"GAGH! No, Zim!" Dib cried, lurching away from Gen weakly. The redhead looked confused, her hands falling away from his chest. They stared at each other for a few moments.
"You aren't Zim."
"You thought I was Zim?!" Gen gagged.
Dib sighed and rubbed his eyes, trying to regain enough strength to sit up. He blinked several times, and Gen offered him his glasses. Slipping them on, he cleared his throat and she helped him up.
"Yes, but I don't think I remembered his lips being that warm," he snickered.
Gen gave him a disgusted glare. "Please, that's not even funny."
Without any explanation, Gen took him by the arm and pulled him through the dimly lit sections of the containment center. As he was dragged along, Dib was astonished at how much Zim's headquarters had changed. Before that torturous evening when he had been lowered into the preservation jelly, Dib remembered being marched through these very halls. They had been drastically different, not as polished, and certainly not so packed with preserved humans.
"Are these...the people who continued to fight after I was locked up?" Dib whispered, his throat locking a little. Gen nodded in response, navigating her way towards the door.
"And you...You're a rebel too, right?" he ventured further.
"Yes, and my mission is to restore you to leadership," she said, stopping and staring him in the eyes. "You're like a hero...a legend..."
Dib's eyes grew wide, and then narrowed again in a skeptical expression.
"That's too cliché to be true."
"Cliché or not, its true. And we desperately need your help," Gen answered, her tone serious and pleading.
"Why can't I get any HELP around here?!" Zim growled, stomping around a row of nervous Irken guards. They were all huddled around a trail of wet footprints leading out of the containment center, whispering curses at the evil liquid substance.
"Must I replace my finest guards with lowly Keef clones?" he hissed, glaring at them all as they cowered. The Irken ruler paced the length of the floor, this time speaking to himself in a low mutter. "The law prohibits anyone out during rainfall... Someone had the audacity to BREAK that law AND infiltrate my fortress! Oh, it pains me deeply..."
"Sir?" a guard ventured. "Remember your squeedily-spooch pressure."
Zim was far from amused. "Find the intruder. Close off all the exits. I shall be elsewhere..." and with that, he swept eloquently away, headed down one of the lime-lit corridors.
Gen and Dib were moving swiftly now through small hallways and dingy, unused rooms. Slime coated their boots as she forced them to a stop in one such decrepit room. Gen put a hand to her white lab-coat, trying to get her breath back as Dib crouched beside her on the floor. On the right of Gen's coat, Dib discovered a little embroidered patch. It featured a pair of scientific goggles with the word "BrainStem" written in yellow across them.
"BrainStem...Its-still going on?!" he nearly gagged, his eyes growing wide. BrainStem had been the name of his small organization of rebels before Zim had finally managed to crush them with a literal flood of battle clones. The alien had struck on Dib's birthday and he and his men had been celebrating their long-lived success. What was left of BrainStem was supposedly locked up in the containment center he had been imprisoned in.
"Yes, we're the new wave of rebels. I couldn't risk freeing all of those taken by Zim, but at least we have our leader back," she whispered with a small grin. Dib's cheeks flushed red.
"But that isn't my original logo, I see. Mine was the symbol of an atom," he remarked, pointing to her badge.
"I'm sorry Dib, we needed something a bit more modern," she explained, looking a bit embarrassed he had noticed. They sat in silence for a few more moments, dreading the sound of marching Irken feet. Gen was not entirely sure where to go from here. She had a map, but it was likely all the exits had been closed off. She still wondered how Zim had found out so quickly that she had stolen his prized prisoner...
"Dib?" she called, suddenly noticing that he wasn't beside her anymore.
"Over here," a voice replied from a darker spot of the room. Gen followed the sound as best she could and finally found Dib standing over something in the corner. On the floor lay a busted S.I.R robot...
