Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots Read online

  “Oh, like, don’t worry about it,” twinkled Cyndi. “We don’t require that you keep the faith before you’ve tasted your first cup of midnight coffee.”

  Velma blinked. “I was kidding.”

  “That’s okay. I’m not.”

  The crazy just kept upping the ante in this town. Forcing her smile to stay in place, Velma said, “Midnight? I thought we closed at eleven.”

  “Well, like, technically we do.” Velma breathed a silent sigh of relief, only to catch Cyndi’s next words and wish that she hadn’t dared to drop her guard that far: “It’s just that the local branch of the Midnight Bean Society rents the place every Wednesday, and they, like, really pay well, so it means we can keep offering free wireless access.” She gave Velma a pleading, doe-eyed look. “You can stay tonight, can’t you?”

  “Well, I don’t think that I can—”

  “You’ll be making double-overtime plus tips after you’ve been on the clock for eight hours.”

  Velma nodded so firmly she was afraid her head might fall off. “I’m absolutely staying.”

  *

  Velma had worked in coffee shops before, and knew the basic routines the job required. Sure, the details changed from place to place, but except for that one New Age vegan coffee shop in Berkeley (which only served coffee brewed from cruelty-free beans), the big picture remained essentially the same. After an hour on the floor at Andy’s Coffee Palace, she could probably have done the job in her sleep. She tuned Cyndi out—as much as it was possible to tune out someone whose voice could probably have been used to cut glass—and just served coffee, cleared tables, and wished that she hadn’t broken her iPod a week before leaving the Bay Area.

  “—ooOoooOoo!” squealed Cyndi. “My favorite show is starting!” Grabbing a remote control from beneath the counter, she clicked the coffee shop’s television into sudden, blaring life. A few patrons looked up, scowling, but settled once they saw the screen. Apparently, Cyndi’s tastes were well known to the regulars, and tolerated because of her place in the circle of coffee. Velma had her back to the screen, and while she heard the set click on, she didn’t see the channel, or realize what Cyndi was turning on.

  And then the theme music flooded the room. The damnable, familiar theme music, with its bouncy major key and its easy-to-sing lyrics that burrowed into the brain like tapeworms. The theme that had haunted her dreams for years, and her nightmares for even longer. The theme that was like Pavlov’s bell for middle school students all over the country, causing them to turn and start begging their parents for the latest toys, clothes, and tie-in novels.

  The bane of Velma’s existence.

  “Welcome!” shrieked the announcer, sounding like he’d just been told that failure to show the proper enthusiasm would result in the execution of his entire family. “Welcome to the show you’ve all been waiting for—the end of the annual talent search that introduces you, America, to the latest members of The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division!”

  (As if it were really a contest. As if most of the “hopeful applicants” weren’t paid actors faking super powers through special effects and cunning bluescreening, to make it seem like the latest products of the Marketing Machine had actually done something to earn their places on the team. Hell, as if most of those new members had actually volunteered to be there. Velma wasn’t the only kid superhero to be essentially sold to her handlers. She was just one of the only ones where the conditioning didn’t take, and there was nothing she could really be blackmailed with. Threatening her parents made her giggle, and threatening to suppress her powers did much the same.)

  “We’ve had a great run this season, with everything from the awe and terror of the aerial battles—all supervised by our very own Sparkle Bright, current co-leader of The Super Patriots, West Coast Division!—to the mind-boggling intellectual battles conducted under the watchful eye of String Theory and Uncertainty. But now, at the end of our journey, only six contestants are left standing to compete for the three precious slots available on this year’s lineup! We’ve taken a moment to talk with our judges, and see what they have to say about the matter.”

  Sparkle Bright’s familiar, dulcet tones, more annoying in their own way than Cyndi’s squeaking: “Well, Brian, we haven’t had a selection like this in years. As you know, we’ve sometimes been forced to take special-needs supers by a lack of available talent. Not this year. This year, it’s all gold.”

  Sparkle Bright was talking about Velveteen, of course. They served together as children, and they would have been archrivals during their teen years, if only Vel had been able to stir herself to give that much of a crap. Shoulders locked, Velma kept clearing tables, not even glancing at the screen.

  “It is probable that one or more of the remaining contestants will be elected to join the team,” said Uncertainty, with his usual vague air of “I am doing eighteen things at the same time, and you need to just stop irritating me.” “It is equally probable that all three positions will be filled. The probability that a giant monster will attack the arena is eight point three percent. The probability that you are about to cut away from me is—”

  “Uh, hi, Brian.” The voice was deep without being pretentious, hesitant without being unsure, commanding without being arrogant. It was, in short, perfect. “Yeah, this is the last lap of the contest. I like some of the new kids. They’re okay. Mobius has some neat powers, and I think the Candy sisters would be a total asset to the team.” Hastily, he added, “Oh, and The Loch. I mean, when was the last time we saw a power set like that?”

  “Action Dude always does that,” said Cyndi conspiratorially. “He totally spills the winners during the pre-show interview, because they always film it after the contest is over. It’s a little treat for the fans.”

  “No, they don’t,” said Velma numbly. Her fingers were locked so tightly on the coffee cups she’d been collecting that she couldn’t really feel them anymore. Gangrene. That would be a change. “The interviews are filmed before the show.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I have to take my break now,” Velma said hurriedly. Turning, she shoved the coffee cups at a surprised Cyndi, and then bolted for the back room, hoping that she could make it before she broke down crying.

  She almost succeeded.

  *

  Seven years ago . . .

  They’d just finished battling Dr. Dodo, a mad scientist bent on returning the planet to its pristine, pre-pollution condition. A goal which seemed to involve cloning vast numbers of previously extinct animals and unleashing them on unsuspecting population centers. It seemed sort of inefficient to Velveteen—messy, too—but since she wasn’t the supervillain, she supposed she didn’t get a vote. Anyway, they’d come through mostly uninjured, at least in part because Velveteen’s powers extended to animating the robot dinosaurs from the local science museum and sending them out to smash some saber tooth skulls.

  “You shouldn’t let Yelena get to you,” he said, standing between Velveteen and the door with his arms crossed. Some one who didn’t know them might have thought he was holding her against her will. Someone who knew them at all would have realized the truth: he was protecting her from whatever was on the other side, ready to play living wall if it was required. “She just does it to upset you.”

  “She does a good job,” muttered Velveteen, wiping viciously at the tears that had managed to escape beneath her brown velvet domino mask. “I shouldn’t be here anyway. I’m not a real hero.”

  “You’re hero enough for me,” said Action Dude. Putting a finger beneath her chin, he raised her head, leaning toward her. Velveteen closed her eyes, leaning toward him in turn, and—

  *

  “I thought that was you,” said Cyndi, shattering Velma’s flashback into a thousand pieces. Startled, Velma turned toward her, blinking. The manager was standing in the break room doorway, almost echoing Action Dude’s pose from all those years ago. “I had the poster when you were still with th
e team. It hung right over my bed. So I thought that was you.”

  Shit, thought Velma. “What do you mean, Cyndi?”

  “Do you have any idea how much free wireless I could provide to our customers with what the tabloids will give me for pictures of you? I mean, the Super Channel has a reward out! They’ve done six ‘where are they now’ specials begging for any word on your secret identity.” Cyndi smiled. Velma wondered how she could ever have thought this woman was guileless. “You’ll totally be able to get your car fixed after this. It’s going to be awesome.”

  “I think you’re mistaking me for somebody else.”

  “I think you’re mistaking me for an idiot.”

  Velma took a deep breath, finally forcing a smile. “Okay, you got me. Just . . . can we talk about this maybe? After we get off shift?”

  “Sure. As long as you’re not thinking this is a chance to run for the hills, since you’re on the store’s CCTV, and that would just mean I didn’t have to share the profits.” Cyndi glanced at the clock. “It’s time to start preparing for the Midnight Bean Society, anyway. We’ll talk after.”

  Granted a temporary stay of execution, Velma followed Cyndi out of the room.

  *

  The coffee for the Midnight Bean Society didn’t look like any coffee Velma had ever seen before. For one thing, it was black. Not dark brown; not almost black; black, like the deepest pit of a supervillain’s loveless heart.

  Velma shook herself. One little television special, a flashback, and a blackmail threat, and she was falling back into the dangerous habit of thinking in metaphors. That way lay capes and action figures and talk show appearances. Better to think in literal terms, and leave the shitty poetry for the comic books.

  The coffee was black.

  “Where did you say these beans were from?” Velma asked dubiously, eying the pot as Cyndi reverently began pouring its contents into the Midnight Bean Society’s “special mugs.” They appeared to be made of obsidian, and were even blacker than the coffee. Probably not a good sign.

  “Oh, they’re specially cultured in the natural caverns beneath an Aztec temple and sacred burial ground,” chirped Cyndi.

  Velma sighed. “Of course they are.”

  The doors of the coffee shop swung open at exactly eleven fifty-nine, allowing fourteen black-clad people to file inside. They ranged in age from “grandmotherly old woman” to “Goth kid who should probably have been in bed already,” and approached the counter without making so much as a sound. Cyndi beamed at them, passing one cup after another into their crowd.

  When she was done, there were two cups remaining on the tray. Cyndi picked up one, giving Velma a meaningful look.

  Velma, faced with the possibility of being forced to drink a cup of pitch-black coffee worshipped by a secret society and grown under a burial ground, responded in the only sensible manner:

  “Oh, hell no.”

  Cyndi sighed. “Well, poop,” she said. “Then I guess we kill you.”

  *

  Andy’s Coffee Palace offered little to no opportunities for Velma to use her powers. Unlike Imagineer and Mechamation, she couldn’t animate things that weren’t at least partially shaped like living creatures—a class designation that didn’t include espresso machines or slightly stale biscotti. Her emergency bunny was locked in the trunk of her car inside the mechanic’s shop. And the Midnight Bean Society was closing in around her, looking confident of their seemingly-inevitable victory. Why not? They had a cornered second-string superheroine, they had plenty of the sacred fluid. . . life was going pretty good for them, really.

  “It’s so simple, Velma,” said Cyndi, cradling her cup against her chest and watching as the black-clad figures surrounded Velma. The room was getting darker, filled with flickers and flashes of motion in the corners. “Andy was a visionary. He always knew that coffee would be the key to elevating man to a higher plane of being. When he found the Sacred Bean—”

  —a sigh ran through the room, like the adoring whisper of a church congregation—

  “—he opened the door to his own re-creation. He’s with us now. He’s always with us. And soon, when we ascend, we’ll have enough power to take this whole town to a higher plane. We’ll be gods! We’ll be heroes!”

  “I thought you were going to sell me to the tabloids,” protested Velma, casting frantically around for anything she could use to save her own ass. Sadly, she’d mostly slept through her improvisational heroing classes. At the time, she’d never gone anywhere without a small army of animated plush, and there hadn’t seemed like much point.

  “Oh, no. That was just to distract you.” Cyndi dimpled. “See, we’ve never managed to elevate a superhero. Once we have, I guess we’ll be just about unstoppable. The world’s going to be ours! We’ll be bigger than The Super Patriots!”

  . . . bigger than The Super . . . “Wow,” said Velma, stopping in her attempts to escape and simply looking at Cyndi as she calmed herself and cast her mind outward, searching, searching. It had taken her almost a year of training to learn to do this; she hadn’t even tried in almost six years. “You’re a major super-fan, aren’t you? I mean, super-major.”

  “I am,” Cyndi confirmed proudly. “That’s how I knew what we’d need to do to exploit the amazing properties of this bean. I just brewed it at ten times regular strength and the super-ability awakening qualities totally started to manifest them selves.”

  “Right.” One of the coffee cultists grabbed Velma’s arm. She didn’t resist. Her questing mind had found what it was looking for. It was barely there, but she was almost certain that it was in range. If it wasn’t, well . . . no harm in trying. “So you totally have the action figures, right?”

  Cyndi froze.

  Velma closed her eyes and pushed.

  And the entire action figure lineup of the last ten years of The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division, and The Super Patriots, West Coast Division, burst out of the break room and swooped down on the bad guys like a tiny avenging horde.

  Opening her eyes, Velma commanded, “Go for the coffee!”

  “You can’t do this!” shrieked Cyndi. Velma could almost see a second shadowy form behind her, a man’s form, looking suspiciously like the picture of Andy that hung on the break room wall.

  “You people need to get some new dialog,” Velma snapped, and slapped her palms together over her head. “And lay off the coffee already. It’s making you jittery.”

  Cyndi never saw the tiny Mechamation swooping down behind her. She just felt the suddenly animated wireless router as it rose up and smashed her against the back of the head. The Midnight Bean Society let out a despairing wail, dissolving into shadow.

  Velma wobbled.

  The action figures fell.

  “Wow,” she said, somewhat distantly. “I didn’t know I could do that.”

  And then she collapsed.

  *

  Velma woke up in “her” bed—technically hers, at least for the moment, at least until the mechanic realized she’d gone and lost her job by attacking her boss with a squadron of animated action figure versions of her former teammates—with a damp washrag against her forehead. She sat up, catching the cloth as it fell, and looked bemusedly around the room.

  The mechanic (Paul? Mike? Chris?) was sitting in a chair off to the side of the bed, watching her with a measuring expression. “Andy’s got sucked into another dimension last night,” he said. “Pete saw it go, says it looked like the place was shunted off into a world of eternal shadow.”

  “. . . oh,” said Velma faintly, unsure what sort of reaction was expected from her. She was equally unsure of how she’d managed to get out of the coffee shop before it got “shunted off into a world of eternal shadow.” That would probably have put a damper on getting to Portland.

  “Guess that means you can’t pay your repair bill.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Guess that means I won’t charge you.”

  “I can—what?” Velma
blinked at him. That response hadn’t been in her internal script.

  The mechanic shrugged. “Them damn shadow cultists have been threatening the town for months now. Guess it was about time some masked man swept in and took care of ’em. Can’t charge you after that.”

  “I’m not masked. And I’m pretty sure I’m not a man.”

  “Ma’am, you got carried out of the place by an army of tiny plastic superheroes. You get your repairs for free.”

  Velma decided not to argue, electing to go back to sleep instead. The mechanic laughed.

  “Superheroes,” he said wryly, and stood, walking straight through the wall.

  *

  A deep pool of shadow had formed at the center of the vacant lot where, until recently, Andy’s Coffee Palace had been located. The shadow appeared to be moving. That probably would have worried people, if anyone had been there to see it. It was almost midnight again, twenty-four hours after the coffee shop’s collapse, twelve hours after Velma “Velveteen” Martinez got into her car and got the hell out of town.

  At midnight exactly, the center of the shadow writhed, and a floating figure made of darkness shot through with blue glimmers of light shot up into the air.

  The creature that had previously been Cyndi Davis, superhero wanna-be, looked down at itself and began to laugh hysterically. Then it turned, diving smoothly into the nearest unsecured wireless network, and was gone.

  VELVETEEN

  vs.

  The Flashback Sequence

  THE DRIVE FROM RED BLUFF to Eureka took several hours, largely because traffic slowed to an inexplicable crawl for almost fifty miles. Velma sat behind the wheel and fumed, trying to distract herself by coming up with more and more unlikely causes for the delay. She’d just reached “alien cows have landed and are demanding reparations for the slaughter of their colonists” when things started moving again. She hit the gas, all thoughts of colonist cattle forgotten in her urge to find a truck stop where she could get food, coffee, and a much-needed nap before continuing on toward Oregon.