Invader Zim – "Love Thy Enemy"

Chapter One

"Victory! Victory for ZIM!"

My superior battle cry rang out as I ran as fast as I could out of my nemesis' private quarters, waving a scrap of paper triumphantly gripped in my gloved, three-clawed hand. I raced down the nasty beast's hallway to the front door, grasping the handle and pulling it open. My adversary made little attempt to thwart my escape.

"Zim, gimme back my Spanish homework!" the human spat in confusion as he half-jogged, half-walked towards me, his hand outstretched. "I need that for tomorrow!"

"Nonsense!" I screeched, pulling the paper away and stepping outside. "This is a secret coded message! You are simply trying to trick me with one of your silly Earth LIES! I have studied your language for all of the six miserable years that I have lived here. I KNOW A CODED MESSAGE WHEN I SEE ONE! I AM ZIM!"

"Yes you do, Zim, and yes you are," the pathetic human sighed, turning to go back to his tiny, defenseless fortress. The disgusting worm had lost and had admitted defeat! ZIM HAD PREVAILED!

"After you 'decode' my secret message, do you mind bringing that back? I don't want to have to rewrite everything," he added as he opened the door to his room.

"I fail to see what use this would have after I discover all your planet's secret weaknesses that you have so carelessly written right here," I murmured to myself. "BUT! If I feel that there is no harm in doing so, then… yes, I will bring it back. Seeing how you and I are 'bestest friends' and all of that." I turned to leave, already having been stalled longer than planned. I reached behind my shoulder and pressed a small, central button on my PAK, signaling to GIR that my mission was successful and I was on my way to the base once more.

"I still don't understand how you can be my friend AND my enemy at the same time." This sniveling earth-creature always had some objection to my wishes to take over his filthy, germ-infested planet. What did anyone ever do to make him so loyal to the other awful creatures in this terrible place? They did not deserve him – if it were not for his clever thinking, Earth would have been taken over long ago, and yet they are all oblivious to his heroic actions, shunning him out of their society, calling him a 'freak' and other things much worse.

No matter… if the Dib wished it to be so, it would be so. He was a strange one, alright – with his odd trench-coat and his numerous useless contraptions and obsessive nature – but he made my work interesting (though difficult), and if saving this doomed little planet was what he wanted… well, then, saved it shall be. But that won't stop me from trying to take over. It is my job, after all. For an Irken elite, there can never be submission. ZIM WILL BEST HIM ONE DAY! But perhaps this paper would be the key to the Earth's demise.

"Zim?" Dib brought me out of my trance. "Hurry up and bring me back my homework after you're done. I'm serious. Then maybe we can go grab something to eat."

"What horrible Earth food could I possibly eat? Everything here on this planet is garbage… GARBAGE, I SAY! But, at any rate, I will be going now, and will be back later, so we can… argh! What's that thing that young adolescent worm-spawn do?"

"'Hang out?' "

"Ah, yes. Precisely."

And with that I left him, his overly-sized forehead wrinkled in confusion over what just happened, not knowing how close his planet's demise now was, with the paper – the key – in my hands. He shut the door to his home with a bang, and I could hear the sound of a lock mechanism being turned. I chuckled to myself as I ran back to the base, ignoring the strange glances I got from other passersby. I'd probably just forgotten to put in my contacts to disguise my big, red eyes that were so different from those of these humans. I often did, but nobody ever seemed to care that much. Everyone except for that Dib human believed that it was just a part of my 'skin condition' and was nothing to be alarmed about.

Oh, how very wrong they were.

I effortlessly pushed open the door to the base, greeted by my awful malfunctioning SIR unit, GIR. To this day, the stupid robot won't tell me what the G stands for. Not that I care.

"DID YOU BRING ME ANY TAQUITOS?" the small, silver trash-can of a machine inquired immediately.

"No, GIR, I have brought you no taquitos," I replied. He asked me this every day. ZIM WON'T STAND FOR IT MUCH LONGER, DAMNIT. IT'S VERY ANNOYING. "I am taking this–" I held up the paper, with the coded message scrawled on the surface- "to the lab to be decoded and analyzed. When I return, I expect the doors and windows to be shut and locked. I'm getting very tired of chasing out squirrels, GIR."

"But they're my friends –"

"NO 'BUTS,' GIR. I AM YOUR MASTER!"

"Yes, my lord!" The annoying thing saluted in obedience, his eyes turning a vicious red for a moment before reverting to their normal aqua-blue.

"Good. Now, begone! I have much to do." I pulled open a drawer on a small desk and stepped back as it moved out of the way, revealing a large circular disk on the floor. I stepped onto it and was instantly plummeted to the bottom floor of my secret lair, ready to begin.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN, IT'S NOT A SECRET CODE?" I yelled at the monitor, which was displaying the results of the analyzation of the Dib human's paper.

"I'm sorry, sir." A computerized voice filled the lab from an unknown speaker. Ah, my computer. So much less annoying than that stupid, defective GIR. I had taken a long time to upgrade the computer so that it had a personality of its own; it was something to talk to when Dib decided to get angry and ignore me because I want to conquer his people. "I scanned this message and attempted to translate it into every language in the known universe and only one made sense: Spanish."

"WHAT IS THIS 'SPANISH' YOU SPEAK OF?" I demanded. I was mad. I stole that paper for nothing? No. It can't be. ZIM DOES NOT MAKE MISTAKES!

"Spanish, or Espanol, is a language that originated from the Latin language and is spoken mainly in Earth's Mexico, Spain, and most of South America –"

"But that paper! What does it say?"

"It reads: 'Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492. The native people believed that the new arrivals had come from the sky, instead of from across the ocean. Did they think this because they had been visited before, or –'"

"ENOUGH. I am most troubled and disappointed by this. It must be merely a report for Dib's foreign language class after all."

"Just in case you'd like to know, it was done on 85% recycled newspaper and a 2 graphite pencil was used to write the message, handwriting most resembling the font 'Monotype Corsiva.'"

"I don't care, computer. Stop this drivel at once." My personalized touch to the computer hadn't been completely successful, and I still had a few bugs to work out… such as teaching it when to stop blathering about nothing of any particular importance. "Now, retrieve the message for me so that I can return it to Dib like I promised."

"Yes, sir. Why do you bother with that human, anyway?"

"Silence, computer! The boy intrigues me. Though of different races and having different motives, both of us are intelligent; we both have no true real family (although more so myself- my mother was a robotic arm); we have both experienced the pain of rejection by our peers; we both wish to show our superiors that we are not worthless or stupid. We are one of the same."

As I rode my elevator back to the top floor of the base, I looked at myself in the reflection, my once short body now taller and straighter than when I had first come to Earth, and my dark red eyes clouded while I pondered over what I had said to the computer.

"Yes… the same…"