Disclaimer - I don't own anything. As the corporations say these days, you will own nothing & be happy. I don't, and have never claimed to, own Marvel or Disney or any of its characters. With that out of the way, let's goooo!
Lair Extraordinaire, Scottish Highlands
–Damian Hawthorne–
His eyes snapped open, the dim light from the simulated sun hitting his face as he yawned and sat up on the bed, a very comfortable one, as he looked out the window, which showed the interiors of his base.
It was still a work in progress, and for the most part, he had yet to figure out what to even do with most of the space here, but in the end, its most important purpose for being a bastion of safety was fulfilled.
He stood up, stretched, looked at himself in the mirror for a moment, before moving to the bathroom. With a mental flick, he switched on the base, so to speak. Lights began switching on throughout the base, the active defensive wards in place began simmering down, to a low watchful gaze, instead of just knocking out, capturing, and imprisonment mode that he set it to when asleep.
Once inside the bathroom, he was greeted with a plain setup, with nothing that could be used to turn the water on or off. Instead of fiddling with dials and taps, he just stepped into the designated shower zone and let his magic loose, creating a faint cloud of magic that interacted with the shower here.
Water, pooled on top of him, was heated before raining down on him from the top. Then, two other jets from the top sent water straight down, as he just stood there for a moment, basking in what was basically the perfect temperature of water.
Ofcourse, just like most things, that got old quickly as his body adjusted to the blast of hot water, so he mentally reached out and heated the water even more, allowing him to enjoy the feeling of increasingly scalding hot water on his skin, as he marvelled at the durability of his body.
Once he was done marvelling at that, he reduced the flow of water and began his usual routine.
Thank Merlin for the good toiletries. He'd found a luxury brand based in London itself that did custom deliveries for him every week, placed in a PO box, which had a teleportation sequence that brought it to the secured delivery section of his base.
He grinned at the thought of someone messing with it and finding themselves in a transparent box, surrounded by lava from all sides. That box was lifted out of the lava only after secure checks were done, in a vacuum.
One of the things he had to consciously drill into his mind was the use of his hands. He had to actively train himself to use his hands and legs to do most mundane things. It had become habitual for him to just use his cloud of magic as a telekinetic limb to get everything to him.
It was something that he had only realised after the habit had already sunk its teeth in. One day, he was going to have to live out in the open, he hoped. He would love to live in New York, with Central Park just a stone's throw away, with all the vibrant community that the city provided.
For that to happen, he couldn't just cultivate habits that would instantly oust him as a wizard. With that in mind, he began doing the basic things himself. Things that he would do in public and run the risk of him doing it with magic and being forced to then mind wipe a bunch of innocent people and track down to destroy any digital copy of it, which would be basically impossible in just a decade or so.
So, really, he was just saving himself trouble down the line.
Which is why, he entered the walk-in wardrobe himself, looking over quite a varied collection of clothing, that was unfortunately not custom made for his size because he did not have that background to enter that world of opulence.
As he ran his fingers over the clothes, his mind flashed to the first set of clothing that was given to him. Quickly putting on a plain T-shirt and jeans, he jumped out of his bedroom and landed lightly on the ground, the cloud of magic doing all the work for him, instead of relying on enchantments woven into his clothing.
Inside the base, he never kept his shields up, since they were woven into the walls of this place. Outside, though, he kept them up at all times and felt very vulnerable when he couldn't feel that reassuring layer of magic that would block most things for him. Another thing he hoped to work out by the time he became an adult in the eyes of the law.
Also, he would have grown strong enough by that time to be assured in his safety.
Briskly walking out of the large open space, into one of the many adjacent rooms, he found himself looking at a shit and a pant, both floating side by side, held together in a vacuum, as their threads seemed to be fraying at the seams, with almost a quarter of them already withered away.
Looking at them invoked a sense of nostalgia as well as a sense of urgency within him as he raced to copy all the enchantments woven into that, frankly, miracle material before they withered away into nothingness.
As it turns out, the ROB, bless him, who put him here and gave him those clothes as a stop gap measure until he grew strong enough to protect himself, were not indestructible. Sometime last year, they began to lose their integrity, with the rate of damage increasing day by day.
It took him two days to realise that the rate of damage was increasing because of exposure to the environment around him. Magic, air, water, dimensional energy, and even light were some things that were damaging the first set of enchanted clothing he had seen.
Which is why they were both dangled in a column of absolute vacuum, with minimal magic and even dimensional energy, which was a bitch to make because of the omnipresent nature of that particular energy. He had to constantly, and aggressively siphon any dimensional energy flowing through that space to protect those enchantments.
As far as he could tell, they were the absolute top tier of enchantments, at least in terms of ones that were powered by wizard magic, with varying settings for different levels of intensity.
So far, he had only managed to copy the Calm Mind and Thermal Energy Manipulation to their highest levels, allowing him to create that lava room below. That room, coincidentally, also piloted all the enchantments woven into that glass, and since the energy conservation ratio from heat to magic was absolutely horrible, it allowed him to keep the glass room safe and reduce the heat around it.
Still, it would have been nice to have a warning before the clothes began to break apart. Thankfully, he had already begun making new ones so it was not an issue immediately but even with his best estimates, he knew he was going to lose half of the original enchantments and that bummed him out.
Exhaling, he went out of the room, waving his hand as it sealed up completely, and moved to the kitchen, which was just another door built into the walls. See, with the amount of magic he had learned from the Enchantment for Dummies book, he could have built a spatially enhanced room, but he found that there was simply no need for it.
He had all the space he could ever need in this base, and if he needed to expand. Well, it took him weeks to get everything set up here so the next time, it would take even less time.
Plus, there were warnings written into the book, and he wanted to secure the space from any incursion that might happen because of the Convergence scheduled to happen a decade and change from now.
The moment he entered his kitchen, he went to the fridge, took out bread, and milk.
Ah, yes, the original bottle of unending milk, a gift from the Ancient One, something that helped him survive out in that forest. A worthy gift.
As it turned out, while Sorcery could replicate matter, it was not a perfect conversion, and the enchantment for that ran out of juice pretty quickly. What the Ancient One here had done was essentially create a tap to an alternate dimension, which was, and this was pretty wild to him, made of milk.
Cow milk, to be accurate.
Apparently, there was a place out there, an entire dimension, full of cow milk, with no cows, that did not go bad and retained its freshness for basically forever.
Not gonna lie, his first instinct was to find a dimension full of tea powder, water and bash them all together to make a tea dimension.
Then, he was reminded of the infinite nature of alternate dimensions and realised that there was probably something like that already out there, waiting to be discovered.
Just the fact that a person could only make connections with a small number of alternate dimensions stopped him from writing that down on his task list for when he became an adult and was allowed in Kamar Taj. The Ancient One was an exception, which meant she cheated using either the Time Stone or her Dark Patron.
He sighed in contentment as he made French Toast for himself, and sat down on the kitchen island to eat his breakfast. Lunch would be meat, and today, he had chicken in mind. After all, his body needed lots of fuel every day, which was fantastic because he would have eaten up all that food anyway. It helped that he now had a body that could keep up with his eating habits.
Once he was done with his breakfast, he carefully placed the bottle of milk back into the fridge and went to the teleportation room.
Enough dilly dallying around. Time to face the music.
Let's see what the rag known as the Daily Prophet had to say about him and his explosive exit yesterday. He just hoped that Dumbledore did not do anything drastic just because of his flight spell.
If you would like to support me, read ahead(12 chapters rn) on this & other stories, commission more stuff like this, or vote in Snippet Polls, you can head on to my P*treon.