Page 104 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

Polychrome also turned, and paled as she saw her friend.

“Vel,” she said, in a carefully measured “I am not freaking out right now, but gosh I would really like it if I could” tone. “What’s wrong with your arm?”

Velveteen looked down at her arm, where long burgundy flight feathers were pushing their way through her otherwise bare skin. She looked back to Polychrome, unable to shake the feeling that there was something very wrong with the length and shape of her neck, and said, “I don’t know.”

The pain hit a moment later, great, rolling waves of agony that seemed to radiate from every cell of her body, creating an overlapping field of agonies so intense that she staggered away from Snow Princess, dropping to her knees. Victory Anna and Polychrome began to scream half a beat later, both falling to the floor with long feathers growing from their arms and shoulders.

Snow Princess looked on in horror, unable to quite understand what was happening to her friends, unsure of how she was meant to defend against it. The skin of her forearm prickled and she clasped her hand around it, feeling the sharp tips of pinfeathers press against her palm.

“No, thank you,” she gasped, and hurled one of her snow globes at the floor. It shattered on impact, a swirl of glitter and artificial snow rising all around her, finally wrapping around her like a bright ribbon. When it faded, she was gone, leaving only her feathered, agonized friends behind.

And the screams, of course. Nothing she could have done would have taken the screams away. Someone listening very closely might have picked up on the screams coming from outside as well. It was like the whole city was screaming, united by a sudden, unexpected agony.

And then, as quickly as it had begun, the screaming stopped, and all was silence.

* * *

It was a beautiful morning. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the nation’s premier superhero, Doctor Darwin himself, was going to address the city at noon. It was a special appearance, only announced the night before, and the city government had been in a tizzy since the news came in. Even the governor and her sister had come to attend, making the mayor of Portland even more uncomfortable than he would have been already. The city wasn’t equipped to host a truly A-tier superhero, or to deal with the villains his presence might attract.

Oh, they’d been moving up in the national power hierarchy since Velveteen chose to settle there, inevitably bringing her own toybox full of allies to haunt the city streets. Crime was down, tourism was up, and their three full-time heroines could be counted on to save the city at all hours of the day and night. But that didn’t mean they wanted to deal with the real top-tier supers, the ones who could crack planets or rearrange realities with a wiggle of their noses. Animating toys, slinging light, and making clever little machines was about the speed Portland was equipped to handle.

But Doctor Darwin was coming, whether the mayor liked it or not.

More concerningly, at least for one local superhero, was his stated intention to call his “close, personal friend” Velveteen up on stage with him. It was a ridiculous idea. They’d only met twice, at Super Protectors, Inc. functions, and she’d excused herself as quickly as she possibly could. Doctor Darwin was the only certified ultra-genius currently in circulation. His inventions always worked, unlike Victory Anna’s, whose inventions exploded about half the time (even when they didn’t have a power source that should have been capable of exploding). He had cured every known disease, eliminated global hunger, and was well on his way to treating the terrible plague that had wiped out eighty percent of the planet’s mammalian population. He was a true hero. She was…

She was a girl who brought toys to life. She was powerful, sure, and she’d learned to stop denying it, but she wasn’t great. Not like Doctor Darwin. Velveteen stared at herself in her dressing room mirror, unable to shake the feeling she’d been trying to understand since she woke up, the one that said everything about this was somehow wrong, and needed to be set right. But nothing she could see was actually wrong. Her scales were glossy, her feathers were smooth and well-oiled, glowing with the healthy sheen that couldn’t be faked, only fought for.

Someone knocked on her dressing room door. She looked around. “Yes?” she called.

“Fifteen minutes, Miss Velveteen,” said an unfamiliar voice.

She sighed. “I’ll be ready.”

The sound of footsteps moved away from her door, accompanied by the clicking of claws against the floor. One of the raptorial pages, then; they always tried to send the raptor-types to deal with her, probably because she’d been a borderline supervillain for so long before they got everything sorted out with her registration. Even though she’d never actually committed a villainous act—never hurt anyone, never committed any intentional crimes—enough supervillains had turned cannibal that there was some concern. But for some reason, they didn’t think she’d eat her own kind.

Velveteen turned back to the mirror, considering her reflection for a moment more—her bright golden eyes, her sharp teeth, her long, flexible neck—and reached for her headband, the one that mimicked a microraptor’s plumage. It wasn’t the branding she would have chosen for herself, but she was tightly enough associated with The Velveteen Microraptor by this stage in her career that leaving it off would only confuse and upset people, without rebranding her in the least.

She settled the headband securely atop her head and stood, tail naturally extending to provide a counterbalance to her neck and head. She was as ready as she was ever going to be, and once this little dromaeosaur and styracosaurus show was over, she could get back to her normal life.

All that crime wasn’t going to fight itself, after all.

* * *

The Princess was lounging comfortably on her throne when a swirl of glitter in the middle of the room caught her attention and resolved into Jacqueline Claus in her full Snow Princess costume, white-faced and panting slightly. Jacqueline had no sooner fully appeared than she collapsed to the floor in a crumpled heap.

“Jack!” yelped the Princess, throwing herself from her throne and rushing toward the fallen Winter avatar as quickly as her current ball gown would allow. She silently cursed the fact that she’d needed to do a meet and greet that afternoon as she ran: this would have been so much easier if she’d been in her customary T-shirt and jeans. “Honey, are you all right?”

It wasn’t as foolish of a question as it seemed. Jack could get over-tired when she used too many snow globes in a row, and this could just as easily be the result of some sort of excessive power use as anything else. Jack didn’t reply.

The Princess reached her and gathered her into her arms, swearing softly as she did. The girl was ice cold, like something dead except for the rise and fall of her chest and the heartbeat in the side of her throat. The Princess pulled her close against her chest, rocking back and forth and trying to will her own warmth into the other woman.

After several minutes Jack coughed and began trying to sit up under her own power. The Princess pushed her gingerly into a sitting position. “You all right now?” she asked. Jack nodded. “Good. Then you can tell me why in the Ever After you just dropped into my ballroom like you’d been picked up and thrown away by your faerie godmother. What happened, Jack? What’s wrong?”

Jack stared at her for a moment in what the Princess would have called abject terror, then inexplicably ran a hand over her bare forearm. Whatever she felt—or didn’t feel—there appeared to reassure her, because she relaxed slightly, leaning against the Princess, and said, “We were wrong, Cara.”

“Wrong about what, honey?”

“Wrong about Doctor Darwin. He’s not a joke. He’s a real, true, terrifying supervillain. He’s been kidnapping Velveteen and pulling all the energy from her dimensional transfers off of her, so that he could build some kind of big, weird machine. Even Torrey couldn’t figure out what it did, and she had at least thirty seconds to look at it. I’ve never seen her get stumped by anything she could actually see before, but this thing, it was a mystery. We went to his lab to rescue Vel, and she was strapped to a table, talking nonsense. But when I got her off the table, she started screaming and growing feathers from her arms. Her hair was just starting to fall out when it began to happen to the rest of us.” She paused then, reaching up to almost frantically touch her own hair, like she was reassuring herself that it still existed. “When the feathers started breaking through the skin on my arm, I ran. I ran here. I didn’t want to go back to the North Pole when I didn’t know what was happening, and I thought…I thought you’d want to know.”