"...then that damn perception filter broke and I finally remembered you," I finished recounting the past few months while Jerry and Amanda listened. The three of us were sitting in a very well-stocked kitchen and private dining room that simply hadn't been there when I arrived... because of course the space battleship could reconfigure into a luxury resort on demand. "Now spill; what have you two been up to that you didn't even come close to the States?"

"Only preventing the rest of the world from blowing up," Mandy snarked, downing a whole bottle of whiskey in her eternal quest to fit as many Irish stereotypes as possible. Given the enhanced physiology of supers, I doubted it was physically possible for even the kids to get drunk. The proof still needed work though, as my best friend had sent them to bed early. "Yes, most of Florida is monster land and the rest of North America is lousy with supers, but with developing powers being possible everywhere lots of people try and by people I mean crazies."

"We tried to bury the details of how powers work and so did the Army, but far too many parties quietly leaked it," Jerry added in a falsely cheerful tone. "After all, why shoulder the expense of developing powers safely, when you can make it known conflict works best then recruit the survivors? There's nothing that could go wrong with that, right?" He seemed to deflate before chugging down his own bottle of liquor. "Terrorists, pirates, cults, organized crime, third-country warlords, government-backed black ops... most are blindly fumbling their way into an ability or two but even they are dangerous."

"You're telling me guys that can barely lift trucks or throw a fireball are a global problem?" I asked, eyebrows rising in incredulity. "Mere wights during the invasion were close to that level and we took on hundreds of them. Thousands for the bigger battles."

"Them being people makes it a problem," Mandy countered. "For one thing, none but the craziest supers openly use their powers from the beginning."

"That sounded like a personal attack," I mock complained. The redhead stared back unimpressed. "If you are awesome why not show off?" Unlike the two of them, I slurped down some chocolate milk. Ah, sugar and dairy; the two primary food groups.

"It's a lot harder for authorities to track you if the first power you develop is a secret identity that works," Mandy snarked back. "Nothing like our level of total concealment, just a minor power to scramble mundane surveillance and just finding the bad guy becomes either a matter of luck or a job for us with powers."

"Huh, so that's why nobody noticed all the villain attacks everywhere until they tried to blow up the UN building." From both the bad guys' point of view and comic book tropes, a working secret identity made sense. No wonder Rinaker's people were surprised time and again. "Still, things can't be that bad if there's no mention of major disasters from all around the world. Everyone should know if only through word-of-mouth."

"We managed to keep casualties under a million total so far," Jerry said with a shake of his head. "That's barely above the yearly deaths due to genocide and most people don't even notice those even without superpowered efforts to keep things quiet. The only events outside the US that made the news were the Kaiju attacks, and that was mostly your doing."

What? I stared at the two of them. That couldn't be right.

"Jerry, I don't care how many secret identity powers the bad guys have, there's no way a million people died and nobody noticed." That was just impossible and/or stupid. "The Invasion itself had fewer victims and that was with a two-miles-tall asshole throwing around strategic spells like party favors before getting repeatedly nuked." Like, what the actual fuck?

"Tell that to the Wizard," Mandy shot back, her eyes and hair momentarily flaring into red-hot flames. "He and his little cult have been attacking ancient historical sites every six days like clockwork for the past half a year. Thirty-one mass sacrificial rituals and if we didn't stop them every time who knows what that madman would have used them for. Natural disasters? Plagues? Worse?" She snapped her arm over the table and our drinks chilled nicely while the forgotten plates of food became as hot as fresh from the oven. "And that's just one guy and his posse."

"It was not just stopping villains," Jerry added, leaning back. The chair gleamed blue then molded itself to him, and he seemed to just melt into it. Effectively custom-fitted furniture not just to his body but his stance; neat. Though I still preferred flight and not needing furniture at all. "We stopped the Invasion because everyone that could help worked together but we were very nearly too late."

Jerry shuddered. Mandy and I scowled. Yeah, it had been really close. As in, maybe a minute or two later and the enemy's superweapon would have grown and adapted to anything we could have done. And maybe if we'd been earlier I wouldn't have had to spend half a year recovering.

"Mandy and I," the former nerd and current super-inventor continued, "we decided to search for new heroes from the beginning this time. Or even just people that wanted to help that could be trained." He waved at the sci-fi dining room all around us. "That's why we built this station. It didn't quite turn out how we wished but still..."

"I hear ya, buddy. Training kids is hard." If their students were anywhere close to as unruly as mine... I shuddered. There were almost fifty teenagers with powers on this station, though judging from what my senses could tell about their physical abilities all except one did not even come close to Mark, Gabby's and Cindy's level. "How did you get so many of them anyway? I got supersenses and the US government has a ton of people searching and we only found three that could fight in the field."

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"It helps that we aren't meatheads like a certain former cheerleader," Amanda said with the air of someone making a huge revelation, the little shit. "You get to punch giant monsters in the face, we get to make things with broader utility."

"Uhuh." I nodded sagely. "And the broader utility of a thousand-foot-tall robot would be... what exactly?"

"Deep sea exploration. Large scale robotics research. Testbed for various technologies, from new sensor types, to aerospace travel, to insulation and electronics, to the new field of magitech" shot back a list that sounded a bit rehearsed. "But mostly? Bragging rights. I made it first, I made it bigger, and I made it better than anyone else."

"Are you sure you aren't overcompensating for something?" I asked in a fake sweet tone but was immediately shot down.

"No," Mandy said, smiling widely. "No he isn't."

"I see." So that's how it was. I thought I saw some signs back during the Invasion but I wasn't sure. Good for them, though I felt a bit sad about the half a year of lost time. I would have liked to have been there for them, gave some support or proper teasing. Not advice though; relationships were the field I sucked in the most. "Say, is that fire-breathing chicken in the ship's bridge a fruit of your new... collaboration?"

I stepped out of time for a good five minutes just to fix their expressions of incredulity and indignation to memory properly...

xxxx

The space station's habitation module was more like a garden than a residential building. It had wide, well-lit corridors with double lines of growing pots on both walls where various odd-looking plants flowered... while bearing fruit at the same time, fruit I did not recognize. Growing plants in space was odd due to the absence of gravity and plants being confused at which direction to grow but not that odd. Besides, the station did have artificial gravity. No, I suspected the oddities were power-made modifications.

Doors to living spaces interrupted the lines of pots every so often, each door as well as the room beyond it personalized to the individual. Out of respect for the kids' privacy, I avoided paying attention to the interior as much as my senses and my search allowed. I walked by walls of steel, of wood bearing elaborate carvings, of plastic that flowed like water while maintaining its shape and other, entirely alien materials that were obviously power-wrought until I came to a door of solid light, if light had been spun into crystal. There was no doorframe, no hinges or keyhole, just a pane of crystallized light in the shape of a door with a triangular handle.

Except there was no door at all, was there? My senses just showed empty space, both in the entrance and the room beyond. As far as my awareness of forces was concerned, there simply was nothing there. No pane of crystal, no glowing, pale yellow light, nothing but the air and the normal illumination that seemed to pass through the door as if it weren't there... because it really wasn't. I walked up to the entrance and lay my left hand upon the door, touching and feeling nothing. No texture, no temperature, as if my hand had come to a stop on its own accord. So I pressed down more, but not with my strength. Not with my powers either, but with conviction. I did not just want to pass or believed I would pass but knew I would, as much as someone would walk through an empty archway and not even think that they could not because what would stop them?

It was counterintuitive and illogical, but anyone thinking logically would not have been able to pass through. Once upon an uglier time I'd forced myself through a similar barrier by being too tired and too angry to care that it existed. The attempt had hurt in a deeper way than just the physical. This time, though the curtain of light seemed far more solid, I walked through after only a token resistance, a push back that felt more like hesitation on my part, like not really wanting to go through. Except my certainty exceeded the barrier's compulsion and I walked through it to a room like from some grand museum.

Row after row of crystal shelves lined the chamber's walls, loaded with countless objects of that same glowing crystal, from flowers perfectly carved into the unearthly solid, to board games of all types where both boards and figurines were works of art, to statuettes of various supers and monsters half a foot tall done in impossible detail. There were even books with pages of wafer-thin glass and glowing letters. In the center of the room stood a tree, a tree made of glowing gems spun into veins of wood, silver and gold spun into leaves and flowers akin to tiny suns. Instead of the symmetry and rigidity of a statue it seemed alive, from its roots growing into the soil, to its trunk where fluids oozed through translucent fibers, to leaves where oxygen, carbon monoxide and water wafted through millions of tiny mouths.

It was beautiful, the most complex power-wrought item I had ever seen, yet I barely gave it more than a cursory glance. Most of my attention was focused on the room's sole occupant. A tall, slim girl of ten or eleven, with long, straight, platinum-blonde hair, eyes of cerulean blue and skin a shade paler than my own despite the halo of sunlight that seemed to emanate from her head. In short she looked like me, a me a good ten years younger and many battles and cheerleading practices more innocent.

"Hello Anne," I greeted her fondly and a bit tentatively. "Long time, no see."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" my younger sister answered without even turning to look at me. She busied herself instead with a foot-tall sculpture of a superheroine in flight, half-carved out of a solid mass of power-created crystal. As I stood there waiting for her to say something, anything else, she kept pointing a finger at the crystal, shooting a hair-thin beam of golden light that simply vanished the crystal little by little, carving the sculpture out of it with painstaking slowness.

It took Anne nearly an hour to carve the heroine's clenched fist out of the crystal, the statue's fingernail-sized hand rendered in such impossible detail my senses could pick up the texture of its skin. That done, my sister continued as if she hadn't been ignoring me for fifty-seven minutes straight. She still did not turn to look at me, though.

"Apparently, the several layers of will-barriers pushing against any intruders weren't enough of a hint," she said in accusation. "But of course, no matter how backed by powers the social cues, they still won't work on the great and powerful Maya Wennefer."

Then she turned around and glared at me with eyes that were not the blue my senses saw but pools of liquid gold.

"Well, big sis? What was so important that you broke into my sanctuary?"