VELVETEEN vs. Evolution
Victory Anna crept down the hallway of the home she shared with Portland’s other premier superheroines, a hand-held boxy device in front of her and occasionally making a soft pinging noise, like it didn’t want her to forget that it was there.
Unlike her robe. Anyone who happened to see the normally modest gadgeteer could have been forgiven for doing a double or even triple take.
She was wearing a corset over a knee-length chemise and nothing else, not even the elaborate clips that normally kept her braids up and out of her way.
By her standards, she was virtually naked.
There were no windows along this hall, and this deep into the house, the only people she really needed to worry about running into were Polychrome, her girlfriend, and Velveteen, her technical landlord.
As neither of them shared her particularly Victorian sense of modesty, she was reasonably in the clear.
Which didn’t explain the creeping, exactly.
She was moving like someone who expected to get caught doing something she wasn’t supposed to, deliberate and quiet, and her expression matched her movements.
She stopped when she reached the door at the end of the hall, holding up her device like she expected it to provide the answers.
It beeped, twice, and two of its little indicators turned red, causing Victory Anna to frown deeply and lower the device again, shooting the door one last unhappy look before turning to slink off down the hall, still silent.
Polychrome was waiting for her on the couch.
Unlike Victory Anna, the photon manipulator was fully dressed, wearing a black unitard that seemed to swallow the light around it, with a rainbow sash wrapped around her waist. She looked just as worried as the diminutive gadgeteer as she sat forward and asked, in a low tone, “Well?”
Victory Anna took a deep breath. “It’s time we involve the extra-dimensional experts,” she said. “I suggest we contact your North Pole at once. We need to speak with Jacqueline.”
“Meaning you want me to call the North Pole.” The magic mirror they used to contact Jack when she was at home didn’t like Victory Anna much, and had a tendency to glitch and go to static when she tried to use it.
Victory Anna said it didn’t bother her, but they both knew that it did.
In her home dimension, the Snowfather had occupied the position held by this world’s Santa, and being endlessly rejected by the spirit of seasonal generosity didn’t feel very good.
Still, it wasn’t Santa’s fault…this time at least. He had more than his fair share of villainous acts behind him, but he couldn’t be blamed for the fact that his magical reality saw Victory Anna for the threat that she was.
She represented a different winter time tradition, one that had never existed in this reality, and the dissonance she created was more than the magical underpinnings of the holiday could stand.
“That’s the grand difference between magic and science, Pol,” she’d said, after the last attempt to take her there without breaking anything had failed.
“Science doesn’t give a toss whether you believe in it or not, and the laws of physics certainly don’t stop working because you think they oughtn’t to function as they do. ”
For Victory Anna to be suggesting they contact the North Pole, things had to be truly dire. Polychrome looked past her to the dark, silent hallway. “Is Vel in danger?” she asked. “Do we need to be scared for her right now?”
“In all honesty, I would tell you if I knew,” said Victory Anna.
“All I can tell you right now is that if I were hatching some perfidious scheme, I would be dearly tempted to abduct the bunny-girl as a battery of sorts. She’s the only animus in the world.
The amount of power that could be wrung out of her is genuinely incalculable. ”
“That sounds bad.”
“In the wrong hands, it could be dire.”
“You know how sometimes definitions have changed between your time and the present day?”
“Yes, but Pol, I don’t believe this is one of those times.”
“Humor me, all right?” Polychrome looked at her levelly. “When you say ‘dire,’ what, precisely, do you mean?”
“I mean there is no good reason for her to be entirely free of cross-dimensional residue. In my world, we were taught that a traveler who had once passed through a magic mirror or tumbled down a rabbit hole would be more inclined to encounter such ‘soft spots’ in the fabric of our reality, allowing them to cross over into another, whether voluntarily or no.”
“We’re taught something very similar,” admitted Polychrome. “Are you saying you understand why that happens?”
“Not fully. No one has ever been able to map the probability of any given person falling into another reality. It seems to happen more frequently with the animus and probability manipulator power classes, but only marginally so, and the data to create a unified theory of cross-dimensional movement has never been codified. But we know from Velveteen’s history, both recent and not, that she’s always been inclined to cross realities.
The fact that she currently shows none of the signs of such dimensional instability is… worrying, at the absolute least.”
“I don’t like this.”
“No one with any sense does. Now please, my dearest love, keeper of my heart, anchor of my mind, will you do as I have asked of you and pick up the damn mirror?”
Polychrome didn’t say anything. She just stared.
Velma had a mouth like a stereotypical sailor.
Even Yelena herself had been known to indulge in some light recreational swearing, taking a quiet delight in thinking about how appalled her former handlers would be by her vulgar language.
But Torrey…Torrey didn’t swear. Ever. She used a variety of creative and colorful epithets to get her point across, swearing by things the rest of them had never heard of, but which she insisted were the core of cutting insults.
Simple profanity had never been appealing to her. She seemed to see it as beneath her.
After several seconds of silence and staring, Victory Anna sighed, shoulders slumping as she seemed to shrink in on herself.
She was a small woman who had mastered the art of seeming large through sheer force of personality, and now she was revealed for her true, unassuming size.
“Please, Pol,” she said, pleading resignation in her voice. “Help me save us all.”
Polychrome nodded and turned away from her lover, moving toward the bathroom.
The mirror there was the kind that was generally found in mid-century, middle class homes, silver-backed, scratched in places and slightly dinged in others, but unlike most mirrors of its kind, it seemed to glow very faintly with a soft silver light.
Polychrome brushed her fingers across it, leaving trails of brighter silver-blue glittering on the glass, then pressed her palm flat against the mirror’s face.
“My name is Yelena Batzdorf, and I have been given this mirror so that I may contact the North Pole whenever my need is great and my heart is open,” she said, in the slightly stiff tone of a child reciting lines they had memorized against their will. “Please, will you allow my call?”
The glass clouded over, literally: Polychrome’s reflection vanished, replaced by fluffy white clouds, the sort that never rained on a picnic or snowed on a wedding.
They were photogenic clouds, designed for the aesthetic of it all, and Polychrome watched them as patiently as she could until they cleared, revealing a pale, somewhat anxious-looking girl in a red and green Christmas sweater.
“Hey, Lena,” said Jacqueline Claus, daughter of the big man himself. “Is everything okay?”
Yelena swallowed, hard. “Not sure. Torrey says no. Can you come over here, please?”
* * *
Even more than when dealing with non-powered individuals, the question of identity is a complicated one in the superheroic world.
Most heroes—and villains—will have at least two names they use commonly: their civilian names, and their costumed names.
It’s considered a bad sign for the mental health of one of these individuals when they discontinue the use of either of their names.
For them, living two lives is the norm, and attempting to too strenuously reject one or the other can be indicative of deeper psychological issues.
This does not, however, resolve the question of how they should be addressed.
At its simplest, the answer is easy: in costume they have one name, out of costume, they have another.
In practice, things rapidly become more complicated.
For some heroes, it’s a matter of posture and attitude as much as anything else, while for others, their costumed alter ego actually is an alter ego, a spirit or cosmic entity sharing their mortal form and occasionally taking over.
The most psychologically well-balanced superhumans will switch between names almost without comment, and will always know who they are when they are talking to someone else.
The question comes, naturally enough: what happens when a hero never puts their costume on, but never takes their heroic identity off?
Can they truly be said to be a member of civilian society after that line has been crossed, and will they ever be able to recover the person they once were, or have they been lost forever to the spandex and the sky?
* * *
The surface of the mirror rippled as Jacqueline stepped through it, a snow globe clutched in each hand. Victory Anna, who had gone and put an overdress on over her corset on as soon as she knew they were about to have company, blinked.
“Are you planning on shunting us into a snowy glade somewhere to freeze to death before you initiate combat?” she asked.