Chapter Two
There were even more humans etc. inside the building than there were outside. Zim also saw samurais and people wearing wide shiny headbands some of them half naked and brightly colored frogs and girls in lacy dresses. There were so many things he'd never even imagined and didn't know how to describe; Zim knew it would be easy to lose Dib in this crowd! There were also a lot of signs with arrows pointing everywhere but Zim didn't have time to read any of them.
With his superior information-collecting ability, Zim had heard of places like these, but until now he had thought they were only filthy lies. So this one filthy lie was true. But the rest were all still filthy lies.
Just as Zim was about to run into the main hall, but an earth guard stopped him. "Hold it right there," he said, "you have to register
first."
"I AM...! An Irken invader... and I go! Where I please!"
"Of course you can go wherever you please, just as soon as you register." The earth guard pointed Zim towards a long table with boxes and boxes of cards on it and several harried looking guys behind it, looking through the boxes and signing people up.
Anything to get away from Dib; if Zim couldn't lose him in here he never would. Zim pushed aside a tall clumsy human dressed as a tall clumsy robot and hastily threw some earth moneys at the registration drone behind the long table. Just in time he remembered to scribble his name in the earth language instead of Irken. Taking his card, Zim shook his fist. "You realize when we take over your filthy earth planet your inferior earth moneys will be even more no good than they are now!"
A wave of thumbs up greeted this, making Zim even madder at the humans who didn't know a deadly Irken invader when they saw one. But just then he saw Dib's hair scythe appeared over the crowd at the door, and Zim turned and ran into the main hall.
Once inside, Dib paused for just a second, looking around in astonishment at all the signs. Some of them were over six feet high. Others had arrows pointing in all directions, reading things like "Cosplay Contest," "Martial Arts Tournament," and "Meet Jhonen Vasquez!"
"Interesting, but I've got no time for any of that," Dib told himself. "And what a weird name!"
This building was usually used for hockey games and rock concerts, and provided emergency shelter the last time a hurricane had hit thte town, but now it was full of young people who were all obviously very much into anything animated, Japanese, either, or both. Until that moment Dib thought these gatherings were no more than stories the high school kids had made up to tease the younger ones. This proved it paid to find things out for yourself, no matter how crazily impossible they seemed to be.
The registration guys were still chuckling over Zim's clever, inspired cosplay when Dib, panting just a bit less now, staggered up to their table. "Did you guys... see an alien... come in here?"
Humoring Zim had taken up all of the registration team's sense of humor."At least twenty or thirty, so far, kid. So I vote pizza, you vote Chinese, whaddya you want, Hank?"
A short fat guy at the far end of the table looked up from a bag of cheese covered corn chips and shouted back he wanted both.
"Which way did he go?" Dib continued asking.
One of the guys finally stopped talking about lunch and asked Dib, "Which alien?"
"You know, the one as tall as me, green and with no ears or nose!" Dib gasped out. "He's wearing a red uniform and a PAK on his back! This is far more important than what you're going to have for lunch! He's here to destroy the earth and I'm the only one who can stop him!"
The guys behind the desk looked at each other and almost fell of their chairs laughing.
"Hey buddy, aren't you going a little far with that?" one of them said when he could finaly stop laughing. "Even Dib himself wouldn't be such a dork."
Dib sighed. He saw he could expect no help whatsoever from the staff, and only by coughing up the fee (extra because he didn't bother to pre-register) and registering himself would he be able to continue chasing Zim. But before he did, Dib breathlessly asked once more, "Which way did he go?"
The two guys on both sides of the guy attaching Dib's registration card to his lanyard gave each other a quick look. "He went THATAWAY!" they shouted together, pointing in opposite directions before all three doubled up in laughter. With an annoyed look, Dib grabbed his registration card and still putting it over his head, raced into the main hall.
If Zim was anywhere in here, Dib was going to find him. If he wasn't Dib would leave as sson as he had inspected the whole building.
He made his way through the gathering crowd, asking everyone, "Did you see an alien?"
Everyone laughed at him. That much wasn't any different for him, that much was just business as usual. It was the fact that almost everyone was wearing a costume. They all seemed to be dressed as Totoros, Asukas, Godzillas, Gokus, Keroros, Akiras, Narutos, Sasukes and everything else one could imagine, which made it a very sureal experience.
Dib thought he saw Zim a few times, but each time it only turned out to be someone cosplaying Zim. Even when they tried doing Zim's quotes, it was immediately obvious that this wasn't the real Zim. And when one of them batted eyes coquettishly and tried to kiss him, he KNEW no way could that ever be Zim. Holding his mouth, Dib dashed for the nearest men's room (the fake "Zim" couldn't follow, he was really a girl) before puking and barfing and retching his every last gut out at the very idea.
When Dib came out again, he did so slowly, looking around carefully to make sure that sex-crazed impostor was nowhere around. But he forgot all about that when he knew he was looking at the real thing.