Author's Note: I own nothing.
20 The Mind For It
Kevin did not age gracefully, though aging eighty years in about two seconds was bound to be hard on anyone. Jen was doing her best not to laugh she really was. But Kevin trying to unlock a cactus with his car keys made her snort. Gwen shot her a dirty look but Jen just took the keys. They would find a way to fix this. In the meantime it was pretty funny, watching old man Kevin flirt with Gwen and grouch at her.
"I hope you know what you're doing." He grumped from the backseat. Jen grinned at him in the rearview mirror. She started the car and spotted something in the side mirror. She swore and gunned the engine, throwing the car into reverse, slamming into a set of trash cans. "It's not a bumper car!" Then Gwen spotted what Jen had seen.
"Drive faster!" Jen pulled the emergency brake and spun the car in a perfect handbrake turn, snapping the brake back off with a flick of the wrist. Kevin screamed from the back seat and Jen tried her best to block him out as she raced away from the creature that was now following the car.
"Wannabe street racer!" Kevin grumbled as the girls hauled him away from the now wrecked car. Well aged, it was a mess of rust and as Jen glanced behind her the wheels creaked and the metal of the axel bent and snapped, the whole thing coming crashing to the ground. Jen flinched as Kevin glared at her. "You are never driving my car again."
"True." Gwen just managed to suppress her laughter. Jen shook her head and stiffened as she spotted the figure across the street from them. She leaned Kevin more firmly against Gwen and stepped in front of the other two. "Isn't that right Paradox."
"You're late. You were supposed to be here fifteen seconds ago. Or is this thing running fast again?" He clicked closed a pocket watch and slipped it back into his pocket. Gwen frowned.
"Who are you? What is that creature?" Paradox ignored her and eyed Kevin.
"You look different. Did you do something to your hair?" Kevin's scoff turned into a cough about halfway through.
"Yeah, I'm parting it down the middle now and I also got real old!" Paradox scoffed.
"Don't talk to me about old. I walk in eternity."
"You better start running in eternity!" Kevin threatened as he waved a fist at Paradox from where he was still leaned on Gwen. Jen stayed between the two.
"What do you mean?" Paradox stepped up to her and frowned.
"You're a little different too." Before any of them could do anything Paradox took Jen's chin in his hand and moved her face to get a good look into her eyes. "Something in your eyes isn't… isn't there yet." He frowned and released her chin, looking back over her shoulder at Kevin. "But you might slow us down. I'll have to fix that. We'll come back right over there." With that Jen blinked and Kevin and Paradox were gone.
"Jen what is he talking about?" Jen shook her head.
"I don't know." They both glanced over their shoulders at the spot Paradox had pointed to as Kevin and Paradox came back around the corner. Kevin now back to his proper.
"He doesn't have a time machine. He has a map, inside his head." Paradox grinned at her.
"Very good Jen, but you did always have the mind for time travel." Paradox Looked into Jen's face again, searching for something. "You've been closer to time than any but myself. The last of her kind. She used you to try and fix that, but you won in the end. She walked along time itself, and you walked with her for a moment." Paradox frowned. "It's still not there though." Jen glared.
"What's not there?"
"I can't say. I may not yet know. It's exciting not to know things isn't it?"
"You mean like how you don't know how to beat that creature." Paradox frowned.
"That one's more frustrating at the moment really."
"Take us back to the experiment!"
"I told you, you can't stop it from happening!"
"I know, just trust me!" Paradox nodded and the world around them flashed and changed. Jen took off without a second thought, Kevin and Gwen following close behind her.
Catching the assistant before he could go spinning off into the void was easy as Humungousaur. What she hadn't been expecting was what she saw looking into the swirling blue vortex. She stared. She only stopped staring when something grabbed her around the waste. She hadn't even noticed that she'd transformed back, still holding on to the scientist who was shaking. Gwen dragged her away from the event horizon and smashed the machine. The three of them escaped in the cloud of smoke that ensued.
"How did you not realize he was your assistant!? You had a thousand years to figure it out!" Paradox laughed at Jen's words as they vanished back to their present.
"Oh that was fun! Would you like a gumball?" Jen shook her head at Paradox who shrugged and put them away. "I must say for your first time in the past that wasn't bad." Kevin frowned.
"First time in the future too, on the moon no less." Paradox laughed.
"Oh Kevin, it isn't their first time in the future." He grinned at Gwen and Jen who shrugged at each other.
"He's not wrong." Gwen nodded.
"I know we went to the future, I just don't remember a whole lot of it." Kevin frowned.
"You went to the future and you don't remember it?" Paradox shrugged.
"Energy beings are beings of the present. Past and future never sit well with them. But Jen has the head for it." Jen tapped a finger to her lips.
"I was sworn to secrecy." Kevin frowned.
"By who?"
"The only person she listens to on a regular basis." Gwen said grinning.
"And who is that?" Kevin asked glancing at the redhead.
"Herself." Jen held up a hand at Gwen as her friends laughed.
"Wait guys, where did Paradox go?" Looking around they saw that Jen was right while they had joked the lab coat clad man had vanished and this time had failed to reappear.
"Oh yeah! Thanks for stranding us out here!" Kevin yelled.
"Kevin?" Gwen said tapping the taller boy on the shoulder and pointing behind him. He blinked and laughed loudly as he spotted what she had seen.
"My car! I take back everything I was about to say about you Paradox." Jen laughed as Kevin and Gwen admired the car. "It's factory new! From 1976. Ok I like him he can stick around." Jen shook her head and pulled a sheet of paper out from underneath the windshield wiper.
" 'Kevin please keep in mind that if this car makes contact with anything else from 1976 it will explode like anti-matter.' Better keep a close eye on the change you keep in here." Jen said as she stepped into the back seat. Kevin frowned.
"He's not serious right?" Gwen shrugged and got into the car. Kevin shook his head and got in as well. Gwen fell asleep about ten minutes into the drive back to Bellwood.
"So what was Paradox talking about? The last of their kind? Tried to use you to fix that, sounds like some intense stuff." Jen nodded, fiddling absently with the dial on the Omnitrix.
"Back when I was ten we ran across someone called Eon. She tried to use the Omnitrix to turn me into her, to open something called the Hands of Armageddon. To save her whole world." Kevin frowned.
"I mean that doesn't sound so bad, saving worlds is kinda your thing." Jen nodded.
"Yeah, but not at the expense of other worlds. Eon wanted to use earth as a substitute for her world. To roll over everything and everyone there and replace it with her world. And she almost succeeded. Her DNA is still in the Omnitrix, without Gwen she'd have taken over. " Jen flicked a finger across the dial of Omnitrix as if brushing a speck of dust off of the dial.
"Yikes." Jen nodded.
"Yeah we don't like talking about it."
"But why did you becoming Eon mean you 'walked along time itself', like Paradox said?"
"Eon's race had mastered the ability to control time like Paradox does it. I was still in there when Eon took over for the time she managed to. I watched through her eyes. It think that's why time travel doesn't freak me out. I understood it when I was Eon and it still makes sense to me now. Sort of like how I understand how to make fire as Heatblast or Swampfire. But cant do it as a human. It's just something I understand. Does that make any sense?" Kevin was silent for a moment.
"I mean sort of. Not really but kind of." Jen shrugged and went back to twiddling with the Omnitrix for the rest of the trip back to Bellwood.