Way 13
Leave your watch and daytimer on your desk sometimes.
Trying to take down International Rescue at the same time as you are attempting to get your hands on the secrets that make their Thunderbirds go, is a bitch.
What's even worse, is that he's decided to finally get himself into a…he squeezes his eyes shut as though in physical pain…relationship. So he ditches the whole To Do list (every one of which's twenty items, by the way, starts with 'Get International Rescue…") and focuses every bit of his attention not on stealing secrets and taking down the Tracys, but on finding a woman.
Not because he particularly feels the need to be 'in love' or any such nonsense, but simply for the sake of having an heir. A legal heir. He searches the world high and low for two years before finally settling upon a female with the characteristics he desires.
From there on out it is simply a matter of mesmerizing her to do his will. Easy enough. What? Why are you looking at him like that, he wants to know. This is how he does things because he really doesn't know any better.
The problem with that whole scenario, is that the woman is then unable to conceive while under his spell, and who knew, right? So then he has to undo the whole eye-control thing (no, they don't glow, that is nothing more than a special effect for television, got it?), put the woman back where she came from, and go at it in a more…traditional way.
He is a little mystified initially as to why the whole order-her-to-marry-me approach doesn't work with the next one. He winds up having to find yet another female, and settles for the one who'd been third down on the list from the start.
And he is realizing he barely knows what day it is anymore, because all of this is seriously eating into his 'Get International Rescue' time, dammit. Oh, how he longs for the days he used to sit at his desk plotting their demise.
He sighs again.
With the third female, he does a little better. He actually asks her out on a date, and doesn't try to abscond with her until afterward when he is supposedly dropping her off back at her place. Unfortunately, she's wearing heels and he leaves the house's front stoop doubled over and in a ridiculous amount of pain.
Once recovered (some four hours later), he phones his second-in-command to seek his counsel, and is promptly given the rundown on something called 'wooing.' It sounds stupidly infantile to him, but he is assured by Chang that it will indeed be the best course of action should he actually want a woman to remain with him of her own free will.
"Free will? What the hell is that? I don't do what anyone tells me to do, and everyone else that isn't me does what I tell them to do. What is this free will of which you speak?"
Chang tells him it will work.
And so he goes to the fourth female on the list, and she actually seems to like him – a concept with which he is wholly unfamiliar – to the point where he cracks a smile.
This wooing business is dangerous to his mental health, he decides. He can turn on the charm like nobody's business, but for hours at a time? Ugh.
At any rate, he follows through on Chang's instructions, and after six weeks of 'dates' to such irritable destinations as a museum, a park and…heaven help him…a movie theater, he decides he's had enough of the wooing.
So he buys the biggest, most expensive and ostentatious ring he can find, and tells the woman to marry him and join him in Malaysia.
She actually does. Ha, easier than Chang made it sound, right?
Not so much.
He leans forward in his gilded throne, elbows digging into his thighs, and rubs his temples. He's been putting a lot of thought lately into whether having an heir is worth this…this…aggravation is a good word. Because—
"BELAH!"
His head snaps up, eyes wide and round. Any other person, he would've killed. But she is loved by all the slaves in his temple, all those who work for him, and she is pregnant with his children.
You heard that right. Plural. Twins.
Twin…girls.
He'd been after a son! An heir! Someone to carry on his heinous acts when he finally got caught with his foot in Death's door.
But no.
What he gets instead: a high maintenance wife, and two infant females due in two months. Which means that Giselle probably wants a burger smothered with ice cream right about now and you know what? When you're in the Malaysian jungle, neither a Baskin Robbins nor a Burger King is easy to get to, okay?
So he does what men for thousands of years before his time, and men of the future would still undoubtedly do thousands of years from now: he runs.
"BELAH!"
Her voice fades behind him as he flees into the jungle, two guards quickly flanking him as they always do when he leaves the confines of his haven.
Correction: his former haven.
He wonders, as they lose themselves under the too-green canopy just as the light starts to wan, what the eternal penalty is for doing in your wife and kids. And suddenly understands why men actually do that.
He has to face facts here. He really isn't cut out to be a husband or a father. Because three squalling, wailing, demanding females, and he'll be on a bullet train to the nearest demonic dimension, happily signing over his soul for eternity. He knows this deep in his bones.
And that is how, ultimately, International Rescue catches the Hood and puts him in jail and out of their lives forever, because Giselle?
Well, when he informs her he is seeking a divorce, she goes nuts, tells every press agency from Kuala Lumpur to New York who he is, and the next thing he knows, Scott Tracy is hovering over the temple in Thunderbird 1 with a whole shitload of missiles ready to fire and when the hell had they armed that bird with that many teeth, anyway?
All in all, he decides prison is a much better deal than a family, hands-down. Besides, between the broken wooden spoon handle and the little coil of spring from his metal cot, he's working on an escape plan, which will be closely followed by a permanent face change and a new identity so the evil mother of his equally evil daughters never finds him.
He just hopes Giselle and the brats remember to feed his favorite dragon while he is behind bars…for the next five hundred and fourteen years…
Way 14
Make a meal for your family.
Scott can cook!
As long as no heat is involved, that is.
Virgil is an excellent chef!
If you don't mind spending half a day cleaning up after he's through.
John is smart enough to not even volunteer for the job.
Gordon makes a mean bowl of cereal, and has been known to not burn toast on occasion.
The real surprise, and of course source of endless teasing for the youngest Tracy (like those damnable older brothers of his need more ammunition, thanks much) is that Alan can cook.
With heat.
Without a mess.
And he volunteers to on a regular basis.
And? He never burns toast.
So Tin-Tin gloms onto him like he's the second coming of Christ and that has the unfortunate (in his brothers' eyes, of course) result of Alan acting like he's the second coming of Christ, and really, they have no right to complain when they not only eat his meals, but eat so much of the food at each sitting, that there are never leftovers!
Plus Kyrano gets to go on vacation, finally.
Leaving his daughter alone on the island with Alan.
And the other boys, of course, but hey, they're well-bred men with good manners and they don't go dipping in another man's honey pot, okay?
So while this is something Alan is grateful for, for the duration of Kyrano's vacation, at least, he quickly learns (the hard way) the one truth that he now understands his poor father was trying to get through his thick blond skull for so many years. What truth is that, you ask? Quite simply put: If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Now, Alan miserably understands that 'heat' means the reactions of both Jeff and Kyrano when he and Tin-Tin announce they've sort of made an 'oops' that is going to result in both men's first grandchild.
And all because of cooking.
Alan decides two things right then and there: he is never going to cook again.
Oh, the second thing?
Well, once Tin-Tin hears the first thing, she threatens to remove a very important part of his anatomy.
So the second thing he decides is that he will continue to cook for her and their kid…and the entire family, by way of a continuous apology for, like, the rest of his life.
So now he knows why Scott doesn't do heat.
And why Virgil is such a mess.
And why John just doesn't even go there.
And why Gordon limits his options to cereal and quasi-burnt toast that nobody else wants.
Why couldn't his father have just told him what would happen if he cooked? Why?
Jeff will swear to his dying day that he did not answerthat question with, "Well, I had to get grandkids somehow."
