I do not own any Disney characters named herein and am only borrowing them to tell a nonprofit tale meant for entertainment purposes only.

Kim Possible: Vamped

By LJ58

1

The mission was somewhat ordinary by most standards. Wade had gotten a call from a worried wife whose husband had vanished without explanation, and yet no one was apparently looking for him.

Some discreet looking around discovered an entire work crew had vanished exploring an unlikely sinkhole that had appeared under a construction crew trying to lay foundations for a new highway system across a very old mountain chain.

The idea a sinkhole could open up on a mountainous ridge confused more than a few people, but the locals were talking, and they all insisted the men had just left the job and there was nothing to investigate. They pointedly refused to let anyone else check out the site after all but strong-arming certain groups to have the highway rerouted.

Cue the worried wife, and Team Possible. Despite the fact they had recently broken up as a couple, Kim and Ron still carried on as a team, and she hoped they always would. It gave her a security she couldn't define, but didn't want to lose in her often uncertain world.

Kim and Ron flew in to check the area, Wade scanning the entire region with available satellites, and finding a surprisingly massive underground complex that stood out so blatantly he didn't understand why others had not found it before now.

Ignoring the warnings of those that suggested they leave, and now, Kim and Ron scaled the peaks just beyond the stalled highway just to hunt clues and found the massive sinkhole that had apparently swallowed up the construction crew. Prepping a descent with their best safety gear, Kim led the way and was soon dangling over the hole by her safety tether as she gave Ron the signal to lower her. After a very long way down, she switched on her Kimmunicator and signaled her partner in Team Possible.

"Ron, I'm down," she reported after her feet finally touched the ground.

"Okay, KP. Unhook, and I'm coming down once I rewind the cable. Winch says you're six hundred feet down. Good thing that was a thousand-foot rope," the monkey master declared.

"Good thing," Kim agreed. "Only…."

"What is it?"

"This doesn't look like a cave," she said, lifting her flashlight to shine around her after she let go of the hook once removing her harness. "It looks more like a…..castle."

"Underground," Ron questioned incredulously.

"Well, the walls remind me of that castle we visited in Scotland. Same design."

"Underground castles," Ron's voice reached her over the transceiver. "Weird."

"No, what's weird is the entire construction crew vanishing overnight and leaving not one trace. What's weird is an entire town running away and leaving everything behind, and everyone else saying everything is fine. Something has to be behind it, and this is the only place that might have the answers."

"Uh, zombies," Ron's voice asked as the whine of the rising cable sounded overhead as she moved deeper into the shadowy chasm around her.

Kim sighed as she shone her small, but powerful flashlight around her, frowning at the tapestries that showed not medieval scenes like those usual tourist castles, but scenes right out of Dante's Inferno. Or so it seemed as she stared at the very graphic and admittedly disturbing images around her as she kept following the apparent walls deeper into the huge chamber.

She was still staring at one tapestry with a woman standing in the center of the image holding two severed heads and laughing when Kim was suddenly aware of a shadow behind her. The woman on the tapestry was surrounded by impaled bodies and seemed to be dripping with blood. She also looked more than disturbingly a bit like her, right down to long, red hair.

"You made good time," she said, turning to greet her partner and best friend.

She looked up into glittering, red eyes that burned like a crimson flame.

Dark flame.

"You're…..not Ron," she rasped as the towering silhouette loomed over her.

"Indeed," a deep, resonating voice drawled as those eyed burned into her own.

She wanted to fight. To drop into a defensive stance and see what this freak had, but all she could do was stare. Something had stolen her will and she couldn't even blink just then as she felt her very blood freeze before this strange being's gaze.

"You…..look familiar," the dark giant murmured, his scarlet eyes burning into hers.

A long, thin arm stretched out, and a skeletal hand toyed with her hair.

"Fiery locks. Fiery passion," he murmured and the shadow-man stepped even closer. "Yes, very familiar," the giant murmured, glancing toward that gory tapestry himself now.

"I…. I am…"

"Mine," the creature growled and leaned over her.

Kim cried out belatedly in vain as something ripped into her throat and she felt herself go limp, her head spinning as she felt a deeper darkness sweep over her.

She felt an unyielding growing darkness that numbed her completely, and then she was gone.

~KP~

Ron's feet finally touched the ground and he gave a sigh of relief as he unhooked himself, and then pulled out his own flashlight in spite of the spelunker's light on his forehead. "Kim, I'm down. Where are you," he called out.

There was no reply.

"C'mon, Kim, give me a clue," he said and then looked down, and saw prints in the very thick dust of what looked like a marble floor.

He started out, glancing around as his twin lights showed stone walls and old tapestries with some really sick and wrong things that would have given even the worst bad guys' nightmares. He grimaced but kept following Kim's footprints to a well where it seemed they stopped.

Only she wasn't there.

The prints looked like she walked right up to the wall where the picture showed some skinny chick ripping off heads from helpless prisoners and laughing doing it, and nothing else. Because it seemed those footprints just stopped. As if Kim had vanished here.

"Kim," he shouted as he looked around.

His own voice echoed around him and he scowled as he held up his Kimmunicator, and muttered, "Oh, yeah."

The device chirped. Chirped again. Then again. There was no reply.

"Kim," he asked, feeling a chill now as he glanced around him. "Where are you?"

He felt uneasy as if something or someone were watching but he saw nothing.

"Okay, we're in a creepy hole where twenty guys vanished without a trace, and now KP is gone. Not good. Not good at all."

He switched the device to another channel, and demanded, "Wade, I have a sitch, so you better be up."

"I'm up, Ron. What's going on? Did you guys find….."

"I found nothing, Wade. Worse, I lost Kim. I'm standing right where she was, but she's gone. Just gone. Her footprints just stop, but she's not here."

"That makes no sense, Ron," Wade frowned from the tiny screen. "Hold your Kimmunicator up, and let me get some readings."

"Okay, but I'm telling you, there is something seriously wrong here."

Wade said nothing as the device hummed and whined, but the boy on the other end of the device said nothing.

Ron just stared around him, still feeling not unlike he was being watched.

~KP~

She woke slowly feeling like she was encased in lead and barely able to lift a finger. She was entombed in living darkness, and only moaned as she remembered that weird shadow-man and the gory tapestry that had drawn her attention.

"Ron," she murmured. "I don't feel…"

She blinked, realizing her vision was slowly clearing, even if things were still as dark as ever around her.

"Ron," she rasped, her voice a soft questing whisper in the dark surrounding her.

She tried to sit up but still didn't seem to have any strength.

She had all the strength, in fact, of a kitten.

If that.

She tried to sit up again and moaned when just the trying had her head spinning and body aching all the more.

"You're awake," a voice said from nearby. "Good. I knew you would be strong. Stronger, perhaps than any of my brides since her. Not surprising if what I think is true," came a faint chortle.

"Uh, yeah. Where am I? What happened," she groaned, trying not to think of the memory that matched that voice with a nightmare still entrapping her.

"You tell me," the voice asked with dry amusement.

"I…..remember a tapestry. Then….something red, and…. Nothing…. What happened?"

"You have no other memory beyond our meeting," the voice asked as if amused.

She frowned at that, the voice confusing her.

"Meeting?"

The voice was silent.

"What do you mean," she tried to shout and moaned as her head went spinning again, and plunged her back into unconsciousness.

She never noticed the tall shadow lost in the surrounding darkness that came over. One bony hand was holding out a silvered goblet encrusted with jewels from which he poured dark fluid past her parted lips once he lifted her slightly into his arms.

"Rest, my bride. Time will tell what you reclaim and how you will blossom. For now, know you are safe. For having found you once more, I will never let you go again."

The paler than normal redhead lay limp in his arms as he slowly fed the dark liquid to her until the goblet was empty, and then lay her back on the bed where she lay.

"Soon. Soon you will rise once more, and then…. We shall make the very world bleed once more," he said, smiling ominously as he glanced to the nearby tapestry on the smaller chambers' wall that showed a voluptuous naked redhead on a throne surrounded by headless bodies.

Behind that throne stood a tall raven shadow of a man.

~KP~

"Wade," Ron asked as he continued to search every place he could find in the surprisingly huge castle inside the mountain.

"Nothing. Ron, I've run every scan I can think of and that entire mountain range only shows you on my IFR grid. Whatever happened, Kim isn't down there now. You're the only life sign I can find."

"Only she went down ahead of me and she was talking about something on the walls of an underground castle, and then….nothing. She just vanished. I'm not imagining things," Ron complained, huddled over a small fire well away from the hole where the winch was still set up after he finally came out when his searching proved he was only going in circles around a really big cavern filled with a castle decorated with old junk, but nothing else.

"What about all those tunnels you said were down here?"

"I can't find any life signs in any of the few I can detect just now," he admitted.

"Say what?"

"Ron, before you guys got there, I detected indications of tunnels leading through the entire mountain range in that area. After I rescanned, all I found was that single cavern with that unlikely building you found, and it showed no other egress."

"Uh…."

"No other way in or out," Wade sighed.

"Right. So….."

"And, no, I can't find Kim's Kimmunicator signal or any of her beacons. It really is as if she just vanished. I detect the Roth, you, and everything around you, but….not Kim."

"Something is seriously wrong here, Wade. All I found were footprints on the floor, and Kim was talking about shadows before I got down. Only I can't find her now. We need more help."

"I'm not sure GJ can…."

"Not them," he said. "I'm calling Yamanouchi," he said. "I finally realized that is what this feels like. A mystic thing. A very dark mystic thing. I just hope I'm not too late."

"Keep in touch, Ron," Wade said somberly.

Ron nodded and switched off the device as he resettled in a lotus posture and closed his eyes even as he began to glow a faint cerulean blue before he rose from the ground, levitating a few feet in the air as he reached out and touched the one mind he prayed might be able to aid him.

To Be Continued….