Chapter Text
“Oh Snap”
Chapter 6
By Eoraptor
Kim grabbed her backpack from the safety box by the receptionist’s desk. Then she was out the doors and looking for the fifty-foot-tall self-actuated tank. Shouldn’t be that hard to find, right?
The redhead wasn’t lying about the headaches though, perhaps exaggerating. Every time her heart got to racing, a headache was quick to follow on these pills. The more amped she got, the worse they got. Ron, bless his heart, was teaching her biofeedback tricks he learned in Japan, and that helped a lot, but she couldn’t help but feel victimized by the very thing that was supposed to help her gain control.
“Wade,” she finally tapped at the kimmunicator on her wrist and got a response, “We’ve got a walking tank problem downtown right now, what have you got?”
“Walking Tank? Well, let me…. Oh yeah, seismic activity two clicks from you south by down east.” the uber hacker sipped from a water bottle as he called up something with his free hand. “Huh, that’s strange… no police or radio reports coming in yet. Let me just see if I can get traffic cams in the area and…”
While her hacker friend was trying to run down the sitch, Kim broke into a run herself. Two kilometers, that was right in line with her panicked estimates of there the walker was when she had bolted from Doctor Bellum’s office.
Rounding a corner she saw the steely leg of the Lowardian Walking tank . but, atop it was not the purple dome of doom and weapons she had expected. Instead, balanced atop the five crab-like legs of the alien scuttler was…
“A construction crane?” Kim was mentally held up by the juxtaposition of yellow and blacl girders and a free-swinging metal ball on an articulated arm, balanced carefully atop what had been one of the most fearsome weapons to ever stride the Earth.
It took another swing with the demolition ball at a standing brick wall, and succeeded in knocking over a solid looking smokestack.
“What…. Who’s idea was…. WADE!?”
She was standing in one of the worst hit sections of the city, and was apparently looking at savlaging equipment which was… itself… salvaged.
“CAT model number ALN-00235318.” Wade reported back a moment too late for her liking. “Apparently the ALN stands for-,”
“Alien.” Kim clawed a hand down her face. In the red dust of the air from shattered brick work she could feel the call of someone to pay for embarrassing her.
“Well, there’s no way this can be safe.” She challenged the air a moment later. “Just let me find out who is in charge around here and,”
Ah, Kim?” Wade interrupted from the kimmunicator watch, “That’s the thing. This thing is automated. No live crew; and I guess it’s a very popular conversion for those walkers that the Lowardians left laying around. The City has licensed three of them to take down heavy structures in the past five months.”
“They WHAT?! Well, we’ll just see about that.” Kim lifted her arm up and fired the compact grapple from her wrist. It snagged a railing that went around the crane proper and she went hurtling skywards.
“KP!” Ron arrived just a second to late to see what his girlfriend was doing.
The walking devastator turned excavator took no notice of the added weight and proceeded on its assigned task of demolition the coal fired power plant that no longer served as anything but a mangled ruin to the failed invasion of two years before.
“Kim!” he called again, trying to wave her down as she ascended to the heights of the five-legged pogo pod robot. “That would be so cool if she wasn’t going to hurt herself!”
The redhead found out that it was as Wade had told her. There was no operator cabin, just a sleek metal faring with a few stubby antennas sticking out of it. Beyond that was the arm with two sections attached to the ugly black battering ball on the end of a cable.
“Okay Wade, how do I shut this thing down?”
“Shut it down, Kim?” Wade’s head had turned into a hologram being projected out of the face of the kimmunicator when this screen repurposed itself to a grapple. “I don’t think-,”
“Wade, this is a high dangerous alien war machine. I don’t think it should be wandering around the city willy nilly with no driver!” Kim spat out her opinion as she looked for a place to jack into the penta-pod.
“Hey! Get off’n there!” came an angry shout from below,” You’ll throw off the balancer pulley!”
The shout came from a roughneck-looking man with a computer tablet clutched in one hand.
“Balancer pulley! Yeah, sounds about right.” Kim started looking over the yellow and black bits of the caterpillar-with-no-tracks and where they plugged into the silver and purple legs that were motivating it.
She flipped a switch with her free hand and then extended her right pinky finger, directing the cutting beam built into the new kimmunicator.
“Whoops!” the faring went clattering to the ground, which the redhead realized was a good sity feet below.
“Hey!” the construction foreman yelled again, growling a bit as he tried to shut down the crane before the crazy girl damaged it any further. “Come off’n that crane before you break something I can’t fix!!”
A second later, Ron was standing on top of the tank-turned-demolition kit. “Uh, KP?”
“What is it Ron, I’m a little busy!” she growled, not bothering to take notice that he was glowing blue all over and clinging like a monkey where the arm of the wrecking ball went into th housing of the crane.
“That’s the problem, I think.” He indicated the small but growing crowd of people standing too close to the spiked feet of the alien hybrid. “Why don’t you come on down with me and we can speak to the foreman or something…”
“Because they’re operating this. this thing! Right out in public where it could go on a rampage and... and…” She had just about cut away the half inch industrial steel faring when she realized just what she was doing. “OH cheese and rice. I’m wrong again, aren’t I?”
Ron looked at his slightly sweaty girlfriend with empathy. Two years ago an army of these things had nearly brought the world to its knees. Now they were helping pull it back together. “PTSD?”
“Putting up with Too much Stuff, Daily.” She cursed at herself. The red cloud of clay brick had long since faded from the air, and now the red angry mist of stopping an alien invasion followed it.
“Here…. It’s easy to fix, okay?” The blond boy reached down and grabbed an un-cut section of metal, “You weld it back together here, and we’ll, uh…. We’ll just chock the other pices up to a learning experience.”
Kim looked at where his hands were, and then to his glowing blue-brown eyes.
Then she looked down at the fifty-foot drop, and the crowd of people, mostly construction workers. And the hard unforgiving, half cracked pavement around the foot spikes of the crane.
A hand landed on her wrist, almost as if he was reading her mind, “No…. not that way. That’s the not-too-safe-even-for-Kim Possible way.”
Kim sniffed back a tear. Now she had another symptom to tell Doctor Bellum about.
Suicidal tendencies.
She slowly lowered herself down off of the CAT ALN-00235318, listening to Wade explain how they were miracles of technology because the legs of the tank, when freed of their weapons on top, simply stood around, self-balancing and self-walking, and waiting for instructions. The real trick was translating Lor-standard language into English, or Chinese, or whatever the new payload on top was to be. Otherwise, they would just stand around till doomsday, occasionally shuffling their clawed-feet, with nothing better to do.
Ron and the foreman talked for a few minutes while Kim felt like an absolute heel. He then paid for the damages with Naco Check money and it seemed that everything was right as rain.
Except for Kim.
How had she been brought so low? In two years, nothing seemed to be going right for her. And now she couldn’t even go sky diving without getting a headache! Now she wanted to fling herself off of construction equipment and into the ground because she over-reacted?
“Ron, take me back to Doctor Bellum.” She sighed heavily.
Then her kimmunicator went off. With a familiar four tone note.
“Wade, can it wait?”
“I’m afraid not, Kim,” the still-slightly round hacker shoo his head, “This one is for real. Drakken and Shego.”