La Disclaim: je ne own pas. And no, that isn't proper French.

Chapter 3:

"Shit, I'm going to be late!" Veronica muttered as she ran into her sparsely decorated studio apartment. "This... Dr. Drakken guy's going to kill me!"

She stripped out of her sweater and jeans, and kicked off her shoes (not necessarily in that order), revealing her skintight green and black jumpsuit. Scowling, she ran over to the mirror, pulled out her braid and shook out her hair, ripped off her glasses, and put in her emerald green contacts, swearing when the contact solution stung her eyes. Rubbing her right eye, she pulled out her sleek black and green palm pilot from her ankle pouch, and checked her messages.

"He's going to be late? HE IS?" She slumped on her bare mattress, and sighed in relief. "Thank God, that would have been unprofessional." She shook her head, grabbed her small travel pack, and checked her swift transformation in the mirror. Perfect.

Sometimes she wondered if her Monochromatia was really such a curse. Yes, it was true that she had lost all skin pigment, leaving her essentially chalk white and unable to tan. But when she wore the right colours, it changed her skin tone to match, which made it easier for her to have her alter-ego in the first place. Not that it was supposed to be an alter-ego... It just happened that way.

She hopped into the round hovercraft her latest employer had provided, plugged in the coordinates, and let autopilot do its job as she lapsed into reminiscing.

She had always been Veronica Shih, that hadn't changed. However, when the comet had hit her dojo when she was 8, her and the other students that early Saturday morning had gotten powers. It was such a shame that her plasma had been green...she hated the colour. When her fellow students decided to form a little band of superheroes and adventurers, she had been pulled in for the ride. The Go Team, they had called themselves, after their preferred form of Martial Arts, Goh Quan (Dog Fist). They had done well for a time, until the law started after them. They'd been branded vigilantes by many countries, and apparently they'd broken the law several times worldwide. By the time she'd been intelligent enough to understand the risk vs. monetary aspect of the hero business (the boys all had money in their families to fall back on, but she didn't) and quit (before she died like two of her teammates had), she and the team were already wanted in 7 countries. All seven had corrupt, oppressive, and evil governments, but they were still seven countries nonetheless. When she had started stealing for kicks, she quickly raised the number to 11. It wasn't all that hard, after all, and she could get away with it, since no one knew that Shego was the quiet little Asian girl she portrayed in her regular life.

Shego was who Veronica had always wanted to be. Confident, snarky, able to speak her mind, and able to strike fear into people's hearts. And she was finally able to stand up for herself. She had mastered several styles of wushu before the comet, and had mastered many more afterwards, but her parents had never let her use them unless she had no choice. Being kicked out of her house may have been the best thing that happened to her, because she could work so much easier, without having to worry about sneaking around parental units.

Being a mercenary was sweet. She had all the time in the world to get her school work done, and whenever an assignment rolled around that she felt was worth taking, it was usually challenging and exciting. And it paid well, so she didn't have to worry about money either. Her days as a hero had made it so that she couldn't really make many friends, so it wasn't like she was leaving anything behind when she had finally left her life up North.

Unlike the first time she'd stepped out as a mercenary a little more than a year ago, she was anything but a bundle of nerves over meeting a new employer. This Dr. Drakken seemed like the mad scientist type that wouldn't succeed no matter how hard he tried, which was incredibly different from her previous employers, but the paycheck had been high enough for her to ignore it. She figured a steady job was important for paying expenses, no matter how padded her bank account already was. Dr. Drakken had provided her with a steady job, good pay, and, if he was successful, the small country of her choosing, as long as she was willing to be bodyguard as well as a thief. Those weren't terrible terms... Hell, they were the best terms she'd had on a contract thus far, so she'd been happy to sign over her free time.

Through their email correspondence, Dr. Drakken had all but agreed. Something about the importance of education... she wasn't entirely sure, it had been tl;dr, she knew that much. She was sure more details would be discussed tonight, wherever it would take place...

Dr. Drakken looked up at his lair's security system, frowning. There was a strange blip on his radar, and he wasn't entirely sure what it was... Oh well, his security would handle it, undoubtedly. He went back to his calculations, since there always seemed to be a minute flaw in his plans. It would be hard enough constructing the nanotick once without incident, he didn't want to have to do it a second time due to faulty calculations.

An unfamiliar voice dragged him from his work, with an angry "What the Hell, Drakken!" and the sound of falling machinery. He looked up from his papers, and saw a remarkably dark scowl on a woman he did not recognize.

"I don't know why you seem so angry," he huffed, "you're the one that broke into my lair uninvited!"

"Uninvited? You HIRED me! How am I uninvited?"

He stopped to think. "I hired someone?" He shook his head, disbelievingly.

Shego then whipped out her Blackberry™ phone, and scrolls to her message from him. "Are you a complete and utter idiot?"

He looked at her... really looked, and huffed again. "Mad scientist, thank you! And you think you're all that, but you're... Green!" His mouth fell open just as a passing fly flew by.

With a flash of green, the fly exploded near the back of Drakken's throat, and he flinched back, coughing. "Doy! Of course I am, blue boy!"

"That's amazing! Just because you're green, I'm inducting you into my evil family! Mwahahahahaha!"

Shego thought for a while, and realized that this really wasn't much of an evil maniacal laughter moment, so... obviously something was wrong with this man. Anything for a steady job, she supposed. And she'd worked for worse.

"So what's on the agenda today, Drakken? What are you paying me to do?"

Drakken thought for a little while, then pointed at a jar of pickles. "I need that opened. I can never get my equations correct without my shot of pickling vinegar, from within a succulent pickled cucumber." Shego raised an eyebrow. "Honest! That's the first thing you have to do for me! Then I need you to go steal this list of things for me from warehouses somewhere... the addresses are on here." He points at a paper on his desk.

Shego nodded. That was much more up her alley, not playing Jar-lid opener. "I'll have this to you by tomorrow evening, only because I have homework and these are all in Ecuador."

He nodded absently, and waved her off, already re-engrossed in his pages of equations. "That's nice, safe travels..."

Shego walked over to the jar, and twisted the cap. Surprisingly, it didn't pop open the way she expected it to. Growling, she twisted it more violently, succeeding in only sloshing the contents within the jar. Her hands glowed in frustration, and (metal expanded, thus causing something amazing;) the jar opened easily. She smirked, inwardly cheering, and put the now-open jar on the table next to her blue employer.

Wait a second... Blue?

"Oh my GOD, you're BLUE! Drakken! You're BLUE! Like, honest to God BLUE!"

He looked up, annoyed. "I thought we established this already, what with you calling me blue boy."

"But... Blue skin!"

"Green skin!"

"..."

"Do you photosynthesize?"

A single plasma blast to the face was his response.

A/N: So... I'm sure you already all saw that one coming. If you didn't, then... I actually did a good enough job! :)

Drakken's going to be a little different in this too... I'm going to see if I can make him out to be sane-ish. Before Shego came along, he did most of everything himself, so he was pretty competent. With Shego around, he just becomes incredibly laxed and slacker-y, so... I think that's his problem.

Anyways, updates are slower, sorry... I have work and a summer course, so my free time is pretty much nil. And my commute is much less long, since I moved closer... So I don't even have time to write anything during it (it's, like, 10 minutes). I'll update when I can!