Man I am on the front page again, this is pretty neat. I have no idea how it works, but here is the first chapter for the week.
The threat Daniel’s father made came true the next week when Daniel went into work. She was called into her boss's office and let go. He explained to her that while he and the firm didn’t want to let her go, her father put too much pressure on the firm and after a week they had to let her go or they would lose half their clients.
He also gave her some more bad news, he and the other partners had tried to call in some favors to find her another job. But her father had reached out to every first and second rate law firm in the city and warned them not to hire her or they would have issues. The only plus side to the whole situation was her law firm was giving her a very nice severance package and they were going to foot her family's health insurance for the next five years.
When Daniel came home after being let go, she unloaded her things into the house. She was upset, but didn’t want to mope around the house alone. So she went next door to May’s for the rest of the day and helped her with the kids she was watching. Over the next week she spent most of her time at May’s as she called around looking for work. When she realized her father made it pretty much impossible for her to work in NYC at any decent law firm she decided to take a break and focus on raising her kids instead.
Daniel took the whole thing better than Jacob at first, who was pissed that her father would be so petty to his own daughter. But with Daniel being so calm about the whole thing, he stopped being upset about something that was out of their control after a few days. By the second week the whole family was enjoying the situation they found themselves in. With Daniel not working she would either spend her day at May’s helping her out or she would join Jacob at the shop and help out around there. Theo also started to go to the shop more and would spend the day learning about cars from Ben or his father.
As for Jacob and Ben’s business, it wasn’t really affected. They only had a handful of people cancel builds abruptly, which they kept the deposit for since the contract the clients signed was canceled. The contracts were something Daniel had written up for the business years ago when Jacob was burned by a new client who backed out of a build half way through. They didn’t really lose anything since Jacob finished the car and then sold it for a profit. But Daniel didn’t want something like that to happen again, so she made some iron clad contracts for any builds they do. When all the drama was done with canceled contracts, the business had made twenty five thousand to do nothing and still had a wait list that was almost two years out.
Another thing that happened in Theo’s home life was him using clones to work on his bedroom. He made a secret door hidden in his walk-in closet that led down under his house into a new room he was planning to use for training. The secret door was mostly hidden with a special uzumaki fuinjutsu script that made people not notice it even if the door was left open.
When Tao found out what Theo was doing she even helped to hide the door with a couple of spells and made it so when Theo walked through the door it portaled him to the room below his house. But she also demanded he make the space larger then he planned because she was going to teach him magic and needed a space to do it. Since Theo’s clones couldn’t practice magic themselves, not having a soul/astral projection. Theo would be forced to learn magic in person and he didn’t want to come to Kamar-Taj or the hidden base to learn from her. Since Theo was paranoid about his henge breaking and people finding out what he looked like.
Since there was now a spell that teleported Theo down to the room, he ended up making the room cover the area under his house all the way to May’s house. It was over the size of a football field with a four hundred foot high ceiling and when it was complete it was a little over nine hundred feet underground. It might have been overkill, but Theo wanted to make sure it was well hidden underground.
It was compacted and reinforced with special earth jutsu so it didn’t need supporting pillars. Theo's clones cleaned up the space then finished it with electrical, plumbing, flooring and some lighting in his area. Tao also reinforced the whole thing with spells and made a special runic light spell for the place that she could control. Most of the time it was set to a soft evening light, but she could make the whole place brighter than the midday sun if she wanted. Tao’s spells also kept the air fresh and the temperature of the place pleasant.
Theo then ordered everything he wanted for his training room which included a full suite of gym equipment, sparring mats, some high end server racks along with a few computers. Tao also ordered some things she needed, but most of the stuff was brought over from different sanctums and Kamar-Taj. In the end Theo only used about a quarter of the whole space for his personal use while Tao had taken over about one third. The rest of the space was going to be used for spell training and Theo’s custom made rock wall.
The rock wall was right in the middle and was about fifty feet wide. It stuck out slightly from the rest of the wall and went all the way to the roof where a small overlook was. Below the wall was a thirty foot deep pool of water that covered the length of the rock wall and went out about twenty feet from the rock wall itself. The area around the water had a special spell in place that would force anything in the air to land in the water. The water also had a spell that would lessen the impact of whatever hit the water. Theo had tested it a few times and planned to add something similar to the main base, once all the other expansion projects were finished.
Tao also came through on her promise to Theo. Once his training room was complete, she sat him down and had a long talk with him about his recent out of character behavior. She hadn’t known him for long, but she had a pretty good read on who Theo was. He was someone who might have lofty goals, but his heart was in the right place. He also liked to joke around, a little too much in her opinion. But at the same time had a soft spot for kids in trouble, which she thought was due to his past life.
The issue was with the other side of Theo, the one that didn’t even blink when he needed to kill people. Or the Theo that accidentally drove a man insane and didn’t feel bad about it. Or when he killed part of Grant's family the other day and didn’t think twice about it. That was the Theo that seemed out of character to her. Or maybe this was the real Theo and the other one was just a false appearance to hide his true self? She wasn’t a therapist or anything, but she was pretty sure he needed some help and she was gonna do her best to give it to him. So she started studying psychology and talking to him daily.
Back at the main base things had changed little since the red room rescue. There were a few issues at first, mostly with feeding everyone. It took a bit of work, but Jarvis and the new help he acquired were able to sort everything out within a week. Jarvis also made a large rotation of helpers from all the kids. They would have different responsibilities each week from food preparation, washing dishes, to cleaning up around the base.
The biggest issue that came up was from the large group of girls who became interested in the handful of boys their age. Mostly Erik, Grant and Darren who was only twenty years old. Thomas was the only boy who didn’t have a group of girls trying to get his attention, but he was currently only ten. While it was somewhat of an issue, the girls handled it themselves in a weird sort of way.
They held weekly competitions and whoever won was allowed to pursue the boy they liked for the week. At first it was based on fighting alone, but Melina found out after the first few days and changed the rules. It would be based on many things besides fighting to give some of the younger girls a better chance at winning.
It had been going on for almost five months and the three targets still hadn’t figured out what was going on. Even though they would have different girls trying to hang out with them in their free time each week. It was kinda funny to watch and Ezekiel even started a betting pool with some people on how long it will take for one of them to figure it out.
The smart money was on Erik, but Ezekiel had hope that Grant would figure it out first. Darren was a lost cause, while the guy was a genius, he was too busy working with his hero to realize what was going on. Oh he talked with the handful of girls who approached him, but that was it. He had no real interest in them at the moment. Even though both Hank and Bill realized what was going on, they were happy to watch Darren be oblivious to the girl's advances.
Speaking of Thomas and his sister Elizabeth. They had taken to life at the base surprisingly well. Grant along with the help they received made them adapt quickly and they were enjoying themselves a lot. Ezekiel still wasn’t sure if they would join the group once they were older, but he didn’t care that much. He didn’t know about them, so he never factored them into his plans in the first place.
Besides that, the only real news was from the new medical base. Sarah was pulled from her cloning project using Steve’s DNA sample when a discovery was made. Why waste resources on cloning a super soldier, when they could clone something even better? They were still working on it, but they were getting closer to completing the first step of the process with phase one of Project Lazarus.
Tobirama made a breakthrough with Orochimaru and they were currently making four staggered batches of twenty clone bodies each. It would take about four months total, one month per batch. But once complete they planned to run a bunch of experiments on them and look for flaws after each batch. If everything went well they could start working with Tao on the next steps of the process.
During that same time, Peter turned four and Milly turned three. After about six months Theo and Milly were sent to May’s for about a week while their mother went to the hospital. Milly was excited but at the same time depressed, it was the longest she had gone without seeing her mom before. When Daniel came back it was with a new family member bundled up in a baby carrier.
Daniel smiled when she arrived home and saw her kids along with her extended family. She moved to the couch and sat down while Jacob gently set the baby carrier next to her. She waved to her kids to come closer as she said, "Come give me a hug, I missed both of you."
Both Theo and Milly came over and hugged their mother before Daniel asked, "Why are you being so quiet Milly?"
Milly glanced at the baby carrier before she looked at her mother, her voice well above a whisper as she said, "Te-o said we had to be quiet so the baby doesn't wake up."
Everyone in the house smiled at that as Daniel patted the couch cushion next to her as she said, "Both of you come up here, I want you to meet your new baby brother."
After Milly and Theo were sitting next to her, she lifted a little bundle out of the carrier and held it in her lap. She glanced at her kids as she said, "This is your new brother, his name is Isaac Mercer.”