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graycardinal********************
I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (9/10)
A Sitch in Slash: Episode #2
Fandom: Kim Possible/Narbonic
Author: Gray Cardinal
Rating: PG -13
Classification: You tell me....
Summary: An assassin's after Shego, Mrs. Dr. Possible is trying to resolve matters without involving Kim -- and you just know that's not going to work out....
********************
We're in the home stretch....
9 • That’s What You Get For Underestimating the Gerbil
Beep beep be-beep! Kim blinked; that was definitely a Kimmunicator signal, but it wasn’t coming from her Kimmunicator. Her eyes – about all she could move easily from within the Narbonic Labs no-longer-dehydrated capture net – tracked the source of the sound to the unit Wade had given her mother, still lying on the sidewalk.
“I’ve got those EEG—wha-?” Wade stopped in mid-syllable, apparently taking in the change in scenery: Kim, Ron, and Shego squirming in their nets, while Helen and Dave stood a few feet away. Dave had Mell Kelly – also netted – slung over one broad shoulder; Helen, Artie perched atop her head, held her quantum tether – which was humming faintly –in one hand and the peanut jar containing Kim’s mother in the opposite one.
Almost at once, the Kimmunicator rose into the air like a tiny hovercraft, and Wade’s voice spoke urgently. “I need seventeen seconds! Do something, guys!”
Helen grinned. “We’ll be gone in elev-OWW!”
The quantum tether didn’t explode when the finger-sized flash of green plasma hit it, but it crackled, glowed momentarily, and stopped humming as the pulse knocked it out of Helen’s hand. She made a grab for it, but with the jar in her other hand she couldn’t quite keep her balance, the device landed on the sidewalk with a thunk, and Helen herself dropped to her knees and just managed to avoid losing her glasses. She did lose Artie, who had made a desperate but successful leap to Dave’s arm as Helen teetered.
“One for the locals,” Shego said with a sardonic chuckle. As she spoke, the flying Kimmunicator skimmed quickly forward and extended a glowing silver needle toward the peanut jar. The shatterproof plastic shimmered . . .
. . . and without waiting for a cue, the elder Possible sprang forward straight through the temporarily phased material to land awkwardly atop the Kimmunicator, which promptly retracted the needle and flew back to hover next to Kim.
Helen tossed the now-empty peanut jar aside with a muttered curse, picking up the quantum tether, but she spared the airborne Kimmunicator a glance first. “Not fair! Impressive, sure, but that was totally a deus ex machina.”
“Not true,” Kim’s mother replied. “Wade demonstrated that function for me about six chap—“ she paused, “er, a couple of days ago.”
Helen didn’t acknowledge the remark; she was busy examining the quantum tether. “Damn,” she said, “it looks like it’s shorted out. I’ll have to—”
SNAP!
Air whooshed inward, filling the space where Mell Kelly had been in the previous instant. Dave stumbled but kept his balance, and Artie grabbed for Dave’s ear to keep from losing his perch.
Helen eyed the quantum tether suspiciously. “That shouldn’t have happened. You’d better not have fried it,” she told Shego.
“Or you’ll what, shoot me with the death ray you forgot to pack?” the mercenary retorted. “Gee, I’m scared.”
“You’re also kind of tied up just now,” Helen retorted.
“You mean I was tied up,” Shego said, smiling wickedly as her entire body began glowing faintly green. The capture net’s strands visibly thinned; after a few seconds Shego flexed her arms and legs, and the netting crackled and shattered. She picked up a fragment and studied it. “Uh-huh, all nice and dehydrated again. Clever.”
Helen regarded Shego with a surprised expression. “Darnit, those nets were supposed to be plasma-proof!”
Shego responded with a feline smile. “But not heatproof. It’s all about the temperature control, Doc.”
Kim took as deep a breath as she could considering the snugness of her own net, and tried not to grit her teeth as she spoke. “Um, a little help over here, please?”
Shego glanced in her direction. “First things first, Pumpkin,” she said, wreathing her left hand in green fire as she reached down and lightly scooped up a certain candy-apple-red gerbil in her right.
“If you don’t mind,” she said, turning toward Helen again, “I’d kind of appreciate it if you could un-gerbilize Kimmy’s mother here.” As she spoke, she conjured a ping-pong-sized plasma ball, allowing it to roll around in her left hand.
The mad scientist stood up, eyed the fireball bemusedly, and shrugged. “What part of you never know with prototypes did you not get? If I understood Mell back there, your friend got hit with the very last Gerbilizer penlight there was – and lucky for you, it’s the only one in the whole production run that actually worked the way it was supposed to. More or less,” she added, regarding the gerbil in Shego’s hand critically. “I didn’t think hair color would translate quite that vividly.”
“I take it coloration was hard-coded into the shapechange algorithm?” It was unnerving, Kim reflected, hearing her mother’s voice coming out of something that small and furry.
“It was supposed to be, at any rate,” Helen replied matter-of-factly.
“Hmm. Most likely a simple microsecond’s disruption in power transmission, then – just enough to skip over that one bit of code in the sequence.”
Helen was nodding. “It’s so hard to maintain proper quality control when you’re working with nanocircuitry.”
“Focus, you two!” Shego cut in, sounding annoyed. “I don’t care how the damned ray was supposed to work. One more time: either you put her back the way she was, or we’ll see how you like being dehydrated into nice little crackly pieces.”
Plasma flared from the mercenary’s left hand, and Kim’s mother squeaked as Shego’s right hand also started glowing. “Oops,” Shego said, frowning as she concentrated on controlling the two power levels separately. “Sorry about that.”
“No harm done – mostly. However,” Kimberly Katherine Possible added as she scrambled out of Shego’s hand, “much as I hate to say it, I don’t think Helen can fix this, at least not here.”
Helen bobbed her head in agreement. “We just don’t have the hardware with us,” she said. “Now if you’d just let me take you back to the lab . . . .”
“Don’t you dare!” Kim called out. “We’d never see you again!”
“Not to worry,” Shego told her. “I’m still working on your mom’s latest Smallville chapter, and I refuse to try and email the comments into a whole different universe.”
Kim did the best she could to glare through the netting. “Yes, well,” she said, “if you two hadn’t started critiquing each other’s wrongsick fanfics, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Shego chuckled. “And I’d still be looking for a really good beta reader. Good thing you introduced us, isn’t it?”
“That depends on who you ask,” Helen interjected. She’d been probing the innards of her quantum tether, but now she looked up at Shego again. “Cross-universe email is easy. Getting home in the first place – that may be a problem. The frequency alignment chip’s cracked, and it’s all your fault!”
Dave, who had been literally twiddling his thumbs, traded worried glances with Artie. “Does that mean we’re staying here? Without Mell?”
“Looks that way, at least until I can replicate the chip,” Helen said. Suddenly, her eyes lit up behind her glasses. “Which means I can be as evil as I like over here after all. Dave, what have you got loaded right now?”
Her tall lab assistant tugged a compact, odd-looking gun out of his waistband and glanced at it. “Kelvin-Z clip,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Cover the girl,” Helen told him, waving vaguely toward Kim. “You don’t want to do that,” she added to Shego, who was on the verge of lobbing a plasma-burst at the weapon. “Superheated plasma, supercompressed liquid nitrogen compound – the concussion effect would level this whole block. Not to mention turning all our brains into so much jelly.”
“Jelly, yuck!” That was Rufus; he hadn’t quite worked himself free of the netting, but he’d managed to extract himself from the pocket of Ron’s cargo pants.
Dave, meanwhile, had obeyed his employer, though he was eyeing her doubtfully even as he trained the peculiar gun on Kim. Gas pellets, Kim decided as she studied the weapon. Hard to dodge even if I weren’t wrapped up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
“Much better,” Helen said cheerfully. She thrust the quantum tether into one pocket of her lab coat while drawing a pistol identical to Dave’s from another. “If I’m going to be living in this universe, the last thing I need is someone writing squicky stories about me and passing them around the ‘Net.”
Then a frown crossed her face, and she eyed Shego sternly. “What’s that humming noise?”
The mercenary shrugged. “No idea. Princess?”
“You’ve got me,” Kim said, then groaned as the double meaning registered. “Ron?”
“A strolling harmonica player?” Ron guessed, making everyone else groan.
Rufus, however, made a thumbs-up sign. “Byebye!”
Helen stared down at the mole rat. “Byebye?”
“Poof!” Rufus told her, pointing toward the sports bag lying nearby on the sidewalk – now partially unzipped, with what looked like the business end of a dustbuster poking out of it. Oh, right, Kim remembered, Wade’s projector thing.
“Have a nice trip!” Kim’s mother said, poking her tiny furred head out of the opening alongside the vacuum nozzle.
As she spoke, the space surrounding Helen, Dave, and Artie seemed to flicker slightly. Helen scowled and fired her pellet gun at Shego, but the missile vanished into the flicker-effect, there was a series of rapid multi-dimensional blinks from within its radius, and then the three visitors simply disappeared, leaving behind only the echo of Artie’s voice saying, “Now see? That’s what you get for underestimating the gerbil.”
“Whew!” Shego said. “Am I glad that’s over.”
“That depends on how you define over,” said Kim’s mother tartly. She burrowed back into the sports bag for a moment; when she emerged again, the device’s humming had stopped, and she scampered briskly across the sidewalk to perch on Kim’s head.
Shego tilted her head heavenward, muttered a fervent “Oy!”, and crossed her arms over her chest. Kim couldn’t see what her mother was doing, but she could feel the tap-tap-tap of a gerbil-sized foot against her forehead. “All right, stop giving me that look,” Shego said at last as she walked over to stand at Kim’s side.
“This may get a little warm, Princess,” she warned, as her hands lit with a green glow more muted than Kim was used to seeing. Shego held her palms a hair’s breadth from Kim’s bonds, starting at shoulder level, and slowly ran them across the netting. Kim felt the web-like strands turn brittle as the heat leeched moisture out of them, and in only a few minutes the net had been weakened enough so that she could free herself.
“Now Ron,” Kim told Shego, who tried to look offended.
“What, I have to do everything?” the mercenary complained. “If you bothered to carry a real hair dryer instead of that grapple gun – oh, please, not you too,” she said as Kim hit her with the Puppy Dog Pout. “All right, but I’m not responsible if his pants catch fire.”
Meanwhile, Kim’s mother had scooted back to her Kimmunicator. “Wade, I think you said you had those test results?”
“Right here,” Wade said, his voice sounding a bit frazzled over the video link.
“And?” Kim asked, leaning in as close as she could.
The boy genius shrugged from behind his desk. “The readings look totally stable to me – except the brain waves are human and the DNA is gerbil. Mostly, anyway. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Dr. Possible was nodding. “It’s brilliant work, but I have no idea how she did it.”
Kim gave her gerbilized mother an alarmed look. “You’re saying you really are stuck this way?”
“It’s possible,” her mother said ruefully. “I’ll have to take a longer look at the test results to be sure. There’s just one anomaly . . . .”
Wade made an ahem noise over the Kimmunicator. “If the fireworks are over,” he observed, “you might want to pick up and move out. Professor Wilberforce is going to want his vortex inducer back.”
Shego grinned. “You’re sure I can’t gift-wrap it for Dr. D?” At the four-way glare from Ron, Rufus, and both Possibles, she backpedaled. “All right, you win; it’s not like Drakken could use the thing without blowing up Nevada. I guess I’m out of here,” she said, then paused, casting a hopeful-looking glance at the crimson-furred gerbil. “I don’t suppose this means we’re even?”
The gerbilized brain surgeon snorted. “When I want to cash in that blank-check favor,” she told Shego, “you’ll know it. Let’s just say you’re not any farther behind.”
“Have it your way,” Shego said, looking amused. “I bet your patients are going to be surprised.”
“Very likely,” Kim’s mother said wryly. “But Wade’s right, we’re done here.”
The group spent a few minutes gathering up the equipment that had been scattered along the sidewalk. Bystanders were still giving the block a fairly wide berth, but as Kim and Ron packed Mrs. Dr. Possible’s personal effects into the sports bag along with the PANIC projector and Shego scavenged bits of Helen’s abandoned gadgetry – notably the James Bond figure, which she figured out how to deflate into a tidy four-inch sphere – the Lower Manhattan pedestrian traffic began narrowing the gap.
“Till next time, Princess,” Shego finally said, giving Kim a mock salute. “It’s been – weird.”
“No kidding,” Kim retorted, only to be interrupted by a familiar four-beat beep tone. She reached for her Kimmunicator – and her mother simultaneously tapped at hers, which she was riding like a hover-board.
Wade’s voice spilled from both sets of speakers. “I’m reading some kind of energy release,” he said in an urent tone . . . .
. . . . as a candy-apple-colored gerbil body shimmered, first gently and then with a bright flash that erupted into a silent but explosive FWOOSH! . . . .
. . . . which damped almost as quickly as it had flared, leaving behind the fully human, fully restored form of Dr. Kimberly Katherine Possible . . . .
. . . . standing, slightly dazed, on a New York City street corner, wearing exactly as much clothing as she’d had on as a gerbil. Which was to say, none.
Everyone started talking at once. Kim folded her mother into a fervent hug. Ron murmured something about total awkweirdness. Wade’s voice, over the Kimmunicators, was saying, “I don’t know how I missed the bio-stasis signature,” but no one else seemed to be listening.
Shego merely shook her head bemusedly, shrugged out of the brown trench coat she’d been using as a disguise earlier, draped it over Kim’s mother’s shoulders, and headed briskly north along Rector Street. By the time Kim realized she was gone, it was much too late to go after her.
(previous chapter )
(Chapter 1)
I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (9/10)
A Sitch in Slash: Episode #2
Fandom: Kim Possible/Narbonic
Author: Gray Cardinal
Rating: PG -13
Classification: You tell me....
Summary: An assassin's after Shego, Mrs. Dr. Possible is trying to resolve matters without involving Kim -- and you just know that's not going to work out....
********************
We're in the home stretch....
9 • That’s What You Get For Underestimating the Gerbil
Beep beep be-beep! Kim blinked; that was definitely a Kimmunicator signal, but it wasn’t coming from her Kimmunicator. Her eyes – about all she could move easily from within the Narbonic Labs no-longer-dehydrated capture net – tracked the source of the sound to the unit Wade had given her mother, still lying on the sidewalk.
“I’ve got those EEG—wha-?” Wade stopped in mid-syllable, apparently taking in the change in scenery: Kim, Ron, and Shego squirming in their nets, while Helen and Dave stood a few feet away. Dave had Mell Kelly – also netted – slung over one broad shoulder; Helen, Artie perched atop her head, held her quantum tether – which was humming faintly –in one hand and the peanut jar containing Kim’s mother in the opposite one.
Almost at once, the Kimmunicator rose into the air like a tiny hovercraft, and Wade’s voice spoke urgently. “I need seventeen seconds! Do something, guys!”
Helen grinned. “We’ll be gone in elev-OWW!”
The quantum tether didn’t explode when the finger-sized flash of green plasma hit it, but it crackled, glowed momentarily, and stopped humming as the pulse knocked it out of Helen’s hand. She made a grab for it, but with the jar in her other hand she couldn’t quite keep her balance, the device landed on the sidewalk with a thunk, and Helen herself dropped to her knees and just managed to avoid losing her glasses. She did lose Artie, who had made a desperate but successful leap to Dave’s arm as Helen teetered.
“One for the locals,” Shego said with a sardonic chuckle. As she spoke, the flying Kimmunicator skimmed quickly forward and extended a glowing silver needle toward the peanut jar. The shatterproof plastic shimmered . . .
. . . and without waiting for a cue, the elder Possible sprang forward straight through the temporarily phased material to land awkwardly atop the Kimmunicator, which promptly retracted the needle and flew back to hover next to Kim.
Helen tossed the now-empty peanut jar aside with a muttered curse, picking up the quantum tether, but she spared the airborne Kimmunicator a glance first. “Not fair! Impressive, sure, but that was totally a deus ex machina.”
“Not true,” Kim’s mother replied. “Wade demonstrated that function for me about six chap—“ she paused, “er, a couple of days ago.”
Helen didn’t acknowledge the remark; she was busy examining the quantum tether. “Damn,” she said, “it looks like it’s shorted out. I’ll have to—”
SNAP!
Air whooshed inward, filling the space where Mell Kelly had been in the previous instant. Dave stumbled but kept his balance, and Artie grabbed for Dave’s ear to keep from losing his perch.
Helen eyed the quantum tether suspiciously. “That shouldn’t have happened. You’d better not have fried it,” she told Shego.
“Or you’ll what, shoot me with the death ray you forgot to pack?” the mercenary retorted. “Gee, I’m scared.”
“You’re also kind of tied up just now,” Helen retorted.
“You mean I was tied up,” Shego said, smiling wickedly as her entire body began glowing faintly green. The capture net’s strands visibly thinned; after a few seconds Shego flexed her arms and legs, and the netting crackled and shattered. She picked up a fragment and studied it. “Uh-huh, all nice and dehydrated again. Clever.”
Helen regarded Shego with a surprised expression. “Darnit, those nets were supposed to be plasma-proof!”
Shego responded with a feline smile. “But not heatproof. It’s all about the temperature control, Doc.”
Kim took as deep a breath as she could considering the snugness of her own net, and tried not to grit her teeth as she spoke. “Um, a little help over here, please?”
Shego glanced in her direction. “First things first, Pumpkin,” she said, wreathing her left hand in green fire as she reached down and lightly scooped up a certain candy-apple-red gerbil in her right.
“If you don’t mind,” she said, turning toward Helen again, “I’d kind of appreciate it if you could un-gerbilize Kimmy’s mother here.” As she spoke, she conjured a ping-pong-sized plasma ball, allowing it to roll around in her left hand.
The mad scientist stood up, eyed the fireball bemusedly, and shrugged. “What part of you never know with prototypes did you not get? If I understood Mell back there, your friend got hit with the very last Gerbilizer penlight there was – and lucky for you, it’s the only one in the whole production run that actually worked the way it was supposed to. More or less,” she added, regarding the gerbil in Shego’s hand critically. “I didn’t think hair color would translate quite that vividly.”
“I take it coloration was hard-coded into the shapechange algorithm?” It was unnerving, Kim reflected, hearing her mother’s voice coming out of something that small and furry.
“It was supposed to be, at any rate,” Helen replied matter-of-factly.
“Hmm. Most likely a simple microsecond’s disruption in power transmission, then – just enough to skip over that one bit of code in the sequence.”
Helen was nodding. “It’s so hard to maintain proper quality control when you’re working with nanocircuitry.”
“Focus, you two!” Shego cut in, sounding annoyed. “I don’t care how the damned ray was supposed to work. One more time: either you put her back the way she was, or we’ll see how you like being dehydrated into nice little crackly pieces.”
Plasma flared from the mercenary’s left hand, and Kim’s mother squeaked as Shego’s right hand also started glowing. “Oops,” Shego said, frowning as she concentrated on controlling the two power levels separately. “Sorry about that.”
“No harm done – mostly. However,” Kimberly Katherine Possible added as she scrambled out of Shego’s hand, “much as I hate to say it, I don’t think Helen can fix this, at least not here.”
Helen bobbed her head in agreement. “We just don’t have the hardware with us,” she said. “Now if you’d just let me take you back to the lab . . . .”
“Don’t you dare!” Kim called out. “We’d never see you again!”
“Not to worry,” Shego told her. “I’m still working on your mom’s latest Smallville chapter, and I refuse to try and email the comments into a whole different universe.”
Kim did the best she could to glare through the netting. “Yes, well,” she said, “if you two hadn’t started critiquing each other’s wrongsick fanfics, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
Shego chuckled. “And I’d still be looking for a really good beta reader. Good thing you introduced us, isn’t it?”
“That depends on who you ask,” Helen interjected. She’d been probing the innards of her quantum tether, but now she looked up at Shego again. “Cross-universe email is easy. Getting home in the first place – that may be a problem. The frequency alignment chip’s cracked, and it’s all your fault!”
Dave, who had been literally twiddling his thumbs, traded worried glances with Artie. “Does that mean we’re staying here? Without Mell?”
“Looks that way, at least until I can replicate the chip,” Helen said. Suddenly, her eyes lit up behind her glasses. “Which means I can be as evil as I like over here after all. Dave, what have you got loaded right now?”
Her tall lab assistant tugged a compact, odd-looking gun out of his waistband and glanced at it. “Kelvin-Z clip,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Cover the girl,” Helen told him, waving vaguely toward Kim. “You don’t want to do that,” she added to Shego, who was on the verge of lobbing a plasma-burst at the weapon. “Superheated plasma, supercompressed liquid nitrogen compound – the concussion effect would level this whole block. Not to mention turning all our brains into so much jelly.”
“Jelly, yuck!” That was Rufus; he hadn’t quite worked himself free of the netting, but he’d managed to extract himself from the pocket of Ron’s cargo pants.
Dave, meanwhile, had obeyed his employer, though he was eyeing her doubtfully even as he trained the peculiar gun on Kim. Gas pellets, Kim decided as she studied the weapon. Hard to dodge even if I weren’t wrapped up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
“Much better,” Helen said cheerfully. She thrust the quantum tether into one pocket of her lab coat while drawing a pistol identical to Dave’s from another. “If I’m going to be living in this universe, the last thing I need is someone writing squicky stories about me and passing them around the ‘Net.”
Then a frown crossed her face, and she eyed Shego sternly. “What’s that humming noise?”
The mercenary shrugged. “No idea. Princess?”
“You’ve got me,” Kim said, then groaned as the double meaning registered. “Ron?”
“A strolling harmonica player?” Ron guessed, making everyone else groan.
Rufus, however, made a thumbs-up sign. “Byebye!”
Helen stared down at the mole rat. “Byebye?”
“Poof!” Rufus told her, pointing toward the sports bag lying nearby on the sidewalk – now partially unzipped, with what looked like the business end of a dustbuster poking out of it. Oh, right, Kim remembered, Wade’s projector thing.
“Have a nice trip!” Kim’s mother said, poking her tiny furred head out of the opening alongside the vacuum nozzle.
As she spoke, the space surrounding Helen, Dave, and Artie seemed to flicker slightly. Helen scowled and fired her pellet gun at Shego, but the missile vanished into the flicker-effect, there was a series of rapid multi-dimensional blinks from within its radius, and then the three visitors simply disappeared, leaving behind only the echo of Artie’s voice saying, “Now see? That’s what you get for underestimating the gerbil.”
“Whew!” Shego said. “Am I glad that’s over.”
“That depends on how you define over,” said Kim’s mother tartly. She burrowed back into the sports bag for a moment; when she emerged again, the device’s humming had stopped, and she scampered briskly across the sidewalk to perch on Kim’s head.
Shego tilted her head heavenward, muttered a fervent “Oy!”, and crossed her arms over her chest. Kim couldn’t see what her mother was doing, but she could feel the tap-tap-tap of a gerbil-sized foot against her forehead. “All right, stop giving me that look,” Shego said at last as she walked over to stand at Kim’s side.
“This may get a little warm, Princess,” she warned, as her hands lit with a green glow more muted than Kim was used to seeing. Shego held her palms a hair’s breadth from Kim’s bonds, starting at shoulder level, and slowly ran them across the netting. Kim felt the web-like strands turn brittle as the heat leeched moisture out of them, and in only a few minutes the net had been weakened enough so that she could free herself.
“Now Ron,” Kim told Shego, who tried to look offended.
“What, I have to do everything?” the mercenary complained. “If you bothered to carry a real hair dryer instead of that grapple gun – oh, please, not you too,” she said as Kim hit her with the Puppy Dog Pout. “All right, but I’m not responsible if his pants catch fire.”
Meanwhile, Kim’s mother had scooted back to her Kimmunicator. “Wade, I think you said you had those test results?”
“Right here,” Wade said, his voice sounding a bit frazzled over the video link.
“And?” Kim asked, leaning in as close as she could.
The boy genius shrugged from behind his desk. “The readings look totally stable to me – except the brain waves are human and the DNA is gerbil. Mostly, anyway. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Dr. Possible was nodding. “It’s brilliant work, but I have no idea how she did it.”
Kim gave her gerbilized mother an alarmed look. “You’re saying you really are stuck this way?”
“It’s possible,” her mother said ruefully. “I’ll have to take a longer look at the test results to be sure. There’s just one anomaly . . . .”
Wade made an ahem noise over the Kimmunicator. “If the fireworks are over,” he observed, “you might want to pick up and move out. Professor Wilberforce is going to want his vortex inducer back.”
Shego grinned. “You’re sure I can’t gift-wrap it for Dr. D?” At the four-way glare from Ron, Rufus, and both Possibles, she backpedaled. “All right, you win; it’s not like Drakken could use the thing without blowing up Nevada. I guess I’m out of here,” she said, then paused, casting a hopeful-looking glance at the crimson-furred gerbil. “I don’t suppose this means we’re even?”
The gerbilized brain surgeon snorted. “When I want to cash in that blank-check favor,” she told Shego, “you’ll know it. Let’s just say you’re not any farther behind.”
“Have it your way,” Shego said, looking amused. “I bet your patients are going to be surprised.”
“Very likely,” Kim’s mother said wryly. “But Wade’s right, we’re done here.”
The group spent a few minutes gathering up the equipment that had been scattered along the sidewalk. Bystanders were still giving the block a fairly wide berth, but as Kim and Ron packed Mrs. Dr. Possible’s personal effects into the sports bag along with the PANIC projector and Shego scavenged bits of Helen’s abandoned gadgetry – notably the James Bond figure, which she figured out how to deflate into a tidy four-inch sphere – the Lower Manhattan pedestrian traffic began narrowing the gap.
“Till next time, Princess,” Shego finally said, giving Kim a mock salute. “It’s been – weird.”
“No kidding,” Kim retorted, only to be interrupted by a familiar four-beat beep tone. She reached for her Kimmunicator – and her mother simultaneously tapped at hers, which she was riding like a hover-board.
Wade’s voice spilled from both sets of speakers. “I’m reading some kind of energy release,” he said in an urent tone . . . .
. . . . as a candy-apple-colored gerbil body shimmered, first gently and then with a bright flash that erupted into a silent but explosive FWOOSH! . . . .
. . . . which damped almost as quickly as it had flared, leaving behind the fully human, fully restored form of Dr. Kimberly Katherine Possible . . . .
. . . . standing, slightly dazed, on a New York City street corner, wearing exactly as much clothing as she’d had on as a gerbil. Which was to say, none.
Everyone started talking at once. Kim folded her mother into a fervent hug. Ron murmured something about total awkweirdness. Wade’s voice, over the Kimmunicators, was saying, “I don’t know how I missed the bio-stasis signature,” but no one else seemed to be listening.
Shego merely shook her head bemusedly, shrugged out of the brown trench coat she’d been using as a disguise earlier, draped it over Kim’s mother’s shoulders, and headed briskly north along Rector Street. By the time Kim realized she was gone, it was much too late to go after her.
(previous chapter )
(Chapter 1)
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