My mistress is coming with me to go to my parents’ house for a cookout over the weekend. How cool is that! I hope my parents like her. I hope she likes me parents. I hope the tweebs don’t do anything stupid and upset her. I’m actually hoping that everything goes perfect for her stay, but I know that’s just hoping too much. Things don’t have to be perfect, but as long as my mistress doesn’t get too annoyed everything should be all right. This is going to be so totally spanking!
“Hi, Mom!” Kim smiled warmly as she hugged her mother as soon as she opened the front door to the Possible home.
“Kimmie, it’s good to see you,” Missus Possible replied while returning the embrace with zeal. “Come in, come in, come in,” she ushered her child and her guest in with a broad smile on her face.
The neurosurgeon motioned for the pair to enter the house, which they did. Shego was not too sure what to think yet, but she was already feeling a little uncomfortable inside of the house. She was not sure why that was; she was only meeting her brat’s family, she reminded herself. It was only her scamp’s people and nothing serious. Yet, some small part of her still felt anxious, as if the parents were going to confiscate her precious monster.
“Kimmie-cub!” Mister Possible greeted his daughter and grabbed her into an enthused bear hug. Shego was starting to see where her pet got such outlandish behavior from.
“Hi, Dad,” Kim groaned because she had not expected such a tight hug. In the back of her mind, she wondered if she embraced her mistress as tightly as her father had her. If she did, she could understand why her owner always grunted when she hugged her.
“It’s good to see you again,” her father said while patting his daughter on the back.
“Good to see you too,” Kim replied as her father finally let her go. She took a couple of soothing breaths and then turned her attention to her master. “Shego, this is my mom and dad, Doctor Anastasia Possible and Doctor James Possible. Mom, Dad, this is Shego,” the young redhead introduced everyone.
“Please, call me Ann for short. Thank you so much for looking after our little girl,” the neurosurgeon said with a smile; she was speaking to Shego.
“Looking after her?” the super-powered law enforcer echoed. It seemed like the parents knew who she was to a certain degree and they were aware that Kim stayed with her, which she did not expect. She did not even know that her pet was in contact with her parents enough to let them know that she was living with someone.
“We’re thankful that you got her to go back to school and everything, even though you didn’t talk her into being a rocket scientist like she should have been,” James commented while reaching out to shake the pale officer’s hand.
Shego arched an ebony eyebrow because she had not been aware that she was the one that got Kim to go back to school. She only recalled forcing the girl to return to her parents to get her to stop acting like a lazy slug when she could do so much with herself. She figured that her girl’s parents would get her to do something with her life, which Shego believed her munchkin needed to do because she was so talented. She thought that they were giving her much more credit than she deserved in getting the redheaded scientist to do something with her life; the Possibles would disagree with that, Kim especially. The redhead had decided to do what she wanted because of Shego and she had gone to the school that she did because it allotted her the chance to stay with Shego.
“Just thanks so much for watching her and taking care of her,” Ann said to the green-skinned woman while cutting a glance at James. Kim was never going to be a rocket scientist, so he needed to just let it go. The girl was a biologist, a herpetologist to be precise, and they should just be happy with that because the slim hero was very happy with it. In fact, Kim was making a mark already as a herpetologist, especially since she could take great photos to go along with any research that she wrote up.
Shego decided to just nod since she seemed to be out of the loop. Her pet’s parents thought that she just looked out for Kim, which was part of what she did of course. She just doubted that her little monster, though crazy, would ever tell her parents that she was Shego’s pet. It was something that a person could tell friends, who would eventually just accept it because friends tended to be of like minds on things or just allowed people to do stupid things, but not parents. Parents were just of a different mindset and were like from different planets.
“It is so not the drama, Mom,” Kim objected. She wanted to get the praise to stop because she could see that her master not interested in hearing such things.
“All right, all right. Well, I prepared the guestroom … if you want to stay there,” Ann said to the pale woman.
Ann was not quite sure what Shego was to her daughter, which was why she hesitated in stating that she prepared the guestroom. She was aware that Kim sometimes dated females, so she did consider that the pale woman could be a girlfriend, even though her daughter had never said such in all of their conversations. Now, if Shego was a girlfriend, Ann did figure that she would probably want to share Kim’s room, but she had prepared the guestroom just in case since her daughter had never indicated who the pale woman was to her. After all, it was plausible that Shego and Kim were just roommates, which was usually how Kim made it sound, even though the petite hero never spoke of paying rent like a roommate would.
“That’ll do,” the moss-hued officer assured Ann.
Kim’s face almost dropped to the floor, even though she suspected that her mistress would do such a thing. She had hoped that Shego would share her bed, though; it was just a pleasant thought. They almost always slept next to each other now and had done that for months. The slender scholar wanted to be able to snuggle up to her owner while they slept like she always did.
“Well, all right. Kimmie can take you up to the guestroom and show you around,” Ann suggested.
Kim almost saluted, but she caught herself; oh man, pet life was really starting to spill into the rest of her life. She turned her attention to her master and motioned to the stairs. Shego followed her pet upstairs with her bag in hand; they had arrived a day early and planned to stay until the fifth. There was going to be a big cookout on the fourth of July complete with fireworks. Kim was happy that they were going to stay a day after the get together, which made Shego happy in return.
“Here you go,” the trim scholar said to her mistress as she opened the door to the guestroom.
“Quaint,” the emerald-eyed female muttered sarcastically as she scanned the room with her eyes. It looked much like a guestroom, almost like a hotel room. Quaint was the only word that she could think of without insulting the area.
“Yeah, we usually put Nana in here and she does her own thing while she’s in here,” the redhead explained to her master.
“Perfect,” the pale woman said in a sardonic tone.
“Well, you’re the one that wanted the guestroom. You could’ve just slept in my room. My parents wouldn’t have minded,” Kim replied. Well, her parents would have at least pretended to not mind, which was close enough for her in regards to her being able to sleep next to her mistress.
“By the way, do they know that you’re my pet?” Shego asked curiously since the parents knew more than she expected.
“No, I couldn’t think of a good way to explain that one. I mean, it’s a hard subject to approach. I just told them that I live with you. They had a lot of questions, of course, since they didn’t know who you were, but I answered the questions as best I could without coming right out and saying I was your pet,” the slim adventurer explained.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you told your parents that you were with me?” the emerald-eyed woman inquired.
“You never asked.” Kim shrugged as if it was no big deal. Her mistress never seemed to care about family matters, no matter whose family it was. She did not feel like bothering Shego with any details or issues that obviously did not register on her radar.
Shego stared at her little monster. Did she come off as uncaring as it sounded when it came to her pet? She liked being informed about her munchkin’s life. She liked knowing things about her redheaded imp. She rubbed the top of Kim’s head.
“You can tell me these things, Princess. I want to know,” she told the younger woman.
“Sorry, I didn’t think you cared about stuff like this. I didn’t tell them a bunch of stuff. It’s just that they worry about me, like I’m going to just fall of the face of the Earth one day. They know what I’m like and my dad does seem to think I’m eight or something, so I just had to tell them stuff to make sure they didn’t worry about me. I just wanted to make sure that they knew it was no big,” Kim explained.
Shego nodded to show that she understood. She considered how much she worried about the kid and the redhead was only her pet; she hated to think how hard it had to be Kim’s parents. They should probably count themselves lucky to be sane, if they were, in fact, sane. Being the kid’s parents had to be a surefire way to go totally loopy in record time.
“I’ll leave you to get settled in for a few minutes. Hey, do you want to see my room?” the slender hero asked curiously with an angelic twinkle in her leaf-colored eyes.
“Sure,” Shego sighed. She agreed because she could see that it would mean a lot to her twerp if she did go and see the room. Besides, how could she say no when her girl was looking at her with such an adorable expression?
The raven-haired woman put her bag down and followed Kim out of the room. They trotted the short distance to Kim’s space, which Shego thought looked rather normal. It was like the room of a regular teenager and to think, the normal teenage that once lived in the room had left and become her pet. So much for the normal teenager; she was a very abnormal adult. Well, normal was overrated anyway, but Shego did tuck the information in the back of her mind.
Kim’s parents were rather curious about Shego, so they were a bit happy that they were finally getting to meet her. When Kim had informed her mother that she was bringing someone to the cookout and that someone was not going to be Ron, they were curious as to whom she was going to bring. Kim almost never brought friends with her when they were having a family get together. She usually brought Ron and later on in her life, she started bringing Monique, but she never in all of her days brought a “significant other.” Now, she did not say that Shego was anything of the sort, but they did wonder and they did assume.
Kim mostly made it sound like Shego was just a roommate or a friend since she had told her mother that she was staying with Shego rent-free. Her mother had understandably asked a lot of questions when Kim first began speaking about the pale woman, which was way back when Shego had made her return home when she was nineteen. The hero had not said much about Shego back then because she had not liked thinking about the green-skinned female much, missing her mistress and the life that she had with the older woman. She also did not want to accidentally talk about her life as a pet too, so she did not talk much about Shego back then.
Lately, when she was on the phone with her mother, she found that she had to talk about Shego somewhat; she spoke to her father too, but about other issues. Her mother was the one that wanted to know about her current life and how things were going. Her father was stuck in the past for the most part and was also trying to push her into being a rocket scientist for some reason. Anyway, lately when she was on the phone with her mother, Ann had all sorts of questions, especially in regards her mistress.
What had Kim told her mother in regards to Shego to sate the neurosurgeon’s curiosity somewhat? Well, she had merely said that Shego was a very kind woman that she met almost the second that she stepped into Go City. She made sure to include that Shego was a cop because her mother worried about Go City and the types of people that lived in the city. Ann thought that Kim might run into all kinds of shady people, so it soothed her nerves to know that Kim had befriended a law enforcement agent. It made her believe that Kim was safe, even though the hero would have loved to point out that she could take care of herself. She did not do that, though; she just made sure that her mother knew that she was with someone that was not unsavory or something like that.
Kim also made sure to include that Shego was very domestic because she knew that her mother worried about her diet. If the petite hero was left on her own, everyone was almost certain that all Kim would eat was pizza and ramen noodles; they were all probably very correct. So, she informed her mother that Shego cooked very often and that eased Ann’s concern about her daughter’s diet, which also helped ease her worry about her daughter’s health.
But, Ann did not understand why Shego was doing so much for Kim. It was not like the raven-haired female and her daughter were old friends or something like Kim and Ron. Kim and Shego did not really have a history together, so why did Shego help her daughter, she often wondered. Why did Shego let the petite hero stay with her free of charge? Why did she cook for Kim? Why did she take Kim into her home point blank? Kim always skirted around those issues and never directly answered those types of questions.
Ann did not know what to think, but she did consider that her daughter might be involved romantically with Shego because it would explain a lot of things. It would not explain why Kim never called Shego her partner or anything like that, but a romantic relationship seemed to make sense with what she knew. She did not have much of a problem with that, except for the fact that the relationship seemed to be moving very fast. Kim had made it clear that she started living with Shego almost the very second that she met the woman and Ann was not too sure how she felt about that. She hoped that Kim did not rush into something and she hoped that her daughter was keeping her head about her. Sometimes, she did not know about Kim.
Sometimes the neurosurgeon envied her husband and his one-track mind and being able to only see Kim as his baby girl. He never thought about things that Kim might do as a grown woman out on her own and as long as she was not with some boy to his knowledge, then everything was fine by his account; it never even seemed to register to his mind that their openly bisexual daughter might be out with some girl doing something. She was not sure why he thought like that, but it seemed to save him a lot of stress.
At least she could get to know the mysterious woman in her daughter’s life, Ann thought. She figured that even though they were only going to be at the house for the weekend, she could still get a better picture of who Shego was. She truly wanted to understand Shego and just what her relationship was to Kim. She was hoping that some of her questions would be answered.
“Dinner, everybody!” James called through out the house, hoping to get everyone’s attention, so he did not have to go looking for anyone.
Shego followed her pet to the dining room. She was a little curious as to how dinner would go in the Possible household. She knew that meal time in the Gooding family was something akin to chow time in a wolf pack, complete with respect for the alpha and battle wounds. And she had also experienced meal time at the Director household and it was totally different from what she was used to; it was like being in a prison having a meal there.
Shego and Betty both came from households with extremely powerful matriarchs, but their mothers were opposites in the way that they did things. Shego’s mother while domineering and impatient, let her offspring do their own things much of the thing while Betty’s mother seemed to need to control everything that was going on in the house or outside of the house sometimes; Shego used to urge Betty to run away, just to be a bad influence on her. So, she wondered where the Possible family would fall when it came to meals.
“Please don’t be brain-loaf, please don’t be brain-loaf,” Kim silently prayed. She did not have much against brain-loaf, except for the fact that it was food shaped like a human brain, which made it a little difficult to eat. Sometimes, she wished that her mother found better outlets for her background as a sculptor.
Kim breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that they were not having brain-loaf. They had a simple meal of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, and biscuits; all of which were very fine by the petite adventurer. They sat down at the table and Shego got a little nervous. She thought that the family might actually bless the meal, which would be too much for her. But, there was no praying. Everyone just civilly collected their food and sat down and that was when Shego noticed the pair that Kim affectionately called “the tweebs.”
The twins were in their teens now and showing some forms of individuality. They each had their own form of fashion, but they still pretty much shared a brain. Jim had shed his red shirt for sports jerseys; they still played soccer actually, so he was very into sports. He liked jerseys from almost every sport and his closet was full of different team uniforms from various sports. At the moment, he had on a throwback basketball jersey because of the heat of the day and it matched his crimson shorts and sneakers. He had his ears pierced too and was wearing three studs in each ear.
Tim appeared to be trying to grow a mustache and that had been the first thing that Kim noticed about either of them; she pointed out that it looked like he had some dirt on his face. He was more interested in tee-shirts with one-liners on them when it came to clothing, which might explain why his black tee-shirt had a little cartoon character on it with a rocket launcher and a caption that read “yes, I do have all the answers.” He was wearing black shorts and white low-top sneakers. He had his left eyebrow pierced, proclaiming that his girlfriend thought that it was cute when Kim asked him why he had a booger on his eyebrow.
“We look better than you,” the twins declared simultaneously, speaking to their sister when she started picking on them again.
“Please, like that would ever happen,” Kim replied with a taunting smirk on her face.
“At least we’ve got girls,” Jim added.
“They probably feel sorry that you’re such tweebs,” Kim shot back.
“As if,” the boys replied with skeptical looks on their faces.
“You’re just mad that we have girls,” Tim argued.
“And that we’re way cooler than you,” his double said.
“You wish,” Kim stated. She would have liked to tell them that she had a girl too, who undoubtedly looked better than both of their girls combined, but saying something like that would have probably upset her mistress and would have probably started up some questions with her parents. It would have just been too much trouble.
“We are. We got scouted by more colleges than you too,” Tim bragged to their sister as proof that they were cooler than she was.
Kim scoffed. “Like that happened. What college are you two going to anyway, now that you mention it?” she asked curiously.
“Well, we were going to go to G.U for the soccer and engineering,” Jim answered.
“But, who wants to share a school with you?” Tim sneered at their sister.
“They’re going to go to M.I.T,” Ann informed Kim since the boys seemed content to just go back and forth with their sister rather than answer the question.
“No way! You guys got ferociously huffy with me when I pitched the idea of going to M.I.T and you’re going to let them go?” Kim complained.
“Kimmie, you could’ve gone to M.I.T if you wanted,” Ann argued.
“Not after the way you guys made it seem like I’d melt, and moon would fly out of orbit and the sun would explode, destroying the entire planet if I left the region,” the slender hero argued.
Her parents had made her so nervous when she was making college plans because of the way they reacted to some of the schools that she had applied to or the schools that were looking at her. She had been so anxious, mostly due to them, that she went to a school in the neighborhood even though it offered almost nothing in regards to what she wanted, but she did not know what to do. Eventually, she had not been able to take it and she had transfer, but the fact that she had even gone there was irksome in her opinion.
“Well, you were only fifteen,” the neurosurgeon countered. Kim was just a child when she was accepted to college; they had not been sure what would happen to her away from home with some wild teens on a college campus.
“So are they,” Kim pointed out. Her brothers were just fifteen right now at that very moment and they were going off to college at one of the schools her parents had completely freaked on when she said she wanted to go there. How unfair was that?
“But, there’s two of them. They can look out for each other,” the blue-eyed doctor riposted. She was a bit more comfortable with the twins going to M.I.T because there were two of them and they stuck together. They could watch each other while there was only one Kim with no one to watch out for her once she was away from the house.
Ann did not want to bring up the point that James made a big fuss about Kim being so far from home when she graduated high school at such a young age while with the twins, he was only proud of them. He did not have any apprehension about them moving on and she guessed that it could be considered sexist of him, but it was not so much that he did not think that Kim was capable of being on her own or taking care of herself because she was female. His whole problem was just that in his mind Kim was still his baby girl for some reason and no one would let a baby go out on her own.
“I could’ve taken care of myself,” Kim argued. She could do anything. What part of her motto did her parents not get?
“Yes, you could’ve, but we were worried about you. You were the first one leaving the nest, after all. It just scared us,” her mother honestly replied, saving Kim’s pride and hopefully quelling the argument. “Besides, you went to a fine school and now look at you,” she added.
“Yeah, I guess,” Kim conceded. She had gone to a school that was great for sciences, biology especially, and now she was deep into biology. So, she guessed that she had made the right decision. But, there was always the “what if” that might have been had she traveled down the road of a mathematician. She had actually had plans to be a code breaker, but she never shared that with anyone and she guessed that it was would remain a dream.
“So, all of this talk of colleges, Shego, what’s your alma mater?” James asked the pale woman at the table to get her into the conversation. He thought it was rude of them to sit there and not try to get their guest talking.
“Don’t got one,” Shego easily admitted, even though she noticed a while ago that she was sharing a table with brainiacs to an almost strange degree. After all, the two parents were doctors and the three children were all college-bound at fifteen.
“You didn’t go to college?” the rocket scientist inquired in an incredulous tone. He did not mean to sound the way that he did, but he thought that everyone went to college nowadays.
“Nope,” she answered. Hell, she would not have finished high school if her mother had not threatened to hospitalize her if she did something “as stupid as drop out.” Fine, so she graduated and made a run for it before her mother threatened her to force her to go to college. She had not cared much for a higher education back then and from what she was seeing from the rest of the world, she had not missed out. She felt that she had learned all that she needed to know on the streets back then and it was on that knowledge that she made her money on for a while.
“I thought you had to have at least sixty credits to become a police officer,” Ann mused out loud, not meaning to be a tad discourteous as she was. She did not have much of a problem with the fact that Shego had no kind of college credentials, but it was just that to her knowledge, to get into certain professions some kind of higher education was necessary.
“Not when you’re good at kicking ass and your friend is desperate for recruits,” the green-skinned woman remarked with a small smirk. Betty had been beyond desperate when she hired Shego because she required someone with half a brain to take on the tasks that she was looking to do and it seemed that Go City was full of nothing but idiots at the time. Shego actually believed that the city was still full of idiots.
“Do you get to shoot people?” the twins asked at the same time.
“I could, but don’t,” she answered bluntly. Of course she could shoot people; she was a freaking cop. What an annoying question, she silently huffed. It seemed that everyone’s brothers were just infuriating.
“Why don’t you?” the boys inquired.
“Because I don’t need to,” she informed them.
The twins went on with that line of questioning until the green-skinned female just ignited her hands to show them why she did not require a gun of any sort and hoped to shut them up. She quickly decided that they were almost as irksome as her twin brothers; she and her pet were on the same page as far as that idea went. The boys thought that the plasma trick was cool and then went into speculations as to how they could replicate such an effect. Kim got annoyed with that idea because they were planning it recklessly and then she had to point out the degree of energy that they would need to create the same plasma that Shego could produce. The siblings then got into a scientific debate that their father jumped into, looking to correct some of the boys’ calculations, which were coming from the tops of their heads. Needless to say, James was not helping the situation, merely making sure that when the boys undoubtedly did attempted to re-create the effect, they did not kill themselves in the process. Ann had expected as much from her husband.
Ann tried to be the “adult” of the whole thing to get the debate to stop. She did not want the boys trying to make plasma because that was just a fire waiting to happen. She would like to make it through just one week where she did not have to call the fire department. Her family did not seem to think in the same manner; sure, Kim was attempting to discourage the boys, but not to keep them from starting a fire. She was just trying to rain on their parade.
Shego just watched the discussion; it was too technical for her to do anything else, even though she would not have joined in even if she did not know what they were talking about. She did find it a bit amusing that throughout all of the scientific jargon, the siblings still managed to get in plenty of childish name-calling and regular insults that any two-year-old would have understood. Despite the fact that there were all obviously super-smart, the Possible family was still the most normal family that she had ever encountered. It only made her wonder about her pet.
The pale woman wondered how she had managed to come into possession of the family’s daughter. What steps lead to the daughter being in Go City when she was? How had Kim even become who she was in the family that she was in? They all seemed so normal to a certain degree, yet Kim was far from normal. Or maybe Kim used to be normal at one point in time. Did she miss what she had at the moment, Shego wondered about her little monster. Did Kim miss being a normal person?
The green-skinned woman just watched her little monster, hoping that she could see the answer to her questions somewhere in her pet’s demeanor. Her girl looked normal at the moment, just arguing with her brothers, like a lot of sisters did. Would her pet want to go back to being normal one day if she had ever been normal at all?
Next time: Kim decides to show Shego around town and they run into Kim’s original mistress. Whoa, wait, her original mistress? She’s going to have some explaining to do.