graycardinal | FIC: Favor For Favor

4 • Darkest Oklahoma

Kim was making a couple of final notes in the margins of Monique’s manuscript when Ron arrived after breakfast to pick up the Tweebs. “What’s that?” he wanted to know. “Homework? I don’t remember any papers being due.”

“Not exactly,” Kim said, shifting her arm to cover as much of the manuscript as possible. “Doing a favor.”

Ron, predictably, leaned closer. “Personal or professional?”

“Personal,” Kim said, a little too firmly. “And private. For Monique.”

The sound of the light bulb going off over Ron’s head was practically audible. “Ohhh! It’s a new fic, isn’t it? That reminds me . . . .” He rummaged briefly in the pack he was carrying and pulled out a thick sheaf of paper. “Would you? Could you? It’s Power Rangers . . . .”

Kim sighed. Ron, also predictably, had taken up writing fanfic the minute he’d found out that half the school – including most of the cute girls – was writing it, and he’d been doing his best to inflict it on Kim ever since. The trouble was that Ron’s fics were blazingly, unapologetically, Marty-Stu epics in which Ron (often under his own name) stepped in to save the Power Rangers or Scooby Doo or Harry Potter or the X-Men from certain doom at the hands of a supremely deadly villain. Like everyone else, Ron had quickly discovered Kim’s gifts as a beta reader and was eager to make use of them – but in typical Ron fashion, any suggestion that his protagonist’s literary heroics were a little over the top went right over his head. It made trying to critique Ron’s manuscripts an exercise in futility, and since Ron’s fics tended to run long, it was becoming a time-consuming exercise.

And yet, the scariest thing was that apart from their flaming Marty-Stuness, Ron’s stories were decent and getting better. Not surprisingly, he didn’t write romances – but his eye for action scenes was sharp and getting sharper, and his ear for dialogue was almost as good (although Kim had warned him a time or two about stealing lines wholesale from Dr. Drakken and Shego).

Ron waggled the manuscript in front of her nose. “Please??? You can read it while the Tweebs and I are playing Big Bad Wolf in darkest Oklahoma.”

On cue, the twins materialized at the doorway. “I’ll huff and I’ll puff . . .” began one—

“. . . and I’ll blooowww your house up!” finished the other.

“Shouldn’t that be down?” Kim asked, her mind still in editing mode.

“Not this week!” said the Tweebs in unison. “There’s gonna be an Earth-shattering KABOOM!” Kim tilted her eyes heavenward and heroically resisted commenting on their overuse of quotations and the clash between fairy-tale and TV references.

“As long as it’s a safe Earth-shattering KABOOM,” Kim’s father said cheerfully, joining the circle. “You keep a close eye on these two, Ron. And you too, Rufus,” he added to the naked mole rat, who popped up from Ron’s shirt pocket.

“Can do, Dr. P,” Ron replied, as Rufus chittered and made a tiny thumbs-up sign. “Kim?”

“Oh, all right,” she said, shrugging and taking the manuscript. “I’ll see what I can do. Gotta go, Dad,” she added, flipping her own pack over her shoulder. “Meeting Monique at Javalatte before school.”