During those days Stephen was passing by Pleasantville to pick up one of the artifacts left after the Ancient One. This small small town was not, though, as pleasant as it was officially promised. Strange had no intentions to stay there longer than it was necessary. However, he had to adjust to circumstances after discovering that his fellow in mystic arts had not arrived at the spot yet. In addition to a stuffy hotel room, which Stephen was forced to rent to spend a couple of nights in the city, it was pretty annoying.
It was so smooth, a transformation to the nicest guy on Earth. Later Stephen would not believe it, but he did not notice the changes from the very start. It was already too late, when Strange dared to assume that the world was behaving badly. It happened only after he was capable of feeling the magic, which was floating in the air. This magic did not belong to this world; it was inhuman.
It took Stephen a while to trace a squabbler. The sorcerer was like a hound hunting down its prey.
Finally, his efforts were rewarded.
Strange stepped out of a magnificently behaving crowd. Now he was the intruder.
"Darling," Stephen shouted out to a man, who was staying in front of him. The magician could smell a specifically weird type of magic, which transformed the naïve city.
"You are the stage director of this lovely performance, aren't you?"
Undoubtedly, Strange could describe a situation better, if it was not for a magic trick limiting his vocabulary. While in the existing circumstances, the sorcerer was forced to treat "darling" as the most eloquent and ambiguously unpleasant out of all (definitely unbearably nice) available options.
"Don't get me wrong," Stephen continued, "I have nothing against those sweet Happily Ever After endings."
"But don't you think that this town has too much of a literal title now?"
Back then a fact that everything was going wrong at that very moment was the only thing, which Stephen was sure of.