Author's notes: What is this? Another update? What are the chances?
So! Here's another chapter. One day I will have most of this uploaded and I won't have to worry about losing it to a computer virus again. Yay!
Best Parent/Worst Parent
Ah... the sweet smell of dark coffee. Miyuki leaned over her mug and breathed in the steam. She was sitting at the duct-taped judge's table with Prisoner 777, Dwicky, and Professor Membrane while some relatively light chaos happened. Compared to the fires and explosions from earlier it was light anyway.
Gir had gotten his hands on some taffy, and he was getting it stuck on everything, including Dib who was currently caught in a giant taffy ball, and Shloonktapooxis who was trapped in a taffy web on the ceiling.
Purple was just about to meet a similar taffy fate. "Ahh!" Yup. He was stuck to the floor.
Red had managed to avoid the sticky mess, but Gir wasn't slowing down, and the crimson eyed Tallest wasn't sure how long he could keep dodging the whacked-out SIR.
Zim had gone somewhere else, blissfully unaware of the situation his robot was causing.
Lard Nar ducked behind the curtains, hoping to avoid being stuck to something. Gir noticed and happily gave the leader of the Resisty a big hug, covering him in goo.
Yes... coffee... Miyuki sighed. "Alright. The coffee break is done," she said as she took one last swing and stood up from her chair. The cup vanished, and in its place appeared the hat. "Pick one," she told Professor Membrane. "And Duxi."
The energy creature popped out of the table. "Yeees?"
"Clean up this mess."
Duxi saluted with a mop already in hand.
The Professor reached into the hat and pulled out a slip of paper. He unfolded it and read it out loud. "This says "Best Parent."
Miyuki became a few shades whiter, and her antennae drooped. "Excuse me...?"
"I said..." Professor Membrane began in a louder voice.
"That was a rhetorical "excuse me!" Miyuki snapped, snatching the piece of paper from his hand. She scanned over it before crumpling it into a ball and sinking it in her coffee. "I guess that's it then... I'm going to get sued for child endangerment and spend the next five to ten years in prison..."
"Hang on... you aren't actually thinking of using real children are you?" Prisoner 777 remarked somewhat aghast.
Miyuki glanced at him. "There's an alternative?"
"Yes. Robots."
"Ah... robots," Miyuki clasped her hands together and smiled. "That will keep me out of prison a little longer."
"She was going to use real children?" Dwicky questioned, noting the horrible taffy mess around them. "Wow... That would be a reaally bad idea. I mean with the zombies, giant spiders, and crazy robots, I would definitely say this place is no good for kids."
"Shut up, I get it already," Miyuki told him irritably. "I wouldn't want PETA getting involved anyway."
"Uh, PETA is an Earth organization that protects animals," Duxi informed her as he continued mopping.
"Right... of course... animals..." She summoned her microphone to her hand. "Alright contestants, we have an interesting contest for you today. Do you think you have what it takes to be a good parent?"
"A parent? But I'm only twelve..." Dib told her having just been freed from the taffy.
"Well someone doesn't sound very confident."
Duxi had already covered the front of the stage and was now working his way across towards Purple.
Red had managed to clobber Gir hard enough to temporarily stun the robot. Because of this there were no new messes.
"I've already raised two children," Professor Membrane stated.
"You're still raising them aren't you?" Miyuki asked, flicking an antenna forward.
"Not really. They become surprisingly self-reliant after the age of five," Professor Membrane remarked.
Miyuki stared at him. She was pretty sure human children required more care than that. "... I'm really glad we're not using real children for this..."
"Wait a sec... what do you mean by children exactly?" Purple questioned.
"I mean smeets," the Irken host reworded.
"Smeets?" Purple's antennae fell. "But... but they're creepy!"
"She said we aren't going to use real smeets though," Red spoke.
"Ah. Hmm. Ok then."
Shloonktapooxis managed to eat his way out of the taffy he was trapped in, and since he could float naturally, he had no trouble rejoining the others. "That was kind of fun," he admitted, grinning happily.
"I don't see how that was fun," Lard Nar said as he came to stand beside him. The leader of the Resisty was trying to wipe some of the taffy off his goggles, but this was proving to be a futile process.
"Free taffy," Purple replied. He couldn't say he hadn't taken some advantage of the tons of taffy spread all over the stage.
"Yeah. Free taffy is awesome," Shloonktapooxis agreed.
"And super hard to clean!" Duxi added from where he was suspended from the ceiling, still mopping away.
"Like bubblegum!" Gir announced, springing up and bouncing over to the judge's table.
"Please don't tell me you have bubblegum too..." Miyuki said drawing back. She wasn't even sure how the robot managed to get its hands on taffy either. It was probably someone in the audience's fault.
"No! I got tuna!" A whole bunch of the squishy fish stuff shot out of the SIR unit's head compartment, covering the host, two judges, and Professor Membrane.
"Tuna!" Gir shrieked gleefully as he latched himself to Dwicky's head and started munching on the tuna caught in his hair.
"Ahhh!" the school counsellor screamed falling out of his chair. "Get it off! Get it off!"
"Hey! I can only deal with one mess at a time," Duxi remarked. He brought a finger to his chin. "Although I could try splitting myself in half."
"One of you is enough," Miyuki informed him wryly. She disappeared from where she was standing, and reappeared completely free of tuna.
"Meow."
"Who made that sound?" Purple asked, looking around.
"Arghfarghhmbl!" Dwicky continued struggling to remove Gir from his head.
Red's eyes narrowed when he noticed the thing walking towards them. "What is that?" he asked gesturing at the small fluffy thing.
"That would be a kitten," Dib informed Irk's leaders.
"Ah. A Kitten. I see," Red stared at it for a few moments before turning to Purple.
The lavender eyed Tallest had an expression of mixed dread and disgust, and he started to carefully back away from the little monster. Red also took a few steps back.
"Aw it's cute!" Shloonktapooxis remarked, drifting a bit closer.
"Don't touch it," Lard Nar seemed to be having a similar reaction that the two Tallest were currently experiencing.
"I can't anyway," he said. He didn't have any hands, so him touching something was more difficult than it was for most people. "But uh, why not?"
"Cute things can't be trusted," Lard Nar replied.
"Ok... guys... it's just a kitten..." Dib told them.
"Mew."
"It's attacking!" Purple stated, pointing at the little beast.
"No it's not!" Dib insisted.
The kitten wandered past everyone as it made its way over to the judge's table.
Miyuki had a stricken look on her face, and she quickly disappeared before the small thing could get her. Prisoner 777, who was still covered in tuna, hid behind the table.
Then the small animal began licking the fish mush off the floor.
"Hey there little fellow," Professor Membrane said, stooping down to pet it.
"Why are you all scared of a harmless kitten anyway?" Dib asked Lard Nar since the leader of the Resisty was standing the closest to him.
"On some planets... small adorable things are the most dangerous creatures of them all..." Lard Nar explained.
"Yeah, you just don't know that because you've never left your planet," Red informed the boy.
"Is that an Earth animal?" Miyuki questioned, reappearing in the middle of the stage next to Purple. "How did it get here?"
Duxi lowered himself down from the ceiling using some kind of pulley system. "Maybe one of the interdemensional portals we used to bring people here opened up," Duxi suggested, grinning. "I'll go check."
Tak reappeared a few moments after Duxi left and stood back a-ways from the judges table. "It smells horrible in here," she commented.
"Where have you been?" Miyuki asked. "And where is Zim?"
"Yeah, his robot has been going nuts!" Purple exclaimed.
"I shoved him into one of the portals," Tak replied, shrugging.
"... Which portal?" Miyuki questioned.
"It was the one by the change rooms. Why?"
"That must be the one that connects to Earth," Miyuki concluded. "You left it open, or broke it..."
"I think it's broken."
"Ok, you broke it and now we have that thing!" she pointed to the kitten.
"Mew."
"Meow."
"Merow."
Suddenly there was a whole bunch of cats walking out from behind the stage, following the smell of tuna.
"It's an epidemic!" Miyuki cried. "Quick, everyone get to the ceiling!"
She turned upside down and 'landed' on the ceiling.
Red, Purple, Dib, Professor Membrane, Tak, Lard Nar, Shloonktapooxis and Prisoner 777 stared up at her.
"You're the only one who can do that normally," Red informed her.
"Oh right... and I can't find the button..." she muttered to herself. The button that could launch all of them to safety was gone for some reason. Had she maliciously destroyed it after the audience proved difficult to return? That was the most likely scenario.
"Yay! Kitties!" Gir cheered as he unattached himself from Dwicky. He began scooping up armfuls of cats, much to the feline's displeasure. Then he started putting some inside the storage compartment in his head. "I'm gunna looove youu!" Gir said, squeezing a particularly fat cat tight.
Duxi ran out onto the stage. "It's... it's..."
Suddenly a jeep roared passed him. The contestants all jumped out of the way of the vehicle. It screeched to a halt in the center of the stage.
"PETA!" Duxi cried. "Everyone run for your lives!"
The people in the vehicle got out. They were wearing black t-shirts with big white capitals letters on the front which read 'PETA.'
"Uh oh..." Professor Membrane said as he glanced up just in time to see one of the men charge towards him. He was tackled to the ground while one of the women scooped up the kitten he'd been petting. The audience all filed out of the building into the abyss, except for Gaz who couldn't be bothered to move from her seat.
"Those experiments were necessary!" the Professor insisted.
Duxi joined Miyuki on the ceiling while the three members of PETA ran around gathering up all the cats. Prisoner 777 was chased around for a while because they thought he was a goat. The Tallests were overlooked because they were insect-like... and PETA hadn't yet decided whether or not they would go so far as to sympathize with bugs.
They would bring it up at the next meeting.
Lard Nar returned to his hiding place behind the curtains to avoid getting snatched. Shlooonktapooxis watched with his mouth agape, but no one took any notice of the strange cone thing. Dib was, at some point, violently thrown off the stage by one of the PETA people so she could retrieve a kitten sitting beside him.
Then once their vehicle was filled with the cats, they piled back into their jeep and roared towards the portal. "We'll be back for the goats!" the driver shouted.
Miyuki slowly floated down from the ceiling with her eyes fixated in the direction the jeep had gone. She turned to the judges table and found Tak sitting there like nothing was wrong. The tuna had disappeared. Had PETA taken it? Both Professor Membrane and Dwicky were lying on the floor unconscious. Prisoner 777 was standing near where the audience was supposed to be seated looking dazed and confused.
She smacked herself in the forehead. "Where's Gir?" she asked.
Duxi dropped down beside her. "I think PETA took him."
Miyuki snatched him up by the front of his apron. "Go find Zim and Gir! And fix the portal before those crazy people return."
"Yes sir," Duxi remarked. She let him go, and he ran behind the stage.
"Why does this always happen...?" she asked, crouching down and holding her head. Her eyes narrowed as she regarded the Irken secret service that was standing in the back row of the audience, drinking coffee. "Get the audience back here," she instructed them.
They quickly drank the rest of their coffee, tossed the cups, and hurried out the current large hole in the wall leading to the abyss.
"Duxi is going to need to patch up that hole too," she noted. She wondered briefly where it had come from, but then decided it would be best not to think about it. "Alright then..." she regarded the remaining contestants.
Red, Purple, and Shloonktapooxis were still standing on the stage, looking confused but no worse for wear. Lard Nar decided to come out of hiding when he realized the members of PETA were gone. Dib dragged himself back onto the stage, but he collapsed before he could make it any further.
One of Miyuki's antennae twitched. "Now before anymore insanity happens..." Large walls rose up on the stage. They came in between the contestants, separating them from each other. "That should keep them out of trouble."
"Er... not to be rude, but aren't those walls just made out of paper?" Prisoner 777 questioned.
Miyuki shot him a glare. "Be quiet. They don't know this."
"Right. Shutting up."
Twenty minutes later, everyone in the audience had been returned by the secret service, Duxi had brought back Zim and Gir, and he was currently working on fixing the portal so no more cats or PETA members could enter. Professor Membrane had regained consciousness and was shoved into a paper room.
Miyuki grabbed her microphone out of thin air just as the robot children were delivered through a different portal. "Now listen up everyone. I had to put a damage deposit down on these things. They cost me a thousand monies each, so don't break them! Understand?"
Gir had already eaten several holes in his paper room. "MMMMMHH!" he responded happily with a mouthful of paper.
She grabbed the sack of robots and opened it up. Each of the devices had been painted to show the species they were supposed to represent. Even so, they all looked pretty generic.
There was a piece of paper sitting on top of the pile, and she reached for it. Her eyes slowly scanned the page. "Should not be exposed to extreme heat or cold... personalities may vary... will automatically turn on with impact..." she crumpled up the note and tossed it over her shoulder.
She hauled the large bag over her shoulder and floated up towards the ceiling. After tossing each contestant a robot child, she landed on a podium which had emerged from the floor. The whole area widened. The paper walls expanded.
Then video cameras flew out from the walls and began recording while Miyuki summoned a big screen and flicked it on.
Each of the robots activated as soon as they struck the floor.
Miyuki looked over at Dwicky who was still out-cold. Tak was sitting at the judge's table with her arms folded over her chest and a bored expression on her face. Prisoner 777 was standing idly by.
Sometimes she wondered why she hadn't just kidnapped the judges when the energy beings were kidnapping everyone else. It would have been cheaper.
Gir finished eating himself out of the paper room right when his robot child turned on. For a second, the dysfunctional SIR stared at the other robot curiously. Then he suddenly exclaimed "I'm gunna make you into pizza!"
He squealed, grabbed the not at all real kid by the hand, and dragged it across the rest of the stage which had grown larger for whatever reason.
"Do we have ovens?" Dwicky asked.
"Shut. Up..." Miyuki growled.
The camera circled around the rest of the paper rooms before poking a hole to see what was going on.
Zim appeared on the screen looking bored. His robot child was nowhere to be seen, but the freezer that held Miyuki and Spork's bodies just so happened to be sitting innocently nearby.
"What did you do to your child?" Miyuki asked through a speaker on the camera.
"Huh!?" Ziim looked started for a moment. He reeled around to see the camera poking into the room and squinted an eye. "That was no worm baby! That was a robot! Zim already has one horrible robot minion!"
"I think you're missing the whole point of this contest."
"There is a point to this?" Zim gestured to the paper walls around him.
"Yes! You're supposed to take care of your robot child... you know, so you can try winning."
"You never told me any of this!" Zim remarked, jabbing a finger into the camera lens.
"Well you need to stop wandering off!"
"But you're boring!"
"Zim!"
"Boring I say!"
The camera floated to one of the other rooms and poked another hole into the wall.
"Keepawayfrommeyoufreaaak!" Purple shouted as he backed away from his robot child. The machine had a strange glint in its eyes.
"I said stay back!" he said, edging closer and closer to the wall behind him.
Clang bang smash!
The camera drifted over to the next room where the sound was coming from.
Red was standing idly with his hands behind his back. His robot child had been smashed into a heap of unrecognizable parts.
"What did you do!?" Miyuki demanded, burying her face in her hands.
"It called me daddy," Red remarked; his antennae flattening in irritation. "I thought it wanted to fight or something."
"That doesn't even make sense..."
"Yes it does."
"No Red. No it doesn't. You just destroyed something that cost me a thousand monies for something completely idiotic!"
"It called me daddy!"
Miyuki started messaging her temples. "Explain to me how that would be a bad thing... you wanted it to think you were a good parent, so the rest of us would think that, and then you would have won this contest!"
"A parent?" Red stared at the hunk of broken metal lying on the floor. "To a robot...? Are you defective?"
"THE ROBOT IS REPLACING AN ACTUAL SMEET! WHAT PART OF THIS DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND!?"
"..." Red stared at the camera. "Look... a dependant robot is just annoying. It's useless. I did you a favour by smashing the crap out of it."
"Ok... I knew my race would probably fail at this... I mean, the majority of us have no contact with smeets for most of our lifespans... " Miyuki breathed a sigh. "Still... this is just sad."
The video camera looked into the next room.
Professor Membrane had constructed something using the left over crap from some of the other contests that had been hidden under the floorboards. The robot was sitting on his shoulder, looking down at the device the Professor was working on.
"Success!" Professor Membrane stated loudly, holding the object high in the air. "I have just created... the super toaster!" He handed the blow-torch he'd been holding to the not real child. "Here random child, hold this while I demonstrate the awesome power of the super toaster!"
The robot pressed down on the handle and flames shot everywhere. Even so, Professor Membrane continued to try toasting a piece of floor board. The result was a horrible electric shock. Flames caught onto the paper walls.
"Nooo! It's all burning!" Professor Membrane lamented. Then the toaster exploded, blowing up him and the completely robotic child simulator.
Miyuki, Prisoner 777, Dwicky, most of the audience, and even Tak stared in disbelief as all of this happened.
"How did he manage to make a toaster so fast?" Skutch questioned from his place in the audience.
"And how did it explode anyway?" the Letter M asked.
"... luckily I took precautions to make each of the rooms explosion proof... and the fire looks pretty self-contained..." Miyuki muttered to herself.
"The walls are made of paper though!" A yellow creature with a screw in his head exclaimed.
"Yeah... how did paper manage to contain an explosion?" One of the secret service Irkens asked.
"Some questions weren't meant to be answered," Miyuki insisted.
Gir ran through the paper walls while happily dragging his floury robot child. It was completely covered in flour... and probably butter. He suddenly stopped when he came to Zim's room and began digging around in the freezer. He pulled out Zim's frozen mechanical smeet. "I'm gunna make you into pizza too!" he remarked.
"Attempting reactivation..." Miyuki's and Spork's Paks both droned.
There was a whooshing sucking noise, but Gir closed the door before either one could get sucked away.
The camera peeked in on Dib through the paper roof. For some reason the boy was staring up at the ceiling.
Slowly, the camera followed Dib's gaze. His robot child was stuck on the ceiling... it looked just as confused as Dib did.
"Uhh..." Dib blinked. "How am I supposed to get it down?"
"Why me... why?" Miyuki asked herself, shaking her head.
Gir hadn't yet finished grabbing all of his "ingredients." Just as the camera moved to peer into the next room, he crashed through the paper wall, grabbed Shoonktapooxis' totally fake child, that wasn't at all alive or anything, and rushed out squealing about pizza and baking.
"Uhh... Ok..." Shloonktapooxis watched through the Gir shaped hole in the wall as the crazy SIR disappeared behind the stage.
The camera returned to Purple's room. The Tallest was somehow tied and gagged, and the robot child was laughing maniacally. There was a hole in the floor where the rope could have come from... Miyuki started thinking about getting Duxi to clean underneath the stage. Apparently there was a whole bunch of random crap under there.
Then the camera hovered over to the last room. Lard Nar was telling his robot child a story in a very calm non-destructive manner.
It returned to view Tallest Purple again... but now he was untied and Red was there standing over a different pile of debris.
"Red!" Miyuki snapped.
"What?" Red questioned.
"That robot was psycho!" Purple stated, looking pretty shaken up. "It grabbed an axe... an axe! I thought I was a goner."
Sure enough there was a large axe lying near the smashed up robot.
"Wheeee! I put em in a pot a pot a pot!" Gir sang as he brought out a large pot with the three machines inside. They were covered in hot pizza sauce and cheese which appeared to have overloaded their circuits.
"Gir... Where did you get that stuff from...?" Miyuki asked as the robot cheerfully approached the judge's table.
"I got it from Bloaties!" he shrieked.
"Did someone say... Bloaties...?" Gaz questioned, glancing up from her hand held for the first time in several hours.
"...that means Duxi didn't finish fixing the portal..." Miyuki said; her voice fading as the sound of an engine growing louder and louder.
The jeep burst out from behind the stage; its wheels squealing on the wooden surface.
Crash!
"I told you we'd be back for the goats!" the driver yelled out his window.
This time the people in the audience stayed to watch as three members of PETA exited their vehicles.
"I'm sorry!" Duxi wailed from the back seat of the jeep. Apparently he'd been captured at some point in time.
There was mass chaos as Prisoner 777 ran, Dwicky hid, Miyuki returned to the ceiling, the paper walls surrounding the contestants were knocked down by angry PETA people, and then the animal rights activists spotted Lard Nar who actually remembered to grab his robot child and start running.
Tallest Red and Tallest Purple ducked under the judge's table to hide from the insanity.
Zim watched, amused by the destruction.
Shloonktapooxis panicked and began floating in circles rapidly.
In the audience, the Vortians were the first to take off when they realized they were the "goats." The Meekrob were quick to follow when one of the strange humans shouted that there were also "poor lost sea creatures" there... and for some reason the aliens with screws in their heads were thought to be ducks of all things.
Then the driver of the jeep revved the engine and ran over Dib, twice, before driving into the audience.
There was a lot of yelling and screaming. Fires started up. The jeep crashed into a solid wall, startling the energy creature that yelped and returned to its floating ball form. This of course caused the abyss to leak in.
More Notes: PETA is extremely and/or somewhat exaggerated in this fic. If you happen to be offended, please disregard all the times they are called crazy. Thanks. xP
Hopefully I didn't lose anyone in the chaos. Is everyone still able to follow the story alright? Do I need to dig-out people from the rubble and scattered bodies? Ha ha. I'm sure everyone will be fine. Yeeep. This one actually turned out closer-ish to the original version, minus a few things I can't remember or won't say.