VELVETEEN vs. Evolution #2
“No, but there’s no guarantee we’re going to be staying near your bathroom, and I can only travel via mirrors when they’ve been specially enchanted to admit me,” said Jacqueline. “Or if we’re going to see Carrabelle. I need to visit her, but I don’t think that’s why you called me.”
“Jack,” said Polychrome, sweeping down the hall and pulling the other woman into a warm embrace. “Thank you so much for coming.”
“You made things sound pretty dire,” said Jacqueline. “Can the two of you fill me in?”
“Exceedingly condensed form: your Doctor Darwin—”
“He’s not my Doctor Darwin.”
“—your reality’s Doctor Darwin abducted Velveteen shortly after her return from the Seasonal Lands, and subjected her to scientific experiments most perfidious and vile.
Upon her rescue, we found she bore no traces of cross-dimensional residue.
Indeed, had I been analyzing her without knowledge of her past, I would have sworn that she had never once passed outside the bounds of this reality, she was so devoid of any unusual energies.
She has traveled several times since then, to visit you and to visit the Princess, and has shown no accumulation of such energies. ”
“Meaning…?”
“Meaning either the initial removal of these energies has somehow coated her in a layer of protons utterly undetectable to my technology, causing all cross-dimensional energies to slough off of her without properly latching on, and she is no longer at risk of movement between realities, or Doctor Darwin is continuing to abduct her without our noticing,” said Victory Anna primly.
“Sadly, based on the activity detected by our security grid, I fear it may be the latter.”
Jacqueline stared at her. Polychrome put one hand over her face and shook her head, half turning away. Jacqueline immediately seized on this motion. “Lena, did you know about this?”
“Yes, I saw the security readouts last night,” said Polychrome, uncovering her face.
“It’s why I asked Vel to jet over to the Crystal Glitter Unicorn Cloud Castle this afternoon to borrow a stick of unicorn butter.
I used it to bake cookies, if you want to take a couple back with you when you go.
Anyway, we needed to test her right after she passed through a dimensional portal. ”
“And?” asked Jacqueline.
“And she came back to us glittering as much as anyone who’d gone to that candied wonderland of childhood fantasies and capitalistic dreams,” said Victory Anna. “But there was a glitch in the security system about an hour ago, and while the cameras indicated that Velveteen never left her bed—”
“Does Vel know you have cameras in her room?”
Victory Anna continued as if she hadn’t heard her (and to be fair, she might not have; Torrey could be remarkably single-minded when she was focusing on potential gaps in her security).
“—there was a ten second gap in the footage that could reasonably conceal all manner of malfeasance. Once the disruption passed, I scanned her again. There was no sign of the disturbance from earlier.”
Jacqueline went very still. She might come off as too soft and sweet to know much about anything, but she had been raised inside the manifestation of a holiday, and more—although none of her friends knew this—she had been raised inside a different manifestation of a holiday from the one they all assumed she belonged to.
She was a faker in this world, a replacement for the woman who should have been there, and none of them knew more than she did about what it meant when the cross-dimensional energies got tangled or erased.
“You have to tell her,” she said, voice gone low and hushed. “It’s not fair to run around behind her back. This involves her as much or more than anyone else, and you have to tell her.”
“She’s right,” said Polychrome regretfully. She stood. “Torrey, you wait here with Jack. Vel’s my best friend. She’ll listen to me when she wouldn’t necessarily listen to either one of you.”
“Much as I might like to argue with your assertation, we both know I would prefer to avoid getting into another fight with our ostensible landlady, and so I shall remain here with the lovely daughter of the Snowfather, and perhaps serve her a proper cup of tea.”
“You know I don’t like it when you call him that,” said Jack.
“That’s true, I do know you don’t like it when I call him that. Will you take cream and sugar tonight, or shall you insist upon cream and those tiny marshmallows you continue to pretend serve as a proper sugar substitute?”
Jack sighed heavily, but followed Victory Anna as the shorter woman led her down the hallway to the kitchen, leaving Polychrome to face Velveteen’s closed door alone.
Polychrome took a deep breath, trying to steady herself.
Somehow, “we’ve been monitoring you for extradimensional energies and we think Doctor Darwin may have been abducting you more regularly than any of us realized” had seemed perfectly reasonable before she was actually going to be required to say it.
Now, the words she was turning over and over in her mind carried the distinct aura of a betrayal.
Vel had been betrayed so many times in the last few years.
How was she going to handle another one?
Putting it off wouldn’t make it cut any less deeply. It would just remove a little more of her excuse that she hadn’t been sure, she’d wanted to be absolutely certain before she said anything. The last thing Polychrome wanted to do was make it worse.
Taking a deep breath, Poly raised her hand and rapped her knuckles against the door. “Vel?” she called. “Honey, I know you’re trying to sleep, but there’s something we need to talk about, right now. It’s important.” She hesitated, then added, “It’s strawberry pancakes important.”
The Super Patriots, Inc. had never been very big on allowing their child heroes to have sweets, unless it was during a public appearance or a photo shoot.
They wanted them to look like normal kids when the world was watching, and to be happy on their protein bars and kiddie kibble when the cameras were off.
It was probably natural that a group of kids deprived of all the things they craved most dearly would come up with a whole bunch of food-themed secret codes and passwords, but Poly still felt a little silly using them now, as an adult who could do her own grocery shopping and have strawberry pancakes any time she wanted them.
As children on adult-mandated low-carb diets, strawberry pancakes had been one of the most magical things any of them could think of, and had thus become the code phrase meaning “no really, this is serious, I’m afraid you have no choice but to let me in.
” It was silly and immature, but they hadn’t gotten around to coming up with new code words now that they were all adults and free to say—or eat—whatever they liked.
There was still no response from the other side of the door. Heart in her throat, Polychrome turned the knob.
As she had basically expected by this point, she revealed an empty bedroom.
The various plush toys and fashion dolls that normally attended on Velveteen while she slept, keeping her pillows plumped and her blankets untwisted, were all sprawled motionless on the floor.
The bed itself, unsurprisingly, was empty and unmade.
The window wasn’t broken this time. Instead, it was standing ajar, the curtains blowing lightly in the breeze. Polychrome stared at it for a while before gently easing the door closed again. She needed to go talk to the others.
Now.
* * *
The alarm was quiet, oddly polite in its own way, like it was ashamed of having been triggered. Doctor Darwin looked up from the control bank where he’d been adjusting dials and flipping switches, and scowled at the little red light that had started to flash on the wall.
“Well, my dear,” he said, turning to face the figure strapped down on his operating table, “it seems the timeline has just been accelerated. You have my most profound apologies. This would have been easier for all of us, and substantially less painful for you, if it had been delayed a few more weeks. But beggars can’t be choosers, and we didn’t choose this disruption, now, did we? ”
Velveteen, who was still unconscious, didn’t open her eyes or respond to him in any visible way.
She kept breathing, chest rising and falling in smooth, measured motions, and gave no sign that she had heard.
Apart from a single tube inserted into the back of her hand and held in place with a small strip of surgical tape, she looked entirely untouched by whatever was going on around her, like she just happened to be a piece of equipment in the presence of some grand and terrible experiment.
And any experiment undertaken in this lab would be grand and terrible, by definition.
Everything was concrete and chrome, a brutalist combination that made the place look like it had been ripped out of the scenery of an early Frankenstein adaptation, or something else starring Vincent Price in his heyday.
There was even a vast laser aimed at a pair of steel doors that would, when opened, expose a substantial expanse of the sky.
It was a lab built for mad science, and anything that failed to reach that height was unlikely to be successful.