Not exactly. ;)
3. Irken Fun Dip
"Dad?" Poking my head down the staircase to the lab, I saw light through the crack under the door, and yelled again as I descended the stairs. "DAD!"
"Dad's not here." I opened the door to find Dib bent over one of his worktables, squinting at something through a microscope, decked out in goggles and rubber gloves. He straightened up and turned to look at me, pushing the goggles up onto his forehead. "He went to some conference thing, remember?"
I frowned. "Obviously not."
"Well, why do you care?"
"Just wanted to see if I could get a few bucks out of him. I was thinking of taking Zara to that swanky Italian joint for dinner."
"Is it your two-day anniversary already?"
"Two weeks, actually."
He rolled his eyes and gestured with a little white stick in one hand, lifting it like a glass of wine. "Here's to another two."
As he returned to the microscope, fiddling with a bunch of little wheels that studded the sides, I ambled over to glance over his shoulder. "What's that thing?" I asked, meaning the white stick, which he had placed on a glass plate and slid under the microscope. Upon inspection, I saw that it was chalky-looking and rounded at the ends, no bigger than one of my fingers. "And why do you care?"
"I found this on my last information-gathering mission at Zim's house. That thing—" he pointed to a small container in a plastic bag on the countertop, made up of interlocking red and purple segments "—goes with it. It's some kind of Irken food." The dials on the microscope squeaked as he turned them up further, practically squeezing one eyeball through his goggles into the lens. "I've seen him with it before. The little container is filled with powder, and you're supposed to dip the stick in it and eat it."
"So it's alien Fun Dip."
"Well, sure, you could simplify it like that. But we've got to think bigger than candy, Gaz!" He grabbed a tablet from a nearby drawer, switched it on, and began making frantic notes, gloved fingertips flying across the touchscreen. "If I can break this down and find out what it's made of, maybe I could reverse-engineer a—hey! Don't touch that!"
Ignoring Dib's protests, I unzipped the plastic bag and opened the container, to find that each side's contents corresponded to its color. After a moment's consideration, I licked my index finger, stuck it into the side full of purple powder, and sucked it clean in my mouth.
"God!" Sputtering and choking, I spat the stuff into my hand the second I tasted it, and proceeded to wipe it off on Dib's jacket. "That shit's disgusting! It tastes like frickin' rubbing alcohol!"
"That's why you weren't supposed to taste it! Seriously, Gaz—"
"Maybe you should leave Zim alone. He's got enough problems if this is all he has to eat." That was when I had a thought. Were these the kinds of provisions Tak had lost? "Hey, let me borrow this, okay?" I said, snatching the little stick out from under the microscope and sealing it up with the powder. "Thanks."
Before he could grab the bag back, I was bounding up the stairs, leaving Dib yelling up at me from the lab. I went upstairs and changed into a little number just slutty enough to raise eyebrows, not enough to get me kicked out of anywhere classy, lined my eyes with a black pencil (as if I needed to), slid on a few coats of devil's-dick-red lipstick, and dropped the plastic bag into a leather clutch, along with a handful of cash I swiped from Dib's nightstand because, you know, why not?
At the restaurant, Zara and I ate linguine in clam sauce and ordered cocktails with our fake IDs, her rhapsodizing about love and socialism and me staring at her cleavage in her too-tight tube dress. I drove her home and we popped off a quickie in her driveway, though she whined the whole time about how her parents weren't home and we'd have had the house to ourselves and if I'd only come in, just for a little while, there'd be rose petals and champagne and…I don't know, I wasn't really listening.
Once her panties were safely tugged up over her ass, I kicked her out of the car and pealed out of her neighborhood – but not before having her run inside real quick, and grab me a can of soda for the road. Not that I drank it. Instead, I stowed it in the clutch, well aware that in situations like these, one could never have too much insurance.
The industrial district was different at night. Not as ugly. Shadows washed the wreckage and softened its edges, hid the crumbling brick of the buildings in silhouette, turned the runoff in the alleyways watercolor blue and green. The lemon factory loomed on the horizon, what remained of its logo shining yellow in the moonlight. Inside, it was silent as the grave.
Unable to preserve the silence (those stairs, decrepit as they were, creaked like crazy), I reached the fourth floor to find her waiting for me, reared up on her spider-legs, the arsenal on her back poised to attack. A laser beam actually zipped past my head (just past, mind you; another quarter of a centimeter, a second slower on the sidestep, and I'd have been Swiss cheese) before I unsheathed my soda can, warding her off.
Her eyes narrowed and she recoiled, metal limbs clicking as she backed onto the factory floor. "Why are you here?" she demanded.
"You should be nice to me," I said. "I have a present for you."
Now that dumbfounded her, though she recovered with, unsurprisingly, more anger. "What?" she barked.
"Are you deaf? I said I have a present for you. Come over here in the light with me and I'll show you what it is."
Without further ceremony, I strolled over to the far wall, where the light from the hole in the ceiling streamed in cool and bright. I sat down against it and motioned for her to join me, taking note of the robot's red eyes peering out at us both from between the bars of a rolling rack.
Tak exchanged a glance with it, saying something without words, then retracted her spider-legs and did as I'd asked – approached me, not cautiously, but deliberately deliberate, if that makes sense. As if she were trying her best not to be guarded, for fear it would make her seem weak.
She didn't sit, at first. Just stood there with her arms crossed, about a foot away from me, and I had to crack a smirk; she was taller standing up than I was sitting down, but not by much. "What?" she said again.
"You seem a lot smaller than you did when I was a kid. It's kind of hilarious."
"You've grown. I haven't. I fail to see the humor in that."
"Well, you would, wouldn't you?" I opened my clutch, produced Dib's plastic bag, and unzipped it, holding its contents up to the light. "This wouldn't happen to be familiar to you, would it?"
Her eyes widened into violet discs, her arms going limp at her sides. "Where did you get that?"
"Dib swiped it from Zim, and I swiped it from Dib. He says it's some kind of Irken food, but to me at least, it tastes like fried ass. Do you actually eat this stuff?"
"Yes. It's meant to be a snack."
"You guys are pretty big on snacks, aren't you?"
"Yes," she said, completely deadpan.
I offered it to her. "You want this, then?"
She blinked and almost reached out, then stopped herself, stepping back. Folding her arms across her chest, she avoided my eyes. "I don't accept charity, child," she said, in as lofty a tone as I suspected she could manage. "Especially not from humans, and especially especially not from you."
"It's not charity. It's screwing up another one of Dib's stupid plans. And who doesn't like screwing up Dib's plans?"
She eyed me skeptically for a moment, biting down on her lower lip. At length, she snatched the container from my hand, and situated herself against the wall beside me; I watched as she opened the container and removed the white stick Dib had been examining, licking it to wet it. Her tongue, I noticed, was raspberry-red, and came to a finer point than mine – like a snake's tongue, minus the fork. I found myself thinking about Zara and her little silver barbell, and how April had always tasted of licorice. I wondered what she would taste like.
When she slid the stick into her mouth, coated in that purple dust that even smelled like death warmed over, she closed her eyes. I could see a shiver of pleasure course through her, from the tips of her antennae to her feet in her tattered shoes. As repulsive as the stuff was, she obviously enjoyed it, and I didn't think it was just because she hadn't eaten in six years – though that was fairly amazing on its own.
Even if she was sucking what amounted to biological gasoline out of the ladybug on her back, it would still be beyond weird not to eat at all, to forget how it felt to put food in your mouth and swallow it. I was still having nightmares about Bloaty's shutting down; I couldn't imagine never eating anything.
The longer I watched her, just sitting there dipping the stick and sucking it clean, the more my fingers itched. I battled the urge for awhile, but eventually, I leaned over and straightened her wonky antenna, untangling it in one quick tug. She yowled like a cat and slapped my hand away, the container tumbling into her lap as her eyes snapped open in a glare.
"What was that for?" she said, her voice a wounded snarl, her hand rising to rub the base of her left antenna.
"Wasn't it bothering you? It was bothering me."
"Well, that hurt!" she snapped, flinging the container and what was left in it at my head. "Why do you think I never messed with it all this time?"
"Sure, but it's over now, right? And you don't look so weird anymore."
She didn't answer, just sat sulking and stroking the offended antenna, refusing to look at me. After awhile, she left it alone, and drew her legs slowly to her chest; she wrapped her arms around them and rested her chin on her knees, staring at nothing I could see. I recognized the clouds creeping into her eyes, from years of watching them hang around Dib. The look she wore, in that moment, was a look of defeat.
"So I suppose I've lost," she said, with none of the fire I'd grown used to hearing in her voice.
"I suppose you have."
She sighed. "I have to commend you, child. You were a worthier opponent than I had imagined."
"I know."