Originally, Bella had wanted to get back to her writing. This time she was planning to compile a guide to the galaxies of the cosmos — and "compile" here meant making the whole thing up.
In her downtime she'd grow the Creed Brotherhood a little more, and slowly rebuild the psionic energy she'd burned through.
But then she discovered, to her surprise, that the Cauldron of the Cosmos could be used to communicate across time. She hurried to contact the Ancient One, and the cheerful Sorcerer Supreme didn't refuse — she simply reached out and pulled Bella, giant pot and all, back to 2005, to the very next second after the Algorithm had sent her away.
"Ahh! That's more like it!"
The curling incense of Kamar-Taj left her intoxicated, and the faint magic in the air set every cell in her body dancing. Bella set the Cauldron down, planted her hands on her hips, closed her eyes and drew in a long, deep breath — like a fish stranded on the shore for far too long finally slipping back into the sea.
It was a good while before she looked over at the Ancient One.
The old woman sat there fanning herself with a folding fan, watching her at complete leisure.
"Master, these...?" Bella asked, pointing at the Cloak of Levitation and the Cauldron of the Cosmos.
"Aha? And here I'd assumed those two relics were lost for good — Wong took it very hard, blamed himself for it. Looks like he can rest easy now. Mm. Since these two have chosen you, you might as well keep them." The Ancient One said it without much concern.
Having already come out ahead, Bella pushed her luck anyway, remarking pointedly, "Master — none of this was a coincidence, was it?"
Landing on Dormammu's radar had been a genuinely rotten piece of luck for her. Not that she'd ever throw in with Dormammu — but with an enemy of that caliber fixed on her, there was no telling when he might land a truly vicious blow.
The Ancient One's face turned grave. "Someone always has to do it. If not you, then someone else; if not someone today, then someone tomorrow. Somebody had to appear in that place on that day — and stop Dormammu."
Bella sank into a sullen mood, and the Cloak of Levitation nuzzled her arm with startlingly human warmth, as if to comfort her.
"From what Dormammu told me, it sounded like a sorcerer summoned him at that particular moment in time. Who was that?"
The Ancient One looked her straight in the eye. "Who it was hardly matters. He meant well — well by Kamar-Taj's lights, at any rate. A world without magic is a cruel thing for a sorcerer to endure. He simply chose a less-than-right method, and made a serious mistake with grave consequences."
The Ancient One seemed to have little interest in pursuing the matter any further. "You're tired too," she said flatly. "Go and rest for now."
Bella really was worn out, her body feeling utterly drained. She badly needed the rest — and after that, she still had to bring Beast back.
Back in 2005, she felt far more at ease. She no longer had to go out and win people over in person; minute by minute, second by second, she picked up praise, in greater or lesser amounts, from every corner of the world. Her confidence swelled, and her psionic energy recovered quickly right along with it.
A day later, drawing on the immense magic at the New York Sanctum's node, she pulled Beast back to 2005, then opened a teleportation spell and sent the handsome, forever-single fellow back to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.
"Goodbye, Hank."
"...Goodbye, Miss Swan."
Bella took her leave quickly. Watching her vanish into the sunset, Beast stood before the familiar school gates and said nothing for a long, long time.
Professor Charles Xavier was still keeping up the crippled act; he wheeled his chair over to Beast now. "Looks like the two of you had quite a journey. Care to talk about it?"
In a rare move, Beast turned him down. "Sorry, Charles. I'd rather not get into it just now... No one's touched my old lab, I hope?"
The bald old man gave a gentle nod. "Of course not. It's exactly as you left it."
***
A quarter of an hour later, Bella arrived in Busan, at the spot where Kang the Conqueror and Andrei Sator had stood.
Some residual temporal energy still lingered here, though only the faintest trace of it.
There were no marks of a struggle, no bloodstains.
"So this is Andrei Sator?" Bella wound time backward, and the scene that surfaced was Sator shot dead by Kang with a single round, his body burning to ash from the inside out.
Andrei Sator, Kang the Conqueror, and that younger Kang each appeared in turn.
Studying their exchange closely, Bella gradually pieced the truth together.
Andrei Sator was a man of the modern age; someone from the 22nd century — the very point in time where Bella and Beast had been stranded — had reached out and made contact with him.
Because of the environmental catastrophe, the people of the 22nd century wanted to use entropy inversion to destroy the past, to stop the humans of earlier eras from wrecking Earth's environment.
And that raised a problem: the grandfather paradox — if the people of the past die, do the people of the present still exist? Those 22nd-century people considered themselves the true moderns; they held that whatever had happened was bound to happen, and that their own existence wouldn't be affected. With their world teetering on the brink of extinction, they had no room left to choose, so they shipped the Algorithm — assembled from nine metal components — back into the past, in an attempt to obliterate the 21st century outright.
Kang the Conqueror deceived and killed Andrei Sator, then seized the Algorithm. His aim was conquest, not annihilation — and in a sense, that made him the one who saved the world. Afterward he activated the Algorithm and kicked people like Bella and Beast, one by one, out of the current point in time.
"Huh?" As she kept rewinding, it finally dawned on Bella, a beat too late, that 006 had been kicked out along with them...
The old boy had been carried off entirely by the backwash as the temporal forces clashed. So much in life goes from a hair's breadth off to a thousand miles astray — and where time is concerned, that margin runs wider still.
So wide that, for a moment, Bella had no idea where the man had ended up.
"This guy really is... useless at everything, but first in line the moment there's a bit of excitement to join. Does he have to turn up in every last thing?" Bella began tracing back the current of time that had dragged 006 away, carefully making out where and when he'd landed.
The great pot of the Cauldron of the Cosmos sat beside her, and each time she narrowed down a likely direction she'd steal a glance inside; if she'd guessed wrong, she simply searched again. Give her a little time and she'd find him for certain.
***
The year was 2185.
Bella and Beast's disappearance drew little notice. The people here had been stripped of all feeling; one of the pair wrote, the other drew, and whether they were around or not, nobody paid the slightest attention.
It was the Creed Brotherhood, instead, that ran into trouble.
On the third day after Bella and Beast left, the conglomerate that ruled the city formally announced it had developed a drug to fully suppress human emotion. Sense Offense had become, after cancer, one more medical riddle conquered by humankind — or so they trumpeted it, at least.
They injected the drug into everyone, and that swept up the Brotherhood members whose wills weren't firm enough — those long tormented by their own emotions. The Creed Brotherhood was blown wide open; forced into a hasty uprising, they touched off a full-scale war against the conglomerate.
Over the next twenty years the Creed organization rode out its highs and lows — successes and failures, moments of glory and the betrayals of turncoats. They were driven into hiding, forced to keep quietly amassing their strength.
And it was around this same time that the old boy 006 woke up in the wilderness. He gazed around him, utterly lost. Where in the world was he?