Velveteen vs. the Junior Super Patriots Read Online Free PDF

ever seen before. For one thing, it was black. Not dark brown; not almost black; black, like the deepest pit of a supervillain’s loveless heart.
    Velma shook herself. One little television special, a flashback, and a blackmail threat, and she was falling back into the dangerous habit of thinking in metaphors. That way lay capes and action figures and talk show appearances. Better to think in literal terms, and leave the shitty poetry for the comic books.
    The coffee was black.
    “Where did you say these beans were from?” Velma asked dubiously, eying the pot as Cyndi reverently began pouring its contents into the Midnight Bean Society’s “special mugs.” They appeared to be made of obsidian, and were even blacker than the coffee. Probably not a good sign.
    “Oh, they’re specially cultured in the natural caverns beneath an Aztec temple and sacred burial ground,” chirped Cyndi.
    Velma sighed. “Of course they are.”
    The doors of the coffee shop swung open at exactly eleven fifty-nine, allowing fourteen black-clad people to file inside. They ranged in age from “grandmotherly old woman” to “Goth kid who should probably have been in bed already,” and approached the counter without making so much as a sound. Cyndi beamed at them, passing one cup after another into their crowd.
    When she was done, there were two cups remaining on the tray. Cyndi picked up one, giving Velma a meaningful look.
    Velma, faced with the possibility of being forced to drink a cup of pitch-black coffee worshipped by a secret society and grown under a burial ground, responded in the only sensible manner:
    “Oh, hell no.”
    Cyndi sighed. “Well, poop,” she said. “Then I guess we kill you.”
    *
    Andy’s Coffee Palace offered little to no opportunities for Velma to use her powers. Unlike Imagineer and Mechamation, she couldn’t animate things that weren’t at least partially shaped like living creatures—a class designation that didn’t include espresso machines or slightly stale biscotti. Her emergency bunny was locked in the trunk of her car inside the mechanic’s shop. And the Midnight Bean Society was closing in around her, looking confident of their seemingly-inevitable victory. Why not? They had a cornered second-string superheroine, they had plenty of the sacred fluid. . . life was going pretty good for them, really.
    “It’s so simple, Velma,” said Cyndi, cradling her cup against her chest and watching as the black-clad figures surrounded Velma. The room was getting darker, filled with flickers and flashes of motion in the corners. “Andy was a visionary. He always knew that coffee would be the key to elevating man to a higher plane of being. When he found the Sacred Bean—”
    —a sigh ran through the room, like the adoring whisper of a church congregation—
    “—he opened the door to his own re-creation. He’s with us now. He’s always with us. And soon, when we ascend, we’ll have enough power to take this whole town to a higher plane. We’ll be gods! We’ll be heroes !”
    “I thought you were going to sell me to the tabloids,” protested Velma, casting frantically around for anything she could use to save her own ass. Sadly, she’d mostly slept through her improvisational heroing classes. At the time, she’d never gone anywhere without a small army of animated plush, and there hadn’t seemed like much point.
    “Oh, no. That was just to distract you.” Cyndi dimpled. “See, we’ve never managed to elevate a superhero . Once we have, I guess we’ll be just about unstoppable. The world’s going to be ours! We’ll be bigger than The Super Patriots!”
    . . . bigger than The Super . . . “Wow,” said Velma, stopping in her attempts to escape and simply looking at Cyndi as she calmed herself and cast her mind outward, searching, searching. It had taken her almost a year of training to learn to do this; she hadn’t even tried in almost six years. “You’re a major super-fan, aren’t