open | if every constellation above us has a counterpart below.

[portalling]

WHO: Stephen Strange & you
WHAT: yet another new rifter arrival
WHEN: nowish and throughout his quarantine period
WHERE: Around the Gallows
NOTES: Catch-all spot for the month and to continue TDM arrival threads; feel free to tag in tho!

arrival (a variety of prompts).

It begins as an anxiety dream.

He’s experienced no end of nightmares about no end of trauma, but this time the stakes are banal: Doctor Strange is dressed sharply in a formal suit with a scarlet pocket square, giving a speech at a medical conference, standing at a podium staring at the hundreds of faces staring back at him, and finding that his iron-trap memory has suddenly failed and he’s forgotten his entire damned speech. It’s almost a relief when the enormous tentacled eyeball monster barges into the conference center, sending people screaming and scattering, and just as the Cloak of Levitation reappears around his shoulders, Strange finds himself —

somewhere else —

What ensues is a disorienting battle on the outskirts of Orlais, with a rifter appearing in anachronistic formalwear and a red cloak gone inanimate, with a conference lanyard hanging around his neck and a little adhesive nametag (‘DR. STEPHEN STRANGE, MD, PHD, NEW YORK METRO-GENERAL HOSPITAL’ now rendered in Thedan script). And in the fight, Strange realises that almost none of his magic behaves as he expects it to. It’s not the first time he’s found himself unexpectedly dumped in another universe, but this is the first time his own capabilities have failed him. Even after the battle ends, wraiths banished and his dream-monster killed, he keeps trying to light a spark of fire between his hands and finding it more difficult than it ought to be. On the carriage ride back to Kirkwall, with both him and the Riftwatch agents covered in horrid black ichor and gore from the eyeball monster’s innards, at least Strange has the decency to look a little sheepish while the other agents scrutinise him.

“Done this sort of reception a lot?” he asks, lightly, while he keeps unconsciously kneading at his left palm. His hand aches. This is normal. What isn’t normal is the green shard embedded in it like some kind of ethereal splinter, and it makes the usual pain in his scarred hands even worse.

Afterwards, during his quarantine, he can be found in the library at all hours, surrounded by stacks of books, devouring them even late into the night – he’s an avaricious student, and wants to learn everything about his new circumstances. He breaks the polite silence when a glob of hot wax from a candle lands on his wrist, and he curses with a sudden sharp “Oh, what the fuck.”

Strange goes for long walks around the Gallows. You might literally run into him where he’s crouched in a hallway in the lower levels, examining the cleansing runes embedded in the floor which prevent the growth of red lyrium, puzzling over the clearly-magical symbols, feeling that faint hum of magic in the back of his teeth. “Do you happen to know what these do?”

He also inevitably winds up poking his head into the infirmary, morbidly curious; one might walk in on him peering through the bottles of potions and jars of dried herbs, and surveying the surgical tools with a thoughtful little hm in the back of his throat.

wildcard.

feel free to toss me anything (late-night insomnia wandering the halls? new dorm roommates? mealtime in the dining hall?) and i’ll roll with it! or hmu @ quadrille to confab. i’ll match prose or brackets.

Comments

for gwenaëlle (cont'd).

[portalling]

continued from.

Straight to the point. Another thing he appreciates.

While Gwenaëlle absents herself to retrieve the bow, Strange doesn’t hold himself back from examining the rest of the room. Hands tucked behind his back and spine straight, he wanders the edges peering around and looking at the art, taking in the details, before he drifts back to that recessed seating area. Where he comes across the cat, with a little bemused oh. The man makes himself comfortable and plops himself down on one of the cushions; the shift in the cushioned pile is enough to pique the animal’s curiosity and squint one drowsy eye at him, and he looks back.

He likes animals more than people. They’re easier and simpler and they don’t take offense no matter how snide he gets. For a while, back in the day, he’d considered going the way of veterinary science instead of medicine. By the time Gwenaëlle returns, he’s extended a careful hand to the lykoi and he’s scritching the corner of its neck, the cat clearly content to be doted upon.

“How long have you been here?” he asks, still thinking back on that when our time in Kirkwall is done. “On this boat or in Kirkwall. Whichever.”

[elegiaque]

Small Yngvi is about ready to graduate to kneading Stephen's thigh with merciless, sharp-edged affection — it's remarkable how few people actually try and pet Gwenaëlle's cat, odd-looking and off-putting little creature — but swings his head away when she returns, carrying a likewise unusual looking bow, gnarled and strange, as if it might have been wrenched from a tree whole. It glints and sparks with cold ice magic, but where a bow-string should be—

there's nothing.

“A few weeks,” she says, oblivious to Small Yngvi vigorously grooming as if nothing had happened, “on the boat. A few years in Kirkwall. The Inquisition is in the Frostbacks, in a keep called Skyhold— we were sent here from the Inquisition as an outpost. Everyone with an anchor-shard had to come, if you bear part of the anchor you don't get all that much of a say in where you go or when.”

[portalling]

“Ah. Yes.” Strange lifts his left hand to glance down at that unfamiliar sliver of green embedded in it, a new addition to the already-scarred topography of his hands. The anchor-shard is numb, but then again, it’s little different from the numbness already present in his fingers. On his ride to Kirkwall, the dull ache had felt so similar to the pain he already lived with each day, and so he’d found himself scrutinising the shard in fascination. “It’s supposed to upgrade to excruciating pain if we spend too much time apart from others with shards, yes?”

Hers is, as promised, bigger. He caught a glimpse of it glinting from her hand, as a fairly stark visual of Gwenaëlle’s time spent with the anchor; it figures that he’s already treating her as a source of useful information and intel, picking through her knowledge and experience.

And. She’s also brought a toy. Abandoning the cat, he scoots a little forward on his cushion, all his attention now razor-sharp on the bow. “Oh, that is interesting,” the sorcerer says, already reaching out, before he remembers a moment later to ask permission. “May I?”

[elegiaque]

“I think I was feeling that on the journey to Skyhold itself,” as she places the bow in his hands, “but I was also in a carriage with unhealed cauterised lacerations from a rage demon across a third of my body, so it's hard to narrow down the specific causes of pain at that point.”

God, she must be fun at parties.

Gwenaëlle sits, one foot tucked underneath herself and one knee up by her shoulder, automatically adjusting slightly when Small Yngvi does a big stretch and saunters over to make himself comfortable somewhere in the puddle of her skirts. “I found this in a swamp,” and it's probably only clear a moment later that she means the bow and not the cat. “I'd sort of fallen, sort of been dragged out of a tree and I landed in the — we're going to call it water, for the sake of my peace of mind — and I put my hand on it. The string sort of...exists when you need it to. I shot a wyvern directly in the eye that day, and then it was months before I recreated even half so good a shot again.”

for ellie (cont’d).

[portalling]

continued from.

Having made himself comfortable as best he can on the carriage bench, Strange glances up from where he’s just spotted another smudge of ichor on the cloak. (Cleaning spells. He’d once been able to cast cleaning spells in a heartbeat. They’re frustratingly out-of-reach now.)

And there’s something to the way Ellie asked that, some specific inflection to the question, but he can’t grasp what she’s after. Thinking over his closest comparison:

“Sort of, but we caused it. I know a teenaged girl with the ability to quite literally punch holes in the universe, which is how we fell through. It’s bizarre coming through a rift which isn’t hers. So there were three of us who all wound up somewhere we shouldn’t have been — which counts as people, but the problem didn’t stick around for a long time. We managed to get home soon enough.”

The corners of his eyes crinkle, a thoughtful squint at her. “Something tells me you’re talking about something else, though.”

[notathreat]

"Okay."

Ellie sounds relieved, of all things. That more universes aren't breaking open and spilling into each other, that the problem seems more or less contained.

She looks up at Strange, catching him catching her, and lifts her shoulders as if to say, got me.

"First, that's a really fucking cool superhero power and I wanna hear all about that, actually." Just for the record.

"I'm asking because I had one stop before this one. Earth, but hundreds of years in the future. Vacations homes on the moon, shit like that. It's the only other place where I've heard of people without any magic waking up in another reality."

Another shrug.

"It's different if you were doing it on purpose. Ish. It's good to know the Rift thing isn't happening in a bunch of different universes."

The idea of reality unraveling is more than a little terrifying, thanks. It's nice to think it's contained.

[portalling]

“It is really fucking cool,” Strange concedes, with a ghost of humour in his voice as he echoes her. Ellie and America would get along, probably. “They’re glowing blue star-shaped portals, even. Quite the sight. Although that’s remarkable, that you’ve been through all this before. I haven’t even experienced a vacation home on the moon, for shame.”

And then, unhelpfully, because his bedside manner was always terrible and he’d never really mastered the art of sounding soothing—

“Well, there was this other time. Where it was, mm, on accident.” Now the man sounds oddly sheepish, fidgety. “A spell went awry and it started pulling in visitors from other worlds. Seemingly very much like the rift situation here, and it was at risk of destabilising our entire reality until we sent the visitors back. I barely contained it. Now I find myself being one of those interlopers. But it sounds like these ‘rifters’ are fairly commonplace here? It’s been happening for a while and the world hasn’t fallen apart?”

There’s that unspoken yet clearly dangling yet? at the end of his sentence. It’s a reasonable concern, having seen what he has.

[notathreat]

Ellie gives a low whistle, but gives a shrug in a manner that is hopefully offhand and not giving away that she's still salty about it: "I didn't get to go to the moon. Friend of mine took a picture of it for me, but he was a dinosaur who didn't know how to work a camera."

She hopes Joel can hear her. Thinking of him almost doesn't hurt.

"Yeah, it's been a while. Five or six years? Maybe more? I've only been here for a year and a half."

Ellie shrugs, a little.

"You'd have to ask someone in Research, maybe Tony or Cosima. They've been studying the rifts for ages now. They open up now and again, but we're usually there to close them up before they get too big."

Ellie indicates the anchor in the palm of her hand.

for mobius (cont’d).

[portalling]

continued from.

A tug at the corner of his mouth. As much as it makes him feel like one of those petty street magicians — pull a penny from behind your ear, vanish a rabbit into a hat, ridiculous Donny Blaze with his Vegas show — Strange is, also, perfectly happy to demonstrate.

(Because it is still a relief. If he’d been spat out of that rift only to find that he’d lost his magic and therefore lost everything for a second time and not even had this crutch left to him… he’d have no idea what to do.)

“Yes,” he says, simply, and decides to demonstrate. Back home, it probably would’ve been a handful of flame, flashy bright pyrotechnics; but his control has been slipshod here, the gestures large and clumsy and out-of-sync with what he remembers, and he doesn’t want to set anything in the library on fire or knock over any bookcases. So instead, Strange summons up an ethereal hand-held shield in front of Mobius’ eyes: glowing and orange but otherwise similar to a native spirit shield. It holds steady radiating around his hand, before it eventually sputters out like someone’s cut the electricity. Strange sighs, glowers down at his fingers.

“But it’s more difficult. Different from how it used to be. Like speaking a language with similar roots, so I can muddle through, but the vocabulary’s different in places— although honestly, I don’t really know if that analogy holds, I’m garbage at languages.”

[favoriteanalyst]

It's like with Loki and his little tricks of magic. It doesn't matter that Mobius has seen native magic a hundred thousand times or more; Rifter magic is different. It's special. It's unique in that while it might emulate the natural magicks of Thedas, it is its own twist instead.

So is it like a spirit shield, yes. But it's a color he hasn't seen before, detailed, spins. Summons it right from his hand before it fails on him. And that part doesn't even matter to Mobius, because his eyes are wide, blinking when the light has dissipated.

"That's more or less what I've heard. Less the language analogy," he admits, "but that it's similar-but-different. A translation error, if you will. But not on your part. You can't do all the wild and crazy stuff you might have been able to do back home because we probably don't even have anything analogous to that here. Shields we've got, elemental control, debilitating effects like confounding the mind. Dreamwalking," with a little nod, the analogy to having a spirit walk around while the body is still alive, though he thinks that also simply might exist as well in its own form. The Chantry does not approve. "Shapeshifting." Also not approved.

"But even if you have access to all of that, it still doesn't work the same way as it did before. The way people tap into magic here sounds like it's pretty unique to the...multiverse." The word is strange on his tongue, but he's heard it used, understands the concept: many worlds, not all from the same plane of existence.

[portalling]

That. Right there. That starry-eyed look in Mobius’ gaze is precisely why Strange never tires of this; why he likes a flourish in his spellcraft (that incorrigible showoff) and why he’s still in love with magic, because he still remembers how the ground shifted under his feet on the day he first saw and accepted its existence. That sudden sharp expansion of what was possible, like a man who’d spent his whole life chiseling away at a wall and suddenly found himself tumbling through into wide open space. Any opportunity to recapture that moment and see glimmers of it in someone else— it’s marvelous.

And then, as the other man uses that term, something brightens in Strange’s expression too. “Aha. So you’re already familiar with the concept of the multiverse? Good.” Thank god, that’s a shortcut and one less thing he has to explain. He’s leaned forward, though, elbows against the table as he’s absorbed in the conversation.

A beat, then, carefully: “When you say dreamwalking, what does that mean for you? Here?”

[favoriteanalyst]

"I've come to learn about the existence of at least one other version of me somewhere," general wavy motion, "out there, beyond the realm of Thedas." Sylvie had heavily implied, and Loki had confirmed. "And getting somewhat used to the idea that people I know but don't know might start dropping out of the sky." Hasn't happened yet, but he also hasn't met the native version of Loki. Once again: aware of the concept. Not necessarily fully cognizant of the implications, but he's getting there.

Strange certainly strikes him as someone who might understand the concept, so. That does indeed take them a little further along.

When Strange leans in, definitely fascinated, and asks that question, Mobius leans back a little instead, a pinching look on his face. "Feels like what it says on the package," he starts, flippant if guarded. Strange can already do something (in theory, he's not sure if astral projecting as described is something that could be done here) not unlike it, but in the waking world.

Far be it for him to deny anyone knowledge, of course. But it feels prudent to be wary of the concept. "I'm gonna guess me saying it's dangerous isn't something to dissuade you." Given the fervent research. This is a man who consumes knowledge like sustenance, who wants to master the very idea of magic. Not being able to do as before is a frustration, an error to remedy. These are things that are easy to read.

"I don't know that it's a skill that can be learned or if it's an ability inherent in some rare mages. But dreamers can allow their spirit to enter the Fade willingly and knowingly, and cause changes if they so choose. They can step into the dreams of others from there. Play around. Drive someone mad, if they were set on such a thing. They don't walk about in the world, though, if that's what you're looking into to do some overnight studying."

for julius (cont’d).

[portalling]

continued from.

Strange falls into step beside the other man, following him up the stairs and down the hallways. They occasionally have to skirt someone else passing in the other direction, but it feels like any other walk-and-talk he’s done at the hospital or the Sanctum.

(Is it odd to think that it feels homely— this sort of conversation is precisely where he’s the most comfortable.)

“Happily. I have a… very good memory,” he’d almost said photographic, “so I can at least try to draw them for you.” The main impediment would be his shaky hands. Did this count as spilling trade secrets? He hadn’t exactly signed an NDA. Well, whatever.

“And yes. It’s the theory of parallel universes, or infinite worlds — they’re literally uncountable, because every decision or turn of events can spawn another entire universe. From large changes like, what if that battle hadn’t been lost, or smaller turns like what if I’d stopped for coffee this morning. Each turn spawns another. Glimpses into other worlds, other ways it could have played out. I’d visited a few of them, before finding myself in Thedas. Do they have the same idea here?”

[overharrowed]

"We didn't, as such, although the arrival of rifters like yourself about seven years ago certainly opened the conversation. There's not a lot of agreement about your nature, but having met several of you, I think that if nothing else, you're excellent evidence for the theory that there are many worlds beyond our own. You'll see, if you haven't already, that some of you come from places that are similar enough to have the same countries and some of the same culture, but sometimes there's magic and sometimes there isn't, for example."

They can probably get more into the nature of Rifters when they aren't in the middle of a hallway; regardless, it's something Julius has clearly thought about at length.

"But visiting others in a way besides this one is new to me. Is such travel voluntary or involuntary, for you?"

[portalling]

“Either. Both.” Strange sounds a little thoughtful as he answers that question, ruminating on how he’d described it to Ellie on the ride to Kirkwall. When he’d still been reeling from the green rift he’d fallen out of, comparing it against the purple gashes in the sky he’d accidentally opened up back home. It was curious how much overlap there was. He still wonders if the colours matter at all.

“I know one person with the ability to open up portals and allow for actual physical travel between worlds. She would do it accidentally, instinctively, in moments of crisis — like a fight-or-flight instinct. She’s still working on mastering her control over the power.”

There’s a lingering paternal or avuncular fondness in his voice, mentioning this person.

“And I did it accidentally, once,” just once! people need to cut him some slack, honestly, “and inadvertently summoned people from other worlds. And there are specific spells, too, for peering into other universes even if you aren’t physically travelling between them. I don’t have access to them any longer, or it’d have been interesting to see if they still worked from this end. In short: there’s a variety of ways, with the potential for conscious control but also accidental misuse.”

He sounds like such a chatty professor when he gets going, but thankfully, it seems like Julius is much the same.

[overharrowed]

"Fascinating," Julius says, and seems to genuinely mean it. "It's been interesting to me ... some of our visitors have overlap in their worlds. Countries with the same names, some amount of history similar. But to my knowledge, we've had few if any who are from worlds similar to Thedas but slightly different. Though I suppose if there are a large enough number of worlds and a small enough number of rifters, it's possible that's just chance."

There are, it must be said, an absurd number of steps in the Gallows, though Julius seems more or less used to it.

"Before the rifter phenomenon, we had just the one world. Well, and the Fade, but it's not so much another world as another aspect of this one. I suppose, depending on who one asks, there might be some dispute on that. But the material world of Thedas and the Fade are interconnected in a different way than what I gather you mean by the multiverse."

for clarisse (cont’d).

[portalling]

continued from.

“Their war, but technically still our problem as long as we’re here,” he points out. He’s gotten a talking-to by the same person, it’s fine, everything is fine. “Although I once had duties elsewhere, so I understand the hesitation. I’m guessing you did eventually sign up?”

It wasn’t mandatory mandatory, stopping just a hair short of being officially drafted for this war, but the heavy stakes had been explained to him on the long ride back to Kirkwall. In the end, a small part of Strange considers it penance for him dragging his own problems into other universes over and over; maybe this will tip the karmic scales a bit back in his favour.

[laruetheday]

"Yeah," she says, "eventually."

In the end it had seemed ridiculous not to, just for the sake of being stubborn. She's still holding out most of the time with her clothes, though, even though she has a few outfits that make her look a little more like she belongs in Thedas.

She holds out her hand—the gesture seems pointedly like a formality, not friendliness—and says, "Clarisse La Rue, daughter of Ares. I'm in forces." Because of course she is.

[portalling]

There’s the slightest beat. An arch of an eyebrow, the man visibly taken aback even as he automatically reaches out (long fingers, those of a surgeon and pianist rather than a fighter, but horrifically scarred) and shakes her hand, politely.

“Pleasure. Doctor Stephen Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts. Division TBD, but I suspect I’ll wind up in Research.” It helped that his one familiar face in this world was head of the division.

And then, well, he just has to ask. “Ares as in, literal god of war Ares, or is the name unrelated?”

for tony (cont’d).

[portalling]

continued from.

[propulsion]

There's a twitch to Tony's mouth at Battle of Earth. Little obvious, but.

"Yeah," he confirms, wandering aside to where there's a chair stationed at another desk. Casually, idly hooking it closer, hefting it over. "Cutting it kinda fine there, Stephen. All that, coming down to a," finger wiggle, setting the chair down, "nasty little wrestling match in the dirt." Because there's just a lot of ordinariness that sticks in his brain. Between the shift in air pressure at the opening of a billion portals and the searing radiant pain of activated Infinity Stones burning half of him away, there's also just

the odd dull thunk of Thanos' knee hitting his armor, the tin can rattle of being knocked across the ground, the fresh spring of blood that felt cold on his face. And then the rest was truly history.

He sits, indicates the stack of books. "If we could do it different with this world, I'd appreciate it."

[portalling]

There’s a complicated ripple across Stephen’s expression. Something on its way to becoming a grimace before he bites it back, his expression going prim and tight and strained.

If there was one ghost he’d never expected to run into again — had closed that door and shut that book and considered the case closed and not emotionally prepared himself at all for the possibility of facing this particular well of insidious guilt — it was Tony Stark. And much as he wishes he could just sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened, there’s necessary ground to be covered here.

“It’s not like I actively wanted it turn out that way,” he says, and there’s a crisp defensive snap to his voice. Before he stops. Pinches his brow. Too many people have been questioning his actions lately: Nicodemus West, Wanda. (And himself, himself on sleepless nights, staring up at the ceiling.)

Seeing the other man’s face has brought it all back in sharp relief, when he’s been pointedly ignoring those memories and trying to shove them aside: the battle itself. The trickle of blood down Tony’s face as their gazes met again across the battlefield. Stephen’s trembling hand, gesturing: one. This was the one path. The only way. Tony’s burned-out husk afterwards, having thrown himself on that pyre for all the rest of them.

— Did it have to happen that way? Was there any other path?
—No. But I made the only play we had.

— Is it the justification you use? When you gave Thanos the Time Stone?
— That was war, and I did what I had to do.

He exhales. Tries to recapture some of that placid meditative calm which the Ancient One had been so good at, and which he’s so terrible at.

He doesn’t really succeed.

“But you’re right. I’m not particularly itching for a repeat. Once was enough.”

And he wasn’t even the one who died.

Infirmary

[sprent]

Gela, to her credit, did not mean to walk in on somebody already occupying the infirmary; she thought that it would be empty. She thought that she might snoop through it first and talk to a healer second, in private, but as opportunity presents itself– having already strode with much purpose inside of the door and stopped dead upon the realisation of some unexpected company–

she may as well just go for it.

"Pardon, Messere." She flashes her teeth in a polite little smile, rolling with the punch. "Do you work here?"

[portalling]

“I— no.” The question takes him aback and he jolts slightly away from the shelves, guiltily, like he’s a child caught with his hand in the literal cookie jar. Except it’s not cookies, but carefully-labeled jars with unfamiliar names like embrium, spindleweed, and elfroot. Strange had been squinting at the latter when Gela walked in.

“I am technically a doctor, but I’m not sure my training applies here.” He keeps introducing himself with the title around the Gallows, but it seems particularly important to deliver that cautionary disclaimer while he’s in the infirmary.

“I was looking for someone myself, but it seems unstaffed at the moment.” He casts his gaze over her, and there’s a clinical edge to it, old triage instinct searching for visible injuries: “It’s not an emergency, is it?”

[sprent]

Gela looks confused for half a beat before it clicks. She is not the first to come and snoop! This eases her considerably. She might have had to really explain herself to anybody else, or at the very least lie convincingly, and truly she's dreading to have to do that to the folks at Riftwatch, kind enough to open their doors and share their food-

Now is not the time for wool-gathering.

Strange looks at her, and she straightens instantly underneath of his gaze. She lifts her chin too, though she is much shorter than he is and there's no disguising it. Her dark, curly hair is scooped back from her face, but pieces have escaped here and there. She tucks them behind her ears (to no avail) before she answers, "No."

Not at all. She has no visible injuries, only old marks left behind. There is a particularly impressive scar on her upper lip, jagged and thick. "I'm new here," will be her explanation, "And I'm still findin' rooms I haven't been in yet! Thought it would be a good idea to know exactly which one is the infirmary."

You know. For emergencies. "Yourself? You're quite alright?"