28. Next time you run across somebody else's windfall and pocket it for yourself, buy the items necessary for your evil plan before the. . . uh. . . supplementary ones. (And, no matter what Shego says, there will be a next time!)

Drakken kicks a board off his belly and coughs from the smoke. He can hardly stand to look around. He knows this scene like the back of his hand - no, better, since the backs of his hands are encased in gloves the majority of the time.

Broken glass flung everywhere. Boards fried to a crisp, falling over. The frameworks of once-proud Doomsday devices lifeless in the corner, if they were fortunate enough to still be recognizable.

Operational Catastrophic Doom just blew itself up. In a big way.

How? Oh, what are the odds that I'm dreaming this?

Across the room that's no longer there, he sees Shego straighten up and slap at a streak of soot on her cheek. "Colossal. Waste. Of. Money." She lets each word drop with a plink, and her face scrunches as if she just stepped right into a cow patty.

Probably somewhere in the seventh decimal place.

Drakken stabs a finger in her direction, hoping the anger behind it can somehow reach her and gives her a good shaking. "Shego!" he barks. "No Iceland for you!"

Before she can retort that he doesn't have an Iceland to give her, he stalks away into the rubble, avoiding those eyes - accusatory eyes that sneer that Drakken fooled away all that money every bit as badly as Stoppable.

Which he didn't.

Okay, so there was that digital shoehorn. But mostly that was just because the batteries weren't included.

The landscape is flat and brown in every direction, all the way to the edges. Empty as a vacuum. Ordinarily, solitude and bleakness are an evil genius's best friends. That, however, was before Drakken found new friends - kids in too-big basketball jerseys and hats you could make sand castles in, who followed him around and cheered on his every purchase, the more extravagant the better.

Only that was when Kim Possible raided his haunted-island lair, and Drakken had to make a daring escape, and he didn't have time to snatch them up. He didn't even have time to snatch himself up - Shego did that for him, throwing on her jetpack and grabbing his wrist and swooshing the two of them off into the sky, while Drakken's palms grew slipperier than they probably should have. Drakken loves shooting through the air on his own jetpack, but to dangle from someone else's grip, no control over where they went or how, must be how it feels to be a character in a video game, at the mercy of whoever operates the joystick. And even though that person was the most skilled player on Earth, it was still frightening.

So now the atmosphere is empty of adoring cheers, the landscape a bleak void. It matches the feeling within Drakken, the feeling that reminds him of Kim Possible's belly button becoming a vortex. He is now alone - alone with Shego, his henchmen, and the ruins of Operation Catastrophie Doom! which was never meant to be ruined at all.

Everything inside Drakken wants to collapse in the middle and wail. But he must be made of sterner stuff than that. Like that diamond.

Yes, the diamond. He'll think about its physical properties until he comes back together again. Hardest substance on Earth. Ten on the hardness scale. Too hard to leave an identifying streak on the streak test, which isn't much of a problem because even a twit like Kim Possible's best friend knows a diamond when he sees one. Only thing hard enough to scratch it is another diamond.

Like Kim Possible and Shego, Drakken thinks, a bit of ruefulness peeking through his anger. They are the only ones sharp enough to scratch each other. That must be why so many things get broken when they fight. . .

And deep, deep, deep down, Drakken is afraid he's no more than a nine-and-a-half on the hardness scale.

The ruefulness disappears, hurled away by a swirl of rage. Drakken growls out loud, grabs a half-blackened board that has come to rest on his feet, and sends it flying toward that stupid moon that refused to cooperate with him. He's not actually expecting the board to hit the moon and knock its orbit off - it'd be destroyed tearing through the atmosphere, anyway - but he's also not expecting it to flip a meager five inches away. Which is exactly what it does, landing with a dry thwap, leather against fence posts.

Gnnnngggk!

Drakken pictures the diamond again, sitting at a fit finally perfect inside the laser's powering compartment. He remembers turning smugly to the buffoon and nodding in its direction. "Pretty bling-bling, huh?" he said.

His lip recoiling, the boy shook his head. "No. Not anymore. Not now that you've said that."

The boy is not a complete twit. He at least recognizes he is unworthy to use the same terminology as the legendary Dr. Drakken!

It's then that Drakken notices he has permitted his body to slouch, too close to the ground. He can feel Shego's eyes stamping disapproval on his back, as if there is something uneven to the hang of his arms.

Well, how is a person supposed to stand after gaining and losing a massive fortune in the span of forty-eight hours? One minute Drakken was online shopping, and he was able to hit the shopping cart icon over and over and over again, without ever second-guessing himself, and his pulse was banging on his temples from the inside, only it didn't hurt at all. Surrounding him were a crowd of friends, urging him onward.

Then he was flying through the air like a video-game character, and then he was paying for a makeshift lair and more Doomsday devices, and then he was waiting for the sun to go down and the moon to appear so that he could set Operation Catastrophic Doom! into action. The henchmen watched the sunset, appreciated it, but Drakken was bouncing on his heels, begging the sun to disappear faster-faster-faster. There would be plenty of sunsets to appreciate once he ruled the world.

And then, the next thing he knew, he's right back here again. He still has vertigo from the clicking and hoping and exploding.

Of course, if he had bought the necessary equipment first and things had still gone bad, he still might have had another cool nine, ten mil to fix it up with. (That's what teenagers say when they mean "nine or ten million dollars" - well, what they will stop saying now that Dr. Drakken has appropriated their language.) If he hadn't bought the digital shoehorn and the person-sized hamster ball and the tropical-fruit peeler. . .

Ruined. Now he'll have to return to his old miserly ways, and where's the fun in that?

So how is a person supposed to remain upright?

Drakken steals a glance back at Shego just for some ideas.

She's uprighter than he is, he supposes, though her head is thrown so far back her hair nearly grazes the sand. On her face, Drakken thinks he can read both disgust that she will not profit from his scheme and victory, a tiny little trace of victory, that she was right about its fail - its success-impairment. Drakken frowns. It seems to him those should be two mutually exclusive events, like rain and no-rain. (It can rain and be sunny at the same time, though a lot of people don't know that. But it can't simultaneously rain and not rain.)

For a moment, Drakken thinks of a plot he saw on TV once. A star football player making wagers against his own team and then purposefully losing the games so that he and he alone was the winner.

The thought crunches Drakken in its grip like a boa constrictor. He shakes it away, guilt hot in his ears. No, Shego is no traitor, and how could he think otherwise?! If she wanted Operation Catastrophic Doom! to fail, all she had to do was not lend him the cool two mil in the first place.

No, Shego would not betray him any more than he would betray her.

Which leads him back to the problem. How did his plan. . . not work? It can't be that his calculations are off. He checked them at least five times each. Besides, there's no way to verify it now. Logbooks are the first things to go up in flames. Handy way of disposing of evidence. And Drakken knows, he knows that he understands the formulas for velocity and trajectory and the exact trigonometric angle he positioned both mirrors on the moon.

Unless - unless Kim Possible went up there and tweaked those angles, just enough to thwart him!

Of course. That must be it, Drakken decides, kicking at a pile of scorched metal. If that child can jet off to Brazil - on a school night, no less! - it's really not that far-fetched to think she could somehow fly to the moon. Especially considering her loving father is a rocket scientist.

Oooh! How am I supposed to beat someone so unfairly advantaged?

Drakken takes another peek at Shego. Her pale green skin is draped over a hard mask of barely-there amusement now. Drakken momentarily believes that Shego has grown so accustomed to losing, grown so devoid of hope, that she can only derive pleasure from picking apart Drakken's plans herself and laughing up her sleeve when they fail, because it is her only method of triumphing. And momentarily, he feels very, very sad for her.

But then her words tramp downward, heavier than her footfalls - Colossal. Waste. Of. Money. - and grind his sympathy into the dust. Drakken is left seething, armpits soaked with frustration. If only there were some way to chemically convert frustration into superhuman strength -

Ooh, what a lovely idea! Drakken rubs his chin to keep the mental stimulation alive. Perhaps that will be his next scheme, as soon as the police clear away from his old lair. . .