Shego leaned back in her chair, feet propped up on a desk, her neon green outfit standing out in the dark room. Slade paced across the floor in front of her, reviewing footage of the football stadium fight. He paused it and tossed away the remote.

"Very disappointing, apprentice," he said coolly. "I expected better from you."

"Mm-hm," she said back.

"I gave you an order," he continued, "and you disobeyed it. We had an agreement. I am not Dr. Drakken. When I give you a command, you obey it. Am I clear?"

"Mm-hm."

"Good. There will be plenty of time for you to fight once everything is in place. When that time comes, you will know, and you will take full advantage of it."

"Mm-hm."

"You were successful in bugging the communicator. For that I will commend you. They are now suspicious, but they do not see what is under their very noses. What matters is that we always stay two steps ahead. Isn't that right, apprentice?"

"Mm-hm."

Slade stopped speaking and looked at Shego curiously. "Shego, what time is it?"

"Mm-hm."

That gave it away. He marched over, grabbed a little white box lying in her lap, and yanked it away, pulling with it a white cord and two earbuds.

"Ow! Hey!" She reached to take them back, but he held them out of her reach. Her hands lit up. "You give me back my MC Honey right now!"

"You take one step closer," Slade warned, "and I'll break it." He held her MP3 player even higher and squeezed it tightly.

Shego scoffed, "You're bluffing."

"Am I?" He squeezed even tighter. The corner of the screen began to crack.

Shego could not live without her music, especially not MC Honey. She took two steps back and let her hands return to normal. "Okay, okay, you win. Now give it back."

He lowered his hand, but did not hand over the white box. "I think I'll keep it for a while. You could do without another distraction." He tucked it into a pocket on his belt and straightened up intimidatingly.

Now Shego was really angry. "What kind of sick person are you?" she demanded. "First you rush me to get out when I can't, then you take away my songs?" Her anger faded into amusement. "Well, what do you know? My new boss actually has an evil streak. Drakken could learn a thing or two from you. But…you are giving it back to me, right?"

"No. The only things that belong in your ears are my instructions. That is all."

"What? You…you can't do that!" Her hands began to glow again. "I need my MC Honey!"

"You may have your music player back," Slade reasoned, "when you have destroyed our enemies and set us off on the path to victory."

"What am I? Four?" Shego replied. "That the equivalent of saying I can't watch TV until I eat my vegetables."

"So be it."

"Okay, that's it!" Shego pounced on Slade. He dodged every move flawlessly. She reached into his pocket and grabbed her MP3 player, then tried to somersault away. Slade caught her leg first. She struggled, but he held her higher so that she was dangling upside down. He bent over to look her in the face.

"Let that be a lesson to you, apprentice," he said. "Defiance is not appreciated, even over the smallest matters." He let go of her leg and she dropped to the ground in a heap.

She stood up and brushed herself off, then carefully moved the MP3 player to the desk a safe distance away. "All right, lesson learned," she said, trying to save herself from getting in more trouble. "So, uh, the plan. Let's talk about that."

"First we destroy Team Possible and the Teen Titans," Slade said, "then we conquer the world one city at a time."

"That's cute," Shego persisted, "but pretty low on the details. I know we're tracking the kids' every move through their communicators, and I get how that's going to help. Really, I do. But I am completely in the dark about what happens next. If you were Dr. D, I'd have already put this plan in the 'way too complicated to make sense' column a long time ago. I've been giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but I think it's only fair to know what about this plan is going to be different from all the failed ones I've seen before."

Slade was glad that this conversation was becoming more civilized. "A wise question, apprentice. You recall that I required you to pretend that Dr. Drakken is still your master?"

"I wouldn't say 'master' is the best word," Shego replied, "but yeah."

"The reason, apprentice, is that he really is designing me a robot army. I gave him the final adjustments to make on his design just this morning. My intention is to move the entire operation over to my own lair, where I have the equipment necessary for mass production of whatever he comes up with. With an unlimited supply of soldiers fighting for us, nobody will dare stand against us."

"Sounds pretty smart," Shego commented.

"Yes, but I am not finished yet. I have a second project in mind for Dr. Drakken." He picked up the remote and pushed a few buttons. A window opened on the monitor revealing blueprints for what looked like a giant laser cannon. "This is why I needed the xenothium. I needed something extremely strong to bring this device to its full capacity of destruction."

Shego stared at it. She hated to admit it, but she was impressed. "One shot from that thing could incinerate a whole building," she said.

"How observant," Slade said, exiting out of the blueprints. "That weapon combined with a mass produced robot army ought to make things quite easy once our heroes are gone. However, we must take things one step at a time."

"So when do we tell Dr. D that he's out?" she asked.

"When he is no longer useful."

"So…when the army is built and the laser thingy of death is ready."

"Precisely."

Shego tried to hold in a laugh, but it escaped. "Sorry, sorry," she said, still laughing between syllables, "but, I mean, you actually expect Dr. D to build two remotely useful inventions? One, maybe. But two? Do you even know him? He'll blow it all up the first chance he gets. I mean, like, those synthodrones you liked so much? I could totally take those out just by myself!"

"Patience, apprentice. I have found that anyone can be efficient when properly motivated, even Dr. Drakken."

"Huh," she shrugged. "Well, it's your choice." She picked up her MP3 player and headphones from the desk. "Nice talk. Guess I'll see you tomorrow."

Slade turned his one eye toward her. "We aren't finished yet. There was something in the fight tonight that caught my eye." He pushed the necessary buttons to make a video clip appear on the screen, then motioned for her to come closer. She obeyed. "I want you to watch this once through, and then tell me about it."

He clicked play. Shego knew instantly what it was. It was the footage of her encounter with Starfire. On the screen, they connected with their powers at maximum, forming one giant ball of green fire, and from the sound of it pain too. Slade paused the video.

"Anything you wish to tell me?" he asked.

"I…I don't know," Shego admitted, though admitting she didn't know something was rare for her to do. "That girl, there was something weird about her. It's like we have the same powers, but that's impossible. I know how I got mine, and she wasn't there." She was careful not to reveal any details about who else had been there. It wouldn't be good to tell her new employer the shameful news that she used to be a good guy.

"She wasn't there," Slade repeated thoughtfully. "I think it would be safe to suggest that she, Starfire, was not on the planet at all when you received your powers. She comes from far away, on the planet Tamaran. Interestingly, your powers as well as your brothers' also came from space, did they not?"

Shego was startled at first, then hurt, and in a few seconds her emotions had progressed to full on anger. She had been hiding her heroic past ever since signing on with Drakken and had even helped her brothers to keep Kim from revealing it online. How dare Slade bring up such a forbidden topic? "Look, I know you're a professional stalker, but do you never draw the line anywhere? I mean, some things are just personal! How would you like it if I went snooping into your history?"

"Calm yourself, apprentice," Slade said, not sounding one bit worried. "I've known all along about your past as a hero. I find that former heroes make the best villains. I am also aware that you and your brothers received your super powers from a radioactive meteorite of unknown origin. You found out tonight that Starfire's powers look and feel exactly like your own, and that she too is from a relatively unknown part of outer space. Coincidence?"

"Maybe," Shego grunted, still angry.

"Or maybe not. I would say almost certainly not. There is a connection here. You have felt it, and I have seen it. All we need now is to find out how to use this knowledge to our advantage. Perhaps, if you had some sort of weakness…"

"Sorry, slick," Shego interrupted. "No kryptonite here. I don't have any weaknesses. Looks like you've hit a dead end." She waited a moment for him to argue. When he didn't, she continued, "I mean, if you want to sit here and research your hunch, be my guest, but you won't find anything. And if you're going to do that, you won't need me around. Adios."

Before Slade could protest, she had plugged MC Honey back into her ears, walked out the door, and shut it behind her. Slade waited until she was gone, then took a slip of paper out of his pocket and looked at it. It was the lock combination for Drakken's room of former failed inventions and untested ideas. However, Slade had a feeling that those were not the only things in that room.

After shutting down all the technology he had been using, Slade left the meeting room and found his way through a few dimly lit corridors and down two flights of stairs until he found a door with a sign saying, "TOP SECRET: KEEP OUT!" Underneath there was another sign saying, "That means you, Shego!" Slade couldn't help letting out an evil chuckle as he twisted the lock according to the combination. It clicked open and he entered, leaving the door cracked open so that Drakken wouldn't hear it close and get suspicious.

The inside of the room was even poorer lit than the rest of the lair, and it appeared that its contents were nothing but junk, as Shego had said. Broken pieces of robots and death rays were everywhere, and Slade had to walk carefully to avoid stepping on them. Drakken's problem with Kim Possible was evident on one wall, where he had taped a picture of her face over a dart board after a particularly brutal defeat and thrown three red darts at it. However, this was not of any interest to Slade. He searched high and low for one single item. It had to be here. He was sure of it.

About to give up, his one eye gave the room one last look over and…there it was! It was hidden well, wrapped up in many layers of blueprints, but the shape was undeniable. Slade reached the stick-shaped item and tore off the wrapping to reveal exactly what he was looking for: Aviarius's staff. This was the Go Team's one weakness. It could suck out the super powers of anyone with the Go Team Glow. Slade figured that Shego was unaware that it had found its way into Drakken's lair, since she surely would have used it against her brothers by now if she'd known. Drakken must have stolen it for himself after the battle with that bird-obsessed villain. But how it got here didn't matter. What mattered was that Slade had it now, and both Shego and Starfire were looking a lot less invincible.