Dr. Strange entered the lab to the sounds of an argument.
"Absolutely not!"
"I realize that you think you have some special knowledge of realm-hopping, Miss Foster, but I assure you th-"
"That's Dr. Foster to you. And it's not about realm-hopping, it's about realm stability!"
"I honestly don't see the point of all this," Loki replied with a frown, his arms crossed over his chest and his torso leaned back against the far wall. "You've confirmed that there's a micro-dimension in there, behind the little witch's dome. And every dimension - regardless of age - will crack at the barriers. Why not simply make use of that?"
"Because that's how you wind up destabilizing a dimension," Dr. Foster replied sharply. "If you make cracks around the edge, you increase the risk of it breaking at the connecting point. And I would rather not make this any more unstable than it already is."
"You aren't listening. I wouldn't be making anything, there are already gaps along the edges of every dimension," Loki insisted, pushing himself to his feet. "You can slip right through them without harming anything."
"Even if there are naturally-occurring or pre-existing gaps, and if you can find one, repeated use will still wear it down," Jane snapped.
"Not on a level that would destabilize the whole dimension!"
"Unless the dimension was already unstable! If you disrupt that gateway dome in any way, we lose contact with her new dimension entirely, and we have no idea where to even look to find it again!"
"So if it is truly that much of an issue, then simply traverse it as few times as possible," the trickster countered with a careless shrug.
"There are far too many people in there to get out safely without destabilizing the barrier," Jane said, shaking her head. "It would take a large number of trips, with each one tearing the rift a little bit wider at the edges every time you open it back up."
"Only if you take the people out of there one at a time. If you take them in groups, you only have to make a few trips."
"Yes, but your rift would also have to be large enough to fit them all at once!" Jane countered in exasperation.
"Only if they are standing shoulder to shoulder. But if you simply take them through one at a time in a line," the trickster explained, leaning close and speaking very slowly, like he was speaking to someone incredibly dense. "Your opening can remain small."
"That still leaves the problem of it being open for that long!" Dr. Foster snapped, taking a step closer to the trickster as if she was trying to intimidate him. "If it's open for more than a few seconds, it'll start to send tremors through the whole edge of the dimension! You won't just tear a hole in it, you'll split the entire seam at once!"
"I assure you, I have been realm-hopping for more years that you have been alive, Midgargian," Loki replied sharply, an insulted little growl in his voice.
"Yes, but you've done it alone, and between much, much, larger dimensions than this" Dr. Foster stressed, struggling for a moment as she tried to come up with a comparison she could use. "The rift you open will have to be big enough for you to fit through it. In a dimension the size of Asgard, perhaps it's barely more than a popped stitch in a king-sized comforter. But in something the size of a child's mitten, you'd be taking out an entire link of the knitting. There won't be anything to keep it from unraveling if any kind of pressure is put on it. And from what I understand, you don't usually take passengers along with you, and that changes the entire situation. One person crossing a large dimension's barriers on occasion isn't going to do anything, but this would be a mass migration of more than a dozen people at once, from a small and already unstable dimension!"
"Once we have everyone out, it doesn't really matter what happens to that dimension. Besides, there were only eleven people who were specifically unaccounted for," Loki replied with a dismissive hand wave. "At least that's all that the spider-child had on his list. The rest we simply haven't heard back from yet. They're not likely to be in her bubble."
"We can't assume that!" Jane said, exasperated.
"Dr. Foster is correct," Strange announced loudly, before the trickster could get another word in. "For now we have to assume that anyone unaccounted-for is in there with Maximoff. Including our backup from SHIELD. If she was able to whisk everyone away and create a separate dimension, who's to say that she had a range on who she could grab? So far the only limiting factor seems to be 'people that she was close to'."
"Was she close to your SHIELD backup?" Loki asked rather tersely.
"No idea. Anyone who could have told us that has vanished along with her."
"And you really think this little witch has the power to grab in people from as far away as your backup was?"
"She managed to get them all to Sokovia, didn't she?" Strange replied dryly.
"All I am saying," the trickster sighed, "is that you are either giving her far too much credit, or she is much, much more powerful than you have let on."
"I would lean toward the second one," Dr Banner interjected, glancing up from where he'd been rubbing his temples in exasperation, and speaking for the first time since Strange had entered the room. "She's got some real crazy enhancements, like nothing I've ever seen before. And I know they came directly from the mind stone."
Loki actually spluttered at that.
"From the stone?" the Asgardian clarified slowly, frowning over at Banner.
"As far as I know," the doctor shrugged. "I, uh...I didn't really get to do a lot of talking to her. But her report said that Strucker exposed a bunch of people directly to the stone, and she was one of the only ones to survive it. Every other volunteer died."
"Yes, because they were exposed to a raw infinity stone," Loki hissed. "Are you entirely certain that she's human?"
"As far as we know," Strange shrugged, making his way over to where Dr. Foster had resumed work on her computer. "We've had no reason to believe otherwise."
"Aside from her surviving an infinity stone?" Loki asked in exasperation, but Strange waved him off, leaning to look at the little scribbled notes Dr. Foster had composed so far.
It seemed just as they'd suspected, an entirely separate dimension, the entrance pocketed within their world like a bead of oil in a cup of water - holding itself together mostly through the fact that it liked itself more than it liked its surroundings.
Which meant that it was bound to be very fragile.
"All we are saying," Strange sighed, straightening up to face the pouting trickster once more. "Is that we cannot risk rushing this, because at the end of the day we really have no idea what is waiting for us on the other side of that barrier."
"So why not use your magic and take a look?" the dark-haired man replied, his grin sharp in a way that rather unsettled Stephen. "Your fancy little portals don't require dimensional rifts in order to operate."
"They do when I'm opening them across dimensions," he replied. "The magic flows through the rifts to connect the two locations."
"But does the magic de-stabilize it as much as sending a person directly?"
"I don't know, and I'd rather not experiment until we better know what we're dealing with," Strange replied tersely, feeling his temper running thin once more. "What's with the interrogation all of a sudden? Are you in some kind of rush?"
"Simply curious, is all," Loki replied blithely, sending him a thin smile that made no effort to extend past his lips.
"Like hell you are…" Dr. Banner muttered under his breath.
"You've shown a questionable lack of interest yourself, Banner," the trickster countered without missing a beat. "Are you not eager to see the titan defeated?"
"Look, I want him gone as much as everyone, but I'm willing to be patient if it means getting my teammates back," Banner replied pointedly. Loki simply shrugged.
"Well forgive me if I'm not keen on having Thanos forcibly separate my limbs from my body at any point in the near future."
"Then perhaps you should focus more on not being a nuisance so the rest of us can get our work done," Banner said tersely.
"Although, I will admit that you bring up a good point with the teleportation," Strange mused. "Perhaps Dr. Foster will be able to better determine how safe a magic-based teleportation across the dimension would be once her scans are more complete."
"Let's just hope that her computer moves a bit more quickly than Thanos," Loki replied with a shark grin.
Strange treated him to a dry look, feeling his headache start to creep back.
"You know, I'm starting to see why the others don't like you..."