The New Ron - Chapter 43

“I can't believe we had to help Drakken and Shego escape!”

Kim groaned, flopping back on her bed and rolling around in a fit of frustration and disbelief.

“Ugh! I feel like I need a damn shower after that!”

Me?

I was pacing.

“What's up, Ron? You'd usually be complaining right along with Kim,” Tara spoke up, shimmying out of her dress enticingly.

Normally, that would have distracted me, but now wasn't the time.

Rufus scampered up my leg as I walked by, crawling up my body to the crook of my elbow and looking me in the face. Or, rather, trying to. I was staring past him at the image burned into my mind of Bowman flying off in that stealth ship. A stealth ship that looked a lot like Wade's, if he'd had a decade to develop it along with a few more iterations to test on.

The naked mole rat made a concerned noise as he tugged at my sleeve, but my mind was preoccupied.

“Got a better idea,” Archer yelled, fiddling with the device. “How about I give you a bigger mess to clean up, KP?”

“Got a better idea,” I said aloud, drawing attention to myself. “How about I give you a bigger mess to clean up, KP?”

“Ron, you alright?” Kim asked.

“Yeah, Stoppable, you spaz out on us?” Bonnie asked, having re-entered the room at some point and I hadn't even noticed. That was sloppy of me. Kim's attic stairs weren't exactly the quietest things in the world unless you knew where they squeaked and groaned.

I pulled out my communicator.

“Hey Ron,” Wade replied to the screen booting without glancing at my feed. “What's up? I've got a new scanner to prototype. Don't wanna get caught with my pants down again by that... jerk.”

Despite myself, I snorted. “You know you can curse, Wade. Neither Kim or I are going to tell your mom.”

Wade rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah... don't wanna get in the habit, though. Now, my vocabulary aside...”

“Do me a favor and pull all of the audio files we have of Bowman and do an analysis of his voice, diction, and that sort of thing?” I asked.

“Ron?” Kim asked, frowning.

Now, Wade looked at me, pausing in his typing. “Okaaaay... I'm going to assume you're going somewhere with this and not pulling one of your jokes.”

“Thanks,” I nodded, rubbing at my chin as I sat down.

“Hmm... okay, files are pulled and I'm running the analysis,” Wade stated, “what do you want me to do with it?”

“Compare it to the records you have of my own voice,” I stated.

I felt the attention of the rest of the room rest heavily on me.

Wade blinked, “Uhh... alright?”

Rufus squeaked loudly in puzzlement.

“Uhh... what's going on?” Tara asked quietly, leaning over to Kim.

“I'm not sure, but I think Ron's figured out something,” Kim replied in an undertone.

“...and, huh... it's a match,” Wade stated. He stared at what I presumed to be the results on the screen. “It's a really close match. Ninety-five percent.”

“Yep, thought so,” I nodded, reaching up to take Rufus and drop him off on the bed gently before handing my communicator to Kim and turning to grab one of her pillows.

Then I screamed into it as loudly as I could.

…

Kim rubbed her temples as I finished my explanation.

“Ron, Bowman – Archer – is not you from the future,” Kim groaned.

“I-is that a thing that can happen?” Tara asked, looking between myself and Kim from where I lay one the bed and our mutual girlfriend as she paced where I had been before.

“Yes//No.”

Kim and I looked at each other, both frustrated. Though, as usual, hers was a higher-energy irritation and mine was a tired and angry one. “Ron-”

“He called you KP,” I replied, letting my eyes slide up to the ceiling. “Who else does that? Your brothers, maybe?”

“So he heard you say it and copied you!” Kim argued back, waving a hand dismissively.

“And the vocal analysis?” I asked. “This guy doesn't just use one word the same as me, he uses ninety-five percent of them! Same inflection and everything!”

“So you talk alike!” Kim stated, throwing her hands up in the air. “Even if I can't think of one, there has to be a better explanation than he's a time traveler!”

Bonnie, who'd disappeared briefly downstairs, came back with her hands full and dropped to sit next to Tara. “Here, T. I'm not watching this without popcorn. What'd I miss?”

“Not much, basically just a refresher on everything that happened,” Tara shook her head and paused. “I've never seen them like this.”

“Because you never liked watching people fight,” Bonnie replied with a snort. “Kim and Ron got into some epic... well, not really brawls since they never hit each other, but they were kind of like cat fights between girls.”

Kim and I, as one, turned to glare at the blond and brunette.

“Quiet in the peanut gallery, okay?” Kim asked bitingly.

Bonnie smirked at Kim, silently miming zipping her mouth shut, locking it, and throwing away the key. Then, to add insult to injury, she threw some popcorn into her mouth.

Kim took a breath and turned back, sighing. “Where were we?”

“I was about to bring up the fact that his stealth thing looks a lot like Wade's flying shuttle, but with a serious upgrade,” I replied.

“Right,” Kim sighed, closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them with that green fire burning behind her eyes. “Please tell me you've noticed that most planes look alike, right? Two wings, a body, some flaps on the sides and tail? They look like that for a reason, Ron. Someone building a shuttle that looks like Wade's is basically just an accident of design.”

“Okay, fine,” I gave her a pair of Jazz hands for lack of anything else to do. “Each individual point might be something you can dismiss, but what happens when you take all of them together? What do you get, then?”

“A lot of coincidences!” Kim cried back, aggravated again and now fully committed to the argument once more. “Just because you have a bunch of coincidences in a row doesn't make them not coincidences!”

“He's out-planning us at every turn!” I palmed my face. “He knows our every move, KP! How about that? On top of everything else?!”

Kim made an aggravated sound and stomped around as she growled at nothing for a few moments.

“Hey, keep it down up there!”

-crunch, crunch-

Kim scrabbled at her hair, running her nails across her scalp and messing up her usual style. “Sorry Mom!” Then she turned back to me. “That's because you've been airing all of our old fights on the internet! He watched them and learned all our tricks!”

“I didn't show off all of our tricks!” I replied with an expressive wave of my hands. “Wade and I edited all of that footage! It took forever, too! We only showed off what a bunch of news stations already had, and maybe a little extra, but it was from our point of view so it was more thorough. Putting everything in would be a total waste!”

-crunch, crunch-

“That still doesn't mean he's a time traveler! There's got to be another explanation, Ron!” Kim argued staunchly. “Maybe he's a clone! We've done clones before, haven't we?”

I waggled my hand. “Like... once? With Dementor? And they weren't very good. Like, he made them out of potatoes and they were a little overcooked and sludgy instead of actually looking like us, remember?”

“Okay, but that's proof of concept!” Kim shook her hands. “Clones are more likely than time travel!”

“They're both equally unlikely!” I nearly shouted back. “And therefore equally likely! It's completely arbitrary that you're willing to suspend your disbelief for someone getting clones to work and not time travel!”

-crunch, crunch-

“Well, why are you so sure that it has to be time travel!?” Kim replied loudly, throwing her hands up again.

“Because if I went evil, this is totally what I'd do!” I confessed, dropping my head into my hands.

Kim was quiet at that.

“Ron?” She asked quietly.

I rubbed at my face. “Look, it's been eating at me, okay? Why he's here... and not you.”

Kim sighed, looking away and snorted. “You were war-gaming being a villain? Should I be worried.”

“It's just... there's the name he's using, too,” I continued, disregarding the question for now. It'd probably come back to bite me later, though. “Archer. I think it's more than just the fact that he uses a bow and arrow. There's this obscure character from a Japanese game I was looking at playing if it got ported... It's... long-winded and weird, but the 'archer' in the game is kind of a time traveler. Weird magic time travel, but it's still basically the same thing.”

“Ron... I want to believe you, but you're really stretching things here...” Kim sighed tiredly.

Then her Kimmunicator beeped and her shoulder slumped as she pulled it out. “What's the sitch, Wade?”

“Uhhhh... so I called in a pair of favors and got two different police sketch artists to do the job, just like you and Ron agreed on,” Wade began slowly.

“And the age regression looks nothing like Ron, right?” Kim asked, smiling smugly towards me and turning back to the small screen.

There was silence on the other end of the device and Kim's smile slowly drooped. “Wade, tell me you're joking. Please.”

-crunch, crunch-

“Okay, so there's some wiggle room,” Wade cautioned as my own communicator beeped and I pulled it out. “Because he does wear a mask, if not a particularly good one. But there's certain things about bone structure, fat deposits, and general skin pigmentation that you can't fake without a lot of effort. And tapping a few mad scientists on the side for good measure.”

I sighed and nodded at the results displayed to me. “Yep.”

“So he could be faking it,” Kim argued, her voice coming out a whine as she gripped both sides of the kimmunicator tightly.

“It's... possible-” Wade's voice paused. “No pun intended, but really, really unlikely. And, even if he was, for the sake of argument, sporting a mask on top of one of the world's best plastic surgery jobs for some kind of double-fakeout... what's the endgame here, Kim?”

“To trick us into wasting the effort of looking for a way to beat a time traveler?” Kim asked.

­-crunch, crunch-

“Hey, Ron?” Tara interjected gently, drawing my eye to where she and Bonnie were camped out on Kim's beanbag chairs and slowly making their way through a bowl of popcorn. I gave Rufus the evil eye as he chewed through a kernel the size of his foreleg on Tara's lap. “Can we see the pictures, please?”

I sighed and took a step over to hand my copy of the device to them.

Bonnie stared at the drawings for a moment, then glanced up at me. She blinked, did it again, then looked at Tara. “Holy shit, T.”

My girlfriend nodded slowly, obviously comparing the age-regressed sketches we'd had done to my own face. “Wow... that's... a lot closer than I thought they'd get.”

I grimaced and nodded, turning back to where Kim and Wade were trying not to argue.

“-and, again, I feel weird agreeing with Ron on this one, but that ship does look like my tech. Which, yeah, you have a point about convergent evolution of design elements, but personal style and design philosophy plays a role in how your plane comes out, too.” Wade sight. “Any aviation expert will be able to tell a WW2 fighter from a Vietnam-era bomber, for example.”

“And you're suddenly an expert on aviation,” Kim stated sourly.

“Nooo,” Wade droned, obviously trying to contain his temper, “but I am an expert on the stuff I build, and that stuff is custom. I'd really, really like to be wrong here, Kim, but even if Ron and I are, I still want to find whoever built this guy's tech because every time I look at the footage we've got, I see something else they cribbed from my designs.”

“Okay!” Kim shouted, throwing the kimmunicator onto the bed in surrender. “I'm not saying I believe this is what's happening, and I won’t until I see a time machine in action – because time travel is a level of weirdness my life is not ready for – but I'm clearly being outvoted on this. If we're going to have this conversation, though... Ron, why are you evil and traveling back in time in the future?”

The words looked like they physically pained Kim to say, but she looked at me expectantly as she crossed her arms and narrowed her gaze.

I took a deep breath. “Okay, so I might not have gone evil.”

“I swear to god, this is better than any soap opera,” Bonnie muttered, shifting in her bean bag chair.

“Shut the fuck up if you want to keep your teeth, Bonnie!” Kim barked out, keeping her eyes on me.

Bonnie blinked and Tara stared, both of them going wide-eyed. The brunette opened her mouth, then closed it, obviously thinking better of herself. Rufus, squeaking in fright, dived for cover behind Tara's pajama pants.

“So...” I began again, slowly, as I internalized how angry Kim was at all this. If she truly didn't believe it, she regarded it as nonsense and a waste of time. Kim hated wasting time, possibly more than anything else. On the other hand, if Kim was just actively choosing to not believe without proof, then time travel was something both outside of her worldview and outside of her control. Which, if there was something that Kim hated more than wasting time, it was not feeling in control of a situation.

I cleared my throat and started again. “So... like all good nerds, I've contemplated what I would do if I had access to time travel and the best answer I've come up with is not to do anything and try to stop anyone else from doing anything, either.”

Kim blinked, taken aback and losing a shade of her anger. “Okay, not what I expected. Why's that?”

“Because time travel is inherently unpredictable and dangerous,” Wade picked up and I shot finger guns at him as he projected his holographic image into Kim's room. “Changing something small, even delaying a person leaving their house by a few seconds, might cause or prevent a car accident which could drastically change multiple peoples' lives and butterfly out the effect from there.”

“And that's bad,” Kim nodded slowly.

“That's bad,” I confirmed, “because you might cause or prevent or change who's born once that chain of dominoes is set in motion.”

“The exception is if we're in a universe – or multiverse – which allows divergent timelines,” Wade chimed in, snapping his fingers and modifying his hologram to produce a single horizontal line before splitting one off diagonally and continuing it further. “This is basically the only way to ethically time travel, because it doesn't actually change the past, it just creates a new timeline and the people living in it don't know the difference.”

“And both of you know this,” Kim looked between the two of us, “and have obviously thought long and hard about it.”

Kim paused, narrowing her gaze at us.

“For some reason.” Her look was tinged with disappointment. “That I can't comprehend.”

“It's a guy thing,” I stated defiantly. “Also a nerd thing, but more of a guy thing. That and thinking about the Roman Empire at least a little bit, every day.”

“Wait,” Wade blinked, turning to me in surprise, “you do that, too? I thought it was just me.”

“Nope, it's basically every dude in western civilization,” I shook my head.

“Really?” Wade asked skeptically, then cocked his head. “Because I have some thoughts-”

“I changed my mind,” Kim interrupted, stepping between us. “Somehow time travel has become the less disturbing of two topics in that last thirty seconds. Back on topic, please.”

“Later,” I stage-whispered to Wade, who nodded seriously, then turned back to an utterly exasperated Kim. “So, yeah, Wade and I know about the ethics of time travel. Which means that, if Wade is still working with future-me and either providing him with tech or gave him a loadout to take into the past, then that's what we're dealing with.”

“And if it's not...” Kim asked cautiously.

Wade and I both flinched, but he pressed forward. “Then, estimating Ron's future-self's age, if he traveled back in time and effectively reset the timeline, he would have wiped potentially billions of people out of existence when he changed the timeline.”

Kim's jaw dropped, but I picked it up before she could muster a response to that bombshell.

“That's the reason why there are only a few legitimate uses for time travel or excuses to actually take a trip through time,” I explained. “One of those being that everyone who would have been wiped out would die anyway.”

“How would-” Tara asked, sufficiently alarmed to speak up.

“Standard global catastrophe,” Wade stated.

“Artificial intelligence situation,” I nodded.

“Nuclear or biological warfare,” Wade replied.

“Alien invasion,” I riposted.

“Stellar impact event,” Wade smirked, pointing at me.

“Global climatological collap-”

“Why are boys like this?” Bonnie, of all people, groaned, her head flopping back in disgust as she refused to look at us.

“Wade's agreeing with Ron and I'm agreeing with Bonnie,” Kim muttered, rubbing her forehead. “Maybe the world really is ending.”

“So, um... you think Future-Ron is here to save the world?” Tara asked, looking like she was trying not to say someth- “Oh, and my favorite is always the supervolcano.”

As Tara blushed, Kim and Bonnie gave her a look of such utter betrayal, that I had to smother laughter. Wade, from the looks of it, did too.

“Look, I'm not going to tie myself to an idea too hard,” I warned them, “but both times we've had to deal with Archer he's been forcing us to team up with Drakken and Shego, as well as stealing Drakken's inventions for himself. So...”

I looked at Wade, who grimaced and nodded.

“Fill the rest of us in?” Kim asked.

“It means that he wants you, Ron, and Wade to get used to working with your enemies,” Tara stated, throwing popcorn in her mouth as she nodded thoughtfully. “Probably so that you'll be able to work together if something bad happens. Meanwhile, he's either building a stockpile of tech to use here and now, or sending stuff back to his own time so that they can use it there.”

“How do you people know this stuff?” Bonnie demanded, looking between the three of us.

Tara huffed smugly. “You're the one who never wanted to watch sci-fi movies when we got together.”

Kim took one look around, then shook her head and threw her hands up one final time. “That's it, I'm done for tonight. Ron, if your future self shows up, you're responsible for handling him, I'm checking out of this weirdness. Someone put a rom-com on before I scream at a pitch only dogs can hear.”

~~~

Alright! Cracked the code for this chapter and I'm overall happy with it!

Yes, for those of you who guessed Adrien J. Bowman's true backstory and identity, this chapter is dedicated to the fallout of that reveal.

And Kim is just... done with this bullshit.

Bonnie is too, especially after the unexpected betrayal.

Thank you for your patience and support, I hope you enjoy the chapter.

Next up is more Mind Games.