VELVETEEN vs. Extinction #3
The robber she had dropped on groaned. She balled up one claw and punched him several times in the back of the head, until he was limp and motionless. With a triumphant shriek, Sparkler jumped off him and back into the air, wings beating hard as she turned herself back toward Victory Anna.
When she got there, the red-feathered vectiraptor was standing perfectly still in a circle of fallen robbers, her ray gun drooping by her side and her crest askew in apparent confusion. She squawked as Sparkler landed in front of her, starting to bring up her ray gun.
“Hey, whoa!” yelped Sparkler, putting up her claws. “It’s me. Torrey, it’s me.”
“I don’t believe this revisionist history was designed to fully account for outliers such as myself,” said Victory Anna, voice hollow and disconnected.
But she didn’t make any more motions to raise her ray gun, which was good enough for the moment.
A gadgeteer who wasn’t opening fire was a gadgeteer who could still be negotiated with.
“What do you mean?” asked Sparkler.
“I was sworn to the Church of my Lady Epona when I was eight years old,” said Victory Anna.
“I stood before the altar and I traded vows with the priestess, to serve her as well as I might, to never give her cause to weep for me. And I have kept those vows all my life, through the deaths of two worlds and the survival of the third. I have brought those vows to our bower.”
“And I’ve always said that was fine by me, honey. I don’t have a problem with your religion. How about you put down the gun, hmm?”
“I know, as a scientist, that the Mammalian Plague wiped out eighty percent of the world’s mammals long before my empire rose, before I was born or my father’s time machine set the current course of my life in shale.
I know these things. But in my heart, as a faithful devotee to Epona, the Lady of the Horses, I know that the mammals must have existed long past that point.
As a woman, I know the world makes no sense, even as I try to reconcile it for myself. How can you explain the contradiction?”
“I can’t, Torrey, you know I can’t. But I also can’t stop in the middle of apprehending a bunch of criminals to debate the nature of reality with you. I’m sorry. I wish I could, but this really isn’t the time.”
Victory Anna looked at her miserably. “The world doesn’t make sense anymore, Sparkler, and we need to figure out how to set it right before it drives me mad.”
“All right,” said Sparkler, soothingly. “All right. Velveteen is meeting with Doctor Darwin soon, and we’re invited to the mixer afterward. Maybe we can get a few minutes with the man. I’m sure he’ll be able to make this all make sense.”
“Yes,” said Victory Anna, with breathless certainty. “Yes, he’ll have the answers. Doctor Darwin always does.”
The two superheroines moved to stand back to back, watching for more criminals, and while everything wasn’t all right, it was going to be. It just needed a little more time.
* * *
“Dammit, Mother, you owe me!” shouted Jacqueline Claus, adopted daughter of Santa, heir to the North Pole and all its wonders, as she glared at the Snow Queen.
Her hands were balled so tightly into fists that her nails were biting into the skin of her palms, deep enough to make her bleed.
Her hair, normally perfect, was a tangled mess, studded with snowflakes.
They weren’t melting. She didn’t seem to have noticed.
“You had me because you were selfish enough to want a child, and then when I wasn’t perfectly what you expected you gave me away like I was a Christmas present!
” she shouted. “How does that define how I’m supposed to serve the season?
Because I was given freely once, I have to give freely forever?
Well, I refuse! I want my world, and my friends, and if I can’t have those things, I want her world, not some sort of ridiculous dinosaur storybook.
You need to let me into the Hall of Mirrors right now. I know you can hear me!”
“But she can’t,” said a new voice, half-familiar, half-strange.
A woman came walking out of the swirling snow, wearing a long white dress like a winding sheet, with hair that fell past her knees in a constantly shifting mix of blue, green, purple, and pink, all the northern lights forced into a single impossible dye job.
Jack couldn’t have described her face if she’d tried.
This woman was beyond such petty things as faces.
“I don’t want the Winter to change to fit the beliefs of a new world, so I’ve stopped it, for now,” said Aurora. “There’s no one awake but us. You want to make your case to me?”
Jack cringed away, then caught her breath and forced herself to straighten and lean assertively toward Aurora. “Do you have the power and authority to stop this?” she demanded. “Is that something you can do?”
“It would cost the Winter dearly,” said Aurora. “Tell me why I should, spirit of selflessness. Tell me how it wouldn’t be selfish to take this glorious dream away from the one who’s worked so hard to dream it. Tell me why our version of the story deserves to win.”
Jack looked at her, exhausted. “There is no selfless reason to want our world to be the one that wins,” she said. “There’s no way to phrase this that makes us look like the unquestioned heroes of the piece. Someone has to lose.”
“Then you lose,” said Aurora. “You sold your selfishness for Velveteen’s life, remember?”
Jack blinked. “Yes, but I wasn’t sure you did. No one else here does. I’ve been so alone since that happened.”
“You were being punished,” said Aurora. “You still are.”
Jack narrowed her eyes. “I have been a very, very, very good girl,” she said, with painful deliberateness.
“How could Santa’s child be anything else?”
Jack started to laugh. Aurora blinked at her, nonplussed.
Jack grinned, almost feral. “Did you start to forget the details of who I was before you revised me to suit your own standards for the story? I was my mother’s full heir.
I walked the entire Hall of Mirrors, glass by glass, and I’ve seen Jacqueline Claus turned selfish and sour, and I’ve seen self-serving Snow Princesses.
Where you come from doesn’t decide what kind of person you’re going to be, just angles you one way or another.
I can be very, very good and very, very selfish at the same time, but I have played by the rules of my holiday, and I demand my Christmas present. ”
Aurora frowned. “You don’t know what you’re asking,” she said.
“Don’t I?” Jack gestured at the corpse in the coffin in front of her.
“This is Tad. He’s a friend of Jackie’s—one of her best friends, really, because he treated her like a person from the very start, and he never tried to force her to be anything she wasn’t.
He died before she did, and I’m grateful for that.
It means someone didn’t get their head rewritten to take her away.
Only this new world comes with a new Tad.
He’s awake and alive and moving around out there in Dino-land, and Vel doesn’t know anything’s wrong, and as long as he’s here, the real Tad is never going to wake up. ”
“Is that all?” asked Aurora. “I can deal with that.”
She clapped her hands.
* * *
Velveteen held her breath as she ascended the three short steps to the stage, aware of Tag lurking in the wings behind her. If she looked back, she knew she’d see him there, claws raised in a gesture of encouragement, crest held high. He believed in her. He believed she could do this.
If he could believe in her, she could believe in herself.
Sparks and Vic were going to try to finish their patrol and make it for the afterparty; she could watch the smartest female she knew go up against the smartest male in the world, and no matter which one of them came out on top, it would be entertaining as hell for everyone else in the room.
And it was going to be such a fancy, big-deal party that she was sure the catering would be top notch.
Maybe they’d even serve mammal. She’d heard the little skittering things were delicious, and their surviving populations were recovering now that the plague was gone.
Forcing her own crest to stay smooth and not dislodge her headband, Velveteen stepped onto the stage.
The crowd cheered, emboldened by the sight of their hometown heroine.
She paused to look demurely down at her claws, then bobbed her tail and focused on them as much as the lights would allow.
They were yelling and roaring and trilling, a hundred vocalizations blending together into a beacon of acceptance and joy.
She waved, and the crowd got even louder.
Then, without warning, the mayor himself was right next to her, making her jump.
She managed to suppress the urge to snap at him, to bury sharp teeth in soft flesh and make him understand that she was not someone for him to sneak up on.
Her lips still twitched, pulling back enough to show the shine of her teeth as he put an arm around her narrow shoulders, his own crest standing high and tall.
“Velveteen!” he announced, as if he thought anyone here didn’t know.
The crowd cheered again, then quieted. “Our hometown heroine has come to meet with a very special guest, someone who I’m sure needs no introduction from someone as ordinary as your mayor.
So please join me in bidding a warm Portland hello to the one, the only, the incredible Doctor Darwin! ”