Kim opened her eyes slowly and grumbled incoherently as sunlight came streaming into the bedroom where she was trying desperately to get some sleep. Still grumbling, she got up to go pull the shade, and it wasn’t until she was on her way back that she woke up enough to realize where she was, or more specifically, where she wasn’t. It startled her into full alertnessas it all came back and she flopped back on the bed tiredly, knowing there was no way she was getting back to sleep now. The Kimmunicator picked just that moment to go off, and already awake and having nothing better to do, she answered it.
“Hey Wade,” she mumbled.
“Whoa, Kim,” Wade exclaimed, loving the opportunity to tease her. “You look rough. Busy night?”
Kim refused to be baited. “You know what I did last night,” she said humorlessly. “You helped. So what’s the sitch?”
“I am picking up a weird signal from the hovercraft and I think it may be a tracking device,” he answered. “With Shego being hunted down and all, you should probably disable it.”
Kim had heard only first part. “Okay,” she said, getting off the bed and making her way outside. As she walked, the rest of what he had said made it through her sleepy processors. “Did you say Shego was being hunted down?” she asked.
“Yup,” Wade replied. “I think you should take a look at this,” he said, bringing up the morning’s headline for several different national and international papers.
Kim looked at them briefly. “You so have got to be kidding me; it has only been a day,” she protested.
Shego strolled through the busy marketplace looking for something that resembled breakfast. People were bustling everywhere, but everyone she met paused to greet her. They all knew her here; she had fallen in love with this little seaside Mexican town awhile back and built a place on the beach. It was just a cabin, nothing fancy, but she loved it both for the solitude and the beauty of the surroundings. It was a place she came to as often as she could, and last night, with Stoppable snoring in the back and Kimmie tired and bitchy in the front, she figured it would be a good place to rest and regroup. She had no food in the house, though, and so here she was, on a quest for morning sustenance.
She had just stopped in front on the panadería when her cell phone went off. The number wasn’t familiar, but it had a Middleton area code, so she figured that Kimmie was awake and calling her about something. “Yeah?” she asked by way of a greeting.
“Shego? Is that you?” came Dr. Drakken’s distinctive voice.
“Yes, Dr. D. It’s me. What do you want?” Shego answered shortly, wanting to be sarcastic but knowing it was useless because the blue idiot wouldn’t get it anyway.
“Is, um, Kim Possible there with you?” he asked hesitantly.
“No,” Shego answered, going for the literal. Kim wasn’t with her after all; she was back at the cabin hogging the only bed.
“Would you know where she was?” he persisted.
“Maybe,” she hedged, suspicious of this whole phone call. “Why are you suddenly so interested in Possible’s whereabouts, Dr. D?”
“Because I am sitting in the middle of the Middleton police station with detectives and FBI agents breathing down my neck, Shego!” Drakken said petulantly. “They seem to think that you have kidnapped her and that I had something to do with it. I tried telling them that I had nothing to do with it and they wouldn’t even know she was with you if I hadn’t told them you were planning to rob the museum, but they don’t seem to care!”
Shego could feel the rage beginning to well up in her at Drakken’s unexpected revelation. She felt like crushing her phone, but she wanted to clarify first. “Let me get this straight,” she said, in a tone that had Drakken looking for the nearest exit even though he was miles away, “you called SWAT on me?”
Drakken did not answer for several long moments, knowing by her tone that he had screwed up lethally and trying to think up a way to save his scrawny blue neck. He decided whining was his best option, which proved how utterly stupid he really was considering how badly Shego hated whiners. “But Shego,” he whined, “you hadn’t been home for a few days and you know how I think of us as a little evil family, so it hurt me when you just showed up out of the blue and then left again. I used the tracking device on the hovercraft to find out you were in Chicago and since we had talked about raiding the traveling exhibit at the Field, I thought you were doing it without me after we had done so much planning to do it together. Well, I was hurt, Shego, and I thought the best way to teach you a lesson would be to foil your plans.”
It really was beneficial to Drakken’s continued existence that he was in Middleton and Shego was in Mexico; otherwise there was a good possibility that he would have found himself dead or at least badly injured. As it was, Shego was damn well not going to let him off scot-free even if she couldn’t reach him, so she decided on another form of revenge. “My plans, Dr. D?” she asked, putting heated accusation in her voice, knowing for a fact that the weasel was allowing the cops to tap the call and wanting them to get an earful. “But those were your plans. I was supposed to lure Kimmie by pretending to steal from the museum and then I was supposed to kidnap her for whatever stupid reason you came up with. I lured her to the museum all right, but only to warn her what your whack job self was planning to do. And since you hollered copper on me, I so am glad I did.” She paused, winding up for the finale. “Last but not least, I quit. I am tired of working for your idiotic, crazy ass,” she finished, and it was not a joke. She was completely through with him after a stunt like that.
Drakken chuckled uncomfortably as a roomful of law enforcement officials turned to stare menacingly at him. “Heh, heh, you are such a joker, Shego,” he said weakly. Shego didn’t respond, but instead hung up on him, sending a resounding “click” throughout the room. As the atmosphere in the room grew increasingly hostile, he made one last effort. “She is lying; it was her plan, I swear. See, I can still trace the hovercraft. Would I do that if it was my plan?” he offered, holding up the GPS tracking device and turning it on. “See there,” he said, pointing at the screen, where a red disc was blinking, “that is where they are.” Before anyone could get a lock on it though, it abruptly disappeared. The officers’ frowns grew deeper. “Oh, snap,” Drakken whimpered.
Shego raced back to the cabin, breakfast completely forgotten; she had to find that tracking device before a vengeful Drakken told the damn cops where they were. Just as she came running up though, a still slightly out of it Kim came out of the craft blinking, yawning and saying bye to someone, presumably Wade, on her Kimmunicator.
“Isn’t it a little early to be running from the police?” Kim asked sarcastically, her lack of sleep making her uncharacteristically snarky.
“If I don’t find what I am looking for, we will both be running, Princess,” Shego answered hurriedly.
Kim watched her for a few moments. “If you are looking for the tracking device, I already took care of it. Wade traced the signal and I destroyed it,” she said offhandedly, yawning. “And I don’t have to run,” she added, a wry smile on her face at the irony. “The whole world thinks you kidnapped me. Well, except that one tabloid, but no one reads the tabloids.”
Shego, having missed the grin, thought she was serious, and she turned to glare at Kim. “So are you going to screw me over too, aren’t you?” she asked angrily, preparing to get damn pissy about how life was suddenly treating her. “What, you weren’t helping last night, and after all this shit is done you are going to go back to your perfect little life and just leave me to swing. Is that it?”
Kim looked at her in shock. “I would never do that, Shego,” she said quietly, hurt at the accusation. “I stick by my friends.”
That last, completely unexpected word stopped Shego’s anger cold, but she refused to show it. “Friends?” she scoffed. “When the hell did we become friends, Princess? Last I heard you hated me.”
“Yes. I hate you so much that I helped you knock over a museum, steal a priceless artifact and make your escape,” Kim deadpanned.
“You had to. The future of the world was at stake,” Shego groused, but in spite of herself, she had to crack a smile. “Was that actual sarcasm, Pumpkin?” she asked in wonderment.
“Depends,” Kim replied with a grin. “Are we friends?”
“You did say you hated me,” Shego countered.
Kim sighed. “I was incredibly pissed off that night and you know it, Shego. I said things I didn’t really mean.”
Shego’s eyebrow rose in amusement. “Sarcasm and swearing in the same conversation? I guess you could be a friend of mine after all,” she allowed.
“Bless you, O granter of friendship,” Kim replied, bowing.
“Cut it out,” Shego ordered. “The sarcasm is freaking me out and I might have to start liking you if you keep it up.”
“Duly noted,” Kim responded. “Now, seriously, what are we going to do about the kidnapping thing?”
“I sorta took care of that,” Shego said, shrugging.
“How?” Kim asked.
Shego chuckled. “I pinned it on Drakken,” she said with satisfaction.
“You didn’t,” Kim said, aghast.
“I did,” Shego countered. “Bastard called the cops on us last night and put the tracking device on the hovercraft. He had it coming.” She smiled
“For once, he didn’t do anything, Shego,” Kim protested.
“And we will tell the cops that,” Shego replied. “Just not until we get back. Speaking of which, I am going to go back into town for food and supplies. You, Princess, need to get something out of the journals so we can do something before the world blows up.”
“Why me? I always have to read Mim’s journal,” Kim complained.
“Nana Mim was your overly descriptive relative; that’s why. Bye, Kimmie,” Shego stated, turning around and taking off before Kim could protest. Kim sighed and walked back to the cabin. She sat down at the table, pulled the journals out her bag and flipped to the appropriate spot. She started reading and taking notes, but the usually long-winded Mim became strangely laconic the instant she started writing about the temple, and it wasn’t until the end that she offered up this explanation: she and Sheila were still concerned that Lipsky or some other malcontent would attempt to gain access into the temple and she did not want the journal to be come a roadmap.
“Why is that even an issue, Aunt Mim?” Kim grumbled, annoyed that there was so little to go on and they could not return to Middleton to ask them about it. “You took the amulet with you.”
“Talking to yourself is the first sign of insanity, Princess,” an arriving Shego mentioned from the doorway. Kim glowered at her as Shego put down her packages on the table. Shego merely grinned. “So what did you figure out, Pumpkin?” she asked conversationally.
“There are six levels in the temple and each level has some sort of trap meant to cause death or at least a whole lot of pain,” Kim replied.
“Sounds like fun,” Shego said. “Do we have anything more specific that that?”
“Kind of. Mim did describe the architecture in the temple as being spiral, and the pathway slopes upward so that you automatically go up as you are busy avoiding death on each level,” Kim explained. “But the only info we have on the death traps is that they are color coded.”
“Color coded? What? These were highly organized primitive gods?” Shego asked sardonically.
“It is the Temple of the Avenging Prism, Shego,” Kim reminded her. “And they sent a rainbow colored comet toward you and your brothers.”
Shego rolled her eyes. “All right, all right. They were big on colors; I get it,” she said dismissively.
Kim listed off what she knew. “Anyway, the pattern follows a prism. The first level is red and the trap has something to do with blood. The second is orange and that trap is fire. The yellow level is light, the green level is, reading between the lines, snakes, the blue level is water and the highest level is purple, but there is no trap. It is the chamber where the amulet is kept.”
“Gotta be a trap up there, even if Nana Mim did not write about it,” Shego decided. “Anything else?”
Kim shook her head. “Nope; that’s it. If we were in Middleton, we could ask them, but we can’t, so that is what we have. There is no question we can do it, but I do wish we had a little more information.”
“That is more than enough, Kimmie,” Shego reassured her. “I mean, come on. How many of Drakken’s death traps have you escaped from? And between the two of us, how many high security facilities have we broken into?”
Kim smiled; she wasn’t saying it, but Shego was looking as forward to this as she was. So, really, there was no point to them hanging around here anymore. “I think that is all we can do here, and we should get going,” she said decisively.
“Works for me,” Shego agreed. She glanced over at the couch. “Although you might want to wake up the sidekick and the mole rat.”