Mission: Possible 007 (Chapter Five)

 

Chapter Five: The Ceremony

            The Unification of Evil Ceremony was in full swing at Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated. Of course, the event played out more like a rave party than a conference for evil scientists. DJ Eggsy provided the music – a bunch of techno beats with some PSY thrown into the mix. It was a bizarre experience for Kim and Perry (and, by extension, Wade and Luther).

            “These guys are seriously the world’s most dangerous geniuses?” Luther cringed as he observed the gathering through the live feed on the surveillance cameras inside Doofenshmirtz’s lab.

            Wade, on the other hand, was more focused over one absent attendee. “Still no sign of Ernst Blofeld. Are we sure he’s even coming?”

            “Wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t,” Luther said.

            “Maybe he’s just fashionably late?” Kim suggested. Every time she spoke with Doofenshmirtz’s scratchy voice, she subconsciously felt the need to clear her throat. The latex mask was smothering as well, adding to the discomfort. If this was what it felt like being Heinz Doofenshmirtz, she pitied the poor guy.

            “A’ight, luvs and bruvs!” DJ Eggsy’s voice boomed throughout the room from the microphone attached to his turntable. “We’re gonna take it old school with a Soul Train style dance line!”

            “Seriously?!” Luther bellowed, sounding slightly offended.

            The evil scientists formed two lines with a space in the middle for dancers to strut down and dance in consecutive order. One scientist – a bald man with a piercing stare beneath a pair of horn-rimmed glasses – performed a ballet dance while looking in Kim’s direction and challenging her.

            “Bet you wish you could have moves this good, Heinz,” he said.

            Kim could only snicker and remark, “Are you for real?”

            “I’ve never been more ‘real’!” the bald scientist scoffed.

            Turning her head, Kim pretended to look as if she was coughing while asking Wade and Luther, “Who even is this guy?”

            “According to the L.O.V.E.M.U.F.F.I.N. database, his name is Aloyse Everheart Elizabeth Otto Wolfgang Hypatia Gunther Galen Gary Cooper von Roddenstein – but everyone just calls him ‘Rodney’,” Wade informed. “He has a pretty heated rivalry with Dr. Doofenshmirtz.”

            “Super,” Kim deprecatingly remarked.

            “C’mon, Heinz!” Roddenstein provoked Kim. “Show us your moves – if you even have any in that worn-out body of yours.”

            Even though the insults flown at her were more towards the man she masqueraded as, Kim couldn’t help but to take them personally. Roddenstein was like Bonnie Rockwaller, if Bonnie was a bald, grotesque-looking man. Those similarities were enough to mess with Kim’s perception, pressured into proving Roddenstein wrong.

            To the surprise of Perry, Wade, and Luther, she went up to the dance line and immediately broke into some dance moves that the real Heinz Doofenshmirtz – a middle-aged man with crooked posture – would be incapable of. She spun and flipped in place, showing off the acrobatic prowess she developed in her years as a cheerleader. They were impressive enough to receive a round of applause from the evil scientists, with the notable exception of an infuriated Roddenstein.

            Along one shadowed corner of the lab stood Vanessa, who – up until now – had little interest in the proceedings, focused more on her phone than the group of old men acting like ravers. But the moment that she saw her “father” breakdance in front of his evil colleagues, without so much as breaking his back, something seemed very off to the young Doofenshmirtz.

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            If there was one thing SFIT labs had plenty of, it was duct tape. Hunt used a few rolls to strap the unconscious Shego to one of the chairs in the facility that didn’t roll. Once she was well-bound to the chair, Edna proceeded in slapping her hard enough across the face to wake her up. “Rise and shine, you League filth!” Edna roared.

            Shego blinked a few times, regaining focus to her hazed vision. She saw Edna’s aggressive face glaring daggers into her, while Bond, Hunt, Dr. Bellum, and the SFIT students stood in observance along the background. She struggled under the layers of duct tape that tied her down, scoffing as she looked down on them and said, “You know I could just easily singe my way out of these, right?” Her hands flamed to highlight this.

            That was until Bond drew his gun, pointing it directly at Shego’s head. “Try to see if you can before I pull this trigger,” he challenged her. The callous way in which he did motivated Shego into switching off her flames.

            “So…how’re we doing this?” Shego inquired of her captors. “Good cop, bad cop? An intervention? I highly doubt anyone other than these two…” She nodded specifically towards Bond and Hunt. “…are capable of torture – and even they won’t be able to break this girl.”

            “Oh, dahling,” Edna told her. “They aren’t the ones you need to worry about.”

            She briefly moved away from Shego’s line of sight while Wasabi and Dr. Bellum wheeled in a complex piece of machinery that looked a lot like a modified death ray to Shego. In spite of this assumption, she still asked (albeit uneasily), “What…uh…What the heck is this thing? Some sort of oversized hair dryer?” She noticed the tip of the gun was aimed straight for her left eye, which only made her more nervous.

            “No, dear,” Edna said. “This is one of my finest achievements. It’s been known to render even the strongest of wills into a shattered husk. A concentrated laser is fired into your cornea, burning through it and surgically slicing your optic nerve to make its way into the brain and out through the back of your skull. The entire process happens within the span of an hour, but it feels like an eternity to the subject.”

            Shego swallowed hard, her usual cool demeanor cracking under pressure.

            Of the SFIT students in attendance of the interrogation (soon-to-be torture session), only Go-Go maintained a stable constitution. Wasabi turned the other way, while Hiro, Honey Lemon, and Fred cringed just from the description Edna gave of her deadly machine. She switched it on, and it came to life with a deep, ominous hum. The tip with the laser, positioned an inch from Shego’s eye, started to glow in a reddish hue.

            With the little bit of defiance that she could muster, she asked Edna, “You really expect me to talk?”

            “No, dahling…I expect you to die!”

            Shego saw the sinister thrill on Edna’s face, as the laser glowed brighter. Half of the room was caked with red from Shego’s perspective. Her eye teared up, blinking and twitching uncontrollably. She began to feel it sting, the brighter the laser got.

            “Alright, alright! I’ll talk!” she screamed.

            Immediately, the machine switched off, along with the laser.

            “Jeez,” Hunt muttered after the tense moment.

            On the contrary, an amused Bond reflected of Edna, “That’s my kind of woman.”

            With Shego’s full cooperation, Dr. Bellum commenced with the questioning: “Now then, what does the League want with Hiro Hamada?”

            Hiro listened intently as Shego answered, “They need the kid to mass produce enough of his microbots to create a powerful EMP machine.”

            “What does the League need with an EMP machine?” Hunt asked her.

            “They wanna take society back into the Dark Ages,” Shego replied. “Reboot it all to their ultimate control.”

            “Retroactively holding the world in a technological ransom,” Bond concluded.

            “We need to contact the Think Tank and let them know that we…”

            Ethan had his phone already in hand when it suddenly received an unknown call. He answered accordingly, placing the phone to his ear to hear the Austrian-accented voice of a man say, “Good evening, Mr. Hunt. If you would be so kind as to put me on speaker, so I could address your colleague, Mr. Bond, and the others in the lab with you.”

            Hunt hesitated to comply, but he did as the man requested and put him on speaker.

            “Hello, James” was the first thing he said following Hunt’s deed.

            Bond stiffened with recognition to the voice on the phone. “Hello, Blofeld.”

            Ethan fired a watchful look on Bond. Until that second, he never heard Blofeld’s voice (or even seen his face) before. He made a motion for Bond to keep the founder of SPECTRE talking while he traced the call.

            “So, what’re you up to these days?” Bond asked.

            “Oh, you know, thinking up new ways to kill you,” Blofeld casually responded. “Of course, seeing that you’re in San Francisco and I’m miles away somewhere else…somewhere that I suspect Mr. Hunt will soon discover, as he’s tracing my call this very moment.”

            Ethan shook his head, smirking. “You want us to find you?”

            “Yes, Mr. Hunt,” Blofeld admitted. “It would be no fun if I just told you where I am, would it? Besides, I’m sure you and James would want to know where I’ll be keeping the bodies of your two fellow Team members, after I’ve extracted them from the Doofenshmirtz building.”

            Bond and Hunt shared a perturbed glance.

            “Tell us where you are, Blofeld!” Bond demanded with urgent ferocity.

            “Oh, James…listen to yourself…getting emotional over a little girl and a platypus. You’re better than this mission, James. I’m sure you’ve realized that by now. MI6 has made a fool of themselves…made a fool of you. All you have to do is step away…find an island to seclude yourself from the rest of the world…your own personal heaven…or Hell, if you choose it that way. That’s what I’ve done.”

            “Well, that’s just it, Blofeld – we’re nothing alike,” Bond refuted. “And you’re right: I am better than this mission. But, when men like you enter the picture, I’m obligated to do my service to see the job done.”

            “Then I hope you enjoy having more blood on your hands, cuckoo.”

            The call ended there.

            Bond looked squarely on Hunt and asked, “Did you trace the call?” Hunt didn’t answer. Bond could see how white he appeared as he gazed on his phone. “Ethan! Did you trace the call?”

            “Yeah,” Hunt confirmed. “It came from inside the Doofenshmirtz building.”