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[portalling]

stephen strange

crystals · correspondence · private scenes

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[elegiaque]

Kirkwall turned out to be less out of the way than hoped, I think.

( is dry, in answer. hightown— probably won't. hopefully, it will be a sight more temporary. )

I was still Lady Vauquelin when we first came here. So much has changed since Trevelyan ate shit, but we're still fighting the same fucking wars, so, I don't know.

[portalling]

( a beat, a consideration. if this isn’t safe to ask, so shoot him, but historically she hasn’t minded the asking. so far. )

What’s the difference between Vauquelin and Baudin?

[elegiaque]

( it doesn't come up often, any more. mostly — people know, or it's not relevant, or there's just no reason to ask. she doesn't answer immediately, but: )

You've seen the portrait on La Souveraineté? The elven woman in the foyer.

( elegant, beautiful; a little confronting, a woman wearing only a man's shirt and gwenaëlle's locket. long limbs. probably not tall, when she was stood up, with gwenaëlle's same colouring and an expression that's hard to read. )

[portalling]

Yes. ( it was a small, fleeting detail, but he has a photographic memory and the woman was striking. ) There’s a familial resemblance.

[elegiaque]

My parents were the Comte and Comtesse de Vauquelin — “Vauquelin de Vauquelin”, it's very funny,

( she doesn't laugh, but she doesn't sound torn up, just: says it, a thing that she is saying, )

— and Guenievre Baudin, in the portrait, bore and birthed me. La comtesse couldn't carry a pregnancy to term, here's my lord's pregnant mistress who shares her colouring, so she goes from lady's maid to estate chatelaine in the space of one pregnancy. Well, one real pregnancy. “Her” baby “dies”,

( and so does the midwife who delivered her, and the entire small family she had been attending to a week later, in a tragic housefire that gwenaëlle has never heard about, )

and I am named Gwenaëlle Vauquelin, my lord's legitimate heir. It's still my name, ( for the sake of clarity and correctness, ) in an, I suppose, legal sense. But I annoyed a few of the wrong people a few years ago, and the whole affair was exposed, and I've used hers the Empress stripped me of my titles and inheritance.

[portalling]

( it’s a deeper dive on topics she’s hinted at before, and all so removed from the things he knows: this sounds like peak historical intrigue, a soap opera storyline for the nobility, all mistresses and hidden pregnancies and empresses. nobility still exists back on modern earth, sure, but this still seems a step beyond the celebrity trysts plastered all over the tabloids. royalty would still care about this sort of thing, maybe.

no wonder there’s that whole thing about wanting to tell her own details, rather than have it told for her. there’s a pause for a moment, strange trying to find the right words. in the end he tries to hit the same matter-of-fact note, just, here it is, a thing that he is saying: )

You’ve had such a very colourful life.

[elegiaque]

My grandfather fucked his way into a title, and my lord fucked his way out of one— I don't think that's my colourful life.

( it's very dry. )

I still have ties to that world, but not as many as people tend to assume.

[portalling]

I suppose that is, among other things, why you’re in Forces rather than Diplomacy.

[elegiaque]

I'm in Forces because the previous Commander in the position would never have forced me into the field when I was unready,

( a thing that she clearly does and did not take for granted across the board, )

so hers was the only division that I was willing to consider being in, at the time.

[portalling]

And now, ( genuinely impressed, ) you can just about break someone’s spine with an anchor gauntlet punch. Someday you’ll have to show me how you do that.

[elegiaque]

( primly pedantic: )

I can definitely break their spine.

[portalling]

I was trying to be polite. Some people get weird about snapping spines.

[elegiaque]

Oh, and I've led a colourful life.

[portalling]

Life with the gods and demons and zombies and murderous lizardmen is melodramatic and all but, like, it’s a different kind of melodrama.

[elegiaque]

Tell me about the lizardmen.

[portalling]

Okay, amendment: murderous lizardman.

( this is the sort of insanity he’s gotten accustomed to; tends to take in stride. it’s interesting and he knows it’s interesting, but it’s not the same kind of salacious as imperial scandal. )

I, hm, ( this part is really rather unflattering, which is why he opts to just be straightforward about his mistakes, ) fucked up a spell, and it sundered the barriers between worlds. Created the equivalent of multiple rifts, pulling in people from other worlds who had a grudge against this spider-themed vigilante hero. One was a man made out of electricity, another made out of sand, another with metallic octopus tentacles he’d grafted to his body. And one was a doctor who’d decided he wanted to turn the entire city in his homeworld into lizard-people because it was… I don’t know, the peak physical specimen in his opinion, or something? The motivations were unclear.

He had a lot of scales and teeth. Big hulking lizardman. There was a lot of property damage when the group fought him, but it was technically just another day at the office, all things considered.

[elegiaque]

( now, of all the ways that a conversation about a lizardman could have gone, gwenaëlle could not have been prepared for— )

You sundered the barriers between worlds?

( yeah, she heard him, and it's not like that could possibly mean some other, secret thing, surely, but

bro what the fuck. )

[portalling]

I mean, it was an accident.

( said sheepishly, the way one might use for ‘oops i broke the milk bottle’ and not ‘oops i broke the multiverse’. )

It’s also why I wasn’t particularly surprised by rifts when I came here, because we’d already experienced something similar. And I’d strived to put those visitors back where they came from.

( strange has a continual tendency to drop extremely concerning information into casual conversation, but even he has the presence of mind to hesitate here before adding, )

Where I come from, if our equivalent of a rifter stays in a universe which isn’t their own — if you keep wearing those barriers between worlds thin, with too much travel — it can trigger a thing called an incursion. Two worlds colliding, and one of them usually winds up destroyed. An entire universe gone, everyone dead. So I am, needless to say, extremely relieved to hear that that isn’t the case here and that rifters have been here for years without the world ending.

[elegiaque]

( yes, that's. a relief. that's the word she's looking for, listening to him, surely.

that having been said (or not): )

I don't think you should say that, ( more carefully, ) to anyone else.

[portalling]

Yeah, there’s a reason I haven’t until now. I’m not exactly keen on having rifters rounded up with torches and pitchforks by an angry mob. It already seems close enough, some days.

[elegiaque]

If that had been on the table seven years ago, you might have been killed on sight, ( does not seem an unreasonable assessment. ) I was honestly surprised no one was in the first place. I'd have argued for it, if someone had told me that was a risk.

( and from a significantly more potentially influential position, too. )

[portalling]

( a normal reaction to this piece of information, maybe, would be some kind of shock or horror or even personal affront. most people might blanch a little at someone saying they’d advocate for him being killed on sight. stephen strange, though, takes a moment to consider and then concludes: )

And you’d have been right to argue for it.

It’s practically what I advocated for our own visitors back home.

( +10 approval points for you, gwen )

[elegiaque]

( the pause is real surprise—

interesting. good. but— not what she expected. )

Rifters didn't exactly go out of their way to seem trustworthy, at the time. Galadriel threatened to try to open rifts, it was a whole— ( she makes a sound, breath between her teeth. ) Thing.

[portalling]

And then there was the woman trying to yeet herself through a rift, which can’t have been good for reputation, surely. Unless that was the same person?

( there’s his own slight pause. considering, then, )

I can’t purposefully open rifts, even back home. If that’s a concern. It was an accident, an existential mangling of how the spell was supposed to work. There’s a girl back home who can punch her way into other universes and consciously bring people with her, but she’s the only one who can do it. It’s not within my capabilities ordinarily.

[elegiaque]

( he probably hears her mutter different bitch, but she's more interested in the rest of what he has to say than the finer details of who fucked up what and how in the past already—

especially. especially given, reluctantly, )

I think that it could be within mine.

( hypothetically, but— )

I have the strongest anchor-shard. It has been done. Galadriel believed it could be reproduced, even if we've never— obviously no one pursued that. I'm not going to pursue that.