Spork II

For all the little invaders-in-training who missed the original Spork, here's a rundown of the plot: GIR zapped Zim into an alternate universe, where he'd never killed Spork with his energy creature. The vicious tallest Spork ruled over a broken and dying Irken Empire. Reuniting the alternate world's Red and Purple, he defeated his alternate world self and, in a stroke of incredibly dumb luck, killed tallest Spork, clearing the way for alternative universe Purple and Red to become tallests.

On his way back to his own universe, however, he was tackled by the bloodthirsty "Murderer Zim," the alternative universe's version of him. The two tumbled through the portal back to Invader Zim's home dimension.

It is there that our story begins…

***

It took awhile for Tak's eyes to adjust. Her head and neck hurt. She distinctly remembered being struck by something and the blinding white light that had followed before she collapsed into the dirt. She did not, on the flip side, remember what had hit her.

Her arms were bound above her head with thick silver wires, coiling from her wrists down to her elbows. Ever since she'd regained consciousness she'd been struggling to free herself from them.

Her legs were similarly bound together from the ankles up to the knees. The tips of her shoes barely brushed the ground when she squirmed on the ropes supporting her weight. A heavy metal block on her back seemed to have made her pack's mechanical legs unable to help her. Her shoulders had begun to sob with a dull ache that came from being hung for so long.

Her base refused to respond to her, let alone acknowledge her, and MiMi was still in the repair bay awaiting a new memory disk. "Whoever did this is going to pay and pay dearly," she snarled in her thick accent.

The door to her lab slid open with a dull hiss. Murderer Zim stood, outlined in light, a sandwich in one hand. He took a bite out of it as he leaned against the wall, looking her up and down.

Of course, Tak didn't recognize that there was a difference between this Zim and the Invader Zim that she so truly hated. She thrashed violently against the binds holding her. "Zim! I should have known! I don't know how you managed to outwit me, but you won't get away with this! I'll slit you open and pull out your organs! I'll…"

Murderer Zim had sauntered across the room in as few steps as possible with his short legs. Lifting himself up on his spider legs, he grabbed her face violently in his fist. Then, without warning, he pressed his mouth hard against hers.

After the moment of initial shock wore off, Tak did what most strong-spirited women in her situation would have wanted to do, but would have been too socially repressed to do. She drew her legs back and, though hanging from her wrists in mid-air, delivered a dehabilitating kick to Murderer Zim's groin.

Murderer Zim, tough guy that he supposedly was, crumpled up in an instance with both his hands jammed firmly between his legs. He howled in pain and rolled back and forth, looking somewhat like a circus monkey as he banged into the legs of various tables in his agony.

After a good half an hour out of the room, he returned back to where he'd left Tak hanging. She noted with a broad smirk that he was limping very obviously, and had been holding frozen Delicious Weenies to his "man organ" in an attempt to bring down the swelling.

"Okay. Perhaps I didn't introduce myself to you properly. My name is…"

"Shove it, Zim! I know who you are, and you will pay for this indignity!" she hissed, trashing against her chains.

Murderer Zim lowered his eyes and reached into his pocket, drawing out a long, thin knife in a blue decorative sheath. Tak's taunts instantly feel to silence, her chest heaving. She hadn't considered the fact that she wasn't exactly indestructible. Sure, she'd known that she'd one day die, but she hadn't expected it to be at Zim's hands while bound and trussed like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Murderer Zim drew his knife out of its sheath, drawing his tongue along the sharp edge of the blade. A bit of blood dripped from his cut tongue and onto the blade, a glistening red against the sheen of silver.

He grabbed her antennae and forced her head back, placing the blade against her throat. Her eyes were half-shut, her breathing shallow. She didn't dare move, as she could feel the sharp tip digging into her smooth green skin.

"Listen to me, for the last time. I am NOT Zim. Well, I am a Zim, but I'm not that pathetic Invader Zim. My name is Murderer Zim, and I'm here from another dimension."

"You… expect… me to swallow… that?" Tak choked, trying not to hurt herself any more than possible.

"I'll prove it to you. I want your help in killing Invader Zim. You're the only other Irken I've found on this planet, and I've been monitoring signals using your base since I knocked you out. I want Invader Zim's head on a platter for what he did to me!"

"You, too?" she asked, still mostly not believing his story. Zim must have hit himself on the head good if he honestly believed what he was saying. If it was a trick, he must think she was pretty stupid to fall for it.

Murderer Zim drew the blade slowly from her chin down her neck. Then, with a single sharp slash, he cut through the front of her uniform open from the neck all the way down her shirt.

Leaving her too stunned to start screaming and cussing at him, he left the room. Pausing in the doorway, he smiled. "I'll give you an hour to make up your mind. You can say yes, or…" he spun the blade in his hand, "I'll cut your skin next time."

Murderer Zim went for a walk around Tak's base, inspecting everything. The only thing that failed to impress him was her false father. Not that the idea didn't impress him, but the very fact that he was a human disgusted Murderer Zim.

"How can she stand to touch such horrible meat creatures, let alone live among them as one of them? Something must not be right with that girl…" he grinned, drawing a finger along the edges of his thin mouth. "But she's still so beautiful, so fiery…"

Murderer Zim was cut off in his thoughts by a piece of plaster falling from the ceiling. Plaster doesn't just fall out of ceilings as impeccably made as Tak's base's ceiling was… he lifted his head, eyes narrowing darkly.

He spotted the small, black-clothed form instantly. The small form spotted that it was being spotted, and made a break for it across the ceiling. Firing up the boosters in his mechanical legs, Murderer Zim launched himself towards the ceiling and crawled across it like a maniacal spider.

The thing he was chasing was fast-amazingly fast. Murderer Zim swung a mechanical leg out, missing by bare centimeters. Oh, this was good fun!

The stranger dropped to the bare concrete, Murderer Zim in hot pursuit. He was amazed that his query should know Tak's base better than he did, when he'd been studying the plans the entire time he'd been searching for incoming or outgoing Irken signals on the planet. Could this be an Irken who simply hadn't been making any messages? It had to be! No other species could move so deftly through Irken technology without getting a limb severed by a laser.

It wasn't until the last possible moment that the intruder slipped up. He tried to make a perfect dive into a drain pipe, which would have taken him straight to the outside world where the undisguised Murderer Zim would not have been able to follow. But the strange little creature in black jumped too soon, and ended up hanging miserably from the pipe, legs dangling in air.

He was just dragging himself over the edge when Murderer Zim landed heavily on all four spider legs in front of him, grabbing him by the collar and snatching him up. Ripping off the mask, Murderer Zim stared in horror and shock.

"You're a human!" A beast of hair and meat products had managed to give him such a chase? It just wasn't possible!

"You're an Irken!" the human snapped back. He wasn't sure if it was a "chy-ld" or simply a very small "ay-dolt". He did notice, however, how disproportionately large the human's head was in comparison to his body. "Whatever you and Tak are planning, you might as well forget it, because I'll stop you! I'll always stop you!"

"You have me confused with someone else," Murderer Zim snorted. "I want off of your planet as fast as I can get off of it! The whole thing smells like feet." He wrinkled up his antennae. "I only want Invader Zim's head on a plate, then I'm out of here."

"But you ARE Zim!" Dib argued, thinking that Zim was trying to pull something.

"I am Murderer Zim. The Zim you have issue with is Invader Zim, and I'm afraid whatever it is you're just going to forget it, for I have claimed the rights to render his useless head from his body!"

Unlike Tak, Dib was strangely easy to win over. "You're Zim and you want to… kill Zim?"

"I came here by accident from another dimension. It was your Invader Zim's fault for shaming me in that dimension, and then bringing me to this horrible germ-infested health trap!" Murderer Zim ranted, shaking out his mechanical legs as if afraid they were covered in pathogens just waiting to make him sick.

"You're a bit more… coherent than Zim ever was. But not by much."

Murderer Zim raised an eye ridge. "I'll take that as a compliment. I'll also take that," Murderer Zim commented, ripping the camera Dib was hiding behind his back away from him. "No pictures, please!" he said cheerily.

"You're not going to get away with whatever you're trying to pull… Something whatever you are Zim!"

"That's Murderer Zim to you. Now stay out of my way and I won't have to hurt you." He set Dib down and smirked grotesquely at the child. "And remember… Zim's head is MINE." With that, he pushed Dib backwards and listened to him scream and he shot out of the drain. Murderer Zim grinned to himself. He almost did hope to see that boy again… there, it seemed, was an enemy potentially worthy of his genius.

"Computer, close off that entrance with a solid, impenetrable screen. We don't want meat creatures building nests in it, after all," he ordered, stalking off. The hacked computer saluted loyally and set to work on Murderer Zim's commands.

After wasting an hour berating every channel the television in Tak's "normal girl" room, which she'd built into the Mansion-base for show in case "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" should want to drop by, Murderer Zim rose to his feet.

It was time to find out if he had a partner or a corpse to dispose of.