Page 146 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“We don’t have a government, we have a badly designed game show,” muttered Tag.

“The American Dream was never about government,” said the American Dream cheerfully. “It was about a good life and a fair deal. It gets corrupted sometimes, and American exceptionalism has a nasty tendency to get bundled in, but the real dream was just safety and freedom, and it was never offered equally to everyone, even though it should have been. I try to be as balanced as I can, when the choice is up to me.”

“And right now, you’re choosing to make this whole thing just…go away?” Velveteen looked at her dubiously. “Forgive me if that sounds too good to be true.”

“You gave us the company,” said the American Dream. “You made it so we could make our own futures, and not just dance to Supermodel’s tune. That’s worth a lot. You gave us our freedom. That’s worth everything. So this is really the least I can do.”

“Accept the kindness, and let us go home,” said Victory Anna. “I tire of this sterile monument to the mediocre.”

“Uh, fuck you, too,” said the American Dream.

“I always knew you wouldn’t stay,” said Uncertainty. “But it was important that you be given the opportunity to make the choice for yourself. Again.”

“Why?” asked Velveteen.

In answer, he only smiled and walked away, leaving them to walk to Dotty Gale and take her hands entirely on their own, Velveteen holding her left, Tag her right, and then Victory Anna and Polychrome joining hands with them, closing the circle. Dotty clicked her heels together, and the little group was gone.

After all the trouble they hadn’t asked for, Velveteen and her friends were going back where they belonged.

VELVETEEN vs. Normalcy

Giant mutant bats were attacking Portland. As a statement, the situation was simple. As an evolving situation, it was anything but. They had appeared shortly after dusk three nights before, dropping out of the sky like stones, if stones had grasping talons they could use to catch themselves on eaves and tree branches before they hit the ground. At first, the people of Portland—the ones who were still wandering the streets at sunset, and thus in a position to see the bats—had been clever enough to give them a wide berth. Then, inevitably, a few people who thought rabies was a government conspiracy intended to keep them from cuddling the “sky puppies” had decided to get up close and personal.

Which was how those same people had learned that rabies was a secondary consideration to “giant bat with a mouth full of very sharp teeth and clear ideas about personal space.” Several of them were no longer in a position to worry about infection. Several of them were no longer in a position to worry about anything.

At least none of the people who’d died of giant bat to the throat had gotten back up and turned into bats in their own right. That proved this was an invasion of giant bats, not giant werebats, and under the circumstances, that was definitely the better option. No one needed to grow wings and fangs and start eating the neighbors.

During the day, the bats disappeared to some unknown location, but they came back as soon as the sun went down, arraying themselves around the city like strange blossoms on some terrible hanging vine. Portland was now effectively under a curfew, with all sensible people getting inside as soon as the sunlight began to dim. The bats attacked anything that moved, from cars and buses to pedestrians and wild dogs. The city’s coyote population was definitely taking a hit, and most of the larger raccoons were already gone.

Velveteen, crouching on the edge of an office building roof and watching the bats take short, gliding flights between the buildings below her, couldn’t help but wonder when she had so effectively abandoned the label of “sensible.” There was a time when she would have been comfortably wrapped in a plush bathrobe and nestled down in the cushions of her couch, letting the teddy bears bring her cheese puffs and watching the carnage unfolding on the news. Instead, she was out on the streets, ready to kick the carnage off on her home ground.

“Fucked-up times fifty,” she muttered, pulling a handful of small plastic birds from her belt pouch. Four of them fit comfortably in her palm, bright colored in a way even real birds—not renowned for their subtlety—would have found off-putting, with big, human-esque eyes and long black eyelashes. In case that wasn’t enough proof that they’d been designed by someone who had never actually seen a bird, they all had long, brushable tails made of synthetic rainbow hair. They were beautiful. They were impractical. But most importantly, they could fly, and didn’t look like anything that was likely to be a normal part of a giant mutant bat’s diet.

(“Will the enemy eat it?” wasn’t normally a consideration when using actual toys for reconnaissance, but maybe it should have been. Her first volley of spies had been army toys, black helicopters designed to look sleek and intimidating, when not blending into the shadows around them. And they’d been very good at their jobs, right up until they encountered enemies who operated more by echolocation than by eyesight. Their shapes and coloring made them seem like regular bats to the giant bats, and all she could do now was hope that the bats who’d eaten her spy planes were going to get indigestion for their troubles.)

She tossed the birds into the air, and they began to flap their wings, frantically forcing their utterly un-aerodynamic designs into something that could actually fly. Their sculpts didn’t change at all, of course, but as vitality spread from her to them, they suddenly became airborne.

“Colorful birds are supposed to be the Princess’s gig,” she muttered, and waved a hand in the direction of the cluster of bats she’d been observing for the past hour. “Go over there, see if you can figure out anything about them, come back here and tell me everything.”

The plastic birds chirped obligingly and flew off toward the bats, leaving Velveteen to watch. Nothing could mistake those birds as natural, or edible. They’d come back, and she’d know what was going on, and⁠—

Little plastic birds screamed as they were snatched out of the air and shoved into toothy muzzles, chomped down with all the enthusiasm a giant mutant bat could muster. In a matter of seconds, her spies were gone, down the gullets of the bats.

Velveteen swore.

Unlike the people of Portland, she had a healthy respect for rabies, and when she’d tried to get close to the bats herself, they’d lunged in a very rabies-implying manner. Polychrome and Victory Anna were on the other side of town, handling the boring but essential task of helping people getting off work make it from their offices to the bus stop and then home.

If it had been up to Vel, all businesses would have been closing by six at the latest for the duration of the bat situation (invasion? Infestation? Things were confusing enough without trying to put a name on them), but she wasn’t in charge, and capitalism was perfectly happy to feed a few workers to mutant bats in order to keep profits high. She didn’t really see how dead employees helped the bottom line, but she was just a superhero, after all. Pol and Victory Anna had the business district, Tag had the schools, and she?

She had the place where the high rises of downtown overlooked the homes and small businesses of suburbia, which spread right up into the edges of that same downtown, creating a steep drop-off that was perfect for a superhero who couldn’t fly unassisted to use as a vantage point. She had a dwindling assortment of flying toys, and a non-dwindling assortment of monstrous bats.

She also had a headache.

The bats, bellies full of plastic debris, were looking in her direction. Swearing again, she moved to put herself behind an air conditioning unit, counting on its vibrations to confuse their echolocation.

She was gonna need some bigger toys.

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