graycardinal | FIC: Favor For Favor

2 • A Guaranteed Win-Win

“. . . Dave Davenport growled with pure, carnivorous lust, and fzzzzkrrrpkow!”

Shego cursed; that was the third keyboard she’d fried in the last hour. Writing sex scenes was difficult when your hands threw off green energy bolts at the slightest lapse of emotional control. Unfortunately, voice dictation software was out of the question. The living quarters in their current time-share lair were bugged six ways from Sunday, and she wasn’t about to give Dr. Drakken the satisfaction of hearing her narrate the most ferociously erotic Narbonic slash this side of the Crab Nebula – and then attempting to tease her about it later.

The trouble was that almost everything Shego wrote – Narbonic, Alias, Smallville, Xena, and occasionally Pretender or Walker, Texas Ranger – was ferocious, page-meltingly hot, fiercely amoral slash. As a result, she went through keyboards by the gross when she was on a writing binge – and, she noted as she collected a new one from the dwindling stack in her closet, it was about time to order another pallet of the dratted things. But she had developed a reputation for hard-edged consistency in the parts of cyberspace that went in for that sort of fanfic, and releasing her villainous frustrations in prose was a good deal more productive than quick-frying Dr. Drakken to a crackly turquoise crunch. As irritating as her blue-skinned boss often was, he was also childishly easy to manipulate – any other mad scientist would have her working three times as hard for two-thirds the pay (not counting what she routinely skimmed from Drakken’s accounts in the Grand Caymans when he wasn’t looking).

Besides the high keyboard-destruction rate, the only recurring annoyance in Shego’s fanfic-writing career was the ongoing lack of reliable beta readers. Finding readers in general was absurdly easy; finding readers who could help her refine her literary technique was another matter entirely – especially in the smaller fandoms, most notably Narbonic. Word on the Net was that someone – it wasn’t entirely clear who – had put out a search-and-destroy order on

jade_firecat, the alias under which her Narbonic stories appeared, after she’d released a five-part Helen Sr./Helen/Artie/Mell slash epic. Downloads went through the roof, but readers willing to openly volunteer to beta her latest opus (a Dave/Artie/Caliban slashfest) vanished at least as fast.

She contemplated the problem as she logged on and prowled through Livejournal’s fanfic communities, looking for stories she hadn’t yet read. Oddly enough, what she liked to read was often very different from what she wrote; usually slash, to be sure, but often much quieter and less, well, pornographic – and in fandoms that included Due South and Early Edition and even Harry Potter (chiefly Snape/Draco, sometimes Snape/Moody, and, when she could find it, Snape/Dumbledore) along with her other preferred universes.

It was in a Snape/Sirius thread that she found the post from

multinique, responding to someone’s question about Potter beta talent: “I’ve been showing mine to

miss_maybe; she gives the best beta ever. Fiercely busy, though – she’s got about three lives outside fic, and I only rate because we go way back.”

Curious, Shego followed the trail of friends-lists to

miss_maybe’s journal, which looked at first like a dead end. The most recent entry was months old, the author seemed largely preoccupied with cheerleading and an unspecified job, and she didn’t seem to have written any fanfic herself. But when she glanced over the “Interests” section of the User Info page, a handful of items caught her eye: harry potter, naked mole rats, superheroes, world travel . . . and narbonic.

Shego’s eyebrow went up. “Couldn’t be. Or could it?”

miss_maybe, she observed, didn’t give a geographic location. “Wise girl,” Shego muttered, clicking back to

multinique’s User Info. The other fan had been less cautious, and Shego barely lifted her hand in time to prevent a bright green ffzzZAP! of satisfaction from claiming another keyboard. “Middleton,” she said cheerfully.

Thirteen minutes later, her spyware probes had established to her complete satisfaction that

miss_maybe was in fact her much-despised goody-goody adversary, Kimberly Ann Possible. “And she reads Narbonic,” Shego said, thoughtfully. “Who’d have thought? This has definite possibilities.”

It took seven solid hours to put all the pieces in place: two and three-quarters to finish the sex scene, fifteen minutes to wind up the story afterward, three hours to create and deploy a suitable virtual identity, and an hour to draft a covering note with just the right touch of helplessness. The ‘Net ID was the trickiest part of the project – it had to be sufficiently crackable that Kim’s pet computer genius could backtrail it to Shego without too much trouble, but not so easily penetrated that Wade would realize she meant him to tag her.

Finally, though, the package was complete, and Shego logged her newly crafted persona onto Kim Possible’s official Web site. “Oh, yes,” she breathed, a Grinch-like grin spreading across her face as she clicked her way through the favor-requesting process. It was, she thought, a truly delicious dilemma. If dear, innocent little Kimmy chose to accept Shego’s “favor”, thinking to gain an advantage in some future encounter, she’d be forced to read and respond to a fic so gloriously, pervasively pornographic that it nearly curled Shego’s own hair just thinking about it. So much for innocent, Kimmy, she mused. You’ll never be able to look at the Disney Channel the same way again. On the other hand, if Kim turned the job down on principle, she’d have to explain why – and that in itself would give Shego enough ammunition to turn Kim’s face strawberry-red with embarrassment the next time they tangled. Anything to put you off your game, Kimmy dear. And just maybe expanding her arch-enemy’s smoldering sensual horizons would be enough to allow Shego to finally put paid to the rivalry once and for all.

“Oh, yes,” she said again, “this one is a guaranteed win-win.” She stabbed down at the Enter key with joyously fiendish glee – and an ear-jarring ffsshhkrklpoppop-ffzzzklkrZZAPP! as the keyboard sizzled and exploded.

Not, however, before the lair computers had dutifully dispatched the files to their chosen destination. Shego gave the remains of the keyboard a resigned glance, but she was whistling as she headed for the closet to break out another replacement.