Following her Personal Terminal's directions, Bella soon reached the Atmos office tower. No one showed her around. No one came out to welcome the new hire. Everyone sat blank-faced at their stations, working.
She walked to the station the terminal had flagged as hers. A one-meter-by-one-meter touchscreen waited in front of her—this was where today's work, and every day's work after it, would happen.
She was desperate to know exactly when she was. Only with the precise date could she fix the coordinates to get home.
Judging from the touchscreen, the trains, the tower, and the weapons the occasional guard carried, she figured this era wasn't far from the 21st century.
Her writing work put her in contact with a fair number of historical records, so she combed steadily through what little there was, hunting for traces of the old days, for some thread that led home.
The more she read, the deeper her frown cut.
The record had an obvious break in it. All it said was that a great war had shattered the foundations of human civilization, after which a new-era dating system was adopted—and heaven only knew what year, what month this "new era" had started counting from.
"99.6% of the planet's arable land now lies beneath seawater. This world war utterly reshaped the course of human civilization. As the land that survived that war, the Collective is now humanity's sole savior. To the south of the Peninsula there remain a few primitive zones where savages live. They are dangerous. They carry disease in their bodies. Keep well away from them…
"The humans who live on the Peninsula are ruled by emotion and desire, habits our kind once carried. The Collective reminds you: Switched-On Syndrome is extremely dangerous and to a degree contagious. Stay away from those savages…"
A low, resonant baritone read out the record on the touchscreen. Bella noticed these people loved to steer the narrative—two lines of history, and suddenly they'd swerved right back to the subject of scrubbing out human emotion. She had no patience for it and hit fast-forward.
Two days later, the Atmos tower gained a new colleague.
Handsome and striking, 1.90 meters (6'3") tall, a pale-blue-eyed illustrator named Silas.
The instant she saw him, Bella felt the same current of temporal energy. This man came from where she came from—from the same moment on the timeline.
She studied his face carefully, trying to match it against the big blue-furred oddball in her memory.
The next day, catching a chance as they passed each other, she asked under her breath, "Mr. McCoy—is that you?"
Silas looked at her, thoroughly baffled.
Bella waved it off. "Sorry. Mistook you for someone."
"It's fine."
Another day went by. Watching Silas snatch a falling water cup clean out of the air, Bella confirmed it: this Silas was the Beast from over on the X-Men's side—the mutant Hank McCoy.
The one she actually knew was Professor Charles Xavier, plus Storm at a stretch. Cyclops and Beast and that crowd she'd only call acquaintances. The world was vast, the people many; a friend of a friend isn't necessarily a friend, and she and Beast weren't close in the slightest. But in a place like this, he was the only friend she had.
After work she didn't leave. Cloaking her movements with an Invisibility spell, she waited until Beast walked past her, blank-faced, as though nothing were amiss, then hauled him straight into the nearby restroom.
"Look into my eyes." She'd copied out a slice of her own memories—of Professor Xavier, of the X-Men—and drove it in reverse, telepathically, straight into Beast's mind.
Bella's guess was that the temporal turbulence, plus a jump through time spanning at least a century, had fractured his memory. However high his intelligence ran, however many gadgets he'd invented, his actual resistance to temporal turbulence was flat zero. He was no god like Loki, and he'd never used the Time Stone.
Odds were his memory had taken damage—but only limited damage. The memories were still in his brain; they just lacked a trigger. Now she was handing him that trigger to bring them back.
"Aah! What—what's going on?!" The memories flooding in made Beast cry out in pain. He clutched his head, pressing his spine to the cold metal wall of the restroom, using the chill to hold on to his wits.
It took the better part of three minutes before he slowly came back to himself.
"You're—you're that, that, whatsername…?"
Three dark lines creased Bella's forehead. So you never actually knew who I was, is that it?
This one, too, was a hopelessly dense tech nerd, all science and no interest in beautiful women.
The way she remembered it, even a man like Professor Xavier had a first love; Magneto had both sons and daughters; Captain America, Iron Man—every last one of them had a rich romantic history. Only Beast… this guy seemed headed for a lifetime of solitude.
Bella had enough trouble of her own these days—her allure was drifting somewhere into the otherworldly range—and she had zero interest in getting tangled up in any of that will-they-won't-they business. She had real respect for a man doomed to bachelorhood.
Seeing that Beast had his memories back and still didn't recognize her, she could only spell it out. "We met at Professor Xavier's place. Cyclops was there too, the way I remember it. Ringing any bells?"
Beast thought hard for a while, and then it dawned on him. "You're that… that…"
"Isabella Swan!"
"Right, right, Miss Swan! Now I've got it!"
One look at your face and I can tell you don't. Bella couldn't be bothered with any of it and got down to their present situation.
"Dr. McCoy."
"Call me Hank."
"All right, Hank. Do you remember how you came to this world? And how you got into this city?"
Beast racked his memory. "I… I remember I was running an experiment in my lab, and then there was a flash of white light? When I got here… it should've been yesterday—some kind of search-and-rescue team found me?"
Only now did Beast have a spare moment to take in his surroundings. What little memory belonged to Silas had folded fully into his own, though it still felt faintly foreign to him.
He rubbed his own forearm, then gritted his teeth and held his breath the way the Hulk does before a transformation—held it a good long while, and nothing happened. He was taken aback. "My mutant powers are gone!"
Bella didn't even have to explain. Digging through Silas's earlier memories, he found the answer himself. "The serum they injected me with has a mutant-gene suppressant in it!"
That part Bella genuinely hadn't known—she relied on the mind and leaned on the body very little.
Soon enough Beast came around to the question every displaced traveler loves best. "What year is it?"
Bella chose her words carefully, wary of prejudicing his judgment before he'd formed his own.
"From what I've seen in the archives so far, it should be the 22nd century. Beyond that I can't say."
When it came to matters of science, Beast was a hundred times sharper than a mind-mage like Bella. Science was his home ground.