Double-digit chapters! Huge thanks to everyone who's engaged with this story.

We're three days away from the 20th anniversary of Emotion Sickness first airing. If that doesn't merit its own fic, I don't know what does. Tomorrow's Possible will keep going as scheduled. If all goes well, weekly releases until the end of November, with the Epilogue released on December 1st.

Please do not provide patients with outside food or drink, as it may harm their treatment. In extreme cases, you may trigger violent behavior that puts you and the patient at risk of injury. Starfleet Medical thanks you for helping us help our patients.

Chapter 10: Obscūrīs vera involvēns

The time is 06:00.

Kim woke up to the computer's announcement and found herself in an unfamiliar bed, with a familiar presence beside her. Ron Stoppable lay on the other side of the bed with the goofiest smile imaginable on his face. The wake-up call had not affected him much, if at all. Her calling for the lights to turn on also did little to wake him up.

"Wake up, Rooooon…" she whispered in his ear.

"Dream… Too good… Don't want to wake up…"

That was a challenge as good as any Kim had ever been given. "Better than the waking world?" she teased and whispered in his ear, "I'd like some more essential Ronness, please and thank you…"

Between her request and her roaming hands, Ron finally opened his eyes. It took him a moment to process the situation, "Okay, you're right KP, this is so much better than free nacos for life."

Kim giggled in response, "Much as I'd like to stay here, that Drakken guy is expecting our visit at 08:30, and I still need to drop by my quarters for a shower and to change into a clean uniform…"

"Hmm," he replied with a mock pensive look, "what I'm hearing is that I have time to make a badical breakfast before you get back…"

"Ooh, now that's sounding a lot better than TKLs," she answered in between kisses.

"Not that I want to shoo you away, KP, but I can't make breakfast if you're holding me here."

The realities of recent physical exertion made themselves known as Kim's stomach rumbled audibly.

"Sounds like your body agrees that I should be feeding you," Ron commented.

"You mean food?" She asked with a sly grin.

"Real food for my KP."

My KP…

Kim got up, smiling and making a point of giving Ron a good look before putting on her uniform. She saw Ron's entranced look and went back over to the bed for a parting kiss, "I'll be right back."

Indeed, after a sonic shower and a change of uniform, Kim was back at Ron's. Maintaining his low profile while allowing him to work in the galley had taken some effort, but it was a small price to pay for his meals, in Kim's opinion. Today, in particular, the upcoming meeting with Drakken was not something she wanted to do on an empty stomach. She had a bad enough feeling about it without piling on physical discomfort.

"Everything okay, Kim?" Ron asked her after breakfast.

"I'm just worried about what this Drakken guy might have to tell us… And how it might impact… us."

Ron thought over Kim's words for a second, "I don't know what he's going to tell us, but I'm not going to let it come between us."

"What if he says 'your' Kim is out there somewhere?"

"You are my Kim, KP." He paused for a second or two with a pensive look, "Of course, a guy should be so lucky to have two of you…"

"I'm not sure if that's sweet or ferociously wrong," she answered with a scowl.

"Let's not worry about things we can't control, and let's hear him out and work from there." Ron reached out his hand as a gesture of reassurance.

Instead of taking it, Kim grabbed his whole arm, "Sounds like a plan to me. Just remember that I have to behave out there, while in uniform…"

"Well, you're the one holding on to my arm, so I guess all I can say is 'after you'."

On their arrival at the psychiatric ward of the starbase's medical facilities, they were shown to a room where Drakken was waiting. He sat at a small table at the center of the room.

"If you need anything, just call out," the orderly said before leaving the room.

Drakken wasted little time as soon as the door whooshed to its closed position, "How do I know you're who you claim to be?"

Ron took on the challenge as he and Kim sat down: "We first met when you stole the robot tick from Professor Acari. Your most recent plot for world domination was to use the Time Monkey and, well, I'm not sure you really had a plan from that point onwards."

"So you really are from the past," Drakken mused, "been here for ten or so years?"

"Actually," Ron replied, "I spent twelve years, from 2366 to 2378 in a different reality, then travelled back to 2366 with the help of a giant Time Monkey from a Klingon prophecy."

Drakken was unreasonably annoyed with that answer, "You've got to be kidding me! You're telling me that the imaginary solutions I discarded 'because they didn't make sense' were meaningful after all!? Do you know how long I spent reviewing my work, looking for an explanation for why more than two people ended up here!? Whenever I asked for help, I always got 'oh did you carry the one' or 'don't forget the constant of integration' or some other useless drivel, and now you casually drop the news that I should have considered all complex answers?"

Ron tried to reason with his old enemy, "Dude, chill out! It's not like I did your homework for you, I just got here last week. Why don't you tell us exactly how you got here?"

"Well, as you might remember, I was thrown in jail after our attempt at crushing Kim Possible on her first mission failed, thanks to that useless Monkeyfist. Three days later, instead of waking up in my cell, I woke up in this nightmare of a future."

"It's really not so bad," Kim interjected.

"Oh, spare me the cheerleader routine, I read the news. And I see what's missing from the news. The war is in a downward spiral, the Federation cannot muster enough ships. All the shipyards are producing ships at a rate never before seen, and yet whole fleets are missing in all public reports. When – not if – the Klingons get to Earth, I get to choose between slavery and death. I've been here for 12 years, stuck in this looney bin for 14 months. We need to fix everything, none of this is right. And we'll need Shego's help."

Kim asked the question that had to also be on Ron's mind: "Why Shego?"

"She remembers things as they were. I didn't manage to reach her, I learned she was here when the news of her failed heist broke. But I saw the trial, she mentioned things nobody else in this world would be aware of, like the Time Monkey." He paused to examine the faces of his interlocutors. "I take it you already knew most of this, which means that half of Starfleet does, too."

Ron responded to Drakken's assertion, "Well, Monkeyfist is pretty clued-in. He came looking for me pretty much immediately after I arrived."

A confused look took over Drakken's face, "Whaa? Monkeyfist? But only five people were transported to the future, I know Killigan came over, plus Shego, you two and me."

"How do you figure," Kim asked, "Rufus came over too, for starters."

The Naked Mole Rat popped out of Ron's pocket to say hi.

"I just know, okay? And I knew about the Naked Mole Rat, I just wasn't counting him."

"Hey!" Rufus called out with a very offended tone.

Ron had an inkling of Drakken's methodology, "Dude, did it come to you in a dream?"

He frowned rather than answer the simple question.

"Totally dreamt it," Kim concluded.

"It was a very vivid dream! I clearly saw Shego and Killigan, but I also saw two human figures and a small rat. The rat was easy enough to figure out, but the human figures were too vague. I saw them disappear before the dream ended, Shego and Killigan were still there, then I woke up in this time. Besides, the math all checks out, five people plus a rodent."

"I thought you said the math was wrong," Ron poked.

Drakken defended his work, "Not on the complex plane it's not, but I never imagined the non-real solutions would be relevant!"

Kim did not like the direction the conversation was taking, but forced herself to focus on the mission, "Alright, let's say we get Shego, what then?"

Drakken shattered all expectations with his next words: "Then we destroy the Time Monkey."

Both Kim and Ron were left stunned by Drakken's plan.

"It's too dangerous," he added.

"Hold on," said Ron, "you're a mad scientist, since when is there a 'too dangerous' for you?"

"I saw the error of my ways when I got to the future…"

That earned him skeptical looks. Ron crossed his arms, Kim raised an eyebrow.

"Alright, I was sick of losing all the time and I figured if I couldn't even take over Earth, how would I take over the Federation? So now I'm only an angry scientist, not a mad scientist."

"What's the diff?" Ron asked.

"Angry scientists build dangerous things that Starfleet can use. As it turns out, a common enemy helps one to focus on what really matters. And what matters now is that the Time Monkey, if it is here, must be destroyed."

"I did that already," Ron announced, "when Shego took over the world!"

"She did…?"

"Yeah, sometime between 2003 and 2023, after you ended up in the slammer."

"And who was the last one to touch the Monkey?"

"Uhmm, that was me, trying to put it back together after it sort of fell and broke into a million pieces."

Drakken was shocked by Ron's tale, "But the surge of chronitons would wreak havoc upon the space-time continuum! Atomic bonds would be ripped apart by temporal stresses, you might even get localized high-energy patches that exceed the electroweak unification energy! The absolute best-case scenario would be an extremely unstable temporal vortex!"

"Well," Ron added, "I did get sucked into a whirlpool thingy, and then ended up in 2366 in that other… universe?"

"That begins to explain things, but there are still too many time travelers," Drakken mumbled as he seemed to be deep in thought.

Kim and Ron looked at each other. It was time to acknowledge the uncomfortable part.

Kim took the lead, "Actually… I was born here, in 2339. I first met Ron last week and the first time I spoke with you was on subspace the other day."

Drakken gasped at the enormity of Kim's statement, "You mean you're not my former teenage nemesis? But you call yourself Kim Possible?"

Kim nodded. Drakken looked her over carefully.

"Buffoon, was she with you when you got sent to the future?"

"Yeah, sucked into the whirlpool thingy."

Drakken was growing frustrated, "But that doesn't make any sense! She can't have been transported to the future, you say you were born here, and yet you look exactly like her!"

"That's not all, you know the vice-president of the UFP? He was the assistant principal back in my high school in the early 2000s. I've also seen others, KP's family are all exactly the same!"

"I'll have to think about this, do some research. It's not making any sense; time travel does not magically recreate people centuries into the future, gah…"

"Is he always such a drama queen?" Kim whispered to Ron.

"Pretty much, he's usually worse than this, must be the meds."

The former mad scientist paid Kim and Ron little attention as he walked around in circles, mumbling incomprehensibly.

"Tell you what, Doctor D.," Ron said to interrupt the mad ramblings, "we'll bring Shego over and we can see what else we can figure out..."

Kim looked at him incredulously. Wait, you're not seriously suggesting that we break her out of prison?

"But what about Duff Killigan," he continued, "wouldn't he be helpful? I hear he's on an explosion-free diet these days."

"Well," the angry scientist mused, "I talked to him a few years back and we traded notes. He wasn't too bothered, since he now gets to see entire planets terraformed and it's his actual, honest job, so I don't think he'll put in much effort to fix things. Also, he didn't have much to add, somehow he ended up a popsicle between arriving here and first waking up – probably a Ferengi scam gone wrong, if you ask me – and his experience was pretty much the same as mine. No, what I really want is to talk to Shego and especially to find out what Monkey-freak has been up to. You wouldn't, uh, happen to know how long he's been here?"

Kim answered, "At least 20-something years. He was the ambassador to the Klingon Homeworld when the war started."

"That double-crossing, good-for-nothing, stinking… Gyah, I swear I'll have my revenge on that…"

"We get it, dude, revenge and all that," Ron interrupted, "we can discuss what to do about him after we get Shego out of prison."

"No, you need to get me released from this damned madhouse. If Monkeyfist finds out I'm here, he might do something."

Oh, great, two breakouts. Kim sighed, why don't you ask for peace with the Klingons while you're at it?

"I'll see what I can do," she said, "but I'd appreciate it if you made things easier for us by behaving."

"That means no doomsday weapons and no threats against the staff," Ron added.

"Fine! But I demand-"

Drakken reconsidered his words when faced with glares from both Kim and Ron.

"Uhh, I mean, I'd like to ask you for a favor… Could you get me some cocoa-moo? It helps me to think..."

Obscūrīs vera involvēns - The truth is shrouded in darkness

Back to English titles next week, with The mummer's motley. I wonder who wears it well...