In Short Supply Chapter 23: Spock Eff Zilt Maroon Knork and Splayd, an invader zim fanfic

A/N: To those who've been asking for more Dib: didn't I say he'd be showing up again? ... Er, I didn't? Well, he is. And he'll keep making appearances every once in a while until either the fic ends or he dies, whichever comes first.

Now I've scared all the Dib fans out there, haven't I? Don't worry, that was intentional. I don't plan on revealing in any author's notes whether or not any characters are gonna die.

Anyway, do enjoy the chapter! And please remember to review.

xxxxx

In Short Supply

Spock, Eff, Zilt, Maroon, Knork, and Splayd

xxx

The instructions Tallest Purple gave Exile Bob on the care of his and Exile Zim's eggs, on Sat. Feb. 14:

1) Keep them in the SLP chamber until they hatch, molt, and are adult. This should take about five days. If it doesn't, you're doing it wrong.

2) Get them Paks. They don't have to be programmed yet, you can do that later. Just make sure the computer installs them and NOT ZIM.

3) Name them and give them to the Control Brains for Pak programming. You don't come up with the names. Get the names from Zim and then contact me so I can approve them. I get to approve all names. Zim comes up with dumb ones.

4) Once they're programmed, keep them out of trouble until I get back to Earth. I don't care how you do it, just do it.

5) Do NOT let them get in trouble!

xxx

On Valentine's Day, normal people do one of two things. They either go out on a date, or they hang out with other losers without dates.

Dib fell into the latter category, sort of: Gaz refused to be defined as a loser without a date. But he was, kinda, hanging out with her. And what better place to do this than at Bloaty's Pizza Hog, where he could watch Zim make a fool of himself at his new job?

Plus, Gaz wanted pizza and she wanted it fresh. So Dib had to take her to Bloaty's anyway.

"You know, I don't see why I still have to come with you every time you leave the house," Dib said irritably. "Dad let me run around by myself in sixth grade."

Gaz grunted around a bite of pizza, then swallowed. "It's because I'm a girl," she said.

Dib snorted. "Yeah, like that's really a big problem for you."

Gaz smirked proudly. Would-be assailants had learned long ago to steer clear of the purple-haired girl with a skull necklace. "Maybe it's because the city's more dangerous than two years ago?" she suggested, shrugging. "You know, all the new weapons on the streets."

"But Dad made half of them."

"For a genius, he's kinda stupid sometimes," Gaz said. "Maybe that's where you get your stupid from."

Dib scowled. "I'm gonna go bother Zim," he said, standing up. As he headed towards the cashier, he said over his shoulder, "By the way, you probably want to check your pizza for poison." They'd got here just before 10 o'clock, so who knew if Zim had made this pizza or not?

Gaz squinted at a slice of pizza, muttered, "Whatever," and shoved it in her mouth.

The cashier was asleep sitting up. Dib waved a hand in front of his face a few times before saying, "Excuse me?"

"Wha!" The cashier jumped. "Welcome to McMeaties you want a meatshake with that?"

"Uh... McMeaties?" Dib repeated.

"Crazy Taco?" The cashier looked at his nametag. "Bloaty's! What kind of pizza you want?"

"Actually, I wanted to know if I could talk to your night cook."

"Who?" The cashier blinked sleepily. "Oh, you mean the green kid. Why would you want to talk to him?"

That tone was promising. "I know him from school. Why? You don't like him?"

"I hate him," the cashier said darkly.

Dib grinned. That's what he'd been hoping to hear. He'd look forward to gloating over Zim's imminent unemployment. "Why's that? Does he come in too late? Leave too early? Get the orders wrong? Anal-probe the customers?"

The cashier shook his head in disgust. "No. He's the boss's new favorite."

Dib stopped grinning. "What?"

"I'll get him. You'll see." The cashier got off his stool and leaned through the open doorway behind the counter, presumably leading to the kitchen. "Hey, green kid. Someone wants to talk to you."

"What is it?" Zim shouted irritably. "I'm busy!" He stomped into view. He looked annoyed, impatient, and rushed, all of which Dib had expected; he hadn't expected Zim to be neither exhausted nor covered in burns.

Zim sized Dib up not with the expression of one rival facing another, but of a butcher eying a difficult customer. "Oh, you. What do you want?" he snapped. "Something wrong with your pizza or what?"

"Uh... no..." Dib said, staring at Zim. He was wearing rubber gloves and a perfectly clean Bloaty's windbreaker (probably protection from water and grease), and was holding a pizza cutter in one hand and a butcher knife in the other. Dib instinctively took a step back.

"Then what? You have a problem or not?" Zim looked past Dib and surveyed the restaurant, as if it was more likely to answer his question. His eyes widened. "Hey!" He whacked the cashier on the back of the head with the flat side of his knife, and pointed with his pizza cutter. "Look at table nine! You see table nine?"

"Huh?" The cashier craned his neck to look. "Yeah. Why?"

"It's filthy! It's covered in grease and cheese and napkins and I don't even WANT to know what that brown stuff is! Clean it up!"

"But I've got to man the cash register! Someone might make an order," the cashier said.

"I've got to make pizza, and I don't see anyone ordering right now," Zim retorted. "CLEAN IT!"

"B-but he's ordering," the cashier said, pointing at Dib and giving him an entreating look.

Zim looked at Dib again, this time less like a butcher at a customer and more like a butcher at some maggot-filled pork. "Then order."

"Uh, I'm not really..." Dib took another look at Zim's knife and reconsidered. "I'll have a salad."

"Sorry, we're out of salad-plants," Zim said, without a trace of apology in his voice. (Dib figured he meant lettuce.) "How 'bout breadsticks?"

"Er, s-sure."

"One-sixty monies," Zim said, as he reached across the cashier to punch in the order on the cash register: 1.61 "Forget the penny." Zim printed the receipt, shoved it in Dib's hand, and leaned over the counter to yank Dib's wallet out of his pocket and extract the dollar and sixty cents himself. He tossed the wallet back at Dib and then turned to the cashier. "You, heat the breadsticks. And then," Zim snatched a Windex bottle and rag from under the counter and shoved them in the cashier's hand, "clean table nine! I've got two large cheese, one large pepperoni, two Fatty Deluxes and a medium sardines and pineapple to make!" And then Zim was gone, probably to prepare the pizzas.

The cashier gave Dib a you see what I have to put up with? look, and followed Zim into the back of the restaurant to get Dib's breadsticks. When he returned, he wordlessly handed over the breadsticks, then headed towards table nine with his cleaning supplies. Dib followed him, and he turned to give Dib a resentful look. "You had to talk to him, didn't you?"

"Sorry," Dib said, although he wasn't really; that table had been making him queasy just looking at it. "Is Zim like that all the time?"

The cashier shook his head glumly. "No, this is him in a good mood. He probably got laid or something." Dib realized now that Zim was much skinnier than he'd been yesterday at school. Apparently he'd had some more eggs, but was it possible that Zim had... er... been impregnated again already? Zim surely hadn't had time to get all the way to his home planet and back since Dib had last seen him; after all, half a year had passed between when Dib had first heard about the Irkens' plans for Operation Impending Doom II and when Zim finally showed up in Ms. Bitters's class. Was it possible that another Irken was living on Earth?

"He makes pizza faster than any of our other employees and hasn't got an order wrong yet!" the cashier said. "At least, that's what his official record says. When he gets one wrong, he usually pins the blame on someone else. I saw him get Bri-Bri demoted for delivering a pizza to the wrong house, when he'd made the wrong pizza. And she wasn't even at work that day!"

Yeah, that sounded like Zim.

"But he's still good," the cashier said. "Too good. He's a neat freak, too. Look at this place!" The cashier gestured around the restaurant. "Do the walls look shiny to you?"

"Um, not really," Dib said. They were just concrete walls painted an ugly blue-purple.

"Exactly! This place used to glow with grease! The grease had fused to the walls! Until the green kid showed up and cleaned the whole place—all by himself." The cashier looked near tears. "Now everything's just dull and Mountain Breeze fresh." He wiped his eyes and sniffed. "I miss the old Bloaty's..."

Well, none of that seemed so bad to Dib. He noticed that the cashier's acne wasn't as bad as the last time Dib had seen him, but decided not to point this out. Maybe he'd liked the acne.

"But the green kid's horrible," the cashier continued. He eyed table nine nervously, screwed off the spray nozzle of the Windex bottle, and simply poured the liquid over the filth. Something hissed in agony. "He makes the pizza and handles the drive-thru window and takes the home delivery calls—but he can't deliver them since he doesn't have a license yet—and he can handle the cash register if I'm not there and he bosses me and the delivery guys around." The cashier scrubbed furiously at the filth as he vented; the filth desperately fled the rag. He tossed down the scrap of cloth in annoyance. "Hey, green kid!" he shouted. "The table doesn't want to get clean!"

"What are you talking about?" Zim came back into the main restaurant, dropping six boxes of pizza on the counter as he came. "It's a table! It doesn't have feelings!"

"But the mess is moving!"

"Let me see." Zim marched to the table, shoving Dib out of the way to get a closer look. He surveyed the mess, then nervously said, "Men's toilet four was clean when I came in. It wasn't last night. Did you clean it?"

The cashier's eyes widened. "I thought you did."

They both took a large step away from the table. "It must've escaped," Zim said quietly. "Consider this a Code ZD situation."

"I'll get the flamethrower," the cashier said.

"Wait, what escaped?" Dib asked, looking between the two, confused. "What's Code ZD?"

The cashier said, "Code Zombie Diah—"

"Classified employee information," Zim snapped. The cashier took the hint and hurried off.

Zim glanced at Dib. "Oh yeah," he said, his tone completely changing. "I need more names. Do you have any?"

"Uh, right," Dib said, glancing at Zim's once-again lean body. Irken labor must be pretty fast, if in the last thirty hours or so Zim had had his eggs and still been able to get to work. "Let me think..."

Dib wasn't letting any more aliens be named after close relatives. He searched for the most horribly stereotypically sci-fi alien name he could think of. "What about... Spock?"

Zim's eyes widened. "Oooh! That's good! I like Spock. I'm taking credit for that name." He grinned evilly.

Dib couldn't believe it. "Yeah, sure. You can have credit."

"WTF."

"Wha?!" Dib jumped—he hadn't heard Gaz come up.

"'WTF'? What's that supposed to mean?" Zim demanded.

"Names. For triplets," Gaz said, smirking. Dib crossed his arms, not looking at his sister. She had to show him up, didn't she?"

"Hmm..." Zim looked thoughtful. "I don't like Tee. I could use Dubya and Eff..."

The cashier returned with an imposing gun attached to a gasoline tank in a wagon. "I found it!"

Zim's tone changed and he was all business again. "What took so long?"

"Sorry! The hobo mascot dude was asleep on top of the flamethrower."

Gaz kicked Dib's foot to get his attention. "I'm done eating," she said. "We should get out of here."

"Ow." Dib lifted his foot to rub it. "Yeah, good idea." He looked at his uneaten breadsticks—he really didn't want them anyway— and set them down on the nearest empty table. "Let's go."

"Wait a sec," Gaz said, walked up to the cash register, and dropped a few bills in the jar labeled "TiPZplzKthxBAI!!"

When they'd got outside, Dib said, "You tipped them? Why?" Somehow he doubted that Gaz sympathized with the plight of the cashier.

"You don't meet born fast food employees very often," Gaz said. "When you do, you have to acknowledge them." She stated this like it was a rule, as obvious as stopping at a red light, going at a green light, and flooring it at a yellow light.

"Born fast food employees? You mean Zim?"

Gaz nodded. "He's found his calling."

Dib snorted. "Right. He thinks his calling is the destruction of humanity."

"Then he's denying his fate. He's a moron like that." Gaz aimed a kick at a dandelion, missed, squinted her eyes tighter, and kicked at the next one. It dissolved to ash beneath her boot. "Besides," she said, "I tipped him with your money."

"WHAT?!"

Gaz smirked at Dib's horror. "So when are you getting a job?"

xxx

Purple got his next transmission from Earth six days after his last visit, in his quarters, at precisely 170 degrees. Oh, good. Purple was really bored.

He'd been trying to hunt down the statistics for the average height of Invaders, and maybe some other careers—he wanted to see whether or not it was true that only short Irkens were Invaders, and whether or not other careers had trends like that. But he couldn't find that information.

He answered the transmission and was immediately disappointed. "Oh, Bob. It's just you." He sat on the couch facing the computer screen and slouched down to show just how completely uninterested he was in whatever Bob was about to say. In most levels of society, slouching like that was a passive stance, trying to make yourself look shorter, surrendering authority and superiority to whomever you were talking to. But Purple was a Tallest, and that rule didn't apply to him. When he did it, it meant you're not important enough for me to be tall for you. "So? What do you want?"

"I'm reporting on the mission, sir," Bob said. "You wanted me to contact you before I programmed the smeets' Paks, remember?" He said this as if he fully expected Purple to have forgotten.

"Oh, yeah, of course," Purple said, and to prove he remembered, added, "To decide the names. So, what dumb names did Zim come up with?"

Bob pulled out a list. (How quaint, he'd found some actual paper to write on. Purple had never understood the appeal of tree-made products. Plants are used to make food. You don't make houses and books out of food.) "They're not dumb names," he said. "The first three are Spock, Dubya, and Eff."

"Ooh, Spock! I like it. It's exotic. Hey, are there any smeets with my eyes?" Purple asked.

"Uh, you mean purple eyes? Yeah, there's one."

"Good. That one gets to be Spock," Purple said. "Dubya and Eff... uh, Eff's okay, I guess. But I don't like Dubya. It sounds like an insult. Like, moron or idiot."

"Yeah, I guess it does kinda sound like the name of someone stupid," Bob said.

"Yeah. Make it Zilt."

"Okay." Bob made a note on his paper. "The other name Zim wanted was for one of the layers. He really wants to name her Maroon."

"Moron?!"

"What? No—Maroon. Like the color."

"Oh. Right." An odd name to insist upon. "Why?"

Bob shrugged. "He figured that if both the current Tallest were named for their eye colors, it'd be fitting for one of his offspring to be named the same way."

Of course he did. Why wouldn't Zim of the infamous ego want one of his offspring to be named like a Tallest? Actually, Purple kind of liked the idea, but for a moment he considered the wisdom of the name—would anyone be able to connect Maroon to Purple, given the similar names? But he decided that it would take someone really creepy to automatically assume that two Irkens were related simply because they had colors for names. Besides, if her eyes were maroon, that meant they'd look more like Red's than Purple's anyway. "Yeah, Maroon's fine."

"Okay. That's all the names Zim had," Bob said. "There are still two more smeets. Can I name them?"

"What, you?" Purple curled his lip, disgusted. "Never!"

Bob sighed sadly. "Of course."

Names, names... Purple had come up with a short list a few days ago and saved it in his Pak. He'd then immediately deleted it to make sure the Control Brains didn't find it when he recharged. He didn't know what they'd make of a list like that. So he went with the first two names he thought of. "What about Splayd and Knork?"

Bob shrugged. "It's not my place to have an opinion, O Tall One," he said sulkily.

"That's right it's not! Splayd and Knork it is."

"Fine." Bob almost ended the transmission, then remembered something. "Oh—by the way, Zim wanted you to know that he got a promotion yesterday. He said he's the fastest employee to ever get a promotion at Bloaty's."

"Oh, really?" Zim would probably be annoyed to discover Bob had shared that info instead of letting Zim do it himself. Purple chose not to warn Bob of Zim's impending wrath. "Tell him congrats for me. And let him know I'll probably be staying a few days the next time on Earth." Red happened to be going on vacation about the time Zim would have the next bunch of eggs. That meant Purple could safely leave the Massive for more than just a few degrees without the usual suspicious questions.

Bob looked startled. "You're going to be here with Zim?"

"Yeah. You got a problem with that?" Purple figured that Bob objected to the fact that he'd have to spend time around Purple, too. (He wasn't looking forward to seeing Bob, either.)

"No, it's just... well, you're tall!" Bob said, as if Purple didn't know. "You're not supposed to want to hang out with an Irken like Zim. It just doesn't happen!"

Purple knew that quite well. "I'm the Tallest. I can do whatever I want," he said, awkwardly crossing his arms (stupid gauntlets) and slouching even lower.

Bob stared at him, blinking. No... he was watering up, wasn't he? What in the Firmament was wrong this time?! "Perhaps I was wrong about you," Bob said. "Maybe you're not like all the other tall Irkens."

Purple was horrified. That was what Bob thought? That Purple was some kind of weirdo that liked to hang out with a bunch of midgets and Drones? That he wanted to mess up the height hierarchy? Never! "It's not like that!" Purple said. "I'm just like any other tall Irken! Zim's just different from other short Irkens, that's all."

From the mouth of someone taller, saying "He's not like other short Irkens" was a compliment; to the antennae of someone shorter, hearing the same thing was an insult. Bob immediately frowned and wiped his eyes dry. "I see," he said darkly. "Fine. I'll tell him." He ended the transmission.

Purple sighed. He'd have rather gotten to talk to Zim... Anyway, he'd better get back to his research.

Surely the Control Brains had the statistics somewhere for which Irkens had which heights in which jobs. It was a basic, essential question! After all, there were laws on some jobs restricting them to certain heights—didn't the Brains have to keep track of that?

But every search gave the same answer in different words: "Statistics not available." "Query not valid." "No relevant data located." Sometimes the Brains were plain stupid.

Purple sighed, but sat down in his recharge chair (it wasn't called a chamber because it didn't have walls; regular chambers didn't fit him, walls weren't needed when he was recharging in his own quarters, and if any aliens with a vendetta and a water gun snuck into his room he'd immediately know), booted up the computer screen, and started a new search.

xxx

name: SPOCK career: MILITARY/Soldier

primary suggestions: While rather lacking in the common sense department, you nevertheless make up for it in tactical creativity and a strong loyalty to whatever group you are affiliated with, which, luckily for you, would be the Irken Empire. Despite your shortcomings, if you manage to avoid doing something utterly ridiculous, you have the potential to become a Commander, or High Commander if height allows. If so, do remember to surround yourself with more rational advisors to help balance out your foolishness.

projected height: 96 UNITS