The monkey growled faintly. Normally, it would have been a tiny sound, barely audible. But thanks to the fact that the volume on the television was turned up as high as it would go, children several blocks away clutched their bleeding ears and fell to the ground with shrieks of pain.
A small robot, cute in its simplicity, sat on the floor in front of the TV. Its round turquoise eyes were barely an inch away from the screen. Slowly, it processed the fact that the monkey had just made a funny sound, and giggled maniacally before falling silent.
GIR wasn't quite sure where Zim was. It was around the time when he usually came home, venting about whatever human annoyances had plagued him today. In some small part of his brain, the little robot might have been worrying; then again, he might not have. His train of thought lent a whole new meaning to the term "abstract process."
That morning, Zim might have told him that he was going to be late tonight for some reason. Or he might have told him about taquitos. GIR wasn't even sure if it had happened this morning, or tomorrow morning, or a morning that had only happened within the confines of his cylindrical head. And at the moment, he was too happy to care. His favorite show was on. Or, at least, he was pretty sure that it was his favorite show...
The doorbell suddenly rang. Somewhere, deep in GIR's subconscious, the sound registered. The little robot's eyes and other turquoise accents switched to red, and he nearly sighed with relief at the sudden sanity. Finally, freed from the fog that his less-than-regulation brain produced most of the time. Considering that his hard drive was little more than random junk, he was surprised that he had even these rare moments of focus.
Switching to duty mode, he thought happily.
GIR hurriedly turned off the TV and donned his dog-suit, then opened the door. A human female stood there, about the same age as the children that his master went to school with. One of her eyes was green and the other was blue. Her long hair was a bright shade of pink, and in the piece of his mind that was constantly frivolous, even when the rest of it was in duty mode, GIR decided that it was his new most favorite thing ever. He quickly crushed the silly thought and readied his weapons, although he didn't extend them yet. This female hadn't yet become a threat to the mission; he doubted that she would. He occasionally ordered pizza while in "casual" mode, but the human standing in front of him was younger than the usual delivery people.
"State your name and business, human," GIR stated in the deep voice that, along with the transition from turquoise to red, signified that he meant business.
"Oh. Uh...okay. I didn't expect that." She blinked down at him, a small green dog with black limbs, incredulously, before reluctantly saying, "I'm...well, I'm Ila." She attempted to peer into the depths of the base. "Um...is Zim home?"
To his horror, GIR felt the turquoise mist fast re-approaching, coming back to make him an idiot again. He struggled against it for a few moments, but it won, just as it always did. The world, outlined in razor-sharp red clarity, was once again obscured with a light blue haze.
"Nnnnnnnoooope," GIR piped in a much squeakier tone. "My master went out to go dancin' with the squirrels. He'll be home later."
He giggled slightly. "Squirrels!"
Ila raised an eyebrow. "Uh-huh."
In his mind's eye, she sprouted a pair of majestic butterfly wings. GIR frowned slightly, unsure where the image had come from. He didn't really care; he liked it. And he especially liked her hair.
"Well...can I come inside?" Ila asked, her wings trembling slightly, as if she were nervous. The sky behind her grew greenish, and cows began to drift through it. GIR smiled.
"Okey-dokey!" He stepped back, and the girl walked into the base, glancing around. The small robot closed the door, then squinted slightly. His guest now sported a set of antennae that weren't unlike those seen on Irken females. The ends were curled around backwards.
"Wow. There are actually a lot of hiding places in here," Ila mused. She walked over to the couch and peered behind it, and GIR sighed slightly as her wings and antennae dissolved. Reality was never as interesting as his head-world.
"Alright." The human took off her backpack and dug through it, obviously looking for something. After a few moments of searching, she drew out what looked like a squirt gun, filled with water.
GIR wondered if he should be alarmed, but was distracted by sudden thoughts of fried chicken.
"All right. Don't talk to me when Zim comes home, you hear?"
He smiled his affirmation, then wriggled out of his dog disguise. When Ila saw his true appearance, her eyes widened, and she crouched down, so they were on the same level. She studied him with a blank gaze, her blue eye moving juuuust a little faster than her blue one as she did so, her lips silently forming words.
SIR. Standard Information Retrieval unit. Issued to almost all members of the Irken Invader class, to aid in hostile takeover of a planet...but this one...it's...different.
Shaking her head, hard, as if to dislodge whatever it was that was going on in there, Ila climbed up onto the back of the couch. From there, she clambered into the tangle of tubes and wires that formed the ceiling of Zim's base. Crouching among them so that she would be nearly invisible to someone who wasn't searching for her, she swept a suspicious gaze over the walls and floor.
"Isn't there, like, a security system or something in this place?"
"Well, yeah, sorta," the voice of the computer answered. "But the only human that I've been expressly told to keep out is Dib, and besides, Zim's not here, so..."
Ila tensed, and glanced around wildly when it spoke, looking for the source of the voice. Apparently figuring out what it was, she relaxed somewhat, and warily said, "...I see."
GIR gazed up at Ila for a while, and figured out that he liked all of her, but he liked her hair the most. He would have been content to stare at her until what passed for his brain shorted out, but when she glared at him, he hurried over to the couch.
Yawning, he stretched, then curled up in the corner of the couch. As his eyes drooped closed, the little robot thought that when he woke up, he just might paint the entire house the same color as Ila's hair.
Zim would be so happy...
When Zim finally arrived home, he was exhausted from arguing with the supermarket drone. She had refused to give him anything without compensation, even though he would one day be her supreme lord and master and it would be smart to get in his good graces now.
"Why did that fool-woman refuse to see sense?" he muttered, yanking off his wig as he stalked across the living room. The tiny alien was too tired to even glare at GIR, who was supposed to be guarding the house but had instead fallen asleep on the couch.
At least I'm safe here, in my own base, he thought wearily, reaching up to pull his lenses out of his eyes. Here, I am the master. None dare to defy me...
Which was why Zim was extremely surprised when someone dropped, shrieking, from the ceiling and onto his head.
"Aaaaagh!" he yelled, the impact knocking him to the floor. "Computer! GIR! Defend your master!"
GIR sat up on the couch, then leapt off of it and turned on the TV. He cheered as some sort of awful cartoon came on.
To its credit, the computer extended a few robotic arms from the ceiling, but then hesitated. It was unsure what to aim for; Zim and his attacker were almost literally bouncing off the walls, and they were pretty close together.
Zim screamed in pain as the human (at least, that's what the intruder felt like) grabbed one of his antennae and pulled hard. That was a very sensitive part of his body, and it was irritating when something even just touched it. Having it yanked nearly off of his head was utter agony.
"Get off of me, Dib!" the Irken yelled, staggering to his feet and then running backwards into a wall. He was rewarded with a grunt, but the Earth-boy held on.
He had come to the conclusion that it was Dib on his back. After all, who else could it be? Who would have the incentive or the knowledge to infiltrate his base?
Although...Zim had to admit that the war cry that Dib had uttered when he dropped was rather feminine. And that he felt decidedly lighter today.
"Dib?" the attacker wheezed as soon as some of their breath was returned to them. "I'm...hah...almost insulted...Zim."
He froze for an instant. The voice was unmistakably female, and eerily familiar.
"Ila?!" Zim cried with a mixture of shock, horror, and just a bit of grudging admiration.
"Bingo."
Taking advantage of his immobility, Ila braced her legs against the floor and managed to hurl him across the room. She looked a little surprised at how far he flew. Did this human not grasp the fact that Irken invaders were very light and compact?
Nevertheless, that didn't stop her from bolting over before he could struggle to his feet, planting a foot on his PAK to prevent him from getting up, and aiming some sort of weapon at his head.
Zim blinked, annoyed that he had been forced to fight with his contacts in. They got so awkward during combat; one of the many reasons that he preferred to battle Dib while not wearing his disguise. He would have taken the momentary lull in the fighting to remove them, but his arms were pinned underneath him.
The tiny alien froze slightly when Ila shifted her weapon slightly and he heard a faint sloshing sound.
"Is that...water?" he asked in a low voice.
"Yes, actually," she replied, sounding proud. "I did my homework."
Zim's eyes narrowed. "How do you know all of this, anyway?"
"Well. Uh." She sounded nervous for a second, before regaining her composure. "That's for me to know and you to maybe find out."
As an experiment, Zim tried rolling to one side to escape, but the girl just increased the pressure on his Pak. She had him exactly where she wanted, and there was no way that she was going to let him go.
"Alright, I give up," he admitted, resigned tone overexaggerated, after several minutes of pointless struggling. "What do you want?"
"For you to give me a chance," Ila said. "Just let me help you with one mission. Let me show you what I can do."
An idea popped into Zim's head, but before he could implement it, he felt the need to flaunt his superiority over the silly human girl.
"And what's to stop me from just agreeing and then ordering my security systems to seize you?" he asked slyly. Yes, he truly was a genius. The Tallest were wise indeed to place so much trust in him.
When Ila answered, he could hear the nervousness in her voice. "Don't-don't do that."
Zim surged upwards, regaining his footing and launching Ila skyward. She landed lightly on her feet, crouching like a cat, then stood and scuttled frantically backwards, looking scared and trying to hide it as she kept her weapon (which he could see now was just an ordinary squirt gun) aimed at him. Her fingers trembled on the trigger, but...she didn't shoot.
"Computer!" he yelled, then pointed to her. "Get her."
A robot arm descended from the ceiling with lightning speed, its huge metal pincers snapping closed around Ila with a resounding clang. Zim grinned viciously at her tiny grunt of pain; the pincers were tight, even around her slender body.
"Zim has won!" he declared, raising his fists over his head and shaking them in victory. Picking up his wig and putting it back on his head (even though she had seen his antennae, and appeared to know what he was, he still felt the need to be disguised in her presence), he waved one gloved hand at the claw. "Destroy her now. Feel free to cry, feeble human female. I know that your failure must be painful..."
The arm started to lift Ila into the air, but ground to a halt when she bucked violently in its grasp.
Zim's eyes narrowed as one of her sneakered feet, kicked up behind her, struck the first joint of the robotic arm with the sound of whining, protesting metal.
"Eh?" he demanded. "What're you doing?"
She didn't reply, but she did fall limp in the pincers' grasp, panting with exertion. Zim raised an eyebrow-or, at least, he raised the part of his face that an eyebrow would have been, if he'd had any hair.
"That's better. Now, on with destroying you—"
As soon as the computer complied and began to move the robot arm upwards, Ila started up again, kicking behind her and striking the joint of the arm on every try. It shuddered, and made a horrible, mechanical keening noise. The Irken clapped his hands over the places where his ears would be if he had them, closed his eyes, and gritted his teeth against the barrage of noise. When he managed to pry open one eye, he saw that the arm was drooping, the casing of the joint that Ila was kicking cracked open and spitting sparks.
"What have you done to my base?!" he yelled over the hissing of the sparks.
"The first joint-" Slam! "-is the weakest." When the arm shuddered, she froze mid-kick, then let her denim-clad legs dangle limply. She had the oddest expression on her face, and her bicolored eyes were fixed on something in the distance that Zim couldn't see. Her voice had an inflection he'd never heard before. "An unfortunate manufacturing error, which only gets worse with time as the joint is forced to bear the weight of the pincers. Most invaders who are given this version of the standard base kit are warned about it." She twisted a little in the pincers, wincing. "I...I think...I know the weak point of anything you could throw at me. I could take it apart." She smiled, and it was tired and a little scared, but it was still a smile. And it enraged Zim. "Good luck getting rid of me now."
Zim snarled, conveying a shocking amount of both rage and hate in that one tiny sound. Ila only looked a little intimidated.
"Alright, drop her," the invader told his computer. The pincers opened, and Ila dropped to the floor with a minuscule sigh of relief. GIR suddenly abandoned the TV. He ran over and hugged Ila's leg, smiling vacantly. She absentmindedly petted his head and looked pointedly at Zim.
"What?" he snapped.
"Well, what am I going to help you with?"
He thought about it. He had planned to capture the Dib again soon; she could help with that. Actually, a human aiding in the torture/experimentation upon/destruction of a member of her own species might be entertaining.
"Well, I was thinking about doing something to Dib soon," Zim said. "I could use your help with that, I guess."
Ila nodded, determined. All her cocky bravery was back. "I can do that."
"But then I get to destroy you, right?"
"Yeah, I guess..." Her face twisted a little, pink eyebrows coming together in an expression of mild concern. "If you want to."
"Deal."
They shook on it (Ila rolling her eyes when Zim wiped his gloved hand on his uniform immediately after), then Zim realized that everything he needed to implement his new Dib-plan was in his underground labs.
The Irken sighed, extremely reluctant about letting Ila into the lower levels of his base. But there was a lot she needed to know, if she was going to help him with this mission. And, besides. He could always teleport her intestines into her skull if she tried to tell anyone about it.
"Come on," he said, beckoning to her as he headed for the elevator. The human retrieved her squirt gun, then stood beside him on the panel that led to the shaft. GIR was still clinging to her leg.
Together, they descended into Zim's inner sanctum.
