VELVETEEN vs. The Retroactive Continuity #4
It wasn’t a literal explosion: more the sudden conversion of all the nothingness around her into prismatic reality.
Polychrome had created illusions before, but this was the largest, and the most complex that she had ever attempted.
One instant, there was nothing; the next, Velveteen was tumbling onto a black and white floor, like a chessboard, like something out of a story, and she would have laughed at the sheer cliché of it all if she hadn’t been so damn scared.
“Poly?!” she shouted, slapping the floor like she thought she could somehow make it disappear again. “Yelena?!”
“There’s no rulebook to this place,” said an unfamiliar female voice.
Velveteen whipped around to find herself looking at a dark-haired woman in a Grecian gown, with a spindle slung across her chest like the world’s most pointless fashion accessory.
“Your friend, though, she remembered something from one of her lessons about ways this sort of terrain can be navigated, and she took a chance. We rewarded it.”
“Where is she?” demanded Velveteen, scrambling to her feet. “Give her back!”
“She forced us into visibility,” said another voice.
Velveteen turned. A man stood behind her, dressed similarly to the woman, with hair the color of pomegranate seeds in the sunlight and an hourglass dangling from his belt.
“It took everything she had. She’s falling, currently.
She’ll fall forever, if you don’t make your case. ”
“What?” Velveteen looked back and forth between the pair, finally taking a step backward, so that she could watch them both at the same time. “Who are you? Where am I?”
“You don’t ask who you are,” said the woman. “That’s interesting. Are you that confident in yourself, that you don’t need to ask who you are?”
“My name is Velveteen. I’m a superhero, and I’m here because Santa Claus told me that if I went through a door hidden in a mirror, I could find a way to fix the world.” Velveteen paused. “Okay, when I say it like that, it sounds sort of stupid, I’ll admit. But it’s the truth.”
“All the identities you could have claimed, and that’s the one you’re going to go with,” said the man. He took a step toward the woman, and his clothing changed, melting into 1920s American finery. His hourglass became a pocket watch. “Superhero. Super. You don’t want to be ordinary.”
“For me, this is ordinary,” said Velveteen. The woman still matched the man. She hadn’t seen her change. This was all getting a little cosmic for her tastes, and she really just wanted someone to hit. “Where am I?”
“Where the Spirit of Giving sent you,” said the woman. “I am Ananke, and this is Chronos.”
“We’re basically the template off which you were struck,” said the man—Chronos. He smiled thinly. “I’m a chronopath.”
“And I’m a precognitive strong enough to adjust the world to fit the futures I see,” said Ananke. “I see that you are still confused. Remember when you had your power level assessed?”
“Yes,” said Velveteen warily.
“They told you the scale went to five.”
“Yes.”
Chronos smiled. “We’re the tens.”
“…oh,” said Velveteen, after a horrified pause. “So you’re the reason everything is so fucked-up.”
“We’re not gods,” said Ananke. “We’re just not equipped to live in the world the rest of you inhabit.
We’ll break it simply by trying to walk in it like we belong there.
So we live here, where things do as we tell them, and every so often someone from the ‘real’ world will show up and tell us that things have gotten out of hand. ”
“So say the word, little hero,” said Chronos. “We can put it all back in the bottle for another fifty years. No more heroes, no more villains. You’ll be free.”
Velveteen jumped. “What? Wait—what? That’s not why I’m here.”
Chronos looked bemused. “But that’s always why you’re here. You can only come once, you little mortal heroes, so that’s always what you ask for.”
“No! I like being a superhero. Maybe there was a time when I didn’t, but I like who I am.
I like my friends. If I weren’t a superhero, I wouldn’t know Jackie, or Torrey, or anybody.
We would never have met. So no, I don’t want the powers to go away.
I just want to go back three years and keep everything from going wrong. ”
“If that’s all—” Chronos reached for his watch.
It was too easy. Velveteen glanced toward Ananke, who was shaking her head, very slightly.
She was missing something.
“Wait!” she cried. Chronos stopped. “If we go back three years, am I going to remember this?”
“No,” he said.
“So it’s all going to happen exactly the same way.”
“Yes.”
“But I won’t be able to come back here. We’ll be stuck with it.”
He sighed, pouting like a child who had just been cheated out of a great prank. “Yes,” he said.
“Is there another way?”
“Yes,” said Ananke. “The Seasonal Lands are less temporally anchored than the Calendar Country. They can send you home the moment you left. No time will pass. No one will have the chance to miss you, or to exploit your absence.”
Velveteen paused. She was missing something, she knew she was…and then she wasn’t. The inevitability of it all was almost poetic in its painful simplicity. “But that time, for me, will have passed exactly like it did in this timeline.”
“Yes.”
“Jackie…”
“Everything has to cost, little animus. Even a second chance.” Ananke reached for her spindle. Somehow, it remained, even as her clothing had changed. “Will you take it?”
All those laws, passed in her absence, designed to narrow the world when it should have been getting wider.
Polychrome and Victory Anna, hiding from the world; the Princess, increasingly needing to hide from herself.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Even Jackie would have agreed.
Jackie never liked anything that made the world smaller than it had to be.
“I’ll find a way to get her back,” said Velveteen. “For now? Take it all back. Three years, and I do my term of service to the Seasonal Lands, and this never happened.”
Ananke smiled as she drew her spindle. “I’m glad I got the chance to meet you,” she said, and held it out, needle-first, toward Velveteen.
I’m sorry, Aaron, thought Vel. It would have been nice to have been heroes again, together.
Then she touched the spindle’s point, and collapsed on the checkerboard floor. Chronos and Ananke looked at her. “That was new,” he said.
“Some things have to be,” she agreed. “Send her back. No cheating.”
“Yes dear,” he said, and kissed her cheek, and disappeared, taking Velveteen—and the floor—with him.
* * *
The door that opened in the fabric of reality had no foundation, no wall to hold it in place or justify its existence: it simply was, a twisted thing of knotted paper roses that dripped with black type and red ink.
It didn’t fit in with the rest of the gardens at the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle at all.
The body of a woman, bone-thin, was shoved through the doorway and collapsed in the dewy grass, unconscious, barely seeming to breathe.
Once again, Velma “Velveteen” Martinez had come home.