Young Justice: Gotham City

July 19th, 2010

I was really expecting more consequences from what happened last night, but it seemed that those would likely have to wait for another day. Probably tomorrow in fact, judging from the fact that I was scheduled to meet with Kent again then and he was the one we’d handed Black Spider off to. The fact that the original man that had attacked us, Hook, had escaped was very irritating, but there was nothing I could really do about it right now. If I ever came across him again in the future, he would not be walking away so easily. Until then, I would just have to live with what had happened.

After Kent had left, I apparated Zatanna and I downtown to the cafe where we’d first met. Thankfully it was still open––the majority of businesses seemed to close annoyingly early, with only a selection of eateries and ‘convenience stores’ ever open past the early hours of the evening.

Despite the strong face she’d shown her uncle, it was clear to me that Zatanna was shaken by the attack. Her being the one to take down Black Spider had helped, but she was clearly cursing herself for freezing up in those first few moments.

We purchased two large mugs of tea and a pair of pastries, then I let Zatanna drag me into one of the booths near the back of the cafe. They were clearly designed to seat four, but there was plenty of room at other tables and I did not resist as Zatanna pulled me down onto the cushioned seat beside her, leaving the two seats across from us empty.

We ate in companionable silence, both of us lost in our own fights. Despite the unpleasantly muggy heat outside, the hot tea helped me center myself and the sugary sweets were a welcome comfort.

I had fought terribly. The only good thing I’d done the entire time was erect a proper shield, but everything else was an utter disaster. Just flinging around combat spells at a distant, fast-moving target was a recipe for failure. I wasn’t facing a fellow wizard on an empty dueling stage! This wasn't a class where I had to limit myself to allowed spells and strategies permitted under form-five regulations.

Now that the fight was over, my mind was packed with dozens of super strategies I could have employed. I could have transfigured parts of the ceiling where he was hiding into noxious gas, conjured birds to harass him, used spells with a bigger area of effect like Incendio, or even just pelted him with a cloud of flying knives.

And the other man! There had been tons of material to work with in the warehouse and I was a dab hand with inanimate to animate transfiguration. I doubted he would have nearly as much success running away from a pack of wolves or a few cheetahs. Or maybe a swarm of hornets––I racked my brain for the incantation of the spell I’d seen while working on one of Dumbledore’s homework assignments. Crabris? Craboris maybe?

The exact spell didn’t matter nearly as much when it came to transfiguration compared to charms. The key was visualization and experience. A spell to turn coat hangers to chinese hornets wasn’t particularly handy, but it could be easily twisted to turn anything into giant wasps with anger issues.

Eventually, it started getting late. We left before the cafe could close with us still inside, my muggle-repelling amulet ensuring that none of the staff members would notice our presence. I dropped Zatanna off at Shadowcrest, then headed home. Though I was rather tired, I didn’t go to bed until very, very late that night, absorbed in finishing a few minor projects that I was no longer willing to put off.

I woke up the next day to pounding rain. Dark clouds filled the sky and barely any light filtered into my room through the curtains I’d forgotten to close the night before. I ate a paltry breakfast of tea and buttered toast, grabbed a few things, and apparated over to Shadowcrest.

Today, Zatanna wasn’t in the library. She also wasn’t in the kitchen, the reading room, nor her favorite spot on the porch. That left either her room––which I couldn’t enter for fear of triggering the detection ward Giovanni had put on the doorway––or the training room where she’d shown me the basics of logomancy.

Thankfully she was in the training room like I’d expected. She was floating in the air on one side of the room, an expression of razor-sharp focus on her face and a blue shield floating between her and the makeshift targets she’d set up on the other side of the room. I watched with interest as she smoothly dodged from side to side, then lit one of the targets on fire without losing focus on the other two spells she was using.

I stepped inside, prepared to wait while she finished up her practice, but she noticed me immediately as I came inside. Zatanna’s shield winked out and she dropped from the air, her knees bending and her skirt flaring out as she landed safely on the ground. Then she rushed over to meet me, calling out my name happily as she approached.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

She stopped awkwardly when she got close to me, and I decided to catch her hand and gently kiss her fingers like I had the very first time we’d met. “Good morning, Zatanna. You’re looking as radiant as ever. I hope you had a restful night?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was fine,” she told me slightly breathlessly. She looked slightly flustered, though I wasn't certain if that was a product of my greeting or fatigue from her training.

Reaching into the pocket of my jeans, I dug out a small jewelry box that I’d…sort of purchased several days earlier, and handed it to Zatanna. “After yesterday, I…wanted you to have this. It would make me feel more comfortable if you wore it when we went out into the city.”

She hesitantly accepted the box and opened it, revealing a charm bracelet with two small charms dangling from the chain. One was a magician’s hat and the other a capital Z, both cast from pure silver and polished to a fine shine.

She stared at the jewelry for a long moment and I quickly began to explain before she could take things the wrong way. “They’re charmed a lot like the ones I’m wearing. The hat is a shield and the z is a bubble-head charm to help with dust, gas, and bad smells.”

There was also a third charm, a small rabbit, but I’d eventually decided to leave that one at home. It was imbued with a tracking charm that I’d cast, but I wasn’t sure that Zatanna would be okay with wearing something like that and wanted to make sure she’d keep the bracelet on as much as possible.

Instead, after casting a few charms on the entire thing I’d removed a single link from the center of the chain and added it to my own necklace. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but there was a ritual I could use to locate the rest of the bracelet using the piece I’d removed. Plus that way there wouldn’t actually be any tracking magic on the bracelet itself that could be removed by a paranoid kidnapper, father, or uncle.

“Oh. Um, thanks Hydrys. That’s…really thoughtful of you.” She took the bracelet out of the box and I helped her clasp it around her wrist. It fit perfectly of course, owing to the sizing charms I’d used during our shopping trips earlier in the week.

Zatanna stared at the two charms for a moment longer, then surprised me by throwing her arms around my chest and hugging me tightly. It was a brief hug, lasting barely more than a handful of seconds, but I found my cheeks heating up and had to surreptitiously reinforce my occlumency barriers as I awkwardly hugged her back.

After handing over the bracelet, I helped Zatanna clean up the room, and then the conversation shifted to what we’d been doing the night before. Before our eventual encounter with the two assassins, Zatanna and I had checked out a number of potentially promising locations to convert into my future home and base of operations. I’d been planning to look through at least a few more options, but after what had happened yesterday, we both decided that maybe it would be better to settle on one of the ones we’d already concluded looked pretty good.

There were three such locations. An old pub, a dilapidated two-story house, and a big abandoned warehouse near the docks. We discarded the warehouse as a choice almost immediately. It was not a bad location and I was definitely going to keep it in mind in case I needed somewhere like that in the future, but it just wasn’t very…homey.

We spent a few minutes debating the other two, and ultimately decided that the pub was probably the better option. It had nice, thick walls, good soundproofing, a big basement, and lots of small rooms that could be easily expanded to fit my needs on the second floor.

The house had a slightly better location––it was very close to Slaughter Swamp and thus the nexus of dark magic beneath the fetid waters––but it wasn’t like Gotham was really lacking in ambient dark magic either. The concentration around the building wasn’t quite as high, but the proximity to Old Gotham still left it high enough that the Ministry back home probably would have gotten involved and tried to clean it up.

Turning the abandoned building into a proper wizard’s home was going to take some time. Even with magic, renovating a space like that wasn’t exactly instantaneous, and putting up enough wards and other defenses that I could finally sleep comfortably at night wasn’t going to take lots of time and work.

I was still trying to decide quite how far I wanted to go with the place. I didn’t think I could actually make it truly impenetrable even if I went all out, but I could definitely make anyone who tried to break in really, really regret it. The Ministry of Magic with all its rules and regulations didn’t exist here. There were no laws against what sort of wards I could put up, nor did I need expensive permits and hired inspectors to make sure no ‘shady’ magic got included in the defenses.

A certain level of protection was a given of course. The building would be unplottable, invisible to muggles, and as impenetrable to every form of spying and unwanted entry that I could manage no matter what other protections I decided to include. However, I could absolutely go beyond that. There was a full moon coming up in a week, and I was pretty sure I could find a few dozen cows, goats, or sheep that no one would miss. Plus, there were all those corpses just lying around in Slaughter Swamp…

Well, I’d need to give it some thought. For now, I apparated the two of us into my future home’s worn and filthy entryway, our entrance kicking up huge clouds of dust that swirled around the outside of our dual bubble-head charms. Before anything else, we needed to set up some basic notice-me-nots and muggle-repellers, then start cleaning up. There was no way I could put up any wards, much less something powerful enough to keep out a determined intruder, in a place like this.