2482/Are You Even Real

Are You Even Real
Date of Scene:	16 July 2020
Location:	Sanctum Santorum
Synopsis:	No description
Cast of Characters:	Meggan Puceanu, Stephen Strange

---

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
"Hey, Meg, don't be afraid, you were made to go and get them," sings the Englishwoman to herself while trying to navigate through Greenwich Village. The hour hovers between late and early. Enough the last partiers refrain from a final round or a last dance, early enough the day workers sip coffees and contemplate bus or subway routes through the travesty of an underground system. Britain thought it had it bad? But she walks through the streets in sandals, checking the map app on her phone every so often.

Humming the Beatles' signature song in a soprano key doesn't help much. Her worn jeans are torn to bare her calves, though several remaining tears aren't artistic so much as goblin claw and goblin fang inflicted. Blood lightly stains the inflicted cuts. Social media buzzes with warnings of what happened: faerie attacks, a ruined concert, folk music. Some guy hurling around a lake's worth of water at them.

An internationally prominent environmental activist with pointy ears involved in the fight eventually finds the brownstone. Amazing what map technology can do today in confusing a recent transplant. She looks up at the building, then down again to her phone. Back up. "This won't look strange at all, will it?"

The phone chimes at her. A certain reminder. Or another hit on her profile. Up to the doors then, she steels herself by not squirming -too- visibly, and lifts a hand to knock. It may not be the least dangerous thing she's done all day.

There's a red cap hat in her back pocket, after all.

Stephen Strange has posed:
It's a late-night food run. Less so for the Doctor, who cannot partake anymore, but for Wong who still feels a hankering for Korean fried chicken. Meggan may well have passed him on the street, reusable grocery bag in one hand and airpods in his ears making his way with all the confidence a mystic practitioner and master martial artist can have in the Village during the waning hours.

When the knock comes, there is barely a moment between the last sound resounding through the house and the door opening. The benefits of perceiving linear time in a decidedly non-linear fashion from time to time. It can tie the psyche into knots, but the payoff is one excels extraordinarily at guessing games.

The Doctor stands there, the vestments of the Sorcerer Supreme not worn at this late hour and instead replaced by what looks like a smoking jacket that may have been more fashionable seventy years ago. He regards her for a moment, brows furrowing before he asks.

"The fae in Central Park?"

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Poor Wong, sent forth to partake of the mouth-watering flavours of the Village without the freedom to sit on a stoop, snarf some tasty eats, and escape from the world for a while. Meg is no master martial artist or even a resident to command such confidence, but the high of triumphing over the fearful site in Central Park buoys her up a bit. Curse of an empath, she takes the buzz or the low with her wherever she goes. Champagne bubbles in the blood still dance, and the sliver-thin moon calls her to turn with abandon. Celtic Warband already lost their chance to finish a gig, thrumming bodhrans and skirling electric flutes still remembered by the breeze and the bones of the soil. So by the time the door opens, she is already starting to shift to the beat. Non-linear temporal flows don't apply to the blonde complication--because anyone with that tangled array of unknown bloodlines *is* a confusing mix of things. Faerie, elemental, mystic, god, all packaged into a blithe girl dancing on Doctor Strange's doorstep.

She stops when he's just there in a smoking jacket, a vision of propriety or splashy historical dramas put out by the Beeb and ITV. A faint rose flush blossoms on the high ramparts of her cheeks, her eyes bled from green to hazel in a moment. "Pardon me. That is," a Cumbrian accent, English Lake Country, a place of tiny villages and picturesque trails, not high society at all. The last of the Mystic wild up there. "The Omniversal Guardian expresses her warmest regards to the Doctor," she says with the polish of someone made to recall those exact words, in that exact tone, with the precision and bombast of Merlin's daughter. "Yes, I am. Was, that is. I was instructed to introduce myself to you. Unless you meant the Unseelie, in which case, they're fair and surely taken care of."

Whatever guards she should have up are blown away for a moment or two.

Stephen Strange has posed:
The Sorcerer Supreme may be expected to wear a pillowing cape or occupy some high mountain stronghold. That he stands in the doorway of the handsome Victorian brownstone tends to subvert expectations. That he looks as though he's dressed to host a laissez faire party in the Sixties only adds to that. The title Meggan offers raises an eyebrow. Roma is a name known to him and one with considerable weight behind it.

"Then I shouldn't leave you out in the street," he offers, politely stepping out of the doorway and gesturing her over the threshold, "Come inside. I can thank you for saving me the trouble with the Redcaps."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
No billowing cape; no prescriptive uniform here either. Meggan stands on the balls of her feet, though she doesn't quite loom. Just a girl with dried blood and the scent of water around her, in clothing suited to dancing at a folk festival and not striding the streets in glory and splendour. Her smile lifts slightly, and some of the tension recedes. Not much but some, in holding her ground. "Thank you."

A step through into the brownstone leaves her in a foreign realm of a sort, splendour of a kind imagined only in museums, movies, and the occasional painting. She reaches into the pocket for the bundled, bloody cap of the faerie, holding it out. "My manners. I'm Meggan Puceanu. I brought this in case you need it. A woman there said the red caps were summoned by a trinket used by someone without much talent, and she took it."

Stephen Strange has posed:
"The trinket would have been preferable, so far as gifts go," Strange replies, reaching out to accept the bloody cap with not a moment of reluctance, "But it'll do. I hope the woman you might trust to keep it safe."

The cap is examined carefully for a moment as Strange steps out of the foyer and to a sitting room adjacent. As he passes a bookcase he sets the cap down on one of the shelves, an item out of place in a room of fastidiously-kept trinkets. He turns for a moment to regard Meggan thoughtfully, looking her from head to toe.

"Your cuts," he adds finally, "Do you need me to look at them? Fortunately for you, the 'Doctor' part isn't just an empty honorific."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
A sidelong look through her golden hair might not be taken too directly, perhaps. Meg looks askance in the best of ways at her surroundings, trying to take them all in. Like the great houses of Europe, it strikes an impressive note. "The lady seemed an enchantress, with the arts she had. In her distress, I deemed it best not to interfere, seeing as how she might have mistaken me for one of them. Blonde about 170 centimeters tall, maybe less, quite thin. She was right angry about the boy playing at magic, without an idea of what he did. He tried to hex a man to do real harm, and I confess I may have bid the air and water to halt that nonsense."

She looks up to Strange, meeting the judgment that may be head-on or not. The cap he carries is bloody, a most definite faerie relic. It's been wetted a bit and dried, losing some of its bloody due, but it's as good a marker as any. Somewhere must be an angry goblin frantically searching for it. She doesn't wither under Stephen's regard, though the malleability of her features might start proving itself too assured if he really looks or thinks too hard in one sense or another. "Roma acts as my advocate or counselor, as you prefer. Though obviously her interests lie more in the European sphere." She looks down where he does about the cuts.

"Ah, a few of them bit me. Better me than another person who wouldn't heal clean." The faint rise of a rueful smile is there, combined with that carefree shrug. "Unseelie usually use poisons and toxins. Probably here, I should expect. But if you want to, by all means. Where do you want me?"

Those words are out before she can claim them back.

Stephen Strange has posed:
There is the faintest tick at the corner of Strange's mouth. A very faint hint at a smile that is not the usual knowing, serene expression he wears when everything goes according to the grand cosmic design. No, it's a sort of smile more readily associated with older and long forgotten concerns. At any other moment he would master it before it became obvious, but now it quirks the corner of his lips beneath that manicured moustache for just a second.

"I don't have a surgery set up," he jests, though one might just as easily reside behind one of the Sanctum's many doors if he so wished it, "So I suppose the sofa will have to do."

He gestures to an ornate couch with mahogany framing intricately engraved. A true antique. It is then that he rolls up the sleeves of the jacket he wears, baring his forearms as he opens an equally ancient medicine cabinet stood against one wall. Despite its antique appearance, the tools and mixtures within are a picture of modernity. He plucks the antiseptic solution from one of the shelves, and clean bandages from another.

"It's been a while since general practice rounds," he offers, turning back to face her, "But I should manage."

Meggan Puceanu has posed:
Hide what he will, Stephen may well be shielded beyond her ability to detect his emotions. Or not, and in that case, the entangled wash comes humming right back to Meggan. Her pointed ears slip through the tumble of silver and gilded tresses, flowing around her shoulders with an easy grace. "I doubt it to be quite so bad. Usually they cannot harm me near at all, but I hoped I might keep them from the civilians." That word sticks a little odd there on the tongue, and she has to amend it, nose wrinkled. "People not so resistant. But red caps are a bother and a half. We were fortunate to have the lake, though it's sullied now."

She glides after him, not limping. But that could be because she walks on her toes, barely in touch with the floor. A habit that brings her to the couch that she watches with some dull sense of horror. "Here? This is probably worth more than everything I--" A prompt time to close her mouth. "Again, I apologise, getting ahead of myself there." She sinks down, neatly positioned. Whatever bit her hasn't sent her into shock, but then that could just be due to the enormous churn of energy anchored between her, the earth, and the floor of the Sanctum. Giving the doctor a curious look, she puts her hands in her lap.

"I doubt you could do worse than bite me."