Young Justice: Gotham

August 16th, 2010

I wasn’t really sure what I’d been expecting in the wake of the battle. I’d fought a Chaos Lord, an ancient malevolent entity with enough magical power to make the strongest wizards I’d ever met green with envy. I’d used two unforgivables and a number of other dark spells in full view of several members of the local law enforcement.

I’d certainly assumed that there would be consequences for my actions. Perhaps not to the same extent as if I’d done what I’d done in front of a squad of Aurors, but consequences regardless. When Nabu had landed in front of me in the body of Abra Kedabra, I had been both relieved that the battle was over, and dreading what came next.

Instead, well. It seemed I hadn’t been thinking of things from quite the right angle. After all, what had people seen me do? They’d seen me risk myself to save my teacher, a respected hero with deep ties to the most powerful heroic organization in the world. They’d seen me fight valiantly to defend him from Klarion’s assault, and then collapse from exhaustion when everything was over. They’d seen me turn the course of the battle by subduing Abra Kedabra and bringing Doctor Fate to assist us.

They hadn’t seen me frantically trying to stay alive in a situation that had rapidly spiraled way out of control. They hadn’t seen me cast two different curses that each bore with them a life sentence in the worst prison in Europe. They hadn’t seen me consign another wizard to potentially a life sentence as a flesh puppet wielded by a higher power.

Merlin and Morgana I still wasn’t used to seeing this place as an entirely different world. There were just too many similarities, even for all the many changes wrought by time and history. There were no unforgivables here. Wizards didn’t have any sort of unified government, and with so many divergent casting styles, banning specific spells wouldn’t really work particularly well anyway.

Sure Kent had quietly asked me if I knew what I was doing with some of the magic I was casting, but that was it! I’d cast the Killing Curse and the Imperius Curse within ten meters of one of this Plane’s highest wizarding authorities and the only thing I’d gotten was a warning to take care of myself!

Certainly I wasn’t completely in the clear. Killing people, even muggles, was still something the locals frowned upon, and I had a feeling that if I started throwing around the other two unforgivables willy-nilly I would also eventually run into issues, but the locals only cared about the effect of my spells, not what spells I cast in the first place. I’d get into just as much trouble for killing someone with a severing charm as I would if I had used the blackest of arts. It was a strange system, but I liked it.

I’d ended up sleeping for nearly four hours after the fight, and woke up with a headache and protesting muscles. I would have slept longer, but I was woken up by Giovanni, who’d finally learned about what had happened and came rushing to the Tower of Fate to see his daughter, who had elected to stay at the tower with Kent and I.

He was, to put it mildly, rather angry with both Zatanna and I, but mostly me. I could understand some of his anger––I was honestly pretty angry with myself too. Zatanna was a talented witch, but she didn’t even have the meager level of dueling training that I did. She was completely unprepared to face down someone like Klarion.

Merlin, I was in no way prepared to face someone like Klarion. If Kent hadn’t been there, and if I hadn’t weakened him from the start with my mana-empowered Killing Curse, I wouldn’t have lasted a fraction as long as I had. Even after the mild but certainly noticeable boost to my spellcasting that I’d received when I became a Planeswalker, I just didn’t have the power or precision to keep up with Klarion’s ridiculously fast casting speed and overwhelming strength. Even as I had tired throughout our exchange, Klarion had just gotten stronger and stronger as the damage I managed to inflict was slowly washed away.

There was a lot of shouting involved. Mostly from Giovanni, but Zatanna wasn’t too happy with some of what her dad had to say. Things did not particularly improve when I eventually hobbled out of my borrowed bedroom in my rumpled clothes with my eyes half-shut against the light of the Tower’s everburning torches.

Fortunately, Kent eventually arrived and managed to diffuse the situation before Giovanni, Zatanna, or I did something that all of us would regret. For all that Giovanni did not particularly like me, he did look up to Kent greatly and saving the life of his mentor bought me a lot of slack. Sure most of that was immediately cut away by the mere idea that I was spending time with his daughter, but I do think that I somehow managed to end the day with a slightly better relationship with the wizard then when I started it.

As Zatanna had predicted, she was immediately grounded for the rest of the summer. Judging from the way she was rolling her eyes behind her father’s back, I had a feeling she wasn’t going to be following that particular command.

As much as I had wanted to go back to bed after that particular encounter, my day had been far from over. Thankfully, what came next was something that I had a lot more practice with than getting yelled at by my secret lady friend’s father. Something I had spent my entire life training for. Mingling. Making valuable connections with people of power and means.

Well, sort of at least.

Kent was still at the Tower of course, as was Doctor Fate, Red Tornado, and the two young heroes we’d come with initially. However, they’d been joined by a number of others, most coming to check on Kent or to speak with the newly embodied Doctor Fate. Most notably, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Batman, some of the core members of the Justice League.

Despite not being in my best form, I did my best to make the most of the situation. Firstly I checked in with the others who’d been with me when I’d rescued Kent, more to maintain appearances rather than out of any particular desire to speak to them, and thanked Wonder Woman again for her aid during our search.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Then, I got Aqualad to introduce me to his king, whose name was Orin. We didn’t speak for long––he was a busy man––but I had enough time to mention my interest in visiting the Conservatory of Sorcery and he promised to expedite the application Kent had submitted for me.

After that I managed to have an incredibly fruitful meeting with Nabu while the Justice League members were discussing something with Kent. He was very thankful for my aid in providing him with a new body and then decided that ‘such service to Order deserved a suitable reward’.

I would have been more than happy with just the nigh-unlimited access to the Tower’s library that he offered me, but then he also did something I didn’t realize was possible. Pressing our hands together, he did something with his magic and I felt a new blueprint form within my Spark. Not for a summon or artifact, but for a spell!

I thanked him, he said something about ‘promoting Order’ and promptly flew away. Slightly rude, but I certainly wasn’t going to say anything.

Before I could get caught up in exploring my new spell, I had a rather strange encounter with the last member of the Justice League present––Batman. He was rather curt and very serious, and I honestly wasn’t sure what to make of him. Our conversation mostly boiled down to a request for me to not start anything in Gotham city, his territory, and then some veiled words about heroism.

Finally, once he was free from other obligations, I had a chance to speak to Kent without Giovanni yelling over him. The elderly wizard looked ten years older than he had two days earlier, but at the same time it seemed as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He happily promised to continue and potentially even expand our lessons, then, very correctly, said that we should probably both go get some rest.

Compared to the excitement of the previous few days, the following weeks were wonderfully free of major issues. I’d had more than my fill of danger and excitement and happily threw myself back into my true passion––magic. Well, that and spending time with my gorgeous, brilliant girlfriend whenever she could sneak out of Shadowcrest. It took her three days to figure out a way to bypass the extra set of wards her father had set up, and another two to put it into motion. After that, the portkeys I’d enchanted for her out of two different decks of cards made it nearly trivial for her to travel from Shadowcrest to the Pub and back.

It was a rather wonderful and very productive time. When I was on my own, I focused on practicing my magic, developing my skills as a Planeswalker, and transforming both my new home and the island at the center of Slaughter Swamp into veritable fortresses. I practiced casting some of the more powerful combat spells I knew until I could swiftly cast them both with and without the use of mana.

Now that I wasn’t quite as worried about casting dark magic, and had an entire house warded against scrying and other detection spells, I was free to finally try my hand at fiendfyre once more. The cursed flames were as difficult to control as ever, but I successfully both cast and extinguished them several times in a carefully prepared area. Then, emboldened by my success, tested the efficacy of augmenting the flames with first Black and then Red mana.

That was…certainly an experience. Black mana made the flames even hungrier than they naturally were. In moments, they consumed the wards I’d set up, every drop of magic and fuel making them blaze higher and higher. I stifled them barely five seconds after the last syllable of the incantation fell from my lips, but in that time they’d managed to melt through six inches of cement and consumed every drop of ambient magic within reach.

Red mana on the other hand, simply made them fiercer and harder to control. I was very glad for the additional mana that the Tower now provided to me because I wasn’t sure that I could have ended the spell with just my own focus and control. I very pointedly decided to, as before, keep fiendfyre as a final option unless I was absolutely certain I could control it. The cursed fire was simply too dangerous to wield lightly.

Of course that was not the only magic I experimented with. Protego Horribilis was practiced till I could cast it every time without needing mana as a crutch. I also finally attempted another version of the protego spell that I had read about but never successfully cast, Protego Diabolica. The spell was ridiculously complicated and draining, but I got it down after about six hours. I certainly hadn’t mastered the spell, but I could cast it––more than ninety-nine percent of wizards back home could manage, that was for certain.

My attempts at refining my planeswalking were less successful, but were still proceeding nicely. It still took an immense amount of focus and effort to tear my way out of reality, but now the fog that filled the space that dwelt between universes was not nearly so opaque. I could see the shadows of distant worlds and was confident that, when the time came, I’d be able to find my way to one of them successfully. I could also now successfully reemerge using any of my three bound lands, though I intentionally avoided revealing that I could bypass essentially any ward Giovanni might set up around Shadowcrest by simply leaving the Plane and returning within his manor.

Finally, my warding and trap-laying was proceeding wonderfully. I spent an afternoon unearthing ninety-seven corpses soaked in dark magic from the depths of Slaughter Swamp, then turned each and every one into an Inferius. Twenty remained lurking in the murky waters of the swamp, while the other seventy-seven, plus the three I’d created previously, I brought back to the Pub and stored away in a spatially-extended, locked, and warded closed in the basement.

Every day I descended down into the ward room and spent at least an hour carving new spells into the wardstone. It was exhausting, mind-numbing work, but day by day, week by week, I felt more and more comfortable sleeping soundly with the knowledge that even a Chaos Lord like Klarion would struggle to assail me within my territory.

I also took more lessons with Kent. Three times a week I came to the Tower of Fate and spent several hours studying Order magic. We primarily focused on the detection spells I wanted to learn, but after our experience fighting side by side he had plenty of advice and suggestions for how to improve my combat skills that I happily absorbed as well. We dueled several times and each time, I could feel my skills and instincts sharpening.

While I loved every moment I spent practicing and learning magic, I also treasured the time I spent together with Zatanna. And of course the time spent doing both was the best of both worlds.

Zatanna sometimes joined me for Kent’s lessons. Other days, she’d bring some books from Shadowcrest with her to the Pub and we’d pour over them together. Yet others she’d drag me to various muggle attractions and restaurants. Most of our time however we spent working on furnishing and remodeling the Pub into a true living space. We browsed through stores filled with furniture of all shapes and sizes, picked paint for the walls, and tested out all sorts of designs and layouts. Most of our work occurred on the second floor, where I’d used undetectable expansion charms to turn the tiny little rooms into far larger and more opulent chambers.

It was…wonderful. As were the days when we got sidetracked and instead spent hours unproductively kissing and cuddling. Things did not yet progress further than that, but I could clearly see the desire and passion shining in Zatanna’s eyes. It was simply that a suitable opportunity had yet to arise.

Of course not everything was fun and games. There was some annoyance that also needed to be taken care of. I met several more times with my muggle lawyer turned business partner and provided him with a number of enchanted talismans and other examples of the work I could do. I corresponded with Megan, the overly-friendly martian girl who had tried to intrude upon my mind, and even met with her and some of her junior-hero friends for an afternoon. Overall however, it was a good time. One I felt I would look back upon fondly in the future.