VELVETEEN vs. Normalcy #2
Neither of those things sounded like a good time.
So she ran as hard and as fast as she could, hoping her flight would bring her to either her team, or something with a face.
The limitations on her powers were strange and likely self-induced, some deeply-buried function of her wounded inner child’s refusal to let go of what little control she’d been able to seize.
That didn’t make them less real. Without a face to focus on, she was frankly and fantastically fucked.
The bats continued to screech and swoop, getting closer with every pass. It wasn’t going to be long before they made contact, and “near miss” was replaced by “hit” in the vocabulary of her night. Mind racing, Velveteen hunched over and ran as fast as she could.
The air grew suddenly icy cold, and one of the bats screamed, a sound that echoed in the night like a wail from beyond the grave. The air kept getting colder, and two more bats made the same sound, even as the wind from their wings passing close over her head receded.
Velveteen stopped, slowed, and turned to look back.
Several bats were flat on the roof behind her, wings frozen inside solid shells of ice.
The remaining bats were flapping frantically as they fled into the distance.
And a blue-skinned woman in a figure skating uniform was standing on the roof, studying her iced-over fingernails with the vague disinterest of a woman who knew she looked good, even if she had ice crystals forming in her hair.
Sighing with relief, Velveteen took a step toward her. “Jackie,” she said.
“You coulda called, you know,” said Jackie, dropping her hand and giving Velveteen a stern look. “I’m not fragile just because I didn’t exist for a while. That would be ridiculous.”
“Honestly, I’m just not used to having you back on the resource list,” said Velveteen. “Jacqueline was useful under the right circumstances, but she was never a solid bruiser the way you can be. I’ll call sooner next time, I promise.”
“You better,” said Jackie, who was recovering from a near-terminal attack of not technically existing.
It was a rare condition, virtually unique to superhumans, and unlike most of its victims, she had chosen to resume her life as if she’d been there the whole time.
For her friends and family, all of whom remembered the woman who’d replaced her, it had been jarring and disorienting.
For Jackie herself, it had been an endless source of frustration, as she found friends not calling and adventures being missed.
She looked at Velveteen, not quite glaring, and waited.
Velveteen, who vaguely remembered the meaning behind that expression, frowned thoughtfully. “Jackie, do you know something about these bats?”
“Ding ding ding and the bunny-girl supreme takes the prize! Jackie, tell her what she’s won,” said Jackie, waving her hands in the air like a children’s TV show host. “Well, Jackie, it looks like she’s won the location of the tear in the dimensional fabric about half a mile above the city, through which giant bats are flying in from an alternate version of Portland. ”
“What, on the bat planet?”
“Something like that.”
Velveteen paused. “You were in the neighborhood because you were trying to find the tear, weren’t you?”
“Some of the mirrors got cracked when Aurora pulled her whole ‘let’s teach the selfish Spirit of the Season a lesson about never being selfless for any reason’ stunt, and Mom’s still having trouble looking at me directly, so I’ve been on crack duty,” said Jackie, with a shrug.
“This one’s been tricky to pin down, but I know where it is now, and I think you can help me fix it, Miss Animus. ”
“Oh, really.” Velveteen crossed her arms. “And how am I going to do that?”
“Do you know how to sew?”
* * *
Less than an hour later, Polychrome was holding Velveteen in a bridal carry while she mimed stiching a tear.
The hot air balloon shaped like a jolly cartoon seamstress that Tag had created for her mirrored her motions, but with each pass of the balloon’s inflatable needle, another strand of shimmering rainbow light was left behind, and the black slash in the sky that had been extruding bats for the past several days got a little smaller, a little more repaired.
Jackie and Victory Anna were on bat duty, blasting them out of the sky whenever they tried to swarm, while Tag rode in the basket of his balloon, marker in hand, making constant small corrections and repairs.
Anything to keep her in the air. And Velveteen focused, pouring energy into the balloon to keep the repair going.
There was no fanfare when the rift was finally sealed: just a sound like someone closing the lid on a Tupperware container, and furious screeches from the bats still on the wrong side of the dimensional barrier. Jackie and Victory Anna tore into them, cackling wildly.
Polychrome rotated to face the pair, blinking. Velveteen just smiled.
“Violence is often the answer,” she said.
And the bats screamed.
* * *
Portland recovered quickly from the bat incident.
Once they were gone, it was almost like they’d never been there to begin with.
Everyone got down to the pleasant business of a Portland summer: farmer’s markets, garage sales, and occasionally watching members of the city’s superhero population fly by overhead, reminding them all that they were protected from superpowered threats.
What they were not, sadly, protected from were all-too-human threats, like the large gang of bikers who rode into town on a June morning, knocking over several stalls at the downtown farmer’s market.
They dismounted, some of them laughing as they bent to scoop shattered fruit off the ground and lick it from their fingers.
“Someone needs to pay for that!” shouted one of the vendors.
Several bikers turned in his direction. One of them laughed.
“No, see, we’re here to help,” he said. “We figure your town could use a little protection, what with the trash you have pretending to take care of the place.”
“Trash?” asked another vendor, taking a step back as she recognized the danger they were potentially all in.
“You got a Mexican in a leotard running around like she owns the city, two lesbos backing her up, and a little pansy-boy with a can of spray-paint? That’s not a hero team. That’s the setup to a really awful punchline.”
“Velveteen beat The Super Patriots!” said a young girl in a brown canvas dress that was probably meant to invoke the heroine in question’s most commonly seen uniform. “She’s the toughest hero in the whole world!”
“She’s still a dirty little wanna-be who needs to leave the hero work to the people who were made for it,” said the biker leader. “You need the right heroes. You need the white heroes. You need us.”
The people at the farmer’s market were not, by and large, heroes in their own right.
They looked around at each other, some stepping in front of friends and neighbors with skin darker than a duck’s egg, others moving to gather their valuables as they prepared to run.
Part of the point of having a city super team was not needing to have fights like this.
Was being able to step back and let the professionals handle it.
The professionals, who were already on their way thanks to one of the businesses overlooking the square having had the good sense to hit the silent alarm, knew the people they protected would be waiting to be saved rather than putting themselves into harm’s way, and they were hurrying as fast as they could.
The report had been sketchy at best, and a little incoherent.
“There’s these guys in leather? On motorcycles?
And I know bikers aren’t all bad, but these ones crashed right into the middle of the farmer’s market and they look like they’re yelling at people, and most of them have shaved heads and I don’t know something about them just looks sort of scary to me. ”
(Velveteen, who had known the history of Portland as a whites-only city before she settled down there, had sighed and asked, with the excruciating patience of a woman who’d been disappointed before and fully expected to be disappointed again, what the woman had meant by “looks sort of scary.” And when she’d answered, “They’re all white, and something about that’s not right,” Velveteen had really started to worry.)
Polychrome blasted ahead, outpacing even Victory Anna’s latest flying machine, and reached the square while the others were still several blocks behind.
Daintily, she came in for a landing, balancing her weight ballerina-like on a single toe before letting her feet fall flat to the ground.
The bikers, who were indeed all white, wearing black leather, and heavily tattooed in a way that spoke of hard liquor and bad decisions more than to any aesthetic ideals, watched her.
She brushed her hands together like she was trying to kick a layer of dust off her palms. A cloud of glitter fell instead, sparkling as it drifted toward the ground. “Is there a problem, gentlemen?”
“Yeah,” shouted a biker toward the back. “Someone needs to fuck the lesbian out of you.”
Polychrome turned a flat look in his direction. “Really?” she asked. “Is that the best you can do? Remember, I was America’s sweetheart for years. I was engaged to Action Dude. If a little dick could convince me to switch teams, it would have happened a long time ago.”
Several of the bikers snickered. Polychrome folded her arms.
“As to the rest of you,” she said. “I don’t think I need to tell you that we don’t want any trouble. Portland is a good city. We have heroes keeping things running smoothly. Whatever brand of chaos you’re trying to market, I’d appreciate it if you’d just run on down the road.”
“And we’d appreciate it if you’d get the fuck out of Dodge,” snapped the lead biker. “We’re here to be the strong hand this city needs.”