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graycardinal********************
I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (2/10)
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....
********************
From: braingirl
To: jade_firecat
Attached: comments on your Chapter 8 (hot as usual) and draft of my Chapter 5 (still trying to make Lex dark enough!).
Have to ask: what was Drew thinking? At least the fruitcake business made sense; magnetizing worldwide underwear supply just plain silly. OTOH, technique could well be useful for keeping twins in line . . . .
Speaking of twins, no luck so far re: development of plasma-proof keyboard. Better strategy might involve tweaking neurotransmitters, but I’d need full EEG and brain-chem workup to evaluate. If you’re interested, you know where to find me.
Best,
KKP, MD
#
Shego laughed as she saved the two document files to her private fic directory, and made a mental note to forward the specs on Dr. Drakken’s underwear magnetizer to Mrs. Dr. Possible when she emailed her reply. While she’d had very limited contact with the Tweebs, as Kim called them, she was well acquainted with their capacity for mayhem, and anything that might curtail it was well worth facilitating.
As for the offer to rewire her brain, Shego smiled bemusedly to herself. While her tendency to leak micro-flares of plasma-energy when she was . . . excited was often inconvenient, she wasn’t inclined to resort to such drastic tactics to deal with it. Oddly enough, it wasn’t a question of not trusting Mrs. Dr. Possible – Shego was disconcertingly certain that Kim’s mother’s medical ethics were utterly reliable. She simply liked her brain the way it was, thank you very much.
The relationship was peculiar enough as it was. Shego and Mrs. Dr. Possible had been trading emails and beta chapters for nearly three months now, and Shego still wasn’t sure whose mind she’d most thoroughly boggled – Kim’s, with the discovery that her mother and her arch-nemesis shared a long-standing interest in writing extra-spicy slash; Mrs. Dr. P’s, with the realization that she had so much in common with her daughter’s most dangerous opponent; or herself, with the degree to which what had begun as a simple exchange of beta-reading services was turning into what could almost be considered a (gasp!) genuine friendship.
And then there was the fact that she still owed Dr. Kimberly Katherine Possible a blank-check professional favor as a direct result of her original scheme to warp the younger Kim’s mind. Mrs. Dr. P. showed no sign whatsoever of calling in the debt anytime soon – which was reassuring and dread-inducing in roughly equal measure. While it hadn’t exactly prompted Shego to pull her punches in her more recent battles with Kim, she had to admit that since the fruitcake affair, she’d deliberately tuned her combat style away from devil-may-care recklessness in favor of surgical precision. She did not, as Kim had all too accurately observed during the fruitcake episode, want to find out what Mrs. Dr. P would ask for if Kim came home from a mission in too many separate pieces.
The lair’s comm system abruptly crackled, derailing Shego’s thoughts. “Shego to Lab Three at once. Please,” the comm tech added in nervous tones; none of the rank-and-file minions would willingly risk rousing her fiery temper. Sighing, Shego logged herself off the Web, engaged her computer’s privacy systems, and went off to see what Drakken wanted.
When she arrived at Lab Three, she found him playing with toy trains. “Christmas was six and a half weeks ago, Dr. D,” she pointed out. “Time to put your inner child to bed till next winter.”
“Ah, but these,” Drakken replied cheerily, “are no ordinary trains. Observe. They go round and round and never stop, and the passengers – like that man in the old song – never get off! I need you,” he continued, “to get me onboard guidance systems for subway cars from New York, Boston, and London. Once we control the world’s public transit systems, we’ll control everyone who rides them. Mwahahahaha!”
Shego managed not to roll her eyes – although the scheme actually sounded fairly promising compared to Drakken’s other recent plans. “I’m on it,” she said, stepping to the wall intercom. “Hangar Two, roll out my jet and begin preflight. I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”
She was on her way to the hangar, overnight gear slung over her shoulder, when the comm system crackled again. “Intruder alert, Hangar Two! Unknown individual has penetrated the facility!” And a dozen uniformed minions came running up the corridor past her practically before the feedback had died away.
“Bunch of chickens,” she muttered, shifting into a jog and allowing her bag to slide to the floor. The hangar entrance was open when she reached it a moment later. “Amateurs!” she spat softly, slipping through, tapping the lock-panel to seal it behind her, and ducking into the shadow of a fuel truck. Meanwhile, her mind was processing what she’d heard. Last I checked, Kimmy and her back-pocket geek hadn’t found this lair; besides, they said “individual” singular. So who’s our uninvited guest?
The answer came a moment later, as a compact, black-haired young woman strolled casually into the middle of the hangar. She wore black jeans, a pale blue men’s button-down shirt, a knee-length white lab coat, and round-lensed dark glasses, and gave every impression of being nothing more than an undersized graduate student. Shego was absolutely certain she’d never seen the girl before – and yet there was something familiar about her . . . .
“Anybody home?” the stranger called out. “I could use some directions; I think I missed a left turn at Albuquerque.”
And wound up under a mountain in southern Oregon? Shego grinned. I don’t think so. She tucked one hand behind her back, conjured a plasma-ball into it, and then stepped forward, lightly tossing the globe of energy like a beanbag. “Suppose you tell me who you are and what you’re really doing here. And if I like the answer, maybe I won’t throw this at you.”
As Shego expected, the girl’s forehead wrinkled slightly as her eyes widened behind the glasses, and she breathed, “Oooh, shiny!”
What she didn’t expect was the ratchet-click!-WHOOOSSSHHH!! as the collapsible flamethrower the stranger whipped out from under her lab coat snapped to its full length and spat a three-foot jet of orange death straight at Shego’s nose as the girl yelled, “Eat hot napalm, you perverted bimbo!”
The firestream missed by scant inches as Shego’s lightning reflexes kicked in. In one instinctive cascade, Shego rolled to one side, flipped the plasma-ball directly at the flamethrower’s barrel, sent two more bursts of plasma at her opponent’s hands and feet, and sprang back into the hangar’s shadows, then swiftly leaped upward and swung herself silently onto a ladder leading to a high catwalk.
She heard rather than saw the modest WHA-KHOOOF! of the flamethrower exploding as she executed the escape maneuver. But as she quickly and quietly scrambled up to the catwalk, she saw that her adversary had somehow evaded the additional plasma-bolts and was standing calmly in the middle of the hangar, turning slowly in a circle and studying her surroundings. The remains of her weapon lay crisped in the middle of a sizeable black smear on the floor a dozen feet away, but the stranger’s coat wasn’t even singed, and her hair had likewise come through untouched. As Shego watched, the newcomer reached inside her coat, withdrew a dark baseball-sized object, and spoke, tossing her new toy up and down in one hand just as Shego had the plasma-ball a few moments earlier.
“Just so we’re clear,” she said pleasantly, “there are three ways this can go down. One: we keep playing hide and seek, and I eventually find you and take you out. It’ll probably be messy, but at least it’ll be quick. Two: you come out and surrender like a pro. In that case I’ll take you back to my boss, and she’ll spend a month and a half dissecting you one cubic inch at a time. She’ll have a lot of fun, but you won’t. Three: I can just blow things up till the whole base comes down around your ears. That won’t be nearly as much fun for either of us, but if I have to, I have to. Dr. N was really specific. And really ticked.”
Then, in one quick motion, the stranger whipped the pin out of the grenade, spun sideways, and threw it halfway across the hangar onto one of Drakken’s hover-disc flyers. The grenade – and its target – promptly exploded with an ear-hammering KAA-BLAMM!, sending shrapnel flying in all directions. Luckily for Shego, the flyer had been parked clear over near the right-hand wall, but the visitor should have been close enough to the “shred zone” to take at least a few stray shards of flying metal.
Except she didn’t. From Shego’s angle, it was difficult to see what had happened, but she managed to glimpse a handful of faint, momentary sparkles that might or might not have been some sort of personal force-field.
Shego was rapidly becoming alarmed. This wasn’t a fight she could win with fancy acrobatics, and it looked as if her enemy had come prepared to counter her plasma powers. As for surrender – as Kimmy might say, so not an option, especially not with so little information to go on.
She pressed herself flat against the catwalk and scanned the hangar through its steel-mesh surface. On the plus side, the main launch doors were wide open and her jet sat just inside them, aimed outward; its preflight checkup had evidently been nearly complete when the alert went off. Unfortunately, Shego was several hundred feet away from it, not to mention twenty-five feet above its cockpit – virtually the full length of the vast chamber. And while the catwalk did, in fact, run the entire length of the hangar, there was the small difficulty of crossing that much space without attracting the attention of Little Miss Arsenal and whatever else she was packing inside that lab coat.
Abruptly, she blinked, slid a hand to her waist, and flicked open one of the pouches at her belt. I’m not exactly naked here, either. I have a remote control and I know how to use it. She chewed her tongue thoughtfully for a moment, then grinned to herself and one-handedly keyed in a command sequence. Below and well behind her, the passenger door of the fuel truck she’d passed earlier opened. The metallic click wasn’t loud, but it echoed in the huge space.
The stranger chuckled, pulled out a slender junior-sized bazooka and fired; the fuel truck went up in a spectacular FWOOSH before the hangar’s fire-retardant systems kicked in and dumped a layer of supercooled foam over it – by which time Shego had scuttled a third of the way along the catwalk toward her goal.
“That was way too easy,” the girl said, slipping the bazooka back where it had come from – as Shego’s next command sequence triggered a second discharge of foam, this time released directly over her head. “Ggllrrph!”
Shego had gotten lucky. Her opponent had been standing directly under a release-nozzle for the foam system, and while there was indeed a force field surrounding the girl, it hadn’t been designed with an overhead attack in mind. While most of the floor was only six inches deep in the foam, the girl herself was somewhere in the middle of a transparent cylinder just under two feet in diameter, about seven feet high – and completely filled with superchilled halon fire retardant, resembling nothing so much as a super-sized column of marshmallow filling.
Shego didn’t wait to see how or whether her adversary extricated herself from the predicament. Instead, she raced the rest of the way across the catwalk, keying in the cockpit release as she went, then leaped from the overhead walkway directly into the pilot’s seat. Within seconds, she’d resealed the hatch and had the engines roaring, and moments after that she was in the air, fully stealthed, and winging her way eastward.
Only then did she pause to catch her breath and consider the encounter. “Who the Hell was that?” she asked aloud. “And what’s a Dr. N . . . ?”
She trailed off, suddenly realizing why the girl had looked familiar. “Mell Kelly? Out of the comic strip?” It was preposterous – but then, so were a lot of the situations she’d found herself in since the comet had left her with glowing green hands so many years ago. Now she had a sociopathic evil intern on her trail – it was barely possible that Mell hadn’t escaped the foam before it either suffocated or froze her, but Shego doubted it. And that meant the mad scientist who’d sent Mell after her was probably also lurking somewhere, ready to – how had Mell put it? – dissect her one cubic inch at a time.
The salient question was Why? What could she have done to offend the Narbonic characters – “Doy,” Shego said, resisting the impulse to whack herself on the forehead. “I suppose this means they read the fanfic.”
Shego set the jet’s navigation controls, engaged the autopilot, and twisted in her seat to rummage through the supply locker for her spare laptop. Much as she hated the thought, she wasn’t sure she could take down Mell Kelly alone. Also, she needed to know where she could lay her hands on a Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer . . . .
[to be continued]
I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (2/10)
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....
********************
From: braingirl
To: jade_firecat
Attached: comments on your Chapter 8 (hot as usual) and draft of my Chapter 5 (still trying to make Lex dark enough!).
Have to ask: what was Drew thinking? At least the fruitcake business made sense; magnetizing worldwide underwear supply just plain silly. OTOH, technique could well be useful for keeping twins in line . . . .
Speaking of twins, no luck so far re: development of plasma-proof keyboard. Better strategy might involve tweaking neurotransmitters, but I’d need full EEG and brain-chem workup to evaluate. If you’re interested, you know where to find me.
Best,
KKP, MD
#
Shego laughed as she saved the two document files to her private fic directory, and made a mental note to forward the specs on Dr. Drakken’s underwear magnetizer to Mrs. Dr. Possible when she emailed her reply. While she’d had very limited contact with the Tweebs, as Kim called them, she was well acquainted with their capacity for mayhem, and anything that might curtail it was well worth facilitating.
As for the offer to rewire her brain, Shego smiled bemusedly to herself. While her tendency to leak micro-flares of plasma-energy when she was . . . excited was often inconvenient, she wasn’t inclined to resort to such drastic tactics to deal with it. Oddly enough, it wasn’t a question of not trusting Mrs. Dr. Possible – Shego was disconcertingly certain that Kim’s mother’s medical ethics were utterly reliable. She simply liked her brain the way it was, thank you very much.
The relationship was peculiar enough as it was. Shego and Mrs. Dr. Possible had been trading emails and beta chapters for nearly three months now, and Shego still wasn’t sure whose mind she’d most thoroughly boggled – Kim’s, with the discovery that her mother and her arch-nemesis shared a long-standing interest in writing extra-spicy slash; Mrs. Dr. P’s, with the realization that she had so much in common with her daughter’s most dangerous opponent; or herself, with the degree to which what had begun as a simple exchange of beta-reading services was turning into what could almost be considered a (gasp!) genuine friendship.
And then there was the fact that she still owed Dr. Kimberly Katherine Possible a blank-check professional favor as a direct result of her original scheme to warp the younger Kim’s mind. Mrs. Dr. P. showed no sign whatsoever of calling in the debt anytime soon – which was reassuring and dread-inducing in roughly equal measure. While it hadn’t exactly prompted Shego to pull her punches in her more recent battles with Kim, she had to admit that since the fruitcake affair, she’d deliberately tuned her combat style away from devil-may-care recklessness in favor of surgical precision. She did not, as Kim had all too accurately observed during the fruitcake episode, want to find out what Mrs. Dr. P would ask for if Kim came home from a mission in too many separate pieces.
The lair’s comm system abruptly crackled, derailing Shego’s thoughts. “Shego to Lab Three at once. Please,” the comm tech added in nervous tones; none of the rank-and-file minions would willingly risk rousing her fiery temper. Sighing, Shego logged herself off the Web, engaged her computer’s privacy systems, and went off to see what Drakken wanted.
When she arrived at Lab Three, she found him playing with toy trains. “Christmas was six and a half weeks ago, Dr. D,” she pointed out. “Time to put your inner child to bed till next winter.”
“Ah, but these,” Drakken replied cheerily, “are no ordinary trains. Observe. They go round and round and never stop, and the passengers – like that man in the old song – never get off! I need you,” he continued, “to get me onboard guidance systems for subway cars from New York, Boston, and London. Once we control the world’s public transit systems, we’ll control everyone who rides them. Mwahahahaha!”
Shego managed not to roll her eyes – although the scheme actually sounded fairly promising compared to Drakken’s other recent plans. “I’m on it,” she said, stepping to the wall intercom. “Hangar Two, roll out my jet and begin preflight. I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”
She was on her way to the hangar, overnight gear slung over her shoulder, when the comm system crackled again. “Intruder alert, Hangar Two! Unknown individual has penetrated the facility!” And a dozen uniformed minions came running up the corridor past her practically before the feedback had died away.
“Bunch of chickens,” she muttered, shifting into a jog and allowing her bag to slide to the floor. The hangar entrance was open when she reached it a moment later. “Amateurs!” she spat softly, slipping through, tapping the lock-panel to seal it behind her, and ducking into the shadow of a fuel truck. Meanwhile, her mind was processing what she’d heard. Last I checked, Kimmy and her back-pocket geek hadn’t found this lair; besides, they said “individual” singular. So who’s our uninvited guest?
The answer came a moment later, as a compact, black-haired young woman strolled casually into the middle of the hangar. She wore black jeans, a pale blue men’s button-down shirt, a knee-length white lab coat, and round-lensed dark glasses, and gave every impression of being nothing more than an undersized graduate student. Shego was absolutely certain she’d never seen the girl before – and yet there was something familiar about her . . . .
“Anybody home?” the stranger called out. “I could use some directions; I think I missed a left turn at Albuquerque.”
And wound up under a mountain in southern Oregon? Shego grinned. I don’t think so. She tucked one hand behind her back, conjured a plasma-ball into it, and then stepped forward, lightly tossing the globe of energy like a beanbag. “Suppose you tell me who you are and what you’re really doing here. And if I like the answer, maybe I won’t throw this at you.”
As Shego expected, the girl’s forehead wrinkled slightly as her eyes widened behind the glasses, and she breathed, “Oooh, shiny!”
What she didn’t expect was the ratchet-click!-WHOOOSSSHHH!! as the collapsible flamethrower the stranger whipped out from under her lab coat snapped to its full length and spat a three-foot jet of orange death straight at Shego’s nose as the girl yelled, “Eat hot napalm, you perverted bimbo!”
The firestream missed by scant inches as Shego’s lightning reflexes kicked in. In one instinctive cascade, Shego rolled to one side, flipped the plasma-ball directly at the flamethrower’s barrel, sent two more bursts of plasma at her opponent’s hands and feet, and sprang back into the hangar’s shadows, then swiftly leaped upward and swung herself silently onto a ladder leading to a high catwalk.
She heard rather than saw the modest WHA-KHOOOF! of the flamethrower exploding as she executed the escape maneuver. But as she quickly and quietly scrambled up to the catwalk, she saw that her adversary had somehow evaded the additional plasma-bolts and was standing calmly in the middle of the hangar, turning slowly in a circle and studying her surroundings. The remains of her weapon lay crisped in the middle of a sizeable black smear on the floor a dozen feet away, but the stranger’s coat wasn’t even singed, and her hair had likewise come through untouched. As Shego watched, the newcomer reached inside her coat, withdrew a dark baseball-sized object, and spoke, tossing her new toy up and down in one hand just as Shego had the plasma-ball a few moments earlier.
“Just so we’re clear,” she said pleasantly, “there are three ways this can go down. One: we keep playing hide and seek, and I eventually find you and take you out. It’ll probably be messy, but at least it’ll be quick. Two: you come out and surrender like a pro. In that case I’ll take you back to my boss, and she’ll spend a month and a half dissecting you one cubic inch at a time. She’ll have a lot of fun, but you won’t. Three: I can just blow things up till the whole base comes down around your ears. That won’t be nearly as much fun for either of us, but if I have to, I have to. Dr. N was really specific. And really ticked.”
Then, in one quick motion, the stranger whipped the pin out of the grenade, spun sideways, and threw it halfway across the hangar onto one of Drakken’s hover-disc flyers. The grenade – and its target – promptly exploded with an ear-hammering KAA-BLAMM!, sending shrapnel flying in all directions. Luckily for Shego, the flyer had been parked clear over near the right-hand wall, but the visitor should have been close enough to the “shred zone” to take at least a few stray shards of flying metal.
Except she didn’t. From Shego’s angle, it was difficult to see what had happened, but she managed to glimpse a handful of faint, momentary sparkles that might or might not have been some sort of personal force-field.
Shego was rapidly becoming alarmed. This wasn’t a fight she could win with fancy acrobatics, and it looked as if her enemy had come prepared to counter her plasma powers. As for surrender – as Kimmy might say, so not an option, especially not with so little information to go on.
She pressed herself flat against the catwalk and scanned the hangar through its steel-mesh surface. On the plus side, the main launch doors were wide open and her jet sat just inside them, aimed outward; its preflight checkup had evidently been nearly complete when the alert went off. Unfortunately, Shego was several hundred feet away from it, not to mention twenty-five feet above its cockpit – virtually the full length of the vast chamber. And while the catwalk did, in fact, run the entire length of the hangar, there was the small difficulty of crossing that much space without attracting the attention of Little Miss Arsenal and whatever else she was packing inside that lab coat.
Abruptly, she blinked, slid a hand to her waist, and flicked open one of the pouches at her belt. I’m not exactly naked here, either. I have a remote control and I know how to use it. She chewed her tongue thoughtfully for a moment, then grinned to herself and one-handedly keyed in a command sequence. Below and well behind her, the passenger door of the fuel truck she’d passed earlier opened. The metallic click wasn’t loud, but it echoed in the huge space.
The stranger chuckled, pulled out a slender junior-sized bazooka and fired; the fuel truck went up in a spectacular FWOOSH before the hangar’s fire-retardant systems kicked in and dumped a layer of supercooled foam over it – by which time Shego had scuttled a third of the way along the catwalk toward her goal.
“That was way too easy,” the girl said, slipping the bazooka back where it had come from – as Shego’s next command sequence triggered a second discharge of foam, this time released directly over her head. “Ggllrrph!”
Shego had gotten lucky. Her opponent had been standing directly under a release-nozzle for the foam system, and while there was indeed a force field surrounding the girl, it hadn’t been designed with an overhead attack in mind. While most of the floor was only six inches deep in the foam, the girl herself was somewhere in the middle of a transparent cylinder just under two feet in diameter, about seven feet high – and completely filled with superchilled halon fire retardant, resembling nothing so much as a super-sized column of marshmallow filling.
Shego didn’t wait to see how or whether her adversary extricated herself from the predicament. Instead, she raced the rest of the way across the catwalk, keying in the cockpit release as she went, then leaped from the overhead walkway directly into the pilot’s seat. Within seconds, she’d resealed the hatch and had the engines roaring, and moments after that she was in the air, fully stealthed, and winging her way eastward.
Only then did she pause to catch her breath and consider the encounter. “Who the Hell was that?” she asked aloud. “And what’s a Dr. N . . . ?”
She trailed off, suddenly realizing why the girl had looked familiar. “Mell Kelly? Out of the comic strip?” It was preposterous – but then, so were a lot of the situations she’d found herself in since the comet had left her with glowing green hands so many years ago. Now she had a sociopathic evil intern on her trail – it was barely possible that Mell hadn’t escaped the foam before it either suffocated or froze her, but Shego doubted it. And that meant the mad scientist who’d sent Mell after her was probably also lurking somewhere, ready to – how had Mell put it? – dissect her one cubic inch at a time.
The salient question was Why? What could she have done to offend the Narbonic characters – “Doy,” Shego said, resisting the impulse to whack herself on the forehead. “I suppose this means they read the fanfic.”
Shego set the jet’s navigation controls, engaged the autopilot, and twisted in her seat to rummage through the supply locker for her spare laptop. Much as she hated the thought, she wasn’t sure she could take down Mell Kelly alone. Also, she needed to know where she could lay her hands on a Pan-Dimensional Vortex Inducer . . . .
[to be continued]
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