After New York's public security had been thoroughly cleaned up, Schiller completely gave up.
He felt that he could no longer find anyone to treat, so he began drinking even more heavily.
Even though the Sky Train station at the sanatorium had already been completed, he did not move back. Instead, he holed up in his little clinic and drank.
Schiller was currently sprawled across the sofa in the middle of the clinic's living room. His white coat, once buttoned neatly from top to bottom, now hung completely open. One side was stained with liquor, the other had two holes burned through by cigarette ash, and there were also traces of blood from who knew where.
Schiller seemed to have just woken from a hangover. Instinctively, he reached for the bottle beside him, only to find it empty. His arm dropped weakly. He pressed his lips together, leaned against the armrest, and fell asleep again.
Over the next few days, Schiller discovered that all the cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs in Hell's Kitchen, and even throughout the Brooklyn District along the Hudson River, had vanished.
Vanished in the literal, Physical Level sense. No matter how much money he offered or where he went to buy them, he could not find any at all.
Schiller could use Blink to move freely through Hell's Kitchen, but there was a limit to how far he could travel through consecutive Blinks.
Stark and Strange, who knew Schiller extremely well, cast a vast defensive net and cleared out every addictive substance within the range Schiller could reach.
This was not a situation where Schiller could gain anything by abandoning his moral bottom line. Those things had simply disappeared on the Physical Level. Whether he tried to deceive or steal, he could not conjure them out of