Comet impact T minus 21 days, 6 hours, 27 minutes:
Three days after the start of her ‘training’ Kim groaned in exhaustion as she unceremoniously collapsed unto her butt on the floor and wiped sweat from her brow. As someone who was a cheerleader, an accomplished martial artist, and a globe-trotting adventurer, collapsing from sheer exhaustion was not exactly virgin territory for her. Still, she wondered if she’d ever felt this drained before, both physically and mentally.
“Okay, I guess we can take a two minute break,” her unrelenting taskmaster said.
Kim gave Shego the best scorching gaze she could muster, but said nothing in return. She knew there was no time to waste. She knew she had to get a handle on this. Still, she would have liked nothing better than to crawl into bed for a week.
Somehow she had always imagined gaining superpowers to be relatively easy. Her short experience of possessing Hego’s powers had seemed to prove her right. Then again, Hego’s powers were far different from the ones she had now. Hego’s glow had enhanced something that was already there, her natural muscles, and she knew how to use those. Her current power, though, was something completely new. It was almost like learning to use a new arm that had spontaneously appeared on her body.
Kim had to admit that Shego was doing her utmost to help her, but it still wasn’t easy. There were no words to describe what they were doing. How did you instruct someone to breathe? To make one’s heart beat? To move an arm? At best you could offer vague descriptions, nudge someone in the right direction, but that was it. The rest had to come naturally.
Interestingly enough, Shego had immediately hit on the best method of motivating Kim to do something: Rub her inability to do it in her face. Shego kept using her own energy powers, switching them on and off with contemptuous ease, mercilessly teasing Kim whenever she failed to do it herself. Which got Kim very motivated indeed.
Three days into the training Kim was now able to turn her powers on and off. Oh, it still wasn’t easy. She had to get worked up quite a bit to make them activate, and she had to calm herself down to make them switch off. Her early theory about the powers being tied to her adrenalin state didn’t seem that far off. The effort of changing gears so often, though, was draining to the extreme. Urging her body into overdrive one minute, forcing it to calm down the next, was pure hell.
What was still problematic was stopping the powers from activating against her will. Getting worked up without the white glow appearing in her hands, that was hard. As long as Kim kept her concentration she could now keep it down for a minute or two, but if something distracted her or she lost her cool (something Shego was very good at accomplishing), then it was all over.
On top of it was the fact that they still didn’t really know what Kim’s powers actually did. She now could summon the white glow to her hands without touching Shego and having her go along, but that was pretty much it. What little they did know was that the white glow seemed to protect Kim from most forms of attack (though not energy-based attacks, as a particularly painful plasma blast from Shego had proven) and enabled her to direct some kind of force. The absorbing thing seemed to come naturally, no conscious participation on her part required. The directing of force was much, much more difficult. She’d only managed it once so far and cracked an armoured wall in half doing it.
It didn’t help that, as far as they could tell, it would indeed be all up to Kim and Shego. Hego, Mego, and the Wegos had tried numerous times to merge their powers without the girls present. It worked, actually, but only sufficed to increase their own abilities. Hego was stronger, Mego could shrink further, the Wegos could make more dupes. There was no energy discharge of any kind, though. Nothing that could be used against the approaching comet.
Global Justice and Wade were still trying to track down other energy-powered teenagers like that Adler-girl he had talked about, but it was proving difficult. The girl’s family had apparently been scared of someone trying to make a guinea pig out of their pink-glowing kid, so they had packed up everything and vanished off the face of the Earth. GJ was trying to find them, but with no luck so far. And no others had been found, either.
Which meant that the world’s only hope right now consisted of a green-skinned mercenary and a teenage girl that still couldn’t really control her powers.
“Getting frustrated?” Shego asked, interpreting Kim’s look correctly.
“Wouldn’t you be?” Kim shot back.
“Oh, I certainly would. When my powers first manifested I cursed that damn comet every single day for months until I started getting a handle on them. Of course I didn’t have a brilliant instructor to help me do it.”
Kim looked up at her smirk, waving her off. “I’ll give you cruel and unrelenting. Not yet sure about the brilliant thing.”
Shego was about to shoot back -trading barbs had become a favourite pastime for the two foes- when the com screen of the training room activated. Wade’s young face appeared, looking down at the two women.
“Hi, Kim. Shego. Got a minute?”
“What’s the sitch, Wade?” Kim asked, not bothering to rise to her feet. “And take as many minutes as you need, please!”
Shego gave her a look that clearly stated her opinion on the matter of extending their break, but didn’t say anything.
“Well, I think I might have figured out what your powers do,” Wade said.
Stunned silence engulfed the room as the two women just stared at him.
“Should I call back later?” he asked, smiling slightly.
“Don’t you dare,” Kim yelled, jumping to her feet, tiredness forgotten. “You can’t say something like that and then sign off. Spill! Now!”
“Okay, okay. Take a look at this,” Wade’s face was quickly replaced by something Kim had never wanted to see again.
Footage from the incident at the Go City Bank.
“Wade, I really…”
“Sorry, Kim, but I think you will understand your powers better after seeing this,” Wade apologized.
Forcing her feelings aside, Kim watched. Everything was happening in extreme slow motion. The robber already had the gun pointed and was firing. The muzzle flashes bloomed slowly, the small dark shapes of the bullets started flying towards their intended target. Which was one Kim Possible, whose hands were starting to glow white.
“Watch what happens when the bullets hit your glow,” Wade told her.
Kim watched, doing her best to ignore the nightmares threatening to overwhelm her mind. Her eyes were riveted to the bullets. The robber fired off three shots in quick succession. The three bullets all travelled the same trajectory and impacted against the glowing white energy that surrounded Kim’s hand as she reached out toward the danger.
All three bullets stopped dead in their tracks, hovered in mid-air for a moment, then simply fell down toward the floor. At the same time the white glow increased.
“What happened there?” Kim asked, confused. She’d always assumed the bullets had either been reflected or vaporized somehow. She’d been much too preoccupied to look for them afterwards.
“Physics,” Wade explained. “Bullets travel at better than the speed of sound. The moment they hit your glow, they stop dead. All that kinetic energy has to go somewhere. My bet is you absorbed it somehow.”
“And then redirected it,” Shego concluded. “I read up on the man you… well, the bank robber. The doctors swore he’d been hit by bullets, but they couldn’t find any. There were no bullets. Just the kinetic energy from them. You sent it right back at him.”
Kim looked at her hands in growing horror. She knew she had hurt that man badly, but hearing it broken down into physics terms like that… it seemed to cheapen what had happened. That terrible thing she had done.
“I figure,” Wade continued, oblivious to her state of mind, “that just like Shego here absorbs sunlight and generates plasma, you absorb kinetic energy and redirect it. It explains how, when you touched the pavement out on the tarmac, you cracked it. You unwillingly sent enough kinetic force into it to rival a dozen sledge hammers hitting at once.”
“But… but nothing like that happened when Hego hit me,” Kim said, looking for some way to focus her thoughts. “I mean… he punched me, but there was no redirecting or anything. He didn’t feel a thing.”
“You didn’t see Hego as a threat,” Shego theorised. “You just absorbed the kinetic energy from his punch and stored it. Probably went a long way towards your near-overload later on.”
“And with Killigan’s exploding golf ball,” Wade added, “you probably did redirect it, turning the explosion away from you. It also explains how you put so much extra zing into the knockout punch you gave Monkey Fist.”
Kim tried to wrap her mind around that. Kinetic energy? Could it be that simple?
“But… but wouldn’t that mean that… I mean, anytime someone touched me, or… or even the wind brushing against my body, it would all charge me up, right?”
“I don’t think it’s quite that easy, pumpkin,” Shego said. “If that were the case, you’d be overloading almost constantly. Besides, anytime someone bumped into you they’d be pushed back with equal force. I think you need to activate your talent to absorb energy. It’s not a constant thing as with mine.”
“Shego might be on to something there,” Wade admitted. “She absorbs sunlight constantly, which is probably why her skin turned slightly green. Photosynthesis.”
Shego frowned. She had never really considered why her skin had changed the way it did, but it actually made a strange sort of sense.
“Okay, let’s say you are right,” Kim said. “How do we go about testing this?”
A moment later Shego decked her with a hard right to her chin. Kim cried out in surprise and pain and fell to the floor. Rolling with the motion, she was back on her feet a moment later, but Shego wasn’t following up the attack.
“What was that for?” she yelled accusingly.
“Surprise attack,” Shego explained with a smirk. “Didn’t expect it, didn’t see it coming, your talent wasn’t activated. No absorbing or redirecting of the force of impact.”
Taking a step toward her, Shego clenched her fist again. “Now turn on your glow!”
Kim hesitated a moment, but then did as she was asked. The white glow slowly appeared. It was made easier by the fact that Shego’s sucker punch already had her worked up quite a bit.
“Now let’s try this again,” Shego said, rearing back for the punch.
Every instinct inside Kim screamed to dodge, to defend herself, but she held still. This was an experiment, after all, and it depended on Shego actually hitting her. So against every urge she waited until Shego’s fist connected with her chin once again.
A moment later Shego was stumbling backwards as if hit by an invisible attacker. Kim just felt the slightest tap against her skin where Shego’s fist had hit, nothing else. Shego, meanwhile, was only now regaining her balance and holding her obviously hurting hand.
“Damn, that stung,” Shego complained.
“You okay?” Kim asked, working hard to shut off her glow.
“Been better, but I guess we just proved nerdlinger’s theory. It felt as if someone was punching against my fist with a jackhammer.”
“That’s pretty much what happened,” Wade said, having observed over the cameras. “Shego’s punch stopped dead when it hit your chin and a millisecond later the full force of impact was turned back on her. You’re lucky your hand isn’t broken, Shego.”
Shego shook her hand to get rid of the pain, but there was a smirk on her lips once again. “Well, princess, this certainly makes future fights between us much more interesting, won’t it? I can’t hit you with fists or feet without getting stung in return, but your power doesn’t protect you from my plasma blasts. Damn, I’m gonna miss the fisticuffs.”
Kim tried to grasp the full implications of what she had just learned. If Shego and Wade were right, and evidence suggested they were, then Kim’s powers made her almost unbeatable in any kind of physical confrontation. Like Shego had said, she was still vulnerable to energy-based attacks, but any kind of physical attack and even projectile weapons would be useless against her. More than useless, in fact, as she could turn them back on the attacker. Okay, only if she saw the attack coming, but still, it was a heady feeling.
She wasn’t sure she liked it.
Shego, possibly guessing what was going through her mind right now, put a hand on Kim’s shoulder and gave it a supportive squeeze.
“Let’s pick it up again, princess. Now that we know what you can do, we should make sure you got a handle on it.”
“Yeah,” Kim agreed half-heartedly. “We should.”
And all the while the comet was coming closer.
TO BE CONTINUED