Kim and Ron were sitting in one of the debriefing rooms of the main building in of Global Justice’s headquarters. Debriefing with them took a little while longer than it did with “normal” agents and they had come to get used to having to wait for Doctor Director to come in the room and properly scold the hell out of them. Needless to say, they did not like it very much, the waiting or the admonishing, but they were used to it. Their debriefings always went that way because they made so many mistakes, even now as two-year agents.
They had gotten better since their first time out, which was to be expected, but they still screwed up plenty of times and on plenty of things. Sometimes, Kim just figured that they got better at screwing up than actually at their missions. Their mistakes were different now as they were more experienced. Their miscues and bad moves were just growing with them it seemed.
Most of their blunders were power-related issues. Many of the mistakes were misjudgments on Kim’s part about the strength of a certain move that she made or a failure for Ron’s powers to kick in at a certain time. When the mistake was not power-related, it could usually be linked to Ron’s fondness for panicking, them allowing other matters going on in their personal lives distracting them, or Ron’s fondness to know what a certain button did.
Ron sighed; he hated getting debriefed. It always took so long. After a mission, all he wanted to do was get home and relax, preferably with Yori by his side. Debriefing was like another mission in itself, though. First there was the wait, which would be almost three hours most of the time that they went to be debriefed. And then there was the actual sit down for the debriefing, which could take just as long as the waiting depending on how many mistakes he and Kim made while they were out. Then there were the “mistake” packets that they got and had to take home to study, which was a collection of their mistakes on paper that they needed to go over to make sure that they shaped up.
He really did not see the reason for pointing out all of their mistakes. They got the job done. They always got the job done. Sure, they slipped up here and there, but it was nothing too serious in his opinion. But then again, not too many things were too serious in his opinion short of Bueno Nacho running out of diablo sauce or Yori coming in late for whatever reasons.
Kim was with her best friend in hating getting debriefed. She could not stand the wait right with him, mostly because she just wanted to go home too. She also disliked having her mistakes pointed out to her, even if it was necessary to help in her getting better at using her powers. Still, it was irksome to have so many mess-ups pointed out every time they were debriefed. It made her feel somewhat incompetent.
She figured that by now she should know what she was doing. After all, she spoke with the dragon daily and it claimed to be assisting her on learning how to control her talents, but she was not really getting any better in her opinion if she continued to make so many mistakes during missions. What if one of her mistakes ended up costing them greatly? It could get Ron hurt or worse. She hated thinking about that and she did it often while they were waiting to be debriefed.
She wished that she could just go home when it was all said and done instead of having to listen to everything that she did wrong while they were out. She sighed and just reminded herself that it was part of the job. It was something that she had to go through now that she was Global Justice field agent. Despite all of the mistakes, most people would say that she was damn good at her job.
“You know, I’m gonna petition that they start having snacks if we hafta sit here this long,” Ron remarked. He was busying himself by trying to balance a pencil on his finger, but it was not working out as well as he hoped.
Kim smiled a bit, showing amusement. She actually thought it was funny that Ron could not balance the pencil on his finger no matter how hard he tried. It seemed so ridiculous that he could not do something so simple when she had witnessed the guy do some really remarkable things while they were on missions. She wondered why he always seemed to have trouble doing things that should come very easy to him, but he pulled off the miraculous with ease. It was a curious thing.
“They do need something in here,” Kim agreed with a nod. Sitting in a room with nothing but a table, chairs, and grey walls for close to three hours was not fun and she wished that Doctor Director would acknowledge that it was a form of torture.
“Some video games would be nice,” Ron added in.
“Just something.”
The blonde young man nodded. He went back to focusing on his pencil while Kim just closed her eyes; it was unclear if she was considering going to sleep or communicating with the dragon. Ron actually thought it was creepy when Kim spoke to the dragon inside of her; it was about the only thing that he and Shego agreed on. He was glad that his powers did not come with some high and mighty lizard leeching off of him; well, he supposed that in his case it would have been a monkey, which only made it sicker and wrong-er in his opinion. He did note that Kim did not seem to have much of a problem with it, which he thought was good. She should not let certain stuff get to her in his opinion.
Kim just wanted to go home and that was all she was thinking about with her eyes closed. Shego was there waiting for her, after all. She had been gone for over a week and she just wanted to cuddle up to her cranky roommate for the rest of the night to relax. That way, she could just forget that she probably made a trillion and one mistakes on that last mission.
“How long have we been here?” Ron suddenly shouted to the ceiling. It felt like an eternity.
Kim checked her watch. “A little over an hour,” she answered. It felt like so much longer than that and they knew that it would be so much longer than that. They could actually still be there two hours later and that thought made them both cringe.
“This is just wrong. Totally wrong. I wanna go home!” Ron whined while pounding on the table in front of them with his fists.
“I know how you feel,” Kim said with a sigh.
“I want a real meal along with a real bed,” he continued on.
For missions, most of the time GJ agents had to make due with a rations packet as far as food was concerned. It was because they were an intelligence organization and had to keep out of sight most of the time, so it was not like they could just run to the store for some junk food when they were on a mission. On occasion, they did get missions where they could hide in plain view, blending in with the population, but most of the time that was not done. It was never to be chanced that they could be recognized by an enemy, so they were typically supposed to keep out of sight and while they were out of sight, their meals came from GJ rations, just about the worse so-called food on Earth in Ron’s opinion.
It had been assumed that the organizations missions would decrease ever since Kim and other members of the organization had taken down WEE for the most part, especially since they had captured the leader of the evil empire among other top-level captives. The organization had disbanded because the leader had been taken, but that did not decrease their missions. It was mostly because that mission had been a search-and-rescue mission and not an enemy roundup, they had missed a number of key players and those people remained in operation, doing nefarious acts whenever the urge overcame them. They just no longer did things under the name of WEE, but instead did things on individual levels for their own personal reasons. Some of them were rather good at being evil in GJ agents’ opinions.
The best friends’ attention was drawn from their misery as the door to the room finally opened and Doctor Director entered. They turned to her and climbed to their feet, standing at attention. She did not even acknowledge them for a while, having to put down a huge stack of paper. The leader sighed and divided the stack in two unequal piles before looking at her agents.
“At ease,” Doctor Director finally said in a nothing but business tone.
Kim and Ron dropped back into their seats. Doctor Director sat down across from them. She put her elbows on the table and then rested her chin on top of folded hands. They were used to her sitting in such a manner, as if she was contemplating just cutting their heads off to make everything easier on her. They were now just waiting for the scolding to begin.
“So, I watched the recording of the main part of the mission,” the brown-haired woman stated in a calm tone, betraying nothing of what she felt as she watched the recording.
Kim and Ron were typically required to record their missions for several reasons. One, it gave their superiors a better understanding of their powers, which would hopefully work out well for everyone in figuring out the best way to use the pair. Two, it gave a clear view of things from their perspectives, which made it easier to point out their mistakes to them, but also understand why they might have made such an error. Three, it made it easier to go over missions point blank.
Not all agents needed to record their missions and not all agents were trusted enough to record their missions. As much as Kim and Ron made mistakes, they were trusted enough to finish missions and not get caught with sensitive GJ equipment on their persons. Ron figured that they should not have to write reports since they did have to record their work, but unfortunately, reports were a requirement of all agents; the organization was very good at keeping records for everything and they were quite insistent about it too.
“Do you two realize that you made at least forty-eight mistakes in under thirty minutes?” Doctor Director inquired, still speaking in a professional tone, even though she could not believe that number. Sometimes, the number of blunders that they committed amazed her because they always got back in one piece and never seemed to realize how close they could have come to ruining something or even dying in a few instances. They were like small children in that regard.
“Forty-eight? Damn,” Kim muttered. She was with Doctor Director on that one; she could not believe it. They made more than a mistake a minute at that rate.
“That’s a new record for that time,” Ron declared with a grin. Their overall mistake record was a mission where they made close to two hundred mistakes, but that was over a few days time, not under thirty minutes.
“It’s not something to be proud of, Mister Stoppable,” Doctor Director pointed out in a bit of a clipped tone.
“It is considering the last mission we had fifty-five mistakes,” he countered. That was progress in his opinion. Of course, that was fifty-five mistakes in about four hours, so they were bouncing around the progress board.
Doctor Director sighed. “In these two piles are thorough explanations of your mistakes and what should have or could have been done instead. They also contain training schedules that you two need to follow and well as areas that you need to work on. Miss Possible, you also have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow,” she stated. She tended to remind any of her agents when they had important appointments if she saw them in a debriefing session.
Kim nodded to show that she was aware that one. She doubted that she was ever going to get used to Doctor Director calling her “Miss Possible.” She had grown up with Doctor Director as a tutor and was accustomed to hearing her say “Kim,” but ever since she became a full fledge agent, Doctor Director turned formal on her. She understood that was how things were, but it was just hard to get used to.
“Mister Stoppable, I’ve made plans for you to undergo training with a Yamanouchi instructor and no, it’s not your girlfriend before you ask,” Doctor Director said and Ron’s expression dropped.
“I don’t need more training,” he huffed, especially since they were not going to let Yori be the one to train him.
“Yes, you do. I’m tired of your powers coming and going. They need to stay and you need to be able to control them perfectly. If that could happen, it should cut your mistakes and accidents down by half,” Doctor Director explained.
“What about the other half?” the blonde young man inquired with an eyebrow arched in curiosity.
“Oh, those wouldn’t happen if you’d just be calm and think things out a little bit,” she answered as if that was the most logical to say and to her, it was.
“Ouch,” he muttered.
“And what about me?” Kim asked, even though she really did not want to know.
“You require better control over your powers too, which means gaining better control over your emotions. If you’re going to keep working with Ron, which I do recommend as you’re an excellent team, you have to keep your head about you if he gets into a moderate level of trouble and you have trust that he can get himself out of trouble too,” Doctor Director answered.
Doctor Director noted sometime ago that Kim usually let her powers slip out of her control when something happened with Ron, which she supposed would be the problem with working with one’s best friend. Kim panicked or got upset easily when it came to him and she really did not have any reason to from what their mission films showed. While Ron goofed up a lot, when there was serious trouble, he almost effortlessly came through. He was good on the big things, but the little things he needed to work on.
Doctor Director then slid the agents each the folder that was theirs. She instructed them to open the folders and they proceeded to go over each and every mistake made by both agents. Ron carried the bulk of the miscues and they were mostly little things, which had come to be expected of him. The leader of GJ was hoping to break him of the habit of treating missions like a game until things got thick, but so far that did not seem to be happening.
Kim’s mistakes, which were not even ten in total, came mostly from misjudging her own powers, as usual. It seemed that she never got proper perspective in what she could do because her powers continued to change and grow, so they were almost always different mission to mission. She either overcompensated or under-compensated when using them because she did not know exactly how strong they were.
“Can you believe the size of this thing?” Ron said as he and Kim were finally released. He was referring to the file that Doctor Director had given him. He might as well be carrying an unabridged dictionary in his opinion. How was he supposed to read the thing?
“That is way bigger than the last one you got,” Kim replied. Her file was about half the size of his, which was larger than the last one that she had been given too.
“You know, I gotta admit, I thought we’d be a lot better than this by now,” he commented with a laugh. It did not bother him too much since they completed all of their missions, but he did think that eventually their mistakes would have grown smaller in number.
“Me too.”
“Well, I guess we were both wrong,” he said and laughed at that too. “So, what’s with you having a doctor’s appointment or is it about something I don’t wanna know?” he inquired, making a repulsed face toward the end of the question.
It was her turn to laugh. “It’s just some routine testing to make sure the dragon isn’t doing anything to me. You know they don’t trust the dragon, so when I tell them that it says it’s not doing anything, they want to make sure,” she explained. She could feel things going on with the dragon and she felt like she would know if it was starting to act up now that she was fully aware of its presence. Sometimes, she thought that the higher-ups in GJ knew more about the dragon than they were telling her just because of the way they kept testing her.
Ron nodded to show that he understood. That was another thing about Kim’s powers that he found annoying. She was always getting tested for some reason or another. She had doctors’ appointments almost every month because of the parasite inside her; yes, he believed the dragon was a parasite. Anything that took up residency in someone else’s body without that person’s permission was a parasite to him; never mind the fact that Kim had been born with the dragon inside of her, so it was not like it had just hooked itself into her one day.
“It feels good to be going home,” Ron commented with a sigh.
“That it does,” she concurred.
Both friends had images of curling up with beautiful women in their heads and so, they parted ways quickly to get home and relax. Kim entered the apartment that she shared with Shego and immediately went to the gym room that they had. There were plenty of gyms around town and even two in the condo complex that they lived in, but they still found it necessary to have their own. She came up behind Shego, who was just shadow boxing, and wrapped her arms around the pale woman. Shego was actually surprised.
“Ah!” the fire-starter hollered in shock when she felt the limbs on her. Kim laughed. “Damn you, Kimmie! Make some noise when you come in or something!” Shego barked; she hated that Kim was able to sneak up on her now.
“There’s no fun in that,” Kim remarked with a smile as Shego turned around to give her a proper greeting.
The green-skinned woman just shook her head before leaning down to give Kim a kiss on the lips. It was not an overly passionate or hot kiss, but more like a “welcome home” kiss. With that out of the way, Shego escaped Kim’s grip because she was sweaty and did not want to share that experience, even though Kim was going to take a shower anyway.
“I was wondering when you were going to get in,” Shego commented. She was happy that Kim was back after being gone over a week, but she wanted to play it cool.
“Well, we had to get debriefed after we came in this morning,” Kim explained. It was now the evening.
“That does explain the homework assignment tucked under your arm. How many mistakes did you two have this time?” the raven-haired female inquired.
“Forty-eight,” Kim grumbled.
Shego laughed a bit. “Well, that’s better than before. How many of those were yours?” she asked curiously.
“Just eight, but they were huge.”
Shego rolled her eyes. Every little slip-up that Kim made on a mission was “huge” to her. Mistakes were always going to be made, especially by someone like Kim, who did not really have anyone to show her how to control her many talents. As long as she and Ron made it back in one piece, Shego figured that it was a good day.
“Well, if you want to talk about them, how about we do it after I get out of these sweaty clothes? We’ll order some takeout and go through everything,” Shego offered.
The redhead nodded, liking that plan, especially since it was what they usually did. Whenever she came in after a mission, she always did have a thick folder of junk that she needed to review. She liked going through it with Shego, who sometimes disagreed on if Kim had actually made a mistake where it was indicated. But, Shego had a lot of field experience on both sides, so she was a lot of help to the redhead.
Kim went to go take her shower while Shego finished up her shadow-boxing. Kim called for takeout when she was done and by the time Shego was ready for everything, the food was at the door. They sat down on the sofa as close as they could and then spread the file papers out on the coffee table. They then proceeded to go through everything while they ate.
Professor Dementor, former top WEE scientist, sat back in his chair while watching several monitors. All of the scenes had something in common; they all stared one Kim Possible. They showed her using her various powers in many different ways at many different times too. He could not believe all of the mission data that they had been able to obtain.
He then glanced down at a package that he had received a long time ago. He opened it and looked at through all of the papers carefully, even though he pretty much knew them all by heart at that point. He nodded to himself.
“This probably can be done, as long as he gets everyone to cooperate with the plan. I do know, I can build it!” Dementor declared loudly, even though he was the only person in the room. It definitely was a good plan, though. Sometimes, he could not believe the leader’s genius.
Next time: Kim and Shego enjoy some time together before Kim and Ron get called off for a mission.