To Immortalize the Moment

"THAT USELESS SCUMBAG!"

Nin kicked a siding panel on her ship furiously. She was beyond pissed off. That stupid little Zim – technically he wasn't even an Invader, yet he had managed to outwit her.

Nin screamed, banging her head against a wall. "They all said he was a Defective. The Tallest said he was insane. But I didn't think it would be that bad…" Nin's eyes widened in fear. "And that SIR unit! That horrible, ghastly thing!"

Nin sat down on the floor of her spaceship, sighing. As soon as she found her center and had calmed down sufficiently, she began to devise a plan.

"The Tallest said that he was crazy," Nin reiterated. "But that doesn't mean anything. Once I make the Smeet with him, I can kill him. And that will make the Tallest happy."

Nin paused. Despite his defiance of nearly every Irken law regarding the Sacred Creator, Nin couldn't help but feel a small attraction to the poor Irken.

That mental blip went away fairly quickly.

"I'll just have to track him down in my own way," Nin reasoned. "There is no doubt in my mind that he has a human disguise. If I just track him down while he's disguised…"

Nin grinned maniacally. "All I have to do is use the toxin glove on him."

She looked down at her palm. In an instant, a glove materialized into view. The Irken emblem was present on a button stuck to the black wristband, and sheer, tissue-like material joined the metallic joints of the glove to Nin's skin.

She began to giggle, an interesting sound in itself. "Zim is mine."

-

"Did you hear there's a homicidal maniac on the loose in our town, Zim?" Dib asked him in an extremely condescending manner.

Zim looked like he hadn't slept. The bags under his eyes were grotesque and visible from nearly five feet away.

"I really don't care about it," Zim admitted, eyes flickering open and closed at random intervals.

Dib was starting to freak out at this. "Did you sleep last night?"

"Sleep…" Zim mused on the subject. "I cannot recall ever sleeping last night. I think I stared at the ceiling."

Dib winced. "What's wrong with you lately?"

"I can't believe you're asking me that," Zim countered coldly. "And when did this 'homicidal maniac' of yours come into town?"

"Apparently two weeks ago," Dib answered cautiously. Before Zim could open his mouth, Dib continued. "Don't you dare think of teaming up with him, Zim. His victims were horribly disfigured when their bodies were found – and there's a wide range of people, too. Men, women, young, old…"

"I don't care about his victims!" Zim bellowed, but since he was sleep-deprived, it came out as more of a croak. "I'm just making sure it isn't…"

Zim cut off, realizing that he had said too much. Dib, however, was now curious.

"It isn't… what?" Dib asked with a creepy grin. Zim frowned at him.

"Nothing of your concern," Zim replied matter-of-factly.

"Well, it's obviously important, if you got no sleep over it, Zim," Dib accused. "Unless sleep has suddenly become unnecessary."

Zim had been backed into a corner on this one, and he knew it. He bit his lip, thinking of something to say – a lie to tell. However, all the stories Zim came up with seemed implausible and convoluted.

"Okay, Dib human, you win. For now," Zim quickly added, seeing the look of sheer delight on Dib's face. "I won't tell you anything really important. All you need to know is that the streak we saw yesterday in class belongs to a female killing machine dead set on having my baby and then murdering me."

Dib's face was contorted into some sort of bizarre, off-putting mess. He didn't quite know what to say, nor did Zim give any indication that he was lying. Dib shuttered, heaved a huge sigh, shivered again, and then paused.

"You're kidding, right?" Dib inquired.

"I'm not kidding," Zim responded, affronted. Suddenly, his PAK began vibrating again, this time softly. Zim jumped nearly five feet out of his chair.

"She's back," Zim breathed. Dib looked around uneasily.

"Zim, I think you're losing -!"

A gigantic crash came from down the hall. Flames were visible from outside of Zim and Dib's classroom. As the rest of the class erupted into pandemonium, Zim grabbed a microphone off of the side of his PAK.

"GIR! GET OVER HERE!" Zim screeched before snapping the microphone back into its jack, grabbing Dib's arm, and flinging him out the window.

As Dib sailed out the window, he thought of many things that had happened to him in his short life – the tricycle accident when he was three, getting wedgies almost daily, his paranormal studies, that jerk Zim who was throwing him to his death…

Dib landed on something soft. He quickly pulled himself up to see that he was resting on a floating pig, and that Zim and his crazy green dog Gir were already manipulating this floating pig as if it were a spaceship.

"What is -?"
"Silence, human fecal worm!" Zim demanded. "That explosion was definitely the Sacred Creator Nin, and if you want to survive, you'll just go along with this!"

Dib had no other choice. Gir squealed in the front seat.

"Joyride! Can we go on a joyride, master?!" Gir asked happily.

"We have no time for that!" Zim countered.

"What's this Sacred Creator thing?" Dib had to ask. Gir flipped around in his seat to face Dib.

"She's REAAAAAALLLLY tall!" Gir yelled. "And likes purple things!"

"The Sacred Creator is the second most important figurehead on my home planet," Zim admitted. Before he continued, he grabbed Dib by the shirt while still looking forward. A quick pat-down gave Zim what he wanted – a voice recorder, which he promptly smashed with his bare fingers.

"The Sacred Creator is the only female on my planet that can create babies," Zim continued, unabated. "However, because of the addition of a reproductive organ on a female, she is rendered mentally unstable and, at her worst, utterly devastating."

"And she's the second most powerful being in your government?" Dib practically screeched.

"I'm not going to question my lords," Zim frowned, "but this Sacred Creator, for whatever reason, has decided that I can create the best baby or some ridiculous filth. And everyone on my planet knows that the father of this baby will die. It's part of the process. So I'd have to be killed in some painful fashion in order for her to have this stupid Smeet."

"Smeet?"

"Baby."

"Oh."

Zim landed the pig on top of the roof of his house. "I have too many things to do here. I cannot die now."

Dib tried to dismount the pig, but he fell off of the roof and onto a garden gnome. Zim looked down curiously before he crossed his arms.

"Stop fooling around! This is serious!" Zim cried. His voice was still not entirely there. "If I can't get you to help me out, your entire planet will be blown up."

Dib peeled his face off of the garden gnome. "WHAT?!"

Gir jumped off of the pig and onto the lawn with perfect form. "Nin's gonna blow up Earth!"

"I got that," Dib frowned. "But… WHY?!"

Zim also jumped off of the roof, landing smoothly on his feet. "I cannot say I know why she'll do this. All I know is that all of the past Sacred Creators blew up the planets where the Smeet was created."

"Why do you need Smeet?" Dib wondered.

"That I can't tell you," Zim responded.

Zim yanked Dib off of the lawn gnome and flung him into the house. Gir jumped in after him, and Zim closed the door, being the last one in. Dib was sprawled on the floor, head reeling. He'd been beaten up more times in the past fifteen minutes than he had in the entirety of the last month.

Zim disappeared into the bowels of his house, leaving Dib sitting with Gir. Gir was chewing on some bubblegum that he had picked up off of the bedside table. This bedside table, for some odd reason, was sitting by the television. Dib twiddled his thumbs.

"So… how exactly does that work?" Dib asked Gir.

"Bubblegum?" Gir responded.

"No. This… Creator thing," Dib clarified. "Wouldn't Zim die for his planet?"

"Nin is psycho crazy like my mama's underpants!" Gir cooed. "But I love my big old fat mama…!"

Gir began singing some random Earthling song, leaving Dib annoyed. Luckily for him, Zim soon popped out of the toilet and sat down beside Dib.

"So what do we have to do?" Dib asked as Zim turned on the television.

"I cloaked my house in an invisibility device," Zim explained. "And everything around it. I'm not a fool, human monkey worm."

"You know that your insults make no sense, right?" Dib asked.

"…What?"

"He's right, you know."

Zim fell face-first onto the floor. Dib looked up and his eyes widened to the size of plates. Nin, the evil genius herself, was hovering over them, hooked to the ceiling with some metal poles.

"You let a human into your base?" Nin bellowed. "You stupid waste of an Invader."

"Invader?" Dib blurted out. "INVADER?!"

"You make it sound like a bad thing," Zim said coldly. "And it's not really important right now."

Zim took out a very large gun of some sort, aiming it at Nin's forehead. Nin lowered herself off of the ceiling.

"A plasma gun?" Nin sighed. "Look, Zim, it'll take a lot more than your puny inventions to kill me."

"Wasn't planning on killing you," Zim corrected, shooting the gun into the television. In a brilliant display of light, the television exploded, sending Dib and Gir flying far beyond the blast zone. Gir, suddenly awakened, shed his dog costume, eyes red, and flew into the fray.

Dib was now sitting alone on the street, watching two aliens and a robot attempt to kill each other. He was torn into two directions. If Nin killed Zim after… doing stuff… with him, Zim would be defeated. However, if this happened, his Earth – beloved Earth – would be destroyed as well. Dib stood up, dusted himself off, and pulled something out of his pocket.

It was the alien handcuffs.

Nin jumped around on some sort of insect-like leg appendage, while Zim used Gir to repeatedly shoot missiles at the Sacred Creator from behind his couch. Nin, not seeing the SIR unit, carried on like she always did. Dib ran up behind the distracted Nin, and before Zim could get a word in edgewise, he was holding her arms together, trapping her.

Nin gasped. Zim put Gir down and tried to get to Dib's side. Gir returned to normal mode and hid beneath the couch. Dib grinned wickedly.

"I'm going to be the one to kill him," Dib gritted. "NOT some psychotic sex fiend like you."

Dib went to click the handcuffs onto Nin's wrists, but nothing was happening. Zim stopped, confused, before he was flung into a wall by some unseen force. Dib felt himself float away from Nin's body, and he flailed wildly. Nin turned around, the handcuffs floating above her head. Her eyes narrowed, inspecting the human stuck in her web.

Nin looked directly into Dib's eyes, and Dib saw her eyes widen slightly. Zim roused himself from his stupor long enough to see Nin reach for something on her hand. In his last breath, he grabbed the plasma gun lying on the ground, cocked it, and fired at Nin's PAK.

Nin whipped around and fizzled out of view, gone, just as the plasma beam flew through the place where her body once was. The stray beam hit a nearby wall, burning it to a crisp. Dib fell to the floor with a rough thud, released from his prison. Zim panted heavily before fainting again, the large gun cradled in his arms as if it were a child.

Dib bit his lip as Gir crawled out from underneath the couch. Gir patted Dib on the head before hugging him.

"I like you, big-headed boy," Gir whispered. "But my master is sleeping, so we have to be quiet."

Dib wished that Gir was right. He desperately wished that Gir would be right, and that Zim was just sleeping, and that he had never gotten mixed up in this mess.

Dib sat up, about ready to leave, when a shadow descended upon him. Someone was sitting on Zim's windowsill, observing the scared boy. Dib looked into the eyes of the gaunt, freakishly tall man, and saw a lifetime of blood, venom, anger, and madness. Dib let out a blood-curdling scream and collapsed into Gir's metallic arms. The emaciated man recoiled and jumped away from the window, fleeing the scene.

Gir watched the man escape with a detached air. Deep within his brain-like object, he sensed that these two forces – Nin and the creepy man – were only just beginning to display their power.

A/N: I am still amazed at the number of reviews I'm getting for this. I'm very pleased, and I hope the story is living up to the high expectations set by the first chapter. Personally, I think I'm terrible at action sequences, but I thought these turned out pretty intense and good.

A/N 2: I never noticed this before, but there is a passing similarity between this story and the movie Species. Not much of one – the only real connection is the presence of alien sex fiends – but it's there. I was watching it on TBS the other day, and I was all, "Crap! The alien baby-monger plot WAS taken!"

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Invader Zim. …Duh.