Disclaimer: I still very much own nothing. In fact, because of the astounding price of post-graduate education in America, I quantifiably own less than nothing. If there was anyway I could make money off of these things I write I would be a much happier and more relaxed human.
So the thing about accidentally ending up in foreign countries is that it happens far more often than you might expect if you are not a demigod with the ability to, in some way, shape, or form, teleport. Nico has managed to end up in China at least twice that Cassie knows about, and Cassie herself took an unplanned detour to Shang Hai as a fifteen year old when she was first getting the hang of her new abilities. Sadie Kane managed to have a very pleasant date with Anubis/Walt in Tokyo once when the two of them had been trying to go for deep dish pizza.
It's Cassie's experience that the best thing to do in these cases is to simply relax, find something to eat to replenish your calorie count, and for the love of all those held holy by even the smallest religious sects, stay hydrated. Essentially, its Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy rules all the way home. Don't panic.
And also keep a tally of how many times you happen to end up in China. 'Why China?' a normal, non-teleporting, emotionally healthy person might ask. The answer, no one knows for sure, but everyone who's ever made one of the trips is seriously trying to find out. Hence the tally.
This is why, when Cassie recovers from the swirling colors and sensations of the Bifrost and the lurching feeling in her stomach to see the flashing neon, Mandarin characters, and flashing bilboards that indicate they've landed in Hong Kong instead of the intended Wakanda, her first thought is well that puts trip number seven on the books not how'd we end up in Hong Kong?
The 'how'd we end up in Hong Kong' question is second on her list. The answer her brain supplies comes in multiple choice format and goes as follows. A.) Her own transport abilities have reacted to the light variations of the Bifrost and zapped them to China which is still somehow the magical transit default. B.) There's a major magical event happening and magic calls to magic like a magnetic particle field. C.) Heimdall thought that this was where they needed to be. D.) The mystical powers in charge of this world are fucking with her. E.) All of the above.
Cassie's going to go with E and say there's a nice potpourri of all of the above going on. It normally is in her case and in Luke's too. Previous experience points to the two of them traveling together being far too big a lure for cosmic shenanigans to resits fucking with them.
Speaking of Luke, he takes the landing well. He sways a little on his feet, blinks several times, spins a three-sixty to get a look at where they are, then turns to her. "Hong Kong?"
"Think so," Cassie confirms, taking an instinctual step closer to him. Her history with Luke is mixed to say the least, but he's still the most familiar thing in her environment at the moment. Its night in Hong Kong and there are many shadows and flashing light patterns for a monster, paparazzi, or other assailant to lurk in and attack from, and a voice born of instinct and Chiron's training is whispering in her head to tell her that there is safety in numbers, and demigods out in the world ought to buddy up and look out for each other.
"Any idea why?"
"Not really," Cassie admits. "But it's China. I never really know why or how I end up in China." She looks around again and lets herself actually take in the sights and smells of the market spread out around them. "Some day I should probably come here on purpose. Maybe Steve and I should take a vacation once that's legal again."
Luke makes a vague noise of sage understanding. "I did actually come here on purpose once, but it was pretty much only half-me at the time, and we were not here for vacation activities."
Cassie narrows her eyes at him, but he's avoiding her gaze. "Im going to go ahead and assume I don't want to know what you were doing at the time."
"You do not," he confirms. "Over to the more relevant topic, getting out of here. Do you know how and can we do it?"
"Yes and Yes," Cassie answers, no longer glaring at him. "That last jump was all Heimdall so I haven't used any significant energy since our jump this morning. Doing another should be easy except for that one obvious problem..."
That makes Luke pause and look back at her before casting around. "The obvious... oh. Right it's night time. No sun. Can you jump us without it?" Cassie takes great pleasure in very obviously raising an eyebrow at him. He holds up his hands. "Hey, I don't know. I was dead when you started doing this."
Cassie huffs as she finds that she doesn't really appreciate the reminder of that fact. "I can make a jump at night time if I'm rested and if I have too. I normally reserve it as an emergency measure because all the power has to come from me, and that's draining. I would need more recovery time to jump again and I almost definitely couldn't do it twice."
Luke frowns and his fingers take up a light drumming that Cassie recognizes from watching his fingers play over a sword pommel time and time again years before. Cassie guesses he would prefer to start pacing but isn't because of lack of space in the crowded street market. Luke had always had the gift of highly specific focus when he had a worthy goal, but at the end of the day he had just as much A.D.H.D as the next demigod. "So if we wait until morning how long is that?"
"I don't know about morning," Cassie says with a shrug. "I think we're technically there already actually. But sunrise is about four hours out." Cassie can't say how she knows, but she always does. Percy always knows where he is when at sea, and Cassie always knows when the sun is coming up.
Luke nods as he absorbs the new information and the tempo of his finger drumming increases. "Okay, if we wait that long how would we jump the rest of the way?"
Cassie gives herself a moment to review her sense of global geography and make some calculations. "Two legs probably. A stop in Tehran, hopefully a short one because I'm not sure how safe it would be, then a jump to Wakanda followed by me sleeping for forty-eight hours."
"And if we tried to go now?"
"One shorter hop," Cassie says, this time more readily because this is a plan she's thought through already. "Stark has a facility in Sri Lanka. I'd call Pepper or Tony before we jumped and then we'd lay low there for a few hours until they could lift us out with a plane. Then we'd have a four hour super-sonic flight to Wakanda. I might also pass out in the process and you would be stuck taking care of me which I would have to trust you to do."
Those words hover in a long moment of poignantly pointed silence between them punctuated only with the ambient noises of a city at night swelling, dipping, and surging around them. Cassie is about to suggest that the two of them should take some cover maneuvers- find a more tourist neighborhood where being two blonde caucasians won't stick out so much as it does here in the local outdoor market- while they think through which option they want to take, when they get interrupted. This interruption comes in the shape of several people about five hundred yards away screaming and shouting in obvious panic.
People can say what they want about the history Cassie and Luke share, but the two of them don't need to do more than exchange a look before they're both running directly towards the carnage. Later, Cassie will wonder why Luke still has that instinct, and if it was always there, where it had gone between 2009-2013. Then, she just focuses on lengthening her stride to keep up with Luke's Hermes given quickness and longer legs.
Fighting their way through the fleeing crowd is an experience not unlike how Cassie imagines a salmon swimming upstream feels. Percy talks to fish and could tell her if she's correct. Maybe she'll ask someday if she can remember around all the chaos that is her daily experience.
What they see when they break through the bodies isn't the weirdest thing Cassie has ever seen, but it's pretty high on the list. Definitely breaks the top ten anyway. She can't speak for Luke but the look on his face suggests this is scoring pretty high for him too.
A swirling miasma of blue, purple, and red energy pulses and seems to almost congeal against the skyline. Chunks of skyscraper are being pulled in to the vortex to be ripped apart and crushed. It's like a rippling soap bubble of destruction has pushed itself through in to their world from the next one over.
But even weirder, and that really is a relative term given the circumstances and Cassie's daily life experience, is that down at the bottom of the strange and malignant-seeming purple dimensional ripple there is a second bubble of activity. And in that bubble, time seems to be running backwards. Not that Cassie really knows what it looks like when time reverses, but if she had to guess she would assume that this is what that looks like.
A man with spiderweb cracks around his eyes and a high brown ponytail seems to be reversing backwards out of a jump with a knife in his hand falling back out of a strike in to a ready position. A few terrified looking civilians are reversing back in to the lines of obvious peril that they'd fled from. Adds on the animated billboards inside the radius of strange are rewinding and sound inside the bubble has been reduced to gibberish as speech is shoved back in to people's mouths. Most bizzarely of all, falling water seems to be splashing the wrong way in and out of puddles and drops of rain seem to be leaping back in to the sky.
Overall, the sight is incredibly unnatural and sends ripples of burning electric gooseflesh up and down Cassie's spine. Something deep on a primal level in Cassie's brain is seeing this and screaming wrong wrong wrong this is wrong! Cassie has seen incredible, unbelievable, unthinkable things before, things caused by gods and titans and monsters, but each and every one of those things had been at least a little natural. Gods controlled and gained their power from nature.
This is not that.
The closest thing that Cassie has ever witnessed is when Kronos had slowed time in and around Manhattan during the final battle of the Titan War. With that in mind, Cassie turns to look at Luke who is watching the colliding phenomena with... interest. "I wonder," Luke muses. "Exactly how he's doing that."
Cassie frowns and follows his eye-line. The man that spider-eyes had been trying to stab seems to be the only person still moving in regular time. Extending from his upraised palm is a swirling mosaic made of green light spinning rapidly counter-clockwise as the whole rest of the world continues to run in reverse. Cassie isn'r sure why she and Luke don't seem to be effected by whatever forces are at play, but she figured that question will keep for another time.
The man controlling the green light lets his hands drop and turns to his... companion? Ally? Whatever, person on his side. "The spell is working. We've got a second chance." he declares, loudly enough for Cassie's hearing to pick it up. And Spell? Seriously? She knows the Hecate campers and the magicians of The House of Life do do those, but these two don't exactly look like either, though they are armed and dramatically dressed enough to fit the profile. Who un-ironically wore capes these days who wasn't actually a god?
Besides, this magic feels wrong. It settles against her skin like petroleum jelly, sticky and slippery all at once. She shudders to try to displace the feeling as the two self-proclaimed magicians take off running and destruction continues to un-do itself.
Luke taps lightly at her shoulder and the fact that she sees it coming is the only thing that keeps Cassie from jumping away. "Are we following them, or are we getting the Tartarus out of this place and not getting involved?"
Cassie sighs and jerks her head to indicate that they should follow behind the two men. Keeping out of trouble that doesn't concern them is not in the demigodly job description. Nor is it a plan of action that particularly fits Cassie or Luke's personal styles. Keeping out of trouble was never the strong suit of their little improvised family.
Luke grins and takes off running. Cassie follows, feeling the beginnings of a slight burning tug at her wrist when Luke begins to reach the edges of the acceptable distance of the enchantment imbuing their bracelets. She closes the gap quickly and the two of them more or less keep pace.
As it turns out, sprinting through a world in reverse is not a straightforward matter. Cassie is forced to dive in to a high forwards summersault to avoid being hit by an uncontrolled taxi and Luke is forced to hit the pavement when a reassembling lobster tank shoots itself off the ground, hundreds of jagged glass pieces, a few gallons of salt water, and several live lobster and all. He get's to his feet at around the same time Cassie rolls out of the crouch she had landed in and brushes his palms together to clean them of grime.
They exchange a glance as the two men they had followed are engaged in combat with a group of enemy forces all distinguishable by their matching robes and the darkened markings around their eyes. "Dive right in? she queries.
Luke shrugs. "Don't see why not. Going to need a weapon though."
"No you don't," Cassie scoffs as they begin to run again. "You're invulnerable. In fact," she keeps talking as she activates her bow and shoots an arrow full of knock out gas in to the ground at the feet of one of their apparent enemies, "why did you even bother ducking the lobster tank? It's not like anything would have happened."
Luke shrugs and, realizing that no weapon will be forth coming, snatches a metal rod out of the air and proceeds to wield it like a staff, clubbing one of the other combatants in the temple four times in quick succession and rendering her utterly unconscious before she has a chance to fight back. "Habit."
By unspoken agreement, the two of them together fight their way in to the center of the malestrom of chaos, a funnel cloud of grey force, dirt, and wreckage, swirling together and making clear vision virtually impossible. It's pretty much a scenario straight from one of Cassie's nightmares. So much so that she's actually grateful when Luke's hand closes around her wrist and yanks her through in to the eye of the funnel cloud.
Their arrival is just in time to see the two men who are, hopefully, the good guys trapping the man with the cracked earth-face inside a wall that seals over stone by stone as he struggles and thrashes like that guy from the story about the cask of wine in a basement. It's possible that Cassie hadn't paid much attention to that book after deciding not to use it for her final paper for her English requirement. She definitely remembers the guy getting sealed in a wall though. That part was very clear.
The man with the red cape and facial hair grooming to make Tony Stark self-conscious drags a third man bodily free of a large piece of the wreckage using the same green pattern of glowing power around his fingertips and Cassie hears him call the man Wong. "-the laws of nature, I know," cape-man is saying as Luke and Cassie draw closer.
Wong glances at the carnage and moves to stand beside his two compatriots, falling in to rank with the ease of long practice. He shrugs as he watches shattered pieces of the city stitch themselves whole. "Well, don't stop now."
Cassie frowns because breaks the laws of nature how and stop what exactly? She's getting really sick of not knowing these things. She's not particularly used to being without information on questions like how and why. It rankles, and if freezing/reversing time is a doable thing then maybe someone should do it while they get some answers, but her experience of combat scenarios makes that happening seem unlikely.
That said, Cassie thinks that this man Wong speaks with wisdom. If Mister Goatee is fixing an entire city with magic, then Cassie doesn't particularly care if the methods used go 'against the laws of nature'. In Cassie's experience, those laws are really more like guidelines. Like the pirate code in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
"When the sanctuary is restored they'll try to attack it again," Mister Goatee man continues. "We've got to defend it."
Cassie doesn't completely know what the Sanctuary is, but she can get from context that it being destroyed would be, ya know, bad. With that in mind, she steps forwards and waves her hands to get the attention of the three men. "Hey!" she calls, voice bright and cheery. "Want some help with that?"
Due to the nature of the combat scenario they're all embroiled in, Luke and Cassie answer the standard barrage of questions (who they are, why they're there, how they got there) while they're on the move. Their answers (Cassie Morgenstern and Luke Castellan, no idea it's probably a mistake, and a mishap with teleporting) are also delivered while on the move. They don't go in for anymore conversation in transit because talking and running at the same time consumes a lot of oxygen and since they're running in to a fight they're going to need the air.
The conversation also takes a bit of a dive when cracked-face man melts back out of the wall and drives his fist in to what's left of the pavement beneath their feet, causing the whole thing to ripple up at them all and shatter. All five of them are thrown to the ground, which would normally be more or less unproblematic because when you fall you get back up and that's basic Hero 101, but Goatee Man (they still don't have his name) cracks his head on the ground and seems to lose consciousness because the glowing green around his hands vanishes. The reversal of the universe seems to slow, shudder and freeze.
At least, it does from Cassie's perspective where she's lying crumpled up on the ground. Before she tries to deal with... all of that, Cassie runs a quick self-diagnostic and summarizes that she's hyped enough on adrenaline now that she won't be in pain for a little while. She's also not healing all that quickly, but it is nighttime after all. For a second, Cassie muses on exactly how ridiculous it is that she's basically solar powered and resolves to never mention it to Tony.
She lets herself have a heartbeat, two, then she rolls over on to her knees and get's ready to deal with the fact that time is broken.
Apparently.
Next big problem: Their primary time-control guy is three feet away with his eyes closed, head on the ground, with blood trickling down from his hairline.
Now this is one Cassie can probably fix. She's definitely going to feel crappy afterwards, but she and the majority of the population of Hong Kong won't end up dead, so the pros are beating the cons on this decision. So long as it works.
Cassie makes her way to the fallen man on her knees and extends her hands, fanning her fingers around his temples. She inhales a deep breath, drawing on the well of power inside her because there is no where else to draw from, and channels it outwards in to his skull. This is something of a risk without any natural light to help her produce power because she doesn't know how extensive the damage is and magic is like throwing a punch. You can't do it halfway. By all logic, Cassie should have checked first with a scan and then gone slower.
Well screw that. Time is broken. The healthy and cautious approach can go fuck itself.
Power flows out of her in a flood of gold sparks and scurries in to the injured body, targeting the areas of most damage first. Spirals of power spin down along his veins and re-emerge in Cassie vision popping and sizzling along his fingers before burrowing under the skin. As soon as they do Cassie knows that there's something terribly terribly wrong here.
The bones in both hands have been, at some point in the recent past, completely and utterly splintered to the point of near pulverization. The nerve endings inside are deadened and shredded and the soft tissue and cartilage are an utter disaster. The echoes of radiating and referred pain have Cassie gritting her teeth and fighting with every instinct in her body not to break contact and jerk away. Doing so would definitely compromise the skull reconstruction and the repairing of the brain hemorrhage she's doing, which are both pretty important if she wants this guy back on his feet in a condition to fix reality any time soon.
So, Cassie does what she always does when other people's pain threatens to overwhelm her and she doesn't have the energy to hold herself above water. She grits her teeth, and she hangs on.
Moments, agonizing moments later, the man's eyes jerk open as he fights his way back in to consciousness and gasps. His eyes are bright gold with Cassie's magic before he blinks them shut and jerks away. Cassie lets him go and collapses backwards with a sigh of relief. She counts her way through four seconds before her head starts swimming and she kind of feels like she wants to curl up in a fetal position and die.
She doesn't quite make it to a fetal position, but she does manage to get horizontal without cracking her head open on the ground, which for the circumstances is something. She stares up, watching the lights in the sky swirl in the lazy style of ink through gel. Cassie vaguely wonders if there's any chance Van Gogh was on to something with his perception of a starry night. Then she wonders if it's been long enough since breakfast in London for her to avoid throwing up. Then doing the time zone math makes her feel really and truly nauseous, so she stops.
Instead of looking up, Cassie cranes her neck to see that the man she had heeled is now kneeling above her and on the point of reaching for her wrist to take a pulse. Cassie grimaces and weakly pulls her hand out of his reach. The man swats at her knuckles and clamps his forefinger over her radial pulse.
"Tachycardic," he concludes shortly. "I don't know what you just did but whatever it was it was stupid."
Cassie rolls her eyes and on her next attempt she has more success in pushing him away and sitting up. "And you're welcome," she replies with just as much sourness. "Can we talk about what's wrong with me later and focus on the whole 'Earth rotating backwards on its axis and then stopping while an unknown purple energy force tears apart a city and a guy with cracks all over his face is trying to stab us' problem now? Because I deal with major world ending problems often and this one is new for me."
The man's eyes narrow at her. "Cassandra Morgenstern," he repeats. "I remember now. A few of your professors at Columbia Med used to talk about you on rounds. They said you were one of the best diagnosticians they'd ever seen. Then you disappeared for two years and popped up again in press photos cozied up to Captain America."
Something clicks in Cassie's mind at the reminder of where she might have seen this man before along with the evident ego and severely damaged hands. "Dr. Steven Strange," she realizes. "The idiot world-class surgeon who ended his career by failing basic drivers safety. Two important things; One, I did finish medical school. At G.W, so it's Dr. Morgenstern and I'd thank you to remember that. I'm sure you remember how hard you worked for your medical degree. And two, Captain America? He totally put a ring on it. So it's Morgenstern-Rogers. And Three, and yes I know I said there were only two things but this one is pretty important, again TIME IS BROKEN. I fixed YOU so now YOU GO FIX IT."
"The girl is right Strange," the man Cassie still has no name for declares. "Stand and fight. We can finish this." While the words are confident in nature and delivered with a level of conviction Cassie can appreciate, there's frankly no ignoring the fact that their speaker is panting for air and obviously near exhaustion.
Still the base sentiment is valid and Cassie forces herself to rollover on to her knees. A hand appears before her, wrist encircled in the magical cuffs from Camp, and Cassie takes it, letting Luke pull her to her feet without taking her eyes off of their advancing enemy. She calls her bow to her hand and knocks an arrow, but she's desperately hoping she won't need to fire many of them.
Healing Strange might have been the only way out of their situation (whatever that situation is, still unclear) but it was what someone might call a finishing move. There isn't much of any kind of magic left in her tank and the physical kickback of channeling her own reserves is setting in quickly with no sunlight available to help her.
"You can't fight the inevitable," says the Lead Bad Guy, pacing slowly forwards. He's not actually looking at any of them, but above and past them at the frozen sky and the people of the city caught in the single second between one heartbeat and the next. "Isn't it beautiful?" he questions (Cassie assumes rhetorically). "A world beyond time. Beyond death."
Luke snorts. "Nothing is beyond either of those things. I would know. I've commanded enough of both."
"Beyond time," Strange murmurs, and Cassie sees it the moment the insane plan forms in his mind. What the insane plan may be, Cassie isn't sure, but she knows it's been formulated and the Dr. Steven Strange has committed to it. She's been part of enough of them to recognize the glint in the eye that means I've either saved us, or killed the planet. Get ready to find out which.
In the next moment, Strange has moved from his place on the ground where he had been crouched beside Cassie, to straight in to the air. The lapels and tails of his red cloak flutter with incongruously gentle little movements as he draws further from the crowd and closer and closer to the glowing miasma of colored light leaching insidiously through the sky. It won't be long before he vanishes in to the clouds.
Cassie nudges her foot sideways to step on Luke's toes without lowering her arrow.
"Yeah?" he responds, sounding somewhat wary. This response is one Cassie thinks is a touch unfair considering that between the two of them, she's the one who has never volunteered to tether the life force of a titan to her mortal soul and lead an army agains civilization with the intention of starting a new dark age.
"Get us up there," she commands. "Strange was the one reversing time before. We follow him."
She can hear Luke's raised eyebrow without actually seeing it. "What makes you think I have a way of getting off the ground? No weapons, remember?"
"You always have something," Cassie mutters out of the corner of her mouth, now hyperaware of the fact that the remainder of the magicians on the ground seem to be flexing their fingers and assuming battle stances to prepare for some sort of final showdown. "We searched for darkened magic, titan influences, and weapons, anything else wouldn't have shown. So, use whatever you managed to smuggle past Chiron and Argus' search, and I'll develop selective amnesia about whatever it is later."
It's a good deal, and Luke knows it, but such processes require the proper observation of certain formalities. "On the Styx?" he asks. "Nothing gets reported or confiscated?"
"On the Styx," Cassie confirms, feeling the weight of the oath settle over her like a led blanket before the sensation lessens. "No get us up there."
Luke steps around and behind her even as the man named Wong and their third companion protest that there's no where to go, that Strange has fled in to the Lion's den, and that they are more needed here on the ground where they have a fighting chance. Cassie does her best to drown these arguments, some of which have more logical grounding than others, with the volume of her own instincts. It's surprisingly easy to do.
Luke takes a firm grip one her below the shoulders. "Might want to hold on to something," he advises. -Cassie's indignant query of "Like what!?"- Is drowned out by the familiar call of "Maia!" and the whispery flutter of wings springing from the heals of Luke's shoes.
The ride up is quick and bumpy and probably would have been jaw dropping if it weren't quite so terrifying. The combination of feelings is both a little sickening, and disturbingly familiar. Almost every jaw dropping alien or otherworldly thing Cassie has ever seen has been either actively or passively hostile, swirling clouds and glowing orbs of multi-colored light and oddly dense fog don't exactly carry a positive track record for demigods the world over.
Given the disorienting nature of the energy field they've flown in to in addition to the plentiful vision obstructions, it could very possibly have been extremely difficult to find Strange and whatever entity is responsible for the destruction around them. However, Luke and Cassie are both children of tracking-enabled gods, and Luke seems to have developed an odd additional sense about where and how time is warping. Between those gifts, they have a decent shot at locating the wayward magician.
In the end though, it turns out to be simpler to just follow the sounds of violent death and carnage.
Really, they probably should have just done that to begin with. When looking for a hostile god, follow the screaming. it was practically a demigod rule, though Cassie isn't surprised it's never been written down. After all, Chiron and Lupa didn't exactly want their campers to A.) go looking for hostile gods, or B.) find them if they did try to look. The outcome of such decisions generally being death and dire misfortune.
Luke and Cassie proceed to take actions which fly in the face of that logic, and proceed to trudge over a purple-orange surface that is either an extra-dimensional plane, a planet, or the body of whatever it is they're facing. Since all of those options are horrible, Cassie tries very hard not to think about it. While she's busy not thinking about several things related to that topic, she hears a roar of inhuman rage and the unpleasant squelching noise of a human body having unwilling and forceful impact with something very heavy.
And yes, she does know first hand what that noise sounds like.
It's a very distinctive noise.
Luke hears it too and frowns before jerking his head at a rise up ahead of them. Cassie knows he's thinking that if they climb it then they might be able to see what is going on now that they know which direction to look in. It's not a bad plan, though it contains the strategic drawback that they won't have more than the lip of the rise to use for cover. Cassie weighs those odds for about fifteen seconds during which they hear the sounds of several more, probably very painful, impacts, then nods and they double time it up the rise together.
The good news is that they find Strange very quickly once they get up there. The bad news is that it looks like he's on the verge of being slaughtered. His butcher is a warped and glistening face formed of what look like shifting sheets of energy. The face alone is roughly the size of the broad side of a skyscraper and is complete with enormous, curling, ram-like, horns to match.
Strange stands below the visage and appears to be craning his neck up at it. From their vantage point, it becomes clear that the magician is standing on a flat platform surrounded on all sides with shifting, almost pixelated, half-formed objects with the nearest potential escape route blocked by his enemy. It's not a position that makes any sense tactically and Cassie catches the scowl Luke makes when he reaches the same conclusion. If things get nastier than they have been already, Strange will have nowhere to go.
No sooner has this thought crossed Cassie's mind does it become reality. The creature lets out a fresh bellow of rage and two spears of crystalline structured black metal fly from the sky and find their mark in Strange's chest. He falls back, dead in seconds, and Cassie registers the quick flash of a life, bright in energy with her magic still flowing through it's cells, flicking out in front of her.
Then the strangest (pardon the pun) thing happens.
The light comes back on. Bare seconds after Strange dies he is a live again. The impaled body below them vanishes and from behind a planet-like structure to their left flies Dr. Stephen Strange apparently hale and hearty complete with immaculately creased clothes despite the dirt and blood clinging to them.
"Dormammu," he greets cooly, and Cassie mentally assigns the name to their bad guy. "I've come to bargain."
Dormammu's massive countenance takes on a look of frustration and bafflement. "What is this?!" he demands to know.
Quite frankly, Cassie had the same question.
Strange shrugs and raises one hand, the one with the green runes of light circling almost lazily around his wrist. "Just as you gave Caecillius power from your dimension, I brought along a little power from mine." he gestures to the green symbols with his other hand, their glow intensifying to match that of the amulet around his neck. "This is time," he proclaims.
Luke lets out a very quiet, very colorful, curse at the declaration. "He's made a time loop," he whispers to her. "Trapping the demon to this one moment until he's forced to talk to him. It could last forever in theory, and it won't matter what happens in each one until he breaks the loop."
Cassie wrenches her eyes from the scene below where Strange is letting out a heartfelt curse before being crushed by an incoming torrent of space rubble. She winces as she feels him die for the second time in as many minutes and forces herself to focus on Luke. "So what? His plan is to just keep dying until the nearly all powerful entity gets tired and goes home?"
Luke shrugs. "Gods hate being trapped. You know that."
She conceded the point with a sour expression and a nod. "Could you do that?" she asks suddenly. "As Cronos I mean. He was called the Lord of Time. I know you were able to slow it down, but could you have done this?"
Luke seems to take the question seriously as Strange once again appears and announces his intentions to bargain. He's dead and trying again before Luke has an answer for her. "Maybe. I think- I think if he hand't been in me, if he hand't been tied to my body, even when it was invulnerable he might have been able to. I was missing something, some extra level of capacity inside my head to use his powers that way, and the more I tried to be in control, the less he could use his abilities. I was fighting pretty hard by the time we were invading New York."
Cassie lets that information soak in and turns back to the scene unfolding below them.
"You cannot do this forever," Dormammu declares.
"Actually I can," Strange responds, with the kind of arrogant smirk Cassie recognizes from numerous surgeons she had shadowed during her medical training. Maybe they taught an extra class in arrogance once you reached a certain level of the mainstream medical profession. "This is how things are now," Strange continues. "You and me, trapped in this moment, endlessly."
"Then you will spend eternity dying," Dormammu taunts.
And we'll spend eternity watching, Cassie thinks to herself. Yippee for us.
"Yes," Strange says, and for all his arrogance, Cassie does admire his calm, his composure, and his apparent iron-clad conviction. "But everyone on Earth will live."
"You will suffer," the enemy hisses.
"Pain is an old friend."
Cassie doesn't doubt that in the slightest. A shudder runs down her spine at the memory of the torn and fraying tendons, muscles, and tissues that had formed the composition of his hands. The recovery from such an injury would have to be permanently continual and frequently excruciating.
Dormammu doesn't seem to appreciate the chatter. As any demigod who'd spent ten minutes with a god/titan/monster/unknowable eldritch terror probably could have predicted. Unfortunately, Strange hadn't asked despite having two demigods present to consult with and was, as a result, being pummeled in to the ground with projectiles composed of energy which he barely survives through using odd rotating shields of amber energy.
"You will never win," Dormammu proclaims darkly.
This, unfortunately, is also something Cassie doesn't doubt.
Apparently, neither does Strange. "No," he admits as he clambers back to his feet. "But I can loose. Again, and again, and again, and again, forever. And that makes you my prisoner."
Dromammu seems to constrict backwards in revulsion at the concept like a cat faced with a spray bottle. And something clicks inside Cassie's head. Maybe it's because she thought of cats.
This whole entrapment scenario is a near perfect parallel of the story that Sadie and Carter Kane had relayed to her about the previous fate of the Egyptian cat goddess Bast, forced to fight her ancient enemy Apophis in a sealed prison dimension for all time to prevent the giant serpent from escaping and devouring the world. Cassie remembers the story, and she remembers that the cruelest bit had been that Bast had done it willingly, not out of any love for the world, but because her king had asked her too.
No one has asked Strange, and frankly Cassie isn't all that interested in watching him die for a ninth time in as many minutes. Also, in that story, there hadn't been two hapless demigods skulking behind a ridge in the magical prison dimension while Bast and Apophis had been duking it out. If there had been, Cassie doesn't think it would have worked out well for them.
Despite what Cassie is and isn't interested in, Strange does in fact, die again. And floats back over the edge of the horizon alive, again. Cassie is seriously considering vomiting and passing out. This entire dimension is giving her a migraine and the time loop is making her eyes cross.
And Luke almost seems to be glowing which isn't helping her feel any better.
The last time Luke had been glowing, he was on the verge of being taken over by a titan Tartarus-bent on destroying all humanity.
"Make this stop!" Dormammu demands. "Set me free!"
Strange shakes his head. "No, I've come to bargain."
Even immortal beings have threshold of frustration and limited patience, sometimes even more so than humans. "What do you want?" the creature grits out.
Strange raises his hands in an odd gesture that Cassie doesn't recognized with his fingers splayed and steepled. Maybe he's about to cast a spell. Cassie is a little unclear on how magicianship works on a practical level. "Take your zealots from the Earth, cease your assault on my planet, and never return. Do this, and I'll break the loop."
"You have a deal little magician," the creature bites out after a moment, sounding a little like each word is being yanked out of him using a toilet plunger. The pixelated swirls of it's face rotate faster and brighter with his anger and there's a worrying pulse of red underlying the color.
This is the point in the proceedings wherein Luke decides to try to give Cassie a heart attack. "Wait," he interjects, suddenly breaking cover and using his flying shoes to enter the conversation. Dormammu, perhaps not unpredictably given what they've already witnessed of his behavioral tendencies, responds to the entreaty with a hail of what looks to be light-based alien shrapnel. Luke doesn't even bother to try dodging it, the curse of Achillies layering over his skin causing the projectiles to disperse against him with a harmless, fizzing, shudder.
"What's to stop you breaking your word and returning to Earth once he's ended the loop?" Luke asks, as though extreme violence has not moments ago been attempted against his person.
It's a fair question, and one that definitely needs to be addressed. Cassie knows from previous interactions that godly deals are finicky things. It took exactly the right oath with just the right wording to make an agreement binding or anything approaching fair, and these are both important elements to this situation. Cassie just htinks Luke could have tried to bring it up without risking death.
Styx or no Styx, with a literal eternity to devote to the job and no compunction over physical harm, it was always possible that Dormammu would just keep hitting until Luke's luck went bad. Cassie would personally prefer not to watch that happen.
Luke's already died in front of her once.
"Why do none of you die!" he demands to know.
Perhaps that query is not the ideal opening for Cassie to announce her presence given that, of the three humans in the dimension, she's the one who actually can die and stay that way, but waiting for the perfect moment has never gotten Cassie anywhere. "Excuse me," she says, standing and clambering over the edge of the ravine. "But you didn't actually answer his question."
Sliding down a pulsating wall of purple energy which is either an internal organ of some kind or the remains of a devoured planet altered in size through it's consumption in to a different dimension is not the most dignified way of joining the conversation. However, it is the most efficient in terms of energy conservation and letting Cassie keep her eyes fixed on the Devourer of Worlds. For these reasons, it's the method that wins out.
"Interlopers," Dormammu hisses. "This is in bad faith."
"Nah," Luke denies. "Just think of us," he gestures from himself to Cassie as she joins the impromptu meeting to determine the fate of the world. "As an insurance policy to keep things honest."
"That's right," Cassie says, leaping quickly on to the train of thought she hopes Luke is driving. "Luke and I represent a third party. Dr. Strange just brought us here to make sure that whatever deal was struck, both parties would abide by the terms."
The face of Dormammu swirls faster and more furiously, seething in a very literal sense. "You doubt the word of a god younglings?"
A wide grin that's all teeth and no joy breaks across Luke's face. It's a smile Cassie has only ever seen directed at enemies, herself included. It is not a happy or reassuring kind of expression. "Every time."
"Swear to the deal," Cassie says, doing her best not to sway sideways and knock over Strange. Her nausea has only recently abated with the sorcerer's kind condescension to stop dying in her proximity with her magic painfully aware and bubbling in his veins, and the whole dimensional pocket they're in is completely without sun. Plus the swirling energy fields are doing nothing for her sense of balance. "Swear it on the Styx, the Duat, and time itself."
She knows she's hit on something with that last one because the swirl of colors actually stops cold for a whole second before resuming again much faster. "An oath on time," he says in a tone that's almost musing. "That is a heavy thing. It requires an exchange of blood to bind it."
Strange tilts his head and wipes his fingers across the still seeping wound across his hairline. He holds out his hand and lets a few of the sticky drops roll across his hand and towards the surface of the planet. "Let's make it quick then."
A small tentacle of purple energy extends from the mass that is Dormammu and several drops of mercurial purple fluid drop in to Strange's hand to combine with his blood. It doesn't look like the ichor Cassie is familiar with, but her magical senses do go fr enough to tell her that it is blood, or at least the closest equivalent to it this creature produces. "Now the blood of one of you 'third party observers'" Dormammu insists nastily. "It will serve as the binding of our oath."
Cassie and Luke exchange a glance. Luke raises an eyebrow and shrugs, spreading his hands as if she might have forgotten his status as invulnerable. Cassie sighs, feeling ver much like she's cosigning a loan she isn't sure she wants to be on, and activates one of her knives.
"Fine," she presses the tip of the blade in to her left thumb until blood wells along the metal and then taps the drops in to Strange's hand.
"Hygienic," the surgeon mutters. Cassie sees his point. Blood oaths are pretty much the definition of medically unsanitary.
"Can we speed this up?" Luke asks. "I mean, I know we're in a time loop, but I still feel like we could be acting a bit more like the world might end."
Dormammu seems to growl. "I swear to your terms and by all those powers you have named."
"I swear to abide by our terms," Strange intones. Cassie spares a moment to wonder if he has any concept of the terms he's just sworn to. She doesn't know what kind of overlap there is between sorcerer training and knowledge of the Greek and Egyptian pantheons.
To be fair, Cassie also isn't exactly clear what it means to be swearing on time itself either.
Before she can think about it much longer, thereby launching herself in a hysterical freakout, the blood pooled in Strange's hand ripples, congeals, and becomes a glowing gold. The mass rises and twists in to a glowing triskelion alive with sparks of energy before it flares white. Then it vanishes, leaving only a faint red after impression in the air.
Cassie wonders if these are the colors that other people see after staring at the sun.
"The deal is struck," Luke's is the first voice to sound after the glow vanishes. Cassie turns to him and sees with a start that his eyes are glowing the same molten gold as the rune. Cronos and magic and time and titan gold. "And it is binding."
The sound that comes from Dormammu then is disturbingly like a chuckle. "Indeed it is little godlings. Indeed it is." He turns his gaze from Luke and Cassie back to Strange. Cassie doesn't like to admit it, but having his focus shifted away from her is a relief. Being under the scrutiny of a malevolent god is never comfortable, no matter how many times she's done it.
"Keep your world Sorcerer," he tells Strange. "It is but one among many. And now keep your word."
"With pleasure," Strange says, flaring his fingers up and out. The glowing symbols coiled around his forearm pulse down along the length of his hands, expanding as they leave him. Cassie's world goes green, the world shakes below her feet, and when her vision clears she finds she's back to standing in the frozen Hong Kong streets beside Luke, Wong, Strange, and the man who's name she hasn't caught yet.
They are back in the moment right before Caecillius begins to muse on the beauty of a world beyond time's effects. Having just experiences a microcosm of that kind of world, Cassie can't say she shares his rapturous point of view. She's decided that she likes her world nice and linear thank you very much.
Strange floats back down, landing lightly behind their enemy just as Cassie is mentally debating the efficacy of just bashing him over the head with a brick. The surgeon lands lightly and his cloak flutters as it settles around him. If she's never seen shoes fly or heard a sword talk, Cassie would probably be questioning just how sentient his outerwear might be. As it is, she's mostly just wondering how hard it might be to get the blood and dirt out of it.
Caecillius hears him arrive and likely takes in the expressions of astonishment on the faces of Wong and their other compatriot. He turns slowly and takes in Strange's grimly satisfied expression. "What did you do?" he asks, and for the first time that night Cassie hears a hint of wariness in it.
"I made a bargain," Strange says casually. He gives his head a half tip towards Luke and Cassie. "With a little help."
It's at that moment that Cassie feels something shudder, feels her magic jitter under her skin, and finds her focus narrowed in on Caecillius and his forces. They are crumbling, and not in the metaphorical way implying their team unity is collapsing, but at an actual atomic level. Cassie watches, feeling a distant sense of mingled horror and fascination as the very molecules that formed their bodies began to simply tank themselves apart.
"What is this?" Caecillius questions in a voice of muffled horror, watching his hands crumble like a poorly constructed sand castle right before his eyes.
Strange shrugs. "it's everything you ever wanted," he replies. "Eternal life as part of the one." His smile is the smugly vicious kind that would have earned him all kinds of dire warnings on Rate my Professor if Cassie had ever had him as a guest lecturer in Med school. "You're not gonna like it."
"Pós ftiáchnete to kreváti sas eínai pós tha koimitheíte," Luke says quietly, and Cassie mentally translates the words. How you make your bed is how you will sleep. It's an Ancient Greek proverb, one that speaks of getting what you deserve.
Coming from Luke, it is not without its irony.
The five of them watch Dormammu's zealots dissolve as they are pulled upwards in to the swirling mass that is their master, devoured by him like so many other souls belonging to countless lost worlds. They seem to dissolve as they go, and Cassie forces herself not to flinch from observing the way the base structures of their bodies are destabilized and dissolved. In a way, it's no different than seeing an autopsy.
"Yeah," Strange says, drawing out the last syllable. "You know you really should have stolen the whole book, because the warnings? They come after the spells."
Wong laughs at the remark but Cassie is stuck on a separate implication of the words. "You guys have books for this?" Cassie asks. "Seriously, why does everyone have books for these things apart from us and the Norse guys?"
Luke shrugs. "It's either cultural philosophy or disgustingly neglectful parenting. You know which side of that debate I come down on."
Cassie rolls her eyes to avoid being dropped in to a very fraught debate she simply does not have the emotional bandwidth for this evening. "Yeah okay whatever. Could one of you fine gentleman use one of these improperly warned about spells to get us home? Surely one of them can make a portal or something."
"Easily," says Wong, stowing his staff and adjusting a ring that loops around two of his fingers. "I do not know the full extent of what you have done to assist us today, but a lift home is the least we can do in return. Where do you need to go?"
"Either Wakanda or Switzerland," Cassie tells him. "I'd settle for either right now."
Wong nods and lifts his hands, holding one outstretched while drawing wide circles in the air with the other. Amber sparks begin to trace the shape he's outlining, whirling with his movement before he lowers his hands and nods to Luke and Cassie. "It will close when you step through," he informs them. Then he turns to Cassie and she's startled to see a blush on his cheeks. "Congratulations on your wedding," he tells her. "And tell Captain America I said so?"
Steve evidently has fans, even amongst magicians. Cassie ignores the way Strange and his other friend are rolling their eyes and gives Wong the kindest and brightest smile she can conjure being as tired as she is. "I'll make sure of it," she promises. Then she reaches in to her back pocket and extracts a by now very battered business card with her name, work email, and phone number. She scribbles her private line on the bottom with an old pen she digs out of her jacket and hands it over. "I still don't really know what happened here," she admits. "But if it ever happens again, call, and we'll help."
"Sure," Strange says mockingly. "We'll let you know if anything needs to be Avenged." The comment doesn't stop Wong from taking the card with a smile and tucking it in to a pouch attached to his belt. Cassie ignores him too and is on the point of stepping back through the portal with Luke when Strange stops her. "Wait."
Cassie does for several seconds before pointedly glancing at one of the digital clocks on the newly repaired billboards. It's still frozen, so it's possible her point doesn't exactly hit the same way, but Strange isn't dimwitted, no matter what else he might be. "My hands," he says, lifting one of them and fluttering the fingers as though Cassie might possibly not understand what he means, educated in the medical sciences as she is. "They're warm. For the first time since they were injured they're warm. I assume those are your abilities." His speech halts and Cassie is more or less ready for the inevitable next question. "Are they healed?"
It's an interesting question and Cassie gives it a little consideration before answering. Her magic had been a little free-roaming at the time so she's not sure how effective it may have actually been in peripheral healing. She'd been largely focused on the head wound, but that doesn't mean she hasn't done something about the damage she'd felt.
She reaches out and makes a small 'gimme' motion with her hands. Strange obeys with all the grace of a doctor forced in to being a patient. Cassie stretches out her senses to feel where her own power is glowing in a nexus around the shredded nerves and tissues, still working away to repair the internal wreckage of trauma and corrective surgery. She makes a few estimates regarding power and repair times and then pulls her senses back in to herself.
"Not completely," Cassie tells him. "You've got a lot of metal pins and plates in there I can't do shit with. The warmth is because the magic has re-established and rerouted a lot of the circulation through your wrists and fingers. I'm sure I don't have to tell you about the arteries and blood vessels involved. Fixing the circulation did a lot to reduce the internal swelling and helped with some of the nerve damage. The residual magic I've left in your hands is helping clear up the scar tissue and replenish some cartilage."
She shakes her head with a frown. "The metal really is a problem. It's blocking a few of the repair paths my magic wants to travel for you, and the number of times you've died and been re-set recently hasn't helped. Your system is very confused, so so are my powers." She gives him his hand back and takes a step away. "If I'd had time and better conditions I might have been able to evacuate some of the metal and reformed more of the bone. As it is, I think I've managed to reduce the tremor significantly and eliminated a fair amount of your chronic pain. By the time my magic dissipates I'd put you at roughly eighty-two percent normal hand function, maybe eighty-six with P.T to get used to how things have reconnected and strengthen the re-established structures." A thought crosses her mind and she frown up at him. "Whatever you do do not go back to your old physical therapist. This'd be really confusing for them."
"Eighty-six percent," Strange repeats, sounding nearly dazed. Then his face splits in to a wide grin. "Not so bad at all, for a non-surgical magical mistake." He dips his head at her in a sign of what is unmistakably respect and then gestures to the portal. "Thank you for your help Doctor Morgenstern-Rogers."
Tired as she is, Cassie grins back. This is why she loves healing. The opportunity to give people back the things they've lost, to leave them better than she had found them. "Happy too, Doctor Strange."
Strange holds out his right hand again. It doesn't shudder or tremble a bit. Cassie shakes it.
Luke steps over to meet her as Cassie backs away from Strange. He's still holding the stick of metal he picked up to use as a staff earlier and Cassie decides there's no point in telling him her can't keep it. "Well this has been nice and absurd," he says as a parting comment to the wizards. "If I ever see you people again, it'll be waayyy too soon."
"The feeling is mutual," Strange assures him, and the looks on the faces of his two friends assures Cassie that the sentiment is shared. She doesn't blame them. She has many dear friends she would like to see way less. Apocalypse buddies make for weird friendships.
Luke gives a mocking salute that Reyna and Steve might both smack him over the head for, and Cassie rolls her eyes. She takes him by the elbow without another word and tows him towards the still rotating portal. "And that would be our cue to go."
"So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu..." Luke hums in a sickeningly sweet tone.
It's because of that that Cassie deliberately trips him straight through the portal to Wakanda with the entirety of The Sound of Music soundtrack playing through her head.
A/N: Sorry about the wait guys! I was making real progress on this thing and then I did that stupid adult thing where I got a job to pay for things I needed and sacrificed all free time in to the bargain. Also, I got my Wisdom Teeth out on Thursday and my whole face hurts. Anyone have any suggestions? I digress... So what did you guys think? Yes I did take 17 minutes of a movie and make it a 10K piece of writing. Frankly, I will be doing it again sometime in the near future. I was just intrigued by the notion of Strange meeting Cassie as two people actually in the medical profession with the added points of magic. Coming up with a narrative purpose for Luke and Cassie to be in the plot of the movie was a bit more complicated. Did I pull it off? Only you can say. Review for me! xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
P.S. The Sound of Music will be coming back. I rewatched it recently for the first time in ages and I've decided it holds up. Sorry not sorry.