"Big Time"
Story Written by Freedom Fighter
At this point, I don't see how I'm going to get this done by the end of summer unless these chapters get a whole lot longer. Honestly, if I had more time to write, I'd put more into each of these chapters. I would've thought I'd have introduced the villain by now...
Sigh... onward to Chapter Four...
Disclaimer: The characters and places of the TV show 'Kim Possible' do not belong to me. They are property of Disney and the show's creative staff.
Part Four - I Don't Get the Last One (07.25.06)
Possible Household
42 Hours Until the Senior Class Graduation from Middleton High...
Kim was sitting at the dining room table with the letter from the University of Colorado lying right in front of her. Her eyes wandered back and forth as her irate father paced to and fro.
"This is unacceptable, young lady!" he shouted, stopping and slamming his hands down on the table. "Do you NOT want to get a college education?"
"Dad..."
"Getting rejected by one school is nothing to be upset about. By two, well, that's the norm for most people. Get to four, and you start to worry..."
"Dad..."
"But six? That's unheard of! You even were originally accepted to this one," Dr. Possible picked up the letter to emphasize his point. "What did you do, write back a letter of rejection?"
"DAD!"
"What?"
"Will you let me talk already?"
"Okay then..."
"I really have no idea what this letter is all about! Sure, I wasn't a fan of going to Colorado. But surely, you don't think that I..."
Kim's dad began giving her a very stern look.
"Come on! This is obviously somebody's idea of a joke..."
"Oh, is it?" he asked, raising his eyebrows with doubt.
At that moment, Kim's mom, Dr. Possible, walked into the room. She went over to kiss her husband, analyzing the situation between him and their daughter as she did.
"I was going to say it's nice to be off from work early for once and be thankful everyone else is here too, but..."
"Take a look at this!" Dr. Possible said, handing the letter to her.
"Mom, it's not what you think!" Kim interjected.
"So they rejected you too?" Kim's mom wondered out loud. "That means all six of your choices turned you down, Kimmie?"
Kim nodded sadly, then pointed at her dad. "Dad thinks I told them to rescind my acceptance on purpose!"
"Now why would you say that, dear?"
"Because it's true!" defended Kim's dad. "She's got access to a 10-year old super-genius..."
"Twelve," Kim corrected, "and in serious need of a growth spurt..."
"He could've hacked into the university's system at her request and make it so that they made a mistake and they shouldn't have accepted her!"
Kim gasped. "I can't believe you would think I'd do such a thing!"
"She's got a point," agreed her mother.
"But think about it... Kim's never been a fan of the University of Colorado and their academic programs! Why would she apply for a secondary institution she had no intention of attending in the first place?"
"Maybe because I firmly believed I'd be accepted at one of my other five choices first?"
Kim's mom smiled smugly. "That's two, dear."
Kim's dad racked his brain, trying to see if he could come up with a theory that made sense given the circumstances. Then suddenly...
"I got it!" he yelled, slamming his fist on the table. "It's as plain as day!"
"What is?" Kim and her mom asked simultaneously.
"This is obviously no fault of Kim's... we need to go straight to the source!"
"Already on it," Kim said with relief, pulling out her Kimmunicator and dialing up Wade. "Wade... are you there?"
"What's the sitch, Kim?" Wade responded back with a giggle. "I've always wanted to say that..."
"Yeah..." Kim rolled her eyes.
"You're right, Kim," observed her mother.
"Exactly," concurred her father. "He does look a little short..."
"Experimental Growth Hormone Test... wow, you were thinking the same thing?" the two Dr. Possibles said to each other.
"O-kay..." Wade uttered, a bit weirded out. "I'm going to ignore that."
"What is this?" Kim shouted. "What about finding out about from the university that this letter's a fake?"
"It's about time!" Ron said as he entered the room.
The three Possibles shot angry glares at Ron.
"What? What I say now?"
Shaking her head, Kim turned her attention back to Wade.
"Wade, I need an analysis of this letter. We need to find out if it's authentic, and who authorized it after my initial acceptance letter was sent out."
"Just scan it with the Kimmunicator," Wade said, pointing at the flashing red light below the screen.
Kim held the letter up with her free hand and did as she was told. Her parents and Ron watched on with interest. After the scan was complete, Wade typed away at his computer for a few seconds.
"So?"
"Well..." Wade began, "it's as I expected. The letter itself is pretty authentic. The president's signature is copied, but that's to be expected... after all, he has to go through hundreds of documents of all sorts every day. You can't expect him to sign them all by hand."
"'K... what about the seal?"
"Authentic as well."
"Can we be sure it was actually sent by the university and not some stranger who doesn't even represent the school?" Kim's dad asked.
"According to the Postal Service's tracking records," Wade stated as he brought up a map of the area, "it definitely came from the school."
"So the letter holds up to scrutiny," Kim deduced, "but what about the admissions committee? Was there something they found that would've resulted in them backing out on my acceptance?"
Wade typed away again at his keyboard, digging for information.
"Hmmm... nothing that was recorded in any of the university's computer databases. I'm pulling up the initial report on your application... now!"
Suddenly, a 3-D image of said report appeared before the group.
"Wait a minute!" Ron objected, "should we really be looking at sealed records? Couldn't we get in trouble for this?"
"That won't be compared to the trouble Kim'll be in if all of this investigating rules against her," Kim's dad said sternly.
"I know there's something wrong here," Kim said, determined to prove her innocence. "Let's see... there's a list of all of my after-school activities, my academic transcript, my professional recommendations..."
Ron gasped, pointing at that last part. "You actually got Mr. Barkin to give you a recommendation?"
"It's no big," Kim said, blowing it off. "The point is... everything here matches exactly what I put on my application!"
"So what could've changed their minds?" wondered Kim's mom out loud.
"Well..." Wade said, pressing a button and bringing up a second report.
"Let me guess... this the second report which led to them taking back my acceptance, right?"
Wade nodded in agreement as the Possibles and Ron began reading it.
"Done!" Kim said almost instantly.
"Done!" her two parents added shortly thereafter.
"Hey, hey!" Ron exclaimed, "I haven't gotten out of the grades part yet!"
"No need, Ron, I've already figured out the problem!"
"Really? What is it?"
"There is none!"
Ron had to rub his ears, not believing what he had heard. "Say what now?"
"Ron... the second report is exactly the same as the first! To the letter!"
"The only difference is..." began Kim's mom.
"The first one was accepted, but the second rejected," finished her dad.
"Wait a minute, wait a minute!" Ron cut in, trying to understand it all. "So if nothing's changed, then how did Kim suddenly get moved from the 'yea' pile to the 'nay' pile?"
"Looks like we'll have to figure that part out ourselves," Kim said, creaking a smile.
Three hours later, University of Colorado campus in Boulder
A red station wagon pulled to a stop in the parking lot of the college's admissions office. Kim was a bit irate... and with good reason...
"When I said 'ourselves,' I meant just me and Ron. Not me, Ron, and you..."
What she was referring to was the fact that her father had driven them up there. Kim shook her head as her dad emerged from the car's interior.
"It's not that I don't trust you or anything, Kim... but I just want to make sure this gets taken care of!"
"This should be easy, right?" Ron asked as he slid out from the back seat. "We just walk right in and ask to speak with them, right?"
"One problem... the office is already closed for the day," Kim told him. "We'd have to find out where they live to talk to them."
"And Wade can't do his thing without us going in?"
"Surprisingly, their database servers are majorly secure. The only way to get what we need is to go straight to the source."
A few minutes later, a door inside the building unlocked, and Kim and Ron entered into the room. With lock pick in one hand, Kim reached over and flipped the light switch on with the other. They had found the server room.
"We're here, Wade," Kim told the boy genius as she turned her Kimmunicator on.
"Good," he replied. "Okay, you need to find the main terminal and plug me in. I'll take care of the rest."
Kim turned to Ron and said, "You and Rufus keep watch. This shouldn't take long."
Kim then proceeded to make her way across the room. It only took her seconds to find the main terminal... which, consequently, was the only one in the entire room.
"Go for it!" she said as she plugged the Kimmunicator into the hard drive.
Wade nodded. "Okay... give me a few minutes to crack the system... done!"
"That was quick. So... where's the list?"
"Uh... about that. There's a problem."
"Small or big?"
"Big. Really big! Most of the admissions council officials have disappeared! When I tried to cross-reference seven of the eight names for addresses, I got keyed into local police reports stating that family members and friends have reported them missing, all within the last 48 hours!"
"That's certainly peculiar. I'm starting to think this whole sitch goes deeper than my acceptance here suddenly turning into a rejection."
"Definitely."
"This seems like some massive kidnapping scheme, but why? Wade, where does the eighth council member live?"
"504 19th Street, just a couple of blocks away!"
"We're on it!"
Kim unplugged the Kimmunicator and ran to the door, grabbing Ron as she passed by.
Meanwhile, a few hundred miles away, two burly guys in suits had arrived at what was left of an old fast food restaurant. Peering around to make sure no one was watching or following them, they then entered through the swinging doors. Once inside, they headed for the kitchen, then to the meat freezer. They ran for a secret door in the back, which led to an elevator. After closing the doors, one of the agents pulled out a keycard, with which he slid in the reader to his right.
He proceeded to punch in a code on the keypad. He pressed three, then two twice, followed by four, and finished up by pressing a button that had a picture of a hot dog with bun that was covered with chili. Once the sequence had been completely entered, the elevator began to descend into the ground.
"I never understood why someone stuck a chili dog sticker on the 'Enter' button," commented the one without the keycard.
They turned around to face the opposite way in the elevator car, just in time to see their view no longer be obstructed by roots and dirt. They were now peering clearly into an open, fully-lit cavern, with literally hundreds of men hard at work all over the structure's four floors.
In one room they spotted four guys in lab coats in the midst of testing a Bunsen-burner-powered flamethrower on an unwilling 'subject.' In a second, a man in Hawaiian shirt and shorts was screaming as he was being lowered into a pit of hungry piranha as two men looked on with laughter. A third featured a group of '70s-style teenagers being chased around an arena by two ghostly apparitions. A fourth featured a woman tied to a conveyer belt heading towards a wood shredder with two men with mustaches watching intently. The next two rooms they saw had kids being attacked by killer tomatoes. The final room on their 'tour' has a teenage girl standing on a scale weighing herself... and then fainting at the sight of the result, as '105 lbs' appears on a screen in front of her.
"I don't get the last one," pointed out the non-card holder.
"The scale's calibrated incorrectly by a pound," noted the card keeper.
"Ohhhhhhhhh... I see. I just realized, there are a lot of ways to kill a person. 'Cept for that last girl..."
"She had a heart attack... trust me."
"Really?"
"You don't have a teenage daughter, do you?"
At that point, the elevator car reached the bottom of the shaft. The doors flung open, and the two suits walked out into the fray of busybodies around them. Suddenly, they found themselves being approached by two fellow agents, each with a gun in hand and aimed right at them.
"Aw... crap," muttered the first agent, dropping his keycard.
"Wait!" pleaded the other, grabbing one of the shooter's ankles. "I'm too young to die!"
"You're 37! That's a lifespan in some countries, you know!"
Without a further word, the two armed men fired at their targets, instantly disintegrating them into nothing.
To be continued in Part 5 - Coming next week!