Memory #27: Leprechaun hunting
Jan. 3rd, 2014 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunny_earsForm: Comes in the form of a dollhouse chair, about 2" tall. You know you must attempt to sit in it to obtain your memory.
Sparks and Jackie are trying to dissuade Vel from doing something, and that something is trying to trade favors with Vegas, which is the closest thing to neutral ground in the US superhero industry. Vegas's supers look after themselves. Princess gives her a lift to city limits, which makes Vel both airsick and heatsick as she walks to the strip. Plus, this is from the period of time when she's keeping Tad alive via her powers, so her reserves are generally down.
She eventually makes it to the Jolly Roger Casino, which is... well, a Vegas Casino, only pirate themed. She meets a super named Showgirl (whose costume is what one would expect from the name). Vel considers the number of animatronics and gift-store plushies and concludes that anyone trying foul play against her would be incredibly stupid, so goes with her to meet a 'Fortunate Son'.
She gets a tour, and then shown to the backrooms, which are much less full of stuff she can weaponize. She and Fortunate Son banter a bit, and she calls his bluff -- luck powers can't possibly make her life worse, and they need her for something. Which turns out to be leprechauns hiding among the toys and animatronics and messing with the casino's luck (and preventing luck-based supers from targeting them). Apparently there's a supervillain which can summon them from Spring. Vel is all 'okay, what's in it for me'.
Then Dame Fortuna, Fortunate Son's mom, shows up and makes Vel an offer of information she can't turn down: the Secret History of the Super Patriots Inc. and the current location of the only (other) surviving member, Jolly Roger.
So Vel summons the toys (two thousand, seven hundred, and eight) that aren't with kids and proceeds to kick the ass of anything toy-like that doesn't come when she calls it. She then fainted onto a cushion of stuffed animals.
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.)
Sparks and Jackie are trying to dissuade Vel from doing something, and that something is trying to trade favors with Vegas, which is the closest thing to neutral ground in the US superhero industry. Vegas's supers look after themselves. Princess gives her a lift to city limits, which makes Vel both airsick and heatsick as she walks to the strip. Plus, this is from the period of time when she's keeping Tad alive via her powers, so her reserves are generally down.
She eventually makes it to the Jolly Roger Casino, which is... well, a Vegas Casino, only pirate themed. She meets a super named Showgirl (whose costume is what one would expect from the name). Vel considers the number of animatronics and gift-store plushies and concludes that anyone trying foul play against her would be incredibly stupid, so goes with her to meet a 'Fortunate Son'.
She gets a tour, and then shown to the backrooms, which are much less full of stuff she can weaponize. She and Fortunate Son banter a bit, and she calls his bluff -- luck powers can't possibly make her life worse, and they need her for something. Which turns out to be leprechauns hiding among the toys and animatronics and messing with the casino's luck (and preventing luck-based supers from targeting them). Apparently there's a supervillain which can summon them from Spring. Vel is all 'okay, what's in it for me'.
Then Dame Fortuna, Fortunate Son's mom, shows up and makes Vel an offer of information she can't turn down: the Secret History of the Super Patriots Inc. and the current location of the only (other) surviving member, Jolly Roger.
So Vel summons the toys (two thousand, seven hundred, and eight) that aren't with kids and proceeds to kick the ass of anything toy-like that doesn't come when she calls it. She then fainted onto a cushion of stuffed animals.
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.)