Standard boilerplate disclaimer: I do not own Invader Zim. Jhonen Vasquez does. Use only as directed. Offer void where prohibited. Product may contain peanuts.
This one suddenly got a whole longer than I expected, so I'm going to post it in three parts. It's okay; there'll be no evil cliffies! Zim's in the first part only, so if you've been wondering what I'd do with him, wonder no more! (Or at least wonder a whole lot less.)
Can You Picture This?
Part One: Friday: Exposure
Whatever in the name of God kind of being that was, it was most definitely not a human one.
As soon as those mandibles parted and the first utterance came out, Dib noticed something was horribly off... something far beyond the bizarre choice of phrasing. NOBODY ever needed to refer to themselves as a "perfectly normal human" unless that fact had ever been in doubt!
The voice didn't sound remotely like any voice, or even any sound, that Dib had ever heard. In fact any human voice it could even vaguely suggest was one that had been stripped down with an oscilloscope and reassembled out of phase. It came out so fake that it seemed vaguely mechanical, as though the being's throat was full of oily gears and cables.
The more Dib tried to name what the sound reminded him of, the more descriptions he came up with, until he decided the most accurate was the whir of a blender on the most menacingly high setting, combined with the rattle of a rattlesnake... plus an unnerving 1000Hz tone laid down over it all.
When Ms. Bitters asked the being, "What is your name, you doomed child?" he (if indeed it was a he) uttered a sort of unearthly chirp, more like the sound a cricket makes than any name Dib had ever heard, but the closest human approximation of the name was "Zim." So Zim he became.
And the moment Zim said, "You have nothing, absolutely nothing to fear from me," just like that, was the moment when Dib knew for sure that he had a great deal to fear indeed.
When Zim spoke this time, Dib noticed that the creature's teeth fit together like the teeth of a zipper or a jack o' lantern instead of the teeth of a human. Dib fought down a wave of nausea as it occurred to him that Zim's tongue, long and pointed, stretchy and finely segmented, made it appear that Zim was perpetually chewing and swallowing a giant earthworm.
Something else was weird about Zim, something Dib couldn't put his finger on until he realized that aside from that tacky wig, Zim did not have one hair. No eyebrows, no eyelashes, nothing. And the eyes bulged to a degree that would in a human be nothing short of alarming.
And Zim's pointed question, right out of the blue, about how prepared the earth's defences would be in the event of a full scale alien invasion, well! THAT should have tipped off anybody with an IQ greater than zero.
And even after Dib pointed out the blatantly obvious, these deliberately obtuse kids took the word of an alien being over his... and STILL refused to see what was right in front of them! "Skin condition," indeed!
After a wild chase through the city streets after skool, Dib found out where the creature had set up its base. Not one single stick of that big new house just around the corner had been in evidence on that vacant lot the day before. Didn't ANYONE find that AT ALL unusual?
After running all the way home Dib desperately tried to describe to Gaz what he'd seen at skool that day. Not only did Gaz care for nothing besides her games, she had long ago tired of her brother's incessant talk about aliens. After no more than one or two warnings today, she leaped off the sofa at him. Dib barely dodged her knee in time, and as Gaz regained her balance he spun around and bolted for his room, slamming and locking the door barely two steps ahead of her.
After ordering new alien sleep handcuffs from his favorite UFO magazine to replace the ones Zim's lawn gnomes's lasers had destroyed, Dib spent the entire evening pacing back and forth in his room, loudly debating with himself what step he would best take next. He barely heard Gaz barking at him through his door to shut up or she would REALLY pound him when he dared to show his face again.
Dib's bedtime came and went with sleep the last thing on his mind. When Professor Membrane finally came home, very late indeed, he hadn't quite fully opened the front door before Dib was running up to him shrieking, "DAD!! DAD! The ALIEN!! It's HERE!! I SAW it! C'MON I'll SHOW you! RIGHT NOW!"
His father, having heard little more than the word "alien," merely said, "Well, this gives you a great opportunity to meet someone from another country, son! Where is this new kid from?"
"NO country on EARTH!" Dib screamed, jumping and flailing his arms in his urgency. "It's all GREEN, Dad, GREEN! Bright, brilliant GREEN! Like a - like a GRASSHOPPER! NO ears! NO nose! What does THAT tell you? And it's from another planet, Dad, and it's HERE to TAKE OVER THE EARTH! We gotta STOP it!! PLEASE Dad PLEASE this is IMPORTANT!!!"
The Professor paused for a minute as Dib raved; could he actually be listening this time?
Then he chuckled softly."Oh ho ho ho! Aliens are just a metaphor for the old Communist scare, son!" he said soothingly. He reached down and patted Dib's hair scythe, so much like his own, as if Dib had merely been scared by staying up to watch an old 1950s horror movie on the Late Show. "And since perestroika and glasnost, we don't even worry about Communists any more! So just put on your pajamas and go to bed, son; everything's all right!"
This baffled Dib so much that he not only stopped jumping, he actually stopped talking. Sometimes his father made even less sense than he usually did.
The next day, Friday, Professor Membrane had already had his breakfast when Dib and Gaz came downstairs for theirs. He was preparing to leave early but gave them his usual breakfast talk while filling his briefcase with scientific papers and pulling on his coat. He leaves earlier and earlier every morning, and comes home later and later every night, thought Dib. Soon we'll never see him at all any more.
The Professor announced that he would be working Saturday and Sunday as well, so he left standing orders for them to have a good weekend, to stay out of trouble, and to have some fun doing things together. Dib knew only too well what Gaz's ideas of the latter would run to, but this time he had far greater things to worry about.
Rather than repeat the frustrating attempt of the previous night again so soon, Dib had joined his father's conversation, steering the subject away from his deceased mother. For reasons of his own, the Professor very much preferred speaking as if his wife was still alive. That alone bothered Dib far more than his father realized, but on top of that, in this area anything could happen. Dib's father had certainly acted extremely weird at his mother's wake; while he could be more demanding with Dib than he was with Gaz, never before had he been short-tempered or harsh, or threatened to strike Dib for daring to state the obvious truth. And his father had yet to actually say his mother was dead; even at the wake it was just "so sick."
Dib deftly kept his father talking on and on about what to major in at college and the best way to take out a home-builder's mortgage and other things he only vaguely understood; if the conversation slowed down, his father might start talking about his mother again. It felt like crossing a river by jumping from one slippery rock to another before you fell in the water. For a long, long time now Dib yearned to have a conversation with his father about anything for five minutes without expecting this topic to come up, and about something other than chores.
Finally Gaz cleared her throat loudly and sarcastically so that the Professor turned his attention to her. Juggling both children in the same conversation seemed beyond his father's rudimentary social skills.
Keeping a sadistic eye on Dib as she did so, Gaz went on and on about what she and her mother had supposedly done together when she got home from skool the previous evening.
But Dib was too preoccupied with how best to get photos of Zim. Today was the day Dib would expose that being to the world for the alien threat it was.
In choosing which camera to take, Dib had selected not his new digital model, but his old fashioned one for its much brighter flash. Not yet fully knowing what he was dealing with, he decided to go for every little bit of tactical advantage he could get. Those sudden explosions of light could disorient even someone who was expecting them. Dib had found only three or four exposures remaining, so he rewound the old film (all false alarms anyway), and dropped it into his wastepaper basket before loading his camera with the spare roll and placing it securely in his trench coat pocket.
Dib had yet to photograph a UFO, but today he was going to get something even better, something even more conclusive. He was well aware that this field attracted a lot of crackpots who made it difficult for someone who'd actually seen the real deal to convince anybody else who hadn't seen it. Dib knew it would have to be a very good photograph indeed to stand a chance of convincing somebody who was in a position to actually do something but who hadn't seen the alien with their own eyes.
What would make the best, most effective pictures? A close up of the front of that head, for sure, as well as...
Thoughts like those were what occupied Dib's mind as Gaz kept adding one fabrication to another. At least it made her father happy enough, but where were Dib's usual pained reactions? Gaz seethed with barely contained outrage. This is not the rightful order! Dib does not ignore me... I ignore him!!
When he had finished his talk with Gaz, the Professor left for work. No sooner had Dib stood up from the table than Gaz thrashed him mercilessly for not putting on a better show for her after all the trouble she'd gone to in making up that story. Dib merely curled up in a ball on the floor and waited for her to finish; when getting just a few little grunts of pain and no pleas for mercy at all got Gaz still angrier, she kicked him a few times extra.
To add even further to Gaz's frustration, when Dib finally stood up, with no more than a groan and a sigh, the first thing he checked for breakage and damage was... his camera! He actually had the nerve to look... relieved!
Growling through her teeth, Gaz stalked off stiff-legged and fuming to finish preparing for skool. By this time, even her skull necklace looked angry. Now that Dib had finally grown inured to physical battery Gaz felt as if she had broken a toy; in fact, the last time she felt like this, she had just smashed her first GameSlave to pieces in a fit of spite.
Gaz was determined to get her rightful upper hand back somehow. She was going to start doing something else to Dib, something else that would be EVEN... WORSE...
And she could still do plenty worse. That much she knew.
Dib limped just a bit as he accompanied Gaz to skool. He didn't call out for her to slow down, not because he knew full well that she wouldn't, but because for once he himself was in a hurry to get there. The haste paid off when they got to the skoolyard and Zim had yet to arrive, giving Dib his much coveted opportunity to lie in wait for the alien. He suppressed a snicker as Gaz stormed off.
Lurking behind the rails of the stairs leading led to the skool's front door, Dib used the telephoto lens to snap several pictures of Zim walking through the skool grounds and approaching the door. When Dib turned around for a rear view of the creature disappearing into the skool his astonishment was such that he almost forgot to get a picture from this angle. What was that thing on the creature's back, and how had he not noticed it the day before?
When Dib strode into the class several seconds later, directly on Zim's tail and steadily watching him, he noted with glee the surprised look on Zim's face upon realizing the human had closely followed for an unknown length of time. Score one for the earth! But it wasn't long before Zim had the advantage again.
That day Zim sat in class speedreading books about the earth's history and geography, spending no more than a half hour on the books for that grade. The next time Dib sneaked a glance at Zim, the alien was now zipping through texts of the next grade up. And the following time, it was hi skool texts. From where the book was open, Dib could calculate when Zim was up to events like the Inquisition, the Black Plague, and the Civil War. From the being's expressions while reading, Dib had no doubt it was getting all kinds of horrible ideas on top of any it had already.
The hi skool texts included biology, chemistry and physics. Zim could barely suppress laughter all through the biology book, and didn't seem too impressed with earthly chemistry or physics either. That expression of amused condescension while reading these texts suggested to Dib the expression he himself would have while reading one of those curious newspaper editorials from100 years ago explaining why air travel was impossible.
Reading on ahead, Zim kept looking around and catching Dib's eye. Was this merely checking to see if anyone was watching... or was this specifically to make sure Dib saw everything? If it was the latter, Zim could have taken intimidation lessons from Gaz, Dib thought with increasing discomfort.
Dib fought back an uneasy feeling that Zim was in a few hours absorbing as much information on these subjects as it took most people an entire skool career to learn... and himself, more like a year or two. Clearly this was no earthly intelligence.
He wondered about evolution and species classification on Zim's home planet. If humans evolved from apes, he didn't want to even imagine what kind of life form these... these Zims evolved from. To Dib, Zim strongly suggested some sort of undiscovered giant four-limbed insect, but which was even creepier, one with a most un-insectlike mental capacity. And it was already using words like "invasion" and "defences... "
Only too readily, Dib now recalled that after utter and total bewilderment, the most frequent emotion reported by people claiming to have seen a UFO was fear, a deep terror that could take days, even weeks, to ease.
With an effort, Dib forced himself to put words to what he was fearing the most. If this alien reminded him of an insect, was it of the type found in huge swarming colonies, like bees... or worse, wasps... or more horrifying still, army ants, those tiny marauders that collectively could devour even a horse or cow caught in their path? Whatever vast, teeming hive of a planet this creature came from would be mighty interested in the resources on this one, once Zim started sending back information, as all scout insects did...
Scout! Zim had to be the advance scout for who knew what kind of invading armada! What sort of horrific fate they had planned for the earth and everybody on it once they caught up with their vanguard was something Dib didn't want to even think about.
And now Dib felt a deep cold fear slowly creeping up around him. Dib Membrane, who woke up each morning and came out of class each afternoon to face a sister named Gaz, was as terrified as if all the foreboding and all the sudden frights he'd ever endured in his life had clutched him in this one icy moment.
Ms. Bitters chose this moment to hiss in Dib's face to "Pay attention!" He leaped with a frantic shriek which made Ms. Bitters's day and amused the class to no end.
Zim was laughing the loudest of them all. Dib forced himself to sit completely still facing the blackboard, his hand resting on the reassuring camera in his trench coat pocket.
When the bell finally rang for recess, the children stood up from their desks and began to mill around. Keeping one hand in his pocket and firmly gripped on his camera, Dib took care to lose himself behind the crowd so Zim wouldn't spot him too easily. Finally Dib approached the creature from the side, camera behind his back, taking a deep breath as he did so. "Hey, alien!" he blurted, cloaking his terror with loud bravado. "Is it true that the moon is made of green..."
Zim turned to look at him. "What is this that you want, you inferior earth - "
"CHEESE!" Dib shouted, snapping the shutter.
"AIEEE!" the creature yelled, shielding its eyes from the flash of light, which gave Dib plenty of time to photograph that alien mouth with those bizarre teeth and that horrifying tongue, both of which were most definitely not of this planet.
To Dib's immense relief, Zim didn't instantly blast him with some kind of alien death ray, or snatch the camera out of his hand and smash it. Apparently Zim was waiting to blend in better before making any openly hostile moves, so Dib knew he'd better take as many pictures as possible while the opportunity lasted.
For the rest of that day Dib relentlessly trailed after Zim, taking picture after picture, and he got some really good ones. A well-placed taunt had goaded Zim into sticking that shudderingly otherworldly tongue out at the camera. Then Dib got a picture of Zim running away on long appendages that came out of the backpack and which resembled nothing else as much as the legs of a spider. At lunchtime he caught a shot of Zim picking up the wig in the middle of the skoolyard next to a dodgeball; the two antennae sticking straight up like rabbit ears surprised Dib so much he nearly forgot to take the picture. That insect metaphor had been even more accurate than he realized. Dib added a few more pictures of Zim that afternoon, capturing images of the creature doing things he couldn't even describe.
Dib continued taking pictures even as he chased Zim home, with the alien shouting to everybody they passed, "Human! Hey, Human! You, Human, YOU! Command this earthstink to desist the chase of ZI - II - IIIM! I'm normal! NORMAAAL!"
Dib knew he was seeing a unique blend of the worst features of both culture shock and jet lag. As rapidly as Zim had learned bits and pieces of earth behaviour, the alien was still in the dark about what exact words to use for each particular situation. The more the being tried to blend in, the more conspicuous it became, to Dib's eyes, at least.
Dib in turn kept yelling to the people, "Somebody stop him! He's an alien, I tell you! AN AAA - LIII - EEEN!!!"
The people along Zim's escape route either turned around, waved dismissively or shook their heads. So that crazy UFO kid had finally found a friend who also wanted to play Alien? There went the neighbourhood.
Dib even got a couple of pictures of that weird green flying dog thing as it once more swooped out of nowhere to carry Zim to safety. He was confident that these images above any others would bury any last lingering doubts that this was the real McCoy. His final shot was of Zim peering out the window of the new house, with the Men's room sign on the door and the "I heart earth" sign in the front yard. Really! Who on... "earth..." did Zim expect to fool with that?
Dib could not keep his face from splitting with triumph as he got on the bus to go to the nearest photo developing place, the one at the maul. In fact, so wide and so persistent was Dib's grin that the bus driver got suspicious and kept eyeing him through the round mirror to make sure that kid wasn't vandalizing the interior of the bus with graffiti.
Once at his destination, Dib headed straight for the photo shop. "Extra prints? Sure! Make it three. No, four. Wait a minute, five. Better make it six. Okay, seven... but no more."
After staying away just long enough to savor a celebratory double scoop ice cream cone, Dib returned to wait at the photo shop counter, impatiently asking the clerk every five minutes if his pictures were ready yet.
By the time the pictures were at last ready, the clerk was as grateful as Dib. He breathed a sigh of relief as that weird kid finally ran off to find a bench somewhere else to sit down and look at whatever could possibly be so important.
And Dib was most satisfied indeed. His pictures were for the most part sharp and well-composed, looking exactly as he had expected them to look. Well, one was a little blurry because he had taken it on the run, but he had another, closer shot of a similar view which could not possibly be any clearer. Years of photographing satellites, kites, and weather balloons had after all helped Dib to develop quick reflexes, a steady hand and a photographer's eye.
On his way home, Dib stopped off at the newspaper office and asked at the front desk if any reporters were on duty because he had an extremely important story. Before long, a young reporter in a white shirt and jeans hurried out and introduced himself as Gavin before guiding Dib to a back room with a desk and two chairs in it. Gavin had already poised a pen over his notepad before he even sat down.
"Something serious?" he asked.
"I'll say it is!" Dib exclaimed as he nodded vigorously.
Sparing not the tiniest detail, Dib poured out everything that had happened over the past two days, beginning with the minute he first saw Zim the day before and ending with the alien disappearing inside that strange new house a couple of hours earlier. As soon as Gavin realized what Dib would be talking about, his face fell, but as Dib got caught up in telling his story, he noticed less and less the reporter's flagging interest.
By the time Gavin could finally get a word in edgewise, barely any questions remained for him to ask. He simply said, "Well, thanks for dropping in, uh, Dib." Dib thanked Gavin profusely for listening, insisting on leaving a set of photos with him.
After catching another bus, Dib went straight home, carefully avoiding Gaz as much as possible. After supper he went straight to his room to write his contact information on the back of each photo and to draw up his to do list for the next day. Dib decided to go to bed earlier than usual, heating a large cup of milk to ensure a good night's sleep. After sleeping fitfully if at all the night before, Dib knew he would need to be well awake and alert for what lay ahead tomorrow.
Coming soon: Saturday: Development