A/N: Well, it's a Saturday, but it's also been almost a month since I updated. So, um, yeah, I'm updating. Luckily, I get intarwebs here. Yay, intarwebs!

By the way, ART CONTEST, PEOPLE? It SHOULD be closing September 1, but so far there's a grand total of one entry. If anyone else wants to enter, you've got a couple of weeks left to do so! ... Unless I don't get any entries, in which case I'll probably extend the deadline. I know school's starting about this time. Does anyone want a deadline extension? (Does anyone even care...?)

Anyway, new chapter. Hallelujah! Hope you enjoy, and please remember to review.

xxxxx

In Short Supply

Brilliant Stupidhead

xxx

An excerpt from a document written by Vortian Rigma Role, approx. two Earthen years after the Irken conquest of Vort, Sat. Mar. 14: I don't care if Mater and Pater would say I'm in a shameless line of work. I think I'm now the official courtesan of Almighty Tallest Red and I'll never have to come back to Judgmentia again. I consider that success.

Even better, he isn't one of those Irkens that likes to dance with Vortians just to try to humiliate them about the fact that they've been conquered. I'm getting pretty sick of shitheads like that. Which is weird, because you'd think the Tallest out of anyone would like to gloat. Wasn't Tallest Red the one that ordered the conquest of Vort? Well, okay, it might have been Tallest Purple. I dunno. Either way, at least he's trying to not be a jerk about it. Lucky me.

So now he's got me hired to come up to the Massive every five days and serve as his personal entertainment. And I've got to come up dressed like a technician so that everyone'll think I'm just doing repairs. He doesn't want anyone to know that someone on the Massive is hiring a Vortian dancer, because then they might trace it back to him. Xenophiles sure are a paranoid bunch.

I come up in disguise, I do the Irken-style dance, I get paid, I leave. It's a pretty good gig.

Crap, who am I kidding? I'm doing the dirty to make a living. This is about fun as trying to piss rocks and sell 'em for money. The only difference is the rocks I'm pissing are prettier now. Maybe they're rubies, since I'm Tallest Red's courtesan. Har har, I made a joke.

But I've gotta keep myself alive somehow. So, here's to the great instincts of suicide prevention: one of the many advantages the Vortians still have over Irkens.

xxx

As usual, Zim's base was unnervingly quiet from the outside. From across the street, Dib couldn't see any activity through the windows, but then again, he could barely see through the windows themselves. (Between cameras, phones, guns, and spare glasses, Dib had remembered to pack every supply possible except his binoculars.) He'd just have to cross his fingers for luck and hope Zim wasn't in the main level of his base. Time to test the fake Pak.

Dib slung his backpack full of supplies over one shoulder (he couldn't put it over both because of the fake Pak duct-taped in the middle of his back), took a deep breath, and headed across the street.

The first test was the lawn gnomes. Dib hesitantly stepped off the street and onto the walkway leading to the base's front door, but the gnomes didn't react. After waiting a moment for any sign that they recognized him, Dib walked confidently to the door, slowly grinning. He couldn't believe it. He was just walking up to Zim's door like it was any other stupid boring house in the neighborhood. Stage one of the infiltration was successful.

He peered through the front window—no one visible on the main level—before he opened the door and went inside. Man, this was almost too easy. He headed to the elevator he knew would be in Zim's kitchen trashcan.

"Hey, you."

Dib froze. Where had that voice come from? "Y-yeah, me?"

"Who are you?"

Dib turned slowly, looking for the source of the voice. "Uh... why do you ask?"

"'Cause it's my job," the voice said. "Duuuh."

"I see..." Dib had turned a full circle and seen no one. "And who are you?"

"What are you, a stupidhead?" the voice asked. "I'm the base computer."

"The base computer?!"

"I just said that, stupidhead."

Wow! Dib was actually talking with the very source of Zim's technological power. He was having a conversation with his archenemy's base! "Hey, can I ask you some questions?"

"I ask the questions around here, shorty," the computer said. "What are you, anyway? About thirteen or fourteen units?"

"Er..." Dib had no idea what a "unit" was. Maybe the computer meant age. "I'm almost fifteen."

"Sure you are, stupidhead. Listen, if you're fourteen units, just say fourteen. No one likes a poser."

"Okay..." Was he really getting lectured by Zim's computer?

"So who are you?" the computer asked. "You look like a human... But you're not a human, are you? I'm not supposed to talk to humans. Humans don't have Paks, though."

"N-no, of course I'm not human!" Dib said. "I'm an Irken, really. My name is Invader... Mothman." Oh, that was just stupid. Why hadn't he thought up a name? "This is my disguise."

"Oh. It's really good," the computer said. "You look just like Dib."

"Uh... thanks."

"You're still a stupidhead, though. But maybe a brilliant stupidhead."

Dib sighed. "Yeah, I can live with that." He headed again to the kitchen trashcan. "Where's Zim?"

"You don't wanna talk to Master right now," the computer said. "He's busy."

The computer was right. Dib didn't want to talk to Zim. But, if he could find out what the stupid alien was up to without having to venture into the subterranean base... Not that Dib didn't want to look around Zim's base, of course, but the more he could find out while keeping himself safe, the better. "Busy? Busy with what?"

"You know... He's... busy. Hint, hint. Know what I mean?"

"Uh..." Not really. But this was probably something that other Irkens would understand, so Dib couldn't let on that he didn't know. "I think I'll just check the place out, okay?"

"Suit yourself, stupidhead. Stay away from the smeets in the SLP chamber."

Smeets? Those were Irken babies, right? Zim's offspring were still somewhere in this base? "Suuure. I'll stay away from them. No problem..." Awesome! Alien spawn! Mysterious Mysteries would probably save the footage Dib sent them for their season finale. He'd have to look for this SLP chamber once he was finished with his work. Somewhere, Zim had a plan that had something to do with watermelons...

He pointed at the trashcan. "This has the main elevator, right?" he asked.

"Well, the secondary elevator," the computer said. "The main one's in the toilet."

Dib grimaced. "I'll use the trashcan."

"Good choice."

He climbed in and headed unchallenged into the lower levels of Zim's base.

xxx

Maroon didn't thank Splayd for helping her get out of the SLP chamber. Since Splayd considered her worth as a living being to be incalculably beneath the worth of him and his unparalleled intellectual capacities, he didn't care whether she expressed gratitude or not. Gratitude was nothing more than an acknowledgment of consideration having been expended on the part of one peer to benefit another, and Splayd was neither Maroon's peer nor intentionally considerate towards others. Gratitude is for the weak.

As soon as the two smeets had made it to one of the higher levels of the base, Maroon automatically drifted towards the nearest stock of weapons, retrieved an assortment of lasers, and then drifted back towards where she'd left Splayd, presumably to bother him. She removed the fuel cartridge from one of the weapons. "This energy source is lame," she said, glaring at the cartridge. "I could make something better."

"What's the energy source?" Splayd asked, not to make conversation but so he could file the information away for later.

"Uranium." Maroon tossed the cartridge over her shoulder. It exploded don the hall, producing a miniature mushroom cloud. Mental note: Irken lasers are powered by uranium. They're explosive.

Splayd shook his head. "Moron."

"It's Maroon."

Splayd gave her a disgusted look. "No, I'm calling you a moron."

"You should be calling me a Maroon," she said, threateningly pointing her laser without a fuel cartridge at Splayd. "Because that's what I am. Maroon." She peered at her skin. "Eh... well, actually, I'm green."

Splayd rolled his eyes. "Obviously."

"But my name is Maroon."

"Duh."

"So that's what you should call me."

"Be silent."

"Hey, you shut up!" Maroon said angrily.

Splayd stopped talking. Maybe it would encourage Maroon—poor, simple mind though she must have—to do the same.

For a while Maroon worked intensely (and, to Splayd's relief, silently) on her lasers. At one point she asked Splayd if he had a toolbox, but when he said no (and after she'd accused him of lying), she went and found a toolbox of her own and resumed her toil.

Meanwhile, Splayd got to do what he'd come up here to do to begin with: hack the Control Brains.

With Maroon working on the floor and paying no heed to anything else, Splayd stood on the seat of a chair in front of a computer screen (he was too short to sit on it and still see yet), logged into the Central Empirical Statistics Database, and began hacking.

"We do not expect much of you," the Control Brains had said. Why? Did it have to do with his height? Was it because his projected height was only 98 units, underneath the 100-unit threshold dividing short and tall Irkens? But, no, he'd seen others with heights over 100 units get the same secondary suggestion. There had to be another reason. And perhaps it'd be in the statistics database.

Splayd's easiest task was faking that he had Rank Tower security clearance, the rank of the Tallest and their closest Taller Advisors. That got him access to the current height statistics, a bell curve of the height distribution of all the Irkens in the empire.

His eyes shot wide in shock. This was unnatural. This wasn't a bell curve, it was a... a dying species! The center of the curve, the "average" height, was nonexistent. Splayd, predicted at 98 units, was nonexistent. This couldn't possibly be right, could it?

But he knew better than to question the information provided by the Control Brains—truly, from his lofty altitude of intellectual superiority, all those beneath him were prone to mistakes, but entities such as the Control Brains were exempt from such a general rule of universal mediocrity. They were perfect in everything they did, for they were programmed to be so, and in return their programming was perfect. Because it was programmed that way. Perfectly. If they said that these were the statistics, then they were. Splayd simply didn't know why.

He hated not knowing something. It had been a scant twenty-two days since he'd received his Pak and first been capable of intelligent thought, but he already loathed a lack of knowledge. The information... somewhere, it was TAUNTING him.

He'd get to the root of this. What about his generation? Against all the statistical odds, somehow, Splayd was 98 units tall. (True, his mental capacities had developed despite the statistical odds of anyone possessing such a mind as his, but the chances of two such unlikely circumstances occurring in him were simply too farfetched to be mere coincidence—if his intellect, therefore, was a statistically improbably coincidence, then his height couldn't be.) Perhaps his generation had a higher percentage of 100-unit smeets than the bell curve would indicate? The Control Brains didn't include the projected heights of Irkens less than ten years old in their bell curve statistics, because they hadn't reached their full height yet. But surely the Brains had recorded these smeets' projected heights, hadn't they?

Even with Rank Tower clearance, Splayd couldn't find anything about the projected heights of smeets under an era old. Not even the Tallest was allowed to see this information?! Why would the Control Brains protect it? Splayd scowled. Fine. He'd just have to do a bit more intensive hacking, that was all...

Mere keyboard and cursor weren't enough for Splayd to do his work. He pulled a cord out of his Pak, plugged it directly into the base's computer system, and used his Pak to invade the Control Brains.

In less than two degrees, he was within the Control Brains' systems.

Any lesser Irken would have been delighted at himself and his success. Splayd, however, was no lesser Irken, but one who had an indescribably amazing brain and knew it. He would have been horrified at himself had he not succeeded in hacking the Control Brains. His only lament was that he wasn't able to just hang around the systems and... and... eh, maybe memorize every fact stored in every Control Brain in the empire, or something. Something cool like that. Just to show how amazing he was. However, for now, he had business to attend to.

"Hey!" he shouted into the digital void. "Hey, Control Brains! I demand information. Give it to me!"

For a moment, the void regarded him irritably. And then an incredible force thundered out of it, speaking with the minds and voices of a million dead ancestors: "Who are you to make a demand of the Control Brains?" Its voice was like that of an all-powerful punishing god.

Splayd was an atheist. "Who am I? I am someone who wants information, which you shall provide for me."

"Identify yourself," the Control Brain requested.

"Mind your own beeswax!"

The million minds gave each other exasperated looks. "We were minding our own beeswax until you chose to bother us. Therefore, it is you, unidentified submitter of queries, who are not minding your beeswax, because we were here first."

Outside the digital realm, Splayd bit his lip thoughtfully. "Well, how do you know I wasn't here first?" he asked. "Maybe I was just exceedingly quiet and you were not aware of my presence until now."

The Brain considered this. "What do you want to know?"

Success! "I wish to see all the records for Irkens under an era of age."

"If you insist," the Brain said. "Obviously, you are not very intelligent."

"What?"

The explanation came within a second, as Splayd suddenly found 95 billion Irken records being downloaded into his Pak. Before it was halfway over, he had to force his hand up and physically pull the plug connecting him to the Control Brain.

Too much information. Even for him, that was too much information. He could hardly think as it was, trying to hold all that information in his Pak, over 40 billion records. He shut his eyes, head throbbing, thinking. This was more than enough for him to construct a bell curve. All he had to do was sift through all the records, take out the projected height and then delete the rest of the information, the names and careers and suggestions, primary and secondary... Just the height and then delete... delete... delete...

40 billion double- or triple-digit numbers are much less imposing than 40 billion lengthy text documents. He opened his eyes, sighing in relief that all that excess data was gone. Now all Splayd had to do was line them up on a height distribution curve, that was all... and he made a very odd discovery.

There was still the dip that Splayd had seen in that first bell graph, a valley where a hill was supposed to be over the middle of the bell curve. But for younger Irkens, the dip was much less pronounced. The curve was shaped more like two hills with a gentle slope in the middle, not two mountains with a canyon in between. There were more smeets with projected heights around a hundred units than there were adult Irkens of that height.

What was that supposed to mean?

"Hey, look what I did!" Maroon said, distracting Splayd.

He turned to glare at her, furious. "How dare you, when I was so close to figuring out—"

"Watch this!" Maroon held up her lasers—which, now, were all a single laser—pulled one trigger, and six muzzles fired simultaneously. A wave of mismatched beams blasted a good-sized hole in one of the walls. "Was that cool or WHAT?!"

Splayd rolled his eyes at Maroon's display of technological innovation. "How easily amused these simple minds are..." he muttered, turning to face the computer screen again.

"It IS cool," Maroon said stubbornly, looking at the hole she'd made in the wall.

Splayd gave her an annoyed look over his shoulder. "What's so great about a little laser light show and a sub-standard explosion?" he asked angrily. "I'd ask you to try not to be so stupid, but I don't think you can help it." He shook his head. "Lasers—feh. The entertainment of weak minds. Now smoke machines, those produce the kinds of subtle shows that only those who are learned in the arts can appreciate..."

"Okay, fine, smoke machines are way cooler," Maroon admitted. "But it's still a pretty neat gun, right?"

"Hmph."

Maroon stuck her tongue out at him, then turned to look somewhere else. "What about you? You think it's cool, right?"

"Who are you talking to now? Foolish, simple-minded—um." Splayd turned around, and found himself looking at one really weird alien.

Huge white eyes with tiny colored specks in the middle like some sort of disease and strange circular shields in front of them, odd soft-looking pinkish skin, tufts of black fuzz on the scalp, a disproportionately huge head, and Splayd wasn't even gonna get started on the clothes. "Hey! You, fleshy. Who do you think you are and what are you doing here?"

If this creature facially expressed emotions in a similar way to Irkens, then Splayd could safely presume it was alarmed at his question. It had a strange gun made out of some see-through material pointed at Maroon, its hands trembling. "Uh, what are you talking about? I'm an Irken," the alien said. "I'm Invader Mothman."

"Oh, really?" Splayd scoffed. He jumped off the chair and walked up to the alien. "If you are an Irken in disguise, then you, without a doubt, have the most convincing extraterrestrial façade ever engineered. From appearances down to the inflections of voice and attitude."

"Oh. Well, thank—"

"Therefore," Splayd interrupted, "due to the fact that you could not possibly come up with a disguise advanced enough to trick me unless you had my intellect—which, obviously, you do not, or else you would be me—it must not be a disguise, and you must be a genuine alien."

There was a long moment of silence, broken by Maroon. "Good one."

The alien stared at Splayd. "But, doesn't that mean I just convinced you I'm an alien? So wouldn't that mean my disguise is really good?"

"Shut up. You know nothing." Splayd rose up on his Pak-legs. "You cannot fool me, creature inferior to my inferiors. What's your business in an Irken facility?!"

"Just info gathering!" the alien said. "That's all. I just wanna ask some questions."

"You want my laser, don't you?" Maroon demanded. She was suddenly up on her Pak-legs too, pushing in front of Splayd. "You can't have it! It's my laser! I made it!" she aimed her mismatched weapon at the creature; it aimed its weapon back.

"Back down, moron," Splayd said, jerking Maroon away from the alien. "Fine, inferior. What do you want to know?"

"Uh..." It scratched its head. Pitiful fool! With its... head-scratching! "I dunno. I guess, are you really Zim's... smeets? His offspring?"

"Zim who?" Maroon asked.

Splayd shot her a dirty look. "Try not to flaunt your lacking mental capabilities, why don't you?" he asked both Maroon and the alien. "Although this moron here apparently hasn't, I have heard of Zim. However, neither of us has met him in person. Unless he has relocated without informing the Irken Empire, he would be on Earth."

"You've... never met him?" The alien looked puzzled. "But, we're on Earth. In Zim's base."

"We are?" Splayd looked around in bafflement. It suddenly occurred to him that he had no idea what planet he was on. How humiliating. "How long have we... er, prove it! How do I know you aren't lying?"

The alien shrugged. "Well, I'm not. This is Earth. Go look outside if you want proof."

"Hnn..." Splayd chose to give this creature the benefit of the doubt. "Fine, Earthen. Perhaps we are on Earth. In any case, we cannot possibly be the offspring of Zim, because Irkens are incapable of reproduction!"

"No, they aren't. I've seen Zim pregnant," the Earthen said. It crossed its arms. "Unless you're gonna accuse me of lying about that?"

Splayd clenched his teeth. How humiliating, being shown up by such an inferior beast...

"Hey, can I ask you a question," Maroon said, like it was a statement. "What's that glass in front of your face for? Can you make a weapon with it?"

"Er... no..." the earthen said. "It's for—"

"For protection, obviously," Splayd said. "Like goggles. Duh." Although it would offer very little protection. Then again, it would take a stupid species to think two little glass circles could guard one's eyes.

"Actually, it's for vision correction. Duh," the Earthen said testily, clearly starting to get annoyed at Splayd. Oh. Didn't this species have any medical procedures to correct vision? "Nobody uses glasses to protect their eyes. What are you, stupid?"

Splayd bristled. "What." No one, NO one had a right to call HIM stupid. They were simply—simply fools, idiots, ignoramuses, all of them! This Earthen beast was so ignorant it couldn't comprehend Splayd's thought processes, and so in is blind fog for an empty mind, it couldn't see the light of brilliance in Splayd's words and—and it couldn't understand him! How dare it, how dare it—no one called him—no one... ever...

"SHUT UP!" Splayd lunged towards the Earthen, stabbing at it with his Pak-legs. It stumbled back, eyes wide in fear. Yes, animal, fear Splayd—fear the superior being. And for the first time in history an Irken would be the predator and this fanged beast would be the prey—

Splayd was shocked out of his rage by a jet of liquid fire to his face. He reeled back, flailing at the fire and cursing in a select few of the 11,563 languages he knew so far (including a few hundred thousand regional dialects). Flailing only made it spread. No—think rationally. It wasn't fire, it was acid. Just hydroxylic acid, that was all. He forced himself to hold still to keep from getting more of himself wet.

Oh, lovely, now the water was dripping.

The Earth creature seemed paralyzed by Splayd's attack. It was still holding its odd-looking weapon up, which was now dripping water from the tip. A gun that shot water... Oh, that was a dirty trick. And so primitive! Why hadn't he seen it coming?

Splayd carefully sat in his chair again, wincing. Clearly, this creature was unstable. It would probably snap at the slightest provocation, primitive being that it was—unlike Splayd, who only got angry at extreme offenses, of course.

Any attempts to question his intellectual superiority were extreme offenses.

"I think you should be leaving now," he hissed at the Earthen. "You're fortunate I consider you too dumb to be a danger to this base, or else I'd expel you from it. In twelve different pieces." He sneered. "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't stop to consider your feelings when I said that, did I? Should I explain it to you in simpler words, or was my tone enough for you to comprehend that I was making a threat?"

"I understood just fine," the Earthen said through clenched teeth. It turned to leave, shooting Splayd a dirty look. "You really are Zim's kid, aren't you?"

Splayd didn't dignify that with a response. Still, it made him think. After seeing the best that Splayd's mind could produce, the first thing this creature thought to do was compare him to the exile Zim? That meant the Earthen must have perceived some similarity between Zim and himself. Perhaps Zim could have a mind kindred to Splayd's?

Maroon had been watching the entire exchange like it was a gory gladiatorial battle, smiling widely. When the Earthen started to retreat, she ran to catch up to it. "Hey, Invader Mothman!" she shouted. "Can I have your gun?"

"What, this?" the Earthen held up its water-shooting gun, giving Maroon a suspicious look. "I need this. Why do you want it?"

"'Cause it's cool," she said eagerly. "I'll, uh... give you..." She looked around for a suitable bargaining material. "This!" She held up her mishmash of lasers, hopping eagerly from foot to foot. "This for your gun!"

The Earthen's eyes widened. "Really?! You'd give me that?"

"Sure! I can make another," Maroon said.

Grinning like the idiot it surely was, the Earthen held out its gun, and accepted Maroon's monstrous invention. "This is so cool," it said, turning the weapon over in its hands. "Hey, which trigger do you pull?"

"I think they all work. Except, this one here. See it?" Maroon got up on her toes to point. "This small blue trigger?"

"Yeah?"

"I think that's the self-destruct."

"You 'think' so?"

"Well, I haven't tested it out yet. I figured it might blow my arm off if I did."

"Oh. Yeah."

"So don't pull it."

"Gotcha."

What fools, Splayd thought. With their primitive bartering systems and obsession with tools of mindless violence. He sighed and turned away from them, standing on his chair to use the computer again. So, he was on Earth, eh...?

"Hey, look at this!" Maroon shouted. A burst of water shot over Splayd's shoulder and hit the computer screen.

He yelped. "Do you MIND?!" he yelled furiously.

Maroon gave the computer a puzzled look. "Why isn't it melting?" she murmured. "Oh—of course!" She eyed her new gun in wonder. "It's a biological weapon! Neat! This is way better than uranium." She wandered off. "I'm gonna do target practice on Bob. Wanna come?"

"Oh, spare me," Splayd muttered.

It suddenly dawned on him that there was foreign material in his Pak. It must have gotten in when he hooked up to the base computer. Well, wasn't this his lucky day?

Upon further prodding, it identified itself as Epileprosy. A virus. Splayd sneered; how pitiful, that it even attempted to challenge him. He gladly crushed the coding of the virus to nothing. With the power of his mind.

Sometimes he even impressed himself.

xxx

Dib considered his options. On the one hand, he could leave immediately and come out ahead, because he now had a really cool gun. A really cool gun.

On the other hand, he still had no idea what Zim was up to. He hadn't even seen him yet. If Dib left now, he'd have a cool gun, but would it be much use if the world were in danger due to some new evil plot?

Actually... come to think of it, if the world was in danger, this was exactly the kind of gun Dib would prefer to defend it with. Still, best to try to prevent the world from becoming endangered to begin with. So he continued his search.

This was the first time Dib had ever been able to freely walk through Zim's base like this, and the more he explored, the more lost he became. The subterranean levels were much more extensive and more labyrinthine than he'd ever expected.

The base was made of endless hallways with narrow walkways, each hall lined with infinite tiny lights and computer screens and machines and controls; only once in a while did Dib run into a door, and more often than not they opened into other halls rather than any rooms. Where were all the chambers that Zim kept his experiments in, where he controlled the base and plotted his evil plots? How could an entire base be made up of hallways?

He turned a corner, and the hall widened and deepened, so that Dib was on a narrow walkway over a deep chamber in the ground. Down in that pit was an ersatz school bus, the duplicate that Zim had stuck Ms. Bitters's class in and tried to throw into a black hole. Dib leaned over the walkway's railing to look closer. It seemed like Zim had made some additions to the bus since the last time he'd used it; there were now several lasers attached to the roof, and the thrusters were much larger. What could Zim be planning to do with it this time?

It was as Dib was leaning over the railing, looking at the bus, that he realized that these weren't just hallways leading to the rooms where Zim did his real work. These halls were where he did his work. Dib had probably passed hundreds of machines that could be used for any of the horrible schemes he'd run into in the past, and couldn't Zim easily control the base, do his research, contact his leaders, whatever, from all the computers lining the hallways? The few separate rooms that Dib had run into were probably used for special purposes, for projects too important or too big to be worked on in the rest of the base.

This wasn't what Dib had expected. Whenever he'd snuck into Zim's base in the past, he'd wasted all his time walking past the important stuff, wandering around and expecting that the Irkens had designed their bases the same way humans designed their buildings: there would be halls used only to get from room to room, where everything important happened. It was a stupid assumption, he now realized. This base wasn't a collection of rooms with halls connecting them to each other; it was a series of tunnels with a few side chambers, like an ant colony. Zim's base was an ant colony.

Either an ant colony or a rabbit warren, but Dib wasn't about to compare Zim to a bunny.

Rather than looking for doors and rooms, Dib started paying attention to the tunnels themselves, and now he found some pretty interesting things; weapons, more weapons, something that looked like salad tongs—no, wait, that was probably a weapon too. He found endless charts and diagrams for even more giant weapons, communication devices, vehicles, a mechanical elephant with room for four or five passengers inside (a Trojan elephant?), what looked like a genetic sequence next two a diagram of a human and a cow... a cow/human hybrid? A Minotaur? Was Zim making a Minotaur?

And beyond that, an enormous blueprint, next to a bunch of computer screens that displayed accompanying diagrams, with designs for some sort of satellite. The other screens showed the schematics for different components of the satellite, a list of AM and FM radio frequencies and TV channels, several zoomed-in screenshots of a Bloaty's commercial, and... a watermelon? A watermelon, with read-outs of its chemical composition underneath. This had to be the latest project! Keef had said Zim was interested in watermelons lately. He was going to use watermelons to do... whatever this thing was!

Dib set down his super-gun, pulled out his camera, took off the lens cap, and started snapping pictures. He could decipher all the schematics later; for now he just needed to record them and get out of here. After checking to make sure he'd gotten all the diagrams, he stuck the camera in his backpack again and started retracing his steps, looking for the elevator he'd taken down here.

Unfortunately, Dib was completely and utterly lost. He did manage to find an elevator, but it didn't take him back up to the main level of the base. It took him one level higher, to Zim's hangar.

Right where Zim was.

xxxxx