ToE 4
The Theory of Everything
Chapter Four: Worlds Enough and Time
Summary: In the new timeline, Devlin finds himself face-to-face with teenage versions of Ben, Gwen, and even Kevin, and none of them are the way he remembers. And while Devlin tries to get the Archamada, Ken realizes they're missing a very important piece of the puzzle.
The Theory of Everything
Chapter Four: “Worlds Enough and Time”
Devlin barely had the chance to get a good look at the girl before she unleashed a whirlwind of pink energy, transporting them to some kind of facility. When the magic let them go, Devlin fell onto some sort of platform, and the girl hurriedly stumbled over and activated a console, encasing the whole platform in green energy.
“A containment field?” he asked, placing his hand against the forcefield.
The girl was leaning heavily against the panel, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. In one hand, she held some kind of comm device.
“Guys?” she called into it. “I’m at Los Soledad. I’ve got things under control, but I’m going to need you. And bring aspirin.”
Once she’d finished her call, the girl fell to the ground and didn’t get up. Whether she was unconscious or just resting, Devlin couldn’t tell. But he could tell that she had long red hair and a very familiar face.
“Aunt Gwendolyn?” he murmured in shock. But that couldn’t be right. Her magical energy signature was pink instead of blue. And where were the Charms of Bezel?
Only a few minutes in this brave new world, and already he didn’t like it. He had to figure out how to get Gwendolyn’s trust here and convince her to hand over the spells. But how he was going to do that while trapped was just as much of a mystery as everything else about this place.
Ken pulled on a pair of latex gloves as he stood over the evidence, now relocated to the complex’s lab. Sure, there were machines and all sorts of things that could do a thorough job of the forensics, but sometimes, it needed a person’s judgment. Sometimes, the old ways were best.
He broke the seal on the evidence bag for the Archamada and slipped the book out of the plastic. Most college kids wouldn’t know half of what he did about handling evidence, but then, most college kids didn’t have practically their entire family so deeply involved in fighting alien crimes that they were trusted with their own investigations. Ken and Devlin had been raised with all of that expertise as second-nature, and they knew exactly what they were doing in this kind of situation.
Flakes of ash fell out of the book as he opened it to the first intact page. Frowning at the obscuring chars, he ran a scanner over the page and began manipulating the image on a holographic monitor. Under an alternative light source, the words became clear, providing a brief description of the spell and how to cast it, in addition to the spell itself.
Investigations had provided stills of the scene, and he examined these closely. Overhead shots flagged where everyone had been when the attack occurred, with special detail on Charmcaster’s position relative to Ben during the spell. Something bothered him about the whole thing, and he brought up video of the attack, commandeered from floating security cameras nearby. He watched the end of the battle, when Devlin had burned the Archamada and disrupted the whole ritual. Charmcaster’s staff had been glowing, but the glow suddenly faded as the spell fell apart, and it fell to the ground. Ken frowned again and backtracked to just before the spell, when he’d been trapped by the array. Charmcaster had pointed her staff toward the ground to create the circle, but it was standing straight up as she performed the spell.
No, he chastised himself, shaking his head. That was speculation-the worst possible thing for an investigator. He had to look at this like a scientist-the facts and evidence had to come first, not the theory. Speculation could blind you to the truth if you weren’t careful, and he had to be as careful as possible if he was going to save his dad.
Still, it didn’t mean he couldn’t look into it some more. Saving all of the digital evidence, he resealed the Archamada and made a note of it on the evidence log before leaving the lab, tossing his gloves into the recycler on the way out.
There was more to this mess than met the eye, and he was going to get to the bottom of it.
About half an hour after the younger Gwendolyn put out her call, two other teenagers arrived-a brown-haired boy in a green jacket and a muscular, black-haired boy in black. The moment they saw her lying on the floor, they ran over to her with a cry of “Gwen!”
“I’m okay,” she insisted as they rushed to her side. She just opened her eyes to smile at the taller of the boys before looking at the other. “Did you bring the aspirin?”
He smiled slightly and fished a bottle out of his pocket. “Here. I’ll get you some water.”
“You’re a lifesaver,” she replied, taking the pills from him.
As his friend left to find some water, the other boy scolded, “I thought you said you weren’t going to use that spell again.”
“Sorry,” she apologized. “I didn’t have much of a choice. I found him.”
She gestured toward Devlin, and the boy looked over at him with a glare. For a moment, Devlin just gave him a confused look. There was something eerily familiar about that stare, something he couldn’t quite place…
“Got the water,” the shorter boy said, walking in with a cup. As he handed it to Gwendolyn, he said, “It’s not the best, but…”
“It’ll do,” she answered, swallowing a couple of pills.
The shorter boy stood up and looked over at Devlin, and with a start, Devlin realized who he was. Impossibly slight, the teenage Ben was a far cry from the muscular demigod he still was even at fifty. But there was no mistaking him, especially not when he crossed his arms, displaying part of the Omnitrix-oddly in green instead of silver and black, but it was as unmistakable as he was.
Seeing him was surreal. At this age, Ben looked exactly like Ken had in high school. The slightly confused look on his face also looked more like something Devlin would see on Ken instead. Ben always knew exactly what he was doing; it was bizarre seeing him so young and inexperienced.
“What’s this guy’s story?” the other asked, and Devlin still couldn’t figure out why he seemed so familiar and why he couldn’t place the name.
“I don’t know,” Gwendolyn answered, slowly getting to her feet. Her friend held her arm protectively, trying to help maintain her balance, and didn’t let go even when she was standing. With how weak she’d been after that spell, Devlin couldn’t quite blame him. “I found him in my room, trying to steal the Archamada. I didn’t want to take any chances, so I teleported him here.”
“Good idea,” Ben agreed, still not changing his expression. Devlin got the feeling Ben was giving him the same look that he himself was giving the third teenager, and he found himself grateful for the hood. It didn’t conceal him completely, but it did make him a little less recognizable.
“What did you want with the book?” Ben asked.
“I need it,” Devlin pleaded. “My father’s dying from a spell-the counterspell is in that book.”
There was a look of hesitation on Ben’s face-something Devlin had never seen from him before. However, it was apparently much more familiar to the others, because the last teen left Gwendolyn and placed himself between Ben and the control panel.
“No way,” he argued. “You’re not doing this again.”
“Doing what again?” Ben asked.
“Falling for another guy’s sob story,” he answered. “Every time you do that, you drag us into a war zone.”
“I do not!” Ben insisted, his voice pitching higher in indignation.
“Last time, you got yourself electrocuted,” his friend reminded him. “You remember Gwen having to carry you out of the garage because you nearly got killed?” Devlin tried his hardest not to flinch, but Ben only scowled. “Or how about the time you listened to Vilgax and got yourself possessed by Ghostfreak?”
“Hey, he was right about that one!”
“Or the time you got manipulated by that Spidermonkey and nearly stole that communications crystal from the Plumbers’ base?”
“But that was a…”
“And does the name ‘Michael Morningstar’ ring a bell?”
It was hard for Devlin to resist the urge to roll his eyes. There went the theory that Ben’s trust was hard to get. The next time Ken complained about it, Devlin was going to hit him.
Ben, meanwhile, was practically sulking. “Okay, fine. I think you made your point.”
“If you two are done fighting,” Gwendolyn interrupted, “we still have to figure out what to do about this guy.”
The three of them turned their attention back to Devlin, and despite how young they were, he began to feel nervous under their gaze. Maybe they were kids, but it was clear they weren’t as inexperienced as he’d first thought. They’d done enough that they might as well have been full-grown Plumbers or Galactic Enforcers, the way they were looking at him.
“Who are you?” Gwendolyn insisted.
Instinct told Devlin to give a fake name, but he still needed to get their trust. At the same time, giving his last name wouldn’t be a good thing at all-after all, this still involved time travel. And giving his original last name was right out; maybe this Ben was naïve enough to trust Vilgax at some point, but he wouldn’t let himself get fooled twice.
“My name’s Devlin,” he said. “And it’s just like I said-my father was attacked, and the only way I can save him is with that book! I can prove it-the spell is called the Mori Spell, and it drained the lifeforce from him.”
Ben immediately looked at Gwendolyn and asked, “Is that even possible?”
“I guess so,” she answered. “Grandma Verdona was able to draw off the mana from any living thing, but she didn’t drain it completely. It would have to be a really high-level spell.”
“It was,” Devlin insisted. “Please. I have to save him.”
The third, the cynic, snorted. “Right. And how do we know that you’re not just going to use this against us the minute we give it to you?”
Ben groaned. “Come on, Kevin!”
The name struck Devlin like a blow, and he realized just why he didn’t want to recognize him. “Kevin? Kevin Levin?”
“Who wants to know?” asked the accused.
Rage surged within Devlin, and he slammed his fists against the containment field, ignoring the mild shock he got from the energy. All the pain, the anger, and the memories were back in a flash, racing in his mind as he stared at his biological father, some thirty years younger. He wanted to unleash all of that all over again on Kevin, but instead he turned and shouted at that idiot Ben, “How can you work with him?”
Ben’s expression went inexplicably cold, and he calmly said, “Kevin’s made up for his past. If it weren’t for him, we’d never have defeated the Highbreed or Vilgax. He’s earned our trust.”
How could Ben be so stupid? First, he trusted Vilgax, and now Kevin? What was he thinking? Devlin was about to say these very things, but before he had the chance, the wall exploded to his left. Without a word, Gwendolyn raised a pink energy shield, protecting her, Ben, and Kevin from splintered wood flying everywhere. Devlin raised an arm to defend himself and half-turned out of instinct, but the containment field kept the debris at bay.
A young woman with silver hair appeared in the dust cloud, wearing a tight-fitting purple dress. Once again, there was no way not to recognize the past version, and Devlin felt a sense of dread. Magic called magic. He’d been sent here with a high-level spell. Of course it would have caught Charmcaster’s attention.
The forcefield dropped, and Ben, Gwendolyn, and Kevin immediately got ready to fight. Kevin reached for a metal panel and somehow managed to absorb it, a steel coating forming all over his body. Ben had the Omnitrix out, his hand on the dial-he probably hadn’t yet accessed the Master Control-while Gwendolyn stood in an attack stance, her hands surrounded by pink energy.
Charmcaster smirked at them and held her hands out. “I’ll be taking back that book you borrowed from us, Gwen.”
“Sorry, library’s closed,” Ben quipped, selecting a form on the Omnitrix. He slammed the dial down, and his body was absorbed by a flash of green light. When it faded, a plantlike alien was in his place, hands producing flames. “Swampfire!”
As the battle began, Devlin pounded harder against the containment field. Things were spiraling out of control, and if he was going to get anything back on track, he needed to get out of here.
The simulation room was usually used for training, but Ken had hacked it for other purposes before. Creating a perfect replica of a crime scene was simple. As he began to punch in variables into the data pad, Great-Grandpa and Aunt Gwendolyn looked at him in confusion.
“Why did you recreate the first attack?” Gwendolyn asked.
“I need to show you guys something,” Ken insisted. “Something important I found in the evidence.”
“Investigations is going over everything,” Max reminded him. “They would have seen it.”
“Not really,” Ken argued. Lowering the data pad, he explained, “They look at a case like cops-all a matter of trying to catch the culprit and match the evidence to the crime. They don’t look at things like a doctor.”
Gwendolyn smirked slightly. “And you do?”
Seriously, Ken answered, “This time I do,” and Gwendolyn stopped smirking. He entered the data and said, “It’s the same process, but a different approach.”
Drawing on the stills and video of the first attack, Ken created holograms of Charmcaster and her first victim, a male Kineceleran who had been out for a morning jog. Using evidence they’d obtained from the attack on Ben, he managed to recreate the process of the spell.
“When she’s about to cast the spell, Charmcaster throws down an array,” he narrated. “See? She points her staff directly at the ground.”
“Okay,” Gwendolyn answered. “But what does this have to do with…”
“Watch,” he insisted.
The Charmcaster hologram brought up her staff again, planting it into the ground as she began to cast the spell. At that point, Ken changed the scenery slightly, bringing up the scene exactly as Investigations had left it, with an evidence flag placed over a mild burn mark, right where the staff had been.
“See it?” he asked. “Watch, it’s in every one of the crime scenes.”
The next two didn’t have any video evidence, so he recreated everything from the stills left by Investigations. In both, there was a flag on a light burn on the ground. In the third, video evidence showed Charmcaster planting her staff into the ground again, and in the Investigations evidence, there was yet another burn flagged.
“Her staff’s giving off some kind of energy discharge,” Max realized.
“A staff does have power in it,” Gwendolyn explained. “It takes someone with magical talent to draw it out. Something like this could be normal.”
“Easy assumption,” Ken pointed out. “It could be natural energy discharge from the staff’s own power. But Investigations always says to follow the evidence, not assumptions. Watch this.”
The scenery changed again, reenacting the battle. Charmcaster pointed her staff at the ground to create the array underneath Ken, then brought it straight up as she revealed the Archamada. It was hard to watch all over again as a hologram of Ben leapt up and threw Ken out of the way, trapping himself instead, but Ken managed to keep his cool as hologram-Charmcaster performed the spell.
“This is what you dredged from Devlin’s memories,” Ken said, keeping his voice calm. “See? That aura-the white energy-is going directly to the staff.”
“It’s storing the power,” Gwendolyn realized. “It adds to the staff’s own power, making any spell Charmcaster casts with it stronger.”
“Exactly,” Ken replied, moving ahead a little, to the moments just before Devlin attacked. “Devlin said that the staff was burning brightly, bright enough to wake him up. When he attacked the book,” The hologram of Devlin sent a blast of fire at the Archamada, “the staff went dead and fell. But look.” He cut ahead to evidence from Investigations. Once again, there was a scorch on the ground-exactly where Charmcaster had placed her staff, burned there by the energy of the spell.
“Why didn’t we see this?” Gwendolyn asked.
“Magical Division might have, but not for the same reasons,” Ken explained. “You’re looking for what spell was cast and how. Not how to reverse it.”
“All of Ben’s energy that Charmcaster took is in her staff,” Max realized. “We need to get that staff back, before Devlin can return with the counterspell.”
“Right, but we’ve got another problem,” Ken said. “The law of conservation of energy.”
Gwendolyn paled. “Energy can’t be created or destroyed.”
“Just changed,” Ken finished. “And the theory of relativity says that energy and mass are related and transmutable.”
“We’ve managed to overcome a lot of Einstein’s limitations,” Max reminded him.
“But at the same time, it describes something simple,” Ken argued. “That staff has a certain amount of volume-which is also related to mass. It can only hold so much, like a glass can only hold so much water before it spills out. If I tried to charge a power cell beyond its capacity, it would explode.”
“But the staff keeps adding energy without going beyond its capacity,” Gwendolyn realized. “Because every time she uses it, Charmcaster drains off some of the energy she’s added.”
“This is why she’s attacked five people,” Ken explained. “She’s used up the lifeforce she drained from them. Theoretically, we can probably reverse that spell if we have the counterspell and the staff, even if the victim’s dead. But if there’s no energy left…”
The implication hit them immediately, and Max ordered, “Find that staff.”
“I’m on it,” Ken answered, setting down the data pad and racing out of the room.
As her nephew dashed out, Gwendolyn looked sorrowfully on the evidence. She felt a hand on her shoulder, and she looked back to see her grandfather reaching up to offer comfort.
“The boys will get the job done,” he affirmed. Gwendolyn nodded, knowing that they couldn’t afford to doubt them. Not with so much at stake.
The title for this chapter comes from the poem “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. Continuing from last chapter, this tries to merge the two major instances of time-travel magic seen in the Ben 10 universe-or multiverse, for that matter. In “Time Heals,” Gwen created an entirely new timeline after trying to change the past. There was some level of permanence: the Gwen from the bad future tried to stop the good future Gwen from changing the course of history, indicating that at that moment, the timelines existed parallel to one another. Not to mention the fact that bad future Gwen was able to exist in the bad future at all, given her counterpart had been dead for some time. This theory posits that like in the 2009 Star Trek movie, changing something from time travel causes time to branch off, creating a new timeline. And the bad future and parallel Paradox as seen in “Paradox” support that theory too. All bullshit science trying to apply various laws and theories in physics to sci-fi/fantasy rules is mine, however, and I apologize to those who know physics much better than that.
Chapter Four: Worlds Enough and Time
Summary: In the new timeline, Devlin finds himself face-to-face with teenage versions of Ben, Gwen, and even Kevin, and none of them are the way he remembers. And while Devlin tries to get the Archamada, Ken realizes they're missing a very important piece of the puzzle.
The Theory of Everything
Chapter Four: “Worlds Enough and Time”
Devlin barely had the chance to get a good look at the girl before she unleashed a whirlwind of pink energy, transporting them to some kind of facility. When the magic let them go, Devlin fell onto some sort of platform, and the girl hurriedly stumbled over and activated a console, encasing the whole platform in green energy.
“A containment field?” he asked, placing his hand against the forcefield.
The girl was leaning heavily against the panel, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. In one hand, she held some kind of comm device.
“Guys?” she called into it. “I’m at Los Soledad. I’ve got things under control, but I’m going to need you. And bring aspirin.”
Once she’d finished her call, the girl fell to the ground and didn’t get up. Whether she was unconscious or just resting, Devlin couldn’t tell. But he could tell that she had long red hair and a very familiar face.
“Aunt Gwendolyn?” he murmured in shock. But that couldn’t be right. Her magical energy signature was pink instead of blue. And where were the Charms of Bezel?
Only a few minutes in this brave new world, and already he didn’t like it. He had to figure out how to get Gwendolyn’s trust here and convince her to hand over the spells. But how he was going to do that while trapped was just as much of a mystery as everything else about this place.
Ken pulled on a pair of latex gloves as he stood over the evidence, now relocated to the complex’s lab. Sure, there were machines and all sorts of things that could do a thorough job of the forensics, but sometimes, it needed a person’s judgment. Sometimes, the old ways were best.
He broke the seal on the evidence bag for the Archamada and slipped the book out of the plastic. Most college kids wouldn’t know half of what he did about handling evidence, but then, most college kids didn’t have practically their entire family so deeply involved in fighting alien crimes that they were trusted with their own investigations. Ken and Devlin had been raised with all of that expertise as second-nature, and they knew exactly what they were doing in this kind of situation.
Flakes of ash fell out of the book as he opened it to the first intact page. Frowning at the obscuring chars, he ran a scanner over the page and began manipulating the image on a holographic monitor. Under an alternative light source, the words became clear, providing a brief description of the spell and how to cast it, in addition to the spell itself.
Investigations had provided stills of the scene, and he examined these closely. Overhead shots flagged where everyone had been when the attack occurred, with special detail on Charmcaster’s position relative to Ben during the spell. Something bothered him about the whole thing, and he brought up video of the attack, commandeered from floating security cameras nearby. He watched the end of the battle, when Devlin had burned the Archamada and disrupted the whole ritual. Charmcaster’s staff had been glowing, but the glow suddenly faded as the spell fell apart, and it fell to the ground. Ken frowned again and backtracked to just before the spell, when he’d been trapped by the array. Charmcaster had pointed her staff toward the ground to create the circle, but it was standing straight up as she performed the spell.
No, he chastised himself, shaking his head. That was speculation-the worst possible thing for an investigator. He had to look at this like a scientist-the facts and evidence had to come first, not the theory. Speculation could blind you to the truth if you weren’t careful, and he had to be as careful as possible if he was going to save his dad.
Still, it didn’t mean he couldn’t look into it some more. Saving all of the digital evidence, he resealed the Archamada and made a note of it on the evidence log before leaving the lab, tossing his gloves into the recycler on the way out.
There was more to this mess than met the eye, and he was going to get to the bottom of it.
About half an hour after the younger Gwendolyn put out her call, two other teenagers arrived-a brown-haired boy in a green jacket and a muscular, black-haired boy in black. The moment they saw her lying on the floor, they ran over to her with a cry of “Gwen!”
“I’m okay,” she insisted as they rushed to her side. She just opened her eyes to smile at the taller of the boys before looking at the other. “Did you bring the aspirin?”
He smiled slightly and fished a bottle out of his pocket. “Here. I’ll get you some water.”
“You’re a lifesaver,” she replied, taking the pills from him.
As his friend left to find some water, the other boy scolded, “I thought you said you weren’t going to use that spell again.”
“Sorry,” she apologized. “I didn’t have much of a choice. I found him.”
She gestured toward Devlin, and the boy looked over at him with a glare. For a moment, Devlin just gave him a confused look. There was something eerily familiar about that stare, something he couldn’t quite place…
“Got the water,” the shorter boy said, walking in with a cup. As he handed it to Gwendolyn, he said, “It’s not the best, but…”
“It’ll do,” she answered, swallowing a couple of pills.
The shorter boy stood up and looked over at Devlin, and with a start, Devlin realized who he was. Impossibly slight, the teenage Ben was a far cry from the muscular demigod he still was even at fifty. But there was no mistaking him, especially not when he crossed his arms, displaying part of the Omnitrix-oddly in green instead of silver and black, but it was as unmistakable as he was.
Seeing him was surreal. At this age, Ben looked exactly like Ken had in high school. The slightly confused look on his face also looked more like something Devlin would see on Ken instead. Ben always knew exactly what he was doing; it was bizarre seeing him so young and inexperienced.
“What’s this guy’s story?” the other asked, and Devlin still couldn’t figure out why he seemed so familiar and why he couldn’t place the name.
“I don’t know,” Gwendolyn answered, slowly getting to her feet. Her friend held her arm protectively, trying to help maintain her balance, and didn’t let go even when she was standing. With how weak she’d been after that spell, Devlin couldn’t quite blame him. “I found him in my room, trying to steal the Archamada. I didn’t want to take any chances, so I teleported him here.”
“Good idea,” Ben agreed, still not changing his expression. Devlin got the feeling Ben was giving him the same look that he himself was giving the third teenager, and he found himself grateful for the hood. It didn’t conceal him completely, but it did make him a little less recognizable.
“What did you want with the book?” Ben asked.
“I need it,” Devlin pleaded. “My father’s dying from a spell-the counterspell is in that book.”
There was a look of hesitation on Ben’s face-something Devlin had never seen from him before. However, it was apparently much more familiar to the others, because the last teen left Gwendolyn and placed himself between Ben and the control panel.
“No way,” he argued. “You’re not doing this again.”
“Doing what again?” Ben asked.
“Falling for another guy’s sob story,” he answered. “Every time you do that, you drag us into a war zone.”
“I do not!” Ben insisted, his voice pitching higher in indignation.
“Last time, you got yourself electrocuted,” his friend reminded him. “You remember Gwen having to carry you out of the garage because you nearly got killed?” Devlin tried his hardest not to flinch, but Ben only scowled. “Or how about the time you listened to Vilgax and got yourself possessed by Ghostfreak?”
“Hey, he was right about that one!”
“Or the time you got manipulated by that Spidermonkey and nearly stole that communications crystal from the Plumbers’ base?”
“But that was a…”
“And does the name ‘Michael Morningstar’ ring a bell?”
It was hard for Devlin to resist the urge to roll his eyes. There went the theory that Ben’s trust was hard to get. The next time Ken complained about it, Devlin was going to hit him.
Ben, meanwhile, was practically sulking. “Okay, fine. I think you made your point.”
“If you two are done fighting,” Gwendolyn interrupted, “we still have to figure out what to do about this guy.”
The three of them turned their attention back to Devlin, and despite how young they were, he began to feel nervous under their gaze. Maybe they were kids, but it was clear they weren’t as inexperienced as he’d first thought. They’d done enough that they might as well have been full-grown Plumbers or Galactic Enforcers, the way they were looking at him.
“Who are you?” Gwendolyn insisted.
Instinct told Devlin to give a fake name, but he still needed to get their trust. At the same time, giving his last name wouldn’t be a good thing at all-after all, this still involved time travel. And giving his original last name was right out; maybe this Ben was naïve enough to trust Vilgax at some point, but he wouldn’t let himself get fooled twice.
“My name’s Devlin,” he said. “And it’s just like I said-my father was attacked, and the only way I can save him is with that book! I can prove it-the spell is called the Mori Spell, and it drained the lifeforce from him.”
Ben immediately looked at Gwendolyn and asked, “Is that even possible?”
“I guess so,” she answered. “Grandma Verdona was able to draw off the mana from any living thing, but she didn’t drain it completely. It would have to be a really high-level spell.”
“It was,” Devlin insisted. “Please. I have to save him.”
The third, the cynic, snorted. “Right. And how do we know that you’re not just going to use this against us the minute we give it to you?”
Ben groaned. “Come on, Kevin!”
The name struck Devlin like a blow, and he realized just why he didn’t want to recognize him. “Kevin? Kevin Levin?”
“Who wants to know?” asked the accused.
Rage surged within Devlin, and he slammed his fists against the containment field, ignoring the mild shock he got from the energy. All the pain, the anger, and the memories were back in a flash, racing in his mind as he stared at his biological father, some thirty years younger. He wanted to unleash all of that all over again on Kevin, but instead he turned and shouted at that idiot Ben, “How can you work with him?”
Ben’s expression went inexplicably cold, and he calmly said, “Kevin’s made up for his past. If it weren’t for him, we’d never have defeated the Highbreed or Vilgax. He’s earned our trust.”
How could Ben be so stupid? First, he trusted Vilgax, and now Kevin? What was he thinking? Devlin was about to say these very things, but before he had the chance, the wall exploded to his left. Without a word, Gwendolyn raised a pink energy shield, protecting her, Ben, and Kevin from splintered wood flying everywhere. Devlin raised an arm to defend himself and half-turned out of instinct, but the containment field kept the debris at bay.
A young woman with silver hair appeared in the dust cloud, wearing a tight-fitting purple dress. Once again, there was no way not to recognize the past version, and Devlin felt a sense of dread. Magic called magic. He’d been sent here with a high-level spell. Of course it would have caught Charmcaster’s attention.
The forcefield dropped, and Ben, Gwendolyn, and Kevin immediately got ready to fight. Kevin reached for a metal panel and somehow managed to absorb it, a steel coating forming all over his body. Ben had the Omnitrix out, his hand on the dial-he probably hadn’t yet accessed the Master Control-while Gwendolyn stood in an attack stance, her hands surrounded by pink energy.
Charmcaster smirked at them and held her hands out. “I’ll be taking back that book you borrowed from us, Gwen.”
“Sorry, library’s closed,” Ben quipped, selecting a form on the Omnitrix. He slammed the dial down, and his body was absorbed by a flash of green light. When it faded, a plantlike alien was in his place, hands producing flames. “Swampfire!”
As the battle began, Devlin pounded harder against the containment field. Things were spiraling out of control, and if he was going to get anything back on track, he needed to get out of here.
The simulation room was usually used for training, but Ken had hacked it for other purposes before. Creating a perfect replica of a crime scene was simple. As he began to punch in variables into the data pad, Great-Grandpa and Aunt Gwendolyn looked at him in confusion.
“Why did you recreate the first attack?” Gwendolyn asked.
“I need to show you guys something,” Ken insisted. “Something important I found in the evidence.”
“Investigations is going over everything,” Max reminded him. “They would have seen it.”
“Not really,” Ken argued. Lowering the data pad, he explained, “They look at a case like cops-all a matter of trying to catch the culprit and match the evidence to the crime. They don’t look at things like a doctor.”
Gwendolyn smirked slightly. “And you do?”
Seriously, Ken answered, “This time I do,” and Gwendolyn stopped smirking. He entered the data and said, “It’s the same process, but a different approach.”
Drawing on the stills and video of the first attack, Ken created holograms of Charmcaster and her first victim, a male Kineceleran who had been out for a morning jog. Using evidence they’d obtained from the attack on Ben, he managed to recreate the process of the spell.
“When she’s about to cast the spell, Charmcaster throws down an array,” he narrated. “See? She points her staff directly at the ground.”
“Okay,” Gwendolyn answered. “But what does this have to do with…”
“Watch,” he insisted.
The Charmcaster hologram brought up her staff again, planting it into the ground as she began to cast the spell. At that point, Ken changed the scenery slightly, bringing up the scene exactly as Investigations had left it, with an evidence flag placed over a mild burn mark, right where the staff had been.
“See it?” he asked. “Watch, it’s in every one of the crime scenes.”
The next two didn’t have any video evidence, so he recreated everything from the stills left by Investigations. In both, there was a flag on a light burn on the ground. In the third, video evidence showed Charmcaster planting her staff into the ground again, and in the Investigations evidence, there was yet another burn flagged.
“Her staff’s giving off some kind of energy discharge,” Max realized.
“A staff does have power in it,” Gwendolyn explained. “It takes someone with magical talent to draw it out. Something like this could be normal.”
“Easy assumption,” Ken pointed out. “It could be natural energy discharge from the staff’s own power. But Investigations always says to follow the evidence, not assumptions. Watch this.”
The scenery changed again, reenacting the battle. Charmcaster pointed her staff at the ground to create the array underneath Ken, then brought it straight up as she revealed the Archamada. It was hard to watch all over again as a hologram of Ben leapt up and threw Ken out of the way, trapping himself instead, but Ken managed to keep his cool as hologram-Charmcaster performed the spell.
“This is what you dredged from Devlin’s memories,” Ken said, keeping his voice calm. “See? That aura-the white energy-is going directly to the staff.”
“It’s storing the power,” Gwendolyn realized. “It adds to the staff’s own power, making any spell Charmcaster casts with it stronger.”
“Exactly,” Ken replied, moving ahead a little, to the moments just before Devlin attacked. “Devlin said that the staff was burning brightly, bright enough to wake him up. When he attacked the book,” The hologram of Devlin sent a blast of fire at the Archamada, “the staff went dead and fell. But look.” He cut ahead to evidence from Investigations. Once again, there was a scorch on the ground-exactly where Charmcaster had placed her staff, burned there by the energy of the spell.
“Why didn’t we see this?” Gwendolyn asked.
“Magical Division might have, but not for the same reasons,” Ken explained. “You’re looking for what spell was cast and how. Not how to reverse it.”
“All of Ben’s energy that Charmcaster took is in her staff,” Max realized. “We need to get that staff back, before Devlin can return with the counterspell.”
“Right, but we’ve got another problem,” Ken said. “The law of conservation of energy.”
Gwendolyn paled. “Energy can’t be created or destroyed.”
“Just changed,” Ken finished. “And the theory of relativity says that energy and mass are related and transmutable.”
“We’ve managed to overcome a lot of Einstein’s limitations,” Max reminded him.
“But at the same time, it describes something simple,” Ken argued. “That staff has a certain amount of volume-which is also related to mass. It can only hold so much, like a glass can only hold so much water before it spills out. If I tried to charge a power cell beyond its capacity, it would explode.”
“But the staff keeps adding energy without going beyond its capacity,” Gwendolyn realized. “Because every time she uses it, Charmcaster drains off some of the energy she’s added.”
“This is why she’s attacked five people,” Ken explained. “She’s used up the lifeforce she drained from them. Theoretically, we can probably reverse that spell if we have the counterspell and the staff, even if the victim’s dead. But if there’s no energy left…”
The implication hit them immediately, and Max ordered, “Find that staff.”
“I’m on it,” Ken answered, setting down the data pad and racing out of the room.
As her nephew dashed out, Gwendolyn looked sorrowfully on the evidence. She felt a hand on her shoulder, and she looked back to see her grandfather reaching up to offer comfort.
“The boys will get the job done,” he affirmed. Gwendolyn nodded, knowing that they couldn’t afford to doubt them. Not with so much at stake.
The title for this chapter comes from the poem “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell. Continuing from last chapter, this tries to merge the two major instances of time-travel magic seen in the Ben 10 universe-or multiverse, for that matter. In “Time Heals,” Gwen created an entirely new timeline after trying to change the past. There was some level of permanence: the Gwen from the bad future tried to stop the good future Gwen from changing the course of history, indicating that at that moment, the timelines existed parallel to one another. Not to mention the fact that bad future Gwen was able to exist in the bad future at all, given her counterpart had been dead for some time. This theory posits that like in the 2009 Star Trek movie, changing something from time travel causes time to branch off, creating a new timeline. And the bad future and parallel Paradox as seen in “Paradox” support that theory too. All bullshit science trying to apply various laws and theories in physics to sci-fi/fantasy rules is mine, however, and I apologize to those who know physics much better than that.