Doctor Strange has been working the problem for the past couple weeks, and they have been getting nowhere. He checks in with Tony every so often to hear how the other man’s monitoring is going and what he’s found, with his devices and seismographs and radar and radiation spikes and whatever-the-hell he’s looking for, and the answer is always nothing, zip, zilch. Strange has his own assortment of magical monitors, the same ones he’d laced into the leylines and which had started caterwauling when a pair of Asgardians landed on Earth— but this time, it’s just not picking up on the otherworldly energies of the Sealing Stone.
Like finding a needle in a haystack.
He’s consulted the other Masters of the Mystic Arts, but the full-fledged sorcerers keep making noises about being too nebulously busy to take on another project. And Wong is always slippery, dipping out at the last moment, claiming he has very important mystical business to attend to in Kamar-Taj, and so the doctor’s suspicions have been ticking slowly upward. As far as he can tell, this seems to be his friend: Wong rolls his eyes about Stephen telling the novices to do the laundry for their new guests, about Stephen hounding him for the new wifi password because someone changed it since he was last here, about Stephen letting a whole assortment of random Theodosians have full access to the building. Their dynamic is the same as it ever was, even if Wong seems oddly distracted and ambivalent about the prospect of searching for the Stone.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and grouses like Wong—
then it might still not be the Sorcerer Supreme, and instead some phantasm dreamt up by the Crossroads and Stephen Strange’s memories.
Strange has been stewing over it. And when his scrying fails for the nth time, he decides he really, absolutely needs to consult a proper sorcerer. Not a Theodosian mage who isn’t accustomed to working their particular flavour of magic, he needs a sorcerer, the goddamned colleagues who were supposed to be helping him. Picking up an armful of supplies — a crystal on a string, a globe, a strange little gem — he strides through the building, and spots Mobius. Some instinct sparks to say:
“Hey, you wanna come see some magic?”
And he shoves the tabletop globe into the other man’s arms, and keeps walking.
the haunted sanctum | closed to mobius.
Like finding a needle in a haystack.
He’s consulted the other Masters of the Mystic Arts, but the full-fledged sorcerers keep making noises about being too nebulously busy to take on another project. And Wong is always slippery, dipping out at the last moment, claiming he has very important mystical business to attend to in Kamar-Taj, and so the doctor’s suspicions have been ticking slowly upward. As far as he can tell, this seems to be his friend: Wong rolls his eyes about Stephen telling the novices to do the laundry for their new guests, about Stephen hounding him for the new wifi password because someone changed it since he was last here, about Stephen letting a whole assortment of random Theodosians have full access to the building. Their dynamic is the same as it ever was, even if Wong seems oddly distracted and ambivalent about the prospect of searching for the Stone.
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and grouses like Wong—
then it might still not be the Sorcerer Supreme, and instead some phantasm dreamt up by the Crossroads and Stephen Strange’s memories.
Strange has been stewing over it. And when his scrying fails for the nth time, he decides he really, absolutely needs to consult a proper sorcerer. Not a Theodosian mage who isn’t accustomed to working their particular flavour of magic, he needs a sorcerer, the goddamned colleagues who were supposed to be helping him. Picking up an armful of supplies — a crystal on a string, a globe, a strange little gem — he strides through the building, and spots Mobius. Some instinct sparks to say:
“Hey, you wanna come see some magic?”
And he shoves the tabletop globe into the other man’s arms, and keeps walking.