Disclaimer: if it was on TV, it's not mine. Soundtrack for this chapter: Only Chaos is Real by Heldon; Pawn Hearts by Van der Graaf Generator; Byzantine by Vermicelli Orchestra, Inception s/t by Hans Zimmer.


Hank Perkins, surrounded by his retinue of guards, had just entered Cell Block Seventeen when Vitali Raikh, head of Psychometrics, stopped him. He disliked hearing from the diminutive, bespectacled man; Raikh never interrupted him unless there was trouble.

The worry on Raikh's features revealed that this was no exception.

"Comrades," said Perkins, "wait for me at the door of their cell. I will join you momentarily. Comrade Raikh has some information for me."

The guards marched down the hall; Perkins turned to the gnomish man. "Make it fast, Comrade."

"Leader," he began, "you must be aware of the dissent and discord your pet atom-bomb is generating among the comrades. They are beginning to have second thoughts about the entire action plan. All the bonus incentives and Oz Principles in the world won't fix that."

He shook his head in disgust. "Qua-Czar found us, we didn't find him. And without him, we wouldn't have found the time tilting device. We'd still be working on long-range infiltration and subliminal subterfuge. It might take decades to do what we'll achieve in one lightning moment."

"Last night, seven men took a minisub and defected."

"Who told you that?"

Raikh gave no answer. "That would have been unthinkable six months ago."

"Some people are naturally worrywarts."

"Worrywhats?"

"Never mind. I think you exaggerate the comrades' distress."

"They may alert Global Justice to our presence here."

"Oh, I'm sure they'll remain silent. They're loyal to the Union, if not to the plan." He smiled. Stanislav in Observation had informed him immediately of the problem. It was unfortunate; there were truly some good men on board the sub. But business is business. And there was a very good reason he alone knew that every submarine was fitted with self-destruct mechanisms.

Solving that had been as simple as clicking a switch. Seven less dental programs and retirement packages to concern the Accountants' Union. Getting to the root of the problem would be a lot more difficult. That's what Raikh should have been doing, not filling him in on the obvious.

The Leader scowled.

Raikh wasn't finished. "That isn't the worst of it."

Perkins sighed. "Thrill me."

"Qua-Czar himself is degenerating."

"You don't know what you're talking about, Raikh. He's indestructible. According to Shchedrin's people, his consciousness now extends to a subatomic level. The Conservation of Matter and Energy Law –"

"Don't turn a blind eye to the obvious, Leader. Mentally he is crumbling. This religious mania –"

"Curiosity. Yes, it's annoying, but it is what it is."

"And the sadism, Leader? The hair-trigger desire to destroy? That annoys you also?"

He refused to give Raikh the satisfaction of being correct. "He was Spetsnaz. Vympel division. They're trained to be hardcore."

"Under the Spetsnaz training, under the, aah, religious curiosity, under the nuclear transformation, a human mind is trapped. And he is trapped, believe me. Almost all the normal sensations are gone. It must be like living in an isolation tank. He is only truly alive when he is taking life."

"When the time tilter comes online, we'll put his destructive ways to excellent use. Not only will the Union never crumble, but it will become the dominant force on earth. We will do what Drakken, Dementor, all the others could never accomplish. The world will be ours. With a weapon like him, unstoppable, virtually immortal, dedicated to his country –"

"And to his Leader?"

"Yes, and to his Leader. He knows he doesn't have the vision for such a far-reaching business model. He's no world dominator. He's a soldier, a willing tool for the man in power. There will be no rebellion from Andrei Dmitrye –"

The lights flickered, flashed, went out. The emergency generators kicked in, exactly as designed; the dimmer but perfectly acceptable emergency lighting came up. Whatever Possible and her goofy pals had done, he could undo. All contingencies had been planned for. He was no Dr. D. Unlike the Ray-X fiasco, unlike the gourmet cupcake debacle, this business venture could not be inopportunely terminated.

"L-Leader! Look!"

Raikh was pointing at something behind him, something beyond the bullet-proof, reinforced observation window. Blue highlights coloured his horrified features.

The Leader turned to behold the buildings and warehouses of the North Quadrant silhouetted against flashing cerulean light, emanating from somewhere not far away.

Somewhere close to Stoppable's cell.


"I offered to take you to your comrades," said Andrei Dmitryevich Asafiev, shaking aside the rubble of the wall he'd been flung through. Men and women fled the area in terror, shouting their panic in a language Ron didn't know. "But it can never be easy with you people, can it? "

"I'll find my comrades on my own." Ron's ch'i formed abstract simian shapes as it blazed around him. Why won't he stay down, he thought. I don't want to – to do something I'll regret later. "And then you can say da svendaniya to your little Nazi playhouse."

"Communist! Not Nazi! We are Communists!"

"Potato, potahto. It's all coming down."

"That will not be allowed," shouted Andrei Asafiev, and attacked once more, still clad in the radiation suit. "Apparently the Leader's shoes no longer fit."

"What?"

"It's a metaphor." Asafiev delivered a lethal uppercut, only to see his opponent nimbly dodge the blow. "Why must you make this difficult? Simply surrender." Two more punches also missed their target, smashing the stone wall behind Ron. The young man was as fluid as quicksilver.

"Sounds more like a simile." An instant later the radioactive man was slammed against yet another wall, this one less yielding than the last, and battered unmercifully, if futilely. "And surrender isn't in my vocabulary. Well, actually it is, but I'm not –"

With a feral roar Asafiev kicked his opponent away, regained his footing. "You defeated the Lorwardians through surprise. Treachery. But I know all your tricks, you Lucifer. You have ever lost the battle against God's anointed!"

"If we have to talk religion, you're gonna haveta let me call the rabbi." Ron leaped into the air, high above the Russian, and hurtled downward with all the force of Mystical Monkey Power concentrated in his open palm, a technique that could pulverize granite.

At the last microsecond his opponent dodged, caught his outstretched arm, and spinning, used the velocity of his own meteoric descent to fling him into the side of a building. Brick and mortar exploded in a cloud of debris.

Ron staggered out, bruised, tasting blood. If not for the protective power of his aura, he would have been defeated by a simple jiu-jitsu maneuver, so basic he'd never considered it.

Despite the increase in his skill and abilities, there was still a lot to learn at Yamanouchi.

Before he could catch his breath, Qua-Czar pressed the attack.


The emergency lights came up to reveal the heavy metal door torn from its facings, still hanging in a network of vines. Drakken grinned wildly. "Pretty good, don't you think?"

The trio bolted from the room.

"Gotta get out of this building," Kim warned. They'd left her the Battlesuit, but taken the Kimmunicator from her wrist. There would be no quick getaway route from Wade. "They can't use their gas if we get outside."

A phalanx of black-clad guards were storming down the hallway.

"I'm guessin'," Shego began, "those guys are here to stop us." Before she could fling the first plasma blast, twelve thickly blossoming vines snaked past her, wrapped themselves around their adversaries and flung them unceremoniously down the hall.

Some of them stayed where they fell; a few staggered to their feet and ran away.

Shego powered down, favored her husband with a glare as they continued to run down the endless halls, looking for a door, a window, a vent big enough to climb through. "I could have handled it."

"So could I." He had a wild grin on his face, a mad light in his eyes. "I never realized how much fun all this fighting could be."

"That's because you were always on the losing end," said Kim, running.

"Hrrph! I did just fine against Warhok and Warmonga."

"And you're doing fine here. You should have reformed a long time ago. See, the good guys always win," she finished, wishing she was as confident as she sounded. Just beyond the next corner, flickering blue light tinted the walls, a colour Kim immediately recognized. She redoubled her pace. "Come on. We're going this way."

"Gotta go do a boyfriend rescue," Shego muttered, not completely under her breath. "That's just so typical."

The disdain in her voice was withering, but Drakken gave no response. He remembered a woman lying in a hospital bed, almost dead, surrounded by hostile GJ men and unknowingly lethal physicians. He remembered a man who risked everything he had to save her.

And he smiled a small, knowing smile. Not every good deed in life went acknowledged, and love was its own reward.

The trio rounded the corner and found themselves facing, not Ron, but a small, spectacled tortoise of a man and a taller, immaculately dressed individual, both standing before a large observation window through which the distant blue flashing could be seen.

Kim recognized the taller man immediately, despite the Lenin-esque goatee he'd grown since the last time she'd encountered him. At last the name came back to her.

"Hank Perkins!" she cried.

"She does that too," said Drakken, sotto voce, to his wife, who simply nodded.

The tortoise, despite his appearance, bolted down the hall, darted out the exit. Perkins was right behind him, shouting orders into his pocket communicator as he ran. "Tomasek! Cell block seventeen! Cleanup in aisle twenty-three!" The door slammed; none of them doubted it was locked. Gas began to spray from hidden nozzles overhead.

Shego's power suddenly flared into life; with a snarl she shattered the shatterproof window into a thousand shards, leaped through. "Come on!"

Her companions needed no convincing, Kim following her with a powerful jump, Drakken slowly lowering himself with a vine, a nervous spider spinning a leafy green thread.

"That's Ron," Kim said, eyes narrowing in the flashing blue light. "Let's go."

As they ran toward the cobalt aura, it was suddenly contaminated with an ugly, poisonous green glow.


They warily circled each other, mongoose and cobra, the older man's radiation suit torn and tattered, the younger man bloodied and bruised, but still savagely intent on victory. Asafiev was impressed in spite of himself. This combination of the Monkey Technique with the Axe-Fist was both unpredictable and brutal, far more dangerous than Shego's expert but mundane fighting skills. He was very much aware that any mere human being, even one with superior Spetsnaz training, would have already fallen to Stoppable's onslaught.

But he hadn't, of course. It was time to end this farce. The Leader would just have to accept it.

He yanked off the gloves, the mask, the cowl. Doubled, tripled his output. The bilious green luminescence, nothing like the emerald sparkle of Shego's plasma blasts, mixed repellently with the clear blue light of tai sheng pek kwar. Hands outstretched, he advanced on Ron. "You have been God's own favorite, Stoppable, and yet you tempt His grace, defy His will. Your fate is your own doing. Do not blame me before the judgment seat."

"You'll excuse me," he said, springing forward, seizing his adversary and spinning him over his head, regardless of the danger, "if I don't make that trip tonight." A blinding blue-white flash heralded Asafiev's impromptu launch as Ron catapulted the bellowing, cursing man into the air with all his might.

A similar move had destroyed the Lorwardians and their spacecraft, all those years ago, but he was sure this would only delay the radioactive man. Buy enough time to find Kim and get the coordinates of this Soviet loonybin to Global Justice.

That was the plan.

Reality proved very different.

To Ron's astonishment, his enemy suddenly flared up in his trajectory like an eerie green comet and plummeted back to earth. The ground shook with his impact, shattering the omnipresent tarmac, but Asafiev was up again in an instant and charging on Ron, his boots sinking into the ground with every thunderous step. The green glow was clearly visible, casting shadows on the buildings around them.

A wave of nausea swept over Ron, leaving a sick, shuddering weakness in its terrible wake. He tried to hide it.

Asafiev smiled. The green glow intensified; sirens across the base began to wail in terror, radiation detectors sensing danger. Workers, soldiers, comrades of all ranks and genders fled toward the submarine bay, knowing what those howling sirens meant. The Leader had them installed some time before, when the Scientists' Union had finally decided what Comrade Qua-Czar was.

The Leader was a great believer in preventive maintenance.

"Get out of there," yelled someone, somewhere above Ron. "He's increasing the reaction – increasing mass." It was Drakken's familiar nasal growl; Ron dizzily spotted him leaning over the edge of the roof of a nearby storage building. "You can't fight that!"

Asafiev was almost upon him, raising fists that were heavier than lead as he came in for the kill.

"QUA-CZAR!" thundered Hank Perkins' amplified voice from speakers throughout the complex. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I ORDER YOU TO STAND DOWN!"

If the radioactive man heard the voice, he ignored it. Perhaps he paused just a moment. And in that moment a lithe figure swung down on a wire, swept up the young man and swung to safety on the roof of another building. Asafiev bellowed his fury at them. "Rescued by your woman? You are weak, Lucifer! The Leader loses nothing if I destroy both of you!"

On the roof, Ron stumbled away from Kim, threw out his hands to keep her away. "Stay back –"

"R - Ron, what is it?" she heard herself stammer, though she already knew what the answer must be.

"I'm contaminated –" He staggered; heedless of his warning, she caught him as he fell, eased him down.

This can't be happening, she thought. Ron can beat anyone. Anything. He's the Chosen One.

But the chosen one was covered in sweat, barely conscious.

Below them, Qua-Czar stalked toward the building, their shelter, deaf to the continued commands of his Leader, when a shout stopped him in his tracks.

"Hey, glow boy."

He knew that voice.

The radioactive man turned to behold the woman he thought he'd killed standing nonchalantly before him, a confident smile on her lips, an evil fire in her eyes. She held up a hand aflame with emerald energy.

"Why waste your time with them? I'm here." She motioned to him. " Let's dance."