Velveteen vs. The Multiverse Read online

  She liked the way freedom felt. It made a nice change.

  No longer really aware that she was shivering, she tilted her head back and counted the stars, naming them silently in her head when she could, sending silent apologies when she couldn’t. Eventually, exhaustion won out over the cold and she drifted off to sleep, still sitting on the motel roof, arms still wrapped tight around her body. The sunrise woke her, and she shuffled to her feet with an awkward half-skip, stepped onto the light, and let it carry her into the room. She shut the window behind herself, but just like nothing can really shut out the darkness, closing the window didn’t do anything to shut out the light.

  Half a city and a world away from one another, Velveteen and Blacklight slept.

  Since the life of a superhero involves a lot of late nights and physical activity, most of them keep sleep schedules that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to celebrities or graduate students (not that these three groups of people have much else in common). Velma was still sound asleep when eight o’clock in the morning rolled around and the pounding at her door began, hauling her out of a particularly pleasant dream involving herself, Tag, and an all-night pancake restaurant that had mysteriously failed to stock any maple syrup. She sat bolt upright, eyes still closed, and shouted something unintelligible in the direction of the door. The pounding stopped. Satisfied that she had vanquished whatever door-to-door asshole had been trying to get her attention, Velma slumped back into a horizontal position. The pounding resumed.

  “Fucked up times infinity,” snarled Velma, and jerked the covers back, swinging her feet around to the floor. Her fluffy bunny slippers were positioned perfectly to receive her feet, something she intentionally didn’t think too hard about. If she was bringing her slippers to life in her sleep, she didn’t actually want to know. The world was better off that way.

  Just owning bunny slippers felt vaguely like she was selling-out. Today, generic bunny slippers, tomorrow, genuine licensed Velveteen Bunny Slippers (tm), with her superheroic logo somehow worked subtly into the plush. At the same time, so what? At least she wasn’t selling out to The Super Patriots, Inc., and at the end of the day, the word for a superhero who didn’t have a reliable source of income was “loser.” That, or “fast food employee,” since fighting crime and staying in shape to fight more crime really didn’t leave much time for a non-heroic career path. If there were any unforgivable lies in the press kits The Super Patriots, Inc. liked to whip up, they were in the company’s insistence that their heroes led full, fulfilling lives outside the workplace. Like any superhero had the time to hold down a highstakes job, start a family, and still fight crime? Hell, there were days where she felt like she was doing well if she managed to check her email before heading for the rooftops or the gym.

  Wrenching the front door open, Velma snarled “What?!” At least, that was the idea. What actually came out of her mouth was an incoherent moan that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a George Romero movie. Clearing her throat, she tried again, managing a semi-comprehensible, “Wha’?”

  The men from the governor’s office exchanged an uneasy look. They were low enough on the office pecking order to have drawn the unenviable duty of waking up a superhero who probably didn’t want to be woken; they really weren’t sure what they were supposed to do if the superhero turned out to be undead. “Running and screaming” were probably going to wind up high on the list.

  Clearing his throat, the taller of the two ventured, “Ms. Martinez?”

  The disheveled apparition in the doorway nodded vaguely, peering with squinted eyes through the curtain of tangled brown hair that was almost completely obscuring its face. “Mmmlgh,” it said, still reaching for that rare and obscure thing known only as “coherent speech.”

  “Ah.” He hesitated, unsure of exactly how he was supposed to continue the conversation. On the one hand, he was here on business. On the other hand, he had no real desire to find out how pissed off Portland’s only official resident superhero actually was about being woken up before she was ready. Finally, duty took the lead from self-preservation, and he said, “We were sent to inform you in person that your presence is requested in the governor’s office as quickly as possible. We’re prepared to give you a ride, if necessary.”

  Velma scrubbed at her face with one hand, croaking something which sounded, to the men from the governor’s office, very much like “fucked-up times too damn many” before saying, quite clearly, “Why? My contract doesn’t include being awake before noon.”

  “I take it from your condition that you have not yet seen the morning’s papers?” When Velma shook her head in the negative, the men from the governor’s office exchanged a look laden and leaden with hidden meaning.

  Velma hated looks laden and leaden with hidden meaning, and she hated them even more before she’d had a chance to pour half a pot of coffee down her throat. Irritation was enough to wipe away the last of her exhaustion-based speech impediment (why was it she could understand herself just fine, and everyone else acted like she was Yeti Girl?), and she snapped, “What in the hell could possibly have been in today’s paper and be important enough to justify waking me up at this sort of an hour?”

  The shorter of the two men from the governor’s office held up the paper, showing her the picture on the cover—herself and Blacklight, very nicely framed against the moon—and the caption “Good Bunny Gone Bad? Portland’s Newest Hero Seen Working With Portland’s Newest Villain!”

  “Oh,” said Velma, feeling the color drain from her face. “That would do it.”

  The applications of law enforcement involving superhumans and their powers has always been a little, well, iffy. How do you try someone who can convince an entire jury to go along with whatever they say just by wiggling their fingers? How do you arrest someone who can summon volcanos from solid ground? Even assuming you can get the superhumans into custody and hence to court, what sort of punishments fit crimes that are genuinely beyond the reach of mortal men? For a while, the idea of trying all crimes involving superhuman abilities as felonies was in vogue. This stopped after an eight-year-old superhuman with the power to move through solid objects was faced with felony sentencing for shoplifting. Since then, tailoring the punishment to fit the crime has been much more popular.

  Of course, given the complexities of applying human laws to superhuman individuals, it’s only natural that a great many courts and penal systems have taken advantage of the kind offer put forth by The Super Patriots, Inc. As the world’s foremost trainers and managers of superhumans, the corporation has expressed their shame over the number who choose to go villain, and are always willing to take a rogue superhuman into custody, keeping them confined away from the human prison population, and offering them the very best in therapy and rehabilitation options. It’s true that they have a very high demonstrated success rate; no fewer than eighty percent of the superhumans remanded to their custody emerge as model heroes, gladly joining and fighting alongside the teams they once opposed.

  It’s true that of the remaining twenty percent, half emerge even more villainous than they were before, while the remaining ten percent are never heard from again. It’s also true that fear of being remanded to the custody of The Super Patriots, Inc. has led to many supervillains making suicide stands rather than risk being brought to justice. Still, considering the damage which a rogue superhuman is capable of, a few suicides seem like a very small price to pay for the knowledge that the majority of villains, once The Super Patriots, Inc. has finished with them, will be villains no more. As to their methods, no one outside the corporation has ever inquired very deeply as to exactly what they are. This might be seen as carelessness. It can also be seen as plausible deniability.

  Regardless of how a given city, state, or political body handles their “bad seeds,” all areas which play host to superhumans must be constantly on-guard for signs that they may be planning to turn villain. After all, when faced with individuals who spit acid and bend steel with their b
are hands, what can a normal man or woman really expect to accomplish? It’s better by far to trust their care to those who truly understand them, and to simply avoid thinking too much about the ones who go into rehab and never return.

  Or the ones who return with smiles on their faces and with screams in their eyes.

  Normally, it took Velma the better part of an hour to really get moving in the morning, and roughly as long to get herself into costume when it was time to go out and start working. Thanks to the raw shock of seeing her own picture on the front page of the paper, she was cleaned up, costumed, and out the door in less than ten minutes, joining the men from the governor’s office in their company car for the ride to meet with Governor Morgan. She honestly couldn’t have said who was more uncomfortable—her, crammed in between them and waiting to be accused of supervillainy in the first degree, or them, forced to ride with a potentially dangerous superhuman. Even if all she did was animate toys.

  All eyes turned toward them as they walked through the foyer of City Hall on their way to Governor Morgan. The footsteps of the men who’d been sent to retrieve her clacked crisply against the marble floor, while her own booted and carefully felted feet made no sound at all. “That’s me,” she muttered, trying to calm her jangling nerves. “The bunny ninja.” One of the men shot her a worried look, and she bit back a sigh, forcing a smile instead. “Sorry. Nerves.”

  He was saved from the need to answer her by their arrival at the door to Governor Morgan’s office. It was standing slightly ajar, providing the hall with a sliver-view of the governor’s secretary, busy at work filing her nails behind the desk. The taller man knocked once, more out of formality than anything else, while the second man pushed the door open. “Morning, Sandy,” he said. “Is the Governor ready for us?”

  “Ready, waiting, and pissed,” reported Sandy, all without glancing up from her already immaculately-manicured nails. “I hope you’ve got a good defense, bunny-girl.”

  Vel had dealt with the governor’s secretary before, and each encounter led her to believe a bit more firmly that the woman was some sort of super in her own right. She never seemed to look away from her hands, and yet the office ran without a hitch, and she always knew exactly who was where. “I’m going with the ‘what the fuck are you people talking about’ defense,” she said, winning a glimmer of a smile from Sandy’s cinnamon candy-colored lips.

  “If you’re done screwing around out there, come and explain to me exactly what the hell is going on,” shouted Governor Morgan from behind the second door which marked her inner sanctum.

  “She wants you to go right on in,” added Sandy needlessly.

  “I got that, thanks,” muttered Vel, and swallowed before walking forward and pushing open the final barrier separating her from the angry governor of Oregon. The men who’d come to collect her didn’t follow, thus proving that they retained some sense of self-preservation. Governor Morgan was sitting behind her desk, clearly fuming. Vel took a cautious step forward, and nearly jumped out of her velvet bodysuit when one of the men closed the door behind her. Great, she thought. At least that’ll confine the blood splatter to a single room…

  “Well,” said Governor Morgan coldly. She made no move to ask Vel if she wanted to have a seat, something which didn’t seem like a positive. Lifting a copy of the paper from her desk, she said, “The bank you were photographed fighting in front of was robbed last night. According to the security recordings, the theft could only have been accomplished through the application of super-powers. Do you have an explanation for me?”

  Vel hesitated, reviewing her options. She really didn’t have any. “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I mean no.” Vel scowled, finally annoyed out of her wariness. “Nobody was robbing anything while I was there, and did you see the costume that she’s wearing? Unless Blacklight’s powers include access to a dimension of eternal shadow, there’s no way she stole anything bigger than a smile.”

  “So you’re telling me you neither witnessed nor participated in a crime of any kind?”

  “Uh, yeah. Even if I was a complete and total idiot and wanted to be a supervillain, do you think I’d go back home and wait like a good little misfit toy until you called The Super Patriots to come and get me? No way. I’d be in some secret lair somewhere, cackling evilly and plotting my assault on the local Build-A-Bear.”

  Much to Vel’s surprise—and relief—Governor Morgan nodded. “Good. I didn’t think you were that stupid, but I wanted to be sure. Now about your friend…”

  “We just met last night.”

  “Still. She may be involved.”

  Vel scowled. “I know. And if she is, she’s going to be sorry.”

  Governor Morgan settled back in her desk chair. Satisfaction curled the corners of her lips upward in a cat that ate the canary smile. “I appreciate your diligence.”

  Vel, who would have appreciated a few more hours of sleep, some coffee, and a day that didn’t start with her being dragged out of bed by government goons, just kept scowling.

  Things that are not easily found between the hours of sunrise and sunset: visiting superhumans with photon-manipulation power sets based primarily around mimicking the effects of darkness-based power sets. After an hour of searching the rooftops, Vel—who was now firmly into “Velveteen” mode, having finally washed the lingering traces of her civilian identity down with a pot and a half of coffee—decided that her energies would be better devoted to sitting in Denny’s, devouring a Moons Over My Hammy and actually reading the damn newspaper. The damn newspaper, whose headline she blamed for the looks the waitresses gave her every time they scurried over to refill her coffee. She glared at them from beneath her domino mask, making them scurry even faster to get back to the dubious safety of the kitchen.

  The article itself wasn’t all that bad. Mostly, it drew sketchy connections between the bank robbery and the fact that there was a new superhuman in town, while conveniently ignoring the fact that Blacklight had helped with the arrest paperwork, and even more conveniently ignoring the Team-Up Rage that had accompanied their introduction. Team-Up Rage didn’t pass when you were fighting a supervillain; it just got worse and worse, until somebody ended up in the hospital. In fact, the more Velveteen thought about it, the more annoyed she actually became. Blacklight wasn’t a bank robber. There hadn’t been time. And there was something about her…

  There was something about her that reminded Velveteen of herself. A faint but general aura of “sometime, somehow, somebody did her really, really wrong.” That didn’t mean she couldn’t be a super - villain—most villains had somebody, somewhere, who’d done them all sorts of wrong—but it did mean that Velveteen wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. At least until they’d had a chance to talk.

  And then, if it turned out that Blacklight really was the bad guy, Velveteen was going to kick her ass so hard she lit up like a firefly.

  Sunset found Velveteen waiting, with questionable patience, on the rooftop where she’d agreed to meet with Blacklight around eleven. She was hours early, but the idea of going out into the city and trying to fight crime really didn’t appeal. With the mood she was in, the odds were good that someone was going to get hurt. Besides, unless Blacklight had been asleep all day, Velveteen was willing to bet that she’d seen the paper, and if she’d seen the paper—

  “What the hell is going on around here?”

  Velveteen yelped. She also managed not to whirl around in a defensive posture, but it was a close thing, since she hadn’t been snuck up on by a flyer in over fifteen years. Not since she passed the finals in Environmental Awareness 101. No one who actually manifested self-powered flight had been able to get the drop on her after that…

  …but photon-manipulation wasn’t really self-powered flight, was it? Velveteen turned slowly, and said, “I’m supposed to be asking you the same thing. Did you rob the bank?”

  “What? No! Did you?”

  No. Just c
hecking.” Velveteen shook her head. “Somebody’s trying to set one or both of us up.”

  Blacklight, hovering a few feet above the rooftop, eyed her warily. “What makes you so quick to believe me?”

  “Simple.” Velveteen shrugged. “You’re not with The Super Patriots.”

  “What?” Blacklight dropped a foot lower, expression—as much as it could be determined through her full-face mask—confused.

  “If you were with The Super Patriots, or pretending to be, and you came into town saying you didn’t know I was here, you’d have to be an idiot. If you were a known supervillain, the paper wouldn’t be slinging a little mud, they’d be burying us both in the local landfill. So that means you’re smart enough to stay off the grid, without getting recruited or winding up on the watch lists. Unless you think I’m a total idiot, you wouldn’t try to pull that kind of stunt here.”

  “And if I do think you’re a total idiot?”

  Velveteen paused, assessing Blacklight’s tone. Finally deciding that it was more amused than anything else, she replied, “I guess that would mean My Little Pony gets another shot at kicking your teeth in.”

  “Fair enough.” Blacklight’s descent continued, until she was standing firmly on the rooftop. “So were we actually set up, or was it just a case of wrong place, wrong time?”

  “Either-or. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. I have a reputation to uphold here in Portland, and that means I can’t afford to let some petty thief start making me—or my friends—look bad.”

  “Better your friend than your enemy,” Blacklight said. “What’s the plan?”

  “Drop back down to ground level so I can get a cup of coffee, then we start checking the other local banks for signs of people fucking around. Sound good to you?”

  “I can’t drink coffee with this mask on.”

  “I didn’t say the coffee was for you.”