~Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season!~
29. Keep work life and home life separate. At least when work life consists of mutations.
"We'll never speak of it again!" Drakken blurts out, and then he shoots up to a sit, in what he recognizes as his bed, fingers clinging to his teddy bear, Sir Fuzzymuffin the Second.
A quick, frantic glance around the room reveals nothing but darkness. Silence. Cold moonlight up against the blackout shades of his windows.
Oh. It was a dream.
That's odd. Normally Drakken doesn't feel such - such neutrality toward the realization that everything he's been through in the past four hours has been a bodily-sanctioned hallucination. Typically, his reaction is either highly negative (when the dream involves him conquering the world or winning three thousand dollars in a bake-off) or highly positive (when the dream involves Shego leaving to work for Dementor or something happening to Mother). Strange.
Yes, strange is definitely the operative word here. The dream starts to come back in patches, the way the first stubble begins to sprout on your head after you've charred yourself bald again.
He was standing in his mother's attic - it felt so real, he could almost smell the must and feel the cobwebs against him - listening to a recording so old it wasn't even on a cassette player. It was on one of those old-fashioned phonograph machines, the kind Thomas Edison invented. The deep rumble on the recording claimed to belong to a man named Barthlomew Lipsky, who had stolen a static-generating device and was planning to use it to take over the world.
A shivery feeling, also unusual for this early summer, slips up Drakken's arms, and he clutches Sir Fuzzymuffin tighter. He doesn't remember ever hearing about a Bartholomew Lipsky. Of course, he's never been close to his father's side of the family, unless you count Cousin Eddy and his parents, and even them he hasn't spoken to in decades. Richard Lipsky was a branch Drakken pruned off a long time ago.
(Or tried to, at least.)
But an ancestor who also wanted to take over the world? Drakken is sure that's a detail that would never have gotten shuffled to the back of his brain. Would look pretty good on the ol' evil resume, even though Drakken's fairly certain there is no hereditary component to supervillainy as there is with dimples or the ability to roll your tongue. The general population of ignoramuses might not know it, however.
And then Drakken dream-remembers saying to Shego, "And that, Shego, is why I became a villain!"
Shego stared at him. "I thought you became a villain because of those guys who teased you back in nerd school."
Yes. So did I.
Drakken dream-sees himself wave her off, as if he is a new comic book writer doing an indescribably poor job of retconning a character's backstory. So - in this dream, he didn't turn evil because of the Bebes and the big dance? It was something that had been there since he was a child?
He doesn't know if his subconscious is complimenting or insulting him.
Perhaps it would be better if it were true. Maybe it was better for the whole villainous PR gig to have genetic tendency rather than a vulnerable background. Maybe there's such a thing as bad blood, after all.
(Has to be from Richard's side of the family, though. Because Mother is a saint.)
Drakken shakes his head. No, he is reading too much into this. A dream is a dream, and even Sigmund Fraser or whoever that guy was had never been able to figure them completely out.
The dream ended with the electro-static generator blowing up Drakken's hovercraft, as Kim Possible yanked him and Shego away just in the nick of time. Saving their lives. They sat there in awkwardness, watching her smirk, and then he awakened.
Seemed so real, though.
Drakken starts to lower Sir Fuzzymuffin back to the covers, and then he gasps and smashes the bear against the top button of his pajamas again. A sound is coming from down the hall, a scuttle-clunk sound, like a dog dragging a bum leg.
Oh, bother - has Commodore Puddles gone and peed on another piece of dangerous machinery? He's been getting so much better about not doing that lately. . .
Closer and closer creep the clunks, and then there is the creaky sound of a door opening, but without the accompanying metallic unlatching of the knob. That sound cuts off abruptly into the sound of. . . chewing?
Drakken's lungs grab all the air they can reach, and he leans over the end of the bed and peers down at whatever has scuttled in.
Ohhh, sweet Mother Theresa!
It's a termite the size of a Chihuahua, very small for a dog, very big for a termite. Its antennae are also turned around backward, and from its mouth jut two yellow fangs - neon yellow, not didn't-brush-well-enough yellow. In between them crunches a chunk of Drakken's bedroom door.
For several seconds, Drakken is immobilized, all but his own mouth, which rips out a scream of, "GAAAAHHHH!" When at last feeling returns to his toes, he leaps up on the mattress, tucks Sir Fuzzymuffin under his arm, and bolts down the hallway, stopping to grab the phone along the way, calling for Commodore Puddles the whole time. Poor puppy is more than happy to give up on his snarling match with the identical, glowing termite in the kitchen and slink off after Drakken.
As soon as the lair's door - metal, not wood - slams shut behind him, Drakken picks up the phone and punches his number-one speed dial. Fear pools in the back of his throat.
"Yeah?" comes from the other end of the phone. Even late-night-groggy, Shego's voice sounds as if she's stuck it in a pencil sharpener.
"Shego! We have termites!" Drakken cries.
There's a reproachful silence, followed by "You woke me up - at three in the morning - to tell me we've got -"
"Mutant termites!" Drakken interrupts her before her sass can fully awaken. "Giant mutant termites with glowing fangs!"
"Fantastic. We'll take care of them at a decent hour, 'kay? Go to bed."
"Go to bed with those things in the house?" Drakken can hear himself nearly screeching, but he doesn't care. She must be out of her gourd! (How does one get in a gourd, anyway?)
"They eat wood, not flesh."
"The mutant ones?" Drakken swallows hard. "Do we know the mutant ones don't eat flesh?"
"How about this?" Shego says after another long, fierce silence. "If one of them tries to eat you, then you can call me back. Otherwise, I will see you after the sun comes up."
Dial tone.
Drakken can't bring himself to go back to the lair, and that turns out to be moot, anyway, because the door has locked behind him. He grunts as loudly as he can and sinks to the narrow stretch of beach between his lair's borders and the sea. Imagines the outgoing tide is fleeing from the dreaded Dr. Drakken. His mind, still sore from the dream, begins to grumble almost audibly.
Grumbling passes the time too slowly, which is just one more thing to grumble about. Mother would tell him to count his blessings.
Well - it's not freezing cold outside. Or raining. And there are no pretty female neighbors to see him outside in his jammies, like there are on every sitcom ever.
That's about all I've got for blessings.
At long last, the sun begins to rise, and Drakken finally cracks something related to a smile. The henchmen like sunrises, and at this moment he can see why. Yellow and orange slowly light up the horizon with promises about the day's goodness that Drakken always wants to believe. It's a gentle usurpation on the sun's part, the stars not stabbed out but laid to rest until evening.
I could do that to you, Kim Possible, Drakken thinks with unexpected gentleness. I could do that, if you would just be smart enough to stop bothering me!
The sunrise brings with it Shego. She lands her helicopter and strolls toward him with casual grace. Shego can be careless and never so much as rip her jumpsuit. If Drakken gets careless, mutant termites storm the premises.
How is that fair?
"Good morning." Shego gives even those pleasant words a sarcastic ring. She nods toward the door. "They in there?"
Drakken nods, too, his head flapping up and down, overly mobile in terror. He wonders why that is. . .
Shego kicks the door open and sticks her upper half into the lair. Twenty seconds later, she's back, saying, "I think I found the problem."
"Already?" Drakken creeps closer - not too close.
"Uh-huh." There's a tearing noise, and Shego's hand returns to her side, holding a good-sized slab of metal. On it is scrawled, Bug Mutator 3.5!
Drakken recognizes his own Sharpeed handwriting. Considers denying it. Finally just fixes his biggest, toothiest grin and most innocent eyes. "Yes, well, I, um. . . wasn't planning on that happening."
"Okaaaaaythen." Shego shoves her wrist back like she's planning on flinging the Bug Mutator 3.5 straight into his grin, and Drakken ducks before realizing she never let go. "Just - humor me, then. What was supposed to happen?"
"Wasps," Drakken says with another, harder swallow. "I was going to mutate wasps."
"Wasps," Shego repeats, deadly quiet.
"Wasps," Drakken confirms. "I discovered a nice little nest on the rear entrance a little while ago, and I knew if I could harness their already painful powers - "
"You were going to mutate a nest of wasps? Here?" Shego's fingers flex. "And I didn't know?"
Drakken can't keep looking at her. Her hunched posture, her tensed-up muscles are too darn frightening. "I got the idea over the weekend, and when nothing happened by Monday, I must have forgotten to tell you. Sorry," he adds in a peep.
A peep. Like a baby chick. This is embarrassing, especially in his jammies and bunny slippers.
"Mutate wasps," Shego says yet again, as if she is having trouble grasping the concept. "And how did that end well for us in your mind?"
"I harnessed them and used them against my enemies!" Drakken rears back for a chortle, but Shego's finger jabbing in midair stops him. "They would obey me," he reassures her. "I'd be their creator!"
"Right. Because that worked so well for Frankenstein."
Curse that girl and her never-ending supply of jabs. Just. . . curse her.
Shego plucks the phone from Drakken's fingers as if she's extracting a splinter. "I guess I'll just have to call an exterminator." She wears that expression - the one she always wears before she lunges for Kim Possible's jugular.
Drakken's own jugular feels like it's already been crushed. He backs away from her and her scary glove-blades, shaking his head over and over again. She can't. She can't! "No, no, no, now, Shego! I know I goofed up - it was very rash and thoughtless of me, I admit that! But surely, there's another way we can work this out - "
"For. The. Termites."
"Ohhhhhhh." Drakken balances against the side of the lair to keep from dissolving into a puddle of relief at her feet. "Yes, that sounds. . . wise."
The phone crashes back into his hands. "Yep. I'll go get the phone book. You get to be the one to explain our predicament to Mr. Bug-B-Gone or whoever." Shego cuts a look at him that he would be a fool not to comply with and plunges without so much as a yip into the Land of Mutant Termites.
She sure is brave. Of course, Drakken thinks, if I had her virtually unlimited powers, I'd be brave, too.
At least, he hopes so.
Well, sure he would! He wasn't the least bit deterred by the thought of mutant wasps. But Shego would say that just makes him crazy. He's a "chicken" when he's scared and an "idiot" if he isn't.
Drakken sighs and lets his shoulders drop for the first time since the termite ate its way into his bedroom. He doesn't understand her terminology or her standards. His need to be imposed, and the sooner the better, if the world wants to have a prayer of making sense at all.
For a second, Drakken almost wishes he could ask Bartholomew Lipsky for advice, but considering the man never took over the world himself - Drakken definitely would have remembered that - he would be about as helpful as Spider-Man. No, less so, because Bartholomew would be dead in addition to being fictional.
And Drakken doesn't need anyone with the Lipsky surname to win the world for him.