Tak sighed.
According to her PAK, it had been two hours, thirty-eight minutes and 14.333333333334 seconds since that red flash, and she had spent all of it sitting in this chair.
Well, not all of it. She'd tried to blast her way out of the room, and ended up hiding behind her chair while the bolt bounced off the walls.
She glanced up at the curl of smoke coming from the pile of misshapen metal on the ground. At least her chair hadn't taken that blast.
Another sigh.
And then… a noise.
Tak's antenna pricked up. A thumping, coming from outside the room. And then voices, shouting.
Far off she heard a voice she'd come to know and hate screaming bloody murder: "You tried to kill me!"
Tak leapt out of the chair, her training coming back to her. Something was killing Irkens on the ship, and it had her trapped. Her PAK assessed the situation, Status: In enemy territory, defenseless, life threatening situation imminent, carrying sensitive Irken information. Objective: Escape.
Tak ran over to the destroyed chair, and sliced it off the ground with her PAK lasers. She pulled off the remaining metal stump, and found a black hole in the floor. She twisted one of her PAK legs in and fired off a shot. It melted through a few feet away. Only one side was laser proof.
She re-angled her PAK leg and twisted around while firing a beam, cutting a hole for herself. She quickly jumped in a maze of tubing and wiring, and began to pull herself out.
Three arm pulls later she heard a clicking noise above her. Claws on metal. She froze, unwilling to be captured so soon.
Above her Scly froze in the hallway. Something was wrong. He sniffed (the natural thing for a carnivore to do), and caught a whiff of something familiar. He sniffed again. A mixture of reactor fumes and synthetics, characteristic of Irkens, combined with the universal smell signal for fear. There was no wind on the ship, so he couldn't be sure where, but there was an Irken a few feet from him.
A transparent inner eyelid slid across his eye. This, combined with a few chemicals in his retina, switched his vision into the ultraviolet spectrum. The world around him shifted in transparency, color and light source: The brightest light in this spectrum were the bright purple gamma rays emanating from the engines, the lights above him lost a intensity, and many objects that ultraviolet light passes through disappeared.
Scly walked over to the wall, and tapped some buttons built into the surface. The lights began to emit soft, harmless levels of X-Rays into the hall. Scly looked around, seeing that the plastic composite that the walls and floor were made out of were now transparent.
He noticed a soft stream of light emitting from a hole in the otherwise opaque interview room he was about to enter. He followed a pathway of bent wires to a group of pipes under his feet, including a small, dome-shaped piece of metal that sent tendrils out into an Irken-shaped gap in the wires.
"I know you're there, Irken."
The gap in the wires merely stiffened.
"I'm not bluffing."
No response.
"Fine then. Computer, send reactor plasma through the tubes surrounding the Irken." That was a bluff (Fission-to-Fusion reactors don't make plasma), but it had it's intended effect, and the Irken crawled back towards her hole.
Scly nonchalantly walked back through the door and caught sight of Tak struggling with getting the cover back over the hole.
"You know, I think they noticed it was you."
Tak froze, slowly put the cover down, and sat back in her seat.
Scly glanced at the pile of scrap metal lying on the floor.
"I don't think that's how my chair is supposed to look."
Silence.
Scly sighed, "Irken, I've had a rough day. Between being scared by that Gaz girl, to meeting Zim, to finding you escaping from one of our interview rooms before we've even met, I'm developing quite a headache."
"Well, between teleportation sickness, almost killing myself because of one of those laser-reflecting wall tiles, and getting irradiated by Irk knows what down there, I think we're even." Tak snapped.
"…You have been regrettably selected as an example of the Irken race in a series of psychological evaluations. You are currently aboard the N.A.S. Victory, more specifically, in a now unusable space-time distortion center/interview room, with a seriously annoyed large synapsid predator. Do you have any thoughts on this?"
"Is said synapsid going to eat me?"
More silence.
"Do you know a Irken named Zim?" Scly continued, mentally deciding that he needed to take a vacation.
"Yes. I've been chasing the little scum bag for five of our years."
"And how many earth years is that?"
"Fifty."
"I take it you're a long-lived race."
"Compared to the humans."
"And why do you think this is?"
"Our PAKs, probably."
"And what is a PAK?"
"Why should I tell you?"
"Because if you don't, I'm going to rip that life-support thingy off your back.'
Tak leapt up on her chair, clutching her PAK to her back, before demanding in slightly fearful tones, "How did you find out what our PAKs do!?"
"So the life support thingy is a PAK! I thought PAKs were some sort of medical equipment you use on your homeworld or something."
Tak slapped her forehead, and sank back into her seat, groaning. There went important data about the Irkens.
"You Irkens are fairly paranoid. What am I going to do with the knowledge that an Irken needs their PAK to survive?" Scly said. A lot, as it would turn out.
"Develop some PAK seeking missile system, cause some galactic blackout while we're recharging, use the interPAK to spread some memory erasing virus, I don't know!"
"Why would we want to do that?" Scly responded, mentally filing the connection between PAKs and memory.
"It's happened before. You might say the galaxy is… hostile towards the Irken race."
"Would that have anything to do with Zim's invasion of the planet? Dib mentioned something about enslavement." Scly said, anger building up against the Irkens.
Tak said nothing.
"Or the fact that Zim mentioned an armada while he was attacking me?"
Tak slowly asked, "You're not one of those noble, idealistic, start-a-war-because-the-Irkens-are-committing- atrocities kind of species, are you?"
Scly's pupils thinned in anger, "Yes, I believe the Introi would match that description."
Tak groaned, "Then I'm dead meat. You might as well give up on the whole 'defeating us' idea though: The Irkens are the most powerful species in the universe, and we deserve the conquest of other species. There is no way you are going to beat us, so if the Empire seems a little unethical to you, I suggest retreating to your home planet and delaying your defeat."
Scly felt his claw-limbs twitch involuntarily. A hiss began to build up in his throat, but before he could have a chance to respond, a warning flashed up on a computer panel in the wall.
Written out in Introi script, the words: Interference with subject's mental facilities detected. appeared.
Scly walked out of the room, and headed towards his labs, stopping briefly to send a soldier robot in to guard Tak.
He reviewed sensor data: The PAK was sending a continuous stream of a few chemicals and information (presumably memory) throughout the interview, as with Zim, but when Scly began to question the Irken Empire's ethics, it began sending signals like ignore ethics, ignore alien influence, and glorify empire. She was being controlled by an external influence, through the PAK.
In his labs, Scly reviewed the data: He scrutinized everything from body language to vital organs. He had his computer run a scan of the PAK's memory centers, and was presented with far more data then he ever could have gotten by interviewing. Compiling this with a similar scan done on Zim, Scly completed his report of the Irken species. He quickly completed his report on the humans, and was about to bring the information before the High council, but remembered that he still had one more interview.
With a groan, Scly set down the discs and walked back to the elevator.
At least the worst is over. He thought to himself, I mean, what can this canine do?
There it is, the long awaited sixth chapter. Well, I don't know how much you people were waiting for it. Review, or suffer!