Page 66 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“Where is she?” demanded Velveteen, scrambling to her feet. “Give her back!”

“She forced us into visibility,” said another voice. Velveteen turned. A man stood behind her, dressed similarly to the woman, with hair the color of pomegranate seeds in the sunlight and an hourglass dangling from his belt. “It took everything she had. She’s falling, currently. She’ll fall forever, if you don’t make your case.”

“What?” Velveteen looked back and forth between the pair, finally taking a step backward, so that she could watch them both at the same time. “Who are you? Where am I?”

“You don’t ask who you are,” said the woman. “That’s interesting. Are you that confident in yourself, that you don’t need to ask who you are?”

“My name is Velveteen. I’m a superhero, and I’m here because Santa Claus told me that if I went through a door hidden in a mirror, I could find a way to fix the world.” Velveteen paused. “Okay, when I say it like that, it sounds sort of stupid, I’ll admit. But it’s the truth.”

“All the identities you could have claimed, and that’s the one you’re going to go with,” said the man. He took a step toward the woman, and his clothing changed, melting into 1920s American finery. His hourglass became a pocket watch. “Superhero. Super. You don’t want to be ordinary.”

“For me, this is ordinary,” said Velveteen. The woman still matched the man. She hadn’t seen her change. This was all getting a little cosmic for her tastes, and she really just wanted someone to hit. “Where am I?”

“Where the Spirit of Giving sent you,” said the woman. “I am Ananke, and this is Chronos.”

“We’re basically the template off which you were struck,” said the man—Chronos. He smiled thinly. “I’m a chronopath.”

“And I’m a precognitive strong enough to adjust the world to fit the futures I see,” said Ananke. “I see that you are still confused. Remember when you had your power level assessed?”

“Yes,” said Velveteen warily.

“They told you the scale went to five.”

“Yes.”

Chronos smiled. “We’re the tens.”

“…oh,” said Velveteen, after a horrified pause. “So you’re the reason everything is so fucked-up.”

“We’re not gods,” said Ananke. “We’re just not equipped to live in the world the rest of you inhabit. We’ll break it simply by trying to walk in it like we belong there. So we live here, where things do as we tell them, and every so often someone from the ‘real’ world will show up and tell us that things have gotten out of hand.”

“So say the word, little hero,” said Chronos. “We can put it all back in the bottle for another fifty years. No more heroes, no more villains. You’ll be free.”

Velveteen jumped. “What? Wait—what? That’s not why I’m here.”

Chronos looked bemused. “But that’s always why you’re here. You can only come once, you little mortal heroes, so that’s always what you ask for.”

“No! I like being a superhero. Maybe there was a time when I didn’t, but I like who I am. I like my friends. If I weren’t a superhero, I wouldn’t know Jackie, or Torrey, or anybody. We would never have met. So no, I don’t want the powers to go away. I just want to go back three years and keep everything from going wrong.”

“If that’s all—” Chronos reached for his watch.

It was too easy. Velveteen glanced toward Ananke, who was shaking her head, very slightly.

She was missing something.

“Wait!” she cried. Chronos stopped. “If we go back three years, am I going to remember this?”

“No,” he said.

“So it’s all going to happen exactly the same way.”

“Yes.”

“But I won’t be able to come back here. We’ll be stuck with it.”

He sighed, pouting like a child who had just been cheated out of a great prank. “Yes,” he said.

“Is there another way?”