I don't own Invader Zim. And I sure don't own the concept of karma.

First of all, I must say that I was most gratified by the reaction to Karma Circle 01. My deepest thanks to everybody who read and/or reviewed. Just in case the reviewers decided to be kind, I made sure to have a lighter nearby, so I did get to enjoy a barbecued birthday supper after all. And now for Karma Circle 02, which thejennamonster so kindly beta read...

Hello and welcome to the Karma Café! I am Dibsthe1 and I'll be your server this evening! Smoking or non-smoking? And please be aware that it's the "Smoking" section because we just put out the fire!

There you are, a nice window seat! Any place that metes out justice is bound to be kind of rough around the edges, so I hope you won't mind if some of the language gets kinda, uh, salty? Our special this evening is the surf and turf: equal parts of retribution and restitution! No, not many places do serve it, which makes it rare! Shame about it being rare... 'cause a story needs balance... just like a meal, you might say!

So here's a nice big basket of bread and a glass of water, and let's get you something to sharpen up your appetite...

The Changeling

Chapter One: Appetizer

Dib sat back on his bed, sniffling just a little. His fingers traced carefully along the warped and dented frames of his glasses, carefully pressing them back to their correct shape.

Sometimes, Dib caught himself wishing these beatings were coming from his father instead. It probably wouldn't hurt much more, and THEN someone would finally take the abuse of a ten year old boy seriously enough to bother intervening!

However, Professor Membrane was usually away in his lab somewhere discovering something that the world apparently needed even more than his kids needed a father; occasionally he managed to drop in now and then for a hurried dinner at some restaurant or other. When he spoke of the home situation at all he said only, "It's good to see you two getting along" and treated Gaz like some kind of fragile little slip of a creature in constant danger of being beaten up herself if Dib didn't "watch out" for her.

As it was, anyone finding out that his SISTER had beaten him up first laughed in his face and called him a wimp, and then in the next breath tried to claim she had "guts." If he was such a wimp, how much "guts" would anyone need to beat him up... and if she had all that much "guts," then what need did she have to pick on someone forbidden to hit her back?

Dib put his glasses on to see how straight they were, and found that at least one lens had a smear of blood. He took out his chamois and wiped it away before it could dry onto to the glass.

Boys were always expected to be able to defend themselves... yet they were never supposed to hit girls. So what on earth was a boy to do when a girl was beating him up?

(A/N) How is everything here? Yes, it's supposed to be bitter and tough; that way the main course will taste so much better! Wink! Trust me!

Every single time Dib did or said anything when he was in the same room with her, Gaz griped that it "bugged" her, and beat... or at the very least threatened to beat... the daylights out of him for next to nothing.

Whenever only enough cereal remained to fill one bowl, Gaz intimidated him into backing down by hysterically accusing him of thinking he owned all the cereal... as if she herself wasn't acting as if she owned it all! Whenever there was plenty of cereal but only enough milk for one bowl, it was invariably Dib who took his cereal with water.

Any time Dib tried to play his CDs, Gaz threatened him with bodily harm if she could hear them at all. Gaz... the very same person who night after night cranked the new game console system in her room and played it at maximum volume without a second thought about keeping Dib, tossing and turning in his room just across the hall, awake well into the small hours.

Just minutes earlier, Dib had been watching a TV special on UFOs. It was extraordinarily well-researched; even with his vast body of knowledge on the subject, Dib was astonished by how much he was learning from this program. Right before the undercover reporter with the hidden camera would have actually entered the secret storage room in Area 51, Gaz reached right across his face to change the channel... and when he had protested, snapped at him that what he was watching was just stupid junk anyway.

"Well Gaz I was still watching it first and - !"

Gaz whirled on him, bristling with self-righteous indignation. "I told you not to bug me during My Show, Dib. You... will... pay!"

Hypocrite, that's what she was... a big, fat, stinking... HYPOCRITE! With the hand that wasn't holding his glasses Dib clenched his fist so hard that his fingernails left long red scrapes across his palm. Gritting his teeth, he squeezed his eyes shut to hold back the tears. He was beyond sick and tired of living like this.

Finally Dib rubbed his eyes and after a little more work on his glasses, they finally looked clean and straight enough. Upon putting them on, however, Dib immediately realized that they were still twisted in yet another direction. Sighing, he took them off and continued to fix them.

As abused children so often do, Dib now told himself for the thousandth time that he had been switched at birth and that this wasn't his real family.

From his diligent previous research on the supernatural, Dib had learned that supernatural beings quite often exchanged their babies with those of humans when the opportunity presented itself. At first, one look at his father had been enough to crush any such speculations flat; nobody else on the planet could have hair like Dib's except...except his father. Unless, that is, an undiscovered race of supernatural beings sported such hair, and the Professor was unique among humans?

What began long ago as a wish had become something Dib dared to hope, and which by now he was more willing to believe with every passing day. At least the option of someday finding a safer home made his miserable days a little easier to bear.

Once the frames of his glasses were as straight as he could get them, Dib headed for his computer and opened the folder he'd named "Ugly Duckling."

Hunting for pages on this subject to pore over later provided Dib with relief from his misery after these incidents, and by this time the folder was well-stuffed indeed.

Dib hunched over his computer and with a fresh intensity began skimming the files one after the other. The more he read, the more convinced he became that he was indeed a changeling. Inattentive parents were most likely to have their children switched in this manner, and no parent could be much more inattentive than Professor Membrane.

Many superstitions surrounded newborns for the sole purpose of preventing such exchanges. You couldn't let the fire go out in any room where a baby lay who hadn't yet been christened, and you couldn't throw out the first water in which you had washed the newborn baby. You did, however, have to make sure that some metal object, like one of those old-fashioned safety pins, was fastened to the infant's diapers at all times. Even if anyone had in fact mentioned any of these precautions to the Professor, it was easy to guess what his reaction would have been...

"That's not Real Science!"

By this point Dib, had narrowed down his list of baby-stealing groups down to one. His real parents were most likely trolls. The most noticeable feature of trolls was their hair, sticking up sharply from their heads as it did...

Dib set his chin and nodded. He had to be a troll child. He certainly didn't feel at home in this family, or even this neighborhood. He was an unhappy misfit, without friends and practically without relatives. He and Gaz couldn't possibly be more different... and as he invariably got the worst of it, he was undoubtedly the one out of his dimension. His inhuman origins would most certainly explain his interest in the supernatural.

Dib now wondered why, having crossed the border between hope and belief a long time ago, he kept hesitating to pursue this possibility. Then he remembered.

That his own parents had left him with another family this way was the ultimate proof that they hadn't wanted him, and Dib was in no hurry to face the risk that they wouldn't want him back now either. As he weighed both sides of the question, Dib ran a finger over the edge of his glasses... the metal still had a bend in it that he hadn't been able to work out... and decided that this was a chance he would just have to take.

Dib copied every file with TRL in the title and pasted them into a new folder. Once more he carefully read this story, that legend, those folklore research papers. The most commonly used way to make the trolls return and demand their own child back was to threaten to kill or otherwise abuse the troll child. When he re-read this part, Dib almost changed his mind. Would he really have to get Gaz to abuse him even worse than she already was? Considering what she'd just done, he would have to bait her into nearly murdering him to get his real parents to show up... if indeed they would want...

Dib turned away from his computer to let his gaze drift out the window. He gritted his teeth, tapping his fingers nervously on his mouse. Sometimes the only way out of a problem is the way through... and hadn't he been saying for a long time now that he would do literally anything to leave this unending torment?

With a sigh, Dib stood up. Methodically he went through his room, packing a few changes of clothes, his core books, and various other things he couldn't leave behind. He left most of his posters, taking only his current research on his most urgent fixation, Zim.

"It's not like I'm going to miss a lot of friends. I may even make new ones once I get back with my own kind."

Dib steeled himself for the coming ordeal, then carried his suitcase downstairs. He placed it beside the door where he could pick it up as he left for the last time. He then forced himself to walk up to the couch.

Having turned off the television, Gaz now sat back on the couch playing her beeping, shrieking GameSlave. Cautiously Dib sat down next to her; carefully he reached for the remote. This time it wouldn't matter what show was on. Dib clicked on the television, loud enough that he could actually hear it this time.

Gaz turned a baleful eye on him. "That's bugging me. Turn it down if you know what's good for you, idiot."

Dib closed his eyes and drew a deep breath... before holding a trembling thumb down on the volume button with the plus sign on it.

X X X X X X

Dib pressed a blood streaked face cloth around his puffy lip...carefully, because his hand was hurting too. In fact, not much of him didn't hurt. Not only had his plan not worked, he had only gotten beaten up yet again and worse than ever this time. So complete was his humiliation that Dib couldn't bring himself to meet his own eyes in the mirror.

This was it. The one and only slim hope that had kept him going for years now lay in shreds. After abandoning him with a beast like this in the first place, his real parents now weren't even going to bother coming back to save him!

Dib's breath was now coming in quick gasps. He couldn't face one more day of living like this. All the news stories he'd ever heard about people living under domestic abuse who'd finally snapped and killed their torturers now came drifting back one by one to the front of his mind.

Up until now, Dib had never really cursed, cursed as in saying something worse than "hell" or "damn." But at this moment, an unprecedented craving to vent forced him to grope for words to adequately voice his bitter disappointment and frustrated agony. He wouldn't seriously do such a thing, of course, but in the heat of the moment, he most certainly did mean the words.

"'Amn 'uckin' 'itch... as soon as she's 'sleep I'm cuttin' her t'roat!"

End of the First Course

How was that? After all that you must be very thirsty indeed for some justice, so for now I'll just clear off your table and refill your glasses; your main course is coming right up!