Chapter 2

The usual boilerplate disclaimer. I do not own Kim Possible. Kim Possible is the intellectual property of the Walt Disney Corporation and the creation of Bob Schooley and Mark McCorkle.

Jen Credible, Dave Seer and Rose Riccaro are the creations of Blackbird. Agni Drago, Cassandra King, Mrs. Turler and the Bogeyman are the creations of Trackula/Festum.

Agni Drago was keeping to herself as she headed towards the cafeteria. Ever since she started school, way back in kindergarten, she'd been stuck here, at the Go Academy for Gifted Women. Despite the school uniform's grey blazer and blue skirt, she felt like she was wearing a prison uniform.

With her pale skin, distinguished beauty mark under her left eye and shoulder-length ebony hair, some people said she looked like a vampire. Her skin was the main problem for her when it came to school, however, for it wasn't just pale, it was a bleached green, emphasized by her vivid green eyes. She often decorated her hair with criss-crossed green ribbons and hair tubes because, well, why not? There wasn't any hiding her real colour, and it wasn't like she could help it. Fortunately, or unfortunately, people just assumed she was anaemic. Regardless, the other girls at the school were quick to ostracize the short, "sickly" girl.

Of course, eventually some got it into their heads that they should also harass the ill girl. But the joke was on them. For despite her appearance, Agni was healthier than a girl her age and small stature should be. A side benefit of inheriting her mother's glow was that Agni possessed a boosted healing factor along with enhanced physical endurance and stamina.

Agni was doing very well in gym class as a result. Even if she did restrain herself in order to avoid giving away just exactly who her actual family was. If that wasn't enough, she worked hard to maintain a decent grade average. She didn't need to have the headache that came with getting low grades at a fancy school such as Go Academy.

This led to a fair amount of the other girls starting to resent Agni. Not only was she a "little freak", she showed up a fair amount of the other students enough to make them dislike her. In their jealousy, they would attempt to salvage their wounded pride through bullying tactics. It was small stuff at first. Other girls would leave the table when Agni would sit down for lunch, snickering as she passed them in the halls, and of course, just plain excluding her from joining any social clique.

They lost their mettle pretty quickly when Agni proved she was willing and able to hold her ground against her would-be tormentors. But a few of the girls at this ivory purgatory liked a challenge. It became a game to them, finding ways to push Agni's buttons more and more until she finally snapped, but Agni wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of winning.

As she approached the cafeteria doors, Agni stopped to look around. She couldn't see them, but she'd learned by this point to keep her guard up, so as she crossed the threshold, she kept her eyes peeled for anything coming from the sides. Her vigilance paid off, as a child's leg, clad in knee socks and Mary Jane shoes propped itself in her path.

Agni deftly hopped over the leg as it came her way. As soon as she was past the leg, she turned around, and to nobody's surprise, there were Cassandra King and her lackeys. Cassandra had a smug look of superiority on her face. It was practically her default expression. If it weren't for that smugness plastered on her face, Cassandra could be the poster child for being a sweet little angel, fair skin, icy blue eyes and pale, blonde hair. Agni thought she looked more like Lucifer than anything else.

At her sides were her two cronies, Grace Blackwood and Shelly Wolfe. Grace was a girl who had a healthy tan and was tall for their age with brown hair tied back into a ponytail. Her hazel eyes were sharp and condescending, making her face look almost hawk-like. Shelly was the same size as Cassandra, but had long, limp red hair with blue eyes and freckles.

"Really, King? That's all you got?" Agni said dismissively as she turned around to continue into the cafeteria.

Cassandra scowled at Grace and Shelly. She then composed herself and proceeded to address Agni. "So sorry, Drago, we were just stretching. It helps to have a little exercise before eating, don't you know?"

"I'll bet," Agni said as she got into the lunch line. She hadn't forgotten all the times she wasn't able to dodge these kinds of 'exercises'. It took her some time to develop the skills to avoid these humiliations. The trips, the other girls ganging up on her during gym and pelting her with dodgeballs or volleyballs. Not to mention the various booby-traps on her locker and attacks on her homework.

Cassandra and her friends got in line behind Agni. "Well, it helps to stay healthy. Of course, you wouldn't exactly know about that, what with all the food you scarf down."

"I have a high metabolism." Agni wasn't lying. She was so lean due to her glow burning away any excess fat she might have developed as she grew. Sometimes she had to eat extra food, just to stay healthy.

"Is that what you're calling it? I heard that you have intestinal problem. That you can't properly digest most foods. That you have to... relieve yourself quite often." Cassandra smirked.

Agni sighed. "Potty jokes? Have you run out of all your insults that you'd have to stoop so low?" she said as she kept her back turned to Cassandra. Now that they could no longer physically harass Agni, it seemed like Cassandra was so desperately looking for a new way to torment her that she would try anything.

"Are you denying it?" Cassandra sneered.

"I'm ignoring it."

"Oh, really? Then can you ignore this?" Cassandra leered at her. "I hear that your mother works as entertainment for men down by the waterfront," she said with venom in her voice.

That got Agni's attention. "What. Did. You. Say?" she snarled through clenched teeth as she tightened her grip on her lunch tray. Agni always could handle the rumour mill better than the physical tricks, but her home life was off limits. Her mom was off limits.

"Oh, did I touch a nerve? Or did you think we wouldn't find out? Your dear, sweet old grandparents don't have the money to send you here, right? I mean, the only way for them to afford tuition for this place is if someone in your family was doing something... illicit to make up the difference." Cassandra looked triumphant.

Agni could feel her blood boiling. It was the same feeling she got whenever she was about to flare up her plasma. She had to keep it under control. If Grandma Roza found out she lit up at school...

"Of course, we always knew something was off about you, charity case. I mean, seriously..."

Cassandra couldn't finish her line of thought as Agni spun around and whacked Cassandra's head up the left side with the lunch tray. "You. Need to. Shut. Up" Agni growled to Cassandra, who was lying on the floor.

Everybody in the cafeteria stopped what they were doing and let out a collective gasp. Some people even dropped their lunch trays. In the dead silence, Agni kicked Cassandra with her right foot and made her face upwards. She then placed her left foot on Cassandra's chest and leaned down, resting her arms on her left leg.

"I don't care who you are, what kind of garbage you say about me, or what kind of money your family throws around. Nobody bad mouths my mom." Agni tersely stated to Cassandra's shocked face.

The murmuring of the students in the cafeteria snapped Agni out of her anger. It suddenly dawned on her that while she hadn't lit up, she was still in a lot of trouble. She stepped over Cassandra, still lying on the floor and headed straight out into the hallways. The other students immediately started to gossip about what had just happened while Grace and Shelly went to help Cassandra up.

As she struggled to stand, a manic little smile crept it's way onto Cassandra's face. "I've got you now, Drago." She looked at her flunkies and gave the order. "Go find Mrs. Turler. She's been waiting for this for some time."

...

Shego dried her wet hair with an ivory towel as she strolled out of the steam-filled hotel bathroom in a fluffy white bathrobe. She needed a nice, relaxing shower after spending the morning in the resort's fitness centre. The attention she got from the head trainer was nice as well. She toyed with his expectations for a bit, but ultimately let him down. Shego wasn't 100% over her memories about Agni from when she arrived two days ago. Besides, Shego always preferred to be the one to initiate those kinds of conversations.

Putting her right hand on the back of her neck and rubbing it as she rolled it Shego headed towards her queen sized bed. She lay down to relax and looked for the remote for the wide-screen television mounted on the wall. Turning on the TV, she flipped through the channels until she came across an interesting news story about some teen superhero who had saved a Brittina concert after a fire broke out backstage.

"What kind of name is Kim Possible anyway?" She asked incredulously.

Not long after she spoke those words, a light knocking happened at the door. Shego initially ignored the faint rapping from the hallway, but even as she raised the volume on the television the person outside would not stop knocking. After a certain point, it felt as if the knocks were ringing inside her own head.

"ENOUGH!" Shego hollered. "Can't you see the notice on the doorknob?! It says DO. NOT. DISTURB!" she yelled as she moved towards the room door.

But when she opened the door, there was nobody there. Shego put her head out in the hallway and looked down the corridor both ways, but saw no trace of anyone. As she stepped forward, her toes came into contact with something cool on the carpet. At her feet was a solid black envelope sealed with grey wax.

As she picked up the envelope, she turned it around as she closed the door and headed back inside her room. In scratchy white letters were the words Your Invitation. A pit began to form in the bottom of Shego's stomach. Those were the types of letters HE used. Something wasn't right about this.

What was inside the envelope made Shego lose all strength in her legs as she fell down to her knees. Her hands were shaking as her eyes became fixated on the image of the picture in front of her. It was a black and white photo of Agni in her school uniform. But her eyes and mouth were blacked out. And surrounding her were more scratchy white letters with a chilling message.

Did you think you could hide her from me?

Shego's mind was racing. "NonononononoNONONONONO-NO!"

Panic running through her mind, Shego pulled out her suitcase from under the bed. She rummaged through her clothes until she found her catsuit. With great hurry, Shego tore off her bathrobe and immediately started to put on her usual mission wear. She then ferociously started tearing through her possessions looking for her WEE communicator.

Once she found, she flipped it on. A deep baritone voice spoke on the other end. "Agent Theta speaking. What do you need, Agent Alpha?"

"CRAM IT WITH THE AGENT ALPHA! I need transportation from Cancun to Go City. NOW!" Shego barked with impatience. Though if there was anybody who knew her well enough, they would realize that there was a great deal of anxiety in her voice.

...

A black convertible with its top up drove down the highway during the sunny California afternoon. It had been about three hours since Jen and Dave had left Los Diablos to head south to Go City to face the "darkness and ruin" from Dave's vision. Dave was sitting in the driver's seat while Jen was in the back seat with her homework spread out over the back of the car.

"Ugh," Jen groaned. "I don't understand why they insist on giving us these college-level physics assignments. I'm not going to become a physicist when I graduate."

"The American education system is messed up in some places. They place more emphasis on the hard sciences than actual practical life skills. When I graduated high school, I wasn't interested in going to college just because it was expected of me. I liked working on cars. So I got a job as a mechanic. It suits me. My time in shop class was more beneficial to me in the long run than anything I learned in physics class," Dave said.

"And my school just cut both home ec. class and shop class completely out of the budget. So a lot of kids won't have those options anymore," sighed Jen.

"And what is it you want to do, Jen?"

"I've always been interested psychology. So my biology class is a must. A little bit of chem class too. Yet they insist on saddling me with physics as well. To 'cover my bases'."

Jen shuffled her papers into her backpack and leaned back into her seat. "Honestly though, the way this keeps going, I feel like I'm the one who will need professional help instead of administering it. I mean, you and have been working together for what, about six months now?"

"Just about." Dave said with his eyes on the road.

"And the things we've seen in that time... sometimes I wonder if I've fallen through the looking glass." Jen tilted her head in Dave's direction and looked at him. "But what happened to you in the warehouse... you haven't said much about it. About what you actually saw. You know I'm here for you, right?"

Dave, keeping his focus on his driving simply said, "I don't really want to talk about it, Jen. If I didn't get such massive headaches from my usual visions, I might be tempted to... lose myself in something from what I saw today."

The car grew quiet for a moment. After a certain point, the silence became too much. "You know what we need right now, Jen? Some tunes." Dave said as he fiddled with the car radio in the hopes of cheering up the atmosphere.

As Dave tuned into various radio broadcasts, snippets of different news stories could be heard. Smarty Mart had just won the award for most accessible retail store chain and Beuno Nacho had just officially accomplished the consumerist dream of having a restaurant in every country on the planet. But the one that stood out was about a young new superhero who had saved a South American village from a flood despite the piranha infested waters.

"Didn't you say you had a cousin named -?" he asked, turning into another station.

"-Kim Possible?" She finished for him. "Yeah." Jen shrugged. "She's been modest about it, though... don't really know how to break it her about the stuff we do."

She reached forward and lightly slapped his hand away from the dial. "All Kim's done is perform rescue missions and combat natural disasters. I just hope she never gets in too deep against something she can't handle." She said with a concerned voice.

"Your family is something else, Jen." Dave said with a chuckle.

"Yeah... I got to give props to my dad. He helped me settle things with the school on such short notice so I could head down to Go City for a couple of days," Jen said as she kicked her backpack. "Which is why I have such a mountain of homework to wrangle with."

"He does good work given that we only had a couple of days to get everything ready. And your friend Rose was a big help too."

There was no denying that. Rose Riccaro was her best and only friend until Dave entered her life. Ever since then, Rose had been smoothing things over on the school front and helping Jen stay on course in regards to the massive amount of homework she kept wracking up as she missed more and more school. She even took the "weird stuff" pretty well. Better than Jen expected anyone to in regards to finding out that the supernatural is real.

As the car advanced towards Go City, the sign for the city limits grew closer. But just as they were about to enter the city proper, the skies darkened and thunder rolled. It seemed isolated to a certain section of the city, however. And as they grew closer, they could almost swear tendrils of shadow were descending from the clouds to touch the ground.

Jen sighed. "Darkness and ruin, huh?"

"Yep."

"... Joy."

...

The cold desert night sky was tranquil. Serene. But on the horizon, a distant roaring could be heard. The roaring came to a head, and, if you happened to be someone with a keen eye and ear, you would realize that the roar was in fact a young woman zooming over the landscape on a state-of-the-art burgundy hover bike stamped with the WEE logo, her long, black hair whipping out behind her like a dangerous storm cloud.

She couldn't get a flight to Go City to arrive fast enough, not since those fanatical lunatics who flew those planes into the heart of downtown New York this past September. So Shego had "requisitioned" a WEE hoverbike to get from Cancun to California. Gemini would probably have her hide for this, but he was seriously at the bottom of Shego's priorities right now.

"It can't be him! It CAN'T!" She thought.

Her mind raced. Between that photograph at her hotel room and all the thoughts that had shot through her head since then, the only thing that she could really think about were the memories of that fateful night. The night she had come home to Go Tower. When she went to her daughter's room to say good night to her sleeping child she had found her room ransacked, her stuffed toys slashed to ribbons. Those same, scratchy letters carved into the walls with that horrid message that has been haunting her nightmares for five years.

She is waiting for you at the construction site at Rojo Avenue.

That particular memory had the inevitable effect of making Shego remember her last fight with that... monster. "Bogeyman..." Shego muttered under her breath.

...

The rain poured down relentlessly at the construction site for a new office building at Rojo Avenue. The half-assembled building had done little to keep the rain out. Though thankfully there were some stairs already built to get up the first few stories of the building. But downpour however wasn't the main hazard here. It was the fact that the shadows cast at the site had all seem come alive!

Shego's instincts were keeping her alive so far. Outside of her peripheral vision she could hear a faint hissing, like leaking gas, and then shards of jagged, black glass would burst forth from the very walls and floor with such speed that even Shego would have trouble avoiding them. But just avoiding the shards wasn't enough.

Whenever the lightning flashed, tendrils of oily shadows would lash out in the split-second illumination to try and ensnare her. Her plasma thankfully seemed to hurt them, as they appeared to squeal in pain when ever Shego struck them with her ignited claws. But the light given off by the plasma just seemed to make the attacks come more frequently. So she would extinguish her hands only for the glass shard attacks to become more periodical.

This... this isn't what it was like before. Back at the children's hospital it seemed like this guy's shtick was parlour tricks and misdirections, manipulating shadows and a show at performing telekinesis. A brief, unnerving thought entered Shego's mind, "What if was real? Had this guy been holding back before? Is that why we couldn't find him at the end?"

She decided it didn't matter. Regardless of what he was capable of, the freak that called himself the Bogeyman had broken into Go Tower and abducted her kid. Shego was not going to let that stand. He made this personal, and now she was going to make him wish he was only going to get a beating.

At about halfway up the structure, his voice echoed through the empty halls. It was soft and had a metallic reverberation to it, with an unmistakeably venomous tone.

"You do not disappoint me, Natasha. I shall give you that. I knew there was something different about you when you interrupted my performance at the children's hospital. Something special. You are nothing like your slow-witted brothers. People like you come by only once in a lifetime. I just had to see you again. It has been far too long since someone with your kind of strength has risen to oppose with me. I shall relish this confrontation."

"Shut it, creep! And how do you know my real name?!"

"I know many things about many people, Natasha. It helps when I need to put on one of these special performances for the truly exceptional in this world. I just need to find what it is they value most in this world. And they come to me like moths to the flame. But you and your little one are not afraid of fire, are you?"

"Leave Agni out of this! She's done nothing to you!"

"True enough. But that is irrelevant. YOU are the one I am interested in. The unmistakeable heart of a mother, true and endlessly devoted, beats within you. And I want to see what that heart of yours compels you to do for your child. What follows next will be the memories that shall last both mother and daughter for the rest of your lives, that will shape the people you will both become. No matter what happens on this night, the two of you will be GLORIOUS."

"YOU BE QUIET!" Shego hollered as she threw plasma bolts into the darkness. At this point, it was starting to feel like his voice was coming from inside her own head.

"I will never tire of this. Of witnessing this primal terror. Parents seeking to save their child from a horrific fate. You are not the first. You will not be the last. But you WILL be one of my most prized memories."

Adrenaline surged through Shego's veins as she climbed the site despite the relentless attacks from the darkness. The higher she went the more the building fell apart, until all that was left of it was a skeleton; steel girders that were to be the supports for the building's infrastructure and a few pieces of wood. With no more stairs to climb, Shego was forced to leap and swing between the girders in order to reach the peak.

Fortunately, the full moon in the night sky was providing more than the fluorescent lights of the building ever could have. With no walls and floors around, the attacks from the glass shards had stopped, having nothing to burst out of. Still, the shadow tendrils persisted in their assault between lightning strikes. Shego pushed forward until she was at the very top of the would-be building.

Standing at the end of an exposed girder was that horrid excuse of a man. He was draped in a mouldering, tattered black shroud and hood, his hands and feet were covered in a black, skin tight material. His face was obscured by a featureless white mask that seemed to be made out of a solid porous material with small hairline fractures in a few places. It gave Shego the impression of a cracked eggshell.

And suspended by his left hand was Agni. Who was cocooned in massive straps of black leather that only allowed her hair and right eye to be visible. Muffled cries seeped through the leather and despite the rain, it was clear she was crying her little eyes out and thrashing desperately to be free. Seeing her baby like this, Shego readied herself to attack and ignited her hands.

"You. Little. FREAK! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY KID?!" Shego roared over the thunder.

"Nothing I that have not done to other children. But if this is what shocks you, you have not seen ANYTHING yet."

As he said those words, his mask cracked around the mouth area, shards of white suspended in the shadows, like a horrific smile as the fracture worked it's way from one side to the other. His mask reminded her of a horrific, grinning skull with no nostrils or eye sockets. The Bogeyman tilted his head towards Agni and let go of the strap suspending her leather cocoon.

Shego's eyes went wide and she lunged forward to grab her child. As she dove past the Bogeyman and over the edge of the girder to grab Agni, her descent was quickly halted by shadows shooting out from under his shroud, leaving her dangling over the construction site.

"AGNI!" Shego cried out as she watched her little girl plunge towards to the ground. As she fell, Agni bounced off of other exposed girders, only stopping when she eventually hit the ground with a dull thump.

The Bogeyman's metallic laugh washed out the thunder. As Shego looked down in horror at her little girl's body at the base of the building, she actually began crying. Despair quickly turned into white hot fury however, and in her rage, Shego ignited her plasma and used the force of the blasts to propel herself back up to face her child's killer.

There were no more words. Just horrific laughter and a screaming mother battling out in the rain at a construction site. They leaped from girder to girder, shadows slashing and plasma bursting, each time getting closer and closer to the ground. The Bogeyman floated around the exposed metalwork, his cloak twisting and coiling like a shadowy serpent. Shego lunging after him, her claws and plasma blasts melting the steel around them, the upper levels collapsing in her wake.

Eventually, they were forced back into the unfinished hallways lower down to escape the falling metal. The brutality of the fight intensified. The Bogeyman would grab her by the ankles with his shadows and send Shego smashing through the walls. In retaliation, Shego set everything ablaze in an effort to burn the monster in front of her to death. As black glass shards flew towards her from the darkness, she shot them down with more quick bursts of plasma.

The more they fought, the more the building suffered. The heat along with the collapsing metal and crumbling drywall caused the floor beneath the fighters to buckle. The enemies ignored the groaning of the overtaxed floorboards until it finally gave way, sending them both crashing down. As they fell, Shego managed to get above the Bogeyman and began a relentless assault on him with her plasma. It wasn't enough to fall through one floor. Shego's ruthless attacks broke another floor. And another. Until she was back where she had started.

He was still laughing despite Shego's relentless thrashing. Rabid curiosity filled her mind. She needed to know what kind of face this lunatic had, what the person who would do something like steal someone's child just to throw them off a building would look like. So she dug her clawed gloves into his white mask and pulled hard. The porous material wouldn't budge, but Shego would not relent. She yanked and tore at his head until it finally snapped off. His head, that is, not the mask. No, not the mask. That was still firmly attached to his face. And he was still LAUGHING.

The shock of seeing the severed head, of everything that happened there and the exhaustion from the fight was just too much. When she finally awoke, the Wegos were caring for her at the Go University Hospital. Ilya was sitting next to Shego, and Andrei was at the door watching the hallway.

Shego began to cry out for her lost child, but her younger brothers heard only a murmur and just told her to rest. They said that Agni was fine. That somehow she now had the same greenish skin as her mother. They said that the doctors couldn't explain it. Shego only cared about one thing they had said, though. Her baby was alive! Relieved, Shego drifted back to sleep.

...

That night had haunted Shego's mind for years now. Everything she'd done up to this point was to keep something like it from happening again. She was sure that whoever was behind the black envelope was just some sick copycat out to live an escapist fantasy, not that this fact would grant that person any mercy. After all, she was so sure that she tore of the Bogeyman's head in the last fight. No human could survive that.

Author's Notes

This chapter took a bit longer than usual to write, but good things come to those who wait. Many thanks to Blackbird and Festum for giving me permission to use their characters. Also a shout out to my editor "Diana" for all her work on this project.

Some of you might have guessed that this is a retelling of Agni's, and by extension Shego's origin story. What I'm working on is something I have crafted after spending a few years talking to both Blackbird and Festum. Taking notes on their characters and concepts that didn't get into any of their own finished stories. I hope you all will enjoy what I'm working on.