AN: Hey, look what's not dead! Sorry the hiatus look a while longer than expected (a year longer, to be exact) but Harder, Better, Faster, Taller is back and back on schedule. I'm not tying myself to update deadlines until I can predict worktime, but it should be every over month or so. Good to be back.

[Chillaxis. Cycle 9. Era 24. Smash Day.]

Somewhere between the sixty-seventh and the eighty-fifth step, after the black stuff starts falling but before the white stuff starts falling, Red gets the weirdest feeling that he's done all of this before. He does his best to ignore it. It's an error or something. Red's shoulders shiver under his skintight smeetery uniform. It's pretty cold out here, and his body's not used to it. Sometimes when your body gets too tired or too cold or too upset, the brainmeats start making stuff up. It creates patterns that don't exist and glitches out. That's gotta be what this is, because how could he have done this before?

Today is a day of firsts.

The first time out of the smeeteries. First time off of Irk. First time on a new planet—an enemy planet, no less. First time in a real spaceship in real life where you can touch the metal and sniff the chairs and the guards tell you not to lick anything but you do it anyway when they're not looking. But most of all, it's the very first Smash Day field trip in centuries. No smeet will have another chance like this for generations because Smash Days only happen when the Empire wins a Great Big War. Red doesn't know when the next great big war will be, but he's sure it'll be long after he's done being a smeet, and Smash Day's just for smeets. Soldiers and pilots and other big important Irkens don't get to go on field trips because they've all got better stuff to do out in space, being cool and awesome, destroying stuff and maxing out their kill counts.

White vapor trails out in a sigh. Okay. One more heave should do it. With a last great big pull of his arms, he hauls himself up and over the ledge of the stair. Last night, all Red wanted was to get his first hit on his kill count. Right now, he'd settle to just get up these stupid stairs. His antennae tilt toward the palace entrance. It's quieter inside now, but if he tweaks his antennae just right he can still hear crashing and smashing and shattering deep inside the building. Faint screams echo from the 9th story windows; some of it's the scared-sad kind from Fweezies dug out of their hiding spots, but most of it's the happy-fun kind from the smeets who just won Hide and Seek. The smeets who got in already. The smeets who aren't Red.

It's not fair. How come they get first dibs on Smash Day? How come they got here first and climbed up first and did EVERYTHING first? Why did they get long legs before Red got long legs? If Red had legs that long he'd have smashed and broke and destroyed way more stuff than any of those other dumb dummy guys with their dumb big legs.

With a scampering leap, Red tackles the next stair, and it only takes four tries instead of six this time. The next one takes four too, but the one after that only needs three! (Seven if you count the test-jumps, but those are different so they don't count.) Right. Okay, good. Two more down, only five left.

Too bad they're all three times his height. (One of the chaperones compared them to a bookcase, whatever that is.)

Red cranes his neck to squint at the top of the next stair, trying to memorize the location before his sight starts to blur. It's so hard to make out where the edges even are; lit up under the glare of the sun, they all mash together in one big white slant. Why did all those weird fancy moth guys build their weird fancy palace in the cold where the sun's too bright?

It could be worse, though. The Planetary Conversion Team put a great big dome over the palace right after the cradle ship landed. That way, no sneaky Fweezies can bomb the smeets while they're trying to have fun, and also so the sun can't cheat by blinding everybody. But dome or no dome, Red's never been anywhere this bright, even before all the lights broke.

Out here, light doesn't just come from emergency lanterns on the walls, monitor screens, or spots on a PAK. Light comes from the sun, and the sunlight bounces off everything else so that the light just gets everywhere. It's weird. Fweezians are weird. That's probably what got them dead. Weirdos with creepy wings and fluffy bodies and long muzzles that made big palaces with too many big stupid stairs. Yeah, let's spend all our time making giant dumb stairs in our big dumb building to make everyone think we're cool instead of winning wars, and then we'll lose the war and die. Great plan, Fweezies. Ugh.

This sucks. He was supposed to be inside by now, not on the stairs. He's been climbing these things for hours, and he's been climbing these last few steps for days! Days or… minutes? Quarter-hour? It's kind of hard to tell time without any timers or Nanny-Bots to tell him. There's a way to know by looking at the sun or accessing this special part of his PAK, but Red doesn't know how to do either of those. It never mattered before. Time only mattered in timed sims, and this isn't a sim. This is the real thing, and the real thing's a lot colder and annoying… and hard. He doesn't want to admit it, but the chaperones were right. The real thing's harder—a lot harder. Especially when you're eleven and a half inches tall.

Standing on his toes, Red slides his palm along the next stair, feeling for a rough spot. These things are all smooth polished marble, but they all have at least one rough spot for his claws to snatch. If he ever gets his hands on a time machine, he's going back in time to find the Fweezie who decided stairs should be bigger on the top and smaller on the bottom, and punch them in the face. Seriously, this staircase is the worst. They started out shorter than his heel and now they're almost taller than he is. An Elite who briefed them called it an "optical illusion". It makes it harder to storm, and something about looking bigger from a distance to scare away invaders. The whole cradle ship had laughed at that, even the pilots and the drones, since that plan obviously didn't work. It couldn't even scare away a squad of little smeets.

The builders probably didn't care how hard the climb was, since Fweezies can just fly over the stairs anyway. The only ones who'd get tired would be enemies or visitors who could secretly be enemies. It almost makes sense in a backwards mothy way… maybe. The stairs are still dumb, though.

Red shakes the sweat off his forehead before it can freeze again. He's really starting to miss that rug. It might have been the ugliest thing ever, but it had good traction. At least, it did before Pesto, Smeet #45f623b, and Skutch set it on fire. Now Red's got to waste all day searching for a good grip. They probably did it on purpose—lit the rug behind them so whoever followed behind couldn't climb on it anymore. Just to spite him. Just to be mean.

Or maybe… maybe they thought everyone else had gotten into the palace already. Their awful scores meant those three didn't get off The Inevitable until the very last wave. (Red got way higher scores than all of them. He was in Wave 2, got off-board early, and he's still the last one inside and it's so so STUPID.) Since they got off the ship last, they didn't bother checking behind them for other smeets throwing rocks or starting another stampede.

Maybe they just didn't see him. Red's easy to miss since he's so…

Nah. Nah, they saw him. Of course they'd seen him, he'd been right there! They'd done it to make up for those awful test scores or because of spite or jealousy or… or something.

Red's claw hits a rough spot. Finally. Digging deep into the marble, he hauls himself up, legs slipping and grappling over the wet stone. His hands hurt. A claw broke off like ten stairs ago, and his palms are all pinkish, raw, and filthy. It's the autoclave for him when he gets back.

More white stuff flutters through the air, dusting his back like a powdered donut and numbing his sensitive antennae tips. "Snow," they call it. The hard clear stuff is "ice", and both of them are supposed to be frozen water. It's nothing new—Red knows about frozen water from sim-training and the Collective Memory. The thing is, the frozen water he saw there was frozen. Nobody ever mentioned the water didn't stay solid forever. When the too-bright sun comes out, it all becomes this… this gross squishy not-yet-water that clings to his uniform so the material sticks to his skin so he's even colder than he already is. The fibers of his antennae froze together a long time ago. It hurts and he can't smell a thing. This whole planet is the worst place in the whole universe and he hates it, he hates it, he HATES it and just wants to go home.

Except he doesn't. Not really. Because that's a stupid thing to want. Only someone small and stupid and weak would want to go back home. Back underground.

Back in the dark.

Red's shivering antennae draw flat against his head as he takes the next stair. Maybe Chillaxis is too bright, too cold, too wet and slippery, and nobody plays fair, but at least it's not dark.

Everywhere is dark at home: the halls, the atrium, the hubs, the fight pits and nesting cells, the training auditoriums and cafeterias and test sites and everywhere else. Smeets too young or dumb to know better think it's always been dark and light only ever comes from the pale emergency bulbs and monitors, but Red's smarter than that. He's old enough to know better. He remembers when the smeeteries had light all the time. The whole ceiling lit up end to end, and the training sims never had lines because all of them were always online instead of just a few dozen.

It also meant everybody trained ALL the time. If you weren't sleeping or eating, and if you were too little for the pits, you were in the education plug. Everyone complained about it on the inside, except one guy. He complained on the outside—loudly.

One of the tall smeets from a neighboring hub, he always complained how long the sims took, how boring training was, complained about everything, really. Until one day, the tall guy decided to do more than complain. He left. Just… Just up and left. Walked out right in the middle of the learning set. It's a crazy idea now, and it was even crazier then. If smeets were supposed to train outside the sims, they wouldn't be IN sims.

It went dark not long after that.

Everyone said the lights would come back on in a few hours. Red knew better back then, too. He remembered when the lights went out a long, LONG time, back in basic. The lights didn't come back for years.

He'd hoped it had been another power surge and the lights really would come back on after a few hours. Then he hoped they'd come back after a few days.

After three months in the dark, the Nannys stopped estimating reboot times and started rearranging everyone's schedules around the few dozen sims that ran off generators. They say the lights should be back online by the time the smeets return from Smash Day. They say it's almost fixed. They've been saying that so long Red doesn't believe it anymore.

Sometimes he still thinks about that tall smeet, and the weird coincidence of that smeet running off to see the surface when the lights went dark, and how that coincidence isn't a coincidence. Tall smeets are good smeets. But good smeets stay still and don't run off in the middle of training sets. Good smeets follow orders and they don't make Irk so angry it takes all the lights away. How could that smeet be tall but not be good? It didn't make sense. It still doesn't make sense. Red wonders sometimes if he should have tried to stop him, but nobody listens to ten-inch nobodies. It wouldn't have done anything. But maybe he could have stalled him a couple of minutes, or told someone what was happening. Maybe then the lights wouldn't have gone away.

For as long as he could remember, Red dreamed what it'd be like to finally breach the surface, of coming out of the dark and into the bright glow of Irk's cities and billboards. They said the cities were so bright the planet shone in space like a star. So bright you couldn't even see the moon or stars because Irk shamed them into hiding. But when Red looked out on Irk's surface, he only saw what he'd always seen: dark, dark, some drones on fire, and more dark. The lights had gone out everywhere, not just underground.

Everywhere except the sky. Above them, points of light cracked through the clouds and concrete, faraway and burning, out in space where all the worthy Irkens go. Boarding The Inevitable, Red had promised himself he wouldn't waste this chance to go into the stars. He'd prove he could lay waste to Irk's enemies like anyone else could, shrimpy smeet or not.

It was a good promise. Too bad he couldn't keep it.

Red's claws snag the top stair. Last one. Up and over in one try. It's a hollow victory. He's the last one here. Too short to climb the stairs on time, too slow to trash the palace, the same way he's too short and slow for everything else. It stings worse than the broken glass under his feet. He'll get over it. He always does.

Red wipes the blood and snow and bits of melted rug off his hands, and steps into the entrance hall. It's a real sight.

According to PAK data, history archives, and at least five back-issues of Overlords & Oligarchs Monthly, the Holy Palace of the Imperial Fweezian Sovereignty had once been the most glorious structure in its galaxy. The moths' seven-thousand-year-old love letter to themselves arched eight stories into the belly of the clouds, wreathed in glittering towers, and trimmed in colorful banners. It dominated the skyline for miles. Only the highest of highborn Fweezies could even touch the cobblestone. Some fasted and saved monies for generations just to stand outside the gates. Rare visitors gawked at the softness of the silks, couches, and carpets, and went home to write books dedicated to the gilded interiors. Once, this had been the birthplace of emperors and gravesite of priests, the galactic hub of political intrigue, and a holy place of spells, divining, and wicked curses.

Now it's a playground for smeets to max out their ransack scores. Maybe snag some extra experience points in terror and/or rampage.

Assuming, of course, you managed to get inside the building on time. Red's heels sink into the smoldering fur carpet as he gazes at the wide expanse of ruin and merrymaking. Candelabras cracked in half droop over upturned bowls and broken pottery. Murals in permanent marker, fingerpaints, and the blood of at least three different species scrawl across the walls and floors and ceiling. Any place to mark has been marked: Irken Empire insignias, drawings of themselves, The Tallest, moths with x-ed out eyes, tally marks, clever jokes, cupcakes, smiley faces, names, numbers, bad puns, battle slogans, and frowny faces claim every inch of wallspace until it overlaps into a soup of conquest and delight. There's no palace left to smash, just one big multicolored territory marker.

Nobody's here, except for the round smeet asleep in a broken chandelier. Everyone's moved on to better spoils. It's not like it's a surprise—this room got hit first and hardest; after eight waves of smeets, the room's lucky to still be standing. Even if the rest of the palace hasn't been totally gutted by now, he'll still get muscled out of any cool stuff left to smash. There's no point hunting for things to break, burn, tear, or drown.

That's just fine with him. Let those dummy dumb-guys have all the shredded couches and melted statues they want. If they want to waste their one and only Smash Day, let 'em. Red came for something better. Much better.

Kicking through the minefield of shattered shiny stuff, he trails the walls, searching the peeling paper and scarred treeskin underneath for… well, Red's not sure yet. A crack, a weird seam in the treeskin walls, a statue cleaner than the other statues, something like that. A secret sign to take him where he needs to be. It's probably a super-secret subtle thing you'd never even notice unless you knew where to look. Maybe it's not a crack in the wall. Maybe it's something even smaller, like too many petals on a flower in a picture, or a scent mark only moths can smell or…

Red slows to a stop and cranes his neck up at a signpost.

SERVANT PASSAGE ENTRANCE.
HIRED HELP ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.
NO SMOKING. NO EATING. NO PETS. NO RUNNING.
NO UNAUTHORIZED SINGING, BLEEDING, CHANTING, OR WEAPONS.
ALL OFFICIAL SACRIFICES LV. 3 AND UP MUST HAVE LEASH.
THANK YOU! n_n

Or maybe they'll just spell it out for him. That works too.

How come nobody's gone in yet? The outside's marked up, and there's claw scratches all over. Someone tried to break in—the passage door's open, but not all the way. Why? Too dangerous?

Shaking the snow off, Red twitches his antennae. There's no Irken blood or alarm scent in the area. If there's danger here, nobody's found it yet. There might be another reason, though.

A long shadow passes over him. The ground rumbles as a pair of boots attached to huge legs brush past him, moving fast. Okay, the boots are walking, but when those boots are as tall as you, they might as well be running.

"Hey." Red forces his cold and tired feet into a sprint to catch up. "HEY! Hey wait, I have a question!"

The boots slow but they don't stop. A tiny head atop a big round body looks around.

At least, Red assumes it's looking around. All he can see are two antennae stalks peeking out of the bulk like two flowers on a mountaintop. The Irken soldier is so wide he takes up half of the hallway and all of the rug. Even when Red catches up, all he can see is a summit of fat and muscle and snow and more fat and muscle. He smells different, too. It's not like the metallic smell of the pilots, and not the icy-smoky scent of the Chillaxis round-up teams either. If anything, this guy smells a little like both. He smells like ships and Chillaxis and Irk and a bunch of brand new scents attached to names Red knows but has never seen. Plookesia. Vort. Bordellux. Dirt. And overlaying all of it, a wash of fungus, plant life, and fry grease from the newly named Foodcourtia.

"Thought I heard something," the soldier rumbles to himself.

"It's me! Down here!"

He wipes the snow off his face with a rag and tosses it aside. "I wonder who it could be. I know it couldn't be a smeet. Smeets know how to show respect to their tallers. Especially Invaders."

This is an Invader? Red looks again. Yes, the plain uniform, the shiny boots over pale unstriped body armor, the overlapping scents of conquest. It really is an Invader.

There's no time to be awed, though. "Uh. Excuse me, sir?"

"That's better." The boots come to a complete stop, and a pair of small purple eyes peer over the mass of himself. His snacking must be immense to fuel all that. It's amazing. He must sense Red's appreciation because his voice turns nicer. "Now what's so…" He squints and leans down a bit. "Ha! Well, look at that. You're not even bigger than my boot, and here you are out on field leave. Not even a little exploded either, good for you!"

Red frowns.

"You uh. You are old enough to be here, right?" The Invader raises an eyebrow and glances around the room. "I dunno what I'm supposed to do with stowaways. Detention or thumbscrews or…?"

Can smeet teeth break through boots? Probably not. If the Invader didn't outrank him by like a billion and wasn't the second tallest Irken that Red's ever seen in his life, he might still try it.

"Excuse me, sir, I'm sixty-five." Technically still sixty-four until next week, but close enough. Not that it matters; some smeets on this trip are only in their mid-forties and they still got to come. "Also, I got an S-plus on all of my tests and…" He's wasting time. The Inevitable won't wait around all week, and Smash Day's just got a few hours left. Every minute he waits is a minute someone else might find the prize before him. "Hey, do you know if anything here's Out Of Bounds?" He points at the entrance sign. "Like that?"

The Invader looks for himself. "I don't think so. Nobody said anything. Why do you want to—"

Red's gone before the second sentence. Last second, he remembers to salute goodbye, even though nobody can see it.

It's clear. The doorway's open and clear and he can use it! Nobody's used that spot yet, and it's not off-limits or dangerous, so it must be because—

Red bolts through the door and smacks face-first into a forcefield. Yeah, he thought so.

The servant hallways are blocked off by either some sort of fancy shield or freaky moth magickey stuff. Same difference. It didn't appear until Red walked into it, though, so there must be a trick to it. Claw marks, scorch marks, laser-burns, and very rude phrases mar the fancy treeskin on Red's left. Beyond the barrier, the hall's untouched. It's not even dusty.

Looks like the forcefield's attached to the wall itself. It doesn't try to follow Red when he moves closer or draws farther away. That means it's stuck to this one spot. He doesn't need to break through the shield, just the wall. And these walls aren't so strong anymore. Red pokes at the treeskin beside his foot. It's soft and wet here, and not just from the snow on his boots. It's really wet.

Nobody can track in that much snow, so it had to come from the snow blown in from outside. Red steps back into the entry hall and shivers under a fresh gust of wind. There's a huge hole in the ceiling where the wind and snow rushes in, and now that he's looking for them, there's puddles and snow all over the floor and banisters and everywhere. Maybe even before the cradle ship even landed. That means it's been snowing in here for days, which means that wall's been wet for days.

Watching for spies and tag-alongs, Red double-checks the location of the forcefield again and walks along the outside wall. The barrier popped up seven steps in, right? He walks three, four, six, nine steps along the outer wall and stops. That should be far enough.

This would be much easier with laser cutters or shock daggers, but nobody gets those until the PAK upgrades, and that won't happen until Red breaches for real. The best he can do is a dull little knife he swiped off a pit fighter. It's rusted halfway through and smells like a junkyard puked in a dumpster, but it still works. The blade stabs through the wet weakened treeskin no problem. He can't cut smooth lines with it, but that's okay. Red jabs several deep punctures in the wall, going up and over his head and down again until there's a little arch of stabs—kind of like a cutout picture.

"Okay." Red squares his shoulders and shoves. Wet treeskin and plaster collapse under his weight, and he goes sprawling across the carpet. The clean, dry, unburned, untouched carpet. He's in. The clear barrier shimmers over his left shoulder. On his right, the servants' corridors stretch into infinity, free for the pickings.

It actually still smells like Fweezie in here. For the first time in his life, the only Irken Red can smell is himself. This really is enemy territory, even if nobody's here anymore. Something deep in his spooch tells him he's in danger. Reminds him if he gets in trouble nobody can help him. Smeets aren't meant to be alone. Smeets aren't even meant to be in groups of less than five. Even on the stairs, other Irkens were still in range and in sight.

Red grips the dull knife tight in his little fist and follows the lights that run along the ceiling. Most of them still work, too—probably powered by weird moon power or batteries or something. At the end of the hall, the path widens and splits into a five-way crossroad. Just by looking, he can tell the whole thing works this way: paths branching into paths like vein-circuits. Doors line the walls of every hall, every path, every possible route. Those doors might lead to rooms, or to more paths, or rooms that feed and loop back into new corridors or…

Red gnaws his bottom lip. Nobody gave them maps to this place, especially not the secret innards inside it. Someone could get lost in here for a whole era. Those stinky jerks probably built it that way to be jerks. The outside rooms are hard to navigate too, maybe harder, because the outside had to confuse enemies. He'd bet his last snack ration that none of them counted on the enemy getting in after they'd already sacked the place. They didn't count on Red, either.

Nobody counted on Red—or any other smeet, for that matter—finding The Princess Room. None of the big Irkens found it yet. If they had, it would have been announced by now. That means it's gotta be hidden really really really good, and it has to be somewhere nobody's been yet.

Pacing the mouth of the crossroads, Red angles his antennae and listens close, just like the sims taught him. Chaos, destruction, and cries of smeetish delight rattle the outer walls of the far left and far right corridors. Someone's in those rooms, so those routes aren't the ones he wants. Down the center path, though it's harder to hear, someone's running water and throwing jingly stuff. That's out, too. The middle left and middle right paths are still quiet. Either nobody's gone down there yet, or everyone's been there and gone already. The mid-left smells kind of Irken, but the right one… the right's the stinkiest mothiest path of all. That's got to be his route.

The knife scrapes along the wall, scrawling long jagged tears of peeling wallpaper as Red follows the corridor. Both so he can find his way back in case he gets lost, and to mark his place. To lay claim on what he did, and what he's about to do. Yes. He's going to find The Princess Room, and he's going to get the prize. Who cares if he didn't get to bite any butlers or ride a chandelier? Red's about to do what nobody, not even the grown soldiers could do.

Ahead, the path splits again. Red swivels his antennae to find the smelliest, mothiest route. Takes a few steps, swivels some more. His smile fades. Everything smells like Fweezies now. It's all the same. Dozens of doors spread down all four halls, and checking all the doors of even one of those halls would take hours. He doesn't have hours.

"Augh, I HATE this place!" His voice echoes in the empty hall. Like it's mocking him. "Stupid moths and their stupid rugs and fancy s-stuff and dust all over everything."

Wait. Red wipes a little cloud of pink moth dust off his leg and sneezes. Was this stuff always here? He doesn't think so. As it swerves into a new corridor, the dust particles thin and thicken in random patches, as if someone had tried to brush it away at the last second. Dust covers the rug, the walls, the abandoned supply cart tipped on its side. Dried blood freckles the wallpaper. It kind of reminds him of the time a feeder bot spun out of control and splashed soda all over the room.

It's not the best lead in the world—no telling where this Fweezian was flying from—but it's better than nothing. Red follows the trail down the northwest corridor as it bends through another turn, down another split path, and up an arching slope where the dust thickens and thickens until it blankets the rug like pink snow. No, more than only dust now. Tufts of fur—mostly pink, with flecks of yellow—poke through the dust and stick to the wallpaper in bloody clumps.

All the Fweezian fur colors mean something about their rank and jobs and stuff, but that data's not in his storage. The fanciest most important ones are blue and white, Red knows that much. The green guys—like the one thrown out the third-story window earlier—are something called "priests" and they're really important, too. Nobodies come in grey or brown. The other colors? Who knows. Pink and yellow are bright colors, though, so this Fweezie had to be someone at least a little important. Maybe important enough to go in The Princess Room?

The trail stops dead in the middle of the corridor. It doesn't fade, it doesn't scatter, it just… isn't there anymore.

There's no sign of a teleportation marker anywhere in here. They could have taken one of the doors near the ceiling, but all of the doors higher than Red's antennae are spotless, even the ones over the dust trail. This Fweezie hadn't been flying, at least not in this spot, and they hadn't come down from a higher room.

Red circles the spot where the trail ends. A bunch of fur's clumped under the rug. Way more than there ought to be. The edge of the rug's dark green in dried blood, too. Red digs his claws into the fringe and pulls and pulls and pulls. Why is this thing so heavy? He can barely budge it; did they glue this thing to the floor? He shakes off the rug burn and yanks the carpet with all his—

BOOM!

The corridor jolts hard. Red flies backward and knocks his head against the wall. When he opens his eyes and wipes the plaster out of his face, he realizes he's still holding a chunk of rug in his hand. The whole section tore off.

Where the rug used to be, clusters of dust and fuzz clump around a circle cut into the floor. A secret trapdoor, just like in the simgames. A bloody handprint stains a handle at the top, right above a shiny insignia in the center.

This is it. This is The Princess Room.

Honestly, Red doesn't even know what a Princess Room is or what it does or why it's important. But he does know that if he finds it, that means he wins, and winning means you're good. It means you're the best. It means he'll get taller and score more snacks and get everything he ever wanted and nobody's gonna look down on him anymore. No more "report your progress, e82d10" or "over here, d10". From now on it'll be "excellent work, Red" and "these scores are amazing, Red" and "I wish I could be as tall and cool as you, Red". No more serial numbers. From now on, they'll know him by his name. Red closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and opens the door to his future.

"You'll know it when you find it," the chaperones had told them. They were right.

Red's never seen anyplace like this before. True, he's never seen the rest of this planet before either, not in real life, but he still knew about it. The palaces and snow and layout grids, the poisoned spears and creepy secret chambers with dead people inside, all that's in his collective memory data or in the sims—snapshots he can reference whenever he wants. Not this place. This is brand new and it's… it's weird. He'd wondered before why they didn't call The Princess Room a vault, since vaults are where you keep valuables. Now that he's here, it's clear that whatever this place is, it's not a vault.

The walls are squishy and soft, like pillows without the bulk. Silver shelves line the walls, holding strange replicas of cities and of Fweezies, kind of like a war room. But war rooms are supposed to be accurate, right? How come all the Fweezie models' faces are so weird-looking? The eyes are way too big, the fluffy antennae are too fluffy and so long they drape off the shelves, with mouths frozen in happy little smiles. And they're all huge. If he snatched the lacy robes off one of these things, it'd be too big for him to wear. Most of them are bigger than the model buildings. Are these Fweezie models supposed to be giants?

Instead of the drab, serious browns, greens, reds, and golds of the halls, colors in The Princess Room look like a sunrise through fog. They're washed out and gentle on the eyes, like none of the colors knew how to be colors yet. It's the only place on Chillaxis where Red doesn't have to squint.

Red slips through the trapdoor on the ceiling and grabs one of the nearby hanging ropes. It's a shiny golden thing—not a metal chain like he assumed, but thread sticky to the touch. Handy for keeping a good grip as he shimmies down the thread, even if it feels kind of gross.

His eye trails the thread down to his landing spot: a round nest (or is this what they call a bed?) hanging from the ceiling, full of pillows and Fweezie fuzz. There, in the crook of the nest, swaddled by blankets and pillows, uselessly guarded by a replica-giant, sits the prize.

The pod capsule bends over itself in a crescent, its glow casting the nest in a wash of blue-green light. From far away it looks like the moon in a soap dish. The pod's at least thrice Red's height—not full-grown Fweezian size, but close. The soft replica giant smiles stupidly at Red as he lands. These things are even weirder up close.

When he steps closer, shadows wriggle and shift inside the translucent capsule shell. The prize smells really nice. Not like snacks nice, but just… nice? He's not really sure how to describe it. It reminds him of naptime, or that one night a supervisor smiled on the monitor and told him he did a good job. Maybe someone can tell him what the name of this smell is when he turns in his prize. Of course that'll be after they tell him "Good job Red, you won Smash Day," and "everybody come see the good job Red did," and—

"Hey, I think something's alive in there."

Did that voice come from inside his head or inside the capsule? Arching on tiptoe, he squints at the shadowy blob. "Hello?" The shell's too thick to see much. "Uh, I think you're property of Irk now?"

"We're already property of Irk, don't be dumb." One of the shadows separates from the blob, rising up and up until Red realizes this shadow isn't on the inside at all.

Another smeet pokes his head out from behind the pod. His onesie uniform is a mess of wall plaster and moth dust, and under the blue glow, his purple eyes are the color of space. Frowning, he tilts his head at Red and turns back to the capsule. "It's moving inside. That means something inside is alive, right?"

"Sometimes stuff moves when it's dead, too. I think dead stuff moves different, though, so it's probably alive. Maybe…" Red's eyes travel The Princess Room's fluffy replicas, miniature buildings, and paintings on the wall. "Maybe all this stuff belongs to whatever's inside. I think it's sleeping."

"What a dumb time to sleep! Oh lookit that the house is on fire I better take a nap 'cause I'm a big dumb moth bluhbluhbluh goodnight everybody." The smeet giggles and snorts at his own joke.

Red knows that laugh. It's the same grating annoying laugh from the education plug and the snack trough. They train in the same sims for group work sometimes, and he sat next to him for a few years before the lights went out. He's in a different pod group, but the same smeeting year. Red's PAK identifies him as Intermediate Class Irken Smeet PAK#8c33b5. He thinks that maybe he doesn't like 3b5 very much.

"Hey, know what? I bet it's full of baby food. That's why it smells so good." 3b5 chews the glowing pod a little bit and makes a face. Apparently it doesn't taste as good as it smells.

"Nobody makes a whole special secret room just to hide baby food." Probably. Maybe. Actually, the more Red thinks about it, the more he's not sure. Why would they need baby food, unless...? Red examines the weird glowing pod again. "It kind of looks like a smeeting pod without the… everything else, but that doesn't make any sense." Babies go underground if you don't want them to die. Everyone knows that; even not-Irkens can't be that stupid. "It can't be a baby or an egg."

"It could be one of those in-between things. I think they call it a uh… cocoon. Yeah, because something's cooking inside." 3b5 lifts the soft Fweezie replica by its lace wing. "That's why it's got all these models and stuff here, so it can figure out what all this stuff is supposed to look like when it comes out of stasis."

"But it's so ugly, though."

"Exactly!"

The smeet's got a point. Red sizes him up, trying to casually look him in the eye without arching his neck up too much. Staring straight ahead, he can only see the curve of 3b5's chin. He's about a head taller than him, give or take an inch. Wild guess, he's shorter than Tenn ( who earned her name last year and was taller than almost everybody), but taller than Alexovich (who earned his name the day before yesterday). It's kind of hard to tell, since his giant head makes up most of his size.

"How'd you even get in here?" Red sure didn't see anybody when he slipped in here.

"Me and Smeet #e74a96c made bombs with some stuff under the sink! He was gonna come with me but he went to play with the fancy green guys Tenn's group found—" Probably those wingless Fweezies Red saw tumbling out the window earlier. "—so I went to blow up some stuff on my own for a while. Then I blew up a room, and then another room where I found a cool rock, then I blew up that wall over there, aaaaand now I'm here!"

The new guy's wet footprints trace a wobbly trail from the cocoon to a line of shelves and tiny toppled buildings. There's a huge hole half-hidden behind one of the biggest shelves. That must have been from the explosion earlier—the one that almost threw Red into the wall when he pulled back the rug.

Red's fingers twist into the plush fur of the Fweezie replica. It's good for sinking claws into. Keeps him from sinking his claws into something else. If this smeet bombed The Princess Room the same time Red found the trap door, that only meant one thing.

"We tied."

"We did?" The taller smeet screws up his face at the idea. "For what?"

"We found The Princess Room at the same time; that means we both win the prize." It also means they'll have to share. It's not… ideal, but murder coverups aren't in Red's lesson plan, so it's what he's stuck with. He knows he ought to be glad he gets to share with someone taller than him, and grateful he's only sharing with one smeet and not twenty. It doesn't make him feel much better, though.

3b5 taps the cocoon with his antenna and slowly, carefully, licks it with the tip of his tongue. "Blech, it's even worse the second time! This is the worst prize I ever tasted. I hate it, I want a new one."

Red waves the smeet away before he gets spit all over the prize. "Okay, I'll take it, then."

"I didn't say I didn't want it, I just said I hated it! And… and actually, since I blew up the wall AND I'm taller than you that means I should get it anyway. You're the one that should go away."

3b5 glances at Red's bared teeth with a humph. "...but I guess we could share. I guess. If you're gonna cry about it."

Let him try that again and lose a finger or three. Then they'll see who's crying about it.

The smeet glances back to the cocoon, then at the rest of the room, searching for something. "Are you sure this is the prize? I don't hear any winning chimes. Maybe they don't know we found it yet."

"They have to know," Red tells him. "They're watching from somewhere, I bet. I saw one of the smeetery monitors on the balconies when I came in. And I saw a bunch go up the stairs before that." He remembers because one of them yelled at him when he stepped on Red by accident and almost fell. "They're all over the place."

More and more adult Irkens have been hovering around lately. Not just for the field trip, either. Whispers around the cafeteria troughs warned of tall figures in the eaves of the smeeteries, lurking in the shadows of the testing simulators, skulking in education plugs, pacing the halls when everyone went to sleep, all of them holding datapads and wearing monitor visors.

Smeet 3b5 considers it. "You mean like the pit scouts."

"What's a pit scout?"

"It's when big Irkens come to watch us in the pit fights and they all point and yell a lot. They're supposed to be hidden, but the stubby guy from Vat 56 hit a switch on accident and the wall got invisible, and on the other side, we saw a whole bunch of 'em watching with snacks and datapads and stuff."

"Oh." Red's never been picked to go to the pit before. It sounds fun. "What's it like fighting the real ones?"

The smeet chews his antenna tip and glances away. "Weird. Sometimes they'll hit you back, but other times they just sit there and make loud crying noises. I don't like it sometimes. It's too loud in there, and none of the offworlders know how to play right. But sometimes it's fun."

The nanny bots spoke of something called a "draft pick" once. Big Irkens came down from Irk's surface or from space to choose who they wanted most to come learn stuff with them. Red bet his last snack pellet that they came looking for draft picks in the Chillaxis palace, too. They HAD to know they'd found the Princess Room. Tall Irkens knew just about everything. Why hasn't anyone said anything yet?

Red pokes the cocoon, watching the blobby shape inside shift away from his hand. "Maybe it only counts as winning if we take the prize down first."

Easier said than done. The gold threads hanging the nest were tough enough to hold Red's weight, and they'd felt solid, too. No biting or clawing through those. Maybe they can burn it.

"I guess we carry it to a chaperone," says 3b5. He frowns at the cocoon twice his height and wider than both of them put together. "Some…how. The important thing is we found it. Hey, you think they'll let us declare for this?"

"They have to!" If they couldn't declare their names for this, Red can't imagine what else would do it.

"What's yours going to be? I picked mine a long time ago right after the lights went out—the first time, not the other time. You wanna know what it is?"

Red starts to argue that no he does not want to know what it is and that exchanging names before formal declarations is illegal.

3b5 keeps talking over him. It's like this guy is always talking. He probably even talks in his sleep. "I'M gonna be Purple! 'Cause of my eyes, see? Nobody's got eyes this color."

"I saw a big Invader today with purple eyes."

"Well, none of the other smeets have eyes like mine. Grown Irkens don't count."

"Okay, but I'm pretty sure 2606jk5 has purple ones, too."

"That…" The-Smeet-Who-Will-Be-Purple-Apparently curdles his face into a glare. "That doesn't count either! Her eyes are lilac, duh. You'd know that if your eyes weren't stupid. Purple's a cool name and it's way better than yours. I bet it's something dumb like… like uh, Smoofindoof or Dookinsmoof! You're just too smeety-smeet to tell me. I bet you didn't even think of one yet."

Shows what he knows. Red thought up and chose his name fifteen and a half minutes after he dropped out the delivery chute. Saying that would just sound like he's trying to one-up Purple, though, so Red saves himself time and keeps that part secret.

That's the nice thing about secrets: they belong to you until you decide to give them away. Names are like that, too. They belong to you, even when nobody knows. They belong to you before anyone, even you, says it out loud.

This isn't how Red imagined saying his for the first time, but this dorkbutt is starting to bother him, and he's probably going to tell his whole pod about the shorty who doesn't even have a name yet. "My name's Red," says Red.

It feels good to say it out loud. It feels real, it feels right, it's—

"Fake."

Red swings around with a hiss. "It is not!"

"Is too." Purple crosses his arms with a sniff. "You copied me, that means it's fake. You only chose a color 'cause I picked a color. Change it."

"I'm not changing—why can't we both be a color?"

He rolls his eyes and talks real slow like he's explaining to some dumb offworlder. "It's too the same. Obviously. What if people get confused and don't know which is which?"

Red stares at him. "Because I have red eyes and my name is RED!" He squeaks so loud the cocoon nest rocks around a little.

The smooth porcelain shifts under Purple's feet. He swings his big dumb head too fast. The quick little skitter of legs can't match the weight of his skull, can't keep up with the wobbling nest, and his feet slip out from under him.

Last second, he catches himself on the edge before he drops. Purple flinches at the spinning floor beneath him and glares at Red. "You don't hafta get all mad just because I'm right."

Red hisses at him again.

"See, this is exactly why you can't have a color name, you're too immature." Both legs kicking under him, Purple manages to pull himself up by his arms. Even without his legs, he still comes up to Red's chin. "And short, too! I'm taller than you, so you have to do what I say. Hah! So change it."

Like that's even possible. Red is Red. That's his name, that's who he is. If even Almighty Tallest Miyuki can't make him change names, this dummyface smelling like moldy wallpaper sure can't. He could point out that lots of Irkens have near-identical names without a problem. He could tell him that he picked his name first and by law, had dibs. Or he could just argue the (correct) fact that Purple's just mad his name isn't as cool as Red's is.

But Red's tried to argue with taller smeets before. It never works. So he bites Purple's arm.

Purple reels back squealing. He tries to hold his own arm, forgetting he's holding on to the edge. The smeet slips off the nest and drops hard into a pile of soft Fweezie replicas. All that's left of him is two antenna stalks poking out of a mound of fluff and weird clothes, and muffled angry screaming.

And he calls Red the smeety-smeet.

A thin green arm shoves the smiling dopey face of Emperor What's-His-Name aside and claws out. Purple stares up at Red with a tiny open mouth. It's like his PAK can't even process what just happened.

Red waves with a smirk. "You don't look so tall from up here." And just because he can, he kicks the fat fuzzy Fweezie replica out of the nest too.

It bops Purple right in the mouth. "Hey! Hey, you—" The smeet spits out a wad of feather fluff. "You can't do that." Little crinkles warp and twist his face until his eyes are fat purple crescents with fluid leaking out. It's gross. "You can't DO that!"

"Well, I did." Red sits himself beside the cocoon and gives it a pat. "I'm the one who found the Princess Room anyway, so I'm the one who should get the prize."

The prize and everything that comes with it: praise, glory, snacks, score-boosts… he might even get a growth spurt! Everyone back home will sure be surprised when Red comes back three feet taller. They probably won't even recognize him.

"You bit me!" Some squeak on the wind is still complaining down there. "You bit me, and it's not even spar day!" He might as well be complaining to the walls and stuffed Fweezies. Nobody cares what losers have to say.

Unlike Red, who's coming back a whole new Irken. Red, who conquered the palace of the Fweezians. Red who expertly tunneled through to the prize like an expert tunneler guy. Red, who finally found—

"Hey, the Princess Room! My fellow little smeets, come—come and BEHOLD!"

…That voice.

Red sits up straight. Gradually, the smile fades from his face.

"Yes, come! Come and see this spectacle of filthy moth… filthness that the greatest and biggest amongst you has uncovered and behold MY greatest—okay, ehhh that's too close. Yes, yes you may admire from afar." The voice crows so loud it echoes off the corners of the Princess Room's ceiling.

Part of him wants to stay up here in the nest guarding his prize on the high ground. A greater part of him, the dumb curious part who just can't help himself, still has to look. Just to make sure. After all, it's been years since they met and it's easy to mistake one voice for another. Red's PAK tries to identify the smeet's PAK, but he only gets error codes.

Still, there's no mistaking the smeet marching with his hands on his hips, grinning like the commander who got the castle. It's the same smug grin he'd worn while skittering down the Plug hall on his way to breach Irk's surface. That's him for sure. Irk's sake, he's even taller than Red remembers. The small party of smeets following him through the blast hole are all a head shorter than him, if not more.

The tall smeet turns to frown at Purple lurking at his shoulder. "Uh, I said you can admire me from afar." He blinks at the pileup of smeets jammed tight in the wall. The squeaking tangle of arms and legs struggle to climb over each other. None of them have realized that maybe they shouldn't all rush in at the same time. "How'd you get in here so fast, anyway?"

Purple flattens his antennae with a wary little squint, but he doesn't step back. Second tallest smeet in the room, he barely comes up to the smeet's eyes. "I was here first before y—"

"WE got here first," Red calls down.

Purple glares at him. "Oh, it's 'we' now?"

Some smeets sure are stuck in the past. "We found the Princess Room," Red says again.

A few smeets spare Purple an apologetic shrug. The smaller ones edge themselves out of biting range, just in case a fight breaks out or the second-tallest smeet needs someone to take his anger out on. Others busy themselves exploring the Princess Room's squishy walls or pushing down the little replica buildings. None of them seem to notice Red at all.

"Hey, hey, hey! Come on, move back before you get stepped on. You! Take that jewelry out of your mouth, that's not food. NO, don't swallow… eugh, whatever." One of the chaperones—a Smeetery Guard on a normal day—shoves the bookcase aside and ducks through the blast hole. He jabs the sides with his shock spear a few times to give himself some headroom.

"I made that!" Purple darts under the chaperone's legs, tugging the cuff of his robe and getting bits of explosive jelly all over it. "He's only here because he used the hole I made first. See?" He waves his stinky jelly hand as hard as he can and points at his blast site.

"Hm? Oh, not bad, Smeet uh… #8c33b…3?"

"3b5."

"That's what I said. Not bad, #8c33b5. Nice edging on the sides, very clean." The chaperone gives Purple a donut hole and shakes him off his robe.

Purple opens his mouth to say something else, shrugs, and shoves the donut hole in his face instead.

Maybe he can be bought off that easy, but not Red. He walked down too much hallway and climbed too many stairs. "I found the Princess Room first. Lookit the trap door I found! It's on the ceiling! Hey. HEY!"

More smeets and three more chaperones crowd the blast hole. One of the rounder smeets starts talking really fast and finally points to Red.

The chaperones follow where the smeet's pointing and their eyes get real big. "The nest," says the one in front. The one in back scrambles to get out a communicator while the other two cheer and hi-five each other and start talking too fast for Red to follow, but he can still hear bits of "the nest," and "we found it," and lots and lots about getting perks and promotions.

Red knew they'd be excited, but not this excited.

Wait. Is that guy on the left aiming a blaster?

A laser pulse shoots between Red's antennae. Another zips past his head, so close he can feel the warmth on his cheek. One by one, the golden threads snap clean through. The nest drops half a second before a tractor beam catches it.

The world's shaded in a bright pink tint as the nest gently sails to the floor in a column of light. Red—who had not screamed when the laser almost shot his face off, that was a battle cry—grips the side of the porcelain nest tight and peeks out.

A chaperone stares back. "Hey, check it out!" She reaches over Red to prod at the cocoon behind him. The shadow inside tries to curl away as the Irkens cluster to see for themselves. "Someone tell Infiltration they won the bet. It's here after all."

"And still alive!" The Guard chaperone who gave Purple the snack kneels down to investigate. It's hard to tell through the helmet, but it seems like he's looking—smiling?—at Red. The helmet's turned right in his direction, anyway. "It's funny, huh? After all that trouble from Information Extraction and the Sweep teams, one of the smeets finds it after all. Amazing."

Red rubs the back of his neck and grins. "Yeah, I guess it's pretty—"

"Excellent work, Smeet 404!"

"Eh?" The tall smeet's head pops out of an eviscerated Fweezie replica on the other side of the room, blinking at the Irkens crowding around him. "It is?"

Red scrambles out of the nest. "404 didn't even get here 'til two seconds ago! I'm the one who—"

"It is excellent work, isn't it?" The tall smeet shakes off the stuffing and feathers. "I pulled off the leg first and ripped out the squishy bits." He holds up two handfuls of squishy faux-Fweezie insides to the swarm of camera drones coming through the entry hole.

"Wow," says Tenn, "I can't believe you found the Princess Room all by yourself."

"But—" Someone's boot comes down, inches from crushing Red's leg. He ducks and dodges before the next one kicks him in the face. "But he DIDN'T! I found the secret passage and the trap door, he didn't even do anything."

Red stares at Purple across the room. He's losing part of this win, too. He made all that explodey goo or whatever. He had to be mad about this too, and he's taller, maybe they'll do something if he says something again.

Sulking beside the wall, Purple looks back at him. His eyes flick from Red to Zim. He frowns at the bite mark in his arm, and goes back to eating his donut hole.

The chaperones lead the room in a formal salute. "Congratulations, 1053r404. Declare your victory and self."

"I—but wait, he—"

"I AM ZIM!" He thrusts the remains of the un-stuffed Fweezie into a camera drone's lens. "BEHOLD, ZIM'S VICTORY!"

It's Red's victory.

"VICTORY FOR ZIM!"

The freshly christened Zim turns toward the furious smeet shaking his fist beside the cocoon nest. He smiles at Red, generous and condescending. A smile meant for comforting smallers, losers, and drones. "Ha ha, don't worry, my tiny podmate." They're not even in the same pod. "If you do your best and get high scores, perhaps you too may one day be slightly as accomplished as Zim. Zim is me." He brushes back a crooked antenna, bouncing a little on his heels. "I'm Zim."

"I still got here first."

"I dunno why you're mad," says Purple. "He didn't use your explosion to get all the credit…"

For once, Irken Smeet Zim notices the gaping hole in the padded cushioning and treeskin behind him. "Ah yes, you did help me find it, didn't you? Thanks, fellow smeet."

Purple's eye twitches.

"When I—no, when Zim becomes Tallest, I'll give you a perk. I mean if I remember. I dunno."

"Hooray for Zim!" cries the round smeet from Zim's pod. The swarm of smeets take up the cheer with hundreds of little voices still ecstatic with the joy of destruction and riding high on the wave of Irken victory. A victory for one smeet is a victory for all smeets. "Hooray for Zim! Yay, yay Zim! Hooraaaaay!"

"Woo, Zim I guess." The last of the donut hole vanishes down Purple's gullet as he licks powdered sugar off the back of his hand. "Look on the bright side, copycat. At least you're not as bad as that guy."

Like it's hard.

"Hooray, Zim!"

Nobody could be worse than that guy.