Look What You Made Me Do (Wanda-SI/OC)

Agatha wasn’t used to feeling nervous. Normally, she waited and she planned, then she’d either abandon a goal that she judged was too risky, or she’d swoop in when the time was right to claim her prize. You didn’t live to be over three hundred years old without learning how to pick and choose your battles, and Agatha rarely made any move where she wasn’t sure of her own success.

Following Eliza was different. Agatha had spent decades of her life dodging the Masters of the Mystic Arts (among others) as they pursued their self-righteous, self-appointed mission to safeguard the world from magical threats, and now she was about to waltz brazenly into Kamar-taj—the lair of the Ancient One herself—and steal from them, with little to no planning whatsoever. No careful surveillance over weeks, months or years. Just a quick briefing and they were off the next day.

The warding scheme on the exterior of the New York sanctum was essentially a work of art—an elaborate, highly sophisticated yet subtle set of interlocking enchantments. However, one thing that Agatha had learned from her encounters with the Masters of the Mystic Arts over the years was that you could always rely on a sorcerer to dismiss a simple solution when an unnecessarily complicated one was also available. As a result, the wards were formidable, perhaps even completely impenetrable without setting off at least one of the many layered alarm systems… if approached from the outside.

However, apparently the masters of the sanctum didn’t like to be inconvenienced. Dozens of intricate checks and protections, meticulous and powerful spellwork woven into every door, every window frame, every wall, and the entire thing was completely bypassed by Ava just walking through the wall and opening the front door normally from the inside. It might be a bit unfair to expect the sorcerers to have countermeasures in place for a nonmagical entity that was capable of walking through walls, but still. It was the principle of the thing.

As Ava ghosted away again to scout ahead, Eliza and Agatha—both under their respective BARF disguises—stepped through from the street into an extravagantly appointed circular foyer with a large central staircase leading up to the second floor and a balcony that encircled the room. There was beautiful wood panel flooring throughout, patterned with tiles of green-veined marble and inlayed with silver and gold. Hanging artwork adorned the walls and vases and similar objects d’art were placed on regularly spaced pedestals, with the entire space lit by dozens of warm, strategically placed burnished lamps.

“Huh. Well, this is nice,” Agatha commented quietly.

It was a grand residence, an impressive edifice that fulfilled and exceeded every single one of the witch’s expectations of one of the sanctums of the Masters of the Mystic Arts, and it was also… empty. The building was quiet, its grand halls utterly without life. Where was everyone? Everywhere Agatha looked, there were ostentatious displays of wealth and power, all of it sitting unused and unappreciated. It made her teeth itch. She’d always known that the sorcerers had significant resources at their disposal, but the way they flaunted their underserved magical riches was almost obscene. 

Past the top of the stairs was a long corridor lit by more lamps, closed doors leading to rooms off to either side, all seemingly devoid of occupants. Eliza confidently led them down the hall toward what Agatha had initially taken as tall paintings but were quickly revealed to be window-like portals to beautiful landscapes elsewhere on Earth—a rainforest, a mountain range, and a burning desert. Eliza took a moment to excitedly point them out to her, manipulating a dial on the side of one that caused the window to cycle through several other vistas, the sorcerous translocation magic almost instantly shifting from location to location.

The sheer amount of effort that must have gone into the creation of these relics… and they were being used as display pieces. The spellwork was both extremely impressive and utterly wasteful. What was the point? Agatha found that she was no longer anxious—she was annoyed.

They went up two more levels, Eliza seeming to hesitate a couple of times as they progressed. As they crested the top of the last set of stairs, they came out directly in front of the large, circular window with the enclosed glyph that they had seen proudly displayed on the front of the building. The room they had just stepped into was huge, the sheer amount of glass cases filled with assorted relics and artifacts occupying the space putting her more in mind of a museum floor than anything else. There was simply too much to describe or take in. She could have spent hours here, just looking—days, maybe—and there was still no one here.

Almost no one. Just then, a man strode around a corner, pausing momentarily in surprise as he saw them. “What…”

The sorcerer was dark-skinned, with severe features, and wore elaborate green and yellow robes in one of the styles favoured by the Masters of the Mystic Arts, though his was sleeveless, leaving his muscular arms bare. The sorcerer’s surprise was gone as swiftly as it came, his body tensing as he started toward them purposefully, his expression darkening.

Eliza pre-empted him, smiling brightly and giving him a little wave. “Oh, hi! Nice to meet you, Master Drumm. Sorry to intrude.”

The sanctum’s master closed most of the distance between them, hands clenched into fists at his side and a stern frown on his face. “Wanda Maximoff. The Scarlet Witch. You should not be here… How? You did not come from Kamar-taj,” the sorcerer said—that was a statement, not a question. His tone was guarded. “How did you get inside the sanctum without disturbing the wards?”

“Wards?” Eliza asked, feigning confusion. “We knocked on the front door but no one answered—it was unlocked, so we just let ourselves in.”

Drumm’s frown deepened further as she spoke. “That… should not have been possible.”

“My apologies, Master Drumm,” Eliza said, almost sounding genuinely contrite as she held up her hands in a placating gesture. “We really didn’t mean to bother you. I just need a few moments of your time, if that’s okay?”

The sorcerer was still eyeing her suspiciously as he weighed her words. It didn’t seem like he was buying it, but neither had he immediately attacked them or moved to raise an alarm. He glanced from Eliza to Agatha, sizing the witch up for a moment before dismissing her as unimportant and returning his attention to the AI.

Agatha suppressed a sigh of relief. She was extremely conscious of the fact that the BARF hologram covering her body didn’t perfectly sync up with her movements—it wasn’t that bad, with less than a half-second delay between her moving and the hologram catching up, but it was still enough that it could potentially cause problems. If all went according to plan, though, it wouldn’t matter at all. Anyone looking at her casually would only see Madame Gao’s pet witch: a young, inexperienced practitioner of Chinese heritage.

If Agatha needed to touch or otherwise interact with anything where someone was able to see her doing so, however, she’d need to choose her actions carefully or it would be obvious that there was something odd going on. Speaking while observed was out of the question entirely—there was no way Eliza would be able to lip sync her words in real time. Better to just remain mostly quiet and still, so as not to rouse much attention.

“What do you want?” Drumm asked tersely.

“The Ancient One and I don’t see eye-to-eye on a lot of things,” Eliza said, continuing to maintain the charade that she was actually Wanda. “But she’s not the only sorcerer that matters. I just wanted a chance to talk to the other masters, see what they thought of the whole… situation. I’m sure you have your own opinion, Master Drumm?”

Drumm snorted, looking decidedly unimpressed. “You look for cracks to divide us with, when we so recently were betrayed by one of our own? When we need the strength of unity more than ever? You are as much of a fool as the Ancient One believes. Perhaps even more so.” He shifted slightly—not quite into a combat stance, but still obviously ready for a fight should it come to that.

Eliza shook her head, raising her hands again. “You misunderstand. I don’t have any interest in weakening Kamar-taj. I just… needed to keep you talking for a little bit longer.” The AI’s eyes had flicked to the relic hanging on the wall behind the sorcerer as she spoke—a complicated, cage-like contraption make of interlocking bands of rusted and pitted metal that Agatha recognised as the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak from the description the AI had given of them.

On cue, Ava’s grey-suited form flickered into existence behind Drumm, silent as a ghost, and grabbed the relic from the wall. He reacted almost instantly—turning and calling blazing mandalas of sorcerous power to his hands—but Ava heaved the relic into him in a two-handed throw and the magic was immediately snuffed out.

The heavy metal device snapped into place around the sorcerer, its central spine latching onto the front of his body even as complex workings twisted around to restrain his limbs. There was a metallic clicking noise as it worked, manipulating his body into a stiff, upright pose for a moment before the tension in the joints forced him to his knees, his arms swept back behind him at an almost-painful looking angle even as a metal gag snapped into place across his mouth and chin. It had bound his entire body incredibly thoroughly—Agatha was reminded uncomfortably of when she’d been trapped inside the Iron Man suit after her initial meeting with Eliza. Drumm stared up at Wanda, his expression thunderous, completely unable to so much as turn his head or speak.

Eliza flashed Ava a quick smile. The assassin inclined her head slightly before she turned on her heel, flickering out of existence as she walked through a nearby wall. “The Crimson Bands of Cyttorak,” the AI said conversationally, looking down at the bound sorcerer. “An interesting relic. Why ‘crimson’, though? They’re not particularly red. They are little rusty, I guess?”

Agatha bit her tongue, resisting the snarky response that had immediately leapt to her tongue. Cyttorak was noteworthy enough to bear a mention in the Darkhold, an extraplanar being hailing from a dimension called the Crimson Cosmos, though Agatha couldn’t recall any specific details about him. Drumm, of course, was unable to respond or do anything else but look up at her with impotent anger.

Eliza reached behind her back, concealing her hand from the sorcerer for a moment as she reached into her body and withdrew a small aerosol canister. Putting it in front of the man’s face, she sprayed him with a small, faintly visible cloud of white gas. His eyes fluttered and closed and he slumped very slightly, still held in place by the Bands.

The AI had been very firm when she’d gone over her infiltration plan: No killing of sorcerers if it could be avoided. She wasn’t completely confident in Agatha’s plan to track Kaecilius—which was fair enough, Agatha wasn’t completely confident in it, either—so her stance was that they couldn’t afford to weaken Kamar-taj unnecessarily. Someone like Drumm, the master of this particular sanctum, might still be able to make a significant difference.

Agatha fidgeted with her hands as they stood and waited quietly for the assassin to return. She opened her mouth to make some small talk, but noticed that Eliza had gone unnaturally still—a sign she was paying more attention elsewhere for the moment—and closed it again. The AI probably wouldn’t get too annoyed, but they were trying to be stealthy for the moment and she didn’t want to spend any precious social capital simply because she was bored.

A few minutes later, Ava walked around the same corner that the sanctum’s master had originally come from, seemingly solid once more. “There’s no one else here,” she confirmed.

“Perfect,” Eliza said, nodding. “We can relax a little, then.”

“Oh, thank god.” Agatha said, letting out a sigh of relief. Being sneaky was fine—she was good at being sneaky—but keeping quiet so that her holographic deception could be maintained was killing her. “Can we take a quick peek at the collection, Liz? Please?” She scrunched up her face in a hopeful, pleading expression.

The AI shot her a quick grin and rolled her eyes as she tucked the canister of gas away. “Sure. Only a quick look, for now, though,” she said, moving past Ava toward the display cases containing the sanctum’s priceless collection of relics. Ava and Agatha fell into step behind her.

As they moved through the room, the witch had to physically stop herself from bouncing excitedly on her heels as she looked around, her anger at the sorcerers’ wastefulness temporarily forgotten. Eliza had told her earlier that, if everything went to plan and they didn’t end up raising the alarm, when they returned to the sanctum from Kamar-taj there might be an opportunity for Agatha to look over the sanctum’s relics to see if there was anything they could use. It really wasn’t every day that she had the opportunity to poke through a treasure trove like this, and she knew that she’d put whatever she found to much better use than the sorcerers ever would.

They stopped in front of a case containing a rather fancy-looking red cloak that was floating in mid-air, unsupported. As Agatha watched, it shifted position slightly, almost moving like a living thing that had turned to look at them—then again, perhaps it was and had. Eliza looked up at it for a moment before reaching out a hand, touching the glass with her fingertips. “Wanna be friends?” she asked the cloak quietly. There was no response. A moment later, the AI sighed and continued past.

“Huh,” Agatha said, her attention also caught by a particular case. “So that’s where that old thing ended up.”

Eliza and Ava paused, glancing toward her as she peered through the glass of another case—this one held several magical staves and a couple of smaller relics, but the central piece was the one she recognised.

“What is it?” the AI asked curiously, stepping back to join her in front of the case.

Agatha tapped her fingernail on the case, pointing to the black metal staff—complex runes ran down its length and it was topped with a circular bronze medallion inscribed with even more tightly-woven runes. “The Dark Sceptre,” she said.

Ava reached up, removing her mask so they would be able to see the face she made at the name of the relic. “Not exactly up there with the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak,” she said, putting on a bit of a pompous, silly voice and over-enunciating the name.

“Or the Staff of the Living Tribunal,” said Eliza, similarly injecting a sense of pomposity into her tone. Despite her joking tone, the way she was staring at the Dark Sceptre, it was as if its very existence vexed her. “Or the Wand of Watoomb.”

The assassin side-eyed her suspiciously. “You made that last one up.”

“I absolutely did not,” the AI responded, smiling faintly. She tore her eyes away from the relic in the case long enough to look at Agatha questioningly. “I have no idea what that is.”

“It’s empowered by light. Consumes it and creates darkness. It’s changed hands a few times over the last couple of decades,” Agatha said, her own gaze returning to the relic’s haft to trace the patterns of runes inscribed along it. It was fascinating work. “I kept track—it was interesting enough that I thought I might grab it eventually to see what it could do—but the witch who had it fell off my radar a year or so ago.”

Without waiting for Eliza to respond, she reached over and held her hand over the case’s latch, focusing her magical senses. As she expected, there was some sort of enchantment on the case—it was hidden well enough that a lesser practitioner would likely not have noticed it, but there was a tell-tale absence of ambient energy that indicated something under an obscuring effect. Purple wisps of energy, edged in black, probed at it for a moment before Agatha decided that it was probably just linked to a simple alarm, rather than anything particularly nasty.

She paused and looked hopefully back at Eliza, eyebrows raised in a question, her lower lip stuck out. The AI sighed and rolled her eyes. “Fine, but only if you’re not going to set anything off.”

“Aperi ianuam,” Agatha incanted, a thread of purple-black energy penetrating the latch and dispelling the enchantment protecting it. The glass panels rattled in their frames as the whole case shuddered, then there was a click and the door swung open. Agatha reached in and plucked the dark metal staff from its resting place. She took a step back and swished it through the air experimentally, a small current of power trickling into her hand as the relic drank greedily of the ambient energy of the brightly lit room around them.

“It kind of looks like it’ll transform you into an evil magical girl,” Eliza remarked.

“Am I not already an evil magical girl?” Agatha asked, grinning at the AI as she brandished the relic. Holding it out to one side, she flexed its power and a corona of energy appeared around the head of the staff, brilliant blue edged in white.

“She means like Sailor Moon and, yeah, it definitely does,” Ava said, grinning lopsidedly. “Y te castigaré en el nombre de la Luna!”

“I will punish you in the name of the moon?” Agatha translated, sounding a little puzzled. “I think I’ve heard of Sailor Moon before. It’s a cartoon, right?”

“You don’t know Sailor Moon?” the assassin asked dubiously.

“Cut her some slack. Agatha’s positively ancient,” Eliza said, an impish smile creasing her features. “She doesn’t know what the kids are into these days.”

The witch shot her a look. “Says the girl who’s a week old.”

Eliza rolled her eyes. “Alright, we’re wasting time,” she said, clapping her hands together. “Let’s get moving.”

Despite her words, the three of them spent the next fifteen minutes seemingly wandering the sanctum at random, exploring its halls and rooms. It wasn’t until they returned to the first floor, heading down a short side corridor off the circular main foyer, that Eliza made a small sound of triumph and pointed to the large set of double-doors ahead of them. The doors were emblazoned with a large circular glyph—similar to the one enclosed by the window on the top floor of the building.

“…You had no idea where the doors were, did you?” Agatha asked, clicking her tongue in a mild rebuke.

Eliza shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, we’re here now,” she said, looking back at Ava and Agatha. “Okay, so as discussed, the door leads straight through to the back of the library. Agatha, I’ll need you to keep an eye out for any magical protections I don’t know about. Once we go through, we’ll be in a small chamber with more doors in it. The Ancient One’s personal collection is just past there. It’s about two in the morning there, so everyone should be asleep. We go in, get the book we need, then come straight back. Quickly but quietly.”

The small chamber that the doors opened up into was of significantly older stone construction, a stark contrast to the polished wood and marble of the New York sanctum. In the centre of the room was a waist-high pedestal, though the stand upon it sat empty. Two more sets of double doors, presumably leading to the London and Hong Kong sanctums, sat around it, and one side of the chamber opened up into the library proper.

Eliza moved forward, pausing for a moment to look longingly at the empty central pedestal. “Damn,” she said quietly.

“Something missing?” Agatha murmured curiously. It was pretty clear that the AI had expected there to be something there.

“Nothing,” Eliza responded. “Let’s go.”

Beyond the initial chamber was a long room lined with books bound to hexagonal frameworks—the Ancient One’s personal collection. Ava ghosted ahead, checking to make sure they wouldn’t be disturbed, while Eliza headed to one of the odd ‘shelves’. Agatha glanced around, sending subtle tendrils of magic out to feel for any traps or alarms, but found nothing.

Eliza hesitated for a moment before unbinding a book and flicking through it. After a moment, she carefully put it back before pulling out the next one. Agatha glanced at her, catching her eye. “I don’t remember which slot it was in. These all look the same and I can’t read the titles,” the AI hissed under her breath. “Give me a sec.”

The third book she checked was the right one, several pages clearly torn from the spine. Ava returned a moment later, flickering back into reality next to them as Eliza clutched her prize and started back the way they’d come. The success of the mission, however, was interrupted by the faint sound of doors opening and closing. Eliza straightened, flashing Agatha and Ava warning glances as they stepped back out into the middle of the room, looking back the way they’d come in.

In the middle of the small stone chamber, just in front of the empty pedestal, a group of three sorcerers now waited, forming a barrier between them and their escape back to New York. They’d obviously entered from one of the other doors, coming from either the London or Hong Kong sanctum.

One was a darker-skinned man in green robes—Karl Mordo, from Eliza’s description of him—while the larger, Asian‑featured man wearing red was clearly Wong, the librarian. In the middle of the two men, however, was a thin bald woman that could hardly have been anyone but the Ancient One herself, her robes cut in orange and yellow. While the masters flanking her were standing in ready combat stances, the Sorcerer Supreme’s body language was relaxed, almost casual. Interestingly, it seemed as though one of her arms was in a sling, bound tight against her body.

“We can’t afford a fight. Get past and get out,” Eliza said quietly, her voice issuing from the collar at Agatha’s neck rather than her vibranium body. Even if that hadn’t been the original plan, Agatha would have agreed—any extended encounter here would mean potentially attracting the attention of even more sorcerers.

“Well, this isn’t ideal,” Eliza’s illusion-covered form said, raising her voice slightly as she looked over at the group of sorcerers. “Hi, Tilda.”

“I expect not. Eliza, wasn’t it?” The Ancient One asked, smiling almost pleasantly. She gestured with her hand, indicating the book the AI held in her hand. “I’d rather prefer you put that back where you found it, if you please.”

The AI looked nonplussed. “Ah. You know who I am. That’s a shame.” She glanced to either side, briefly looking at her two companions. “I was really hoping I could pin this on Wanda if we got caught.”

“Surrender what you have stolen,” Mordo demanded, glowering at them. “If you cooperate, you may yet live.”

“Let’s just get this over with,” Eliza replied as she jammed the stolen book into her chest, burying it in her body.

“As you wish,” the Ancient One said, gesturing widely with her one hand, the air rippling and fracturing as she summoned an aperture to the Mirror Dimension large enough that it cut across the entire room. Another flick of her hand and the glass-like facets shot forward, intent on engulfing them.

Agatha raised the Dark Sceptre and darted forward, brandishing it like a club as she summoned forth the energy it had absorbed since she’d liberated it from its case. There was a burst of blue energy as it impacted the sorcerer’s spell, white lines zigzagging across the facets of the portal for a moment before the entire thing was dispelled. Motes of twinkling energy fluttered through the air as Agatha, Eliza and Ava lunged forward, intent on getting past the enemy line.

Eliza’s hands shifted and transformed into the screaming-face weapons she’d based on the designs from Wakanda, spitting sizzling blue and orange bolts at the sorcerers. Mordo and the Ancient One brought up shields, deflecting the blasts as they moved to intercept.

Threads of purple and black magic formed a lash in Agatha’s free hand and she whipped it forward at Wong as a distraction as she ran toward him. The sorcerer reacted quickly, raising a thick wand with horned heads on each end to catch the attack, dispelling her magic with a crack of energy as the eyes on the relic’s heads glowed. This was a relatively confined space, much tighter than Agatha was comfortable with—even the sorcerers didn’t have a lot of room to manoeuvre. It’d be very easy for someone to get a lucky shot in. Agatha shifted her grip as she resolved to do something about that.

The light around them disappeared, sucked into the Dark Sceptre and casting the area into almost total darkness—Eliza and Ava both had night vision that would let them see, and as the bearer of the sceptre Agatha had no problems at all manoeuvring through the darkness it caused. The sorcerers, of course, weren’t content to remain blinded, immediately summoning burning shields and mandalas to their hands that cast light as a side-effect, but even those were limited by the oppressive magical darkness that now blanketed the room.

Agatha darted to the side, outside of the meagre range of their light, circling around the long way toward the door to the New York sanctum. She focused on her own movements, her own way out—Ava could handle herself, and it wasn’t like Eliza was even physically here. The AI might be annoyed if she lost her new vibranium toy, but Agatha was much more concerned with keeping herself alive and safe in the immediate.

That initial burst of movement had her breathing hard already, her legs burning—she did not do enough cardio for this. Nor did she like relying on a relic that she had had little chance to properly examine and experiment with, but the more she relied on it the more it appeared as though she needed to rely on it. The more she dipped into her own expertise, the harder it would be to maintain the deception that she was a younger, inexperienced witch rather than her usual exceptional self. She would do what she had to to get out of here, of course, but she wouldn’t throw away her disguise unnecessarily if she could help it. Agatha skittered toward the exit carefully, trying to avoid notice. Behind her, orange light flared, Eliza swearing as she fired off more energy blasts.

 

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AUTHOR NOTE: Though it is perhaps of dubious canonicity, the Dark Sceptre is from Doctor Strange Prelude, an official digital comic set before the events of the Doctor Strange movie. Excelsior!