Disclaimer: if it was on TV, it's not mine. Otherwise, yeah, I own it. Soundtrack for this chapter: every Hawkwind album I have, and that's a lotta Hawkwind albums. 13.5 hours of it. Shuffle that play!
Kim was checking her mission paraphernalia, one item at a time. Hair dryer/grappling hook, check. Laser lipstick, check. Expanding hair gel, check. She took out her compact, almost opened it; Ron caught her hand.
"Look out," he chided her. "The knockout gas, remember?"
"It's not the same one," she said, flipping it open. Her reflection looked back at her, green eyes filled with worry. Again she wondered what she was doing here. Why she'd insisted on dragging them through one more adventure. There was no reason an amateur fanfiction should have so clouded her judgment. Unless –
"Ron, right before we went into Hench's place – you were reading a fanfic, right?"
"Let's not talk about it," he said, with a shudder. "It was terrible. Just thinking about it tears me up." He sniffed, pulled out a hanky, daubed at his eyes, realized both Kim and Drakken were looking at him strangely and pulled himself together. "Why would anyone write stories like that about us?" He blew his nose, loudly.
"Why, indeed." She polished the mirror with a tissue, replaced the compact in her belt. "Who wrote it?"
"I don't know, uh, Gormo or Gogro or some such name, I think. What's it matter? They all use pseudonyms."
"Have you ever read Bartolomew's treatise on verbally induced emotional states?"
"Ya know, I just finished that last weekend." The snarky tone of his voice kindled an angry fire in his wife's emerald eyes. "No, wait, that was a Fearless Ferret novelization. Not so familiar with Bartolomew's treatise on la-tee-da da da."
She already had Wade on the Kimmunicator. "Ever been to Fanfic dot com?"
"Ah, no," replied the young genius. "I don't waste my time on shipping fantasies."
"I don't even know what that means."
"Uh, er," Wade stammered, flustered, "neither do I."
Kim decided she really didn't want to know. "There's a section on that site for Kim Possible fanfics."
"You're kidding. I've never, uh, I didn't know that –"
"Never mind that. Copy all of it, but do not read it. None of it. Understand?"
The young man was taken aback by her intensity. "Okay… then what?"
"Send the whole thing to Dr. Beverly F. Skinner for analysis." She gave him an email address, continued. "Tell her it's for me. She'll understand."
"Favors aren't just for rides any more, are they?"
"It was a few years ago. In Venice. No big, just a hostage sitch."
"What're you expecting to find?"
"You never know."
"Never know what?" asked Ron, who was quite left behind, but at that moment Drakken nosed the hovercar out of the clouds.
"Behold," cried the blue man, "the nexus of evil!"
"A fraudulent volcano?" Kim looked disgusted as the hovercar drew near the little island. "Don't super-villains have any creativity at all? My five-year-old could come up with a more original lair."
Drakken looked around at her, a bit irritated. He'd always liked the fraudulent volcano design. "There's more to supervillainy," he testily explained, "than just sloppily throwing together a lair. The volcano is stylish. Effective, yet retro. I have to give this guy props." The hovercar circled the peak; as they'd expected, the smoke and artificial lava generators were just below the rim of the crater. "Not that it'll help him any when I find him."
Kim and Ron shared a glance, wondering exactly what the blue man had in mind. He wasn't much of a fighter on his own, and so far his inexorable botanical powers had made no resurgence. Did he have some sort of portable doomsday device, simply awaiting the proper moment to loose its scientific Armageddon on the man in black?
They regarded their former enemy with a barely concealed awe.
As they descended, armed men fired blasters from every level, but Drakken dodged the rays like an expert. He'd had a lot of practice dodging his own malfunctioning superweapons over the years.
At the very bottom of the gargantuan, multi-leveled lair stood the Copernicus, dwarved by its surroundings, its hungry antigravity accelerators drinking down power from massive transformers, awaiting the liftoff command. Henchmen gathered around it, shock rods in hand, watching nervously as the hovercar spiraled ever closer. The boss had assured his men that this wouldn't be happening; he had taken steps, he'd said, to keep superheroes off their backs. But there were superheroes coming, regardless of the boss' assurance, and his henchmen were beginning to sweat.
It was becoming painfully clear that the boss wasn't everything he thought he was.
At the hovercar controls, Drakken surreptitiously gritted his teeth, silently tensed himself, commanding his lethal flowers and vines to manifest themselves. Nothing. He'd tried several times on the journey without success.
He knew he could do it. All it took was confidence. Belief. But for some reason, he kept remembering that horrible fanfic, the one where he and Shego were killed in a world-wide cataclysm caused by Dementor and Electronique, and his confidence leaked out like water from a sieve. He glanced back at his former enemies, decided he wouldn't tell them. The whole O Boyz shipping thing was a bit too embarrassing. Besides, it sounded like they were already on it. Whatever "it" was.
Maybe he should have put some sort of threatening secret weapon together before bolting out of the lab. It was so much easier to prepare for things when Shego was there.
"Stay back," warned the man in black, drawing a strange weapon, shakingly pointing it at the twins. Sweat beaded on his brow, glistened on his gigantic nose. "This is no tranquilizer gun. It's a gyrojet. The most feared handgun in the world." He'd actually bought the thing for next to nothing at an Army surplus dealer. The gyrojet program had been a colossal failure for the military, but he hoped the twins didn't know that. It certainly looked menacing enough.
James Possible looked on, no external response betraying how fast his mind was racing. Though the compliance chip suppressed individual response, its victim was still completely aware of what was going on around them. He had been involved peripherally in the cyberweapon project, completely against his will. The government had insisted. Its ultimate goal had been an army of cyborgs, all of them telepathically connected, all of them armed with weapons controlled by thought alone. An army that thought as one, moved as one, conquered as one.
The results had been catastrophic. Rhesus monkeys fitted with the cybertech had been rendered quivering, squirming lumps, completely unable to deal with the telepathic fusion. The funding had dried up, the plug pulled on the project. Only two full-scale prototypes had been ever completed, one a cyberlaser, the other a sonic disruptor, both containing cybertronic telepathy circuits. Neither had ever been tested.
Somehow these young women had obtained those prototypes, and survived both the home-brew surgery that had attached the units and the effects of the units themselves. More than survive, adapt to it.
More or less.
The man in black waved the gun wildly. "I'll blow your brains out. I'm not joking. I've planned this too long to be defeated by nuts like you."
"You're no fun," said Phobos, and vaporized the pistol with a flare of her optical cyberlaser. The man in black yelped, danced about the cabin in pain, flapping his burned hand like a fan. His former flunkies waited patiently for him to regain control before issuing their ultimatum.
"We want this spaceship." Deimos' disruptor antenna spun, came to bear on the man in black. "And the scientist. He'll show us how to fly it."
Phobos was watching her toes wiggle inside her shoe. Without looking up, she added, "You don't need either. Your plan is unworkable."
Deimos laughed. "It was a stupid plan anyway. Sneezing powder. Stupid. Silly."
"No fun. No fun at all."
"You should talk," came the defiant response. "Stolen cybertech. Zodiac gas. Armored personnel carriers. Small potatoes. You couldn't even kill Kim Possible, uh, Stoppable and that goofy husband of hers."
The sinister figure's words kindled hope in the astrophysicist's heart. Kim and Ron, still alive! They must have sent the Sloth in under remote control. And if they were still alive, they were on the way.
The man's rant continued unabated. "I stopped the Stoppables. I captured Shego. You'd both be back in the asylum if not for me. Nothing more than vandals. Hardly the stuff of legend. My world-wide sneezing epidemic would have been remembered for a hundred thousand years."
The twins paid no attention to their former master, but stood before Mr. Dr. P, hands on hips. "We don't like the ship design."
"It's too Buck Rogers. Don't you think it's too Buck Rogers, Mr. Scientist?"
"No," Dr. Possible heard himself answer. "It's modeled on Captain Constellation's ship. The Comet LX5."
"Is he a superhero?"
"We hate superheroes. Spoilsports. Killjoys."
"We'll show Captain Constellation how to design a ship. Special. Original. Maybe a –"
"-pyramid –"
"-or a trapezohedron-"
" – or a cube." The twins looked at each other, nodded. "A cube. Anything wrong with that, Mr. Scientist?"
"A cube is not aerodynamic," droned the astrophysicist, despite his best effort to remain silent. "It would be destroyed in the earth's atmosphere."
"We don't want to fly it in the earth's atmosphere." They pointed upward as one. "Space. The final frontier." A shared giggle. "We're going to be space pirates."
"Space pirates," snorted the man in black, sitting in the ship's control chair. "Why did I ever think you'd be assets? "
They frowned, pouted, fell silent. Outside the ship there were the sounds of battle. The twins disregarded it. "Mr. Scientist," began Phobos, mournfully, "do you know anything about cybernetic implants?"
"Yes," he admitted, desperately wanting to deny it.
"Because we think we need more people in the network. Clever people."
"Not like Mr. Bignose over there. He's no fun."
"We wouldn't be in a network that would let him in."
The ebon-clad villain, engaged in surveying the ship's controls, ignored the lunatics. Mere minutes to liftoff capacity. And, unlike the cyborg twins, he could fly the ship. He'd spent a lot of time hacking top-secret sites just to get that knowledge. He could cut his losses, escape, begin work on a new and better plan. If he could just think of some way to get rid of the unwanted baggage.
"People like you," continued the cyborgs, circling Dr. Possible. "If you joined us, we'd know about science. And if Shego joined us, we'd know about martial arts."
"And sarcasm. Mockery. She likes to mock people. It's fun."
"Wouldn't that be fun, Mr. Scientist?"
"No. It's insulting and impolite," he answered, inwardly terrified that the maniacs would take offense at the relentlessly truthful responses the compliance chip forced from his mouth.
They didn't seem to care. "And since you and Shego are sane, you would balance us out. We could all work together. In the network." Their deranged smiles returned, their bright blue crazy eyes sparkled as if looking upon Paradise. "In the collective."
"Take them back to Shego, Dr. Possible," the man in black suggested, adjusting some sliders on the control panel. "I don't need her. And they do. They need both of you. For their collective."
"Yes, Master," said the scientist, and began walking.
The twins immediately forgot their erstwhile employer, followed the astrophysicist, still reciting their plans. "You know in Star Wars, when they called the androids droids? We're cyborgs. Maybe we'll call ourselves something like that, too. When we're all together. When we're all in the collective. What do you think, Mr. Scientist?"
Staring straight ahead, Dr. P. intoned "It sounds ugly. It would never catch on."
The shadow of a huge nose fell across the three of them like a dark cloud. "See? Don't say I never did anything for you."
"We'll see," the twins snapped in unison, and slammed the hatch shut behind them.
The man in black leaped up, locked it shut, returned to the launch controls. "Space pirates." He had never laughed so hard in his life.