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Julien's "castle" from which royal business is conducted and not for sleeping unless someone wants to bunk in.

Realtor: A... lair?
Freddy: Yes. If you have a location like, on a cliff with a castle-esque type thing...

The lair. The hideout. Hero headquarters. Home Base. That place to which the heroes or villains return after a hard day of fighting or committing crime. This is where planning takes place and where teams regroup after missions. Generally hidden, but may be ostentatious.

Some variants are exclusive to certain jobs. For example, the Mad Scientist will naturally live in the Mad Scientist Laboratory, and a Cop Show inevitably has a precinct. In a show where a team is wandering around, their Cool Ship, Cool Boat or other cool vehicle may double as Home Base. Larger bases for villains may have a Den of Iniquity for off-hour "recreation".

A home base may also literally be a private home, which makes it all the more personal when a villain breaks in.

Incredibly common, since it's obviously cheaper to shoot in a single recurring set than to build new locations.

Not to be confused with the British hardware store of the same name or getting to home base.


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    Anime & Manga 
  • It is quite frequent in Humongous Mecha shows (Justified, since you can not easily keep a giant, humanoid machine war in your home unless your name is Banjo Haran):
    • Combattler V: The Nanbara Connection was located by the coast and was protected by a Beehive Barrier.
    • Daimos: The Daimobic worked like this. It was a rocket-shaped building.
    • Kotetsu Jeeg: The Build Base, although Hiroshi and his family lived in another place.
    • Mazinger Z: The Photon Atomic Research Institute was the heroes's base where they kept the Humongous Mecha and all tools they needed to repair them and upgrade them. Originally it was a civilian use building -a laboratory researched the newly discovered Photon Atomic energy-, but Dr. Hell pretty much forced them to make some modifications (such like installing a Beehive Barrier). Over the half of the series, The Hero and his little brother moved to the Institute, making the example even more literal. Big Bad Dr. Hell had two Super Villain Lair: Bardos Island And Hell Island. Both of them counted like Elaborate Underground Base, Island Base and Mad Scientist Laboratory.
      • Great Mazinger: The Fortress of Science was the place where the heroes lived and their HQ to fight the Mykene Empire. It stood out in sea beside the Japanese shoreline and it could submerge -doubling like an Underwater Base-. Some parts of the building could detach off the remain and work like a submarine or a flying carrier. Mykene Empire Home Base was necessarily an Elaborate Underground Base because they were a civilization lived underground.
      • It was parodied, too. Boss' gang were looking for a Home Base for his Humongous Mecha. When they found one place, Boss was pretty angry it was nothing but a rundown shack with one wall crumbled and holes on the roof.
    • Neon Genesis Evangelion: The NERV Headquarters.
    • UFO Robo Grendizer: The Space Science Laboratory was the base of the heroes. The Vegans Home Base was a Space Base located on the Moon.
    • Voltes V: The Camp Big Falcon was located on a penninsula -so it nearly was a full-fledged Island Base- shaped like a bird of prey with its wings spread out. The base also doubled like The Battlestar.
    • Zambot 3: The Zambase was a Airborne Aircraft Carrier AND a Cool Starship.
  • Homura's house in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which not only contains design elements relating to her Time Master powers, but also archives information regarding Walpurgisnacht.
  • Digimon Universe: App Monsters: The heroes have their secret headquarters in a large basement under the local bookstore with the permission of the owner's daughter (the owner has no clue about the basement's existence due to being hidden by a Bookcase Passage). It's a good place for them to safely bring out their Appmons without causing public panic.

    Comic Books 
  • Most superheroes or teams have (at least) one of these, though most, like Batman, opt for an Elaborate Underground Base:
    • Avengers Mansion in The Avengers
      • And Avengers Tower.
    • Batman's Batcave, located in the catacombs beneath Stately Wayne Manor. When he's not living at the Manor, he has his Batbunker connected to the Wayne Foundation Penthouse.
    • The Baxter Building in Fantastic Four
    • The Watchtower in Justice League (as well as the Secret Sanctuary, the JLA Satellite, and the Hall of Justice, the latter serving as the gateway to the new Satellite Watchtower)
    • Superman:
      • The Fortress of Solitude is a huge complex inside an arctic mountain. Though, Superman actually doesn't spend a lot of time there because he goes there when he wants to be *by himself*. Thus the name.
      • In Supergirl (Rebirth), Supergirl inherited her cousin's Fortress of Solitude. Formerly she had an underwater base called "Sanctuary"; and in Action Comics #271, she built her own private underground base beneath the Arabian Desert.
      • In The Untold Story of Argo City, Supergirl carves one new Fortress in a remote and inaccessible rock spire for her and her parents when Zor-El and Allura decide to move from the Bottle City of Kandor to Earth.
      • The Hunt for Reactron: After taking Nightwing and Flamebird to her Parisian safehouse, Kara reveals she has a lot of little secondary "Fortresses of Solitude" all over the world. She readily admits she stole the idea from Batman.
      • In Super Sons, Superboy Jon Kent and Damian Wayne get an Underwater Base built by their dads at the bottom of Morrison Bay that's just a 100 seconds away from both Metropolis and Gotham City by special pod (albeit, Jon can make it in 45 at the cost of getting wet). Jon wants to call it the "Fortress of Attitude", but Damian quickly denies the notion.
    • Robin (1993): After his father's death and moving to Bludhaven Tim is supposedly living with his "uncle" in a townhouse, though really he only visits the townhouse for the sake of appearances and is working out of and living in his "Robin's Nest" in an abandoned Bludhaven penthouse.
    • Red Robin: Tim renovates a loft for himself in Crime Alley, and has a hidden sliding panel in one wall that leads to his underground garage-med bay-chemistry lab-computer lab-gym for use as his base of operations as Red Robin.
    • The various iterations of the Teen Titans have their Titan Tower, which is shaped like a "T" (and is often an Island Base), usually in San Francisco or some other bay area. In Titans (Rebirth), the elder Titans (Nightwing, Donna Troy, Arsenal, Flash (Wally West), and Aqualad, and Lilith Clay) get their own tower as well.
    • The Secret Sanctuary atop Mt. Justice in Happy Harbor, Maine, in Young Justice. It was actually the Justice League's original base.
    • Pat's Pit Stop in Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E..
    • The Triskelion for S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Ultimates.
  • Tintin: Marlinspike Hall becomes Tintin, Haddock and Calculus' homebase from Red Rackham's Treasure on.
  • Quick and Flupke: All gags take place in Brussels. So much even that the characters have become somewhat of cultural icons of the city.
  • Jommeke: All adventures are based in the village Zonnedorp.
  • Tom Poes: Bommel's castle in the village Rommeldam.
  • Nero: Since the album De Verschrikkelijke Tweeling Nero and his family live in Hoeilaart. Their house really exists by the way. It's an old streetcar station where in 1994 a statue of Nero was placed.
  • Urbanus: Tollembeek, Urbanus' home village.
  • Benoit Brisefer: Vivejoie-La-Grande, his home village.
  • Spirou & Fantasio: Champignac, where the Count lives.
  • Asterix: The Gauls' village.
  • The Smurfs: Smurf Village.
  • De Kiekeboes: The Kiekeboes' home in the Merholaan 1.
  • Donald Duck: Duckburg in the comic strip.

    Comic Strips 

    Fan Works 
  • Evangelion 303: The Distler Air Force Base, a secret military base in the Mojave Desert of California that houses Black Project Evangelion.
  • HERZ: The Geofront is peace-keeping organization HERZ’s base. It used to be an Elaborate Underground Base but the top half got blown up during a battle twelve years before the beginning of the history.
  • In Superman fanfic Superman of 2499: The Great Confrontation, Superman's original Fortress of Solitude has long since been discovered and turned into a museum. The newest Superman and Supergirl's Fortress is hidden within the asteroid Ceres.
  • Grunnel's house serves as one for part of the story in With Strings Attached. However, after the four return with the third piece of the Vasyn, they discover the other two pieces missing and the house empty of nearly everything—so much for that Home Base.
  • In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel fic Bring Me to Life, the Scooby Gang and the Angel Investigations team are brought together to face off against Jasmine and the First. They initially set up shop in Angel Investigations' base, the Hyperion Hotel, but after chapter 37, when Jasmine/the First destroys the Hyperion, the two teams relocate to Buffy's house in Sunnydale. In chapter 40, Wesley takes the time to snark that they don't have nearly as much operating space in the Summers household as they did in the Hyperion.
  • My Hero Playthrough: Izuku, Inko, and Tsuyu turn the first Dungeon they clear (a very nice pencil given to Izuku) into one of these. The kids continue to use it to train physically, and they all load it up with furniture and other amenities. Izuku even calls it the Pencil of Solitude. It has the added advantage that he can carry it around, and when he enters, any currently in his party is pulled in as well.
  • In the Mind Games series, the Heroes of Paris take over Hawk Moth's Supervillain Lair after his defeat and arrest, repurposing it as their own HQ and Mission Control for their crimefighting endeavors.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The War: the base is a treehouse that the two gangs fight over. It changes hands multiple times through the movie. In the end, both sides abandoned the treehouse since it was only a symbol of the real problem.

    Literature 
  • Cassie’s barn serves as this for Animorphs. It’s the best place to get non-zoo morphs and can hide Ax and Tobias easily.
  • Reynard the Fox: Reynard the fox lives in a castle named Maupertuis (sometimes translated as Malpertuis) where he has all kinds of secret passage ways to trick visitors.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The Rise of Phoenixes: Ning Yi, Zi Yan and Zhu Yin meet and plot in the House of Lan Xiang. They chose it partly because Zhu Yin works there and partly because no one would think they were discussing their plans in a brothel.
  • The library in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
    • Giles' house in season four also qualifies. Later, so do the Magic Box and the Summers' household.
  • Every season of Power Rangers had some kind of base. In some seasons, they doubled as a home for some or all of the Rangers.
  • The Threshold headquarters, which looks like just about any other government building.
  • Leverage switched from the suite of offices they had in the first season (It blew up) to an apartment (Nate's) above McRory's Pub (Which got put under surveillance after Season 4). In the final season, they moved to the back room of a Portland Bridgeport Brewpub, with appropriate modifications for Parker's benefit.
  • The Bellisarioverse features multiple offices of NCIS.
    • The main headquarters of NCIS is at the Washington, D.C. Navy Yard, and it's where one can find the Major Case Response Team and the Director. (This is a bit of Artistic License — IRL, NCIS is headquartered at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.)
    • The Office of Special Projects in NCIS: Los Angeles is located in a disused building in LA (it has a condemned sign on the outside to deter people from coming in); however, interrogations are done at a separate location known as "the boatshed".
    • There are also additional offices in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Pearl Harbor, and Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
  • Arrowverse:
    • Arrow: For the first three seasons, Team Arrow operates out of a lair built beneath the warehouse Oliver converts into a night club (thus giving him an excuse to always be there). After it gets raided and shut down by the police, they temporarily relocate to a base in a subbasement of Palmer Tech, before building a new base beneath the office Oliver runs his mayoral campaign out of.
    • The Flash (2014) has STAR Labs.
    • Supergirl (2015) has the different D.E.O. bases, Superman and Supergirl's Fortress of Solitude, and Reign's Fortress of Sanctuary (a desert base).
    • Legends of Tomorrow has the Waverider serve as a mobile base for the Legends.
    • Batwoman (2019) has the Batcave, of course, which in this continuity is below the Wayne Enterprises building instead of Wayne Manor.
    • Black Lightning (2018) has the Sanctum underneath Gambi's tailor shop, which serves as Mission Control for the Pierce family's various superhero activities.
  • Supernatural: Midway through Season 8, the Winchesters discover the old Men of Letters bunker and turn it into their new home.
    • The Winchesters: The Monster Club discover a secret Men of Letters club house in Lawrence, Kansas in the pilot, and from then on use it as an HQ.
  • Charmed (2018): For the first season, the sisters use the family manor as their base, like in the original series. In Season 2, however, they discover the Command Center, a bunker underneath Seattle created by the Elders as both a means of protecting the tree that's the source of all magic in the world and as an emergency safe house. From then on, they use it (and its archive of mystical knowledge) to coordinate all their efforts against the evils they come up against.

    Pinballs 
  • In Data East's Secret Service pinball, the Soviet spies have a secret hideout with a roof adorned with barbed wire, satellite and radio equipment, and a large red flag.
  • Spy Hunter has the Weapons Warehouse, a safe haven for Agent GK to collect more weapons.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In Ars Magica, the wizards' Covenants qualify as Home Bases. Well-equipped personal quarters are vital for mages, since downtime and substantial resources are vital for their magical research and experimentation, and extensive rules exist on developing a shared Covenant into its own "Character". Long-running covenants often become some combination of Cool House, Absurdly-Spacious Sewer, Magical Library, and Adventure Town, which is sometimes Bigger on the Inside and has its own unique wildlife.
  • Most of the New World of Darkness games have a buyable Merit for a Home Base which can be outfitted with useful resources for characters. Vampires get Havens to bunker down during the daytime hours; Mages can outfit Sanctums with Mana sources and other magical aids; Changelings carve Hollows out of the Hedge between the mundane world and Arcadia; and so on.
  • The classiest option for a security-conscious archmage in Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder is a personal Pocket Dimension, where reality itself can be customized to their needs.
  • Base Raiders is based around finding the abandoned secret hideouts of superheroes and villains who disappeared during Ragarok, then breaking in, fighting whatever automated defenses or minions might still be around, and stealing everything not nailed down.

    Video Games 
  • Absented Age: Squarebound: Mika's house is the base of operations in this game, where the player can upgrade their skill trees and manage the storage system. This is also the only place where Karen can materialize in the real world, at least until she learns how to materialize anywhere in the ending.
  • In "Episode 2: Memory" of Code 7, your team's HQ is located in a rather run down part of New Berlin, where lots of gangs and drug dealers are doing their business, so it is easier for you not to draw too much attention. It used to belong to the Perisher Gang, but they perished a while ago. Despite all that, it is cosy enough, and a safe place for the team to do research or relax in-between missions.
  • In the Shinjuku chapter of Fate/Grand Order's Epic of Remnant expansion, Artoria Alter sets up her base in a fast food restaurant's basement and the heroes end up using it for the entirety of their stay there.
  • Metal Walker gives the hero various base camps, which he can place at nearby signs.
  • In Persona 4, the heroes have a "special base": the Junes food court.
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker introduces Mother Base, a converted offshore rig in the Carribean that Big Boss receives as payment for taking on the Peace Sentinals. As the game progesses, the plant is modified an expanded to account for all the new mercenaries recruited throughout the game and to house research, medical, logistical, and training facilities. After its destruction in Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, a new Mother Base is eventually built off the coast of the Seychelles which functions the same in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

    Web Comics 

    Western Animation 
  • The Simpsons: Their house in Evergreen Terrace, Springfield.
  • The Planet Express offices in Futurama.
  • Castle Grayskull for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983).
  • Professor Utonium's home in The Powerpuff Girls.
  • Space Ghost has a whole Ghost Planet!
  • Transformers:
    • In The Transformers, the Autobots are based out of their crashed starship (while unnamed in the cartoon itself, it's named the Ark following the lead of every other form of media). Meanwhile, the Decepticons are holed up in their crashed starship, though it's shown that they often set up temporary or smaller bases as needed and at least one of their special units (the Combaticons) maintain a separate base somewhere in a rocky desert.
    • Transformers: The Movie shows that the Autobots are now based in Autobot City, and the first few episodes of the third season (which take place post-movie) show the Autobot starship get destroyed. The Decepticons meanwhile are driven to the burned out planet of Chaar, which they build up into a permanent base of operations.
    • Similar roles are played by the crashed Axalon and Darksyde starships in Beast Wars.
  • The basement of the Silver Dragon restaurant in W.I.T.C.H..
  • Young Justice has the Cave; located in Mount Justice.
  • The She-Lair in SheZow, located under Guy's Aunt's (now his Family's) house (with a secret exit to the sea).
  • The Dinotrux Garage in Dinotrux, built as a symbol of their teamwork.
  • In Mysticons, the Mysticons have a stronghold under the royal palace, where the main characters, as well as Doug and Malvaron, live, as well as discuss missions.
  • Static Shock lightly parodies the idea with Static and Gear's base of operation: The Abandoned Gas Station of Solitude. Being a couple of teenagers, it's all they could afford. Played Straight, however, in the episode "Future Shock" which shows that the adult Static and Gear have built a proper superhero base under the gas station.
  • The Lion Guard lair in The Lion Guard. It has paintings on the walls depicting previous guards and their big events and has a pool for Beshte to hang out in that also serves as an underwater escape route when the vultures burn the lair. There’s also a secret doorway to a series of challenges.

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