VELVETEEN vs. Gainful Employment #2
“Have you ever had a friend, an acquaintance, even, with a fondness for pipe tobacco?”
Even for Victory Anna, the question was out of left field.
Polychrome still frowned, trying to give it the consideration she assumed it deserved.
“Our handlers thought it would be easier for us to resist the temptation of bad habits if they minimized our exposure to them,” she said, slowly.
“It was harder to market us if we smoked or drank or chewed too much bubblegum, so they kept those things away from us.”
“Every fact I learn of your upbringing makes me more bewildered by the fact that you’re as reasonably and relatively normal as you are, my dearest,” said Victory Anna.
“You cannot inculcate good behaviors by removing the possibility of temptations. All you can do is make it more difficult for the people under your control to moderate themselves when they inevitably gain access to the forbidden.”
“I think there was less interest in making sure we’d have healthy adulthoods than there was in making sure we’d have marketable childhoods.”
Victory Anna made a noncommittal noise. “Tell me, darling, do you happen to have the names and home addresses of these individuals someplace easily accessible?”
“No. Now, you were talking about pipe tobacco?” Sometimes prompting Victory Anna onto a different track could work to bring her always-fickle attention back to something safer, or at least something less likely to end in multiple homicides. “What does that have to do with Vel?”
“We’re not done with this discussion, but she won’t sleep forever, so I may as well answer,” said Victory Anna.
“We know, without question, that Velveteen has been traveling through the Seasonal Lands recently, and more, that she’s been making the trip between here and the Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle on a semi-regular basis since her return. Are we agreed on this point?”
“Yes,” said Polychrome, cautiously.
“Much as someone who has spent an extended time around a heavy smoker would come away redolent of tobacco smoke, she should carry the residue of these assorted dimensions on her skin. We certainly do. I can scrape samples of the Princess’s domain or Santa’s workshop off our hands for weeks following a visitation. ”
“So what does that mean?”
“Somehow, the eponymous Doctor Darwin has managed to remove that residue from our Velveteen, for whatever perfidious reasons he might have in mind.”
“There was a Doctor Darwin in your last dimension, wasn’t there? What do you think about him claiming to be a Saurian?”
Victory Anna sobered. “I think it fits well with other claims he’s made in the past, and with the fact that while his heroism or villainy flux between dimensions with even more reliability than most, he’s always been alone.
He doesn’t show up with spouses or children, or join organizations of evil.
He makes his own wicked plans and fights to bring them to fruition.
He isn’t a social man. Antisocial behavior alone isn’t enough to prove that someone isn’t a member of the species they appear to be, but in his case, learning that he’s something else altogether might put certain things into context and make them more comprehensible than they’ve been to date. ”
“Oh.” Polychrome looked over at the sleeping Velveteen. “So you’re saying we may have a serious problem on our hands?”
“Yes. I think I’m saying precisely that.”
Oblivious to the conversation unraveling only a few feet away, Velveteen slept on.
* * *
Waking up in her own bed was no longer a familiar experience for Vel, and when she opened her eyes to find herself looking at her bedroom ceiling, a wave of disorientation washed over her, making everything feel unfamiliar and out of place.
She sat up, clutching the blankets to her chest, and blinked at the edifying sight of half a dozen teddy bears and fashion dolls in the process of fitting plywood sheeting over her broken window.
“Um,” she said. “Not a dream, then? I was actually abducted by Doctor Darwin?”
One of the teddy bears turned to look at her with its single black button eye, nodding silently.
Vel groaned and rubbed her face with one hand, trying to wipe the sleep and disorientation away at the same time.
It didn’t do much good, and when she dropped her hand again, the room was still in the same condition, toys still working to do basic home repair, while light and wind came flowing smoothly in through the holes in the window.
Now that she was sitting up rather than nestled snugly under her blanket, the air had a distinctly chilly quality, real autumn, the kind that didn’t have a zip code, fast approaching.
Vel shivered and stood, taking her robe from the teddy bear that waited, silent and endlessly patient, next to her bed.
If she concentrated, she could feel the thin tendrils of energy connecting her to the toys, the little tendrils of her power that unspooled with or without her permission.
Thanks to Persephone’s tutelage, she knew she could pull them back if she needed to, conserving her strength for more important matters.
They weren’t hurting anyone, and that window needed to be fixed.
She left them to their work and made her way out of the room, heading into the familiar, unfamiliar hall, which was still shaped the way it had always been, but had new pictures on the walls and new scents lingering in the air, perfume and laundry detergent and ozone.
People lived here now, in a way they never had before, and it was wonderful, and it was hard not to feel like an intruder in what should have been her home.
The sound of voices led her to the kitchen, where she found Yelena sitting at the breakfast table, hair rumpled and torso swallowed by an oversized sweater, her weight resting on her elbow and her elbow resting next to her plate of bacon and waffles.
She was laughing at something Torrey had said, eyes bright and shoulders relaxed, finally at peace. That was something else new.
Vel found that she liked it. Torrey was at the counter, flipping an odd device that looked something like a bear trap crossed with a landmine; she looked around at the sound of Vel’s footsteps, and flashed a thin smile, asking, “Waffle?”
“Is that thing a waffle maker?” asked Vel. “More importantly, is there coffee?”
“Yes, it’s a waffle maker, and a quite superior one, capable of creations your standard store-bought model could never imagine,” said Torrey. “Yes, there’s coffee.”
“I will eat your cosmic terror waffles without flinching if I can just have coffee while I’m doing it,” said Vel, heading for the counter.
“So hey, did you guys notice me being abducted last night? I’m pretty sure it happened, since my window was still broken when I woke up, but I don’t know how much noise Doctor Darwin made when he snatched me. ”
Yelena blinked. “Vel…do you not remember what happened?”
“Like I said, abducted,” said Vel, with remarkably good cheer as she filled a novelty mug to the brim with hot black coffee.
The white eggs printed on the side began changing color as they reacted to the heat, while the cartoony Easter Bunny developed both a wide grin and a massive, anatomically unlikely erection. “It’s all a little fuzzy after that.”
“We rode most heroically to your rescue,” said Torrey. “It was quite impressive, really. Your amnesia may be the result of shame, your psyche admitting that you could never outshine us in that glorious moment. But not, sadly, before Doctor Darwin could inform you of his hitherto unknown origins.”
“We’ll still love you if you don’t talk like an escapee from an H.G. Wells novel all the time,” said Vel, and sipped her coffee, only to yelp.
“It’s hot,” said Yelena needlessly.
“I noticed! It’s also sweet. What the hell?”
“Coffee beans, in their natural state, are quite bitter,” said Torrey. “Modifying that chemical process was child’s play.”
“Don’t listen to her,” said Yelena. “First she had to design and build something called an ‘orangerie’ in the backyard—it’s like a really fancy greenhouse—and then she had to flash-grow a bunch of coffee plants to where they were big enough to start bearing fruit, and then she had to build a coffee roaster, since apparently all the ones not made by horrifying science were inferior to her needs, and now we have coffee that tastes like a fancy mocha as soon as it’s brewed, which we no longer need to pay for. ”
“As I said, child’s play,” said Torrey.
“Huh,” said Vel, and looked at the contents of her cup thoughtfully before taking a larger mouthful. “Good coffee.”
“Your praise is balm to my weary ears,” said Torrey dryly, and opened the waffle maker to produce three perfectly golden-brown waffles. Putting two of them on a waiting plate, she speared the third with her fork and carried it with her to the table, where she sat down next to Yelena.
“You know, sarcasm isn’t the only available mode of communication,” said Vel. She picked up the plate. “Thank you for breakfast.”
“Perhaps not, but it remains a favorite.”
“What were you saying about Doctor Darwin’s origins?” asked Vel, pouring syrup over her waffles until they resembled victims of a very sticky flood warning.
“Apparently, he’s as extra-dimensional as I am, but along an evolutionary axis rather than a chronological one,” said Torrey. “While I have slipped out of time, he’s slipped out of species, and is unable to return to his original state. We may have been approaching him all wrong.”
Vel blinked, several times. “What the actual fuck?” she finally asked.
“He says he’s a Saurian,” said Yelena. “A dinosaur person. But something he calls ‘the Evolutionary Plague’ changed him and stranded him here. You’re the one who told us all this. You really don’t remember?”
“I thought the whole abduction was an unpleasant dream,” protested Vel. “If my window hadn’t been broken, I wouldn’t even have asked about it.”