Disclaimer - I don't, and have never claimed to, own Marvel or its Intellectual Property. This is all just so that I can take my maladaptive daydreaming and turn it into something so that it does not ruin the rest of my day.
DoorMan #13
Red Hearth [January 17, 2008]
–Colin Baxter–
"197…" He heaved with all his might, finally getting the weight up, and then threw it across the room, not having the confidence to set it back down properly. The weight made a thunderous noise that felt different than what it would have made in normal gravity.
Heaving for breath, he opened a gate of water and just drowned himself in fresh cold distilled water, drenching the entire area around him in water. It was fine, he would clean that up later on.
He really needed to look into getting some sort of management system for the Red Hearth. As things stood right now, most of that was done by Jin'Ya and even then, he had to pay an exorbitant amount of money to that bastard for that. For regular CHI infusions for his physical body in this plane, Jin'Ya would look after a mere 10% of the total built up area of the Red Hearth, which included his own living quarters.
It was outrageous. If he offered that level of tune up to any billionaire back on Earth, he could have had entire armies work day and night to maintain this place. He sighed as he chugged down mineral water, from the Himalayas.
Once again, a W for the portals. It was supremely convenient to get stuff from naturally inaccessible places using portals and a constantly burning fire all around him. Sure, the dimension of fire that he had in his possession was nowhere near the level of potency of his water dimension, let alone the CHI dimension, but it had its uses, like heating up a small area around him so that he didn't freeze his balls off in a negative 55 degrees environment.
He had only gone there once in the past year, filling in thousands of gallons worth of glacier water before heating it all up and using that to drink every time he was in the Red Hearth. On Earth however, he drank normal mineral water that tasted so bland compared to real mineral water but he had to maintain a disguise so he didn't let something small like that stop him.
He switched off the 5G environment and sighed in relief as the difference was immediately noticeable, with his body feeling way lighter than before and the mere act of wiping the water off his eyes not straining his muscles anymore. Working out in advanced gravity environments really was the best way to get a full body muscle workout for him.
Well, sparring with the Hulk might have helped but then again, his CHI worked really fast but not fast enough to heal a broken bone as soon as it was broken. He might be able to get a broken bone healed in minutes if he really focused the CHI output but that would put him in a vulnerable position and also would not really help if the bone was something essential like his Spine. Something like that would take weeks, if not months of bed rest to heal.
Sure, the spine would come back stronger but that was not something he was willing to risk, especially not with the impromptu rescue operation he was going to mount with Jin'Ya. Once his analysis on the backers of Ross came back, depending on the results, he was going to either do a quick rescue operation of Bruce, OR do a quick brain surgery on General Ross, or rather, have Jin'ya do it on his behalf.
After all, that glutton was going to hog all his meat quota from Ta-Lo this year, so why not get him to do something useful for once?
Sighing as cold water was blasted from the overhead shower at high speeds, he let it wash away the sweat and grime. Remembering all the cleaning that was still left, especially the water that he had spilled on the mats, he sighed once more. He really needed to look into getting some kind of reliable workforce in this place.
Getting hired help was outside the realm of possibility, simply because he didn't trust anyone to loiter around his home when he was not here, which was the majority of the time going forward because of his internships and then jobs, and then once he inevitably started his own firm.
Looking straight up, he let a thin layer of CHI coat his eyes to protect it from the onslaught of high pressure water being thrown straight at him, and thought forlornly at the fact that he would be spending less and less time going forward in this sweet bachelor pad of his.
"Damn Thanos," He muttered as he switched the shower off and got ready. Looking at Earth time, it was 7:00 PM.
Grinning, "Perfect." For some retail therapy that is.
And maybe, after that, he could go visit Ta-Lo. After all, the next appointment to refill his aging body with CHI would be right in the middle of the Stark Internship. Coincidentally, he also needed to renegotiate the meat quota, and this would be the perfect time to do that, away from Jin'Ya's prying eyes, or rather, prying psionic senses.
...
…..
Standing in the portal room, he stupidly waved his hands multiple times in the air, to open a portal in his Earth bachelor pad, which was decidedly less cool than the one here, and had to stop immediately, stiffening as he felt something trip past his magic. More specifically, the ward that he cast around his apartment had tripped.
He immediately closed his eyes and focused on the series of wards he had cast on his house back in Seattle. The ward for detecting living beings with body mass more than 10kg was not tripped. The ward with soul detection was not tripped.
The ward with…motion sensors was tripped? How?
Some sort of machine then? A drone?
His eyes snapped open as he groaned in frustration. "Bloody Stark!"
Tony Stark and his burning curiosity. Hissing in frustration, he stalked back out of the portal room and headed to his office, a different workspace from his usual lab space. In that place, everything was expendable, with a literal magically protected network keeping everything safe and secure.
No wireless devices were in that office and once the door was locked shut with a satisfying thud sound, it was basically a Faraday cage, making sure that no wireless signals ever got out, just in case. Cracking his knuckles, he sat on the best chair money could buy at the moment, set the Air conditioning to a nice 24C, and booted his systems up. He had multiple systems rigged together to provide the very high level services he needed, just in case he had to hack into Stark servers once again.
He didn't want to do this because it would just incite Stark more and more but the man was going to go through a very major morality shift soon anyway so doing this to get the man to back off for a bit was a small sacrifice. Besides, it was not like Tony would ever tell anyone that he found the legendary unnamed hacker that the whole world was searching for.
Yup. he was still unnamed, even by the wider media networks, because anytime someone tried to name him and publish that name, he hacked their servers, deleted any mention of whatever tacky nickname they had given him, and exited their servers.
It spooked everyone into complying as he intended. He was now the unnamed hacker but most of the people in the know now knew what that name meant. Stark was probably also one of them but the man had somehow found something that created a link between his public persona and his Dark Web persona.
Well, that identity could be burned at any point and he wouldn't much care. Actually, most of his identities could be destroyed and he wouldn't lose a wink of sleep, only the main Colin Baxter identity mattered. That was the one most important to him because that was who he was and who he intended to be, for the rest of his life.
After all, that was the name given to him by his parents and it was the least he could do to honor that name, by making it great and a household name on the planet by the time he turned 25.
Lofty goals for a normal human but he was the holder of the Keys, the bearer of the most powerful magic, in his opinion, that has ever existed that did not affect the mind of its bearer.
"Alright, Jarvis. Let's see you take on this," He muttered as he located Tony Stark and began targeting his LA house. Let's see how Tony likes it when someone tries to invade his privacy.
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