Fanfic: The Last Kidnapping, Part 8
Title: The Last Kidnapping, Part 8
Author: Joan
Length: 2654 words
Rating: g (sorry to disappoint you)
Summary: More preparations for interstellar travel. More Metz. Contains a bit of angst and a tiny whiff of suspense.
Warnings: Alien language.
Link to Part 1: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1368493.html
Link to Part 2: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1374255.html
Link to Part 3: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1377920.html
Link to Part 4: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1387246.html
Link to Part 5: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1395039.html
Link to Part 6: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1412253.html
Link to Part 7: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1447675.html
She told everyone at KMCP that she was going into anthropology, doing field work in a remote society that had very little contact with Western civilization. About ten days after she gave notice, her boss called her into his office and asked her if the rumor was true.
"Which rumor?" she asked.
"That Megamind is leaving Earth, going back to his own people, and you're going with him."
"Think about it, Frank. If Megamind is leaving and I want him to go, whether or not I want to go with him, the last thing I'm going to do is make it public."
"You think if the world know that he's going, that'll make him less likely to go?"
"Megamind has enemies. Some are scientists who want to study him or inventors who want to steal his ideas. Some are fellow criminals who have grudges against him. If they think they're about to lose their last chance to get what they want from him, they'll act right away. They might do things like target one or more of the prisoners who raised him, who are now old men, out of prison and living on the right side of the law. They might start searching for his hide-out, and if they got close, he'd have to restrict his movements to avoid discovery. At the very least, they'd delay him, and the longer he's delayed, the more likely he is to change his mind. And one of them might even succeed, just out of sheer random luck. So, officially, there's no story."
"But unofficially?" Frank had the same hunger for information, especially secrets, that Roxanne had. It's endemic in the news business.
"One of these days, a little while after my last day here, I'll send you a text with one word: Tonight. When you get it, have a camera out on one of the piers, with a nice wide view of the lake, between three a.m. and dawn."
"Thanks, Roxanne. And good luck with the, ah, anthropological research. Or would that be the word if they people you're studying aren't human?"
"Xenological. I'm going to be the first human field xenologist in history."
###
Metro Man was in the lair for about fifteen seconds. The brainbots did not sound the intruder alert because he was moving too fast to trigger a response.
He'd found it by the simple expedient of watching Roxanne (from the top of a convenient building) as she left work. He'd seen her stroll through the hologram wall, kiss her erstwhile kidnapper with enthusiasm and speak with him and Minion in a language full of the kind of noises he'd expect in an old Spike Jones song. There had been no signs of missile construction, but the first time he'd seen a weather balloon launch (by a disguised Minion) from the Lair's roof with a payload of confusing machinery and electronics, he'd watched it rise all the way up into the stratosphere, where a larger-than-usual brainbot collected the payload and continued upward into orbit. One of the satellites up there, one he'd never particularly noticed before, turned out to be swarming with brainbots. There was something being built up there, all right, something that didn't seem to contain any explosives (although there was lots of empty space, so that could change) but did contain seats, one sized for Minion's gorilla suit, directly behind the glass and the instrument panels, and two human-sized behind it. In other words, exactly what he'd see if Megamind really were building a starship and planning to take Roxanne with him. Wayne had also tried to watch the work going on inside the Lair whenever he had a break in his hero work, but looking through the hologram wall for any length of time gave him a headache, so he finally decided to just go in at super speed and see what he could find out.
He ended up going in there almost daily over the course of the next three weeks. He saw Megamind working at his forge, Minion assembling tiny electronic components under a microscope and Roxanne writing a two-column page with English in one column and strange symbols in the other. One day he saw the jetboat stripped of its spikes and what he figured were components Megamind had invented, that gave it invisibility, disguise and/or whatever other supervillainous capabilities he had added to it. The hero came back the next day to find the boat gone and a suitcase of dysprosium standing on the dock in the hidden boathouse. He recognized it because he had dealt with dysprosium smuggling before. Since China had banned its export, the rare mineral had been impossible to get on the open market, but as long as there's demand, criminals will find a way to satisfy it, and for its various scientific and high-tech uses, there was no substitute for dysprosium. Next to be stripped was the car, its spikes and fins and unconventional components all ending up in the same heap with the ones from the boat, a heap that was accumulating more and more strange technology as the days went by.
He finally figured out that the key to everything was the odd arrangement of pieces of paper hung on strings from the ceiling behind a red curtain. It took him almost three seconds of real time, but he finally figured it out. The star ship's cargo was arranged to the inch. Almost half of it would be brainbot cores. There were designated spaces for everything from seeds and soil samples to working brainbots to Minion's spare suits to Roxanne's luggage. There were also plans for an invisible barge that would be loaded with all of Megamind's unknown technology that he wasn't taking with him, topped with five sealed containers of thermite with radio-controlled release valves. In the small hours of their departure date (which wasn't specified; he figured it would depend on the weather), the submarine, piloted by Minion, would tow the barge out onto the lake, anchoring it at a point away from the regular shipping lanes. Then he would take the sub down and settle into what the villains called a hidey-hole in the bottom of the lake. Then he would separate the component of the sub that he was in, called the Detachable Pressurized Guidance Module, and return while robotic components mounted on the sub deployed a camouflaging and metal-detector-thwarting cover. Minion would attach the DPGM to the bottom of the barge, leave it, swim back to the Lair and suit up.
Just before departure, a hologram projector located on the underside of the barge would project the illusion of a rocket launching from beneath the lake. The main purpose of this illusion was specified: Distract Metro Man. But there was another one. Under cover of the projected blast, the thermite would be released. It would burn down through the heap of inventions, reducing everything to slag, reaching the hologram projector and the DPGM well after the illusory rocket would have seemed to ascend out of sight. (The hero had to admit, it was one way of preventing the stuff from falling into the wrong hands.) During the pretend launch, Megamind, on the roof of the Lair, would dehydrate Roxanne and Minion, seal each of them into an airtight pressurized bubble tethered to a cluster of weather balloons, and release both clusters. (With the occupants dehydrated, the bubbles would sag, appearing nearly empty; few would suspect that each actually contained a person.) Then he'd step into the last bubble, seal himself in, press the remote to release the last cluster, and dehydrate himself. The three bubbles would be collected in the stratosphere by brainbots, towed to the starship, and fitted, one at a time, onto the airlock, which would suck the contents of each into the passenger compartment. The mechanism for rehydrating the three was not specified, but Wayne was sure it hadn't been forgotten.
Another section of the dangling file system seemed to be the "completed" section. In it, he found a list of accounts set up at financial institutions, not only in Metro City but in Switzerland, Singapore and the Cayman Islands, mainly for holding tax-free long-term government bonds of various sorts, although there were also safe deposit boxes containing cash, documents and valuables. The submarine had also been stuffed with cash in several local currencies, gold and silver bullion, documents for a half-dozen false identities, and all the materials and equipment needed for building two disguise generator watches and adding stealth mode to a vehicle, plus a few inappropriate things to add confusion, just in case any Earthlings did stumble across it and try to guess, from what they found, what could be built. Some of the dysprosium was in there. He considered taking the list, since it was essentially the ingredient list for two of the villain's most effective inventions, but as he thought about it, the hero realized that there wasn't a single human being he knew whom he would trust with this knowledge. Neither could he bring himself to abort the whole process by apprehending Megamind, now that he knew where the blue alien was, and hauling him back to prison. In addition to the personal matter of not wanting to deal with Roxanne's reaction, it seemed to him that this was what was best, not only for Megamind and Minion, but for Metro City and for the alien colony they were going to, where they could make a contribution as they never could here. The only thing that felt wrong about it was Roxanne going along, but she was a grown woman and he felt that he had to respect her decision, no matter how big a mistake he thought she was making. Glancing through the walls, he could see her asleep in Megamind's arms. It looked to him like the mistake had already been made.
Metro Man stayed in super speed just long enough to fly to a local diner. When he ordered a Dr. Pepper (not his favorite, but he tried to avoid throwing his known preference behind any one brand, knowing that the citizens' propensity to imitate him could drive a local bottler out of business) the waitress gasped and squealed and forgot everyone else's order in her rush to fill his. That was satisfying, as was her assurance that it was on the house, but then she asked for his autograph. When he signed her order pad, it started an avalanche. Everyone in the place, customers and staff and passers by who had seen him through the window, was coming up to him with paper and pens. It was an hour before he got out of there, and his drink was weak, the ice half melted. He took it up to the top of Metro Tower to finish it, sitting like a gargoyle on the edge of the circular roof. He wondered what it would be like to live in a society where he was just like everyone else, not because he lost his powers but because everyone had them. To live among his own kind. He held out his cup in the general direction of the Lair.
"Here's to you, little buddy," he said to the empty air. "Have a great trip and a great life."
###
"Alligators. Five of them... No, I don't feed them citizens. They get internal organs of cattle, hogs and lambs from a local slaughterhouse... No, they are trained to put on a very menacing show, but if they were to actually get a citizen at their mercy, they would take it in turns to hold that person for their master. Minion has actually trained them with squeaky toys so that they can hold a human limb in their jaws without harm... Well, their taste in music is horrible... Disco... Oh, seriously, Vector. I'm offering you five living objects of terror... Aargh!" Megamind folded up the phone and handed it to Minion with an expression of frustration. "What is the problem with this new generation of villains that they can't be bothered with fearsome creatures that I'm offering them absolutely free?"
"Nfi[click]ngti sëÿzl kwawyi[squish] toh zhöüë?" Roxanne was trying to speak only in Tseri[gulp]uu in the Lair. What she said was 'May I make a suggestion?' transliterated word for word from English.
"Actually, the correct phrasing would be 'Nfi[click]ngti kwahöuneh toh [gulp]wriyi?'" Minion responded. "It transliterates to 'May I suggest something?'" Megamind merely looked at her with a silly smile. He adored hearing his new wife speaking his native language, no matter how badly. Roxanne repeated Minion's correction. The conversation continued in Tseri[gulp]uu, with some English nouns.
"[Please suggest it,]" the fish requested.
"[The] alligators [are not well-known anywhere except here in] Metro City. [Why don't you ask if the] zoo [will take them]?"
"[We don't say 'Why don't you',]" corrected Minion. "[Well, we do, but it's faintly insulting. It's only used when you think the other person is being stupid. Better to use 'You might'. Boss, what do you think of Roxanne's suggestion?]"
"Hmm? Oh. [I haven't met anyone at the] zoo." As in Spanish, the Tseri[gulp]uu said 'I have met this person' where an English speaker would say 'I know this person.'
"[I've met the boss of] public relations [at the] zoo," Roxanne answered. "[I could call her.]"
"[Yes, try that. And, Menang, what would be the nearest translation for] public relations?"
"[I don't know, sir. It wasn't something a little fish would be likely to hear.]" That was the unspoke limit to Roxanne's language lessons. Amnang had been an infant, Menang a small child, when they came to Earth. There was a lot about their own culture that they didn't know. That was also the reason that pretty much all positions of authority came out as the same word, the one Minion called Megamind when, in English, he would have called him "Boss" or "Sir".
Roxanne was finding even the child-level version of the language tiring. She was on the steep part of the learning curve and she was glad to switch into English for the phone call.
Megamind had modified her phone so that it could interface with the Lair's system to allow her to make calls without revealing her location. She pulled it out and dialed.
"Hi, Moira? Roxanne Ritchi... Just great. How about you?... Megamind is getting rid of his alligators. You want 'em?...Well, I got kidnapped, and I overheard him on the phone to some other villain, trying to give his alligators away, and getting turned down, so I offered... That would be great. No, he should call me. Thanks, Moira." She put the phone away. "[The boss of the] reptile [house is going to call me.]"
"[That is excellent.]" said her blue husband. "[If you can take on that task, I can remove it from the plan.]" He went behind the red curtain, which was there to protect his "hanging garden," as he called the arrangement of papers on strings hung from the ceiling that he used to keep track of his ideas, from being battered by the breeze of fast-moving evil vehicles. "[Menang, did you alter the arrangement in here?]"
"[No, sir. The brainbots found several pages on the floor this morning. Maybe they didn't put them all back in the right places.]"
"[I don't like this. The pages aren't torn, and those clips don't release all by themselves. I'm going to take an hour off from preparations and set up a process to turn out a hundred or so of those little sensors. By dinner time, I want one attached to every page. The next time something like this happens, I want to know about it right right away.]"
Author: Joan
Length: 2654 words
Rating: g (sorry to disappoint you)
Summary: More preparations for interstellar travel. More Metz. Contains a bit of angst and a tiny whiff of suspense.
Warnings: Alien language.
Link to Part 1: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1368493.html
Link to Part 2: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1374255.html
Link to Part 3: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1377920.html
Link to Part 4: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1387246.html
Link to Part 5: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1395039.html
Link to Part 6: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1412253.html
Link to Part 7: http://megamind-movie.livejournal.com/1447675.html
She told everyone at KMCP that she was going into anthropology, doing field work in a remote society that had very little contact with Western civilization. About ten days after she gave notice, her boss called her into his office and asked her if the rumor was true.
"Which rumor?" she asked.
"That Megamind is leaving Earth, going back to his own people, and you're going with him."
"Think about it, Frank. If Megamind is leaving and I want him to go, whether or not I want to go with him, the last thing I'm going to do is make it public."
"You think if the world know that he's going, that'll make him less likely to go?"
"Megamind has enemies. Some are scientists who want to study him or inventors who want to steal his ideas. Some are fellow criminals who have grudges against him. If they think they're about to lose their last chance to get what they want from him, they'll act right away. They might do things like target one or more of the prisoners who raised him, who are now old men, out of prison and living on the right side of the law. They might start searching for his hide-out, and if they got close, he'd have to restrict his movements to avoid discovery. At the very least, they'd delay him, and the longer he's delayed, the more likely he is to change his mind. And one of them might even succeed, just out of sheer random luck. So, officially, there's no story."
"But unofficially?" Frank had the same hunger for information, especially secrets, that Roxanne had. It's endemic in the news business.
"One of these days, a little while after my last day here, I'll send you a text with one word: Tonight. When you get it, have a camera out on one of the piers, with a nice wide view of the lake, between three a.m. and dawn."
"Thanks, Roxanne. And good luck with the, ah, anthropological research. Or would that be the word if they people you're studying aren't human?"
"Xenological. I'm going to be the first human field xenologist in history."
###
Metro Man was in the lair for about fifteen seconds. The brainbots did not sound the intruder alert because he was moving too fast to trigger a response.
He'd found it by the simple expedient of watching Roxanne (from the top of a convenient building) as she left work. He'd seen her stroll through the hologram wall, kiss her erstwhile kidnapper with enthusiasm and speak with him and Minion in a language full of the kind of noises he'd expect in an old Spike Jones song. There had been no signs of missile construction, but the first time he'd seen a weather balloon launch (by a disguised Minion) from the Lair's roof with a payload of confusing machinery and electronics, he'd watched it rise all the way up into the stratosphere, where a larger-than-usual brainbot collected the payload and continued upward into orbit. One of the satellites up there, one he'd never particularly noticed before, turned out to be swarming with brainbots. There was something being built up there, all right, something that didn't seem to contain any explosives (although there was lots of empty space, so that could change) but did contain seats, one sized for Minion's gorilla suit, directly behind the glass and the instrument panels, and two human-sized behind it. In other words, exactly what he'd see if Megamind really were building a starship and planning to take Roxanne with him. Wayne had also tried to watch the work going on inside the Lair whenever he had a break in his hero work, but looking through the hologram wall for any length of time gave him a headache, so he finally decided to just go in at super speed and see what he could find out.
He ended up going in there almost daily over the course of the next three weeks. He saw Megamind working at his forge, Minion assembling tiny electronic components under a microscope and Roxanne writing a two-column page with English in one column and strange symbols in the other. One day he saw the jetboat stripped of its spikes and what he figured were components Megamind had invented, that gave it invisibility, disguise and/or whatever other supervillainous capabilities he had added to it. The hero came back the next day to find the boat gone and a suitcase of dysprosium standing on the dock in the hidden boathouse. He recognized it because he had dealt with dysprosium smuggling before. Since China had banned its export, the rare mineral had been impossible to get on the open market, but as long as there's demand, criminals will find a way to satisfy it, and for its various scientific and high-tech uses, there was no substitute for dysprosium. Next to be stripped was the car, its spikes and fins and unconventional components all ending up in the same heap with the ones from the boat, a heap that was accumulating more and more strange technology as the days went by.
He finally figured out that the key to everything was the odd arrangement of pieces of paper hung on strings from the ceiling behind a red curtain. It took him almost three seconds of real time, but he finally figured it out. The star ship's cargo was arranged to the inch. Almost half of it would be brainbot cores. There were designated spaces for everything from seeds and soil samples to working brainbots to Minion's spare suits to Roxanne's luggage. There were also plans for an invisible barge that would be loaded with all of Megamind's unknown technology that he wasn't taking with him, topped with five sealed containers of thermite with radio-controlled release valves. In the small hours of their departure date (which wasn't specified; he figured it would depend on the weather), the submarine, piloted by Minion, would tow the barge out onto the lake, anchoring it at a point away from the regular shipping lanes. Then he would take the sub down and settle into what the villains called a hidey-hole in the bottom of the lake. Then he would separate the component of the sub that he was in, called the Detachable Pressurized Guidance Module, and return while robotic components mounted on the sub deployed a camouflaging and metal-detector-thwarting cover. Minion would attach the DPGM to the bottom of the barge, leave it, swim back to the Lair and suit up.
Just before departure, a hologram projector located on the underside of the barge would project the illusion of a rocket launching from beneath the lake. The main purpose of this illusion was specified: Distract Metro Man. But there was another one. Under cover of the projected blast, the thermite would be released. It would burn down through the heap of inventions, reducing everything to slag, reaching the hologram projector and the DPGM well after the illusory rocket would have seemed to ascend out of sight. (The hero had to admit, it was one way of preventing the stuff from falling into the wrong hands.) During the pretend launch, Megamind, on the roof of the Lair, would dehydrate Roxanne and Minion, seal each of them into an airtight pressurized bubble tethered to a cluster of weather balloons, and release both clusters. (With the occupants dehydrated, the bubbles would sag, appearing nearly empty; few would suspect that each actually contained a person.) Then he'd step into the last bubble, seal himself in, press the remote to release the last cluster, and dehydrate himself. The three bubbles would be collected in the stratosphere by brainbots, towed to the starship, and fitted, one at a time, onto the airlock, which would suck the contents of each into the passenger compartment. The mechanism for rehydrating the three was not specified, but Wayne was sure it hadn't been forgotten.
Another section of the dangling file system seemed to be the "completed" section. In it, he found a list of accounts set up at financial institutions, not only in Metro City but in Switzerland, Singapore and the Cayman Islands, mainly for holding tax-free long-term government bonds of various sorts, although there were also safe deposit boxes containing cash, documents and valuables. The submarine had also been stuffed with cash in several local currencies, gold and silver bullion, documents for a half-dozen false identities, and all the materials and equipment needed for building two disguise generator watches and adding stealth mode to a vehicle, plus a few inappropriate things to add confusion, just in case any Earthlings did stumble across it and try to guess, from what they found, what could be built. Some of the dysprosium was in there. He considered taking the list, since it was essentially the ingredient list for two of the villain's most effective inventions, but as he thought about it, the hero realized that there wasn't a single human being he knew whom he would trust with this knowledge. Neither could he bring himself to abort the whole process by apprehending Megamind, now that he knew where the blue alien was, and hauling him back to prison. In addition to the personal matter of not wanting to deal with Roxanne's reaction, it seemed to him that this was what was best, not only for Megamind and Minion, but for Metro City and for the alien colony they were going to, where they could make a contribution as they never could here. The only thing that felt wrong about it was Roxanne going along, but she was a grown woman and he felt that he had to respect her decision, no matter how big a mistake he thought she was making. Glancing through the walls, he could see her asleep in Megamind's arms. It looked to him like the mistake had already been made.
Metro Man stayed in super speed just long enough to fly to a local diner. When he ordered a Dr. Pepper (not his favorite, but he tried to avoid throwing his known preference behind any one brand, knowing that the citizens' propensity to imitate him could drive a local bottler out of business) the waitress gasped and squealed and forgot everyone else's order in her rush to fill his. That was satisfying, as was her assurance that it was on the house, but then she asked for his autograph. When he signed her order pad, it started an avalanche. Everyone in the place, customers and staff and passers by who had seen him through the window, was coming up to him with paper and pens. It was an hour before he got out of there, and his drink was weak, the ice half melted. He took it up to the top of Metro Tower to finish it, sitting like a gargoyle on the edge of the circular roof. He wondered what it would be like to live in a society where he was just like everyone else, not because he lost his powers but because everyone had them. To live among his own kind. He held out his cup in the general direction of the Lair.
"Here's to you, little buddy," he said to the empty air. "Have a great trip and a great life."
###
"Alligators. Five of them... No, I don't feed them citizens. They get internal organs of cattle, hogs and lambs from a local slaughterhouse... No, they are trained to put on a very menacing show, but if they were to actually get a citizen at their mercy, they would take it in turns to hold that person for their master. Minion has actually trained them with squeaky toys so that they can hold a human limb in their jaws without harm... Well, their taste in music is horrible... Disco... Oh, seriously, Vector. I'm offering you five living objects of terror... Aargh!" Megamind folded up the phone and handed it to Minion with an expression of frustration. "What is the problem with this new generation of villains that they can't be bothered with fearsome creatures that I'm offering them absolutely free?"
"Nfi[click]ngti sëÿzl kwawyi[squish] toh zhöüë?" Roxanne was trying to speak only in Tseri[gulp]uu in the Lair. What she said was 'May I make a suggestion?' transliterated word for word from English.
"Actually, the correct phrasing would be 'Nfi[click]ngti kwahöuneh toh [gulp]wriyi?'" Minion responded. "It transliterates to 'May I suggest something?'" Megamind merely looked at her with a silly smile. He adored hearing his new wife speaking his native language, no matter how badly. Roxanne repeated Minion's correction. The conversation continued in Tseri[gulp]uu, with some English nouns.
"[Please suggest it,]" the fish requested.
"[The] alligators [are not well-known anywhere except here in] Metro City. [Why don't you ask if the] zoo [will take them]?"
"[We don't say 'Why don't you',]" corrected Minion. "[Well, we do, but it's faintly insulting. It's only used when you think the other person is being stupid. Better to use 'You might'. Boss, what do you think of Roxanne's suggestion?]"
"Hmm? Oh. [I haven't met anyone at the] zoo." As in Spanish, the Tseri[gulp]uu said 'I have met this person' where an English speaker would say 'I know this person.'
"[I've met the boss of] public relations [at the] zoo," Roxanne answered. "[I could call her.]"
"[Yes, try that. And, Menang, what would be the nearest translation for] public relations?"
"[I don't know, sir. It wasn't something a little fish would be likely to hear.]" That was the unspoke limit to Roxanne's language lessons. Amnang had been an infant, Menang a small child, when they came to Earth. There was a lot about their own culture that they didn't know. That was also the reason that pretty much all positions of authority came out as the same word, the one Minion called Megamind when, in English, he would have called him "Boss" or "Sir".
Roxanne was finding even the child-level version of the language tiring. She was on the steep part of the learning curve and she was glad to switch into English for the phone call.
Megamind had modified her phone so that it could interface with the Lair's system to allow her to make calls without revealing her location. She pulled it out and dialed.
"Hi, Moira? Roxanne Ritchi... Just great. How about you?... Megamind is getting rid of his alligators. You want 'em?...Well, I got kidnapped, and I overheard him on the phone to some other villain, trying to give his alligators away, and getting turned down, so I offered... That would be great. No, he should call me. Thanks, Moira." She put the phone away. "[The boss of the] reptile [house is going to call me.]"
"[That is excellent.]" said her blue husband. "[If you can take on that task, I can remove it from the plan.]" He went behind the red curtain, which was there to protect his "hanging garden," as he called the arrangement of papers on strings hung from the ceiling that he used to keep track of his ideas, from being battered by the breeze of fast-moving evil vehicles. "[Menang, did you alter the arrangement in here?]"
"[No, sir. The brainbots found several pages on the floor this morning. Maybe they didn't put them all back in the right places.]"
"[I don't like this. The pages aren't torn, and those clips don't release all by themselves. I'm going to take an hour off from preparations and set up a process to turn out a hundred or so of those little sensors. By dinner time, I want one attached to every page. The next time something like this happens, I want to know about it right right away.]"