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 #2
The Red Hearth, Colin's Mindscape [January 1, 2008]
–Colin Baxter–
He felt his mind expand as a kaleidoscope of colours assaulted his mind, his ability allowing his mind and soul to reach out throughout the multiverse. He had been a wee bit child when he had lost his parents and then uncovered his ability to do…this. While it was exceedingly hard and very confusing to make sense of what his ability was back then, he knew video games back then, it was his favourite thing and while it was kinda childish of him to think of making this as a Videogame as well, it kind of worked out in the end.
With little, okay a lot of help from the Ancient One and more importantly, from Old Man Wong, he managed to make this a very nifty way of scouring for alternative dimensions across the multiverse, both tethered and untethered.
As he was now, he was strong yes but he was not all powerful. Physically, he was much stronger than Captain America but not as strong as Luke Cage was. So no bulletproof skin though his body was getting better and better at stopping most puncture wounds, and no throwing around trucks, though small cars were in his realm of capability.
All in all, a very strong C-grade threat, if he could say. Someone who can take out teams of trained men with ease but a bullet to the head will take them out all the same as the normal people, though the bullet might need to be a tad bigger. Now, once he factored in his Sorcery and his Doors, then things began to change.
Even then, he would hesitate to call himself an S-class threat, A class at best, even with his doors. All he had until now were 7 doors, one for each year that his ability had been active. It had been 7 years since then and all he had to show for it were the class four elements, an overglorified light bulb. The only ones worth mentioning were the last two doors, the CHI door, and the Kinetic Laser doors. Both of them gave him very nifty abilities, offensive as well as defensive capabilities, not to mention the overall passive boosts he got from making that door stay open all the time.
He was a literal superhuman now, with all the extra CHI running in his body. He had it in his blood now, so much so that the Ancient One warned him to reduce his interactions with Kun'Lun in the future because some of the more pragmatic elders there might just capture and store him in their dungeons because he was essentially the same as their Dragon. Punch his heart with their fists, absorb his CHI, and voila, Bootleg Iron Fist created!
The Kinetic lasers were nifty as well, especially in an omnidirectional way because after fighting a literal horde of demons when he was 17, all by himself, simply because he could become a ball of lasers in the middle of their army was priceless, even for Kamar Taj as a whole.
Also, he might have been taken advantage of as a kid, without being paid for it. He called child labour!
His mind wandered around itself as his soul finally did a scan of all the dimensions available to him, and then rendered the UI for the literal dimension searching that he did on a semi-weekly basis. It was actually Jin'Ya's theory that the more he tried to expose his soul to his weird ability, the more capable it would become of opening new doors.
As usual, the UI rendered and then he was greeted to a page that had a big Screen on the left, with a number of rectangular boxes on the right. He could mentally scroll through the list of the dimensions that were on the right.
The one selected right now was the most used dimension, i.e., the CHI dimension. The display on the right showed just golden light, yup, that was all there was in that dimension. It was something weird, not conforming to normal physics rules at all, like there was not even gravity in the dimension so no life could form there, even if the dimension was technically full of what many on Earth might call the "Lifeblood" of every species.
"Alright, let's see what we have here," He muttered as he plopped his ass on the most comfortable chair he could imagine, which was more along the lines of a bed as a box of his favourite caramel popcorn appeared on his lap, completing the stereotypical movie theatre setup.
Looking past all the windows that were highlighted, those were the ones he already made a Door for. He was looking for the scanned ones.
"Aww, only 6?" He whined as the number was far less this time for some reason. While Jin'Ya's theory of exposing his soul to this UI looked solid but it would seem they might have to do something else because the number of dimensions being scanned was only decreasing. Not the overall number but the number of new dimensions that can be opened with his doors. The filter was set on only new dimensions, so these 4 were the only new ones.
Ones. The total dimensions scanned were 1700, which might sound like a lot but the majority of them were useless to him. Like, what was he going to do with a dimension filled with just bones? The universe was a truly weird place.
"Let's see," he muttered as he selected the first green dimension. The big screen flickered before a scene full of trees greeted him. Trees everywhere, bathed in green fog.
"The heck? Is this the Green?" Thinking of the elemental force primarily based in the DC universe. It looked the same as this dimension though there might be differences. Might be useful but not right now. Once he had to work on restoring Earth's environment back to sustainable levels after defeating the Big bads of this universe, of which there was no lack of.
Moving on, he looked at the next yellow dimension. He blinked as he saw heaps of gold. Yup, Gold bullions, as if this was Fort Knox or wherever the world's governments kept their gold reserves. It was all very neatly stacked as well, forming pyramids, mountains, and more of that stuff.
Pass.
He selected the next dimension, which was light blue. Selecting that, he saw an empty dimension, with white as far as his eyes could see. He couldn't really know more about this place unless he used one of his Doors and currently, he was all out of doors. Even if he did have one, it wouldn't be used on some possible useless dimension.
Pass.
The next one was pink. The big screen just showed a huge dimensional box filled with pink liquid of some sort. His mind began racing as some of his fantasies reared their ugly heads, telling him about the possible uses of something like a magic pink liquid but he shook his head. This was not the time to think with his little head.
Pass.
With that, the UI collapsed as he found himself back in his mindscape, in the same position, touching the giant door, floating mid air.
Sighing, he exited his mindscape and found himself back in the pseudo dimension which collapsed, depositing him back in the same ritual circle that Jin'Ya activated.
Opening a door on reflex, he took a deep swig of pure distilled water from his Water Dimension to get rid of the acidic taste in his mouth that was always deposited in his mouth when a pseudo dimension collapsed.
Taking a deep breath, he was about to ask Jin'Ya who was lounging on his own tiny chair with–was that a facepack?
"What the fuck?"
"Language!" He felt a bonk on his head accompanied with that censor shit.
"Fuck you! I am 19 now AND you are staying under my roof." He drew himself up, even as Jin'Ya deadpanned at him, looking up from his book that he was reading, while having a facepack on his face, which was tiny as well.
"Why do you even use those? You are a freaking Psionic Dragon, you could shed that body and create a new one with literal shining skin whenever you want to."
Jin'Ya floated at his level, not even breaking stride as he replied, "This self-care thing is good. Humans have advanced at a remarkable rate when it comes to taking care of cosmetic things, though, oddly enough, despite having most of the power in society, most of this self care stuff has been catered to women, not men. This is another one of my experiments."
He sighed at that, then cracked up at the self care bit. Ah, if only Jin'Ya knew. Actually, shouldn't he know all this?
"Shouldn't you know all this? You know, being a Psionic dragon and all that."
"For the last time, I don't willy nilly go around trying to read in all the Astral output of Humanity, it would leave me not just comatose but surely with an intense urge to perform genocide on your species. So, for both yours and my sake, I refrain from doing that."
"I see, go on with your experiment then. Do give me a copy of your conclusion though. In the meantime, did you log the time like I told you to?"
"Who do you think I am, a human? I did log your time, it has been 1 hour 3 minutes in Earth time, significantly shorter than your first trip under my supervision, which took about 16 hours if my Eidetic memory serves me right."
"Right. There goes the mandatory Draconic superiority."
"What?! It's not arrogance if it is true."
"Yes, it is. It is in the way you say it."
"..Agree to Disagree then."
"You have got to stop watching Reality TV these days.." he sighed and got out of the basement. He might have been joking with Jin'Ya about the deadline but he did have a Comic Con to get to, and only about 16 hours to make sure that none of his friends had the same outfit.
"I will be out for the weekend. Don't blow up the Red Hearth." He nagged at Jin'Ya before waving his hands a bunch of times in the air, feeling so stupid and self conscious, until the Portal Gods finally took pity on him and opened a small flickering portal for him.
Jumping through, he arrived on his Earth Pad, which was decidedly less cool than his Mars home. He even named his place on Mars as the Red Hearth, which was pretty smart in his opinion, not in Old Man Wong's eyes though who cared about Old people's advice?
His nose wrinkled as he felt the air quality drop by magnitudes when compared to the Red Hearth. Having enhanced lungs might have meant that polluted air wouldn't give him cancer but it did nothing about his ability to differentiate between them.
Sigh, it might have been worth it to take the Green Door, just to spawn a couple of Pure Oxygen trees around his apartment.
"Nah, too much work." He grinned like a loon as he slipped into his wardrobe, about to sew some last minute changes on his costume, which would definitely NOT take a lot of time.
A/N - What do you guys think about the Power UI.
Also, the MC is 18 right now and he awakened his powers at the age of 12 and on his birthday, getting a Door for each successive birthday.
Also, if I haven't said it before, this story will focus more on individual struggles with some world ending serious stuff mixed in.
Yes, Wong is his guardian, officially and magically.
If you guys would like to support me, or just want to read up to 15 chapters ahead, you can head on to my P*treon. It is the same name as my username.