Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It said something about Maxwell Possible's family that this was almost a fairly typical day.

For one thing, there was the sitch itself. Most teens wouldn't consider it ordinary to be vaulting through an ancient jungle temple after a raving criminal, dressed in an outfit specially designed by an old family friend and fellow agent.

Then there was the fact that he was related to every other crime fighter currently on the field: his mother and father busy dealing with one of the latest crazy's new toys, an aunt slipping in and out of the shadows in hopes of taking the madman by surprise, and an uncle fiddling with some gadget just below where Max himself perched on a high ledge with the family pet peeking out of his pocket, the three of them blocking the only path of escape. It wasn't that everyone on Team Possible belonged to the same extended family, but… Well, there was a reason they still used that name.

(In his opinion, it was because his family was awesome. Come to think of it, that kind of opinion was probably also unusual for a guy his age.)

Under most circumstances, even the fact that the criminal they were chasing had extreme genetic alterations and a ridiculously rare power would only rate about a 3.5 on Max's weirdness scale. But it was the man's identity – or, more precisely, his particular history with Team Possible – that made this mission stand out.

"Who," Kim Possible, illustrious leader and world-famous original member of the team, growled as she dove out of the way of a toppling statue, "decided it was a good idea to break Monkey Fist out of his stone prison?!" Pausing just a moment to flick her long braid out of her face, she added, "I mean, I know he was bound to get restored eventually, but couldn't it have been done in a cell or something?"

Ron Possible, Ultimate Monkey Master and the team's second-in-command, managed to effect a shrug even as he grappled with the life-size stone gorilla that had knocked the statue over. The gorilla, and its partner that was now making its way toward Uncle Tim, were the reasons Team Possible had been called on the case. They didn't yet know what Monkey Fist was planning here, but he had somehow managed to animate the things after spiriting them away from a museum a week ago.

"To be fair, whoever did it probably didn't want Monkey Fist in jail," Ron pointed out. "Dunno if they wanted him to do this either, but crazy is as crazy does."

Max, who thus far lacked any cool titles of his own but at least got to claim the former two as his aforementioned mom and dad, frowned and dropped down in front of the second stone gorilla. "Need a hand?" he asked his uncle, already vaulting onto the behemoth's shoulders and swinging around to throw it off balance.

A concerned chittering drew as much of his attention as he could spare to his lower left side. Rufus had clambered out of his pocket and was scampering up to where his arms were wrapped around the thing's neck. The aging mole rat gave his youngest human an equally concerned look before squeaking again.

"I've got it under control!" Max snapped defensively, shifting his grip and smacking the stone gorilla on the head for good measure. That did nothing to harm it, of course, but his main goal right now was distraction anyway. The sudden shift of weight under him and the awkward turning of its head told him he'd succeeded.

"Ha! See, Rufus? No babysitting job nee- Whoa!"

The gorilla had just started swinging its body in sharp arcs, and Max scrambled to simultaneously keep his grip and dodge massive arms that were now reaching back at him.

In the midst of all this, Tim just scowled at the device in his hands, barely paying any mind to the grappling contest his nephew was swiftly getting caught up in. He pointed it at the thrashing construct, pressed a button to no effect, and then scowled harder and smacked it sharply in the side.

"I can't figure out the frequency this animation spell is working at," he said in the same tone one might use to complain about a busted toaster. "And I can't disrupt it if I can't get the frequency!"

"I was wrong, I do not have this under control!" Max shouted.

Uncle Tim shrugged. "You're doing fine. And anyway, that's what the babysitter's for." He casually took a step back from the impromptu wrestling match and started muttering to himself and fiddling with his disrupter again.

Scratch that, my family is awesome except for Uncle Tim.

The gorilla twisted itself around in its efforts to dislodge its attacker, and now Max was able to see what was happening in the rest of the temple. His parents were still tag-teaming their own stone gorilla, but while they evaded its swinging fists with a fluidity borne of vast experience, they couldn't disengage to approach their real target without the thing getting right back into their path.

Meanwhile, said target was perched on a raised platform in the center of the room, clutching something tightly within his robes and watching his harried opponents warily. As Max looked, the man glanced up at a beam of focused sunlight that shone through a precise hole in the ceiling, one which seemed to be creeping its way toward the very heart of the platform.

"You thought you were rid of me," Monkey Fist snarled. "You let yourselves forget about me for over twenty years. I was on the cusp of having the very world in my hands, and thanks to an infant I lost everything!"

"Yeah, after you made a deal with a monkey demon to attack a baby!" Kim snapped. Max could no longer see what his mom was doing, as the construct he was clinging to had chosen that moment to redouble its frenzied thrashing, but he could at least keep an ear on what was happening around him. "Forgive us for being a little short on sympathy."

Rufus was growling now as he clung to Max's arm. He knew better than to bite unyielding stone, but during a brief pause in the scuffle, he shimmied his way forward and started batting at the gorilla's face with a tiny paw.

The gorilla rumbled in response and reached up to smack the offending rodent off, but Rufus leapt out of the way and back onto Max's shoulder. The end result was the construct comically slapping its own face, and Max couldn't help but cackle as he readjusted his grip around its neck.

"Nice one, bud!" he said. With the thrashing briefly disrupted, he looked back into the room just in time to see a pair of black-clad arms wrapping around Monkey Fist from behind and pinning his own arms at his side.

"Not that you have to worry about babies anymore," Aunt Han appended to her sister-in-law's earlier comment, a smirk evident in her voice.

Monkey Fist snarled and threw his weight forward, unbalancing Hana enough that he was then able to twist around and throw her off of him. He glanced at the beam of sunlight again, and an evil smirk played across his lips.

"Oh, I don't plan to," he purred. "With the Tempus Simia finally complete, I will stop you from ever getting in my way!"

Several things happened at once then. A resounding crash erupted as the stone gorilla that had been harassing Max's parents slammed into a wall it had weakened earlier, toppling it. That must have been their plan; they were already well clear of the crumbling masonry that swiftly buried the construct, and they wasted no time in bolting for Monkey Fist. Aunt Han sprang to her feet and began to charge back up the stairway she'd been thrown halfway down. Monkey Fist cackled wildly and pulled two items – parts of a statue, it looked like? – from where he'd hidden them in his robe. And with a sharp lurch, the stone gorilla Max had hitched a ride on finally threw off both of its passengers, sending him crashing into his uncle and Rufus flying off somewhere behind them.

Max was scrambling to his feet when some kind of shockwave pulsed through the room. His assailant grunted and slid a foot or so toward him, unintentionally shielding him from the blast. Three shouts, followed shortly by the rough impact of bodies hitting the stone floor, told him that his teammates had not been so lucky.

"Guardians, to me!" Monkey Fist ordered. The gorilla that Max had tangled with turned and began to make its way toward the raised platform in the center of the temple. Across the room, the pile of rubble from the collapsed section of wall shifted and gave way as the other gorilla pulled itself free.

Max looked up to find that a shimmering red portal had opened up behind Monkey Fist. The criminal grinned triumphantly as his gaze swept over the temple and the adult agents still just beginning to recover.

"Now I can ensure that your precious Han never has a chance to defeat me," he said. "And when I do, I will be the unstoppable one!"

Max snarled. "Not if I have anything to say about it!"

With that he took off at a dead run for the madman and his new… whatever it was. Monkey Fist only had time to startle at his voice and turn.

The nearest stone gorilla was quicker to react, though. Before Max could even think to dodge, a massive hand swatted him to the side. The force of the blow was enough to both knock him dizzy and throw him off the edge of the platform.

But his forward momentum, coupled with the size of the portal, meant that he still managed to tumble right through its crimson expanse. That wall of swirling red was the last thing he saw before he blacked out.

And the last thing he heard was his mother's voice, screaming his name in pure, unfiltered horror.

Chapter Text

Note to self: Don't make quips at the bad guys when you have a chance to take them by surprise.

Max groaned as he came to. Bright sunlight stabbed at his eyelids, a sharp contrast to the mostly dim confines of the temple he'd been in before… whatever had just happened. He opened his eyes and sat up carefully, only to let out a hiss of pain when the spot where that gorilla thing had smacked him throbbed.

Especially when they have freaky giant golem things to protect them, he added to himself. He prodded gingerly at the sore spot, just around the right side of his chest. Nothing broken, thank God, and he didn't think any ribs were cracked either. Still, it was definitely going to leave a bruise.

That business done, Max finally turned his attention to his surroundings. It was mostly vegetation from his current vantage point, but more like the edge of a temperate forest than the dense jungle that surrounded the strange monkey temple his family had tracked Monkey Fist to. The air wasn't nearly as hot or humid either, though it was still pretty warm. He was near the bottom of some sort of dip or hill, which from a few half-flattened bushes above him he guessed he had tumbled down after going through the portal, and he thought he heard the distant sounds of voices and light traffic from that direction.

There was no sign of Monkey Fist, his stolen minions, or anyone else Max knew anywhere.

With a sigh, he stood up and turned on his Maxciever (Wade had way too much fun naming everyone's communicators). That portal had clearly dumped him somewhere far from his starting point, and Mom and Dad had to be worried sick by now. He was kind of surprised that they and the rest of the team hadn't woken him up with a call already.

Max winced when the screen of the wrist-bound device came up with an error message. "Great," he muttered to himself. It had been working fine before, but if something was broken, he supposed that was at least one mystery solved.

With another sigh, he started up the hill. With luck, it wouldn't take him long to find a phone he could borrow and call Wade or someone else who could pass on to the field team that he was okay.

As he walked, he tried to think of what the portal thing, this so-called 'Tempus Simia,' was meant for. It obviously transported people to different places, but was that all Monkey Fist wanted? A way to effectively teleport around the world for easy break-ins and quick getaways?

Fear suddenly gripped Max as the full implications of that question sank in. What if it wasn't just quick transportation around the globe? What if that thing had sent him to another dimension or something? That would explain why his communicator couldn't connect to anyone else's, but how would he contact anyone or get home then?

Max quickly went over what Monkey Fist had said during the fight. "I will stop you from ever getting in my way." "Now I can ensure your precious Han never has a chance to defeat me."

That didn't sound like dimension-hopping. Actually, it was more like…

"Oh no," Max muttered to himself, his steps quickening until he crested the ridge and peered out into town from behind a large tree. "Oh, no no no."

The town looked startlingly familiar – Middleton, of all places, he realized. But it was subtly different from the Middleton he knew. It was in the way people dressed, the design of the cars passing on the nearby street, the style of the buildings. And it wasn't just some vague sense of "out of place" – everything looked old-fashioned. Out of date.

"Oh no."

Max's heart was pounding now as he stumbled toward the nearest collection of shops, but he still had enough presence of mind to recognize the area. That bakery was supposed to be a music store and there was an entire building missing, but –

There. The city library was still just down the street. That would be a good place to get information. He sprinted all the way there, heedless of the pain in his side blossoming anew, and he only slowed down when he burst through the library's doors and made a beeline for the nearest of its ancient-looking computers.

The device happened to display the time and date on its screensaver, saving him a step at least, but his heart plummeted when it confirmed his fears.

August 17th, 2003.

Over twenty years ago. The same amount of time Monkey Fist had been ranting about.

Max leaned onto the desk on shaking hands, staring at the screen while he took deep, heaving breaths and tried to get his panicked thoughts under control. He could sense that people were staring at him now, and he honestly wasn't sure how much of it was from his dramatic entrance and how much was from his future – his hero attire.

"Hey, kid." The voice finally broke him out of his shock, and he whirled around to see a young man in a volunteer uniform.

"You okay?" the man asked, a worried crease on his brow.

I'm trapped far enough in the past that it'll be several years before I'm even born; there is nothing okay about that. "Yeah," he lied.

The volunteer eyed him for a moment, but finally nodded. "Well, let me know if you need anything."

After another moment's thought, he added, "You know, there was another guy who came in looking just as lost as you did a little while ago. He wouldn't be a friend of yours, would he?"

Max's breath caught in his throat. Dad? Uncle Tim? This will be way easier if one of them made it through. Man, why didn't I give Rufus a chance to catch up to me when I went for that stupid portal?

"Maybe. What did he look like?"

"Kind of tall. Black hair, and a lot of it if I'm being honest. He was ranting something about being in the wrong place in this English accent, and he had on some kinda ninja-looking robes."

The man looked Max up and down, taking in his own attire. "He's not… I dunno, chasing you or something, is he? Or are you chasing him?" He smirked and added playfully, "I thought Middleton already had a teen hero."

Max made a very deliberate decision not to process that last statement for the time being. Instead he focused on what had come before it. "It's… kind of complicated, but yeah, I know him. What was he looking for?"

The volunteer shrugged absently. "Mostly just what I told you, he didn't want to talk to anyone. I think I heard him mention something about Japan, but he just looked up something on the computers and then left."

Max forced himself to keep his breathing steady. "Right… That sounds about right," he muttered half to himself.

After a few assurances that the newcomer really was okay and that he didn't need help looking for books or anything, the volunteer left to check on other patrons. Max, meanwhile, rubbed his forehead and tried to organize his thoughts.

"Okay," he said to himself, starting to pace. "You're trapped in the past with a crazy monkey man on the loose. He's gotta have the thing that brought you here, but right now he's busy using it to try and do something nefarious to your aunt…" He glanced at the date again and did a quick mental calculation, "...before she's even born, apparently. So now all you have to do is track down the guy and his giant stone lackeys, stop his evil scheme, and get this 'Tempus Simia' thing to bring everyone back before the timeline is wrecked forever. Great."

He took a deep breath. "Hey, okay, it's like Grandpa always says. Anything's possible for a…"

Max froze in his tracks as he trailed off, the family motto suddenly clicking with the offhand comment that volunteer had made earlier. His gaze drifted back to the computer he'd been staring at as a plan began to form in his head.

"...Possible."

It took him a few minutes to figure out the website. His first instinct had been to put in the address as he knew it, teampossible.org. Of course, in this time period that gave him nothing but a generic error message about nonexistent web domains.

After confirming that he hadn't typed in anything wrong, he then tried putting the team name into a search engine. That did little better, returning with some other hero team he'd never heard of and a bunch of websites that had nothing to do with what he was looking for.

Did the team not have an official name back… uh, now? He was fairly certain he hadn't gone back so far that it didn't exist yet, especially since he doubted that comment about teen heroes could be referring to anyone other than his would-be mother.

Regardless, he scrolled down the search page just in case. This turned out to be a good call, because it only took him a moment longer for one website to catch his attention. He blinked.

"Oh."

kimpossible.com wasn't exactly what he expected. Okay, so he was kind of prepared for the bright colors and popping graphics of early 2000s design now that he was getting used to the idea of being in the past, but the actual content was just… surreal. It was clear that this website hadn't originally been intended for full-scale hero work, as there were separate inquiry pages for "emergency" requests and mundane jobs like babysitting and tutoring. She could do anything, indeed.

The weirdness only compounded when, on a curious whim, Max opened the bio page. This technically being her personal website, Kim naturally dominated the page – a teenage Kim, barely older than he was. Still, mission work had apparently been going on long enough that information was also provided on the rest of the now tiny team: an equally young "sidekick" Ron, venerable Rufus still in his prime, and a Wade who didn't sound like he'd ever been in the field before.

Max was about to knuckle down and go to send in a request to meet them when something on the main bio caught his eye.

"Even just out of her Sophomore year of high school, Kim has already…"

Max realized something as he read that line again. This was going to be more complicated than he thought.

See, he knew very well just how his parents had first become a couple. He'd always been a bit of a romantic at heart, and even if he hadn't, the wild adventure surrounding the event still would have left him spending his childhood begging to hear the story again and again until he practically had it memorized. So he was quite certain in his understanding that they hadn't – wouldn't – so much as admit to their growing feelings for each other until right around their Junior Prom.

Right now they hadn't even started their Junior year.

Max could just picture himself trying to explain the situation. "Hi there, I'm your kid from the future. Yes, both of yours. The two of you will finally realize just how much you mean to each other at a crucial moment and I'm sure that me telling you this won't change how it goes down at all. Anyway, I'm here to ask for your help in stopping a time-traveling Monkey Fist from kidnapping and/or killing the prophecy-bound baby girl that Ron's family is going to adopt next year. Yes, that is also a thing that you weren't supposed to know about yet. Oh, gee, it looks like I'm fading out of existence because I said too much. Let's hope I didn't just doom the rest of the world too!"

Max grimaced and shook his head. Yeah, that wasn't going to work. Should he even tell them he was a time traveler in the first place?

He looked back at the photos that accompanied Kim and Ron's biographies, and tried to compare them to his own features. Bright red hair – that was the most obvious connection, but hair color alone wasn't really a giveaway. Hazel eyes – not directly shared with either parent, and common enough. The rounded face he shared with most of his family and the distinct ears he'd inherited from his dad were more concerning, but his hair was just long enough that he could probably flatten it out a bit and make those features less obvious. The smattering of freckles across his face was distinct too, but that was common enough with redheads.

Still, it was a close thing when he put it all together. His mother was curious, intelligent and resourceful, his father deceptively clever and fond of thinking "outside the box," and if either of them started asking the right questions, it could jeopardize everything.

Better not to give them any clues he didn't have to, then. Max wasn't sure what would happen once they tracked down Monkey Fist, but he would have time to figure it out. The important thing now was to alert the people who had experience with this guy and get to him before he did something catastrophic to the timeline.

With that thought in mind, Max pulled up the emergency requests page and began to type.

Chapter Text

Summer was winding down and school was looming on the horizon, but there was one more week for the teens of Middleton High to get in some final "chill" time before it was back to work. For Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable and Rufus, this inevitably meant squeezing in a little extra free time at their favorite fast-food joint.

Kim gave her best friend and sidekick a dubious look. "You know this can't be healthy, right?"

Ron didn't even miss a beat, already getting to work on some form of taco. Kim had lost track of how many items off Bueno Nacho's menu he'd already eaten, to say nothing of which ones they were. She honestly didn't know where he put it all.

"End of summer blowout, KP. We gotta savor our freedom while we still can," he said in between bites.

Rufus popped his head out of a pile of nachos and squeaked in agreement. "Ayup, savor it."

Kim just leaned her chin on a hand and raised an eyebrow. She'd already finished her own meal, so there wasn't much else she could do but discuss the matter while she waited for him. "And you can't binge on Tex-Mex during the school year because…?"

Ron seemed to contemplate this for a moment while he chewed. Finally, he swallowed and said, "Well, I gotta bulk up for mascot duty this fall anyway."

Kim was just about to point out that the acrobatics involved in cheer routines generally favored less excessive "bulk" when the ringing of the Kimmunicator interrupted her. Pulling it from her pocket, she flicked the device on and asked, "What up, Wade?"

"Hey guys," came the reply. "How are you enjoying your last week of summer?"

Kim took a moment to eye her lunch companion. "Well, Ron's trying to clean out Bueno Nacho again, so I'd say pretty standard so far."

Ron set down the chimurrito he'd just started on. "Savoring my freedom, guys. What does it even matter to you, Wade? You've been done with school for ages."

"I do consulting work!" Wade protested. "I don't even get a summer vacation."

Kim cleared her throat before the debate could escalate. "So, is this just a social call, or do you have something for us?"

Wade returned his attention to her. "Oh, right. You've got a hit on the site, but… it's kind of a weird one."

Kim raised an eyebrow. "Weird how?"

"Well, the message isn't signed, but whoever sent it says they have important information on Monkey Fist's latest plan and they need your help. No other details; they just want you to meet them at the Middleton Library."

Kim groaned and rolled her eyes. "Monkey Fist? Seriously?! We just put him away after that 'Orb of the Monkey Lord' sitch!"

"Those prisons really need to figure out how to supervillain-proof themselves," Ron mumbled through a mouthful of food.

Wade shook his head. "That's one of the weird things. There haven't been any reports of a breakout since he was last locked up."

Kim frowned. "Could it be a false alarm? Like, some kind of prank, or a trap?"

Wade shrugged. "One way to find out. At least the library's a public place, so meeting whoever sent the request should be safe enough."

Kim nodded thoughtfully. "True." She stood up.

"All right, we're on our way. Grab a to-go bag, Ron – you should really wait to eat the rest of that anyway."

Max took a deep breath and tried to keep his leg from jiggling nervously as he waited for his not-yet-parents and not-yet-pet to show up. He'd already tried poking around on the computers to see if he could figure out which one Monkey Fist had used, and had managed to find one with what seemed to be rough travel plans to Japan in its recent search history. He couldn't rule out the possibility of it being a coincidence, and neither did it tell him much that he couldn't guess already, but it might be a start.

The library door opened, and he looked up in anticipation to see… some random family walking in. He let out a low sigh. He'd been doing this for the past thirty minutes, and it was slowly driving him crazy. He was just thankful that he'd landed in the right city and that school hadn't started back up yet. He didn't know how he could have dealt with a serious wait.

Max was contemplating browsing present day websites or something to distract himself when two sort-of familiar figures caught his eye out in the parking lot. It was them.

And they were wearing their mission clothes.

This was not something he should have found noteworthy, and indeed it didn't surprise him in the least. But the thing was, they were in their original mission outfits.

Words could not describe how awkward Max felt at witnessing his own mother in a crop top. Especially when she was currently, as a heinously treacherous corner of his mind pointed out, a rather attractive teenager.

Forcing that particular line of thought down, Max stood up as Team Possible (were they calling themselves that yet? He still wasn't sure) entered the library. Kim caught him watching them right away and made her way over, Ron trailing close behind.

"Hello there," she said with a warm, inviting smile. "We're looking for an informant who told us to meet here. You wouldn't happen to be him, would you?"

Max greeted her with what he hoped was an equally friendly and not at all awkward expression and accepted her proffered handshake. Remember, from their perspective, you've never met these people before.

"Yeah, that would be me. You must be Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable, then?"

Ron grinned. "Hey, you know my name! That settles it, KP, this guy is the real deal."

Kim shot him a smirk. "All right. And does our 'real deal' informant have a name?"

Max just managed to hold back a wince. He'd forgotten that he had sent the request anonymously.

"Oh, right. I'm Max… uh… Lincoln." Really should have come up with a pseudonym earlier, Possible.

He could see a cloud of suspicion form over Kim's face when he hesitated, so he quickly moved on. "S-sorry, I was kind of in a hurry when I wrote. I was tracking Monkey Fist's movements when he led me here, and since you two have the most experience with him, I realized it would be a good idea to get your help before he skipped town again."

Kim's expression and posture had slipped into what he recognized as her mission mode – arms folded, gaze focused and intent – as he started to explain himself. It was not an unkind look she was giving him, but there was still a hint of suspicion in her eyes.

"Interesting. I have to admit, I didn't know anyone other than us really dealt with Monkey Fist. How come we've never heard of you?"

Now, this cover story was something Max had prepared in advance. He produced an ID card he'd had in his pocket during the mission. These cards were something his team had gotten relatively recently in his own time, and identified its members as allies of Global Justice. He held it up in a way that obscured his last name and the word "ally" and showed it off to Kim.

"I'm a junior agent with Global Justice, but I'm relatively new to the field," he lied smoothly, returning the card to his pocket before she could scrutinize it too closely. "We got the first alert that Monkey Fist was at large again, and I was sent to recover him before he could get his resources together and start any real trouble. Unfortunately, he gave me the slip when I followed him into town this morning…"

"And that's when you decided to call us for backup," Kim concluded, a hand to her chin and her head tilted thoughtfully.

Ron scratched the back of his head. "'Junior agent?' Is that why your uniform's all different?" He glanced at his partner. "Hey Kim, why haven't they invited us to be junior agents?"

Kim returned his look. "Honestly, I'm more surprised that Dr. Director didn't contact us herself."

"Or just woosh us off to HQ," Ron added.

Craaaap. Max could have sworn they hadn't actually dealt with Global Justice yet in this time period, and he'd been banking on their lack of familiarity with the organization to obscure any holes in his cover story. He tried to think fast.

"Uh, that's because it was a last-minute decision. My decision. I could've gotten my superiors for backup instead, but this was way more practical."

He glanced down at his outfit. He wasn't sure if it qualified as a "uniform," seeing as it had been personally designed for him, but it still followed the general pattern of his team's current (in his time) mission wear: light-cut shirt, colored a dark forest green in his case and subtly armored with some of Wade's old battlesuit tech; thin and flexible yet durable black gloves, specialized utility belt, form-fit yet flexible pants shaded a dark gray that went with the shirt, and sturdy black combat boots. He'd stowed away his Maxciever lest Wade or one of the others recognize the tech, but he figured he should say something about the rest.

"And yeah, this is the uniform of our junior agents. It's a new department, but I could… check with my supervisor… and see if they're considering you?"

Much to his relief, Kim smiled and shook her head. "Thanks, but no thanks. It's a flattering thought, but we like being free agents."

"Sweet uniforms though," Ron added with a thumbs-up.

When I get back to my time, I'll let Auntie Monique know you said that. "Uh… thanks."

Meanwhile, Kim had slipped back into mission mode. "If Monkey Fist is still getting his resources together, that must include the monkey ninjas. That would explain why he's back in Middleton – there aren't a lot of options for dealing with nonhuman criminals, so the local prison has a special facility for holding them until the wildlife authorities can figure out what to do with them."

"That… makes a lot of sense, actually," Max considered. "Our sources suggest his ultimate goal is in Japan, but he'll want to get all his forces back together first." Plus it might explain why the portal dropped us off here, if it was something he'd been subconsciously thinking about when he used it.

While he was considering this, Kim pulled out her Kimmunicator. "Wade, have you picked up on any funny business down at the prison?"

"Negative," Wade replied. "As far as I can tell, Monkey Fist is still in custody. Are you sure he's broken out?"

"Absolutely. I tracked him here myself," Max cut in.

"We think he's come back for the monkey ninjas, but he might also be getting ready to head to Japan," Kim explained. "Can you keep a lookout for any suspicious activity that could be either of those?"

"Sure thing. I'll let you know when I find something."

With that, Wade signed off. Kim sighed thoughtfully as she stowed the Kimmunicator, and then turned back to Ron and Max.

"In the meantime, we'll see what we can dig up here," she said. "What have you got so far, Max?"

Chapter Text

It was another hour or two before Wade called back. In that time, the team questioned the library volunteer Max had spoken with earlier, as well as anyone else who had been in the building when Monkey Fist came through. Nobody had any information beyond what little Max had already learned – none of them even remembered which way the criminal had gone after leaving the library.

Still, they'd managed to confirm that the very rough travel plans he'd found earlier indeed belonged to their target. That at least would help narrow the search when Monkey Fist decided to head out, but the information they could glean wasn't specific enough for them to know just when that would be.

Max, too, had filled in the others on as much of his "source's" details as he felt were safe to divulge. "He's looking for someone who's supposed to be connected to Mystical Monkey Power," he explained. "From what I can tell, this person hasn't actually been born yet, so that means he'll be going after the mother. I'm not sure if his plan is to kidnap or adopt the kid as some kind of twisted heir or, uh, 'get rid' of a potential rival, but either way, it's definitely not good."

While he was talking, Rufus had poked his head out of Ron's pants pocket and started sniffing at something. Now, Max realized with a start that the little guy had confused beady eyes locked on him.

"Uh…" Max gave him a tentative wave. "Hi?"

Rufus just leaned further out of the pocket and started sniffing intently at his hand.

Ron frowned down at his pet. "Dude, come on, personal space." He glanced up at Max.

"You just come from a fondue place or something? Usually he doesn't get this excited unless it's about cheese."

Before Max could come up with a response, Rufus shook his head and said, "Uh-uh. Smells funny."

"Funny?" Kim piped in, folding her arms. "Funny how?"

Rufus seemed to consider it for a moment before chittering his response. Max couldn't quite help wincing a little at the comment, and he had to stop himself from responding outright and giving away that he understood the rodent-speak.

"Like you?" Ron repeated for the supposed benefit of the other humans in the group. "What's that supposed to mean? You haven't even touched the guy!"

Rufus just shrugged, clearly as baffled as his human.

Max, of course, knew exactly what was going on. But he couldn't explain it without giving away the game and it wasn't like the others would guess that he'd recently had a much older Rufus in his pocket, so he just shrugged as well when they all turned their questioning looks on him.

It was a relief, then, when Wade's call came in and derailed the conversation.

"There's a break-in in progress at the animal holding center of the Middleton prison," he reported. "Looks like your hunch was right."

Kim gave him a curt nod and started for the library's exit. "We're on our way."

Max surreptitiously took a deep breath as he followed her. This is it.

It wasn't hard to find where Monkey Fist had gotten to. The intermingled sounds of mad cackling and monkey shrieks kind of gave it away.

By the time Team Possible had gotten there, Monkey Fist and six of his simian minions were already outside. The facility's alarms were blaring, but the guards on the scene had clearly been outmatched. It wasn't hard to guess why – while most of them were by now out cold and scattered about the place, the last two were struggling futilely in the clutches of the stone gorillas that Monkey Fist had stolen back in his own time.

Kim's eyes narrowed as she surveyed the scene from around the hole in the perimeter wall that had no doubt also been the gorillas' handiwork. "I'm guessing those are the animated statues you told us about?"

Max winced and nodded. "Yup, and they hit hard. Trust me, I've got the bruise to prove it."

Ron nodded. "Right, stay away from the giant stone monkeys. Don't have to tell me twice."

"Gorillas are apes, Ron," Kim said reflexively.

"Same diff."

Kim just shook her head at the comment. She then stepped out from behind the wall, pulling Monkey Fist's attention away from whatever he was planning to do with the two hapless guards.

"Back already, Monkey Fist?" she called out, hands on her hips. "You know, if you miss prison that much, we'd be happy to get you back in."

Monkey Fist's gaze snapped to where she stood. "Oh, goody," he drawled, "the cheer squad is back. And here I was hoping for a nice private reunion."

His eyes widened when Ron and Max emerged to join her. "You!" he snarled at the latter. "What in blazes are you doing here?!"

Max smirked and folded his arms, projecting as much bravado as he could muster. "Miss me already, Monkey Boy? That's sweet." Please don't say anything about time travel, please don't say anything about time travel…

Fortunately for him, Monkey Fist was either thinking the same thing or just didn't feel like talking. Instead, he turned his snarl to the group as a whole.

"I am not in the mood for this right now. Monkey ninjas! What are you waiting for?"

Not much, apparently. In a whirlwind of simian chattering and shrieks, the monkey ninjas descended upon the team.

Kim didn't waste a moment, dodging around the wave of monkeys and shaking off the two that grabbed at her arms as she made a beeline for their master. The monkeys seemed content to leave her to him, and instead focused their efforts on the boys.

Max quickly found himself on the defensive. He hastily shielded his face with an arm as one of the monkeys went at him with a flying kick, only for it to change tactics and grab onto his raised forearm with both grasping feet. While he was trying to shake that assailant off, another monkey swung hard at his lower leg and nearly knocked him off his own feet.

"Okay, so this is what it's like fighting these stupid monkeys," he muttered to himself, stumbling around as he desperately blocked the punches and kicks of the now three monkeys assaulting him. He couldn't say he was a fan.

Some sort of exaggerated war cry drew his attention, and he looked over briefly to see Ron shouting and waving a stick at his own trio of assailants. Or at least, it would have been brief if the scene hadn't caught him completely off guard.

As it was, it took him a few moments to process the sight of his future father, someone who would go on to inspire him almost as much as his mother did with tales of great bravery and cleverness and with a masterful grasp of tai shing pek kwar, yelling like an idiot and just barely holding off his opponents with his improvised weapon.

"...What."

Max didn't get a chance to say or do anything more, though, as the monkey ninjas hounding him naturally took advantage of his distraction. It was only another moment before he was tackled to the ground, one monkey sitting on his head and another pinning his arms painfully behind his back. He scrambled to try and throw them off, but he could already feel the third begin to tie something around his legs.

Well okay then. At least his current vantage point gave him a chance to see how the rest of the battle was going, in particular between Kim and Monkey Fist. She was faring much better than her teammates, dodging and blocking all of her opponent's quick strikes and using her own offensive to gradually push him back from the holding cell and whatever other damage he had planned there.

Max grinned. This was more like it – while his mom lacked a little of the precision he was used to in his own time, she was still every bit the awe-inspiring hero he'd always looked up to.

Yeah, yeah, so he was a momma's boy – sue him.

The grin left his face, though, when he noticed who else was just now joining the fight. The two stone gorillas had apparently decided that Kim was a bigger threat than the remaining security guards, and one was coming up behind her while she was occupied with Monkey Fist.

"Mo-" he shook his head, "Uh, Kim, look out!" Max renewed the struggle against his captors as he shouted his warning.

Kim perked up and turned just in time to dodge the gorilla's swinging fist. She grit her teeth and backed away warily, on the defensive now that the thing was teaming up with its master.

Max took a moment to glance back at Ron, who was… suddenly brandishing his stick like a proper bo staff and knocking the last of his opponents away with solid precision.

"Okay, what?!"

Ron shrugged and rubbed the back of his neck, chuckling awkwardly. "Mystical Monkey Powers. They come and go," he said by way of explanation. "Mostly when these guys are involved, weirdly enough."

Max was so done with this time period. "...Right. Hey, can you help me out here? I'm kinda stuck," he said, wiggling under the weight of his captors for emphasis.

"Sure thing, dude!" Ron sprang forward, sweeping at the two closest monkeys while Max ducked his head. Rufus, who had at some point in the battle scampered out of his human's pocket, circled around the third while it was distracted to gnaw at the ropes binding Max's legs.

The second stone gorilla was making its way to Kim now. Max rolled the moment his legs were free, throwing the now disoriented monkey ninjas off of him and springing to his feet in one fluid motion. "Come on, we gotta help!" he shouted, taking off toward Kim and her opponents.

The redoubled shrieking behind him, from both the monkeys and Ron, told him that he would probably be the only backup here. Not much time to worry about that, though.

Max launched himself into a front handspring that gave him just enough air to latch onto the closest gorilla's neck. Pulling his legs up, he managed to get a semi-stable perch on its shoulders and pulled hard at one of the stone ears to throw it off balance. It lurched to the side, giving off a gravelly-sounding howl of fury.

Max opened his mouth to gloat, but the words died on his lips when he realized just where he had positioned himself. Instead he was just able to mutter, "Not again," before the gorilla started thrashing about in an effort to throw him off.

"Hang on!" Kim called out to him. He couldn't see exactly what she was doing, as he was busy holding on for dear life, but she had her grappling hook out and seemed to have much more freedom to move now that one of the gorillas was otherwise occupied.

Mission accomplished, at least. Not that it was all that much comfort in the moment. "Why do – I keep – doing this?!" Max cried out to nobody as he swung back and forth from the gorilla's neck.

A crunch of metal against stone invaded his thoughts, and a sudden singular lurching motion accompanied it not long after. The gorilla was falling now, he realized, and he took swift advantage of the merciful absence of flailing to safely jump off its back.

When he landed, he saw the reason for the sudden change – Kim had shot her grappling hook into a wall and pulled it taut right in front of the stone gorilla, effectively tripping it. Now she pulled the hook free with a practiced motion, and she was already eyeing both gorillas as she pulled the thick cable back to herself.

"Monkey Fist slipped away in the confusion," she told him. "I've got an idea for these two – you go after him before he busts out the rest of his ninjas."

Max nodded. "Right." He turned and started for the hole the gorillas had made into the holding center.

"And call for backup from your team!" Kim called after him. "I don't think we'll be able to bring all these guys in on our own!"

Right, about that… Max just grit his teeth and kept running. Not much he could do about that now.

"Wait!" One of the still conscious guards, a commander of some sort by the looks of his uniform, stumbled toward him. The man was noticeably favoring one leg. "That's not what he's after."

Max slowed to a halt. "Okay, where is he going then?"

The guard frowned worriedly. "There's something you should know," he said. "When we got the alert that Monkey Fist was breaking in, we checked and… He's still in his cell. It's like there's two of him. I don't know why that is, but that's where your guy ran off to – to break the other one out."

Max's breath caught in his throat. He should have known this would happen… and that the prison guards would be able to confirm just what was wrong with this sitch. If Team Possible realized there were two Monkey Fists, it was going to raise a lot of questions he wasn't prepared to deal with.

"We know about the doppelganger," he half-lied. "Can your guys keep an eye on the holding cell while I go after this one?"

The guard nodded sharply and grabbed his radio to start barking instructions to however many of his colleagues were still available.

Meanwhile, Max took off in the direction the guard had pointed out, watching carefully for signs of his target. The cells for actual human criminals were in other buildings, with enough open space in between to make attempts to hide all the more difficult. For a jailbreaker who was actively being hunted, there weren't really a lot of options for laying low.

It wasn't long before he found him, just beginning to scale one shadowed corner of a cell block.

With a swift motion, Max pulled the Maxciever out of his pocket, aimed, and pressed one of the side buttons. A kind of sticky webbing shot out of the modified watch, spreading wide as it was exposed to air until it plastered itself against Monkey Fist and the section of wall surrounding him.

Max let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. "Glad this thing was still useful for something," he muttered to himself as he stowed the device away. He folded his arms and made his way to the wall his opponent was pinned against.

"It's over, Monkey Fist," he called out. "You had your fun running around in the past, but it stops here. Let's just make this easier on both of us by telling me where you've got the Tempus Simia, so we can use it to get back home."

Monkey Fist scoffed, the effect of which was mostly lost coming from a guy currently plastered to the thick stone wall of a prison building.

"You think you can make demands of me?" he sneered. "I did thorough research when I escaped that demon's curse, you know. I know exactly who you are, boy. In our own time, you've only just joined your precious mother's team. You have no real power, no experience. All your false bravado comes directly off of her, little different from common nepotism."

Max's eyes narrowed. "I'll try to keep that in mind, Lord Fiske."

Monkey Fist scoffed again. "Please, as if anyone else of the Fiske line has achieved half of what I have."

"What, a whole lot of jail time and two decades as a statue? You're the one who has time travel on your side and still can't even break yourself out of prison," Max shot back. He frowned thoughtfully.

"Why this year, anyway? Not that I'm complaining – or that it matters now either way – but wouldn't it have been easier to go after the baby than her adult birth mother?"

"Research, boy!" Monkey Fist snapped, pulling hard against his bonds. "Honestly, it's clear you have no future in archaeology if you don't even know what your own aunt was capable of as an infant. I have prepared for this." He sighed.

"Though I suppose one could consider the period when she was a newborn who had neither the coordination for such things nor the love of an adopted family that granted her unstoppable power. I did, if you must know, but it makes little difference. Left to her own devices, the Han's birth mother will turn to the Yamanouchi School to – oh, spare me the fake blank look, I am the reason your family works with that secretive little school of relics! Regardless, by the time the child is born, she will be under far more protection than that of a lone woman who barely understands her own bloodline. That is why we are in this time – and why we will remain here and now until I have finished what I started."

Max shook his head and closed the remaining distance between himself and the trapped villain, retrieving a pair of handcuffs from his utility belt as he did. "You still don't get it, do you?" he asked. "Okay, I'll admit you had a decent plan, but it's over. We're going home now."

For a moment, he thought he saw Monkey Fist's gaze shift to something behind him. The corner of the man's lip curled into a devilish little smirk, and he replied, "Oh, I wouldn't say so."

"Max, behind you!"

Before Max could even process the new voice, a monkey dropped onto his shoulders and started shrieking in his ear while another one threw a smoke bomb right at his feet. The sudden noise and billowing smoke took him completely off guard, and he could do nothing but double over and cough as a cacophony of monkey ninjas got to work on something just out of his muddled view.

In moments, the noise began to fade into the distance. It was immediately replaced by the pounding of footsteps, which in turn ground to a halt as a firm hand came to rest on his shoulder. He looked up through the now thinning smoke to see Kim checking him over, a concerned frown on her face.

"M'okay," he managed to mumble.

Kim sighed and nodded in relief, but her expression remained hard. "Max, what happened back there?!"

Max winced a little at her tone, and with a sinking sense of dread he turned back to look at the spot where his foe, his fellow time traveler, the whole reason he was stuck in the past, had been safely contained not three minutes ago.

The webbing was cut cleanly through, no doubt the work of Monkey Fist's loyal hench-critters.

And Monkey Fist himself was nowhere to be seen.

Chapter Text

Kim grit her teeth and looked over to where Max was talking with one of the prison guards some distance away. She had already touched base with them, but had been interrupted just as one guard was bringing up Monkey Fist's cell (for whatever reason) by her strange new ally running up to let her know that Ron still needed help untangling himself. She honestly didn't know where the monkey ninjas had gotten that much rope, but now he was standing beside her and rubbing at a chafed wrist.

"Six monkeys plus one Ron equals a very bad start to the last week of summer," he grumbled. "I'm telling ya, KP, Monkey Fist and his freakish minions are the actual worst."

"Normally I'd tell you to turn down the drama, but those statues of his are making things a lot harder," Kim admitted. The fight against Monkey Fist hadn't been a total bust – about half of his monkey ninjas were still in custody – but the ones he'd already freed had managed to overwhelm Ron and Rufus before running off to help their master.

Meanwhile, while she had almost managed to incapacitate one of the stone gorillas with her grapple cable, the two of them working together had ultimately proven too much for her. They'd forced her back until one finally managed to grab her and throw her halfway across the yard. By the time she'd gotten to her feet and returned to the scene, they were gone and the monkeys were sneaking up on Max.

Max… She took another look at the boy, and her eyes narrowed. Why didn't you call for backup?

With a sigh, she pulled out the Kimmunicator.

"Wade, can you get into the Global Justice personnel database?" she asked. "I need you to run a search on Max Lincoln… or anyone fitting his description, I'm not convinced he gave us his real name."

From the other end of the screen, Wade frowned and set down the soda he'd been drinking. "Do you think Max is trying to trick you or something?"

"I'm not sure, but… He's setting off my weirdar in so many ways right now. He hasn't shown any signs of contacting the people he's supposed to be working for, and when I caught up to him and Monkey Fist, he'd captured him, but they were just… talking. And Max looked like he was getting ready to take the guy off somewhere on his own."

"That is weird," Wade agreed. "I'll see what I can find. If you want, I can run a global scan too, and see if that picks up anything on him."

"Please and thank you," Kim said, smiling wanly. She shot one more glance at her mysterious ally. "I don't know what it is he's hiding, but with what's going on, ignoring it could be very bad news."

This mission was a total bust.

Max was working very hard to keep himself from screaming as he half-listened to the warden thanking him for his "help" with the evening's little misadventure. He really didn't feel like he should be thanked – he'd gotten caught up in talking to Monkey Fist, had honestly had no idea what to do with the guy when he refused to cooperate, and now thanks to his carelessness, Aunt Han and the future were in more danger than ever.

Evidently he wasn't the only one upset about the events of the evening. Through the massive gaping hole in the outer wall of the animal holding center, he could clearly hear the angry shrieking of the remaining incarcerated monkeys as a handful of guards prepared to move them to a more secure location.

He couldn't take it anymore. "Will you all just can it in there!" he snapped into the hole. "You're better off without that stupid jerk anyway!"

Great, now he was yelling at a bunch of monkeys that'd probably just been following the training of their primate-obsessed master. He groaned and rubbed his temples. Dad would be so proud right now.

Max resisted the urge to glance back at where the man in question – no, the guy who would eventually become the man in question – was waiting, none the wiser, for things to wrap up around here. This time period's Ron and Kim were plenty eager to stop a criminal from endangering a child as part of some world-conquering scheme, but they had no idea just how high the stakes were.

And he'd gone and let them down.

"Max."

There was a brief, surreal moment in which Max felt the instinctive terror of a child realizing he'd just majorly pissed off a parent, followed immediately by confusion when he remembered that his parents weren't actually his parents in the here and now. Before he had a chance to process just what that meant, he turned to see Kim charging toward him and —

Okay, yeah, that was definitely a younger and less familial variant of her 'majorly pissed off parent' face.

"You've been lying to us," she snapped as she caught up to him. "I just had Wade check Global Justice, and they don't even have a junior division. You're not in their files at all, and don't try to spin some story about them being classified — Wade is very thorough."

She folded her arms. "If we're going to keep working together, I'm going to need some answers, and fast. Who are you, really?"

Max stumbled back as the irate teen hero's eyes bored into him, and he found himself unable to form words for several agonizing seconds. Everything was falling apart, and he was basically alone in this, and if he tried to make up another cover story it would just make things worse and —

"The truth?" He finally said, running shaky hands through his hair. "The truth is that I can't tell you the truth, and I only made up that Global Justice stuff because I thought you'd take it easier than if I told you absolutely nothing about myself."

Kim's expression remained stony. "What is it you think you need to hide from me? Max, helping people is what my team does. How can you expect us to trust you if you won't trust us?"

Max didn't know how to answer that, so he just shook his head sadly and held out his arms in a half-shrug.

Kim frowned and held out her Kimmunicator. Something in the gesture seemed almost threatening.

"Here's where we're at," she said. "Right now, Wade is running a global scan to find any information he can on you. Frankly, I'm not even confident he'll come back with a name that matches the one you gave me. So if you want my trust, tell me honestly, Mr. Hero — what exactly is he gonna find?"

For somebody who technically doesn't exist yet? Max would have laughed at the irony of it if he wasn't on the verge of a complete breakdown.

"Nothing," he said.

Kim's eyes narrowed in disbelief. "Nothing?"

"Yes, nothing! I —" Max took a deep breath.

"Look, here's all that I can tell you. The truth is that I'm in so far over my head that I am literally unable to turn to anyone who actually knows me right now. The truth is that this… this monster who calls himself Monkey Fist is threatening my whole family, and that I would gladly give you more information about it if I thought it was safe, but I am terrified that telling anyone more about myself would only make the problem that much worse. And I know it looks bad, but you and your team are the only chance I think I have of stopping him. I… I do trust you, more than you can imagine, and right now all I can do is beg you to trust me back."

Hot tears pricked at the corners of his eyes as the words came pouring out. When he finished, he rubbed them away and tried to take stock of Kim's reaction to his confession.

The indignation and anger had all but left her face, he realized, replaced by genuine concern. She still looked a little uncertain, but after a few moments of thought, she sighed and reached a hand out to him.

"Okay, look," she said. "This whole thing is still very weird, and I don't want you lying to us anymore. But… I'm looking at you now, and I think you really are being honest with me this time. You were right about Monkey Fist breaking out, after all. So I'm going to go ahead and trust you. Please don't make me regret it."

She considered something for a moment, and folded her arms again. It looked less threatening and more simply formal this time, though. "But I would like you to tell me one more thing, if you can."

Max nodded hesitantly. "If I can."

"Do your parents know you're out here doing the teen hero thing? Because you don't fight like someone who's suddenly been pulled into it because of whatever's going on with your family, and trying to sneak around their backs with something like this… It never ends well."

Max had to take a moment for that question. He looked at Kim, then over at where Ron was now making his way toward the two of them. And then he did laugh, a wry little chuckle.

"They know exactly what I'm up to, don't worry about that."

"Sooo," Ron cut in as he joined the group, "what's the game plan here?"

Kim raised an eyebrow at him. "Glad to see you're here just in time to miss the difficult talk."

Ron shrugged. "I play to my strengths."

Kim shook her head good-naturedly and sighed. She returned her attention forward and flipped on the Kimmunicator. "Wade?" she asked.

"Sorry Kim, this search is taking longer than I expected," Wade's tinny voice came out the other end.

Now that he was in between villain hunts and no longer had to worry about keeping up a cover story, Max found himself struck with curiosity about the current year's technology. He circled around to get a better look at the Kimmunicator Mk I.

"I don't know if you're just right about the name thing, but I haven't been able to dig up any info on your new friend," continued a baby-faced and almost hilariously short Wade. He was typing absently as he did, but froze when he looked up to see Max watching him. "Uh… I mean…"

Kim shook her head. "Don't worry about it," she said. "Max and I have come to an understanding." She paused to give Max a curious look, no doubt intrigued by the fact that her genius webmaster genuinely couldn't trace him.

"I was actually calling to let you know you can cancel the search," she went on. "Our efforts would be better spent figuring out where Monkey Fist went anyway."

Wade shot off a lazy half-salute. "Sounds good to me," he said. "I'll let you know when I find anything."

"You rock as always," Kim replied with a smile, and the feed cut out.

Max folded his arms absently. "Huh," he thought out loud. "So that's the Kimmunicator? It kind of looks like a smartphone."

Ron gave him a funny look. "What's a smartphone?"

Oops. Max took a moment to think of an answer that was neither a lie nor a treatise on near-future technology.

"Oh, it's… what I use sometimes," he half-explained. "I don't have it on me right now, though."

Kim smirked. "Well, don't tell Wade that. He prides himself on being totally cutting edge."

Max just barely suppressed an amused snort at that.

Ron clapped his hands and rubbed them together. "So now that we're done here, who's hungry?"

"How can you be thinking about that?" Kim retorted. "You've been snacking on leftover Bueno Nacho all afternoon!"

"I asked who's hungry. I never said I needed more than a light snackage."

Rufus popped his head out of Ron's pocket and chittered an agreement to the idea of snackage.

Now that the subject had been brought up, Max realized that he wasn't sure when he had last eaten. What part of the day had it been before he'd gone through the time portal, again?

"I could really use a meal," he admitted.

Kim frowned thoughtfully. "Actually," she asked him, "do you even have a place to stay while you're here? I wasn't worried about it when you said you were with GJ, but after everything you've just told me…"

Max winced a little. "…No, now that you mention it."

Kim nodded. "Let's go, then. You can crash at my place until we get this all sorted out."

"Don't forget dinner," Ron piped in.

Kim smirked and shook her head. "I'm sure we'll have something."

Max's uncles were currently younger than him.

Max's uncles were younger than him.

This really shouldn't have been such a shocker, considering how this whole mission basically centered around the fact that his paternal aunt hadn't even been born yet. But there was a difference between knowing logically that something was the case and seeing it firsthand.

"Mom, can we be excused?" Unc – er, Jim asked as dinner wrapped up and Max tried valiantly not to stare at his unknowing extended family. Ron had already gone home with Rufus, so he was the only guest at the house now. "We've got a project we want to finish before bed."

"We're building a fusion reactor!" Tim boasted.

Kim raised an eyebrow at the two of them. "You guys are so going to burn the house down with that thing."

"Oh, whatever," Jim scoffed, already getting up. "You just worry about the mission thing with your new sidekick."

Tim cackled. "Or is he your new boyfriend?"

Max deeply regretted trying to finish off his water right then. His abject horror at that comment was quickly overshadowed by a sudden fear of choking to death then and there.

"Tweebs!" Kim snarled while he tried to catch his breath without spewing water all over the table. "Honestly, you're as bad as the guys at school who keep assuming I'm dating Ron."

Max, if possible, started choking even harder.

Kim growled at the laughing and retreating forms of her brothers, but after a moment she turned to him with a concerned frown. "You okay?"

Max coughed a few more times, cleared his throat, and finally managed to compose himself. "Yeah," he croaked. "I guess that just, uh, caught me off guard a little." He really hoped the incident itself and his explanation would be enough to excuse the beet red color he was sure his face had turned.

Kim rolled her eyes as she and her parents started clearing the dinner table. "Yeah, that's little brothers for you." She glared in the direction the twins had run off to.

"Especially those little brothers."

Max winced and rubbed the back of his neck. "I really hope I'm not that bad with my sister."

"Oh, you have an older sister?" James piped up.

Oops again. Well, as long as he stuck with the minor details…

Max nodded, getting up to help the others collect dishes. "Yeah. I… I hope she's okay."

Joan had never gotten into the 'family tradition' of freak fighting the way he did, but she was all right, he thought. At the very least, he never really fought with her to the same extent that, if tonight was any indication, their mother and uncles had when they were kids.

Max paused at the kitchen sink, leaning over it and letting his thoughts drift after he'd put his plates in. Was his sister okay? He wasn't really sure how this time travel stuff worked, how or at what point the events of 'now' affected the future. He was struck by a sudden sense of longing, of missing Joan and everyone else and wanting to see them as he knew them again.

It only made it all the more surreal to think that he'd last seen her off right before the team went after Monkey Fist, which from his perspective had been that very morning. Or that, from the timeline's perspective, said morning wouldn't be happening for another twenty-six years.

A gentle hand came to rest on his shoulder, and he looked over to see the teenaged Kim's sympathetic visage. She gave him a small, encouraging smile.

"We will find Monkey Fist," she said, "and we'll do everything in our power to save your family, all right? I promise."

"And in the meantime, we'll help you out in any way we can," her father added.

Max couldn't help but smile back at that. "I'm counting on it."

Chapter Text

Max groaned softly and kept his eyes screwed shut against the intrusive light of morning, his mind still foggy from the haze of half-remembered dreams. He rolled over in bed, trying to stave off the wakeful rays, only to shoot up with a yelp when his weight pressed into the bruise on his right side.

There was a split second in which he looked around in confusion at the familiar yet distinctly off surroundings of his grandparents' spare bedroom. It passed when he remembered that it was the spare bedroom of their old house, and that he was sleeping there and then for the same reason that he had the bruise. He groaned again and let himself fall back onto the bed, careful to actually stay on his back this time.

"So much for all of that being one big nightmare," he muttered to himself.

Max closed his eyes and tried to see if he could get a little more sleep, but the attempt only lasted a minute or two before an enticing scent from down the hall stole his attention. No way he was getting any more shut-eye with hunger distracting him.

First things first, though. Sitting up again with a stretch, he looked over at where his shirt was hanging in the doorway between his temporary room and the spare bathroom. Its integrated tech was subtle, mostly geared towards defense from energy weapons and the like, although he still didn't want to think about how much worse his bruise would've been without it. But, for all the tweaks and advancements Wade had made over the years, he still had yet to figure out how to make such gear machine washable.

Max pulled the shirt off the hanger for closer inspection. He'd managed to get it cleaned up all right in the sink, but it was still a little damp. He took a moment to consider this, glanding down at the too-large clothes his grandfather had had to lend him while his own were being washed.

Meh, dry enough.

By the time he made his way to the kitchen, he was dressed halfway decently and his gran– Kim's mother had piled up a small stack of pancakes on a serving plate and was working on the next batch.

"Oh, good morning Max," she said pleasantly. "Everyone else should be up and about soon. I just thought I'd get a head start on breakfast."

Max responded with little more than a vague nod and a mumbled thanks and sat down at the table in the breakfast nook. He wasn't sure what to actually say to the woman, and so he just sat awkwardly for several seconds and finally found himself absently drumming his fingers on the table.

Anne glanced over at him for a moment, frowned, and then turned back to switch off the burner and move her pan off the stove.

"Oh, honey," she said, sweeping over to sit down next to him. "Don't worry. Your family's going to be okay, I'm sure of it. You've got the best people you could ask for to help with this."

Max bit back a low sigh and glanced up at her. "Oh… I know that."

"Mm-hmm." Anne eyed him for a moment. "I'm sure you do, but then that doesn't explain why you have the same look on your face that Kim gets when she's trying to convince herself she can take care of everything on her own. Mind sharing why?"

Max winced. "The answer to that question is so much more complicated than you can imagine."

"Try me. I know Kim said there are secrets you need to keep, but are you sure there aren't any little details that are safe to share? I'm the matriarch of a family of overachievers, so I know what I mean when I say it helps a lot to talk about it."

Max looked down at the tabletop and chewed his bottom lip. It would be nice to get his worries off his chest – he felt tied up in a knot right now – but how much could he share? And would a vague half-explanation really help?

What if he just… told her? Like, actually told her?

That last thought was sudden and unbidden, and he almost dismissed it out of hand. But… it wasn't as if she had to fall for the right person at the right time, or keep young Hana just out of Monkey Fist's reach until it was time for her to achieve her destiny or whatever. And it was a little too late to avoid messing with the past at all. If Monkey Fist could run around in the past, causing trouble and busting half his minions out of prison, then maybe –

"I'm your grandson."

The admission burst out of him so suddenly that, for a moment, he wasn't sure he'd actually gone and said it. He hadn't entirely lifted his head since his future grandmother had sat down beside him, but now he looked up to see her scrutinizing him with a single raised eyebrow.

"Well then," she said, "considering my eldest child can't be more than a few years older than you, there must be an interesting story behind that."

Max blinked and sat up straighter. "That – that's it? You actually believe me?"

Anne chuckled and shrugged. "Well, it seems like an odd thing to lie about, and between having a teenager who regularly goes toe to toe with supervillains and two preteens who build working rockets as a hobby, I'd be in trouble if I hadn't learned to take these things in stride."

She cupped a hand under his chin and tilted his face up just a little to study it more closely. "Actually, this would explain why you keep reminding me of Kimmie. And…" Her face lit up in recognition. "Ron, if I'm not fooling myself?"

Max felt himself flush deep red, and he pulled his hair over his ears as if hiding them could somehow undo her quick guesswork. "Please don't tell them," he muttered.

Anne was wearing the most delighted grin now, but she said, "Don't worry, I have an excellent poker face. Once you go, it will be like this conversation never happened." She paused for just a second. "But, until then…"

And so Max found himself telling her… well, not everything exactly. There was no point in spoiling the whole future for her, so he left out any explanation for just why Hana was so important to the family or what exactly had Monkey Fist resorting to time travel for revenge. But he told her about how an odd but seemingly straightforward museum robbery had suddenly turned into a race for his mother's team to stop a ritual that they didn't even know the purpose of, a race they ultimately lost. He relayed how he'd been slapped through a giant glowing portal and woken up decades in his past. He confessed his error in dealing with the younger Team Possible by trying to pull a fast one on them with a 'cover story.'

And he confided in her all of his fears and frustrations – how before this mission he had thought he was finally ready for anything the supervillains threw at him, and his current concerns of just what failing this mission could mean, and his strange sense of loneliness even when surrounded by people that – to an extent – he'd known all his life.

"And you know what the completely stupid part is?" he ranted, stabbing a fork into a hunk of pancake and shoving it gracelessly into his mouth. He couldn't quite recall when his grandmother had prepared the plate for him, but she was waiting and listening patiently and the food did help calm his nerves a little.

After taking a moment to chew and swallow his bite, he went on, "All this crazy time travel stuff, all the things I have a legit reason to worry about, and now all of a sudden I'm starting to kinda freak out about the fact that my parents aren't, like, dating or anything. I mean, I knew this time was before they get together like that, but… I dunno, it somehow just feels wrong. Are they seriously this blind to the fact that the people they're supposed to be with are each other? Or have I somehow managed to interfere with all that and now I've already erased my own existence?"

Anne smiled gently and placed a reassuring hand over his. "Oh, honey, I'm sure it isn't nearly as bad as that. You have to remember that Kim and Ron have been best friends for almost twelve years now. They're just not used to seeing each other like that yet. If it's meant to be – and it seems to me like you being here is more than enough evidence that it is – then it will happen."

Max nodded weakly in response. He took another bite of pancake, forcing himself to just think of breakfast for a moment in lieu of finding something else to panic about.

"And if you ask me," Anne went on, "I think you're doing a much better job than you're giving yourself credit for. I may not be an expert on this… this time travel business, but if I had to wager a guess, the fact that you're still here and still doing what you set out to do means that you're on the right track."

The sound of footsteps made her glance up toward the hall for a moment, and she stood up and gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze.

"Just remember that your family's in good hands," she said with a wink just as Kim entered the kitchen.

"Morning, Mom! Breakfast smells delish," Kim said in greeting. "Oh, hey Max. You sleep okay?"

Max nodded around a mouthful of food while Anne prepared another plate for her daughter.

"That's good," Kim went on. "I know it can be hard to try and get sleep in the middle of a…"

Her attention drew away from him as she trailed off, a confused and slightly concerned expression shadowing her face. Max followed her gaze to see Anne giving her an adoring smile, her eyes shining with unshed happy tears.

"Uhh…" Kim tilted her head and folded her arms uncertainly. "Mom? Are you okay?"

"Oh, I'm fine dear!" Her mother set the plate she was holding onto the table and sniffled. "Just thinking about how proud I am of you. You and Ron both. Just… you know, taking in this nice young man and… Oh, come here you!"

With that, she crossed the room and swept her now completely baffled daughter into a tight hug. Kim just stood there stiffly for a moment before reaching around to give her mother an awkward pat on the back.

"Uhh… Thanks?" she hazarded. "I mean, it's your and Dad's house, so technically you're the ones taking him in."

"Oh, that was nothing. You're the ones who decided to help him in his time of need." Anne pulled back to rest her hands on Kim's shoulders and study her face, still smiling.

"I am just… so proud of what a remarkable young woman you've grown into. I can't wait to see how you continue to grow and mature. Both of you."

By the look on her face, Kim was no less confused by the turn this conversation had taken than she'd been by the start of it. "Riiight. I'll just… make sure to pass that on to Ron."

Max barely resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands. So much for an excellent poker face.

Once that weirdness was settled and the rest of the family had wandered in to join breakfast, Kim spoke up again. "So Ron and I had plans to hang out at his place today. Wanna come with?" she asked Max. "We won't be able to do much else with the mission until Wade finds out where Monkey Fist went, so we might as well stay together and do something fun to keep from stressing over it."

Max shrugged and nodded. "Shway."

Kim raised an eyebrow. "What?"

Oops. Max added slang to his mental list of anachronism minefields. It was getting to be a disconcertingly long list.

"Uh, sure. Sounds cool." He proceeded to down the rest of his milk to excuse himself from any more awkward conversation.

If anyone had asked Max a week ago how he'd be spending this day, playing the original Zombie Mayhem with his father would not have been high on his list of guesses. Granted, this was mostly because Max technically didn't exist a week ago. But even following his personal timeline, while family game nights were far from unheard of in his household, those typically involved party games.

"Gotta hand it to ya, my man, you pick up on this fast," Ron commented as he mashed buttons in an almost wanton manner. "You been playing it a lot at home? This game hasn't even been out long."

Max half-shrugged. "Not really. I guess I'm just really familiar with similar games." Most of them are distant sequels to this one, but no need to worry about that. He'd almost slipped up earlier and called the original a "classic," but in his defense, he suspected that Ron would have appreciated knowing that it was destined to stand the test of time.

The round wrapped up with the two of them close to tied and just holding off the zombie horde. Ron leaned back and craned his head to look at Kim, who was watching from the couch while the two boys sat cross-legged on the floor. "You sure you don't want to join in, KP? We can switch off every round, no problem."

Kim shook her head. "Sorry, but video games are no more my thing now than they were when you asked me ten minutes ago," she said wryly. "I can watch a couple more rounds as long as we try something else afterward. Did you manage to get that new episode of Fearless Ferret Forever recorded the other day?"

"Uhh… No, I already had the DVR recording Agony County." Ron's eyes widened a hair. "For my mom! She's, uh, a big fan."

Kim looked just a little too intrigued by that. "Oh? That's a, uh, shame. I guess we'll just have to catch the rerun later."

Max opted not to contribute to the conversation, instead returning his attention to the game and trying to keep a straight face. He didn't know what was strangest – that Agony County was seriously this old, that his parents were clearly already watching it at this age, or that they were actually trying to hide that second fact from one another. If he made it back home all right, he might have to give that old soap a try out of pure familial intrigue.

It wasn't long before he and Ron started up a new match. Max played somewhat simply, moving and swinging with his fighter but putting little effort into remembering the button combinations for special attacks. Zombie Mayhem wasn't quite as complex as later entries in the series, anyway.

This whole thing was… weirdly nice. He could never quite shake the knowledge of just who these people were, but for once he was actually able to start seeing them, here, now, as kids. Not parents, who'd raised him (would raise him?) with life lessons to absorb and family rules to either accept gracefully or engage in a little teenage rebellion over. Not the leaders and most veteran members of his team, to emulate and try to prove himself to. Just… people.

People who were already renowned international crime-fighters at sixteen, but still.

"Wha-" Ron was starting to mash the buttons of his controller frantically. "Come on, come on, how are you beating me this bad already?"

Max glanced over to find Ron's character on the brink of being overwhelmed by zombies, while his own managed to just stave them off in a steady wave.

He grinned. "I learned from the best." Never mind that the best was sitting right next to him but clearly hadn't earned that title just yet. Or that the other best apparently wasn't into video games in this time and place. He wondered whether Everlot hadn't come out yet, or whether it just took some time to catch his mother's attention.

The round wrapped up with Ron's avatar getting carried off by the undead while Max's struck a triumphant pose. Max set his controller down and leaned back on his hands. "You know, I think you might just be trying to do too much at once," he commented. "It's like… there's no point in trying for a handspring if you haven't mastered the basic handstand, right? Otherwise you just end up hurting yourself."

Kim sat up straighter in her seat. "Okay, I thought I recognized some of the stuff you were doing on the battlefield. You're involved in some kind of tumbling, aren't you?"

Max turned his gaze toward her. "Yeah, gymnastics."

"Nice! I do the same thing with the tumbling I use in cheer routines. Using the moves in combat, I mean."

Max laughed. "Oh, I know. You were actually the one who gave me the idea."

Kim's eyebrows raised. "Really?"

"Yeah." Max took a moment to think it over and ensure he wasn't about to say too much. "You know, I almost went into cheerleading too. My parents talked me out of it, though."

Ron scowled. "Aw, that tanks. You should do your thing, be true to your essential… uh, Maxness. Right, Kim?"

Kim raised her hands in surrender. "Hey, don't look at me! I came around to the Mad Dog."

Max just shook his head and settled back against the foot of the couch. "Oh, it's nothing like that. More like… My mom wanted to make sure I was doing something because I really wanted to, not because it was something sh- uh, you did."

He shrugged. "So I put some more thought into it and decided gymnastics looked more my speed, and it turns out I'm pretty good at it! Even helped my team win state last year."

Kim blushed a little at the indirect praise, but she seemed surprised by his last statement. "Oh, wow. I'm flattered that I inspired you, but… Just how long have you been following my freak fighting anyway, that you had the time to learn so much since then?"

…Riiiight. Max had forgotten about the crucial part of the story where he'd been only six at the time. Not exactly something that matched up with however long Kim had been famous for in this day and age.

"Oh, well, to be fair, athletic stuff sort of runs in the family. And… I dunno, I guess I just have an interest in following hero types?"

Ron folded his hands behind his head and leaned back against the couch, a playful little smirk on his face. "Well, I guess that makes one more for the KP fanclub. Joss had better start recruiting if she wants to catch up."

Kim chuckled. "To be fair to her, I think Joss does enough to be your fan club all on her own. How much fan mail have you gotten from her again? Considering it's been like two months?"

Max was reaching for his game remote to prepare another round, but those last couple of comments made him pause. He glanced back curiously at the two of them. This certainly wasn't a story he'd heard before. Didn't his mom have a cousin named Joss?

Before he could think of a way to ask for clarification on the topic without sounding weird, the Kimmunicator rang and derailed all conversation completely. All three teens perked up at the sound, and Kim wasted no time in retrieving the device.

Max couldn't see the screen from where he was sitting, but he could still hear Wade's voice clearly.

"Found him. He's heading for Japan now," he reported.

Kim nodded, already standing up. Max and Ron were only seconds behind her. "Then so are we."

Chapter Text

Montgomery Fiske fought the urge to glare at his fellow passengers. None of them were human – while he had been unable to retrieve his contemporary counterpart's personal jet, he at least had enough sway in this time period to commandeer the services of a small plane for himself and his minions. But he couldn't shake the sense of betrayal that had plagued him ever since he first laid eyes on this era's monkey ninjas.

To distract himself from his discontent, he pulled the Tempus Simia from his bag and took a few moments to admire it. The literature on the artifact had been curious: detailed plans on the rare components and spells necessary to craft such a thing, a fully functional temple already built and designed for the explicit purpose of activating it, and yet the project had by all appearances been abandoned the moment the Mystical Monkey Monks were ready to begin its construction. He had come across the first manuscript back in his purely scholarly days, and spent the next few years seeking out others when he could and trying to decipher whether or not the Tempus Simia had been completed and simply well-hidden. Alas, he had eventually come to the conclusion that it simply did not exist, and that if he wanted time travel for himself, he would have to put in some extensive legwork.

He never seriously considered that idea until many years later, when some grasping fool had awoken him from his stony tomb in the naive belief that the rightful Monkey Master would be beholden to aiding him in his own inferior schemes. All at once, Monty had found himself with nothing – decades lost to the Yono and that blasted child, all his resources confiscated or bequeathed to less worthy members of the Fiske line. Even his personally trained monkeys, having long since abandoned their duty, refused to return to his side.

That had been sufficient motivation. There were many ways to add the scattered powers of the ancient Monkey Monks to his own. But there was only one way to reclaim the power, the life, that was once and still should have been his.

Digging up the information he needed on the Han's origins had not been quite as difficult as constructing the Tempus Simia, but finding all the information he needed, and planning out his perfect revenge, had taken time. There were new minions to acquire – he couldn't quite explain why he had chosen the stone gorillas, but something about them had seemed right. There was the acquisition of the precise minerals he needed to properly draw in and channel the chronal magic that would make the Tempus Simia into something more than an ordinary statue. And all of it done in hiding, plotting his course of revenge to the finest detail while avoiding the attentions of the infuriatingly successful Team Possible until he was finally ready to mark his triumphant return to the world at large.

Now Monkey Fist did glare when he returned his attention to his not-so-loyal minions. At the very least, he could have retrieved the other half of the troop instead. Curly and Marchioness, two of his most skilled, were still back in that Middleton prison, and instead he was stuck with Chippy. The one who had betrayed him — would betray him, he supposed — even before the incident with the Yono. And all of it thanks yet again to the meddling of young people who insisted on denying him his rightful glory!

Like that whelp who had somehow made it through the time portal. If Kim and Ron's little mini-meddler hadn't gone running to mummy and daddy, Monkey Fist would likely have had all his old minions and more of his resources together before their team was any the wiser. Now that they had someone who more or less knew his plans, he had no doubt that he would be dealing with them again before this was over.

His building frustration must have been showing on his face, because Chippy caught him still scowling her way and turned to give him a look that was as concerned as it was questioning. His blood boiled at that oh-so-innocent expression, and he snapped, "Eyes forward! As distractible as you are, you could stand to learn some discipline."

Chippy leaned back in her seat, startled at his outburst. The fabric of her ninja mask stretched as she bared her teeth in a mild act of defiance. Still, she complied, and so Monkey Fist turned his glare out the airplane's window. Hmph. Ungrateful traitor.

The reflection of the Tempus Simia in the window caught his attention, and he pulled it closer. None of it, not even the whelp, was of any real consequence, he reminded himself. After all, he had time on his side.

Max had always known on some level how much travel time could affect the length of a mission. He remembered once when he was young, when he had to stay with his grandparents for almost a full day while his parents were on a mission somewhere overseas. He'd later overheard his dad complaining that they should have sent someone closer because the actual busting of the bad guys had taken less than fifteen minutes. That was an extreme case — most missions were comparatively closer, and the team usually had access to one of several ultra-high-speed forms of transportation — but he was still getting used to the long stretches of simply waiting to get to the place he needed to be.

When most of those high-speed transports didn't exist yet and the mission was both time sensitive and all the way in Japan, the wait was nothing short of agonizing.

"We made good time," Kim reassured him for the upteenth time when they finally got out of the Matsumoto airport and into the city where Monkey Fist's target apparently lived. "We're not too far behind Monkey Fist, and Wade's managed to track his movements enough to know he hasn't met with anyone yet. Whatever move he's about to make, we still have time to stop him from making it."

The team followed Monkey Fist's trail — one upside to his new giant bodyguards was that his trail wasn't hard to find, especially when he was in a hurry — to a small shared home near the edge of town.

Kim blocked the others with an arm shortly after the house came into view. "Monkey ninjas," she explained, pulling them behind the corner of the building next door. "I just saw one looking out a window. Monkey Fist must already be inside."

Max tensed. "Then we have to hurry!" he whispered insistently.

Kim's jaw clenched as she considered the situation. "If he's going to the trouble of posting sentries, there's a good chance he'll do something drastic the moment he knows we're here. We have to find a way to sneak in and take control of the situation before that happens."

Max frowned thoughtfully and pulled the Maxiever from his pocket. "Then let me go on ahead. I've got something that can help with that."

Taking care to keep it clear of too much scrutiny, he strapped the watch onto his wrist and started navigating its settings. He might not have been able to contact anyone with it at the moment, but he could still interface it with the tech in his mission wear. With a few button presses and some assistance from the wiring in his shirt, a kind of holographic haze blurred his form and dulled the colors of his hair and clothing to softer, more neutral tones. It wasn't quite the thorough cloaking the battle suits could manage in full stealth mode, but it was enough to help him blend into the shadows of the tightly packed houses.

Kim's eyes widened at the display. "Wow. We have got to get one of those."

Max smiled awkwardly, although he wasn't sure if she could pick out his expression through the cloaking. "Uhhh… maybe later."

Max had to take care picking his way toward his destination. It was around midday at this point, and his camouflage wouldn't work nearly as well in bright light as it did in the relatively scarce shadows. Still, he managed to edge himself to a corner and dart across the thin strip of lawn to the target house. From there, he kept low, hugged the wall, and crept his way to the window Kim had pointed out.

A faint murmur of voices filtered through the closed window, and he picked up the pace as much as he dared until he could carefully peer just around its edge. After confirming that none of the monkey ninjas were currently paying it their direct attention, he turned his focus to the human occupants of the room.

"This is… a very strange way of making an offer, sir," a woman said, her voice hesitant. He wasn't sure if it was because she was unused to speaking much English or because of her palpable tension. She was sitting stiffly in a corner armchair and giving the monkeys scattered throughout the room a wary eye. She seemed young — maybe college age, maybe a little older — and she wasn't showing any visible signs of pregnancy. It struck him that if this was Aunt Han's birth mother, it might be his family's one chance to learn more about her.

It wasn't exactly a happy thought. Would she have wanted to meet them, especially like this? Would his aunt even want to know, after living a happy life with her adopted family?

"It is a very strange set of circumstances, my dear," Monkey Fist replied. He was standing in the middle of the room, a central living area by the looks of it, and his posture was stately and poised as if he hadn't just broken into her home and literally cornered her into some kind of leonine contract. At least the gorillas weren't there – they must have been too big for the house.

"Though your family has long forgotten it, your lineage is that of Toshimiru, the first master of the Mystical Monkey Power. That in itself is a great honor, but I fear it gets more complicated with your unborn child. You see, she is at the heart of a very crucial and dangerous prophecy. That is why, as an expert on such matters, I am strongly suggesting that when you put her up for adoption—"

"That is not a decision I have made yet!" the young woman snapped, hands clenching as she leaned forward in the chair. "And I am more concerned about how you knew of my child, much less how you could be so sure it is a girl."

The monkey ninjas all set their full attention squarely on the woman at that outburst, a few even moving a step or two closer. Max took the opportunity to turn toward where Kim and Ron were hiding and gesture them over, careful to keep out of the window's view while still making broad enough gestures for them to see.

"He's trying to convince the mom to give him the baby," he whispered when the others reached him. "It hasn't gotten ugly yet, but she isn't giving in and I don't think he's gonna accept that."

Kim nodded, her brow furrowed in thoughtful concern. "We'll have to act quickly then. Do you have more of that stuff you almost caught Monkey Fist with before?"

Max gave a hesitant nod. "Yeah, but just enough for one more use."

Kim nodded back. "That's fine. I have something that won't last as long, but it should be enough for this. When I get the window open, aim for Monkey Fist and I'll get as many monkeys as I can."

The two of them worked quickly and quietly, Kim shifting around Max to get under the window while he got in position to shoot the moment it was open. While she was jimmying the latch, he could hear Monkey Fist's attempts at persuasion deteriorate into barely concealed threats as his patience waned.

"I am giving you a very generous offer!" he practically yelled. "Your child would live like a queen under my care, and I promise you will not like the alterna-"

Max didn't give him a chance to finish that thought. Kim got the window up at that moment and, in one fluid motion a part of him couldn't help but be proud of, he leaned in and shot the ranting villain with his restraining webbing. A quick thwip beside him signaled Kim's own shot, and a fraction of a second later, four of the monkey ninjas were caught against the far wall in something that looked like a cruder version of his web.

The woman shrieked and pushed herself up against the back of the chair as Kim vaulted through the open window, but she seemed to relax a little when she realized the newcomers were on her side.

"You know, Monkey Fist," Kim said, eyes narrowed dangerously as she positioned herself between the criminal in question and his would-be victim, "you've actually managed to reach a whole new level of low. What exactly is your endgame here?"

Monkey Fist scowled at her, then at Max and Ron clambering in through the window after her. He seemed concerningly unperturbed by the fact that he was trussed up on the living room floor. "Oh, but that would be telling," he said.

The remaining two monkeys backed away from the heroes, all too aware that they were outnumbered. Max advanced on them, keeping them on the retreat, while Kim held position and Ron started coaxing the poor confused woman at the heart of all this out of her armchair and away to safety.

"Of course," Monkey Fist continued, "you seem to have forgotten one tiny detail. Guardians!"

Before Max could react, the house started shaking and one of the stone gorillas squeezed through the doorway he'd been herding the monkeys toward. He suddenly found their roles reversed, scrambling backward as the two monkeys clambered onto the shoulders of their massive advancing companion and started hollering tauntingly at him.

"Okay, time to go!" Ron shouted, bolting for the window with the woman in tow. Unfortunately, their progress was almost immediately cut off when the other gorilla smashed through the connecting wall and cut off their escape.

"You didn't think I would come all this way just to let myself fall to your meddling, did you?" Monkey Fist asked as the trapped monkey ninjas began chewing at their bonds and the remaining two jumped back down to help him with his own. "And to think, this could all have been resolved without any bloodshed. You should have taken my offer, Miss Chiyo."

With that, the stone gorilla guarding the window made a lunge at the woman — Chiyo, apparently. She cried out again and scrambled back, and Kim was forced to leave the monkeys to their work so she could block the guardian's path to her.

"I'll deal with this one! Max, keep the other one busy," she barked. "Ron, Rufus, see what you can do about the monkeys."

Max scowled at the gorilla advancing on him for the third time now. "You know, I am really starting to hate these things."

He rolled to dodge one swipe of its huge arm, then used that momentum to grab onto it and force the gorilla into a partial turn. With a low grumble, it threw him off with enough force to smack him into the wall. As he shook off the blow, he saw that it was turning its attention back on Chiyo.

Max snarled. "Stay away from her!" he cried, springing forward and beating at it with his fists. That was enough to draw away its attention, and for once he was kind of relieved to find himself suddenly having to dodge those massive stony hands.

The other members of the team had found themselves in similar standstills. Kim was trying to lure her own opponent away from the window so the group could escape, but every time it started to move it was to advance on Chiyo's corner and she was forced to push it back again. Meanwhile, there were only so many ways Ron or Rufus could swat at the monkey ninjas without meeting the wrong end of their sharp canines or getting ganged up on. Chiyo herself had taken cover behind the armchair she'd been in earlier, and was frantically looking for an opening amidst the chaos that would allow her to flee.

As Max dodged another punch and kicked obstinately at the offending arm to keep his opponent from ignoring him again, a loud snapping sound drew his attention to the far wall. Two of the monkeys pinned there had just managed to break through their bonds, and they dropped gracefully to the floor just a half second before leaping at Chiyo.

There was an instant — and only an instant — of time to fear that everything the team had done to stop Monkey Fist's plot would come to nothing. Before Max could even think to channel that fear into action and rush to the rescue, Chiyo's wide eyes flashed with a sudden determination, and she reached for her assailants. In two swift movements, she intercepted their attacks and threw them bodily past where he and his gorilla were fighting.

"Don't just jump at her, you fools!" Monkey Fist shouted. "She has the Mystical Monkey Power!"

Chiyo's expression twisted into confusion even as she ducked back behind her cover. "Please, leave me alone! I do not even know what that means!"

Max kept one eye on the monkeys as they picked themselves back up. When they started running again, he dove to grab them and push them right in the path of the gorilla. It was enough to disorient all three opponents for a few crucial seconds.

"It means you can defend yourself!" he called out to her. "Just let your instincts and your need to protect your kid guide you, it should help. We'll get you out as soon as we can!"

He couldn't see how she responded to that, as it turned out he'd distracted his own opponents so well that the gorilla and one of the monkeys were now ganging up on him. Still, while he dodged back from swinging stone fists and scrabbled to get the screaming monkey off his face, the sudden shriek and thud of another monkey landing behind him told him that she had either gotten some help or was getting a handle on her powers.

Just as he managed to pull his smaller assailant off, he stumbled back and tripped over something. Falling hard on the ground, he looked over to see that Monkey Fist had finally managed to get free just in time for Max to crash into him and knock both of them over.

Monkey Fist snarled at him, hatred boiling in his eyes. "You!" he snarled, grabbing Max by the collar. "You have been a thorn in my side for —"

Ron tackled him to the ground just then, sending all three of them tumbling. Max had to suppress a sudden yelp when his back pressed into something hard.

Monkey Fist was opening his mouth for yet another indignant rant when he stopped and shot upright, eyes wide. Max took the chance to look back at what he'd slid into.

He sucked in a breath. With a quick glance back at the distracted criminal, he surreptitiously shoved the item further behind him and out of sight.

"Retreat!" Monkey Fist barked to his assembled minions in the same moment Max registered the sound of approaching police sirens. He pushed his way out of the pile of bodies and added, "We will have other opportunities to finish this, but not if we get captured now!"

There was a mad scramble as various primates both real and stonework stopped what they were doing and made their way through the hole the second gorilla had put into the wall. Kim grabbed futilely at the last monkey to untangle itself and flee, but otherwise hovered around Chiyo's corner to keep anyone from trying any last second potshots. Ron sat up in a daze, clearly in less than no position to chase down the entire group.

Max kept silent, holding his breath as he watched them all go.

When the simian shrieks were finally drowned out by the wail of the sirens, Kim visibly relaxed. She turned to the young woman they'd all helped defend from Monkey Fist's assault and asked, "Are you okay to head to the police station with us? I know this has to have been a lot, but I think we'll all feel much better if you can get somewhere safe before that man takes one of those 'opportunities' he mentioned."

"That won't be as easy for him as he thinks it is."

Everyone turned toward Max when he said that. "What do you mean?" Ron asked. "Is there something you know that he doesn't?"

Max couldn't keep the grin off his face as he sat up and set the Tempus Simia out in front of himself. "Yup. Because he clearly hasn't figured out that he lost this."

Chapter Text

Master Sensei knew well the virtue of patience. It was absolutely vital to the way of the ninja, but in truth, that only scratched the surface. In learning and teaching, work and relationships, and daily life itself, he found that it was often better to let things come as they were than to rush life's course along its path. It was a lesson that he worked hard to instill in his young and naturally anxious students.

So it was that he waited quietly at the desk of an office space the Yamanouchi school had on hand for observation missions in the city of Matsumoto. One of the school's graduate ninjas had discovered the presence of a person of interest a short time ago, and now Sensei was awaiting a full report on why that individual was here and whether Yamanouchi should be concerned.

A knock on the door suggested that his patience was about to pay off, and in soft Japanese he said, "Enter."

The student who complied, a highly promising young pupil of his, had switched out her dark uniform for a set of casual clothing. Evidently she had seen fit to leave the shadows behind and consult with civilians or authorities – something must have come up. She bowed deeply and said, "Master Sensei, I have much to report."

Sensei nodded and gestured for her to continue. "You may speak, Yori."

"I do not know the full details, but it seems Monkey Fist has discovered the family line of Toshimiru. Earlier today, he confronted and assaulted the latest bearer of that lineage, who had recently become pregnant with her first child. Apparently, he believes the child to be involved in some form of prophecy."

It took all of Sensei's considerable self-control to keep his expression even. For the lineage of Toshimiru to resurface after all this time, and the latest bearer to be subject of a prophecy… it was almost certainly the Han. But how on Earth had Monkey Fist learned about the Han, much less that her time was upon them?

"This is most troubling," he said softly, stroking his long beard as he thought. "I trust from your description that this woman escaped the encounter?"

Yori nodded. "Yes, but she did not do so alone. By the time I had found their whereabouts, she was in the process of being rescued by the team of Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable."

So the Stoppable boy had been involved as well! Sensei could not say whether it was destiny or simple cause and effect that had brought both new bearers of the Mystical Monkey Power here, but it bore further investigation regardless. It was fortunate that he already had plans to introduce the young Mr. Stoppable to his school.

"It would be best not to draw too much attention to what has happened," he decided aloud."I will speak with the local authorities about bringing us into their investigation and keeping the details quiet. Have you been able to contact them or the victim of this attack?"

Yori nodded with a quickness that suggested she had anticipated this question. "I approached the police station under the guise of a concerned citizen to alert them of the situation, and after the target and her rescuers arrived, I briefly spoke with her. She is taking shelter at the station for the moment, but has already expressed a keen desire for help for herself and her child."

Sensei stood from his chair. "You have done well, Yori. I am very interested in meeting this woman myself, and I can think of several ways we might provide the security she seeks. Come – it is likely that this will not be your final involvement with Toshimiru's legacy."

He allowed Yori to lead the way, preferring to keep a steady pace with which he could more easily mull over this new development. As he walked behind her, he silently considered the likelihood that life at his dojo was about to become significantly more interesting.

Tell me your secrets, Max thought to himself as he turned the Tempus Simia over and over in his hands.

Magic was a bit of a finicky thing, he knew. He didn't have any of his own, but between his dad, aunt, sister, and the family pet, he was pretty much surrounded by living examples of monkey magic at work. There was a kind of intuitiveness to it – sometimes it just sort of happened when you least expected it, sometimes it reacted to stress or a pressing need or even some vague concept of destiny, and to use it with any real intent and consistency took a slightly paradoxical combination of focus and instinct.

Magical artifacts, though they could be complicated to set up, worked similarly once they were active. So long as a user knew roughly what the thing did, that same mix of focus and instinct would help them more or less know how to make it go. With the right force of will, Max could hold the Tempus Simia in front of himself and just sort of make a time portal appear. That much he'd figured out how to do simply by giving it his full attention once the team had finished at the police station. But he also had a sense that there was more to it, some property or even another power that his 'magical intuition' or whatever was missing.

"I don't like this," Kim muttered half to herself, glancing out the window. Team Possible was holed up in a small cafe on a quiet street not far from the police station. They were hanging around here in the likely event that Monkey Fist came back either for another desperate stab at Chiyo or to get his magical toy back. The others had left Max to his investigation for now, under the excuse of it being "more secret family stuff," and he had a feeling that Ron now suspected him of belonging to a family of wizards.

"What's not to like?" Ron asked between sips of hot chocolate. "Chiyo's got plenty of backup between the cops and us if Monkey Man goes after her, we've got backup if he goes after us, and this is quite possibly the best cocoa I've ever had. Even with the creepy gorilla statues, this has got to be the best way this sitch could have played out."

Kim sighed and went back to nursing her own drink. "Maybe, but we can't guard Chiyo forever and she can't get back to her life until this is over. I won't be comfortable until we bring Monkey Fist in."

Ron seemed to consider that for a moment, but then he perked up and frowned thoughtfully. "Hey, so Chiyo has the Mystical Monkey Power, right? But she couldn't have gotten it from the funky jade statues because Monkey Fist was the one who put them together and then they got all smashed."

Kim shrugged. "She must have inherited it from an ancestor who got it back when the monks were around."

Max glanced up. "She did. That's something Monkey Fist said before you guys got to the house."

Ron nodded. "Right. And this whole… prophecy thing, it has something to do with her kid getting it too, right?"

Kim cocked her head. "I mean, probably. Where are you going with this?"

Ron stirred his drink absently and pursed his lips. "So if the Mystical Monkey Power can be inherited… does that mean my kids are gonna have it?"

Max looked back down. It only passes to the firstborn. Normally he was crazy jealous of Joan for being born on the right side of that particular monkey power rule, but in this scenario it had been kind of a blessing in disguise. He wouldn't have to worry about trying to explain away a power he didn't have, after all.

Kim pursed her lips as well. "I guess they could? That's so weird to think about."

She smirked. "Honestly, when I have kids I just hope I'm half as badass a pregnant lady as Chiyo was back there. I mean, I know part of it was her powers kicking in, but did you see how fast she moved?"

Okay, now Max was half convinced his parents were doing this on purpose. He held back a grimace and wished he could just talk to them frankly without worrying they'd get stuck with knowledge they shouldn't have yet.

The Tempus Simia thrummed under his fingertips, its magic responding to his stray thought, and all at once he knew how to use one of its powers.

His eyes widened. "It can seal memories," he muttered under his breath.

Kim and Ron looked over at him. "Come again?" the former asked.

Max's mind was racing. The two of them had accepted his general secrecy about his stake in this mission well enough, but the closer they got to the part where they caught Monkey Fist and he had to take the guy somewhere other than prison, the harder that was going to get. He hadn't told them about the time travel because that little detail was the key to them potentially figuring out a whole host of other details about him. But if this thing could erase memories of facts they'd learned about the future, that meant he basically had a safety net. He straightened up, a small smile on his face, and returned their gazes.

"I said it can seal memories, but that's not gonna make much sense without context," he replied, placing the Tempus Simia on the table and tapping it with a finger.

"Okay, so bear with me because this is about to get weird. This thing? It's called the Tempus Simia, and…" He hesitated for just a moment before plowing on, "Well… It's basically a time machine."

Ron blinked. "...What."

Max's heart was pounding, but he kept going before he could second-guess himself. "Yeah, told you it was weird. But my point is, Monkey Fist – at least, the one we're chasing – used this thing to come to this time period from the future to change something bad that happened to him in his past. I… more or less followed him through the portal."

Ron's eyebrows shot up, and Rufus' head popped out of his pocket to listen more closely to the conversation. "Wait wait wait," Ron said, "You're saying you're from the future?"

Max smiled awkwardly. "Yeah."

Kim was resting her chin on folded hands, propped up by her elbows. Her brows were furrowed as she processed this information, but gradually her eyes began to widen.

"Everything makes so much more sense now!" she suddenly blurted out, snapping upright. "That's why you can't contact anyone you know, and why Wade couldn't find any info on you, and – Chiyo and her baby, they're part of your family or… or are going to be, aren't they?"

Max considered for a moment before nodding. "More or less."

Ron raised an eyebrow. "Wait, how does that work? She's Japanese, and you're, ya know, not."

Max shrugged. "I never said it was a biological relationship."

Kim sighed and rubbed her temples. "Okay, so this is a thing now. So you're from the future, the Monkey Fist we've been fighting is also from the future, and you're telling us all this now because it turns out the thing that brought you here can do some kind of 'memory sealing'?"

Max nodded and glanced down at the 'thing' in question. "That about sums it up. From what I can tell, the memory sealing is to keep people who learn too much about the future from staying that way."

Kim frowned and leaned forward to scrutinize him, squinting a little as she looked him over. "Who… are you? What happens in the future that we're gonna have to forget when this sitch is over?"

Max winced a little at the question. "...Do you really want to know?"

Kim stared at him a few moments longer, mulling it over, but finally she sighed and shook her head in resignation. "I guess if it's not important to the mission, it would be better not to have the distraction."

"Aww, but now you got me all curious!" Ron complained, slumping over in his seat.

"But what's the point if we'd have to forget the whole thing anyway?" Kim countered. To Max she shot another quick look and added, "This is all we need to know for this mission, right? Or does Monkey Fist have a secret weapon from the future or something that we'll have to be ready for?"

Max shook his head. "Just the gorillas."

"That'll have to be good enough for now, then."

A familiar four-tone beeping cut into the group's conversation, and all heads turned as Kim retrieved the Kimmunicator. "Monkey Fist?" she guessed when Wade's face appeared on the screen.

Wade nodded, but he was frowning thoughtfully. "Monkey Fist. But didn't you say he'd probably be going after you to get back something Max took from him?"

Kim glanced at the Tempus Simia. "Now that we've learned more about it, that seems more likely than ever. Why?"

Wade's frown deepened. "Well, Monkey Fist doesn't seem to think so, because he's heading back to England now."

Kim's eyebrows shot up. "Really?" She looked over at Max. "There's – there's no way he hasn't figured out that he doesn't have the Tempus Simia anymore, right?"

"No way," Max agreed. His brow furrowed in thought for a moment, and then he snapped his fingers as he realized something. "I bet it's because we have it! If he just up and went after us now, there would be nothing stopping me from using it to escape and stranding him here in the past."

Wade shot up in his seat. "I'm sorry, did you say the past?"

"So you think he's, what?" Kim asked. "Laying low to catch us by surprise later? Putting something together to counteract the Tempus Simia until he can get it back?"

Max shrugged. "Honestly, you have way more experience with him than I do."

Kim nodded absently and considered the situation. "Well, whatever he's planning, we can't just wait around for him to get the upper hand. Wade, were you able to get ahold of Nakasumi-san?"

"Affirmative," Wade said, though he was still giving the group a slightly wide-eyed look. "I just have to give the word and he'll have a jet ready to pick you up by the time you make it through the airport."

Ron suddenly straightened up in his chair. "Ooh! Can that time portal thing take you to different places too?"

"Time portal?!" Wade echoed from the Kimmunicator.

Max blinked and looked down at the Tempus Simia. "I mean, yeah?"

"So then, why don't we just use that to get to Monkey Fist's place right before he shows up?"

"Except we don't know for sure that Monkey Fist is going back to his estate," Kim pointed out. "There could be a museum he's planning to rob or something in the area, and it will be easier to change course if we're traveling normally than to keep trying to guess both the time and place."

Max nodded thoughtfully. "True. And come to think of it, I'm pretty sure Monkey Fist landed in the wrong place last time he used it, so I don't know how accurate that part of it is."

"That settles it, then," Kim said, getting up from the table. "We'll call the time portal plan B, if we have to."

"Again: time portal?!" Wade practically shrieked.

"Short version: Max is a time traveler," Kim said as the group made their way out into the Matsumoto sunshine. "I'll fill you in on the way."

"Hey, d'you think this is the present or the past?"

Max looked up to where Ron was parachuting several yards above him. Monkey Fist had indeed been heading back to his main estate, and Wade's quick coordination with the Nakasumi pilot and the rest of Team Possible meant that they'd reached it less than half an hour after him. They were aiming for a little-used tower that Kim and Ron had managed to slip through unseen once before, in the hopes that they could get the drop on Monkey Fist before he did the same to them.

At Max's confused look, Ron elaborated. "Okay, so, from your point of view, you were chasing Monkey Fist around in the present, went through a time portal, and now you're in the past. But from me and KP's points of view, now is the present and you're a guy who showed up from the future."

There was a brief pause in his train of thought as Kim, then Max, landed smoothly on the flat top of the tower. Ron just missed the mark, and the other two had to help him scrabble up and over the parapet before removing their parachutes.

"So anyway, which one of us is right?" he continued in a low voice as the group filtered through the access hatch and started making their way down the tower. "Is now, like, now-now, or is it past-now and everyone here but you and Monkey Boy is just a… I dunno, a memory of the us that are running around in your time?"

Max tried to process that question for a moment, failed, and let out a weak, "Huh?"

From her place at the front of the group, Kim glanced back. "I'm not sure time even works that way," she interjected. "I mean, I think I get where you're coming from, but bringing time travel into the mix makes the whole concept of the present kind of freaky-weird."

The three of them had reached the landing into one of the estate's main halls by this point, so she motioned for the boys to keep quiet while she nudged open the door to check for occupants. After confirming that the coast was clear, they all filed into the hall and started creeping along one of the walls. They kept their eyes and ears open for any signs of Monkey Fist and his entourage, but there was nothing just yet.

Still, the lapse in conversation had given Max time to think Ron's question over.

"Well… Monkey Fist came here to change his past, right?" he reasoned. "So the first time around, you guys must have been doing something different than this. So if time does work that way, then the fact that we are doing this means that this must be past-now."

Ron groaned. "Aw, but I don't wanna be just a memory!"

Max shrugged. "I mean, you're still doing stuff in the future… er, present?" Probably freaking out over my disappearance, but if this works then that won't be an issue for much longer. "Whatever it is."

Kim suddenly halted and shushed the two of them. "Look," she whispered, pointing further down the wall they were sneaking alongside. Soft light was spilling out into that part of the hall, and as they got closer, they could now see that it was coming through a small and seemingly random opening in the wall. Craning his head, Max could just make out a set of stairs leading downward.

"Looks like Monkey Fist is in his inner sanctum," Kim went on. "Chances are his goons are either with him or nearby, so we need to be extra careful sneaking in."

Max and Ron nodded, and the three of them made for the stairway in silence. Max could almost feel the tension building as he glanced around furtively, but no gorilla guardians materialized to cause them trouble. It was eerie how quiet a giant frigging castle could be when any staff had long since ditched the job and the only human occupant was holed up in a secret room with all his not-so-human buddies.

It wasn't until they were about a quarter of the way down the stairs that Max heard any sound from this 'inner sanctum.' Soft simian hoots and chatter told him that at least some of the monkeys were down there, which was probably a good sign. As he edged closer to the room, a distinctly human growl of annoyance confirmed that the monkeys weren't alone.

"Speak to me, blast it all!" Monkey Fist suddenly yelled. A shadow fell across the thin strip of room visible from their vantage point, and everyone quickly pressed against the darkened wall of the stairwell. Monkey Fist appeared a moment later, loping forward on all fours with a heavy scowl etched on his face. He was directing said scowl at some kind of altar that Max couldn't get a good view of.

"I grow impatient, prophet," he continued. "The monkey ninjas are at the ready, the golden banana is in position, and still you are forcing me to wait. I demand a sign!"

Max blinked. Well, that was… something. He glanced back and forth between Kim and Ron to see if either of them knew who the heck Monkey Fist was talking to, but they both looked as lost as he was.

Monkey Fist continued to pace in front of his altar, and the sound of the monkeys' chatter became more subdued at their master's growing agitation. The next minute or two seemed to stretch impossibly long as the heroes tried to determine whether to strike now or wait for more information.

"Well?" Monkey Fist asked, the bite in his tone cutting through the near stillness of the room.

All at once, a radiant green glow shone out from somewhere in the altar. Monkey Fist halted in his pacing as a deep and reverberating voice began to speak.

"I have told you already," the voice said, a slight edge in its otherwise even tone, "my duty was to provide a sign of the Ultimate Monkey Master, not answer to the whims of every disciple who thinks highly of himself. Ron Stoppable is and will always be the Ultimate Monkey Master. Not you."

It was probably a minor miracle that Ron managed to keep his cry of "I'm the what?!" to a hissed whisper. Kim held up a hand to remind him to stay quiet, but Max could tell that she was just as shocked by this revelation. Huh. He wondered how they were supposed to have found out about that if not for this.

Back in the sanctum, Monkey Fist sneered. "I still fail to see why you would anoint that buffoon over me, but will you at least tell me how to circumvent the Tempus Simia? It was your order's own design, after all."

There was a long pause. Then the voice softly asked, "You came across someone who built a Tempus Simia?"

"I built it," Monkey Fist corrected. He stood up straight, his hands folded behind his back.

"Or at least, I will build it several years from now. I have returned to my past to prevent… an unfortunate incident with the Yono, but the device has been stolen from me."

Kim glanced back at Max and mouthed, 'The Yono?'

Max grimaced, rolled his eyes and made a so-so gesture, hoping that would be enough to convey that it was a long story that Monkey Fist was twisting to his own end.

After another pause, the mysterious glowing entity spoke up again. There was a note of concern in its voice as it said, "If what you are saying is true, then you are wielding the Tempus Simia in error. You cannot use it to prevent the return of the Yono, because anything you use it for in the past has already affected the future."

Max gasped, his brain short-circuiting for a moment. Monkey Fist's cry of "What?!" was basically a significantly angrier version of the one thought that managed to run through his head.

"Wait, does that mean what I think it means?" Ron whispered.

Before Kim could shush him again, Monkey Fist stole back everyone's attention with a howl of "No! No, I won't allow it!" He scrambled up to the altar and gripped its edges, his face bathed in verdant light.

"This cannot be how it ends!" he shouted. "After everything I've worked for, I refuse to believe it was predestined to come to nothing!"

"The Tempus Simia's power is tied to stability," the voice replied evenly. "It works alongside the flow of time, not against it, and to use it effectively one must have the wisdom and foresight to do the same. If you have not already seen its effects in your fight against the Yono, then you must either search harder to understand what you should do and have done, or else make things right in your own time."

Monkey Fist's eyes narrowed. "I'll show you foresight, you –"

Ron leaned forward and spoke just loud enough for Max and Kim to hear him over the continued ranting. "So, if Monkey Fist can't actually change the past… Does that mean we already won?"

Max shook himself out of his stupor. "I… guess?"

Ron smirked. "So then, can we just waltz in right now, nab him, and then you'll be free to take him home or whatever?"

Max opened his mouth to reply, but stopped. Too late, he realized that the inner sanctum had suddenly gone quiet.

Before he could turn to see if its inhabitants had discovered his group, a monkey ninja dropped down from the stairwell ceiling and shoved Ron forward. Thanks to Ron's position above the rest of the team, he tumbled downward into both Max and Kim and set all three rolling uncontrollably until they finally found themselves sprawled at the entrance of the sanctum. Max looked up with a low groan to find Monkey Fist staring down at him like he was some kind of disgusting insect.

"Seize them."

Before Max could get his bearings enough to stand up and make a run for it, one of the stone gorillas stepped forward from its place just beside the stairwell and hefted him up roughly by the upper arms. The other hooked one thick arm each around Kim and Ron and held them both, struggling, against its wide stone chest. Rufus poked his head out of Ron's pocket, but before he could drop down and scamper off to mount a rescue operation, one of the monkey ninjas grabbed him and held him tight.

"I wouldn't start celebrating yet," Monkey Fist said, eyes trained firmly on Max. "The Han's future may be secure, whelp, but the same can hardly be said for you."

Chapter Text

It was more than a little creepy how quickly Monkey Fist could switch between a half-feral gait that suited his moniker and the full poise of a proper gentleman. Where he'd been ranting and raving moments ago, now he positively loomed over where Max struggled in the clutches of the animated statue. From where he was positioned, Max could finally see the source of both the strange voice that had been speaking with Monkey Fist and the stranger glow still lighting up this part of the room: a tiny projection of a robed man that was hovering above some kind of pedestal. The projection said nothing, but watched the scene with a concerned furrow in his brow.

Overall, it wasn't looking good. The five monkey ninjas that weren't holding onto Rufus had moved to surround their captives, and the gorillas' grips were as heavy and unyielding as… well, stone.

It felt like this was the right time to say something defiant. He wasn't sure how well it would work on the gorillas, but who knew? Monkey Fist was so unstable right now that Max might be able to get somewhere by throwing him off with a sufficiently bold and witty line.

"Whelp?" he blurted out instead. "Seriously, that's the insulting nickname you picked for me?"

Monkey Fist just stared at him at first. He snapped his fingers and pointed at the backpack slung over Kim's back, and one of the monkey ninjas scampered up and started rifling through it.

"And why not?" he finally replied. "You are but the latest example of the many young people who have plagued me throughout my villainous career."

The monkey pulled the Tempus Simia out of Kim's pack, chittering triumphantly, and she could only glare as it clambered back to the floor and passed the artifact into Monkey Fist's waiting hands. A nasty grin flashed across his face for just a moment, but then he tucked it away in his robe and jabbed a hairy finger toward Kim and Ron.

"First, you two and your little friends hand me defeat after humiliating defeat, from the moment I first access the Mystical Monkey Power to what should have been my discovery of the Han. Then, once you have her on your side, she goes and gets me sealed away for decades!"

Kim blinked. "The who now?"

Ron raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, this evil rant was working a lot better before you started ranting about stuff that hasn't happened to us yet."

But Max snarled. "I do know that story, well enough to know you're absolutely full of it. Aunt Han didn't do anything but defend herself, and even that much was barely anything more than some kinda magical instinct. You were the one who made that deal with the Yono, you sent him after her, and if you weren't so busy trying to blame everyone else for your screwups, you could have just gone back to before all that and warned yourself to leave her alone!"

Not that he would have been able to change things anyway, apparently, but it was the principle of the matter. Max could see why it had taken so long for someone to revive this jerk.

Monkey Fist rounded on him, eyes narrowed dangerously. "And now we come to you, the boy who likes to pretend he knows what he's talking about." He took a few steps forward, and something in that movement had Max shying back against his captor in spite of himself.

"To think," Monkey Fist said, "I finally managed to come out ahead of Team Possible, even after all my time away. And then who should come along to make things difficult again but the very spawn of the two meddlers who started it all!"

Max flinched at the dual exclamations of "What?!" that suddenly sounded behind him. He glanced back to see Kim and Ron alternating between giving him gobsmacked stares and throwing supremely uncomfortable looks at one another.

"Dude, seriously?" he groaned, shooting Monkey Fist another glare.

The criminal scoffed and waved him off. "Please, you know as well as I by now that your existence is secure… at least up to a point."

The gaze he held was shifting to something calculating and almost hungry, and again Max was starting to feel more than a little uneasy. He tried to shove the feeling away and keep up his own defiant stare.

"H-Hey!" Ron cut in. "Didn't you hear the glowey ghost dude? You already lost!"

"Oh, have I?" Monkey Fist asked casually. "Because I thought of something very curious when I found you all intruding in my sanctum. Why, if the timeline remains unchanged, did my past self never hear about any of this?"

Max's eyes narrowed. "Maybe you're just not as good at research as you thought."

Monkey Fist didn't take the bait. "Highly unlikely," he said. "Perhaps, instead, it was by my own design. Perhaps I will make — and have made — the effort to keep this whole incident from becoming known to the wider world."

He turned away from the group and walked over to an antique display cabinet near one corner of the room to search for something. "Here is one theory. While the Monkey Fist of the past was indisposed at some penitentiary, the Monkey Fist of the future arrived to borrow his minions for the purpose of preventing the former's unfortunate fate. This time-displaced self — that is to say, I — was dogged throughout my journey by a stowaway who had called upon the aid of Team Possible, but it was not until my quest had failed that I learned I was going about it the wrong way. This much we already know."

Monkey Fist seemed to find what he was looking for then. He lifted the object up to admire it, and Max realized with a sinking feeling that it was an ornate dagger.

"Of course," Monkey Fist continued, "it did not take a visionary like myself long to realize that it would be as impossible to end my nemeses as it was to neutralize the Han. The Monkey Fist of the past would go on to face them several more times, after all. But neither he nor I recall ever hearing of their friend. And so, to preserve the timeline and to punish the team for its insolence, I silenced the boy."

"Don't you touch him!" Kim snarled as Monkey Fist turned, dagger in hand. He didn't respond directly, but instead watched her with slightly narrowed eyes as he went on.

"Of course, it would not do for Miss Possible and Mister Stoppable to go on knowing that their own child had been killed in front of them. Certainly not when I fully intended to recover my missing time even if it meant taking the slow path back to my future. So I had their memories of the whole incident sealed. It was something of a shame that my perfect revenge would go unknown for so long… but then again, the Tempus Simia has told me that the memories will return the moment one meets the future one learned about. What better time to realize that I have been there all long, quietly building up my strength away from prying eyes, than when it is far too late to stop me?"

With that, Monkey Fist began to approach. Max found his panic rising quickly as he struggled in vain against the stone gorilla's tight hold. He hadn't had much experience dealing with supervillain death traps yet, but he could safely say that there was a big difference between being strapped to a slow-moving conveyor belt of doom with an off switch his more experienced teammates were already planning to exploit and having the villain of the hour moments away from dispatching him personally.

"No!" he hissed, aiming a wild kick at Monkey Fist that the latter easily sidestepped. "No, don't – s-someone –" Monkey Fist began to raise the dagger, and he squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself. "Mom –"

He didn't entirely register what happened in that moment, but he did recognize that the sudden shriek that sounded a second later was not his own. He opened his eyes to see that Monkey Fist had stumbled back and dropped the dagger, and was clutching one hand in pain. A quick look back told him why: Kim had managed to get one hand free and retrieve her laser cutter, which was now pointed squarely at the criminal. The fury she'd shown when she found out Max had been lying to her was positively cheerful compared to the look she was giving Monkey Fist now.

"I said," she spat, "don't touch him."

As if a spell had just been broken, all at once the monkeys began to scream and swarm her in defense of their master. Kim fought back as best as she could, but there was little more she could do than make inefficient swipes at the nearest ones as they hemmed her in.

They weren't the only ones to react, though. The gorilla holding Max loosened its grip for just a moment, whatever magic was keeping it active torn between following its current directive and moving to the defense of its commander. Max took full advantage of this tiny opening and slipped his arms free, then ducked under its hands and out of its reach before it could retaliate.

It all took only a few seconds, and in that time Monkey Fist was still reeling from his injury. Max tried to think quickly as he scrambled to distance himself from both would-be assailants. Okay, first priority is… well, not dying, but that's been taken care of for now. Rufus had gotten free at some point in the chaos, but even in the unlikely event Monkey Fist stayed down, the two of them were still horribly outnumbered. So, next priority is to free the rest of the team.

The monkeys were still swarming Kim and making it difficult for her to do much, and Max doubted that going in himself would do anything but complicate matters further. But Kim wasn't the only one being held by the other gorilla, and if everyone's attention was on her…

"Dad!" Max called out half a second before realizing what he'd just said.

Ron yelped, wide eyes turning toward him. "Okay, this has gotten weird enough without you calling me that!"

Max ducked out of the way of his own gorilla's grasping arms and took a moment to put more space between it and himself. "Just – listen, you remember that thing I told Chiyo earlier about Mystical Monkey Power?"

Ron glanced between him and Kim, who was busy trying to keep her laser cutter away from three monkeys at once. "Yeah? I don't see how intermittent mystical kung-fu skills are supposed to help here though!"

Max clambered up onto a high wooden archway near the middle of the room, just out of reach of his pursuant. "You're the Monkey Master, your powers are a lot stronger than you know!" he shouted back. "Just focus on what needs protecting and they should be able to work with you!"

It was a bit of a gamble – he knew his dad's powers were at their most potent by far when he was looking out for his family, but he probably hadn't fully processed that Max was family yet. But whatever Ron thought of this not-so-random time traveling kid, hopefully the simple idea of protecting the future would be enough.

Ron looked between Max and Kim one last time, glanced back at Monkey Fist, and then a deep resolve hardened his expression. Something flashed in his eyes, and for just a moment everything went blue.

Before anyone could react, Ron stomped hard against the ground and shoved himself back. Even from his difficult position, he had enough force to push back his gorilla and slam it against the wall with a heavy crunch. The construct froze in place, cracks spiderwebbing across its body.

And then, all at once, it collapsed into a pile of rubble. Clambering monkeys tumbled down with an array of confused howls, and its human prisoners dropped from its no-longer-existent grasp.

Ron gaped as he stumbled to the ground. "How did I…?"

"Move!" Kim barked, pulling him up and out of the wreckage. The monkeys all crashed into the spot where they'd fallen half a second later, and the two teens had to move fast if they wanted to keep their advantage.

A frustrated growl drew Max's attention down below his perch, where he saw that Monkey Fist was back up and holding the dagger a little awkwardly in his uninjured hand. The remaining gorilla had idled when it couldn't reach its quarry without damaging its master's home, but now it was leaning over to scoop up Monkey Fist for a boost.

"I will not leave this time period empty-handed!" he snapped, stepping onto the gorilla's proffered palm and gingerly using his other hand to steady himself against its shoulder. "So why don't you stand still and accept your –"

Kim dove into him, cutting him off and tackling him to the ground. The dagger flew from his grip for the second time and clattered to the floor, sliding several yards further from the struggling pair.

A pale pink blur darted from a shadowed corner as Rufus made a beeline for the fallen weapon. One of the monkey ninjas outpaced him, though, forcing him to a halt when it scooped up the dagger and brandished it at him.

"Chippy!" Monkey Fist barked, raising his head off the floor and pulling one hand free from where Kim was pinning him to reach toward the monkey. "Bring me the sacred knife!"

The monkey – Chippy, apparently – looked from him back to the dagger. Its (Max wasn't sure what kind of name "Chippy" was, so he was going to stick with 'its') expression was all but unreadable behind the mask, but even as it took a few steps forward, something in its movements seemed hesitant.

Rufus was decidedly less so. While the monkey was distracted by its own thoughts, he leaped up and kicked the dagger from its hands. Chippy swiped at both mole rat and weapon, but Rufus moved too quickly, grabbing the dagger's handle in his jaws and scampering off with it. In moments, he had pulled the dagger beneath the cabinet, which was situated too low for anything not rodent-sized to get under.

"No!" Monkey Fist yelled. With a low growl, he pushed Kim off of himself and rose up to fight her head-on. The two of them punched and kicked and blocked and dodged, but with Monkey Fist still injured, he wouldn't last long without help.

That left one stone gorilla, the rest of the monkeys, and Ron. Max looked around the room for a moment, only for Ron to answer his unspoken question by scrambling his way up to the other end of his archway perch. Two of the monkey ninjas were trying to follow him, but he managed to bat them off.

"So," he asked, looking over at Max, "what's the plan?"

Max balked a little at that. "You're asking me?"

More monkey ninjas were coming up on his side, and he took a couple seconds to grab one and drop it onto the others. That sent all three tumbling back to the ground, buying him some time.

"Honestly, I'm still pretty new to this whole hero thing," he told Ron. "Why did you think I called you guys when I ended up in this time period?"

Ron raised an eyebrow. "Maybe because trying to deal with all these guys by yourself would have been stupid, and if you were trained by Kim because if you're related then why would you not have been, you obviously knew better." As if to demonstrate his point, he kicked off a monkey that had grabbed onto his leg.

"Anyway, KP's busy right now and I'm more of a whacky schemes kinda guy than a big picture planner. And you're the one who found a way to sneak up on Monkey Boy when he was at that house and got the Tempus thingy away from him without him noticing. So?"

Max considered that and scanned the rest of the room. The remaining gorilla had started providing Monkey Fist with backup, and their combined efforts were enough to finally put Kim on the defensive.

"If we can take that thing out, we should be able to overpower Monkey Fist's other forces," he thought aloud, nodding to the gorilla.

Ron grimaced down at the construct. "Okay, fair enough. But how? Monkey Master or not, I don't think I have enough juice left in me to make an encore performance with whatever I did to the other one."

One particularly enterprising monkey jumped up in Max's face in an effort to knock him down, and he grunted and grabbed onto the archway with one hand while using the other to pry it off and practically chuck it away. He watched the monkey fall with a scowl, but noticed something when it reached the bottom of the structure he was on.

"I don't think this arch is secured to the floor," he said, looking from the bottom of its support to the skirmishing trio to get a rough estimate of distance. "If we time it right, I think we can push it onto the statue while Kim has enough room to get out of the way."

He edged over to the very end of the archway's flattened surface – it was close to the wall, and he could just brace himself by wedging his feet in the gaps between the flagstones.

"Brace yourself on your end and follow my lead!" he called out to Ron. After one last check once the latter was in position, he said, "Okay, we push in three, two…"

The monkeys were climbing up the arch again, but when it began to shift, they abandoned their chase and scattered out of the way. The arch scraped a little across the floor and resisted every inch of movement – it may not have been bolted down, but it was very stable and very heavy. Max grunted and strained, heaving the shoulder of his good side against his end and throwing all of his weight into it. From the corner of his eye, he could see Ron doing the same.

Slowly, though, the archway began to tilt. The boys' combined force and high position were just barely enough to lever it onto the ends of its supports, but as they continued to push it forward, its own great weight began to work against it. Finally, it overbalanced, and Max swiftly found himself having to readjust to drop safely to the ground.

Kim and Monkey Fist both saw it coming, and dove out of the way with relative ease. But the gorilla statue was bigger, slower, and facing the wrong direction. With an almighty crash, the fallen arch pinned it to the ground.

"No!" was all Monkey Fist could shriek before Kim was on him again. He tried to counter, but the hand injury and all the stress he'd put himself through had taken their toll. One precise jab from her and he crumpled to the ground, unconscious.

With a low huff, Kim pulled her defeated opponent's wrists behind him and slapped on a pair of manacles. She then rifled through the deep pockets of his robe until she found and retrieved the Tempus Simia.

Max had picked himself up by that point, and he made his way carefully around the fallen arch and the still-groaning construct beneath it. The monkeys had all huddled in a far corner of the room – clearly, they knew when they'd been beaten – and Rufus scampered out from under the cabinet where he'd hidden with that dagger to rejoin Ron.

Kim held the Tempus Simia out to Max. "All things considered, you should have this."

Max accepted the artifact with a mute nod. It looked like Ron had been right after all: in a weird, time-traveley way, they had already won. And now that he'd caught up to that win, he could grab the restrained Monkey Fist and finally go home.

Except for the fact that, now that there was no big battle to preoccupy them, Kim and Ron were starting to give each other some intensely awkward and uncertain looks.

Max probably had some explaining to do.

Chapter Text

For several seconds, nobody was entirely sure what to say. They all knew more or less what they were thinking, but the recent revelations and the still ebbing tide of adrenaline did not exactly make it easy to put into words.

Max drummed his fingers nervously against the Tempus Simia and cleared his throat. That seemed to finally break the spell, as all of his companions' gazes snapped to him.

With a weak smile and a little wave, he said, "Uh, hi there. I'm your kid from the future."

Kim nodded and folded her arms uneasily. Her voice squeaked a little as she replied, "Uh-huh, so you are."

Ron rubbed the back of his neck. "So, uh… Just to be, like, 500 percent clear, when you say 'your' you mean…"

Max nodded back with a wince. "Yes, both of yours."

Ron shared another look with Kim. "Right. Okay."

Kim rubbed at her arm. Her eyes were still on her partner, but for all the awkward tension in the air, something in her gaze was starting to turn thoughtful.

"I just… I – I mean, I never really thought of us like… or never seriously, but maybe…"

Ron blushed and let out a weak laugh. "Yeah, I – I think I get what you mean. Maybe…"

Were – were they flirting now? Was this flirting? Max had never really been the kind of guy to get grossed out by the idea of his parents' affection for one another, but whatever the heck was starting to unfold in front of him, it was weird. Perhaps a little more forcefully than necessary, he said, "Okay, maybe now's the time to try that memory sealing thing, huh?"

"Ah, I'm glad that feature is intact. That's what I was about to suggest."

All three teens practically jumped out of their skins at the sound of the new voice, and as one, they turned to find the glowy projection man still watching them from his spot above the altar.

Ron spoke up first. "You've been here the whole time?! Why didn't you do anything when Monkey Fist was getting all stab-happy?"

The man shrugged. "I'm just an earthly projection of a long-dead monkey monk's spirit. There isn't much I can do in this form."

Ron raised a finger, opened his mouth, paused, and then put his hand back down with a thoughtful hum. "You know, it probably says something about all the freaky stuff we've faced that I can completely accept that explanation."

The man, or spirit or whatever, nodded in agreement. "Facing worldwide mystical threats does that to you. But returning to our earlier topic of discussion, there is a reason the Tempus Simia was planned with a function to temporarily seal memories. It seems the two of you have learned more about your future than you are yet prepared to deal with, am I correct?"

Kim and Ron shared yet another look. "I mean…" the former ventured. "This is some major weirdness that I don't really think we should know yet, but… it feels kind of wrong to just, you know, forget."

Ron nodded. "Yeeeah, both options are kinda a lot, aren't they?" He looked at Max. "What do you think? You're from the future, you'd know what we're gonna go with."

Max's eyes widened and he held up his hands. "Hey, don't look at me. I definitely never heard of this happening, but for all I know at this point, you guys are just really good at making up epic love stories. As far as I'm concerned, I'm just the guy who ended up stuck in the past for a bit while chasing a supervillain."

Ron raised an eyebrow and glanced back at Kim. "He takes after you," he told her bluntly.

Kim scoffed, but there was a light blush on her cheeks and more than a little affection in her voice as she said, "Ron…"

She trailed off thoughtfully, taking a few moments to consider the situation before she finally took a deep breath and held out a hand to Max.

"I'll do it. I'd rather experience this 'epic love story' of yours properly than start a relationship just because I know how it'll turn out. Even if it means forgetting all of this for a while."

Ron smiled at that. "You know what? Me too."

Rufus clambered up onto Ron's shoulder as Max handed over the Tempus Simia, and the three non-time travelers settled in to work the artifact's magic. While they did so, Max wandered over to where the spirit monk guy was hovering.

"So, you're like some sort of prophet?" he asked.

The monk chuckled. "Close enough. It is my duty to pass on the prophecies of old to those still in the land of the living." He paused for a moment to eye the fallen form of Monkey Fist.

"Though some are less equipped to handle such truths than they would like to believe. I cannot say I understand the full extent of what he came to this period to do, but it does not surprise me that it involved a petty attempt to screw over his enemies, as today's youths put it."

Max let out a noncommittal grunt, grimacing slightly and folding his arms as he glanced toward Monkey Fist.

"Why so dour?" the monk asked. "You have won this day, haven't you?"

Max frowned. "I mean… We have, and I am happy about it, but…"

He searched his thoughts for the best way to explain himself. "I mean, these last few days have been the most stressed I've ever been in my life, because I didn't know what disaster would happen if Monkey Fist managed to change the past. And then all of a sudden it turns out he couldn't change the past anyway. Even with that last stunt where he went after me, even though neither of us knew what would happen, it was still something that had kind of… already happened, in a way.

"And all that is a relief, but at the same time, I feel like I finally did something I could be proud of, but at the same time I can't really because it was basically destined to happen that way anyway. You get what I mean? I just want to know that I really, honestly can keep up with the rest of the team."

The monk remained quiet for a moment. "You know," he finally said, "the funny thing about destiny is that it does not hold those in its grasp as tightly as they often think. Monkey Fist may not have been able to change his past with the Tempus Simia, but the fact that he could even attempt an alternate use still speaks to its power to influence time. He may have become a great force, for good or ill, if he applied that thinking to more than just attempting to weaponize everything at his disposal."

The monk nodded toward the Tempus Simia, which was pulsing with a soft light as its three users sat around it in some kind of trance. "And just because the Tempus Simia has toyed with the order of cause and effect does not mean they no longer matter. You believe that Monkey Fist would have failed in his plot against this aunt of yours even if you had not intervened. Perhaps that is indeed the case. But perhaps instead, his unopposed actions would have made it so that the future you first came from did not include your aunt at all. Your actions still have meaning, even if the circumstances have muddied it somewhat."

Max grimaced at the mind-bending thought. "…You know what? I don't know if that makes me hate time travel less or more."

The monk chuckled dryly. "There is a reason my order abandoned the project. But that reminds me of one last word of advice: when you have returned to your proper time, you should separate the Tempus Simia into its component pieces but keep them intact. Even as dangerous as that artifact is, there is no telling what strange effects its destruction would have on the timeline."

Max blinked. "Wait, what's that supposed to –"

The projection disappeared before he could finish his question. Rude. Still, he supposed he got the message.

"Umm, excuse me?"

Max turned back from the now empty altar to see Kim waving him over. The Tempus Simia had finished its light show, and Ron and Rufus were both shaking their heads and rubbing their eyes as they stood up.

"Okay," Kim said, "this is going to sound completely whack, but you're, um… the time traveler, right?"

Max's eyebrows shot up at the uncertainty in her voice. "Yeah, Max." He eyed the artifact still resting on the ground. "That thing must have really done a number on your memories."

Kim rubbed her head and gave him a sheepish smile. "Max, right, sorry. I think I remember most of the past few days, but a lot of the details surrounding you are… fuzzy. I guess that means we're going to meet some time in the future?"

Max couldn't help letting out a good-natured snort. "You could say that."

Kim nodded thoughtfully. "Okay, guess I shouldn't pry too much then. Still…"

She took a moment to cast her gaze around the room – at the unconscious Monkey Fist and his pinned and unmoving stone gorilla, at the pile of rubble that had been the other gorilla, at the last of the monkey ninjas that Max was just now realizing had been taking advantage of the heroes' distraction to make a discreet escape. She didn't bother going after them, and instead turned back toward him with a broad gesture to the room at a whole.

"What… happened here? I mean, I think we can safely assume that it turned out well for us, but the memories kind of cut off with all of us getting captured."

Max considered his answer for a moment. He smirked. Might as well have fun with it. "Monkey Fist said too much and ticked you off, so you kicked his butt hard."

Ron raised an eyebrow and glanced at Kim. "Really? That sounds kinda extreme."

Max shrugged. He was enjoying this way more than he should have. "You wouldn't be thinking that if you knew exactly what it was he said. Also, you helped."

Max was getting good at this veiled truth stuff. His parents were not going to like that when he got back to his proper time.

Neither Kim nor Ron looked any less bewildered than they were when this conversation had first started, but the former finally sighed in resignation. "Okay, you win. I guess telling us any more would defeat the whole purpose of forgetting… whatever it was we had to forget in the first place. We'll just have to wait until we catch up to your own time."

Kim knelt down to pick up the Tempus Simia and hand it back to Max, but then Ron's eyes widened and he raised his hand. "Wait!" he shouted, and everyone turned to him.

"So if this was actually a time loop all along… Does that change whether this is the past or the present?"

Kim raised a skeptical eyebrow. "Ron, at this point I'm even less sure time works that way."

Max accepted the artifact from her with a shrug. "Ditto." With that, he looked around the room and took a deep breath.

"So, I guess this is it. I should be able to take Monkey Fist and that one statue thing with me, but I don't know if I'll be able to do much with the broken one. Think you guys can take care of it?"

Ron was busy staring wide-eyed at the remains of the statue in question – apparently he'd only just noticed it – but Kim nodded. "We'll figure out something."

Max offered her a small smile, then turned his attention to the intact statue and willed. The Tempus Simia thrummed to life, and a deep red portal appeared right beneath the stone beast.

The archway fell the rest of the way to the ground with a crash as the construct slipped away from under it. Its frame straddled about half of the portal, but there was still enough space for a couple of humans to slip through.

Kim and Ron got on either side of Monkey Fist's prone form and hefted him up by the shoulders. "Look out below!" Ron called out with a snicker as they heaved him through the portal.

Max walked up to the swirling red edge before looking back to the teenage forms of his parents and the young Rufus one last time. It was strange, really. He knew he would be seeing them all again in just a few moments, but he also knew that it wouldn't be quite the same.

"Well," he said, "see you guys on the other side."

Kim raised an eyebrow. "Do you mean that literally?"

Max gave her his best enigmatic smile. "You know, answering that question would be kind of a spoiler."

Kim playfully rolled her eyes and folded her arms. "Fair enough. See you… someday, Max."

Max was just about to step into the portal when Ron hummed in thought and glanced at Kim. "You know, I really like that name. It's kind of inherently badical."

Max tried very, very hard not to think about that as he dropped into the timestream. He'd dealt with too much time travel weirdness already to start wondering if he had, in fact, been named after himself.

Twenty-Six Years Later

"Max!"

Kim would never really understand just how her parents had managed to act so calm when she first went into crime fighting as a teenager. Now that she had children of her own, it was hard to shake the instinctive urge to protect them at all costs – and she had personally trained them in self-defense. Few aside from her husband knew it, but a significant part of her was relieved that only one of the kids had shown interest in the "family trade" as it were.

Monkey Fist had affected her a brief glance before stepping into the strange portal, but it didn't look like he'd even noticed Max falling through. Kim's boots pounded against the stone floor of the jungle temple, and in seconds she shot past the still dizzy Hana and surged up the stairway in the middle of the room. Ron kept pace beside her, but by the time they reached the top platform, the portal had swallowed up the second stone gorilla and winked out of existence.

"M-Max?!" Tim yelped as Kim skidded to a halt and started searching frantically for any sign of where everyone had gone. "I-I'm sorry, I should have kept a better eye on him, but I thought he was doing fine and then the portal showed up out of nowhere and –"

A sudden tingle in the back of her mind, like a thought that was just out of reach, drew her attention away from her brother's guilt-ridden ramblings. She clutched the side of her head as a wave of deja vu rushed over her, and then…

…She caught up.

Kim gasped, a sound that she heard echoed beside her. She turned slowly to meet the wide-eyed gaze of Ron – her husband, her partner, her second-in-command, her beau, her sidekick, her best friend. She could tell just by that look on his face that he remembered too, but something still needed to be said.

"That was Max?!" she shrieked.

"Max was our kid?!" Ron screeched.

"Well of course he's our kid, we've had him for fourteen years now!"

Kim started pacing, her fear for her son's safety relieved for the moment and replaced by an overwhelming crush of information. Monkey Fist's return, his promises of revenge, the gorilla statues, the little stone idol – the Tempus Simia. That memory spell must have been potent to keep her from connecting the dots until now.

"Well, I don't know," Ron continued shouting, "it's like there's this sixteen-year-old version of me in my head that's going through a huge freakout right now!"

Kim sighed, forced herself to stand still, and rubbed a hand over her face. "Okay, yeah, I get what you mean."

"Uh, guys?"

Kim's attention jerked to Han, who was standing at the foot of the stairway with Tim and a jittery Rufus. The two humans looked incredibly confused.

"Two questions," Han asked. "What the actual frig are you guys talking about, and does it mean my nephew is okay?"

Before either Kim or Ron could answer her, another crimson portal sprang to life and one of the animated statues fell through it. Though, it didn't seem to be animated anymore – it just tumbled down the other end of the raised platform with a series of crashes before coming to rest on the ground below.

"To answer your first question," Ron said as a cuffed and unconscious Monkey Fist dropped out next and collapsed onto the platform, "time travel. Time travel is what we're talking about. And I think your second question is about to get answered for us."

Max had made it to the right place and time! The last lingering trace of Kim's worry faded away, and she pushed Monkey Fist aside and took a step back to make space for the last traveler to come through.

Max had barely finished stumbling out of the time portal when he was swept into his mother's embrace. What little teen instinct he had to object was smothered in the sheer relief of getting to see his family as he knew them again, and he didn't hesitate to return the hug.

"So it looks like you were being literal after all," she murmured.

Max blinked and craned his head to look at her. "Huh?"

Kim chuckled and released him, keeping one gentle hand on his shoulder as she tapped the side of her head with a wink. "The memories that the Tempus Simia seals are surprisingly fresh when they come back. You said you'd see us on the other side right before you went through the time portal."

Her expression softened. "I'm proud of you, Max. I can't imagine how overwhelming that must have been, but you handled yourself well."

Max cracked a small smile. "Thanks, Mom."

His mother gave his shoulder a little squeeze before letting him go, and he turned to accept the second hug from his father.

"You did good, kiddo," he said.

Max laughed. "You too, Dad."

Ron pulled back with a grin. "Right?! Man, I wish I could've remembered that move back there with Rocky Number Two years ago. It would have made figuring out this monkey power so much easier."

A low groan interrupted his reverie, and Max looked down to see that Monkey Fist was starting to come to. In an instant, his mother grabbed the criminal by the collar and heaved him up until his feet were dangling over the edge of the platform.

"Ron, dear?" she asked with a sweetness in her voice that belied the sudden cold fury in her eyes. "I know that Monkey Fist has always been a little more your villain than mine, but I just remembered that I wanted to have a good long talk with him on the benefits of serving out his full sentence and not causing any more trouble. Would you mind if I took the initiative?"

There was no good humor in his dad's smirk as he replied, "Go right ahead. You always were the more persuasive one. Just make sure to let me know if you need any help."

"Of course."

Monkey Fist only had time to let out an unintelligible whimper before he was thrown bodily off the platform, Kim jumping down after him a moment later. It was times like this that Max wondered why the supervillains even bothered trying anything with his family around.

Uncle Tim raised a hand. "I'm still confused."

Ron considered his response for a moment while Rufus took his chance to clamber up on Max's shoulder and offer a rodent-sized hug of his own. "Well… Do you remember way back when that mysterious kid who was chasing Monkey Fist had to crash at your house for the night?"

Uncle Tim's eyes widened. "That was you?" he asked, looking at Max.

Max shrugged. "Guilty as charged."

A moment later, he remembered something. "And you tried to ship me with my own mother!"

His dad blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"

Uncle Tim's eyes went even wider, but after a moment he started shaking his head vigorously. "Nnnnope, nope, I remember that and that was definitely your uncle Jim."

Max folded his arms. "I think I can tell my own uncles apart."

"Sure, in the now. But we were preteens or something back then! Huge difference."

Aunt Han shook her head. "Yeah, okay, this sounds like a 'before my time' thing and I definitely want to hear it from the beginning."

Max wasn't surprised to hear that, and he couldn't say he minded. He'd grown up hearing stories about his parents' exploits around the world, and now that he was part of their team, he was starting to gather a few of his own. Not all of them were worth telling, but he knew he'd be getting asked about this one for a long time.

It was, after all, a story for the ages.