“Once upon a time,” Strange admits, as he trails Mobius toward the kitchen. “The farm where I grew up. Countryside life was insufferably small. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. Once I got to New York, however, then my world broadened. Foreign cuisines. Travel. New people, fresh perspectives. I had the money to see other countries for the first time in my life, and that felt like an exponential expansion. Then, becoming a sorcerer— it never felt small after that, precisely because I could go anywhere. Peel back the layers and there was always more to find, a deeper rabbit hole to disappear into, more than I ever imagined. And that’s not even to speak of other dimensions; I could visit the mirror dimension, the dream dimension, the astral plane, and then we broke open the doorways to other worlds, and then Thedas—”

He falls silent for a moment; his words had sped up into a perhaps surprising display of passion. One gets the impression the conversation had hit on something, like a pickaxe digging into earth and finding gold. This matters to him.

“Every step of my life has meant opening more and more doors. The world becoming larger and larger. That’s what I’ve learned, I think. What about you?”