"So where are we going?"
Peter shrugged, opening the driver's door to the Pontiac.
"Just for a drive. Unless you want to go somewhere in particular?"
"Nope." Pete got into the car, too, and buckled himself in. "I just want to go somewhere."
"You know more about different dimensions than I do," Peter said as he started the car. "What do you think Stephen is going to run into?"
"I've never heard of pocket dimensions," Pete admitted. "I don't think we've gotten to that, yet, in my training."
"Oh."
"I didn't even know what a Flerkin was," Pete added.
"That's not too surprising," Peter pointed out. "They're pretty rare, from what I understand."
"Deadly, though…"
"You saw the tentacles and teeth." They drove out of the compound and onto the service road. Normally it would be dark, but the Avengers wanted to see who – or what – was heading down their road so they had security lights here and there providing plenty of illumination for the boys. "What could stand up against that?"
"He looks so tiny."
Peter smiled.
"He is. Clint wanted to name him Danger Kitty when I first found him. We didn't know what he was, then, but it definitely would have been applicable."
"How did you find out he wasn't a cat?"
"He ate an alien creature that was threatening him and Jack."
"An alien?" Pete asked. "In the compound?"
"Careful…" Alec said. "Remember, we don't want him to know too much about Thanos and his attack on Earth."
"It's one of those crazy things," Peter told him, pulling onto the highway and heading toward the gas station – although he planned on driving by there and only stopping on the way back.
Seems like something from outer space is always coming to earth. Luckily they come for the Avengers, and save them the trouble of going out to look for them."
"True."
"Has Stephen ever taken you dimension hopping?" Peter asked, curiously.
"Not, yet," Pete said. "I get the feeling that it isn't easy – and that there are all kinds of weird things that people can run into in them."
"Probably. I hope he's okay."
"He's really powerful," Pete assured Peter – even as the mind stone provided its own silent assurance that the sorcerer supreme was alive and well. "People underestimate him because he doesn't look like much, but there's a reason he's in charge of the sanctum."
"True…"
OOOOOOOOOOOO
It was almost ridiculously easy. Stephen's spell was a tricky one, but it was the locating part of the spell that took the majority of the sorcerer's skill. The pocket dimension wasn't as hard to break into as say the mirror dimension was, it was more an issue of making sure he found himself in the same dimension as the marble.
He stumbled as he 'landed' but he was a master of his body and balance – not to mention the cloak of levitation flared as they materialized, allowing him to keep his balance even if his own had, somehow, failed him.
"Wow…"
It wasn't a phrase that he used often. Stephen Strange was a magician, after all – and a good one. He'd been to a multitude of dimensions and had battled creatures that no man had ever seen, before. Not to mention a planet-sized demon bent on the destruction of the earth. He wasn't easily impressed, really.
But the place that he found himself was definitely an exception.
It was immense. At least he assumed it was; he couldn't see beyond the multitude of things that were surrounding him. Nothing dead and rotting, though, despite the real expectation of just that.
"Maybe the organic items go elsewhere…" he muttered, more to himself than anything. "I suppose there-"
He was interrupted by a screech that seemed to reach into his very soul and brought up his hands just in time to bring a forcefield of energy up as a dark shape suddenly slammed into it. Razor sharp fangs clashed against the energy barrier with a gargled noise that was chilling – even to him – and he started to move his hand in a counter-attack when the form was suddenly gone.
Gone so quickly that he wasn't even sure what it had looked like, beyond those teeth and a glimpse of what might have been yellow eyes with black irises.
Strange made a slight noise of his own, watching the entire area around him for a return of the creature. Whether it was something that had been swallowed whole by a Flerkin and had somehow survived (doubtful) or was the natural way the pocket dimension remained free of dead creatures who had fallen prey to a Flerkin (more likely) it was obviously the reason that there weren't any dead creatures laying around in heaps. Instead, what was laying around were countless items or all shapes, and all sizes, and they went on forever, it seemed.
"Insane…"
The place – it wasn't a room, more like a wide open area that seemed to go on forever in every direction with no way of discerning up and down (aside from the fact that there was clearly gravity holding himself to the lowest surface, as well as all of the inanimate objects) and no barrier that he could discern that showed a limit to just how far it went in any one direction.
Still alert for a return of the creature – which had had an eerie fog-like quality to it and was that much more dangerous because of it – Strange took a moment to look at the items strewn about. As learned as he was, he didn't have any idea what many of them even were, much less what they did or why they had been at one time or another eaten by a Flerkin. There was no doubt, however, that it hadn't all been eaten just by Nutmeg. There was a large item that looked something like a filing cabinet but was made of what looked suspiciously like gold, and the sorcerer knew that the compound didn't hold anything like that. Of course, he supposed that it could have been eaten before Peter and the cloak found Nutmeg, but it was unlikely.
Who would leave their gold filing cabinet out for a baby Flerkin to eat?
He also saw hundreds of items that could have been coins of some kind, and a plethora of weapons to judge by the sharp points or the metallic sharp edges on them. Statues, dishes, clothing and cloth, jewels, and so many other things were around him, all of them interesting to him because they weren't things that he recognized and he yearned, suddenly, to catalogue each of them.
The cloak slapped his shoulder, drawing his attention away from the trove of unknown objects, and he shook his head – almost like a dog shaking water from its fur. Looking to the side, he saw it pointing to the small marble on the floor (or ground, or whatever it was).
"Sorry…" apologizing for losing his focus, he carefully leaned over and picked the pebble up, examining it, carefully. "It's ours…"
Now that he knew he was where he was supposed to be, he only needed to find that small figurine that the Collector had lost to a completely different Flerkin in another time, completely.
The sorcerer supreme looked around at the mountains of items once more amazed at the eons worth of different items and the history that each one must have. He knew what he was looking for, but he was realistic enough to know that he wasn't going to find it sitting out on a pedestal, or on a solid gold filing cabinet.
"This is going to take a while," he muttered.
He shook his head, and then concentrated.
Time to go home and let them know what he'd found. And maybe he and Wong could come up with a way to make the search a little less impossible.
OOOOOOOOOO
"Something happened…"
Wong frowned, looking at Strange, who had been seated at the library table beside him.
"What?" He suddenly looked concerned. "Is it Peter?"
They had still been seeing the occasional vision of Stephen's apprentice. Sometimes he was with his other self, and occasionally he was with Tony Stark (crazy as it was) and once with someone that a little research had made them think might have been Natasha Romanoff. There were also people they didn't recognize, of course, and places that they didn't know.
None of them showed the magicians how to get the boy back, though, but they were still welcomed, because they seemed to be designed to reassure them that Peter was alive wherever he was.
A relief to all of them, of course, but especially to May, who was walking around with a slightly haunted, worried expression that grew more concerned as time went by and her nephew still hadn't made his reappearance.
"No. I mean… yes. But he's fine." Stephen shrugged. "I assume he is, that is, because I don't-"
He was cut off by a vision of the boy riding in a car along the highway. It was dark, but there was no mistaking the interior of the Pontiac for any other car.
"He's fine," Wong agreed, clearly seeing the same image. "What happened?"
"I don't know. I just felt something."
"Something sinister?"
"Something… odd."
"Does it have to do with Peter?" the other magician asked.
They had other concerns on their plates, after all. Peter was just the most recent and one they cared most about.
"I'm not sure." He frowned, and pushed the book away that he'd been searching through. "I'm going to go meditate."
A good way to try and figure out what it was that he'd felt.
"Need me?"
"No."
"I'll be here."
"Thanks."
The sorcerer supreme got up and walked out of the room, but it was a sure indication that there wasn't any danger when the Cloak of Levitation opted to stay in the library rather than go with him.
Wong watched until he left, and then closed his eyes, allowing his mind to go over the latest vision, hoping for a clue to finding Peter and returning him home.