April is a busy month for me – final exams and all – so I decided to get most of it done in advance. And you know what that meant, right?
One day, you wake up, and blue is gone.
I don’t mean blue things. The things are still there: bluebells, the sky and sea, various types of whales, the road uniforms for the Toronto Blue Jays, the Thing’s underwear. They just – aren’t blue any more. It’s not that the blue spectrum of light is missing, either. Things that are cyan or magenta are still cyan or magenta; the disappearance of blue hasn’t affected those colours of which blue is a root component. And that’s your first hint that this isn’t a problem science can solve.
Here’s another: most people aren’t even noticing blue is gone. You point at the sky and ask them what colour it is, they’ll shrug. They won’t say it’s blue – on some level they understand it isn’t blue any more – but they don’t notice the difference. Psychics notice. Sensitives notice. Those with the bad luck to have had run-ins with demons or angels or gods notice. But even most of these people won’t understand what’s going on. Most of them will just think something’s gone wrong with their eyes. (Just because you have a heightened attunement to things supernatural doesn’t mean you don’t visit the optometrist.)
And why would anybody take blue away? What’s the point? Put aside the rank impossibility of it for a moment – the question of how exactly something like this happens – and consider that this is a fundamentally absurd act; removing blue without removing its physically affecting properties is in many ways an entirely symbolic act.
Or at least it is to anybody from this dimension. In other dimensions, where the laws of physics are written by a wholly different hand, blue might not be a colour. It might be a power source. It might be a currency. Maybe it’s food. We’re going to a new definition of the word “alien,” so new that our existing understanding of alien-ness becomes insufficient to explain what the thieves of blue want, or if they’re even capable of desiring anything in the first place.
Normally, in the Marvel Universe, this is where you call in Reed Richards. But this isn’t something the Fantastic Four can handle. As smart as Reed Richards is, he still needs to start reasoning from the common ground of natural science he’s occupied his entire life, even if only to distinguish a new Other from our world by the differences. But in a case like this, the difference between the Other and us is the difference between a high C-sharp note and a feeling of remorse.
To fix this – and you know, instinctively, looking at the sky, that the lack of blue is a problem, and one more pressing than just a source of aesthetic displeasure – you need someone who can explain scientifically unquantifiable differences in lay terms that, while entirely inaccurate in any proper sense, still serve to give the listener an accurate idea of the larger issues at hand without driving them insane. It’s a very, very rare skill. Most people who dabble in magic can’t begin to handle it.
But the Sorcerer Supreme can. The Sorcerer Supreme isn’t just a fancy title, but a job description. The Sorcerer Supreme isn’t just a mystic superhero, he is the guardian of this entire reality. It’s his (or her, when that’s the case) job to be able to dive into the deep end of what any human would consider pure insanity and say “the water’s fine, and I’ll be out in a few minutes after I get your wallet,” where the “wallet” is in fact the continuing stability of this entire plane of existence.
And that’s why this is a job for Dr. Strange.
Top comment: My last relevant thought was “You know, if DOOM was the Sorcerer Supreme, he wouldn’t just get blue back, he’d give us colors we never had before.” He’d call them Doom, Light Doom, Doomish Yellow, and RICHARDS!! The Hated Color. — HitTheTargets
