Adrian Blackwood

"Right!" Adrian said. "Here, we'll start with the house." He led her over to the snug wooden cottage that he'd brought with him from Massachusetts.

The front door they stepped through was intricately carved, and decorated, though that level of decoration did not seem to extend into the house proper. Here, simplicity and ruled, letting the craftsmanship speak for itself. Most of the space was taken up by a single vaulted room that seemed to be a combination kitchen and workshop. Where they weren't pierced with tall antique-glass windows, the wooden walls were covered with built-in shelves containing every sort of witchy ingredient from rosemary to dried snakes. One entire corner was dedicated to a fieldstone fireplace with a massive cauldron hanging from an iron chain at its center. The kitchen area beside it had a wood-fired iron stove along with a deep enameled sink and a spice cabinet the size of a wardrobe. Well-used copper pots and pans hung from an iron rack above the wooden island, which had a second cauldron stowed beneath it as well as rows of glass bottles in all different shapes and sizes. A small bedroom lay off to one side of the workshop, and a door out the back led to a glassed-in greenhouse patio that was already full of plants. The ceiling was steeply pointed and braced with massive oak beams, one of which supported a ladder-accessed loft that appeared to be Adrian's office. There were several bookcases up there along with a large circular window to let in the light, a comfy-looking pile of cushions for reading, and, oddly, a laptop computer. Other than that, nothing in the house seemed to use electricity.

"This is my home," Adrian said, pulling his phone out of his pocket and hooking it up to a portable solar charging panel, which he shimmied up the ladder to place under the loft's sunny window. "The greenhouse out back already has full rainwater capture and filtration, which means I won't have to worry about digging a well. I use a combination of aquaponics and compost for waste removal, so that takes care of septic and trash. Food scraps go to the garden - I will have to buy some real solar panels for the roof eventually, because those I couldn't make myself, but this should do for now."