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Chapter One

A recreational center for shifters and changelings: sounded like a dream, didn't it?

Imagine if you would, a place where creatures that couldn't often reveal in their true natures to the world could come and get a chance to relax somewhere that was secure from the outside world's doctrines as well as human free. An authentic kind of Never Land, as it were; a territory where the normal rules of society didn't have absolute control and you could be what you were without the restrictions that often hindered your very nature.

That was the thought on the mind of a certain wolf shifter as he scratched his pencil across a large canvas while outlining empty spaces in front of him with patterns and designs worthy of his dream. Biting down his bottom lip, the wolf in human form kept his green eyes focused in front of him with an intensity that could have bored on the edge of madness.

The amount of work that needed to be done was staggering for him to think about, but it had to be channeled by his fortitude and then executed with careful precision. There wasn't going to be any other way to try and make this happen. Hundreds of people and creatures cried that they had a dream and wanted to make it real, but this is where it all started from. This moment here when all you had was something to write on, something to write with and an ideal.

There was going to be a weight room for the wolves to associate with other packs from around the city while, a lounge area for the felines to lounge around in while sipping on milk, a massive pool for the merfolk to swim around in for hours on end, a room specifically for the elementals to work on their crafts on alternate days of the week and possible even a place where everyone could come and eat at while shooting the latest gossip throughout town.

His eyes could see everything, even as his twitching fingers tried to steady his pencil over the blank spaces being filled with his visions. There was just so much that could be done and would be done when all the important pieces feel into place, but for now he had to concentrate.

It took the wolf shifter three more hours of intensive laboring before he could call it a night and once he was done he rolled his chair back and proudly gazed at his work of art. Tired eyes focused on the picture that he had made and recorded every feature of his work as a sleep depraved yawn burst from his lips, reminding the shifter about how much time he had spent on his task.

His name was Jonathon Archival Maverick III, a name he loathed so much that he had changed to Alexander Crosse after moving away from his family pack at the age of eighteen.

Graduating from high school with an outstanding record, not to mention full honors, Alex made his way to across the country to a place he felt that was just right for him and then settled down at a local college where he could begin paving the ground for his future. Making his way through college on several scholarships, a part time job at a local construction company and changing his diet to cup of instant noodles until he finally got his Majors in building architecture and minored in business, Alex had done whatever he thought it would take to get to the place he needed to be to make his dream a reality.

Six years, Alex was confident enough in himself that he could finally make his visualization come true.

Setting his pencil down and cracking his knuckles, Alex leaned back into his seat while playing over the events that had lead him from the place he had grown up in to where he was now.

It had started with a... difference of opinion with his old man on how he wanted to live his life. Thankfully the fur and claws had stayed hidden but tempers had flared and soon Alex, or rather Jonathon, had stormed up to his room to sit and think about where his life was headed. The picture in his mind about always having to live underneath the thumb of his father was like a curse that echoed in his head hour after hour until soon a migraine with the wrath of the god of war pounded at his skull.

Somehow though, a thought blossomed amidst the shuddering and trembling inside of his head and Jonathon had come up with the initiative to run away from it all and make his own way in the world.

At the time, his only thought was to show his know-it-all father of what he was capable of and prove to him that he didn't have to have a structured life in order to make something of himself. Looking back on it now, Alex realized that he had a lot more of his mother's personality that he would have admitted as he looked up to the white walled ceiling and snorted to him.

Traveling across the country on nothing but a few hundred dollars in his pocket; Alex had caught the first thing smoking and gone from city to city, learning what it was really like for shifters to have to live among humans and determining for himself that how things were, was not how things always had to be. Some of the places he journey to were nothing but cesspools of misery and discontent between the relative species living in areas filled with hostility and contempt, usually with humans as the main instigators of anger and resentment.

It had only been a hundred or so years since shifter and changeling kind had stepped out from behind the veil and the world was still reeling from the shock. Just like in every other movie, theater play and paperback novel; most humans showed the extent of their ignorance and unwillingness to accept others different from them with a fervor that beguiled any form of rational tolerance.

That wasn't to say that every place was as bad as the next but far too many were nothing more than pitfalls of desolation and mistrust between the relative species littering the world. It was only in the last twenty years that things were settling and finally a modicum of civility could be seen among the faces of the people. No longer did packs have to keep their cubs hidden away until they were old enough to go out and enter into society like they had to before, now human and shifter kind met in open public and worked together to try and make their livelihoods somewhat better...

But it still wasn't enough for Alex.

The young wolf had it set in his mind that he was going to make a place for shifters and changelings only and prove to the world that they didn't need mankind's approval to be who and what they were. Alex wanted everyone to know that you could howl as loudly as you wanted whenever you wanted and that was alright, even when it wasn't.

Remembering some of his nighttime escapades when he had first settled into his new hometown, Alex stood up from his chair, walked over to his front window and looked out at the street below. Howling at one o' clock in the morning and getting cursed by everyone from teenage mothers to old warlocks who swore that they would mount his tail onto their mantles if he didn't knock it off, had been one of the greatest joys of Alex's life at twenty. Back then it was proof that he existed and that the world had to stop and take notice, whether it wanted to or not. Now though, he was twenty-four and had finally established himself to get one part of what was needed to make his dream real; good credit.

Alex looked up to the sky and watched the moon rise while thinking about what he needed next to move his plan along.

Capital: lots of it to be exact.

Preferably close to six million dollars in order to invest in the building he had in mind, hire a contractor to work for him, the materials needed to furnish said building and then have enough to higher workers when he first opened his doors. It was going to be a challenge; Alex wasn't naive enough to just believe that everything would fall into his lap just because he shouted his ideal to the world, despite what his early twenties had lied to him and said when he first graduated collage.

There were going to be hurdles along the way, both before he got started and after he opened his doors, but like everything else, it was something Alex was determined to perceiver through without wavering.

Deciding to call it a night, Alex went back over to his desk, switched off the overhead lamp then headed into his room to grab his house keys and wallet from off his dresser before going to his front door. Stepping out into the dimly lit hallway, Alex breathed in the scents of his apartment complex and then sneezed at the stale, bitter taste of mold, mildew, cheap disinfectants and the lingering smell of old clawed its way into his nose. He really, really hated this place but it was the only thing he could afford while working his full-time job as a construction worker in order to save up the money he needed to boost his credit score.

Currently, Alex and the rest of the crew were off work for the week because of a... misunderstanding in the contract between the higher-ups and his boss but that was alright since it gave Alex enough time to scope out the building he had his eyes on buying. Walking down the creaking stairs and out of the building, making sure to hold the door for old lady Chancy who was carrying a bag of groceries, Alex smiled to the small bespectacled human before watching her enter safely into her home and heading into the cool autumn night. He may not have had a pack, mostly because of all the focus he had spent with trying to work through school and his job plus a drop of reclusiveness in his personality, but Alex kept a firm respect for the elderly and those who showed him the safe deference in return.

Making his way onto the sidewalk and then breaking out into a light run, Alex let his brown and grey fur puff up from underneath the long sleeve shirt and thick blue jeans he was wearing before he lifted his head to the sky and let out a joyous howl for no other reason that because he could.

All around him, dogs barked and people swore as his boisterous echo resounded through the darkness with only the moon looking down at him from her perch in the sky.

Here I am world, watch me as I do the impossible and do the unthinkable, Alex chuckled inside of his head even as his eyes began to glow amber and fangs pressed out from between his lips, the wolf shifter increased his speed until he became a fast tracked blur through the night.

Chapter Two

Night had firmly settled over the city when Alex came to a slow jog up to his destination, panting hard with sweat liberally dripping down his brow. Shaking himself like a dog or wolf rather, Alex grunted and licked his lips, tasting the salty aftertaste of himself on his tongue, before heading into the abandoned building that he was looking to buy. Eyes still glowing and helping him to see in the almost pitch black darkness, most humans who would have come across him would have probably freaked out at the sight of the wolf like appearance he supported as Alex ripped open the hole he created in the wire fencing and stepped up to the front of the abandoned building.

Thankfully however, most of the area was completely deserted as the nearest residential area was close to two miles down the road. He figured, the first time he was here anyway, that the entire area must have been a business district that had been commissioned for demolition once the era had ended and humans ran out of money to keep the place up. Sad to say that while most of the surrounding area had been cleared off, from whatever was supposed to have been there, this structure was left to stand the test of time while bearing the weight of the elements and human inactivity.

The front doors had been pried open some years ago by a bunch of kids looking to make the place into a hangout but now sat in a slump from where Alex had to pry them open from their rusted bolts. The dull squeak of metal grinding against would have made Alex lower his ears, if he had been in either hybrid or full wolf form, thankfully though his muted human senses dulled some of the noise to a near tolerable level just as he opened the doors enough to slip inside.

The smell was always the first thing to hit him; decay, mold, mixed with the stench of chemicals from somewhere Alex could never discern, making the wolf shifter sneeze and then cough to try and adjust his breathing to the foul odors. Natural wolf instinct had his legs moving before he could think and soon Alex was off to the side of the wall unzipping his pants and marking his territory.

Once he was done, Alex zipped up then began to walk around for what had to have been the umpteenth time this week, taking note of every board that was out of place, every nail that needed to be hammered back into its rightful position, right on down to the hanging bits of wire that would have to be ripped out and then reinstalled before the electricity could work. The light from the half full moon shone through the upper floor windows giving him enough illumination to see; though there wasn't honestly enough illumination to tell how much labor needed to really be put into the entire place. Alex had already made mental notes about what things he thought needed to be repaired to but still felt that the contractor he was going to hire would be able to tell him exactly what needed to be fixed. Even after working for construction for the six years he had been with his job, Alex didn't trust himself to think he knew everything that he needed and wanted that second opinion to verify what he had in mind.

Walking around and knocking on walls and listening to the reverberations, Alex had to shake his head in disgust about how someone could just let the place go to waste with all the potential that it had. Even though it was just like one would come to expect from a decrepit old structure with half the place was falling apart and the other half was covered in dust, cobwebs and mold, there was just so much that could be done with it. Then again, maybe the past history haunting the area had been why humans had all but abandoned it in the first place, as if trying to forget the shame of their ancient history.

Remembering some of the archives he had looked up from the city library and on his laptop at home about what the building had been way back when, Alex had to laugh to himself.

Once upon a time, the very room he stood in had been an up and coming nightclub that had been happening back in the day with what apparently had been a hell-of-a-lot of illegal gambling, drug use and sex rings filtering through the place. There had to be no telling about just how much crime and corruption had taken place within the walls and as he made his way deeper on back, Alex couldn't help but smile as he thought about what once was and what was to become of the very rooms he had his sights on.

Mental images filtered through Alex's mind as he organized what he wanted to go where while stepping through space after space after space. The sketches he had back home didn't do much justice to what he had envisioned but they would have to do for now, not having enough light to take pictures, more pictures anyways since he had two memory cards full back at his apartment, Alex settled for photographing everything in his head for now.

Standing between the gap between a conjoined set of rooms, Alex realized that the pool area was going to have to be smaller than he thought unless he busted out the older wall and connected two rooms together to make it into one larger area. The weight room would have to have to be on the right side of the building though because it was the only place, other than the upstairs, where all the machinery was going to fit.

The lounge was needed to be in the front near the receptionist desk or either there was going to have to be a wall there. The main recreational room would have to be big enough so that the canine shifters and the feline shifters could separate from one another or he might as well call the place into a fight ring and offer to sell tickets at the box office. There would be no chance in hell that a pack of wolves were going to play nice with a pride of cats unless there was something between them to keep them from killing one another.

Old lesson learned from his days as a youth, but feline and canine shifters just don't mix. Most wolves and other canines preferred their own company while felines liked to be independent of each other unless it was a family group. While coyotes, foxes and dog shifters could play nice when they wanted, put them with the average leopard and the fur was literally going to fly. It wasn't because of any real animosity; it was more instinctual in truth, though that didn't mean that the odd occurrence didn't happen every now and again.

Shaking his head and pushing those thoughts aside, Alex walked up to the top floor and then looked around at what he had to work with. The top floor, while not having the height of as the lower floor, had several large rooms upstairs that had been, what he could only guess as being part of some kind of brothel. Though he couldn't smell the lingering traces of sexual pheromones from so much time having passed, Alex got the suspicion that a lot of sexual favors had been overturned in those rooms. His biggest clue had been the pair of men's underwear that he had sniffed over from underneath one of the mold infested bed when he had been scouring the places in his quadruped form.

The fact that said underclothing had been pink with smiley faces on it left Alex to believe that there had been a number of gay men to come through the place... or either the fashion style of the past had been an atrocity to good taste. Least to say that said undergarments, along with several other... interesting pieces of clothing apparel, had been tossed into the garbage and quickly forgotten.

Taking a stroll along the hallway and opening each and every door along his path, Alex couldn't decide if he wanted to keep some of the rooms as they were in case he needed them for private activities for those changelings who needed to get away for a while or just to tear everything down and make the upstairs into another part of the downstairs gymnasium. In total there were twelve rooms and most of them were about as wide as someone would come to expect from a building about the size of shopping mall.

Making a choice to leave the possibilities for these rooms up in the air, Alex already determined that two of the back rooms were going to be for his private use. More than likely that would be where he lived since then he wouldn't need for a house and that way Alex figured he could save on having a mortgage and paying other property taxes and just funnel most of his assets into his place of business. Not being one for grand luxury; Alex cared more about things being practical and functional in his personal life rather than flaunting what little he didn't have.

That one reason why he was living in that roach infested building when he was making close to a five figure salary. The money he had saved up wouldn't buy him the building, not even if he worked for another ten years, but it did serve to make his credit look good enough to try and get a load big enough from his current bank, at least he hoped so.

Tackling aside those thoughts, Alex went back downstairs and then made his way to the basement area from a pair of stairs he had stumbled on when he had been knocking on all the walls of the room. Seemed that someone had purposely put a plaster wall up to block off the stairs that lead down into the underground room and when Alex had first gone down there, he had both seen and understood why.

Apparently this place had some secrets to it that bordered the line of being disturbing because when Alex had gone down to see what he had stumbled over, he found all manners of chains and torture devices that looked like a sadist's wet dream. The smell of decay and rot had been so bad at when he first scented the place that Alex had to run out of the room to throw up before he could go back down and start to clean up. Thankfully, there weren't any bodies hanging around, that would have been so much fun to try and explain to the police, not, but it had taken a total of three days for him to clear everything out before he could deem the room fit for him to try and plan for its rebirth.

Once he could see what he had to work with, flashlight in hand since there were no windows down here, Alex found that he had enough space to make the entire room into either a pool hall or maybe a small bar, he wasn't sure as of yet. There was at least a thousand square feet to play with and like a little kid; Alex wasn't sure about what he wanted to do. Walking around and visualized where he could put the plasma screen TVs or maybe even a dance floor, the possibilities seemed almost endless but one thing Alex did know was that he had to make an entry/exit way down here before building code enforcement even thought about coming through. Just imagining a bunch of fire elementals using the place and burning down his building from the ground up sent a trail of shivers through the wolf shifter that were followed by a warning growl.

Definitely going to have to keep the 'pyromancers' upstairs where he could keep an eye on them.

Heading all the way over to the other side of the room, Alex looked up at where the concrete was starting to chip at and figured that if someone could punch a hole here and then dig a pathway up, then it become a staircase leading to the outside. That would give code compliance a little less to gripe about.

The entire building was actually situated between two streets up above so he would have to have someone manning the door to keep an eye on who went in or out otherwise there was no telling about the riffraff that would blow through. Alex wasn't so idealistic to think that every shifter had good intentions in mind and knew that he would need some serious muscle to guard over the place between day and night. The real dilemma would be about how to have a bar underneath his center and make everything work legally. Not saying it had to be a bar, but the idea of a water hole for shifters did sound better and better with every minute as he went back upstairs to give the place another once over before heading in for the night.

Alex spent another hour going over everything before a sleepy yawn made him reign in his examination for the evening. Reaching into his pocket and pulling out his cell phone, the wolf shifter read the green numbers and sighed as he realized that it was tomorrow already. Stuffing the small cellular device into his pocket, Alex walked out of the building and made one last turn to regard the dilapidated old place before silently reaffirming his promise to himself that he would do whatever it would take to turn his dream into reality. Turning away and walking onto the street with hands buried in the pockets of his pant, a stride in his glide, and a newfound sense of determination, Alex thought about what tomorrow would bring as he made plans to head down to the bank to apply for his loan.