"Betcha I can hit the bushes."
"No way! You'll hit the rocks before you hit the bushes."
A young girl looking to be no older than 12 gave the blonde boy next to her the evil eye. "Are you doubting the awesome that is La Chipacobra?"
The boy scrunched his face up. "Lachiwhat? I don't know what that is. I'm just saying that there's no way you can hit the bushes." He pointed over to the side of a white house that had bushes clinging to the soil next to the house, a bed of rocks covering the ground.
The brunette gave the boy a bland stare. "You really don't understand the idea of nicknames, do you Alan?"
"You're doing that thing again. That thing where you make me feel dumb just by looking at me."
She sighed. "Well, maybe if you would actually try to think…"
The blonde scowled, scratching his messy hair in irritation before shoving a rock in her hand. "Whatever. Just toss that so we know that I'm right."
"You're such a jerk sometimes," the girl grumbled as she stepped up to the curb.
"No curb, Chi!" Alan called, ignoring the fact that he was standing 2 feet from her.
"Yeah, yeah." The bells that she had attached to her shoes jingled as she hopped back down into the gutter. Bouncing the rock in her hand, she took a stance that looked to be a poor imitation of a baseball pitcher. "And here is your new player, Chi-Chi Monk! She winds up the ball…" she tensed her arm, preparing to throw "…and THERE IT GOES!"
Not even a second after she threw the rock a large blast came bursting out of the large, mountainous home behind them. Before they could smash into the side of the house with more force than the rock (which had gone past the rocks, past the bush, and through the dining room and living room of the house before bursting out the other side), they were snatched out of the air. Both children found themselves pressed into the patchy grass by someone who held them, cradling them protectively in her arms.
After a few moments of intense heat blowing over their heads, everything became still once more. Alan began to squirm the second everything returned to status quo, trying to wrestle his way from an annoyingly familiar grip. Once he felt the evil babysitter's arms take on a minor slack, he swung through the crook of her arm like a monkey and ran a few steps away to give some distance.
Narrowing his eyes, his voice became a pseudo-macho growl as he said, "Well well well. Look at who showed up. I thought I'd had you beat back in 2nd grade."
Chi-Chi waited for the young woman to let go of her before glaring at her companion. "I told you we shouldn't play outside with the resident loon being home! We could've been zapped into vegetables or something." The girl turned to their rescuer and smiled. "Thanks for saving us from the blasty ray thing."
"It's no big," the redheaded teen replied automatically. "I was just passing by." Jade eyes turned their attention from the girl to the boy, recognition flickering in the orbs. "Hm…oh!" she snapped her fingers. "You're Jack Daniels' son, Alan. Your dad knows my dad from work and asked a few favors when I was just starting my site."
The boy puffed his cheeks in irritation. "You sucked as a babysitter."
Ignoring the barb, Kim checked the children over. "Are both of you okay?"
"I'm okay," Chi-Chi replied as she began to wander over to the white house. "Where did it…?"
Alan kept his cheeks puffed. "You wouldn't let me play my games."
"You had a curfew AND you had played past your allowed time," Kim smoothly countered. "If you two are okay, I need to go and check on what did that." She had a pretty good idea who was responsible, or at the very least had it narrowed to two.
"It was just our mad science-y guy," the blonde replied, suddenly forgetting that he was peeved with his former sitter. "He gets worked up sometimes. I think that was the thing he puts up whenever the green lady tries to come in angry."
The heroine grimaced. 'That's probably going to be at least a room-wide mess. But knowing how angry Shego can get…'
"Stay out of trouble you two. And don't throw rocks at people's houses!" As Kim ran towards the lair-like house that had smoke trailing from an upper window, Alan went and rejoined his friend who was staring at the side of the house. He glanced around, trying to figure out what was so interesting, before he saw what had caught Chi-Chi's eye. Tentatively, he reached over the bushes as best he could and felt the hole that wasn't there before the blast. Even with the scratching of the branches on his arm distracting him he was able to tell that it went straight through at least as far as half his finger.
Growling, he withdrew his hand and picked up another rock from the bush bed. "Best two out of three!"
"Do you have the holo-Kim ready?" Tim asked his brother as he set up projectors around the living room.
"Almost," Jim responded as his fingers flew across the keyboard. "Still have an erroneous response whenever she tries to do anything that needs elevation."
"We don't have time to fix it!" the red clad preteen proclaimed as he set the last of the holographic devices up. "And we can only sustain the holo-Kim in here." Crossing his arms in frustration, he added, "We wouldn't even have this problem if Wade would just share his holo-Kim."
"He just wants to spoil our fun," his twin grumbled in agreement. The two of them jumped to attention when they heard a car pull into their driveway. "She's here!" They rushed to clean up the living room, Tim grabbing the portable drive and hooking it into his laptop while Jim took the numerous electrical devices and desktop and, by some miracle, balanced them all in his arms as he ran up the stairs. He managed to not-so-delicately toss them on his bed before running back downstairs.
The twin in red began running the program, doing a quick check to make sure that the projectors were all connected to the system. A few seconds later the projectors silently whirred to life. Kim's visage suddenly flashed into existence in triplicate, a yellow, blue, and red Kim all standing in a relaxed battle stance before they blended together into a perfect imitation of their older sister, down to some samples of the clothes in her closet.
A knock sounded through the house, panicking Tim. He hadn't gotten to test or calibrate the vocal commands! Sighing in regret, he reluctantly started to input the commands for a relaxed, easygoing stance.
Jim raced down the stairs, jumping down the last few with joy-filled abandon before stumbling into the door. He chuckled in slight embarrassment as he opened it to let their guest in.
"Heya Tweedle 1. You seen Kim? Got a call from my girl that there was a major fashion disaster that needs fixed ASAP." The green-clad twin directed the dark-skinned young woman to the living room where the holo-Kim stood and greeted her with a faintly eerie smile.
"Mo-Monique! Good. To. See. You!" the holographic image stuttered, the image around the mouth flickering jerkily to try and fit the words.
"…GF?" Monique said, her eyes fixing on the holo-Kim's feet.
"What. Is. Up. Girl?"
"You're hovering."
The false girl beamed at Kim's friend. "Why. Thank. You."
"No, I mean you're actually hovering," Monique amended, pointing down to the fake's feet. The two boys, who were desperately trying to act normal, looked down at the doppleganger's feet to see she was standing several inches above the floor. Tim panicked and latched on to the first excuse he could think of.
"...Wade. Is. Trying? Something. New. Out!"
One of the young woman's eyebrows rose skeptically. "Uh-huh. And that TBTBT outfit you're wearing isn't part of it?"
"TBTBT?" Jim asked against his better judgment.
"Too Bad To Be True," she supplied. "Nice try kids, but that ain't my BGF." Counting each point off with a finger, Monique continued, "Even when hyped up on sugar, caffeine, and adrenaline, she doesn't go off like someone that took a dip in the Arctic, the girl is way too straight-laced to ever test TTMEWEP in her parent's house, and" she shuddered in revulsion "there is NO WAY she would ever mix plaid and vertical stripes. She's a fellow worshipper at Coco Banana's feet and that's an unforgivable sins."
"Uh?" both of the boys said in unison.
"Things That May Explode With Extreme Prejudice." Monique gave the nearest twin a slightly condescending yet playful pat on the head before pausing and adding, "I never needed that acronym until I met you guys."
"Aww man," Tim grumbled as he despondently turned the projection off. The vaguely off-looking Kim shimmered out of existence.
"We thought for sure that would work," Jim sighed as he sat down next to his twin.
"What exactly were you trying to accomplish with that? Just trying out a new toy?"
"I'm not sure we—"
"We're getting a new brother!" Jim interrupted his twin. As Tim glared at his twin's careless release of information, Monique did her best to process the new tidbit.
New baby? Nah, Kim would've told her if that was it.
Opposite sex clone? That would be a lot of fun, but she was sure that Kim had mentioned once that the henchman company took care of the wayward clones.
Someone from an alternate dimension? That would explain why Kim wasn't here. Though the twins would probably be more excited about seeing themselves from said dimension than a new brother.
Adoption? She chuckled at the absurd thought. Who in this neighborhood would actually adopt?
Stumped, Monique shrugged. "NITK. Any chance of getting details?"
"Not In The Know, right?" Jim guessed.
Monique smiled and affirmed with "You're learning!"
Hesitantly, Tim said, "Well, he's a teenager from what we know."
A teenage boy? Under the same roof as Mr. 'my little Kimmie-cub must not be touched by mortal man' Possible? How in the world had anyone convinced him to let that happen?
"What?" the twins asked in unison.
Monique flinched as she realized that the last part actually came out of her mouth.
"Just wondering how anyone managed to convince Papa Bear to drop the boy-proof cage he built."
"Oh." Tim scratched his head. "Sis gave him a huge guilt trip."
"We couldn't have done it any better ourselves," Jim said with no small amount of pride.
"She pull the Rapunzel argument on him?" the dark-skinned woman asked.
"No…" both twins trailed.
"…do you two even know who Rapunzel is?" she queried as she saw the boys' brows furrow.
"He's the imp—"
"—that stole the baby's golden goose."
"Right?" they finished in unison.
Monique began to rub her head, fighting off what she felt was an oncoming headache from the painful reminder that fairy tales being read to children at bedtime was becoming a dying tradition. "Nevermind. So she guilt tripped him into letting a guy stay here. Did he hit the poor kid with his car or something?"
"Nah," said Tim.
"Dad owes him from being a jerk during college," Jim finished.
Pause. Reprocess. Gears grinding…and stuck. "Your dad was a jerk to a baby."
"No, they went to college together," the boys said at the same time.
"…okay…" Monique turned around and began walking out of the room.
"Where are you going?" Jim asked.
"You boys just hit my weirdness censor's limit," Monique said as she reached the door leading outside. "I can just wait to get filled in. Gonna go get some brain bleach and do somethin' normal, like shopping. Good luck with whatever you were doing."
"But wait! We—"
*WHAM*
Before Jim could try and convince her to stay, Monique had opened the door and closed it a bit harder than necessary.
Jim sighed and wandered over to the couch. The twin brothers listened to Monique drive away in silence.
"So what do we do now?" asked Tim as he shut his computer down.
"I don't—" he stopped himself short as he looked at his twin. "We were just going to get him some brotherly garb to make him feel like part of the family, weren't we?"
"Yeah," his brother said with a shrug. "So?"
"Well…we just need bigger versions of our clothes, right?"
"Growth ray?" Tim asked with a touch of excitement.
"I was thinking more conscripting some of dad's clothes into the effort. Remember his attempts to be our third twin when he was going through his 'I'm too old' phase?"
"Which was wrong in its basest form. How can you have a third twin?"
"I'm sure if we'd let Dad keep going that day he would've found a way," Jim remarked. "Anyway, do you know anything about dyeing?"
"Nope." A pause. "Do you?"
"Not in the least!" Jim declared. "Let's just grab some stuff from the garage and throw it in the washer. Mom always seems to think that all our clothes will turn brown if they're washed together right away."
"I guess that's better than nothing," his twin uttered before hopping off the couch. "This does mean we'll have to operate the washer."
"You mean operate on," the boy in green corrected. "I'm sure we can get that thing to wash clothes in one minute or less if we try."
"Why did I leave them here alone?" Kim asked herself for the fourth time as she ran through the halls in the lair looking for the two teenage boys she left together. She knew that she had told them to stay in the same room, but how in the world could they have caused an explosion like that in a room filled with junk? Of course, considering who she had left alone together… "Couldn't I have sent them for ice cream or something? Or maybe on a sightseeing tour? SOMETHING better than leaving them in a lair full of weapons of massive doom!"
Giving up on looking in every room for them and deciding to just start where they were last she saw, the redhead mentally sighed. No, she couldn't have let them leave. While Ron was a dear friend to her, his judgment wasn't the best in even the most ideal conditions. He probably would have just dragged Drew off to Bueno Nacho which would probably be too much of a culture shock all on its own, let alone what they would've seen on the way there…
"What's that?" Drew asked, pointing at a large construct.
"That is a radio tower. If you get into a position to threaten people, you can totally use that to give your demands," Ron said, strolling along on his way to Bueno Nacho with the blue boy in toll.
"And that?"
"That's a car," the blonde rattled off, completely oblivious to anything but his stomach. "You drive around in them and, occasionally, redesign them to be vehicles of mass destruction."
The bespectacled boy frowned. "They didn't use to be that quiet back in my day." He paused. "What's that?"
"That is a toaster. It toasts toast."
"Hmm…" Drew hummed out loud. He slipped away quietly as Ron whistled the theme song from the Bueno Nacho commercials.
Several hours later, Ron was enjoying his tenth order of Grande Supreme Quesadillas with Mini-Nacos as he watched Drew from inside the hat-shaped building. "You look like you're doing great!" he tried to yell through the glass. "Keep playing; you'll totally make great friends like that."
"Mmmm, Nacos," Rufus chittered before tossing several into his mouth.
Outside, Drew had somehow constructed a large toaster-shaped tank out of a few cars, a toaster, the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer, and a set of braces.
"The world shall be mine! Bwahaha—HACK!" The boy coughed a few times before muttering, "Shouldn't chew gum while gloating." Then he pulled a lever and shot high-speed toast out of the cannon on the top of his attack toaster…
Kim shuddered at the unwanted scenario that her brain had played out for her. Yeah, leaving them here was a good idea. Ron had helped to make enough supervillains in his time. Having him try to explain things to a was-a-future-villain would probably be a disaster.
Of course, that didn't ease the heavy weight in her gut that told her something went wrong.
It took only a few minutes of running through the lair to make it back to the large familiar room where Drakken usually pulled off his grand schemes. What she found was a strangely nostalgic sight to her veteran world-saving eyes.
"A McHenry laser grid?" she wondered to herself. The lasers sat in their predominantly random pattern, the red flashing a warning to anyone that would even consider trying to get through. "Why would Drakken…OH! Right…" Kim muttered, "the angry Shego deterrents. I guess this would be hard to get through without focus." A determined smile crossed her face. "This should be fun."
The redheaded hero took a deep breath and allowed herself a few side-to-side stretches before launching herself into the mass of deadly beams. As she landed on her hands while doing a split, she looked ahead of her to see her margin of error. It was a comfortable amount. A few inches to be able to catch her balance were plenty. She flipped forward, making sure to keep herself on her tiptoes to prevent stepping on the laser just under her left foot. A quick ballet step and a few leaps, culminating in a quick wall-jump over the massive clump of lasers that seemed to be the last line of defense, were all that were needed to clear the entire defense system.
Smiling in satisfaction, she continued down the corridor that she had gone down with the boys earlier. A minute later found her in front of the junk lab's door. Stopping for a few seconds to catch her breath, she prepared herself for any sort of possible damage that could have happened while she was gone, up to and including a possible invasion by some sort of extra-dimensional demon.
Kim pushed the door open button and secretly thanked goodness that the door didn't automatically lock when she left. A wince escaped her as the doors opened almost as noisy as could be possible, granting her entrance.
She took a few tentative steps into the room before she saw something that was managing to rank high on her own personal weirdness scale.
There, in the middle of a goo-splattered room sat a gigantic attack robot. Its head looked like it would have scraped the ceiling and, looking up, saw that it had. She couldn't figure out how it was still fitting into the room when she realized that it wasn't. Part of its torso and its arm hung outside of the room, the massive body having broken down the rocky barrier with ease. Looking out through the hole she saw Middleton Wood—or, at least, what had been the city's small forest. Where once stood a large cropping of trees now stood a large charred field of burnt and burning piles of wood.
The various partly broken and mostly trashed devices that had been strewn throughout the room were now little more than piles of charcoal and rubbish. Some were still smoldering from having been aflame less than an hour ago. Kim couldn't help but double-take at some piles that looked to have been cut up, stomped, and then crushed into oblivion.
The weirdest part, though, was seeing Drew, Rufus, and Ron all sitting around a small green fire, roasting marshmallows like they did it every day.
Kim stood, watching the scene in a sort of way that a man who used a valet service watches the valet ram his car repeatedly into a wall. This is what she gets for leaving these two alone.
Rufus noticed the heroine's arrival and picked up a small stick that was pre-prepped with an uncooked marshmallow. "Hnck! 'mellow yum!" the mole rat declared in a chipper tone.
Make that three.
A/N:
Yay for an actual update! \o/ Whoo~ My muse is so cranky... No shipping fun, but there is silliness abound. I have no fashion sense, so I had to ask a few people what styles would clash.
I really enjoyed writing this chapter once I got started after nearly two dozen false starts over the last nearly two years (thanks to metamochara for the still-hopeful review they left; I actually started writing the chapter once I got the review figuring it'd be another exercise in frustration but I actually made progress, finishing this about 2 days after I started). Also thanks to all the rest of you that still continue looking in on the story even after such a long time without an update and give reviews, unsure if I actually read them. I do, by the way. Thanks for them all!
Also, thanks to fallin brick blues and kgs-wy for looking at the chapter to make sure I wasn't totally off my rocker when I wrote it.
PS: Those of you who are VERY observant...no, the time it took to get back is NOT wrong. Kim was gone a whole hour and somehow the boys did not die. Where did she go? Why don't you take a stab in the dark? :P
