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Secret Lair
–Damian Hawthorne–
"Voila!" He announced their arrival, as they came into the portal room, with the intention of giving her a full tour of the place he had built for himself. Speaking of which, he turned to her and asked something that had been on his mind but was not nearly at the top in terms of priority.
"There isn't really a law in terms of mandating the construction of magical homes in publicly owned land, right? I mean, as long as–"
"No, Mr.Hawthorne. There isn't one. As long as you do not needlessly expose magic to the wider world and this place does not risk running afoul of that single mandate, you can continue staying here." She replied as she looked around before walking to the doors.
He hurriedly followed behind, having to walk faster than normal to maintain pace with her freakishly long legs, or was it just him who was smaller than everyone else?
Damned pre pubescent age.
He then showed her the entire place. Everything, from the labs to the kitchen where her gaze meaningfully went to the bottle of milk, which he pretended to ignore, to his office, to the place where he stored the fraying clothing received from the ROB as well as the wand he got from Ollivanders.
He had expected some reaction to the wand, but he got none. Moving on from that, he showed her the seven empty levels, ready to be used for anything, with a single prison floor he built just as an experiment, all with enchantments up to the wazoo, from protection to crowd control to asphyxiation to food and water control, to atmospheric composition control. Everything.
It was quite an educational week that he spent on this floor, making sure that nothing and no one could slip through the cracks, just in case he had to host a prisoner in his lair, which was unlikely but even so, this place served as a blueprint for him, just in case he had to build an offsite prison in a place where no one else had jurisdiction but him.
Like Mars.
Then, finally, they reached the lowest floor and after showing her the panic room, which was pretty useless because this entire place was one giant panic room that had defenses much stronger than this puny panic room, he was about to head up, only to pause as the Ancient One did not follow him, instead opting to look straight down, where he knew the Root Tree was.
He sighed and returned, standing beside her as she stared, or more like, glared at the floor with alarming intensity, as if looking any longer would let her look through the floor. Actually, shouldn't she have some sort of X-ray spell to do so?
"Don't you have an X-ray spell?" He voiced out loud, taking a few steps back to lean on the wall, feeling the coarse surface poking through his shirt.
"I do," She said while circling the same spot. Then, abruptly, her neck snapped to the side, to look at a different part of the surface, while she muttered, "Interesting."
"You can't reach it. I made sure to seal every path to it. Plus, over time, it should learn and move itself–"
"It isn't just learning, it has already begun learning. It has moved from its original path, using all the connections around the place as a conduit, to instantly move its core location away from the current threat." She summarised, as she continued moving, her neck on a swivel as she looked at multiple spots on the ground, then her gaze slid to the walls, and then up. After a while of that, she stopped moving her neck around and focused on him, as he was leaning on the wall the whole time, watching the spectacle.
He knew she was not going to hurt the root tree so it was amusing to watch her chase it as it moved around the lair, trying to get away from her. He had not programmed anything into the Root Tree yet when it came to authorised users, because he did not foresee anyone else entering this space aside from him but something about the Ancient One must have stopped the Root Tree from employing any measures against her.
It might also be because he was with her at all times. He honestly, genuinely did not know.
How fun!
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"I would advise caution on going further than this, Mr.Hawthorne. Doing so might incur the risk of gaining the attention of beings that you do not want the attention of," Were the first words that she spoke to him as they drank tea in his kitchen, with her sitting on one side of the kitchen island and him on the other side, sitting on small ottomans with adjustable heights, allowing him to sit at roughly the same height as her.
"Hmm," he said, drinking his tea, thinking things through before replying, "I was not planning on making any more of them. Don't really have a place to put them, you see." He conveyed in a joking manner, but seeing the ever present frown on her face, sighed and confirmed in an earnest tone.
"Fine. I will not make any more of them. Happy?"
"I am not saying that you can't make more of them. I am just informing you that doing so will garner the attention of entities that are avoided by most Mystics for a reason. If you deem yourself strong enough to do so, you may freely continue." She explained her reasoning, which was pretty sound, in her defense.
Before he could ask the obvious, she replied, "And no, you are nowhere near strong enough to do so. As you are now, even Dumbledore, with very little information on you, could put up a strong fight. I believe you have no more than 2 chances of surprising him before he takes you seriously and forces you to escalate to a level of force that would end up bringing the full might of the ICW on your head."
Okay, one, she did not outright say he could defeat Dumbledore, but that comparison was not nice for his already very high ego. Secondly, she was right. As he was now, he had plenty of tricks to just defeat Dumbledore or realistically, any wizard alive, by simply denying them the right to a stable environment.
How could someone cast spells, for example, if they were in a vacuum or in a high gravity or high atmospheric pressure zone? What if their entire surroundings were suddenly ignited because of how much kinetic energy he released into the atmosphere all at once?
He had dozens of ways he could manipulate the area around them in such a way that no living being could come out of it alive, but that's the thing. All of them were lethal measures, designed in such a way that the only outcome would be death.
He couldn't just do that to Dumbledore or many other people he was going to clash with, in the future, on both the magical and the mundane side. For one, they certainly did not deserve that and secondly, it would just invite more conflict, more fights, and even if he did win almost all of them, he only had to lose once.
This being a superhero universe, it was certain that he would lose to some underdog hero, which is why he nodded at her, taking her warning seriously, before finishing the cup of tea.
The cup being enchanted to keep the tea warm, gauging the temperature preference of the drinker by measuring the exact temperature of the tea when they take their first sip, instantly absorbing thermal energy from the tea and then adding to it as time goes by, just to maintain the right temperature of the tea, keeping in mind the preference of the user.
A tedious way of keeping the tea warm, but once an idea took root in his mind, he couldn't help but bring it to reality, even if it took an entire day to make and then multiple subsequent days to refine.
He wondered if he could just sell these once he graduated from Hogwarts?
"Very well, I hope you take my warning to heart. And Damian, that is a very impressive piece of magic in its own right, and when you take your age into account? That becomes even more impressive." He nodded, smiling abashedly at the unexpected praise.
"Just don't let this get to your head." He nodded at the advice as well, as she walked into the portal room and then looked at him, maintaining eye contact as she just…. disappeared in front of his eyes, withering into dust that settled on the ground.
"What the…" He exclaimed before rushing forward to examine the sand. Was that a clone?
"Damn," He did not account for that in his bunker defences or his ward structure. What if she could affect the integrity of the clone and move it through small gaps?
What a marvellous piece of infiltration magic!
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