wage jobs for chirpy-voiced Barbie dolls who believed that Valley Girl culture was the ultimate expression of mankind’s development as a species.

  “And I just want to, like, say how totally and like awesomely delighted we are to have you working here at Andy’s Coffee Palace, where we, like, revere the sacred bean in all its totally bitchin’ forms.”

  And I don’t believe you just said “bitchin’,” thought Velma, resisting the urge to puncture her eardrums with straws. “Well, I’m really grateful for the job,” she said carefully. “Although I didn’t realize this was a church. I’m not really a church-going kind of person.”