"....so why would he do it?"

"Because he is some combination of wrong and evil, I guess? I don't think he has Melkor's exact motivations but for most immediate purposes the differences are immaterial."

"That's too bad."

"I assume if there were a way to talk him out of it Strange would have seen it."

"I mean, not necessarily, fourteen million is a lot but it's fewer than there are combinations of two words in a single language. Fourteen million is not a dictionary attack. But it probably does mean Strange's first hundred tries and the first hundred tries of anyone he could talk into attempting it didn't work."

"And probably he thought of talking to the rocks. Since he had one and knew what they're like."

"I'm not sure he did know what they're like, actually. If his had a good relationship with him he really shouldn't have needed to sit through fourteen million iterations - he sounds like a smart, determined sort who could have expended much less effort getting a good result out of a friendly time stone. So it seems likely that he was in some intermediate state where it consented to being used but wasn't on speaking terms or anything like."

She bites her lip. "I - don't know if 'talk to the rocks' would be in the first fourteen million things I'd try if I thought they were rocks. Maybe it's that easy."

"I mean, maybe he thought of it and grievously offended the Mind Stone and had the possibility erased form his brain, we don't know what his search algorithm was."

"Not that I mind, but I think you guys are worse than my parents at enjoying a break."

"I normally party pretty hard! It's the everyone-being-dead."

"I was enjoying a break when I got flung here! I was tromping through a field of awesome giant mushrooms which turn out to have really inconvenient teleportation-based defense mechanisms!"

"I believe you but that sounds very ridiculous."

(Carol catches a starfish and holds it in her hands, quietly awed.)

"All the superpowers that've cropped up are a little ridiculous, really. We're the only ones who've figured out how to replicate it and they're all - people getting bitten by spiders or exposed to radiation or - Carol what was your thing -"

"Oh, uh, mine don't make sense either. There was an explosion of some alien tech, and there was a star, and honestly I don't remember the whole thing very clearly..."

"I looked into this once because I was curious why S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn't figured out how to make any of their heroes elected or appointed positions. There are a lot of people with more minor super abilities, too, mostly caused by industrial accidents even though really nothing about that makes sense."

"Ours are a benefit that come with well-vetted government jobs!"

"More reasonable, but a lot less exciting."

She pulls a shell out of the sand with her toes and starts polishing it. "Are all the rest of them dead, or just not useful for this fight."

"Not useful for this. Most of them are squishy."

"Plus some dead."

"Yeah, that's fair, lotta dead."

"BE FREE," Carol yells, flinging her starfish a good quarter mile out to sea.

"...that can't be good for them."