VELVETEEN vs. Doctor Darwin
“Now, sweetheart, are you sure?” The Princess raised her hands pleadingly. “I promise you, you’re not a burden at all. I enjoy having the company. Jack can’t be here all the time, and it’s nice to come home to a coherent conversation that isn’t with a woodland creature.”
The ring-tailed lemur that was engaged in dusting the window ledges made a deep-throated chittering noise. The Princess ignored it. Sometimes that was the only way to survive her household staff.
“I promised you could stay here as long as you wanted, and you know I don’t take back my promises. It’s bad for my story.”
“I know, and honestly, your hospitality has been a lifesaver in every possible sense of the word,” said Velveteen, taking the Princess’s hands in her own.
She squeezed them lightly as she continued, “I needed time. I needed a place where I could rest and recover and not need to worry about reporters popping out from behind every hedge. I needed a friend, and Cara, you have been the best friend I could ever have asked for. Seriously. I’m so lucky to have you in my life.
And if I don’t get out of this glitter-encrusted nightmare castle, I am going to start animating the topiary and making them fight each other out of sheer boredom. ”
“You already do that.”
“Yeah, but up until now, I’ve been willing to stop.
” Velveteen let go and took and step back, spreading her arms. “I’ve been on bed rest for a month.
I’ve put back on most of the weight I lost, I’m in better shape than I’ve been in years, and the tabloids aren’t trying to sneak in the back door anymore.
If I don’t go home now, it won’t be because I’m in recovery, it’ll be because I’m in hiding.
Plus if I don’t go home now, I’m giving it even chances that Torrey declares that she’s allowed to annex my bedroom for the glory of the British Empire, and then I have to sleep in the garage. ”
“Sometimes I wonder how much that girl makes up about her original world, since she knows we can’t contradict her, and uses it to just get away with whatever she damn well wants to do.”
“Probably a lot,” said Velveteen amiably. “Just wait. Sooner or later some cosmic entity with the power to grant our deepest desires will come along and recreate it, and then we’ll all wind up shoved into corsets and attending services at the Church of Epona.”
The Princess shuddered. “I surely hope not. I have no idea what the fairy tales in an alternate reality that alternate would look like, and I’d rather not be completely rewritten for someone else’s amusement.
But we’re getting off the topic, honey, you’ve just gotten your strength back.
Can’t you give it one more week? I’ll even throw in theme park passes for all three of you.
All three of you and Aaron, if you insist.”
“That would be a lot of fun, but really, I just want to go home.” Velveteen shrugged. “I miss my toys.”
The Princess sighed.
Velveteen was looking much better. It helped that she was wearing a new costume, following the same basic design as her old one, but tailored by the rats and raccoons to fit her properly, and without the bloodstains and holes.
Night Shift had done an incredible job with her care: between skilled nursing and the ambient magic of the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle, only someone who’d seen her before her disappearance and subsequent convalescence was likely to notice the thin edge of hesitation in her movements, the new slope of her hips and belly.
Some people would probably think she’d simply started following the “no carbs, ever” diet that so many superheroines swore by.
The Princess, who loved her, knew better. But it was that same love that was telling her this was a losing battle. Keeping Vel caged when she didn’t want to be had never been in anyone’s power, not really. Not The Super Patriots, Inc.’s, not Aaron Frank’s, and certainly not the Princess’s.
“Will you at least promise me you’ll take it easy for a little while?” she asked plaintively. “No arch-villains, no team-ups, no big super fights. Just you, getting back into the swing of things, patrolling Portland and stopping muggers from doing anything they’ll regret later.”
Sensing victory, Velveteen nodded like one of her bobble-head toys, almost knocking her headband askew.
“I don’t think Torrey or Yelena will be letting me patrol alone for at least a month, and you know Jory is still doing sweeps of Portland.
If anything, I’m going to a city with an excess of superheroic options.
I probably won’t find much more than petty crime for weeks. ”
“Your lips to the universe’s ears, honey. I just don’t want to see you getting hurt before your big press conference.”
Velveteen grimaced. “I was hoping you’d forget about that.”
“There’s still talk of legislation, taking steps to make sure that what happened with Supermodel and the rest never happens again.
They’re going to want you to testify, because you’re the face of this thing, whether you like it or not.
That means you owe it to yourself and to our entire community to be ready.
There are worst-case scenarios here that make what Marketing tried to do to you look like a kiddy ride.
A press conference is the start. It lets you get in front of the story, lets you say ‘this is what happened and this is why’ before somebody else gets to start setting the narrative.
Take it from me,” the Princess smiled wryly, “controlling the narrative is more important than you know.”
“I’ll be there,” said Velveteen. “But right now, I just want to go home.”
“We all want to go home, darling,” said the Princess. “I guess for a change you’re one of the lucky ones. You actually get the chance. Who am I to stand in the way of that?”
Velveteen hugged her, hard, and ran off to magic mirror her friends, letting them know that she was coming back. The Princess watched, and sighed.
Who was she? Just one of the people who loved an animus without the sense Grimm gave the little wooden boy. Maybe, if they were lucky and the story was kind, that would finally be enough.
* * *
The rise of The Super Patriots, Inc. has been referred to as the greatest legislative hole of the modern era.
It has also been held up as an example of corporate greed and the “free market” distorting and interfering with human rights, taking individuals and seeing them only for the potential profits they represent.
Comparisons have been drawn to both unlicensed gun ownership and indentured servitude, with proponents on both sides agreeing only that it should not, should never have been allowed to happen as it did.
How it should have happened is a matter for even more intense debate.
Most seem to agree that some form of control over the superhuman community was and remains absolutely vital: after all, people deserve to know what’s living in their neighborhood, don’t they?
People deserve the opportunity to make choices about whether their children go to school with boys who can fly and girls who can start fires with their minds.
The fact that any form of legislation would carry the potential to trigger another Super Patriots incident has been, by and large, ignored in favor of debating precisely what level of superhuman power will be required before registration becomes mandatory.
Interestingly enough, the superhuman community itself has been equally divided on the matter.
While many seem to enjoy the freedom to live where they wish, offer their services without corporate oversight, and even go into non-heroic (or non-villainous) lines of work, others have seemed lost without someone telling them what to do.
A tiger that has lived its entire life inside a zoo may still be a tiger, but it will not be well-suited to the wild, no matter how much it might wish to be.
In the end, far too many once-wild creatures will seek the safety of a cage.
* * *
Velma stood in front of her own house, in her own city, clutching the duffel bag of possessions she had accumulated while in the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle and wishing she could find the nerve to ring the bell.
Surely they’d be glad to see her. Surely they would open the door and wave her inside and tell her how boring things had been in Portland while she was gone.
Surely. Definitely. Absolutely. And if she could just convince herself those things were true, maybe she’d finally be able to make herself move.
“This is stupid,” she muttered, and tried to lift her hand. It didn’t move. She glared at it. It remained stubbornly down by her side. Sadly, her legs had joined the mutiny, and so walking close enough to smack her head against the door wasn’t an option.
“This is Portland,” she said. “It’s going to rain eventually, and I’m going to wind up all wet unless I go inside the house. It’s dry inside the house.”
Still, she couldn’t seem to make herself move.
Everything seemed to have frozen at the moment when the Princess’s magic mirror deposited her in the alley behind the old convenience store—at her own request, even.
She had wanted to walk home in her civilian identity, to see the house the way she’d seen it for the very first time.
If she’d realized that seeing the house was going to inspire bone-shaking terror, or that the terror was going to come with an awesome side order of “absolutely unable to ring the damn doorbell,” she might have gone a different route.
“Come on, Vel,” she said. “If you can’t even make it to the front door, maybe you’re not ready to go home after all.”
The door opened.