Every evil genius needs a place of relaxation and quiet, a place to hoard his stolen loot, a place to scheme and plot. For Magtok, this has always been the MagCave. Drilled into the side of Mt. Enn, it served as his base of operations, living quarters, garage, and workplace. It has held damned damsels in distress, placed protagonists in perilous predicaments, and was once the fanciest-looking fortress in all of the Nexus.

For the longest time however, it has been abandoned. Magtok and all of his clones left the Nexus and their beloved lair behind. They built a space fleet and vanished into the stars, wandering across the cosmos for some nebulous, secretive purpose known only to them and their closest allies. A lot changed in their absence as they turned out the lights and left the cave to collect dust. Weeds and vines quickly swallowed up the foyer, deadly Mesozoic experiments ran wild through the halls, forgotten lab projects had no recourse but to eat one another to survive. Chaos, entropy and terror ruled the day in the crumbling, haunted fortress.

Years later, a brief civil war between clones within the star fleet left the Magtoks without functioning cloning vats or the infrastructure to build new ones. Their mission halted by this unexpected, self-inflicted brush with mortality, the MagFleet immediately hurried back home, sending down a scout to investigate the state of the Nexus and revitalize the original machinery that maintained their technical immortality. When that clone vanished under mysterious circumstances, they sent another. This clone has been considerably more successful, though not as much as the Space Hegemony would like. The beds are warm, the mutated wilderness and loose experiments may have been pushed back to the darkest corners of the lowest floors of the MagCave, and power has been rerouted to all of the basic essentials and creature comforts of our evil overlord, but the cloning vats are still non-functional even after all this time. Almost like that sneaky scoundrel of a scout set things up like this on purpose, like he's happy and thriving as the one and only real Magtok in the Nexus.

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Lazing On a Sunday Afternoon

Today, that scout is absentmindedly tidying up, directing a series of drones to mop, scrub, and scour every inch of the massive ritual circle made of blood, salt, and chalk that took up the majority of the foyer last night. It's such a pain in the ass, trying to do business with devils. The bindings have to be precise, the syllables must be exact, and if even one of the dozens of overlapping geometric patterns is less than completely perfect...gods, and that's not even getting into how much of a chore getting enough blood for the ritual was. You'd think we were doing business with Riverside's vampire mafia again, with the stink that hung in the air all night. All of that prep work and exasperation, when the devils could've just bought cell phones like everyone else in the Nexus and settled this complete waste of time in minutes.

"Where would we even find a virgin cat goddess, anyway? Hell, even if one did exist, it'd be easier just to exterminate the stupid treasure-hunter ourselves," he grumbles, handing over a bloodied mop to one of the hovering janitorial drones for proper disposal. Once again, magic proves itself too much of a convoluted mess to bother with. Even the inept assassins he used to hire were never so haughty and demanding. The whole payment upfront, really? Ridiculous. The only bright spot in that entire wasted evening was when he opened a telewarp portal in their contact's plane of reality, one connected to the bottom of a lake he had instructed Needs to consecrate a few hours prior. To the best of his knowledge that portal is still open, and will remain that way for some time.