Young Justice: Gotham City

July 19th, 2010

The initial charms work didn’t take long, but then again it was more meant to repel nosy onlookers and muffle any noise we made while we focused on more important work. The street the abandoned pub was on was almost as empty and dilapidated as the building itself, with only the rare car or hurried straggler passing therows of boarded-up storefronts and filthy brick walls. Only the distant rumble of engines and honking of horns, reminding listeners of the busy thoroughfare just two blocks over, showed that this was not some abandoned settlement in the middle of nowhere.

With that out of the way, Zatanna and I began looking around the pub in earnest. Though we’d done a cursory walkthrough of the building the day before, there was a big difference between shuffling around making sure the foundation was intact and the floor wasn’t about to cave in, compared to actually looking at everything and deciding what work needed to be done.

Though I’d mentally been referring to the place as a pub, that was perhaps not the most accurate description of the building’s past applications. Much of the first floor had clearly fulfilled such a purpose–some of the furniture, dishes, and decorations were still present and painted the picture of a cheery place to go to share a pint with friends in the evening––but that was far from the only thing that had gone on in this building.

Shamefully, it was not I who realized this first. After looking around the former dining area, kitchen, stockroom, and bar, Zatanna and I had descended together into the building’s expansive basement. Well, the first basement, it actually had a second, smaller one that I had managed not to notice during my first visit due to the difficulty in accessing it.

Instead of using a simple lumos spell shining from the tip of my wand like I had yesterday, I summoned a half-dozen balls of pale white light and sent them flying around the room to illuminate everything all at once. There were more tables and chairs, another bar, several sectioned off areas, and a number of platforms with thin metal columns connecting them to the ceiling. Those had worried me somewhat yesterday, but a spell had told me they were not critical to the building's integrity and could be easily removed.

Zatanna took one look around and her face flushed a bright red. It took several minutes for me to convince her to open up about what had her so flustered, at which point she finally decided to educate me on a number of entertainment options that muggles had come up with over the decades. She did a lot of mumbling and her blush did not go down for quite some time, but it was enough to get the point across.

This place had clearly once had entertainment outside of just food, drink, and music. The idea of a club with female entertainers was not fully foreign to me. There were always scandalous rumors about which lords and whose sons had been seen frequenting parts of Knockturn Alley that I had been told to avoid for reasons other than just safety, and I’d heard stories of what went on at some of the upscale gentlewizard clubs my father and uncles were all members of.

However, the idea of such a public venue with so many people, and some of the utterly degenerate ideas that even a well-raised young woman like Zatanna knew about…well, it was certainly something. I guessed that if the regular clothes of the time were as revealing as the ones I now saw every day, you had to go a lot further to separate a man from his coin than you did in my day.

Once she had regained her composure, Zatanna and I walked around the rest of the property. I looked at everything with new eyes, certain architectural decisions that had previously seemed rather dubious now looking far more logical. The purpose of the small, thick-walled and windowless rooms on the second floor now seemed clear. The rather strange distribution of staircases also made a lot more sense once I realized why someone walking from the basement to the second floor would not want to be seen on the first.

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Zatanna’s theory was further confirmed by the small dressing room we found at the back of the basement, complete with a few discarded garments hidden in out-of-the-way corners. I had never seen a garment consisting of so little fabric before, but I was glad that Zatanna was otherwise occupied when I found it as the thought of the beautiful witch beside me in it and nothing else left me distracted for a distressingly long time.

After about an hour of poking around, Zatanna and I met up in what had once been a small office attached to the kitchen. She was, particularly after what we’d found in the basement, not fully convinced about my choice of future residence, but I was quite pleased with it. The construction was solid, the sub-basement hidden beneath a trap door in the basement’s small kitchen would make a perfect ward-hub, and the two-dozen small rooms on the second floor were almost perfectly set up for undetectable expansion charms to turn them into proper rooms.

Though I could see where she was coming from, I personally had no issue living in what was essentially a former brothel. Certainly I was going to sanitize and purify everything very thoroughly, but it wasn’t like basically any home I chose had once housed muggles breeding with one another.

“Would it help if I told you I’m going to tear out basically everything in the basement?” I asked. I had a lot of ideas for that space, and a good bit of it would maybe even end up covered in water to boot. Though maybe I could preserve some of that area that had once been reserved for high-paying guests. The idea of Zatanna twirling around in some of that ‘clothing’ wouldn’t get out of my head no matter how much I reinforced my occlumency barriers.

“A little,” she admitted.

“And you can burn all the sheets and those broken bed frames we found on the second floor as well. It's not like I plan to reopen this place for business. I doubt this place will ever see more than a handful of outside visitors. The foundation is firm, the construction is sound, and ultimately nothing here will have any resemblance to what once was in a handful of weeks. What does it matter what manner of people once patronized this place?”

This place was going to be a fortress, I could already picture it in my mind’s eye. I wasn’t an expert warder by any means, but between my Planeswalker mana, the amount of dark magic saturating this entire city, and a willingness to use techniques and spells that would have had me rightfully thrown into Azkaban back home, I was pretty sure I could manage something pretty impressive.

Anyone who tried to invade my home would sorely regret it for the handful of moments they could. There was a fascinating ward I’d always been itching to try that transfigured individual drops of blood into pure lithium, and I could probably fit an entire army worth of inferi into a sectioned-off portion of the basement.

“I guess you’re right,” Zatanna admitted finally. “So, uh, what do we do now?”

I looked around at the junk on the floor, the broken furniture, the mountains of dust covering every surface and the peeling wallpaper. I really, really wished I had a house elf right about now, but even without one at least household charms would make this go a lot faster than if I was doing things the muggle way.

I sighed heavily. “Unfortunately, this disaster isn’t going to clean up itself.”

Zatanna ran a finger along the wall and looked at the giant clump of dust she’d collected in the span of just a few inches. “Oh. Ugh, this is going to be so much worse than cleaning my room.”

“It will be worth it in the end, and at least the company is good.”

Zatanna looked down at the bracelet on her wrist. “That’s something.”

“Well, we’ve still got an hour or two before lunch. Let’s see how big a dent we can make in all of this.”