Page 148 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

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.”

“You know we still have ordinary police, right?” asked Polychrome, sounding honestly baffled. “They take care of the human crime, most of the time. The people who don’t need heroes. We’re only getting involved because I can see that some of you are packing heat, and I’d rather no one got shot today.”

“We know the laws,” said a biker. “You’re supers. You can’t touch us unless we have powers or somethin’.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” said Polychrome, shooting him an utterly terrifying-looking smile. “Who told you that?”

He paled. “W-what?”

“We’re allowed to fight unpowered individuals when they pose a threat to others on their power level. There are kids in this crowd. We’d be in more trouble if we didn’t fight you. Especially since we’ll have all these lovely witnesses to make sure nobody gets away with creatively editing the way things actually went down.”

“Yeah? Well if you’re so tough, why aren’t you hitting us yet? Huh? Unless you’re lying, and it’s not really allowed.”

“Or unless I was able to call a concerned citizen during my fight over here and found out how you were talking about my friend,” said Polychrome. “I don’t like it when people talk about my friend like her ethnicity is something to be ashamed of, or something that means she shouldn’t be a hero. I don’t like it at all.”

A rising scream from a nearby alley heralded Velveteen’s approach, surrounded by a squadron of teddy bears, fashion dolls, and tiny robots. As she ran, the figures on the push-and-play carousel in the little kiddie zone shook themselves free and lumbered after her, poles in their paws like quarterstaffs.