CH4: Doctor Strange

She woke up from being passed out in a ditch. Harry was gone, her parents were dead, and some old woman was carving runes into her mother's corpse.

When in doubt fuck off somewhere. Vergil discovered early on that she could do things to people when they looked into her eyes. Implanting little suggestions like buying her food, opening bank accounts in her name, or letting her live in their home rent-free. After five years of trial and error, she built a nice nest egg. She often lived in hotels, the really nice ones. When she needed clothes, she convinced people to buy them for the poor girl on the street. She had quite the wardrobe and enjoyed styling herself like a supervillain. All she had to do was pick and choose her marks carefully, and all her acts could be mistaken as charity from the rich to a poor little girl. When a constable found her, she often made them forget or lose track of her, allowing Vergil to live mostly nonviolently.

Vergil was watching The Powerpuff Girls when someone opened the door to her room. In five years, she had grown to be quite powerful. Rituals that imprinted on her soul fed from the bounty her body passively absorbed and produced. Adding her normal training to her ever-growing strength, she was growing formidable.

That's why she plastered a winning smile when a dark-haired man with piercing blue eyes entered her hotel room with his keycard.

"Sorry, this must be an error on the hotel's end. My name is Doctor Steven Strange; where are your parents."

"Vergil Potter and dead, don't worry, I will find another room. This hotel always has a few empty ones." Vergil said.

The man sighed. "Ms. Potter, I will have to report this to the police. You can't squat in hotel rooms; it's against the law, and there are bad people. The police will put you someplace where the bad people can't get to you." Steven said.

Vergil opened her oversized backpack and pulled the money and bank cards from the room before zipping it up. With a wave of her hand, her clothes folded and squished into her backpack. It looked easy, but numerous steps were needed to perfect the show. What she called rough telekinesis wasn't automatic and took hours of practice. Fortunately, she hated folding clothes by hand, and it was a way to get practice in. Vergil tossed a gawking doctor the remote to the tv. After stepping into the bathroom to ensure her hair wasn't messed up.

"What did you just do?" Dr. Strange asked.

"Do you want the long or short answer? If you call the cops, I won't have time for the former. The latter will hardly be enough for someone who wants to understand." Vergil said.

"You aren't a child."

"I am seven years old, and I read books." Vergil fiddled with her belt to keep her pants from falling down if she had to leave from the outside of the building. "My parents died before they could fill me in on the world as they understood it. From their own books, it seems they were ill-informed. Let me make this easy have you heard of magic and prophecy?"

"Terms for old superstitions without a basis of fact in reality. If you're going to lie, then at least make it believable." Dr. Strange said.

He wasn't treating her like a child anymore and seemed to have reverted into skeptic mode. That was good; she needed someone to bounce ideas off of.

"I agree." Dr. Strange only lifted an eyebrow. "What we know of as magic and prophecy is superstition. They are words used to discredit and obscure something based on fact. A crime has continued to be committed since before written history. Once, ancient people made sacrifices before and often during battle to receive a sign from the gods and determine if their tactics and strategies would succeed. A sacrifice was always needed before the gods or magic would do anything. Energy can not be created or destroyed; only changed do we agree that is true." Vergil raised his hand, and the remote in Dr. Strange's hand flew over to her. She turned her show back on and then off. "Power and signals must be sent for the television to turn on. Now imagine that you had a similar setup built into your body. Still, instead of turning off and on a TV, it altered reality." Vergil said.

"Nice trick, but I'm not buying it. You could use a string, the clothes could have been an illusion, or you could have hit me with a hallucinogen." Vergil lifted her hand, and he floated off the ground. Then she implanted the thought that what he was seeing might not be an illusion or trick. "Alright enough, let's say that I believe you. Did your parents not have any information?"

"A user doesn't have to know how their tv works to use it. Witch Britain doesn't care how the magic works so long as it works. That or they know and are too ashamed to inform their population. Magic comes from sacrifice, but witches don't steal babies and sacrifice them to clean their pots with magic. No, I hypothesized the process was streamlined long ago and no longer requires human interference. Long before the modern era, a machine was created that takes those who die as sacrifices to fuel itself. We call it magic to cover up the blood and wave our wands to connect to the machine, like picking up a remote." Vergil said.

Dr. Strange sighed. "I'm sure you thought out this theory and think you're smart. Come back to earth. None of what you said has any proof; at most, your hypothesis is full of circumstantial evidence. To prove the existence of such a machine, you would need to find a way to test its existence. To add credence to your test, others like you must test it in a large enough sample size to prove it. Maybe study a few more years before deciding whether your reality warping comes from Satan."

Vergil felt like she had been thoroughly reprimanded. While she felt her theory was right, unloading it on the first person she met was dumb.

"I'm assuming you don't go to school. What do you plan to do for the rest of your life?"