Chapter 3 - Back to Normal
The door opened up, and Kim was greeted by the perpetually smiling face of Bonnie's mother.
"Why hello there, if it isn't my little Bon-Bon's friend, Kitty!" She exclaimed, looking every bit like she wanted to lean over and engulf the teen hero in a hug. Looking over Kim's shoulder, she spied Ron shifting about nervously. "And is that Roland back there?"
"Hi Mrs. Rockwaller..." Kim began.
"Oh please, call me Jude!"
"O-kay... We were just calling by to see Bonnie, is she here?"
For a second the older woman's cheerful expression wavered, giving Kim the tiniest glimpse of sadness before being replaced once more with her grinning visage. "She's with her father, she spends the weekends with him."
"Oh, sorry," she began, shuffling her feet, "we have to see her, could you give us his address please?"
Mrs. Rockwaller gave her directions, and waved the two of them off and they went on their way.
"That was super-awkward," Kim confessed once they were out of earshot of the house. "I didn't know Bonnie's parents lived apart."
"Why would you? It's not like the pair of you hang out together?" Ron reasoned.
Kim thought back to earlier that year, when she had spent the afternoon at Bonnie's house, and to their ski trip where Bonnie's mom had come to chaperone. She never saw any sign of a father.
"Still, I should have known that." She muttered to herself. How was it she still knew so little about her greatest rival, even after they'd spent a whole day joined at the hip?
The trip over was uneventful, mostly consisting of Ron whining about how far they had to walk; Bonnie's father's house was all the way in Lowerton. Lowerton was a lot scruffier than Middleton, and came across as a much rougher area to live in. Nobody gave them any trouble (only a fool would try and mess with the Kim Possible after all) but she still felt uneasy, and certainly wouldn't want to go wandering about at night.
They eventually reached the terrace house that Mrs. Rockwaller had described to them. Kim grabbed the back of Ron's shirt to make sure he didn't wander off on his own, and then knocked on the door.
From inside a gruff voice could be heard, ordering someone to get the door. A few moments later, said door partially opened, revealing a confused looking Bonnie.
"Kim?" The brunette asked, wide-eyed, before quickly snapping into queen-bitch mode. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Hey Bonnie... listen, I-" she began, before the door was wrenched fully open, and a middle-aged man pushed his way in front of the cheerleader.
"Hey, didn't I tell you no friends when you're grounded?" The man grunted to Bonnie. She shrunk away quickly, leaving him to address Kim and Ron. "She's not available for visitors right now, not since she went and lost the cell phone I bought her. Come back when she's learnt some respect for her belongings."
And so, less than a minute after first knocking, Team Possible found themselves staring once again at the front door.
"Well, we know where Bonnie got her good manners from, huh?" Ron noted.
"Yeah, rude!" Came the sqeak of agreement from his pocket.
They set off back in the direction of Middleton, only this time with the sidekick leading, and Kim lagging behind, staring at her feet.
'Great, now Bonnie's in trouble at home, and it's all my fault. She even covered for me, why did she do that? Probably so she didn't get into more trouble for picking fights. Still, I need to fix this...'
"Hey, Earth to Kim? Hello?" She looked up and saw Ron waving his hand infront of her face. "I was saying, want to head to Bueno Nacho? Assuming Ned has put their disaster recovery plan into action, they should be serving again by the time we get there."
"Sure," she agreed, if only because she didn't have any better ideas for the moment, and could do with a bit of normality.
She was still debating what to do as they slid into their usual booth, her with a salad, Ron with a naco, and of course, a serving of nachos for Rufus.
"Can't believe they haven't returned to the original pricing yet, I mean come on, the CEO was a straight-up supervillain! You'd think they'd want things to go back to normal asap!" Ron moaned as he pinched together the corners of his naco.
"Back to normal, yeah, that'd be nice..." Kim sighed, poking at her salad. As she flipped over a particularly stale looking lettuce leaf, she had an epiphany. "Back to normal! Ron, that's it!"
"Watsit?" He asked around a mouthful of nachos and cheese.
"All we have to do is get Bonnie a new phone! We show it to her dad, she gets ungrounded, and everything goes back to normal!"
"Are we still on the whole Bonnie thing? The girl hates your guts, and now you wanna buy her a phone?"
"It's not about the phone Ron, it's about getting everything back to normal, so we can move on with our lives!" She declared, jabbing her fork hard enough into her food that the plastic prongs snapped. "Sorry, it's been a rough week for me," she confessed, "Between Eric, the diablo robots, and now Bonnie, I just really want everything to go back to normal. Will you help me?"
Ron smiled. "Sure thing KP."
Finally ready to act, the teen hero whipped out her Kimmunicator and hit the large button that put her through to her resident tech expert, Wade.
"Hey Kim, what's up?" He asked, slightly perplexed at being called outside of mission time. Seeing him on the viewscreen, he was up to his elbows in wires, trying to fix the damage caused to his command station by the lil diablo bot.
"Hi Wade, I need a paying gig, do you have anything?"
Wade gave her a puzzling look before moving to his main PC. It wasn't long into Kim's hero career that she had decided against taking paying jobs, preferring to offer her services to those in need. Still, offers of "for hire" work came in fairly regularly, and Wade diligently filed them all away in their own sub-folder, should they ever be needed.
"Well, the head of Club Banana has sent something through, he seems to think one of his employees is engaged in corporate espionage, and is willing to pay to find out. Pretty good money too."
Kim shook her head "Sounds a little sketchy, have you got something a bit more above-board? I only need a few hundred bucks?"
"Most of these corporate jobs are I'm afraid. Let me do a sweep of the web," he offered before manically typing away at his keyboard. After a few moments, he looked up, beaming, "Here's one: one of the museum's Shego has broken into a few times is looking to beef up security, and wants a consultant to give them some pointers. You go in, find the gaps in their system, maybe give the guards a few pointers, and done! You want in?"
"That sounds more the vibe. I'll just take what I need from the job, and the rest can go into your equipment fund, it looks like you could need it," she noted, eying up the mess that was his usual set-up.
"Yeah, those robots really did a number alright. Okay, I'll get this set up and call you back."
"You rock Wade!" She grinned, terminating the call. "You up for a trip to a museum?"
Ron groaned. "KP, school just ended yesterday, do we really have to do something educational so soon?"
Kim rolled her eyes. "Don't worry Ron, nobody's going to make you learn anything. Come on, Wade'll have a ride ready in a jiff."
Ron got to his feet and called over to the counter. "Ned, we'll take a second order to go!"
"So this whole 'Back to Normal' thing, when exactly are we talking here? Like before you started dating a synthodrone... before I went to a secret ninja school..." Ron continued rambling, his voice echoing off the sides of the air duct they were crawling through.
Kim let out a low growl in response, a not-so-subtle hint to drop the subject. The truth is, she didn't have an answer. Ideally before Bonnie started taking creepy photos of her, but who knew how long ago that was? Since she started dating Eric? The molecular bonding incident? Even earlier?
The pair continued crawling until they found their path through the vent blocked by a laser grid. The grid wasn't that tight, and while it didn't leave room for a human to pass, there was more than enough room for a naked mole-rat to slip on by.
"Rufus, you're up!" Kim called back to him. She moved aside to let the rodent squeeze past, and he sprinted ahead and under the lasers no problem. A couple of feet ahead, he found a small circuitbox on the wall of the vent, which he deactivated with a swift kick.
'Having the shutoff inside the vent is definitely a poor choice.' she mentally noted, already drafting her report in her head. When the museum had found out that The Kim Posible was willing to give her opinion on their security measures, they had let her get started at once.
She'd already had a look over the guards, and made a few suggestions there. They weren't built for going hand-to-hand against well-trained martial artists, but setting them up with heart-rate monitors linked to silent alarms would at least prevent them from being picked off one-by-one. Combined with some drills on how to lock everything down quickly, and at least they'll be able respond quickly to an incident.
Now all that was needed were defences that actually kept people out, and she wasn't seeing a great deal of that. Having reached the end of the vent, she looked out into one of the main display rooms. Valuable treasures sat in their display cabinets, protected only by a pressure-sensitive floor.
She looked up at the ceiling where, sure enough, there were plenty of hanging light fixtures waiting to be grappled on to. This was too easy.
There were no pressure sensors on any of the walls, so Kim had all the time in the world to manoeuvre herself into position over the decoy treasure they'd set up. Even when she snatched it, the alarms didn't go off. 'It's like they're not even trying!'
She dropped onto the plinth she had just taken the decoy from, and fired her hook down the exit hallway. "Come on Ron, we're leaving."
Ron hopped down from the vent onto the floor, finally triggering the alarm. Shutters began to close over the entrances, embarrassingly slow. Kim hit the release on her hair-dryer, zipping her to the exit whilst grabbing her friend en-route. Moments later, they were lying in the hallway, with the treasure, and the room sealed behind them.
"Way to go KP!" Ron cheered, while the red-head got to her feet and dusted herself off.
"Nothing to it. I certainly have some suggestions for the curators," she said, holding up the replica vase she had "stolen".
"So, you fill in your comments card, we get the money, buy the phone, then head to the arcade?" He suggested, desperate to get summer vacation back on-track.
"Sounds good," she nodded. Tucking the vase under one arm, she strode off towards the main entrance, with Ron taking up the rear. As they were rounding the corner, they saw a bunch of henchmen in matching uniforms filing into the lobby, overpowering the guards. They ducked back to regroup.
"What the hey? I thought this was just a fake robbery. As in, no actual goons involved?"
"Looks like a change of plan," Kim noted, secretly glad of the intrusion. 'I wanted back to normal, and here we are.' "Come on Ron, let's show them how real security gets the job done!"
So sorry for the delay everyone! I was really hoping to get this posted up sometime yesterday, but that was back when I imagined the Museum scene to be maybe a couple of paragraphs long, not almost a third of the chapter! Hopefully I should get the next chapter ready for you in a week, at which point I will be bumping up the rating to an M for language, so don't forget to filter stories by "all", or better yet, follow this fic to make sure you don't miss an update! See you next time!
