[h1][center][b]Dr. Strange[/b][/center][/h1] What he had learned from the prophecy meant that Strange needed to get in touch with Magik as soon as he could. A telepathic message would be the normal way, but Magik lived a very eventful life; one never knew if she would be off in another galaxy or visiting some demon realm. Not being familiar enough with her signature to locate her without expending some effort, Strange decided the best option was to send a general message in the direction of Krakoa; someone there would know how to reach her. That gave him time to wait for a reply, and so he looked into another mystery, Strange figured out that the meal ordering app on the back of the business card he found was a way of arranging a covert meeting. It advertised one free dine in or carry out meal anywhere in Manhattan, all he had to do was select the time. The fact they had timeslots open all week as soon as one hour from now showed that they were serious about trying to reach him. The place he chose was called #1 Authentic World Famous Ray’s Original Pizza Manhattan. Despite the constant flow of tourists from the bus terminal every local knew it was awful. Inside there was a line out the door, full of people wearing newly bought “I <3 NY” shirts, speaking in a half dozen languages as they waited to grab a lukewarm piece of greasy pizza from one of the grumpy teenagers working behind the counter. Strange surveyed the place once he arrived and waited in the short line to pick up his order, as soon as he grabbed it a man sitting in at an empty table in the back started to walk towards him. He was in his mid-40s, wearing the midtown finance bro signature of Chinos, a plaid shirt, and Patagonia vest. Strange turned to the right, then to the left, and noticed the man still came towards his place, following the twisting path through the crowd. In all likelihood, that was the man coming to meet him. Strange waved his hand and a field of magic fell over the area. Time slowed to a crawl, a spilled drink stayed mid fall, people stayed mid stride, and a dozen conversations became just extended noises. Then for his next trick he opened a line of telepathic communication to the main that was following him, confident he had the right person based on both deduction and magical intuition. Strange sent his first message “Don’t be alarmed, time is still moving, just at an extremely slow pace. Physically, neither of us will be able to do much but telepathically we can still have a full conversation in the time until the spell wears off. I apologize about not asking, but this is a very secure way of doing things. Not only is our telepathic broadcast warded and controlled enough that it will be difficult to notice, this will make it very short and nigh-impossible for an eavesdropper to understand. I hope you appreciate the security.” The man replied “I do, might take me a bit to get used to, hit me out of nowhere. You know I’ve gotten a little bit of telepathic training, purely defensive stuff but necessary with the threat model we deal with, and even before then I was with SHIELD and the three letter agencies when they started getting interested in this kind of thing.” “Intriguing. I would like to know more about why you contacted me, whoever you are.” “You can call me Agent Graham, and I’ll be honest with you, I’m from Orchis. What do you know about us?” “Three things: The boilerplate on our website, the fact your ads ran alongside a lot of anti-mutant material in major press outlets, and that the Mutant Legal Defense Fund has added you to their list of anti-mutant hate groups.” “Yeah…about that. I can’t exactly beat around the bush here but what I can say is that they don’t have the full perspective. Might not do much good to say it, but I’m not some Greydon Creed, Cameron Hodge type who just starts foaming at the mouth the moment they smell an X-gene on someone. I’ve never done anything to them personally, I’ve interacted affably with the few I’ve known, and I think you’d be surprised by how many of them would prefer us to that Krakoa business.” “Whether I choose believe that or not I still don’t understand what you want to tell me. I think you know my current perspective based on my past actions, and my stance on recent issues is not yet settled. I would like to hear what your aim is.” “Glad you asked, I’ll get right to it. Now, to start I’m gonna throw out an MLK quote, and it’s probably not one of the one’s you’d think. ‘Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.’ King said that when there were thirty two thousand nuclear warheads in the world. What he didn’t know was that even then there were people walking the earth born with powers inside them that would dwarf every one of those bombs put together. There were a handful of them then, there are many more now, and who knows what the future will bring? Let’s talk about it in a different way.” Agent Graham concentrated and a square of text and images appeared by his side, superimposed into the pizza restaurant. In the tone of his telepathic delivery Strange could tell he was surprised in a good way by his ability to leverage the medium and project something other than simple messages. “Sorry some of the contents of my mind look like a powerpoint presentation it’s a bad habit I picked up. Believe me, I used to be the kind of guy that dove into papers back when I was the Kennedy School and SAIS, but enough years in the government will change you. To get to the point, I’ve got a couple of graphs that should tell the story.” He flicked through a dozen charts, each showing trends over time of very serious matters. They included a logarithmic scale of known superhuman and their power outputs, a count of the postgenius level intellects on earth, a list of recorded incidents where extinction was narrowly averted, and more. Strange found them generally accurate, he could guess most of the datapoints; a few were missing but mistakes were inevitable, and all showed an upward trend over time. Then the agent wave his hand and all of the charts became divided into two colors, one representing mutants and one representing humans. Now an even clearer trend emerged: Mutants had been grabbing a greater and greater share. The agent said “I minored in Math, but you don’t need me to tell you the way it’s going, heck even drawing a line on it is overkill. I’ve got another set.” He pulled up charts related to the mutant population over time, all of the valleys from moments like the Genoshan genocide and M Day were clearly present, and supplemented them with a chart of mutants as a percentage of births, showing that although the population had faced a setback, it would rebound to even greater heights in the future. “One final one, the showstopper.” The charts from before returned, but now an additional feature: these showed what would’ve been without those incidents, how the mutants would’ve held an even greater share than they do now, and more than that, they showed the future projections, of mutant power spiraling so far the axes of the graphs had to be adjusted, so dominant that the human portion fell to an imperceptible sliver underneath. “The funny thing about showing off these graphs is that it’s something most mutants agree with, something they’ll tell you it all if you ask them and it’s a point of pride for a lot of them. Everything I said here could be recycled into a Magneto speech and none of it would feel out of place. I’ll agree with all of the stuff Magneto says about the awesome power of the mutants, how they’re so much above the humans, except for one aspect, one point where I disagree with him: the ethical dimension. Homo Sapien and Homo Superior, there is one thing all of us share: the same hardwired instincts from our animal ancestors, underneath us all is some beast that is categorizing the entire world into things it wants to kill and things it wants to mate with. We can fight it, we do a pretty good job of in modern society, but we’ll never eradicate it, and mutants are no stronger against it than anyone else on the street, they just have way, way worse consequences if they do ever go sideways. If the mutants were a race of saints, down to every last one of them, maybe we could just go back to sleepwalking through our lives, but you and I both know that is a chance we can’t take. There is a loaded gun pointed at the temple of the human race, and we’ve got to find some solution other than hoping the mutant holding it doesn’t feel like pulling the trigger.” Strange replied “Interesting that there is one area missing from your chart, yet it is one that you alluded to: the spiritual dimension. I’ve never seen your agencies try to measure it, and if you did I wouldn’t trust your results, but I have seen much of it and I can speak from experience that it is the great equalizer. I’ve probably met or corresponded at least once with every one of the postgeniuses on your chart and I can tell you it is remarkable how little their talents correlate with magical aptitude; every attempt to find some inherent trait that will foretell who has a special genius for magic has failed miserably. I’ve tried to tutor Richards, Stark, Pym, Cho and others, none of them ever got far when it came to the mystical arts, and I’m only aware of two individual who have reached high levels in both science and magic. There’s even figures like Arash the Fool, an illiterate Persian mystic who never learned to count beyond ten or any mundane trade, but had magical power great enough to rearrange realms merely by misremembering where everything was before. Imaginary numbers came into existence when someone tried to teach him math. It seems to me that in the magical dimension we are all equals, human and mutant alike. I certainly haven’t seen any threat of mutant domination in that area.” “Haven’t seen any yet.” “I don’t indulge in fear-mongering. Even if I did, I wouldn’t trust your solutions. I prefer to see people as changeable, not fixed, and believe that moral character is something that can be built, can be honed and taught. I’ve always believed for that, I’ve always worked for that, and if your statistics are true then my work is more important than ever before. I see no reason to abandon my approach.” “So you’ll do what? Hold some teach-ins, do some consciousness raising, and hope that’ll be enough to awaken the world and usher in a new age where we all just hold hands and sing?” “You have a very small view of the possibilities.” “Maybe I do, but I don’t deal with that kind of stuff, I deal with the concrete. Give me a call when you start to get worried, because you will, sooner or later. Every human will.” Time began to move again and they both turned off in opposite directions, never exchanging a single spoken word.