Let's Go Possible Force!
By
Ken-Zero
Disclaimer: I own nothing of any characters associated with this story, or the general backgrounds, etc. All characters and ideas are properties of their respective owners. This is a work of fun, not profit, and so on.
Boredom was a feeling only one person on the fair-sized spacecraft was accustomed to having.
Ron, used to spending his time hanging out with Kim, playing video games-either alone or, more recently, with Felix Renton, their wheelchair-bound friend-agonizing over homework with Rufus' help, or saving the world, now could only attempt one of those four. He had no console on which to play, no homework over which to stress, and, for the moment, no world to rescue, which left trying to hang out with Kim…and that particular option was curiously difficult these days.
Kim kept herself occupied by making rounds of the ship itself, inspecting as much of it as she could, making mental notes about her guesses and assumptions, all in the name of learning how it worked, Just In Case. She was also trying to avoid Yori like the plague, a feat which was made tougher by the relatively small size of the ship—in comparison, at least, to a planet—and yet easier by Yori being a ninja.
Yori was handling her boredom by seeing how long she could remain unobtrusive, and seeing how long it took before either someone found her, or they forgot she even was on board until she reappeared.
Wade…was not bored. Not really, at least. When he wasn't engaged in some pedantic discussion or another with Drakken, he was up to his armpits in computer systems, trying to see and understand what made the reverse-engineered technology tick.
Drakken, conversely, was splitting his time between the aforementioned discussions with Wade, and frowning at the universe at large. The rest of the crew privately believed that his frown was etched into his facial features, a thought preferable to his maniacal grin being stuck that way instead.
Really, it was only Shego who was bored and didn't care. She'd had years of practice at ignoring Drakken's rants, tuning out the grumbles of the henchmen, and other various daily unpleasantries, all of which meant that she was usually bored. She'd long since developed ways of passing her idle time that kept her from snapping. Filing either her nails or her special gloves, reading the same articles in the same trashy magazines, even sleeping…she'd found a myriad of ways to keep her attention while basically tuning out existence in general.
In fact, the only real disruptions to what had become the routine for the last two and a half weeks were the few times that Drakken had vacated his station in the command area and Kim took his seat. It had happened three times since they first launched, each time with Kim trying to be patient and ask that Shego teach her at least some of the details of commanding the complex craft. Each time Shego had repeatedly asked "Why?" To her, it was just the kind of hilariously immature thing that she was sure would drive Kim batty, and each of those three times it had worked, with her last instance running exactly one repetition of the word before Kim stormed away.
The former-as-far-as-anyone-knew villainess couldn't help but chuckle at the memory. The trip seemed to be turning in to a big waste of time, as far as she was concerned, and getting on Kim's nerves like that was her one guaranteed source of amusement—she couldn't count on the buffoon remaining as such, after seeing him step up during the invasion, and getting on Drakken's nerves was getting old.
And then salvation from her by-now-old-news magazine appeared once again in the form of Kim Possible. The red-haired heroine sat in Drakken's chair, stared out the view screen for a few seconds, and finally ginned up enough determination to risk once more asking The Question .
"So…can you find it somewhere within your agonizingly impossible personality to display the patience to teach me how to fly this?" she asked, somewhat more sharply and bitterly than she'd intended.
Shego simply raised an eyebrow, and opened her mouth.
Kim, seeing the start of that infamous word on her former foe's face, began to roll her own eyes.
"Wow," came the unexpected first word. "Normally you don't get that short with me until three or four minutes in."
Kim finished rolling her eyes, having stopped when Shego did not say "why."
"Call it an anticipatory reaction," she returned. "What reason would I have had to make me think otherwise?"
"I dunno," Shego shrugged. "What's the matter? Bored?"
"Stiff."
"Heh." Dark-colored lips turned up in a half-smirk. "Why do you wanna know, anyway? Don't trust me flying this tin can?"
"Actually I kinda do," she said, and Shego blinked. "I mean, we're not crashed, stranded, asphyxiated, or any of the hundred other problems that can happen out here, for all I know we're not lost, and we didn't blow up on takeoff or anything like that. In view of that, I think it's pretty safe to say this—not that I ever thought I would. But we're all trusting you with our lives, and you're doing a good job."
Shego's slightly almond-shaped eyes had gone progressively wider as Kim's short speech went on, and by the end of it Kim could clearly see the whites all the way around the iris. She frowned, a bit concerned that Shego had found something overly surprising or offensive in what she said. "Shego? What's—"
"PLANET!" the pilot proclaimed, pointing at Kim, whose expression darkened.
"Not funny," she grumped. She still weighed the same as she used to, for crying out loud!
"No! Planet! Behind you!"
Kim heaved a sigh but turned around anyway…and gasped herself.
Thuds on the ship's false-gravity deck plating heralded the arrival of the rest of the small crew as they crammed up in the forward area, each trying to see what Shego had seen.
Sure enough, passing by on the ship's starboard side, a brown-and-blue sphere streaked with white floated silently by, little larger than Kim's fist at this point. The planet slid across the screen as Shego hastily strapped herself in and took the controls, steering until it finally stopped in front of them.
The planet grew steadily as they neared, and soft sounds of appreciation filled the place from almost every person present—except for Drakken, who only stared in speechless wonder, having even ceased the habitual dry-washing of his gloved hands that he used to think enhanced his diabolical image.
And not a one of them could find fault with that; for as many times as they'd seen photos of Earth from orbit, and as little justice as those photos did when they had the chance to see it for themselves, this was an entirely new world, something no human had ever seen before…and for the six of them to be the first to witness a sight enormously more important than even the Moon landing was a prideful, humbling feeling.
Even the ever-cynical Shego could feel her eyes starting to prickle with tears as she tried to keep a handle on the sense of childlike awe that accompanied their approach.
Four hours later, Dr. Drakken actually won the argument.
They were in orbit around their new planet. Nobody had even the slightest clue what to name the thing, but the arguments over that had concluded quickly. The most recent argument had been over what to do next—report back home, or do some exploration themselves. Drakken had argued in favor of staying, insisting in no uncertain terms that any time spent returning home was time lost in this most historic of moments, and that the chance that whatever survey crew came through next would have naming dibs on the planet as a whole, not to mention any surface features, sat poorly with him—and with most everyone else, as well.
Privately, Kim suspected he would have liked nothing more than to name the world after himself, but when she imagined him trying to do so, she almost had a giggle fit. The mental image of the blue scientist displaying his utter lack of imagination and declaring, "I hereby name this new planet…Drakken's…Planet!" was too funny to her, and yet she didn't doubt for a second that that would be the kind of name he would come up with.
Having swayed the rest of the team of explorers, though, he bade Shego dip their craft into the atmosphere. As she did, they watched the external plasma discharge as friction heated the hull to extreme temperatures. The display left a trail of fire behind them as they slowed, and when they reached an airspeed only slightly above that of standard jetliners, the plasma vanished, leaving long contrails in its wake.
The console pinged in front of Drakken. "Would you look at that," he mused. "We can breathe out here."
"Without help?" asked Wade.
"Without help," Drakken confirmed. "The air measurements are showing a remarkably Earth-like atmospheric composition. We may be a percent or three in favor of oxygen over nitrogen, but if anything that should make you feel better than usual."
The next several minutes passed with them flying over water; their speed was such that the lake, or ocean, or whatever it would end up being, was massive, easily the size of any of the major oceans back home.
And then they crossed a beach, and were cruising over land. Trees—or whatever the native analogue was—began a short way in, standing in a closely-packed stand that was a bit small to be a full forest. They skimmed well over the treetops, leaving plenty of altitude in case the land did something tricky. Birds of some sort lifted in startled gaggles from the trees, scared into flight by the sound of the passing craft. Other avians, their silhouettes larger than the first set, made swooping passes at the cloud, and Kim could see a few of the big ones flapping away with something grasped in what were presumably its talons.
The trees began to thin, no longer a solid canopy of green—a green that almost exactly mirrored one of Earth's typical deciduous forests—and rolling plains began, gently sloping hills and shallow valleys rushing by underneath as they sped across miles and miles of what seemed to be virgin land.
Another sound issued from the controls, and Shego had to tear her gaze away from staring at the scenery to diagnose the noise. Everyone else continued to stare.
Shego blinked twice at what the readout was saying before raising her voice. "Uh…people," she started, her voice more than a little excited. "You may want to hear this. According to this bird's computers, this planet's—"
"Farms!" Kim shouted, pointing.
"—inhabited." Shego finished lamely, shooting a dark look at the heroine. "Way to ruin the big reveal, Princess."
"Sorry, but look!"
Shego craned her head to look outside the window. Sure enough, the landscape had leveled out, and now the miles consisted of fields of golden, stalked plants of some kind, interspersed at regular intervals with ruler-straight roads and the occasional disturbance in the fields that probably meant some sort of building or another. Here and there the golden plants ended, the ground instead covered by short green grass with herds of some animal or another grazing contentedly. They couldn't make out any details—they were flying too high and too fast—but groups of domesticated animals like that, along with the regular farmland and constructed buildings, implied rather heavily that something intelligent lived there.
A broad river, a welcome swath of blue amid the relentless browns and greens, wended its way across their flight path, and the farms stopped at the near bank. On the other side the land returned to hills, gradually becoming taller and steeper until they culminated in a mountain range.
Shego lifted the ship's nose a bit, pulling them back above twenty thousand feet of altitude, and they ascended through some light mountain cloud cover; peaks occasionally peeked up from underneath, and from their perspective it was hard to tell that the rock wasn't going to reach up and tickle the craft's underside. A few minutes later, the mountaintops subsided, and Shego dropped them back through the clouds to more gasps from the assembled group.
Ocean, blue and green and huge, lay before them, stretching as far as they could see in every direction that wasn't back whence they'd come.
Drakken worked something on the computer next to his usual chair, then sat back in a different seat. "This…ocean…dwarfs even the Pacific back home," he said, and his usual whiney tone was quiet for a change. "It's…difficult to even conceptualize that much water in one place."
Shego brought them down low enough that even the ungainly spacecraft was wave-skimming, and despite their prodigious speed they could see moving shadows, implications of marine life that mimicked Earth's own fairly closely, if size was any comparison.
Then they were rising again, and the horizon tilted as Shego banked the craft around to head back to the first landmass they'd flown over. She leveled off after a moment, aiming for a different diagonal across the land, following a kind of haphazard grid pattern to get as much detail as they could on each pass.
They saw more farms, though some were more well-tended than others; indeed, some had gone fallow, browned and withered under the sunlight. Aside from the farms, though, there was a distinct lack of anything else structural in this area—no homes, barns, sheds, roads, coops, shops, or any building of any sort was visible as they flew by, which was a little…unsettling in spite of the presence of these mostly-kept farms.
And then the farms ended, and barren, rocky land stretched for miles ahead of them. The transition was practically instant. Great pits and craters with smooth sides littered the landscape, and cliffs that looked more like they were cracked off by explosions—and not gradually cut by natural erosive forces—rose to heights of sixty to seventy feet. Nothing was tall enough to threaten even Shego's nape-of-the-land flying, but falling from one would still prove fatal. The ground was the cracked light brown of sun-baked dirt and mud, and the rock formations were reddish brown, blackened in places; no one aboard cared to imagine just what could have caused those discolored marks.
It was Shego, once more, who benefited from needing to keep her eyes on the road, so to speak; what she saw, the first sign of true civilization since arriving at the planet, was at once hopeful and completely flabbergasting. Her voice snapped everyone else's attention away from the scorched-earth remnants of the area.
"What the—it's a castle!"
