A/N: Some very minor spoilers for Florpus/the first few comics in here. This fic will include Florpus as 'canon'.

Dib groaned as his alarm blared directly in his ear, fumbling around for a few moments before slamming the button down and stopping it from assaulting his poor ears. He yawned, stretching.

"Okay, it's Saturday, isn't it? He grabbed his glasses, adjusting them for a moment before grabbing his phone to check. "Right, I'm off." He groaned- Dad had him scheduled for a nine-hour shift tomorrow. At least he'd gotten most of the work done on the robot he'd been assigned, he probably wouldn't need to be there the whole time. It wasn't that he didn't appreciate the challenge, or getting to talk with Dad for more than fifteen seconds a day, it was just that Zim always left about twenty messages-

Zim. He nearly fell out of bed.

"Man, was yesterday a dream, or-" The phone in his hand started vibrating, with a picture of Zim sticking his tongue out popping up on-screen. He fumbled, almost dropping it before managing to hit 'call' and press it to his ear. "Zim?"

"Where are you, Dib-worm?"

"It's only nine, I just wake up." He yawned. "So, did I hallucinate yesterday?"

"How would I know? You were here, we learned of the smeet, and found out the sandal-man makes terrible jokes."

"Okay, I wasn't dreaming. Good to know." Dib rubbed his eyes, getting a smudge on the glass when he brushed it with one of his knuckles. "You're freakishly calm about this."

"It's merely another experiment, why wouldn't be?" Zim sounded dismissive, and Dib's fingers tightened around the phone.

"Zim, it's not just an experiment, this is serious. This is a real commitment of eighteen years- or more!"

"Pssh, is that all?"

Dib raised an eyebrow. "Is that- what, isn't eighteen a lot to your species?"

"Of course not!"

"In earth years, that's more than twice the amount of time you've been here. It's how old I am."

"...Oh."

"This is insane. I knocked up an alien who forgot how to count." Dib raked a hand through his bedhead, feeling his hair start to spike up like usual.

"It's not my fault earth-years last so long," Zim said.

"The kid isn't going to be an, er, smeet for like twenty years, are they? I don't want to change diapers for that long."

"I was a smeet for about thirty."

Dib sputtered. "What?"

"What? You were a smeet too until... what was it? Months ago."

"Seven months. Okay, so smeets are just kids in general, and irkens have weird years. Got it. That better not mean they're gonna be a little kid for that long." Dib took in a slow breath before letting it out.

"Now, if you're done fussing over numbers get over here, we need to make plans. Such plans!"

"Right, right. I'll be over in twenty minutes. But this is not the end of that conversation." Dib ended the call, tugging on a pair of pants and heading to the kitchen by sliding down the banister.

Just over forty minutes later, (after a fight with a very disgruntled sewer alligator that had ended up in the toilet somehow) Dib waltzed past the gnomes and into Zim's front door.

"You're late."

"Yeah, tell that to the reptile that's currently becoming Gaz's purse." Dib slumped down on the couch. "So, what's the news?"

"Interspecies breeding within the empire is… uncommon," Zim admitted. "With irkens, of course- there are far more records of smelly captive species engaging in it."

"Well, could it be that it's just being covered up?" Dib raised an eyebrow. "There's some kind of supercomputer connected to all the Paks, right? Seems like it would be easy to just wipe that kind of thing out if they don't want anyone trying it out."

Zim waved a hand. "There are military exceptions, and Zim is one of them. Memory banks can't be tampered with without a trial, or by the irken themselves."

Dib opened his mouth to ask about the trial Zim had had, but then realized it wasn't worth the thirty-second dead stare. He was preeeeetty sure Zim had scrubbed at his own memory at some point, because he always got fuzzy when it was brought up. The only reason Dib even knew about it was Gir (and Minimoose), who probably only knew because of Zim griping about it. "Okay, so let's assume it's true. Is there any way to monitor yourself to see if something's going wrong?"

"I have a medical bay," Zim said. "You are not bringing me into any human medical establishment."

"No, your base is probably better anyways. It would know what counts as healthy is for you," Dib said. "Anyways, can I see any of those records?"

They appeared on the TV screen, and Dib scanned over them with wide eyes. He was still working on his fluency in irken, but the charts and images spoke for themselves.

"Huh. So it's pretty similar to earth pregnancy, it looks like. Is it live birth?"

"A few of the crossbreeds had eggs, but if humans have squirmy goo-monsters live, then yes," Zim said. "You're bringing me chocolate before that, you hear me? Buckets worth. The sugar rush will cancel it out."

Dib nodded. "Yeah, sure. Earth was a newly-discovered planet, right? So you're the guinea pig here."

"Zim is no pig!"

"It's a figure of speech- it means the test subject." Dib said, watching as the screen scrolled through more diagrams. He winced. "Wow, that looks painful."

"Eh, I've seen worse." Zim waved a hand to the side, and the reports started moving faster. "Invader training is impossibly hard, you know."

"I'm sure," Dib said. "I've got to be in the labs tomorrow, so we should get the plan on how to deal with this out of the way."

Zim whipped a digital notepad out of his pad and started chewing on the back of an alien-looking pen. It was bulky and bright pink with a little armada symbol on the end.

"Computer, bring up a timescale!"

"Geez, is it too much to ask for a please now and then?"

"Please," Dib said.

"Bringing up timescale now. How come the human is the only one that appreciates me?" The papers disappeared, replaced with a timeline. Dib stood up to get a better look.

"If there haven't been any irken/human hybrids before, this is probably an estimate, right?"

"Eh, it's a couple of the examples mixed together, take it how you will."

"Well, it's better than nothing." Dib's eyes roamed over it. "This is using the four month baseline, so we should start seeing something within a week or two?"

Zim hopped off the couch, scribbling something down. "Ugh, this is going to take too long."

"Zim, you once spent a year sitting in a toilet." Dib said. "A couple months is nothing compared to that."

"It was for a good reason!" Zim put his hands on his hips, and Dib rolled his eyes.

"Honestly, if you'd spent that time actually coming up with a plan earth probably would be yours by now."

"...Shut your face!"

"Anyways." Dib looked up at the computer. "Is there anything about… er, mates?"

"Not really," The computer replied. "Only in the reeeally old stuff, and then it's just about taking care of the one that's having the baby."

Dib let out a sigh of relief. "Okay, good. That's good."

"By the last few weeks he's gonna need you, though."

"I will need no one." Zim made a 'pfft' sound, dismissing the idea with a buzz of his lips.

"Says here pretty much all attention goes to the smeet so the one carrying them needs to be brought food and stuff."

"Oh, yeah, that's not too much of a problem. Besides, he's got Gir and Minimoose, right?" Not that Gir was going to be much help, but the little robot could be surprisingly attentive when he wanted to be.

"Exactly, I'm much better off than those other losers!" Zim said. "I have the finest technology in the galaxy!"

"Does GIR know yet?" Dib asked.

Zim shrugged. "Feh, he's been interrogating the chicken-cow experiments for the past few days, I'll tell him when he gets back. He'll be fine, he likes babies, anyway. They're chewy."

"You know what, I'm not even going to touch that." Dib said. "I still have to work, but I'll be here when I can."

"Come onnnnnnnn," Zim whined.

"I'll see if I can bring work home when it gets later," Dib said. "Dad did that a lot when we were really little."

"Hmmph, it's better than nothing, I suppose."

Dib tweaked one of Zim's antenna, getting a hiss. "We'll get through this together. I call naming rights."

"Whatever name you come up with will be stupid." Zim muttered.

"So will yours," Dib countered. "But we've got four months to argue about it, we'll deal with that later."

"Gir has about fifty dolls stuffed into the vents, and he's named all of them. He'd probably love the chance to name it," The computer said, but Zim and Dib glared at the TV screen in unison and didn't dignify that with a response.