SPOILER WARNING: This article contains spoilers for "All-New X-Men" #14, which is on sale now.
After a few lessons and an adventure, the science-minded Hank McCoy realized that magic wasn't really so different from science -- at least, from a certain point of view.
While Doctor Strange may not have been able to help with the time-displaced team's temporal problem, he did soften Beast's anti-magic stance. The Sorcerer Supreme even left the X-Man with a gift, a mask known as the Third Eye of Horus.
The Third Eye of Horus came into play during the next arc, as it was partly to blame for Beast and his teammate Evan from getting kicked all the way back in time to Ancient Egypt. After a whole storyarc set in the distant past, Beast finally reclaimed the Third Eye of Horus and used its magical powers to return the pair of X-Men back to their home time.
That brings us to the present and the most recent issue, which sees Beast locked away in his lab working on...something. Unlike previous times he's gotten fixated on a project, Beast won't let anyone know what he's doing. With the rest of the team out, only Cyclops is around to see the curious thing poking out of Hank's pocket.
Unsure of what he saw and frustrated at Hank's secrecy, Cyclops (still recovering from wounds sustained back in the book's opening arc) tries to find a way to peek into Hank's lab. His attempts only succeed at annoying the secretive Beast, but things go from inconvenient to dangerous when a big monster appears seemingly out of nowhere.
While the monster isn't identified, it sure bears more than a passing resemblance to the types of magical beasts Doctor Strange fights on the reg -- specifically a beast like Shuma-Gorath. Cyclops defeats the monster, but his happy ending doesn't last long.
So what's going on here? Did these monsters emerge because of something secret -- and possibly magical -- Beast is up to? Could this tie in with the fact that we know the Goblyn Queen Madelyne Pryor is on the way? Has Beast been tinkering with magic the way he tinkers with gadgets? There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, but it looks like the teenage Beast could be going down a very different road from his adult counterpart.
"All-New X-Men" #15 arrives in stores on November 9.