VELVETEEN PRESENTS POLYCHROME vs. The Court of Public Opinion and Not Punching Anyone
Victory Anna’s whoops of joy echoed over the rooftops. Someone on the ground below might have mistaken them for screams, but Polychrome was close enough to see the sheer glee in the other woman’s face as she pursued the giant clockwork bats across the sky.
Victory Anna had been tinkering with a new model of jetpack recently, and this was its maiden outing. She looked something like a bat herself as she bobbed and weaved through the air. A very large bat, inexplicably dressed in Victorian finery, and carrying an extremely large gun.
She looked nothing like a bat at all. She looked like a profoundly self-satisfied time-displaced mad scientist who enjoyed the challenge of blasting someone else’s automatons out of the sky.
Polychrome smirked as another bat fell. Sometimes dating was really all about knowing where to take your significant other.
For some girls, dinner and a show might have been the answer.
For Torrey, “want to go see if the people who’ve been reporting giant bats near the site of recent robberies were high or onto something? ” was the perfect outing.
Normally, Polychrome would have been right there in the thick of it, zapping bats with beams of coherent light and sending them, smoking, to the alley below.
Not tonight. Tonight, she was on the lookout, hovering above the battle on a platform of glitter and bad physics, watching to see if any of the bats broke formation.
According to Torrey, either the swarm was pre-programmed for a variety of situations, which didn’t mesh up with their relatively limited processor power, or there was a “control bat” being used by the scientist who’d created them.
If they could follow the control bat back to its belfry, they might be able to cut this crime spree short.
“Look alive!” shouted Victory Anna, before blasting another bat. Polychrome spun in mid-air, scanning the edges of the fight. There: a bat, slightly smaller than the others around it, was breaking from the flock and flapping frantically down an alleyway.
“On it!” called Polychrome, and dove, adjusting the angle and power of her light beams instinctively as she bled height and gathered speed, turning herself into a shooting star.
There had been a time when flight was difficult for her, something she needed to think about.
Her early training runs had been made while wearing heavy padding, to save her from bruises.
Now flight was as natural as breathing. She only had to know where she was going.
The sound of Victory Anna’s joyful destruction faded behind her as she followed the bat through the night.
It would have been difficult for anyone else to see, but her eyes were adapted for everything from blinding light to absolute darkness.
Her own bioluminescence provided more than enough light to make chasing one little robot easy.
She spared a brief pang of concern for Torrey, who was going to have to finish the cleanup on her own, and gave chase through the night.
* * *
The weakening of The Super Patriots, Inc.
’s hold on the superhuman community of the world was immediately and keenly felt, although nowhere as immediately as in North America, where the corporation had always been at its strongest. Splinter groups sprung up essentially overnight, with formerly retired heroes putting their spandex and masks back on, while minor supervillains whose wickedness had always been more informed than actual suddenly announced themselves as heroes.
Super teams with no corporate sponsorship sprung up across the continent.
(While the foundation and funding of the majority of these teams does not reflect on the scope of this project, it is important to note that of the “sponsorless” super teams, a full eighty percent were backed by one or more independently wealthy members, and more, that all but one of the documented private backers were white males.
Most had inherited their wealth from previous generations, and were uniquely well-situated to serve the public good without worrying about where their next meal would come from.
The remaining twenty percent of super teams were dedicated to protecting one neighborhood or community, were active less than fifty percent of the time due to other commitments, and often received financial and material support from the people they were sworn to serve.
Even superpowers do not guarantee a level playing field.)
More common than independent super teams were the independent heroes, vigilantes working either above or alongside the law.
Many of them worked solo, at least at the start of their careers, before later settling into duos and trios—groups small enough to avoid the funding issues that plagued the super teams, but large enough that no one had to fight the forces of evil without backup.
Going into danger completely unsupported was often fatal, especially for those heroes who had been working with The Super Patriots, Inc.
for the majority of their careers. The collective noun “funeral” entered common use to describe solo heroes during this time period.
“Enough of them showed up for the mugging that it was like a funeral.”
Most people viewed the reduction of The Super Patriots, Inc.
’s control over the superhuman community as a bad thing.
After all, most people did not know a superhuman personally: with a distinct minority among the human population, those who had close family or social ties to a superhuman were equally rare.
From the perspective of the common man on the street, taking away the careful controls on superhuman movement and behavior was akin to taking away all gun legislation in an instant.
The new age of superheroic freedom was more like the pause between “bad” and “worse.”
Within a year of Supermodel’s death, superhumans around the world were mourning for the “glory days” of absolute control by The Super Patriots, Inc.
Sure, the corporation had been draconian, cruel, and dedicated to complete ownership of the heroes in their employ, but at least then, there had been someone to answer to.
Most superhumans had never known a world in which they were expected to make their own decisions or choose their own paths.
Like show dogs suddenly released back into the wild, they reeled.
It was perhaps only natural that the governments of the world would begin stepping in, proposing legislation to protect “the common man” by controlling and commanding the uncommon one.
By the time the superhuman community realized that their freedoms were once more being eroded, this time by people whose interests were less commercial, and more military, it was too late for any organized resistance.
Perhaps it was ironic that within a very short period of time, the superhuman community would look back on their days under the control of The Super Patriots, Inc.
as a time of peace, prosperity, and decent dental care.
But then, they were always only human, and it is human nature to mourn the past.
* * *
The bat was fast. Polychrome was faster, especially now that she was putting all her power into speed.
She hung just behind it as it flew, keeping her sparkles black and dark gray to prevent them from being too obvious.
The last thing she wanted was to be called to stop and show her license when she was in pursuit of a possibly dangerous automaton, especially since Victory Anna was at least a mile behind her now.
Torrey didn’t get along well with the local authorities.
She’d been a supervillain for too long, back in her last reality, and while she had always been on the side of good—assuming anyone knew which side was the “good” one anymore—she didn’t take kindly to people asking her what she thought she was doing.
People asking her what she thought she was doing was a good way to wind up having a long wait in a windowless room while the Portland P.
D. drew straws about who had to talk to the superheroes this time.
Governor Morgan was doing everything she could to protect her state’s superhumans.
The fact that the governor’s sister, Jennifer Morgan, was an earth-manipulator from a parallel Earth where she hadn’t been killed as a child hero, helped a lot.
No one with actual family ties to the superhuman community could ever be completely against them.
That wasn’t going to keep the wolves away forever.
Public opinion was swinging too hard, and sooner or later, even Oregon would have to admit that times were changing.
The mechanical bat abruptly folded its wings, dropping like something that had just traded all its aerodynamics for the elegance and grace of a brick of solid brass.
Polychrome almost overshot before she could correct herself, flip around, and drop after it.
Once she went into her own descent, she quickly found that keeping up required her to fall so fast that the wind brought tears to her eyes.
She gritted her teeth and swallowed her natural instinct to tell gravity to go fuck itself.
Just this once, she needed to be as subject to the laws of nature as everybody else.