FIC: Favor For Favor - 7

[graycardinal]

7 • It Just Doesn’t Seem Right

“We’ve got company!” Shego told Dr. Drakken, gesturing toward one of the wall monitors in the fruitcake factory’s security control room. Kim Possible and her annoying sidekick – Ron something-or-other – were climbing as silently as they could down a set of service stairs from the roof into a storage room. As usual, this meant that Kim was making no noise whatsoever, while Ron’s shoes click-click-clicked loudly on the concrete steps and something jingled in his pants pockets.

Drakken glanced at the screen and stiffened. “Kim Possible!” He flicked his headset microphone on and bellowed, “Station Fourteen – fire a sleep-gas grenade up those stairs! Now!”

Much to Shego’s surprise, the maneuver worked. Moments later, Kim and Ron reached a stairwell and collapsed in a cloud of pale green mist, as did the small pink mole rat who fell out of Ron’s shirt pocket. Drakken rubbed his hands together in glee. “Bring the prisoners to –”

He paused abruptly. “No,” he said with uncharacteristic firmness. “If I simply tie them up, set up a fiendishly diabolical death-trap, and allow them the delicious panic of contemplating their awful demise while I explain my ingenious plan, that dratted girl will somehow manage to escape, neutralize my entire squadron of killer henchmen, destroy a fortune in evil weaponry, and foil our plans for the -- sixty-second time, I think it is. Better to simply do away with them all before they wake up.”

The outburst caught Shego by surprise, but she couldn’t argue with the logic – Kim and her friends were all too good at wriggling out of inescapable doom. And yet, as she reached for her own headset control to give the order, it occurred to her that she hadn’t faced her nemesis in person since getting the beta of The Bad, the Worse, and the Fuzzy back.

It had been a surprise in more ways than one. Despite the enormous temptation of the blank-check favor, she hadn’t really expected Kim Possible, purest of the pure, to submerge herself in what even Shego admitted was one of the deepest, most pornographic gutters in all of fanfic. But she had gotten her beta – and not the one she’d expected, either. The critique hadn’t been mere generality and fluff. There’d been detailed, incisive, and often scorching notes on every page, all too accurately pointing out lapses in plotting – and worse, chiding her in chapter-and-verse depth on the implausibility of some of the sex scenes. “Artie’s too big to fit in that space,” one comment had observed, “at least if he’s going to be able to breathe while he’s in there.” Yet there’d also been compliments, particularly about her characterizations of Helen Sr. and Mell.

It was easily the most thorough, thoughtful beta Shego had ever seen. Its author, she reflected, more than merited the “Beta Goddess” title – and gave every sign of understanding uncannily well just what drove Shego’s literary urges. It would be a shame, she thought, to lose Kim Possible just when she might finally have come to her senses about the whole good-vs.-evil thing . . . and besides, she wanted a chance to see firsthand just what her handiwork had accomplished.

Aloud, she said, “You’d let some – minion have the satisfaction of taking out the greatest enemy of mad scientists and evil geniuses everywhere? It just doesn’t seem right.”

Drakken frowned. “There is that,” he admitted. “And I do so enjoy the gloating. But still . . . .”

“We’ve got an advantage this time,” Shego pointed out. “This place is totally computer-controlled – that’s how we spotted them so fast -- but the command systems are separate from the processing floor. We can set it up so nothing she does can disrupt the machinery before it does its thing. And we gassed them all at once – including that obnoxious little gerbil-creature – so it’s not like there’ll be cavalry to the rescue.”

“True. Especially about that annoying pink beast,” Drakken conceded. He squared his shoulders and shouted in his best Mad Scientist Rant voice, “Very well, Shego, arrange the fiendishly diabolical death-trap. This time, Kim Possible will perish once and for all!”

Not necessarily, Shego thought. Not if the Kim Possible we knew and despised is already gone forever.