The moment we went through the foot-thick metal door, the hazy image of the building's interior cleared up to my super-senses. There would be time to look into the new information later though; for now, I took note of how everything outside blurred instead, my enhanced senses reduced to the equivalent of looking through translucent glass. Everything within a dozen feet was still clear enough but with little detail and things further away were reduced to just their outlines. The blockage wasn't as good as Anne's perception filters and was the opposite of subtle, but as far as maintaining privacy was concerned it was good enough... and as long as someone was unwilling to outright attack the place privacy was good enough.
Not that most attacks would fare better. The boxy brick and concrete walls were a thin disguise for the layer of familiar metal spreading under them all through the construction, thicker than the door and built into beehive-shaped reinforcing pattern. It was a gunmetal grey I'd seen before into the guardian golems and reinforced underground labs of the General's secret bases, a power-resistant material created by Liz the Warden. The last time I'd encountered it it had proven difficult but hardly impossible to damage and with only a minor impact on my senses. This one was not only an effective enough super-senses blocker but it seemed somehow... denser without having any actual extra mass. Physics seemed to be affecting it less - by a factor of four if I was pressed to make a guess. But I did not have to; the power seeping into the material and altering its nature was another familiar one.
My attention turned away from the barrier in favor of the club's interior, the gloomy, candle-lit atmosphere and dozens of velvet-and-gold-covered tables where people sat in silence bringing with it an air of both mystique and relaxation. Impeccably dressed young men and women in form-hugging translucent fabrics of spun gold, silver and precious gems in styles reminiscent of ancient Greece or Egypt roamed the space with superhuman grace, taking the patrons' orders with radiant smiles or making suggestions in musical, perfectly pitched voices, hair spun in incredibly elaborate works of art dancing as their owners shifted their stance every so often, subtly showing off without being provocative or obvious.
It was cleverly done, I had to grudgingly admit. Everything was perfectly orchestrated to imply the staff were supers, displaying physical abilities, skill and appeal of low-superhuman scale, wearing understated but obviously power-wrought clothing if one knew anything about fashion. It was all an elaborate deception, of course. Oh the clothes were indeed power-wrought, making diamond threads hadn't been done anywhere outside a lab, but that was the work of a minor super at best and they did not look so impossibly perfect and regal naturally. They, along with the staff themselves, were affected by the same power as the metal barrier, augmenting them by a factor of four. The products of a niche power were turned into gowns fit for royalty while well-trained and pretty but human staff became temporary supers. Show-biz at its finest... and all that were just the opening moves.
I found Anne where she'd strayed deeper into the club and couldn't help but smirk. She stood rooted just before the stage where the first act of the evening's entertainment was about to start, gaping at the singer that was about to begin the solo act. Her face was even redder than when the subject of flirting had turned up earlier and if not shaken from her stupor she'd soon be drooling. Not that I blamed her, or all the patrons who gave the stage their undivided attention.
If superpowers had given both me and Anne borderline-superhuman looks that might just be possible for unpowered people to achieve via excellent genetics, a lifetime of effort, surgeries, an army of the best beauty experts in the world and some creative photo-editing, the twenty-something brunette on stage had the looks of a goddess... or possibly the result of the latest image-making a.i. fed the wildest dreams of a million men. Skin of impossible perfection that also glowed like polished ivory, body symmetry down to nanometer scale, gravity-defying proportions designed to maximize instinctive appeal while ignoring such trivial things as conforming to human biology, all layered with the same power effect as the rest of the club to magnify the influence of those looks by a factor of four.
Then she started to sing and my annoyance at the mental trickery melted away. A lot of sins could be excused for a superhumanly good composer that was also a superhumanly good singer. Maybe in some distant future where both technology and social studies had advanced enough it could be replicated, but for now it was literally beyond human ability to both equal and replicate. What little I could grasp of the technical bits of the performance included bouncing sounds off the surrounding surfaces to deliver uniform performance to the individual ears of close to a hundred people, the song we were actually hearing being a result of superposition and actually different than what she was singing.
We all stood there, entrapped by a beauty more fundamental than bodily appeal until the song was over. The singer bowed and smiled and sent lots of hearts fluttering. I sighed and walked up to Anne. My sister was still rooted to the same spot but no longer blushing. No, it was much worse; she had that look of awe and hero-worship teenagers get when they are seriously into some trash band or another, except I couldn't do my sisterly duty by explaining how her time would be better spent on more useful pursuits. The song had really been good enough to be worth the attention. I shook her off the stupor instead.
"...bwha?" She looked around, blinking unfocused eyes before visibly shaking off the mental stun. "Maya? What... who was that?"
"The club owner," I said as I gently pulled my sister to an open table for two. "She must have been practicing. The music wasn't nearly that good a couple of months before."
"You... know her?" Anne's eyes shone with eagerness and anticipation that I'd unfortunately have to deflate. "Could you introduce us? Please? I'll... I'll do anything!"
"Don't be stupid," I told her, flicking her nose just hard enough for her to wince. "You are never to repeat that offer, to anyone, no matter what. It was dumb in the age of drugs, Rock 'n Roll and human trafficking. It is even dumber in the age of super-disguises, black magic and human sacrifice." There were far too many very dangerous people that would gleefully take up my baby sister on her offer and actually deal fairly just to get an in with someone that could hide giant space stations from the entire world. "And no, that singer and I don't see eye to eye on some things." Mostly the mental influence, which she deemed harmless but was anything but. Also, some of her side-gigs which did not have much respect for the law.
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"Aw, come on!" she whined and gave me puppy dog eyes.
"Name one instance in which that argument ever worked," I shot her down then started reading the menu. Its contents were little different than most other five-star restaurants I'd been or looked into via super-senses. The menu itself on the other hand was made up of sheets of black silicon carbide with the contents engraved in platinum, because of course it was. Ostentatious displays of wealth and/or superpowers were always in vogue.
"If you didn't want me to meet the singer, why did we come here?" my little sister grumbled sourly.
"Because regardless of my personal disagreements with said singer, her songs are still the kind of experience the existence of powers has begun to produce that I want you to enjoy first-hand. Magic can be incredibly violent, but violence is only its crudest use." I settled on the East Lothian beef, braised truffle barley and Scottish girolles, the Spring Carbonara, and the Saffron risotto with forest mushrooms. "Being who we are we often face the worst this new world has to offer, but we also have access to the best if only we reach for it. All it takes is putting in a bit of effort."
"Are you sure you're Maya and not a bazillion-year-old guru under some clever disguise?" Anne demanded as she played with a gleaming red glass that captured the light in its many-faceted surface and seemed to shine with an inner fire. "Because that sounded halfway wise."
"Yes, I am," I answered with a small smirk. "And if you keep studying and living healthily and eating all your vegetables for another decade or two you might become half as wise as me in turn." She kicked me in the knee under the table and I fended it off with Focused Invulnerability. Then we had to stop fooling around because one of the waiters approached us and took our orders.
Some time passed and we heard another superhumanly good song while we waited, but they were spaced a good half an hour or more apart, the interludes filled with borderline superhuman but not supernaturally intense or inhumanly perfect music. My eyes and senses scanned over the patrons and to my relief while I saw more than a few tears and some slack, stupefied expressions, they gradually faded over time, at least until the next song. The owner, it seemed, had listened to my arguments at least in part. Extreme sensations could actually damage the unshielded mind and cause permanent personality changes with repetition but given more time to adapt humans could be very resilient. The songs were still intense enough to be addictive, but probably no more mentally harmful than smoking or sugar highs. I'd try to sneak in some experts on the subject if Anne cooperated, but recordings didn't help; they couldn't capture even the sounds properly, let alone the supernatural influence.
While I people-watched, Anne fiddled with the cutlery and dishes to alleviate the nervous energy all teenagers seemed to generate regardless of the situation. She started with spinning a spoon faster and faster until it almost flew off the table. Then, when that was no longer amusing and/or distracting, she picked up one of the golden knives, examined it closely with narrowed eyes and when that didn't satisfy her, bit it. I couldn't help but snort. A super at her level could probably bite through armor plating; trying to test for real gold like that would be completely useless. She glared at me as little sisters are wont to do and I answered her glare with an indulgent smile that made her scowl and return to examining the teeth marks she'd left on the knife's handle as if they were the most important thing in the world.
It didn't last. Soon it was the gleaming red glass that had drawn her attention and it was put under the old "test" of rapping it with a spoon and hearing it ring. One of the patrons on the next table over looked around for the source of the sound with an annoyed expression but failed to find it. Anne's perception manipulation might not be a flashy application of power but it was little incidents like that which reminded me she could hide a space battleship from the world with the same effort as most people breathed, or stab someone to death without them noticing they were being murdered with even less effort than that. Still, I formed an outbound sound barrier for propriety's sake; no need to be more annoying than we had to.
"Say Maya," she finally asked after several more rounds of testing. "What kind of glass is this? It's both pretty and pretty tough."
"That's not glass, Anne, that's ruby." A single near-perfect crystal of the precious gem, the imperfections matching naturally sourced Myanmar rubies perfectly - I'd checked the first time I'd come by looking into nearby jewelry stores with super-senses.
"Wait, really?" She stopped ringing the glass and started looking at it with something approaching respect. Then she looked at the other glasses and the dishes in other tables and understood. "Power-wrought?"
"Of course." Because if you had niche superpowers, why not use them to tweak the noses of gemstone experts via an obviously artificial stone that was indistinguishable from natural ones? The answer was because you had made a few hundred stones, not just one, and sold those that were not obviously power-wrought for hundreds of millions.
"...isn't that a crime or something?" my sister asked tentatively, looking at the club around us with a new light.
"There is no law against using powers to provide real gems and whoever is responsible could claim to be summoning them from deep reserves beyond human reach or alternate uninhabited versions of Earth instead of conjuring them and none could prove otherwise." Plus if anyone tried to make laws against using powers for profit, industrial accidents and substandard material failures would start happening to all businesses benefiting from it until said laws were thrown out.
"Huh." Anne dropped the knife and I fixed the dents on it with a minor force-field. "Do you have any good ideas for profiting off our powers?"
"I'm working on it." In my copious free time between fighting off superpowered terrorists, wrangling artificially-created Kaijus, fixing messes for the government, appearing on national television, training teenage supers, or sitting on civilian idiots that insisted on charging into war zones. God, my life was a mess. I sooo needed a vacation. Then a vacation from my vacation because several of my jobs had been intruding into this one. I was mentally tallying possibilities - Europa had a nice ring to it - when our order finally arrived.
The food smelled positively divine, a single breath enough to leave both our mouths watering. I passed Anne the risotto since she wasn't as much of a pasta lover as I was then tucked in with gusto. The spaghetti was somehow both al dente and well-boiled, combining the benefits of both and the drawbacks of neither. It was of course fresh from the machine, none of that cheap mass produced crap. The green beans popped in the mouth as if fresh but despite maintaining that texture they tasted as if cooked properly. The sauce proved even better, a slight difference in taste indicating that something other than chicken eggs had been used for it and made it all the better. Then there was the beef; cooked with unsalted butter and thyme and rapeseed oil, with sauce of barley and garlic garnished with whipping cream and ground truffles, accompanied by spears of broccoli and air-dried girolle mushrooms. Perfection. That each mouthful exploded with four times as much taste and sensation as it should have without actually adding any substance that would not fit only enhanced the experience.
"The bad guys can come kill us now," my little sister declared imperiously half an hour later.
"Really?" I asked her with another fond smile.
"Yeah. That way we can die content instead of stressed out or terrified in the middle of some grand battle."
"Uhuh." I wiped my mouth on the silken napkins and stretched contentedly. "Does that mean you don't want dessert? The chocolate fudge is pretty good."
"Dessert or I'll make everything you wear invisible forever."