His name is Wolfhart Tadius, Hart for short.

He’s stuck in a city he’d have never chosen to stay because some time around 1930, he needed a shot of good whiskey in a place he didn’t need to sneak around. Europe was at war, so he couldn’t really go home to Germany. He didn’t feel like going to the trouble of hieing himself to Oceania, Asia, or South America, so he went to Kansas City.

He intended to stay there where the good liquor was and the revenuers weren’t (for the most part), and while he was there, he tripped over beings he’d heard were real, but had never had any reason to meet.

And these beings—bound to the mortal plane, with the same needs as everyone else but less ability to navigate a technologically advancing society—needed help.

Lots of help.

Specifically, by a mortal who knew who and what they were, could clear their path through the ever-enlarging bureaucracy, was smart enough to get through law school, and if necessary, could blow up the planet with one wave of a hand.

Hey, it was 1930 and he wasn’t doing much right then, except dating a pretty and very feisty girl who, by the way, was a junior attorney for the mob when women generally weren’t attorneys for the mob, and decided that since he’d already collected a few dozen doctorates in his very long life, a J.D. wouldn’t be any kind of challenge.

He took on the responsibility, took on family number six, and settled in—

But it’s over a hundred years later and his sixth wife died decades ago. His youngest son is ninety-six and in memory care. His youngest daughter is eighty-four and moving back home with daddy because she’s tired of being the matriarch of her family, especially when one of her daughters-in-law doesn’t like her. His colleagues are starting to wonder why he never looks older than thirty-eight and their wives are trying to marry him off. Kansas City has become the locus for every non-mortal, non-human being in the world because that’s where Hart is.

He’s a four-hundred-twenty-year-old mortal sorcerer who has learned how to manipulate energy, matter, and time in five dimensions, has access to a reservoir of youth and vitality, and built his wealth on a gift he only partook of once. He turned lead into gold before he was twenty. He figured out physics not long after that. He’s walked the world, observed through the centuries, and learned half its languages. His power grows with every year that passes. He converses with angels, demons, fairy tales, myths, legends, gods, and demigods of every cosmology known to mankind—albeit he does not put up with fae linguistic shenanigans. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

He loves memes, Waffle House, movies, and fervently believes that English is the most magical language on Earth because its precision is unparalleled, and if there is anything Hart loves more than Waffle House, it’s precision.

However, these beings—the reason he stayed in the first place—have grown to see him as the help, and he’s getting pissy about it.

He could leave, sure. But he’s not an asshole.

And he’s just met a very attractive woman whose job is the restoration and conservation of medieval and renaissance alchemy texts at the Linda Hall Library of Science, and whose theology might allow her to be the first woman he’s ever been in love with to roll with who and what he really is.

So, in an effort to impress upon his dependents that he is, in fact, not “the help,” but the most powerful sorcerer who has ever walked the face of the planet and has, in fact, stood down the Angel of Death, he’s going to have to content himself with presenting yet another PowerPoint.