I do not own any Disney characters named herein, and am only borrowing them to tell a nonprofit tale meant for entertainment purposes only.

Kim Possible: Impossible Journey

By LJ58

3

Meanwhile: Just Over One Month Ago…

"Damn you, Princess," Shego howled, actually screaming in fear as her gloved hands slid futilely over the nearly glass smooth walls as she tried to slow their fall.

"Wade, I really need help," Kim tried to call, but the bursts of static from her wrist Kimmunicator were her only reply.

Twisting in midair, she put away her useless grapple, and stared into the stygian depths below her as they continued to fall.

"I thought you were a good guy," Shego shouted, her tone genuinely filled with fear as they felt the cold of the depths starting to fade as the air began to warm more and more as they fell deeper and deeper.

"And I thought you would be able to support my weight, and pull me out," Kim shot back.

"That's right," Shego swore. "Blame me!"

"You shoved me in this hole in the first place."

"You deserved it!"

"Deserved….? Keep on, and I'll let you figure out how to save yourself!"

"Yeah, right," Shego complained, "Because you just happen to have a way to….."

Shego yelped as the heating air suddenly turned cooler again as Kim's familiar force field blossomed around the both of them, and they began to slow as Kim gradually expanded the glowing ball around them, and used the friction of the walls on the crackling energy field to ease their headlong fall.

After what felt like a very long slide, they stopped, and were left dangling in darkness with nothing overhead, and nothing below.

Except a very faint, disturbingly crimson glow that was just visible below them now.

"Okay. Okay," Shego shivered at the sight below them, forcing herself not to look down again. "Kudos for thinking under serious pressure. Now what, Kimmie?"

Kim grimaced, and said, "Now, we hope my power supply holds out while I use the controls to push us back up. Only it's going to take time. Those walls really are as smooth as they look…."

"Duh. Drew used that damn laser bore again. One of these days….."

"Okay. Okay. I have an idea. How fine can you channel your plasma?"

"Uh….. What are you thinking," the comet-powered woman asked.

"I'm thinking if we have even the slightest hole, or irregularity around us, we can use it to expand my shield against, and push off to get us moving upward. So, if I opened a small window, say….there," she said, her flashlight indicating a more gray than blue section of rock near their knees where the shield had been opened.

"Like this," Shego smirked, and pointed a finger that fired a thin burst of raw plasma into the rock, and opened a handhold.

"Perfect."

"Actually, I had a better idea. Now we've stopped freefalling, I can do this," she said, and letting plasma roil around her hands and feet, she slammed them into the rock even as Kim caught on, and pulled back the shield enough to let her do what she was doing.

"Okay, I think I can angle my force shield to keep us supported against the rock, and let you carve handholds for us to climb."

Shego looked down at her after climbing a few feet, and swore, "Just never tell anyone I screamed, will you? My rep is going to take a beating as it is after they realize we worked together to get out of here. Again," she muttered sourly.

"Your rep is the least of your problems just now," Kim scowled up at her, monitoring her power flow, and keeping an eye on where Shego was poking holes into the rock. She had to give them time to cool before she used them, so she would let the felon get up of her ahead a few feet, then scramble up after.

"Any idea how far down we are?"

"Trying very hard not to even think about it," Kim complained, knowing her ears had seriously popped at least twice on the way down. Maybe three times. "Let's just focus on the getting out part."

"Fine. Fine. I'm just making conversation," Shego grumbled.

"Okay, then why?"

"Why, what?"

"Why go back to Drakken, again, when you had a complete pardon? You could have done anything?"

"Oh, yeah. Lots of calls for ex-thieves with comet powers out there, aren't there," she complained, pausing to glance down at her longtime nemesis as she took a break from the maddeningly slow climb.

The faint red glow was no longer visible, so she had to consider they were making some headway.

She turned, and channeled her plasma again even as something dropped atop them, bouncing off the force field around them.

"Uh-oh."

"Uh-oh," Shego asked her uneasily.

"Better hold on. I think we're about to have another quake!"

"That blue-skinned freak," Shego screamed as the very world seemed to twist around them, and she had visions of being buried alive.

At the least.

Then the rubble was falling thicker, and heavier, and something slammed into one side of the shield on her left, and Kim swore herself as it impacted so hard it almost made them slide downward again.

"Whoa! What was that?"

"I think….. I think….. The tunnel collapsed on top of us," Kim told her somberly as only her glowing force field now lit the stygian darkness around them. There wasn't even a faintest trace of light from overhead now.

Shego felt her super-heated blood chill as she slowly looked up, following Kim's gaze, and saw the massive boulder just over their heads. It was lodged right over them, and had it not been for the force field, it would have likely slammed right into them with enough force to kill them both instantly.

If they had been lucky.

"I swear…. I am going to kill him, Kimberly," Shego said, her voice betraying she was very close to hysteria just then.

"Hold on. I'm going to try something else."

"What? We're been buried alive, and….."

"Just hold on. I need to check….."

"Ah! What is that," she complained as she looked down, but Kim seemed to only be fumbling with her watch again as something sounding like bird calls filled the air.

"Sonar," she said. "I'm bouncing a signal around us to… Yes!"

"What?"

"Shego, we have to go back down a few feet."

"Down," the green-skinned woman shrieked.

"Not far. "Three feet down, and on our….right….is an open tunnel that shows sign of being stable. If we can reach it, we might find another way out."

"Okay. Okay. But couldn't I just….burn our way back up? How deep is…."

"You don't want to know," Kim told her, deactivating her Kimmunicator sonar, and starting down without waiting. "Once I reach the level, I'll show you the direction, and you can get us over to the tunnel mouth."

"That's me," Shego complained loudly. "The human climbing buddy."

"Right now, I'm actually glad you're down here with me," Shego was told.

Shego had absolutely no answer to that.

They climbed back down slowly. Carefully. Listening to the rubble overhead shift again when the force field slowly descended with them.

"I was just thinking," Shego finally said when she started a horizontal climb around the tunnel wall.

"Yeah," Kim asked, following her as cautiously as ever.

"When we get out of this, I'm going to melt down your damn grapple….."

"Hey!"

"And pour it down Dr. D's throat. Yeah. That'll make me feel better. For a start. How about you?"

"I'm going to build a cell you two can't get out of," she spat. "Because it occurs to me that half my trouble comes from you two doing the same damn song-and-dance."

"Oh! Kimmie cursed!"

"Funny. You should be about….."

"Hey, I found it. It's bigger than I thought. It looks like a damn truck came through here," Shego exclaimed as she clambered up into the space before her.

Kim climbed in after her, dropped her force field, and stared around with the small mini-mag she pulled from her belt.

"That's odd," she murmured, running a hand over the walls before stepping deeper into the stygian channel.

"What?"

"These walls don't look like Drakken's tunneler dug them," Kim pointed out.

"Well, duh. He was only using his laser bore..."

"No, Shego. This passage wasn't carved out by humans at all. At least, not by hand. Look at these marks, and all these crystals. I think we're in an old lava tube. But I didn't think there were any active volcanoes in this region. At least, I didn't think so," she remarked as her bright beam of light played over the crystalline walls around them.

"Just tell me how far we're down?"

"I'd say we're about close to forty, maybe forty-five kilometers down. Pretty well past the transitional barrier between the crust and the outer core. Only…..this isn't what you'd expect to find. Not this far down."

"Okay, say I don't have a clue what you're saying, and…."

"Lava tubes aside, I just realized this tunnel is way too big. Yet, no one else should have ever been down this far, Shego," she told her, turning to walk down the tunnel, and noting it had a slight upward angle. "And yet the walls seem remarkably solid, and well preserved. As if they were….kept open. And yet they're…..old. This isn't exactly a new tunnel. Someone must have dug this out of a lava tube…..a long time ago. It's probably why Drakken triggered the seismic activity. If he hit parts of this tunnel, it might have destabilized, and caused a….."

"Whatever. Will it get us out," Shego demanded.

"Well, haven't you noticed?"

"Noticed what, Dr. Possible," she complained sardonically.

"The air. It's….cooler in here. Fresher."

"But if we're that far down….?"

"Exactly. Where's the fresh air coming from," Kim remarked with a frown as she looked around the tunnel.

"I just want to see the sky," the green-skinned woman complained.

"So do I," Kim said, even as she felt as much as heard the rumble behind them this time as her force field no longer insulated them from the sounds around them.

"Uh-oh," Shego rasped, looking around.

"Run," Kim shouted, and they both bolted down the tunnel, praying that whatever was giving way behind them didn't catch up to wherever they were going.

KP

"Now," Jim shouted as he fired something into a power relay station, and the sparks shot out of the device like lightning.

Bonnie didn't hesitate as she lunged forward, slamming a captured stun baton into the dash of the computer console controlling whatever the bearded dwarf was trying this time.

She howled, feeling some of the feedback in spite of her insulated gloves her power suit provided, and jumped back just before the whole console just exploded.

"Ach! You foolish fraulein! Do you know what you've done?"

"Stopped you," Bonnie smirked, tossing her dark hair over one shoulder as she stepped back, eyeing the mad dwarf surrounded by fallen Henches, and Ron already moving toward him.

"This is beyond belief! I, Professor Dementor, should have won! Without Kim Possible, you should have just stayed home and pouted! The world would have been mine! Mine," Dementor howled at Ron.

"What can I say," Ron growled, lifting the man up by his throat. "I got bored."

His punch slammed the madman back into his own self-destructing control panel, and Ron watched dispassionately as he howled in pain as the surging energies sent him collapsing to his hands and knees, before he just fell on his face, utterly out cold.

"Okay, it's done. We got that portable fusion reactor of his unhooked, and ready for transport," Jim and Tim appeared to report just then.

"Any problems?"

"No big," the twins smirked, just as something chirped, and they both looked at their own communications device.

"That's….?"

"Let's deliver this freak, and then we'll check it out," Ron said, knowing exactly what that signal was. Or wasn't. It was, after all, something the boys had continued to work on for weeks even as Bonnie proved she was getting just as good as any of them at holding her own in the field.

Even he couldn't hide his hope, though, and not even Bonnie said nothing as they dragged Dementor out to the waiting authorities, and dropped the man in front of the local constabulary.

"He's still alive," Ron told the man who eyed Dementor's still smoldering coat. "And he has twenty men inside. Don't worry, the mutant dogs are incapacitated, and his defenses are all shut down. You can clean out the place without worry."

"You have our thanks, Mr. Stoppable," the man told him, gesturing to his men that quickly cuffed the man still in his trademark helmet. "But….what is that?"

Ron turned to see the twins loading a fat, heavy box into the back of the jet, and kept his face blank.

"Something that needs turning over to Global Justice," he told the man blandly. "For your own safety," he added, though he rather doubted the experimental fusion reactor would be going anywhere near GJ's labs anytime soon. Lately, the twins were less than trusting of them. Especially after Will Du tried to have them shut down as vigilantes when Betty Director was away on some other business after they took out DNAmy, and then defied him by letting some of her creatures escape into the wild.

Said creatures were intelligent, harmless, and yet Will had wanted them all put down. Ron refused, and Will tried to have him arrested.

Ron had not quite forgiven him for that one, either.

"Don't worry. We'll help GJ dispose of it, and you won't have to worry about any further danger from it," Ron said blandly. "Let's go, Bon," he called her. "This isn't over yet."

They were in the air, after the boys had secured the fusion reactor, when they turned to their own communications panel, and linked with an experiment being controlled from their underground lab back home.

"It did it," Jim rasped after reviewing data on the active monitor. "It really worked!"

"It," Bonnie frowned, not knowing about their project they had launched almost two months ago from right out of their back yard.

"The boys build a robot mole to….find Kim…and….and bring her home," he said quietly. "That signal means that it's reached wherever in the pit that she...fell."

"What….? Did it find…..her," Bonnie asked, looking shaken as the boys continued to study the monitor.

Bonnie looked as grim as Ron felt just then.

Just over three months ago now, the twins had finally launched the explorer they had built to seek, and find Kim. It was programmed to lock onto her genetic pattern, and give them a viable signal of where she might be. If it had sent a signal, it had to have found something.

"We have a biological signal, but….it's not a lock."

"What do you mean," Ron asked. "Don't tell me…."

"Hold on, Ron. Look. Look at everything," Tim told him, pointing at the monitor that was coming to life now after they isolated the frequency.

"I don't see much," he complained to the young genius.

"I'm cleaning up the video," Jim told him. "See it now?"

"Uh…"

"Handholds," Jim pointed out. "Handholds cut into smooth rock. Bloody ones. Kim's blood, obviously, or the genetic alarm wouldn't have sounded. But she isn't there now."

"Then….she did fall…?"

"No. Look," Jim grinned. "The signal vanished behind this rubble, but…"

Tim frowned, and pressed a button.

The rover, obviously live, backed up, and he manually adjusted a light that played over a sloped wall that had half collapsed into what seemed like a rather large tunnel.

"I didn't think anyone ever got that deep," Bonnie frowned as she realized what they were seeing on the monitors. "I thought you said the rescuers quit after they barely got halfway, and everything collapsed."

"We didn't quit," the Tweebs spat. "Besides, look at that. Kim got out! Hey, look. There," he pointed when Ron and Bonnie both frowned as the light played over the sloping wall on the screen. "Those initials! As crazy as it seems…. Guys, it looks like she's following Verne's story."

"His….what," Ron frowned.

"A.S., Ron. Arne Saknussemm! It's in Jules Verne's story! It must be true," Jim all but shouted. "And Kim found the tunnel because that's her blood on the wall near those initials. She must be following the same path now! She's alive!"

"Alright, sending new commands," Tim said, still working on the monitor station. "I'm sending the explorer after her. Wherever she went, it might be able to help, and it'll let her know we haven't given up," the boys said, grinning ear-to-era now.

"You really think….?"

"She got out of the pit, Ron. We didn't find her body, or Shego in there. Just that blood from a carved out handhold. She must have cut her hand. But she got out, and she kept going. She must have. We just have to find her, and then figure out a way to get her back."

"Call Wade. He has to listen now," Bonnie told them, knowing the boy genius was still in mourning, and not helping anyone just then.

"Actually, first we had better call dad," Jim said, glancing back at the fusion reactor.

"Yeah, the Possibles should know that….Kim may be alive," Bonnie agreed.

"Not just that," the twins grinned knowingly at Bonnie.

"We want to borrow his new Keppler Probe," Tim said with a sly grin.

"His….probe?"

"Just think of the Tunneler we could build with that, and with Demenz' fusion reactor to power it," Jim told Ron with a genuinely manic grin. "We could follow her, and bring her home ourselves."

"Annie," Ron called out. "Take us home. Full thrust."

Bonnie howled as she ended up thrown down from the force of acceleration.

"How about a little warning next time," she shrieked at them as she fought to get back to her own seat.

The boys only grinned.

To Be Continued…..