Disclaimer:These characters belong to Jhonen Vasquez and not me. I've just got a story to tell.
--
HAPPY CENTRES
"Here let me get the door for you," Dib says, his ears lifting with his smile. Zim strides past him and hunches his shoulders as if deeply embarassed. Dib follows him into the classroom.
"Today's gonna be exciting, I can feel it!" Dib exclaims as he hikes up his backpack. He turns to Zim who is slowly slipping into his desk, when finally Zim looks up.
"Go away, go away go away!," Zim screeches at Dib while flailing his body parts in different directions. Dib runs to his desk. He swings into his chair and plops onto his bum, bouncing happily.
"I love the world!"
Dib grabs the air around him and hugs it fondly.
On the other side of the room Zim whispers into a little radio while hiding his face from the rest of the class. "Gir, listen, turn the big dial left! Left, left, left!"
Zim's mouth hangs open as he watches Dib's forehead begins to sizzle and smoke.
"You're turning it right, Gir! I want it left!" Zim shrieks and shakes the radio like a stubborn mustard bottle. The tension in the classroom rises steadily as the skoolkids shimmy around, relatively freaked out. Dib is now screaming as if he's on the rollercoaster ride of his life, when suddenly the smoke and screaming vanishes.
"I like life," Dib says with a calm smile, hands clasped together. A little rainbow might very well paint itself over his head. Dib's anti-climactic calmness leaves the built up tension to poise in the air for a moment before everyone finally lets go of their breath to relax and regain normalcy (the word 'normalcy' being relative of course!). Zim quickly tucks the little radio under his collar with relief.
"Zim, if you're going to yell angrily, do it outside of class," warns Miss Bitter, as if deciding that nothing else that had happened in the past two minutes was worth mentioning.
"Ah," Zim quips as he straightens his uniform, "I will yell no more."
Miss Bitters gives an annoyed grunt and grabs a chewed up piece of chalk to begin class.
--
Dib trots home after school. He is happy. The metal rooftops reflect the sun and blind him. That makes him happy. The sound of his boots landing on the pavement makes him smile. The sight of Gaz waiting for something at the door makes him laugh heartedly. Menial things all around him, no matter what, uplift him.
Dib approaches Gaz and puts a flower in her hair. It's a daisy that he'd picked up on his walk. Something inside him screams a warning, but he feels too happy with the world to take it seriously.
"It matches your eyelashes," he says while walking past her to get inside. The punch pulverizes his stomach, his body seizes and sends him staggering, immobilized with agony. He trips into the kitchen where his Dad is installing some super-enhanced megawatt light bulbs that are just fresh from his lab.
"It's quite spectacular. These bulbs hold enough energy to cause a nuclear explosion if not handled exactly right. I think they'll light this room quite nicely." He tightens the last bulb with a squeak from his glossy rubber gloves and nods approvingly. Dib turns the light-switch on and the room instantly blasts with radiance brighter than the sun. Him and his Dad duck out of the kitchen and close the door behind them.
"Yeah! Who's the Membrane!?" Shouts his Dad while punching the air with a "take that!" followthrough.
"Wow Dad! That's amazing!" Dib pants as his frightened heart thumps against his chest. "It was like the sun was exploding in my face! What a feat!"
He squints his eyes enthusiastically and opens them widely, trying to blink away the yellow splotches behind his eyeballs.
"Son, when my experiments succeed, I am happy, for science makes me happy. In your case, unless you are about to claim that the intense light has unveiled some illusionistic otherworldly vision to you, it would be unnatural for you to be as excited about this as I am, which it seems you are." Professor Membrane deducts. He takes out some tweezers and plucks a hair from Dib's head. "I'll just do some tests to make sure you're...still in working order." He seems to force a chuckle as he swings the lab door shut behind him.
Dib's smile drops for a second and becomes much like his regualr self again.
Dad's right, Dib contemplates, It's not like I got any sort of paranormal enlightenment out of almost being blinded! Why am I so excited about a nuclear lightbulb anyways? Maybe-
Suddenly his these thoughts are cut short by an imposing blast of happy-go-lucky-ness that spreads through his brain and softens every nerve and feeling in his body. A smile spreads from ear to ear and he ponders on how good life is. What was that I was questioning about life again? Absolutely nothing! Carry on then.
--
GIR, I feel strangely good, like a good thing," Zim confides to his robot, sincerely awed. He picks at a screw thats starting to come loose in the table. GIR watches the screw intently.
"I am good for enhancing the happy centres of Dib's brain yes? Now he loves his pitiful life."
"You gonna put another thingy thrugh his head?" GIR asks. His voice rises with every word.
"No, the 'happiness probes' that I drilled through Dib's forehead last night seem to be enough for now. As long as you don't let those happy levels go critical, GIR." Zim starts tugging at the screw more assertively, "Never let him get that hideously cheerful again. Not now, anyways"
Zim jumps off his chair and rides an elevator to a new room that he's been constructing for the past month, careful to step over the skinny pipes that are rearing and twisting around madly. All of them rise from the centre of the room. There, a steel tower reaches to the ceiling; the tip harvests sparks of blue light that pulse through a canopy of wires. After each pulse of light the room lapses into darkness.
Zim peeks at the tower's controls. His newest evil plan. It all began with the help of his recent test subject, Nick, with whom he reworked the idea of Nick's 'happiness enhancer' to devise a set of smaller probes that could be implanted inconspicuously.(Nick even helped design the probes by painting smiley faces on the ball-shaped peices).
And now, with every shot of sparks from the elusive tower, a flight of supersonic happiness stimulates the probes in Dib's brain. Zim quivers with excited anxiety. The forces of the mind are under his control. Not even the humans have harnessed such an accomplishment. He puts his hand on a big dial that rests midway between two emotional extremes, one labelled 'normal Dib levels', and the other labelled 'certain cheerful doom'.
Blue light flashes across Zim's face, then the sparks subside once more. In this moment of darkness he twists the dial two clicks towards 'cheerful doom' and scampers out of the room.
"I make the Dib smile because my master plan commands it, and not because I actually want him to feel good. That's right, so be gone icky feelings of pitiful human kindness that corrupt my wrathful blood! This is not for him, this is for me!" Zim chastises his feelings. "You'll see."