Fic: "Shego's Plan: Awakening" (2/6)

[cdybedahl]

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Shego's Plan

Written by Calle Dybedahl

Awakening

Morning in the Possible residence could be an interesting experience. Between her dad bringing stuff home from the Space Center, her mom leaving articles on experimental neurosurgery lying around and the twins doing their best to violate the laws of physics, it was a lively household. Add, sometimes, one young man possessing uncontrollable monkey magic and his disturbingly intelligent naked mole-rat, and, well... You usually weren't bored.

Except this morning Kim was. Really, really bored.

It was all so trivial.

What homework she hadn't finished the night before she'd done during breakfast, at roughly the speed she could move the pen. She must've been really tired when she returned home from the mission, because it really was incredibly easy.

She sat in front of her makeup table, looking into the mirror, thoughts racing. So many things she'd worried about yesterday suddenly seemed much less important. She couldn't really see why she'd worried so much about what Bonnie would think about her. Even if it mattered what Bonnie thought, it wouldn't be too hard to find some information that would make Bonnie really want to keep things to herself.

She wished that Wade would beep her and tell her that there was some urgent mission. At least the adrenaline rush would provide a good distraction. And maybe she'd run into Shego...

That thought led to another thought, and another sigh. The Ron situation. Which she really needed to do something about. She couldn't really remember why she'd started it in the first place, actually. She did remember it making a lot of sense at the time, but for the life of her she couldn't recall what the sense was. Oh well. She'd talk to him in the car on the way to school.

She picked her books up and headed out.

"Morning, KP!" Ron said as he bounced into the car.

"Mrforningl!" Rufus added.

"Hi, guys," Kim said.

She put the car into drive and eased back into traffic.

"So what's up?" Ron said. "Any exciting new missions? Some nefarious plan from Drakken or someone? 'Cause I'm so there for that. Don't like it so much if it's Monkey Fist again, but I'll be there covering your back."

"Mrfonkey!" Rufus said and blew a raspberry.

"Ron," Kim said. "We need to talk."

"We need to talk?" Ron said. He looked confused. "But we are talking?"

A light went up for him.

"Oh," he said. "You mean we need to talk."

He turned to look at her.

"We need to talk?" he said. "What do we need to talk about?"

"Remember when we talked about having sex?" Kim said. "About waiting until after graduation and all that?"

"Yeeeaaah," Ron said. He was starting to look scared. That had not been a particularly comfortable talk for either of them. For some reason that Kim couldn't quite remember at the moment.

"And you remember when you asked if I'd slept with any guys before we got together?"

"Burned into my memory," Ron said.

"Well, I was sort of telling the truth when I said I hadn't," Kim said.

"Sort of?" Ron said. "How can you sort of tell the truth about that?"

"I haven't slept with any guys," Kim said. She was surprised at how easy this was. She'd expected it to be all awkward and embarrassing.

"But," she went on. "I've slept with Monique. Kinda regularly for the past year."

"With... Monique?" Ron said, obviously stunned.

Kim tried to keep her mind on the road as well as the conversation. It was kind of hard, with the other drivers making decisions so slowly and clearly not seeing the most optimal ways to drive. She had plenty of time to get bored and distracted between the times she needed to engage her brain.

"Mrfesbian?" Rufus said.

"Monique?" Kim said. "No, she's bi. That girl has a lot of love in her heart."

"And you?" Ron asked.

"Pretty much," Kim said.

Ron was pointedly not looking at her.

"How long have you known?" he said.

"Couple of years, maybe," Kim said. "I had a few really steamy dreams about Shego, and boy would I like to get her out of that catsuit..."

Her voice went kind of dreamy.

"So all the time we've been together," he said.

"Oh yes," Kim said. "Way longer than that."

"So what about us?" he said, his voice sounding as if he was on the edge of tears. "Was all that a lie?"

"No!" Kim said. "You're my best friend! It's just... a cheerleader has to have a boyfriend, or people will think she's a lesbian. And I knew that you'd never make any demands on me."

Well, that had been part of it for her. She hadn't ever thought about it like that before, but if she was honest with herself the non-threateningness of Ron had been a large part of why she'd gone out with him. She frowned. Why had she cared if people knew she was gay in the first place? Thinking back, there was also a vague memory of thinking that if she just got a real boyfriend maybe she'd learn to enjoy it. To be like everyone else.

"Could you please stop the car?" Ron said. "I'll, er, I'll walk the rest of the way."

"But it's just around the corner," Kim said.

"I, um, forgot my... homework," Ron said. "I'll just walk home and get it."

"Don't be silly," Kim said. "I'll drive you back. We can make it to your place and back in time for class if I don't care too much about speed limits and driving regulations."

"KP!" he screamed. "Stop the car and let me out!"

She stopped the car, neatly steering into an open space at the side of the road.

"Sheesh," she said. "All you had to do was ask."

"Come on, Rufus," he said and left.

"Hi, Wade," Kim said after she'd opened her locker door. "Any news?"

"Hi, Kim," Wade said. "Nothing. It's so slow that I even checked to see that the site is really working."

She let out a frustrated sigh. If Drakken wasn't up to something, that meant there'd be no fights with Shego. She glanced up at the picture she had taped to the inside of the locker door.

"You know, Wade," she said, "this isn't really doing much good is it?"

"What isn't?"

"The way I'm working. Getting a mission, fixing it. Getting another, fixing that one. Getting a third, and a fourth, and so on. I spend most of my time catching the same guys over and over again!"

"True," Wade said. He looked a bit confused.

"But what can we do about it?" he said. "They keep breaking out of prison all the time!"

"Wade," Kim said, "I think we need to be a bit more proactive."

"Er, okay," Wade said. "How?"

"Track down the usual villains for me. Drakken, Dementor, Killigan, Monkey Fist, the Seniors. DNAmy, the Bebes and Camille Leon if you have the time."

"On it!" Wade said, typing furiously. "What about the old Team Go villains? Like Aviarius and Electronique? You've fought them too."

"Sure," Kim said. "As many as possible. Download files on them to my communicator as you compile them, okay? I need something to read in class."

Wade's eyes flickered to the side as he read something on another monitor.

"But you're having math," he said. "You usually don't want to be disturbed during math, because you need to concentrate to keep up."

Kim made a dismissive gesture.

"Eh, it was no big once I figured it out," she said.

"But you told me that yesterday!"

"It was a lot clearer this morning," she said. "Send me those files, okay?"

"Er, sure," Wade said.

"Please and thank you!" Kim said.

When the bell rang after math class, Kim stayed behind. Ron hadn't come to class at all, but that didn't worry her. He'd come around sooner or later.

"POSSIBLE!" Mr Barkin said. "WHY AREN'T YOU LEAVING WITH THE REST OF THE LEMMINGS?"

She got up from her seat and approached the teacher's desk. Mr Barkin towered over her.

"I want to talk to you for a moment," she said.

He glared down at her.

"Do you remember Miss Go?" Kim said. "You hired her to be a substitute teacher a while back."

Barkin's glare eased considerably.

"CERTAINLY," he said. "A MOST MEMORABLE YOUNG LADY."

Kim smiled at him.

"Absolutely," she said. "Say, did you do a background check on her, as mandated by the School Board?"

A glint of nervousness appeared in his eyes.

"WELL, NO," he said. "BUT I CAN'T IMAGINE A NICE WOMAN LIKE THAT TO HAVE DONE ANYTHING WRONG."

Kim's smile got a hard edge to it.

"She's wanted in eleven different countries for theft, robbery, fraud, arson, assault, kidnapping, espionage, bribery, obstruction of justice, perjury, extortion, hijacking, piracy and murder. Among other things."

She pulled a very thick folder from her bag. On the front of it was a picture of Shego smiling and make a V sign with her fingers.

"Here's her Interpol file, in case you doubt my word," Kim said. "Now, what do you think the school board would think of you hiring an internationally wanted murderer as a teacher?"

Barkin had gone pale as a sheet.

"THE SCHOOL BOARD?" he whispered.

Kim nodded enthusiastically and smiled nicely at him.

"The school board," she said.

He was sweating and, Kim noticed, his hands had started to tremble. That was an even better reaction than she had hoped for. The man genuinely looked scared out of his wits.

"Now," she said. "I'm going to be missing school for a few days. If, when I get back, there is not a trace in any records of me being away, and all my assignments are filed with their usual A-pluses, I will be so pleased that I'll completely forget to tell the School Board about Miss Go and her Interpol file."

She abruptly stopped smiling.

"Have I made myself clear?" she said.

Mr Barkin nodded slowly.

Her smiled returned.

"Good!" she said. "Have a nice day."

She headed for the door. As she was just about to leave the room, she turned around and pointed at the file the stunned Mr Barkin was holding as if it might suddenly bite him.

"Better make sure not to put that where anyone can see it," she said.

Back home in her room, Kim started to plan. She downloaded the files Wade had sent from her communicator to her desktop machine and started looking through them, taking notes on a number of sheets of paper as she went. Every now and then, she took a paper and tacked it to the wall. She then stuck nails through certain words on it, and tied pieces of string from the nails to nails on other papers.

When she'd gone through all the files, she stepped back and looked at the whole picture on the wall. She frowned. Something was missing. She took out the communicator and pressed a button. Wade appeared on the screen.

"Hey, Kim," he said. "What's up?"

"There's no file on Shego," she said.

"I know," Wade said. "That's because I can't find her."

Kim frowned.

"But there is a file on Drakken," she said. "It says he's collecting pieces for an army of... what was it..."

She bent forward and read from the paper with "DRAKKEN" written across the top.

"...BattleWarMechBots," she said. "Whatever those are. Anyway, shouldn't she be with him? She's his sidekick, after all."

Wade shrugged.

"She isn't," he said. "I have him and his henchmen on video, but no Shego. What's even stranger is that her credit cards haven't been used in almost a week. It's as if she vanished off the face of the Earth."

Kim raised an eyebrow.

"Where were her credit cards last used?" she said.

Wade typed at insane speed for a few moments, then peered at his monitor.

"Boca Raton, Seattle and Tokyo. Live uses, within minutes of each other," he said.

He frowned.

"Hey!" he said. "She's hiding from us!"

Rather than annoyance, a swell of pride rose in Kim. Of course Shego would be the one of all her foes to actually be a challenge.

"All right," she said to Wade, smiling. "Stop looking for Shego. If she has had a week to hide, we're not going to find her. Concentrate on the others. And Wade?"

"Yes, Kim?"

"Could you send me the blueprints for the battlesuit?"

"I guess," Wade said, looking surprised. "What do you want with them?"

Kim shrugged.

"No reason. Just want a look."

"Sure," he said. "They'll be in your computer in ten seconds."

"Thank you!"

She switched the communicator off and turned to the wall full of papers again. Wade had, as usual, given her what she wanted rather than what she asked for. There was information on every villain she'd ever fought with. Well, except one. Which was annoying, she'd counted on being able to use Shego's help. Well, that couldn't be helped. She'd find something else. Carefully, she took down the paper labeled "SHEGO" and rearranged a few pieces of string.

Pleased with the overall picture again, she turned to the computer and the battlesuit blueprints. She did need to use her books and some net searches to figure out the meaning of some of the symbols used, but it turned out to be much easier to understand than she had hoped. With some work and the tweebs' tools she should be able to fix the bugs in the suit.

She looked at the clock. Almost midnight. Not too bad. A couple of hours to fix the suit. Another hour to 'borrow' some equipment from her mom. That still left time for a few hours sleep before she needed to get up and catch a ride.

Smiling, she bent down over the battlesuit blueprints. Tomorrow she would take the fight to the villains.

Doctor Drakken was in a foul mood. He hadn't really realised how big a help the vicious and foulmouthed Shego had actually been. Just her threatening presence had served to keep the henchmen in line and working hard. But now? There was nothing but complaining, laziness and mistakes. At this rate, he'd never be able to win the bet with Shego.

"Aaargh!" he groaned.

He paced back and forth across the large laboratory, swerving around the half-assembled BattleWarMechBot in the middle of it. The stupid thing wasn't working right. Physically it was fine, as far as he could tell, but for some reason the weapons-control AI only wanted to discuss the implications of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. He was just about to give the CPU module a good hard kick when he saw something moving out of the corner of his eye. He spun around.

"Who's there?" he shouted.

Something moved again. This time he caught a female-shaped silhouette before it vanished out of sight.

"Shego?" he said. "Is that you?"

He put his hands threateningly on his hips and scowled.

"Have you come to spy on my plan?" he said. "Is that it?"

"Guess again," a voice said. A voice he knew far too well. His scowl was instantly replaced with surprise and quite a bit of fear.

"Kim Possible?" he said the moment before the sole of a battlesuit boot impacted on his head.

When he woke up again, Doctor Drakken found himself securely strapped to the dentist's chair he kept in the lab exactly for the purpose of strapping people to. Not that he'd actually done that, but you had to have one if you wanted to get any respect as a supervillain.

It seemed that the chair had been modified. Something was holding his head in place. Very firmly in place. It didn't use to have anything to do that. Also, he discovered when he tried moving his head, he had no feeling in his scalp.

"Welcome back to consciousness, Doctor Drakken," a female voice said. Kim Possible's voice. From behind.

"Er, hello?" he said, trying to swivel his eyeballs far enough to see through the back of his head.

"I suppose you're wondering what's going on," Kim said.

Actually, he'd been too busy being scared to think about that.

"Kim?" he said. "What are you doing?"

Steps. Slowly, she came into view. She was dressed in her white battlesuit, with a white doctor's coat over it. She had her hair in a net, surgical gloves on her hands and a face mask pulled down to her chin. She was holding a scalpel. A bloody scalpel. Next to her was a trolley full of medical equipment.

"We're going to be doing a bit of brain surgery, Doctor," she said.

"Brain surgery?" he said. His voice sounded weak even to himself.

"Well, skull surgery, to be exact," Kim said. She reached up and turned on a video monitor. It flickered to life, and Drakken could see himself from above. His head had been shaved, the scalp neatly sliced open and pulled apart with clamps. The skull could easily be seen, red-stained and wetly glistening.

"Here," Kim said. "Watch. I don't want you to have the slightest doubt about this."

"About what?" Drakken croaked. Involuntarily, he was trying to watch both the grisly image on the monitor and Kim at the same time.

Kim picked something up from a steel tray on the trolley. She held it up so he could see. It was a small plastic cylinder, about an inch long and half as thick.

"This is a radio-controlled blast cap for chemical explosives," Kim said. "I nicked it from my brothers. I think they use it for separating stages in chemical rockets, but never mind. Its job is to explode violently, providing sufficient heat and shock to start a chemical chain reaction in a high explosive compound."

She carefully put it back on the tray.

"I'm going to open up your skull," she said. "On the inside of the piece I remove, I will carve out a hollow large enough for that charge. With the charge in place, I will put the piece of bone back and fasten it with medical glue. I'll suture you scalp back together again. I know how to do this. I watched my mom do it during mother-daughter day at the hospital. Well, not the implanting a bomb, but opening the skull and closing it again. You'll heal."

"Good," Drakken whispered. "Healing is good."

"Doctor Drakken?" Kim said. "Can you imagine what will happen to your brain if that charge goes off inside your skull?"

He tried to nod. When that didn't work, he croaked an affirmative.

"Good," Kim said. "That brings us to the question of when it might go off."

Drakken could hear himself whimpering.

"You are evil," Kim said. "You have proven that over and over again. You're a threat to the world, and you don't deserve to live."

She leaned closer.

"And after this, if I don't like what you're doing, you will very, very quickly and finally stop living. Am I making myself clear?"

He didn't manage to get anything understandable out, but Kim seemed to accept that as an answer. She stood up straight.

"Well, then," she said. "Let's get started."

She picked up a medical power drill from the trolley and experimentally spun the bit a couple of times.

Drakken fainted.

Kim looked down at the unconscious blue-skinned man. When she was sure he wasn't trying to fake it, she used the drill to make four small indentations in the bone of his skull.

She didn't actually want to open up his head. She wanted him to use his brain for her benefit, and he couldn't do that if Kim turned him into a vegetable. But she wanted him to think that the little bomb was in there. After her little performance, and with the added details of 'holes' in his cranium he'd be able to feel with his fingers when his scalp had healed, he would be very sure that he had a bomb in his head.

She smiled as she made the sutures. Imagine that it had taken her this long to figure out how to turn people like Drakken into useful citizens! All these mad scientists and super-powered villains, they weren't problems to be eradicated. They were resources to be exploited. She laughed a little to herself. A problem is just an opportunity in disguise indeed!

She made the last knot in the final suture. There. Some antiseptic cream, some compresses and in a week or so he'd be as good as new. Well, apart from the hair. And as soon as he was awake and somewhat coherent, he'd start helping her get the other villains under control. Oh yes. She had it all planned out. Drakken took some time, but that was because she was working alone. The more of them she got, the speedier the process would get.

It wouldn't be long before she'd caught them all.

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