In the end, more than thirty toys climbed down from their racks and out of their bins, “choosing”—if toys can choose—to give up the chance at a second owner in favor of following Velveteen into battle. She led them to the break room where the staff had gone to hide, sticking her head in past the curtain, and asked, “Can you send a bill to the city?” One of the cashiers gave a little shriek, following it with a louder shriek as she saw the army of plush standing around Velveteen’s ankles.
“That would be . . . fine,” said the manager tightly. The city would never see that bill. Better to just put this incident aside as quickly as possible, before some fool supervillain decided to level the place as some sort of perverse arms dealership. “Great, thanks,” said Velveteen, and withdrew. Mercifully, the toys followed her. Even so, no one dared to breathe until they heard the bell over the door jingle to signify her exit.
*
Velveteen crouched on a rooftop in Observant Observer Observation Position Number Sixty-Two: The Gargoyle, one hand resting loosely against her knee, the other braced down between her ankles to provide her with a third point of balance. She wasn’t sure the stealth lessons really applied in her case, given the whole rabbit-ears thing, but it was always a good idea to stay in practice. Not that she was in practice, or had practiced in the last way-too-many years. It hadn’t been all that important to remember how to impersonate a brick wall when she was concerned mostly with how to make a perfect latte every time.
Her thighs hurt. Her knees hurt. Her ankles hurt. Hell, her ass hurt, and if she managed to sprain her ass her first time out at solo patrol, she was going to be so incredibly pissed off that it wasn’t even funny. Her utility belt, heavy with toys, felt almost like an accusation. If you were a real hero, you’d have used me by now, said the weight of it. If you were a real hero, you’d have found the crime.
So totally untrue. Finding crime had nothing to do with whether or not someone was a “real” hero, and everything to do with whether or not someone had acquired a talent for wandering into trouble with their eyes wide-open and their heads filled with a total lack of the concept of self-preservation. “Advanced Going Into the Big Spooky House at the Top of the Hill” was one of the most popular training classes for young heroes, and not just because it included a whole bunch of horror movies in the classwork. You had to study to be that pigheadedly stupid.
The trouble was, those were the sort of lessons that can get a body killed when you’re living in the “real” world, away from supervillains and epic battles. Walking straight into trouble is only a good idea when the trouble has a death ray. And since Vel had been living in the “real” world for years, she was getting very confused by her own instincts, which couldn’t seem to settle on which direction she wasn’t supposed to be walking in. “This would be a hell of a lot easier if there was actually a creepy house on top of a geographically implausible hill,” she muttered, and settled a little deeper into her position. Did it still count as going on patrol if she didn’t fight any crime because she hadn’t been able to find any?
Fortunately, she was saved from further contemplation of that particular philosophical question by the sound she’d been waiting all night to hear: a woman’s scream. Delight flooded over her, followed immediately by shame over her excitement. “Right,” she said, straightening up and turning to face the commotion. She was cold, she was cranky, she was conflicted, and she knew the best way to deal with all three of these situations.
She was going to hit somebody until they stopped hitting back.
*
The sound of screaming led Velveteen to a narrow alley—one which, blessedly, was lined by stage dressing fire escapes, thus solving the question of “how the hell am I supposed to get down to floor level without breaking an ankle or something?” The rooftops were the best place to watch for crime, but if you didn’t happen to have one of the flight-based power packages, you could wind up shit out of luck when it came to actually reaching the crime you’d been watching for.
Down in the alley, two hulking figures had almost backed a svelte young woman into a corner. She was holding her purse out in front of her at arms’ length, pleading through her tears for them to take it, take anything they wanted, only please, let her go. The figures weren’t listening. They also weren’t varying their speed, continuing to advance on her with the same slow, methodical strides. Scaring the prey was apparently a part of the night’s entertainment for them, and they weren’t allowing that prey to interfere with their plans by doing anything as silly as being reasonable.
Velveteen dropped from the rooftop onto the first of the fire escapes, the soft soles of her boots muffling the sound as she began her descent. She was going to pay for this the next day, she could feel it already, but that didn’t matter; she was finally in the zone, and all the training she’d had drilled so firmly into her head was taking over, telling her where to put her feet, how to grip the bars to keep the metal from creaking and giving away her position. She was going to be a hero.
The eyes of the woman in the alley locked on hers, widening slightly as she took in the characteristic combination of “spandex, weird head-gear, inexplicably well-groomed hair” and came up with the only possible answer: “superhero.” Velveteen’s own eyes widened, and she began shaking her head in hurried negation, trying to will the woman to keep her mouth shut.
“HELP PLEASE OH GOD PLEASE HELP ME!” shrieked the woman, demonstrating the sort of lung capacity opera singers around the world could only envy.
It was impossible to miss the fact that she was yelling at one specific spot, rather than screaming for help from the world in general. The heads of her assailants whipped around, their eyes glowing a dull red as they focused on Velveteen’s location. Hanging six full feet above the alley floor, Velveteen suddenly remembered, in vigorous, living color, exactly why she’d thought going back into the hero business was a bad, rotten, terrible, no-good, awful idea. Starting with the cost of funeral expenses, and moving down the list from there.
Witty one-liner, she thought frantically. This is the part where I need to pop off with a witty one-liner. Forcing her expression into something she hoped was more stern than scared, she commanded, “Evil-doers, stop doing your . . . stop. . . no, that’s not right.” The goons watched in bewilderment as her irritation took over from her common sense and she dropped to the alley floor, landing easily as training hip-checked hesitation out of the way and gave annoyance the floor. “HEY, FUCKOS!” she shouted.
The goons stared. The woman screamed. And the tiny army of olive green plastic soldiers attacked.
All in all, it really wasn’t much of a fight. But it took quite some time for the screaming to stop, and longer for Velveteen to explain to the deeply puzzled police why they needed an EMT with tweezers and a magnifying glass if they wanted to get all the tiny plastic bullets out.
It was a good night’s work.
*
After she finished with the police, Velveteen found herself faced with the somewhat interesting (and definitely irritating) question of how, exactly, she was intending to get back to her house. She was too tired to feel like taking the overland route all the way back, and her costume—despite having a fully-stocked utility belt, a spool of concealed rope under the belt, and lock picks built into the rabbit ears—didn’t exactly come with a place to stick a wallet. She was, in short, dead-broke, and couldn’t really imagine a taxi driver giving a costumed hero a ride out of charity.
“This was so not covered in basic training,” she muttered, and started stomping her irritated way towards the mouth of the alley. The fallen plastic army men rose as she passed them, scampering after her as she made her way out to the street and started in the direction she vaguely recognized as “the way home.” Behind them, the erstwhile victim of the two goons stood frozen and forgotten as she stared after the heroine, entirely unsure of what one was expected to say in a situation like this.
“Um,” she said, finally. “Thank you?”
&nbs
p; But Velveteen was gone.
*
“I swear, Jackie, it was like idiots on parade out there,” Velveteen said, vigorously towel-drying her hair as she glared at her phone. Luckily, the speaker function was good, or she’d never have been able to hear Jackie’s response.
“Of course it was,” said Jackie reasonably. “You were there.”
On second thought, it might have been better if she hadn’t been able to hear. “You’re not helping,” said Vel peevishly.
“I am so. I’m providing moral support and unflagging confidence in your capacity to do this job. This job that you’ve been fully trained for, and were basically born to do. Anyway, look at it from where I’m sitting. You took down two baddies, you saved the damsel in distress, and you didn’t even break a nail. I’m having trouble counting this as anything other than a win.”
“Don’t you quote Buffy at me,” said Vel, dropping her towel. “I mean, seriously. I took them out with plastic army dudes. Do you really think I can protect a city like this?”
“I think that if you really didn’t want to do it, you would have come home with me.” Jackie’s tone was suddenly serious. “Or you would have asked the Princess for a ride to Canada, or you would have found a way to get to Dr. Chameleon and bought yourself a new face. You could’ve done it, you know. You’ve definitely got enough of the sort of coin he deals in.”
Dr. Chameleon was neither villain nor hero. Dr. Chameleon was simply very, very good at what he did, and was always looking for someone who wanted what he was selling. As for the sort of payment he took . . .
Velveteen shuddered. “Fine,” she said. “I can do this. I can bring truth, justice, and the fuzzy Muppet way to Portland. Or at least I can keep women from getting harassed quite so openly on the street.”
“There’s my girl,” said Jackie encouragingly. “Now get some sleep. You sound exhausted.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Velveteen. She was almost laughing as she hung up the phone.
Thousands of miles and a few layers of reality away, Jackie Frost sat looking at the pale blue phone in her hand. “You have no idea what’s at stake here, Vel,” she said quietly, before dropping the phone back into the cradle. She hadn’t said it to Velveteen. . . exactly. But she’d come close enough that she might be able to sleep without resorting to chemical aid, and that was something, anyway. There was always something.
“No idea,” repeated the nascent spirit of the winter, and turned to head for the kitchen. They’d have a fire going, and the elves would be playing poker. She could probably get them to switch to strip poker if she asked nicely enough, and she really, really needed the distraction.
*
In a little house in Portland, Oregon, a woman named Velma Martinez—more commonly known as “Velveteen,” a name she didn’t choose, but was coming, grudgingly, to believe in as her own—stretched out in her bed, nestling her head down into the pillow, and closed her eyes. All around the room, plush toys were handling the basic chores of a human evening: putting laundry into hampers, cleaning discarded towels off the floor, closing curtains, and generally making the house back into a home. Velveteen didn’t notice. This was the natural order of things, for her, and while it was an order she’d been denying for years, she’d always really known what her home was supposed to look like.
A battered plush bunny rabbit crawled up onto the bed next to her, its ears tattered and bent from more battlefields than any toy was ever meant to see. It crept, cautiously, onto the pillow, and froze as her hand emerged from beneath the covers to grasp it, firmly, around one foot. The toys tensed, waiting to see what would happen next.
Eyes still closed, sinking ever deeper into slumber, Velveteen pulled the plush rabbit down to nestle against her chest.
The night, and the world, went on.
VELVETEEN
vs.
The Blind Date
AFTER THE BETTER PART OF a summer spent in Portland—a summer spent patrolling the rooftops, fighting crime with teddy bears, and being cruelly reminded of the way spandex likes to creep upward when worn for extended periods of time—Velveteen was starting to feel like maybe she had things back under some form of control. Sure, she was sore all the time, and sure, when she wasn’t patrolling, she was sitting on her couch, watching television and eating cheese puffs. (Ah, but she had a couch to sit on, a couch of her very own, that had been purchased from an actual Goodwill, rather than being picked up from a street corner. Not only that, she had cable, and those cheese puffs were name brand.) After years of struggling to keep from falling off the edge of society, it was sort of wonderful to be able to come home and not worry about where the rent was coming from.
Slipping back into the life of a professional superhero had been almost unnervingly easy. She got up when she felt like it, wandered around the kitchen in her bathrobe for a while, and then put on her sweatpants and a tank top before heading to the city gym to spend an hour or two working off all those cheese puffs. The exercise was surprisingly centering. She’d do some aerobics, work on the resistance machines for a while, maybe go for a swim, and then command the toys to start attacking her, for a sort of “Island of Misfit Toys vs. the Elves” training regime. She hadn’t been in such good shape for years. Not since she left The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division—not since she said she was done being a superhero.
Oh, well. One out of two wasn’t so bad.
After training, she’d shower, hit the gym’s sauna for a little bit, maybe get a massage from a member of the staff—they were all a little wary of her superhuman status, but they’d relaxed a lot since they’d figured out that no, really, she didn’t have any physical powers, she just brought toys to life—and then change into civilian clothes to go get a little lunch and do a little toy shopping. (The turn-over rate in her personal army was a pretty daunting, especially among the plush. She really needed to find a way to reinforce them. That, or get an endorsement deal from one of the big toy manufacturers. “When I’m fighting the forces of evil, I do it with my licensed Beanie Babies by my side!”) And then it was time to put on the spandex and the velvet and go protect Portland for another night.
It was simple. It was comfortable. It was predictable. It was exactly what she’d spent her childhood learning how to do, exactly what she’d spent her childhood learning how to be. Everything between leaving The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division and Portland was starting to seem like a long and impossible nightmare, the sort of dream that leaves you cold and shaking in the sheets.
Only now the nightmare that left her cold and shaking—not every night, but often enough to scare her—was the one where she forgot about being Velma Martinez, and only remembered being Velveteen. It was a chillingly plausible dream. After all, wasn’t she happier than she’d ever been? Didn’t she love being a superhero, every bit of it, even the impractical shoes and the control-top tights? Maybe not the bunny-eared headband so much, but it was iconic, and she had to admit that criminals across Portland were starting to develop an atavistic fear of rabbits. True power wasn’t convincing a cowardly lot to be afraid of something that people were already afraid of; it was giving them a complex that made them run screaming when a fluffy kitten came bounding into the room.
If she loved being a superhero so much, what was going to happen the next time The Super Patriots, Inc. decided that they needed to get her under control? Would there come a time when teaming up would start looking like a good idea again—better resources, better intelligence, and all she’d have to do was allow a little corporate branding?
So she ran the rooftops of Portland and monitored her own heart for signs of turning traitor, and at night she went home to her little house, her little house, and told herself that it would never happen. She could be a hero and still remember why she’d quit being a hero. She could. She could. And maybe if she kept telling herself that, she’d learn to believe it the way the criminals of Portland were learning to be afraid of girls in bunny ears, and
she’d be able to sleep at night. Maybe.
In the meantime, she had her couch, and her cheese puffs, and her days at the gym, and that was going to have to be enough. It was more than she’d ever had before, wasn’t it? Asking for more than that . . .
Asking for more than that would just be wrong.
*
“It’s like she’s signed up with the Stepford Wives or something, but she didn’t get the hot hot hunk of burning man-flesh to go with it,” complained Jackie, filing her nails with an icicle. The phone was wedged between her shoulder and her ear, forcing her to hold her head at an angle that made the elves wandering by on their way to the Fat Man’s workshop wince. “She’s not doing anything.”
“Incorrect,” replied the Princess, her voice coming sweet and clear down the miles upon miles of trans-dimensional telephone lines. Running wire between the Winter Country and her own fairy tale wonderland had been difficult, but very little was impossible when you had the power of a holiday and the combined belief of an entire world full of starry-eyed pre-teen girls to throw at your problems. “She’s fighting the forces of darkness, doing push-ups, and eating a really epic amount of junk food. Maybe she’s training to fight the Dark Overlord of Processed Cheese Spray.”
“Could you be serious for like, thirty seconds? Maybe?”
“It’s hard to be serious when I’m talking to someone who forgot to leave her blue eye shadow in the eighties, but I guess I can make the effort, if it’s that important to you,” said the Princess, flinging herself down on an enormous canopy bed crafted from a sunflower the size of a trampoline. Jets of perfume-scented pollen puffed up around her, and she sneezed, twice, before she asked, “So what do you think she should be doing? Because I thought the idea here was that she’d get back into the hero business, remember how much she enjoyed it, have a few run-ins with the locals, remember how much she hated them, and then go along with the big scheme.”