Ben Grimm Calls Doctor Strange

Rain poured down as if the sky itself was crying. Street people escaped the sidewalk, crouching up under stoops, awnings, anything. Even the working girls and boys did their best to keep dry. Yet down those wet streets splashed a huge, lumbering figure in an immense coat and hat. Thicker than a linebacker, a mountain that walked, water streaming off slick cloth.

When he reached Bleeker Street, a single door opened. A light, warm, and welcoming. A bald head waited with an enigmatic smile on his face, and the slightest incline of the head. Not a bow, but an acknowledgment.

"Wong," Ben Grimm said, as he stepped onto the porch and took off his dripping hat. "Any chance I can speak to him?"

"Of course, Mr. Grimm," Wong said. "He awaits you."

Wong took Ben Grimm's coat, and the stony figure, dressed in only his blue Fantastic Four shorts, walked forward carefully, as if the entire house were made of eggshells. The slightest bump could break some priceless artifact or unleash some ancient evil. The stairs creaked ominously under his weight.

Yet doors opened at his approach, and when he stepped into Doctor Strange's sanctum sanctorum, he found the mustachioed Master of the Mystic Arts seated cross-legged in mid-air, staring into a glowing crystal ball, his hands gesturing as streamers of light flowed between them and the clear surface.

"Ben," Doctor Strange said warmly. "What brings you here, on such a night as this?"

"Susie," Ben said. "She's got a new psychiatrist. Shrink named Doctor Karla Stone. I checked her records, but it's like...too clean. And Susie's actin' a little weird. Not...like her old self. Uninhibited."

He stood there like a golem, trying not to grind his teeth.

"I keep tellin' myself it's maybe nothin', that I'm bein' paranoid, but I just...you wuz a medical doctor. You got connections."

"I am a doctor," Strange said, his voice kindly. "And you should trust your instincts. They have not led you astray. 'Stone'...the very name rings false. Yet we shall see what the Orb of Agamotto reveals."

The light from the orb increased, to the point that Ben Grimm held up one huge hand to shield his eyes. Yet Doctor Strange stared into it, his lips moving soundlessly, hands gesturing ceaselessly.

"...something blocks my divinations. Spells of concealment, layers of misdirection, false auras. There are few who have skill or power enough to hide from the Sorcerer Supreme, even for a time...none who may hide for long!"

The amulet on Doctor Strange's chest opened. A pale golden eye peered out, and from it shone an impossibly pure light, like a laser, into the heart of the brilliant brightness.

Half a world away, in Latveria, Doctor Doom's hands moved through counter-conjurations. Sweat beaded his brow beneath the iron mask. The defenses he had constructed to mislead any mystics about Moonstone's true identity might have been sufficient for Agatha Harkness or the Scarlet Witch, but Strange was another level entirely.

Still, Doom had planned for this. If the Fantastic Four's suspicions had been raised sufficiently to bring the Sorcerer Supreme into this, then there was only one thing left to do:

Attack.

And Ben Grimm would be his instrument.