graycardinal | FIC: I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (5/10)

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I Suppose This Means They Read the Fanfic (5/10)
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....
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“Where’s Mell?”

Dave Davenport plugged the printer’s USB cable into the hub before looking up. “Don’t know,” he told his attractive blonde employer. “She said something last week about a vacation, and I don’t think she’s been in since. Except last night,” he added. “She was raiding the weapons locker.”

“What’d she take?” Helen Narbon, head of Narbonic Labs and self-proclaimed mad scientist, wasn’t particularly upset. One of Mell Kelly’s primary jobs as the lab’s officially designated Evil Intern was keeping the weapons locker inventoried and stocked, and the lab being an evil enterprise, a certain amount of pilfering was actually encouraged. On the other hand, if Mell was appropriating lab resources for personal gain, Helen reserved the right to demand a cut of any profits.

Dave frowned, thinking. “Harpoon gun, pocket Gatling laser, superminiaturized rocket launcher – oh, and I think she picked up a handful of those single-shot Gerbilizer™ penlights you were working on a few months back.”

“But I never got those to work right!” Helen said. “The mass reduction shunt only worked about half the time, and when it did, the gerbilizing matrix almost always aborted right after the ear and tail grafting sequence. And none of the morphs ever lasted more than two hours.”

“Except for that one subject that morphed into a three-foot gerbil with piranha teeth and then ate the penlight,” Dave pointed out. “We held onto him for at least a week before he escaped into the sewers.”

“Don’t remind me,” said Artie, whose normal-sized gerbil body was presently perched on Dave’s shoulder. “I still have nightmares about that thing. Besides, we’re getting sidetracked. If Mell’s just off on vacation, why does she need a rocket launcher, a Gatling laser, et cetera?”

“This is Mell we’re talking about,” Dave said. “Since when does she need a reason to tote an arsenal around?”

Despite having no shoulders of his own to speak of, Artie shrugged. “There is that – but she doesn’t usually pack quite that much firepower at once, and she usually has something, well, bigger in hand when she does. Something’s fishy.”

“Agreed,” Helen said. “This wants looking into. Dave?”

“On it,” said her assistant. “Um, do you still have Mell chipped?”

Artie gave both of them an annoyed look. “We discussed the ethics of that . . . .”

“Hello,” said Helen, “evil business model? It’s in her internship contract!”

“It’s still an invasion of privacy,” Artie grumbled, subsiding.

Meanwhile, Dave had seated himself, flexed his fingers, and logged back into the lab’s computer network. “Hmm,” he said, after a few minutes’ typing. “She’s not showing up on any of the GPS systems – even the illegal covert nets.”

Helen frowned. “Which means she’s either removed the chip – in which case she’s toast when she gets back – or . . . .” She trailed off.

“Universe-hopping?” Artie suggested.

“Possible, I suppose,” said Helen. “Dave, get into her personal files and see if there’s anything that explains this.”

Another few minutes of typing followed. “Nothing on the lab systems,” Dave reported. “I could hack into her home setup, I guess . . . .”

“You have to ask?” said Helen. “Do it.”

There was more typing, followed by a brief silence. Then Dave whistled softly. “Good Lord. I didn’t think . . . .”

“I may faint,” Artie commented from Dave’s shoulder. “That’s just – wrong. Also horrendously unsanitary.”

“What?” Helen demanded. Instead of speaking, Dave merely swiveled the monitor so that Helen could study the screen. She looked, frowned, stared – then reached for the trackball and began scrolling, her rectangular-framed glasses slipping farther and farther down her nose as she read, and her already fair complexion growing paler by the paragraph.

“Eeeuuuuwwwww!!” she said a few minutes later, pushing the monitor back to its original position. “Me and Mom? That’s disgusting! Where’d that come from, anyway?”

Dave was typing again. “If I read these notes right, about three universes over from ours; in that reality, we’re a comic strip, and this stuff is – what’s the word? – fanfiction based on that. Loosely based,” he added, noting the expression on Helen’s face.

Artie’s whiskers twitched. “We still need a clear connection between these – disturbing literary efforts and Mell’s absence.”

“Working on it.” Dave kept typing as he spoke. “Okay, here’s a file that IDs the jade_firecat byline as someone called Shego.” He fell briefly silent as he scrolled through the dossier, then whistled again. “Yikes. Mercenary, enforcer, cat burglar, evil sidekick . . . shoots plasma bolts from her hands . . . she could almost be that universe’s Mell, only sane and with mad kung fu skills.”

“So.” Artie jumped from Dave’s shoulder to the desk and began counting off points on his tiny claws. “Mell comes across this fanfiction – ”

“Slash,” put in Helen. Both Dave and Artie shot her startled looks. “I was a Star Trek fan,” she said defensively. “They invented slash, more or less.”

“—this, ah, slash about Helen from a neighboring reality. She announces a vacation, raids the weapons locker, and disappears from our universe. The logical conclusion is . . .”

“. . . that she’s gone three universes over to reduce Shego to her component atoms,” Helen said. “Good for her. The sooner that – that creature is erased from existence, the easier I’ll sleep. I may have to wash my brain out with soap just to get those – images out of my mind.”

Dave and Artie exchanged glances. “Um,” Artie said. “You’re sure you want to leave it at that?”

“And why wouldn’t I?” Helen demanded. “Some things are just – too nauseating to contemplate.”

“Two reasons,” said Artie promptly. “One: in a professional sense, this Shego is a colleague. If you let Mell do her in, you’re doing that universe’s forces of good a significant favor.”

Helen frowned. “O-kay,” she said, stretching the word into two syllables. “And two?”

Artie came as close to grinning as was possible for a gerbil. “If those stories squicked you out, just think how much they’d aggravate your mother. Killing Shego is the emotional quick fix – but keeping her alive has the potential to annoy Helen Senior for years to come.”

Helen gave Artie a penetrating glare. “You’re sure you’re not just trying to maneuver me into doing something good against my better evil judgment?”

“Of course I am,” Artie said promptly. “But most of the good will manifest in Shego’s universe; in this one, you’ll still be your normal diabolical self. And even if preventing the assassination is good in the absolute sense, it will raise your stock with the evil mad-science community over there.”

“Which I can use later to call in favors,” said Helen, her scowl softening into a thoughtful expression. “And you’re right, Mom would just hate this stuff; in some ways, it makes her look almost nice.”

Dave eyed Helen quizzically. “Practical question – how do we get to Shego’s universe in the first place? I’m not finding anything here that looks like a road-map in the files.”

“That,” Helen said, much more cheerfully, “is why I’m the mad scientist and you’re the loyal assistant. Let me have a look.” She took Dave’s place at the computer, scrolled back and forth in the files for a few minutes, and grinned suddenly.

“Aha!” she said. “There’s a quantum-spectral resonance code buried in the headers of Shego’s dossier. That should let us locate her native reality, and if I cross-index the quantum signature into the evil satellite surveillance grids and wire a relay into the teleporter, we should be good to go. If we’re lucky, we’ll even be able to home in on Mell’s locator chip through the interdimensional nexus once I’ve got the interface running.”

“We?” Artie said. “I’m not sure I—”

“Of course, we,” said Helen. “It’ll take all three of us to rein Mell in. Dave, you put together a field kit. We’ll need the dehydrated capture nets, a couple of gas-pellet guns – the full suite of clips for both – and the inflatable solid-rubber Pierce Brosnan. Artie, you’re with me; you can check me on the resonance sequencing. We’ll meet in the teleport lab in,” she paused, glancing at her watch, “two and a half hours.”

#

At exactly the appointed time, Dave walked into the lab where Helen kept the teleporter, one canvas attaché case slung over his shoulder and another dangling from his left hand. He handed the latter bag to Helen, who swung it carefully onto her own shoulder so as not to dislodge Artie.

“One question,” Dave said before stepping into the teleport sphere. “How do we get back here once we’re finished?”

Helen held up a device that looked rather like a cell phone grafted to a small brushed metal flashlight. “Quantum tether,” she said. “It should maintain a link to the main teleporter here in the lab, and reel us in on my command.”

“Should?” Artie asked.

“Haven’t had a chance to field-test it yet,” Helen replied cheerily, “but the theory’s perfectly sound. Now come on.” And she strode merrily into the teleport sphere, Dave on her heels, before Artie could leap away.

Immediately, lights flashed, Jacob’s ladders crackled, and the whirring of various electronic systems was quickly overshadowed by a deep thrummm from nowhere and everywhere at once as the teleport sphere flickered through at least half a dozen degrees of tangibility in as many seconds. This was followed by an abrupt SNAP! as the chamber reattached itself to its native plane of reality.

Its passengers, however, had gone elsewhere.