It was a glorious day in the kingdom.

The dreaded chaos dragon that had plagued the kingdom was no more. A brave warrior had come forth and he, along with his true companions, had slaughtered it. No longer would it steal any children, demand a tithe, or require constant grooming from the lowly peasants.

Now the warrior and his troupe were celebrating in the castle with the king, his wards, and his children. A grand banquet set up for the grand guests. Before the food was the dancing, as many of the guests were still filtering in. The princess had been looking for a suitable dance partner, but was stopped in her tracks by the head of the group of heroes, the strong, brave frontline soldier.

The warrior raised his muscled bicep and flexed, trying to woo the maiden with his machismo. The princess, however, eyed someone else that caught her attention more. Across the room, just entering, was a specimen that most would pass up. The warrior's friend, some may even venture to call him a sidekick, was scanning the room with curiosity. He was raven-hai

No, wait. That's too flowery. And raven-haired? She wasn't trying to write any of that Sunset day vampire drivel. There was something off with it still besides that… Wait. Muscled bicep? That didn't make sense! Curse flowers for invading her story! She swiftly replaced 'muscled bicep' with 'arm' with a few swishes of her pencil.

The man's black hair glistened in the

Glistened? Ugh. Bonnie's bragging about her glistening Adonis was getting to her. She didn't want to think about the nice yet dull boy that her BFF had managed to hook up with. He was… Well, plain. Just like all of the other 'hotties' that the blonde had come across when she was on her summer vacations. All of them looked - and acted - alike.

Maybe skipping to the dialogue would be better.

"I see that you have just arrived," the princess noted as he shut the door behind him.

"I can see other reasons for why I was just entering the keep... Mayhaps I was peeing in the bushes?" the squire noted drily. "Goodness knows that this castle requires more care than it seems to have been given."

"Ah yes, I know that

Dialogue was going nowhere.

Ugh.

The blonde chewed on the end of her pencil, staring at the notebook in front of her as she pondered how she could save her fantasy story. She liked the world that she'd developed. The backstory alone would've taken fifty pages to get down, but it was solid and deep. She had no idea where to go with any of it, though.

Maybe she should talk with that one roleplaying group at the comic store about this. They were all into the fantasy stuff a lot more than she was, and she was pretty sure that Larry had mentioned something about writing fanfic-..

"Miss Blie? Tara Blie?"

Her head shot up, pale blue eyes settling on the middle-aged man that had called her name. Smiling at his affirmative nod, Tara got up from her seat. She flipped her notepad over to the 'important notes' side, making sure to adjust her 'fancy' clothes (a nice blouse and a mid-length skirt, both navy blue and the best Coco Banana offered) and readjust the chair she'd been waiting in before she skipped over to him.

The voice had sounded familiar in a vague way, and his clothes struck a chord with her too. She couldn't quite place where she had seen him before. The closer she got, the more familiar he looked. She tilted her head and ducked in to peer at his face more closely. So close, in fact, that he took a step back.

He had short brown hair that was cut into severe angles, making it seem nearly square. The hair on his temples were fading to gray, indicating his age as well as the small lines around his face, the laugh lines being the most prominent. There was something, something she really should know but couldn't grasp...

The man cleared his throat and gave a strange-looking smile. He held out his hand as he said, "I'm Dr James Possible, one of the head resear-"

"Possible!" Tara shouted, slapping herself in the head. Of course! How in the world had she missed that? She didn't need a phone book to know how rare that last name was. "You're Kim's dad!"

"Erm, yes." He pulled his hand back and adjusted his tie nervously as he looked around at the other people in the lobby that were now looking at them, again clearing his throat. Apparently trying to switch gears, he guessed, "You and my Kimmie-cub went to school together?"

"Yup!" she chirped. "She and I were on the cheerleading squad."

"Oh right!" Dr Possible snapped his finger and pointed it at Tara. "You're the one that was at the bottom of the pyramid all the time."

"That was me," Tara affirmed, her smile growing.

"Hm…" He looked down at his paper and back up at her. "Your papers did say that you were 18, but I didn't realize… Well, I thought that it was a typo…"

The blonde blinked several times, a frown tugging at her mouth. "Why did you think that?" she asked with a pout.

"It says that you have a bachelor's degree in biotechnology…" the middle-aged man said as if that answered everything.

"Well, yeah, because I do!" She didn't understand what was wrong with having a degree. Maybe it was because he didn't like that sort of thing? If Tara remembered right, he was into rockets and stuff.

"And you graduated high school with my Kimmie-cub…" Again with the obvious tone.

"Yes?" She waited for him to say something else.

He tilted his head at her. "...how do you have a college degree if you just graduated high school?"

A bright smile crossing her face as she answered with giggles, "I took extra credits through the college credit program!"

"Enough to earn a degree when you graduated high school?" Dr Possible asked in disbelief.

"Well, yeah! I started doing it my freshman year, and just kinda kept going." She shrugged, continuing, "I wanted to get some stuff done, and it wasn't like I couldn't do it." Another laugh bubbled up from her throat. "Even with college and high school classes I maintained a 4.2 GPA!"

"You can't get a GPA that…" he trailed off as he looked at her papers again. "Huh. So you can."

"How do you think the cheerleading squad kept up their average GPA of 3.8?" The blonde asked with a mildly chastising tone. "Bonnie's a good girl 'n' all, but she isn't the studying kind."

"Uh-huh." The doubt in his voice was confusing. What did she say that didn't make sense? Before she could ask, the rocket scientist said with a grin, "Well, however it ended up I'm glad to welcome you to the facility! We're all one big happy family here."

He turned, swiping his badge across the sensor for the door and pulling on the momentarily unlocked door. A sweep of his arm let her know to go first, with him following behind to pull the door shut. After the door was shut, Mr Possible motioned his hand and began walking, clearly indicating that she should follow.

Tara blinked at the bright lights that had given her mild gray spots in her vision. With how bright it was she almost expected it to be a surgery room or something! Shaking her head, she began looking up and down the corridor they had just entered, even turning around and walking backwards to take it all in.

Unlike the lobby, a modern but sterile-looking open space with some chairs and a stern receptionist, this hall had some semblance of personality. Silly-looking paintings were hanging on the wall, and every dozen feet there was a bulletin board with a variety of things on it, such as the weekly Rocket Booster meetings itinerary and various astronomy events that were coming up.

Maybe she could start helping out with some of it! Oh, it would be spiffy if they had a Booster shirt in her size!

Dr Possible's voice cut into her thoughts. "I suppose I should start telling you about the position and what's expected of you, but… Well…" He heaved a sigh. "To be honest, we've had three other hires before you that we thought would be perfect… The, ah, scientist that you'll be under, though… He rejected them for being 'unfit'."

"Unfit? Like, they needed to exercise more?"

He laughed at that. "Oh no, nothing like that. It was more expectation-related." Another set of doors, this time they had to wait for the ones behind them to shut before the ones ahead could open. "Drew gave them a test. They failed." The next part was muttered, yet Tara heard it all the same. "Not that most people could pass..."

"Is it ethics?" She hoped not. She managed to skip the ethics class by doubling up on some English courses. No chance she'd pass an ethics-based test!

"HA! Haha, an ethics test, from Drew?" Kim's dad shook his head. "I don't think he would pass one."

"That's not a very nice thing to say," Tara admonished. "He's your friend, isn't he Dr Poss-.."

"Please, call me James," he interrupted.

"Erm, James, isn't he your friend? Everyone here's supposed to be family!"

"Every family has its black sheep," he noted, "and Drew… I suppose..." A light seemed to come on in his eyes. "Have you ever heard of Dr Drakken?"

"Well duh!" Tara watched the news. From what she got, his plants were awesome while he was… Less so. Brooding insane mad scientist that was a laughingstock even among villains. It was almost sad, the backhanded compliments that were given to him. At least he got that nifty medal at the UN ceremony.

"Good!" James nodded. "Dr Drakken was his villain name… But here, and in public now, he goes by Dr Drew Lipsky."

"Doctor?" Tara's eyebrows furrowed. "The news said that he didn't even have a bachelor's degree! How can he be a doctor?"

"Sometimes you don't need to go to school to earn a doctorate," the middle-aged man said vaguely, rushing his next words, "Anyway, Drew has been looking for an assistant and his requirements are strangely stringent. I'm not even sure his last assistant, Shego, could do it."

Before she could ask more about her, he continued, "She worked here with him for a short while, after they got their pardons. Mostly all she did was grumble at him and steal all of the cookies from the employee lounge. Some days she didn't even bother showing up. The more time passed, the less she was here, until she just stopped showing up a few weeks ago. Vanished from the general public radar. Drew managed to track her down a few days after she left using our computer network…" Dr Possible cringed. "That poor lab table. Drew walloped it pretty good after their screaming match.

"He's been working by himself since then. Normally it wouldn't be much of a problem… Drew's a special case. He's been getting more and more erratic as the weeks have passed. Certain… Individuals… The ones that set him up with a job here… Are concerned that he may relapse into villainy because of it. He can't seem to function without a partner to at least talk with." James sighed as they stopped in front of a set of heavy-duty doors. "But as hard as we've tried, he just won't put up with anyone unless they wow him by passing his test. The previous candidates, we've assigned them to other tasks in the facility. There's a place for you too, when he 'fails' you."

"Don't worry!" The blonde gave him a confident smile. "I'm sure I can handle whatever he gives me."

"Just don't feel like you're stuck with trying to finish his silly test," James said, turning the handle for the door. "When he tells you to go, wait outside the lab. One of us'll be by in about an hour or so to take you to your new job."

Tara puffed her cheeks in frustration. He was already assuming she would fail? Her brain itched at the implied challenge, a protest on the tip of her tongue.

Yet again, just as she was about to speak up, James opened the door to the lab. Was he psychic or something? How did he keep cutting her off like that?

He entered the room with mild trepidation, looking around with concern as he hovered near the doorway. "Drew?"

Tara, feeling a kind of petulant determination, went into the room in front of him.

She gasped and gawked, her eyes soaking in everything around her.

The workroom was enormous! High ceilings, the kind not really suited for a laboratory, loomed at least 30 feet overhead. The rest of the lab was similarly big, with the wall opposite the door mostly invisible, partly due to clutter.

Scattered around the room and floor were a variety of half-finished projects. Robots slumped over, shells empty of hardware; glass tubes half-full of sludge-looking liquid; a small garden with a plentitude of flowering plants hung on a half-dozen tiers against one of the walls; a piece of some kind of metal art piece sat haphazardly in the corner; and in the middle of the room was a Lorwardian walker, a side busted open and laying on the floor.

It was clearly the room of a career tinkerer. One with trouble concentrating on a single project. The room itself was pretty impressive. It left Tara with one nagging question.

"Why does the space center even have a room like this?" Her words echoed lightly, her normal volume breaking the audio emptiness of the room.

"Well…" James scratched his head as he whispered, smiling as he did so, "This used to be the launch area of the facility, for a certain type of rocket. It's where the Kepler II was kept, and where it launched from. But… Well…" he looked away guiltily "We didn't actually have clearance to have this room, what with the problem we had a few years ago when I accidentally launched a rocket that caused the military to scramble jets to chase it down…"

"So you had to dismantle everything and were left with a big useless space," Tara finished. "Yeah, I guess I can see why you'd give Dr Lipsky this room."

"Good thing we did, too," he said quietly. "Goodness knows the rest of the center couldn't handle this many projects at once!"

"...why are you whispering?" the blonde asked, ducking in conspiratorially. "Are there security systems that react to noise? Does he have attack mutant weiner dogs? Oh!" She shot up, quiet forgotten as she said excitedly, "Or maybe he has monkey ninjas! Kim said stuff about seeing those on her missions!"

"Oh no, nothing like that!" The middle-aged man began to carefully make his way deeper into the lab, Tara tagging along like a duckling following its mother. "It's more Drew's been jumpy lately. Why, just last week he almost vaporized Dr Wong for barging in and demanding to know why he needed so much electricity!" Another chuckle popped out of his mouth.

That didn't seem all that funny to Tara. Maybe it was an inside joke?

Apparently bolstered by the joke, James said more loudly, "Drew?" as they began to strafe the Lorwardian walker.

Once they partially rounded the large machine, Tara heard a mild tinkling sound, like metal hitting metal. She was pretty sure that it was coming from the direction of the walker. The doctor she was tagging behind apparently also heard it as he zeroed in on the quadropod.

It was obvious where Dr Lipsky was now. Being closer, they could see a man hanging upside-down from the split-open walker, his legs tangled in some wires to keep him aloft.

"...and connecting the thrust chamber with the energy source? What were they thinking? It'd be much more efficient…" Mumble mumble mumble, something Tara couldn't make out.

"Drew?" Dr Possible tapped the blue man's shoulder once they were close enough.

"ACK!" The surprise attack made Dr Lipsky lose his grip with his legs, sending him splatting to the floor.

"I, uh, brought your new assistant…" Kim's dad seemed a bit lost for words.

"Hrmph." The kinda-maybe doctor pulled himself up from the floor with as much dignity as he could muster. "I'll be the judge on if she'll be my assistant, thank you very much! Now then…"

Tara stared, wide-eyed as he walked over to her. More like lumbered with how big he was. Dr Lipsky? Maybe once upon a time… But no. This man...

Doctor Drakken

She could tell he used to be a villain. Heck, she'd think he'd always and forever be a villain. Deathly blue and gnarled skin, vicious underbite and stooping forehead, and the ragged jaggedy scar made for a much scarier image than the tv or Kim ever made. Even his big blue lab coat and teeny hands were scary!

"I, ah…" Tara felt trapped, the much-bigger-than-expected grumpy blue man towering over her like that. There was only one reaction, one solution she could come up with. Shaking now, she managed to squeak out, "OhlookIhavetogogoodbyeEEP!" before running for the door, dropping her notebook as she did.

The two men stood as she fled, one with mouth agape and the other with a tilted head. After the door shut with a heavy THUNK, Drew began to laugh.

"Ohhhh, I like her." Dr Lipsky turned towards his former best friend and excitedly asked, "When does she start?"

A/N: Felix had a GPA of 4.4. Tara was so salty about him being class valedictorian.