Nested along the picturesque shores of the artificial water reservoir of the former lake MacDonald, the Lake Austin Spa Resort was a sanctuary that provided "a holistic escape from the pressures of modern life", as their advertisement said. With diverse personalized treatments, innovative fitness programs, and nourishing cuisine, guests embarked on a supposedly transformative journey of relaxation and rejuvenation. It was said that the resort’s commitment to holistic wellness and unparalleled hospitality ensured an unforgettable experience, making it a top choice for spa enthusiasts worldwide.
Not all of their services worked well on superpowered people, of course. The fitness programs were the first casualty, as even minor supers were beyond human limits and those of us with more physical gifts no longer needed exercise to maintain them. Personalized treatments were the second casualty. Supers of any significant power had unique experiences beyond what any "expert" could hope to understand, let alone experience. Take super-senses for example; how could anyone that didn't share in such abilities understand the different mentality of a super that could see and hear everything within a mile at all times?
Fortunately, my Force Awareness could be dialed down or turned off entirely, and the vast majority of information my brain handled subconsciously, allowing me the freedom to choose what to focus on, or not to focus on anything at all and simply enjoy the ambience of open wooden bungalows built amid palm trees by the lake without being constantly interrupted by people the next town over. The food was great - made better through enhanced senses that turned it into a smorgasbord of individual yet harmoniously blended tastes. Being pampered with everyday massages and rare scented oils, morning swims through crystal-clear waters and evening strolls through carefully curated woods to look prettier and calmer than natural forests, staying up late at night to read my favorite novels... it was the best way to pass the time and relax. Not perfect - I doubted anything could be and I, for one, had never enjoyed or even understood the attraction of fishing - but then perfection was but a dream, not reality.
The people at the spa, both visitors and personnel, had recognized me on sight, of course. After my appearances on both national television and international news, Maya Wennefer had to be one of the most famous new celebrities in North America but for once the newsies did not turn up only minutes after my appearing in public. Showing admirable professionalism, the spa personnel respected my privacy and treated me like any other client in all respects but one, and the visitors were other people that payed exorbitant sums for a few days away from the pressures of the rest of the world, a state of affairs none of them wished to disrupt by inviting either the press or rabid fans.
Speaking of exorbitant sums, the one way the spa did treat me differently was my not having to pay conventionally. Not that I could not afford it - with my powers capable of nuclear transmutation and a very generous stipend from the US government I could have probably bought the whole spa outright - but they had offered to waive their fees in exchange for my help. Curious at what help such a quiet resort would need from a very loud and active super like yours truly, I had agreed to at least listen to their request... only to laugh at what their problem turned out to be.
The former lake MacDonald (now Austin) was one of the Texas Highland Lakes infested with hydrilla, a non-native aquatic plant species. A couple of decades before, the Lower Colorado River Authority had done everything to stop the infestation, from lowering the water level every year to kill the overgrowth, to using chemical and biological pesticides, to physical harvesting. It had taken the stocking of Asian grass carp by the City of Austin, a herbivorous fish species, to finally see the complete elimination of the hydrilla. Unfortunately, using one invasive species to kill another had not ended well, and the grass carp population had grown to the point of nearly destroying the Colorado river ecosystem.
Worried about the survival of recreational fishing activities in the region, the spa owners along with the Colorado river authorities had asked me if I could do anything about the infestation, offering to waive my spa fees if I could make a significant contribution to the invasive species' population control. Perhaps they'd expected the environmental efforts to turn to a days-long, newsworthy production that would have limited results but promote tourism through my presence, but after considering the problem for a minute or two, I'd come up with a workable idea.
The basic concept was similar to the anti-intrusion forcefields around my house, invisible and mostly intangible planes of force that selectively barred passage. It took a bit of fiddling and several fish samples to make one selectively permeable in just the right way, then a few hours of work and nearly a day's worth of fatigue to link hundreds of them together but in the end I had an invisible bowl of force wider than the Colorado river at its widest, that for all practical purposes only existed for me... and Asian grass carp. From there, it took only an hour to drag it across the entire length of the river, catching every single grass carp from adult fish down to eggs then carrying the several-thousand-ton load to the nearest processing facility that could handle them.
In the end, using my powers in a very different, non-violent application had actually been both challenging and fun in a way that constant battles weren't. Just like a certain fictional benevolent alien, I'd sometimes wondered if being humanity's strong-woman would be the limits of my contribution to the world despite the countless ways powers such as mine could be used to help society along. What was the point of being a hero instead of a warlord when both ultimately amounted to violence and destruction? Maybe this, doing public works in novel ways through the use of superpowers, was the answer...
xxxx
I was relaxing in my own first collaboration with the spa's experts on creating a hot tub for supers, my thoughts jumping between the pleasant sensation of water as hot as molten iron running over my bare skin, the hoops I had to go through to make water's critical point adjustable without turning the hot tub into a bomb, and the spare points on the character sheet provided by Liz's magic ring. It was that funny mixture of light work, idle speculation, and fun third-grade experiments with the superpowered equivalent of a soda volcano.
With a bit of fiddling I heated a portion of the tub's tungsten carbide frame until it melted, then shaped it into a rotary switch. Not an actual rotary switch, mind you, just something that looked like one. It took more than one attempt, the first time the material shattering as it cooled, the second not turning properly in its frame, and I thought about spending my points on increasing the fine control I had over my powers. That would allow me to make more elaborate and complex forcefields, making my force manipulation into a more effective tool without needing to have direct contact with what was being manipulated. It was only one of the options I'd been thinking over the past week, the moments I was feeling too stressed or energetic to relax properly.
Turning over and stretching out in the room-sized tub, I frowned at my inability to leave well enough alone, to sit back and not worry about the future. I couldn't help it; the entirety of my life prior to gaining powers had been day after day of constant effort to excel, to become the best Maya possible physically and mentally. Gaining powers had only increased the pressure but then... had I not chosen my path? I shrugged then set that fruitless line of thought aside and linked two layers of Force Adjustment to the fake rotary switch. Heating the water was a relatively simple matter of amplifying vibration. Keeping it liquid at extreme temperatures was a slightly more complex issue of increasing attractive forces between molecules and reducing vapor pressure. Doing one without the other would result into either the water in the tub exploding with the force of a large if conventional bomb, or congealing into clay-like consistency. Keeping the two balanced was the secret in providing a proper hot tub experience to supers with enough durability to swim in molten rock and enjoy it, but not all supers had the same levels of durability thus making the enchantments adjustable and tying them to the rotary switch. I managed to get it working properly after some more testing, which left only a few final touches.
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I got out of the tub, getting fully dry in doing so. The force-field keeping all free water inside the tub not only made towels largely obsolete, but was also a safety measure. Not letting the superhot water touch anything less vulnerable than the supers the hot tub was intended for had been one of the first things the spa's security head had suggested. My own addition to accident prevention had been a force-field that gently pushed normal people away while the tub was in use, with an added emergency cooling enchantment if it was breached. Now I added the rotary switch to it, a tiny forcefield turning it back off the moment the tub was no longer occupied. More safety measures meant things didn't explode in your face when you least expected it.
Unfortunately, like every other prior test, I found myself topless once again. While the lower half of my two-piece swimsuit had been created through my Super Suit skill, the upper half had been mundane cloth to test whether my latest attempt to fix the tub's only significant bug had borne fruit; it hadn't. While enhanced materials and clothing existed, they were not nearly as common as superpowered people. Most supers would only have mundane clothing, especially when it came to clothes not meant for battle... and the hot tub destroyed every mundane fabric we'd tested so far. Attempts to make an enchantment to reinforce clothing in the tub didn't work; to key enchantments that would work while I was not around to direct them, targets to be affected either needed to be enchanted directly or needed to share intrinsic qualities. People were more than ninety nine percent identical; different types of clothing didn't even share materials and shape.
Increasing the versatility of my force-based powers would have solved the problem... but as that was one of the few options at the fourth tier, increasing it would have cost a whopping sixteen points. Points I didn't have currently, and too much of a cost for something that wasn't a priority. Not with all the nebulous threats still looming on the horizon. Sighing, I replaced the lost swimwear with my Super Suit power and walked away. The hot tub was basically done; I'd let the spa people go through all the features just in case there was something missing or needing adjustment but until then...
I returned to the character sheet and the eight unspent points. Seven had come from slaying the titanic tentacle horror back in Florida, one from helping clean Colorado river from invasive fish species. Earning that one point had felt better than my victory over the monster despite the objectively far greater impact of the former... but the nature of the monsters the world faced left me antsy, worried about when the other shoe would drop. Yes, Florida's monstrous infestation had greatly dropped in intensity, but what new horror would be born from the old one's death? That was the problem with supernatural corruption feeding off a cycle of violence; it was very hard to end through violent means.
I drank one of the elaborately mixed cocktails the resort's people kept leaving for me since my success with the river, gulping down the beverage while feeling entirely unaffected from it. Yes, the taste was great, but there was neither lasting refreshment nor pleasant buzz. Most alcohol and soft drinks just didn't work properly on a super's constitution, a problem I was nowhere close to finding a solution for. If one even existed, it was likely to work only for the super it had been tailored unless very specific superpowers were involved. My body changed internally every time my powers grew; trying to understand how it worked and how chemicals that could affect it could be made was a waste of time for anyone without super-intelligence or chemistry powers.
What to do with those eight points, though? Control, number of active effects, range, scope; those were the areas of my abilities I could afford to increase, either for all the powers that had a common element of "Force" or for those that had a target of "Self". Raw power and base versatility were too costly, so the options were how easily I could shape and direct them actively, how many I could maintain at once, how far and easily they could be used at range, or their overall size or area of effect.
Of the nineteen abilities Liz's magic ring notes as "skills", the majority were force effects. Somewhat counterintuitively though, some of the most useful in a fight had only an association with "Self" rather than "Force"; both types of regeneration, the ability to step outside of time and act while my enemies could not, the two forms of teleportation, making my defenses reflect harm back to the attacker, even my super-suit fit only in the second group while several of the force-based ones fit in both groups. Thus, to get the most out of the improvements it would be better if I improved the second group of power "slots". It might have a lower Versatility or Scope than the "Force" group, but most of those abilities were not about versatility and the Power and Control ratings were the same between groups.
Speaking of "slots", the different applications of my powers I'd collected might total nineteen but the number I could have active at the same time was limited to six. Given how quickly I could shift between them there was no issue of access... but how many effects I could combine at the same time was. More than once I'd been on the back foot for not being able to leverage both great power and unusual utility and in fights I'd found myself not using all the tools at my disposal because doing so would have weakened my offense or compromised my defense. From that point of view, Range, Scope or Control were less important than having one more ability available to be combined with the rest. Thinking back on my fights, the times I'd been "locked down" by complex enemy tactics due to lack of alternative mobility or caught by surprise because foes knew to expect overwhelming force from me... they made the option a no-brainer;
Testing out the change, I slotted Force Adjustment, Forced Acceleration and Greater Proximakinesis in the "Force" cluster, with Empowering Regeneration, Force Awareness, Immutable Force and Instant Action on the "Self" cluster. Then I stepped outside of time, hitting my maximum possible speed without compromising defense or offense. That done, I dropped Forced Acceleration and Empowering Regeneration while remaining outside of time, and picked up Forcefield Creation and Lasting Force in their place. With those, I created a permanent force-field while still outside of time. The stamina drain felt like a punch to the gut, but the ability to lay down permanent effects independent of my direction while enemies couldn't do anything to interrupt was worth every one of those eight points by itself. Smiling at the new glowing band of solid air around my head, I returned to the normal flow of time to catch my breath.
"Are you ready to leave yet?" a familiar voice demanded from right behind me. I did not yelp and jump like a little girl caught with her hand in the cookie jar and anyone claiming otherwise was a lying liar who lied.
"Anne? When did you get here?!" I asked my little sister who was standing there arms crossed, in her full panoply of enchanted crystal, and with an unimpressed look on her face.
"While you were busy breaking causality to make a glowing princess tiara for yourself," the little miscreant told me with an eye-roll.
"But that happened out of time, how-"
"It happened and I was looking for it; that sufficed," she explained with the air of someone who'd had to give the same explanation many, many times. "But that is neither here or there. Put on a proper costume and let us depart, we are very nearly late for the meeting as it is."
"What meeting?" I demanded, when a more important question occurred to me. "Are you intentionally using big words to sound older and smarter?" I asked her, my lips turning up at the corners.
"Shut up!" Anne said, flushing. "You'd be doing the same after a year of being treated like a kid despite everyone coming to you for knowing more than they did." She scowled and stamped her foot. "Now get ready, the council is about to begin."
"What council would that be?" I tried not to smirk while suppressing the desire to pull at those red cheeks as was my prerogative as a Big Sister.
"The one Amanda and your General Rinaker decided we should have to decide how to coordinate our efforts and handle future threats," she explained with a scowl of impatience every older sibling and/or parent was familiar with. "Now get moving, May, I don't wanna be late in my first-ever time on the grownups table."
"Well... shit..." I groaned, looking down at myself.
"What is it now?" Anne demanded in growing frustration at yet another issue cropping up.
"My suiting power is still in a fifteen minute cool-down," I told her, pointing at my very skimpy two-piece swimsuit.
"...seriously?!"
"That's what you get for not calling ahead, little sis," I told her, wondering who would be on the aforementioned meeting slash council thing. But why did I have to wonder? Making a guess on where it would happen, I extended my super-senses as far as they would go and looked to the skies above. Then I smirked...
