Page 52 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

What changed?

Some scholars of superhuman history believe that we did, alongside the rest of humanity. They point to gaps in the historical record, to disappearances that were never solved, assassinations in locked rooms, and mysterious plagues known only from the graves they left behind, and cite them as obvious proof that history has been rewritten. Chronopaths and continuity manipulators are among the rarest of the superhuman types: most revise themselves out of existence before finishing high school, while others are known only by the holes they leave behind.

It would not be hard, they argue, for a sufficiently powerful chronopath to rewind the world every time superhumans were revealed to the public, erasing their reality from the collective consciousness. By doing this over the course of centuries, it would be possible to prevent mankind from ever realizing its full potential.

The question then becomes why? And if the answer is a good one, why has it ceased? Why has the modern age been allowed to grow ripe with heroes and villains, with superhumans of a hundred different stripes, sometimes seeming to darken the skies as they pass by overhead? If some cosmic force or secret organization has dedicated this much time to keeping the greater population ignorant of the existence of superpowers, what would make them stop?

Is our world a soap bubble, waiting for the day when the secret masters of all decide that we need to be cast back into ignorance? Most importantly of all…is there anything we can do to stop it?

* * *

For Polychrome and Action Dude, the transit through the swirling snow was familiar, even comforting; they had been taking this trip, through this mechanism, since they were children, and knew that only good things waited for them on the other side. For Victory Anna, it was a tooth-grindingly wrong reminder of how much she had lost when her home reality was destroyed; the world might have accepted her as a part of it, but the Seasons never would. That was only right. Something had to remember that she didn’t belong here, if only to reassure her that she was not, in fact, mad.

For Velveteen, it was all wrong. Traveling with Jackie wasn’t a swirl of warm snow and the scent of cocoa. It was a burst of freezing cold, like chewing peppermint gum with your entire body. It was mint and tingling brightness, that first slap of chill before the winter really settled any deeper than the skin. It was invigorating, it was impossible to ignore, and it was not a warm embrace and the scent of hot chocolate. This was not the way things were supposed to be. This was wrong.

When the snow fell, they were standing in a snowbank. Well. Most of them were standing in a snowbank. Yelena was hovering a foot or so above it, the air around her lit up like the Northern Lights. Just the sight of them was enough to make Vel’s skin crawl. Torrey was standing primly atop the snow, her holiday-themed costume change having come with a pair of snowshoes. And Aaron…

Aaron was sitting down in the snow, his weight resting on his hands and his face turned toward the sky, laughing helplessly. Unlike the rest of them, the passage hadn’t dressed him in a variation on his normal costume (which was probably reassuring; she’d always been a little weirded-out seeing her Jewish teammate and boyfriend dressed head to toe in Christmas colors, instead of something blue and white and culturally appropriate). Instead, he was wearing dark blue ski pants and an ugly holiday sweater stitched in snowflakes, stars, and snowmen wearing ironic beanies.

“Oh, how delightful,” said Torrey dryly. “The poor man’s snapped under the strain. Well, I never liked him anyway, and our time here is inherently short, due to the strain I place upon our environs. I say we leave him for the wolves.”

“That’s not kind to the wolves,” said Yelena. Her own costume was still skin-tight, but was no longer midnight black: instead, auroras climbed from her ankles to her knees, and from her elbows to her wrists, while her normally rainbow sash was an ever-changing strip of winter sky.

“No one is getting left to the wolves,” snapped Vel, and knelt next to Aaron, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Hey. You okay?”

“I’m here,” he said, and beamed at her. “You look great. I love it when you have holly in your hair.”

Velveteen resisted the urge to reach up and feel what Winter had done to her this time. She had skin, not snow; she could feel her heart beating. That was good enough for her. “Yes, good, you know where you are. We sort of rode a magic snow globe to get here, and that sounds weird even to me. But are you okay?”

“I haven’t been here since I let them drive you away,” he said, and grabbed her, hauling her down into the snowbank with him. It was a child’s embrace, giddy and joyous and utterly platonic. Velveteen squeaked before she was sprawling in the snow. He didn’t let her go. “Santa didn’t let any of us come to visit after Marketing drove you away. We were all on the Naughty List.”

“What in the world is a ‘Naughty List’?” demanded Torrey.

“Papa keeps watch over all the children in the world, and makes records of whether they’ve been naughty or nice,” said Jack serenely. “Nice kids get a genuine collectable North Pole toy on the winter holiday most closely aligned with their personal belief systems. A lot of them wind up getting sold on eBay. There was a Jacqueline Frost doll one year. She goes for about six hundred dollars mint in box.” All four of her companions were staring at her by the time she finished speaking. She blinked. “What?”

“I do not even know where to begin,” said Torrey slowly. “Shall we begin with a Snowfather who would spy upon the world’s children, watching them at their most vulnerable? Or with the concept of tracking one’s own collectable action figures via Internet auction sites? Truly, I’m not sure which is the more disturbing.”

“How have you been living in this world for three years without at least getting the basics behind Christmas?” Vel sat up in the snowbank. Snow clung to the rabbit ears attached to her headband, giving her a comically jaunty air. “Honestly, Lena, I thought you’d have her singing carols by now.”

“We’ve been busy.” Yelena offered her hands to Vel and Aaron. “Besides, Santa is the secular side of the holiday, and I really didn’t feel like enduring another of her rants on the evils of monotheism just so she’d understand why Jack traveled by snow globe. This is Winter, Santa fills the same role as the Snowfather, and that was good enough.”

“I’m finally back at the North Pole,” said Aaron, smiling beatifically as he allowed Yelena to pull him out of the snow bank. “I’m finally back on the Nice List.”

“Yeah, well, that makes one of us,” said Vel, getting her own feet back under herself before she let go of Yelena. She dusted the snow off of her skirt. “The rest of you might want to stay here. I’m about to get myself permanently filed under ‘Naughty.’” With that, she went stalking off across the frozen field, heading for the distant lights of Santa’s Village.

The others watched her go in silence for a long moment before Yelena sighed, said, “She’s going to get her ass kicked,” and launched herself into the air. She soared after the angry animus, leaving a trail of rainbows behind her.

“On it,” said Aaron, and took off, flying after Yelena. Jack and Torrey exchanged a look.

“Some people need more gravity,” said Jack. Torrey laughed, and the pair followed their friends, on foot, through the snow.

* * *

Velveteen waved her hands as she walked, almost without thinking about it. Snow animals formed out of the drifts around her, shaking themselves to life and running after her. By the time she reached the edge of the village, she was accompanied by a menagerie of frozen beasts. They ranged out behind her in ascending order of size: bunnies and squirrels at the front, wolves and bobcats in the next rank, and at the back, snow lions and snow yeti and great bears with icicles for teeth. The elves and penguins saw her coming and scattered, running for their cheerful little houses and slamming the doors behind them.

Silence fell. In Santa’s Village, normally the cheeriest place in the Seasonal Lands, nothing moved. No carols played. Everything was still except for the chest of one velvet-clad animus, which rose and fell with the force of her labored breathing.

“Come out and face me, old man!” she yelled. The anguish in her voice was enough to crack glass, here where the happiest part of the holiday was meant to reside. “You owe me that much! You owe me…you owe me that.”