Velveteen/Velma Martinez

Skill: Anima powers (group of toys)
Form: Small silver locket

Basically, Joy can now command a population of toys. Aather's power cap still keeps that as 'roughly a person-sized pile'. Her canonical limit is over 1000 toys over an entire casino, and that was being drained by using her powers for a Very Complex Thing Elsewhere at the time, so she could probably do more.

(Basically Joy is a one-woman army when properly equipped.)

Form: [Memories are in the form of a small chocolate horse. One use.]

( It tasted like charcoal, but it was the first time anyone had cared enough to try, and so I ate every bite. )

Form: Comes in the form of a dollhouse chair, about 2" tall. You know you must attempt to sit in it to obtain your memory.

( Final count and analysis of the security recordings would show that there had been exactly nine hundred and two leprechauns within the confines of the Jolly Roger Casino when Velveteen cried havoc and let slip the dolls of war. )

What Joy Learned

This is another memory that shows Joy exactly how strong she can be without Aather's powercap. Context -- she has the memory after this -- might let her figure out that the tired feeling she has means she's keeping a second human alive on her powers, and she's still able to animate nearly 3,000 toys and direct them against a variety of threats. (This does take her full concentration, and she probably isn't thinking about individual toys as much as overall tactics: the toys have to have a high degree of autonomy for Velveteen to manage even a hundredth of those numbers.)

This also shows the peculiar overlap of anima powers and empathy. At the Oregon border, Vel sent all the toys that had homes home and took the abandoned ones in. In Vegas she can tell which ones 'belong' to someone invested enough in them that taking them would be wrong: she does animate souvenirs bought by tourists, but not ones belonging to kids.

I could write an essay on how I suspect a lot of Velveteen's powers are bounded by a mythology created when she-as-Velma was young, which is why she focuses on toys and the connection between them and their owners/playmates. Had she grown up in a culture where animuses (animi ?) had another form -- necromancers, makers of golems, roboticists -- her powers would likely have a different expression, since we know from canon she can control corpses, animate snowmen, and steal robotic automatons from their creators. Instead she has armies of GI Joes with My Little Pony air support.

(Canon also hints that Vel might be up there in 'most powerful current superheroes', but The Super Patriots Inc. constantly trained and treated her as a support hero partially so she wouldn't realize this, and partially because of spoilers.)

Come in the form of a crystal. Hold to view memory. Good for one use.

( The dinosaurs had been so pretty when they started to jump around. But that didn't matter now, because now she was In Big Trouble. The Biggest Trouble ever, maybe. )

Memories come in the form of tiny edible ginger gears in a packet tied with string. Four gears per baggg.

( What evil have I done, huh? I flunked community college because there kept being 'accidents' in my apartment complex. 'Accidents' that always happened right after I turned down another offer from Marketing. I couldn't hold a job because these people wouldn't leave me alone. So I disappeared! So I went into hiding! I didn't do it because I was evil, I did it because I wanted to be left alone. They've probably told you that you can quit when you turn eighteen, haven't they? They've probably told you you're going to get a walk-away-free pass, that you can go back to the private sector. You're on the inside! You know what it's like! How many have quit? Huh? )

What Joy Learned
If Joy takes this one after her memory with talking to Sparkle Bright, she might figure out that final push was from Sparks. Not too gentle, because Sparkle Bright's photon manipulation isn't exactly trained for fine manipulation, but it got the job done. At the time, she didn't really care what happened.

This also hints what her powers are like without a powercap. She was controlling any toy within a several mile radius and without thinking about what each was doing, only in the general sense of 'drive off the kids and free me so I can get back on the road'. And she could feel what was going on in that general sense.

Given Joy in Aather, the whole situation will be fucked up times infinity. She kicked the ass of nine teenaged superheroes; if she had been a villain, she could have killed one or more. And Marketing had sent them in alone (at first). None of the kids were over eighteen and they had no business fighting an adult woman who could be willing to use lethal force to escape. At the time, Vel was more focused on her own concerns, but the distance -- and the presence of so many teenagers in Aather -- will make Joy even angrier. How dare they put kids in danger like that, and how dare they promise these kids that they can have normal lives afterward when Marketing makes it clear that you don't walk away from The Super Patriots Inc. if they want you to stay.

Skills come in the form of little paper witches in your team color. Burn the paper witch to receive your skill

Vel can not only animate toys to fight, but to use them as scouts. She has to be able to see them to get their reports, like a general and an army scout, but she does understand what they perceive.

We don't know how that works either, since she's not so much seeing through their eyes as creating servants that know how to report what they observe through their plastic eyes and ears.

Memory form is a packet of jello mix! You'll have to make it at your cabin and wait for it to set . . . or, just lick the sugar. Do what you want. I'm a cat, not a cop.

( I'm not going to put my mask back on. And if I'm delusional for taking it off, you're delusional for thinking that you could fool me like this forever. )

What Joy Learned:
* Suddenly everything makes a lot more sense.
* Also, all the feels. Both in canon and Aather, Vel is a 'you do not mess with my friends' type of person. Somehow playing both her and her best friend to make them hate each other is even worse than the other things, perhaps because it caused a lot of actual pain. Plus... well, a lot of Joy's memories of Yelena at this point were of her as a kid, when she was pretty timid.

Memory form is a card. Trade with someone else to view their memory—then trade back to view yours. Single exchange use only.

( You seriously have no plan beyond ‘let’s go and hit them until the candy comes out.’ Because not all of them contain candy. Candy is not a default filling. )

So this fills in some information, as well as letting Joy know that, unless the Darkness grabbed her at exactly the wrong time, the problem was Dealt With.

Also she has an army. (Sadly, she does not have a Hulk, but neither does the other side.)

Form: A shot glass of water.

In canon, Velveteen can control some giant statues and such. In Aather, with powercap engaged, she's going to be limited to things her size or smaller. But she can now manage bigger things.