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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
- 26
- 27
- 28
It was lunchtime in Middleton when Agent Du emerged from the travel tube on the Directorate level of the Global Justice HQ complex. He still needed a shower, and he desperately needed to catch up on lost sleep; he had consciously tried not to sleep on the plane, to avoid screwing his body clock up even further than it already was - he didn't want to be falling asleep on horseback tomorrow! With luck, he would be in and out of debrief in twenty minutes - he didn't have much to report beyond "Miss Possible got onto the fourth junk in Lo Pin's flotilla OK", and he was surprised to be told that Dr Director wanted to hear that from him personally. He had expected to file his report with a junior operations officer, preferably via commlink. Still, he knew that Dr Director had no sense of proportion when it came to matters concerning Miss Possible, so perhaps he should have expected it.
He approached the door to her office and pushed the button. The door hissed open and he stepped inside.
"Doctor Dir...", he started to say, and then stopped in mid word. Dr Director was sitting at her desk, which was covered in maps and papers. A couple of Global Justice science geeks sat opposite her, looking very much like Will felt. Something was up!
The door hissed closed behind him, and seconds later there was a loud clunk, as the room went dark. When the emergency lighting flickered into life, it wasn't Dr Director who spoke first, it was one of the two science geeks.
"Jeez, mate... you smell like a ten dollar whore!", said the scruffy strung out looking man with the badge that identified him as Dr Callum Hawk, Global Justice Scientific Division, speaking with a broad Australian accent.
Agent Du eyed him disdainfully and said "Believe me, Dr Hawk, better this than the smell of Hong Kong Harbour it is covering. Would you like me to comment on your personal grooming? Or more accurately, the la...".
"Agent Du", interrupted Dr Director firmly. "We have a situation. Need to know only. And now you need to know. Shego is alive!".
"Alive? But.... was she not on that plane?", asked Will Du, incredulously, his burgeoning verbal spat with Dr Hawk instantly forgotten.
"Oh, she was on the plane alright. But apparently, she really is indestructible.", said the other, more youthful, obviously English science geek.
"But... how..?", he asked.
"The details are unimportant at this moment, we'll brief you fully later. If and when we locate her, you will be our point man on the ground for a mission to... resolve the situation. For now, though, we need to find her. You understand the implications of Shego being out there and on the loose, given the circumstances?"
"Yes... yes, I've read the profile. I've seen her in action as well. I... assume my R&R is cancelled until further notice?".
"Yes Will... sorry about that, but I can see you understand why. You can take your leave as soon as we've sorted out this god-awful mess. ", said Dr Director apologetically.
"No problem, Dr Director. What do we know?", he asked.
"We know that ten days ago, she swam ashore on Ilha de Santo Antão in the Cape Verde chain. Nine days ago she walked, or at least hobbled, off the beach where she came ashore and vanished. She was clearly quite badly injured, and there were limited vectors for her to escape from that island. She obviously realised that everybody was going to assume that she died when that plane exploded, because she has stayed completely off the grid. We think that she has gone to ground somewhere, on the island or off it, and is laying up, healing up and marshalling resources. At some point, when she is ready and not before, we can expect her to attempt to exact revenge on whoever she blames for what was done to her. We are reasonably certain that that means the CIA. Mike Jones here has pointed out that there is a very small outside chance that Shego will believe we knowingly and deliberately handed her over to the CIA. In which case she might want to take out her misdirected rage on us first. I think that is unlikely, but we should nonetheless be aware of the risk.
"Our task now is to find her, and then neutralise her as a threat by the most efficacious means available. The Kinetic Operations Squad are on two hours stand-by to move, and... when did you last sleep?", Dr Director interrupted herself as she saw Will Du stifle a yawn.
"About 23 hours ago, I think, Dr Director.", replied Will.
"Well then, go home, and go to bed. I need you on top of your game, Agent Du. Not a zombie! You are also on two hours notice to move, but I don't anticipate us finding Shego in the next few hours, so get the hell out of here until we need you, consider yourself debriefed, OK?"
"Yes, Ma'am", said Will, brusquely, and turned back to the door, waiting for Dr Director to reconnect the power and hit the door release.
As he walked wearily towards the travel tube that he knew would eject him into a phone booth within half a mile of his apartment, he reflected upon the fact that a presumably extraordinarily pissed off Shego was still alive, still out there, and that it might very shortly be his job to lead a mission to take her on in a fight to the death.
Perhaps the Global Justice benefits package wasn't quite as generous as he had been smugly telling himself it was only a few hours earlier? 'I must remember, when I wake up... I haven't checked and updated my will for a while... best do that before I head out on my next mission...', he thought to himself, grimly.

oOo
As it happens, Kim Possible wasn't on Lo Pin's island within an hour and a half of the flotilla of junks climbing out of the water and up onto the plane. The vessels spent the next seven hours zig-zagging wildly and randomly across a vast expanse of the South China Sea, covering a huge distance as they ensured that they wouldn't be intercepted by anybody, as was standard operating procedure for Lo Pin's vessels whenever they headed to his island, a combination of natural pirate paranoia and a defence against ambush by his very real enemies. This, and the radar cloaking devices that the four vessels had activated immediately before the first radical course change ensured that the stealth hover ship that Dr Director had diverted from a mission over Taiwan to intercept the flotilla had failed to find any trace of them. They eventually approached Lo Pin's island, roaring in from the South East, just as dawn was breaking at about 5 am, while Kim slept like a baby in her cabin, the movement of the ship mercifully banishing the hideous nightmares that had recently disturbed her sleep so badly.
Kim awoke as the four junks dropped off the plane and very rapidly slowed as their hulls once more dragged in the water , and lay happily in the comfortable bed, blissfully relaxed and well rested. The four junks, still in line abreast formation, slowed almost to a halt and then just as they had almost lost steerage way, turned once again line astern and dropped anchor just off shore, prompting Kim to get out of bed and swap her pyjamas for the karate gi she had worn the previous day, and then head for the windows of her air-conditioned cabin to get her first look at her home for the next few days.
Klaustaffen island was far more impressive, imposing and forbidding in reality than it had appeared on the screen in Dr Director's office. The giant almost black volcanic plug rose vertically for hundreds of feet into the sky above Kim, its sheer sides devoid of vegetation barring the occasional tiny patch of green lichen, clinging precariously to the volcanic rock. Kim noticed tiny openings cut into the sides of the black cliff, the lowest she could see perhaps 150 feet above the tiny beach that separated the towering black bassalt plug from the clear blue sea. In a couple of the openings, Kim could see a glint of a reflection from the rising sun as the dawn light glinted off what Kim realised was window glass. That tiny beach bore further study as well - the immaculately groomed white sand, pierced occasionally by black rocks, was also home to a geometric arrangement of tiny black protrusions, protrusions that Kim recognised as the tips of the emitters of a laser grid, although she couldn't see the beams; perhaps it was turned off? Or perhaps it was using infra-red lasers instead of the visible beams she had previous personal experience of? Of course she also couldn't see what else was buried beneath the sand; was there a minefield under there? She had no desire to find out.
There was also, Kim noticed, a striking lack of bird life. Not a roosting Booby nor a nesting Shearwater, the native birds that Wade's background research on the flora and fauna of the area had led her to look for, to be seen anywhere; this struck Kim as a little odd, and reminded her of the dead zone around some super villain's lairs, and hinted at automatic laser turrets or other automated defences that might have cleared the skies of avian fauna. Not that she needed to be concerned about the island's external defences, since rather than sneaking on to the island through a sewer pipe and then crawling through the ventilation system to gain access, she was arriving through the front door as an invited guest and had no doubt she would be leaving the same way.
But the biggest aperture in the vast black obelisk was at the far right hand end of the massive craggy edifice, where a giant black cave mouth pierced the rock. Kim knew that this was the cave that had been the entrance to the old coaling station, and the dark water in front of it was a clue to the deep water channel that led into the giant inky black portal. And yet, if Kim hadn't already known, she would have assumed at a glance that the cave was shallow and contained nothing of significance.
As she watched, two lights, one green and one red, blinked on just inside the cave mouth, one to port and one to starboard, and she heard the faint sound of a turbine spinning up some distance away, and presently one junk very slowly moved towards the black cave mouth. The scale of the cave entrance became properly clear only as what Kim had spent the best part of a day considering to be a large ocean going tall ship looked more like a bath toy as it was slowly swallowed by the impenetrable blackness of the giant cave entrance.
The green and red channel lights blinked out as the ship vanished from view. Kim had no idea how long it would take to disembark each junk, but she realised that she would be on the last vessel to unload, and that she hadn't even had a wake-up call yet, so she assumed it would be a while before she would set foot ashore herself.
She closed the blinds and stripped off again for a shower, but not before selecting her outfit for the day; she chose the very stylish Kung Fu uniform that she had been presented with by Sigung Foo of Five Tigers Hung Gar Kung Fu, along with the Gold Sash he had awarded her at the end of the two week visit he had made to Middleton purely to train her during summer break back when she was 13.
It had become a regular thing for Kim; martial arts teachers would fly into Middleton just for the privilege of training her. After she had earned a junior black belt in Karate within three months of study at 5 years old, and then backed it up by grading at a similar level at the local Twae Kwon Do school and also in Lau Gar Kung Fu, all before her sixth birthday, the word had started to spread about the incredible little girl martial arts prodigy who lived in Middleton. Mrs Dr Possible had had conniptions at what her little Kimmie was cheerfully putting herself through, on her own, with no professional supervision or encouragement whatsoever, as she honed her tiny body to make it capable of performing techniques that nobody would ever have imagined a small child capable of. Indeed within a couple of years, she was working out how to really perform apparently impossible feats of martial prowess devised by Hong Kong cinema stunt directors rather than ancient warrior monks, feats that she had well understood were hitherto only ever possible for cinematic purposes with the assistance of wire and harnesses and special effects; Mrs Dr P had much more recently confided to Kim that she was quite pleased that child services didn't ever see what Kim got up to for fun in the back yard when she was younger, because explaining to them that 'If Kim is comfortable doing it, it must be OK!' might not have been quite as watertight a defence against a felony child abuse charge as it would have if they had known little Kimmie as she did.
However, somewhat before that, Kim had been effectively forced to teach herself basic but comprehensive human anatomy from some of her mother's medical texts, merely to fend off her mother's desperate concern that Kim would destroy her growing body; apparently Mrs Dr P found "I'm just stretching my left adductor muscle, mommy" a lot more reassuring than "I'm just stretching the funny one in my leg that pulls...".
The longer time went on, without little Kim suffering any detectable ill-effects from her apparently ridiculous self-motivated regime of exercise and gruelling extreme martial arts training, and the more she could see her daughter carefully managing her exercise programme, moderating it with great precision to protect specific muscles, tendons and joints from injury, and the more Kimmie was able to articulate what she was or wasn't doing and why, the more Mrs Dr P had accepted, against all her medical instincts, that somehow her little girl knew exactly what she was doing and the less inclined she was to rush her in to work and stuff her into the MRI scanner to see what terrible damage she must have done to herself today; by the time she was eight years old, even the sight of her young daughter gleefully breaking great stacks of roofing tiles with the tips of her fingers in the back garden no longer had her rushing outside holding her arms to her head in horror.
But one thing she had always been very clear about; Kim was staying in Middleton and having a normal life. Anne had nixed the idea of young Kim becoming a monomaniacal globetrotting ballerina at five years old, and she had no intention of her going the same way with martial arts. At least ballerinas got paid! She could have toured the country and probably the world, winning every competition she entered against all comers, but at a cost that Anne thought far too high to bear. Instead she stayed in Middleton, went to school and had a normal, well rounded childhood. Or as normal as childhood gets when you are a savant with a passion for martial arts, anyway.
However, as Kim had wowed all those who had taught her, not just with the amazing skills and abilities she was already able to showcase but with how inhumanly quickly she was able to assimilate and demonstrate new techniques, the mountain started to come to Mohammed. Before she was even ten years old, she was sparring and holding her own with the best competition fighters in the state in several styles; martial artists would come to town to the little strip-mall dojo she most often trained at for the sheer novelty of being beaten fair and square by a 9 year old girl. And Kim discovered a particular relish for sparring; she loved the way that combat felt like a unique performance, where the next sequence of moves she needed to make was dictated by the unpredictable response of the opponent rather than the dictates of a predetermined form.
In between sparring with the best adult fighters in a 500 mile radius, Kim was learning, then mastering, whole new systems and arts, the way other people collect stamps. Masters and teachers would come to Middleton from all over the country, later the world, either to pour scorn on the rumours that some kind of martial arts prodigy lived there by exposing her as some kind of fraud, or so they could say they had instructed Kim Possible on a poster one day, if as they suspected she well might, she were to become a future Olympic or world champion, or simply because they wanted to teach and work with somebody who other teachers had already described as "The best student they would ever teach".
Sigung Foo, though, was one of the first category. The Grand Master had flown over to Middleton all the way from his giant dojo, ancestral cradle of the Five Tigers branch of Hung Gar Kung Fu in China, with two of his most skilled masters as assistants, overtly and determinedly planning to unmask a gweilo charlatan and prevent the corruption and debasement of his and his noble predecessors many lifetimes of diligent study, sullying the legacy of a proud and ancient martial art in the name of media hype and shallow decadent western imperialist notions of co-opting Chinese cultural values as their own.
That wasn't quite what happened.
He arrived expecting to denounce the redheaded young American teenager with the braces on her teeth as not worthy of even studying Five Tigers Hung Gar Kung Fu, let alone being feted as a prodigy.
Just before he flew home to China, a scant two weeks later, he had had the ornate uniform and the gold sash express shipped across to him from China and presented both to her, anointing her Si-Poo, which when she looked it up later apparently meant 'Grand Master'. Which was pretty impressive given that she had never seen any of the specific Five Tigers branch forms or techniques before he had arrived and demonstrated them to her. It didn't hurt that at the end of his two week visit to Middleton, 13 year old Kim was clearly head and shoulders in skill, technique, control, focus, precision, speed, athleticism and power, above the two senior Masters of Five Tigers Hung Gar Kung Fu that the Great Grandmaster had brought with him to help him to expose her. Honoured as she was at the time, the uniform was clearly sized for her to grow into and it wasn't something she was likely to wear anywhere outside a Kung Fu school anyway, so it had gone into a suit bag and vanished into the back of her wardrobe where it nested amongst various similar articles of clothing that she never wore, almost all of which were either now in her suitcase or bagged up and awaiting donation to a charity clothing drive back in Middleton, if they no longer fitted her.
Satisfied that her sartorial choice for landfall and her first day at the tournament was a particularly apposite one, she bundled up the gi and the previous day's underwear and stuffed them into her 'dirty washing' bag, and then headed cheerfully for the shower...

oOo
Shego lounged on deck impatiently. The queue of assorted martial artists in a bizarre variety of uniforms and garb stretched right around the deck of the junk, which was connected to the floodlit dock by a long gangplank. Above her, the roof of the giant cave was a long way above the tip of the main mast, and the dock was clearly capable of accommodating a much larger vessel than this hydrofoil come sailing junk. More than one, in fact. Indeed, from the array of heavy cranes, some positively antique looking, some more modern and even some quite recent looking state of the art container handling equipment, it was capable of unloading the booty from large vessels as well! It was in every way the perfect modern pirate port…
At the other end of the gangplank was another set of scanners, through which everybody was shuffling, laden with various items of luggage. There were a variety of lethal martial arts weapons being waved through the scanning arches with a cheerful nod, and nothing had set off the scanners yet. Patrolling the dock were two pairs of guards, one fore and one aft of the gangplank, each dressed in the snazzy Dragon Fist uniform and carrying a hi-tech crossbow. Shego was hanging back, watching the crowd as it shuffled forward. Just as she thought she might get off the ship without Lo Pin waylaying her and fitting her for the rather unwelcome plasma-shorting jewellery that she had implicitly agreed to wear on his island, he appeared alongside her and said "Please, step into my cabin for a moment, White Ninja.".

oOo
"Is this necessary?", asked Shego, as she placed the bracelets on Lo Pin's desk.
"No, of course not, Shego. You are welcome to swim back to Hong Kong without them…", grinned Lo Pin. She got the feeling that he might not be joking. She wasn't wild about having her plasma power short circuited, but she didn't reckon she'd have much difficulty getting the things off if she needed to in an emergency, not that she had worked out exactly how just yet. She was more concerned about her accommodation arrangements while she was here.
"Where am I billeted?", she asked, as a crew member plugged together a small spot welding machine on Lo Pin's desk.
"Stateroom 312, Shego…", said Lo Pin, studying a clipboard on his desk.
"I'd much rather have a room on the second level - can you arrange that?", she asked .
"Of course, Shego…", said Lo Pin, and turned to the computer on his desk.
There were a couple of minutes of silence, punctuated only by the tapping of keys and Lo Pin referring to the clipboard. By the time the crewman had finished setting up the spot welder, and was proffering pairs of semi-opaque sunglasses to both Lo Pin and Shego, Lo Pin looked satisfied. "Would room 256 suit? The section of the cliff face it is set in is actually slightly overhanging, both above and below, and the cliff face is particularly devoid of fissures and holes in that area…".
'Dammit. He's reading me like a book…', thought Shego.
"That would be just fine, thank you…", said Shego, as Lo Pin and the crewman both donned the black glasses. Shego demurred with a wave of her hand…
"Shego, they will protect you from arc-eye…", said Lo-Pin in a concerned tone.
Shego smirked. "Natural immunity…", she said, holding up a hand and lighting a momentary intense green flash between index finger and thumb. "Comes in handy when I can do that with my hands…".
"Ah, of course…", said Lo Pin . "You may want to stand on the rubber mat there, though. I don't know if you are also immune to high voltages, but I think getting the burn marks out of my carpet might be a problem even if you are."
Shego smirked again, as she donned the pair of Molybdenum Ferrucite bracelets and stepped onto the rubber mat. Then looking at the crewman with the welding clamp and holding out her hands, she said "You'd better do a good job of this; if there's one thing I really can't stand, it's second rate welding... ".

oOo
It was time, decided Wade. On one screen, he had the ground control radar map for Chek Lap Kok, and on another he had flight plans for every flight scheduled to depart Hong Kong in the next hour. The aircraft he had decided was the ideal choice was an International Parcels cargo flight, and it was currently seventh in the queue to take off from the active runway, and sitting on taxiway Papa Alpha. His fingers flew over the keyboard, and 8,000 miles away, on top of a dockyard crane on Stonecutter's island, the Kimunicator blinked into life, then crawled over the edge of the roof of the crane and began to plummet towards the ground. Before it had fallen far, though, it sprouted wings and propellor, and soared back upwards. Wade switched to a joystick, and began flying the Kimunicator towards the airport. Within 5 minutes, the airport was in sight, and he identified his target, a Boeing 757 with the 'International Parcels' logo on the fin, and he dived low over the airport perimeter, then swooped up to land on top of the fuselage, engaging the electromagnetic clamps as he made contact.
'Perfect!', he thought, retracting the wings and switching the propellor to 'generator' mode, so that the movement of the Kimunicator through the air could power the electromagnetic clamps and top up the power pack once it took off. He had engaged the radar cloak before taking off from the roof of the dockside crane, so he knew his brief flight wouldn't have shown up on anybody's scope, but he quickly tapped in to the ground frequency in Hong Kong, just in case somebody on another aircraft had spotted his little flight and reported it. He was reassured to hear that his electronic stowaway had reached its berth unnoticed.
Five minutes later, the 757 was climbing away from Chek Lap Kok, and turning out over the ocean.

oOo
Ron stood on the deck of the third Junk in line and waited as his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the vast cave they had just slowly motored into. It had been about an hour since they had first dropped anchor off shore, and they had just passed the second junk in line on its way back out of the cavern as they headed in. The first junk had emerged from the cave about half an hour after it had entered, had raised its sails and by the time his own junk had hauled up anchor and headed for the cave entrance, its hull had dipped below the distant horizon.
As his eyes started to adjust, Ron could see a glowing marker in the distant darkness, which seemed to hover between two vertical glowing bars of light, and which the junk's helmsman was clearly using as a guide and target as he or she initially nosed the ship blindly into the inky blackness. The cavern was vast, and by the time what looked all the world like a small commercial port hove into view, the cave entrance was a small patch of daylight quite a distance astern.
The junk very slowly moved past a thick, luminously painted line up the walls and across the ceiling of the cave; it was obviously another marker, because as soon as it slid past the stern of the junk, it swung to port and headed straight for the floodlit dock, where there was apparently quite a large welcoming committee awaiting them. Looking over the stern, Ron could see that a boom had emerged vertically from the water, just inside the cave entrance, denying access from and to the sea.
As the junk approached the dock, the engines went astern and the ship slowed almost to a halt, before one of the propellers changed direction yet again and the junk slowly swung in parallel to the dock, as a crewman on the bow flung a heavy mooring line ashore, where it was grabbed by another man, also dressed in a Dragon Fist gi, and dropped over a bollard. As soon as the stern had swung in far enough, another line snaked through the air and landed ashore, before being dragged over a second bollard, and the whine of the turbines spooling down signalled that the engines' work was done for now.
More lines snaked through the air from the deck of the junk to the dockside, accompanied by shouted commands, which echoed around the massive cavern; small groups of people on the dockside, all identically dressed in the seemingly ubiquitous Dragon-Fist gi, clustered around each line and dragged the junk slowly in towards the dock, until it thudded into long, sprung, rubber-tipped bumpers that were hung over the dockside, and arrested the ship's movement about ten feet away from the dock wall proper. There were more shouted commands and the additional ropes were tied off to cleated bollards, and then big electric winches whined as the two initial big mooring lines that were now hanging loose over the large dockside bollards gradually tautened. Meanwhile, a dockside crane was already swinging overhead, with a gangway lazily swaying beneath it, as a couple of dockyard workers on the end of dangling ropes kept it pointing in the right direction. As soon as the ship was tight to the fenders, the gangway was lowered carefully in to place between the ship and the scanning arch. It all looked very professional.
Presently, the gangway was secured, the dock crew melted away and were apparently replaced by security guards and the gate in the ships rail was opened; Ron, who had headed up on deck long before the junk had hauled up its anchors and headed for the cave and had been waiting third in line for some considerable time, headed down the gangway with his wooden trunk balanced on one broad shoulder, behind a bald monk in saffron robes and a very short Chinese woman with a cartoonishly large sword slung across her back.
Out of the corner of his eye he very briefly caught sight of a rapidly moving tiny pink flash, on the underside of the large mooring line at the stern.
A flicker of a grin crossed his face.
At the bottom of the gangplank, he passed through the scanning arch, without raising any comment from the operators, and was waylaid by an efficient looking woman wearing, of course, a Dragon Fist gi, and carrying a small handheld terminal. She had obviously identified him from a picture on her little screen, as she smiled and said "Dai 10-kai nenji doragon no kobushi budō no tōnamento, Chonouryoku-san e yōkoso! O heya wa,-ka no shukuhaku shisetsu no reberu de hyaku san jū kara nana-sūdesu. Koko ni anata no kādokīdesu. Gozen nana-ji-dai hōru ni shūgō shite kudasai...", which roughly translated as "Welcome to the 10th annual Dragon Fist martial arts tournament, Chonouryoku-san! Your room is number 137 on the lower accomodation level. Here is your key card. Please assemble in the grand hall at 7am...".
"Dōmo arigatōgozaimashita. Watashi wa Yamanouchi o arawasu tame ni koko ni iru koto o kōei ni omoimasu!", replied Ron. "But… please can we speak in English? I really need the practice…", he asked.
"Of course!", she said, tapping and altering his language preference on her terminal. And then she was greeting the next person through the scanning arch, as Ron moved to the left, out of the stream of people, and looked around the cavern; he was watching his fellow competitors coming ashore, looking at the dockyard equipment, staring at the distant roof of the huge cave some massive distance above and taking an interest in the equipment on the dock. This really was an extraordinary place.
Presently, Ron felt rather than saw or heard, a familiar scurrying sensation up his leg. The mildly ticklish patter of tiny feet made it up to his torso and then to his chest, before he heard a quiet voice saying "OK…".
'Saru Chounouryoku' promptly merged back in with the stream of humanity heading into one of the tunnel openings at the rear of the dock.

oOo
Ron swiped the key-card through the card-reader on the door of room 137 and the little LED light went from red to green, with a satisfying 'clunk'. He swung the heavy wooden door open and walked inside. The first thing that grabbed his attention was the view. It was all clear blue sun-drenched ocean to the horizon, from height, through the windows ahead of him; the window apertures were cut through solid rock and PVC coated armoured glass triple glazing panels had been recessed from the external face of the cliff, although there was no ledge below the glass to provide either a handhold or a roost for birds. It was a large room, hewn from solid rock, the floor hard and incredibly flat, but polished to a shine and then with milled grooves cut into it to simulate a tiled effect.   The walls were similarly dressed up to chest height, but then were natural rock up to the high, roughly arched and vaulted ceiling, all complete with chisel, thermal lance and blasting marks, not that Ron particularly recognised them as such. The room was lit by wall mounted uplighters, courtesy of surface ducted wiring, controlled by a switch beside the door, and by another switch alongside the large, robust and comfortable looking sprung double bed, with a sturdy metal bedstead, a lightweight duvet & four pillows, and sharp creases providing evidence that the bed had been freshly made up. The room was actually comparatively cool, despite the disappointing lack of air-conditioning; the stateroom on the junk had been gloriously cold, all be it a little hard on the throat with its very dry air, which had contrasted absolutely with the brutal heat and high humidity on deck . Deep inside the basalt volcanic plug, it was both cooler and less humid than the air outside, but both those natural benefits of being deep inside a massive, basalt heat sink were being given a helping hand by an ingenious dehumidification system, consisting of a large bore copper pipe running the length of the external rock wall of the room over a gulley carved into the floor with a drain at one end of it; the pipe was obviously filled with fast moving chilled water, and condensate was running off it and pouring into the gulley, almost in a continuous curtain along its length within the room. There were rock benches carved into the 'walls' in a couple of places, and a very solidly fixed and empty chest of drawers with a table lamp solidly bolted on top, mounted in one corner of the room, alongside a low table, also bolted to the rock, with a mirror mounted on the wall behind the table. There was a chair tucked under the table, and above the mirror, a wall clock.
Ron placed his wooden trunk on top of the table and opened it to reveal a selection of neatly folded and rather small looking black shinobi-shozoko, all be it one less of the garments than there should be, and laying across the top of them corner to corner in the trunk, a non-descript but reasonably well crafted looking Katana in a plain wooden scabbard. The Lotus blade would hold this disguise indefinitely unless he or another Monkey Master commanded it otherwise, but as long as he was within a range where he could sense its presence, and it his, and for as long as he was embodying the flesh and blood of Toshimiru, the sword's original owner, it would answer to him above all other Monkey Masters. The sword had already placed Ron and Rufus in its pecking order of who it wished to be wielded by, and both sat above Monkey Fist, if he became aware of its presence on the island.
Ron quickly removed the shinobi-shozoko and placed them in the chest of drawers. Next came the world's clingiest expanding briefs, many pairs of, and then many pairs of socks and a spare pair of the incredible expanding twin-toed cleated black training shoes that Ron was wearing. Finally, and unexpectedly, there were several pairs of what Ron could only surmise where intended to be pyjamas, but were actually just a dead ringer for the lower half of his shinobi-shozoko, with a drawstring waist closure. On the one hand, it was obviously too hot for pyjamas at night here and he'd probably not even bother with the incredible expanding underpants in bed, whilst on the other given the shocking heat and humidity, they actually looked like they might be a comfortable option for training in!
Once he had unpacked, he began a detailed inspection tour of the room, walking slowly around the walls, inspecting the furniture closely, looking under the bed, and covering as much of the space as he could. Then he opened the uPVC door to the en-suite bathroom, and was hit in the face by a blast of heat and humidity. He closed the door behind him quickly and found himself in an equally large room, with similar décor, except that the floor was ground to a non-slip surface, and there was a drain in the middle of the floor. In the outside wall was one small window, open, and at the far end of the room, a much larger window, almost a French door over a low sill, which stood open to allow some air to circulate; not a door you would want to step through, though, unless plummeting to your doom appealed. A large shower, without a curtain, was situated in a rock alcove, again with a floor drain, and there was a toilet and a bidet in another alcove, surely the ultimate 'loo with a view'. There was no dehumidifying pipe through the shower room, either, but there was a well stocked towel rail, and a shelf heaped with bottles of shower gel, shampoo, face flannels and spare toilet rolls.
Once again, Ron carefully toured the room, peering into every corner, and examining every fitting closely. Once he had circumnavigated the entire room, a little voice said "OK!", and a pink head emerged from the V-neck of his shinobi-shozoko.
"Clear, Rufus?", asked Ron.
"Yes.. This room. Bedroom… no.", chittered Rufus. The little electronic gizmo he was carrying on his back was doing its work.
"Oh… that's… interesting! OK, well at least we can talk in here! What did you find, little buddy?", asked Ron.
"Night vision cameras. Light fitting nearest the door on that side, nearest the head of bed on that side, in the table lamp. Also microphone in table lamp. Motion sensor in middle of the ceiling!", chittered Rufus, gesticulating with his tiny pink hands. "Nothing in here though. Completely clear!".
"Hmm…   that's some pretty heavy duty surveillance! And… that could complicate things! ", said Ron. "I think you should stay in here for now. Does that shelf look like a comfortable place to nest?"
"Hmm…", said Rufus, doubtfully. "A bit hard!"
"Hang on, let me stick a towel up there for you… there you go! I'll let you arrange the toilet rolls to hide behind.", said Ron. "And… I'll bring you back some breakfast!".
"Breakfast!", said Rufus happily, as he ran along Ron's arm and jumped onto the shelf…

oOo
Kim closed the door of Stateroom 377 behind her and headed back along the wide rock tunnel that she had earlier navigated while searching for her room. She had just had time to unpack her expensive suitcase on wheels and stow her clothes in the chest of drawers before she had to head back out again, this time for the 7am meeting in the grand hall. Which she first needed to find.
At the end of the long rock tunnel, which boasted carpet on the floor, strip lighting and periodic security cameras, was a steel gate which sat open, and was attended by a bored looking Dragon-Fist gi wearing guard, armed with a Jo stick. Then she entered a spiral tunnel which descended to a larger vestibule cave. On one side another tunnel, with another open gate and bored looking guard, headed downwards in a curve; Kim assumed that, as the sign by the tunnel entrance stated, it would lead down to the lower level staterooms, but she would check it out for herself after this 7am meeting, and some breakfast. A third open gate, with a third guard, gave entrance to a long straight tunnel with doors on one side only, and a sign by the entrance bore the legend '200-299', supporting the obvious conclusion that this was the tunnel leading to the second level staterooms.
A fourth steel gate, also guarded, was closed and locked; Kim knew where the now dark tunnel behind that gate went because she had walked up it from the underground dock not twenty minutes earlier. The final opening in this vestibule was a large roughly cut portal at one end, which clearly opened out into a larger area, from which she could hear a burble of voices, so that was the direction in which Kim headed.
She emerged into a large floodlit hall hewn from solid rock. Through a throng of heaving bodies, perhaps 300 strong, apparently all martial artists, who seemed to be forming a large semicircle around the perimeter of the hall, Kim could see long refectory tables and chairs, and some distance behind them, a long serving range, behind which worked a row of white-wearing chefs and kitchen staff . Behind them was a very large open plan stainless steel kitchen, in which more kitchen staff scurried around, as pots steamed, pans sizzled and woks clattered. But the focus of attention was a tall, powerful looking man standing on a raised dais, between the serving range and the refectory tables. He was dressed in a Dragon Fist gi, but crimson rather than blue, and he had striking white hair and a long matching moustache. He was flanked by three people wearing the ubiquitous blue Dragon Fist gi, and who Kim judged - from the flags pinned to their gi, and the microphones they held - were probably interpreters.
This was Kim's first sight of her host. He didn't look like the evil scourge of the South China Sea, slaver and pirate king, but then Kim was quite used to not judging books by their covers. She looked around her, to see if there was anybody she recognised. The Sumo ninja stood out, but only because he stood head and shoulders above the throng, and she thought she caught a momentary flash of a white shinobi-shozoko through the press of bodies, and she recognised a few of the uniforms of the people closest to her as coming from dojos and styles of which she had personal experience, but none of the wearers seemed familiar; she decided that she might try to introduce herself to any Anglophones from styles she recognised later to see if they had trained under anybody she had met.
As the large clock on the far wall of the grand hall clicked around to 7am, the general hubbub died down. A couple of stragglers came in behind Kim just as the hall fell silent. And then Lo Pin spoke for the first time.

oOo
Shego's Cantonese was fairly rudimentary, but she got the ghist of Lo Pin's opening sentence. He repeated the same thing in Mandarin, which she was more fluent in, and then in English; "Ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests, welcome to the tenth annual Dragon Fist Tournament!". Finally he reprised the line in Japanese, and then each of the three interpreters in turn recited the same line, variously in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and German.
His welcoming speech continued in similar style, one stanza at a time, in nine languages, so it was painfully slow going, but Shego tuned her mind out of the translations and focussed on the English version, which if she wilfully ignored the painfully long pauses for translation, sounded like:
"Thank you all so very much for coming. You have each been invited to participate in this festival of martial arts because you represent the best of the very best martial arts practitioners from all around the world. In joining me on my island you are also helping me honour the memory of my late father in a way that you may only come to fully appreciate at the conclusion of this tournament.
"While you are here, all of the facilities of the Dragon Fist Academy and indeed my entire island are at your disposal. There are only a few private areas that are out of bounds for your own safety during your stay, but they are all very clearly marked and my security staff will be happy to assist you if you are lost. For the next three days you are free to acclimatise and to train as you see fit, and then we will begin the main event, which will be a surprise that I will not ruin for you now. There is only one exception to that. Please do not spar amongst yourselves before the main event!".
That last sentence elicited a gasp and some disgruntled murmuring from different sections of the audience in each of the nine languages it was recited in, but Lo Pin continued "I say do not spar with each other, only because of the superior alternative we offer here at Dragon Fist Academy. Levels five and six of the school are devoted to advanced holographic combat simulation. The Academy has built hundred and twenty immersive simulators that will enable you to train against skilled computer generated opponents, without any risk of injury to yourselves before the main event begins. I would ask you to suspend your doubts and experiment with the training simulators, I believe you will be very impressed. We also have forty robotic grappling simulators on level four, for those of you who practice the grappling arts.
"During your stay, meals will be taken in this grand hall, starting very shortly with breakfast which will be at 7am for the remainder of your stay. Lunch will be served daily at 1pm and an evening meal at 6pm. I have tried to ensure that cuisine from all traditions is available at each sitting. Please don't hesitate to speak to the chef if you have any special dietary requests.
"So, finally, can I say again, you all honour me by your presence and I wish for you to enjoy the next three days of training as if they were your last on earth. Until we speak again, welcome, welcome, welcome!"
Lo Pin stayed on his dais, beaming genially, until the last translation ended with "...willkommen, willkommen, willkommen!", and then he quickly stepped down and strode away, to spontaneous applause from the assembled martial artists. A quartet of Dragon Fist men appeared, grabbed the dais one at each corner, and then jogged away with it between them. And then, once the last of the interpreters had vanished from view, a chef banged a very large gong. And that meant 'Breakfast' in everybody's language!
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Enter the Naked Mole Rat