InsaneJournal

WHO: Doctor Strange, John Constantine
WHAT: Looking for drugs, finding space trouble
WHEN: Friday
WHERE: The House with the Doors, Tattooine
WARNINGS: TBD


Strange was on his last leg. Arriving in this pocket dimension (which he patently refused to call Starklandia on a matter of principle) had deprived him of the support systems that kept him sane. Which, unbeknownst to anyone, had nothing to do with magic. His prescription for medical marijuana kept him relaxed. Helped him sleep. Then there was the opium when things got really bad. That wasn't legal. But Strange's type of problems weren't the kind you could diagnose with a PhD and a residency at New York Presbyterian. The quiet was the worst, when Strange was trying not to think, trying to sleep. That's when the images came, bubbling up from his repressed unconscious. The horrible things he'd seen. Things that the human mind wasn't built to process, things that drove people insane or turned them into catatonic vegetables or drove them to suicide. Eldritch horrors were the job description for the Sorcerer Supreme, and every one of them had to come up with ways to cope. Stephen used to be a doctor, so of course he resorted to drugs.

Except there were no drugs here. There was coffee, thank god, which helped keep him awake. But there was nothing to help put him to sleep. Stephen hadn't slept since he got to this dimension. Which, for a regular human, would have meant death. Luckily for Stephen, he had magic at his disposal. Magic-empowered vedic meditation helped him achieve periods of clarity that sustained him when the caffeine made him feel like he was about to explode. He'd used spells to substitute sleep, to force his body to energize and replicate the vigor with which a well-rested person would perform, to suppress the hallucinations of sleep deprivation. But it wasn't a solution. It was counter-productive in the way that magic made you tired, channeling all that extra-dimensional energy came at a cost. What spells he did know to actually put him to sleep wouldn't work. They required the yantra of finality to be spoken after the target had fallen asleep in order to stay asleep. Otherwise he just immediately woke up. There were other spells he might try, other lore he might put to use, but the Sorcerer Supreme was without the Book of the Vishanti, his great repository of spells, and had to rely on memory.

So, needless to say, Stephen Strange had a problem. Which was what brought him to the House with the Doors today. The Cloak of Levitation was wrapped around him, the collar high and ostentatious like some vampiric count of gothic fiction. The Eye of Agamotto hung at his breast, closed and protected behind its amulet. He looked tired, red in his eyes with dark circles beneath them. His hands were trembling, moreso than usual. It was difficult to control an already difficult impulse.

They rose, those damaged hands, and steadied as circles of arcane light shaped like pictographs drawn from the tips of his fingers. Sigil after sigil he wove, his mouth chanting in the High Speech of Old Atlantis. These were subtle enchantments of protection, auras that drained and redirected kinetic energy away from his body. It was nothing that would save him from a full directed attack by any kind of super-powered weapon or person, but it would stop him from being shot or stabbed in the back by some run-of-the-mill thief while he was abroad. Strange had no idea where he was going, so it was good to be prepared.

In one final flash, the circle he had woven around him broke and steadied like a bright exoskeleton around him before fading from sight. There, the spell was done.