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Enter the Naked Mole Rat	By : kwh Category: Kim Possible > Threesomes/Moresomes Views: 18153 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Kim Possible, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 21
- 22
- 23
It hadn't been her fault, decided Kim, as she took her shiny new suitcase from the immaculately turned out chauffeur. Temptation had been placed unavoidably in her way. When the boutique staff had decanted themselves into the Dragon Queen Suite yesterday evening, they had come very well provided with rails of clothes that they felt were appropriate for Kim, along with several fashion models and even a master of ceremonies to commentate on the impromptu fashion show. The one thing that hadn't been on display were price tags, presumably on the principle that if you needed to ask what it cost you probably couldn't afford it. The very slinky little black dress she had selected for dinner looked innocuous enough; had she known then that it was by 'Chanel' and thus not merely expensive but obscenely and ridiculously so, she would have left it on the rail. And of course, having sold her the dress, they wouldn't hear of her not completing the ensemble with 'the matching accessories', in the form of a pair of incredibly expensive and impractical hand-crafted high heel shoes, hand-stitched black silk cami-knickers and a strapless bra that both fitted perfectly and actually supported things (so she knew it must be horribly expensive). But the pièce de résistance of the whole ensemble, were the fine fishnet stockings, and the associated garter belt, which she had actually worn under the dress to complete the outfit when she went to dinner. The sumptuous gourmet feast that followed in the hotel restaurant was better than she could have ever even imagined it might be. And, before she stepped into her private elevator on the way down to partake of it, she stared at herself in the mirror for a while and came to the conclusion that she had never actually looked hotter in her life. The stockings and suspenders in particular and quite unexpectedly made her feel as outrageously sexy as the visible ensemble made her look. Perhaps, she had decided, she would need to give this outfit one more try back in Middleton before she donated it to charity. Ron would absolutely love it, she had reflected, before frowning as she realised how much she missed having him around.
Reality slightly intruded after dinner when Kim discovered that said expensive new outfit wouldn't fit in her battered holdall, but she solved that problem by acquiring a very nice suitcase on wheels from the boutique team, into which both her new and outrageously costly outfit and the contents of her trusty holdall fitted with ease. She had a horrible feeling that the price of the case that Lo Pin had just purchased for her would comfortably exceed the price of an equivalent item at Middleton Smarty Mart by a factor of many, but it was either that or leave the uber-hot new look behind at the hotel, and she wasn't about to do that!
Hotel beds, even King Size four poster ones with three foot thick mattresses, apparently couldn't protect her from the nightmares the way a first class airline seat could, unfortunately, but that morning, rather than 'dressing for breakfast', she had eaten a marvellously decadent breakfast cooked for her by her own chef on a kitchen range that rose from the floor of her suite on demand. Then, dressed in the now freshly laundered clothes she had flown into Hong Kong wearing, she hit the private elevator for the final time to check out, and to meet the car that Lo Pin had arranged to take her, via many of the sights of Hong Kong, to her dockside rendezvous.
Kim waited until the Rolls Royce had pulled serenely away, leaving her alone with her suitcase and an empty, wind-blown access road adjacent to the container terminal on Stonecutter's Island; after a few moments, she sauntered into the shadow of a giant shipping container and took a good look around to ensure that she wasn't being observed.
Then she pulled the Kimunicator from her pocket and said "Hi Wade! What's the sitch?".
Wade's face blinked into view and he said "Hi Kim!". Then a moment or two later he added "Woah! Kim, what have you done to your eyebrows?".
"Spa treatment, Wade. It's a girl thing. Is there anything I need to know before I temporarily say goodbye?"
"They look.. different, Kim," he said. "Good, though!" he added quickly, before continuing "No news on Shego, Kim. CIA still looking, Global Justice still looking, nobody wants to stop searching until they find... something. I really don't see any way she could have made it, though, Kim...".
"I know, Wade", sighed Kim. "Have you heard anything from Ron?".
"Sorry Kim. If I do hear from him before we talk again, is there anything you'd like me to tell him?".
'Yes', thought Kim, sighing inwardly. 'But definitely nothing I'd want to tell him via an about to be 11 year old boy!'.
"Tell him I'm thinking of him, Wade. But I've got to go and sign in now, I think, so I guess this is goodbye for a couple of days!",
"OK, Kim. I'll try and get the Kimunicator to you as soon after you reach the island as I can, so hopefully you won't be out of contact for very long...", said Wade reassuringly.
"You rock Wade!", replied Kim. "Shall I just leave you here?".
"Kim, please throw the Kimunicator as high up into the air as you can for me. We'll speak very soon!", said Wade.
"Bye Wade!", said Kim, and then windmilled her right arm a couple of times to build up speed and released the blue plastic high-tech gizmo skywards.
The Kimunicator rocketed into the wide blue yonder, and then just as it lost momentum and started to plummet towards the adjacent dockside, a pair of wings sprung from the casing along with a small propellor which immediately started to spin, and the Kimunicator stopped falling, then started a spiral climb into the sky. In due course it landed on top of a very tall dockyard crane, where it retracted it's wings and appeared to settle in for a long wait.
Kim picked up her suitcase and began to walk happily and nonchalantly along Ngong Wan Road towards the distant quayside marquee with the large multi-coloured flags fluttering above it. 'Spa treatments, expensive boutique shopping, a luxury cruise and then a chance to spend a few days safely indulging my favourite hobby in an island paradise; if more missions were like this one, this saving the world thing might get to be pretty popular! I'll have to remember all this next time I'm being eaten alive in some foul smelling swamp somewhere while people try to kill me… '. She reminded herself not to think about who was paying for all this hedonism, nor to think about the ever lengthening list of unpleasant things that she had compartmentalised away for now and that would all be waiting for her to deal with when she got home, lest she ruined her whole 'dream vacation' vibe.
She had, at least, timed her arrival perfectly; the flap on the tent was being opened up for the day just as she approached...

oOo
As Kim walked into her reception centre, at one minute past nine in the morning Hong Kong time, she was entirely unaware that Ron was climbing into a leather-upholstered mini-van with blacked out windows at the foot of Mount Yamanouchi in Japan, and setting out on the journey to an almost identical centre just across the harbour from her.
It had started as a typical morning at Yamanouchi, which is to say 'at 5 AM'. Ron, who had managed to get an almost reasonable amount of sleep despite his revelatory nocturnal adventures, was re-united with Rufus in the mess hall over breakfast. There was only time for one more training session before they needed to leave for the airport, and Ron's assumption that his imminent departure would preclude his participation proved hopelessly optimistic.
Sensei had been waiting for him when he left the mess hall. "Master Stoppable, in ancient times before a Monkey Master left Yamanouchi to do duty as a guardian of Sosumiha there was a set of tests he was expected to have already passed. Of those tests, it seems you also have passed all but one, and it seems a pity not to complete them all for the sake of tradition. Therefore, Master Stoppable, I have taken the liberty...".
Ron had been less than amused at learning that it was 'his honour' to spend an hour in the main courtyard being soaked by the freezing early morning rain and wearing a blindfold, while the entire student body and all the faculty each got the chance to throw a very sharp spear at him to wish him on his way; nevertheless, the mystical monkey power was more than equal to the task, judging by the lack of spear holes in Toshimiru's imposing physique.
Now, though, he was back in his own body, and wearing the previously exploded clothes he had arrived at Yamanouchi wearing, over his incredible expanding Shinobi Shozeki. They had been painstakingly stitched back together by somebody (Ron hadn't asked who) at Yamanouchi but were designed to come apart again in exactly the same way they had before, next time they were put under pressure, this time without the pain though.
It was four minutes after eight in the morning, Japanese time, when the mini-van pulled away from the kerb, with Ron, Rufus and Sensei sitting together in the facing back seats. As they drove towards the Expressway, Sensei handed Ron the key to a secure left luggage locker in the main terminal at Hong Kong Chek Lap Kok, where he could leave his Ron Stoppable identity behind temporarily and collect a wooden travel trunk containing Saru Chonoryouko's rather unimaginative luggage, which had been shipped on ahead. From there, he simply needed to take a taxi to the reception centre mentioned on the invitation, and the first, if least difficult and risky phase of the operation would have been a success.
It was all going exceedingly well. Until, directly after they joined the Expressway towards the airport, they ground to a dead halt, locked into three lanes of completely stationary traffic…

oOo
Shego meanwhile was approaching Hong Kong in the pilot's seat of the Tajiri oil minister's Airbus A340-8000, having used almost all of the plane's 8,000 mile cruise range in order to misdirect the attentions of it's overly inquisitive owner. Even now, Shego knew, a very expensively assembled crack surveillance team would be looking at their watches in Vancouver and fidgeting, wondering when she, or her alter ego at least, was going to arrive, while she was about to briefly appear on almost the very opposite side of the world, and then vanish into thin air before their employer's client, the Sheikh, could do anything about it. She yawned expansively. She had made a point of getting a good night's sleep in the desert the previous night, and she had been able to take the odd catnap while the plane cruised through lightly trafficked Chinese airspace on automatics, but she would still be happy when she could find a bed. Even if everything went to plan, that would be a few hours away. If it didn't, who knew when she might be able to sleep again?
She was about an hour out from touching down at Hong Kong when she decided it was time to try to save the Sheikha's legend for another day. She reached for the PA microphone, called the main cabin and proceeded to explain to the entire crew in terms that if they told anybody that the Sheikha Mustaffa had flown the Oil Minister's flying palace all the way from the Emirate of Tajiristan to Hong Kong, they would not be believed and would be at best fired for lying, at worst… well, the Emirate had fairly crude standards of 'justice' to say the least. If by any chance, they were believed, Shego further explained, then they would be fired or worse for dereliction of duty instead of sedition, but the outcome would be the same. But if they said nothing, nobody would ever be any the wiser about what had happened and they would keep their jobs and all live happily ever after. Obviously she laid it on pretty thickly, but she had logic on her side, and she was banking on the fact that the crew of the oil minister's flying palace were not particularly stupid, and thus unlikely to turn self-destructive tattle-tale for no reward. Shego knew that the Sheikh had no interest in seeing her dead, since her death would very likely lead to his own death very shortly thereafter, that meant that if one of the crew did talk to the Sheikh, it wouldn't be Shego who regretted it. However, the merest hint shared more widely that the Sheikha might not be who she claimed to be would invite scrutiny that she was currently able to entirely avoid, just by virtue of who people assumed she was, and who they assumed her husband was (i.e. the notoriously fickle oil minister of a small autocratic kleptocracy with 10% of the world's known oil reserves, distributed more or less at his whim) . At the moment, everybody's main focus was on not doing anything to the Sheikha that might offend the Sheikh. It wouldn't take much to start customs and immigration officials asking themselves 'Who is under that Burkha?' and at that point, the Sheikha would be a busted flush for her in future.
After a while, she carefully popped the breakers for the satellite phones and the on-board internet connection back in, and kept her fingers crossed.
Half an hour later, just as she was beginning her descent, she called the Captain to the cabin-crew phone and told him to come to the cockpit. When he knocked on the door, Shego let him in, dressed once again in the full Burkha and silk gloves she had worn when she had boarded the plane, and then ushered him to the commanders chair. "Please, have your aeroplane, Captain", said Shego in Arabic, as she arranged herself in the jump seat. " We are just approaching Hong Kong - the approach plate is on your table there. We have been cleared down to Flight Level zero-seven-five for now, we have a landing slot with no hold expected, and fuel is comfortably above minima. You'll find that Air Traffic Control are convinced they have been talking to you all through this trip not to me, and that you filed the change to the flight plan that bought us here not long after we took off. Don't question it, just accept it. I don't think there is anything else you need to know that you can't work out for yourself, so I'm going back to sit in the more comfortable seats now…"
The Captain was as white as a sheet and clearly had trouble processing what he was hearing, but he sensibly elected to just roll with the punches and get on with it for the sake of his continued career. It seemed that he'd be landing the plane alone (or at least monitoring the auto-land alone), though, because as he explained to Shego, the co-pilot, a good Muslim who had never touched alcohol in his life, had come to the conclusion the previous evening that with a supposedly completely uneducated, illiterate peasant woman flying the plane, he would be dead by morning, and decided to make sure it wouldn't hurt by quaffing the Sheikh's expensive single malt in quantity. Or, as Shego said reassuringly to the Captain, "You mean surely that he was struck down with a bad case of food poisoning just before landing? That's what I heard you say, anyway…".
The die was cast now, they would certainly be landing in Hong Kong , whatever else the crew decided to do individually or collectively later; there was no fuel to go anywhere else! Shego had done all she could, and she thought on balance that she had probably done enough, so she gathered her luggage and headed back to the opulent luxury of her stateroom, past various members of crew who tended to stare at her wide-eyed as she passed them. She locked her door behind her and headed for the bed. There was just time for one final catnap before they landed…

oOo
On the Kowloon side of Victoria Harbour, ignored by the bustling lighters and barges, bypassed by the scudding sampans and water taxis, a giant bulk carrier floated unnoticed at anchor amongst the other ships in harbour . A particularly observant merchant shipping spotter might have noticed that 'Arenesto Dawn', nominally out of Panama, showed less lights at night than the average ship moored in the harbour, or that it's dual anchor chains were rustier and encrusted with more weed than those of other ships moored nearby, but on any given day it looked to the casual observer just like every other ship in the harbour. Only the fact that it hadn't moved from the same spot for 18 months made it obvious that it was, in fact, mothballed until there was enough cargo available to make it worth crewing and putting back into trade. Until then, it languished at anchor in Victoria Harbour, 'crewed' only by a single caretaker, whose job was to ensure that nobody 'borrowed' any vital components, or indeed the entire ship, as it sat otherwise unguarded in the middle of the busy port.
Anybody observing the vessel this day would have noticed the caretaker standing on the starboard bridge wing of the dark and silent bulk carrier, peering across the busy waters of Victoria Harbour with a pair of battered binoculars.
But they would have been mistaken. The caretaker was still in bed in the Captain's cabin below, fast asleep under the influence of a powerful narcotic. Only his jacket, binoculars and woolly hat were up on the bridge wing at present, and they were currently being modelled by Agent Du, Will Du, crack Global Justice covert operative. He was paying particular attention to one particular sampan that moved slowly through the congested waters of the harbour, powered quaintly by paddle alone, and which carried a striking red-headed teenager sitting cross-legged on the prow.
In due course, the sampan pulled alongside the rearmost of the line of four junks, and Agent Du watched until Kim Possible and her distinctly up-market suitcase were safely aboard. As the sampan headed back whence it came, Will Du headed into the wheelhouse, and spoke quietly into his sleeve.
"Rapier calling Irish Eyes, Rapier calling Irish Eyes, the vixen is in the hen-house, repeat, the vixen is now in the hen-house. Over!"
Then he put his index finger into his ear and appeared to listen for a moment, before once again speaking into his sleeve.
"Roger, Rapier Out!".
Then he headed back down to the Captain's cabin, replaced the jacket, woolly hat and binoculars on the hooks where he had earlier found them, then donned the flippers, tank and mask he had stashed here when he had first arrived before dawn.
Ten minutes later, he was sliding rapidly, arm over arm, down the forward anchor chain, and disappearing with barely a splash beneath the filthy waters of Victoria Harbour.

oOo
'This is bad' thought Ron. They hadn't moved for forty-five minutes , which was coincidentally more than their entire margin of error for making Ron's flight to Hong Kong. Sensei had been making phone calls from the car for the last half an hour; apparently GSM sometimes trumps astral projection in a crisis. It turned out that there had been a series of minor earthquakes a little earlier that morning near Mount Hamkenjutsi and they had closed the expressway while highway engineers inspected it for structural damage. It looked like Ron wouldn't be making his flight, or the tournament, but Sensei was busy trying to cobble together an emergency 'Plan B'.
After a little while, the back to back conversations Sensei was having seemed to become slightly less desperate and slightly more business-like; it seemed that the without access to the cuff's innate fluency in old high Japanese, the few words and partial phrases that Ron had learnt to try to modernise Saru Chonoryouko's archaic use of language were of no more use than a dozen pieces of a 1,000 piece jigsaw might be in seeing the bigger picture, so Ron had no idea what Sensei had in mind, but he was all ears when Sensei eventually spoke to him in English…
"Master Stoppable, members of our alumni association will hold the plane on the ground by subterfuge until you arrive. If you leave your own luggage with me, I will have it shipped back to your home in Middleton. Hirotaka-San will be here in a few minutes. Carry only the essentials you will need to get to Hong Kong. You must don the hood of your Shinobi-Shozeki and wear the cuff of Sosumiha for the trip to the airport. But please remove the pants and sweater first, Master Stoppable, you will need them in one piece for your flight. Roll them up and secrete them inside your Shinobi-Shozeki, along with your passport, the tickets and the key to the left luggage locker. You must also secrete the Lotus Blade about your person. Quickly, we do not have much time…".
A few minutes later, the roar of a powerful motorcycle with a distinctly non-stock exhaust system heralded Hirotaka's arrival alongside the mini-van, between the van's sliding side door and the curtain-sided trailer of an 18-wheeler that provided a little cover for Ron as he hopped out. He came face to face with Hirotaka-san wearing a black visor, black helmet and black armoured leather astride a very large gloss-black bike. "Stoppable-San!" he said, and handed Ron a helmet that he had been carrying over his elbow, but it was no good - Toshimiru's head was just too damned big, so the unused helmet was quickly deposited in the mini-van with Ron's luggage, and he slung his leg over the back of the bike. It was only as he was putting his feet on the pillion pegs that he started wondering what make and model of machine it actually was, and then he was tapping Hirotaka-San on the shoulder and saying "OK, Go….Wooooaaaah!!!"; Hirotaka-San dropped the clutch and gave the throttle a good tweak, discovering in the process what approaching 300lbs of muscle hanging over the tailpiece of his bike would do to front-rear equilibrium, as he wheelied at speed for about a hundred metres between the lanes of stationary traffic, stopping the bike flipping with judicious use of the back brake, before dropping the front wheel gently back on to the tarmac so that Ron could use the leverage of the top of his feet under Hirotaka's armpits to regain a sitting position. Ron eventually put his feet back on the pillion pegs, then shuffled forward and secured a decent hold on both the tank and the grab-rail behind him.
'Oh man… I should be doing the riding', thought Ron. 'That way I might get to the airport alive!'.
As Hirotaka was winding the bike noisily into the power band in third gear, and as he jinked left and right to snake between the haphazardly arranged lines of immobile cars, trucks and vans, Ron was having yet another jaw-dropping flashback, reminding him of something he had experienced the previous night… 'I wonder if this is real' he thought, "...because if it is, that would be sooooo cool...".
At that moment, the bike shot out from between the queuing cars, jinked around a couple of plastic road cones and shot past a motorcycle cop who had apparently just been woken up by the cacophonous scream of the unbaffled exhaust on Hirotaka's steed. A few seconds later, with Hirotaka winding it up through the gears, the throttle pinned wide open, and the front wheel pawing the air at each gear change, they blew past two more cones, shaved the top layer of paint off a small van, and then shot in between a man with a theodolite and his assistant with inches to spare, leaving them both sitting on the tarmac wondering what just happened. Ron noticed, when he looked around, that the moto cop who had been holding back the traffic was now in hot pursuit, although Ron doubted that a police spec VFR-800 had a chance of catching them on 25 miles of empty expressway, given a suitably throttle-happy rider on… what was this… a big Kawasaki, Ron guessed? He may only ride a tiny scooter, but in his mind's eye he was a fearless biker on an iron horse , and he entertained himself drooling over all the high-performance motorcycles he would be buying any day now to replace the scooter. Any day being a date related to the point where his parents throwing him out of the house for buying a 'death machine' (as actuaries are often wont to describe the bikes their relatives are about to buy themselves) wouldn't inconvenience him too much, and then just as soon as he invented another fast food phenomenon that would allow him to pay for it...
He wasn't wondering about the manufacturer and model of Hirotaka's bike for more than half a second though, because the earthquake had obviously caused some 'rippling' of the road surface, which was… more than a little unpleasant at... he glanced… 160 mph and climbing... on a bike where the rear suspension preload was still set up for Hirotaka on his own, rather than Hirotaka plus two normal men on the tailpiece; his internal organs bouncing off his rib-cage wasn't the nicest sensation, but at least he was now firmly locked to the bike and unlikely to fly off the back, he reflected. Another source of unpleasantness was the ever increasing wind-blast on his helmetless, if hooded, face, although ducking down behind Hirotaka as best he could helped a little with that. He found looking backwards more comfortable, at least for his eyes, so he was able to see the VFR-800P he had first identified vanish into the distance, and then two more joined the expressway just behind the... 'Hey! Ninja's on a Ninja! Cool!!'..., red lights flashing in perfect if coincidental synchronisation, and then also faded backwards into the far distance. A helicopter had obviously been waiting over the expressway to pick them up and continue the chase as they rocketed towards the airport, and Ron yelled 'Helicopter!' to Hirotaka to warn him of the hovering spy in the sky; he might as well have whispered for all the good it did at 160mph. Nevertheless, Hirotaka did in due course suddenly stretch the throttle cable tight; Ron realised that he must have looked in his mirrors, which Ron had earlier noticed were equipped with little circular stick-on convex blind-spot mirrors that covered the sky as well as the more conventional lateral blind-spots. At something close to 190mph, even with over 500lb of well muscled and decidedly un-aerodynamic cargo aboard, the top speed of Hirotaka's bollide was clearly sufficient to pull away from the presumably police helicopter in a straight line, but even the slightest curve saw the chopper cut the corner and start to reel them in. At 180mph+, with Hirotaka-san hunched behind the low screen as far as possible, and Ron unable to fold his massive body into the small space remaining behind him on the pillion seat without vanishing off the back of the bike, merely staying in place became a workout and a half, as the buffeting battered his body, pummelled his face and tried to tear his head off if he lifted it a millimetre from Hirotaka's back. Only his vice like grip on the grab rail, and now round Hirotaka's waist prevented him from bouncing down the road behind the bike, a receding dot in Hirotaka's mirrors himself! At 180mph even gentle expressway curves become hugely challenging corners as Hirotaka had to shift weight to the inside in order not to run out of ground clearance with the softly suspended behemoth and catapult them both into the central divider at "strawberry jam" speed, leaving Ron to have to choose between moving his own huge bodyweight to the inside which might help Hirotaka keep the engine cases off the expressway, and staying where he was, thus avoiding unsettling the bike and provoking a loss of grip or control. When Hirotaka was hanging off the motorcycle in one corner at in excess of 190 mph indicated, with his knee, ankle and boot sliders all smoking away as they were burnt through by the fast moving asphalt, and with occasional showers of sparks indicating that the very solid left hand exhaust collector was lightly skimming the road surface, the decision was made for him; he either hung off in unison with Hirotaka in future fast corners, or hit the concrete divider right next to him when Hirotaka managed to lever the back tyre off the ground! Then, through streaming eyes, he saw something that looked suspiciously like it might be a Nissan GTR, but covered in red and blue flashing lights, join the expressway a quarter of a mile behind them and started to reel them very slowly in even at over a ton-eighty mph.
The car had eaten up maybe half its initial distance deficit when Hirotaka-san suddenly peeled up an exit slip road, stood the bike on its nose on the brakes, and started jinking through heavy traffic once again, heading in to the airport, at which point the ultra high performance police car that had been chasing them down might as well have been a school bus. However, in its place two more VFR800P's joined the chase, and in this tight, congested traffic slalom space they had the legs on Hirotaka's big black beast, the police pilots skillfully lobbing their smaller lighter charges from scraping one engine protection bar to dragging the other, sirens wailing and red lights flashing, as they ate up the gap between themselves and Hirotaka-san's back wheel hand over fist. And then, just as it looked like they might be caught, as the two expertly ridden Hondas jinked up the right hand side of an airport bus directly behind them, Hirotaka suddenly turned sharp left, left the road and shot down a pedestrian underpass, spinning the back wheel around on the throttle at the bottom of the first half of the wheelchair ramp and then shooting back under the road and off up a pedestrian walkway towards the airport terminal. Apparently Hirotaka had successfully hung the two bike cops out to dry in traffic and at the vital moment they just hadn't been able to get into the pedestrian underpass for a few tens of seconds, just enough time that suddenly Hirotaka was turning sharp left again and they were bouncing down a set of steps into a dark service tunnel. At which point he jammed the brakes on, elbowed Ron hard in the ribs and said "Good luck, Stoppable-san", before dropping the clutch again and roaring off almost from under him as he staggered backwards. Within a handful of seconds, he was effectively invisible, employing the dark arts of the Stone Monkey to blend seamlessly into the shadows at the base of the concrete tunnel wall, as two Honda VFR-800P's bounced down the steps and shot past, V4 engines roaring, red beacons flashing and sirens wailing, in pursuit of Hirotaka's tyre-smoking progress.
Less than a minute later, a blond haired gaijin kid in cargo pants and a sweater climbed the steps out of the service tunnel, looked up curiously at the police helicopter circling overhead, and waved cheerily. The camera operator on the helicopter took one look at him, and aimed the camera away towards the other end of the service tunnel on the grounds that he bore no physical resemblance whatsoever to either of the individuals on the recklessly ridden motorcycle. The helicopter shot off towards the other end of the tunnel, and Ron followed the pedestrian path towards the terminal and the nine AM flight to Hong Kong, currently showing as 'boarding delayed' for the last 45 minutes due to a small technical fault that was shortly going to be miraculously resolved.

oOo
Just as Ron's plane was turning on to the active runway and lining up for take-off, with the man himself looked disinterestedly at the in-flight magazine and worried about Hirotaka-san's fate, the Sheikha Mustapha was climbing into an embassy limousine having just left the airport terminal in Hong Kong via the VIP entrance.
Now she sat alone in the back of the bullet-proof Bentley, with a chauffeur in front, the Tajiri Ambassador in a similar chauffeur driven limousine in front of them, embassy bodyguards in a car behind, royal pennants of the House of Tajiri flying from the wings of all the cars, and two motorcycle outriders from the Hong Kong police leading the way with sirens blaring, clearing a path through the traffic as best they could manage. This counted as a low key welcome from the embassy. 'Hiding in plain sight' thought Shego. She had only called the embassy to forewarn them of her arrival and request a limo to take her to her destination, fifteen minutes before they had actually landed; by now the Sheikh would know that she wasn't flying in to Vancouver, but there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
In due course, after a long drive into Kowloon, the convoy pulled into the driveway of an exclusive private clinic. Shego stepped out of her limo, walked up to the ambassadors ' limousine and tapped on his bullet proof window. When it slid down, Shego said 'Mr Ambassador, thank you for meeting me. I trust I am assured of your complete discretion?'. Shego was, of course, none too subtly hinting that the Sheikha's visit to the clinic was related to some medical condition that might bring great embarrassment to the nation. He nodded his assent, and Shego said 'Please return to the embassy, I will be in contact if I need assistance…', and then walked back to her own limo to collect her luggage from the embassy chauffeur-bodyguard. By the time she was checking in to the clinic, and filling in the admissions forms using a disposable identity, the convoy was half-way back to the Tajiri embassy. Shego had paid for a private room in advance for a fortnight via the same one-shot disposable identity she had booked the room with but she didn't intend to be there for a single one of the colonic irrigation sessions she had scheduled for herself. In fact, as soon as she was inside the private room in question, she closed the blinds, and pulled off the Burkha, though not the white silk gloves. The Burkha went on a hanger in the wardrobe, and then she pulled a green hold-all out of the big suitcase. Firing up her finger, she erased the gold 'Diplomatic Bag' legend from the attaché case, and then pulled the small laptop out of the bigger suitcase, popped the solid state disk drive out of it, and headed for the en-suite bathroom, where she melted the CCD drive containing all the evidence of her flight plan shenanigans into charcoal and flushed the resulting ash down the toilet. Then she looked in the mirror and checked that the bandages swathing her head were in good order, and that the visible plastic splint around her nose was also still in position. Then, heading back to the well appointed private room, she pulled a silk robe out of the big suitcase, and dropped the entirely untraceable remnants of the laptop back into it. Finally she gave everything a good blast of 'bye-bye fingerprints' and donned the silk robe, checking as she did so to confirm that the small electric screwdriver was still in the pocket. Next, she threw the holdall and the attaché case up on top of the wardrobe, and was about to hop up after them when she remembered that she was still not quite 100% yet and therefore shouldn't push her luck unless she absolutely had to, so she climbed up to join the slightly rationalised luggage via the window sill. She took a quick glance at her watch, which told her that she still had ten minutes to reach the ambulance bay downstairs, where she was scheduled for a patient transfer to another hospital for a revision to a failed nose job under yet another disposable identity. She had three more elaborate 'Russian Doll' games lined up before she headed to the reception centre, and that should be more then enough misdirection to lose the Sheikh's hired sleuths when they eventually turned up in Hong Kong to look for her.
But for now, she had nine minutes to complete a short drop down two floors via the ventilation shaft behind the grill she was about to remove, and then three more floors via a disused laundry chute straight to the ambulance bay. She gave the electric screwdriver a quick 'whizz' and turned her attention to the screws securing the grill…

oOo

The mobile phone rang loudly and rudely, sharing the theme from classic 1970's Britcop series 'The Sweeney' with both occupants of the double bed in the tiny bedsit in Clapham. At first nobody stirred. The phone rang out, and then very quickly started ringing again. One occupant of the bed snored loudly. The other hid under the duvet and tried to ignore the cacophony. Eventually, a tousled and bleary eyed peroxide-blonde head appeared from under the covers, and a female voice said 'Shut the fuck UP!', testily. The owner of the voice, sometime exotic dancer and in recent years, on and off barmaid at the Dog and Firkin, scrabbled for the bedside lamp and eventually succeeded in turning it on. But only after she had variously knocked cigarettes, lighter, an empty wine glass and a half full ashtray onto the floor, and sworn again. Then, she lent over the side of the bed, towards the source of the music; the phone had stopped ringing and then restarted yet again. She groaned and dived into the pile of clothing, tossing aside a leopard-skin print nylon thong, the matching lycra body, a pair of skinny jeans and a wonder-bra, until she came to a pair of cheap suit trousers. She found the phone in one of the pockets, and held down the power button until it shut down, and more importantly from her point of view, stopped ringing. Then she stuffed it back in the pocket and dropped the trousers on the floor, turned the bedside lamp off, and rolled back under the duvet. She hadn't been planning on bringing company home tonight, especially not company that would cost her sleep by having a mobile phone that some arsehole would ring him on at 2 am, but the copper laying alongside her had a cheeky grin and a marvellous way with words. Also, crumpled, careworn, horny and rat-arsed was admittedly very rarely an attractive combination, but Foster carried it off so well that she was standing next to her own bed and clasping his drunken head between her ample and freshly released bosoms while he made a very childish raspberry noise and shook his head vigorously from side to side, before she even remembered that she needed to be up early (for her) the next morning.
She noticed that the snoring had stopped, and opened her eyes again. A roguishly attractive, if somewhat bleary-eyed face had appeared in front of her. "Morning Gorgeous'", said DI Foster. "Can't get enough of me, can you Dawn?".
'It's Maria, not Dawn, you tactless tosser!', thought Maria. 'Dawn got homesick and moved back to Newcastle, and I'm obviously helping out at the pub by temporarily filling the vacancy she left in more ways than one!', but she didn't say anything out loud. And then she felt his warm hand sliding insidiously into the still damp sticky void between her legs, as he breathed beery fumes over her and she realised that yes, since she was awake now, another bang from the forces of law and order would be both quite good fun and would help her get back to sleep.
She grinned lecherously, gently grasped his balls and began to fondle them, pulled herself towards him across the bed and kissed him enthusiastically. "Open Wide!", said Foster, with only a slight slur to his voice now, as he rolled her onto her back and gently prised her legs apart with his knee.
"No you don't, you cheeky bastard, haven't you ever heard of foreplay?", she asked, in a slightly peeved tone, not that she stopped fondling his nuts or tried to close her legs. "Heard of it, yeah!", he grinned impishly as he positioned himself between her thighs. "But my boat seems to do the trick just as well…"
'The trick?', she thought. 'What trick? Do you mean that your boat… err… boat race, face… is enough to get me wet enough and turned on enough that I am actually looking forward to being penetrated by an unreconstructed Neanderthal throwback like you, without any kind of basic warm-up action or common fucking courtesy? I'm amazed that people like you even still exist! What the hell did my mother burn her bra for anyway?'
She scooched down the bed slightly, opened her legs just a little further and tilted her hips back to give him easier access, as she reached forward with her mouth and kissed the end of his nose provocatively.
'This is utterly ridiculous! It's obviously that fanny-dampeningly cheeky grin that does it...' , she thought...

oOo
It was around two in the afternoon when the taxi driver helped the hideously burned blind woman out of his taxi at the dockside. She thanked him very politely in mandarin, and gave him a reasonable tip, as she unfolded her white stick. He had picked her up outside the main shopping centre on Hong Kong Island, where she stood at the kerb with her attaché case and pink holdall, hopefully holding up a cardboard sign stuck to her white 'feeler' that said 'Taxi'. She wore a long sleeved, floral smock dress that obviously hid a great many terrible burn scars, judging by the compression bandages she wore on her horribly contorted hands and covering her face, not to mention the fact that she also wore all but opaque dark glasses and carried a white stick, making it blatantly obvious that whatever hideous calamity had befallen her had obviously taken her sight. He had of course been curious about what had happened to her, who wouldn't be? But it's not a question you'd ever feel comfortable asking, so of course he didn't. Four minutes after he drove away, a businessman in a suit flagged him down, and the old burnt blind woman evaporated completely from his mind, just like the ten thousand fares before her...

oOo
Shego tapped and swept her way with the white stick towards the reception desk, remaining 'in character' and then presented her invitation to the young man behind the desk.
"La Comptesse?" he asked.
"Oui!", she replied. Then "Yes…" with a heavy French accent when he looked blank. She saw him tapping away at a laptop ,obviously recording the fact that 'La Comptess D'Aurigny' had checked in, and out of the corner of her eye she caught sight of a flight case with a network switch and a router in, so she surmised that anybody who wanted to know when she arrived would now know.
She was guided quickly through the scanning arches, remaining once again in character, and waited while her attache case and hold-all were scanned. There was a minor delay when the tiny ear-bud she had used to listen in on the bug she had planted in Sheikh Mustaffa' s desk phone triggered an alarm, but fortunately Shego had tucked it into an outside pocket of the pink holdall (which she has stuffed inside a green holdall, and then jammed into the expensive suitcase) and then forgotten all about it, so it was easily retrieved at her direction, to be smashed by Lo-Pins flashily attired guards and dropped into the harbour, before the luggage was re-scanned.
Then, after a short wait, it was aboard a traditional sampan, which set off on a slow and somewhat sea-tossed meander across Victoria harbour, with her still playing up to her cameo as a badly burned blind woman; she chose to make the trip as much as possible below the gunwales of the sampan, so that the minimum number of people saw much of her as the little vessel made stately progress across the harbour.   'Atmospheric…   quaint… and a complete waste of time..', thought Shego dismissively, as they were tossed around by the choppy waters of Victoria Harbour, and forced to take a very indirect meandering route across the water to avoid being run over by any one of a hundred larger and/or faster vessels.
Shego was pretty sure that nobody around here, with the obvious exception of Lo Pin, knew that she was even alive, let alone in a small traditional wooden boat in the middle of an open expanse of water in Hong Kong (now that she had checked in, she knew that Lo Pin and at least some of his minions would know exactly where she was, so if she was wrong about all this, and this was merely a massively over elaborate attempt to kill her then right now would be the time when she found out; if she made it aboard one of the junks they were clearly heading towards without having to dodge bomb, bullet or being run over by a super-tanker then clearly there was more afoot than a mere crude assassination).
Eventually, the little sampan pulled alongside the leading junk of the four; this encouraged Shego - she had assumed that Lo Pin or whoever spoke for him would want to talk to Shego as much as she wanted to talk to Lo Pin, and she would have placed bets on Lo Pin, if he was here, being based aboard the lead ship in the little moored flotilla, even though the four junks looked identical to each other.
Actually, describing them as junks was probably not according these vessels the respect they deserved, thought Shego. She was passingly familiar with the modern single masted incarnation of the traditional Chinese junk, and from a distance these four-masted vessels looked very similar to the smaller but still large sailing vessels one could watch puttering about Victoria Harbour under motor power. Only when Shego got closer did it become clear that these vessels were far, far larger than the junks she had seen close up on the way out here. These were, in fact, monsters, and while there was a great deal of hardwood and traditional design in the ship her sampan was now being lashed to, there were clearly more modern materials and technology not far under the skin. The rows of large portholes along the flanks hinted at cabins, or perhaps staterooms, behind them. Shego could see automatic electric winches at the foot of various ropes, and the ropes themselves seemed to be something other than either traditional hemp or nylon. These were junks on steroids!
One of the two boatmen passed her two bags to a junk crewman who was dressed in similar style to the security crew back at the reception centre, and he immediately scampered away up the steps attached to the landing stage that was hanging against the side of the ship. The boatman then guided "blind" Shego to the steps over the gunwale of the sampan, and handed her over to a second crewman, who pulled her safely onto the platform by the arm. She thanked both parties in English in her best manufactured French accent, while looking vacantly into the middle distance, and allowed herself to be guided up the steps, and onto the deck. Once there, another crewman waited for her, although again she remained in character and feigned ignorace of his presence, as she unfolded her white stick, thanking the crewman who had helped her up the steps.
The patiently waiting crewman held his tongue until she had unfolded the multi-segmented white feeler and then spoke… "Bienvenue à bord, la comtesse, Monsieur Lo Pin a été désespéré de vous rencontrer. Puis-je vous montrer à sa cabine et de vous présenter?". Without skipping a beat, Shego replied "Merci beaucoup, jeune homme. Vous n'avez aucune idée à quel point je suis impatient de rencontrer Monsieur Lo Pin. S'il vous plaît avance sur! Est-ce que quelqu'un d'apporter mes sacs pour moi?". Her guide bowed slightly and then spoke quickly in Mandarin, tasking one of the two duty gangway crew members to carry La Comptesse d'Aurigny's bags. The 'greeter' then skilfully guided an ostensibly blind Shego towards the stern of the vessel, successfully preventing her from walking into any of the ship's rigging or other obstacles, yet doing so without either manhandling her or appearing to be overly attentive. Shego suspected that despite the DragonFist gi, this guy was probably Lo Pin's butler, and by the looks of him, a very well trained butler at that!
In due course they arrived at a door set into the front of the raised poop deck and the greeter/butler knocked on the door. A commanding voice emanated from the intercom and said "Yes?" in Mandarin. "La Comptesse D'Aurigny is here, Sir!", said 'the Butler'. "Ah… EXCELLENT! Please show her in, and then leave us alone!".
"Yes, sir!", said the chap who Shego was ever more convinced was Lo Pin's butler. He opened the door to her employer's cabin and showed her over the threshold, before saying '... et vos sacs sont là, Madame la comtesse ...', obviously having taken her bags from the temporarily press-ganged porter and deposited them just inside the door.
A deep booming voice said, with a barely detectable chinese accent, "Aha! Bonjour, Madam la Comptesse! ". As she looked for the source of the words, the room suddenly darkened significantly as the blinds flicked closed en masse. When half a second later the artificial lights came on. Shego's dark glasses lay where she had been standing just inside the door, while she herself was halfway across the room in a low defensive stance.
She relaxed but only slightly, as Lo Pin's booming laugh filled the large cabin and Shego finally spotted him sitting at a large desk at the far end of the cabin. "A thousand apologies, La Comptesse… or should I call you Ms Go? I thought you would appreciate the discretion afforded by the blinds. That disguise must be… quite uncomfortable!".
Shego raised an eyebrow. "Actually, yes I do, and yes it is uncomfortable. And it is definitely not Ms Go! Shego is just fine. For my friends and enemies alike."
"Very well, Shego it is. Please, please, come and sit down, relax. I imagine that you have some questions?", said Lo Pin.
Shego did indeed have some questions. She pulled herself upright, anxious not to betray the pain that the instinctive dive and roll had caused to bloom in her right shoulder and left thigh. Still, she didn't seem to have set her recovery back any, and the pain was receding quickly. She walked warily over to her bags, keeping one eye on Lo Pin as she did so, then headed back towards Lo Pin, making a conscious effort not to limp. In front of Lo Pin's large desk she found a large and very inviting couch, so she deposited the holdall and the attache case in front of it and then sat herself down on the comfortable soft leather, arranging herself decorously, and trying to appear relaxed, though inwardly she was still a coiled spring.
"Please, may I offer you a drink, Shego?", asked Lo Pin. Shego eyed him critically. He wasn't in the first flush of youth, with a mane of white hair that Shego was sure was natural but made him look older than he actually was. He was a tall, imposing man in early middle-age, who looked to be in very good shape. He affected a very distinctive and long moustache, which in many contexts would have looked ridiculous, but seemed entirely appropriate for a man who had his own criminal empire, martial arts school and a blue-riband martial arts tournament. He wore a rather more ornate version of the gi worn by his guards, only in a very fetching crimson rather than pale blue.
"Maybe later, thank you", said Shego, evenly, as she pulled off the compression bandages on her hands and discarded the plastic splints she had used to temporarily hold her fingers into a deformed claw shape. Then she held her two hands up, fingers outstretched and there was the briefest flash of green flame as she disposed of the minimal make-up she had used on the exposed parts of her hand to both conceal the green tinge, and also to hint at further serious burn damage under the bandages.   Then she asked "So… why am I here?".
"Shego, this year is the tenth anniversary of my establishing the Dragon Fist academy, after the tragic death of my father. It has always been my intention that this year I would invite the worlds greatest exponents of the martial arts to participate in my annual tournament, and it has equally been my ambition for as long as I have held that intention that you should be one of them. When I heard of your tragic death shortly before I was due to despatch the invitations, I was devastated. When I heard that there was a chance that you were still among the living, I was overjoyed, and I took immediate steps to invite you, in such a way that only you would receive the invitation. If I was wrong, and La Comptesse was somebody other than you, then you would not have seen the invitation. I was also aware that if it was you, you had gone to considerable effort not to announce your continued survival, and I did not want to do anything that might compromise that, partly out of common courtesy, and partly because I do not wish to attract the kind of attention to my tournament that your… overt… participation would bring. Also, there would be no point in inviting you if you either could not attend, or if my invitation were to result in… further unpleasantness for you. You can only die so many times before it becomes… permanent. I must say that until you checked in an hour ago, I really had no idea whether you were still alive, let alone whether you would accept my invitation. I am so very happy that you are here! You are clearly as resourceful as your reputation would suggest! ". He smiled winningly.
Shego smiled back, though she was inwardly scowling. "Well, I'm pleased that you are impressed. But I would very much like to know how you were able to find me."
"Ah… ", said Lo Pin knowingly. "To answer that, I must tell you something about the way that my… business... operates".
Shego allowed the silence to prevail for a few moments, looking expectant, before saying "Go on…", trying but failing to supress the faintest hint of irritation in her voice.
"As you may well imagine, information is the lifeblood of an organisation like mine…".
Shego continued to look expectant, and continued to smile pleasantly, but one of her eyebrows began to twitch slightly.
Lo Pin changed tack. "When a poor hacker wishes to create a legend for a false identity, they will often insert records into various databases to create a false history for their new identity. A better hacker will fix the data access logs to remove all trace of their activity. An outstanding hacker will construct logs and audit trails that simulate the contemporaneous update activities they wish to replicate. A world class hacker will ensure that all of the databases they touch are consistent with each other to the ultimate degree, and that there are no gaps in the legend that might allow a forensic investigation to spot the legend in computer databases by identifying what is missing rather than what is there. But the greatest hackers of all will use their resources to insert forged paper documentation into the historical record that support and reinforce the legend. The people who can do work of this quality are very few and far between indeed. La Comptesse d'Aurigny is a creation of rare and exquisite beauty, a masterpiece if you will. Her legend is so strong, so complete, that it would be absolutely impossible for a forensic investigation to identify a flaw. She is, in every respect, a real person, with substance. You are to be congratulated!"
"Thank you," said Shego icily. "But that raises the obvious question…",
"How did I know that La Comptess was a construct and that you were her architect? Because the one thing that no hacker, even the very greatest hacker, has access to is a time machine. Rather than looking forensically for inconsistencies in the historical record, we have taken a different approach. Data mining. On an unprecedented scale. Uniquely, rather than merely hacking into databases around the world and analysing them to gain information, we capture them wholesale, often from archives and backups. But we do not do this just once. We do this repeatedly, and capture the entire database over time. In fact we have the capacity to hold a twelve Yottabyte global data archive…"
"Yottabyte?", asked Shego; this was not a quantifier she was familiar with.
"An Exabyte is a million Gigabytes. A Yottabyte is a million Exabytes. Our global scale data warehouse enables us to store online multiple complete historical snapshot copies of every database we have ever been able to access, and there are very few databases that we haven't been able to access. In theory we could have stored a daily snapshot of every significant computer database in the world since computer databases first became commonplace, and continue on into the future to do the same, effectively indefinitely. We have almost unlimited bandwidth and we hold unimaginably large quantities of data. We use this incredible resource to identify… business opportunities. But also threats to our organisation and our business activities. To that end, we have processes that identify retrospective additions to databases.   Sometimes these signal attempts to infiltrate our organisation. Sometimes they signal attempts to conceal high value cargoes from us by altering manifests retrospectively. Sometimes they reveal fraud or smuggling or other skullduggery by people on the inside, who we can then blackmail to do our bidding instead of their own. Often the retrospective changes that we are alerted to by our monitoring processes are of no immediate use to us, but need to be investigated all the same. When, one day, La Comptesse d'Aurigny did not exist, and then a week later she had existed for the last 50 years, this was flagged up to us by our monitoring systems, and we understood immediately of course that she was a ghost. When we realised how exceptionally, indeed brilliantly well crafted the legend was, we knew that only a very select few of the most exceptional operators in the world could have created such a thing of beauty. Of course, with such a short list of suspects to chose from, it was easy to cross-reference the creation of the legend with your movements around the same time. I am afraid you were given away by your own brilliance, Shego. And of course, once we had made the association, we filed it away as of no immediate interest. And then, after your… untimely but ultimately unconfirmed demise, we were alerted via the same data analysis operation that La Comptesse was now suddenly active and generating live data. The conclusion we drew was an obvious one. I suspected… hoped... that you were... less dead than we had been led to believe, and acted accordingly."
"OK, I'm impressed…", said Shego.
"Thank you!", said Lo Pin smugly.
Clearly, thought Shego, Lo Pin's revelations were pretty worrying; if a database like that existed, somebody somewhere would find it and hack into it, and then she'd be completely screwed. She was pretty sure that Kim Possible's pet nerd would be into it in ten minutes and blowing every one of Shego's bolt holes wide open to all sorts of people she'd like to keep in the dark ten minutes after that, once he found out it existed, and for that reason alone, she would be very interested in causing the world's biggest head crash at some point in the reasonably near future. Although perhaps there was less urgency now, since clearly Lo Pin had known about La Comptesse, and probably all the rest of her carefully constructed legends, pretty much since they were created, and nothing had yet leaked out; the only thing that was new was that Shego now knew about Lo Pin's data mining operation. Although she wasn't sure what Lo Pin's wilingness to tell her all about it might mean; it did make her feel slightly uneasy, for reasons she couldn't quite place.
Anyway, now she thought about it, however Lo Pin was able to store twelve Yottabytes of data ('Yottabyte? Did Lo Pin just make that up?' wondered Shego, as an aside), she doubted that it would involve a billion Terabyte sized SCSI drives in racks in a cave on his island. She was pretty sure that that much disk storage hadn't actually ever been manufactured, you'd need a lot more floor space than the average tropical island gives you and the electricity and cooling requirements alone…   sheesh. Then there was the bandwidth...   Where the hell would you get that much bandwidth? Lots of questions, no obvious answers. On the other hand, now that she knew how he had done it, it became 'just' a problem to be solved rather than a sinister mystery.
Lo Pin's database would wait, she decided. Wait until she knew a lot more about it and how to shut it down at least. And until she had dealt with certain more pressing priorities, in Langley, Virginia, of course. That is, if Lo Pin wasn't about to do or say something that moved him up her priority list...
Shego did, however, feel confident enough that Lo Pin wasn't about to whip out a pistol and shoot her, to peel off the compression bandage covering her face, and its attached 'burnt head' hairpiece. Then she shook out her mane of black hair, which she had tucked up inside the mask.
"That's better…", she said absent mindedly. Then she added, less absent-mindedly, "A couple more things have been worrying me. First, these...".
Shego dived into her attaché case and emerged with the bracelets she had been sent in the parcel that had brought her here.
"What are they for?" she asked, sweetly. As if she didn't know.
"Ah!", sighed Lo Pin. "You may not be aware of this, Shego, but I have one very strict rule about firearms on my island, which is of course the venue for my tournament; they are strictly forbidden, on pain of death. A gun is a coward's weapon, for those utterly without honour. I cannot abide them and will not stand for them or those that use them!". As he spoke about the evil of guns, he became visibly more animated and passionate, and Shego sensed that he was sincere in that at least. Even the limited research as she been able to do as she travelled had revealed the fate of Lo Pin's father to her.   "Of course, your… umm.. thing… with the hands… is not a gun. And you do not carry it by choice. But its power is similar, and I simply cannot allow it onto my island, for it makes a mockery of my strict rule against the presence of firearms. It would also give you an unfair advantage in the tournament."
"And the relevance of these?", she asked, feigning ignorance again as she held up the bracelets.
Lo Pin grinned, "Surely you have already discovered that they are made of Molybdenum Ferrucite, Shego?"
"Molybdenum... Ferrucite? What do you know about… Molybee Thingee? ", asked Shego, playing it dumb.
Lo Pin grinned again. "Nothing at all. I'd never heard of it. However, when I wanted to find a way of temporarily neutralising your… hand… thing… so that I could welcome you to participate in my tournament, I was able to use our data mine to look at what you might have been researching that might assist us. Of course, we were able to cross-reference your searches for information on Molybdenum Ferrucite with some security camera footage of a burglary at the Smithsonian Institute, and you had helpfully provided us with an answer yourself. So of course, you know all about Molybdenum Ferrucite."
"It is starting to come back to me now," said Shego drily. 'Damn it… Infosec!' she thought. It had been the evening of the museum job, in a draughty time share lair, one hand bandaged up with a meteorite sized hole burnt in it, and she hadn't felt like implementing a secure net environment from scratch, all while typing with one hand, before she could find out what the hell caused her to only have one hand free in the first place. 'What harm could a few random insecure web searches from who knows where for data about an obscure cosmic alloy do, anyway?' she had asked herself at the time, as she talked herself up to her own neck in the shit years later without ever even knowing it at the time. Self inflicted wounds hurt far more than any other kind…
"And if I don't fancy wearing your bracelets?", asked Shego.
"I would be very upset, Shego. But there will be sampans going back empty to all three reception centres for the rest of the day, and you are more than welcome to take a ride on any of them, with no recriminations on my part. I very much hope you chose not to."
"Really?", asked Shego, cynicism and disbelief radiating from every pore.
"Of course, Shego. I have no interest in making an enemy of you. I purely sought to invite you to participate in my tournament out of immense respect for your martial prowess. Having invited you here, turning you in to the authorities would be dishonourable in the extreme. And very bad for business. In my profession, people have to know that sometimes, only sometimes, they can trust me, or I would be left with nobody to negotiate cargo ransoms with. Believe me when I say that if you leave now, it will be to me as if you were never here. Perhaps if I extend a fresh invitation next year?", asked Lo Pin.
'Is he bluffing?', thought Shego. 'But the only way to find out is to leave and see if he tries to stop me. Or drops a dime on me. So I'm going to take that at face value for now...'.
"And these?", she asked.
"A gift!", he replied. "You are free to take them with you and to keep or dispose of them as you see fit. Please bring them back with you if you do intend to enter my tournament next year, though. I'm afraid there won't be any more; as I'm sure you are aware, the material is in... very limited supply."
"Yes, about that... this must be two thirds to three quarters of the world's total known Molybdenum Ferrucite. How did you obtain so many meteorites? And how were you able to smelt a workable metal from them?", asked Shego.
"For the first, I cheated, Shego. Or was uncommonly lucky. Once I knew what was needed to temporarily negate your... hand... thing...., I realised that there was a large meteorite on my island that, luck would have it, was made of Molybdenum Ferrucite. Some was lost as we struggled to develop our own smelting process on the island that would produce a workable metal without changing its properties, but eventually, the remainder of our very own meteorite plus two small rocks bought from a private Australian collector in Queensland yielded the metal you have in your hand. I estimate that that is therefore now about a third of the world stock. Although as you have observed, the rest is distributed in tiny quantities in meteorite exhibits and collections across approximately 400 museums and institutions world wide."
'Yes, but not for long', thought Shego. At some point in the not too distant future, she'd need to go on a little global road trip and replace a lot of Molybdenum Ferrucite meteorites in a lot of geological collections with expanded polystyrene replicas. With luck, by the time anybody had noticed that somebody had got their rocks off them, to coin a phrase, the 'originals' would all have been ground to dust, dust which would be sinking towards the bottom of the Marianas trench.
Although realistically, scheduling anything for after her forthcoming planned visit to Langley was... perhaps a trifle optimistic.
"And when were you proposing that I should allow you to weld those things on to me?", asked Shego.
"Oh, not before we reach the island. But definitely before you are allowed ashore, Shego. We will remove them the moment you leave the island." replied Lo Pin.
Shego considered her options. If she wanted to find out more about Lo Pin and his unimaginably giant database, she probably ought to accept the invitation. Although she had no idea whether the storage and bandwidth required really made it likely that the data mine was even on the island, and if she believed Lo Pin, which she was loath to do, she would be welcome to come back next year anyway. Which if she was honest with herself she doubted she'd be in any condition to do. And even assuming Lo Pin was sincere about letting her leave without any comebacks, she wasn't too keen about being dumped back in Hong Kong. She had about 24 hours give or take before Sheikh Mustaffa's hirelings turned up in force and started looking for her, and Hong Kong was too small a place to guarantee being able to dodge them, or to lose them easily once they had caught up with her. It was also too wired a place for her to be comfortable hiding from the full might of the US intelligence apparatus, and too hard a place to get out of without being tracked by somebody. She had always had the viable option of heading back to the clinic, reclaiming her Burkha, flying back to the Emirate and riding her invisible motorcycle all the way back to France, or indeed into another bolt-hole. But something within her rebelled at the idea of beating the crap out of herself and her battered body and taking risks the way she had to get here, only to turn round after a ten minute meeting and go back whence she came. Even if that did make most sense…
Lo Pin could clearly sense her indecision, and made a play to try to tip the scale in his favour. "Shego, I notice that you appear to be carrying an injury or two? I am aware of your extraordinary healing powers, and also aware that you are no doubt still playing dead because you wish to… surprise… somebody. I further therefore deduce from recent events that whoever it is you wish to surprise may be somebody involved in your... recent death. My tournament will give you somewhere… absolutely secure and discrete… to recuperate, to train, to hone your skills to a razor edge against the best of the best, before you pay them that visit. The facilities of Dragon Fist Academy will be at your disposal as an honoured guest and entrant in my tournament. "
What he said certainly made sense to Shego. A martial arts dojo at her disposal, and possibly some sparring partners to work through. Although she did inwardly scoff at the whole 'best of the best' thing. 'If you've found anybody to enter your tournament who is even a bit better than Little Miss Possible Prissy-knickers, then I'll be more than amazed. And I'll want their phone number, I'll be booking lessons with them myself! '.
Instead, she said "You make some good points, certainly. But tell me…", as Shego rent the floral print dress she was still wearing into two pieces in one easy ripping motion, revealing a somewhat sandy, and sweat-stained green and black cat-suit underneath it, then winced as her shoulder complained, "...how do you suggest I might participate in your tournament without the other participants spilling the beans after they leave and blowing my cover?".
She was already regretting the dramatic ripping motion, since if Lo Pin was about to say 'Oops, I never thought of that', she would need to construct a new disguise to get herself back to shore again.
"I thought long and hard about that, Shego. Once again, I turned to the expertise of my data miners, to look for a solution that would be both appropriate, and yet not in itself likely to reveal your identity. And...", said Lo Pin, standing up for the first time as he stepped over to the wall of the stateroom where it quickly became clear that one of the moulded panels was actually the door to a walk-in cupboard. Despite herself, Shego tensed as he reached in to the concealed cupboard. "...we came up with THIS!", Lo Pin continued, withdrawing his arm to reveal a coat-hanger containing a cream Shinobi-Shozeki . "It is surely a perfect time for the return of the White Ninja…".
Shego gasped, and grinned broadly, again despite herself. "Oh, you have done your research haven't you!", she said out loud. 'Of course…', she thought. 'The White Ninja, so called because she isn't a Ninja and the suit isn't white!', she remembered Amelia saying frequently, with a twinkle in her eye.
"I had several manufactured, to the same specification as the original, although obviously tailored to your current size. For now, you can put one on over your cat suit, which will enable you to get down to your stateroom incognito. You are being accommodated in twenty-one, deck two, starboard bow. If you need anything, just…"…
But Shego wasn't listening to a word Lo Pin was saying. She had been transported back in time. Back to a time before her life was completely fucked up and filled with anger and frustration and misery, back to a time when… well, when it was just as fucked up to be honest, but she was as happy as she had ever been…

oOo
The Go family was a rigid and institutionally misogynistic patriarchy. Four generations of the sons of the Go dynasty had built Go city from a one shack stagecoach halt into the thriving metropolis it was at the end of the 1980's, and had built Go and Sons General Store & Livery Stable into the global corporate industrial colossus that the Go Corporation now was. For generations the daughters of the Go dynasty had been married off like surplus cattle, to secure a business deal or just to get them out from under the feet of the menfolk. It had ever been that way, and Hubert Go, current Patriarch, had no intention of changing anything. If she had a contrary view on the matter, his good lady wife Lucinda was powerless to influence matters. In the fullness of time, the eldest, Henry, after spending time at a succession of the very expensive private boarding schools that educated the children of the elite of the elite and specialised in inculcating them to believe that by birth-right alone, their shit didn't stink and that they were 'children of destiny', would go to an Ivy League university that would have coincidentally recently benefited from a new 'Go Library' or similar, academic achievement or lack thereof notwithstanding, where he would hopefully learn something other than how infallible he was. After that, as the eldest child, he would begin an apprenticeship at the corporation, learning the business and then taking gradually more and more responsibility. His younger brothers would follow the same trajectory, ready to step into his shoes were he to fail to make the grade for the top job. If Hubert concluded that Henry wasn't up to it, the script said that he would find himself with some grandly titled and highly paid do-nothing sinecure where he could not do any damage, and Michael would get the next shot at being groomed for the brass ring. William and Walter were still babes in arms, but in due course they too would get their shot. Even if Henry did make the grade and inherit the top job, Michael, William and Walter could expect to be heading major divisions of the corporation if they were up to it. So far, at least one of the Go sons had always had what it took, in intellect, drive and ambition, to make the Go Corporation his; the Go gene. It was the way the Go Dynasty worked. And Sheila? Little Sheila didn't count. Sheila wouldn't go to a top private boarding school, it would be a waste of money and only give her ideas above her station. Sheila would have a governess who would manage her education, hire her tutors and ensure that she would be taught all she needed to know to be eligible to be married off at some convenient point, preferably sooner rather than later, with a realistic expectation of her station and purpose in life, which was to make babies for somebody else and make appropriate chit-chat at the dinner parties she hosted for them in between the making of the babies and doing needlepoint.
In fact, the only Go publicly not on board with this life-plan for Sheila was little Sheila herself. She was just about to turn seven years old and had seen off two governesses already, by the most Machiavellian and horrible means. One, a lady of Germanic origins with a glittering track record as a governess to the fabulously wealthy, and who had perpetually attempted to turn natural tomboy Sheila into a 'pretty young lady' had literally run away screaming having had a nervous breakdown after a year of unremitting verbal torture and psychological warfare at the hands of the proto-brat in question. The second had lasted only 9 months, after developing an addiction to the prescription anti-depressants that she had started taking to ward off the effects of Sheila's insidious campaign of mental torture. And then the little minx reported her to her father's head of corporate security as a junkie, and she was gone with in the day.
The problem, or a good part of it, was that Hubert didn't believe in hands-on parenting. Or daughters. So hands on parenting of daughters was doubly against his principles, and if it was against his principles then by definition it was against his wife's principles as well - that being how their relationship functioned, as far as it did. And at 6 years old going on 7, Sheila wanted to be a daddy's girl, to earn if not her father's love, at least her father's attention. She had sent one governess mad, any number of tutors had declined to try to teach Sheila anything further despite the excellent remuneration and her obvious intellect because she was such a calculated and despicable horror, and now she had ruined the career and health of a second. And still Hubert wasn't going to go anywhere near his daughter, in fact he would have done anything to avoid it, even if he hadn't been busy running a corporate empire. But what he did do was up the salary he was offering for the role of governess massively, on the principle that there is no problem that cannot be solved by the application of sufficiently large amounts of money. He didn't attract either Mary Poppins, or Nanny McPhee - they obviously both had more sense. But the huge rewards did attract an application from one Amelia McTavish, con-artiste par-excellence. She came with beautiful letters of recommendation and exquisite references, all carefully forged by her own fair hand, and she also came guaranteeing that Hubert would see results from her innovative and novel approach to child rearing. Although in fact she was interviewed for the job of Governess by the HR department at the Go Corporation, because Hubert was busy on a conference call at the time, and it was made clear to her that the two results he most wanted to see were no hassle now or in the future, and an easily marriageable woman in about eleven years time.
The fact that the Go Corporation, and Hubert, knew her as Amelia Bo-Tournet, governess to the stars didn't become a problem for Ms McTavish for about two and a half months. That was when little Sheila, curious to understand why her new governess seemed not to be interested in giving her a hard time or sending her to any tutors, but did seem to be spending a lot of time typing up invoices for expensive private tuition to send to the Go Corporation accounts department , decided to search her apartment to try and get some answers for herself.
Amelia McTavish was going to hoover as much money out of the virtually bottomless Go family pocket as she could while the going was good, and then get the hell out of dodge, one step ahead of the posse, relying on the fact that the hyper rich very often have egos that prevent them publically admitting to the fact that they have been had over by a confidence trickster, preferring to take the losses on the chin rather than submit to the public humiliation and widespread sniggering that pursuing her or involving the police would entail.
And then the just-turned-7 year old girl that she had hardly exchanged two words with since she was appointed as her governess, cleared her throat from across the Children's Day Room in the East Wing at Go Hall and said loudly to her "And who is Amelia McTavish? Or Anna Santiago?".
"I've no idea, who are they?", lied Amelia. In later years, she laughed with Sheila about how screwed she had felt at that moment when she was outed by a 7 year old girl.
"I don't know either", said little Sheila. "But they look just like you, and their passports were hidden in the lining of your suitcase. I wonder if my father knows them? Perhaps I should ask", the little girl asked sweetly.
Amelia didn't say a word, but she ran back to her room, returning very shortly afterwards with her suitcase and an empty holdall, and started grabbing valuables, antiques and ornaments from shelves, the walls, cupboards and stuffing them into the empty canvas bag, saying "You'd better give me those passports, kid, or I'll have to come and take them off you…", over her shoulder as she worked.
"You and whose army?", said Sheila, sweetly. Amelia later remembered thinking 'Jeez… this kid has spirit' as she desperately tried to grab everything she could before doing a runner. Apparently she hadn't been looking forward to taking her passport back from a feisty 7 year old kid, let alone locking her in the broom closet while she made her escape.
None of which was an issue in practice, because just as Amelia was struggling to zip up the bulging holdall full of ill-gotten booty, little Sheila cleared her throat loudly again. When Amelia looked round, she was shocked to see a smirking Sheila standing on a chair pushed up to the wall, with her finger on the wall-mounted panic button. One press of that button would put the mansion into lock-down and bring armed security running. Jail would follow with a horrible inevitability. But Sheila hadn't pressed it. Yet.
There was a stand-off. But Sheila obviously had Amelia's undivided attention. And still she looked like butter wouldn't melt in her pretty little mouth as she asked "How much do you think you will get for all that stuff if I let you go?", pointing at the holdall.
After thinking for a few moments, obviously weighing up the difficulty of fencing some of the more identifiable art and antique items, and the naturally limited range of buyers interested in obviously hot identifiable artwork which tended to depress values further. "Maybe $5,000… or $10,000 if I'm really lucky", she eventually said, beads of sweat forming on her forehead.
"And how much is my father paying you to be my Governess?", asked Sheila.
"$150,000 a year plus expenses", said Amelia, still sweating. And of course, that was back when $150,000 really was a hell of a lot of money. Apparently the price of being reassured that you'd never have to actually talk to your own daughter was quite high.
"Then it does seem a bit of a pity for you to leave now, doesn't it!", said Sheila with a cheerful grin.
An expression that telegraphed a mixture of relief, real admiration and wonder came over the woman's face. "Keep talking, kid…", said Amelia, with the beginnings of a smile.
"I think you will make an absolutely wonderful Governess. If you are interested…", said Sheila, with that same damned dimpled sweetness that Amelia later said had very obviously concealed a core of steel, even when Sheila was just seven years old.
"And… your cut of the action would be?", asked Amelia, sounding a little confused.
"Oh… what on earth would I do with money, silly?", said Sheila holding her free arm out and waving it around to indicate all of the opulence of Go Hall, which was the very embodiment of a gilded cage. "No, I want to learn things. I want to do things. I want to have fun!".
Amelia never said a word. She just unzipped the holdall and started putting the things she had stuffed into it back where she had taken them from. After a couple of minutes,   Sheila climbed down off her chair, and began to help her put the would-be booty away.
Sheila had a new plan, not yet full formed, beyond having fun, getting some intellectual stimulation and not having to take piano lessons any more. Instead of gaining her father's attention by being a little horror, which she had begun to realise would only end with her father shipping her off to some austere convent school a thousand miles away as a preferable alternative to being a parent to her, she would secretly become utterly brilliant and indispensable to Go Corporation, and then he would be forced to take her seriously and acknowledge her when she was older.
It began as a relationship of mutual convenience. Amelia converted her 'smash and grab' con into a long con, building a proper legend for Amelia Bo-Tournet that would withstand an in-depth investigation in future, and then she began working with others in her circle of former partners in crime to build front operations that would enable her to funnel Go money through educational institutions that Hubert Go, the Go Corporation finance department, or indeed the auditors, would consider suitable suppliers of tutoring to young Sheila. It pretty soon became clear that Sheila definitely had 'the Go gene'. It was only later that it became clear that she was the oldest of her siblings to have it. She was intelligent, motivated to the point of being driven to learn, voracious in her thirst for knowledge and a quick study. She was, in fact, very hard to keep up with. Amelia found herself using her front operations more to conceal the breadth and extent of Sheila's quest for an education and skills than for milking the Go Corporation. Although she was always careful not to ever end up subsidising her partner in crime, and to take at least some profit on everything she funnelled through her network of front companies. She was also firm with Sheila, but only when she needed to be. When Amelia insisted that she take some piano lessons, Sheila rebelled and pointed out that one point of the whole deal with Amelia was that she wouldn't have to do that any more. Amelia replied that she needed to learn two pieces of piano music off by heart and how to play scales so that she wouldn't have to learn any more, but she would always have a party piece she could use in an emergency if her father ever asked to hear her play. And then she packed a pouting Sheila off to a piano teacher.
To this day, Shego thought she could probably sit at a piano, and belt out a pretty competent rendition of the flashy part Mozart's piano concerto no 23, and some bit of Beethoven she couldn't even remember the name of now. Both learned entirely by rote 'just in case'. Her father never heard her play them, of course, rendering the whole exercise moot.
Sheila was no genius or savant, but the combination of being both clever and highly motivated compensated for this deficiency in large measure. Initially her largest childish indulgences were that she wanted to learn to fly (both for fun and because she had it in her head that if she were a pilot she could fly the Go corporate Jet and ferry her father round the globe on business), and she wanted to learn martial arts, so that perhaps she could prove herself as her father's bodyguard. It was Amelia who picked Wing Chun for her to learn, because - she later explained - she didn't want 7 year old Sheila getting injuries in a more kinetic style that she would find it impossible to explain to her employer/mark. Of course, Sheila turned out to be a naturally gifted pilot, and took to classic ip man Wing Chun like a duck to water. Amelia erected a Wing Chun dummy for her in the little tool shack behind the air conditioners on the roof of the East Wing of Go Hall, and Sheila used to spend hours up there practicing. As she got older and generally angrier year by year, she would spend hours in that little shack, smashing the crap out of the unyielding hardwood dummy at blistering pace for hours on end, as a form of therapy. It was what enabled her to keep the lid on all her many frustrations for the rest of the time. Sheila had one to one tuition from a Wing Chun instructor to begin with, and Amelia slipped 10% on top and billed Go Corporation for 'Self Defence Classes for Well Bred Young Ladies' or something similar. Eventually the instructor wanted to introduce Sheila to his instructor, and pretty soon she was training learning complex forms with weapons and was becoming an incomparable demon at sticky hands, and at breaking with kicks; Amelia nixed breaking with her hands or contact sparring for fear that she might injure herself and put what was now the greatest, most lucrative con of her career in jeopardy.
Sheila also discovered a facility for languages, and again, partly motivated by the nebulous idea that if she was multi-lingual she could prove her value as an interpreter for her father in global negotiations, she focused on the languages associated with the countries that the Go corporation did business. She eschewed academically rigorous studies of grammatical rules in favour of being able to make herself understood in conversation, and read and write in different languages competently. Learning one or sometimes two languages at a time, she eventually gained a basic competence in seven, not including English, the most challenging to become literate in being those that didn't use Arabic script.
Of course all of her studies had self-generating consequences. Having learned to fly, she quickly realised for herself that she would need to learn more mathematics if she was going to learn to navigate, and she voluntarily embarked enthusiastically on high school level maths tuition. She didn't have a pilots licence, but she did have a log book and had more logged hours in it at 9 years old than a great many private pilots managed in a lifetime, but she wanted more. She unofficially made the high school maths grade, she studied meteorology, she unofficially passed all the exams she would need to pass in order to obtain night and instrument ratings. And then she wanted to fly multi-engine planes, and then jets, and then more and more specific types. By the time she was ten years old going on eleven, keeping up with her was causing Amelia real difficulty. For example, Sheila wanted to add the Boeing 737 to the list of planes in her log book, so Amelia had to find a full motion flight simulator somewhere in the USA, arrange access to it after hours by greasing the right palms, using all her skill as a con artist to conceal who she was doing it for or why, then find a retired instructor pilot and a recently fired simulator operator who would turn up there at 9pm in the evening and work all night in exchange for a well stuffed brown envelope. By morning, little Sheila was signed off as qualified to captain a Boeing 737, or at least she would be if she actually had had a pilots licence, and a very confused retired training captain went home to bed, not sure whether the whole thing was actually a bizarre dream or not. After the event, Amelia had to find a way of charging the cost of all that palm greasing and back handing back to Go Corporation without raising questions; there were only so many 'Ladies Deportment' or 'Advanced Needlepoint' classes that Amelia could put through the books before somebody raised an eyebrow.   By now Sheila had more flying hours in more types of aircraft than most professional test pilots, was a highly skilled aerobatic pilot, had learnt to sky-dive, to snow-board and to scuba dive, and Amelia was starting to think that a proper job would be less work than her life of supposedly easy crime.
At the age of 11, it occurred to Sheila that Amelia was a mine of useful skills and knowledge herself. Indeed, all Amelia's skills in skulduggery would be useful for somebody who wished to pursue a career in industrial espionage. Perhaps she could prove her worth to her father by spying on the competitors of the Go corporation?
Amelia was hugely in favour of this new focus of Sheila's, because teaching Sheila the skills that she had acquired over a lifetime of bunko and fraud was more profitable and less like hard work for her. Of course, it didn't last, Sheila had soon soaked up everything Amelia could teach her about forgery and social engineering, about laying false trails and the art of top class flim-flam. Her charge soon wanted to know about forensic science, about the new fields of computer-aided crime and hacking, about the skills of the burglar and the safe cracker, how to pick locks and hot-wire cars, how to use explosives, second story work, electronics and alarm systems; fortunately, Amelia knew a lot of people, experts in all these fields, who she could trust to teach Sheila everything they knew, for the right price, all paid for by the father she was still desperate to impress, despite not being able to share her accomplishments with him just yet. One day… one day…
Over the years, Sheila's relationship with Amelia became much more ambiguous. It started out strictly as a business arrangement, the precocious 7 year old brat and the thirty-five year old Scottish con-woman working together for mutual advantage, with no underlying warmth at all. By the time Sheila was just starting to grow into a young woman, it was all a little less obvious whether they were still merely unlikely business partners, or whether there was a hint of surrogate mother/proxy daughter in their relationship. If there was, it remained mostly unexpressed, the ambiguity surfacing only with the utmost rarity. In fact, the clearest example of ambiguity of them all coincided with the only time that Amelia's rigorous vetting of the criminals she contracted to teach young Sheila what she was desperate to know let her down .
Normally, Amelia picked personable, friendly crooks who at a minimum understood that 'keeping the kid happy' was essential to their getting paid. Some of them were genuinely nice people, others just good at pretending for the sake of a lucrative pay-day, but the effect was the same. The reticence that, say, an expert safe cracker might feel at sharing his hard won skills with a potential competitor was entirely defused by Amelia in advance of Sheila ever meeting the prospective teacher; she used to explain that teaching a spoilt billionaire's daughter how to be an expert safe cracker obviously wasn't going to end up with her cracking safes for a living when she grew up, and in the end most people love to show off for a lot of money if it doesn't hurt them to do it.
Just once, Amelia messed up. Twelve year old Sheila had gone to see 'Sammy the Toe', who was supposed to teach her how to make, and fake, credit cards. 'Sammy the Toe' actually thought he would be a lot better off if he kidnapped the rich heiress and ransomed her back to her family for a six figure sum. As Sammy was advancing on the twelve year old girl cowering in the corner of his locked workshop with a chloroform soaked pad in his hand, though, Sheila kicked another human being in the face for the first time in her life, breaking his jaw, then ran into his office, barricaded the door and tearfully phoned Amelia to ask for her help.
It was twelve minutes later, as 'Sammy the Toe' tried desperately to get into his office and have another go at subduing his potential meal ticket, that the door of the workshop caved in, and half a dozen very large men who Sheila had never seen before, never saw again and who all seemed to share a single eyebrow between them, steamed in through the splintered portal, followed by an extremely angry and upset looking Amelia. Of course Sheila rushed out of Sammy's office and straight into her arms, where she sobbed uncontrollably while Amelia enveloped her tightly in a hug and made reassuring noises into her ear. Somewhere in the background, there were some very unpleasant sounds indeed surrounding 'Sammy the Toe', but Sheila wasn't paying that much attention. When she eventually emerged from Amelia's arms and wiped her red-rimmed eyes, neither 'Sammy the Toe', nor the six very large men, were anywhere to be seen.
Of course the ambiguity arose because Sheila really was the goose that laid Amelia's golden eggs, and if you'd asked her she would have sworn blind that that was why she was so desperate to protect Sheila from the would be kidnapper, and to hug her so tightly when she brought the cavalry to her rescue, but it didn't feel like that to a bawling Shego at the time.
Amelia later told Sheila that 'Sammy the Toe' had been encouraged to leave town forever immediately and never come back, and of course with touching naivety, Sheila believed it without question. With the benefit of 15 years of perspective, Shego was now perfectly resigned to the idea that Sammy had ended that same day wearing a concrete overcoat and laying at the bottom of Go Bay for all eternity.
'Sammy the Toe' aside, these were the happiest years of Sheila Go's life, between the ages of seven and fourteen. If two tonnes of space rock hadn't turned her existence upside down forever, who knows how events would have unfolded? Henry was clearly never going to make it as the next patriarch of the Go dynasty, Michael was more capable and less of an idiot but completely unmotivated and disinterested, and Sheila… well, who knows how it would have panned out. Maybe Sheila would have been able to break the mould and become the first Go matriarch; the only reason she couldn't have made it was the lack of a Y chromosome. But of course she'd never know now. Her parents were dead, Amelia was dead and her life had spiralled off ever further into chaos and insanity, with so many questions left hanging and unanswered, so many issues unresolved, so much unsaid that never would be now. The if-onlys piled up on top of the what-ifs until they were heaped up higher than Go mountain, and… EUGHH!!!
But… 'The White Ninja'. When she was 9 years old, Sheila was desperate to compete in the martial arts competitions that the other, regular students of her sifu were able to enter. Of course it was impossible. If she won anything, and she was desperate to win, one photograph in the Go City Chronicle and it might all be over. It was Amelia that came to the rescue, with the assistance of her Sifu who campaigned on her behalf with the local martial arts organisations, and 'The White Ninja' was born. Of course, competing anonymously, Sheila couldn't enter competitions in her own age category so she had to enter the Open classes, competing against adults. Not sparring, obviously, but demonstrating her prowess at forms, kata, with weapons and without. By the age of eleven, her photograph was indeed in the Go City Chronicle, a newspaper owned by the Go Corporation, as she won her first competition against all comers. By the time she was 13, the little shack next to the air-conditioners on the roof of Go Hall was full of open class forms and weapon trophies, as The White Ninja put all comers to the sword, quite literally (her Sai Sword demonstrations were the highlight of any competition, drawing spectators from far and wide) at city and even state level, and beside them a cuttings book bulged with local newspaper articles and martial arts magazine clippings. One day, she had dreamed of showing her father what she had accomplished, and fondly imagined him blooming with pride.
Of course it had all been vaporised when that accursed meteorite struck the building. And that had been the end of The White Ninja, like so much of the rest of Sheila Go's life, forever.
Or so she had thought at the time.

oOo
As she stepped out of the white Shinobi-Shozeki, folded it carefully and placed it on the comfortable looking bed in her stateroom alongside three identical outfits, Shego wondered whether Lo Pin had just been lucky when he hit on the formula that would so readily persuade her to stay and enter his tournament, or whether he really was that good at pushing her buttons. This time three days earlier, she had been two continents away, licking her wounds and thinking only about inflicting a horrible and unforgettable revenge upon the CIA. Now she was aboard a Chinese Junk heading towards a martial arts tournament on a rock in the middle of nowhere organised by somebody she had never previously even heard of, let alone met. If all this was part of some Machiavellian plan to get her here despite herself, Lo Pin was clearly a very dangerous individual indeed, and she almost wanted to be here all the more to find out what diabolical plot he was hatching. Otherwise… meh. Lo-Pin's island was as good a place as any to get herself back into top fighting shape and ready to rumble.
She pulled open her holdall, and had a brief rummage, before pulling out a boult of asbestos cloth, which she unrolled across the coffee table at the foot of the bed, to reveal several pieces of titanium scrap, and a half fabricated Sai Sword. Then she dived back into the holdall and pulled out a clean sports bra, socks and a fresh pair of panties, all green and black naturally. Then, finally, she unzipped the stained green and black cat suit, wrinkling her nose as she peeled it off and the air hummed gently with the stink of a body after 5 days and nights of exertion and desert heat, untroubled by soap, water or deodorant. 'Phew…', she thought. She temporarily discarded her somewhat crunchy underwear onto the floor, and advanced towards the en-suite facilities with relish, flinging open the door enthusiastically. Then she frowned. 'Dammit,' she thought as she realised that the shower head was fixed very firmly to the cabin wall in the shower cubicle. 'Oh well, at least I can get clean, anyway…'.

oOo
As Shego allowed the hot water to wash the stink and sweat of 5 days and 10,000 hard miles down the drain in the shower cubicle of her stateroom on Lo Pin's junk, Ron Stoppable was glancing anxiously at the clock over the concourse in the Arrival's Hall at Chek Lap Kok International, as he fumbled with the key of Left Luggage Locker 126. After a brief fight, he was victorious and the door swung open to reveal a wooden trunk, a large manila envelope and a small empty messenger bag. He quickly rifled through his pockets, transferring every vestige of Ron Stoppable, including his passport and the return half of his ticket, into the messenger bag. He popped the The Cuff of Sosumiha into the unlocked trunk, closing the lid and then turning the large key; it locked with a loud clunk, and he quickly pocketed the key. Then he pulled out the envelope and rifled inside. There was a bundle of bank notes, he was expecting there to be three hundred Hong Kong dollars although he didn't take the time to count the bills before he pocketed those, and then he pulled out a little electronic gizmo with a couple of tiny shoulder straps. "Yours, little buddy!", he said quietly, and slipped the device into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants, where he felt it taken from his hand and heard a muffled "Aha! OK". Then he shook the now empty envelope out to make sure there was nothing else lurking in the bottom, pulled the heavy trunk out of the locker and put it on the floor, dropped the messenger bag inside the now empty locker, which he slammed and locked, popped the key inside the empty envelope which had a Yamanouchi crest on the front, and sealed it quickly, then posted it into the adjacent post box. If all went to plan, it would be extracted from the local postal sorting centre by a Yamanouchi alumnus and used to recover his Ron Stoppable documentation from the locker. It would then all be returned to him before he headed home. Assuming he didn't end up incarcerated in Lo Pin's dungeons or worse in the meantime. Then he shouldered the heavy trunk and made his way as fast as he could walk towards the exit that advertised the presence of a taxi-rank. He still had a little time in hand, but a lot less than he should have, thanks to that damned earthquake. He hoped Hirotaka-san hadn't got himself caught or worse!
As soon as he reached the exit he slowed to a halt and his jaw dropped. "Uh oh…", he said under his breath, as he gazed upon the long, snaking taxi queue and at the head of it, an empty taxi rank. "Not… good." He got the distinct impression, looking at the queue, that he'd still be standing there when the Reception Centre closed, and probably for an hour after that. He made a snap decision, re-hefted the trunk on his shoulder, turned around and all but ran towards the signposted Airport Express Rail Terminal. He had no idea where he was going, beyond the place name on the invitation, he had been told to take a taxi from the airport, but he figured that if he took a train ride and hopped off at the first station stop, he would be able to flag down a taxi from there much more easily. Well, he hoped so, anyway.
'Fingers crossed…', thought Ron as the steps down to the MTR railway station hove into view... , '...and anyway, what else could possibly go wrong?'
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Enter the Naked Mole Rat