Murderer Zim smiled quietly to himself. It seemed his little prisoner had cried herself to sleep in the hour that he'd been gone. Her face was streaked with drying liquid, her head was down, and her eyes were shut.
Right. Like he was falling for that. "You might as well stop pretending. I'm not going to let you down."
Tak lifted her face, her dark violet eyes flashing with internal rage. Murderer Zim continued to smile. To the ghost of Spork, she was beautiful when she was mad. "Are you going to help me or not?" he asked smoothly, cracking his knuckles.
"All right, but don't think I'm going to let you live when this is over…"
"I never expected anything more from you," he smirked. "So you agree to help me?"
"Fine," she muttered, looking away.
"Then you won't object to this," Murderer Zim sneered, grabbing her by the pack and slamming something down between her body and the pack. A shock went through her body and she screamed, thrashing so violently against her binds that the metal cut through the skin and sent a thin drizzle of Irken blood down her arms.
He finally released the metal holds, letting Tak collapse to the ground. Her arms twitched when she tried to move them; her legs weren't working at all. "What did you do to me?" she managed to choke out.
"Ever heard of a Slave Chip?" The blank look on her face told him that she hadn't. "Something I brought over from my universe. I just clipped it to your pack. Any attempt to disobey me, double cross me or remove the chip and you'll get another nasty shock like that. And I should mention, the shocks get meaner with each… shall we say… incident?"
Her face still looked blank from the pain, but the flicker of rage was still in her eyes. She hates me, Murderer Zim mused to himself. That's okay. I like 'em that way. Keeps them on their toes more than if they liked me.
"Now, take me to your disguise making center. I have no desire to spend my time cooped up in this metal meat emporium." Still a bit dazed, Tak merely lay sprawled out on the ground. He grabbed her arm and forced her to her feet, pushing her ahead of him. "Better get going before the chip kicks in again!" he chirped brightly, grinning like a jack-o-lantern.
Murderer Zim was less than impressed by Tak's selection of male-oriented disguises. "I've been watching your television. This society values beauty the way we value tallness. I want to be pretty, not pasty," he sneered. He pushed her away from the controls. "I'll design my own disguise."
Out of the corner of his eye he saw her make a fist and then release it. It usually didn't take many shocks for someone carrying the chip to learn their place. He was glad she was a quick learner; he had very big plans for her, indeed.
After a long period of deciding, he emerged from the machine with his new holographic disguise. It had deep, soul-piercing brown eyes and blackish hair with brown and tan highlights. His skin was a light tan color, just dark enough to have color in it but not dark enough to make him susceptible to racial profiling. A pair of dark blue round sunglasses with round lenses sat on the end of his holographic nose.
"You shall introduce me to your peers as your cousin, the son of a wealthy burger-baron," he informed her in a thick but false Spanish accent. "I shall be an exchange student from the deepest depths of Peru, where my father fell in love with a beautiful Peruvian woman and sired me. You will inform the females that I have more money than I know what to do with, and that I am very lonely for companionship. In other words, I'm a rich stud."
Tak didn't know whether to laugh or throw up. Before she could voice her doubts, however, he cut her off. "You are too worried about "blending in," about humans seeing through your disguise. I say these humans are so stupid I could walk out in public naked and they wouldn't recognize me for what I truly am. I will take the sheep-like minds of these "popular girls" and make them my unknowing but willing servants. After all, why do for yourself what others can do for you?"
Tak couldn't argue with that logic, even if it was robots she usually had serving her. Murderer Zim waved off her silence with one tanned hand. "You will arrange for one of those long moving vehicles… what was it again? A lime-o-seen? Yes, a lime-o-seen to take us to the Skool. I want to arrive in a style benefiting a future Burger heir. But for now, I am tired. Show me to your bedroom."
"You're not sleeping in my bed," Tak snapped.
He looked coldly at her. "I would have thought one shock would have been enough to teach you not to talk back. Please don't infuriate the device."
"You can have the couch," she said firmly, crossing her arms over her chest. She'd put the front of her uniform back together with staples while he'd been designing a disguise, as he'd refused to let her leave the room while he worked even to get a new one. Bits of her flesh showed through the repairs, having an intoxicating effect on Murderer Zim. The only "female" he'd been allowed to see more skin than only her face on back home had been Spork's pet, Violet. Many a times Spork had issued the current kill command from atop her slender frame.
"I don't want to sleep on the couch," he whined loudly. "Pleaaaase let me sleep in the bed?" he asked, giving her large eyes filled with shiny lights.
"If you insist, I'll have the computer generate a bed for you. But I don't know where you'll put it."
"Anywhere is fine. I just want to sleep in a bed," he smiled. Give it time. He'd get what he wanted eventually. After all, he had plenty of time before he killed Invader Zim to work on her. "I'm going to use your dust shower now, okay? Thanks!" he smiled as he dodged into the bathroom, leaving Tak behind to fume like a volcano preparing to explode.
After a long, hot, well-deserved dust shower he emerged, shaking fine sand off of his arms. He brushed back his antennae, preening and admiring his eye color in a mirror. "Zim, you are one handsome dude," he preened to himself.
He was also one stark naked dude. As he rounded a corner Tak let out a squeal of shock and disgust and dropped everything she was carrying, throwing her hands over her eyes.
Mistaking the disgust for another emotion, Murder Zim puffed out his chest. Guess she's never seen a man as manly as me before, he chuckled mentally to himself. He strutted past her, intentionally failing to cover himself whatsoever.
It wasn't until Tak was absolutely sure that he was gone that she dared uncover her eyes. She'd thought Invader Zim was bad… at least he hadn't been NAKED when he'd caused her to fail her test.
"Oh gods, I don't think I would have been able to take that…" Tak muttered to herself. Deciding to forgo her nightly shower in favor of not taking the chance of being peeped at by Murderer aka Pervert Zim, she slipped into her night robe and under her sheets. She only hoped tomorrow wouldn't go so badly.
The sleek black limousine pulling up in front Skool did gather a decent amount of attention, but not from the children. They were too busy being wrapped up in their own little lives to really notice. It did, however, gain lots of attention from the people who lived across the street, grumbling under their breaths and across fences about how "people with enough money to hire a limo to send their kids to school ought to give some of it to us!"
Tak pretty much ignored Murderer Zim as he prattled off his planned speech about who he was and where he came from. She was too busy wondering if there really, really was an underground classroom. Damn, she thought. Doesn't he ever get tired of talking about himself? But he was doing a pretty good job of making up a backstory for himself. Maybe he played too many role play games, Tak snickered quietly to herself.
"So if I do anything odd, please forgive me as I have not quite learned American culture yet," he professed through the thick accent.
"Now sit down and don't say another word until you graduate," Ms. Bitters snarled, pointing a long finger at a newly vacated desk in the center of the room.
Murderer Zim, who had given his human name as "Justin" to seem more normal, found himself highly disappointed. He'd prepared his best spine-chilling evil glare for Invader Zim… and Invader Zim was too busy doodling little decapitated stick figures to even bat an eye in his direction.
He must be really sure of himself to ignore what a threat I am. I will make him pay for his ignorance. Oh, how I shall laugh as he falls screaming and writhing at my fee…
"Hey idiot, the lunch bell rang," Tak's voice sounded in his holographic ears. He looked up at her in annoyance.
"You ruined my mental ranting!" he cried angrily.
At lunch, Murderer Zim wrinkled his nose at the cafeteria food. After all, he hadn't been up all night researching human life to be fed from the bottom of the slop barrel. He whipped out his cell phone, which was actually a cleverly disguised Irken device. "How wants pizza?" he asked loudly.
Of course, a throng immediately flocked to him, bowling Tak over. As she crawled out from beneath the stampeding piles of Nike and Adidas shoes she looked around the cafeteria. Both Invader Zim and Dib were missing, which slightly bothered her. "Justin" had introduced himself as her cousin. That should have set off warning bells in Dib's oversized head.
Leaving Murderer Zim behind to devour mounds of sticky cheese pizza with his "new friends," Tak stalked down the hall. She was going to find Zim and Dib. Most likely, she'd find them together, cleverly spying on one another. Of course, neither would think the other one noticed or was doing any spying themselves.
Men! More and more, Tak was beginning to wonder if the old adage about "only enough blood to run one head at a time" was true. It was too bad that she didn't like women enough to give up on men entirely.
Meanwhile, back in the cafeteria, Murderer Zim was making quite a few friends. Not real, true, people you could tell anything to friends, but he didn't particularly care to get close enough to stink beasts for that purpose. No, he was making shallow suck-up to you for your money friends to form his entourage. Even the most trained generals need an army, he smiled to himself as he watched the other kids mill around him.
"What do you guys say we go hang out at the mall tonight and look too cool to be there?" he suggested to the group. "We can make fun of people who can't afford cars on the bus ride over."
"Sounds like a plan," the blonde girl with hoops pierced into her ears agreed. Her loyal group of lackeys all nodded like brain-dead lapdogs. Because the popular girl was agreeing to it, everyone else did too. Even Zita, who hadn't been keen on the idea of warming up to someone who was related to the freakish Tak, gave her high and mighty consent to spending an afternoon at a place pretending she didn't want to be there.
As soon as the bell rang, Murderer Zim caught up with Tak and put an arm on her shoulder. "Go back to the base and start planning our offensive against Zim, okay? I'm going to prime our army," he whispered.
"Prime our army my ass," Tak hissed. "I heard about your plans to go hang out at the mall, and I also heard Zita telling another girl not to let me find out about it because they didn't want any "freaks" tagging along… relatives or not, and I quote!" Tak snarled, her voice increasing in volume with each word. She seemed to be forgetting that they were still in the classroom. The last few students trickling out of the room, as well as Dib, had stopped to watch the argument.
The Justin hologram's eyes became soft. "Tak, you're not a freak…"
He reached out to take comfort her, but she slapped his hand away. "Have fun at the mall. I'm going home," she snapped, shoving her way through the crowd of onlookers. Except for Dib, the crowd quickly dispersed. A few rushed to Justin's side to assure him that he would have been correct in calling her a freak. After all, she kept to herself and didn't play any sports. What kind of decent person didn't play any sports?
Murderer Zim was torn between pursuing building his army and running after Tak. After all, until Spork had taken him under his wing and taught him to be a deadly assassin, he'd been nothing more than a "short freak" himself. He could still feel the sting of the taunts like whips across his memory.
Eventually, the army won out. Tak would be there when he got home. The other kids would not.
Meanwhile, Dib rushed home to busily begin compiling a database on what he'd seen and heard over the past two days. He'd fought an Irken who looked exactly like Zim in Tak's base, and now what was obviously an Irken had arrived in his classroom posing as an exchange student. One in the same, or two different Irkens, he pondered as his fingers flew over the keys to his battered black laptop. The chance that they were the same seemed 90% likely, but a paranormal investigator in training couldn't afford to overlook that last ten percent.
Then again, he thought, Tak didn't seem to get along with this new Irken. Maybe he'd been sent by their superiors to do some task for some…abet hideously, demented, evil… reason. If that were the truth, it could be imperative to survival of the entire human race that he find out what this new Irken was up to.