Page 152 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“No,” said Ananke without hesitation. Then she scowled. “Chronos, you know better than to ask me questions. Once I’ve spoken the answers into the world, they’re fixed. Our purpose is ended.”

“Maybe that’s what I was hoping for,” he said. “We could have been sitting here for centuries, waiting for a hero to come and ask us to take it all away, and now we don’t have to do that if we don’t want to. Now we have choices again.”

Ananke scoffed. “What are we supposed to do with choices?” she asked. “It’s been so long since I had to choose anything beyond breakfast that I don’t think I even know how to do that anymore. At least waiting would have been something to do.”

“We’ll think of something,” said Chronos. “But the heroes have made their choice, and now they get to live with it, whatever that’s going to mean. What happens next?”

Ananke slowly, deliberately picked up her glass, taking a sip of the liquid inside. Her eyes dipped half-closed as she swallowed, spices that had been lost or so transformed by cultivation as to be forgotten coating her tongue in the familiar taste of home. “For who, old friend?”

“For everyone,” he said.

“Ah. Asking the complicated questions today, aren’t we? Free will is still at play. Things could go any number of ways from here, but one thing is fixed and true: in all of them, humanity will retain the powers they have finally decided to claim. The age of men is ended. The age of heroes is begun.”

“So even you can’t speak a happy ending into being?”

“Not without taking away their choices on the road from here to there. I can speak the outlines of the universe without pinning their lives down like butterflies under glass. And yes, the outlines of the universe will define the happy endings they can pursue, but saying that imposes on their free will is like saying that gravity and the progression of linear time are unfair restrictions. I’m quite willing to build walls for them to hurl themselves against. I’m not willing to define their days on the level a happy ending would require. I haven’t spent so much of my life serving humankind and helping them make their own choices just to turn around now and say they don’t get any more choices after this.”

Chronos smiled. “I’m glad to see you remember why we’re here,” he said.

“So what now?”

“Time is my toy, even as the future is yours,” he said. “Now we see where those choices might yet lead them.”

The surface of the table between them brightened with the golden-purple light of a solar flare breaking through the heliosphere, and the air around them darkened, then lit up with silvered stars as the glass began to play out one possible future.

Maybe…

* * *

No one truly knows where superpowers come from, or why they first began to appear. Some theologians believe the appearance of superpowers in the human population marked the end of the age of gods, a time when beings more powerful than even the most powerful of heroes created life out of nothingness, exhausting themselves in the process. When they died, their power passed into the worlds they had created, and began, gradually, to express itself in their successors. Superpowers, they would argue, are like heavy metals, inevitably accumulating at the top of the food chain.

There is no conclusive way to identify the first superhumans to arise, but with the perspective of our current understanding, we may step back and indicate the first two to make a lasting impact on the world: Chronos, a chronopath arising from the distant Hebrides, and Ananke, a Cycladic precognitive so powerful that once she spoke a future aloud, it became fixed and immutable. Their power distorted the world around them, causing them to realize independently that they needed to retreat from their peoples if they wanted to protect them.

How their powers combined to create their own pocket reality is unclear, and may be traced back to rumors that they began their quest for solitude in the company of a full team of heroes, losing them along the way to claiming their prize: a realm outside of reality, where they could observe the world without intruding on it…save when the world intruded on them.

For thousands of years, superpowers continued to manifest themselves in the world, only to vanish with no apparent cause after a generation, two at the most. This has been traced back to superpowered individuals making their way to Chronos and Ananke and being asked whether they thought humanity was ready. Again and again, the ones asked in this manner have answered no. No, humanity wasn’t ready for that kind of power; no, humanity wasn’t responsible enough.

So for thousands of years, the question was a cycle, unable to close, unable to move forward. Until, finally, Velma “Velveteen” Martinez answered in the affirmative, and things began to unwind. The powers, which had always been something that ebbed and surged, were here to stay.

The world, at last, was changing.

* * *

Three years…

Polychrome, who was not on the board of The Super Patriots, Inc., but had nonetheless somehow become their acting CEO, leaned back in what had become her chair, arcs of multi-colored light dancing across her fingers. Firecracker ignored her, continuing to drone on about merchandise and market shares, two things Polychrome could only vaguely remember caring about, in another lifetime, before she’d figured out that this was all bullshit.

Important bullshit, to be sure: without merchandise and licensing deals, they wouldn’t be able to afford to keep the corporation functional, and the superhumans of the United States needed them to stay functional. Since the company stopped effectively purchasing children when their powers manifested, they were out in the world, having childhoods, interacting with normal kids. That meant higher insurance rates for their parents, and payouts from the general superhuman damages fund to the cities where they lived. It meant stationing therapists and psychiatrists with backgrounds in superhuman trauma in the relevant municipalities, and providing support for parents suddenly faced with challenges they had never expected. Keeping the kids in the world was a lot more expensive than any of them had fully understood. The kids needed to be supported if they were going to stay with their families, and supporting them meant money, and money meant merchandising deals.

Firecracker had proven to be remarkably skilled at merchandising and marketing, finding gaps in the relentless campaigns Marketing already had in motion. Under her guidance, The Super Patriots had branched into crafts and cosmetics, lingerie and dog toys, turning superheroics into one of the nation’s fastest-growing lifestyle brands. It was now possible for people to decorate their homes entirely in their favorite heroes, from the carpeting on up.

Remarkably, this had helped the corporation’s public image. It was apparently difficult to stay angry at your child’s favorite breakfast cereal or your dog’s favorite chewy toy. It also helped soothe the fears of parents who still expected lawyers to come knocking on the front door with a writ of custody allowing them to seize any superpowered minors on the property. They weren’t in that business anymore. They were never going to be in that business again.

Victory Anna had even stopped threatening to repurpose the pipes in the main building. Really, they were coming remarkably close to finished with the long, hard work of repairing the damage that had been done by the previous management. Both the main and junior teams were functioning well, as were the various satellite teams. They were doing good work.

They were doing good.

Firecracker finished her presentation to pleased noises from the table, Jack O’Lope and American Dream asking several quick, incisive questions while the pyrokinetic was still standing next to her vidscreen. Firecracker shot Polychrome a look of mildly exasperated desperation. Polychrome clapped her hands.