Able to control time and space, Eva Bell gets roped into Cyclops’s mutant revolution, the opposite of what she intended to do with her powers, which was to be Australia’s Captain America. She learns to control her powers at the New Xavier School where she makes fast friends with other new mutants, and takes the codename Tempus. Though she loses hold over her time-manipulation abilities and travels through time only to return seven years older, having lived another life.
Caught in a Time Warp
Australian-born Eva Bell grows up idolizing Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, and desires to become the equivalent if she ever obtains powers.
When she’s older and she sees her crush, David, get punched, she freezes herself and an entire block in time for over 20 hours inside a temporal sphere. This event gives Scott Summers, AKA Cyclops, and his small team of mutant revolutionaries time to respond and invite her to join his cause and make the world a better place for mutants. She accepts and when the sphere falls, the X-Men thwart an Australian task force from taking her into custody.
Brought to Cyclops’s headquarters, what was once the Weapon X Project in Canada, she meets Christopher Muse, a fellow mutant, and they become friends. She uses her powers to protect the team from Sentinels, the Avengers, despite her idol Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America, being present, and gets sucked into limbo, AKA Otherplace, when Dormammu attacks. Not long afterward, she takes the codename Tempus.
Chronokinesis
Eva Bell can freeze the world around or in front of her, capturing anyone or anything in a time vortex bubble. She is a fast learner, and learns to control her abilities over space and time over the course of four days. Eva can slow time down so much so that it would take someone within the bubble one hundred years to take a single step, and it seems that most outside forces cannot penetrate her temporal spheres. When she makes physical contact with someone or something, she can slow down how they experience time as well.
She can also travel in time. When she finds herself in mortal danger, these time-manipulation powers activate and sometimes have the unintended side effect of sending her to a new time and place.
Timely X-Allies
When Eva’s powers manifest, Cyclops’s X-Men recruit her and train her in how to use her powers. The team, led by Cyclops, includes the sorceress Illyana Rasputin, AKA Magik, the former master of magnetism, Erik Lehnsherr, AKA Magneto, and the diamond-skinned Emma Frost. Eva takes the codename Tempus and learns alongside other recruits Christopher Muse, AKA Triage, Fabio Medina, AKA Goldballs, and Benjamin Deeds, AKA Morph, at Cyclops’s New Charles Xavier School. She eventually works with David Bond, AKA Hijack, and the telepathic hive mind the Three-In-One, or the Stepford Cuckoos: Celeste, Phoebe, and Mindee Cuckoo.
When she gets lost in time and ends up stuck in 2099, she meets the X-Men of that future and learns under Sorceress Supreme Doctor Illyana Rasputin for seven years. While there, she gets married and has a child. After a brutal attack by an unknown creature, she uncontrollably goes back through time, eventually ending up back in her original timeline and to her X-Men. Despite losing her family in the future, her immediate family consists of her mother. Mrs. Bell, and her brother, Steven.
Tempus later lives with all the mutants on the nation-state Krakoa. She joins The Five, a group of mutants with the combined power to resurrect fallen mutants. The resurrection process started with Goldballs eggs and a warp of reality from Kevin MacTaggert, AKA Proteus. Injected into the eggs are the preserved DNA of mutants and life-giver Joshua Foley, AKA Elixir, then kickstarts cellular replication. Tempus comes in to speed up the incubation process. Hope Summers enables the group’s powers to work in synergy, and the process turns the eggs into pods that produce cloned bodies. Charles Xavier, AKA Professor X now going by X, having used Cerebro to copy and record the minds and essence of mutants, then puts the fallen mutants into the new bodies. The mutants on Krakoa revere The Five.
No Time for Enemies
Tempus goes up against Dormammu and his demon horde, the robotic Sentinels, and even the Avengers outside her home in Australia when they threaten the team of Cyclops’s X-Men that took her under their wing.
A Record in Time
While Tempus trained in Tabula Rasa, Montana, with her fellow team of young X-Men, she disappeared. Unable to control her powers, she traveled into the 31st century, a bleak future suffering from an alien-invasion, then back in time to Texas in 1875, and forward into 2099 in Nueva York. There, she met the X-Men, a different group than those she came to know in her time. In 2099, she met her former teacher Illyana Rasputin, AKA Magik, now the Sorcerer Supreme of the entire galaxy. Though with Illyana’s powers removed by unsaid means, Eva feared to end up anywhere if she used her time powers to return home, so she stayed in 2099 for seven years. During that time, she not only trained under Illyana’s guidance so that she might one day return to her time, but also married Danny Warburton and had a daughter with him. When Illyana advised her to go back to her time, Eva refused not wanting to leave her family. When a giant demon attacked, it destroyed the Sanctum Sanctorum and mortally wounded Illyana. Before her death, she told Eva to go back and make sure Hank McCoy stood trial for his crimes. Before she could even say goodbye to her family, she lost control of her powers, which thrust her spiraling through time and back to 1,000,000 B.C.
Trapped at the dawn of man, she meets the sorceress Morgan le Fay, who tells her she suffered from a concussion and that she healed her with spells. She explained to Eva that she could never return to the future she never belonged in, and that it didn’t exist, and that their only way out of their current timeline was for Morgana to provide directions and Eva to carry them out. Eva, knowing who Morgana is and the evil she’s capable of, freezes her in a time bubble to focus on getting back to her time. Though Morgana breaks Eva’s bubble and in fighting her back, Eva travels through time again to 2099 but finds it completely changed with the sorcerer supreme Doctor Anthony Stark. He confirmed Morgana’s statements about her future no longer existing. Through tears, she accepted her fate and returned to her original time. She reappeared in Tabula Rasa when she left and to her original X-Men, to them having aged into a young woman. She asked Celeste, one of the Stepford Cuckoos, who could read her mind, not to tell anyone about where and when she had been.
Tempus avoided telling her team the truth, despite Celeste’s pressure and instead helped them save a new mutant in Chicago from a Sentinel attack coordinated by Hank McCoy, AKA Dark Beast. After the powerful mutant, Matthew Malloy, killed Cyclops, Emma Frost, and Magik, she traveled back in time to meet with Charles Xavier to stop the future from happening. Together, they went back further to stop Malloy’s parents from ever meeting. Xavier warned her that there would be a cost to her meddling with time. She confronted Cyclops about it, called his mutant revolution Cyclops’s nervous breakdown and blamed his hubris for the death of himself and the others. She threatened to make sure his parents never meet if he doesn’t keep his head on straight, and left the X-Men.
After Xavier, Magneto, and Moira MacTaggert, AKA Moira X, established the nation-state of Krakoa, a sovereign nation-state for mutants, Tempus joined The Five—a group of mutants that combined their powers to resurrect fallen mutants—who are revered by the citizens of Krakoa.