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Christine felt genuinely speechless. Stephen was sitting quietly, silently, waiting patiently for her to take in all his words, she could only assume. It was all so... surreal. And yet, so real. She knew every word he had just said was entirely true, and she also knew why he hadn't volunteered the information earlier. There was simply no way she could have even remotely coped. She barely could now.

"So those two girls out there...?" She didn't even know what she was asking, but Stephen seemed no less sure for it.

"My apprentices, yes. Your patient is a Sorcerer, albeit a little rusty, Elice is an apprentice. She was taught by the Ancient One at Kamar-Taj, before. She turned her back on her medical training - willingly, in her case - to instead study sorcery, but she has a destinct talent for medicine also. That's why I am keeping her here with me - I can help her become the best of two worlds, I hope."

The modesty of those two last words really proved more than anything to Christine that Stephen had well and truly grown up.

"Also, she seems to just be nice," Christine suggested, trying to bring the conversation back to more understandable matters. Anything, really, which she could relate to.

"There is that," Stephen allowed. "And the Cloak likes her." Christine blinked at that sentence unexpectedly added in, but her sorcerer just shrugged.

Noticing her continuing confusion, Stephen smirked. "It tends to – playfully - attack people it finds boring or tedious. Especially if it is bored. Elice gets along well with it - she even named it." Well, Christine decided. This new world was very peculiar... and perhaps not so different from her own. (Even though it did possess modest Stephen. What was this, the bizarro universe?)

It was a bit of a random thought which led her there, but her next question was at least logical in her own mind. "Is there such a thing as a bizarro universe?" If Stephen found this question peculiar, he certainly didn't show it.

"There are many dimensions and universes," he settled on instead, speaking softly as if afraid to scare her, "and many of them are... quite bizarre." His face twisted slightly, as if his thoughts had brought him on quite the journey at that question.

She had to ask.

"What happened to you, in that battle you speak of?" She wanted to reach out, to touch him, but for the first time during this entire conversation he had closed off and did not seem like he would appreciate it. His face looked pinched off slightly and his body langauge was closed. When he spoke in response, his voice was unnaturally dispassionate.

"I came to you after the attack on the New York Sanctum. I had gotten stabbed, as you know; I was unexperienced and up against several sorcerers, many of them way above my level. At the time. They killed the current Master of this Sanctum. The cloak chose me, and it saved me as well as the Sanctum, too."

Christine wanted to comment, to try and comfort in any way she could, but Stephen didn't pause. Instead, he plowed on, no longer looking at her. She could tell that telling her this took effort, a lot of effort for Stephen, but yet he didn't hesitate. Not at all.

"Then... I made a mistake. The Ancient One payed for it. She talked to me in our astral forms as she died - that was why I fell, if you remember, I left my body for a few moments - and I did whatever I could to sway the battle. I... cheated a bit," Christine had to smile at that, "and then I left to another dimension, to... sway the being that had been drawn here by our enemies. I managed." His voice was taut at the last few words, letting Christine know - though he likely didn't know it - that he had finally reached the point of his story which made him so tense.

Instead of pushing him further, she just nodded, and stepped forward. She knew enough for now, and he was ready to talk to her about what his life had changed into. Knowing that, she did not attempt to push him into subjects he was genuinely not ready to talk about. She knew everything she needed to know, and she had enough to digest as it was. Even without that final piece.

Silently, she simply hugged him, and let him hide for a while in her hair, arms closed tightly around her. Sorcerer or not, Stephen had gone through a lot more than the trouble with his hands this past year. She could only sympathise and silently hope that he had others to rely on: who had it in them to understand. A stray, bizarre thought considered that this friend might be his cloak. She was more right than she could possibly have been able to grasp.