~I've been salivating over this project for almost a year now. The 2019 live-action movie: rewritten. The movie wasn't bad at all on its own merits, but I felt that in many cases it fell short of capturing the tone of the show itself - most notably in its portrayals of Drakken and Shego. In this story, we'll watch the same events unfold in a different (and admittedly, sometimes more cartoony) way. Drakken is blue, Shego is sharp-tongued, and Athena. . . hoo-doggy, do I have plans for that girl.
Anyway, I hope you'll give it a shot, whether you were also disappointed by the movie or not. I'm not trying to write a version that's objectively "better" - just one that's more faithful to the rules of our favorite show. :)~
1. Jailbreak
People could speculate endlessly on her cruddy childhood and her family issues - and, who knew, maybe they had a point. But the main reason Shego had gone into the villain biz was for the glamor.
And now here she was, reading a list of demands scrawled on toilet paper.
Dr. Drakken wouldn't know "glamor" if he wiped his nose on it.
Shego had already followed most of the instructions that were still legible through the seeping ink - blue to match the skin Drakken still didn't seem quite comfortable inside. Stolen the helicopter with its cloaking-device doodad from HenchCo. Rounded up the henchmen. Located an underground hideout in a neighborhood the police mostly ignored. Fired up the robot incubator - and Drakken had assured Shego he'd take it from there with his "superoir brillaince."
Right. That same "superoir brillaince" that couldn't learn to spell.
She'd grant Drakken this: he was much more entertaining than any other employer she'd had so far.
He was also possibly the most obnoxious person on the planet who didn't share a family tree with her. But, hey, there was nothing good on TV, so she might as well break him out. He'd already offered to pay her more than Shego knew his red-smudged checkbook could afford to dole out.
Drakken had also done his pathetic best to direct her to the "remote Arctic prison" where he was being held in "solidarity" - his own words, natch. He even semi-apologized for not being able to provide her with landmarks. Uh, yeah. Because there weren't any, unless you counted various sizes of snow-covered bumps. It ended with, If you reach Santa's workshop, you've gone too far.
Which Shego sincerely hoped was Dr. D's idea of a joke.
Iffy and straight-from-second-grade as Drakken's directions had been, though, it was hard to miss the enormous chain-link fence, strung with barbed wire at its head and feet, trying to look like it had sprung up naturally on the tundra. Shego snorted under her breath as she steered the helicopter over it and set it down on the outskirts of what would've been the prison yard if not for the inhumane wind chill.
The helicopter perched delicately on a fresh patch of snow, as if it too couldn't WAIT to have this over with. Shego flung herself from the front seat and hit the ground in a crouch. After a moment of nothingness, she strolled over to the building, her walk casual but her senses jacked up to fire-at-the-first-footstep-in-the-snow readiness.
No alarms, though. No sirens. No flashing lights. It was almost disappointing. She hadn't had a decent fight in weeks.
Ventilation shafts were always the first things she looked for. Yeah, it was the easy way out, but Shego saved the over-complicating for Drakken and other villains of his caliber. Just might explain why he was the one in prison, and she was the one busting him out.
Shego squatted beside the vents, screwed onto the building at about calf level. Through their mini-slits, she stared down at a lipstick tube of a shaft, maybe wide enough for her to swing a limb or two in. It couldn't have been any less helpful if it had been a prairie dog tunnel. Shego could almost picture the architects grinning at their own cleverness as they crunched the sides in as close together as they could get. The slits themselves seemed to leer back at her.
All right, so say goodbye to the crawl-in-through-the-vents plan. Hardly a bummer. Unlike Drakken, who marked every entrance he made with everything short of a brass band, Shego could appreciate the subtle approach. Sometimes, though, it was nice to burst through a wall and watch the faces gape at her in horror - the more macho, the better - realizing they should be afraid of a woman who still had two more online semesters to go before she got her degree.
Shego clawed the grate off the vent anyway. It was just begging to be used as a diversion.
Sure enough, that caught their lame security system's attention. There was a brief pause, and then the building shook with a five-year-old-who-skinned-his-knee wail. Two years ago, Shego would have shaken off the shrill clang of it. This time, she took a moment to absorb it and let it fill her with pressure, all of which she charged down to the legs that had carried her around the other side of the building probably before the guards had even set down their coffee cups.
No exaggeration there. And no bragging about her speed, either. The place was surprisingly dinky and squat and looked like it had been designed by whatever moron had slapped together Go City Elementary's jungle gym. At least that moron had the sense not to wrap a rickety slide around this building. Odds were, even Drakken would figure out how to take advantage of that.
Eventually.
Shego curled her fingers inside her gloves, arching the blades at their ends. Adrenaline buzzed in her ears and hot-wired her veins. There were people who'd take drugs to get that kind of high.
A whiplash-look over both shoulders revealed nobody coming her way yet. Shego cruised through the snow until she located what appeared to be the front door, where a laminated sign pleaded with her to "KEEP OUT - RESTRICTED AREA."
Mmm-hmm. Cute. That hadn't stopped her since she was five.
Shego slipped a fingertip under the doorknob and turned the plasma on to a simmer to soften the thing. The Arctic winds pushed against her back, trying uselessly to intimidate their way into her thermal-insulated jumpsuit. Fifteen seconds and a swipe later, and the knob dropped into a snowbank, leaving behind a hand-shaped hole surrounded by steaming metal. Shego reached through, found the place where the door met its frame, and plucked it out like a stray eyebrow hair.
Instantly, a guard was there, handcuffs and other prison goodies jangling from his belt. "Hey! You can't go in there!" he hollered.
Zero points for creativity. He might as well have been cooked up in Drakken's lab himself and loaded with a few prerecorded phrases.
Shego cocked her head to the side and pulled on a mask of confusion. "Actually, yeah, I can," she said. "Want to watch?"
The plasma hurled itself to the ends of her fingers, inseparable from the anger racing to keep up with it. Shego gathered every emotion she had cut off before it could reach under her skin in the past year - which, admittedly, wasn't a lot - and threw it all into the punch she landed between the loser's eyes. He fell to the ground like a sandbag.
Shego shook back the couple strands of hair that had fallen out of place and cranked a phony-sweet look down at the guard. "I guess not," she said, and she slid another fingernail under the doorknob behind him.
Three more layers of doors, each with a single guard offered up as bait. When the fourth door was tossed aside, however, a whopping four men - huge, armed, and all that jazz - stared back at her. Heads jerked around on necks that froze. That buzz in Shego's veins? Yeah, it was enough to beat back the cold on its own.
The first man shot to his feet and got to stay vertical for a beat or two before Shego's fist cracked against his jaw. Its chiseled-out cockiness flinched back into itself, and he slid to the floor in a daze, mumbling something about wanting a raise.
A second man jumped up and had the cluelessness to run toward Shego with an arm outstretched - an arm she gratefully latched on to, twisted behind his back and used to swing him into the third man, who had been trying to sneak up on her from around behind. Emphasis on "trying." The collision propelled one of them backward through the wrecked door and left the other in a heap beside his friend.
Now they were down to one man, whose chest was level with Shego's face. He eyeballed her with an I-know-you-femme-fatale-types expression. The way his hands shook as he crossed them protectively over that chest - as if Shego was really gonna puncture his uniform with a poke and then saw it all the way open, as if she enjoyed stripping enemies down to their boxers - confessed that he'd really only ever seen them in B-movies.
As bile-inducing as the thought was, Shego decided to play to his fears. She poised a nail in front of the man's jacket zipper. He forfeited his grip on his walkie-talkie to grab the zipper, and Shego took that moment to snatch him by the collar and slam his helmeted head into the wall. She tossed his squid-limp body to the ground and wasn't too sophisticated to avoid stepping on it on her way into the threshold.
Her own body was still humming with that battle-electricity that would inevitably peter out the further away she got from the scene. That had been about as hard as taking on a couple of those little green plastic soldiers that Drakken still kept a bucket of under his bed. It was a pump, but it didn't last long enough to satisfy her. Man, she almost missed that little middle-school girl who'd put Drakken in here in the first place - the braces-faced one with the Lara Croft complex.
This door took three tries to pull off its hinges. If Shego hadn't known she was reaching endgame before, she would've figured it out now. Turned out she was right - when she'd finally flung the door aside, she was standing in a wafer-flat room, stamped on all sides with doors the shape of playing cards, each with a padlock on it big enough to chain up an ATV.
Annnnnnd checkmate.
Drakken had actually described this room to her in his TP-letter. His door would be the one "right in the center of things - right where I belong." Shego prepped her eye muscles to do some serious rolling and swung a green bolt at the lock, which gave a hollow bang and deflated against the door. The door itself crumbled away like aluminum within a minute of her plasma touching it.
This was what was supposed to keep the world's supervillain population contained? Were they kidding?
Or maybe it did work on your average supervillain.
Shego shook her head at the flames as the door dissolved into ash. She didn't want to sound like a snot, but it was hard NOT to smirk over the realization that if they had tried to slap her in here, she would've booked it to Switzerland and claimed asylum in way less than a year's time.
So - better go in there prepared for anything. From what she knew about Drakken, Shego had him pegged as about the last guy who'd be able to do hard time. The dude had a case of claustrophobia almost as bad as his permanent bed-head. And in solitary? Yeah, Shego wouldn't have blamed him if he'd chewed off an arm by now.
Especially not once her eyes acclimated to the cell-the-size-of-her-whole-apartment she was now crossing into. Blank and unfurnished, the floor waxed clean of shoe prints, it looked more like a warehouse up for sale to the highest bidder. A few windows cut through the walls at their highest corners, but a peek through them only revealed the twenty more layers of gray standing between them and the lifeless Arctic landscape. In the center of the room sat a diamond enclosure, glass clamped tight on all six sides in a way that screamed snake-in-a-cage.
Except a snake wouldn't have needed the steel reinforcements clamped to the base of every pane.
The Drakken Shego had last seen in the grasp of a policeman who remained utterly unfazed by either his screamed threats or his bucking-broncho attempts to wrench free - that Drakken couldn't have thrashed his way out of here if he'd been given a pair of brass knuckles and a baseball bat. Shego had known THAT about him from the first day she'd clocked in. Inside the dome, she could make out the very-basic necessities - toilet, sink, and cot.
A memory winked in Shego's mind, something where she'd been bored and had shown up super-early for work one day and was greeted by an astonished Drakken dressed in flannel PJ's and a well-used bathrobe. A mug of unnecessary coffee had steamed in front of him as he thumbed through the funny pages. He'd had the biggest, gooniest smile.
The plasma stayed hot and ready in Shego's fingers, but for the briefest moment, the vein-buzz went cold.
Shego heard Drakken before she saw him. He was mumbling under his breath - which, in Drakken's thunder-baritone, was still a surround-sound experience. "They just don't understand," he said. "She thinks she's all that - and she's not!"
Ah. He must still be bitter about Little Miss Chain-Link Teeth.
Shego took a step closer. Yep, it was Drakken all right. Not too many other prisoners whose skin blended right into the powder-blue thick stripes they were forced to wear. He sat huddled in the corner like a baby rabbit. Whatever bozo was in charge of this place must have snipped off Drakken's trademark cheesy ponytail when he'd first arrived. The scraggly strands of hair reached desperately for his shoulders and kicked up around his ears, like they wanted to curl and undo everything that voice of his achieved.
"The problem is - they think she's all that, too!" Drakken continued. "But she's not, right, Shego? We are, right, Shego?"
Uh. Okay. Pretty odd even for Dr. D to be talking to her without looking at her.
Even odder that he paused as if she had said so much as a darn word to him, and then followed it up with, "Oh, thank you, Shego. I knew you'd see it my way. . . eventually."
Yup. Officially no more icing on THESE cupcakes.
Shego smacked the heel of her hand hard into the glass. "Over here, dipstick."
The baby rabbit whirled around and transformed into the Tasmanian Devil.
Drakken launched himself straight at the wall, bawling her name, fingers scrabbling at the glass as if they could scratch free to find hers. His forehead knocked against it and left a grease stain, the sign of a man who'd panicked himself into a sweat. Between that and the wild-twitching legs, Shego wouldn't have been surprised if he'd taken his tongue to the glass next. "Oh, Shego! It's really you! This is really happening!" he shouted.
Yeah, and thanks for announcing it to the world.
Another gallon of sweat streamed down Drakken's forehead. The rest of his face didn't seem to have aged as much as it had just gotten bleaker. The bags beneath his eyes looked like someone had charbroiled them to match the scar that slashed down his left cheek.
Shego lifted a hand. "Move back, Drakken," she said into that face.
Drakken shot to the back wall, though judging from the backward, this-is-torture glance he turned on her, it took everything he had to do it. Shego took a half-second to picture Drakken scribbling his gratitude on a fat check and to fill her lungs with musty air before she sent her fist through the front of the diamond.
Glass shards sprayed inward, and Drakken yelped. Whether he'd actually gotten clipped by one or was just being a nervous wreck, Shego didn't know - and didn't especially care. Their explosion tore a few bits of steel loose from the base, which gave a weakened groan.
Perfect.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Drakken staring at her, his chin hanging on its rounded, hairless hinges that made him look about fifteen years younger than he should've.
Shego executed the handstand she'd spent almost a decade of gymnastics lessons memorizing. From there, she plunged her weight off her hands into a front flip. In midair, her legs came up to meet the top of the pane and shoved against it. It fell backward into the diamond and shattered, slinging fragments of glass into the other panels as if to take them down with it.
Drakken rushed forward across the ground he apparently didn't care was crunching under his feet. He skidded on the wax job within inches of her - Shego let him freak for a while, and then caught hold of his sleeve in his last second of balance. And then he did what was pretty much the last thing Shego would have imagined he would do.
He flung his arms around her and pushed his shuddering beanpole-frame up against her.
Shego froze. It had been years since somebody had hugged her, and it didn't take long to remember how much she absolutely hated it. Also not helping were the sounds coming out of Drakken, the sort that dogs made pre-upchuck. Shego was this close to doing a clothes-saving back-away when something wet plopped onto her collarbone.
Those heaves. Drakken wasn't retching. He was crying - actual, serious tears that soaked her shoulder and warmed it. Between the sobs and the stale sweat, the smell of salt oozed so heavily from him that Shego had no choice but to breathe through her mouth.
"Shego!" Drakken gasped. "Oh, Shego, you came! You came for me! At last you came! Oh, thank goodness you came! I was so lonely!" Whatever else he had to say dissolved into mush.
Mmmkay. The heck?
She'd never seen a supervillain brought to tears before. Oh, sure, Aviarius had come close those couple times when she'd threatened some of his killer-birdie friends, and The Mathter always kept up a continuous whimper when he was being carted down to the station. But now here was Dr. Drakken, the man who she'd watched finger HenchCo's laser blasters with greedy eyes, clinging to her like a pair of skinny jeans and just spurting worse than a busted shower-head.
In some sinking part of herself, Shego began to suspect that maybe Santa's workshop hadn't been a joke.
All right, so maybe this WOULDN'T exactly be the crime of the century. But - hey - whatever happens, I still get paid. At this point, Drakken probably would have donated a kidney if she'd asked for one.
Not a bad feeling. At least not compared to how it currently felt to have Drakken smearing moisture-that-had-better-just-be-tears all over her.
Weird. If Dementor or Killigan or any of the other guys she'd done mercenary work for had EVER hugged her, Shego would've removed their hands - and, like, not from her body. From theirs. It would have been such a lame excuse to get their paws all over her. But this felt different somehow.
It didn't feel good, and it sure as heck wasn't welcome. But the arms that clutched her now weren't taut with a plan or silky with ulterior motives. He was all shudders and slobber and poke-out elbows he didn't know what to do with and a pathetically weak grip that barely made a dent in the fabric it found and eyes like a pair of Ding-Dongs. Crazily, the word harmless came to Shego's mind, and the toughness she'd prepared for this meeting locked inside her with nowhere to go. Sort of like blazing into a grizzly's cave with your bear spray ready and getting greeted by a cub who just wanted to bat at your jeans leg instead.
The anticlimactic non-event almost frustrated her.
Just when Shego was about to jerk away, Drakken pulled back first and straightened himself up. He slapped his tears flat and seemed to pull a layer of Cellophane - thin but almost impossible to remove - over his face. "Yes, well, nicely done, Shego," he said with a noisy snuffle that was probably supposed to ring with I-am-so-over-this. "It is now time to move on to Phase Two."
The transition wasn't smooth, but it was quick - Shego could give him that.
She could. But she wasn't gonna. Not when he'd left another option gaping open for her.
Shego stared up at the suddenly-cold man in front of her, the man whose warmth she could still feel soaking into her shoulder. "Um, yeah, Drakken. That just happened."
"Whatever do you mean?"
"I have your snot on my jumpsuit." Shego gestured to the stain that was so getting scrubbed with disinfectant at the next available opportunity. "That totally happened."
Drakken cranked his eyes down into red-rimmed slits. "I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," he said, fingers fluttering toward the smoldering hole that used to be the doorway. "Back out the way we came?"
Shego shook her head. Nah. The guards had probably woken up while Drakken was having his little pity party.
"No way," Shego said. "Up and at 'em."
He wasn't the only one who could work in a bad pun every now and then.
A question mark all but popped out over Drakken's head, and he gestured to the ceiling with a hand Shego just realized was covered with a sock. Once bluish-green and now fading into disgusting, it sported a smudged-up face that had clearly been drawn with the same fat-tipped marker that had scribbled in black shock waves all across the top of the sock and down its back.
That's supposed to be my hair, Shego realized with a recoil. It's supposed to be ME.
Well, crud. That was a tiny bit concerning.
Too far to turn back now, though.
With a tug at the front of his striped jail duds, Shego hopped the two of them up onto the Drakken-cage's ceiling. She brought her plasma out to play and carved a circle at least twice as wide as Drakken's shoulder span into the ceiling.
Drakken stared at her, lips parted. For a second, Shego was sure she was breaking him out of Juvie instead of solitary confinement a thousand miles from anywhere.
That didn't really go away as she nudged him up through the hole - to the lovely soundtrack of his back cracking - and followed him. "Let's move," Shego said and gave Drakken a shove off the roof. Short drop into at least a foot of snow, but he still hollered like she had pushed him from the top floor of the Empire State Building. She'd have to get on his case for that later - but at this point she'd have been surprised if anyone could hear him over the chorus of sirens now shrieking from every place they could possibly shriek.
Shego landed beside him in the snowdrift that barely had time to fold under her before she sprang to her feet, snagged Drakken's wrist, and hauled both their tails across the tundra to the helicopter. Furious shouts got flung their way, but they were coming from the other side of the building, from still-groggy guards who wouldn't be able to reach them anytime soon. Shego could hear Drakken gasping beside her. Her breaths, on the other hand, though they felt like liquid steel sliding in and out of her lungs, didn't get any faster or shallower.
If anything, the faster her cheetah-sprint carried her, the more control she felt spread through her. Yeah, her veins raged, but only on her terms.
The slam of the helicopter door behind them was a relief, but Shego also heard that same click inside herself that her cell phone got when she plucked it off its charger. She didn't do power-down mode any better than Drakken apparently did stints in solitary. He'd folded onto the passenger seat and attempted to fasten his seat belt with hands that wouldn't stay still.
Shego got her own hands onto the controls and lifted the two of them off the ground. Below her, she could hear the guards griping at each other, trying to pass the blame down the line. It made her grin, and Drakken sighed so heavily Shego thought for a minute that he'd just gone ahead and swooned.
He hadn't, though. Next time she glanced over at him, his fingers had formed a nest for his mega-chin to rest in, propped up by his thumbs. Those fingers rubbed in movements that Shego was sure were meant to be shrewd. "Did you follow the instructions I sent you?" Drakken said.
"Uh, yeah. Boy did I ever." Shego waggled the T.P. roll at him. And then she threw out the words she had no reason not to say - "And it was just as annoying as working for you in real life."
Drakken shot her a death glare that worked about as well as Bricks of Fury: The Musical. Ground-up sounds pulled out of his mouth in spasms. Shego remembered that about him now - get him exasperated enough, and he would practically have to give himself CPR in order to stay in the conversation.
A good two or three minutes passed before Drakken was able to shake it off - bodily, in that wet-dog style of his. "Then it is time to get to work avenging my lair," he said, his voice lowering into its white-water-rapids-rumble.
Oh, so THAT's what this was about. He was feeling all homesick for that stupid private-island lair of his, the one she couldn't care less about. Between the charcoal-colored ceiling pillars that jutted aggressively toward the sky and the skull-and-crossbones warning signs punched just as hard into the sand, it had screamed There is definitely a supervillain in here working on a plot to conquer the world! a little too loud for Shego's taste.
She glanced out the window, where the whirling frost had already blotted the prison out of sight. "So we'll go back to our new hideout, and I can hear all about whatever dopey scheme you've rigged up now."
Drakken turned to look at her, questions wrinkled into the usually-way-too-smooth-for-a-dude-his-age forehead. "You know, you're not nearly as supportive as my sock puppet," he said, holding up the sock his right hand was still buried in.
"Yeah, but I'm so much less of a sock. And she didn't break you out of prison, Drakken. I did." She put an edge on that last syllable and poked him with it. Because she just wasn't ready to tune into the all-Drakken-all-the-time channel yet.
Drakken lapsed into a pout. Shego was suddenly grateful that they'd had him caged up by himself. Sure, he'd gotten "lonely" - but that was nothing compared to how the other prisoners would've been on him like a flock of falcons as soon as they'd gotten a whiff of him. Even in Juvie, she realized with a grunt, he'd have barely survived.
"Not everything can be solved with brute force, Shego," Drakken said, huffing air as if she were the one being ridiculous.
Shego probably could've held back the guffaw, but it was so much more fun to let it tumble out. "Why were you even in prison if you believe that?"
Drakken's next glance her direction was hasty and fighting to back itself up. "Most things," he told her. "But not every single thing."
"Thanks for the clarification, Doc."
There was no way Drakken caught her sarcasm. He'd already turned back to what little horizon there was out here, his gaze vacant, halfway to Pluto by now. "Yes, Shego. We shall steal from Kim Possible that which allowed her to defeat me, and we shall make sure the entire world knows that she is nothing more than a pubescent female poking her nose into the affairs of grown-ups!"
He so did not just say "pubescent."
Aside from that, even Shego couldn't craft many zingers around THAT speech. It wasn't that his words were so impressive - it was the rapids rushing up to a speed where they actually sounded hazardous to Miss Goody-Two-Shoes' health. Not to mention the sneer he sent her way that he must have spent his entire lockup practicing, 'cause it was way closer to intimidating that it had been a year ago. For a flat-out sprint of a moment, he wasn't the geeky ding-dong with the eyes to match anymore. He was someone whose brain Shego could just about see darkening with the promise of revenge.
Maybe this wouldn't be the most annoying gig of all time after all.