A/N
DISCLAIMER: I do not own Inspector Gadget (2015), or any other version of Inspector Gadget. All rights go to their respective owners.
TIMELINE: A year and a half after A Penny Too Many. By no means are you required to read that, or What Couldn't Be first, but I recommend it. Also, I've written a new fanfic that takes place before all of them, Connection Severed. Again, reading that is optional, but recommended.
I lock the door to my apartment, shutting the blinds to all the windows. I live on the second floor, and it's late at night, so I figure it'd be pretty hard for anyone to peer in and watch me, yet I feel like I can never be too careful these days. Especially with the huge mess between good and evil that's going to go down in as soon as a few months. Making my way through the darkness to the bedroom in the back, I lock the door back there, and shut the blinds too, just in case.
I pull my cellphone out of my pocket. The name "Cody Crow" is the first on my contacts list. Drumming my fingers impatiently on my leg, I wait for him to pick up.
"Yello?" a deep, distorted voice answers.
"Cody, hey. It's Talon. I'm in."
"Excellent! Glad to hear that, buddy."
"So, what do I do now?"
"Well, first thing's first. You might be an 'official' good guy, but it takes a lot to gain the trust of the heroic branches. Remember, you've already betrayed their trust once at a different location. They've probably got that on record somewhere. You've got to 'prove' to them that you've changed since then, and you're one of them. Pull off some daring heroics every now and then, but garner too much attention, and people might catch a whiff of what's really going on if you're not careful."
"Right."
BEEP.
"Eh, gotta go: someone else is on another line. So, quick recap: play along, be a hero, but try not to draw too much attention to yourself. I'll call you in a couple of weeks to check on your progress, and depending how good of terms you are with them, we'll go from there. Sound good?"
"Sounds great. Thanks, Cody."
"All right, talk to you later, kiddo."
"Bye."
I just graduated from a brief training program in HQ. It didn't take all that long, since I'm already pretty physically and mentally adept from working for M.A.D., and occasionally fine-tuning my skills in their Villain Reformation Program. As far as HQ's concerned, I've turned over a new leaf, and am one of the good guys now.
What they don't know is that I'm a double agent: also belonging to an agency known as CROW. I'm not sure what it stands for, but if I just had to guess, it's more likely Cody, the agency's founder, just named it after himself, without a particular acronym in mind. The guy's only a few years older than me, but in eighteen months he's already got hundreds of double agents working for him on both sides of the good/evil alignment.
A little over a year and a half ago, I had gotten so fed up with working for M.A.D., I knew something needed to change, so I decided to get a new job. No one wanted to take me because of my track record, but one night, I got an email from a guy named Cody Crow. He said he'd been watching me for a long time (which, admittedly, I found pretty creepy), and really admired my skills. He was willing to hire me in Riverton, and make living arrangements for me under one condition: I had to prove myself capable of tearing something apart from the inside-out.
Professor Von Slickstein in HQ's Metro City's branch had made a cloning machine that could easily be corrupted by a glitch virus, so I snuck in to place one on it. All it took was a day or two, and clones of filled up the entire city to the point where they had to evacuate. Impressed, he hired me right after.
I would have begun the work he had cut out for me sooner, but HQ busted us to the police, and we were all placed in the nearest VRP building where I was kept until about a week ago. Keeping in touch via phone calls, he said I had run into an opportunity to get into heroes heads, and figure out just how they work. And the exact opposite is the reason HQ wanted me: I used to be a villain, so I would know all their moves.
Which side is CROW for? Well, neither, really. If anything, we're actively against both. Our main goal is to take down both the good, and bad; to tear apart all of their organizations until only CROW remains. Without good or bad, no one has to pick sides. If CROW is the only one you can pick, police brutality and crime levels will decrease by a long shot once we're the only ones in control.
Yeah, seems like a bit of a stretch, and there's probably some details that make this more complicated than it sounds, but if we reach what we've been working for, it will keep more people from having what happened between me and Penny happen to them.
Penny was my arch-nemesis. And, as much as it may sound like an oxymoron, she was basically my only friend. We liked each other as more than friends for years, but our loyalty to our respective agencies kept us apart. We tried being just friends for a while, but given our chemistry together, you can only imagine how well that went. She wanted to take things back to a professional level. Admittedly, I could've handled it better, but ultimately it was the straw that broke my back. I know I've really played up my jackass traits in our last few weeks together, and even exaggerated the depression I felt over it, but it wasn't without a good reason: getting over her was already difficult, and I'm not sure if I'll ever truly be over her, but I figured if I were a total butt to her, it would be much easier for her to let go of me than it was for me to let go of her.
Come to think of it, Riverton is only about fifteen minutes from Metro City. Does Penny even know I live here? Probably not, but maybe that's for the better. How would she react once she found out what was going on? Would she forgive me if it were for a good (or, I should say, "neutral") cause? Would she despise me for it? Either way, I'd probably have to do a lot of explaining when this was all over.
