Chapter Four: Revolution Is Not A Dinner Party
Victoria wishes she could say that the fortnight after her sister dies passes in a blur, but the fact is she remembers each individual moment of anguish. She gets through them all by anchoring herself using three conversations, conversations that will determine her future path.
The first takes place in her parents' living room after the bank robbery. She flies home to tell her parents what happened to Amy, but when she arrives, her father is flopping around on the floor like a salmon dying of crushing existential apathy. It's been one of those years, so she tells her mother instead.
"Good," Carol says brusquely. She opens the oven door. "She was always evil. I'm so glad we had this talk about our feelings and you agree with me. Meatloaf?"
Victoria flies off to join the Wards.
Armsmaster arranges the second for her. Lung has actually seen the tank replicator, which no one else who's still alive has, and Armsmaster lets her talk to him through his cell's intercom. Victoria gathers that her nemesis is a teenager ("the perfect age for my farm of hundreds of sex slaves, but—"). More relevantly, Lung provides some insight into how her enemy thinks.
Namely, she is a Communist.
With that revelation in mind, there's only one person she can have that third conversation with.
"Your parents have advised me that they will sue you if you use the Glory Girl identity," Miss Militia says. "Apparently the name and image are copyrighted to New Wave, and since you aren't a part of New Wave anymore . . ."
"They'd sue me over the name?"
"Your mother would. I'm given to understand your father is too busy wallowing in ennui to care about bathing, let alone intellectual property."
"Seriously?"
"Seriously."
Victoria frowns; it would do no good to start her vendetta against an unAmerican Communist supervillain by violating another group's property rights, even if the other group was enforcing their rights just to be petty.
So Lady Liberty makes her debut at a Protectorate banquet to celebrate the successful arrest of Lung. Victoria's new costume is black with gold and red accents-very "101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)" meets "Darker and Edgier." She feels very adult as she enters the room on Dean's arm.
Frankly, the celebration is premature. Lung might be in prison, but Bakuda and Oni Lee are not, the Empire Eighty-Eight has not been disrupted in recent memory, and no villainous truce needs to be overshadowed. Indeed, it is hard to see why this banquet is taking place at all.
It is even more difficult to see why New Wave has shown up, since they had no role in defeating Lung. Victoria suspects they are only there so her mother can berate her, and that is exactly what happens.
Carol immediately interrupts Victoria's conversation with Dean to explain Victoria's own feelings to her. She peevishly monologues for ten minutes and concludes by saying "you already agree with me about Amy, you just need to admit that and come home."
"I'll get us some punch," Dean says into the awkward silence, and heads off to the buffet tables.
"The meatloaf is cold," Carol says.
An explosion spares her from having to answer her maternal parental unit, but it does not spare the wall from getting blown inwards or spare Dean from getting his lower half blown off.
Bakuda steps through the hole in the wall. "Frankly," she says through her gas mask, "this celebration is premature."
She says more, a lot more, mostly about her intrinsic superiority and how grade deflation at the more insecure of the non-Harvard Ivies is just some bullshit, you guys, I mean really, but Victoria flies to Dean's upper half. "Dean!"
"Ugh," says Dean, "I think they spiked the punch."
She looks down and wishes, now selfishly, that Amy weren't dead.
"It really knocked my socks off."
It's not a problem. He's babbling, he's in shock, Amy is dead, but it's not a problem. Not a problem. Victoria runs to collect Dean's legs so she can stuff them in a refrigerator before the paramedics arrive. Maybe they can save—
A tank crashes through the ceiling and lands on him. Nobody else, just him.
"Oh, come on!" Victoria exclaims, waving her arms and her dead boyfriend's legs in frustration.
The hatch pops open and a skinny teenager in ugly clothes pops out. "Greetings, capitalist pigs," she says with a sneer. "I come in precisely as much peace as you deserve."
Victoria has no time for this class struggle nonsense. "You killed my boyfriend!"
"Wasn't that your sister?" The tank cape's confusion hardens into contempt. "Degenerate."
"What? No!"
"Hey, jackasses!" Bakuda snaps. "I'm monologuing here!"
The tank cape rolls her eyes, pops back down into the tank, and closes the hatch behind her. A few moments later, the tank moves towards and over Bakuda.
"You lunatic!" Battery screams. "She had a dead man's switch! Killing her just set off every bomb she made! You just killed hundreds if not thousands of people and unleashed God knows how many unchecked superpowered effects on—"
"Nobody told me that," the tank cape says, a little petulantly.
"It was the first thing she said when she came in! She announced she effectively had hundreds of hostages! Hostages," Battery snarls through barred teeth, "That you just killed. By, I repeat, the hundreds."
"Nobody told me that," Tank Girl repeats.
"Horseshit," Victoria proclaims. "A contingency plan to kill a bunch of people if they're thwarted is Villain 101. No villain just shows up at a gathering of all the heroes without hostages. Right?"
Tank Girl looks shifty-eyed.
"Right?" Victoria says, pointedly.
The Communist points to the soupy puddle of Dean residue. "One death is a tragedy." She makes a sweeping gesture with her arm, encompassing the city and indicating the hundreds of detonations presumably taking place. "A million is a statistic."
Victoria hurls Dean's legs at the tank girl, but she ducks into her hatch and they just bounce off the turret. She pops back up again. "Anyway, I'm here to overthrow the class system, starting with the running dogs who drink champagne in galleries while the boat graveyard rusts along with the dreams of the working class."
She would probably talk more—communist philosophers just go on and on and fucking on—but Victoria slams into the tank at eighty miles an hour. The tank is driven back through the window and the two begin to fall as Victoria tears armor off to get at the cape inside.
"I was going to liberate them!" Tank Girl screams, frantically spawning tanks to break her fall. "Knocking me out of a window to pursue a personal vendetta is pure selfishness!"
"Selfishness is morally good!" Victoria retorts.
"Enlightened self-interest? Ha! How does it feel, knowing your ideology hasn't been respected in academic circles since the 1840s?!"
"When the fuck do you think Marx wrote!?"
"Why the fuck do you think I said the 1840s!?"
"You know what capitalism is good for? Decent clothes!"
The dismembered tank containing her nemesis finally hits the ground, and her nemesis struggles to her feat. "If slave labor falls within the realm of decency, then sure!"
"My costume is 100% American-made!"
"Yeah," Tank Girl shouts. "By prisoners, who are legally permitted to be slaves under the thirteenth amendment to your pathetic 'Constitution'!"
Victoria pulls up short. "What?"
"Yep!" Tank Girl begins to fire her weapons at Victoria, who has to dodge because of her shield's recharge time. "Let me just drive this symbol of workers' solidarity through the giant loophole in your exploitative liberal system and over your revisionist head."
"Yeah, well," Victoria says, flying to get out of the way of the tank fire as she scrabbles to find mental purchase. "Remember that every time Marxism is implemented in real life, millions die. Ukraine, the Gulags, the Great Leap Forward, the Killing Fields—can you deny that?"
"I don't deny any of it," Tank Girl says as she turns to leave. "Everyone who died deserved it."
"Even the babies?"
Tank Girl gives her one last long look, and a fierce, fiery determination fueled by the collective spirit of the united workers of the world blazes in her eyes. "Especially the babies."