Jack's intention had been to remove Chase Young as a threat, but the opportunities that came with the fall of such a powerful man simply couldn't be ignored.

The castle and the entirety of the Land of Nowhere was without owner, and Jack saw no reason not to scoop up the entire area for himself.

Did that make him a king now?

Chase hadn't been a king, had he?

Jack supposed that to be a king one needed subjects and Chase had gone out of his way to make sure that his land had none, save for the enslaved warriors he surrounded himself with. So, if Jack wanted to be a king he would need to import a whole lot of people and even without Chase's negative influence this place wasn't exactly hospitable to human habitation.

That sounded like a of work.

The ley line Chase had used to control the land itself could theoretically be used to make the place friendlier to people and indeed that was what Jack was working on now. Jack had no intention of micromanaging everything as Chase had done, instead the genius did what he had always done when facing an unpleasant chore, he made a robot to do it for him.

The thing would have to be connected to the castle and more importantly to the enormous structure Jack had discovered. Buried deep under the castle directly beneath the throne was a cave that the inventor suspected Chase had dug out himself, which contained an enormous stone sphere. The entire place reeked of Chase Young's magical energy, but fortunately, Jack had a way to purify his former enemies magic into something a bit easier to work with. Jack retrieved a bag from his pocket dimension and seeded the cave with his specialized magic purifying plants.

He had noticed a change in the energy the plants had been giving off in the past few weeks. Where before the energy they produced calmed him now it felt more comfortable, like it had become closer to his own power. He couldn't use it any more than he could before, but he could feel it like it was his own. One day he hoped to be able to use the plants to produce Jack energy, so he wouldn't have to go through the process of draining magic from foreign sources, but he had no idea how to bridge the gap between himself and the plant energy.

Simply standing in his garden and breathing in the air made him feel stronger and his thoughts became clearer. He had taken to doing most of his planning in his pocket dimension and had set some patio furniture and an ice chest full of sweet tea, life was going pretty good.

He seeded the cave and used a tiny bit of magic to induce rapid growth in his plants, not enough to actually feed them but, if he was lucky, ah yes, the plants latched onto the magic in the room and were draining it dry to feed their growth spurt. He could already feel the echo of Chase's power weakening and the cave felt somehow cleaner. It would take time before the taint of Chase left this place completely, but Jack could be patient when the situation called for it.

In the castle proper the atmosphere had completely changed from the time Chase was in charge. The cat warriors were no longer bound by magic and they moved through the castle freely along with what remained of his robotic army. Jack had thought the freed warriors would hold animosity towards the robots or even himself, but they seemed more curious than anything. It wasn't an uncommon sight to see squads of his robots sparring with one of the warriors and they seemed to be enjoying themselves.

When it came to Jack they had been cautious at first but as they grew accustomed to their freedom he found that they often gave him a smile and friendly greeting when he passed through. All of them were once powerful fighters that Chase had wanted in his collection, and they appeared to all be adapting well to the change in situation.

Jack entered the throne room and observed the mess that sat where the throne had formerly been. The inventor had been building a machine that would be able to tap into the ley line just as Chase had done and his creation just kept getting bigger as Jack kept thinking of things he wanted to add to it. Since it was going to be monitoring the land of Nowhere, Jack would have to think about changing Nowhere's name perhaps Jacktopia, it needed to have access to an enormous network of cameras and be intelligent enough to act on that information. It wasn't one of his normal bots, so it didn't have to move around, but that just meant the genius had more space to devote to processing power. Once he connected his latest creation to the stone orb Chase used to control the land this machine would become the ultimate security system and would hopefully use the power of the ley lines to bring this desolate land to life. With that thought in mind he dubbed his creation Gaia and connected it to the rod that had been the spine of Chase's throne.

A light blinked on and an image of a seed appeared on one of the many screens. This was the loading symbol Jack had programed in. When the seed grew to a tree Gaia would be operational, but that would take a whie as drawing energy from the orb wasn't exactly like plugging a computer into a socket. This would require time, and even after it fully activated more time would be required for it to learn just like all his other robots. He patted the machinery affectionately

"Pleasant dreams Gaia."

As he left, the seed on the screen grew a tiny sprout.

At the factory business was booming, since his graduation he had no longer needed to devote time and energy to college and could now devote that attention to growing Smith Innovations. Phil had acquired a building in New York that was going to be devoted entirely to research and development. Jack had used his contacts at MIT to put out the word that he was hiring, and the applications flooded in. Phil vetted them to only the most promising candidates and now the young business owner had teams of scientists developing new and interesting products utilizing his designs. The place was a money pit, but it had already produced results and stores around the world had begun stocking his products, several companies had contacted him in to make deals for using his holographic technology for gaming and television systems as well as myriad of uses he had never considered. How was his hologram technology going to be used for duck hunting?

Oh, the contract was for a camouflaged bird blind, neat.

Jack had poured virtually all of the money made selling his phones back into the company, and his coffers had already started to refill. Things looked good for his growing empire.

Wanda was a concern.

He suspected she had a burgeoning case of borderline personality disorder, but it could easily be something else. She spent all her time that wasn't spent training or studying staring at Jack and not saying a word. Sometimes he got the feeling she wanted to speak but just couldn't manage. She needed professional psychiatric care that Jack was simply unqualified to provide, and he had taken her from the only person he knew of who was qualified to treat her.

Jack had been spying on Charles Xavier in an effort to discover more about these mysterious mutants that Jack had never heard of and, to his surprise, Jack learned that he had heard of them. Xavier kept files on all the mutants he could catalogue, and Jack was able to steal himself a copy. According to Xavier, mutants were all over the world and some of the more colorful characters Jack had encountered over the years owed their powers to being mutants. Even Mrs. King, the mother of the girl he rescued, who used her power to play the roles of long dead actresses was a mutant, huh.

Xavier was worried, and for good reason, that the world would reacted poorly to the revelation that people who possessed the x-gene would one day, at seemingly random, develop potentially devastating powers. At the moment, the powers that be were covering up the existence of mutants to the general public, but it was only a matter of time before that bubble popped.

Xavier himself seemed to care a great deal for the mutants of the world and went out of his way to track them down and offer them positions at his school, or any other help they might need. It was likely that Wanda would soon have ended up under Xavier's care if Jack had not interfered, and maybe the good professor could be the solution to his situation with the mutant witch.

She wanted to go to school and make friends, right?

He would have Phil print up a clean bill of health for her and buy a house near Xavier's institute. Enrolling Wanda at Bayside High for the upcoming school year as a senior shouldn't be too hard, it was amazing the legal trouble you could bypass by being rich. If he had a good read on Xavier's character, the man wouldn't be able to resist helping Wanda now that she could safely be in a public setting and then he could have Wanda create an in for him with the mutant community, while also getting her out of the factory and not staring at him all the time.

He called Phil to have him set things up, but his assistant had his own ideas about the plan.

"Wanda can't operate alone in that sort of environment and the boys also need to learn to socialize normally, let's enroll them all." Phil suggested.

Phil had a good point, he would have to alter their appearance a little to help them fit in with a bunch of high school students, but that wasn't too hard, and they had been getting antsy without any major enemies to fight. He suspected they had been slipping out at night to explore the world and if he didn't channel their energy who knows what trouble they could get up to.

Yes, the more he thought about it the better the idea sounded. His boys would soon start their careers as public school students.

They grow up so fast.

Phil seemed pleased by his acceptance and hung up to go take care of the legal trouble involved in creating four identities and clearing the record of an escaped mental patient.

Everything was going smoothly.

Mayor's Office NYC

Warren Wilhem Jr., better known as Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City, sat at his desk with his head in his hands trying not to cry. This was the worst disaster of his career as mayor, and he had faced many disasters.

Millions, perhaps billions, of dollars in property damages as well as an entire section of the city inaccessible because two monsters rampaged down main street destroying everything in their path. A giant green man had been in an all-out slugfest with some sort of abomination and he couldn't think of any way they could afford to clean up after them.

Bill sighed, this was probably going to be the end of his career.

He flinched as the phone rang. He had been getting nonstop calls all day begging him to do something about all the damage, and for just a moment he entertained the guilty thought of not answering.

No, he couldn't do that.

Bill answered the phone and, instead of angry demands or sob stories, he heard a cultured voice on the other end of the line.

"Hello Mayor Wilhelm, my name is Philip Irons, and I am representing Irons Construction, I understand you have a problem."