~Wow, was THIS a fun one! Hope you all enjoy.~
34. Be careful who you trust and when. Sometimes it's not immediately obvious. And sometimes it is immediately obvious, only you're telling yourself it can't be, and then you end up defeating the purpose of things being immediately obvious!
Mr. Sit-Down is too innocuous a name for this foul felt creature. Drakken knows he could think of worse. If he could think of worse, then maybe, just maybe, it'll distract him from the pain.
Yes, errr, the only problem with that is that this is the sort of pain he can't be distracted from, the sort in his back. It starts right at the base of his neck, which sticks out so vulnerably where his hair should be and isn't, and streams downward in hot rushes. He is an egg frying in a skillet, broken open in the middle to let the yolk leak out.
So Drakken's thoughts come in - Fannie - ow - tush - ow - rump - ow-ow-ow!
The good news is Kim Possible has left. The bad news is she and the buffoon and their naked vermin have fled, abandoning Drakken and Shego to the underbelly of. . . he shudders. . . cable TV.
Kim Possible's plan, the one she spouted about plugging the interdimensional hole with monkeys, rang true to Drakken's scientific mind. But Shego's expression was so hard you'd need a pickax to chip at it, and she was sometimes a better judge of situations. . . certain ones. Equating Kim Possible's good guy status with an inability to lie and trick, not being faithful to Shego, plugging interdimensional holes with monkeys - those are all mistakes he's made before. Well, the first two, at least.
So they stayed. And Kim Possible turned out to be telling the truth.
Ow. Ow. Ow.
After what has certainly been hours, years - surely starlight is shining right now that wasn't visible from Earth when they entered the television - someone speaks up, high-pitched and schmaltzy enough to fasten Drakken's contacts to his eyeballs. "Okay, Mr. Sit-Down. I think their time is up."
Mr. Sit-Down obediently rises, and Drakken remains in a heap on the ground. All of his body parts are complaining at once, and he doubts he can stand. With this much pain, something has to be broken, right?
Evidently not, because Shego reaches down, grabs him, and hauls him to his feet. Slowly, joints slip back into place, fluid pops, blood vessels calm. Drakken shudders again, more from the old-man sound of it than the pain.
"Now," the puppet continues, "have you seen anything green?" It stares at Shego with false felt eyes that Drakken resolves to plaster all over his next torture chamber.
Drakken watches Shego turn to stone again right there in front of him. When she speaks, it is in a voice like lemonade, sour-sweet. She doesn't want any more dealing with Mr. Sit-Down, either. "Um, actually, sorry to break it to you, sweetie, but Dr. D. and I have another appointment," she says. "We're due at the, uh, children's hospital any minute, right, Dr. D?"
She nods at Drakken, and he quickly surveys the surrounding area. There is no one else to believe, so he nods along with her.
The puppets let out one big disappointed moan, but they don't summon any more towering demons to take Drakken and his sidekick down. Shego grabs his wrist and hauls him across the fields, through the colors - too happy, too garish - until she hits a spot where the field simply ends. Moving her legs just jogs her in place.
"I guess we've reached the end of Teletubby Land," Shego says.
Drakken makes a gallant dash to her side. Well, it would be a gallant dash if he didn't trip over something long and slithery in the grass and sprawl on his bared tummy.
"My hero," Shego says, only there is nothing genuine in it. She strides over to him, her heavy dark mane swinging as she reaches a hand down to him.
Drakken bats it away and stands up on his own strength. He just realized how. . . uncomfortable he is. Not just in the areas where Mr. Sit-Down left his mark, but in the ridiculous skimpy costume the Evil Eye Trio stuck him in. It sports none of his lab coat's generous padding, and he would wager that a greater ratio of skin is being exposed here than when he left his pants behind in the Crooked D's jailhouse.
See, he has to think about it in terms of science, or else he will burst into flames and burn himself down to the ground. Drakken turns his back to Shego, hoping that silly cape will at least cloak him better from behind. As he does, he catches a glimpse of what tripped him. For a minute, his pulse panics, thinking it's a snake, and then it settles into a delighted dither as Drakken realizes it's actually a wire, its end an open plug.
"Shego!" Drakken reaches down, snatches up the wire, and almost hugs it in his glee. "Shego, look, I tripped over a wire!"
"Congrats," Shego says flatly. "The judges give you a 7.2 for form."
There are no judges around. She is just razzing him, as the teens today say.
Undiscouraged, Drakken bends back down parting the stiff green blades to reveal four more wires, lying parallel to each other like snakes in the grass. "Ohhh, yes!" he cries. "I knew there would be more!"
"Joy," Shego says.
"Don't you see?" Drakken tells her. "Kim Possible's disabled the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer and taken it away! That means we're no longer stuck in a loop of dimensions. All that's left is us, a few cable channels, and my VCR. And that means where we are right now is like - okay, if we kept going through doors to get to other dimensions, this is like the storm door in front of those doors!"
"Oh, goody." Shego gazes down at the nest of wires with something less than affection. "Was that on your bucket list or something? 'Stand in the storm door between dimensions'?"
"Actually, yes it is," Drakken admits. "But - even more importantly - it's our way out!"
"What is?"
"These wires! Oh, can't you pay attention?" Drakken sticks on the question mark, hears the whine on the edges of it, coughs it away and says, "I'm going to need to do some energy readings."
Shego sort of hisses. "How do 'energy readings' work in a place like this?"
"Simple." Drakken straightens, tugs his cape forward around his ribs. "I will make use of my five senses!" He pauses. "No, wait, make that four senses, because I shall not be tasting anything!"
"Oh, good," Shego mutters. "You're not a complete lunatic."
Several minutes later - minutes which seem infinitely shorter when not being crushed by Mr. Sit-Down's buns - Drakken clears his throat and gestures to the four wires. "It's just as I suspected, Shego," he says, doing his best to keep from lapsing into squeals. "These wires correspond to the buttons on a VCR. This first wire that I found - "
"By tripping over it," Shego interjects.
"That I found," Drakken shouts over her, "it's the 'control wire,' so to speak. It must correspond to the PLAY button. See how it's in the center? PLAY buttons are always in the center on a VCR. Now, the play wire emits a certain barely audible frequency at a rate of three beeps per minute. This other wire here rushes ahead at a rate of six per minute, so it must be FAST FORWARD. This other one plays three beeps per minute, but it plays the sounds backwards, so it must be REWIND -"
"Yay. Yippee. Science is great, yada-yada." Shego rolls her eyes. "But how does this help us?"
"See this wire here?" Drakken points to the one farthest left. "Its energy is traveling outward, not inward! Which means it must be -"
"EJECT," Shego says.
Drakken glowers at her. "Shego! You spoiled my big reveal!"
She doesn't say she's sorry, and she's not. Instead, she points at the EJECT wire like she's accusing it of a felony. "Why should I believe this is going to work?"
"Because. . . because. . ." Drakken runs through a crushed list of logic in his head and can't find anything better to finish with than, "Because it's going to work, that's why!"
"Yeah, I've heard that at least twice today. And it didn't."
Drakken's shoulders shrivel, wishing for their pads, wishing to be part of a body that's kept a mystery from the outside world. "If I hadn't listened to you, it would have!" he snaps.
Shego pulls back and raises her fingers in their last-warning, pre-plasma stance. Drakken doesn't need energy readings to detect how close her flames are to the surface. Yes, she's had a rough day, but not as rough as his - the fact that she is standing there in her actual outfit testifies to that.
"Be-cauuuuuse," he says, "that was when I had to work with the Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer, which I don't kn - which there isn't a lot of information available about. But I know how to program my VCR!"
Shego slowly claps her palms together. It stings him as if he's between them.
"Now!" Drakken hoists the EJECT wire, which is almost thicker around than his arms. "If EJECT is connected to the control wire, we shall be out of here in no time!" He extends a hand. "Shego, the control wire!"
"Should I click my heels together and say, 'There's no place like home'?" Shego asks. Some of the mirth has returned to her tone.
"Do whatever you want," Drakken says, "just as long you can do it connecting this wire to mine!" That last part seems almost unnecessary to add. Shego could pretty much do ballet while finishing a cabinet, as far as Drakken is concerned.
Shego grabs the control wire and jams its plug into the EJECT socket. A blueish portal takes shape, and the beating of blood in Drakken's ears grows faster and faster. Before he can scream for joy, the portal assumes a pseudo-gravitational pull so intense it instantly swallows them.
Drakken is turned upside-down and then knocked around in a round room, but the pseudo-gravity knocks him tightly onto each side in turn, as though he is traveling through a set of narrow pipes. Then a long tunnel opens up in front of him, drags him forward in a buildup, and then blows him out. Even as Drakken smacks, all four appendages at a time, onto his lair's floor, he can only compare interdimensional travel to being sucked through a tuba.
They're here, though. They're alive, and they're here!
"Home sweet home," Shego says beside him. She has landed in a tangle of limbs, but she stands up and shakes them back into place as if they are no more hassle than a set of empty, tipped beakers.
Drakken himself is slower to rise. Yes, this is his lair all right - yet earlier today, he thought the same thing, only to be confronted with three caped crusaders out to rid the world of mullets and lab coats. If they have wound up on another reality show -
But the luscious potatoey smell of soup doesn't fill the air, and for the life of him Drakken can't find that one patch of wall they painted sky-blue to match his skin. He focuses on the dark maroon interior so that the wall appears to be moving closer, growing, coming to him, which could be attributed to either a minor head trauma or dizzying hope.
On the strong possibility of the second, Drakken risks peeking down at himself. And rather than his navel, he sees the green jetpack-button on his belt. And he can see it, fully, without that slicked and shined wedge of hair hanging down over his eyes like a shade someone has pulled too low.
The runny-egg feeling has returned to his back, but how he is supposed to care about that right now?
Drakken raises a hand to swipe at the back of his head. The bristly strands confirm it. Houston, we have a ponytail! He feels a smile bounding across his face, the biggest and widest any of his have been since Kim Possible triggered his ingenious trap-trap.
"Shego!" Drakken leaps upright and only staggers a touch to the left. "Shego, I look normal!"
"Eh, I wouldn't go that far," Shego says. "But it's nice not to have to look at your knees anymore."
Drakken blinks. His arms are suddenly too long, much too long, and despite his orders to hang straight at his sides, they curl up at the ends like the page corners in his favorite science manuals. "What - what's wrong with my knees?" he demands.
"Oh, for the love of. . ." Shego flicks a glare at the ceiling. "What do you want me to say, Drakken? 'Your legs are flawless and put mine to shame'?"
"Ewwwww." Drakken takes a few steps backward - or at least, he must, because he finds himself getting farther away from her. Doesn't feel those steps, though. "No."
Shego's lips twitch. That could mean a variety of things. Drakken wishes once again for a strand of her DNA - not to clone this time, just to place under a microscope and analyze. There has to be some part of her that will bend to the scientific method someday.
Drakken lifts his fingers and drags them back from his forehead to his spikes of hair. Ohhh, his spikes of hair! They gave that nasty Evil Eye Trio a heap of trouble. Admittedly, there have been times when Drakken despised those spikes, too - the childish way they spring from his forehead, how thick and soft and fluffy they are, that they have a menace factor of absolute zero. Right now, though, he wouldn't trade them for all the tea in China.
(He doesn't even like tea all that much, anyway.)
Best of all, he's wearing actual clothes. His lab coat cradles his body gently, protectively, with the careful grip of a jeweler, where the stupid rags the Evil Eye Trio put him in tossed him around and didn't care one bit if he slipped right out of them.
It allows his genius to catch up with him, and Drakken blurts out, "Fatal Fanny, that's what they should have named him! Or - Rump of Ruin! Or - Derriere of Doom! Or - no - I've got it - Posterior of Prodigious Proportions!"
"Sure, Doc," Shego mumbles, already halfway to the door, hoisting her bag. "Whatever you wanna call him. I'm gonna clock out for the night, 'kay?"
"'Kay," Drakken replies.
Drakken runs his hands up and down the warm fabric, relishing how it squeaks under his gloves. For the rest of the day, as he pores over what he can salvage of the cable box, he keeps coming back and touching that fabric, particularly around the waist and the lower legs. Touches his spikes and his ponytail, too, whenever the reminders of his bareness crawl back over him - memory-ghosts, the only kind that he can believe in as a scientist.
Too bad that little inside-out place inside him won't tuck back into the hole it left behind.