Pre note: If you have any music by Brainbug, especially "Rain" (original mix preferable), "Benedictus", and/or "Nightmare" (If you have a clean copy of the original 'sinister strings' mix, that one is the greatest, but I had a club mix on), put it on while you read this — It's what I wrote this chapter to. If you don't, then, dude, you're missing out! You're also missing out if you don't have the album "Aura" by The Alpha Conspiracy, the feature of my normal playlist, which I'd switched back to in the last phase of writing this chapter.
"What will you say, as the rain fills up your mind?" (Brainbug / Rain)
And now, in the ring of fate, Prepare yourselves for (drum roll)
The Amazing Chapter 13 (fan fare)
Also known as "the chapter where I traditionally accidentally give the game away and/or run out of plot ideas."
Staring at the ceiling, Dr. Director weighed up how best to answer Kim's latest question. It wasn't one she wanted particularly to answer, but the teen hero deserved to know what she was in the middle of. She then looked down, and motioned to everyone as though she was about to tell a story. "Let's start with the basics of what I know for fact," she started, and looked up.
"Da Hand is not his real name. That's the name GJ assigned him when he opted, like most recruits, to be anonymized."
"So you called this guy 'The lion-hearted conqueror'? Great idea, that." The interjection had been made by Josh.
"Huh?" Kim looked at him confoundedly, her eyes wide, one brow raised, and her mouth half open; It was intentional – her emotional cast and facial features meant that she could employ this expression well. She normally used it on Ron when she actually didn't really want to know what he was on about.
"Etymology of names," replied Josh, "Leonard – lion hearted, James – usurper or conqueror. I guess we're lucky they didn't make his last name 'Di Atlas.' Conqueror of Hand; Heh." Josh chuckled as he finished his explanation.
"Whatever." Kim shook it off, closing her eyes as though trying to get rid of a light headache. Again, it was normally something she used with Ron's whacked out theories on life, the Universe, and how she was so fantastically great and he was such a loser. She was beginning to realise how it was that Ron and Josh could be fighting one minute and friends the next when they were nowhere near as close as they should to be like that.
Dr. Director scowled at Josh. "As I did," she continued,
looking to the rest of her congregation again, "he kept his real
given names." – Josh grimaced apologetically at this stage
– "What's more surprising is that I never found out what
his real name actually is, and I suspect no-one at HQ ever did.
I have no idea why he would still be using his GJ name, but I can
guess why he wouldn't want to be using his own.
"He was there at Global Justice pretty much as far back as I was.
He found – I guess I could call us 'them' at the time, being a
rookie myself – not the other way around. He was like that
— no-one ever had any idea where he came from. Normally
that's grounds for pretermination, but his skills were such that
the directors just couldn't bring themselves to waste them.
"Instead of being brain-locked and dropped in a mental care
facility like we normally do the people who 'discover' us so, he
was recruited."
"Brain-locked?" asked Kim.
The HoloWade explained this one. "It's when part of your memory is kept from you. It's better than total brainwashing in case the people with the key, in this case GJ, decide they want to use you after all."
"There's a downside," Dr. Director continued, "It can have serious repercussions, such as becoming permanent, or worse cause random parts of the brain and CNS to cease function. Either way, if that happens, it results in a kind of mature-age autism most frequently, but also other sometimes terminal mental diseases. That's why they didn't do it to Len, it was too much of a risk. Anyway, he and I were assigned to each other as training partners, and thus developed such a trust in each other that we chose to become partners on mission.…"
"That was seven years ago," stated Dr. Director. Her eyes were moist. "Ronnie was real good to me.…" she mumbled to herself.The two agents looked out over San Pablo bay. "Bett Erwin" and "Len Da Hand" were on their first mission, and they were determined to get the results. It was a test, and as such there was little chance of them being sufficiently hurt that they could not go straight back into training, but they didn't know that.
"They're not going to show, Jimmy," stated Bett, "It's been over an hour."
"Just wait, Beth," he replied, not even looking down the road, but out over the bay instead.
Right on cue, a black sedan with darkened windows pulled up on the road behind them. They turned their backs to the bay, and walked to the car. Len stood station at the front, no weapons drawn, but making it plainly clear that he could have one at hand whenever the need arose. The illusion was better than textbook, and the rear window was opened as Bett leaned down.
"Why does the dolphin open its gills?" asked the window.
Bett was not expecting this. She waivered, and looked aside. "Dolphin," she muttered. This was not the protocol they'd been given!
"I'm waiting," said the window.
Bett panicked. "Look, have you got the goods?" she asked, "We have the money."
Not far away, in an almost identical black sedan, in fact the one that Bett was supposed to be 'buying' from, a special ops agent smacked his hand to his forehead. "Bad move, Betty," he said. He turned to his partner "What do we know about dolphins? Do we know anyone who uses something like that?"
"No, we don't have any protocols like that listed," was the reply.
"Shit." Dr. Director had heard this transfer over the radio. "Shit, shit, shit, with a side of crap. We have to get the rookies out of there now! There's no-one nearby, so you're on your own. Best of luck. We need those two."
"OK," the first op said, "now that our worst nightmare has started, what's the plan for the rest of it?"
"D has these two on priority," replied his partner. "That means we forget about the potential leads."
"Right."
Back with Bett and Len, it was as bad as they feared. "Wrong answer, chicky-baby," was the window's reply, and suddenly there was an assault rifle in Bett's face. "Who are you with?" asked the window as the driver's door opened and Len was machine-gunned down.
At least that's what would have happened, if Len hadn't turned into a light blue and silver shadow in the air. Bett found herself around the other side of a grass hill.
"Beth! Are you OK?" Len himself had blood running down his chin, bleeding from his mouth.
"I'm fine, Jimmy," she replied. It was true — she was only a little disoriented.
A car came screeching past, forced to oversteer on the way around the corner, brakes hard on and locked. It spun right around so it was facing the opposite direction on the road, and the two special ops agents rushed out the front doors, guns ready.
"What the –?" the man on the other side of the window that Bett had been speaking with was cut off, due to a bullet checking into his head.
The GJ examiner, leaning over the back seat of his own vehicle, gun pointed through the rear windshield, was confused. "Where are the rookies?" he asked himself. Into his radio, he yelled, "There's no sign of the rookies!"
"We're on the other side of this ridge," the radio replied. The examiner sighed heavily at the sound of Bett's voice. He still didn't how they got there, but looking behind him, he saw that they were, indeed, out of harms way.
"The scene's clear," he spoke into the radio, "let's blow this scene and get the hell home."
The specials ops agents were on the other side of the drug pushers' vehicle already though, and still had only the one of them down. And then the very worst of their nightmares began. The red-haired male operative was gunned down.
"No!" his partner screamed. She rushed over to his side. "Kim," she said, "stay with me, Kim."
The man blinked, and looked up at her. "Ron…." his voiced trailed off and he smiled as he sighed. Then he went limp in her arms.
"No," sobbed Ron, "no, this can't be."
"Ron," the examiner spoke into the radio, examining Kim's life signs, his face fading into stone. "His vitals aren't good," and they weren't at all. Then they hit the deadline. "Ronnie, he's dead. You have to finish the operation and we'll get out of here. We can't bring him back with us."
"Is this my fault?" asked Bett, who had, with Len, got into the examiner's car. She was extremely worried, and upset.
"It's no one's fault," replied the examiner, "just things went wrong. This was supposed to be a test. You had the right protocol, just the wrong people. If you'd tried that on me, you'd probably still pass the test." Turning back to the radio, he commanded the blonde girl again. "Veronica! Time's short. Finish them. We have to get out of here!"
Ron had other plans though. Sure, she'd finish it. "You killed Kim Perceptible," she said slowly and loudly, walking towards the druggies' car. "She's my best friend. You're going to pay for that." She unclipped a grenade-like device from her belt, and flicked the pin off. Bullets grazed her side, but she didn't notice them.
"Oh shit!" cried the examiner, staring at the device. "Bett, take the wheel and get us the hell out of here now."
"What about Veronica?" the girl protested.
"She's dead," replied not the examiner, but Len. "Drive. Drive fast."
Bett trusted Len's word enough that she did so immediately, although she was confused as to how Len could conclude that the woman was dead already. She counted to the end of the maximum 5 second fuse, and still didn't hear an explosion. "That wasn't a grenade?" she asked.
"Grade 6 biological weapon," replied the examiner. "You're not cleared to know, and trust me, you don't want to. It'll oxidise and have become harmless in about half an hour, but we're almost still too close." Now he spoke into the radio. "Dr. Director? We need this road closed Now."
"Already done," replied the radio.
Behind them, they heard the muffled sound of a petrol tank being melted and scattered around the landscape at high speed by its contents.
"I hope Defeatable was smart enough to put herself in that explosion," said the examiner, "those gas bombs are horrible. She doesn't deserve to die like that."
"I've seen him do that," said Ron, "Actually, more I've seen him finish doing that. He knocked me out immediately afterwards, I think. The next thing I knew, I was chained to a wall next to Mankey. At least I think it was him. I remember the blue outline."
"He told me afterwards that that was a Celtic magic," Dr. Director explained. "It takes a lot out of him, but by the time he ran from GJ, he could move a mile in a second. It makes it possible for him to see into the future a fair way as well, otherwise he'd never be able to react in time — He said that it felt like train-surfing when you're drunk. You feel like you're moving that fast, and you can process that much of what's going on."
"Of course, I've never been drunk," said Kim, "or train-surfing."
"Yes you have," accused Shego, "with your mother, even."
"Oh yeah. On a bullet train while riding an ATV."
"Well that's probably about the same, then," stated Dr. Director, "Considering he was only talking about normal passenger trains."
"An all terrain vehicle? I don't remember that," Shego said, resuming her conversation with Kim.
"It was before you and Drakken so rudely interrupted me trying to slow the train. Did you ever get it to stop, by the way?"
"Yeah," Shego snickered, "by clawing into the tracks behind it. You're supposed to brake brakes, Kimmie, not break them."
"I only broke the lever!" exclaimed Kim. "The brakes must have been broken already!"
"Yeah, sure, Princess. Heh, that would've made Drakken's day if I'd told him that all he needed to do was wait for the train to fall off the tracks of its own accord."
"Speaking of interruptions," Dr. Director said before pausing to catch everyone's attention. "It's because of the psycho-temporal effects that he knew about the gas bomb. Apparently those effects remain for about 30 seconds after he's gone back to normal speed, but can be misleading. For example, in that incident, he thought we were going to die because of the gas as well. That's actually why he was bleeding out of his mouth, it turns out; The spells affect him physically as well as mentally and his most vulnerable point has always been just after completing them."
"That's bullshit," growled Shego, "he beat the crap out of my three best soldiers right after pulling some stunt that got him into the middle of Drakken's lair. Then, then, he pulled another shifty and disappeared right before I was going to nail him to a wall. Took my favourite soldier with him."
"He cut her in half in the police station," Kim said, detachedly. "Spells, plural?"
"I don't know what they all are," replied Dr. Director, "But I've seen him do a couple of things I wouldn't have thought were possible. His reaction times, too… I've only seen one person match that kind of time and she's touted to be able to do anything." Dr. Director winked at Kim, who blushed.
"In the police station?" asked Shego, "That's a teensy bit brassy. Wait, how do you know that?"
"I just so happened to have been framed for homicide. I was spending the night in the cell, as it were. You should know about that, Shego."
"They framed you for homicide to get your phone thingy?" laughed Shego, "Now, that's what I call overkill. I had very little to do with that."
"It's a sad state indeed when policemen can't even investigate a robbery at a jewelry store without being killed," replied Kim.
Dr. Director was confused by this. "You have an autographed get out of jail free card, Kim.…"
"No-one's above the law, Betty."
Shego started to count on her fingers. "Unlawful entry, breaking and entering, destruction of property, expensive property I might add, theft, unlicensed use of military-grade weapons, train surfing, driving without a license, attempted murder, mass homicide, and probably others, most multiple times. Do you want to re-think that statement, Princess?"
"What?!" Kim was quite shocked.
"She's right, Kim," said Dr. Director, "You have multiple offences, most criminal, some felonies, under you belt. In fact, you have a worse criminal record than Shego here. If you weren't … you, they'd probably have fried you by now, juvenile or not. Taking the law into your own hands is a highly dangerous and illegal business."
"How come no-one ever told me?" asked Kim, looking like her face was about to fall off.
"Uh, maybe because it was so obvious," supplied Wade.
"That, and you have an autographed get out of jail free card," added Dr. Director
Shego smirked. "You're not exactly the brightest cookie in the jar, are you, Kimmie?"
"Hey, go easy on the girl!" Ron cried. "She does what she can, and she takes a lot of shit. She doesn't need it from you." He pulled his chair closer to Kim, and put his arm around her shoulders. She flopped on to him, and he cuddled her closer.
Josh, on the other hand, seemed to have ceased all bodily functions. His was just sitting there, eyes wide. He slowly fell over backwards, chair and all. He didn't even notice when he hit the ground.
"Ooh, ouch," chittered a certain naked mole rat who'd just made the distance from Ron's house to Kim's. He then walked right over the top of Mankey's face. The boy still didn't react.
"Is he alright?" asked Dr. Director.
"He just hasn't had breakfast yet," said Ron, looking down at his friend, who climbed up onto the table and curled up in front of Ron, going back to sleep.
"No," stated Wade, "that looks more like a trauma-induced coma."
"Oh, you mean Josh?" said Ron, now looking down at him. "I think you broke him. Kim, too," he continued, caressing Kim's cheek. She didn't react to this, other than to sigh. This wasn't normal for when she had her eyes open, Ron thought. Then again, it wasn't something he generally did except for when they were on their way home from a mission and she was slowly falling asleep. As if she was reading his mind, she closed her eyes, and nestled into his neck, just like she would when the villain had got away. It was at times like these that Ron knew, being the one comforting the world's greatest hero, he was the luckiest person alive. Today, it brought him no joy.
Josh blinked. He then rolled off the chair, and rose to his feet. "If anyone wants me, I'll be taking a cold shower," he said, and all eyes were on him, with the exception of Kim's, as he walked across the room and to the door. He turned around to face everyone. "In liquid oxygen." He left up the stairs.
"I think we just had a demonstration of what happened to Da Hand happening to Kim here, but much faster," Dr. Director opined.
Kim, brushing Ron's hand away, opened her eyes and looked up at Dr. Director. "What do you mean?" she asked.
Da Hand's story in chapter 13, as prophesised in numbers. Well, at the end of chapter 12, anyway. I was considering continuing writing from that point, so you'd have got your two chapters, but no dice. I hadn't worked out how to introduce Da Hand's backstory yet. So, here's 2900 or so words of one chapter, which is longer even than the epilogue. I suspect it's not going to be the longest. Might make up for there not being two chapters here, though. There won't be another incredibly long storytelling sequence, more will be told as Dr D. Flashbacks to specific details of events.
Oh, do you like Betty's pre-Director name, BTW? Before you say that I keep making Len call her "Beth", not "Bett" this is on purpose - both are abbreviated forms of "Elizabeth", as is "Betty". In case you couldn't figure it out, they preferred not to use "Bett" and "Len" between themselves. This isn't the whole of Da Hand's backstory, just an introduction to how he started to be like he is. Duh, I'm here to give Hitchcock a run for his money.
I hereby deny all claims you may make of Josh bashing. I am in fact one of only a handful of people, it seems, who doesn't think that Josh should just die and give up KP to Ron. Josh falling over backwards was in fact inserted for a sort of comic relief, and in the style of the intellectual variety of humour — the amusing part is supposed to be his lack of reaction, not that he fell over. It just so happened that Josh was the only person suitable to do this at the table. Spot the TV culture reference soon after, and you probably watch BBC comedy, and therefore you'll understand. Admittedly, the reference as used here doesn't have the sexual connotations.
No, Wade does not magically appear. Any time I refer to Wade here, it's the HoloWade. He might turn up in person in the sequel if you decide me to write one.Feedback on feedback time:
WolfBane :- No, hence the "Suspense" part of the story. Well, I'm telling you now I guess, but thanks for reacting. I wasn't sure if it was still getting to anyone enough. ;-)
GreenGal, you're absolutely right. I guess I wasn't really thinking about Ron. Although, I had been going to put a bit in there where Ron didn't get Shego her coffee — In fact that was why I included the fact the Ron was smiling, he was about to drop it and grumble about Kim telling him to do something for Shego. I forgot. I guess that I thought that I had conveyed a enough tension when I was proofreading it.
Ace, don't feel bad. Kim's tougher than just about everyone.
