.
"Don't like that map?" The Ancient One asked when Stephen just stared at the picture without saying anything.
"Oh, no. It's... it's very good. It's just… you know, I've seen it before. In gift shops."
"And what about this one?" She turned the page.
"Acupuncture, great."
"Yeah? What about... that one?" She turned the page again.
"...You're showing me an MRI scan? I can't believe this." He growled.
"Each of those maps was drawn up by someone who could see in part, but not the whole."
"I spent my last dollar getting here on a one-way ticket, and you're talking to me about healing through belief?" He asked in disbelief.
"You're a man who's looking at the world through a keyhole, and you spent your whole life trying to widen that keyhole. To see more, know more. And now, on hearing that it can be widened in ways you can't imagine, you reject the possibility?"
"No, I reject it because I do not believe in fairy tales about chakras, or energy, or the power of belief. There is no such thing as spirit! We are made of matter, and nothing more. We're just another tiny, momentary speck within an indifferent universe."
"Wow. That's depressing." Peter sighed.
"You think too little of yourself."
"Oh, you think you see through me, do you? Well, you don't. But I see through you!" Strange yelled and tried poke her in the chest. She grabbed his hand and twisted it, and made a quick motion with her other hand. In a moment Stranges body was falling to the ground and being caught by Mordo, however, and exact copy of his body was floating back through the air. You could see through it, almost like a ghost. The copy of Stephen looked at his hands really quick before being pulled back into his body.
"Awesome!" Peter cheered.
"Woah. That… that's some freaky stuff right there." Sam said.
"Like Baba Yaga." Scott whispered with an amused expression on his face.
"Huh?" Tony asked Scott.
"Oh, uh, nothing." Scott grinned and shook his head. "Its a long story. There was just this super villain named Ghost, who's a good guy now, but she could teleport and turn invisible and phase and all this crazy stuff, and we were trying to fight her and my friend Kurt kept saying 'like Baba Yaga', like, a million times."
"Okay, that story is totally fake." Natasha said.
"No, its true." Scott insisted.
"Ooh! Tell us the story!" Peter cheered.
"It would take me at least two hours and five minutes to tell that story." Scott said, earning a few confused looks. "Four hours and three minutes if I start at the beginning."
"What did you just do to me?!" He gasped as he regained his balance.
"I pushed your astral form out of your physical form."
"What's in that tea? Psilocybin? LSD?"
"Just tea. With a little honey."
"What just happened?"
"For a moment you entered the astral dimension."
"What?"
"A place where the soul exists apart from the body."
"Why are you doing this to me?"
"To show you just how much you don't know. Open your eye." She said and touched his forehead.
Suddenly all of his surrounding her twisting into blurs of colors and he shot back, crashing through a window. He flew up into the air through clouds and into space, with Earth getting smaller in the background.
"No! No... No! Oh god! Oh god! Oh god! This isn't real it isn't real it isn't" He screamed as he was thrown around the planet. Suddenly he stopped and a lone butterfly flew past him. He reached out his hand to touch it but went plummeting over the Earth. As he flew the Earth got misshapen and turned into a flat, spinning ring before everything went black.
"Oh God! No! No! NO! NO! NO!" He screamed. Suddenly the black turned to blue and the blue turns to pink and the pink turned to green. Swirls of colors danced around him as he shot through the sky.
"His heart rate are getting dangerously high." Mordo said. Stephen suddenly flew back and landed in a chair back in the main room. Everything was back to normal.
"He looks alright to me." The Ancient One said before sending him back. He was suddenly flying through space in a big ball of fire.
"You think you know how the world works?" Her voice was heard. Stephen started twisting through a rainbow, different colors reaching out to grab his limbs like ropes.
"You think that this material universe is all there is?" She said.
Multiple copies of him were made, each one getting more run down until the last one was just a pile of ash. Suddenly Strange was sucked into a huge black hole.
"What is real? What mysteries lie beyond the reach of your senses?" Strange kept turning into ash and turning back as he fell. He went into a land made of orange clouds. Big floating orange and green spheres surrounded him.
"Quantum Realm!" Scott shouted, causing everyone to jump back in surprise. Scott leapt to his feet and started jumping up and down while pointing at the screen. An excited smile stretched across his face."Quantum Realm! Quantum Realm!"
"Scott. What are you trying to say?" Nat asked.
"Quantum Realm!" He beamed and continued pointing at the screen. By the excitement on his face you'd think he just won a billion dollars. "I've been there! That's the Quantum Realm! You can only go there when you shrink forever. I've been there twice. Three times if you count this vision I had. Quantum energy is what powers my suit."
"Interesting." Tony leaned forward. He had been completely ignoring him until he mentioned his suit.
"Let's just keep watching the movie." Nat said and pushed Scott back into his seat.
"I've been there!" Scott whispered and pointed at himself, obviously proud.
"At the root of existence, mind and matter meet. Thoughts shape reality."
Strange fell into what looked like a kaleidoscope made of sand. He went into a tan cave, when hundreds of hands reached out and grabbed him for a second before going back into the dirt. Stephen looked at his hands in horror. On the ends of his fingers grew tiny hands. On the ends of the fingers of the tiny hand grew even smaller hands, and so on. After a few seconds his hands when back to normal. But then thousand of hands reached out from the ground, grabbing and pulling on his legs.
"That's officially the creepiest thing I've ever seen." Clint said.
"This universe is only one of an infinite number. Worlds without end." Stephen flew through more swirls of colors, this time crashing threw what looked like giant diamonds.
"Some benevolent and life-giving."
He was shown a beautiful, colorful world with strange, sparkly animals roaming around.
"Others filled with malice and hunger."
He was shown a solid back world, before a large head poked out of it.
"Dark places, where powers older than time lie… ravenous... and waiting."
The head had dark ridges going all over his face, and purple, fiery eyes.
"Who are you in this vast multiverse, Mr. Strange?"
Stephen floated around a dark place with little glows of color now and then. All was silent.
He was shooting across space again and screaming, before hitting the ground next to the Ancient Ones feet. He frantically glanced around, so grateful everything was normal again.
"Can I do that?" Peter asked with a huge grin on his face. "Could you send me there, doctor? That looks like so much fun!"
"I could…" Stephen said.
"Absolutely not!" Tony said.
"But-" Peter tried to argue.
"Nope. I've given my answer. You are not doing anything like that on my watch."
"Pleeeeeeeease." Peter said.
"Nope. No. Nein. Nee. Nah. Non." Tony said. "How many different languages do you want?"
"Aww." Peter pouted and crossed his arms, sinking low into his seat. Tony rolled his eyes and rubbed his knuckles into Peters hair, messing it up.
"Have you seen that before in a gift shop?" The Ancient One asked.
"Teach me!" Strange kneeled and held out his shaky hands.
"Hmm...No." She said.
The door to the building was opened and Stephen was thrown outside.
"No... No!" He cried and ran to the now closed door. "No, no, no, no no no no! No! Open the door! Please!"
"Wow. Rude." Steve said.
"You think I'm wrong to cast him out?" The Ancient One asked Mordo.
"5 hours later, he's still on your doorstep. There's a strength to him." Mordo responded with a smirk.
"Five hours?!" Christine said. "Are you serious? You could've gotten a cold! Or worse!"
Stephen sighed as she continued to nag him.
"Stubbornness, arrogance, ambition… I've seen it all before." She said.
"He reminds you of Kaecilius?"
"I can not lead another gifted student to power, only to lose him to the darkness."
"Oh, come on!" Stephen shouted.
"You didn't lose me. I wanted the power to defeat my enemies. You gave me the power to defeat my demons. And to live within the natural law."
"We never lose our demons, Mordo. We only learn to live above them."
"Kaecilius still has the stolen pages. If he deciphers them, he could bring ruin upon us all. There may be dark days ahead. Perhaps Kamar-Taj could use a man like Strange."
"Go Mordo!" Stephen smiled. "He's awesome."
Wong shifted uncomfortably in his seat like he knew something Stephen didn't.
"Don't shut me out." Strange whispered to himself and rested his forehead against the door. "I've nowhere else to go."
Suddenly the door flung open and he fell inside in a heap.
"Thank you."
A few people laughed.
Mordo led Stephen into a small room with a bed and a table.
"Bathe. Rest. Meditate… if you can. The Ancient One will send for you." He said and handed Stephen a small piece of paper. The word "Shamballa" was written on it.
"Uh, what's this? My mantra?" Stephen asked.
"The Wifi password. We're not savages." Mordo said and left.
Now alone, Stephen sat down on the bed and looked at his watch. It was still broken, but he flipped it over to its back. There was an engraving on it:
Time will tell how much I love you.
- Christine
"Awwwww!" Wanda said. Christine blushed a deep red and buried her head in her hands.
"Strange and Palmer sitting in a tree!" Shuri sang.
"K-I-S-S-I-N-G." Peter sang.
"First comes love, then comes marriage! Then comes the baby in the baby carriage!" Clint sang, much louder than Peter or Shuri had.
"You're a child." Nat said to Clint.
"Thank you very much." Clint said and gave a silly bow. "I'll be here all night."
"The language of the mystic arts is as old as civilization." The Ancient One said. She sat in front of Strange on the floor. "The sorcerers of antiquity called the use of this language spells. But if that word offends your modern sensibilities, you can call it a program. The source code that shapes reality. We harness energy drawn from other dimensions of the multiverse, to cast spells, conjure shields and weapons to make magic." She waved her hands in the air and summoned orange electricity.
"But... even if my fingers could do that, My hands would just be waving in the air. I mean, how do I get from here to there?" Stephen asked.
"How did you get to reattach severed nerves, and put a human spine back together bone by bone?"
"Study and practice. Years of it."
She nodded and smiled.