Hello Everyone! Here is the special project I mentioned for the anniversary (^.^)

For everyone who just found this story and isn't familiar with the main one, this is a prequel to my on-going story "The Aliens Next Door", an alternate universe retelling of the series where Dib & Gaz are a pair of Vortian siblings who traveled to Earth for their own reasons, with Dib ending up as surrogate big brother/dad to human children Zim & Gir. This story follows Zim's early childhood, before Zim's stubbornness and poor communication on everyone's parts resulted in the family spending more time apart than any of them really want to.

This story actually came from when I was figuring things out with The Aliens Next Door, specifically the personalities of their parents and somehow ended up with several vignettes but no names; he's a little older in the other chapters, and this one fleshes out his parents a bit more, but we get to see them all being happy together while we wait for them to get their act together in the present.

I did have some trouble with the title, it's a bit of a play on "problem child", if anyone has a better idea for a title I'd love to hear it though. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

"What have we done?"

The woman wondered as she regarded the tempered glass tank in front of her, over two years of research, experimentation, and waiting had led up to this. The faint reflection of her face in the glass told her that her neglected bangs had lost their curl, leaving the small cowlick fully exposed, but she had bigger problems right now. Namely the feeling of existential dread that was chipping away at her usual confidence with every second she looked at the tiny baby boy floating in the tank.

Her name was Jane, and she was a few minutes and one button press away from becoming a parent.

It wasn't that she had been opposed to it, she and her husband had both agreed to this; researching and experimenting in order to develop the solution they'd grown their child in and celebrating every time they made a breakthrough. There were plenty of opportunities for her to stop the project if she wanted to and she hadn't, which was why it was so frustrating that she found herself feeling this overwhelmed and doubting herself right at the end.

She supposed it shouldn't have been completely unexpected; children were alright, but babies were...complicated. Part of the reason they were doing this, besides the pure joy of problem solving and discovery, was still being uncomfortable with...natural spawning.

Granted, having watched one of her classmates go through the process normally back in the day certainly didn't help. She remembered how the others had fussed about the girl, what was her name again? It sounded like a type of car, she remembered. Anyway, many of her classmates had excitedly asked questions and waxed poetic in a way that only people of a certain combination of maturity and lack thereof could, except for her. It was like she and car girl were the only two magnets with a certain charge; while everyone else's magnet was drawn to car girl's, her own was repelled by it.

And she had tried, she really did. During one of the regular speculation sessions about which traits car girl's baby would get from which parent, she had stepped in and offered that typically you got your brains from your mother. Things had promptly gone downhill when car girl said she could 'sense' that her baby would be destined for greatness and the fledgling scientist had pointed out that, even before the baby, car girl was consistently only one step above just scraping by so academic greatness was likely off the table.

And so it was that she remained the only one completely unenchanted, even Rachel wasn't immune and she seemed to be unaffected by every other related urge. It was strange: everyone regarded car girl as brave for having a child so young while Jane considered her a fool, car girl would make mistakes she shouldn't have and laugh it off as 'baby brain' and everyone would follow suit while she was just annoyed the way she was always annoyed by such mistakes. And don't even start about being able to feel it moving; how was everyone else not bothered by this? Yet people cooed and wanted to touch, they wouldn't be so excited if car girl was talking about a tapeworm, so why was this different?

Even upon seeing the 'finished product' nothing really changed; everyone wanted to see, and play, and get their fingers gummed on, they were all excited by the days the baby was brought to school, while she never got the appeal. The baby always screamed and cried during lectures, loudly enough to be heard through the doors when its mother took it outside, and to Jane it looked like an ugly flesh blob.

It had felt a little weird, actually; this was far from the first time she'd noticed that she and her peers got excited over different things, but this time was different. Everything else could be waved off as a matter of taste or that she was often younger and smarter than everyone else in her class growing up, but this time it was a matter of instinct, one that most mammals had. She was a good ways into puberty by then, and even younger children found babies that weren't their siblings cute, that she didn't to her meant one of two things. Either there was some part of her brain that was missing or flawed, or she was the next step in evolution and was simply not wired for natural reproduction (Personally, she liked to think it was the latter).

Eventually the edges softened enough for her to be open to the idea of having a child, namely after meeting the children of her colleagues who had already moved past infancy, but she wanted to do it on her own terms. Besides, they could clearly see this child through the glass and he wasn't blobby in the slightest, and if he got her brains there was nothing to worry about. Her brain was great.

"Any minute now" her husband, Gilbert, smiled. Though his tone was excited, his intention was reassuring; he knew that look on his wife's face and recognised that she was in the process of thinking herself into a frenzy. He knew exactly why too, over the past several days there had been little hints in her behaviour that she was worried that she wouldn't be emotionally invested after the project stage was over, and being worried now didn't count.

He was sure she would though, right now everything was speculative, but he was certain she'd like the baby once she got to know him, that was just the way she was with people. She tended to lean anti-social and needed to adjust to someone new before she stopped keeping them at arm's length, but once she did open up to somebody she was a fiercely loyal friend. That's how it had worked with the two of them anyway.

The first time they'd met was when they were getting one of their many degrees, they had been in the same class together and ended up being each other's partners for a group assignment. While it took a few months for them to become a couple, he always considered when she was looking over his work for the first time and he saw the stunned look on her face at the realisation that somebody had actually met her standards for once to be when he first fell in love with her.

Both had been pleasantly surprised, actually; Jane had always been a perfectionist and was a rare case of someone putting more pressure on herself academically than her parents did, she had gotten used to carrying a project herself. It wasn't always that her group mates didn't care, those rarely made it into her group to begin with, if for no other reason than her making no secret of her abilities and drive to succeed. It was usually enough to keep people who wanted to take advantage of her skill at bay, but the people who did make her team were rarely able to keep up with her.

Inversely, Gilbert's classmates often didn't realise how gifted he was until they actually partnered off with him and saw an example of his work. In that regard this project hadn't been very different from the usual, starting out with her being skeptical, though she had to respect the confidence he had to actually volunteer to work with her. And of course the look of surprise when she realised what she was dealing with, but this one was different and had something to it he couldn't quite place, maybe she had fallen in love with him then too, but for him it wasn't so much what was there as what wasn't.

He'd received surprised looks from classmates many times before, usually followed by seeing the wheels turning as the other group members tried to figure out how to take advantage of his abilities and seeming naivete to saddle him with all the work on future group projects, but this was different, she was different. So it was that they began working together regularly, and for the first time, he worked on projects with the same person twice in a row, and kept working with her whenever possible. They weren't like the other couples, but they worked well for each other and that's what mattered.

Even their mutual proposal had been unconventional; the night after graduation they were flipping through program catalogues to try and find their next step when the topic came up of coordinating their studies to give them a complementary skill set. Both agreed to a balance where they would focus on the areas they were strongest in while remaining literate in the others' for their future endeavors, with an unspoken understanding between the two that they were entering into a life-long partnership.

The same was true of their soft skills: he was a good idea person, but this often made it difficult for him to choose one to give his full energies to, especially since he was a good multitasker and often tried to juggle too many things at once. His wife, on the other hand, tended to hyper focus, sometimes to an unhealthy degree as she would latch onto a problem and either single mindedly pursue a solution or do the same with an unrelated problem to try and push the first one out of her head.

So it was that she helped him manage his time and efforts to avoid being overwhelmed by too many projects, while he helped distract her so she didn't run herself ragged focusing on just one. Or failing that he at least made sure she ate and slept every now and then...Now that he thought about it, it was probably best that they weren't doing this the normal way.

While he was at it, he also realised they'd never really stopped being a bit strange compared to other couples, or at least the fact that they'd extracted the eggs for this project on their wedding anniversary had resulted in a few odd looks when they told people. In their eyes it wasn't strange at all; some people spent their anniversary eating expensive food cooked by strangers in a poorly lit room, they spent theirs' engaged in delicate micro surgery. And really, which one showed more care and trust between partners?

Jane knew exactly what her husband was doing; the body reads fear and excitement the same way and relies on context for which one it's interpreted as, he was showing her how excited he was to try and steer her away from being anxious.

She cast a glance at the pile of baby stuff in the corner: clothes, diapers, formula, some sort of mesh walled thing-y. All of it purchased over the past few days; the two of them had spent so much time trying to figure out how to grow the baby in a tank, that they had completely forgotten that it would have needs afterwards. Even the parts they had thought through had felt...jarring; once they'd placed the starter embryo in the tank they just stared at it for an hour as the weight of what they'd just done had sunk in.

Without the usual hormones thrown into the mix they had been left with a feeling that was sort of like having killed someone, but the reverse. Instead of staring at a lifeless body knowing they had made it so and having to carry that for the rest of their lives, that they were staring at one they had just put life into (hopefully), life they would be responsible for to some degree for the rest of their own.

Their research said that talking to it was good for development, but trying to do so had felt weird and awkward: how did you talk to somebody that hasn't done anything yet? At that point they couldn't even call it a somebody, just a barely visible cluster of cells. Ultimately they'd ended up just sitting by the tank reading textbooks and journal articles out loud, it takes about a year after birth for the human brain to be able to store retrievable memories, it wasn't as if it'd care they weren't reading "Bruno the Bear" or something.

She chewed her lower lip. This...this had been a mistake, hadn't it? She wasn't any good with babies, honestly they still weirded her out a little. Especially the receptionist's nephew, who had apparently stayed a baby for the past several years, that wasn't normal. She knew there were rare conditions that caused the body to age abnormally, but still...either way, this one had better not stay a baby that long.

Besides, it was far too late to really do anything now; even if they took him out of the tank, he was due to be pulled any minute, so it wouldn't change anything. Granted he was made with her and her husband's DNA, so it should be different from the average person's baby, right? She glanced at the tank again and sighed, if they were doing this the normal way everything would just really suck right now.

She was pulled from her thoughts as the expressionless face on the panel lit up and smiled: it was time.

Before she had a chance to react, her husband was behind her and slipping his arms around her waist as he pulled her into a gentle hug "Are you ready?" he attempted to whisper, but his enthusiasm made it come out as only slightly quieter than a normal speaking voice. "Not really" she was so tense her reply came out as a barely audible squeak.

"It's alright, we'll do this together" he assured, in a real whisper this time, as he took her hand, weaving their fingers together, and guided it over the button "Your turn" he smiled. She took a deep breath and pressed the button before she had a chance to second guess herself and the liquid slowly began to drain from the tank, gently lowering its tiny occupant, who gave a startled squeak at feeling something solid under him for the first time.

As soon as the liquid drained, the sides of the tank rose and Gilbert scooped up his newborn son. Was it born or hatched in this case? The tank was modeled on an egg, after all, at least in terms of function. He turned to show his wife, but upon seeing her anxiously muttering to herself about how nobody recognises her in casual clothes and starting over in New Zealand decided to take care of cleaning and dressing their child himself. This was part of her coping process and there was a very low chance of her actually bolting.

Most babies are born crying, possibly due to the shock of the sudden change of environment, ironically this one didn't. Partially because he had to spit out a bit of gel first, and partially because in his case it wasn't really that jarring; it was a little colder and a little brighter, but a decent amount of light got through the tank, so it wasn't completely unfamiliar.

That didn't stop him from making a few displeased squeaks at having been interrupted; he had a busy schedule of sleeping and floating in gel, just who did this creature think it was to wake him up and pull him from his tank?

"Easy, kiddo. Let's get you cleaned up"

A cloth wiping the gel from his face accompanied the talking, making him stop and look up at the source: he knew this voice. A lot of voices came and went, but this was one of the two that was almost always there and that often spoke to him, specifically. Fine, he supposed that finally seeing what the voice came from was worth it.

Now there was a new problem; the cloth hadn't cleaned everything off before being removed, and now that some of the gel was gone, he was becoming aware of just how disgusting it felt against his skin. He screamed and waved his still uncleaned hand in an effort to dislodge the gel before a larger hand stopped it and cleaned it with a fresh cloth.

"I know, I know, just be patient a little longer" The voice assured before its owner finished cleaning him. After that, something was wrapped around his lower half and something soft was slipped over most of him, with a bit of struggle. The attempt to wrap another layer around him was considerably less well received and he loudly protested until the wrapping was removed: nobody confined him!

The creature seemed to realise its mistake quickly enough, so he decided to forgive it this time, especially after it picked him up and carried him around.

There was no doubt this was their child, at only a few minutes old he was already something else. Or at least, he was already different from what he expected of babies; in most of the pictures he'd seen, they liked the feeling of messy, gloppy things squishing between their fingers, but this one seemed repulsed by it now that he'd felt not having it on him. Either he'd grow out of it, or he'd just skip the finger painting phase.

He'd objected to being wrapped up in the blanket too, though he supposed it made sense. From what he'd read the reason newborn babies preferred being restricted was because it was familiar; but the tank had to be fairly big to fit enough gel, so he'd always had plenty of room to move. Instead of comforting familiarity it was seen as a hindrance, one that was apparently deeply unwelcome.

It was difficult to tell what the culprit behind the slight hint of green in the skin tone was; it could be the florescent lighting, or maybe that the gel in the tank had been tinted and it transferred. Oh well, it wasn't that bad, and would probably go away eventually, assuming it wasn't just the lighting. It made the colour of the pink baby clothes Augustus gave them stand out though, and Augustus was one of his favourite co-workers, even if you had to make a new phone call to change the subject with him.

Jane seemed to have calmed down a bit in the meantime, at least enough for him to carefully hand the baby off to her. She took a deep breath, here it was, no going back now, gently, support the head….where are you oxytocin!? You're needed here, it's pretty urgent. Wincing, she glanced down and stared at her offspring for a minute while everything sunk in.

Big, violet-blue eyes blinked curiously up at her, the same colour as his great-grandmother's. Ah, there you are oxytocin, it took you long enough. "Hello….er, boy child?" She said awkwardly "I'm your co-gene dono- Your Mother" His tiny hand hooked onto the chest pocket of her lab coat and he cuddled against her. Aww. She smiled warmly at him "Yes, I'm your Mother...Zim" Alright, she was attached, and she'd cause untold devastation for this child.

However, there was one thing she couldn't help but notice "He's really small" she said quietly.

"Of course he's small, he's brand new" her husband said "You know how it works, newborn babies have to be small or they won't fi-"

"That's not what I mean!" she interjected a bit too quickly, preferring he not finish that sentence "I mean he's small even for a newborn. Do you think we took him out too soon?"

"We went over the figures a hundred times" he replied "Maybe he's just short, your grandmother was short"

"There's no way of knowing if that was genetic or environmental" she sighed "Still, he seems to be alright"

"I wonder if he'll have your walk" he mused in reference to an unintended side effect of his wife's childhood; growing up surrounded by people older and by extension, taller than herself had resulted in her walking like somebody much shorter than she actually was.

Meanwhile, Zim was soaking in all the new sensations the world outside the tank had to offer like blinking lights, fabric textures and the owner of the other most familiar voice. Having been held by both, he wasn't sure which one he preferred; this one didn't have any pokey hair nubs which made it more comfortable, but the other one went higher up and felt less tense.

After a few minutes of hearing them talk, he was turned around and shown more things, this time up close and with the voices speaking again. He suspected the noises they made meant something, but he could figure it out later, for now he was content to enjoy the new sights paired with the familiar sounds and prescenses.

Once he seemed settled in they had started showing Zim around the lab, letting him see everything as they told him what it was and what it did. Some might argue that a baby of any age was too young to be shown lab equipment, but he was going to be growing up with this. Besides at least this was something he'd potentially use, how often did anyone use 'the cow goes moo' in their daily lives?

Admittedly there had been an odd moment when he'd reached to hug one of the robot arms, the best explanation they could come up with was that it was next to the tank and he'd heard it running enough for him to recognise it like he did their voices. Either way they moved along with their tour while an intern quietly sobbed in the corner about having an engineering degree, yet being unable to assemble a crib.

"And this is called a 'generator'" Gilbert said as his wife held Zim up to see "It's a big, important machine that makes electricity. This one makes electricity for the whole city"

This was the moment when they made their first mistake in handling their child. Namely holding a baby in front of a big, red, shiny button and thinking he wouldn't immediately reach for it. As soon as he saw the generator, his eyes were drawn to it and it seemed to beckon him he stared at it enraptured for a moment before his pudgy little hand smacked into the button, too quickly for anyone to stop him. Everything went black for a few seconds before the lab's backup generator took over and restored power.

Zim was delighted and made a small, squeaky noise of approval, clapping his hands a couple of times before deciding he'd had enough action for now and cuddling up against his mother to sleep.

"Eh-he, curious little guy, isn't he?" She chuckled awkwardly before smiling at her child again. She amended her original thought, she decided: she'd cause untold devastation for him, but it seemed he was perfectly capable of causing it for himself.

So there we are, happy anniversary Invader Zim (^.^)

The show's now old enough to drink in any province in Canada, or I suppose Gir is since he's born in the first episode. I haven't given a huge amount of thought to how the Zim & Gir in my story would be by that point, though I imagine something similar to my 19th birthday for Gir's where he's taken to his first concert in a place that has alcohol to celebrate shortly after...and Zim's the one who ends up being carded.

Besides that there's a couple of little easter eggs, Gilbert's name actually came from an assignment for my script class when I first started working on the series and still had a long way to get to some of the parts I was excited about with Zim & Gir's side of things, so I incorporated it into an assignment with them being named Jim & Gilbert (Gir - Gil - Gilbert). Augustus is also a little nod to somebody my mom worked with when I was little and she had an import business, a guy from Germany who actually needed a separate call for each topic (fun fact, there pink is a boy's colour and blue is for girls). And yes, the generator incident is lifted from "The Trial", even without a computer attached to his spine and the whole of Irken knowledge, newborn Zim still causes a massive blackout; I also picture his mom holding him the first time playing out a bit like when Zim gets attached to "Little Meat Man" in issue 45 of the comics. (I'll leave you to guess who specialises in what, but it took both their knowledge bases to make him)

I'm not sure what the update schedule is going to be for this yet, I have about 8 chapters in mind for this so I might switch one of the regular updates for this every once in a while (though not chapter 2 since I've already written it and it's fairly short) or just update this one separately at random. Either way, this will mostly be cute early childhood antics including a few incidents mentioned in "The Aliens Next Door"

Thank you for reading everyone, if you want to share your thoughts, I'd love to read them (^.^)