33. Never count out the Possibles. The Possibles are coming. No matter where you hide, they will find you. When they do, you need to be prepared for them!
At least it isn't winter yet.
That is the only "blessing" Drakken can think of, and even it is moot at this point. Scientifically, it makes an equator of difference whether or not the winter solstice has come upon them, but those are things the body can't physically distinguish - even Dr. Drakken's body, which should be more tuned-in to science than any other body on the planet. Nonetheless, Drakken shivers as the late-autumn winds slip in through the cracks in the barrel and swoosh in through the entrance hole, that vast expanse left by Drakken's waist.
Drakken aches from forehead to pinkie toe from being trampled in the stampede he did mean to start - his only mistake was overestimating how fast he could get free of it. It's not very comfortable in the barrel, either, with his back smashed into a curve and the wood scratching at his bare legs, but he doesn't dare come out, because he has no idea where his pants are. His authentic, wowful, macho-fying pants with their branded silver belt buckle that betrayed him, albeit only due to the laws of physics. This barrel is not coming off until there is a pair of trousers within arm's length.
Below him, the henchmen still scramble through the blowing dust, heading for their horses or for the unmarked van rental that got them all here. They, too, are eager to escape from the Possible clan. The Possible clan who he went out of his way to avoid a confrontation with. The Possible clan who tracked him down anyway.
The Possible clan who stood there and watched while his pants were torn away like shingles in a windstorm.
Drakken moans and presses both hands to his thundering temples. Maybe if he closes his eyes, if he keeps them closed for a good long period of time, when he opens them again, maybe he will be in his bed back in his suburban lair, and it will still be yesterday morning, and all of this will have been nothing more than a bad dream.
Bad dream is right. A good forty-five percent of the nightmares Drakken has had over the years have stranded him half-nak - err - disrobed in front of all of his worst enemies.
At least Ann wasn't there. (Kim Possible was bad enough.) He would have keeled over in front of her pity - and if she had been standing there in marital agreement with James, Drakken suspects he would have become the first human in history to begin spontaneously secreting magma.
No, no good. Not magma. Reminds him of Wisconsin. He was so close, so close to having his own little scale model of an empire, and all he ended up doing was bringing a slab of aged Swiss to a boil.
The words begin to pummel Drakken again. Even though he never heard that first set spoken out loud, it takes little effort to imagine them in a monstrous voice. The second set - James Possible, his own voice just as scornful and twice as cold as it was back in college.
. . . you do not meet the requirements for attending the World's Greatest Minds Convention.
You'll always just be Drew Lipsky - the science student who couldn't make the grade.
They beat at the inside of Drakken's head like a tom-tom - no, more like a tomahawk, intent on cleaving his skull in two. Over and over and over again they hit him.
Make the grade? What grade? He was bringing in straight A's right up until the day he dropped out.
How much of their history has James rewritten?
Drakken should have let Shego rewrite his face when he had the chance.
Is that a real phrase, "rewrite someone's face"? No. . . wait. . . isn't it "rearrange"?
Several people needed their brains rearranged this week. The Global Convention of the World's Greatest Minds sparkled in Drakken's thoughts whenever the light touched it, right up to the moment when he received an unapologetic slip in the mail telling him he was not qualified to attend. Not qualified. Huh. They've never even met him. They've never watched him disassemble a machine, restring faulty wiring or replace a defective gear, and put it back together again; never seen him warp himself into another person's body by way of a brain-trading machine he built himself; never stood in the lab and observed him as he concocted a lethal embarrassment potion. How long Drakken has waited for an audience other than the skeptical Shego and the openly-scoffing Kim Possible and her ignorant friend.
Of course, Drakken hates having his concentration broken while he works. But these are all fellow scientists, and surely they understand. They will not barge in and interrupt him at the height of his genius, they will wait until the end, and none of their questions will be petty or stupid. Why, in their company, in their friendship, Drakken might have even been able to stop -
Instead, they rejected him. Sight unseen. Drakken went to the trouble of typing his inquiry up on the computer, spell-checking it, and printing it out, yet he might as well have scribbled it down in pacific-blue crayon for how seriously they took him.
So of course he had to invent the Silly Hats to drag their much-lauded IQs down into the single digits, to ensure their tongues would hang out and their eyes cross, looking far sillier than Dr. Drakken himself ever had, thank you very much. No one who ran across that ranch full of babbling men running in circles could consider them intellectually superior to the man who engineered their downfall.
Drakken's teeth begin to chatter, the top row clacking off the bottom, no matter how tightly he tries to gnash them together. He purposefully invited everyone on the list except for James Possible. Despite how tempting it was to watch James walk around drooling, the common sense that Shego keeps saying Drakken doesn't have won out. The Possibles would tear his scheme to pieces as they did so many times in the past, so it was better they didn't know about it.
And then what happens? James shows up anyway, with all three of his kids and the buffoon-kid in tow. Also a couple of people - a cowgirl and a cowboy (together, are they cowpeople?) - who Drakken never saw before but could identify as Possibles right away from their snooty faces.
How did they find him? Do they have him microchipped? Curses, why didn't I think of such a thing first?
Well - because - because - because it chafes his sense of fair play, that's why! So offensive even his twisted brain never went there.
Besides, what good would it do Drakken, anyway? Tracking chips on the Possibles would only show them getting closer - and closer - and closer - and he will have to pack up and leave and run away, only to have their little blinking dots on his trail no matter where he goes in the world.
Even after Drakken tricked them with the old fake-key-ring-on-the-hook trick - something he always wanted to try! - he had precious little time to gloat from the right side of the bars before an enormous metallic horse with glowing red eyes broke down the jailhouse door. It was trademark Possible work, a blend of traditional and technological and terrifying.
Would have been terrifying. To a lesser man.
Of course, Drakken reassures himself, anyone would seem a lesser man next to an enormous metallic horse with glowing red eyes. Its hooves glowed a haunting, bluish shade of white, and Drakken recognized magnetic energy in the instant before his belt was gone and his pants with it. His legs immediately gave up the illusion of being long and sturdy - they scarcely managed to carry him out the door.
His one stroke of luck was that he had found a barrel and climbed into it, just as he has seen Donald Duck do in the old shorts when his feathers explode off him, before he crossed paths with Shego again. Anything else would have resulted in undoubtable cardiac failure, Drakken knows.
Even now, the Possibles are probably all sitting around the dinner table and remarking on what lovely boxer shorts Dr. Drakken wears, pastel yellow with even-paler-pink polka dots. If James Possible could force those words out of his sanctimonious mouth, even sarcastically.
You'll always just be Drew Lipsky. . .
James barges into Drakken's head again. Drakken gasps softly and, on instinct, throws his body against the left side of the barrel, but the words find him just as easily over there.
. . . the science student who couldn't make the grade.
Acid bubbles in Drakken's chest. Not stomach acid. The type that can eat through titanium.
Please, please, please, be a bad dream!
Drakken opens his eyes, and - it's not. Wood still presses into the backs of his kneecaps, which feel oversized and clumsy compared to the rest of his legs, and exposed. Exposed to the open air, if not to Shego's inscrutable glance, the glance that knows what varmints are and won't tell him.
"So, world domination bites the dust again. Second time in two weeks," Shego says from the driver's seat. At the sound of her awakening snark, Drakken breaks into a sweat beneath his neckerchief. Her mouth is flat - no twitches of amusement, no sympathetic hang to the corners.
Drakken gives her a concurring growl and stares doggedly at the horizon. (Why do they call being stubborn being dogged anyway, when dogs are far from the most stubborn creatures in the animal kingdom?) It wasn't really about world domination this time. It was because someone - several someones - lunged at Drakken and raked their nails across his ego, and he had to put them in their rightful places, seventeen platforms below him in the video game of life.
(You're mixing your metaphors, Shego would say now. Whatever that means.)
The thought - not the mixed metaphors, but the wounded ego - skewers Drakken so sharply that he fully believes a splinter has imbedded itself in the unprotected skin of his thigh. A quick peek into the barrel reveals that not to be true. No, he is simply facing the idea that being told you're not a genius after all. . . well, pardon the pun, but it smarts.
And that's ludicrous. Short-sighted. Telling Dr. Drakken he's not smart is like telling him he's not blue. The matter is not even up for dispute. Just because someone - several someones - deny it doesn't make it any less the truth.
Drakken straightens and pushes back the brim of his cowboy hat. No, this was not about putting salve on those burns (as the teens today call insults, Drakken is hip enough to know). It was a world-domination thing all along, had to have been. When the world was deprived of its greatest minds, he would become the most. . .brilliant. . . est (still can't figure that one out) by default. Then who would the leaders call on in their times of need?
Dr. Drakken, that's who.
Then why didn't you invite James Possible and ruin him too?
Drakken pauses and shifts, uncomfortable in the barrel, too hot, too cold, too something. Because James Possible is two years older than him and three inches taller, and Drakken can feel every millimeter and millisecond of that gulf when he's around the man. Because James can turn him back into Drew Lipsky with one glance. Because that cruel line on James's face - a smile, maybe, the kind of smile Drakken still has to fight to achieve - when Drakken's pants flew away can inflict a rare type of pain, worse than Shego's jabs.
I invented the Silly Hats! Didn't steal, outsource, or borrow! I made them myself!
And it still didn't wring a drop of respect from any of them.
"Yeah, and speaking of dust," Shego says. "You've got some on your. . . everything."
Now her mouth is twitching. Drakken turns away from it. He doesn't want to think about his everything. The Possibles pretty much saw his everything.
Somewhere below him, his Silly Hats lie in ruins, either crushed by the stampede or dismantled by the Possibles. Drakken hopes for the former. It's a lost battle either way, but at least that would be one less opportunity for the Possibles to have slaughtered his dreams.
"Yes, well, never mind that, Shego. A true genius can handle a little dust," Drakken says, interrupting himself to sneeze seven times in a row. Rather poor timing on his respiratory system's part. "And he can certainly come up with another plan - one even. . . more. . . brilliant. . . than this?"
Not a sound from Shego, and Drakken knows that this time, he has said it correctly. He grins, though only for a moment. He and James Possible are both going to walk freely to their beds tonight, their times behind bars just memories, and slide in between the covers, but only James is going to be able to go to sleep peacefully, untouched by all he has said and done today.
How is that fair? It isn't - it can't be.
Drakken scratches at his neck. His soul is still inside-out and smarting, the flannel lining flapping in the same breeze that raises goose bumps on his everything.