Superhero life? Super-Sized troubles!

"Heya, Squirt. Is that a new way of telling me to get out of your room?"

Those were the words that came out when I opened my mouth. What does one say when their ten year old sister accuses them of 'invading her sanctuary' with a straight face? I had either spent long enough in superspeed to forget how kids were supposed to talk, or...

"Yes, because you're the only one to have been changed by your powers," she said with a roll of her eyes that was textbook teenager. "Some changes were a lot less physical than yours." She twisted her fingers as if pulling at invisible strings, silver-white radiance forming between them as she whispered too low for most people to overhear;

'There is neither this world nor the world beyond nor happiness for the one who doubts.'

The glow between her hands flashed with blinding intensity for an infinitesimal moment so short even under superspeed and enhanced perception it could barely be said to have happened at all. Then there was an invisible, intangible film of the same power as in the room's many decorations wrapped around the entirety of the space station. In a similar way to my own intangibility it was both there and not, not physically where it didn't exist at all but at the level of perception and communication.

"That's a very odd force-field," I commented, wanting to avoid an argument and grasping for any subject to fill in the conversational space. "What does it do?"

"A seed of doubt in the awareness of observers. It prevents bad guys from knowing we even have a base to attack," she said, then sat not on a chair but on the desk of crystal, feet kicking in the air. At least in that, she still looked her age. "You know, like the other barrier you tore through on your way here?"

"Excuse me for wanting to clear my mind of external influence!" I shot back, annoyed. "What are you doing, using mind magic like that?"

"Hiding," she shot back, either completely missing the point or deliberately ignoring it. "What are you doing in my room?"

"Talking to my sister, who I haven't seen for a subjective ten years." And failing, probably. Then again, I'd never been good with relationships - or talking. "Some mind magic kept me away, thought I should ask at least one of the people involved."

"You were dead, Maya," she explained, gathering more light in the palm of her hand. "Verity said you needed time in safety to get over it, I offered to help. I am Sanctuary. Safe time is in my job description." The light formed a sculpture like all the other decorations for a split second... then burst to pieces. "Damn it! Why do your visits always have to be annoying?"

"Annoying am I?" I smiled, then grabbed her in a headlock and messed up her hair. "Silly little Anne, annoying you is in MY job description. If I weren't annoying, I'd have to burn my Big Sis card." We both ignored her sudden tears. "So... Sanctuary huh? How'd you get a cool superhero name before I did?"

"Because you suck at names, that's how," she shot back with a brittle chuckle. "When the Old Bastard decided he wanted a second pet project and threw me at the monsters, I swore I'll never become like him. Then this..." more light flashed in her palms "...happened out of nowhere. I could stop everyone from harming me but it wasn't until Verity taught me that I could hide others."

"So... it was exactly what you wanted, just more?" That sounded familiar.

"Well, yes. I never wanted to fight, just make pretty things." The crystal objects all around the chamber chimed pleasantly. "Staying here... it kept me away from the battles and let me help those that did fight. It was perfect, given the situation."

"So I shouldn't punt Verity into orbit next time I see her, got it," I nodded sagely. Every time that otherworldly fake-midget had meddled I'd always gotten something that was needed down the line. Though the methods differed, this seemed the same though I was sure it could have been done without my best friends and family being kept away. Maybe Anne could have visited Mars? "What have you been up to while I was gone?"

"Other than hiding the good guys from the bad guys?" She lay back on the crystal table and made an all-encompassing gesture at the room around us. "Made these things, mostly."

"Huh, cool." I walked up to the now finished statue of the heroine in flight. She looked suspiciously familiar, though the proportions were closer to my pre-powers life and the costume was wrong. A flick of my finger rung the crystal in a pleasant, ringing din that filled the chamber for a few seconds. "But what do they do?"

"They look pretty and building them makes me feel better," Anne said with another roll of her eyes. "Not everything has to be about utility, sis."

"But sculpting?" I protested with confusion. "I thought you liked painting and escape room games. What changed?"

Instead of an immediate answer she reached for the room's far wall and a crystal cube lifted itself from the shelf it was on and flew to us. It looked a little lumpy and uneven, a far cry from the impossibly lifelike statue Anne had just finished. "Break this and I'll tell you." My sister said and threw the cube at me at an oblique angle.

I sped up just enough to catch it before it could fall and break. "Is that a challenge?" I asked, bemused. "Why would I break one of your works?" Sure, it might look silly and crude but then so did all those famous paintings she'd been fan of as a kid.

"Don't you want to know why I sculpt instead of paint now?" she added with a glint in her eye. Yeah, definitely a challenge.

"Look, Anne, I wanted to see and talk to you, not break your things." Unlike some other people we both carefully avoided talking about. "I want you safe and happy, not..." I trailed off, not knowing what to say. Breaking the thing had been her own idea, not mine.

"It's just an early, failed piece," she waved off my concerns with an air of nonchalance, but it was very hard to deceive someone that could see microexpressions clear as day. "Go ahead and break it. I don't mind." For some reason, my little sis was feeling very smug right now.

"No," I said, unwilling to fall into the trap, whatever it might be. "Can't you just tell me?"

"Nope!" she giggled and for a split second she sounded like the little kid she appeared to be. The cute, happy little sister that lived with our grandparents because the trailer park was no place for a kid to grow up in - though in reality because everyone knew what an asshole our father had been. "You know, I bet you can't break it! Strongest gal on Earth, stopped by a crystal cube."

"Forget it," I said, staring at the fragile-looking crystal in my hand. For a moment I felt like clenching my fist and grinding it to dust but then I shrugged, shaking the thought off. "How long have you been cooped up in this place, anyway?" I asked as I threw the crystal across the room, nudging it just right for it to land perfectly on its shelf. Given the sheer number of sculptures filling the place, I was sure Anne had spent most of her time carving up those things with her powers.

"I like it here," she shot back, still with that smug grin. What did she have to feel smug about? "At least here nobody is going to associate improved looks with superpowers, or ask me to tackle some alien monster."

"Anne, you hid an entire space station and the hero group living on it from the entire planet. You're telling me you couldn't hide a few supers in plain sight for a few hours?" She gave me an open-mouthed look of total stupefaction, as if the idea was some sort of great revelation. Teenagers.

"Get up," I told her. "We're going out for some fun and I know just the place."

xxxx

For NASA, re-entry is a matter of millions of dollars' worth of equipment, years of training and hundreds of people crunching numbers to make possible. For all mid-tier supers and above, it's just a particularly long drop from a high vantage point. By the time we have sufficient strength to throw around tanks, endurance has increased to the point we could hold our breath for an hour and re-entry friction is just a warm breeze. I wasn't about to take risks with my baby sister of course, but neither was I particularly worried; nobody with abilities of that scale was really fragile.

"This feels odd," she said, pulling at the transparent layer of force that hugged her body like a glove. "What does it do?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" See sis? I can be arbitrarily contrary, too.

"Do you really want to do this? Now?"

"Fine!" I could never tell her no, and she knew it. "It gets rid of harmful things while keeping in a layer of air."

"It's less than an inch thick, how much air could it hold?" she asked in a dubious tone.

Instead of answering I pushed her off the space station's hangar bay and into the void. A small adjustment of gravity and she was dropping like a meteor, screaming obscenities I'd never have heard without super-senses. Shrugging at the camera in the corner - and an idiot ex-nerd laughing at us from all the way in the ship's bridge - I leaped after Anne, accelerating hard.

At a pretty sedate fifty gravities of acceleration, we'd arrive at our destination in a mere eight minutes despite starting further away from Earth than the vast majority of satellites. Flight in the exosphere was completely silent even at several miles per second, the air molecules being so few collisions didn't happen often enough for sound. That didn't stop my super-senses from listening to Anne cursing me in various creative ways as she tumbled, or using my powers to talk to her directly.

"Calm down and stop flailing," I spoke by vibrating the force-field around her. "The field is trying to stabilise you but can only do so much." Miracle of miracles, she listened to and followed my advice; her tumbling stopped and soon she was flying straight with minimal nudging on my part.

"You kicked me out of the airlock!" she shouted at the top of her voice, my Force Awareness picking out the vibrations in the thin sheath of normal-pressure air around her.

"Would you have taken that first step if I hadn't?" I shot back as I overflew her by a few feet then turned around, dropping with my back to the distant ground. "We'd still be talking and you'd be missing out on this!" I spread my arms, indicating the void around us and the planet below.

"Fine! Just never do it again!" She tried to pout but there was just enough tidal effect to twist her features into a funny grimace. I'd meant for her to get the exhilarating sensation of acceleration through a slightly uneven force field but had not predicted the funnier results. The entirely coincidental result set me into a fit of giggles, which only made Anne try to pout more.

"Stop laughing!" she demanded, which naturally only made me laugh more. Which probably explained why she conjured a pillow-shaped effigy with her powers then started whacking me up the head with it. That quickly escalated to a full-on pillow fight, where I had the clear advantage. We both could and did make our pillows invisible, but now that I was aware and looking for it my senses could just peek through her concealment power. I totally didn't exploit this to trap Anne in a fortress of invisible pillow-constructs and nobody can prove otherwise.

We were both red in the face and panting when the atmosphere became dense enough to ignite in our passage and I had Anne's force-field clamp down on the speed of air molecules within, keeping them cool. At the same time, it started pulling in oxygen to replenish what my sister had already breathed. It wasn't a perfect solution, mostly because it needed at least some oxygen in the environment for it to work. I had some ideas on how to make an entirely self-contained life-support field that could provide breathable air indefinitely even in outer space, but I'd need more time and rats to perfect it and this was a day for having fun with friends and family, not experimentation.

"This is awesome!" Anne shouted as she rode down on a sheath of plasma. "...except I can't see through the fire. Is that normal?"

"Don't worry, it'll go away way before we land," I told her then enjoyed the blast of steel-melting warmth. In some ways it was even better than bathing in molten stone and once Anne's durability got a bit better I vowed to expose her to both. They were the kind of surreal, entirely supernatural events only people with superpowers could experience and once again I was reminded that for all the horror that had come with our powers, there were enough mind-boggling, miraculous experiences that I never regretted getting powers or stopped looking for more.

Finally, after nearly a minute and a half of fiery fall from the heavens, our velocity was reduced enough that the plasma curtains dissipated and Anne could see again. Maybe one day I'd discover how to share my own senses with others, but until the lab rats' brains stopped exploding Anne would have to settle with the minor annoyance of brief visual obstruction during re-entry trips. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if-

"Wait, that's Florida!" Anne exclaimed, pointing at the sprawling expanse of said state a mere twenty miles below us. "Why are we going there? It's full of monsters!"

"True, sis, but it's also full of cool things," I told her as I nudged her trajectory South, South-East.

"Monster hunting is NOT cool, it's a stupid way to get killed!" she retorted and started flailing again, nearly sending herself into a tumble. "Get me back to the ship! This is the worst sister-bonding trip ever!"

"Stop being such a drama queen, we aren't going monster-hunting," I explained as our flight took us over a sprawling urban landscape with countless people crawling across a towering, gleaming edifice separating a major city from the monster-infested wasteland.

"No, little sis, we're going to Miami."