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OOC INFORMATION
Player Name: Gee
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
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Other Characters in Game: n/a
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Dr. Stephen Strange
Canon: MCU
Canon Point: Post-Endgame, pre-anything else in the MCU continuity.
Background: Wiki!
Suitability: Stephen’s time as a sorcerer has really honed his interest in the magical and previously unknown to him, not to mention his hero skills and tendencies. Willing to make incredibly difficult decisions and put his life, and on occasion the lives of billions of others, on the line in pursuit of the best possible outcome, Stephen is likely to step up to the plate to attempt to steer and limit the scope of damage in times of conflict or danger. This may manifest in him involving himself directly in battles, defending settlements etc or attempting to throw a hidden third track at trolley problem style quests. It might also involve him doing his best to insinuate himself into a position of favour where he’s listened to by leader types, or neutral parties who others might try to persuade to join the war, whoever he can influence to protect the most people. Once he accepts that this is his reality now, he’ll want to be of use to the people of this world, and while he’s no trained diplomat he’s spent one portion of his life smooth-talking (fellow) rich people and the other more recent portion preventing the world from coming to an end through actions in the field so he’s very likely to combine and repurpose those skills in whatever way he perceives best serves the world and its people.
A healthy fascination with the arcane, esoteric and fantastical is not only his job but his life’s new passion, so he’ll also be throwing his all into uncovering mysteries to do with magic, gods and the Singularity. This could easily branch over into researching the root cause and a cure for the disease which robs people of their magical potential, as it kind of bridges both his medical and magical backgrounds.
I’ve lobbed a lot of potentials at the wall here and I’m sure during gameplay he’ll focus down into a specific area or combine them in a way that makes sense, but I wanted to offer a look at a few of the ways I can see him getting involved.
Powers:
Take a deep breath, maybe make yourself a cup of tea...
Eldritch magic, a form of light-based magic utilized by the Masters of the Mystic Arts that draws on energy external to the user to various effects, including:
Energy constructs, such as weapons, eldritch whips, and tao mandalas typically used as shields. These can be varying sizes, from small shields slightly wider than a couple of palms to larger mandalas or even spherical barriers big enough to protect multiple people from heavier impacts.
Locator spell, usually used in conjunction with a sling ring to create portals, but without his ring he can still presumably generate a spell that will locate another person using a piece of theirs or their family’s DNA, he just won’t be able to attach that spell to a portal to transport to them.
Elemental manipulation, he can manipulate eldritch energy to interact with the wider world, for instance casting energy out to clear the street of dust and debris in Infinity War, or utilising magic to manipulate vast quantities of lake water in Endgame.
Item enchantment, he can imbue items with magic to varying effects, such as casting a warding spell on an object that burns anybody who attempts to touch it, unbreakable unless he willingly removes it. He’s also an innovator so has likely researched and experimented with how to imbue items with power, so could potentially create weapons with low levels of magical ability for other people to wield.
Binding spells, red bands of power used to bind particularly strong enemies.
Energy blasts, he goes pew pew with big ol’ energy beams.
Transformation spells, he can convert energy into other forms, so if attacked with a spell or other kind of power that is energy-based he can transform it into something else before it can reach him… sometimes that thing is butterflies. Why not.
I haven’t checked in with you guys about this on the FAQ yet because it only just occurred to me and time is ticking, but as the chances are he knows how to enchant items with magical power it might be possible for him to use materials from this world or his transmutation power (detailed below) to create a sling ring and imbue it with the necessary enchantments to make it functional, enabling him to use his portals. I’m not sure if these count as space travel or if you meant ‘the great void of’ rather than just moving through space on earth, but if portals are an option and he does manufacture himself a sling ring he can also:
Create portals, using eldritch magic he can create portals to anywhere he can picture in his mind or anywhere he can pinpoint using a locator spell. He can also do things like set up two portals to act as an entry and exit point rather than one acting as a doorway, which can be useful in combat situations.
Mirror dimension, the sling ring also usually gives him access to the mirror dimension, a little pocket dimension that sits over reality and allows you to create an inception-style picasso out of your local cathedral without actually affecting the real world. It’s a good training space and potential prison that can only be accessed with a sling ring, and it’s also very easy to say it’s specific to Earth and can’t be accessed here at all to nerf it because yikes that’s an interdimensional travel power.
Other magical skills he has that don’t seem specific to Eldritch magic include:
Duplication spell, creating identical dupes of things. This can include objects and people, but these things are essentially illusions: if he duplicates a cup of tea you wouldn’t be able to drink them all, and interacting with the duplicates would result in them vanishing. He can create as many at once as he likes. Regarding copies of himself, they copy the original and are easily defeated. They can still do harm and interact with others using magic he casts, but if engaged physically they are unlikely to hold long. If Stephen himself is significantly harmed or otherwise distracted, the spell will be broken.
Transmutation, he can change one thing into another. This is seen in effect in Thor: Ragnarok when he changes Thor’s tea into a large, self-filling mug of beer. Whether these things exist in Stephen’s imagination and he can then build them immediately into reality using the material energy of the previous item or he just steals stuff from somewhere else nearby and swaps it in in an instant is ???? a mystery I do not have or wish to seek the answer to. Movie magic built into his actual magic skillset... upsetting.
Conjuration, he can summon items from the nearby vicinity to him, having them magically appear, ie. the umbrella stand for Mjolnir in Thor: Ragnarok.
Teleportation, he can travel and transport others short distances without a sling ring, moving in an instant with no need for portals (unsure if this is what you mean by space travel or if you meant literal space, happy to nerf if you meant any kind of travelling through space!)
Astral projection, can separate his spirit from his body and exist in astral form. His body loses consciousness as he does this and is left defenceless, though he can will his astral form to be perceived by others if needs be. (Again this one technically relates to another dimension, the astral plane, so if it needs nerfing that’s no problem and goodbye ghostie!)
He has a number of abilities that combine various elements of the above abilities, for instance a spell that opens up chasms in the ground for glowing purple tentacles to emerge and pull enemies back into the earth is likely a friendly combination of energy constructs and elemental manipulation. Given that he’s incredibly intuitive and prone to innovation, he tends to make up his own spells and push the boundaries of existing ones on the fly.
Doctor Strange magic in general seems to basically be ‘we tried to create rules but that lasted for one movie, that would look cool/funny/reinforce the idea that this man is a powerful magic man but also hilariously a wizard, let’s do it,’ so it’s fun to be able to play around with spells a bit within the framework of what we’ve already seen, but I’m very aware that this man is ridiculously OP as a result so I’ll be mindful of that! I’m also happy for anything to be nerfed and don’t care how much by, whatever is necessary to make him playable in the setting is fine by me! I’m just sorry for the absolute wall of text… yikes.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
There are many defining moments in Stephen’s life but the biggest turning point for him was the moment the Ancient One thrust him out on a tour of the multiverse and opened his eyes to the impossible extent of the things he did not know. Previous to that he’d been hurting and bitter, thought of himself as just another tiny, momentary speck in an indifferent universe. Absolved himself of responsibility for his circumstances by blaming the universe for being so vast and devoid of meaning that it let bad things happen to talented neurosurgeons, and him looking at brain scans on his phone while speeding up a winding cliff road had had absolutely nothing to do with it.
After being shown that the universe is not just the universe, not just empty nothingness and lumps of floating rock but a vast multiverse teeming with life and with terror and with unfathomable beauty, his mind opened. He wanted there to be more to the world than cold indifference. He wanted desperately to fight to keep hold of that unfathomable expanse, to explore the impossible, know more, and in doing so he began to recover. Through hard work, focused dedication and careful guidance, he regained control over his own life, overcame his hatred of his disability and learned that his worth was intrinsic, not tied to his hands.
Being introduced to the multiverse saved his life. It reignited his imagination and his will to live after his self-imposed accident, was the stepping-off point for rediscovering himself and redefining his identity, and the beginning of a journey that would ultimately lead him to abandoning the persona he’d built up over the years so he could find out what he was capable of without it. Turns out, he actually has quite a lot to offer the world, neurosurgeon or not.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
For a long time, his Hippocratic Oath was a moral code he took for granted - most notably the pledge to do no harm. Easy enough when you're a super rich neurosurgeon with a perfect surgical record, but it became flexible fairly swiftly after becoming a sorcerer and has loosened up more and more ever since. Initially he felt awful for killing a man in self-defence and vowed to never do it again, but by the end of his movie he sent the human antagonists off to suffer an agonising eternity in another dimension, and by Infinity War he was making decisions which affected the lives of billions and where the best case scenario still necessitated deaths and came with collateral damage in the millions (if not billions universally). When his friend Karl Mordo's rigid morality had him leave the Masters of the Mystic Arts altogether, Strange recognised that being too strictly bound to a personal philosophy can be as detrimental as not having one at all.
Essentially, Stephen’s adapted his existing moral code to account for his new power and the responsibilities that come with it. It’s his job to protect the planet and the dimension. To this end he will let people die if it serves a higher purpose, drag enemy soldiers into lethal chasms if it edges a friendly force closer to victory where the alternative is mass genocide. Do no harm becomes weigh the lives in the balance and do the least harm to save the most you can, and these are calculations he can make in an instant and act on without hesitation no matter how uncomfortable or difficult to live with they might be.
This revised code allows him a lot more flexibility of action - he'll do his best to use his tactical ingenuity and imagination to find solutions which avoid causing significant harm wherever possible, and he’ll opt for the non-lethal option where there’s a viable one every time, but ultimately he considers himself responsible for saving lives and protecting reality first and foremost and will do what he must to achieve that end no matter the personal or moral cost.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Patience and compassion. During his medical career Stephen became the ‘be the best as fast as you can and use that talent to do prestigious work and take on only the patients whose medical problems will look good on your resume’ type, and it’s something he deeply regrets. There have been times in his life when he’s been treated with care and/or patience when he was busy being a self-absorbed, spiteful, belligerent asshole, and it’s left him with huge admiration for the kinds of people who can stand by someone who needs them even while they’re lashing out in fear.
In spite of how he wound up, he’s naturally inclined towards care for others (see: patching up a street dog) which often makes his shift away from his previous morality painful for him, but nurturing his compassion is too important to him to try to stifle it again. Having the best interests of other people at heart, even when you can’t always allow that to inform your decisions, grounds people in humanity. It’s something he’ll recognise and gravitate to in others, automatically holding a measure of respect for anyone who is motivated by a compassion for people. He knows how difficult a trait that can be to maintain and how much easier it would always be to give it up.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
The part of himself he least likes is his old tendency to be guided by fear, and the ways he's allowed it to motivate and warp him.
His fear of failure was born from the loss of his sister, who drowned before he knew how to save her (a comic plot point not mentioned in the movie bit mentioned by the creatives according to a wiki footnote so I factor it in, hope that's okay!) After that he hunted down professional progress with a fervor born of fearing the consequences of failing to succeed - an inability to save lives. It had him sculpt himself into a perfectionist, someone with a perfect record and prestigious skill, and somewhere along the line that skill got to his head. He became arrogant. He wouldn't let the patients he determined he couldn't save past his secretary, would cycle through the scans of the grievously injured in search of the most interesting cases where his ego convinced him only he could possibly succeed. He turned his focus to research and refused requests to commit himself to saving lives in the ER, gave speeches at galas and conferences, appeared on TV to discuss medical research developments-- he became addicted to the lifestyle, to his success, self-absorbed and unable to see far beyond his next accolade or dinner party.
His fear of losing all that did a number on him too. He'd wrapped his identity so completely up in the life he'd built that when he was faced with losing it he couldn't handle it. Rather than accept things as they were, he underwent operation after operation, seeking out ever more experimental surgeries to fix what he'd broken. He sold everything he had in desperate pursuit of regaining his steady hands and claiming back his life, as though his hands were his only worth. When Christine, ex-girlfriend turned friend who helped him care for himself since the accident, tried to explain to him that life without his previous work would still be life and asked him to stop because watching him was hurting her, he became spiteful and cruel, mocking her and devaluing their relationship, doing anything he could to not have to listen to or accept what she was saying.
His fear has always been the thing that's corrupted him and held him back from offering people all the use he could be to them. He resents all the things he can be when living according to it: arrogant, unkind, vindictive, self-absorbed. He consults it now only to avoid being overtaken by it, to make sure the path he takes leads him in the opposite direction to the one his fear would have him walk. It's the most dangerous part of him and one he has to work hard even now to keep in check.
What is their sign, and why? The High Priestess. His strongest options are this and the Magician, but I'd say the Magician was more relevant to him while still wrapped up in his fear-driven need to be the best. At his core, and in the words of the Ancient One, he has always been “a man looking at the world through a keyhole. [He’s] spent [his] whole life trying to widen that keyhole. To see more, to know more.”
He's driven and can study a topic to mastery, but his motivation is now more often intrigue, fascination, passion or practicality than single-minded focus on his discipline. He's totally enthralled by magic but is equally eager to learn whatever catches his attention, anything that might provide an unexpected solve somewhere down the line. He'll study spellbooks and myths, languages and public records of threats to planetary or dimensional safety, to name a few choice areas relevant to his craft. He'll also create vast and always accurate mental databases of current and historical musical releases. Music is good, he listens to a lot of it, and his mind is set up well for storing facts. It's fun information to keep around. Knowing things is something he takes both pleasure and pride in.
He's an exceptionally skilled sorcerer and he trained and studied hard to get there, but he’s also a gifted individual with an eidetic memory that allowed him to study for an MD and PhD simultaneously, learn enough ancient Sanskrit in a year to read ancient tomes, and memorise his entire record collection and more besides alongside his medical training and practice. So as much as he’s prone to mastery of the things he sets his mind on, half of it seems to be a natural gift, and the pursuit of sorcery itself was motivated initially by awe. He was given a glimpse of the multiverse and he couldn't bear to let that door close on him. When it did, he beat on it for hours, begging to be let back in until his voice went hoarse. If it hadn’t opened, he’d have waited for days.
A skilled martial artist, tactician and surgeon, a willing explorer of dimensions and bane of primordial entities, a medical doctor, a doctor of philosophy, a neuroscientist once bent on developing new treatments, a music enthusiast with an unparalleled recollection for release dates, it’s safe to say that he has a talent for learning and an eagerness to continue to seek knowledge for as long as he lives.
Stephen Strange is an expert at a good many things but the range is diverse and ever expanding, and underpinning it all is a compulsion, a wonder, a perpetual desire to know.
SAMPLES & ARRIVAL
Samples: Top level!
Arrival Scenario: Welcomed.
Player Name: Gee
Are you over 18?: Yes
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: n/a
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Dr. Stephen Strange
Canon: MCU
Canon Point: Post-Endgame, pre-anything else in the MCU continuity.
Background: Wiki!
Suitability: Stephen’s time as a sorcerer has really honed his interest in the magical and previously unknown to him, not to mention his hero skills and tendencies. Willing to make incredibly difficult decisions and put his life, and on occasion the lives of billions of others, on the line in pursuit of the best possible outcome, Stephen is likely to step up to the plate to attempt to steer and limit the scope of damage in times of conflict or danger. This may manifest in him involving himself directly in battles, defending settlements etc or attempting to throw a hidden third track at trolley problem style quests. It might also involve him doing his best to insinuate himself into a position of favour where he’s listened to by leader types, or neutral parties who others might try to persuade to join the war, whoever he can influence to protect the most people. Once he accepts that this is his reality now, he’ll want to be of use to the people of this world, and while he’s no trained diplomat he’s spent one portion of his life smooth-talking (fellow) rich people and the other more recent portion preventing the world from coming to an end through actions in the field so he’s very likely to combine and repurpose those skills in whatever way he perceives best serves the world and its people.
A healthy fascination with the arcane, esoteric and fantastical is not only his job but his life’s new passion, so he’ll also be throwing his all into uncovering mysteries to do with magic, gods and the Singularity. This could easily branch over into researching the root cause and a cure for the disease which robs people of their magical potential, as it kind of bridges both his medical and magical backgrounds.
I’ve lobbed a lot of potentials at the wall here and I’m sure during gameplay he’ll focus down into a specific area or combine them in a way that makes sense, but I wanted to offer a look at a few of the ways I can see him getting involved.
Powers:
Take a deep breath, maybe make yourself a cup of tea...
Eldritch magic, a form of light-based magic utilized by the Masters of the Mystic Arts that draws on energy external to the user to various effects, including:
Energy constructs, such as weapons, eldritch whips, and tao mandalas typically used as shields. These can be varying sizes, from small shields slightly wider than a couple of palms to larger mandalas or even spherical barriers big enough to protect multiple people from heavier impacts.
Locator spell, usually used in conjunction with a sling ring to create portals, but without his ring he can still presumably generate a spell that will locate another person using a piece of theirs or their family’s DNA, he just won’t be able to attach that spell to a portal to transport to them.
Elemental manipulation, he can manipulate eldritch energy to interact with the wider world, for instance casting energy out to clear the street of dust and debris in Infinity War, or utilising magic to manipulate vast quantities of lake water in Endgame.
Item enchantment, he can imbue items with magic to varying effects, such as casting a warding spell on an object that burns anybody who attempts to touch it, unbreakable unless he willingly removes it. He’s also an innovator so has likely researched and experimented with how to imbue items with power, so could potentially create weapons with low levels of magical ability for other people to wield.
Binding spells, red bands of power used to bind particularly strong enemies.
Energy blasts, he goes pew pew with big ol’ energy beams.
Transformation spells, he can convert energy into other forms, so if attacked with a spell or other kind of power that is energy-based he can transform it into something else before it can reach him… sometimes that thing is butterflies. Why not.
I haven’t checked in with you guys about this on the FAQ yet because it only just occurred to me and time is ticking, but as the chances are he knows how to enchant items with magical power it might be possible for him to use materials from this world or his transmutation power (detailed below) to create a sling ring and imbue it with the necessary enchantments to make it functional, enabling him to use his portals. I’m not sure if these count as space travel or if you meant ‘the great void of’ rather than just moving through space on earth, but if portals are an option and he does manufacture himself a sling ring he can also:
Create portals, using eldritch magic he can create portals to anywhere he can picture in his mind or anywhere he can pinpoint using a locator spell. He can also do things like set up two portals to act as an entry and exit point rather than one acting as a doorway, which can be useful in combat situations.
Mirror dimension, the sling ring also usually gives him access to the mirror dimension, a little pocket dimension that sits over reality and allows you to create an inception-style picasso out of your local cathedral without actually affecting the real world. It’s a good training space and potential prison that can only be accessed with a sling ring, and it’s also very easy to say it’s specific to Earth and can’t be accessed here at all to nerf it because yikes that’s an interdimensional travel power.
Other magical skills he has that don’t seem specific to Eldritch magic include:
Duplication spell, creating identical dupes of things. This can include objects and people, but these things are essentially illusions: if he duplicates a cup of tea you wouldn’t be able to drink them all, and interacting with the duplicates would result in them vanishing. He can create as many at once as he likes. Regarding copies of himself, they copy the original and are easily defeated. They can still do harm and interact with others using magic he casts, but if engaged physically they are unlikely to hold long. If Stephen himself is significantly harmed or otherwise distracted, the spell will be broken.
Transmutation, he can change one thing into another. This is seen in effect in Thor: Ragnarok when he changes Thor’s tea into a large, self-filling mug of beer. Whether these things exist in Stephen’s imagination and he can then build them immediately into reality using the material energy of the previous item or he just steals stuff from somewhere else nearby and swaps it in in an instant is ???? a mystery I do not have or wish to seek the answer to. Movie magic built into his actual magic skillset... upsetting.
Conjuration, he can summon items from the nearby vicinity to him, having them magically appear, ie. the umbrella stand for Mjolnir in Thor: Ragnarok.
Teleportation, he can travel and transport others short distances without a sling ring, moving in an instant with no need for portals (unsure if this is what you mean by space travel or if you meant literal space, happy to nerf if you meant any kind of travelling through space!)
Astral projection, can separate his spirit from his body and exist in astral form. His body loses consciousness as he does this and is left defenceless, though he can will his astral form to be perceived by others if needs be. (Again this one technically relates to another dimension, the astral plane, so if it needs nerfing that’s no problem and goodbye ghostie!)
He has a number of abilities that combine various elements of the above abilities, for instance a spell that opens up chasms in the ground for glowing purple tentacles to emerge and pull enemies back into the earth is likely a friendly combination of energy constructs and elemental manipulation. Given that he’s incredibly intuitive and prone to innovation, he tends to make up his own spells and push the boundaries of existing ones on the fly.
Doctor Strange magic in general seems to basically be ‘we tried to create rules but that lasted for one movie, that would look cool/funny/reinforce the idea that this man is a powerful magic man but also hilariously a wizard, let’s do it,’ so it’s fun to be able to play around with spells a bit within the framework of what we’ve already seen, but I’m very aware that this man is ridiculously OP as a result so I’ll be mindful of that! I’m also happy for anything to be nerfed and don’t care how much by, whatever is necessary to make him playable in the setting is fine by me! I’m just sorry for the absolute wall of text… yikes.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
There are many defining moments in Stephen’s life but the biggest turning point for him was the moment the Ancient One thrust him out on a tour of the multiverse and opened his eyes to the impossible extent of the things he did not know. Previous to that he’d been hurting and bitter, thought of himself as just another tiny, momentary speck in an indifferent universe. Absolved himself of responsibility for his circumstances by blaming the universe for being so vast and devoid of meaning that it let bad things happen to talented neurosurgeons, and him looking at brain scans on his phone while speeding up a winding cliff road had had absolutely nothing to do with it.
After being shown that the universe is not just the universe, not just empty nothingness and lumps of floating rock but a vast multiverse teeming with life and with terror and with unfathomable beauty, his mind opened. He wanted there to be more to the world than cold indifference. He wanted desperately to fight to keep hold of that unfathomable expanse, to explore the impossible, know more, and in doing so he began to recover. Through hard work, focused dedication and careful guidance, he regained control over his own life, overcame his hatred of his disability and learned that his worth was intrinsic, not tied to his hands.
Being introduced to the multiverse saved his life. It reignited his imagination and his will to live after his self-imposed accident, was the stepping-off point for rediscovering himself and redefining his identity, and the beginning of a journey that would ultimately lead him to abandoning the persona he’d built up over the years so he could find out what he was capable of without it. Turns out, he actually has quite a lot to offer the world, neurosurgeon or not.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
For a long time, his Hippocratic Oath was a moral code he took for granted - most notably the pledge to do no harm. Easy enough when you're a super rich neurosurgeon with a perfect surgical record, but it became flexible fairly swiftly after becoming a sorcerer and has loosened up more and more ever since. Initially he felt awful for killing a man in self-defence and vowed to never do it again, but by the end of his movie he sent the human antagonists off to suffer an agonising eternity in another dimension, and by Infinity War he was making decisions which affected the lives of billions and where the best case scenario still necessitated deaths and came with collateral damage in the millions (if not billions universally). When his friend Karl Mordo's rigid morality had him leave the Masters of the Mystic Arts altogether, Strange recognised that being too strictly bound to a personal philosophy can be as detrimental as not having one at all.
Essentially, Stephen’s adapted his existing moral code to account for his new power and the responsibilities that come with it. It’s his job to protect the planet and the dimension. To this end he will let people die if it serves a higher purpose, drag enemy soldiers into lethal chasms if it edges a friendly force closer to victory where the alternative is mass genocide. Do no harm becomes weigh the lives in the balance and do the least harm to save the most you can, and these are calculations he can make in an instant and act on without hesitation no matter how uncomfortable or difficult to live with they might be.
This revised code allows him a lot more flexibility of action - he'll do his best to use his tactical ingenuity and imagination to find solutions which avoid causing significant harm wherever possible, and he’ll opt for the non-lethal option where there’s a viable one every time, but ultimately he considers himself responsible for saving lives and protecting reality first and foremost and will do what he must to achieve that end no matter the personal or moral cost.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
Patience and compassion. During his medical career Stephen became the ‘be the best as fast as you can and use that talent to do prestigious work and take on only the patients whose medical problems will look good on your resume’ type, and it’s something he deeply regrets. There have been times in his life when he’s been treated with care and/or patience when he was busy being a self-absorbed, spiteful, belligerent asshole, and it’s left him with huge admiration for the kinds of people who can stand by someone who needs them even while they’re lashing out in fear.
In spite of how he wound up, he’s naturally inclined towards care for others (see: patching up a street dog) which often makes his shift away from his previous morality painful for him, but nurturing his compassion is too important to him to try to stifle it again. Having the best interests of other people at heart, even when you can’t always allow that to inform your decisions, grounds people in humanity. It’s something he’ll recognise and gravitate to in others, automatically holding a measure of respect for anyone who is motivated by a compassion for people. He knows how difficult a trait that can be to maintain and how much easier it would always be to give it up.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
The part of himself he least likes is his old tendency to be guided by fear, and the ways he's allowed it to motivate and warp him.
His fear of failure was born from the loss of his sister, who drowned before he knew how to save her (a comic plot point not mentioned in the movie bit mentioned by the creatives according to a wiki footnote so I factor it in, hope that's okay!) After that he hunted down professional progress with a fervor born of fearing the consequences of failing to succeed - an inability to save lives. It had him sculpt himself into a perfectionist, someone with a perfect record and prestigious skill, and somewhere along the line that skill got to his head. He became arrogant. He wouldn't let the patients he determined he couldn't save past his secretary, would cycle through the scans of the grievously injured in search of the most interesting cases where his ego convinced him only he could possibly succeed. He turned his focus to research and refused requests to commit himself to saving lives in the ER, gave speeches at galas and conferences, appeared on TV to discuss medical research developments-- he became addicted to the lifestyle, to his success, self-absorbed and unable to see far beyond his next accolade or dinner party.
His fear of losing all that did a number on him too. He'd wrapped his identity so completely up in the life he'd built that when he was faced with losing it he couldn't handle it. Rather than accept things as they were, he underwent operation after operation, seeking out ever more experimental surgeries to fix what he'd broken. He sold everything he had in desperate pursuit of regaining his steady hands and claiming back his life, as though his hands were his only worth. When Christine, ex-girlfriend turned friend who helped him care for himself since the accident, tried to explain to him that life without his previous work would still be life and asked him to stop because watching him was hurting her, he became spiteful and cruel, mocking her and devaluing their relationship, doing anything he could to not have to listen to or accept what she was saying.
His fear has always been the thing that's corrupted him and held him back from offering people all the use he could be to them. He resents all the things he can be when living according to it: arrogant, unkind, vindictive, self-absorbed. He consults it now only to avoid being overtaken by it, to make sure the path he takes leads him in the opposite direction to the one his fear would have him walk. It's the most dangerous part of him and one he has to work hard even now to keep in check.
What is their sign, and why? The High Priestess. His strongest options are this and the Magician, but I'd say the Magician was more relevant to him while still wrapped up in his fear-driven need to be the best. At his core, and in the words of the Ancient One, he has always been “a man looking at the world through a keyhole. [He’s] spent [his] whole life trying to widen that keyhole. To see more, to know more.”
He's driven and can study a topic to mastery, but his motivation is now more often intrigue, fascination, passion or practicality than single-minded focus on his discipline. He's totally enthralled by magic but is equally eager to learn whatever catches his attention, anything that might provide an unexpected solve somewhere down the line. He'll study spellbooks and myths, languages and public records of threats to planetary or dimensional safety, to name a few choice areas relevant to his craft. He'll also create vast and always accurate mental databases of current and historical musical releases. Music is good, he listens to a lot of it, and his mind is set up well for storing facts. It's fun information to keep around. Knowing things is something he takes both pleasure and pride in.
He's an exceptionally skilled sorcerer and he trained and studied hard to get there, but he’s also a gifted individual with an eidetic memory that allowed him to study for an MD and PhD simultaneously, learn enough ancient Sanskrit in a year to read ancient tomes, and memorise his entire record collection and more besides alongside his medical training and practice. So as much as he’s prone to mastery of the things he sets his mind on, half of it seems to be a natural gift, and the pursuit of sorcery itself was motivated initially by awe. He was given a glimpse of the multiverse and he couldn't bear to let that door close on him. When it did, he beat on it for hours, begging to be let back in until his voice went hoarse. If it hadn’t opened, he’d have waited for days.
A skilled martial artist, tactician and surgeon, a willing explorer of dimensions and bane of primordial entities, a medical doctor, a doctor of philosophy, a neuroscientist once bent on developing new treatments, a music enthusiast with an unparalleled recollection for release dates, it’s safe to say that he has a talent for learning and an eagerness to continue to seek knowledge for as long as he lives.
Stephen Strange is an expert at a good many things but the range is diverse and ever expanding, and underpinning it all is a compulsion, a wonder, a perpetual desire to know.
SAMPLES & ARRIVAL
Samples: Top level!
Arrival Scenario: Welcomed.