DISCLAIMER: Nothing belongs to me if you've seen it on TV. Soundtrack for this chapter: Stratos Airlines by Hydravion; Adonia by Ose; The Unexplained by Ataraxia.
Ron, slightly puzzled, ventured a response. "Are you talkin' about Al Dibbs' Bar and Grill, Mrs. P? In upper Lowerton?"
"It's a star, Ron." Kim looked as if she'd just been shot. Again.
"I wouldn't go that far, KP. More of a low dive with live entertainment." In the awkward silence that followed, he sheepishly added, "Or so I've been told."
"Mom – what do you mean, you're from Aldebaran?"
"Not really, honey, that would be impossible." She was pleased to see her daughter relax a little. Maybe she wasn't going to have too hard a time with this after all. "Stars are uninhabitable. Actually it was a planet in the Aldebaran system, but the name Hydraia wouldn't mean anything to you."
"Didn't mean anything to me the first time I heard it," Mr. Dr. P. helpfully announced, "and I'm an astrophysicist."
"You were a scared space cadet the first time I saw you," said Mrs. Dr. P. with a twinkle in her eye.
"And you were the most beautiful outer space princess I'd ever seen. Especially when you blasted that hostile alien."
"No winged space lobster's gonna come between this Wilma and her Buck."
The Doctors P gazed at each other dreamily across the table, remembering.
Kim's gorchy feeling was growing by the moment. "I hate to break the, uh, mood, Mom, Dad, but this is – this is – this is way weird. I mean, even for our family, it's weird." She looked to her father, hoping for something she could fathom. "So – you met Mom on Hydraia. A planet orbiting Aldebaran. Is that the sitch?"
"Oh no, Kimmie-cub. We haven't the technology to get to Hydraia. I met her on Pluto." His face grew grim. "Which is a planet, no matter what Science may say."
"You said it, Mr. Dr. P." Ron's expression was equally somber. "Science doesn't know everything."
"I'm a scientist, Ron. That gives me the right to talk trash about Science. You're a Mystical Monkey Master. Capeesh?"
"Uh - capeeshed."
Mrs. Dr. P. quickly restored order. "Your father was accidentally launched aboard the unmanned space probe Willy Ley."
"Which wasn't supposed to be launched until the next day," Mr. Dr. P. hastily added. "I'll always believe Dr. Harris did that as a prank."
"That's not what the records show, dear."
He frowned. "I don't care what the records show. I know what they told me, and they said the next day. Luckily there was a spacesuit on board. One spacesuit. Pretty strange for an unmanned space probe, don't you think?" He poured himself a cup of coffee, stirred sugar into it with ferocity. "Nothing's worse than being the butt of a scientific practical joke."
"Honey, we've been over this before. And it was quite a few years ago."
"Wonder how Harris would like to be lost in space."
Kim tried to get the conversation back on target. "Mom, if you're –" It was hard for her to actually form the words. "If you're from Aldebaran, how did you get to Pluto?"
"I was searching for habitable planets. We did have the technology to cross the interstellar void. Quantum foam propulsion." Pride glowed in her features, so similar to those of her daughter. "Earth would have been perfect for us."
"You were – invading Earth?" Kim was appalled.
"Not like that, honey. We were trying to find a new home. Somewhere we could blend in. The whole star system was under attack –" She choked up. "I never saw the enemy. Just heard descriptions. Crazy descriptions. But now – I think they might have been the Septenant."
"The abstract art aliens?" Kim had encountered those creatures some years before. They had been preparing to assault the Earth when the first ship from Lorwardia arrived, bringing Warmonga on her quest to find the Great Blue, the prophecied Lorwardian messiah. The Septenant's bizarre, ultra-Darwinian philosophy led them to avoid beings they considered superior, so they'd left Earth to the mercy of the extraterrestrial techno-barbarians and sought easier prey elsewhere. The whole mission hadn't been one of Kim's most shining moments. "That's, uh, some coincidence, Mom."
"Isn't it? What were the chances?" Mrs. Dr. P. pulled herself together. "Regardless of what they were, the enemy horde was approaching, and we couldn't stop them. We'd put war behind us a thousand years before. Our most advanced weapon was the induction pistol. Not nearly enough. Our only chance of survival was escape."
"Like Superman," Ron said. "Except you weren't, you know, babies and all."
"Exactly, Ron. Like Superman." There was a deep sorrow in her eyes. "I'll never know what happened. The crustacean things on Pluto shot me down. They have designs on this solar system, I think; maybe some day we'll have to fight them off."
Mr. Dr. P. put down his coffee cup; his wife motioned him to set it on the coaster, not on the tablecloth. Doing so, he added "One of the space lobsters was after me when I met your mother. Induction pistols do work on them, believe me. What a mess."
"I thought he was a Hydraian," she said. "Another stranded scout."
"I thought she was from Earth," he responded. "Part of a rescue party."
"Together we were able to make one workable ship out of what was left of my craft and the Willy Ley. But no quantum foam drive. It was beyond repair."
"Why haven't you built a new one?" Kim asked, and immediately began apologizing for the question. "Not that I want you to go or anything. I just wondered – you said you'd never know what happened on Hydraia – and it would help, uh, both our races –" That sounded awful, she thought. All of the sudden I don't know how to talk to my Mom.
The woman called Anne Possible seemed to understand. "Can you drive a car, Kim?"
"Sure, Mom. Of course I can."
"Can you build one?"
She laughed, recalling her efforts to rebuild her Dad's old car, the Sloth. "Not so much. Point taken."
"I wasn't trained to build interstellar craft. I was trained to fly them. Our educational system was very compartmentalized."
Kim was slowly beginning to accept this new development. "How did you understand each other? I'm sure they don't teach English on Hydraia."
"That's my gift, honey. It's a minor gift compared to some – x-ray vision, precognition, all that sort of stuff – but it's a very useful one."
"Your mother has something called block comprehension. She can analyze and apply linguistic information at a speed even our fastest computers can't match."
"Very handy for an extraterrestrial scout. No need for electronic translators. I can learn a new language almost as fast as someone speaks it."
Kim decided it was time to put all her cards on the table. "Why haven't you mentioned this before? All these years I've believed I was doing the missions with my way wicked cheerleader skills. Now – "
"Honey," began Mrs. Dr. P, "a lot of your success was because of your 'way wicked cheerleading skills'. But some of it was due to your Hydraian heritage. Like dodging laser beams. Or pulling three-ton generators into position with nothing more than a grappling hook and your own strength. I always wondered why you didn't think that was a little odd. Do you think Bonnie or Tara could do that?"
"This is too big a thing to hide, Mom! Are you gonna tell the Tweebs when they come back from science camp?"
The Doctors P glanced at each other; an unspoken message seemed to pass between them. "Yes," said Kim's mother. "It's time to quit keeping secrets from each other in this family."
"We're sorry, Kim," added her father. "But the fewer people who know, the better. I pulled a lot of strings to get your mother into the system covertly. She has a background, a genealogy, a history, and it's all falsified. I could go to jail for that, but that's not the worst of it by far. There are people all over the world who would love to have a living alien in their collection. Van Statten, for instance. Ever heard of him?"
Both Kim and Ron shook their heads.
"Google him. You'll understand. Obsessed with extraterrestrial evidence. And he's got the money and the power to make it happen. If he knew. And he's only one of many."
"No one can know, Kim." Her mother almost whispered the words. "But we should have told you and the boys long before this. You too, Ron. We should have trusted you."
"Do the Tweebs have this power? Do you?"
"The boys can only be carriers. Maybe their children will have a gift. If they're girls. It's very gender-specific. And we never know which of the gifts a child may get. Mine is block comprehension. Fairly common among Hydraians. Yours is one of the rarest. We call it retro-metabolism. There is no test for it. You learn you have it one of two ways: get killed and resurrected, or –" She trailed off, seemingly at a loss for words.
"Mom?"
"Kim, there are a few things that can still kill you. Permanently. Fire. Disintegration. Certain poisons. Electricity, if there's enough of it. But barring catastrophe, honey, you're going to live for a very long time."
"H – how long? A hundred years?"
Her mother's expression told her that was not the case.
"Two hundred?"
"On our world, it was not unusual for a woman with retro-metabolism to live twenty-five or thirty years. And our years were 17.7 times longer than yours. I'm sure you can do the math."
Ron reached out, took her hand.
She looked around the table, seeing her mother and father, so earnest, seeing the young man she loved, his eyes filled with concern, and she knew what it was to be utterly and completely alone.
Drakken stepped out of the transport tube to find Shego waiting on him, leaning on a stanchion, very calm and unconcerned, filing the clawed tips of her gloves. He knew that meant he was in trouble. Deep trouble.
The green woman nonchalantly asked a question. "So where's that positron stuff we risked life and limb to get?"
"None of your bees-wax, Shego." He tried to step by her, but she moved just a little to pin him between her and the transport tube. There was no avoiding this discussion. Much as he'd like to. "Anyway, what do you care?"
"I'm just curious. It wouldn't have been for that goofy computer thing you keep down there in that sub-sub-sub-sub-basement, would it?"
"What if it was? It was mine to use as I saw fit. And I have."
Shego shook her head, put her hand to her forehead in dismay. "So I gave up my weekend, and spent hours confined in a zeppelin with you and Professor Shout-A-Lot, and broke into a top-secret scientific facility – all so you could perk up that piece of junk?"
"Yes. That piece of junk." His voice was unusually stern. "Its sentient vectors were destabilizing. Personality fragmentation."
"I know it's hard, but please try to make sense."
"Its, uh, functions were becoming – erratic." Under his breath, he muttered "Not that it's much better at its best."
"How can you tell? It doesn't do anything. Lights flash and it makes weird noises. I've sat down there and watched it. That's it. Blink, blink, buzz, hum. A great invention. Miracle of the modern age. "
"Ridicule as much as you like, Shego. It does a lot more than that, and I know when it isn't working right. It was …losing its edge. "
"Its edge."
"It needed a new infusion of positronic colloid. The original had become depleted with the years. That's why we teamed up with Dementor. That's why we broke into that facility. That's why I've been down there all night working on –"
"Whoa, Dr. D. It's no big deal." His barely concealed anger bemused and amused her. It sounded almost as if he felt like he'd done her a favor. "No need to get wound up about it."
"I could have spent my weekend doing something else too, you know."
She laughed. "Yeah, I'm sure you had some wild stuff lined up. Excuse me, Dr. D., but you think Karaoke Night's fun."
"It is fun. You should get up and sing sometime. You'd learn how much fun it is."
She rolled her eyes in response.
With a scowl, Drakken continued. "And, you know, sometimes I'd like to do something other than tinker around with defiant, resistant, unappreciative equipment."
" ' The perversity of inanimate objects,' " she quoted sarcastically, and raised a hand crackling with emerald energy. "I can fix that. Give me five minutes down there and you'll never have to tinker with it again."
"What do you know about the Walther P-38?"
The question surprised her. "What? That gun Dementor had? I've read a little about them, somewhere. I don't need guns." She smiled a wicked smile, remembering how their brief fight on board the zeppelin had concluded. "It did him a lot of good, didn't it?"
"He may have killed Kim Possible. He probably did. How do you feel about that?"
"Is this Armchair Psychology Night? I don't like it, you know that. He cheated. But if it happened, it happened. Que sera sera." Her expression was unfathomable. "I'll put a rose on her grave."
"Headache gone, then?"
Without thinking, she moved aside, let Drakken pass. Followed him out of the secret room, into the lab proper. The hidden door hissed shut behind them. "Yeah. Yeah, it is. Funny what an hour's sleep can do. I've been trying to get over it for weeks. Swallowin' Motrin like they were breath mints."
"I know."
His posture was oddly triumphant, as if he'd made a point. Worse, deep within Shego's mind there was a tiny, nagging thought that she should acknowledge that. Respect his work. Obey. She shook it off. That wasn't happening any time soon.
"I had a strange dream," she announced.
Drakken immediately turned around, all ears. "What? What have you been dreaming?"
"I dreamed," she began, surprised at his concern, "that I was in a room lined with 1s and 0s. I was trying to sort them out. Make them make sense. Whaddaya make of that, Dr. Armchair Psychologist?"
His interest was gone. "Who knows? Dreams are what you make of them."
"Well, I'm makin' what I can out of what's left of the weekend. See ya on Monday, Doc."
He watched her go with a strange expression on his face. Almost a tear in his eye. "This is how God must have felt," he mumbled, as the lair door slid shut, "in the Garden of Eden." Sometimes he wished he'd been raised in some other religion, instead of being dragged to the little Baptist church on the corner every Sunday morning. Something exciting, with UFOs and ancient astronauts and ominous portents. Not something full of guilt. And sin.
And rebellion.
He wandered the lair, found something else to work on, something else to plot and plan. Shego would be back Monday, punctual as clockwork. It was her nature. He knew it very well.
She was his invention, after all.
