Dill City, Oklahoma, was one of the smaller and quieter towns in all of the United States. In fact, with a population of barely half a thousand and a surface area of half a square mile, it could barely be said to be a village by most peoples' definition, but legally still was a town and not a village or even a minor settlement. Looking it up, I'd found that there were quite a few 'towns' that boasted a single house in some less populated areas of the country, more evidence that legal-speak was an alien language that had been backdated before the Invasion via time-travel. Or maybe that was just the usual Wyoming weirdness.

The town itself was just a main street, a couple of side-streets, a gas station and RV repair center, a school right next to said station, a farmer's co-op and a little over two hundred houses. It also had no less than four churches for some reason, five if you counted the 'City' Hall that was, according to the guide I'd read, a partially rebuilt church. There was nothing truly remarkable about the town at first glance and its people liked it that way. They liked the town's failing economy less, but you couldn't have everything. At least one of their two larger roads was Rambo Street?

The whole place was rural, not quite in the way of vast open fields much like a lot of the Midwest, but still far from the bustle of any city. It wasn't really isolated, but it was overlooked. Small farms and ranches, dried out fields, some hills with sparse vegetation, a single line of green trees while much of everything else was brown or olive drab. The people were mostly uninterested in strangers and nobody accosted us as we flew down State Street Forty-Two, the mile and a half long road that had been built specifically to serve as the town's access point. The answer to life, the universe and everything it wasn't.

Mandy, Jerry and I landed before that line of trees, then walked through a field of anemic grass that could really do with some more water, then to an empty, unpaved lot, gravel crunching underfoot. Still nobody intercepted us or even looked our way despite Jerry's newly rebuilt and polished armor, the few passers-by that crossed our path not even looking in our direction. That probably had less to do with the locals' passive attitude and general indifference and more with the basketball-sized cube of diamond-like crystal Mandy was carrying in her arms.

The fight in space had taken me all the way to Jupiter and a little beyond, and it had been the work of over an hour to get back to Earth. Anne, like most of the rest of the kids, had still been contentedly asleep by that time but Mandy and Jerry had of her several enchanted objects that worked as portable cloaking devices for emergencies. The cube had been the largest, capable of extending a cloaking field with a radius of exactly π times the height of the person that held it. It was also the most annoying because to my super-senses it looked like a sphere exactly one foot in diameter while physically it looked like a perfect cube of the same material and mass, which meant it had the same volume. Apparently, Anne had sent it to Jerry along with a note saying "I squared the circle, stop bothering me" and never went to his Math classes from that point on.

"This doesn't look like much," the aforementioned superpowered engineer said dubiously as we stopped before the yard-high rusty fence separating about half the unpaved, gravelly lot from the rest. Equally-rusty signs such as "No Trespassing", "Risk of Tetanus" and "Boredom Generator" hung from it, warning people away from the even rustier ten-foot-tall superstructure of a sixty-year-old drilling platform in the center of the lot. It consisted of a few thick and leaky pipes that practically oozed rust and decay, stairs and platform that were largely falling apart, and a sealed-up hole in the ground the pipes disappeared into. The quintessential useless, pointless, nameless abandoned lot that nobody would ever want to be found in, we could practically feel it killing curiosity in a quarter-mile radius by its mere existence.

"It has been abandoned since the late nineties, what did you expect?" I told him with a roll of my eyes then walked at the sign proclaiming the "Boredom Generator". The fence slipped through me or I slipped through it, its metal completely intangible to my passage. The moment I set foot beyond it, the view changed radically. Gone was the unpaved lot, the crumbling drilling platform and the hole. They were replaced by a single, foot-thick plate of grey metal covering most of the area, two faceless, vaguely humanoid, thirty-foot-tall statues of a slightly different metal with a green hue so dark it was almost black, and what looked like a bottomless pit between said statues, one just wide enough for the statues to drop into without touching the walls.

"Simple, utilitarian, dull," Mandy commented as she followed me in with Anne's cube. "Yes, this does have Liz's fingerprints all over it."

"She goes by 'Warden' now," I told her, looking up at the two statues with mild interest. Twice as dense as lead, from a material with enough toughness to build a tower to orbit with, they also slightly obscured my senses. Not like the walls of the supers club I'd taken Anne for dinner, but enough to indicate decent levels of power resistance. I also knew first-hand that the statues could not just move but fight, and fight well. Idly, I wondered what additional enchantments had been built into them; they did serve as the Pit's outer guards after all.

"A mildly clever nickname with obvious connotations and little originality," the redhead sorceress snorted dismissively. "Just like her arguments in the Debate Club."

"To be fair, most of modern civilization works by not having originality," I shot back with a smile. The easy banter was relaxing after having to put down the simulacrum of a madman and the half a thousand victims it had brainwashed to oblivion. "Also, you're still annoyed they made her Club President instead of you."

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"She got it on a Rationalism vs Objectivism debate!" Mandy complained. "A guy in the IT Club wanted to study a flame war and hacked us to replace the random argument generator," she went on, her voice getting louder and louder as she picked up steam. "...instead of scrapping the thing due to interference, the rest of the Debate Club went for it!"

Yeah, she was still annoyed after most of a year, an alien invasion and our home town's total destruction happening in the meantime, so I wisely said nothing. Especially given my less than stellar opinion on that whole situation and its aftermath. Give me a Cheerleader Team to run any day. At least the conflicts there had a basis on practical matters.

"...wait, where's Jerry?" Mandy hastily broke off her tirade to scan our surroundings. "He was right behind us, he should have been here by now."

When a quick look around did not immediately produce a former nerd in a twelve-foot-tall battlesuit, both of us tensed. The lot was empty, both the fenced-off part and the rest. So were the fields around it, the treeline or the street beyond. A quick scan of the city with my senses revealed none but the normal residents within and as I expanded my attention first within a mile, then five, then twenty, I still couldn't find any sign of the missing super engineer.

"If something happened to him on the government's dime," Mandy growled a lot more furiously than her previous nagging about her ancient history with Liz, "I'll turn this place into a new volcano." Literal flames danced in her eyes and hair and you could hear a wildfire's roar in her voice... or maybe a volcanic eruption. "Then I'll ensure the ash clouds concentrate over every airfield for the tourist season, see how they like that."

"Let's not be too hasty, I doubt Liz would try something and General Rinaker wouldn't let her anyway," I made an attempt at calming the now literally fiery Irish girl. "There's probably a simple explanation."

"Sure, he got lost in the open, empty lot twenty feet away in the fifteen seconds we weren't looking," she snapped. Then she stared at me and I stared at her as we considered it.

"...it can't possibly be something this dumb," I protested weakly all the while focusing my senses a lot closer but also a step along the w-axis. The answer was yes. Yes it could. Sighing, I walked out of the hidden facility through the same bit of the fence we both had come in through, the fence's metal once again behaving as entirely immaterial. The moment I stepped outside, I heard the calls of a lost and slightly confused Jerry.

"-on, girls, where are you?" the slightly metallic-sounding, very loud voice coming out of the golden battlesuit asked the empty air. "This is not funny!"

"I disagree," I shouted back, making the whole suit leap in surprise. "From where I'm standing it is at least a little funny."

"Maya!" he shouted in relief, his suit's arm coming within an inch of striking the rusty old superstructure. It was good that it didn't, otherwise Jerry would have added 'vandalism of American cultural heritage' to his list of crimes. Since said list included things like "International Space Treaty violations" or "possession and production of nuclear weapons" I decided I didn't need to mention that bit. "Where did you girls disappear to? Was Amanda messing with the cube again?" he asked with the fond yet long-suffering tone of someone that had been on the receiving end of hijinks from loved ones many times before.

"Again?" I asked, raising an eyebrow in interest at the possibility of further blackmail material on my best friend.

"Ugh, forget I mentioned that, will you?" He came out of the lot in his big stompy battlesuit, stepping over the short fence in the process. I resisted the urge to facepalm.

"Fine, be a spoilsport." I'd ask Anne for all the juicy bits when we next talked. I bet she had lots and lots on everyone on that station with how her perception-based powers spread throughout it. "Now remind me, Jerry. What did I say about how we get into the Pit?"

"Er... go over the fence?" In the comfortable, dimensionally-expanded piloting seat inside the armor I saw him scratch his head awkwardly.

"You weren't paying attention while I explained, were you?" I should have expected it, he'd been way too focused in rebuilding his suit. "I specifically said 'through' the fence."

"Why would that matter?" he asked, still confused. Instead of replying I walked up to his suit, picked him up with Proximakinesis, then carried him along as I stepped through the portion of the fence with the "Boredom Generator" sign, making sure that at least part of the suit went through the intangible fence. Immediately, the empty lot with the abandoned drilling platform was replaced by the Brutalist-style solid-metal entrance to the Pit, its twin towering sentinels and one slightly bored, somewhat irate redhead sorceress.

"Oh!" Jerry exclaimed. "That was why."

"It's a simple dimensional overlap," I told him, somewhat downplaying Liz's accomplishment. "She probably got the idea from Harry Potter." If she'd wanted praise she'd have at least prettied up the place. Slapping simple grey slabs on everything was so boring.

"It's an actually interesting enchantment," Mandy grudgingly admitted. "I still can't find how she anchored one that big, in this little town of all places. It's not some ancient ruin, old temple, Native American graveyard or monument. Nor is it a place that's been lived in for millennia, with mentions throughout human history."

"It's the Bertha Rogers Borehole," I told her. Predictably, I got only blank looks in return. "The deepest borehole in the entire continent and once deepest in the world? It goes down six miles."

"Huh." My best friend nodded. "That does thematically fit an underground facility but..." she frowned and looked around again. "It kinda lacks in similarity."

"It also stands almost exactly halfway between the geographical center of the conterminous United States and the geographical center of Texas, the state with the most prisons," I started counting on my fingers, "The oil drill failed due to hitting a deposit of molten sulfur and we're in the Burns Flat area, so there's that nice Hell association which is another prison. The place has been long abandoned and the whole purpose of the spell is to keep making it look abandoned. Plus the people living here are some of the most uninterested in, least aware of the outside world I've ever met and the lack of traffic and things of interest keeps curious eyes away as much as the Boredom Generator does."

My friends stared at me in surprise.

"What? You thought I wouldn't look up the thematic associations for the first-ever prison for supers in the world?" In the New Age of powers we found ourselves such things were soon going to matter for a lot more than optics and publicity stunts. "Now let's go see a General about an invasion of China."

We still needed to talk with some Red Trash about his unacceptable recruitment practices and/or continued existence.