Atomic Mage by Garrett Carter (short books for teens txt) 📕

Complications

Finishing up on the first floor of Cade and his mate's new mobile home was a relief.

The bottom floor was completed as the sun dropped below the tops of the trees.

As night settled quickly, the swift shift from daylight to near pitch blackness still surprising him.

Bringing them to shore for the night was unnecessary, Cade having thought ahead and built into the center of the house an anchor system that would allow him and his mates the safety of the deep water surrounding them.

Sitting in the small alcove he had dubbed his man shack, he could steer their unwieldy home upstream blessedly with the accommodations he was used to.

The man shack led to their living room, with no TV to provide entertainment he had dredged the bottom of the river to build a decent sized fireplace to cozy up to with his mates on cold nights.

He had pieced together a heating and cooling system in the fireplace that worked almost as well as the one back home.

The dial on the wall had none of the digits that told the actual temperature it would be set at, just a maximum and minimum setting with little hashes in between.

It was simple but effective though as the muggy air in the home was replaced by warm dry air quickly.

The condensation ran off into the anchor hole as he looked on with a smile.

The weight of the stone fireplace slash HVAC though had caused the barge to tilt slightly.

Cade's attempt during the build in offsetting that tilt had caused the living room to open to the kitchen on the opposite side of the barge.

With more stone and a decent amount of metal that he had luckily found by pausing their trip for a few minutes.

He, with a liberal application of power, located a wide variety of metals a few hundred feet below the river. He had used the windfall of materials and fashioned a kitchen that wouldn't look out of place in a five-star restaurant.

With no real electricity, he had opted to make his lighting fixtures by tying a tiny graphite rod into his twenty-pound power generator and tying a spell that would run electrons through it.

Surrounding the glowing rod with the glass he had created from the sand at the bottom of the river he had removed all air molecules from.

The improvised lights had worked better than he had expected.

Setting the homemade bulbs around the house had lead to his home being a shining beacon in the jungle.

Cade had been a little worried he would attract the wrong kind of attention, so he redid his wrap around porch and added a pivot that would dump unwitting intruders into the river.

Smiling at his foresight he had continued with the home's renovation, with the master suite coming next.

The amount of area he had to work with was massive, he had grinned like a fat kid in front of a cake when he had started the project.

Sex swings, stripper poles, and other less savory adult toys flying through his mind as he envisioned their bedroom in his mind's eye.

He had settled with a truly monstrous bed twenty feet wide, almost stretching the complete width of the room, by ten feet long with three feet thick memory foam material he had created in his first bachelor pad after he had been dumped here.

It was glorious, he had to physically hold himself back from gripping his mates sleeping bodies and using the ginormous bed to wake them up.

With his still sleeping mates carefully laid on the large L shaped couch in the living room, he had to hold himself back from the debauched plan he had in his head to turn into a Cade alarm clock.

He had held himself back by working on the bathroom, if the bedroom was decadent then the bathroom was downright naughty in his eyes.

Having a clear idea of what he wanted, he had started by fabricating a water pump.

As simple as it was to make the water pump, executing on the idea that his mates would be able to turn the water on and select the temperature of the water that it moved had been a major bitch.

He could have just used his power to filter the water from the river and adjust the temperature as needed.

Making the system work for his mates was another matter entirely.

He finally, after hours of trial and error had settled on a dial, using the same idea as the fireplace come HVAC.

Creating a regulator for the temperature controls that governed the energy levels of the atoms in the water that the pump pulled from the river that kept the water below scalding, he had tied the rest of the plumbing for the bathroom into the piping coming off the pump.

He almost did a jig as the hot then cold water spilling into the sinks proved he was able to control the temperature of the water.

As he replicated the faucets for his pride and joy the almost too hot water began spilling into the tub mounted to the far wall of the room.

Resembling a small pool their tub was big enough for all of them to fit in, even Sabine's 15-foot length.

The idea for the color of the tub had him searching for a black rock that would hold water and their weight.

He had found one after a short search through his pile of materials that would work.

Mounding the huge block had taken a few minutes, and even after the long hours of construction, he was still anxious to put it to