"You'll never get away with it!"
Dib-stink's howls echoed deliciously through the base's inner sanctum, and he struggled pointlessly in the gravitylessness -- what a wonderfully foolish creature. Zim grinned, and turned the nausea intensity knob up another two levels, another two clicks that made the machinery whir ominously.
"Oh, but I will, Dib." He approached, drinking in the victory of it, the thump of meat-fists against infallable prison walls and the pathetic burny doom of Dib's glare. "And you can't do a thing to stop me, not while gripped in the grabbing...GRIP of the Vomitron! Isn't it horrible? Tell meeeee."
Clutching at his ill-prone organs, Dib spat, "I'll nev-- urgh, I'll foil your evil plan, Zim! Whatever it is!" It was difficult to tell in the Vomitron's yellow glow, but he seemed to have turned a paler shade of filth, he hung there like the first softenings of defeat but still he glared. "Indigestion won't stop me! Nothing will stop me from stopping you!"
It warmed Zim the way it always did, trickling down to the blackest depths of his squeedlyspooch, and he turned away from Dib to smirk wider.
"You obviously have no idea what you're up against. My evil plan is far beyond anything a smelly human could hope to stop!" It was wonderful, the pieces coming together, everything beginning to align in a glorious hail to Zim and so he laughed, threw his head back and cackled with the overlordingy power of it. "But I'll tell you what it is anyway!" A few more crowing cries of laughter, tribute to his genius, none could best Zim!
And then GIR happened by, and the cloying-sweet stench of his human beverage carved a line through Zim's senses, it sent a shudder through his sensitive antennae and his laughter dissolved into distinctly un-overlordy coughing.
"Hey, is that ginger ale?" Dib asked, pressing up to the Vomitron's glass. "D'you have any more of that?"
"Sure do!" GIR squealed.
He popped open his cranial compartment and curse the robot's chips, he still had an assortment of cans buried in ice. Hadn't Zim already ordered him to get rid of those horrible drinks? And get rid of the ice machine? And, for that matter, stop filling Zim's boots with maple syrup all the time because that was getting really annoying?
"You've got different flavours? Hmm, maybe I should stick with the basics."
"Ah like the lemon kind!" GIR waggled the can in his hand and cooed, "It's so lemony!"
Invaders were stoic; Invaders carried on their missions no matter what and they never gave in to petty distractions. Zim cleared his throat and began, at an appropriate conqueror's volume, "My evil plan--"
"Lemon? Sure, I'll give it a try."
"Okeedokee!"
The Vomitron's object intake valve whirred and clattered. Nothing was worse than being ignored and Zim clenched tight fists -- how dare a mere human defy him?! Zim! He pried a fist open long enough to turn the nausea intensity knob another level higher -- that would teach the Dib.
"My EVIL PLAN--"
"Crackers go real great with ginger ale, you want crackers? I got crackers!"
"Hey, that'd be great, thanks!"
Once GIR had frolicked ridiculously from the room, Dib looked back to Zim, and he wasn't anywhere near as petrified or grovelling as he should have been but was that fluid beading on his brow? It was -- it was a trace of filthy, filthy weakness.
"Go on, Zim, I'm listening," Dib said, popping the top of his can, his eyes slowly narrowing.
"Clearly, your pudding brain is too full of terror to grasp the situation." Zim lockstepped -- the proud stride of vanquishers -- past his poor stupid adversary. "You see, my plan relies on the doomy properties of--"
"I found you this, too! Here ya go! IT'S FER YOU!"
GIR's shriek echoed and the horrible stench of dirt and feathers hit Zim's antennae, sending crawly revulsioniness down his spine. The intake valve clattered and Zim forced focus -- Invaders overcame adversity. Invaders weren't bothered by chickens, the most inferior creatures ever to be slathered in mayonnaise.
"Thanks," Dib said, wrapping up in a blanket and pointing to his fellow prisoner, "But you're supposed to make soup out of that."
The Vomitron wasn't designed to hold more than one captive, wormbaby or otherwise! The schematics raced through Zim's mind, the capabilities of every bolt and wire and chip, and the sugar-beverage stench was wafting back and couldn't he just have one moment of pure nefariousness?! "GIR! Stop that! Stop it NOW!"
The infernal robot's optics welled up. "But he jus' needs a monkey. Everybody needs a monkey." He brightened, and screeched at Dib, "Ah got just the thing, you keep yer big head all cozy!"
"It's not big."
There was no effort at all in the protest, since Dib was sipping his drink and reclining against a fluffy pillow, where had he gotten that? And the chicken stared with its freakish glassy pupil-eyes and it wasn't working, Zim's plan to reduce the Dib to quivering goo wasn't working and he snarled, and grabbed for the intensity knob. Another two clicks -- that ought to leave any human emptying their weak, sloshy innards and begging for Zim's mercy.
"I have an evil plan, listen to my evil plan! It's so EVIL!" One click more, just because it was a satisfying motion and Dib would look wonderful retching, he would bow, "I AM ZIM!"
"I told you, I'm listening." Dib examined his drink. "Hey, that is lemony!"
The nausea field wasn't enough anymore, not with the chicken inside. Two chickens, in fact. Then four, then nine as the intake valve's mechanisms grated, and mangled bits of white feathers began fountaining into the air and what was GIR doing?!
"GIR! GIR! Noooooo, you're ruining my PLAN!" Zim howled, and yanked his antennae hard -- there were NOT supposed to be chickens and what a smell, what a horrible thick choking barn-stinky smell!
GIR just kept stuffing the foul birds in, and he looked up at Zim and grinned. "I couldn't find a monkey!"
More and more of Zim's test chickens stuffed into the intake valve, filling the containment tube with squirming, fluttering whiteness. He hadn't even finished the avian response tests yet! That many chickens could--
"Is this your evil plan, Zim?" Dib struggled through all the flailing birds and pressed against the Vomitron's glass, smirking, "Chickening me into submission? I'm soooo scared!"
The intake valve screeched and was quiet, clogged with feathers and sticking-outy legs, and GIR continued shoving at the miserable birds anyway. The Vomitron's anti-gravity drive couldn't take much more, surely, it would be approaching critical mass and none of it mattered, Dib just needed to suffer something really, really bad so Zim grabbed the intensity knob, turned it as far as it would go with a snap of his wrist and spat, "Foolish Earthboy! Defy Zim and THROW UP!"
The red-blazing fury ebbed a little and Zim heard the warning keen of machinery, the alarms of stressed processors, distressed squawking and something rumbling that shouldn't have been rumbling. Smoke scratched acrid into his senses for an instant before the blast and all he cared about was whether he had triumphed; Zim, after all, was an Invader.
He did triumph in a way -- he regained consciousness a few seconds before the Dib.
"Nnngh," Dib muttered, and crawled from under some bent wreckage, covered in bird fluff, "How did--"
"Chickens explode when they get queasy." Simple, really, any fool with a particulite accelerator knew that. Zim fished feathers out of his collar and flung them aside, filthy disgusting filth.
Dib raised a brow. "But that doesn't make any sense...!"
"Yeah, well. Wanna hear the plan?"
"I...guess I might as well?"
With his Pak already working on the bothersome dislocated spine, Zim stood over his battered adversary and smiled, small and wicked. "My work observing the human race has finally paid off! Your piggy kind is pitifully vulnerable to a spleen-enlarging compound made from the extract of a rare breed of chi--" And then Zim's jaw dropped, he grabbed again for words and snarled, "Chicken! My chickens! GAAAAH, I can't do a thing with explodied pieces of--"
And then metal fingers pried into Zim's boot and the oozing pain began, the horrible saccharine smell and the sizzle of his own flesh and all he could do was thrash in the rubble and scream GIR's name most ragefully. Not the syrup! Anything but more of the accursed maple syrup!
All GIR had to say in his defense, afterward, was that he liked chicken with his pancakes.