AN: Author suggests Rated R, or a very strict T for Teen for sexual content and language. (Seriously, why is there not a rating between T and M?) "Won't Back Down" by the inimitable Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

"Risque"

Chapter 3

By Eoraptor

After two weeks of searching, Kim had yet to find out what Shego had wanted. If she wanted anything at all.

Maybe all she really wanted was what she said, a night out; and finding Kim had been happenstance after all?

The redhead made her way into the Upperton Downtown club, keeping an eye out, but not being as paranoid as she had been. If anything, she was feeling more worried about being found out by others now. What was to stop someone else from recognizing her?

Well, aside from the fact that she and Shego knew each others' bodies and moves as well as any two people who hadn't slept together could.

"…and oh my god those legs!"

"Chica, are you STILL on about her? Go buff it out already, Tangerine."

'Tangerine,' AKA Valentina Valencia, made a very rude gesture at her dressing room companion, Lotus Osiris.

Despite the fact that she looked and played the part of Exotic Eastern Beauty, Lotus spoke as though she was out of the barrio, for some reason.

"Oh, Hey Lynne," Lotus rolled her eyes and changed conversations, "What's on the bill for tonight?"

'Lynne Vincible,' also known as Kim Possible gilding the lily, wondered what she had stumbled into as she looked back and forth between the orange-haired pole cat artiste and the lingerie ballerina.

After a moment, she shrugged and opened her duffel bag, peeling out her purple sequined top, "I'm thinking a redoubt of last time. I owe the people a show after all, so just some songs and commentary."

With these two hard bodied dancers in the house, Kim didn't imagine her little titillations would go over quite as well. Valentina could do Olympic caliber gymnastics on the pole, and Lotus with her golden skin displayed against her trademark white lingerie with her mind-melting ballet would basically leave the redhead le déguisement as cold leftovers.

"Yeah, what was up with that, Red?" Valencia adjusted her fishnets to maximum effect as she looked on the redheaded imposter, "You tore out of here, and I hear tell you were looking for some chick in a black skirt?"

'Some chick?' Kim's mind tried not to go on a tear about the fact that these women had no idea just what kind of dangerous creature had been in their midst that night two weeks before. "Ah, Someone I needed to talk to showed up, but didn't wait around long enough for me to get said what needed to be said?"

It was a hamfisted excuse at best, but it seemed to mollify them.

Lotus pursed her lips, "So that was the 'leggy school mistress' Sammy saw you arguing with?"

"Bet she didn't have legs like Onyx, though," Valencia continued, her eyes momentarily glazing over.

"Uh, yeah." This time Kim noticed the look and recognized bald-faced lust therein, "Who's Onyx?"

"New act, guitaratrix with hair for miles and legs for days," Lotus huffed as the conversation circled around again from her point of view, "And Miss Orange here wants them."

"…wrapped around me until I can't breath and she knows it and she likes it and…"

"Uh… Kay then." Kim demurred a bit, not sure exactly how to respond to the out-and-proud lesbian retelling what apparently was a very vivid fantasy.

"That's what I said, Chiquita roja," Lotus rolled her eyes and departed for her performance. "Now if you'll excuse me, mi musa awaits and Lotus must ascend."

"Pffh," Valentina rolled her eyes, "That's the difference between her and me. Her muse is the crowd and their reactions. I do this for myself. And of course the occasional groupie."

Kim went about transforming herself from a street urchin into 'Lynne Vincible' as the conversation turned and went on. She had to go heavy on the base again, hiding the bags under her eyes from a long and active spate of world saving both with and without Ron.

She'd learned a while back to hide any real bruises and marks on her body before coming in. She didn't relish the looks she got when she came in with a blued cheek and people thought she was being beaten at home.

As if she would allow that to happen to herself or anyone else she knew. And she knew from the whispers she heard, that it went for a lot of the regulars. She didn't want them to try following her home only to find out it wasn't just some guy slapping her around, but thirty heavily armed men.

With a few extra flourishes on her cheekbones to make them sparkle while simultaneously disguising herself, Kim Possible vanished, and her stage persona rose up in place as she waited her turn at the mic for the night.

As she did she pondered muses. Her original muse had been the great American dollar. Now, it was more about ventilating. She imagined a big old steam whistle as a muse and her piping off abouit mentally deficient hunches as serving it, smirking a bit as she let Lynne take control now.

Risqué

"Henchmen? They're easy. Most of them are former high school bullies who never quite grew up. Someone comes along bigger or stronger, and they back right down. Punch em hard in the mouth once or twice; boom, they back down."

Kim was well into her act, and despite feeling a bit rusty, felt like she'd got the audience into her grasp well enough to break into her first musical number, "But that's what we really need from our heroes, right? Someone who just… won't back down."

On that cue, the house band picked up with a slightly bluesy rock riff.

Well, I won't back down.

No, I won't back down.

You can stand me up at the gates of hell,

But I won't back down…

Gonna stand my ground.

Won't be turned around.

And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down,

Gonna stand my ground, and I won't back down!

The crowd started to get into it, as the caricature of Kim Possible that was Lynne Vincible, in her purple sequined tunic, black spandex capris, and bejeweled kimmunicator sung about being a real hero for a change. The song was practically from before when the real Kim was born, but it still felt… right.

She stuck close to the bluesy-sounding rock notes, more suited for her than for a true songbird, allowing her lower register to take the lyrics where they needed to go, and massaging the microphone stand a bit with black leather gloves as she crooned.

She punched up a few notes just to give her own twist on the song, but never fully breaking out of the sultry note she'd adopted as Lynne's pseudo voice.

Well, I know what's right,

I've got just one life.

In a world that keeps on pushin' me around;

Gonna stand my ground, and I won't back down!

(I won't back down.)

Hey baby, there ain't no easy way out

(I won't back down.)

Hey, I will stand my ground and I won't back down.

Kim-as-Lynne held out the microphone in a few spots, inviting the crowd to participate in the old standby, and managed to hear a few tremulous voices participating in the intimate atmosphere.

You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won't back down!

She finished the song up to generous applause and a few whistles, and grinned broadly, both to herself and to the room. It was a rare night when Kim Possible and Lynne Vincible got to directly cross paths in her act, but that song, in this outfit, was one of them.

"Thanks," She offered her audience to the dying applause and smiled her big world-beating grin. "Been wanting to try that song for weeks and tonight felt like the right time to drop the beat."

When Kim had become more of a regular at the club, she had instituted one change to the routine to make it feel less like a strip club. Now each performer came out with their own stylized and ornate tip jars and set them on the stage before their sets, instead of collecting loose bills from the floor or foot of the stage. And hers was filling up nicely.

Her own was a traditional "fishbowl" of glass, akin to what a piano performer in a club or lounge might put up on the ivories. By contrast, Lotus Osiris had a plastic sarcophagus in Egyptian style with the top carefully cut open for tips to be inserted; and Valentina Valencia had gone chintzy, with a cigar box with a plastic hula girl glued to the top. The psychopomps had a bust of Freud piggy bank, and [NAME] with his physics-in-the-news act striptease, a bust of Einstein.

Good was the night when any of these vessels got overfilled with crumpled bills or the rare-but-not-unheard-of gold coin or foreign note of value.

Kim resumed her monologue as the band behind her fell silent. "But seriously… a hero is a weird thing, right, someone who runs towards danger?"

Risqué

"Despraying" her face in the dressing area, Kim sighed and went through her mental regime. She'd learned this from Sammy, the scheduler who ran the roster of participants each night.

Sammy didn't say, but Kim had come to learn, that the technique was actually from sex clubs, where sexually dominant and submissive partners apparently entered an altered state of consciousness in the heights of their games.

She was pretty sure that she was not into whips and chains, having had plenty of experience with both, but it still helped her. Sometimes, in the past few weeks, it had been hard to switch back and forth between the bombastic Lynne Vincible and the cheery Kim Possible.

So much so that it started giving her tension headaches.

Ironically, running into Shego the previous time had made it much easier. A blast of adrenaline straight to her brain was like flipping a switch, and within a few seconds Lynne was gone, and instead Kim was play-acting on stage, pretending to be Lynne as she worked out how to get Shego into custody.

But on most nights it was a bit of a mental exercise to subsume her normal self beneath the mask of Lynne, or to come back up for air afterwards. She'd heard Valentina refer to it as sub-space, but she was pretty sure that that was a thing from Captain Constellation or Space Passage, not from a sex club.

Wherever the technique came from, it was a great help.

Kim felt a familiar sensation prickle her skin. It was fainter than usual, but that didn't matter. It was who it was associated with that mattered;

"Shego?"

Looking around herself, the redhead saw no evidence that she wasn't completely alone in the dressing room. Of course, with the green villainess, appearances could be deceiving. Just ask Martin Smarty about Ms. Whoabakov, or Steve Barkin about Miss Go.

Rising from her chair, still in Lynne's sequined parody of her mission gear, Kim began to follow her senses. The prickling along her skin was familiar, and caused apparently by Shego's powers and their effect on electricity in the air.

At least that was as near as she could figure to why she could practically sense the villainess's presence after all these years. Sometimes five years seemed like a lifetime. Mister Paisley's Flamingoat certainly seemed a lifetime ago now.

Kim followed the impressions, and occasionally sniffed the air. It wasn't that Shego stank… so much as that when she was using her powers, she gave off ozone like an open electrical circuit. Plus, the woman was a creature of habit, and always wore the same sandalwood and sage body spray.

Eventually, tense with anticipation, Kim followed the scent and the sensations to their source.

She found not Shego, crouched and waiting to attack, or worse, blow her cover…

But just a guitar, sitting half-plugged into an audio pickup. The speaker it was attached too hummed faintly with interference from the loose connection.

Sighing, Kim rubbed her half-desprayed face with a palm and sighed.

The noise was contributing to a nascent headache, so the nineteen year old unplugged what looked to be a bass, and then laid it back down into its guitar case. She close the lid and rolled her eyes at the faux bullet-hole stickers she saw at the far end of the case.

Looking upwards, she saw that it was in a recently vacant locker. At the top, crudely scrawled on a piece of gaffers tape, was 'Onyx.'

"So, this is the leggy one's guitar huh?" Kim considered the closed case a moment, and then shrugged, turning away from it. "Needs to take better care of her stuff if you ask me."

Rubbing a pressure point along her right eyebrow, Kim returned to one of the pair of chairs in the communal dressing area and finished removing all the product from her face. Clearly she'd got a bit deep into 'sub-space' tonight if she was imagining Shego where there was only an abandoned guitar.

"Not like sage and sandalwood is that uncommon," she shrugged to the large mirror as she peeled off the sequined top and pulled on an old purple Mad Dogs shirt in its place.

She would have liked to shed the push-up bra too, but she'd neglected to bring a replacement for it with her, having got here right off a helicopter from Belize.

Finally Kim rose from her chair and shucked off the tight capris, trading them for the black cargo shorts she had been wearing in the rainforest earlier in the day. Once again Kim Possible stood there, looking a bit unrecognizable for her mussed hair and tented over-sized shirt, which was kind of the point.

Grabbing her tips jar, she pulled out the not inconsiderable pile of cash and thumbed it into some semblance of order. She didn't take time to count it, as that was rather déclassé inside the walls of the club, but estimated to be about six hundred dollars.

Shoving the wad down into a velcro'ed pocket, she grabbed her duffel bag, needing to wash Lynne's costumes or dry clean where appropriate, and dedicate the rest of the night's take towards rent. That was about three quarters of rent and utilities, so she decided she'd have to be back in next week to close the gap.

"I swear, if I hadn't spent all that time chasing Miss Green Jeans," the redhead lamented.

She walked out of the dressing area, past the older playbill in her locker with her first appearance listed on it, and again caught a whiff of body-spray from the other locker. Shaking her head, she paused, and noted again the guitar case.

"Wait a minute," she knelt to examine, "these are… real holes?"

Kim decided that, compared to her experience in the acting space as Lynne, that someone else was perhaps paying a bit too much time to realism with their own act. Maybe she ought to scope out this 'Onyx' next time she played.

She had to turn side was as she exited the hall to the back door of the club. Valentina gave her a pretty smile, but Kim sometimes felt a little crowded by the natural 38 DD pole dancer in the narrow space.

Then again, Val had a body that could go in any dirty magazine rather proudly, and Kim was, charitably, sporty.

"Break a leg, Val."

"Great set tonight, Lynne."

Smiling, Kim took out her smart phone and asked it to set a reminder about "Onyx" for her, having traded her bedazzeled Kimmunicator for a regular one.

And with that, Lynne in a bag at her side, Kim made her way into the autumn night.