VELVETEEN vs. Gainful Employment
Having her first night back at home disrupted by a supervillain, even one as second-string as Doctor Darwin, hadn’t done much to settle Velveteen’s nerves.
She perched on the arm of the couch with a blanket around her shoulders and a mug of hot tea cupped between her hands.
She had yet to take a sip. Torrey—Victory Anna, really, since she was still in costume—kept shooting her sour looks, as if her reluctance to drink were some sort of personal affront.
“He said he was a Saurian, right before the two of you busted in and broke me out,” she said, looking at Polychrome and grimacing. “He said his world was destroyed by something he called ‘the Evolutionary Plague,’ and somehow that transformed him into a mammal.”
“I shouldn’t like to be a dinosaur-person,” said Victory Anna, somewhat dubiously. “I am extremely fond of my breasts, and must assume that any evolutionary path beginning with the dinosaur would leave me bereft of their presence.”
“I’m sure your breasts are more powerful than evolution,” said Polychrome, in the sort of tone normally reserved for talking to animals, small children, and women who regularly carried ray guns the size of their torso. “And it doesn’t matter, anyway, because we’re mammals, and Doctor Darwin is—”
“I think he was telling the truth, or at least the truth as he understands it,” said Velveteen.
She finally took a mouthful of tea, swallowing before she continued.
“He knew about Torrey, and how she’s from a parallel world.
He said there were at least six iterations of him, all stranded in parallel realities by the Evolutionary Plague.
Either he’s a transformed dinosaur person, or he really needs some help.
” She yawned then, enormously, and stopped to blink in evident confusion at the other two women.
“Why’re you both cartoons now? It’s funny-looking. ”
This declared, she slumped back into the cushions, eyes abruptly closing.
Victory Anna was there to pluck the nearly-full mug from her hands before she could drop it on the couch cushions, stepping back as the exhausted animus snuggled deeper, mumbling small, nonsensical syllables to herself as she got comfortable.
Polychrome sighed. “Torrey, what have we discussed about drugging other heroes?”
“That I ought only do it when absolutely necessary.”
“And what about this situation made you decide it was absolutely necessary?”
Victory Anna shrugged, a smug expression on her face.
“She’s not supposed to be patrolling on her own yet.
We’re meant to keep her on light duty while she finishes recovering her strength.
I doubt the Princess intended for her to be going off alone to fight supervillains without backup, or to be experimented on via unknown scientific methods. ”
Polychrome eyed her. “That’s the real reason you drugged her, isn’t it? Your professional pride has been offended.”
“The potential exists,” admitted Victory Anna, with a sniff. “If anyone is going to perform unspeakable experiments on our housemate, it’s going to be me.”
“Is that your way of asking me to help you get her down to your lab?”
“I would be less likely to drop her if I were provided with assistance,” said Victory Anna, doing her best to look winsome.
Polychrome sighed heavily, managing to look even more put-upon than she had a few moments before.
Nights when Torrey was really feeling the spirit of scientific exploration were often marked by excessive sighing, and more than a few doses of painkillers.
“Well, we can’t have you dropping her,” she said, and moved into position at Velveteen’s feet.
Even after the Princess’s efforts and the loving stewardship of Night Shift, Velveteen was still underfed and thinner than she had ever been in her adult life.
Between the two of them, they were able to hoist her easily, carrying her through the kitchen to the closed pantry door.
Victory Anna shifted her grasp on Velveteen’s shoulders, resting them against her hip while she freed her left hand.
She pressed it, fingers spread, to the wall beside the doorframe.
The touchscreen embedded in the drywall only appeared for an instant as it read Victory Anna’s palm, a small light flashing green at the top of the door as it did.
There was a beeping sound from some unseen source, and the touchscreen disappeared again.
Victory Anna removed her hand from the wall and hummed a happy, melodic little tune as she opened the pantry door to reveal a small metal elevator that was most distinctly not in the house blueprints.
“Onward, to science!” she chirped, and stepped inside. Polychrome followed, with her half of Velveteen still firmly in hand.
“You know, this is Vel’s house,” she said.
“I am quite aware, and remain most grateful for her unwavering hospitality.”
“Eventually you’ll need to tell her that you’ve constructed an entire subterranean lair beneath her house, especially since you didn’t get building permits before you did it.”
“My dearest Pol, what would be the point of building a secret laboratory if I immediately registered the plans with the city?”
The elevator door closed, the mechanism whirring to itself as the car began to descend into the earth.
It dropped quickly but smoothly, moving with a speed many falling bricks would have envied, all without seeming to move at all.
As it reached the bottom, it made a self-satisfied little dinging sound, and the doors slid open on a cavernous room easily larger than the entire house above, its walls lined with monitors and contentedly beeping machines, its ceiling lost in the shadows beyond the catwalks.
Visibly and ridiculously pleased with herself, Victory Anna stepped out of the elevator, forcing Polychrome to follow or risk losing her grip on Velveteen’s legs. “I still don’t understand why you needed all this space. There’s only the two of us, not a whole crime-fighting empire.”
“Give it time, my love,” said Victory Anna. “Your Super Patriots began with a trio and a trial, did they not? With Vel returned to us from the Seasonal Lands, we have the same resources at our disposal as they did at theirs.”
“I didn’t think of it like that,” said Polychrome, sounding briefly baffled.
“No, I rather thought not,” said Victory Anna. “And while I would prefer to never be sworn to such an organization, at times needs must, and right now, we need must be prepared for anything. Life turns oddly when Miss Velma is around.”
Together, they hoisted Velveteen onto the slab at the center of the room, a massive, oddly antiquated construct of concrete and steel.
Victory Anna moved to begin digging objects out of a cupboard.
Polychrome remained where she was, smoothing Vel’s hair back from her face with one hand. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess it does.”
* * *
One thing it has historically—even within the relatively limited scope of superhuman history—been distressingly easy to forget is that superhumans, no matter how powerful, no matter how close to divinity in their strengths and impossible powers, are still human.
They want the things humans want, desire the things humans desire, and are subject to the weaknesses and whimsies which afflict all flesh.
They are not somehow above the frailties of their fellow men simply because they can fly or bend steel with their bare hands.
They are better than us in some ways, yes. But in others, they are precisely the same.
To be human is to be a social creature. Even the most misanthropic among us will admit that they, at times, seek the comfort of others like them, the reassurance that they are not alone in the universe.
Something in our primitive primate brain chemistry tells us that our existence is, on some level, tied into the perception of the world around us.
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
If a person exists in a vacuum and there’s no one there to perceive them, do they really exist?
Superhumans, like anyone else, will seek out the company of their fellows, and once they have achieved it, will begin to organize themselves into a hierarchy.
It seems to be an inescapable part of human nature, and a phenomenon that will play out over and over again, however much we may wish it wouldn’t.
However hard we may attempt to stop it.
* * *
Asleep on the slab, Velveteen looked very small and very fragile, like it would only take one hard blow to end her superheroics forever.
She was still wearing her headband, which had been on her head when she lost consciousness; her mask, which she had removed when she got home, was nowhere to be seen.
It didn’t matter here; drugged or not, she was at least technically among friends.
Polychrome stood watch as Victory Anna attached sensors, clipped what looked like miniature jumper cables to Velveteen’s fingers and toes, and took readings with strange pieces of whirring machinery.
Now that Velveteen was in her lab, Victory Anna was every inch the serious scientist, working without pause or hesitation, stopping only to write down her findings.
After twenty or so minutes, she stopped, lowered her latest bit of strange machinery, lifted her head, and looked directly at Polychrome as she passed judgment on the situation:
“Bollocks,” she said.
“Meaning what, exactly?” ‘Bollocks’ was one of those multi-purpose swears that could mean anything from ‘you have just said something completely ridiculous, which I am choosing to ignore’ to ‘we are all about to die in a firestorm of screaming and pain.’ It would have sounded pretentious if Polychrome had tried it, but for Victory Anna, it was as natural as dismantling the toaster whenever she got bored.
“Meaning everything about her is perfectly normal.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” asked Polychrome.