Chapter 1
Ms. Bitters was deathly quiet today.
The pinched old woman sat stonily at her desk, her hands knotted in front of her, staring resolutely ahead. The air about her reeked particularly of doom today, enough so to make every hair on every neck within ten feet stand up. She stayed this way until quite awhile after the last student had shuffled in. Sensing some impending, unknown horror, the children also remained still and silent. After five minutes Mary leaned over her desk to whisper to Chunk. She hadn't gotten her mouth halfway open before Ms. Bitters stood up, pointed at the girl and barked, "Shut up!!"
Mary's mouth now tightly closed, Ms. Bitters sat back down and resumed her tense position.
After another minute or so, the panel on the edge of the Ms. Bitters's desk slid open, and a yellow disk, wreathed in flames, rose up from within. The class video screen lowered in front of the blackboard with a deeper, more unnatural boom than it did for the informative grammar cartoons.
Ms. Bitters stood up.
The class gasped in dread anticipation.
Plucking the disk between thumb and forefinger as one might a phlegm-covered rag, Ms. Bitters inserted it into her computer. The videoscreen flared to life.
Ms. Bitters scurried out of the room, the door slamming behind her just in time for the words "Sexual Education: A Very Special Journey" to flash across the screen in flowery script.
The students howled, hooted, blushed and giggled. Rob stuck his finger in his mouth and made gagging noises.
Dib yawned, trying to act bored – he and Gaz had gotten 'the talk' from their Dad when he was six, although it had been much more dry and fact-laden than this dewey monstrosity was bound to be. Instead, he occupied himself with watching Zim, and making sure that the alien wasn't hatching any devious plots. The last one had been perilously close to succeeding, though Dib had foiled it in the end with a letter to the local librarian, a very tasty piece of cake, and a well-aimed Elvis statuette. After three years of trying to conquer Earth, Zim still hadn't given up, and Dib continued in his steadfast vow to stop him at every turn.
Zim leaned back casually in his chair, trying to absorb this new gush in the neverending stream of useless human knowledge, and balance a pencil on his lip at the same time, but to Dib it sure looked like some devious hatchey-plan-hatching-plotting-pose…thingy. He leaned his head sideways on his hand in his favourite Zim-watching position. Until the absolute hideousness of the video finally got his attention, that is.
For something that had seen the transfer to digital file, the video was unbelievably outdated – the thing must have been around since Ms. Bitters' schooldays. Two feathery-haired youths in bellbottoms stared coyly at each other while a lilting monologue droned on about 'special feelings.'
The documentation of their developing relationship continued, and soon they were holding hands on a summer stroll, then kissing shyly in a grassy park, and then touching and fondling each other on a blanket, in the shade of a tree.
Next they had all their clothes off and were writhing enthusiastically against each other.
Other visual aids were added to the presentation – diagrams and such, but bizarrely it kept cutting back to the scene of the two teenagers wriggling away on their blanket.
By the time the light went back up and Ms. Bitters came back in, there wasn't a human leg uncrossed in the entire classroom.
"And that, children, is the process by which society hopes two people begin the process of mutual enslavement and propagation of our already cancerously growing species," she paused as she noted Zim was about to snap a few tendons from reaching into the air as far as he could stretch. ". . .yes, Zim?"
"What was that you said about slavery, Ms. Bitters?"
Ms. Bitters raised her eyebrow. As she seemed prone to doing (especially when the comment given was a particularly stupid one), now that she'd given her student a chance to speak, she completely ignored him and continued on with her lecture about hopelessness, horror, and inevitable doom, leaving Zim to stew in his own burning juices of curiosity.
Fortunately for Zim, Dib was for the moment a bit distracted, staring up at the ceiling with a beet red face, trying desperately to think non-writhing-related thoughts: puppies. . .grease-pits at McMeaty's. . .Dad in a bathing suit. . . Arg – damn his fourteen-year-old hormones!
Dib didn't seem to notice that the 'weird green kid' in the other corner was actually (and obviously) hatching a plan, his gloved fingers steepled before him, an evil grin spreading over his face, and a low chuckle earning him odd looks from the few kids closest to him.
*******
Later that afternoon, in the comfort of his base, Zim tried to piece together what he remembered of the class video, and research his new theory. Ten video screens cued to search topics 'sex' lit up the room with lambent, explicit shows. Most of them were occupied with slapping flesh of many kinds, a select few of them portraying faces in various stages of entrancement, ecstasy, and/or pain. Altogether, over 35 trillion references were returned, far too many for Zim to examine them all at any length, but after four hours of sampling bytes Zim felt he could make a few conclusions.
1) Human sex was bizarre and horrifying
2) Humans were absolutely, slavishly obsessed with sex.
Still no conclusive evidence, however, of the hypothesis he'd formed earlier in class. Sifting through the glut of sound, video, and text information was pointless. He needed to consult an expert, someone who knew their way intimately around the subject.
Pulling Minimoose off of the phone, where Gir had stuck him in his latest scotch-tape adventure, Zim looked up one more subject on the computer, picked up the receiver, and began to dial.
*******
It had been a slow night for Gladys. The one call she'd gotten earlier had only lasted for about three minutes (she hated those kinda guys), just long enough for her to miss the cataclysmic Ted and Maria break-up scene on 'Hearts of Desire' that she had been predicting to her friends for months. Now that there was nothing on but reruns of 'The Scary Monkey Show', there hadn't been so much as a telemarketer's call. Gladys took off one of her slippers to rub her bunion and stuffed another cheesy-poop into her mouth.
The phone rang.
Scrambling, Gladys fished the remote out of the couch cushion where it had fallen, muted the TV, forced the cheesy-poop, half-chewed, down her throat, and picked up the receiver.
"Hello there, big boy." She'd lowered her voice to 'ultra sultry,' but the crumbs in her throat mangled her voice into sounding more like a fish schooner captain. Damn – the last time that'd happened, she'd gotten a yelp, a hangup, and a good firm talking-to from her supervisor about eating cheesy-poops on the job.
Surprisingly, the guy on the other line only cleared his throat, sounding a bit impatient.
"Yes, yes, greetings. The craver of credit card numbers said you would tell me all I need to know about sex."
Gladys blinked. "Sure thing, honey. I'll tell you whatever you want to hear."
"Good. Now tell me," the guy's voice lowered to a whisper. "Is it possible to use sex as a weapon of. . .enslavement?"
Some people had the strangest fetishes, but in all actuality, this one was nowhere near the strangest one Gladys had encountered in her time. She cleared her throat, and tried 'medium forceful.'
"Absolutely." A bit unsure of where he wanted to go with it, Gladys hoped the guy on the other line would take the lead.
"Exxxcellent." He sounded pretty excited now. Fantastic – these bondage types could go on forever.
"Now." The guy whispered heatedly. "Tell me the secret. . .tell me!"