Kim skittered across the linoleum floor in the kitchen, hoping to confine the space that Gemini could use to assault her. A laser suddenly blasted above her head, singeing the wall next to the fridge.
It was bad enough when he had rockets, but lasers too? When in the world did her dad have time to make that for him? It would've taken at least a day, and Kim was pretty sure that whatever had changed Drew into that would have eaten up most of the time that Kim and Shego had spent at the spa even if her dad had broken right away!
"Ha! Got you!" Gemini made his way through the doorway and aimed, all four rockets going off at once.
Kim ducked under their family heirloom table, using it as unfortunate cover from the rockets. As expected, the rockets destroyed the table and accompanying chairs. The heirlooms did their job, though, as all the rockets failed to make it to her. She ran around the island and ducked down, waiting to see what Gemini's next move would be.
"Oh grand. You want to play glorified peek-a-boo then? Fine!" He jumped up onto the island, aiming down at her head. "Peek-a-boo, I see you!"
"No you don't!" Kim did a backflip up and over him, grazing the overhead light. She tagged him with a quick punch to the chin before she tried grabbing his legs and pulling.
He fell over roughly, his chin cracking against the quartz countertop as he lost his footing and toppled over backwards. Shaking his head and grabbing his jaw with his non-robotic hand, he growled up at her, "You little pissant! You think you can stop me with that?!"
"No. This, on the other hand…" She delivered a quick punch to his trachea, hoping to stun him.
He barely reacted beyond getting angrier.
"Eat this!" He aimed his hand in her face and fired off a laser.
Kim backflipped in succession, ending up back in the main room of her parent's home. There, to her shock, Shego was encased in a practical cocoon of vines with her father crushing the life out of her via her neck.
"Mom!" Kim shouted. She began running for the two, hoping it wasn't too late, when a rocket whizzed by her head.
"How dare you forget about me!" Gemini growled behind her. He aimed another rocket at her and sneered, "Good luck dodging this!" before firing.
"Mom!" a distant voice screamed.
Shego recognized it.
Kimmie.
That snapped Shego out of it. Enough, anyway. She was still trapped, and still graying out, but she had her faculties back to her for the most part.
She did the only thing she could think of in her desperation for air.
Lighting up as hot as she could, she burned through the vines, burned through her leg, burned through his coat, burned through everything.
"ACK!" Agent Alpha jumped back and unwound his vines from her, grabbing at his leg. Just like Shego, he'd lost a good chunk of it and vines to her attack. Glaring, he asked, "So, you want to do this the hard way? Fine!" His vines whipped around him.
"Doesn't that hurt?" Shego gasped, glad for the air. Even through her choked breaths she wondered… She had expected at least a little bit of whining from him. Her own burned and throbbing leg was probably nothing compared to his, what with her focusing the flame to her palm.
His gaze shifted to the newly emerged Gemini for a moment. "I…" He shook his head. "I've had worse! I could have worse!" He began stomping towards Shego with a distinct limp. "Stop trying to distract me!"
Shego was still seeing some gray spots, but she had recovered enough to resume the fight.
Kim ducked under a rocket as she saw her mom blast free of Agent Alpha's grip. The blast looked like it hurt them both pretty badly, but Kim had her own share of trouble to deal with before she could help Shego.
"Stand still so I can kill you!" Gemini shouted, aiming one of his knuckle lasers at her. Kim somersaulted over and around it. It kind of reminded her of the McHenry laser grid. Just had to keep moving, keep flipping, keep away from the glowing ray of doom.
"Good luck with that!" she heard Shego call out in reply.
"Shut up!" Gemini turned his attention towards Kim's parents. "Alpha, you had better make her shut up or I'll-.." Face, meet boot.
Kim had used the precious few seconds to close in on the one-eyed villain. She'd loosed a kick that would've made even Shego wince back. Gemini was no different, staggering around drunkenly from the blow. A shake of his head, though, seemed to clear the fog.
"You think you can take me in one-on-one then, hm?" Gemini made a 'come hither' motion. "Give me your best shot."
"My pleasure." Kim made to move in again, then realized that his hand was still raised. Almost too slow, she dodged out of the way of a rocket that would've taken her head off. Grimacing from the rough tuck-and-roll she had to do to escape it, she wheezed, "What happened to one-on-one?"
"Psha!" He spat, aiming a finger at the teen, "I'm a supervillain! I don't play fair!"
"So not cool!" Still, she had to close the distance to get to him. And it was clear that he was going to do his best to keep that from happening. She needed help.
Then, eyes settling on something, Kim got an idea. She began to run across the room, looking to get to a specific piece of equipment.
"Why. Won't. You. DIE!" Gemini shouted, continually sending out a barrage of missiles and lasers. Kim hopped, skipped, and jumped over many of the missiles, a few cutting it too close for comfort, and dodged around the lasers.
She got to her dad's favorite laser drill, the one that he'd apparently only recently used to try and open a gherkin jar. It only took a moment to aim it.
"Take this!" she commented with some amusement at Gemini's gobsmacked appearance. At the same time that she pushed the button, he let off his full arsenal: four rockets and two lasers, all aimed at the machine Kim was shooting him with.
A bright red glow encompassed the area...
"Shego, would you please stop resisting?" There was a plea in his voice now as his vines thrashed and grew vicious thorns. His teeth glinted as he seemed to unconsciously giggle. "I promise, if you give in now he won't kill you!"
"How reassuring," Shego said flatly. "I bet he'll do everything under the sun other than that, though, huh? Like he did with you?"
Her husband grunted, "I was different! I refused to listen to him! I was a fool!" He walked towards her, again a hand out. "You don't have to make the same mistakes I did!"
To Shego's surprise, after only a few steps he was no longer limping. A quick look at his leg explained it and made her feel queasy all at once. It was mostly healed somehow, but instead of midnight blue skin there was what looked like bone peeking out of his flesh in a little mound, pressing against the edges of the hole she'd burned into his clothes. That helped to complete the picture… So that's why his clothes had odd lumps…
Shego shivered at the idea that presented itself, that those mounds were created after he'd mutated… She wondered if he'd been burned clean through there, or if his flesh had been carved out like Gemini had implied earlier.
"Doc, we aren't going to join you," Shego stated even through the disgust. "Please stop trying to-.."
"Well FINE then!" he growled, withdrawing his hand. "I tried to save you! I tried! But you won't listen!" His vines shot out towards her. "Let's see if you change your mind when you're begging for mercy! After all, what are a few broken bones and concussions between family?!"
She was ready for them.
Shego danced around, hands flashing and flaring at the various tendrils that came towards her. Every few swings she would let loose a few blasts at her husband. She caught on pretty fast that he could either dodge the blasts or command the vines, but not both.
Smirking, she realized that she had this in the bag.
Instead of focusing her blasts at the vines, she decided to start dodging and weaving through them. Her plasma instead began finding their home in Agent Alpha's face. He sputtered back, vines thrashing with no rhyme or reason each time her blasts found home. His lip began bleeding, and his clothes began coming apart as the flames began to lick at them. He didn't seem to notice the fire, his gaze completely taken with trying to get his vines on her.
She began closing in again, this time assured that she could take him on in close quarters.
He seemed to realize the same thing as he started to try and use his vines even in the midst of getting hit by her plasma blasts. Of course, he failed; even if he didn't seem to be feeling or caring about the pain, the concussive blasts were distracting enough.
Eventually, finally, she got within arm's reach. Just as she was about to give him the punch of his life right to his face, an explosion ripped through the room. Both Shego and Alpha went flying, each of them hitting the far wall.
They were both slow to get up, the blast being strong enough to knock the wind from Shego's lungs. She looked over to the other battling duo and gasped.
Gemini and Kimmie were both splayed out. Shego couldn't tell if either were breathing.
"Kimmie!" Shego staggered to her feet and hesitantly tried to make her way to her daughter. To her shock, she suddenly found her legs pulled out from under her as vines wrapped around her ankles and lifted her up.
"I tried to stop it!" Her husband wound up his vines and smashed her into the ground. Before she could aim at him at all, he picked her up again and smashed her into the wall. "You wouldn't listen to me!" Another slam, this time into the ceiling and then to the ground. "Now I have to hurt you!" He began to flail his vines around, slamming her time and again into the ground, the wall, anywhere the vines could reach. He screamed, "LOOK AT WHAT YOU'RE MAKING ME DO!" before launching her across the room.
She smashed clean through the giant computer that Drakken had installed against the wall. Sparks went every which way as Shego was electrocuted. The pain was nearly indescribable, every nerve firing off at once.
Finally, thankfully, it was over. Shego fell out of the machine, crawling her way out from the glass and ruined machinery. She looked back towards her husband, who was closing in again with a sharp-toothed snarl on his face, then back to where her daughter was laying.
She hadn't moved at all from under the wreckage of the doc's favorite laser weapon. Neither had the prone form of Gemini, his mechanical hand looking to be partially destroyed.
Shego didn't care about the fight at the moment. She only cared about Kim.
Ignoring the apparently implacable blue man, Shego staggered over to her where her daughter was laying and fell over next to her. She put a hand to Kim's face and waited. To her relief, the redhead was still breathing.
"I'm going… To…" Her husband came up to them then stared. He looked as if he hadn't noticed the scene before, as if the explosion had never happened. Then, cautiously, he asked, "She's… She's okay, right?" He twiddled his fingers.
"She's breathing, if that's what you mean," Shego growled, trying her damnedest to recover some while he was flabbergasted by the scene. The fight wasn't nearly over, and she wasn't going to make the same mistake twice.
"I… I…" Fingers and vines twiddling at max speed, he said, "Is anything broken?"
Shego took a quick look at Kim's body. Wincing at the weird angle her daughter's elbow was achieving, she noted, "Looks like she broke an arm." She listened to Kim's chest and said, "Doesn't sound like anything punctured her lungs, so she's safe on that front…"
"Thank goodness!" he slapped his head. "If Lord Gemin-.." He then looked around, panicked. "Lord Gemini…?" Then, finding him in a crumpled heap a short ways away, he screamed, "LORD GEMINI!"
Abandoning the two women, he ran over to his boss and began looking him over. After a bit of light shaking, the one-eyed man groaned and began sitting up.
"What was-.." He stopped as he tried to rub his head with his destroyed hand. After realizing it was gone, he muttered, "Agent Alpha, report. What. Happened?"
"Well…" Kim's father shrugged. "Something blew up."
"I KNOW THAT!" Gemini looked to be counting to ten under his breath. Taking another breath, he asked, "I meant after that!"
"Oh! Erm, not much…" He shifted his gaze to Shego. "Just having a family disagreement."
Wow. Crazy way to say that he was beating the hell out of her.
The one-eyed villain frowned.
"You know what happens when you fail me…" Gemini warned, fingering one of the few buttons on his wrecked hand that looked to be working. It looked to be the same one from earlier.
Her husband whimpered, twiddling his fingers. "I-.. I haven't failed you! I promise!"
"Then why is she-.." Gemini waved at Shego "..- still alive?!"
"I, erm…" Looking embarrassed, he mumbled while kicking at the ground, "I had an idea that they could join us."
"I don't pay you to think," the one-eyed villain grumbled.
Apparently offended, Agent Alpha stated, "You don't pay me at all!"
"That wasn't always going to be true," Gemini insisted. "Good boys get stipends."
"And what determines if I'm a good boy? Give me an objective measure!"
While the two bickered, Shego worked to wake Kim up. She looked in her leg pouch for some of her smelling salts and, feeling blessed that they were still intact, applied them to Kim. It took longer than Shego hoped for, but eventually Kim stirred. Shego put a hand over her mouth when it looked like she was going to start muttering pained nothings. That fully woke Kim up and, slightly panicked, she looked between Shego and her father with an increasingly worried frown.
"..-and that's how you get to have a stipend!"
"Hm…" Agent Alpha thought hard and said, "I have to admit, that isn't a bad system…"
"See?" Gemini looked at Shego, apparently looking for a second opinion on the topic. "I'm a fair if harsh boss, aren't I?"
"You're kidding me, right?" Shego looked at him as if he was nuts, because he was.
"Oh, right, you aren't dead yet." Gemini waved in the direction of the two women. "Agent Alpha, take care of them."
"Oh! Erm…" He awkwardly turned to Shego and asked, "Are you, uhm, okay?"
"THAT ISN'T WHAT I MEANT AND YOU KNOW IT!"
The other man cringed. "Can't we recruit them? Please?"
"Yes, because they look like they're going to go along with any plans I have," Gemini deadpanned.
"You don't know until you ask!" Clearly Shego's loud-and-clear messages from earlier didn't hit.
"Fine!" The one-eyed villain shakily got to his feet and asked Shego, "You're not going to join me, are you?"
"...what's your view on vacation days?" Might as well buy more time for Princess to recover.
Gemini was gobsmacked while Agent Alpha looked over-the-moon. Shaking it off, Gemini said, "I don't believe in vacation days."
"Not even for weddings or anything?" Shego asked with a tilted eyebrow.
"If you have time to get married, you have time to work!" Gemini growled.
"Doc and I're supposed to get married and-.."
"Recommitment. Ceremony."
"Whatever." Shego rolled her eyes. "Anyway, we're supposed to have a thing."
"Well, that thing would need to be cancelled!" the villain said peevishly.
"Yea-.. No." With that, Shego blasted both Alpha and Gemini away from the two women with separate one-handed blasts. It didn't pack the punch that a full-on assault would, but it gave her and Kim the space they needed to get back up. Shego hopped to her feet and offered a hand to her princess. "You okay?"
Kim winced as she stood. "I think my left arm might be broken, but otherwise I'm good."
"I thought so."
The two men climbed back to feet, Gemini glaring at his underling and growling, "See? You have failed me!"
"Please please please don't…!" Alpha begged, falling back to his knees.
"Don't what?" Kim asked. Shego winced at the question, knowing what would happen next.
"This." Gemini pushed a button on his hand.
The collar around Alpha's neck hissed. Then, eyes bulging, Kim's father screamed and fell to the ground.