4626/(SoS)I'm Doing My Part!

(SoS)I'm Doing My Part!
Date of Scene:	06 January 2021
Location:	Sanctum Santorum
Synopsis:	The Bug is inspected by Strange and Zat, with Thor watching for safety. Strange is a potential source of the bugs invasion.
Cast of Characters:	Stephen Strange, Thor, Zatanna Zatara

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Stephen Strange has posed:
    Not long after, Stephen is at the Sanctum Sanctorum, an ever evolving and shifting house has shifted yet again, this time resembling something closer to the modifications Scotty made in the middle of Star Trek IV. In the main landing just a few steps up out of the foyer, the double staircase leading upstairs is the same as it's always been, but there's a new staircase in the middle, near the back of the landing, leading down. It's a metallic thing, leading down in a tight spiral to an almost cavernous room that didn't exist before it was needed. Now, the large aquarium type domicile is required. Inside is a single survivor and a few pieces and remains of various other bugs from the assault in India.

    Stephen has taken his time making sure everything is secure and safe before he finally reaches out to Zatanna, requesting that she come and help him investigate the creatures. Things are starting to happen faster and faster, magic is being shifted and altered and now is the time to reach out. Stephen closes his phone and then reaches out with a hand, and a glowing golden circle appears in the air and then slides down, revealing the other assistant he wanted in the event of something truly goes wrong. He brings forth Thor, the god of thunder with a wave of his hand, and interrupts the thunderer's meal. "Thor, it's urgent. I need your help." Stephen explains, while waiting for Zatanna to show up.

Thor has posed:
     Thor had been in the middle of feasting on a massive leg of turkey, the kind you usually only see at Ren Faires. Smoked to perfection, and a flagon of Asgardian ale in his other hand, filled to the brim with delightful, foamy goodness.

  "What say thee, sorcerer? What pestilence haunts your halls?" He asks, ripping into the turkey leg with the sounds of sinewy muscle tearing off the bone.

  Funny enough, he seemed relatively unfazed by this involuntary sojourn from Avengers Mansion mid-meal. Nor does he seem exactly rushed for that matter.

Zatanna Zatara has posed:
Somewhat by mundane contrast, Zatanna comes in the front door. All mystical oddity aside, the Sanctum's location in the Village makes it an ideal stop on a typical day out in downtown Manhattan. It's a nice area, and a refreshing change from Gotham, so the magician makes a day of it. There may be Big Gay Ice Cream involved.

However, once she passes the threshold, any sense that the building is remotely normal is left behind, and she arrives in the arena of her 'working' life. Well, one of her two. The rearrangements don't seem to surprise her too much, although they do lead her to a bit of curious wandering before she finds her way down that strange metal staircase and into the newly-transmogrified holding area.

"Love what you've done with the place, Stephen," she remarks, making her way down. "All this for our overgrown bedbugs?"

Oh, and there's Thor, mid-meal. "Sort of rude to bother a man during a meal, isn't it? If you'd told me we'd be eating, I'd have taken some of the ice cream to go."

Stephen Strange has posed:
    Stephen pauses to look towards Thor and blinks very very slowly at the god and is in the middle of taking a deep breath to respond to Thor when Zatanna makes her presence known. "I didn't do it, the house does it itself." Stephen explains. Eat your heart out TARDIS. Stephen lowers his hands as he turns towards the large window between them and the sedated enormous bug creature. "You can eat now if you'd like, but I imagine what we're going to be doing wont exactly leave us with the spare hands to eat." Stephen says with a nod towards Zatanna and a motion towards Thor. "You're our heavy hitter, should things go south." Stephen explains before turning and moving towards the door.

    A tap of his finger against the simple wooden knob and it unlocks, disarming the wards that have been set up, and the list of wards is neumerous, the air actually feels easier to breath as soon as he does. Zatanna and maybe even Thor would be able to know what that means.

    "So... Thoughts on where to begin?" Stephen asks as he steps up and motions towards the slumbering chittenous creature on the floor, that even on the ground like this it's nearly as tall as they are standing. Seems Stephen is going to let Zatanna take the lead.

Thor has posed:
     The son of Odin finishes his bite before setting the leg down on a nearby surface.

  As casual as can be, he walks toward Stephen, and begins drinking from the flagon, and not stopping.

Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug.

  For at least fifteen seconds he kept going, until he reached the bottom of the vessel. When he was done, the flagon was tossed aside with little care how it would break. The ceramic vessel smashed into hundreds of pieces as he reached out to the air.

  Soon, Mjolnir came crashing through the walls of the Sanctum, right into Thor's hand. "Very well, Strange. Show me these bedbugs, as the lady says."

Zatanna Zatara has posed:
"Honestly? Not really. Dissections are hardly my specialty," Zatanna remarks, eyebrows slightly raised and a somewhat dubious look cast back at Strange. If he expects her to be the knowing expert, he may find himself disappointed! "I can't say what we observed during the incident was all that telling. I did check my library afterward, and my guesses about the mountain spirit seem like they were mostly on the nose. But there's nothing in the local mythology that would fit these," and she gestures toward the captive bug and the remains of its comrades.

"So if I had to guess? The victim was indigenous, but its infestation wasn't."

With that said, the gesticulating hand returns to join its counterpart, resting on her hips. She glances over at Thor, who is still making his way through that large drink, and watches that spectacle to its completion before looking back again. "So we can assume they came from somewhere else, probably drawn by the ley lines, by the accumulation of energy that the mountain god represented. They could be extradimensional, even. So maybe try to identify what sort of resonance they have, see if it matches anything you recognize? I think as universe-hopping goes, you've got more experience, Strange."

Stephen Strange has posed:
    "Was hoping you wouldn't say that." Stephen smirks to Zatanna as his eyebrow shifts while looking towards Thor dowing a flaggon and smashing it in the darkness of the antechamber of the bugs' prison. "Um... you're cleaning that up." Stephen notes as he stops at a small station to clean his hands before slipping on a pair of latex gloves and grabbing a tray of tools for disection as well as a large tome beneath it. He moves through the room with bits and pieces of the other bugs, like something out of a horror movie. Soft white lights everywhere, no harsh shadows anywhere, everything is beyond sterile and clean. It doesn't appear to be magical any more other than the old leatherbound book in Stephen's arm.

    PUtting the book down and opening it up, Stephen holds up his hands and closes his eyes. He lifts off the ground, sitting crosslegged in the air as the tucks his legs beneath himself, allowing himself to enter a trance as the bug itself begins to twitch.

    Slowly more and more of the creatures enormous facilities return, until it is standing of it's own volition and it turns to face the east, opposite of Strange, and it rushes at the glass before it and crashes into it. Mystical energies begin to ebb off the creature as if the insides were turning to smoke and whisping out from between the bits of the shell segments, giving the thing a horrible white ghastly sort of look.

Thor has posed:
     "You take me from my dinner and you expect me to clean as a housemaid?" Thor seems less than pleased as they make their way through the Sanctum, not caring when where his feet fell.

  It wasn't until Strange started to do something to the large bug that Thor was even aware of it being alive. "Strange. The insect is about to breach its confine." He warned, before starting to swing Mjolnir around, getting ready to throw it at the insect, should the need require.

  If he hadn't had his back to the two magicians, they'd see quite the smile beginning to develop on his lips.

Zatanna Zatara has posed:
See? This is why you call an actual doctor when you want something Area 51'd.

Meanwhile, Zatanna takes her turn observing in her less scientific fashion. And with the combination of magic oversized terrarium, Strange's wards, and backup from Thor of all people, the doesn't seem overtly concerned by the bug's effort to escape its confines. She takes the opportunity, less frantic than when they first met the creatures, to get a good look, circling around the enclosure at a slow pace. "The last time, I was a little too busy setting them on fire," she recalls. "I didn't get a good sense for a lot of the details."

And then there's the magic junk, because she's not a cryptozoologist either, and just peeking at the thing in its cage isn't going to tell her much: "Nepo eht driht eye, dna laever eht ecnesse fo eht erutaerc."

At a baseline, Zatanna's Homo Magi origins allow her to perceive a great deal beyond the normal senses, to understand the workings of mystical forces as she observes them. But there is still room to focus that sense, to shift perceptions. The spell perhaps one more similar to the sort Strange might use, with its traditional imagery, although (fortunately) no actual physical third eye appears on the woman's forehead; instead she simply opens herself to other ways of seeing, exchanging the mundane for the supernal.

Stephen Strange has posed:
    Opening the third eye is enough for Zatanna to see that it's FLOWING with mystical energies, but in ways she's never seen a mystical creature do before. It's ... beautiful, and haunting, like, seeing a venmous snake for the first time. It's beautiful in its deadliness. It's alien and there's fields of magic never before considered.

    When it turns towards Zatanna's third eye, and then to the more readily devourable, Stephen, the creature lunges, mystical energies powering it's every movement, as if pure magic was the things blood, it's soul, it's ... mind. The pyshical form smashes into the glass again, but this time it's 'teeth' scrape against the glass as it reaches out and tries to bite onto Strange, it's many segmented and visibly sharp limbs scraping at the glass too, reaching towards Zatanna and even Thor now. It hungers for magic, and is reaching out to all sources indescriminately.

Thor has posed:
     Thor's eyes started to glow with electricity, each crash and scrape on the glass only served to pump up the Asgardian.

  "When will you know we have no other option, Strange?!" He harks, not wanting to smash through the glass unless it was necessary to put the creature down once and for all.

Zatanna Zatara has posed:
"It's definitely more than just a generic thaumavore," Zatanna eventually decides, after watching the spectacle of the creature through her expanded senses for the time. One might also wonder how -any- magical devouring creature could be called 'generic,' but no doubt these things do come in matters of degrees. And evidently, this creature exceeds the normal definition. Whether it's really necessary to explain it to Stephen (and whether or not Thor would care for such 'minor details'), she goes on: "It's not simply subsiding on a magical diet. It's fundamentally otherworldly, there's really not much of it that -isn't- magic, so I suppose it's obvious that's what it would eat."

As the creature's thrashing about inside the containing area gets a little more energetic, Zatanna continues to show little concern... until it comes thrashing up against the glass quite close to her. That is sudden and violent enough to startle her a little, and she steps back, even if the creature eventually recoils and turns back on Strange. And here, her brow furrows some.

"There's something familiar in it-" she finally says. "Similar to -you- Stephen, not that I'm sure how that's quite possible. Don't tell me you were working on some unusual experiment and somehow set this thing loose on us?"

Stephen Strange has posed:
    Stephen doesn't move from his trance, not yet, as the thing continues to ram around inside its confinement with abandon now, no longer trying to go a specific direction, or seek out the food it can sense, but now trying only to get free. It slams the main of its bulk into the opposite wall, and then with full force it smashes into the divider and it cracks, spiderwebs growing before Zatanna's two and a half eyes. And it knows.

    Taking a few scuttling steps back it rams back into the glass again, shattering the thing in a rain of glass and a puff of mystical wards being destroyed with pure brute force.

Thor has posed:
     Mjolnir's swinging moved in front of him, protecting himself from the glass as the creature breaks through. Thor tosses the mighty hammer at the insect. As soon as it clashes, Thor holds up his hand and calls the hammer back, only to smash it against the creature again and again. The Asgardian let out a battle cry as he battled with the escaped insect.

Zatanna Zatara has posed:
"Now seems good!" Zatanna quickly shouts as the creature hits the glass one last time and it starts to visibly fracture, only to, somewhat predictably, shatter on the next attempt. At least that moment of warning gives her time to back away, giving Thor both that spoken cue and plenty of room to step in and be the hero he was requested to be. She takes the opportunity to conjure her own shields in the meantime, juuuuuust in case.

Not that The Mighty Thor versus a single bug, no matter how big, really strikes her as a major threat. They killed a bunch of them before!

"Stephen, you still with us?" she calls, looking over her shoulder toward the meditating Wizard.

Stephen Strange has posed:
    The hammer pelts and smashes into the creature, though it does shift its attention from trying to bite Zatanna, to actively trying to eat the hammer itself. It senses great magics within the uru of Thor's mighty weapon. Though this could well be the creatures downfall as it does get a hold of the hammer, and the hammer doesn't stop, exploding out of the rear of the bug with ichor and fluids splattering the broken glass and floors of the sanctum before doing the same thing in the opposite direction when the hammer is recalled, causing the orange and blue goops to splater Thor and coat his hammer.

    Not something Thor hasn't dealt with before and yet it can't be pleasant any time he gets icky.

    Stephen falls to the ground as soon as the creature expires, landing with a heavy thud as he suddenly inhales his breath, snapping his eyes open and leaning forward to cough as he's trying to breath in too much air. "Oh my god... Wh-What just happened?" Stephen asks looking up from his hands and knees towards Zatanna and Thor, looking completely lost at the moment. A rare moment of weakness for the wizard in the eyes of those he'd call colleagues, if not, friends.

Thor has posed:
     As Thor called the hammer back, the wave of blue and orange was unavoidable. There, but for the grace of everyone, was Thor, having just closed his eyes as he was pelted with ichor.

  "The insect perished. Lady Zatanna said something about having a piece of you in there." Thor raised a hand to wipe off the neon colored viscera from his face, flinging it down after wiping it off with his hand.

Zatanna Zatara has posed:
"Ugh, this is not what I was expecting of my evening." Zatanna sounds only mildly annoyed. Maybe by Stephen's absence, maybe by his apparent involvement in this. Or maybe it's just because a sinlge drop of bug goop makes it allllll the way from Thor's smash-a-thon back over to get on her. Gross.

Despite the snark, Thor gets an appreciative up-nod for the thorough bug smashing, and then turning to look down at Stephen, Zatanna smirks, and offers an unecessary hand down toward the good Doctor. It might be a rare low, but kicking a man while he's down is pretty classless! "Didn't get any of that? Seems like you really were out of it." A quick glance back to the shattered container, and she adds the unecessary explanation: "It got loose."

"More the point, uh, best as I can tell the thing is made mostly of congealed magical energies. I can't tell if it was -ever- something normal, like some bettle that got saturated to the point it turned into that, or something spawned whole-cloth from magical residue. But it looked a lot like your work, Stephen." The last delivered with a more solemn, serious note "You weren't doing anything that would have intentionally created something like this, I assume?" All jokes aside, his reputation is hardly one of careless 'Mad Wizard' shenanigans. "So- I don't know. Maybe your work drew them, or somehow, by some side-effect, brought them into being."