Sorry this update is so long overdue, but I got severe, severe writer's block on where to go with it next. What I have currently written doesn't fit too well into what I had planned to write, which has me in a dilemma. So I'm just going to see where this rock of a story rolls to, and hope it doesn't smash any cars on it's way down. –IA

Murderer Zim paced back and forth, pulling on his antennae. "Two months, three weeks, and six days!" he shouted, waving his stubby arms in the air. "Two months, three weeks, and six days of having to make sure Violet doesn't leap out from behind some corner at me with a burlap sack, or Zim doesn't try to push my head in the drinking fountain, or those useless IDIOT humans I command won't make my head explode from their stupid stupidity-ness!"

Tak threw a shoe, which smacked Murderer Zim in the back of the head. "Quiet! I don't want her first sight ever to be her naked father ranting about how long it took her to hatch. Go put some clothes on for the tallests sake!"

Murderer Zim grinned and wiggled his hips. "I'm, too sexy for my uniform, too sexy for my…" Tak hit him square in the mouth with her other shoe, cutting his song short. He fell over backwards, hitting his head with a dull thud on the metal floor.

Tak leaned over the incubator. "Come on out, little one! I can see the cracks in your egg, I know you want to…"

As if on command, another crack appeared, followed by a pale green leg sticking out of the bottom of the shell. Another slow crack, and part of the shell fell away, revealing a tiny, wrinkled green body blinking angrily at the light suddenly assaulting her eyes. Tiny antennae with curled tips pressed flat against her head, and she cried in the light's direction.

Her mother reached in and wrapped her arms gently around the smeet, pulling her out of the shell and pressing the tiny body against her own. "Sssh, ssssh, it's okay," Tak soothed as MiMi watched cautiously from a distance, uncertain of what to make of a tiny version of her master.

The smeet blinked and cooed, sticking out her stubby tongue at her mother. By that time, however, Tak had set about to cleaning the clingy remains of the shell and yolk off her tiny daughter's body, the daughter crying "Iee iee!" with each brush against her skin.

Murderer Zim, clad in a towel he'd put on simply to please Tak's sense of decency, frowned as his own antennae flattened back against his head. Tak may have been too wrapped up in the moment of new motherhood to notice, but he wasn't. The new smeet… only had one leg.

Her left leg dangled down and kicked as her mother cleaned the yolk remains from her antennae. Her right leg, however, was little more than a stump extending from the base of her naked torso. Her arms, eyes, and antennae all seemed fine, it was just that, that one absent leg was about as obvious as a purple-skinned Irken.

"What do you think?" Tak asked, holding the tiny smeet up. The smeet cocked her head at Murderer Zim, then stuck out her tongue again.

Murderer Zim's heart sighed deeply, feeling proud enough to be face to face with his own daughter that she could have been missing all her limbs and he wouldn't have cared. His mind, however, was spinning. She'll never make it through training like that, it sneered. You'd better find a mate who can give you healthy offspring.

"She's beautiful," his mouth said, ignoring the bitter banter of his mind. "She looks… well, she looks just like me!"

Tak blinked. "What do you mean, just like you? She's got my eyes and my antennae."

"She's got my skin, my head, my… uh… fingers! And my pack, too," he said, spinning around and wagging his pack at Tak in a supposedly alluring manner.

Tak rolled her eyes, but of course, being an Irken it wasn't possible to tell that she'd done so merely by looking at her. "What should be call her?"

"If you'd allow me… Spork always said that if he had a daughter, he'd name her Midori… and now that Spork's gone, he can't, so I was hoping we could…"

"Midori's a beautiful name," Tak said reassuringly, petting Murderer Zim's arm. She looked about the nearly empty base and signed. "I almost wish she could have had some time growing up on Earth. I mean, I've spent so much time here I've almost gotten attached to the stupidity of this planet…"

"But we can't stop the Armada, curly-antennae," he replied, using what he knew to be her favorite pet name. "And they should be here by the end of the week…"

"How do you know they'll come?"

Murderer Zim smiled. "Oh, trust me. They'll come."

Murderer Zim thought back to the day after his daughter's egg was laid. Hacking Invader Zim's transmission line, he'd contacted the tallests.

"Yes, Zim, what do you want?" The red-eyed one had groaned dismissivly while playing with a puppet that looked oddly like himself.

"I just wanted to tell you guys how highly I think of you. And I wanted to tell you that- YOU SUCK!"

THAT had gotten their attention, as well as the attention of every Irken in the control room. Thousands of pairs of eyes had focused on him. That should have made Murderer Zim nervous, but he was on a roll. "You're the worst leaders the Irken Empire has ever had! I mean, you're probably too busy making gay love to one another to notice if the Meekrob army wiped out six planets! All you ever do is eat, eat, eat… and don't think the rest of the Empire doesn't know what those silly looking corsets are for! You guys must be HUGE when you don't have them on!"

"I'm… not… fat," the violet-eyed tallest whined.

"Oh, stop being such a cry baby! Everyone knows you're the bitch."

"The wha…"

"It means, you're on the bottom, baby."

There were a few moments of staring before the purple-eyed tallest broke into hysterical tears and burst out of the room, leaving several attendants to stare after him. By that time, however, the red-eyed tallests eyes flashed fire. His fingers were dug into the chair he'd been sitting in, his claws ripping straight through the vinyl and exposing the stuffing the chair was padded with.

"If this is your idea of some kind of joke, Zim…"

"No, THIS is my idea of some kind of joke!" he cried, spinning around and bending over, pulling down his pants in one swift movement. Two crude drawings of the tallests stared out from Zim's green butt. "Kiss my ass!" he cried, wiggling his butt back and forth.

Purple, who had returned to retrieve his soda, froze in the doorframe and promptly doubled over, vomiting out a morning's worth of donuts onto a poor communications officer's head. Red was curled up in a ball, his eyes as wide as they could get, his face pale and his body trembling. "Make it stop, make it stop!" he screamed.

The communications officers were frozen in place, unable to so much as react until the tallest shrieked "make it stop" loudly enough to shatter crystal, which jarred them out of their stupor enough to make them run to hit the controls to cut the transmission.

The scene in the control room of the Massive was absolute chaos. Red was curled up in a ball, covering his closed eyes with his claws and shrieking incoherently. Purple was sprawled out on top of the poor communications officer, both of them dripping with his vomit, bawling his eyes literally out of his head.

It took three tranquilizers and four strong military commanders to pry Red out of his chair, and for two days thereafter Purple remained near comatose, occasionally waking up from his hospital bed to scream "The horrible buttchecks! HORRIBLE!" before the nurses would run in and re-tranquilize him.

So, back home, Murderer Zim was pretty damn sure the Armada was coming to crush the Earth and Invader Zim in the processes. If they weren't, he didn't know what to do, as he wasn't sure what WOULD finally bring them to Earth. He couldn't think of much that would scare them more than that. Then again, maybe he'd scared them to the point where they wouldn't even think of coming near the Earth…

Back at his base, Invader Zim screamed angrily at his computer. "Come ON!" he shouted. "Make a connection with the tallests!"

"I told you… connection has been refused, for the last time!"

"Then… then force your way through!"

In the background, Skoodge and Violet were playing some sort of Irken card game. Violet studied her hand and frowned. "I hate my own dealing!" she whined.

"At least we know you're not cheating then," Skoodge said, making another high-point play.

"Argh! If I started cheating, maybe I'd only lose by half as many points!" she snarled.

"How's your son doing?" Skoodge asked as he watched her struggle to make a play.

"I talked to him via the interdimensional communicator just yesterday," she sighed. "He's doing just fine… DAMN IT!" she screamed, slamming her fists into the table they were sitting at. "I want to go home and see him! Why can't I catch Murderer Zim?" She grabbed the alcohol bottle off the table and downed another long drink.

Skoodge's antennae twitched. Violet had discovered booze by accident while meandering aimlessly around town, and had become the biggest boozehound Irken Skoodge had ever had a chance to encounter in his life.

"If you didn't drink so much, maybe you'd be able to…"

She swung the bottle at him. "Don't tell me what to do! You don't control me!" she shouted, her face somewhat flushed. With that, she knocked all the cards on the floor and stormed out of the room. Skoodge's antennae drooped. He liked Violet so much… he hated to see her wrecking herself that way.

Before Skoodge could pursue her, however, Zim's computer forced it's way through the blocking controls and opened up a line to the tallests. Red was patting Purple's trembling hand, sighing. "It's okay, you're safe now, you're safe…"

Then the screen came on. At the sight of Zim poor Purple screamed and clawed his way half way up the wall, clinging to the tapestries like some kind of monkey and crying. Red glared at the screen, eyes glowing with anger. "You've got some nerve to call us after what you did!" he hissed, smoke fairly rising from his antennae.

"Huh? What did I do? Was it splendid!"

"You scarred him for life!" Red shouted, pointing a finger at Purple, who was still trembling as he hung from the draperies. "And not to mention the therapy bills I'm going to ring up…"

Invader Zim's chest puffed out. "I know I'm impressive, but I didn't know I was THAT impressive!" he said, assuming that his greatness was what had terrified the two tallests.

"No! It wasn't impressive! It was hideous!" Red shrieked. "I'll never stop having nightmares…"

Not only was Zim confused by that point, but Skoodge as well. "What exactly did he DO?" Skoodge asked from the background, causing Zim to turn around and give him a glare of death.

"I don't want to talk about it!" Red shouted, waving his arms angrily in the air. Right at that moment, Purple lost his grip on the draperies and fell on Red's head. With a sound like spines breaking the two collapsed onto the floor, and the transmission cut out.

Skoodge frowned. He hadn't liked how the tallests were behaving at all… as soon as Zim sulked out of the room, grumbling about how the tallests didn't appreciate his plans, Skoodge jumped up to the computer console.

Fat fingers flying over the keys, he pinpointed the location and flight formation of the Massive and its surrounding ships. His eyes widened as the statistics came up. It was making a beeline for Earth… with the organic sweep team leading the pack.

Skoodge ran to the elevator and endured getting near motion sickness as the jerking canister carried him to the top floor, where Violet was sprawled out on the couch watching television. "Violet! Violet! The Armada is coming to destroy the Earth!"

Violet looked at him out of one eye. "Isn't that a good thing? You and Zim are invaders, after all…"

"I think they're coming to destroy us, too… look, the tallests were being really weird! I think Murderer Zim is responsible, and I don't know what he's up to, but…"

"Who cares?" Violet asked, waving her bottle about. "If they kill him that means I can finally go home."

"But if they destroy us all, doesn't that include you?" Skoodge grabbed the bottle out of her hand and slapped her hard across the face. "Come on, Violet, snap out of it! Think of your son!"

Her dark eyes blinked, then welled up with tears. "You're right! I've been so horrible!" she cried, burying her face in her chest.

"I'd be a lot more inclined to believe that you meant that if you were sober," Skoodge frowned. "Stay here."

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"I'm going to drain out all the bottles of booze you dragged home!"

She clung to his leg. "You can't!"

"Come on, Violet! The armada is coming and we've got to do something, and you're no good for anything drunk off your ass!"

She blinked. "You want to… save this planet, don't you?"

Skoodge smiled only slightly. "It's the only place I've ever really felt at home. Now come on, we've got to think of a plan."

-BTW I didn't have time to do a final spell check. Sorry…