Serum
Prolog 2:
A Heart as Hard as Gold
Chapter Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot and my Irken symbol tattoo. Everything else is owned by Jhonen Vasquez.
A young man stood in a sterile environment holding a small vile of orange liquid with a steady hand while injecting a tiny amount of a dark purple substance into it. There was nothing to do now but wait as the timer ticked away the seconds. In two minutes he would know if the last month's worth of work was going to serve his purposes or not.
At 17 Dib liked to think that his life was finally starting to head in the right direction. He'd grown to a height of 5'9'' and was still growing. Now towering over Zim, who hadn't grown at all during his stay on Earth, he'd gained a certain intimidation factor over the alien. Sure his frame was still a bit willowy and his head was still a bit big, but he'd managed to slowly become much more proportionate as the years went by. Dib's wardrobe hadn't really changed much. Any given t-shirt under a long black trench coat, black jeans, and boots was still his staple outfit. His hair kept its unique style, though he was currently going through a phase of coloring the last few inches of the tip of his 'scythe' a different color every month or so. This month found it a dark teal.
But what had changed the most as Dib matured was his mind. Somewhere along the way he had gained a sharp strategist's mind. The days of blindly chasing his enemy were in the past, as were the days of simply trying to stop the alien's plans. The war between them continued to creep slowly toward deadliness as the once brash paranormalist developed a great deal of common sense. The tables had slowly turned over the past few years and now it was Zim that played the defensive while Dib sought to destroy him.
A soft beep sounded but Dib didn't really hear it. His eyes were fixed on the vile clutched in his hand. Gold... A richly colored liquid that looked like melted gold. A grin crept across the teenager's face. It had worked!
The serum, called Claustrverù -C182 by the many scientists who'd helped developed it, was an extremely finicky compound to work with. Any slight deviation from the exact chemical mixture ruined it. The final ingredient was often at fault because in order to work Claustrverù -C182 required 2 milliliters of blood from the subject to be dosed with it. It had actually been Dib's father that had pinpointed that blood types containing B blood caused a problem in the chemical reaction. The result of failure was a very costly, yet completely useless, mud drown mixture.
Of course Dib had more to overcome than slight differences in blood type to make the serum useful against his foe. Once the compound had been perfected he'd spent the next month in his father's labs making endless modifications in a series of trial and error tests. Irken blood was similar to a human's yet vastly different in small ways, and hard to get. The grin on Dib's face twisted into a smirk as he recalled how easily he'd gotten several voluntary samples of Zim's blood in this very lab so many years ago. He'd been only 11 at the time and they'd been at a 'truce' at the moment... Stupid bologna.
Glancing at the clock caused his smirk to falter for a moment. 3:53.
"Shit." He had skool in 4 hours.
That'll end the prologs. Have I gotten you interested yet?
Just what IS Dib working on? There's a bit of a clue hidden here if you can find it!
Thanks to andalitebandit-6 and neoKOS-MOS. I'm a sucker for lengthier reviews.