Disclaimer: if it was on TV, it's not mine. Otherwise, yeah, I own it. Soundtrack for this chapter: a little Green Day, a touch of Symphony-X, a bit of Roger Sessions, a breath of Hawkwind, a byte of Kraftwerk. Shuffle till done!
Two henchmen went flying across the room; Kim dodged the third's shock-rod, used the force of the man's brute rush to catapult him after his fellows. Another sprang from somewhere overhead, blaster flaring. She cartwheeled toward him, narrowly avoiding the beam, and took him out with a solid kick to the jaw. Spinning around, she saw her husband across the room, struggling with several of the man in black's minions.
That shouldn't be happening. Ron had enough power to handle the technobarbarians from Lorwardia, much less these flunkies. But his MMP glow flickered and flashed, one minute full strength, the next feeble and waning. The henchmen sensed his weakness, closed in, jeering.
She fired her grappling hook, swung across the huge launch bay to join Ron in the fight. "Ron," she began, as they stood together, surrounded by warily circling henchmen, "what's the sitch? You should have taken all these guys out –" Three burly men rushed the Stoppables, shock-rods crackling with power; as one they met the challenge, disarmed the villains and sent them flying. " – By yourself," Kim finished.
Her husband was surrounded by the fearsome glow of Mystical Monkey Power, but even as she watched, it again flickered like a failing fluorescent. "I don't know, Kim! I can't – can't focus. That fanfic –"
"Ron!" With her Battlesuit's energy-deflecting glove, she intercepted a blast from overhead, flung it back at the sniper with devastating effect. "Get that out of your head!" As she said it, a bit from one of the things came back to her like a slap in the face: "Danger, destruction, delirium, desperation. Was this all there was to life?"
It was from the story that had so troubled her, the one that depicted, somehow, their last adventure. Their decision to give all this up. The one that had almost forced her to take this mission on, just to prove the author wrong. She still had what it takes. She was still Kim Possible. She could still do anything .
A sudden vision of her little daughter froze her in her tracks. Why, in the name of God, had she done this? And why was she thinking like a carefree teenager? She had a family now –
A shock-rod caught her in the stomach, threw her against the metal wall, hard. The henchman guffawed, advanced on her, only to be attacked by Ron, kicking and biting, unable to muster his world-saving power, determined to defend the woman he loved. Just beyond them the launch gantry elevator descended, though they were not aware of it, or of the threat it contained.
They were too busy fighting for their lives.
Noted psycholinguist Beverly Francine Skinner shared initials and a last name with the famous Burrhus Frederic Skinner, behavioral psychologist and author of Walden 2. She often joked that her name led her to her profession.
She wasn't joking now.
Somewhat puzzled by Kim Possible's request, she'd begun by running the thousands of text files Wade had downloaded from Fanfic-dot-com through software of her own devising, a program which detected psychological cues, subliminal messages, and other insidious linguistic traps. The power of the written word over the human mind was incredible, yet very little research had been done on it, outside of her own.
The results were unremarkable. As the program proclaimed one fanfic after another safe, she'd amused herself by reading a few.
She had been in the middle of a remarkably well written story concerning a scandalous centerfold when the warning beep sounded. Skinner regarded the onscreen graph with something close to annoyance. "Needs a reboot. That can't be right," she muttered under her breath. When the machine came back online, she repeated the scan on the last story. Then another by the same author. And another. Annoyance turned to awe. And deep concern.
She snapped her phone open, called the number she thought she'd never use. Global Justice had covertly funded her development of the analysis software, convinced that somewhere, somehow, someone might use coded messages to sway the minds of the populace. It sounded insane at the time, but they were putting up the money, and she was intrigued by the experiment. She'd processed religious tomes, best sellers and classical literature, amazed at how often the writers had intuitively grasped the power of a certain phrase, a particular construct of words.
But this was no intuitive accident. This was a purposeful, diabolical setup, written by someone whose knowledge of psycholinguistics was far beyond her own. Someone dangerous enough to report to GJ before their sinister stories harmed anyone.
If they hadn't already.
Concealed in a niche between two enormous generators, Drakken watched as the Stoppables struggled with the swarm of grim henchmen, trying with all his mind and heart to make the vines and flowers appear, the botanical power that would make him invincible.
Nothing. The Stoppables were going to die, Shego might already be dead, and he was hiding, paralyzed with fright. Just like the bad old days. Just like all those stories that ended with his defeat, or his despair, or his demise. Strange how they kept intruding on his concentration, reminding him of just how asinine he really was. Almost like some sort of hypnotism. Mind control.
That was one thing he'd been pretty good at. Mind control. After all, he'd invented Dr. D's Brainwashing Shampoo and Cranium Rinse! Shego didn't steal that one for him from some top secret installation or island laboratory. He'd developed it himself. From scratch. And the telepathic amplifier, his most famous creation, an incredible tool in treating certain mental illnesses. The device that had made him the respected and honoured Dr. Drew Lipsky in the eyes of the world.
Yes, he knew mind control inside and out. Causes, symptoms, effects –
The fanfic's crippling mental darkness was suddenly blasted by dawning light. "Wait a minute," snarled Dr. D, "I get it!" He glared out at the Copernicus, watching the gantry elevator descend, and stood up, unafraid. "I'll shake this off. Whoever you are," he thundered, "you won't beat me at my own game. I won't let you."
Several shock-rod wielding henchmen heard his declaration above all the din of battle, advanced in his direction.
"Aw, poop," squeaked the blue man, and ran.
"It's exactly what you people feared," Skinner told Betty Director. "Someone's using Fanfic-dot-com to set psychological booby-traps."
"Mind control? One of Drakken's projects? All our surveillance indicated that he really has gone straight."
"He's one of the targets. Drakken, Shego, Dementor, Electronique, someone is trying to make sure all the possible competition, hero or villain, is out of the running."
"How do you know that? You're not reading it yourself, are you?" Director's voice held an edge of alarm.
"If you're not in it, you're not affected. It's designed to draw its targets in. To lower their natural defenses by making them the main characters."
"What about Kim and Ron Stoppable?"
"Oh, you bet. It would destroy their confidence. Only a uniquely assertive personality would have a chance of shaking it off. It's poison. Devastating. And yet the style is so simple, pared-down to basics."
"Easy to read."
"You need to contact them. Warn them. Kim must have seen some of it; she had Wade Load send me the files."
"If she has, what, uh, what effect will it have on her?"
The barely concealed worry in Director's voice troubled Skinner. "At the very least she'll need counseling; at worst, she might have to submit to the Lipsky treatment, telepathically purge the psychic toxins. If her husband's read it, he'll need the same. Luckily the Stoppables retired from adventuring, or they'd really be in danger."
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone.
"They are retired, right? Raising a family and all that?"
There was still no answer.
The gantry elevator doors slid open silently on the pitched battle around the ship. The gestalt creature that had been Phoebe and Debbie Marrs, then Phobos and Deimos, and was now beginning a new phase of existence, drew back, a snarl of rage on both its faces.
"The girl."
"Redhead."
"Hurt us at the Space Center."
"We hate her. She doesn't deserve to be part of our collective. She deserves –"
"— to be destroyed."
They stood on either side of James Possible, who blankly stared at the mayhem, the compliance chip still secure on his forehead. "You hate her too, don't you, Mr. Rocket Scientist?" asked the cybernetic beings.
Sweat broke out on Possible's forehead, but he answered regardless. "No."
"No?" The cyborg twins were shocked. "Why not? What's she to you?"
"She's my daughter," droned the scientist, "and I love her."
The twins glanced at each other, shoved the astrophysicist from the elevator. "We don't want you in the collective any more." One of them bent down, removed a blaster from an unconscious henchman's holster. "Walk over there –"
" – and kill her. With this," said the cyborgs, handing him the weapon. "We'll get by with just Shego. She'll be enough for now."
Dr. P. felt his feet moving against his will, saw his hand holding the lethal weapon, saw his daughter and her husband valiantly fighting the diminishing group of the man in black's minions. Struggled to defy the deadly orders, to no avail.
In the Copernicus, waiting for the anti-grav engines to attain full charge, the man in black watched the events below on a monitor and laughed. The twins might have been absolutely useless as minions, and ultimately more dangerous than he had predicted, but he was evidently going to get at least one victory out of their madness.
"She should have stayed retired. Stayed at home with her kid," he told the control room. "Must not have read my fanfic trap, or she would have."
He switched the monitor view to the sky-filled crater far above, began the final countdown to takeoff. Clicked a switch; the control room shook to the beat of Green Day's American Idiot.
He always did his best work to music.
"Who wrote those stories?" snapped Betty Director.
"Strange name. Probably a pseudonym. Looks vaguely Swedish."
"The name, Dr. Skinner!"
"Morskopp. Gomro Morskopp."
There was a quickly stifled gasp. "I thought he was dead."
"Who is he?" Skinner demanded, not caring if she was treading on dangerous ground, remembering the vivacious, red-haired young woman who had saved her and a dozen other tourists from the amphibious terrorists in Venice, quite a few years ago now. Realizing the girl was enmeshed in something bigger than even she could handle, if she'd actually read any of the terrible tales. "Who is he?" she asked again.
"A very, very bad man," came the grim reply. Then Beverly Skinner was holding a silent phone.
Hundreds of miles away, deep in the volcano lair, a very, very bad man threw a final switch. The sound of the anti-gravity generators filled the lair, startled hero and villain alike with their furious howl. Only one person was unaffected by the noise; expressionless, he continued to advance on his daughter, his finger tightening on the trigger of the blaster.
Her voice inaudible, Kim's mouth formed a single word. "Dad?"
The ray lashed out.