Abracabra and the whole nine yards. DC AU Multicross

[Kingofdreams]

Chapter 1​

I should have been grading papers. Instead, I was bleeding out on Hancock Street.

The irony wasn't lost on me. A historian dying before making any history of his own. My Alfa Romeo was thirty feet away, crumpled against a telephone pole. The truck that had run the red light was already gone, the driver probably panicking, probably drunk. My phone was somewhere in the wreckage, and the streetlight above me flickered like it couldn't decide whether to witness my death or not.

Everything hurt. Then everything went numb. Then everything went dark.

---

I opened my eyes to sunlight that felt wrong.

Not wrong like "different latitude" wrong, but wrong like "different physics" wrong. The light had weight to it, substance, as if photons had learned to press down on skin. I sat up, too easily considering I'd just been turned into a human accordion by several tons of steel.

No pain. No blood. No cracked ribs that should have been puncturing my lungs.

I looked down at my hands. Same hands. Same slight calluses from years of turning archive pages and tinkering with carburetors. I was wearing the same clothes I'd died in: khakis, a button-down shirt with a coffee stain on the collar, and the leather jacket my father had given me for my thirtieth birthday.

But the ground beneath me wasn't asphalt. It was cobblestone, old enough to have that worn-smooth quality that spoke of centuries of foot traffic. Around me stretched a city that looked like someone had taken Art Deco, Gothic Revival, and Brutalism, thrown them in a blender, and poured the result into a skyline that clawed at clouds I couldn't quite focus on.

The architecture made my historian's brain itch. Nothing matched, yet everything worked together in a way that suggested either brilliant urban planning or cosmic accident. A building to my left had flying buttresses supporting what appeared to be a chrome and glass penthouse. To my right, a structure that could have been a 1920s bank had holographic advertisements floating in front of it, words in a language I didn't recognize but somehow understood: LEXCORP FINANCIAL SERVICES.

I stood up. My legs worked fine. Better than fine, actually. I felt like I could run a marathon or climb a mountain or teach a full day of classes without needing three cups of coffee.

"Okay, Ben," I said aloud, because talking to yourself in a strange city after dying seemed reasonable. "Think. You died. You're clearly not dead now. Therefore..."

I trailed off because a figure was flying overhead.

Flying. Not in a plane. Not with a jetpack. Just flying, like gravity was optional and they'd opted out.

The figure banked left, and the sun caught their form. Green. Bright, glowing, emerald green. A man in what looked like a skintight uniform, with a symbol on his chest that my brain supplied a name for before my rational mind could catch up: Green Lantern.

"No," I said. "No, that's not possible."

The Green Lantern, because apparently that's what we were calling reality now, flew between buildings with the casual confidence of someone who did this every morning before breakfast. A streak of green light trailed behind him like a comet's tail, and then he was gone, disappeared into the vertical maze of the city.

My heart was pounding. Not from fear, exactly, but from the sudden, crushing weight of implication.

I'd spent the last three months in a weird place mentally. The school year had been brutal. Budget cuts meant larger class sizes, which meant more papers to grade, which meant less time for anything resembling a personal life. I'd been stress-eating takeout and staying up too late, and I'd fallen down an internet rabbit hole that started with YouTube history documentaries and ended with... what had it ended with?

The CYOA.

Choose Your Own Adventure. Except it wasn't an adventure, not really. It was one of those absurdly detailed power fantasy questionnaires that people made for fun. This one had been tailored to fictional universes. You picked a world, you picked your powers, you built your character like you were creating a tabletop RPG protagonist.

I'd filled it out as a joke. A way to turn off my brain after grading thirty-five essays on the fall of the Ottoman Empire, half of which had clearly been written by what felt like 6th graders.

I'd picked the DC Universe because I'd grown up reading my uncle's old comic books. I'd picked powers that appealed to the part of me that loved systems and teaching and the idea of magic as something that could be studied, not just wielded.

[Archmage]: Mastery over all forms of magic, from the fundamental to the esoteric. Reality was just another system to be understood and manipulated.

[Magic Bestowal]: The ability to grant magical power to others. The gift was permanent unless I chose to revoke it, and the strength of the magic scaled with the importance of the recipient. A nobody got parlor tricks. A king got world-shaking power.

[Traverse]: The ability to visit different dimensions, but only after completing quests in my current one. A reward system baked into reality itself.

I'd submitted the form at two in the morning, laughed at myself for wasting an hour on internet nonsense, and gone to bed.

Then I'd been hit by a truck.

"Okay," I said, louder this time. "Okay, if this is real, if I'm actually in the DC Universe with the powers I picked, then there should be..."

I held out my hand, not entirely sure what I was doing, and thought about fire.

A ball of flame appeared in my palm.

Not metaphorically. Not "I feel warm" or "I'm imagining things." An actual, honest-to-god fireball, hovering above my skin like I'd just broken every law of thermodynamics and several laws of common sense. The fire didn't burn me. It sat there, patient, waiting for instruction.

I closed my fist and the fire vanished.

My breath came faster. I tried again, this time thinking about water. A sphere of liquid formed in the air in front of me, perfectly contained despite lacking any container. I waved my hand and it splashed against the cobblestones, real and wet and impossible.

"Holy hell," I whispered. "It's all real."

I needed information. I needed to understand where I was, when I was, and what counted as a "quest" in a universe where people regularly punched gods in the face.

The street I was on appeared relatively empty, which was a small mercy. A few pedestrians walked by on the opposite side, too absorbed in their phones or their conversations to notice a man conjuring fire from nothing. In the distance, I could hear the ambient noise of a major city: traffic, construction, the occasional siren.

---

A/N had a muse of this and decided to explore it.
Tell me what you think?
Should I bold [Archmage]? Or skills in general.