Dr. Stephen Strange (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
strangebargains) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thelegion2016-12-05 05:00 pm
strangebargains) wrote in thelegion2016-12-05 05:00 pm
[Video]
[The image is shaky at first, since he's holding it. A moment later and the image stabilizes and becomes much more than a chin or pair of nostrils. Stephen comes into view, he's wearing a red cloak with a high collar but it isn't his cloak and he's pretty miffed she didn't get pulled into this universe.]
Hello, everyone, I figure it's best to see if there's anyone I know here. New arrival, Doctor Stephen Strange, if that name rings a bell I congratulate you. That means you're alive and well because I was probably your Doctor. You're welcome.
[He waves a yellow-gloved hand. Underneath they were scarred and ached in certain temperatures, so he figured it'd be best to protect them in this manner.]
Now I've done this whole multiverse song-and-dance deal before. If I'd had the foresight to bring the Eye of Agamotto with me I could have taken care of your little problem. Chronoblivion? Been there, done that.
[He gets a dark look, and shakes it off. That sound exactly like Dormammu and he wouldn't be surprised if that simply was what they called him in this universe.]
Too many times.
Plus, what's the deal with giant world-eating entities? Do they have a club or something? Is it like what they do for fun since they're all bored in their dimensions?
Anyway. I decided to join your little group of Legionaires. I can't use magic here for some reason, but apparently I can still do some things. It's a little different from what I'm used to, but it's nice not having to worry about losing your sling ring.
Hello, everyone, I figure it's best to see if there's anyone I know here. New arrival, Doctor Stephen Strange, if that name rings a bell I congratulate you. That means you're alive and well because I was probably your Doctor. You're welcome.
[He waves a yellow-gloved hand. Underneath they were scarred and ached in certain temperatures, so he figured it'd be best to protect them in this manner.]
Now I've done this whole multiverse song-and-dance deal before. If I'd had the foresight to bring the Eye of Agamotto with me I could have taken care of your little problem. Chronoblivion? Been there, done that.
[He gets a dark look, and shakes it off. That sound exactly like Dormammu and he wouldn't be surprised if that simply was what they called him in this universe.]
Too many times.
Plus, what's the deal with giant world-eating entities? Do they have a club or something? Is it like what they do for fun since they're all bored in their dimensions?
Anyway. I decided to join your little group of Legionaires. I can't use magic here for some reason, but apparently I can still do some things. It's a little different from what I'm used to, but it's nice not having to worry about losing your sling ring.
no subject
[Rich rolls his eyes and wonders if there's any universe anywhere where the Avengers actually have their shit together and don't fight each other. Still, that's not the right lineup. No Ant-Man and Wasp, Cap in the mix earlier instead of being found by the Avengers as a Capsicle later, and Black Widow on the team even earlier still. So, this is an alternate Strange then. Things are making more sense now.]
That starting lineup's different than my universe, so you're definitely an alternate instead of it being a time thing.
[He leans his head to rest on his hand. The hand's metal -- a robotic prosthetic. The real arm was lost in the Cancerverse, against the Many-Angled ones.]
[He's lost a lot of things, fighting all those things out in the stars. His life was only one of them.]
[That arrogance is going to be a problem -- just like it held him back until he'd gotten over it. He'd just been a cocky idiot with a bucket on his head until he'd learned to swallow down the ego. This needs to be nipped in the bud, for the sake of the team -- and for Strange's own good.]
So now that you're here, I guess we've got this Chronoblivion thing in the bag, huh?
no subject
Focus, Stephen. ]
If I had the Eye of Agamotto, sure. But unfortunately I don't. Neither can I access magic for some reason.
[He looks troubled at that. He'd come to utterly rely on it, now he felt vulnerable and exposed.]
no subject
[He leans in closer to his omnicom and his expression gets more intense.]
Listen, I've fought world-eaters. Plural. And beings that could make and unmake reality like it was a toy. I've pulled omnicidal warlords inside out, and felt the psychic backlash of cosmic abstracts dying around me when death for them should've been impossible because they were never really alive.
[His eyes go a little wild there, because feeling the abstract dying still remains one of the most brain-breaking things that ever happened to him up there.]
I've fought the Many-Angled Ones in universes where death itself was dead.
[He shakes his head.]
And Chronoblivion stills scares the ever-loving crap out of me.
[Brainiac 5 had talked about the readings he'd gotten of the area where the monster was latched onto this universe, and about how the universal surveys now read that the material universe was bigger than before -- by several times its own magnitude.]
[Chronoblivion isn't a world-eater, it's a multiverse-eater. It's bigger than multiple dimensions. It's beyond all human comprehension.]
If it was as easy as all that? Chronoblivion would already be dead.
[They have a hell of a lot of firepower on the team already, and there are worlds in the UP filled to the brim with people that have superpowers -- and even a planet full of sorcerers.]
'Been there, done that.' Who the hell do you think you are? Talking to everyone here like we've just been sitting on our hands? The Strange I know is smart enough to know when something is bigger than him. He wouldn't swan into some strange situation talking about it like it was nothing.
For everyone's sake -- for your own good, even -- drop the ego. Starting now, you need us and we need you, and you can't hope to work together with us in this "little group" until you realize that. And that'd be the same even with the Eye.
[The words are harsh but he's not saying them to cause hurt. It's just that ego like that won't do anyone any good -- Strange himself included. How can you rely on a team, and understand when you need them to back you up, if you're overestimating your own ability? That's a recipe for disaster.]
TO ANY AND ALL WHO HAVE NOT SEEN MY BOY'S MOVIE YET MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW
It isn't about you.
But still, he's got to say something. He's not going to take it sitting down even if he's planning to shut up and play along. He's not being defiant for the sake of it, he's just stubbornly optimistic, it was how he squandered his fortune in trying to find a treatment to heal his hands on the mere shred of hope it was possible.]
The Eye contains something called an Infinity Stone, and can stop and reverse time. I don't know if that's the same as the one you know of, but it allowed me to trap Dormammu, who was currently trying to destroy-slash-devour our world, in a time loop.
He wasn't happy about it, needless to say. And he took it out on me. In increasingly creative ways. Smashed, stabbed, disintegrated. Over and over again until he finally tired and gave into my requests. But it worked.
[Oh, that dark look again. He really should deal with that dying a bazillion times thing. Later.]
Maybe you all just lack imagination.
[That thing about saying things that he was probably going to regret later? Not exactly out of that yet. Despite his training at Kamar-Taj, he wasn't used to being a particularly big team player. A pang of regret when he thought about Mordo. The one person, besides Wong, that he did get on with well and worked in sync with.]
no subject
[His tone goes a little more gentle. There's a difference between being cocky because you're just a jerk and being cocky because you've seen such big and terrible things that you think that's the highest the scale goes. Rich has had plenty of those moments himself, thinking 'nothing could get bigger than this, now I've seen it all' only to have those thoughts dashed by the next weird (even bigger) cosmic googly-moogly.]
[But then there's the 'maybe you all just lack imagination' and he has to resist the urge to strangle him through the screen.]
[Still, he has to keep trying to get through.]
I know what the Infinity Stones are. [He's gone head to head with Thanos, after all, and every time the Avengers gathered all the heroes up for each of the Infinity-Whatevers he'd been part of the crowd.] And I'm telling you, it'd probably take the Infinity Gauntlet and all six Infinity stones to even put a dent in this thing.
And maybe a cosmic cube or two while we're at it. And the quantum bands. And the Ultimate Nullifier.
[Rich rolls his finger in a little circle, in a 'is this coming through loud and clear?' kind of gesture.]
I know who Dormammu is. I know exactly what kind of power you're talking about. And compared to something this big? He's a small fry. Bush leagues.
Do you understand now? This is the kind of thing that could give Dormammu the shakes. It's not about one world. This world is just the door. This thing can take them all.
no subject
This?
This was making his imagination run wild in a bad way and now that feeling of being hurtled through incomprehensible realities, of existing in ways that humans shouldn't exist before being yanked back through countless dimensions, that feeling, coupled with the thought that something like Dormammu was small fries compared to this thing they were facing--
--he needed a paper bag to breathe in.
Stephen took a moment, he held up a finger as he attempted to fight off the dizzying feeling. This was wonderful. Fantastic. Why was he even surprised that he was pulled here? Just what he needed.]
That's...that's a far, far better explanation of what we're facing than what they gave back there.
no subject
I know what it's like. When you're The Guy. When you're all that's standing in between the big...whatever it is that wants to snack on reality and all the people that would die if it did. I know how it works -- to pull it off, you have to believe you can do it. You have to be the cockiest son of a Schlag this side of the Zeta Reticula, because if you have one single second of doubt, those monsters in the dark will chew you up and spit you right back out.
[He's been there. He's felt that weight.]
In those situations, the second you let the doubt in, it's over.
But this isn't that kind of fight. It's too big for just one of us.
[He shrugs one shoulder.]
-- which is why it's good it isn't going to come down to one of us. You can have doubts here. You can feel overwhelmed and the universe won't end because of it. You can accept how small you are in the face of this 'cause you're not gonna have to face it alone.
[It's taken him some time to accept that himself, because he'd grown so used to being the only thing standing between the monsters and the rest of the rest of the universe, but he's learning how to work on a team again. Slowly but surely. He's bad at it sometimes, but getting better.]
[He also remembers how hard it was to learn how to do it the first time. To admit weakness or ask for help or let himself feel doubt and understand it was okay, that he was allowed to feel overwhelmed because he had people at his side.]
But step one: understanding where you are on that scale. Then you can move onto step two: figuring out how to help the people around you become stronger -- and letting them do the same for you.
no subject
He's not above admitting he was wrong, either.
He'd come quite a way from the jerk he'd been when he was just a neurosurgeon. He was used to being the expert, he was used to having the utmost confidence in himself because the moment he doubted he couldn't delicately pull a bullet from someone's brain was the moment that someone died.]
Okay. So maybe we can start this again.
[A pause.]
Hello. I'm Doctor Stephen Strange, master of the New York Sanctum, purveyor of obscure musical knowledge and magical oddities. I have absolutely no idea how to beat the thing that's threatening all of reality, but I'm willing to go to the ends of the multiverse to do whatever I can to help stop it.
no subject
[Rich gives him a huge, reassuring grin when he hears that. Now there's a bit of the Doc he knows.]
I'm Rich Rider. I also go by Nova Prime. It's nice to meet you, Doc -- this you, anyway.
no subject
[He was still coming to terms with that. He just wanted to be called by his normal name. Plus it was annoying when people called you Mister Doctor.]
no subject
[He and most of the superhero types are comfortable with both. But he's pretty sure that Wash, Chief, and any other people named after states or military ranks are going exclusively by codenames. Meanwhile, there are some civilian types that only used the codenames during battle.]
Usually, we all use the codenames on the field, but outside of missions, usually it's just best to ask what each person prefers.