"You..." Ron breathed.
"Me," the woman acknowledged with a smile as she hoisted herself from the scuba lagoon. As she had been the last time he'd seen her, she was naked.
Ron's cheeks burned, giving them the shade of old brick in the crimson glow of the emergency lighting. He was too shocked by her presence to show more of a reaction; he simply stared mutely into her eyes.
"Two minutes to self destruct."
The computer's announcement jolted Ron from his distracted state. "Quick... you've got to get out of here! This whole place is going to blow!"
She raised one eyebrow. "Your work again?"
Ron shook his head, "Not this time - not directly... but there's no time to explain. Please, you've got to go while there's still time!"
As though there were all the time in the world, she glanced around the small room, seeing the distinct lack of egress. "And you?"
He had no response.
"I've thought about you a lot since the last time we met," she continued, "and I'd hoped to see you again." She smiled, unashamed of her nudity as she stood before Ron, her skin dyed the color of an abattoir's floor by the emergency lighting.
Ron was too distracted to properly appreciate what was on display before him. "Please, forget about me," he urged, pointing to the lagoon that she'd used to enter the doomed undersea base. "Just get out of here before it's too late."
"You have done me some services," she continued, ignoring his increasingly frantic attempts to send her away. "And received a minor reward from me, as well. If I take you away from this place, I would think this would shift the balance of the debt the opposite way. Do you agree?"
Shocked, Ron blinked in surprise. "You have a way out of here... for me, too?"
She stepped closer. "Yes; will you let me take you from this place? Will you accept the burden of debt by doing so?"
"Yes," Ron dazedly answered, captivated by the gleam in her eyes.
She smiled; it was a mysterious smile with a thousand layers of meaning, and Ron was lost in it. "Drink," she ordered, handing him a small flask.
Ron looked down at the container in his hand. "She's naked... where did she get...?" "Where...? What...?" he began.
She interrupted before he could properly frame the answer. "As you pointed out, time is short. Drink. And fear not. It is a form of mead - of sorts."
"I'm not old enough to drink," Ron muttered, unscrewing the lid.
Amused, she retorted, "Nor will you ever be, should you not drink now." She watched his face twist as he tasted it, and warned, "Drink all of it."
"One minute to self destruct."
Ron's tongue lolled from his mouth as he gagged, the flask slipping from between his slack fingers to clatter on the deck. "Yuck," he shuddered. "What was that?"
"Come," she instructed, ignoring his question. She jumped into the lagoon, her sleek body creating barely a ripple as she entered the water. Ron hesitated on the side, standing on the cement and steel lip of the pool.
When Ron made no move to enter after several long seconds had passed, she reached up, grabbed his bare leg just above the slippers he'd worn beneath the fins he'd used to swim to the base so long before, and with a strength that greatly surpassed his own, simply pulled him in. "Hey!" he barely had time to yelp before his head went under.
She ducked beneath the surface, and pointed to the underwater passage leading out of the hidden lair. Before Ron could breach the surface to fill his lungs with a fresh breath, she swam into the tunnel, dragging him with her by one leg.
Ron struggled briefly, but her hand simply tightened on his ankle as she swam. Eventually, he was concentrating too hard on trying not to breathe as he was dragged through the water to worry about struggling.
She swam faster than Ron would have believed possible - especially since she was burdened by his limp weight. He could only guess the rate of their travel based on the distantly and sporadically spaced emergency lights which were intermittently visible in the tunnel, but even these markers flew by so quickly that true estimation of their speed was all but impossible.
They finally reached the end of the passage and shot into open water. Ron caught a faint glimpse of sparks as he was dragged out, the crackling discharge erupting into the water from what had once been a control panel near the opening to the passage they'd emerged from - before the metal had been clawed apart as thoroughly as Shego might have done.
Despite having escaped the base, she didn't slow down. Instead, she actually increased her speed (in Ron's half-blind guesstimation) as she dragged his unresisting body deeper into the ocean. She arched her back in a move as graceful as a porpoise's as they passed over the lip of an undersea cliff, then dove down, rocketing ever deeper into the abyssal deeps.
As the glow from the lights surrounding Gemini's base faded into the distance, the darkness became all but absolute. And as the cliff blocked Ron's line of sight, it became even more so. At this depth, light from the surface never penetrated, and now that they were beyond the feeble range of the WEE installation's illumination, the sheer blackness was indescribable.
But the absence of light did not impede their travel. Even when the darkness was complete, and Ron could barely tell whether his eyes were open or closed, she continued to drag him through the water, deeper and further away from the doomed base.
Between the lack of light, the unusual mode of travel, and the sheer shock of the last few minutes, Ron had totally lost track of time. The only hint he received of the countdown's completion was a release of the grip on his leg.
Before he could think of the implications, or do anything to prepare himself, a muted rumble filled his ears. Distantly he wondered what it must have been like to be closer to - or even in - the base, if he could hear it this well from so far away. "Would I have felt anything? Or would it have been so quick that I'd be dead before realizing it?"
The WEE base first exploded, then imploded as the ocean rushed to extinguish the flame and reclaim the pitiful fraction of its depths that man had so briefly and arrogantly attempted to claim as his own. Even as the rumble of the base's destruction still shuddered through Ron's bones, a shockwave thrummed through the water.
Ron gasped as his chest was struck by a hammer blow as the wave, borne of the fiery death throes of the base, reached him. Despite the depth and the distance, the force that struck him was potent enough that the feeble volume of air he'd somehow retained in his lungs during his wild ride through the Stygian darkness of the ocean erupted from between his lips in a pained grunt.
Ron panicked as his lungs flooded with water. He thrashed, trying to purge himself of the fluid, blindly fighting against the logical and inescapable conclusion that he would very shortly be dead, drowned in the eternal darkness of Davey Jones' locker. But nearly as quickly as the panic had erupted, he stilled once more. He suddenly realized, "I'm breathing... how am I breathing? I should be dead."
The woman who had brought him out of the doomed base chuckled, and to Ron's ears, the sound seemed to be utterly unaffected by either the staggering pressure at the ocean bottom, or the complete lack of air.
"Am I dead?" he wondered aloud, lazily sweeping his arms and legs to hold himself still and upright in the water. "I'm breathing and I don't feel cold..."
"You're not dead," she replied, swimming back to him. In the absolute blackness of the ocean depths, he couldn't see her, but he felt the wake of her movements as she slowly began to swim in circles around his hovering form as he treaded water.
"Then how...?" Ron wondered aloud, then realized, "The flask! It must be... What was that stuff?"
"It is an old recipe; a very old recipe in fact. From time out of mind, it has been used by many races to traverse the sea of stars. For us, in the here and now, until the stars are right, it is mostly used for bringing honored... 'guests' to temple services."
"Cool... I wish K.P. and me had more of that stuff. Maybe Wade can make us some. It'll come in handy since I'm not the best swimmer."
"That will change," her voice sounded faintly amused once more. "And perhaps he can, at that; it is not truly a complicated magic."
"Magic?" Ron blinked in surprise. "You know, actually, that explains a lot," he thought. He knew magic existed; for all his fear and hatred of Lord Monkey Fist, he couldn't deny there was something underlying his belief in the Mystical Monkey Power - Ron had felt its touch for himself. And if magic existed, it certainly could explain how he could learn a dead language all but instantaneously, and more importantly, how he could possibly be alive and breathing when by all rational thought, he should be dead - either crushed by the pressure, drowned, or chilled beyond survival by the frigid conditions. "Oh... Well, maybe not. Wade doesn't deal well with magic. I think it annoys him for some reason."
She laughed. "And here I was concerned you would reject the very possibility; it was the one thing I myself had the most difficulty learning to accept, having been so logical and rational before..." she didn't complete the thought, choosing instead to change the subject. "And who is this... K.P.? The Kim you mentioned the last time we met?"
Ron blinked, idly glancing around in the Stygian darkness that surrounded him, but unable to see her - or anything else for that matter. "Which is probably a good thing, since she's likely still naked," he thought distantly. "Yes; Kim Possible. She's my best friend; you've probably heard of her, since she saves the world a lot. You know... come to think of it, I don't think we've ever introduced ourselves either... Funny," he mused, "Can't imagine why I've been so distracted every time we meet. I'm Ron. Ron Stoppable."
For a moment, Ron felt the wake of her passage still, and he realized she'd briefly stopped swimming. After a brief pause, she resumed her circling of him, and moments later, broke the silence. "K.P... Kim... Possible... and Rrron Stoppable. My, my. How... fraught a situation. And truly an explanation of sorts, as well."
She pronounced his name oddly; trilling the "R" and giving the vowels an odd inflection. "Which is weird since she doesn't really have an accent," he noted. "Huh?" Ron asked in confusion.
"It is of no great import," she responded easily, swimming closer and closer, until his fingertips intermittently began to touch her skin as she circled. A situation he found easily distracting enough to make him lose sight of the odd way she had said his name.
"Okay," Ron replied, his brow wrinkling in confusion, "'It is of no...' Oh! She means, 'No big.'" Then his eyes widened and he found himself trying not to think about what part of her body could have just brushed across his fingertips. "And you are?"
He could sense her amusement once more. "I think," she paused, then added, "I would like it if you called me... M.P."
Ron blinked. "Sure; that's a bon-diggity name. But what's it stand for?"
"You'll learn in time; you'll learn a great many things in time," she replied, and her amusement remained plain. "But now is not the time for questions."
Before he could react, she abruptly closed the distance between them, and pressed herself flat against his back. Ron stiffened as her arms and legs intertwined with his, and her body molded itself to his back.
"Wha... What are you doing?" he asked, his limbs stiffening to immobility. He felt... strange; as though heat were radiating into him from every point where her body touched his - even through his clothes.
"Working my magic on you," she whispered in his ear. "The old blood is strong, and yours is ancient indeed. Can you feel your blood awakening? Do you hear the call?"
Ron remained silent since it was not his blood he felt awakening - or at least not exclusively - and since he'd lost his pants back at the base, he was more than a little... preoccupied. "Ah... um..."
She kissed him once on each side of his neck, taking her time while doing so, sucking and nibbling with surprisingly sharp teeth at his skin. Just when Ron was sure something would burst, he was abruptly released.
"It is done," she told him, her voice tired, but triumphant.
Ron looked about in the darkness, eyes wide. Things certainly didn't feel done from his perspective, but he was confused and uncertain enough that his only response was, "What?"
"In time, you will understand without the need for explanation."
Shaking with the strength of his emotions and the fire burning in his blood Ron stared into the darkness.
"It will shortly be time for you to go," she continued. "It will be some time before you are ready to join me. Tell me," she asked conversationally, "do you know anyone who lives on the shore? A fisherman, or...?" she trailed off.
Ron's teeth ground together as his muscles knotted, but he managed, "Na.. na... Nana Possible... Kim's grandma... She lives in Florida... Chez... Leisure... in..."
She chuckled, "Keeping it in the family, hmm? Perfect. I suspect I know the location well."
"What's... happening... to me?" Ron managed to ask through gritted teeth, shaking as though afflicted with a palsy.
"Shh," M.P. soothed. "Relax. Your ride will be here soon."
"Ride?"
"You must return to the surface for a time. But fear not; you will come back to me. We are linked, you and I. Now and forever."
At any other time, Ron would have reacted to those words - either with confusion, fear, or distress. But here and now, with the fire she'd unleashed burning in his veins, the quivering that afflicted his limbs, and surrounded by the eternal night of the ocean depths, he simply accepted them as simple truth. He still might have reacted as the undercurrents of her words penetrated his mind, but something intangibly changed, and M.P. and her words evaporated into insignificance.
Somewhere in the back of Ron's mind, beyond the layers of civilization and society and evolution, at the most primitive level, something began to gibber in terror. Before culture and logic layered meaning over instinct, the most fundamental tenet of survival was the question of "fight or flight." That instinct remains in even the most civilized, urbane, and cultured of modern humans, and in Ron, it suddenly began to howl.
In the unfathomable darkness, it was impossible to see, but somehow beyond anything tangible, Ron simply knew that something approached - and the terror that ran before it screamed from every lingering primitive instinct he possessed in his body. Despite his disquiet and feelings of illness from whatever M.P. had done to him, the mindless urge to flee seized hold, and he blindly began to thrash about, desperately trying to reach the surface and escape.
A hand gripped his ankle, and just as before, M.P.'s strength was more than enough to hold him captive. "Got to get out of here," Ron whimpered to himself, still thrashing wildly and trying to flee before it could find him.
"Such senses," M.P. breathed in delight, even as she anchored him to the seabed. "You can feel your ride coming even now... You will be marvelous when you return... I knew you held the seeds of greatness within you."
From out of the Stygian night, a pinpoint of green light appeared, shockingly brilliant in the darkness. Ron's eyes, with pupils swelled to their maximum diameter thanks to the enveloping darkness, immediately seized on the change, and though his eyes watered as the light stabbed deeply into his retinas, he couldn't look away.
In the unfathomed depths of the ocean, the sun's rays never pierce the eternal darkness. The only natural source of light is the infernal glow of volcanic vents.
To the creatures adapted to the conditions of this abyss, eyes as humans think of them are an evolutionary disadvantage. Even those creatures that sense light in order to locate the volcanic vents - and the bacteria, heat, other creatures, and compounds vomited from the heart of the Earth - everything needed to help sustain life in this cold, hostile environment - managed to do so with only the simplest of light-sensing organs rather than with complex, fragile, vulnerable, energy-sapping eyes.
But as the source of the light grew closer, and Ron's eyes began to ache as the light hurt his dark-adapted eyes, he learned what naturalists and the primitive and panicked part of his mind already knew. There was one other source of light in the abyss: bio-luminescence... The light generated by living creatures.
While many reasons existed for such light, ranging from a display to rival a peacock's for gaudiness (and with similar intent), to a signal beacon, the reasons for the generation of the light that was growing ever closer to Ron were far more fundamental. To creatures that sought light to find a volcanic bounty, it served as a lure... Bait. And since those animals needed to sense the smallest variation in the darkness to locate the distant glow of volcanic emissions, the lumens that were being poured into the deep served as the phosphorescent equivalent of a club to the head: a weapon to stun and disorient as specialized and effective in its way as a crab's claw or a jellyfish's venom.
Ron's thrashing increased as his panic mounted, but he gained no more ground than before as M.P. held tight. As the pinpoint of light grew closer, it was suddenly joined by more, of a multitude of different sizes and intensities that bathed a section of the ocean floor in the first light it had known since it had sunk beneath the waves in a geological upheaval untold eons before. Primal terror compressed his heart and throat, but trapped as he was, he could do little but watch. And as he watched, and the source of the ever growing flock of lights grew closer still, Ron learned to his mounting horror that the lights were not simply lights.
They were eyes.
Ron watched as the mass of glowing eyes approached. His chest heaved as his heart pounded and his lungs pumped like bellows, trying to hyper-oxygenate his burning blood so that his muscles could perform at their peak, to better the chance of escaping from what was coming... But his body's efforts were for naught; he was trapped without even the hope of escape.
His eyes wide and watering, Ron found himself unable to blink or tear his gaze away from what approached. He watched the thing grow closer - and larger. In the light emanating from the eyes, its bulk was partially illuminated, bringing elements of the immense form into view. It was amorphous; appearing as a foetid black iridescence against the backdrop of the lesser darkness of the Stygian abyss. In the shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles that was the creature's body, the sickly glow from the myriad of eyes allowed Ron to see the way eyes continually sprouted, opened as eyelids were extruded and retracted, and glowed into unholy life as other eyes closed and were reabsorbed back into the formless and viscid body of the thing.
As it drew nearer, it dominated Ron's vision. Although the undulating mass disguised the true size of the creature in a haze of wrongness as it drifted and oozed over the seabed, Ron's fevered brain began to spit out comparisons, desperately trying to divert itself from contemplation of the nature of the thing that loomed ever larger. It dwarfed the robot Dr. Drakken had once turned Nakasumi-san's Z-Boy production line into... It was larger than Duff Killagan's blimp... It was bigger than Junior's sunlamp... It was huger than Pop Pop Porter's Cryolater... It was even larger than Aviarius' Flamingo of Doom... And the mouth that stretched across the amorphous flank looked massive enough to swallow the Middleton Bueno Nacho in one massive bite.
"Sick and wrong! Sick and wrong!" some fragment of Ron's mind chattered as his eyes were confronted with a horror that even his limited schooling knew should not exist... and before now would have insisted could not exist. Ron panted, close to hyperventilating as his eyes widened further and further, as it continued to loom ever closer...
As Ron stared, frozen in terror, his ears began to resound with the distant echoes of a mocking, eldritch cry. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" the creature called as it came, the cry coming louder and louder as it drew ever nearer.
Dread crystallized in Ron's soul as he realized that it was not simply an abomination - an affront to nature, and all that was good and normal in the world. It was also a thinking creature; a monstrosity as alien to life as Ron knew it as any of the beings found in Area 51 - or even more so, given his experiences there - and possessed of a malignant intelligence. Its call resounded with a vile delight, a ghastly and diabolical eagerness unknown even in the blackened heart of the most execrable of men.
Ron began to laugh maniacally, his mind shuddering away from the thing that should not exist outside the dreams of madmen. Gibbering in wild panic, he turned on M.P. - who still held him captive by the ankle.
His blunt fingers scrabbled fruitlessly across her skin, sending him even deeper into a hysterical delirium. In his frenzy, he abandoned all modesty, decency, and seemliness as he clawed at her naked body, falling into a primitive savagery as he fought to flee from the advancing thing with tooth and nail.
Despite the frenzied assault, his fingers found no purchase, and his nails slid uselessly over flesh that seemed unnaturally firm and resistant to damage. And, just as her skin failed to yield to his attacks, neither did her hand yield in its grip on his ankle.
M.P. crooned to Ron gently, her voice a gentle ululation as she tried to soothe her increasingly wild captive, but as the creature grew ever closer, and that mocking cry grew louder, Ron became uncontrollable. His body twisted and contorted, muscles and sinews straining against each other as he tried to flee... to no avail. He gnashed his teeth and kicked with his free leg, tearing the fabric of his boxer shorts and splitting a seam in his shirt as he wrenched his body about in manic furor, but still he remained trapped.
Ron fought his captivity not with the Mystical Monkey Power, nor any of the martial arts skills he'd acquired over the course of his association with Kim Possible, nor anything else he'd learned; he was beyond all thought or reason. He fought with the savagery and raw intensity of an animal in a trap, driven by primal instincts to flee no matter the cost... before it arrived.
When he failed to loosen M.P.'s grip to enable his escape, the maddened animal Ron had become turned his assault upon his own pinned leg. He clawed wildly, his fingernails raking his flesh and releasing a fine haze of blood-mist into the water as mad laughter convulsed through his body. Before M.P. could react to the assault, or he could seriously damage his leg, the creature loomed over the pair of them, the mass of eyes blinking randomly in the seething darkness of its gelid form - and all of them gazing intently at the pair hovering above the seabed.
It was too much. Stressed beyond all measure, bathed in the febrile glow of the creature's multitudinous eyes, the last vestiges of Ron's mind surrendered to the darkness, sinking into the merciful embrace of unconsciousness even as his body began to drift gently down towards the ocean's floor.
