[color=8493ca][h1][center][b]Dr. Strange[/b][/center][/h1][/color]
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Posts from the last thread, consolidated
[hider=Strange adjusts to being back in New York, gets an update on the situation and realizes something about a prophecy]

The simple pleasures of a shave and shower in his own place had been exquisite, enough to clear any lingering feelings of remorse of losing the title of Sorcerer Supreme. He didn’t doubt Wong’s capabilities, it was just that Strange had gotten used to the role, and adapting would be one more part of the adjustment of returning home. After he finished up and ate some breakfast, Strange spent the morning gathering some of his belongings, and then stopped by the foyer on his way out to say a temporary goodbye to Wong.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay? Your room is just like you left it, and I’m sure there’s plenty you can do around here.” Wong said. 

“No, I’m good. I’ll leave my stuff there and I might pop in, but I want to get out of my comfort zone. It’s all too familiar here.” Strange said.

“Alright, but just remember, you’re welcome any time.” Wong said

“Sure, and I’m glad things have been going well while I’m out. I think you’ll do a great job as Sorcerer Supreme.” Strange said.
“Thank you, It’s a great honor to have this responsibility. I just hope I can live up to the previous examples.”

“I’ve only heard a little bit but it sounds like it’s going well so far. Any goals you’ve set for yourself?”

“Well, I think comparisons between us are going to be inevitable, so I might as well work off of that benchmark. I’m aiming for the same amount of saving the earth; maybe a little less mess along the way.”

“Fair. If there’s anyone I trust to do that it’s you. I’ll see you around.” Strange said as he stepped out the door.

One of the old tricks of the Sanctum Sanctorum was that the back door would deposit someone on any street in Manhattan as long as you thought about it hard enough. That tripped up quite a few visitors, but for Strange it was just an easier way of getting to the library. He had four months worth of news to catch up on and some time to kill while he waited for his check-in at the hotel. Strange grabbed whole stacks of back issues of the newspapers and magazines from the periodical section and walked over to a table where carved out space for his pile. Even before he was trained in the mystical arts, Strange had a knack for reading quickly and remembering most of it; it was hard to get through a top flight medical school without that. The pages flitted by as he went through the events of the past quarter, as soon as he had finished reading one another floated over and opened itself, continuing the rapid pace. An animated pen filled up a scroll conjured from underneath his cloak with notes, half-muttered, half transmitted through telepathy. It was a symphony of activity around Strange, hyperfocused and devouring information with mystifying speed. The thrill continued until he felt someone tap him on the shoulder and suddenly it all paused. An old lady with a library ID badge had gotten his attention, and spoke in a voice that was trying to be firm but clearly startled “Ummm, sir I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to take your activities elsewhere. You’re scaring our other patrons.” Strange looked up slowly and saw that everyone in the room, from those seated at the table to the ones just walking by had stopped whatever they were doing to stare at him, and made sure to give him a wide berth.

While walking through Bryant Park after his unceremonious exit from the library Strange stopped by a news stand. He looked over the newspapers and magazines and bought a few different ones, even though all of their headlines were about one thing: Krakoa. He could tell it was a big deal when he was going through the back issues in the library, and even before he got inside he saw two rival groups holding rallies in the park. They were still there, just as determined as before. The pro-mutant side was clearly enjoying themselves; despite the signs they held it had the atmosphere of a celebration. Everyone on the anti-mutant was angry, whether it was simmering anger or blinding hatred varied from person to person. They chanted their slogans and alternated between glaring menacingly at the pro-mutant side and the cops manning the barricades separating them. Strange took a roundabout way to the subway station to avoid them.

	On the train Strange enjoyed a proper New York bagel for the first time in what felt like thousands of years. Interdimensional wars didn’t care much about good food. Part of the reason he was so focused on the present and catching up was because it let him block out memories of the war. It had consumed him so fully for so long that much of it melded together into one massive event. He wish he could say he had come out of it better, but there was nothing he liked about it now, not even the “gift” they gave him at the end, a glimpse of the future as a way of thanking him for his dedication. That one would take him time to unpack, like many prophecies it operated on multiple levels, he had seen images, heard words, felt auras and so much more. Examining it would be for another time. For now he just focused on his food and the copy of the New York Times he had floating in front of him, reading about the UN recognition of Krakoa. No one on the subway thought it wise to bother the man who could make a newspaper levitate.

	His room at the Hotel Chelsea was ready for him now. The clerk gave him a standard warning about how it was New York’s most haunted hotel, and Strange did his best not to laugh; while the clerk was talking he could see a whole host of malevolent spirits fleeing the premises, having realized who would be their new neighbor. Perhaps Wong could get one of the students to track them down before they found another place to haunt. Before he even opened the door he noticed someone had left a business card in the frame; oddly it was solid black, not a single mark on it. There was no magic residue at least, so Strange picked it up and filed it away as a curiosity. 

	Traveling was easy with magic, even a small bag could hold an enormous amount and with the right spell it could pack or unpack itself. As soon as Strange was sitting down his record player had already settled itself and loaded a Mahavishnu Orchestra album, and the electric kettle was readying a cup of tea. He held the business card in hand and twirled like one of those cheap birthday party magicians, then came up with an idea as he supped on his tea. A spell let him see the past of the object, and with that he saw what had been printed on it before it was covered in black: The web address of a meal delivery service on one side, and a logo he had never seen before on the front, along with one simple phrase “We’d like to talk”. It could’ve just been an advertising gimmick, but Strange had a lifelong belief in meaningful coincidences, and filed the logo away in his memory as he set the card down.

From the stack he opted to start with was a special issue of Time, “Krakoa: A Guide”. Most of it was basic, a lot of the profiles were of people who he had met personally, some of it was incorrect; overall it did help him learn about the power players and the features of Krakoan society. Strange kept reading and noticed a particular slant to the advertising, not a single slot was filled with the usual material about soft drinks and car brands. The most premium places had been taken by interests affiliated with Krakoa, the largest was an open letter from Xavier to the nations of the world, and further spaces were taken by the Hellfire Trading Company, the His Dream Foundation, Summers News and Media, and other mutant affiliated causes. All of it was glossy, well done, a little heavy on PR speak but clearly an earnest attempt to win the hearts and minds of the world, Human and Mutant alike. The rest of the ads were more numerous but less polished, and they all shared one feature: absolute opposition to mutants. It was impressive how every one seemed to come from a different group. Some of them tried to act highbrow, claiming to raise legitimate concerns about international law, world security, and human rights, couched in the sort of language common in the halls of power; those were credited to NGOs with little history and very generic names. Other ads came from groups aligned with old foes of mutantkind like the Friends of Humanity and the Church of Human Potential or new organizations like Facts and Logic About the Mutant Experience, and their content was downright vile. They featured headlines like “Magneto: From Nazi Collaborator to The Quiet Council”, “Decimation Wasn’t Enough: How You Can Continue Wanda Maximoff’s Legacy” and “The Genoshan Genocide: Mutant on Mutant Violence”. Whatever he could say about Krakoa, it had certainly given the anti-mutant groups a new sense of urgency. The next page made him pause.

 It was an ad that was vague about their intentions, just mentioning some conference on “safeguarding the human race”, but something struck him about the logo, which he had seen only once before: on the card left in his doorway. The only thing other identifying mark on the ad was the name of the group, listed in fine print near the bottom: Orchis. This inspired Strange to pause his reading, maybe pull out his aging laptop for some internet searches, but as he set the magazine down he saw something else that grabbed his attention. By chance the page of the magazine he left facing up was a profile belonging to Ilyana Rasputin, better known as Magik. They’d met before, but now seeing her photo triggered something inside his mind, it dredged up the prophecy he saw in the war, it made him relive those visions, and it explained a part of him. Now it was clear as day to him, he had seen Ilyana in the vision, she was at the center of it all. Outwardly he remained calm, standing, staring at the wall for minutes on end. Inside, all he did was go over the words of the prophecy again and again, repeating the poem in his head: 

“You Strange shall know earth's next sorcerer supreme
None born human shall hold the title again
All you know will be like water turned to steam

Make straight their path, depart and find peace at the end of mankind's reign
What more light, what glory shall be left for your eyes to ascertain

Mankind draws near finality and sorrow
Both you and they shall live without tomorrow”
[/hider]


[hider=Strange gets a sales pitch from Orchis at an extremely bad pizza place]
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. 
[/hider]

[hider=Fun, possibly noncanon Holiday Special part 1 (the difficulties of holiday shopping)]

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Doctor Strange made a visit to the Crooked Market to pick up a gift for someone special. Some preferred to shop via scrying and using the free portal delivery available to members, but Strange didn’t trust the operator enough to do anything except face to face business. He didn’t particularly like dealing with Mad Jim Jasper’s quixotic brand of commerce either, but he had few other options for sourcing a special item. He walked up to the stall where Mad Jim himself was standing with payment in hand and said 

“Here is your payment, ten thousand years worth of magical essence harvested from Earth’s leylines, encased in a time crystal with etchings done by the Dwarves of Nidavellir. The time crystal is a Lunella Lafayette design, she might not yet be as esteemed as Richards when it comes to that field but give her time and it will surely grow in value. In any case, it’ll be enough to keep the essence shelf stable until the heat death of the universe, possibly even beyond that. “

Jim said

“Huh, didn’t think you had it in you to actually match the demand. Very well, your payment is accepted”

“Eh, I thought it was a bit high but then I found a way to source it ethically from a timeline where life never evolved on earth. “

“Ah, I would’ve liked it more if you hadn’t told me that. I’m a busy man but I still have time to get wistful about times gone by, not quite as lovely if my little bottle of fun was appropriated from some inanimate rocks rather than a bunch of cultureless, underserving bores.  But a deal is a deal.”

“Indeed. Do you have what we agreed upon?”

“Yes, except for some matters with the item’s shipping and receiving.”

“What matters?”

Jim gestured with his hands and pretended to look busy examining papers laying behind the counter, but Strange’s mystical senses could tell the stack had only been conjured into existence a few seconds ago. Jim said

“Oh, it’s not for me to know precisely, but I’ve been ready to do my part when it comes to receiving, so whatever difficulty has arisen must be with their shipping.” 

Strange said

“Surely you can do something to figure out what’s wrong on their end, it’s a gift for someone and I can’t have it being late.”

“Excess hurry is such an ugly habit, it wouldn’t due for me to show exertion over something trivial, nor should I harrang them about such a lowly matter.”

“I thought we had an agreement.”

“Oh, but we did, unfortunately said agreement did not cover whatever business is going on with those layabouts at the Mall of Babel; if the item is in my possession it will be yours, but until then I can do no more for you. If you’d like a second opinion, I could direct you to the customer service department but I fired the relevant people when I realized how many inquiries could be dealt with by the sign behind me.”

Jaspers cocked his eye towards a sign that Strange didn’t remember if had always been there or if it had materialized just a moment before.

 It read:

1.	Mad Jim Jaspers is always right

2.	If Mad Jim Jaspers is ever wrong, re-read Rule 1

There was a silence between them, and the big smile on Jasper’s face crept back to a neutral position when Strange didn’t find the matter funny.

Jim said

“Well, if you really want I can give you the invoice and you can look into it at your leisure. Might be a character building exercise, you know, personal responsibility and all that. “ Strange had a portal open as soon as the invoice was in his hand and made his way to the Mall of Babel.

The Mall of Babel was a dimension that sold everything. Not a lot of things, not just trillions of things, but literally everything, an infinite amount of products. It was composed of a series of endlessly repeating heaxgons, with stores along the edges of each gexagon and a set of escalators in the center, leading up and down to the next in an unbounded number of floors. Two of the edges of the hexagon were open, holding a pathway that ended in another hexagon. Along one side of each pathway was a set of restrooms, along the other a small food court. It was said that no two heaxgons were alike, even that no two stores were alike, but proving it was a futile exercise, just as hopeless as trying to map the layout of the space. 

The hexagon Strange landed in had a typical assortment of useless shops. One sold decorations for holidays that didn’t exist. Another  sold only sports cards of people that never played sports, showing what their stats would have been. The place by the pathway sold only defective toasters, and each one was broken in a slightly different way. Looking through the windows of the others he saw ones that specialized in mesh umbrellas, parts for trinary computers made with vacuum tube technology,  luggage that used pocket dimensions to hold more space but had the unfortunate side effect of occasionally dumping their contents into the void between universes, and hot sauces that could only be consumed by immaterial beings. Finding the store listed on the invoice would be a struggle even for him.

Fortunately, Strange had the Eye of Agamotto with him, and when combined with a little finesse it would enable him to actually navigate the place. Even it’s awesome powers took some time to work in something as overwhelming as the Mall of Babel, giving Strange a moment to look around. What interested him most wasn’t what he saw, but what he didn’t see: any actual shoppers. There were employees, but the whole place was eerily silent, even when you’d expect it to be busy. He had heard that sleeker competitors like the Crooked Market emerged, lost teenagers found other realms to haunt, and that most of the people who ended up there were tourists visiting The Backrooms due to its sudden fame that took a wrong turn upon exiting. Still, he didn’t expect it to be this empty. He’d have to find something else to do, and he found it when he spotted a Nightmare’s Café stall in between the escalators.

Once he had confirmed it was a franchise store and thus not actually run by the eponymous founder and member of the Fear Lords who counted Strange as mortal enemy (which included terminating his rewards account and barring him from all corporate owned stores), Strange looked at the menu and thought about what kind of dreams he’d like to ingest. They weren’t great quality, but they had a brand name. As their slogan used to say

 “It’s not just dreams harvested from the sleeping masses and bottled for you. It’s Nightmares.”

Strange looked at the bored looking multi-armed barista behind the counter and said

“Give me a cuddling with soft puppies with a topping childhood nostalgia.”

The Barista said

“Figures. Everyone wants the saccharine stuff overloaded with sweetness, no one wants the old school hard stuff anymore. And the order is for?”

“Do we have to do this? I’m the only one here.”

“Boss said I have to, people like the personal touch when you write it on their cup.”

“Fine. Stephen Strange, MD, PhD, Master of Mystic Arts, Sorcerer Supreme, whatever fits.”

As the Barista began to work, Strange asked a question

“Didn’t there used to be a lot of Mindless Ones around here? This place was practically daycare for them, they could just wander around and stay out of Dormmamu’s hair errrr flames and loiter or shop or skateboard, whatever they like to do when they’re not trampling over everything. “

The Barista said

“You’d think, but Dormmamu shut down the transit connection. Rumor is he’s trying to choke out the mall’s lifeblood to make a play for it when it’s really hurting. Wouldn’t be the first time he gobbled up more real estate for the dark dimension.”

“So who is here?”

“I dunno. Don’t really go beyond this part. The place’s infinite, not like you could get a good sense of it all. Unless something more infinite comes along and tries their hand nobody’ll ever have a grasp on it all.”

Strange picked up his cup and took a sip, ready to set off on the path the Eye of Agomotto had found. It was only when he got a look at the cup on his second sip that he made a small frown upon reading that the Barista wrote his name as “Steve”
[/hider]


[hider=Holiday Special concluded (you never know what you will find at the mall)]


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Strange found the Cantor Gifts location inside the Mall of Babel completely empty, not an employee in sight. The shelves were unevenly stocked with impossible objects, one section had dozens and dozens of untouched Klein bottles gathering dust, another large display for Penrose Triangles was completely empty. Almost all of the things had gone out of style long ago; petering out when people no longer thought it was hilarious to give someone something from the Non-Euclidean Naughtiness section. The anti-theft wards were trivial to dispel, but Strange thought it important to do everything above board. He found a hold pickup shelf with his package sitting on it, but no matter how long he waited no one came to the counter, and his mystical sense confirmed the store was empty. With a heavy sigh, he carried his package to the self-checkout station and read off the runes above the checkout sigil to open a connection to customer service.

Strange could see that the signal from the speaking stone was being routed to Mephisto’s realm. Apparently Mephisto had been quite aggressive in the call center outsourcing business. The connection was crackly, possibly due to the sound of brimstone in the background. The voice on the other end said “Hi thank you for calling Cantor Gift’s customer service, my name is Pieter. How may I help you?”

“Hi Pieter, I have an invoice in my possession for an object that was shipped to this store. I found it in the pickup area but there were no employees. Can you handle my purchase?”
“Certainly, just give me a second to process some things.”

Pieter thought he had muted himself, but Strange was able to hear the conversation that went on while he waited. “If I have to take another call about people not showing up to work 
in the Mall of Babel locations I don’t know how I’m going to get through these eons of punishment. Hey Nicolae! Shut up! I’m trying to work here and I don’t care if you’re on break you and your buddy Enver can go discuss your Marxist babble somewhere else.” 

“Uhhm, yes sir I’ve made the changes in the system. Just wave the item over the checkout sigil one more time and the anti-theft wards will be released. Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

“That will be all. Thank you.”

Before he left the store, Strange opened the package and stared at it, scanning the complexities of its form. This was a work of fine craftsmanship by a skilled interdimensional smith, a crystalline structure filled with literally infinite fractal paths inside of it. Every one of the infentismally small passages bent light in its own distinct way, creating a shimmering effect like nothing else. Every second, every angle of view, and every change in light condition produced an entirely unique effect, nothing about it was static, nothing about it was exhaustible. Even if one could examine it on a microscopic level they would see new things, never before seen patterns, inside the truly infinite interior space. For all of its wondrous complexity, it was ultimately a curio, of no use other than admiring its aesthetic charms. Perhaps that was why it had been left to gather dust in the backroom of a mall store, a rare piece only appreciated by a few eccentrics. Strange himself had gotten it for Clea, who had memories of seeing one her mother owned when she was young. Clea had only been able to see it once, as soon as Umar heard how much she loved it she hid it away, thinking it was unbecoming of her daughter to be in awe of something so tacky when she could direct her energies towards more productive efforts. 

Even though they were apart, Strange still cared for her, and wanted to give her something to help her cope with the stress of running one side of an endless Dark Dimension civil war. He didn’t expect anything back, he didn’t even really have a deeper intention, and he just wanted to practice a little generosity. 
There was a rumble from the other side of the room. It was a low, quiet one but it was still the loudest sound Strange had heard during his entire trip to the Mall of Babel. He focused his senses in that direction and felt something that should geometrically impossible, like the space was entirely filled but warped, and whatever this disruption was emerged in one sudden moment, too fast to track. He concentrated further to try and see what it was, but in that time it had grown to the point that even his eyes alone were enough to see it: A mass of thousands of tentacles, from ones thicker than tree trunks to narrow as snakes, shooting out from the largest storefront. One glimpse told him all he needed to know, and in an action too quick to be perceived he opened a portal to another part of the mall, lightyears away from the mass.

As soon as the portal closed he heard the rumbling again, and knew it was coming. From the single sight of it he got he could tell exactly what he was dealing with: One of the Many 
Angled Ones. He didn’t know if it was Shuma-Gorath itself or another of its ilk, but all were equally terrifying, devouring beasts from beyond reality. They wanted nothing more than to tear existence asunder, to devour it whole with their infinite appetite, ancient minds beyond reason or morality. Even for one as mighty as Strange fighting them was a hopeless endeavor, a fact he remembered when his invocation of the Winds of Watoomb failed to even slow the next mass of tendrils before he teleported away again. The Many Angled One knew nothing more than a desire to engulf the entire Mall of Babel, and from there it would free to spread to even more realms, connected to an uncountable number thanks to the Mall’s vast network.

Strange was running away even though he knew there was no safe place at the rate it was growing, all it wanted was more room to grow, and Strange could feel it seeping forth from the place between universes, holding open a hole from its home dimension. In his haste he remembered he was still carrying his gift for Clea and he began to think. With one more jump through a portal he sighed and solidified his plan.

The first spell he cast was a simple one aimed at the monster, a mental spell to open the mind. It was safer than trying a direct mental attack on the creature, merely allowing it feel the ambient emotions. Next he reached across the universes and focused his mind on one shining concept: generosity, the idea of giving without expecting anything back. He drew these emotions from countless being and brought them here, across space and time, filling the whole room in a sea of them. That was when he saw the creature stutter for the first time, struggling to process the unknown emotion that was now flooding in. Strange knew it would be only a momentary pause, so that was when he made his final move, one that didn’t require casting a spell. As he saw a tendril reach out he took Clea’s gift in both hands and tossed it towards it, then watched and smiled as the tentacle traced a path inside the fractal structure of the crystal. More tendrils followed, and soon the whole monster was rushing inside it’s newfound gift, and Strange felt it’s presence recede from the mall. Once it had all moved inside, Strange threw the gift back through the portal from which the Many Angled One came and sealed it up. Mall Security would hear about the incident, possibly even give him a gift card for his service to the community, but Strange doubted he’d be back. His gift for Clea was gone, and although she would’ve done the same if she had been in his position, he was still left with a touch of sadness. Life would go as normal, with her none the wiser about what happened that day, and Strange headed back to his solitary work, knowing that someday all would be well and he’d be able to find another worthy gift.



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