"Nnnnaggghhh."
The scarred blue eye of Dr. Drakken narrowed as he stared at the conglomerate of metal and glass in front of him. The infuriating contraption had been baffling him and every intern he could throw at it, occasionally literally, for the past couple of months, proving stubbornly resistant to any attempts to penetrate, dismantle, or reactivate the thing. Diamond-tipped drill bits had worn themselves into dust, acetylene torches burned out after the first hour, and none of the screws matched with any of his screwdriver sets! Not even those really weird foreign ones with the strange shapes.
Drakken frowned. Ever since he had found the thing out in the Exclusion Zone, it had been one infuriating mystery after another. For starters, why didn't it look like any of the other trash bots that were just lying around? All those other shoddily branded ones had rusted away from all the acid rain and poor construction, but this one looked as untouched as if it just came off of the manufacturing line.
Assuming it did come off of a manufacturing line, anyway. You never could tell with some of them. The construction was oblong and vaguely cylindrical, consisting of bands of metal surrounding transparent glass that offered a view to the inside. Detailed electronic components rested on the interior, their purpose completely unknown, but from what little he could tell they seemed incredibly advanced. Long, spindly constructs extended off of the central chassis, giving the implication of limbs, or perhaps connectors. Maybe supporting beams? Drakken got the impression that it was supposed to be part of a larger structure, as if it were meant to slot into something… but up to this point, it had refused any of his attempts to gain more information.
"Shego! Where did those goons of yours find this thing, anyway?" He whirled around as if expecting an answer and was met with the solitude of his lab. "Meeeh. That's right. She's off doing business or something."
===
"Enrique, I love you but we can never be together! My brother-in-law's mother's aunt's hairdresser-"
"Ugh, Pass." Click.
"Howdy and hello! Come on down to your local Noodle Burger for a mouth-watering-"
"No." Click.
"Egad! The Prognosticons and the Trashcandroids working together would be enough to destroy our dimensional reality-!"
"Hard pass." Click.
"Coming up next! The sordid affairs of America's top ten CEOs! Number Eight may surprise you!" an announcer said as a thinly-veiled silhouette of a frosted-over Heinz Doofenshmirtz appeared on screen.
Shego blanched, and hit the power button. "Okay, I think that's enough for the day." She yawned, her plush chair creaking under the strain as the wall-to-wall television slid into the ceiling. She glanced at the clock. 3 pm. Great. She'd have to stay here for another two hours. 'Just in case'. Senior knew how to run the company so she didn't have to, but she really didn't appreciate all the scheduling he continually begged her to do. Anything she had to do was always done three hours into the day, leaving her pretty much stuck here in case a 'situation' happened that no one else could deal with. It was worth it, but such things only happened once a week or so, leaving her stuck here in her office waiting for something interesting.
Her idle musing was interrupted by the buzz of her intercom. Sitting up straight, she hit the button.
"Y'ello?" She drawled.
"Shego!" Drakken bleated through the tinny speakers. "That weird robot is still refusing to give me answers! I've tried everything, it doesn't fit in any of the sockets! I've even tried making custom sockets and it still doesn't fit!"
Great.
"Yeaaaaah, I don't really see how this is my problem, Drakken. Last I checked, you said your genius was unparalleled and required no assistance." Shego checked her nails. Still good.
"Grr- this is your problem because this is one of your 'company projects!' You sent your goons to pick this thing up months ago, and I still haven't made a dent in it! Literally! I went through three bottles of acetylene before I realized the darn thing was heat resistant, and wasted five of those diamond drill bits on the same! None of the screws are right!"
"You've told me this three times, Drakken. What do you want me to do about it?" Shego grumbled. "Or are you just calling me because you have nothing better to do with your time?"
"I don't know, why don't you send your pet technopath over to open it up? Or is she too busy chucking people off of that school of hers? At least tell her to get back to me on those screws, I sent her five emails!"
"If you'd met the guy, you'd want to throw him off a floating island too. Besides, she's doing that whole 'revolutionizing space travel' thing? You know, her job. Job. Like you're supposed to be doing?"
"Hmph. That may be true, but come on. You're telling me she doesn't want to take a look at this thing? It's not like those other junky bots out there, this one's all metal and… chrome, and… shiny bits! And if we can find whatever it plugs into, then-!" Drakken cut himself off. "...Wait a second. What are you working on right now, anyway?"
"What, me? I'm, just…" Shego's eyes flick down at her desk, the dusty in-tray, crowded and overwhelmed by a legion of desk toys. "Looking through Sky High applicants. Seeing if any interesting ones are popping up."
"What? But you hate paperwork! And besides, it's only 3 PM! That's another hour before that 'Duchess Approves' show you like so much comes on."
A twinge of annoyance ran down Shego's spine. "What do you want, Drakken?"
"Would it kill you to come visit every once in a while? I want some help getting this thing working! Maybe you can, like, power it with your plasma powers or something! The last time I hooked something up to the island's power generator was…" Drakken made a noise of disgust. "...not fun."
"Uhuh." Shego found herself staring at the clock again. 3:02. Drakken was right. Another 50-odd minutes to kill. She sighed.
"Fine."
===
Drakken was muttering to himself, pacing circles around the room with his hands clasped behind his back. "Hmm… thermal shock didn't work, radiation embrittlement didn't work, brute force didn't work… Shego! Finally!"
"Are you sure it isn't just junked?" Shego eyed the construct skeptically. Now that she was finally seeing it in person, it looked, well, it looked like a part that had been torn out of a greater whole.
"Of course it's not just junked!" Drakken gestured to the pile of rusted husks lining the lab tables around the edge of the room. "Look at those! All rusted, electronics corroded, and branded by that awful 'BnL' company." He fished out a circuit board long corroded by sand and acid rain, holes burned through it in several places. "That is junked. This-" Drakken raised an arm to the glass-covered construct "-those smooth, curving lines! The modernistic appeal! The design! Just look at those circuits!"
"The exposed circuits. Yeah. Okay. Riveting."
"The exposed circuits that made it through all that horrible acid rain! We are dealing with something unique here! I just need- to- turn- it- on!" Drakken grunted with exertion as he attempted to tighten a vise around the extended mechanical parts.
"Maybe we're better off just cracking it open and taking it for parts." Shego gathered a ball of plasma in her hand. "You said you couldn't crack it at all, right?"
"No! I don't know if they've got impervium in here or what, but nothing I could do even scratched it!" Drakken grumbled. "And fine, I guess if we can't reactivate it we could make a killing off of the chips…"
Tilting her head slightly, Shego walked up to the odd machine. It had stymied Drakken for weeks now, which meant she could probably get it running with a swift kick. Leaning in with an expression of barely-averted boredom, Shego gently tapped the glass with a finger.
And immediately took a wild swing at the device as she felt a piece of her glow slip from her fingers and into the machine. The device fell over onto the ground from the impact, undamaged but entirely unbalanced. It laid there for a second, and then there was a gentle click.
"Bzzt...fleuzwashtul estb jhorisho."
Shego swore, staring at her finger and rubbing away the lingering sting. Before she could even open her mouth, Drakken pushed past her in a flurry.
"What was that? It did something!" Drakken leaned over and pressed his face against the glass capsule to look at the circuitry suspended inside. "What did you do to it, Shego?"
"I'll tell you what it did to me: Piss me off. What is that thing?"
Annoyance warred with wariness on Shego's face as she took a few steps back, before she settled herself on a mask of sardonic smugness.
"Looks like you were using the wrong tool for the job."
Irritation flickered across Drakken's face before being replaced by a manic grin. He felt around the edge of one of the metal bands for a small indentation and depressed it with a click. A low, whirring hum filled the room as the device pulsed with energy, electricity arcing between the electronic components and the glass surrounding them.
"Zero." The device spoke in a modulated, feminine voice. There was a pause for a moment as Drakken leapt back in excitement.
"Oooh! Shego! We did it!"
"One." the voice repeated. "Uno, два, tres."
Drakken blinked. "Wait. Is it counting?"
Shego quirked an eyebrow. "You're supposed to be the expert, aren't you?"
"Cinco-huit-dreizehn." the rapid-fire monotone continued. There was no emotion in the voice, but one could almost get the impression that this was by design rather than a technological limitation.
"It can't even stick to the same language! What was that, French? I don't speak much French. Only took a few years in Monsieur Deshailles' preparatory." He shoved a whole mess of papers, folders, and books off of a messy lab table and grabbed at a notepad.
"Maybe it's a code? Some kind of coordinate set?"
"二十 一. тридцять чотири."
"Let's see…" Drakken muttered to himself, scrawling figures in a messy hand. "Zero, one, one, two, three, five…"
"Cinquantacinque-восемьдесят девять-cent quarante quatre-two hundred thirty three-三百 七十 七-sześćset dziesięć."
"It's not coordinates! It's the Fibonacci sequence! Stupid machine!" Drakken looked like he was about to kick at it before reconsidering. "Say something else! We already know that!"
"Where in the Wasteland did we drag this one out of again?" Shego asked, looking like she was considering bombing it.
"It was that one really weird place, wasn't it? You know, the one where we lost three interns that one week, then they woke up somewhere in Nevada with nothing but their shoes?"
"Was that the one with the glass trees or the one with the acid lakes?"
"Hrmmm. I think it was the one with all the spikes? I'm still having nightmares about that tank!"
Shego lost her patience and rolled her eyes. "Drakken, I asked because I have a lot of things to do, and keeping track of everything related to this thing was your job."
"Dos. Drei. Cinque. Sept. Eleven. Tretten. Seacht déag."
"Stop counting in prime numbers!" Drakken shouted. "If you're going to count, at least tell us something useful! Coordinates, universal insights, I dunno, something! If I spent three weeks trying to reactivate some oversized calculator I'm going to be very upset." He turned back to Shego. "And come on, you only have two seasons of The Duchess Approves to catch up on! That's not 'a lot'. Put it on in the background when you're filing your taxes or something, I dunno. It's not like you'd be missing out on much acting."
Snap.
Shego tossed the shattered halves of the nail file into a garbage bin stuffed to the brim with balled up blueprints.
"What did you say?" Shego asked warningly.
"You know, that show you watch when you're pretending to be working?" Drakken asked, too distracted to pay attention. "I know you want me to watch it too, but I cannot bear the idea of that insipid-"
Drakken was violently spun around to see Shego glaring an inch from his face, plasma up.
"...Too far?" He asked.
"Huit cent. Ottocentocinquanta. 九百二十. Mil treinta. Trí mhíle dhá chéad. пять тысяч пятьсот. Huit mille sept cents. Thirteen thousand. Twenty-six thousand. Czterdzieści trzy tysiące. Kvindek ses mil. 六萬四千."
Shego let Drakken down to stare at the robot.
"Okay, okay! Sheesh." Drakken said, brushing himself off. "Some people are so picky about television nowadays. Now where were we?" Drakken questioned rhetorically. "Right, right, impossible robot spouting nonsense in a variety of languages I barely understand! I told you I don't speak much French, so stop speaking it!"
"दो हजार एक सौ. Tri mile ceithir cheud. ສີ່ພັນຫົກຮ້ອຍ. Lima afe lua selau."
"That's better." Drakken groused.
"You understood it that time?" Shego asked in disbelief.
"Well, no, except for the Scots-Gaelic. But it stopped speaking French, so that's progress!" Drakken continued poking at the machine for a moment before his mind clicked back into its previous rant. "Now back to those interns. Maybe it wasn't the time we lost three, but the time all nine disappeared? Not the first time, the other time. Big empty fields, chunks of graphite, those weird-shaped cooling towers- eeeeugh." Drakken shuddered. "We need to remember to send a gift basket to the next of kin. Shego, make a note of that."
A socket wrench impacted Drakken's head. Drakken yelped.
"...I'll just make a note of that, then." Drakken said, in a somewhat more pained voice.
"Tolu sefulu lima afe. Fjörutíu og tvö þúsund. Kırk sekiz bin. 五十三千. Sexaginta milia.
жаран нэгэн мянга. Seachdad tri mile."
"Aaargh, I don't know what it's doing! Look, it's obviously a pattern of some sort- these are all even numbers and they seem to be going up- but what do they mean?"
Drakken began pacing. "Let's see. We know for a fact that this device is unlike any other we've found in the Ex-clu-si-on Zone," Drakken said, putting unnecessary emphasis on several nonexistent syllables. "It clearly represents a unique form of technological… doohickey that communicates in an indecipherable code. Now, why does that sound familiar? Shego! Why does that sound familiar?"
"Ceithir fichead 's dà mhìle. Ninety thousand. Cant ac un o filoedd. Ciento cinco mil.
十 一万 千."
"Oh, whatever!" Drakken said, throwing down his tools in a huff. "Maybe some tunes will help clear my head."
"It won't." Shego replied.
"Einhundertfünfundzwanzigtausend." the machine remarked as if in agreement.
"Yes it will!"
"You'll get distracted complaining about modern pop music again."
"There's been no heart in it since the Cheetah Girls stopped putting out new albums." Drakken groused. "Sev'ral Timez sounds like they came out of a vat. And I should know!"
Drakken rolled up his sleeves and made his way over to the unnecessarily large control panel he preferred to keep in every major room. After several attempts that lead to activating the central heating, dumping the base's entire supply of creosote oil into the Atlantic, and flinging a pair of guards out an escape hatch, Drakken succeeded in turning on the radio.
A incomprehensible burst of noise issued from the impractically large contraption, garbled phonemes blending together in a vague simulacrum of words, completely indistinct from any language Drakken had ever heard of.
"See what I mean? Modern music is nothing but noise!"
"Drakken, that's clearly nothing like music."
"I know that, I was being humorous. Urgh. You think I wouldn't recognize that horrible hellish noise I've been trying to decode for the last few weeks?"
The machine switched from its ceaseless count into a series of rapid-fire dolphin cries, undulating in tone and pitch.
"Oh come on! Switching languages was bad enough, but now you can't even stick to human ones? What am I supposed to do, go to that idiot pharmacist and ask him to translate?! He only speaks Whale! That'd probably be like trying to speak Finnish when all you know is Karelian! Sure, you can probably understand a few things, but it'll be really awkward for everyone involved and you'll probably end up insulting someone."
"...Doofenshmirtz speaks whale?" Shego asked, actually looking up.
"It was in his last email demanding you give him Colorado. Come to think of it, we haven't gotten any in a couple months."
"You read my emails?" Shego asked threateningly.
"You… you made me do that for you." Drakken said lamely.
"...I did?"
"십삼만 팔천. Centoquarantacinquemila. One hundred fifty two thousand. сто шестьдесят одна тысяча. 十七萬三千. הונדערט פֿינף און נײַנציק טױזנט. Ducent dudek mil." After finishing another barrage of dolphin noises, the machine dutifully switched back to its now-familiar counting.
Drakken fidgeted. "Shego…"
"Yes?" Shego asked, full of resignation.
"Do you want… me to learn Whale?"
"Oh my god."
Shego allowed her head to slump gently into her waiting fingers.
The silence stretched on. Both turned to the robot only to find it waiting in silence as well.
Drakken kicked the robot.
"Stupid robot! Keep working!" Drakken scowled, clutching his bruised foot.
The robot went beep.
"Wait, I think that worked, what did I say there?"
"Something pathetic about whales?"
"No no, before that."
"A̵A̵A̵A̸A̸A̵͇̐Ã̶̪A̸̤̓A̵͔͔͛Á̴̱̄̕Á̷̪̼͈A̸͚͐̏A̷̢͚̣͋̿͒̀͋̆̇͝Ḁ̶̳̳̣̫̭̮́Ḁ̸̧̙̖̣͇̪̺̀̒͗̾̿̏́A̶̢̛̦̱̥̝̞̯̿̎̅̓̀̊͋͆́̈͝ͅA̵̞̙͕̘̦̠̥̟̓̀̀̈́͌̾̉͠A̸̞͇̻̍͂̌͛͂͝Ȃ̴͎͍͔͒͑̂͂̅̔̈́̽͠À̵̫̹̤̭̟̝̫̥̥̘̬̰̘̬͌̾̀̉̈́͑͆͒̀̌́̉͆̾̑̚͝͠Ả̸̻͔͙̥̟̱͖̩̟̤̳̙̼̅̊̄͗̍̈́̄̅͆͌͋̔̽͂̎͂̆̍̕̚-"
"WILL YOU STOP TOUCHING IT!!!" Shego screamed.
"STOP SCREAMING! STOP IT!" Drakken screeched, clutching his ears.
"五十 三万."
