Seen from space, Florida was mostly dark. The thick golden band of the Miami metropolitan area was the only place that shone as brightly after the invasion as it had before. From it, a dotted line of night lights hugged the coast, towns and small cities shining like little stars in the darkness stretching up to the much brighter beacon of Jacksonville. I'd seen the old photos on the 'net of course; all of us survivors had, some for remembrance, others for bitterness, more than a few out of morbid curiosity. That line of lights had been twice as thick only a year before and it was hardly the only place diminished.
The Tampa area was not as bright either, with a jagged lightless line going through it like a thunderbolt. One of the Invaders' "iron quake" strikes had rolled through it all the way into Tampa Bay, iron spikes growing taller than trees and spreading faster than a runaway train, a devastation half a mile wide shredding everything in its path. Since then, the area had been struggling a little; you can't cut roads or railway tracks through a forest of iron spikes after all. Of course, the Tampa area had gotten off lightly, even with roaming monster bands approaching the Bay with alarming (for any sane people) frequency.
Where Orlando had once been there was only blackness. Winterhaven, Lakeland, Sanford, Deltona, Arcadia, Port Charlotte, Fort Myers, Cape Coral; the entire central area of the state had now become a swampy, overgrown, monster-breeding ruin. The southernmost major town left other than the isolated Tampa and Miami areas was Gainesville, two hundred miles north of the initial invasion point. About half of that destruction had happened the very last hour of the invasion when the enemy leader had turned into a demon the size of a mountain and rampaged before dying to the concerted effort of supers and a generous helping of nuclear fire courtesy of the US military.
The other half? That had been the geological and ecological disaster that followed, the spreading of violence-fueled supernatural corruption, and the birth of new monsters. The initial efforts to purge the area of monsters had failed disastrously, of course. You can't fight violence-fueled sorcery with physical weapons, you'd only make the problem worse. After the particular nature of the problem was confirmed most of the remaining population was evacuated and purely defensive lines had been set up.
The Northern Defense Line was where I'd taken my students for a live-fire exercise a couple of weeks before. It was more of a series of guard stations by the US military supported by occasional super patrol but functioned more because the majority of monsters did not travel that far North than because a line in the sand and a few tanks could hold a state's worth of mutants and undead - not that most of the government accepted that fact even many months after the Invasion. Things in the South were a bit different.
As Anne and I descended beyond the cloud cover, the sheath of plasma surrounding us completely dissipating as we slowed down, the Miami metropolitan area came clearly into view even for people without super-senses. Several large planes were flying through the nearby airspace and hundreds of smaller ones, a huge amount of air traffic even for a city of that size in such a geographically important location. More than half were military craft, flying constant patrols against aerial monsters or transporting soldiers, vehicles and supplies in and out. But that was far from the biggest change.
"Is that... a wall?" my sister asked, pointing at the silvery-grey line stretching almost straight North to South between Miami and the Everglades. From more than a dozen miles up it still looked impressive, a solid construction that looked more like a small dam stretched out to the horizon than a wall. Thousands of tiny forms moved over it like so many ants and with my enhanced hearing I could pick up the bark of weapons, at least one or two firing at any given time for every mile of wall across its entire length.
"Welcome to the modern Walled City," I told Anne as we slowed down further, dropping at a sedate pace of four hundred miles an hour - only about twice terminal velocity. "While most of Florida was evacuated, Miami was deemed too major a city, too important to abandon. So the government decided to build this wall around it instead."
"That's just stupid," my cute little sister snarked. "Lemme guess; far too many people didn't want to evacuate plus losing a big city would be horrible optics. Maybe the public would start thinking the Invasion wasn't stopped by the indomitable might of the US military after all."
"When did you become so cynical?" I asked and got the Mark One mocking eye-roll for my sisterly worries. "But no, the situation was more complex than that. As I was told-" and certainly didn't overhear by spying on the government with my super-senses "-the main issue was preparing for future invasions. It had been ninety years since the US last was in a serious war, more than a century and a half a major conflict took place on US soil. Lots of people blamed the enormous losses on lack of readiness and not enough military spending and pushed for both rearming and integrating new developments to the armed forces." That was the meaning behind several thousand hours of political double-dealing, lawyer-speak and weasel-words anyway. Anne was smart; it only took her a few seconds before...
"They're using the wall to make supers!" she exclaimed. "They're exposing all those soldiers to monsters under controlled conditions. Providing a big target to draw monsters that is also a fortification that will blunt their attacks!" She narrowed her eyes at the figures in the wall as we finally dropped under five miles and started moving laterally away from the wall and towards the waterfront. "Is it working?"
"There's a hundred thousand troops on the wall, rotated often to avoid long-term fatigue. They're using crew-served weapons because the only man-portable weapons that could harm monsters are too expensive for mass use." Sixty thousand dollars per shot that killed an enemy tank was acceptable. The same shot killing just one of endlessly regrowing monsters was not. "You tell me, sis."
"There's a whole army of good guys so the gains are split too many ways," she started, thinking the implications through. "Plus if they're using big guns they'll develop powers related to said guns. And they're barely putting in effort with the guns doing most of the work so..." She was biting her lip now, her nose scrunching up cutely. I refrained from flying close and messing up her hair; prior experience showed that was counterproductive with both teenagers and little sisters both. "Maybe slow overall gains and minor powers? I don't expect they'd get more powerful than tanks even after a year, maybe with the occasional unique trick. That... doesn't seem enough for all the effort?"
"Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Time will tell." What Anne was missing and I wasn't quick to explain to her was that a hundred thousand tank-equivalents were twenty times more than the army currently had, and more than the rest of the world had combined. Plus the much smaller profile and stealth and mobility advantages of a person with the power of a tank over an actual tank meant that said person could be far more effective, especially in urban environments. With how recent events had showed security against supervillains was sorely needed, training such an army made sense to a government that had its monopoly of force threatened. Its future implications on the other hand were... iffy and not just on attempted militarization of supers. What would other countries do without convenient access to monsters to develop their own supers? What about supervillains getting their powers in said countries as the ambient magic level kept rising?
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But those were future-Maya's problems. A really unlucky gal, wasn't she? For now, I pulled my sister into a sisterly hug, messed up her hair, and dodged her retaliatory attacks as we landed on the crowded Miami beach. Thanks to Anne's powers nobody noticed the pair of abnormally pretty blondes coming down from the heavens to slum it with normal humans and only moments later I'd shifted my superhero costume into a far more mundane-seeming bikini. Anne paused to look at what I'd done for a moment, then her own clothes started wriggling and shifting into a one-piece swimsuit of glittering white color. With my super-senses I could see the thousands of threads like spun diamond she rearranged with her powers, the same supernatural material she built everything out of. With that we looked a lot less like two supers that casually violated the laws of physics and more like two supermodels out for a day at the beach. We still were abnormally pretty but this was Miami, Florida, one of two places on Earth where too-pretty blondes would never stand out.
It was time to forget about the problems of the world and spend some time with my little sister.
xxxx
Night had fallen by the time we finally stopped playing in the sand. Beyond a certain level supers only had a stamina limit when they pushed their powers and after a full nine hours of water sports, sandcastle construction and non-stop fooling around I was pretty sure Anne had hit that level some time before. Our day started with water-skiing, continued with beach volley, sunbathing that didn't really do anything for either of us, then we spent four hours building in the sand. We stayed out of anything contest-related as that wouldn't be fair for our opponents and if we put any amount of real effort against each other we'd probably wreck the beach.
Shaping sand was actually fun, though. We kept our building speed on the upper limit of human and went for more detail than volume. I decided to build the White City from Tolkien's books while Anne went for a familiar-looking fantasy castle by a lake that I couldn't quite place. It was distinctive enough I should remember where I saw it before but my usually infallible memory came up blank. We kept working at it, both cheating outrageously in subtle ways, and soon we had an audience. I used Proximakinesis to minutely rearrange sand grains and pack them more tightly together so that even after the effect faded the result would be denser and tougher than sand would normally be. Anne on the other hand was converting half the sand grains into the magical material she used for everything, then worked the result with superhuman precision and skill despite not using any other active powers. The level of detail she put into it blew my own efforts out of the water and soon most of the watchers were crowding her and even taking pictures or recording video with their cell phones as she worked. By the time she somehow started started shaping a forest out of loose sand I admitted defeat and bowed to her vastly superior artistic skills. I still had my sisterly revenge as we left, though.
"You know those guys in the Panthers swimwear were flirting with you, right?" I asked with a shit-eating grin as she stumbled and her face turned beet red.
"You're one to talk," she grumbled, looking anywhere but me. "There must have been over fifty guys checking you out in the end there," she tried to shoot back and I laughed.
"One hundred and thirty-seven, actually," I informed her, still grinning and completely unruffled. "In the immediate vicinity anyway."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means, little sis, that I have appeared on national television in the past and I have super-senses." And though most people knew both of those things, they didn't think them through to the logical conclusion.
"So what?" Case in point.
"So I know exactly how many people within fifty miles are watching videos of me and why," I told her with a shrug. "I'm not going to be embarrassed by the few guys at the beach just looking without even knowing who I am."
"Ew!" Her cute face scrunched up in disgust. "Ew, ew, ew! Why would you ever bring that up!?"
"Because it's something that happens with most celebrities?" I explained as we left the beach and the first line of hotels behind, flying deeper into the city. Nobody accosted us for the superpowers and we were far from the only girls in swimwear. "One of the downsides of world-shaking importance, real or imagined."
"Stuff publicity in a black hole," Anne grumbled, grimacing in distaste. "If that's what happens when you're famous I'd rather stay cloaked behind my powers and remain an absolute nobody. Public opinion is stupid anyway; half the population has below-average intelligence by definition."
"Below median, actually," I corrected her idly before guiding us towards a boxy, windowless building straight in the middle of downtown Miami. "Though the average is pretty close."
"Semantics," she said, giving me another typical teenage eyeroll. "Most people don't know the difference between average and mean without looking it up."
"Sure, but do you want to be like those people?" We touched down on the parking lot behind the boxy building then walked up to the line stretching some hundred feet to a small back door flanked by a pair of overly-muscular, very good looking bouncers. "If so, I can start describing what said people are doing in sufficient detail."
"Oh shut up," Anne told me and kicked me in the shin for good measure. Thanks to a quick application of Focused Invulnerability I didn't even feel the hit. "Where are we going anyway? That looks like a military warehouse but it's in the middle of the city and the line really doesn't fit."
"It's a club house, obviously." Though the bouncers being supers wasn't as obvious and the sheets of metal within the walls partially blocking my senses even less so. "You're still keeping us cloaked, right?"
"Since we're not hounded by your not-so-little fan club that should be obvious too," Anne huffed in annoyance. "Why? Are you worried about being carded at the door?"
"Unlike you, sis, I'm an adult now. There's a General that will back me up on it, too." No, the issue was a little different this time.
"Probably a member of your fan club, isn't he?" my no longer cute sister told me snidely as we skipped to the head of the line without anyone protesting. This perception filter business was the good stuff; we could have probably skipped inside undetected, but with the level of security I knew the club had I decided not to risk it.
"Why, are we feeling jealous, little sis?" I couldn't help but tease as the bouncers took in the two gorgeous blondes standing before them and immediately waved us in.
"Keep it up and the cloaking might start applying only to your clothes," she threatened. We kept bickering like old times while hydraulics slowly opened a door that would have fit more on a military installation than some club.
And with that we slipped into one of the most exclusive clubs in the world a good three months before my ban ended.