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Profile

[PLAYER]
Name: Michelle
AIM/e-mail: vervainwolf/marvelousbooks@hotmail.com
Timezone: US Central

[CHARACTER]
Name: Dr. Stephen Strange
Codename: Dr. Strange
Age: 55
Character Base: Dr. Strange

Home Reality:
*Earth-707: Mostly identical to Earth-616 up to the present day, except Dr. Strange is released from his magical tutelage under the Ancient One earlier than he should have been. Life clicks along, crises happen as in Earth-616, and eventually, some time in the future, Strange decides that what’s best for everyone is to bring the world under his dominion, and he’s got the magical power to do so. This is not a good thing for numerous reasons.

What did this person do wrong to be pulled out by the Timebroker?
*His arrogance coupled with his power is a massive disaster waiting to happen in the form of the world conquest and demons that break free of a poorly cast summoning circle. He needs to delve deeper into his magic to teach him not only how spells should be cast, but when and why, which will hopefully come through tempering his arrogance.

Appearance:
Dr. Stephen Strange is about average height, but often appears taller, and is lean to the point of bony. His face is well-worn, lined and often tired, his dark hair well salted with gray; long days and nights of reading occasionally drive him to glasses, and when he gets wrapped up in his work, he tends to forget to shave, giving him a scruffy beard. His hands were once graceful, but now are scarred and often tremble and ache in the cold, the constant reminder of the crash that effectively ended his career as a surgeon. His clothes, however, proclaim him a sorcerer with their silks and brocades and strong patterns, along with the sweep of a cloak about his feet and the sparkle of several rings on his fingers; outlandish clothing at best, and certainly distinct.

PB: Jeremy Irons

Powers / Skills
Stephen Strange is one of the most powerful sorcerers, with the potential to be the foremost in the world. He is adept at both arcane and divinely based spells; both can produce the same effects, ranging from simple combative magics to the most complex of scrying. Major categories of spells include Conjurations and Banishments (summoning things and sending them back), Illusions (creating pretty lights), Scrying (seeing things), Transmutations (changing things), and Transportation (sending people or things places), and Combative magics (shielding and fighting) with considerable overlap with some spells.

Arcane spells take considerable prep work, often involving astrological calculations and chalk circles and symbols on the floor and hefty research in very thick spellbooks; fortunately, these spells can be prepared and cast in advance and stored in a compact form for release with a key phrase and gesture later, though they cannot last too long as such. Divine spells merely call on the extradimensional entity (such as Stephen’s patron of the Vishanti or the Octessence) in question, and hope they’re in a good mood to grant the spell.

Both types have nuanced differences in strengths and potential consequences, and the key to being a good sorcerer is knowing which spell to use in which situation; when he has access to his full library of spellbooks and inventory of enchanted items, Stephen just about has a magical answer to anything that comes his way. It’s just the finding the spell or artifact that’s the hard part, and once divorced from his library, his repertoire of spells is cut down dramatically. His assorted magical items can be even harder to find, often leaving him with only his Cloak of Levitation (granting fairly low and slow flight) and the Eye of Agamotto (a general-purpose scrying tool he can manipulate to find various things, from portals to people).

Weaknesses:
Aside from his own innate personality, Stephen’s greatest weaknesses are in the magic that gives him his power. Magic is not a logical thing, and attempting to apply order to it - even a mere indexing system - tends to result in an explosion of some kind. Because of this, mixing magic and technology is also a bad idea, nor does magic mimic technology well, if at all: there are no magic-based generators, and magic’s ability to heal is severely limited. Comparatively speaking, a mutant or other superpowered who has control over a certain element or skill - such as Telekinesis or summoning fire - will always be better at it than the spell: Stephen's Telekinesis is slow and takes considerable concentration, and is limited in scope to a few immediate feet.

While Stephen is a powerful sorcerer, both he and magic have their limits; Stephen cannot simply do whatever he wishes. If he does not have a spell, either due to lack of inclusion in his spellbooks or through not existing at all, he cannot cast and therefore cannot change some things. While the Timebroker was just thoughtful enough to bring along one of Stephen's spellbooks to his new dimension, that book does not contain everything - far from it. For example, most Transportation spells and certainly all the larger ones, including Teleportation, are missing, and therefore outside his current repertoire. Furthermore, Stephen has always been better at some spells than others, either through natural talent or finding them distasteful to cast: he's good at Banishing and Scrying, but dislikes Conjuring in the first place, and finds that spells of Illusion (especially creating images, though also invisibility) make his head hurt, and he hasn't had much practice with most of the Combative spells, preferring to to stick to the few he knows, which may or may not be effective in certain circumstances.

Most importantly, Sorcerer Supreme or not, there are still some spells that are too powerful for him to cast. All magic takes energy to cast, both the physical time and energy of research and preparing the particular ritual, and mystically-physical energy to cast the spell itself; the larger the spell, the more energy and power it demands of the sorcerer. Some spells completely draining Strange, sending him straight to bed for the rest of the day or week, while others are beyond his reach. Even lesser spells require rest after they are cast, and he certainly feels the strain of casting many spells in a row.

Part of the innate nature of magic is the need for absolute confidence, or the assurance that the spell will work: uncertainty over one’s own abilities or about the spell usually translates into a poorly cast spell...though spells can also fail due to legitimate flaws in preparation. Sometimes spells that usually need hours of preparation and casting time can be cast on the fly with sheer confidence that they will work, however, this can backfire horribly.

While some spells such as Telekinesis are simple enough to be memorized and require very little ceremony to cast, and as such Stephen has them “on tap,” most are complex enough that they require the extremely thorough research and preparation, even and especially spells that are appropriately destructive and thus useful for combat. Shielding spells take almost as much work to cast as most major workings, and even then they tend to be limited to particular types of shields, and Stephen can be wounded just as easily as anyone else without super-durability. This means that Stephen can quite easily be ambushed and have little magical answer to it, and improvisation with spells can only go so far. Furthermore, his hands are still scarred and damaged; though the strain and stress that made the tremors so acute when he was first searching for a cure have eased, they are still present. As that is the case, he still sometimes has difficulty with fine details, and his handwriting tends to be atrocious at best.

In spite of his many years as a sorcerer, Stephen's first training was still based in logic, and when he still sometimes attempt to apply logic to magic, he ends up only frustrating himself. While there is little doubt that Stephen is brilliant, magic is not always impressed by intelligence alone, and further, his age makes him slow to modernize: he routinely fights with his computer, which was forced on him by necessity over his protests.

Personality:
The same qualities that made Dr. Stephen Strange a good surgeon make him an excellent sorcerer: concentration bordering on obsession, focus on details, and a great deal of self-confidence - a confidence that would rather bluff when he doesn't really know the answer then admit he doesn't know. In that absolute confidence magic demands, Stephen's Achilles' Heel has always been his arrogance, and that hasn't changed since he became a sorcerer; if anything, it’s only become worse due to the very real and very great powers at his disposal.

Fortunately, for magic, arrogance through confidence can work quite well. It doesn't work so well with real life - he never wants to look ignorant, so if he doesn't know something, he bluffs. It's usually a good bluff and sometimes he's even right, but he's still faking it. Even when faced with the fact that he's wrong, he is very reluctant to admit it and apologize. It is a credit to him that at least his bluffs and general arrogance come about in response to a desire to help, seeded in his medical training and nurtured during his tutelage under the Ancient One.

Combined with Stephen's focus and dedication, he has a curious nature, enjoying figuring out puzzles ranging from mundane crosswords and Suduko to the magical puzzles that consume the bulk of his attentions. His innate nature usually means that he is fundamentally incapable of leaving these puzzles alone until they're solved; he is generally fairly solitary by preference, not particularly interested in "the real world", and especially not when he has a puzzle to solve. It might reflect dedication to his art and his duties, but it makes him a lousy friend as he retreats to his workroom for days (sometimes weeks) on end, completely absorbed in searching for the answer to a problem and ignoring all else.

While Stephen likes to present himself as the quintessential academic, even if he’s currently wearing brocade and more jewelry than most women, beneath the facade of clinical detachment, he is very human and has a passionate nature buried deep beneath clinical eyes. It is that sense of having a calling, to medicine or to magic, that drives him to throw himself into projects where he might not be needed. Used to acting when confronted with a problem, as his medical training taught him, Strange sometimes struggles with the idea that sometimes the biggest spell isn't the answer; sometimes a spell isn't the answer at all. But he enjoys casting, so he sometimes can't help himself: it taps into a dramatic side of him that struggles to free itself of his general professionalism.

Overview:
Born in 1930 in a small Nebraska town, Stephen Strange grew up during a hard time, though his family was well-enough off, but he'd always been ambitious and driven, even as a young man; he saw himself as being too intelligent for his surroundings and wanted to escape his provincial life, and in time, he did, fleeing East for college and medical school. With a natural talent and brilliance, Stephen became Doctor Strange, Neurosurgeon, and therefore allowed to indulge his arrogance and whims - taking on only the patients who could pay well, indulging a craving for fast cars and beautiful women because he'd earned it, and it was as far as he could get from Nebraska.

Simply put, Dr. Strange was not a good person.

Then he was in a car accident that caused considerable damage to his hands, leaving him with a permanent tremor; it varied in severity from day to day and as his moods and actions influenced it, but that only meant that they were unreliable and thus, he'd never operate again, given the extremely delicate nature of his work.

Too proud to accept a position as a "mere" consultant, Stephen swept out of the hospital and vowed he'd find a cure. Unfortunately, medicine being what it was, there was nothing any reputable doctor could have done; unfortunately, Stephen being the kind of man he was, he didn't take "no" for an answer. Legitimate doctors led to quacks as he devoted his considerable focus and wealth to chasing any promise of a cure...and eventually, whispers led him to Tibet, to a man said to be deathless - Stephen figured that if someone had the medical know-how to extend life, he could cure nerve damage.

The man in question, sequestered in his lonely temple, could not heal Stephen either. But he could offer peace, enlightenment...and magic (notably, in that order). Once he stopped sulking and started listening and opening his heart and mind, Stephen found that beneath his usual arrogance there was a better man. More importantly, that his true calling was not surgery, but magic, a natural expansion of his curiosity. And so it was that Stephen Strange became the devoted acolyte of the Ancient One, and learned magic - the enlightenment he struggled with, but magic came even easier than his medical studies had. And with the ease of the power came a renewal of his pet sin of Arrogance, at least this time directed to using his power to benefit others rather than himself.

Concerned with a growing crisis just beyond the portals that led to Earth, the Ancient One neglected to trim back the regrowth of Stephen’s arrogance, and instead shooed him out into the world as a fully trained sorcerer while he was busy confronting evil in other dimensions. Stephen was more than happy to head back, eager to put all his newfound skills to use...only to find that the Ancient One actually did reside on a timeless demi-plane, meaning he stepped back into the world not in 1973, when he left it, but 1998, and the technology that had sped past him apparently hated him to boot.

Still, he settled into Greenwich Villiage in New York City, where cloaks and brocade vests rarely got a second look, and worked on developing and honing his magic. Eventually, mostly through his intricate knowledge of spellcraft rather than strict wisdom, he received the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme, responsible for keeping an eye on all the portals leading to Earth’s dimension. Knowing this to be of the utmost importance and taking his responsibilities seriously, Stephen started looking for a way to become deathless, as the Ancient One had done before him, the better to continue to protect the people of Earth...

...and right about as he found a spell and started chalking in the runes, the Timebroker approaches him and pulls him out of his reality. He takes the presence of alternate realities in stride, and as such, is more miffed by the interruption of his work than confused by the concept.

[SAMPLE]
Books floated at various heights and various locations about the room, and Stephen moved from one to another, checking the symbols and incantation of the ritual, hardly noticing when he began levitating and when he hit the smooth wood floor to cross to another one. The room was wonderfully large and almost completely open, and most times, filled with light that made it easy to work in. But now, all he cared about was that he wouldn’t trip over anything, and he’d cast so many spells here that a perfect circle was practically engraved in the floor.

He told himself he’d cast larger spells before, or more powerful ones, but he rather thought this would be the most important one. No matter what dire warnings the spellbooks prophesied, Stephen knew he’d be able to manage it - he was the Sorcerer Supreme for a reason, after all, and that meant he had to protect Earth. Logically, the best way to do that was to take steps to ensure that protection forever.

And after that...Stephen frowned to himself as he started chalking in the first circle of runes. Well, there were so many things out there that wanted to destroy humanity, including humanity itself. Stephen was intimately familiar with the self-destructive nature of humans, of how anger directed within and without could spiral out and effect a vast range of people. Harmony and peace was far better, but few people cared to listen to such quieter words when hate shouted so loudly. Perhaps he needed to make people listen...

Stephen finished the first circle and sat back on his haunches. Those ideas would keep, until he could best explore them and research the best possible answer to the problem. Right now, the scent of powerful magic lingered in his work room - wax and insence mingled with chalk and crackling with power - and perfecting the spell called him. But when he reached for the second color for the second ring of runes, he came up with only a nub. He could have sworn he’d checked that he had everything before he began, as he always did, but no matter now. He had to have it, and the spell was incomplete enough it would keep long enough for him to fetch what he needed.

He went out to the store, not bothering to exchange his Cloak of Levitation for something more mundane, and with a single encounter of an indistinct man, was forcibly whisked away from his spell, never to complete it.