Time Cornucopia
By Eoraptor
Rated T for situations and language. Shego, Kim Possible, and related characters property of The Walt Disney Company and Disney Animation. I own nothing save fr the concept of the story, and publish this as a fair use item.
Shego smashed her way into the laboratory, slamming the door shut behind her. She whirled, intending to weld it firmly closed, and ignited her finger.
Then she howled in pain as her finger pulsated and felt like it was going to explode. Shaking her hand viciously, she eyed the door. Nothing looked particularly impressive about it, just a foam cored steel passage door with a bar stop. She was about to fire her finger again when she stopped. When had repeating the same step ever worked for any mad scientist she'd known?
Instead she pushed on the door. And incredibly, it pushed back. Literally an instant after she set her weight to it, it sprung against her. Shego eyed the gas operated return at the top of the door. It too looked normal. So she turned, tugged a lock pick from her ankle pouch, and flung it at the door.
Not only did it bounce back, but it actually returned to her hand on exactly the same arc. Shego was no physicist, but she knew basic science well enough to know that things thrown tended to follow a curve, no matter how hard one threw them; that pick should have bounced of the door and fallen downwards, not upwards. Obviously anything not in direct contact with her was rewinding instantly, including her own energy.
"Great, time in here is well and truly fucked. Probably woulda blown my finger off if I tried to weld that door." She fling an impolite finger skywards and scowled at the ceiling, "Never gotta make it easy, do ya?!"
Figuring she had, relatively speaking, only minutes before either the supreme bitch or Kelly the wonder lug caught up to her and sought to impart their own versions of reality, Shego turned towards the warehouse floor.
Her course was pretty obvious; there was a laptop, sitting on a skinny laptop stand, sitting in the middle of the floor. From it led two cables. One to a typical power brick under the stand, and the other leading to the obvious culprit. That culprit was a monolithic mass of what looked like grade school electro magnets. Big black masses of metal with bare copper wires around them.
Shego might not be a scientific mastermind of the highest caliber, but she wasn't stupid enough to think that all it took to bend space and time was her fifth grade science fair project on steroids. Obviously there was more to it than iron, copper, and 1.2v.
With some trepidation, she stepped up to the laptop. She'd prefer just blast the thing to hell and go home, but two thoughts stopped her; one, blowing the mass of metal and cables to hell didn't guarantee fixing time, and in fact might just blow it completely to fuck-all, and two, the way time was rewinding inside this room, she'd pretty much have to vaginally insert the thing to blow it up without blowing her own arms off in the process.
"And I can't stretch quite that much, keagles notwithstanding," she muttered morosely as she looked at the laptop.
The screen had a strange flat quality to it. It took her a moment to realize that that was because time was pretty much dead this close to whatever this was. So not even the electrons flowing inside the screen were working properly.
Until she rested her hands on the keys. Slowly it came to life, the colors brightening, the frozen cursor blinking, the lights along the edges indicating whatever those lights meant.
Almost immediately a great red warning appeared on the screen. [Quantum Implosion Detected. Particle Colocation Equilibrium Lost.]
Shego understood… surprisingly… more of those words than she thought she would. Drakken had talked about particle colocation when he was futzing around with that teletransporter he stole from Dementor. So that obviously had to do with turning particles to energy or something.
"Great, I know just enough to be dangerous…" She mused as she looked. She lifted a hand from the keyboard to move the attached mouse, and the screen started to do that odd flattening thing again, the color and reflectivity draining from it.
"Shit… no mouse… I HATE touch pads." Sighing bitterly, she kept both her hands as close to the keys as she could. Since touch pads tended to work on thermal signatures, she had learned years ago to loath them because they hated her flaming fingers.
Finally it worked, though it was sluggish. She wasn't sure if it was the time distortion, her disuse of touch pads that didn't like her any more than she liked them, or just the age of the laptop and the advanced work it was being forced to do.
When she moused up to the big read warning, something popped up. [engage stasis locking bubble?]
"Sure, why the fuck not?" a flick of her finger executed the command and she heard an odd noise. She pinpointed it to the thing the laptop was hooked to, but was hard pressed to describe the sound.
An odd sort of whirring buzz was as close as she could come, again, uncertain if the time effects had any bearing on the sound. Still, within a moment of the sound starting, all the colors and sounds around her suddenly stopped entirely. Life literally went black and white, and a fuzzy black and white at that.
The only things that remained real and vivid were herself, the laptop and its stand, and a small circle of floor around her. The floor was a sort of blue-gray anyway, so it was hard to tell the limit of the circle. It clearly didn't extend all the way to the machine.
Sighing, Shego looked up and around in frustration. Then she noticed that above and beyond her, the window was cocked near the ceiling of the warehouse. And who was half way through it but Kelly Gomez, Olympic pain in the ass. Except that she wasn't moving.
It took Shego a minute… "Doy… Stasis bubble. Phew… well that helps."
She looked around, but could see no evidence of her other counterpart. Wherever the supreme skank was, she was not visibly in evidence and probably was frozen too. Or at least was locked outside whatever the range of this bubble was.
Shego sighed again, and returned her attention to the laptop. Only to see a fundamental flaw in whatever this particular safety system was. Electricity was no longer flowing into the laptop from the wall outlet and power brick. And the battery symbol on the screen was ticking down. Visibly ticking down.
"Oh you have got to be fucking kidding me!" She groaned and clapped her hand to her face.
Doing so weakened whatever influence she had over time in the immediate area and the laptop's bright yellow lights began to fade to gray. The villainess quickly returned her hand to the keyboard alongside its mate and growled, "Like I said, never easy… It's a wonder Princess hasn't blown her fucking brains out trying to keep the world spinning before now."
She began to move around the screen as best she could, and tried to understand things. It was like trying to teach introduction to calc to a third grader, and a not-freakishly-smart one at that. She could catch some words here and there, though, so she pressed ahead. "ooooh ohkay, video log. Let's look at that."
The file was dated from three days ago, relatively speaking. It was a security camera trained on this spot. She turned her head and identified it as one of three arrayed on the ceiling, before refocusing on the screen. A mad scientist was in the view.
"Doctor Tennant; video log number…. Oh blast what number is this again? Forty two?"
British… well, beat the hell out of trying to decipher a German accent, or worse… Jersey.
On the screen, Doctor whoever was continuing his narration. Shego tried to pay attention, but the rapidly dwindling power bar kept screaming at the edge of her subconscious, "I have finally isolated the temporo-bosson particle inside the electro-ferrite matrix,"
"Electro-Ferrite matrix? Seriously? Iron block was not refined enough for you?" Shego muttered as she watched, hopping for a clue.
"And if my calculations are correct, once I energize the matrix, it will create a localized temporal disassociation. A bubble of timey… whimey… well, a bubble in time. Here goes." On the screen the doctor mashed the enter button.
"God, even Drakken takes more precaution than that," Shego mused irritably as the guy just flipped the switch with no thought to what was going to happen, not even a pair of goggles.
"Goodness, that's all a bit wibbley wobbly, isn't it?" doctor whoever he was muttered on the screen. Seriously, was a name tag so much to ask? "It shouldn't be wibbley wobbly like that… I wonder if the temporal stasis lock should be turned o-,"
And he vanished. As did all the furniture which Shego now realized was present in the video, but not in the warehouse she had entered. A moment later, the visible effect of wibbley wobbliness engulfed the camera filming all of this and the video ended.
"Okay, so, if this is what started it all… then the wibbl… the fucking time bubble," Shego cast off the goofy doctor's affectations and reasserted herself in her own inimitable fashion, "kept expanding outwards and altering things, creating time mashups, right up till now. So… how in good glorious hell do I stop it? Can it be stopped?"
Shego looked at two more videos of this Doctor Tennant. One was him assembling the machine; the outside really was just iron blocks wrapped in copper wire, but apparently they were aligned with precision she couldn't even pronounce, let along comprehend. The other video, though, was what she needed.
Which was good because the battery indicator was now into the red and still ticking down pixel by pixel in the corner of the screen.
"What you can see here is the temporal application realignment drive, iOS."
"TARDIS? Really? Jesus Christ it's a wonder the nerds haven't blown us all to hell five times over by now."
Then she realized that was exactly what she was here trying to prevent and sighed, watching the video and wondering if it, or the battery protecting her and the laptop, would finish first.
The mad doctor on the screen showed how the program interpreted what it was receiving from the iron blocks into data about space time. Tennant showed how knots in it formed fixed points where new time streams branched off.
She was shocked to see one was bright green, and thrice damned when he spoke her name aloud from the screen, "This on belongs to Shego of Team Go. Lots of media coverage over several years, easy enough to track. Not sure where each of these branches lead to, but tugging on the fixed points around them with the EFM would surely cause some very noticeable shifts in reality."
"fucker… MOTHER FUCKER! You did this to me?!" The villainess yanked away her hands in impulse, an impulse to incinerate the laptop and everything associated with it.
Only the laptop slowing and fading to black and white stilled her fury. She quickly put her hands back to it before it completely faded and the video resumed, "Normally I would pick just such a target to work with, but such large-scale changes might have a catastrophic effect. One of the branches off of her curls to a dead end. I'm not entirely sure, but either that means she died, penniless, alone, broke, and forgotten by every single being in the face of the cosmos. Ooooor more likely the universe was destroyed. So I'll file this away under file TARDIS 0005 for later research when I can fine tune it, see if I can't figure out which it is."
Shego scowled. Then she looked at the list of files in the window behind the video. TARDIS 0000 through TARDIS 0008. Suddenly she realized something.
"These nerds… half of them can't tie their fucking shoes without a labeling system. Is it possible the moron just opened the wrong god damned file?"
Shego looked. And indeed, the window she had minimized was TARDIS0005. "Fucker… so that's why I'm immune? Not because of the meteor, or my powers, or my super science exposure but just because you clicked the wrong fucking nerd-porn?!"
She looked back at the 0005 file and suddenly, it sorta made sense to her. If this bundle of lines was her life, assuming the pointy end where they came together was where she was born, or conceived, or some shit, then she could sort of pick out all the big points. The knots. There was where she was in the hospital when she was three for rubella.
Some lines died off right there. And then there, another cluster, her tenth birthday. Most people probably just remembered it as a standard issue clowns-and-cake affair, but she remembered it because she remembered feeling like she was a step ahead of everyone when she silently predicted her mother was not strong enough to hold on to the sheet cake that was four feet wide; only to later realize that, yes, most people were idiots and she really was a step ahead of most of them. Three years later, a similar sized knot where she realized that… what is so special about boys? Suzy Jenkins is cooler than any of them.
The beginning of her realizations of her sexuality, and how it too was different and perhaps a step ahead. She was disturbed that a few lines died off there too. Her child development degree told her what that probably meant, and it made her stomach clench. Right next to that knot, however, was the mother of all knots.
It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what else happened when she was thirteen that might be considered cosmically important; though it did take a rocket scientist to tell them all what had happened at the time. Unsurprisingly, dozens of lines faded out here. And one dead-ended completely, rather than fading to death, just as doctor whatshisface said.
Shaking her head, Shego tried to use these few knots as a scale. If the pointy end was her birth, and the double knot was summer of 1993…
A beeping interrupted her. "Seven percent battery remaining, save your work and recharge now."
"…shit…" it was all she could conjure. A dying battery and this time machine thing would shut down, or implode, or something.
Shego's eyes quickly shot along the tangled line of chords. She realized that a block further along, was every bit as big as the one symbolizing her meteor encounter. And from that one, dozens of lines just dead-ended. "Fuck me… so I save the world… or destroy it, huh?"
Then she realized that it was even bigger than a similar knot right next door to it with a lot of its own fadey death lines, but no dead-enders. So whatever she was doing now, she was gonna repeat in a few… months. If her scale was anywhere near right on this screen.
And the battery beeped again.
Shego sighed. Whatever she was going to do, she had about a minute to do it or the god of lithium-ion batteries was going to decide for her.
Shego decided that if all of this was based around a map of her life, then going back in time to the point it started should undo it. And lock in events at that point, right?
She sure as fuck hoped this thing could rewind time; because it was the only idea she had, or hoped would come to her in the next fifty seconds.
She looked along the lines quickly again. They looked a bit like a rope which had begun to come unfastened and unwound, with knots and kinks in between. She looked at the knot from 1993. After a moment's thought, she was able to pick out one strand that came loose from that knot, looped way out, bypassing the huge meteor-knot, and then came back in to the big knot at the end. "So… that must be the gymnast."
She scanned back and forth frantically along the lines, looking for any more of those loop-outs. Finally she found one. Strangely enough, it was not in the middle of any knot. It just suddenly, and at a right angle no less, shot out of the bundle. Then it looped and swirled and twisted, looking a bit like a circus crazy straw, before suddenly shooting right here to the end knot. "Well, I'm gonna have to make an ass outta u and me and assume that one is The Supreme Cunt."
Unfortunately, if she was reading any of this anywhere near right, a colossal gamble if ever there was one, both branched off her line way the fuck back when. It was hard to tell with the Supreme One's line, because it actually folded back on the stream in a number of places, including the meteor-knot.
Shaking her head, Shego realized that there was no way to outright prevent Gomez or TSO from coming to be here and now. Shego did not want to rewind time that far.
She did not want to risk becoming some mundane athlete, doomed to a life as a car dealer, or a restaurant owner, or whatever other shitty jobs washed up athletes went on to have after their glory days were over. A fate worse than death, a life of mediocrity.
Nor did she want to go to the point of whatever had created the supreme bitch. That woman was well and truly psychotic. Worse, though, was a thought which had occurred to Shego just a few moments before…
Earth had a number of implacable defenders, chief among them, at least during her lifespan, was Kimmie herself.
And Shego knew her Kimmie. She was the indomitable type. Even if she was well and truly defeated, she would just stand up, dust herself off, and come again. And again. And again.
Until she couldn't come any more. If the supreme skank really did rule her time stream and Earth… it could mean only one thing for how she had dealt with Kimmie.
Shego shuttered. She didn't want that time stream either.
But did she, she suddenly realized as the battery light began to flash, want hers either? She was rich, and reasonably powerful… but she had about two people she could count as friends. And of those, neither was anything more than a friend, though they wished on occasion.
Four percent battery was not enough time for this shit, she lamented as she quickly scanned the tangle of knots, working backwards from what she could only assume was now, and estimating the relative seconds she had left before the battery died and the universe decided for her.
She found it. A small knot, really. Just a bump on one side of the great chord that was her life. If her impromptu scale was anywhere close to accurate, then this was six months ago. A choice had been made for her, not by her, but clearly it was a big enough one to show up on this TARDIS thing. From it, one line looped off, a bit away from the others. It continued onwards, past the huge knot that represented now, to the one after it, where it rejoined the rest.
Shego had no idea if this was going to work. If any of this was remotely close to right even, and if what she thought was going to happen was going to happen; but the battery was at two percent. So she had to choose now, or let the great god of shitty laptops decide for her.
And Shego always chose her own destiny. She pointed the trackpad at that knot, and clicked on that string… then she clicked on the {SELECT} button.
And her world went white.
That morning, Team Go awoke, and instantly knew something was wrong with the cosmos. Once the fog of sleep cleared from their minds, they knew what it was. Their sister was gone. In her place, an alien presence. Shego had saved the universe, they now realized, but in doing so she had also made a choice, perhaps a very selfish one. Because rather than restoring the universe to the way it was for them, she had changed it to suit her.
It would take time to determine if this was for the best.
One thousand miles away, and a few hours later, Miss Kelly Go removed the headband from her hair and smiled at herself in the mirror. She'd had some incredibly vibrant Shego-themed dreams in the night, but then that was most nights for her. Shego was a violent presence, constantly clawing at the edges of her mind, fighting to get back in.
Shaking her head, Kelly pushed the thoughts away. She had a girls' night out to get ready for. Tomorrow was MHS graduation. Her students would be graduating… well save for one who had missed a finals exam.
Her guest, Kimberly, desperately needed a night away. Away from the chaos of her family visiting from all corners of the globe, from the hectic pace of trying to decide what college to attend, away from Drakken's mysterious disappearance from prison four months ago in an apparently alien space ship, and definitely away from her obsessing boyfriend, whom Steve Barkin, formerly Stevie, had sent into overdrive with some remark.
Thankfully, the past few months had been relatively quiet, or Kelly was certain that Kimberly would have snapped. After the unpleasantness in Go City, Drakken had no longer had access to Shego's… to her… abilities. A few weeks later, curious why he had been so quiet, Kimberly's little friend had dug up financial records on him. He was quickly found and arrested at a new plot. He was trying to build some kind of fraudulent college, and was claiming federal education grants to do it.
And just like Al Capone before him, Drakken found out the hard way, you don't defraud the IRS. A few days later, someone or something had broken him out of prison, and he hadn't been heard from since.
Without Drakken around, things seemed to quickly quiet down for Kim, Ron, and Wade, and thankfully, for Miss Go as well. For some reason she could not fathom, no one once associated her with her felonious alter-ego, Shego. And for whatever reason, Kim and her friends saw no reason to correct the record.
Aside from an incident with Kim's cousin Larry and Dementor, only one incident in the past six months had really warranted Kim-level attentions. Two months ago Kim and Ron had been at the hospital for some techno thingy, something about memory recovery. Honestly, Kelly tried to stay away from any such thing anymore. She'd had a belly full of those adventures as Shego. Both on Team Go and in her… less reputable days.
Unfortunately, someone, nobody was saying exactly who, had tripped over a power cord. The memory machine zapped Ron, and he lost his memory. It slowly returned over the course of a few days, but something unforeseen happened. Something got stuck; Ron hit a certain point, and instead of continuing to recover as "Ron" he suddenly began to become "Zorpox." Needless to say a Ron who didn't remember dating his best friend crushed Kimberly, and worse was to come as he actually became outright evil.
It was the only time in the last six months that Kelly had put on her green and black catsuit. And it had been hell on her. Shego screamed and shrieked and clawed around the edges of her mind every minute of it as Miss Go, in her old Team Go mask, helped Kim to catch and restrain the suddenly expert ninja Zorpox, and affix the repaired memory helmet to his head and fix his broken brain. It felt sickeningly similar to that time Doctor Dee had put a chip on her forehead and also locked Shego inside of her own mind with no outlet.
Maybe the only reason that Shego didn't succeed in reasserting herself was that at the penultimate moment, Zorpox fixed Miss Go with a red eyed glare and she felt Shego shriek even louder and run to hide in her mind, remembering how dangerous and unstable he could be. She shuddered to think which would be a worse fate, a world with Shego in control of her powers once again, or a world with Zorpox on the loose and able to fight either Kim or Miss Go to a stand-still.
Kelly Go shook her head hard. All of that was past. Ron was back to his normal very special self. Dementor was in prison and Larry was graduating from his school on Monday as well. Drakken was apparently gone.
A week at Port Mystic Cove Haven had turned out to be telling. Miss Go had been able to learn a lot about her students with them cut off from their cell phones, and hand held games, and laptops, and even Kimberly's Kimmunicator. For one, Kelly Go learned that Kimberly didn't necessarily know her friends as well as she thought. At three AM Monique Benois had come into her cabin and confessed that not only was she not strictly straight, but that she was having seriously tortuous thoughts about her best friend.
Kelly remembered her own teenage years. She remembered these sorts of feelings, and while she couldn't impart all of that to the fashionable girl at 3am in a private cabin for rumors developing, she could still give her some comfort that Kim would love her in some special way no matter what, even if it wasn't the way she wished.
Miss Go sighed and looked at her reflection again in the mirror. Wasn't she about to do the same thing? Worse, wasn't she going to hurt both Monique AND Ron, if inadvertently?
Six months ago, in Go City, she had been swept up. Swept up in the excitement of the battle and the aftermath, her brain miraculously repaired of all its evil impulses by Electronique's error in judgment; She had been about to confess to Kimberly her deepest secret. That she, like Monique, harbored strong feelings for the redhead which went beyond comradery.
Then a snap of electricity had whipped past her eyes, almost searing off her eyebrows it was so close. Ron profusely apologized for accidentally setting off the Reverse Polarizer and almost turning either her or Kimberly evil again, but it broke the spell of endorphins running rampant through her. The moment was lost and she didn't confess her feelings for Kim.
But now, tonight, she intended to change that. Kim graduated tomorrow. Tonight might be Kelly's last chance to get this off her chest before the girl disappeared somewhere to save the world and not come back to Middleton again.
Kelly looked down at her hands on the edge of the vanity. If she did this and Kim…. reciprocated… It would probably mean the end of her being a teacher. School systems tended to frown on teachers dating students, no matter their ages, until at least a few years beyond their graduation. Most states, in fact, had laws against it; at least at the k-12 level.
And then there were Ron and Monique's feelings to consider. Monique had confided to her, and Ron was ACTUALLY dating Kim. Kelly honestly didn't understand how it worked… but she also knew that a strange sort of magic seemed to follow the boy, and she had seen too many strange things in her life to question that. She was going to sew a lot of hurt if this happened at all. It seemed so evil, and so selfish, so much like Shego.
Looking up Kelly jerked back in shock. Her reflection was suddenly not her own. It was Shego… the bad one. This was not the first time Kelly had been confronted by an apparition of her evil self in the mirror, but this time it was different; brighter, more tangible.
Shego wasn't ranting. Wasn't looking disgustedly at her, wasn't pounding and clawing at the glass of the mirror as if to get her hands on her and throttle the life from her the way previous apparitions had…
Shego was smiling. Nicely. An open, honest, happy smile. And then, she waved at Miss Kelly Go.
And she faded away completely, leaving behind only Kelly's normal reflection, her hair down and frazzled from the headband.
The teacher blinked. She stood there in shock at the occurrence for a long moment, staring at herself. And then she realized that something was gone. It was the pressure. For six months she had had one continual tension headache. A low-level ache and buzz at the base of her skull. It always became worse when something would rattle Shego's cage within her, but it was always there, even in the quietest moments, an ember burning in the back of her brain.
And it was just… gone.
Miss Go shook her head, testing the absence of the pain. And she looked up and smiled at herself. Suddenly, she felt happy. Confident, finally at one with the world which she had lived in for 6 months now. She shook her hair free, and ran her nails through it, going to her closet. She pushed aside the white blouses and pulled out the lone dress, the simple, little green dress. She had a girls' night out… no, a date… she had a date to get dressed for. And she felt better than she had in a long time.
AN: So I dug this out of my old files today and cleaned it up. It was a random ficlet, a cookie crumb, written back in September of 2013. Reviews = Love and Resharing is Caring.