[New York] Antagonistic Roots

"My dominion is of the shore, not of the tempestous seas", Liberty replied, shrugging off the need of asking. It was an equally dismissive answer, it suggested that whatever consciousness Jamie invoked took more responsability than he did, the soul of New York, how cliché. The statue tilted Her neck backwards as Strange threatened her back, seemingly indignated at the Sorcerer. "Hark this hypocrite!", She announced, the gears of the cannons reloading their payload. "For he gladly saved a few to claim moral high ground, yet would doom more souls than the spangled banner has stars", She proclaimed. Strange saved everyone at Eagle-Eye, but weren't there more people in the building? Would he round all of them up and escort them out, or accept the casualties of war?

She didnt give him time to ruminate on the conundrum, as the statue's robes lifted slightly as the colossus displaced itself forward once, ina dizzying, world turning motion. It did so again, and Strange would see the statue already stood right in front of him, Her left hand already reaching to hold him tight and crush him under Her grasp. What would feel like translocation at first was anything but; Liberty wished to walk, so the entirety of New York twisted and turned to make sure that Her foot landed back on the pedestal as She did.

"War it is! We forge freedom in the crucible of conflict!"

Liberty frowned as she let go off a pile of confetti. The world snapped around once and twice so that the goddess could search for the sorcerer without having to turn around, but she had neglected looking up. The titan was at first bemused by this fickle attempt at ensnaring it, but the magical chains proved binding, pulling downwards with all her body and might, save for her right hand which still rose the obsidian beacon. The statue struggled to look up, amd as she did, Strange could see inside her crown. Jamie was still there, huddled comfortably in a corner despite gravity's best efforts. He was trembling, his face buried on his phone just to ignore his surroundings. Whatever force he invoked was out of his control, just as he would have preferred.

"HNGHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"Strange would feel the whiplash of a trembling world as gravity and air seemed to whisk once again, it was not just the copper construct's owm weight, but the weight of the world that shaked and squirmed to break it free. "Let the seas take the continent! It matters not!". The woman announced as the world continued to seize. "For this haven will endure, and receive its dogged visitors!", the pitch-black flame flared and fumed into a pillar towards the skies, as well as through thr magical bindings, sloely eroding them and turning them to ash, for Liberty refuses to be bound. The hellfire came back down, and threatened to provide Strange with the same fate.

"Hallowed is this flame! It will not quench! It must not quench"

Jamie stammered as Strange addressed him, recatching his phone and holding it tight with both hands as the social media feed extended from its screen into a blade of pure light that took up the space between him and strange. The energy it emanated was formidable, disregarding its cowardly wielder, or the concept of being held at bladepoint by a gif of a dog sneezing. "Does it look like I can help you, doc?", Jamie rebutted, still holding onto anger. "You keep going and going on about portal this, world that, multidimensional collapse by next Sunday. None of that is my job, none of this is my problem!", the world outside seemed to blur and shift as the island burned in ebony hellfire, as Liberty sought to relocate Strange. "Some space ghost offered me peace, and so far that's what I've gotten until you came along. I don't know if she punched a whole in reality to do so, and at this point I do not care!", he continued, there it was again, this mysterious benefactor. "All I want is peace! All. I want. Is peace! ALL I WANT IS PEACE".

The world shook once more, and the room was no longer illuminated by the dimly lit sun. Outside of the crown, Strange could see Liberty pressing her face against the bars of her own crown, the space in which it formerly rested was replaced with a pitch black void. "You Will Have No Refuge, No Solace", the Statue chanted, and black flames crept from every corner of the room. They circled around Jamie and kept him unharmed, but wouldn't be as considerate for the interloper.

"No Peace, No Forgiveness, No Matter What"

"Lo! The Coward Hides In Front Of His Cowardice!", Liberty seemed to have made her decision, her right hand lowering for the first time as the brazier of her torch burned hotter and dimmer, unleashing a torrent of consuming fire. "If Victory Is Impossible, Then We Shall Quarrel Forever, For It Is My Purpos-STOP!", the flames froze to a standstill, the world itself halting to take a breath as Jamie himself did. The world blurred once more and the incongruencies righted themselves, the Statue was once again standing up, and nothing was aflame. "Alright that's...that's more my speed, alright...", Jamie undusted his shirt from the edge of Liberty's crown. Strange could feel the world behind him shift and turn, were he to look back, he could see it apparently ammending all of the ruckus from their engagement, someone's gotta man the shoe outlets, after all.

"Now, I don't like checkups, and I think they're below your paygrade, but it hurts more to neglect em, don't it?", the world shifted once more, and in the air, an office assembled, there were no walls or ceiling, only floor tilings and floating diplomas, ornaments, and a door, it was Strange's office, or the shell of it, rather. It was rather dramatic from him to elect going through the door, but the normalcry placated the frenzied engineer. "Well, Doctor Stephen Wizard, I really don't know why I'm here", Jamie stepped forward, the bladed edge retracting from his phone as he shoved it into his pocket and took a seat. "You keep saying something's wrong and I just don't see it. What could I ever do about it?"

"Nope, not all doc, soz bout that", Jamie leaned back into his seat, the gleam on his glasses swirling as if to simulate an eyeroll. "It's my father that's diabetic but I also can do without sugarcoating. Code, finances, numbers, taste for the straightforward stuff, y'know, it's part of the biz", he added. Strange already had him sit down once, but it seemed like his grand rethoric scared off the prejudiced engineer before they could get started on that front, perhaps its best not to lose em again. "So you can tell me what's wrong with New York, and I'm probably not going to like it, but I feel like I've enough spoons for bad news this week, which is blisssssss", he tensed his fingers inward in some sort of reminiscent relief, Strange's forays into the multiversal unknowns have nothing on the volatility and perils of the crypto market.

The whiteboard was, in fact, not there at Strange behest, it would take another lapse of perception for it to actually appear, it seemed like the world was still busy working on cleaning up, a reminder that it meant that, should things go sour, this whole song and dance would start over.

Jamie seemed to take to the graph quite earnestly, though the gleam on his lenses seemed to glaze over as vague enough words such as 'realities', 'universal collapse', and 'catastrophe'. "The important takeaway I'm getting here is that tomorrow there could be a hole in the atmosphere", Jamie mentioned quite nonchallantly for the direness of the situation, at least he seemed to get that there was a catastrophic threat hanging from somewhere, even if he massively underestimated its breadth. "Well, yes, kinda. Now I imagine you figured this out as you went along, because you're here and we're not inside of the evil wizard orb yet", he kept up, his tone was somewhat derisive, but cooperative. "But what do you need me for? I believe you said you escorted my friends out, for whatever reason. I've never seen Jackson so relieved before, well it took him a week or so." Jamie spoke quite lucidly of this whole kidnapping session. "You seem to be the different dimension portal man, that's not me", he dismissed, as if they weren't thirty feet in the skies above Liberty Island on the shell of an office at his behest. Strange described this world's will as an animal, and it was an apt comparison, it was apparent that it understood Jamie, but Jamie did not understand it back, nor did he find it necessary to do so.

"Hey hey slow down there, what do you mean 'real'", Jamie leaned forward with a tinge of hostility, an undiagnosed symptom. "Everyone is real, I speak to them every week, we go by first names. I get new clients all the time. You're saying that this is a whole nother New York, doesn't it have a whole nother people as well?", he argued. A complication, was Jamie truly not able to tell between his real coleagues and the marionettes of this hollow world? "Wait, who did you carry out? Only the 'real' folk? Whatever that means?", he inquired.

Despite being rational and cooperative, it appears that the world still held some sort of illusion over Jamie, dispelling could have unexpected results. There were some number of people in this world that were caught by the spawning portal that leads here, most of which work at this building, but not all of them, and there was no guarantee they were currently there due to the ruckus at Eagle Eye; Jamie doesn't know all of them, and apparently can't even tell them apart, Liberty, however, boasted to Strange that she did, no less than 50 of them, whether she would cooperate was a different matter. 

"How's this gonna work, doc? You got some secret divination technique for 'real' people? Do you flip a coin?"