Brief Author's Note: While I work on other stories, I thought I'd share these snippets of half-written works, pieces of planned works, and other scenes that have already been written and such. These mostly stand alone, and don't really spoil anything of the larger (planned) works they are taken from (though one is a fair teaser), although I expect when I eventually write enough to reach these sections, I'll have to modify them to suit where the story is. Hopefully you'll enjoy these as is, and these will tide you over until I update the existing works in progress.

A scene from an eventually forthcoming work tentatively titled "Bad Future" (not that work in progress titles mean much, in my case).

DING-DONG! The ringing of the doorbell echoed through the dusty and partially destroyed lair.

From his position elbow deep inside the bowels of an incomplete and heavily damaged Destructo Bot, Dr. Drakken bellowed, "Shego!"

"What?" she called back, not looking up from her copy of "Modern Villainess" magazine.

"Answer the door!" he bellowed again, squinting even through the highly polarized lenses of his welding goggles as the plasma cutting torch he was using sliced through a broken fragment of armor, clearing the way to the power core he was attempting to salvage from the demolished machine.

"Get it yourself," Shego retorted, scowling down at the smirking image of Arena Lynn that graced the center spread of the magazine.

Looking up from his work, Drakken bellowed, "What do I pay you for if you won't even answer the door?"

"No menial labor. It's one of the clauses in my contract right after 'No cloning,'" Shego lazily called back. She tore the section of the magazine gushing about Adrena Lynn's promising future in evil and incinerated it with a casual eruption of green flame.

DING-DONG! The doorbell echoed through the lair once more.

Dr. Drakken grumbled under his breath as he stalked to the entrance, tossing his goggles carelessly behind him. Peering into a device that closely resembled the periscope assembly of a World War II-era submarine, he checked the identity of his visitor.

"Shego!" he bellowed.

"What?" she called back, not looking up from her now abbreviated magazine.

"The buffoon is here. Come take care of him. And hurry! If he's here, Kim Possible must be as well!"

So great was her surprise, Shego actually set aside her magazine and sauntered over to the front door. "It can't be him; Kimmie ditched him years ago." She peered through the periscope, then raised a quizzical eyebrow as she looked up. "Well, I'll be... it is him." She pressed a button mounted on the wall near the door, and stepped back as the thick door swung open with a groan of long-disused hinges.

"What are you doing?" Drakken demanded furiously, stomping over to his sidekick. "Get him!"

Ron Stoppable stepped into Dr. Drakken's lair and smiled at the green tinged villainess. "Now why would she want to do that? I do have an appointment, after all. Hello, Shego. Nice to see you again."

"Nice suit, Stoppable," she grinned back, eyeing him up and down and nodding in appreciation. "Saville Row?"

"Hong Kong, actually," he replied, smoothing the lay of his silk tie with one hand, his splayed fingers keeping the clawed tips of his gloves from touching the material. "I've heard Scotland Yard wants to talk to me as a 'Person of Interest' in a few matters, so I haven't been back to the United Kingdom since Monty's funeral."

Drakken blinked in confusion, looking at the man he persisted in thinking of as Kim Possible's buffoonish sidekick - though the name continued to elude him. "You're a villain? Since when?"

Ron snorted at that description of himself. "Not exactly." He snapped his fingers and a small white rectangle appeared in one hand as if by magic. "My card."

Shego took the card from Ron's hand and examined it curiously as Drakken peered over her shoulder. "'Zorpox the Realtor' ... Cavern complexes, undersea labs, hollowed-out volcanoes... We build lairs to suit?" Shego read aloud.

"'Ask me about excessive power availability!'" Drakken's eyes widened in undisguised delight.

Grinning somewhat sheepishly, Ron lowered the red-tinted goggles that had been concealed in his disordered hair so that they covered his eyes, then clenched his fists, causing them to erupt with the same blue plasma flame that usually graced Drakken's henchmen's shock sticks. "It's a bit cliché and derivative I admit, but when one deals with a niche clientele, it pays to appeal to the market." He flexed his hands, and the flame flickered and faded. "And what can I say? I know a lot about villainous lairs."

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