A/N: What's this? An update from me? (gasp) And on April Fool's Day to boot. We'll this isn't an April fool's joke, I assure you. I highly doubt you'll get a laugh out of any of this. I should probably do something shorter and more humorous in the future, once this is finally done. I will finish this fic! No matter how long it takes I will finish! (steps off soapbox) On with the show…
Chapter 3: A Bouquet of Lilies
Kim and Ron arrived in Paris without further incident and met up with Cristophe Domoulin, the head of the French sector of Global Justice, who drove them to the famous cabaret while giving them an update on the news report they had seen earlier. The building itself was relatively untouched; it was the windmill that had suffered damage. There were two charred, gaping holes, one facing the street where a window used to be, and a much larger one near the top of the windmill's pointed roof facing away from the street. Inside the windmill's walls sported a series of long, thin scratches, as if someone had sharpened the ends of a rake and dug them into the windmill's walls while running up the winding staircase leading to the rooftop. The holes themselves were also a bit perplexing. There was nothing inside the windmill that might have caused a fire, unless someone had gotten inside with a flamethrower there was no possible explanation for them. Add that to the mysterious green light that had accompanied the flames and the authorities were completely baffled.
The teen hero, however, was not. "The person you're looking for, M. Domoulin is a woman named Shego." The car rolled to a stop in front of the icon they had been discussing and Kim stepped out onto the sidewalk.
"She-who?" Domoulin climbed out of the car and turned towards Kim with a look of perplexity.
"Not Shewho, Shego." Ron explained, "Works for a mad scientist, wanted in eleven countries, long black hair, glowing green hands…"
"Green hands!" the Inspector's moustache twisted into a grimace.
"It's a long story." Kim explained. "But the green light, the scratch marks, they all point to her."
"But why would this Shego person want to destroy the Moulin Rouge?"
"Well, we're not exactly sure why…" Kim continued, "But we do know she was coming to a 'red windmill'."
"And how do you know this?" Domoulin prodded, not thoroughly convinced. Kim went on to explain the mysterious note they had been asked to deliver along with their previous relations with the villainess while Domoulin's face became more humorously twisted. "Miss Possible, I think this case would be best left to professionals, not…"
"Hey, Kim knows what she's talking about," Ron protested, getting a little too close to Domoulin's face then is considered polite.
"Erm… of course, uh… what was your name again?" Domoulin asked.
"Ron Stoppable," he grumbled. He had figured Domoulin didn't like him, the way he had looked at him while eating the last of his French fries in the car was proof enough of that. But why must everyone forget his name?
"So, is there any chance of us getting to check out the windmill from the inside?" Kim asked hopefully. Usually people were more than happy to let her get a first-hand look at the crime scene, but they hadn't been asked to come here, Wade had had to pull a few strings to convince Domoulin that Kim's assistance would be worthwhile, and Domoulin seemed reluctant to even listen to the teenager.
"Absolutely not!" he bellowed. "The staircase is weak and unstable. We almost had a concussion earlier when a professional went to investigate," he had accented the word "professional", much to the annoyance of the two teens.
"So what was the whole point in coming here? We already know what this thing looks like," Ron said, he had seen it once on a family vacation and again on the news.
Domoulin waved him off, "It is much too dangerous to go inside the windmill. You may go inside the building or talk to any of the personnel present. I have matters to attend to back at GJ…"
"We'll need a translator," Kim pointed out. Her dislike of the man had grown considerably during their conversation, but she wasn't going to take the chance if none of the police officers spoke English.
Domoulin let out a huge sigh. "Very well, I'll stay and translate… but only for half an hour, then we must leave."
Kim marched towards a friendly looking policeman patrolling the entrance to the main building and began asking him questions, which Domoulin translated hurriedly. The man had little to add to what Domoulin had already told them, except that there had been one injury. A woman was found lying on the roof of the building at the foot of the windmill with several ugly gashes on her right forearm. Some suspected she must've jumped from one of the windows on the upper floor of the cabaret, though no one could explain why she jumped towards the burning windmill rather than away from it. The man who found her was of a questionable mental state. He claimed that he heard a scream and when he got to the roof and found the unconscious woman he looked up to see another figure crouched on top of the windmill, her hair blowing with the wind and smoke and her hands lit with green fire.
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"KP, this thing's just getting weirder by the minute," Ron remarked. They both were seated at a small café, sipping limonade, which turned out to be closer to a Sprite than lemonade. They had tried getting into the hospital that had emitted the injured woman so they could talk to her, but by the time they had her room number one of the nurses informed them in broken English that she had vanished earlier that morning. The doctors were less concerned about her cuts, which had been stitched and bandaged, and more concerned about the fact that her skin was an odd shade of green.
"How can Shego be both the victim and the attacker?" Kim asked.
"There could be more than one person with green skin, y'know," Ron pointed out. "Actually Shego's skin isn't exactly green, more of a greenish tint."
"Next you're gonna say there could be more than one person with power to summon green energy from her hands," Kim said, half joking.
Ron shrugged, "Hey, you never know," he replied, finishing off his drink with a loud slurp. He paused and his eyes widened in surprise, "Kim, is that who I think it is?"
Kim turned in her seat and followed Ron's pointed finger to a flower shop across the street. A woman with long dark hair with several grey streaks was walking out of the shop with a handful of lilies clutched in between her hideously long nails. Kim gasped, "What is Feliah Morgan doing here?"
"And more importantly, why is she buying lilies? She doesn't seem like the flowery type." Rufus nodded in agreement.
Kim's eyes followed the woman closely as she walked down the street, her head erect, her previously fluid movements stiff and forced, the poor lilies looked ready to snap under her harsh grip. "I don't think they're for her, Ron," she said slowly.
Ron looked from Feliah, to Kim, and back to Feliah again. "Then who are they for?" He couldn't imagine a woman as creepy as Feliah having any kind of love interest, unless…
"I'm not sure," Kim said, leaning out of her chair so she could see the woman retreat around a corner.
"You wanna follow her?" Ron asked, sensing Kim's curiosity.
"Ron, whatever she's doing is none of our business," Kim said, turning away from the street to face her friend. "Besides, we have enough to worry about already."
"But you wanna know where she's going? Don't you?" Ron said, now obviously teasing her.
"Well, I'm certainly curious, but…" Kim stammered.
"But what? We're not doing anything interesting. We might as well," Ron stood up and motioned for Kim to do the same.
"Well…I suppose if it's just to see where she's going…"
"Great let's go!" Ron grabbed Kim by the wrist and yanked her out of her seat.
"Ron! The drinks!"
Ron skidded to a stop, "Oh right," he dug into his pants pocket and dropped a bill on the table.
"And remember," Kim said, "we can't let her catch us. I don't think you want to explain to Feliah why we're stocking her."
"No worries, KP. I am the king of stealth!" Ron struck a heroic pose on the sidewalk that emitted a giggle and an eyeroll from his companion.
"Alright, Your Highness, let's hurry before she gets away," she grabbed Ron's wrist and sped off in the direction Feliah had headed.
They stopped running just before reaching the corner Feliah had disappeared behind. Kim motioned for Ron to keep quiet and peered around the corner. She could see the woman's shrinking form much further down the street. Not wanting to lose sight of her, Kim whipped out her hairdryer and shot the grapple hook at one of the buildings along the sidewalk. Grabbing Ron's hand, she swung onto the roof of the building and the pair proceeded to trail Feliah from above.
She eventually stopped in front of a large cathedral. Kim and Ron, stationed on the roof of a building across the street peered after her, puzzled. Feliah marched, not into the cathedral, but into the door of an iron gate surrounding the cemetery next to it. Kim and Ron didn't move from their position till Feliah emerged once more, her head still held high, the bouquet of lilies gone. When she had vanished around a corner, Kim and Ron dropped from their posts and raced across the street to the cemetery. It didn't take long to find which tomb Feliah had visited. The cemetery was obviously relatively unused. Every plant in the vicinity was on the verge of death themselves, except for the few fresh lilies Feliah had deposited next to one particular gravestone.
Kim read the headstone solemnly, "Mariah Morgan. 1967-1997. Car accident." The abruptness of the gravestone seemed terrible to Kim. Had this woman really done nothing in the thirty years she lived worth mentioning? She shuddered. The very air seemed to suddenly turn cold and dry, lifeless. The place on her arm where she had found the mark earlier seemed particularly starved for warmth and she began to rub it vigorously.
"Hey, KP, look at this," Ron said, his tone solemn but still managed to break the lifeless atmosphere around them. Ron had a way of doing that. Things just always seemed brighter when he was around. She bent down next to him to look at the piece of paper lying next to the lilies. A note was written in red ink with a smooth, careful hand, the letters standing out strikingly against the white lilies. Kim's blood ran cold when she read the words:
"I will avenge you."
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Shego raced into an alleyway and skidded to a stop. She had been dodging the hospital personnel and various police officers all day. She thought she had finally eluded them, but when she caught sight of Possible and company sitting at a café her nerves snapped and she ran. The last thing she needed on a day like this was a fight with Kim. She leaned up against the wall and panted for breath. Try as she might her heart wouldn't stop pounding. It wasn't like her to get tired this easily. She had spent most of her energy trying to avoid detection. Normally it would've been easy for her to blend in, maybe a bit of makeup to cover the green tint in her skin if she was feeling especially cautious, but now…
She relaxed her leg muscles and slid down the wall till she was in a comfortable sitting position. Almost mechanically she rolled up the sleeve on her right arm, revealing a thick bandage running from her wrist to her elbow. It had been bandaged well enough, but the cuts were deep and the gauze had soaked up so much blood it now showed in a series of thin, vertical red stains across the bandage. Four of them.
The villainess moaned, more out of hopelessness than physical pain. Her arm had stopped hurting hours ago, either that or she was used to it, but now she was faced with the dilemma of what to do next. What could she do next? Her skin was already several shades greener. She couldn't count on authorities to help her; they'd only make it worse. And now Possible and the gang were involved, or at least she assumed. What else could explain their presence in Paris the day after she had nearly gotten herself killed? The Moulin Rouge was one tourist attraction she wasn't going to visit again any time soon.
A small noise, sounding somewhat like several pebbles knocking against each other, jostled her out of her thoughts. Her senses snapped into full alertness as her eyes scanned the alleyway. She rose from her seated position as slowly and quietly as she could and assumed a fighting stance. Her gaze drifted toward the edge of the alleyway where out from behind a building poked the edge of a rather familiar black boot.
Shego relaxed her fighting stance and let out a sigh of relief. "You can come out now, Dr. Drakken," she said as calmly as she could.
-14 years ago-
"Zeb! Open this door!" Shego pounded her fist against the front door of her best friend's house, "Zeb, I know you're in there!" she shouted, causing enough mayhem to wake the dead, or the next best thing, a sleeping fourteen-year-old boy.
She saw the light go on in Zeb's mother's room overhead and heard her scraggly voice shout in a similar fashion for her son to answer the door. A few moments later, the door swished open to reveal Zeb rubbing his eyes, his hair sticking out in more places than it usually did. It was still raining and a bit of water dripped from the door onto the rug inside.
"What are you doing? Do you have any idea what time it is?" Zeb groaned.
"This is an emergency!" Shego said, lowering her volume only slightly. "Our house just got flattened by some kind of meteor!"
Zeb's half-sleeping eyes slowly got wider and wider. "It what? Are you sure?"
"Of course I'm sure! You think I'd be mistaken when a giant glowing rock comes crashing out of the sky and bulldozes my house!"
After a short pause Zeb looked up at her almost thoughtfully and said, "You wanna come out of the rain?" while opening the door wider. Shego suddenly noticed the water dripping from her limp hair down the back of her shirt and shivered. She stepped inside, for once grateful that Zeb's mom insisted on keeping the house unusually warm at all hours. "So, have you called your parents?" he asked quickly.
"Not yet. Hego's at the neighbors calling 911 or something. That moron! I told him I refused to be dragged off to some testing facility, but he wouldn't listen, so I decided to come here."
"Wait, a testing facility? What are you talking about?"
"The meteor… it did something to us," she began. "Instead of two Wegos running all over the place there's twenty, last time we counted anyways. We can't find Mego anywhere. Hego lifted the Moreno's entire house with one hand looking for him. And I'm…" she stopped and looked down at the palms of her hands.
"You're what?" Zeb asked, looking incredibly confused.
"That's weird, I could do it five minutes ago," she said, staring awkwardly into her hands as if willing them to do something.
"What? Do what?" Zeb raised his voice in frustration.
"My hands lit up with this green stuff. It nearly blew a piece of Hego's hair off earlier."
Zeb chuckled. "Sounds cool."
"No, not cool," Shego turned from her hands to staring at Zeb, "this is the worst thing to happen since…since,"
"…since the invention of spam?" Zeb offered.
Shego glared at him. "How can you be so nonchalant about this? Our house is gone, my brothers and I have been turned into some kind of freaks…"
"You don't look freakish to me," Zeb replied calmly.
As if on cue, Shego's hands erupted in a blast of green light. Zeb recoiled and ended up falling backwards onto the floor, his eyes wide and mouth agape. Shego stood with her hands as far from her body as humanly possible, her eyes dancing with the reflection of the dangerous green flame. After a moment she relaxed a bit, bringing her hands closer to her body as the flame died down somewhat. Zeb stood, his eyes still as wide and round as a saucer, and stepped towards her.
"Now that looks freaky," he said in awe.
-Present Day-
"How did you know…?" Drakken began, stepping out from his hiding place to face his employee.
"A ninja you're not." Shego replied curtly. He did look rather odd standing in the middle of a dank alley in his normal blue lab coat and wearing a pair of sunglasses and an oversized hat. It would've been almost funny if it weren't for the fact that he'd obviously been trailing her. "What are you doing here? I specifically asked you not to follow me," she crossed her arms, now obviously annoyed.
"I need to know what's going on, Shego. Earlier you seemed… upset." Drakken started to fumble, as if searching for the right word.
"Upset?" Shego spat the word out as if she'd never heard it before.
"Yeah, and now I find you in Europe burning down old cabarets and…" his eyes fell on her arm. "You're hurt."
Instinctively, Shego yanked her sleeve back over her arm, covering up the bandage. "It's… it's nothing," she said quickly.
"Come now, Shego, you don't expect me to believe that old line, do you?" It was Drakken's turn to cross his arms.
"Yes… well, no, but… ARG! Let's just get out of here," Shego grabbed the doctor's wrist and proceeded to drag him down the alley to the street.
With a twist of his wrist, Drakken managed to pull away from her grasp. "No, Shego, until you fill me in on exactly what is going on, I'm not moving from this spot!" He stomped the ground underneath him, squishing a small leaf under his heel, to emphasize his point. Shego fixed her eyes with his in a harsh glare, as if she was testing him. He faltered at first but returned her glare with intense determination. Minutes ticked off as the two squared off in complete silence, forcing themselves not to let up, not to blink, or twitch, or falter and be forced to consent to the other's will.
Finally, Shego relaxed her gaze and turned away. "Fine," she muttered. Drakken's mouth stretched into a smug grin of triumph. "You can just stay here."
And with a sharp turn Shego marched out into the street, leaving Drakken in the deserted alleyway, his smug grin twisted into a defeated frown. He had lost. "Aw, doodles!" he kicked a pebble against a wall and it ricocheted further down the alley and disappeared into the shadow of the building.
Drakken heard it clack against something metallic, and not a moment later, two small golden lights appeared casting an eerie orange glow about half a foot in diameter. The glow gave Drakken chills and he shuddered despite himself. The two lights were at least five and a half feet off the ground; they couldn't have been from a cat or some other animal. And whatever it was making the glow was very well concealed, as the sun was still out and the shadow should've been faint, yet nothing was distinguishable other than the orange orbs. "They look like eyes," Drakken thought to himself. The lights disappeared for a split second then came back, as if they were blinking. His heart skipped a beat. They were eyes!
"Is… is anyone there?" Drakken asked nervously, but the shadows gave no reply. "Hello? Anyone? Shego?" Saying the familiar name seemed reassuring to Drakken and he repeated it a little louder. "Shego?" Still no answer.
"She's just trying to play a trick on me," Drakken said to himself. "She's just getting back at me for following her." Somehow, the thought wasn't reassuring. Drakken bit his lower lip nervously. He hadn't moved from his designated spot and had no intention of moving, but the eyes, or whatever they were, seemed to be getting closer.
Something grabbed Drakken's shoulder, making him jump and let out a yelp. He whirled around, his arm whacking something in the process. He heard a familiar grunt followed by a "Watch it!"
Never in his life had Drakken been so relieved to see the green villainess glare at him, it almost didn't matter that she smacked him across the cheek as punishment for his clumsiness. After all, he knew from experience that getting zapped with her green glow was much worse.
"Now let's get out of here for real," Shego said, "and I mean it this time." She grabbed the collar of his shirt, rather than his wrist and started a second attempt at dragging her boss out of the alley.
"But Shego, the glowing eyes…"
"What glowing eyes?" She stopped instantly. Drakken turned his head and pointed, but the eyes were gone.
"They were right over there…" he whined in a tone that reminded Shego of a young child trying to explain to his parents that the monster was in his closet two seconds before the lights were turned on. Her green eyes darted to every shady corner, every dark part of the alley, scanning the area as thoroughly as she could without actually moving.
"There's nothing here, Dr. D," she said slowly, as if she hadn't quite convinced herself of that fact.
"But…"
"Nothing here!" she said, now clearly aggravated. "Do you want to go back to the lair, or do you want me to leave you here to search for your glowing yellow eyes that don't exist."
"Uh, the former," he replied meekly.
"Good, now let's go!" she released him and marched deliberately once more towards the open street. Drakken followed, soon taking the lead back to where the hover car was parked in a shelter of bushes on the edge of one of Paris' many small parks.
"You flew this over the Atlantic Ocean by yourself?" Shego asked in disbelief.
"Yes. I am perfectly capable of flying my own invention, Shego," he said. "And besides the only people left to fly it were the henchmen and… well, you know what they're like around controls."
Shego nodded; still vaguely impressed that Drakken could pull off such a journey. Flying across an ocean in a hover car was tricky business. Plenty of things could go wrong and there'd be no place to land. Shego was careful not to show her boss she was, however slightly, impressed with him, and jumped gracefully into the passenger seat.
"Well, then I guess you wouldn't mind flying us back while I get some rest," she said, collapsing the seat so it lay flat.
"I…suppose," Drakken said, looking somewhat perplexed. It wasn't like Shego to get tired so easily, or to take the backseat to anyone else, especially him.
"I've just had a rough night, that's all," Shego said, twisting in her seat till she found a comfortable position. "I need some rest."
Drakken tapped his fingers nervously against his seat as if he was debating something in his mind. Finally, he found the courage to speak. "Shego, you said you'd kill me if I came after you and…"
Shego popped one eye open and fixed it on the blue doctor. "I said you'd be a dead man, Drakken," she said with harsh deliberateness, "I didn't say by me."
"Oh," Drakken responded, still quite confused. Shego rolled over, facing her back towards him and signaling the conversation over. Drakken started up the hover car and it lifted slowly in the air. Though he didn't know it, Shego kept her eyes open the entire flight.
A/N: So, have I confused anyone yet? If I have I sincerely apologize. Hopefully it will make more sense once I have the rest of this thing written up. It seems to get longer and more complicated the more I work on it. Drat! Special thanks to those who reviewed (hugs) You guys just made my day.