The Occult Experience
Chapter 6
----------------------------------
Kra-k-k-k-ick!
Cartilage is an interesting material. It functions as structures in some parts of the body, and in other parts it acts as a buffer and shock absorber in between bones.
At least this is what it does in humans.
Blorchians were not human, they were huge creatures, rat-like in appearance, and exceptionally strong when compared to humans.
Sort of.
The blorchian home-world (Now known as Parking-lotia) had a gravity field roughly at one-third the strength of Earths. This did some very amazing things to the biology of anything that lived on said world. It also made it a wonderful place to practice flying a new model Voot Shooter, though that's neither here nor there.
The average Blorchian didn't have very many bones in their bodies, spinal column, skull analogue, pelvis, and small number of inter-connective bones leading to their tails. Instead, the majority of a Blorchians semi-solid inner structures were made of cartilage. This made the species as a whole extremely flexible.
It also meant that, when their arms or legs where overstressed too quickly they made a number of cracking sounds before snapping. The Ripper King could generally get about four cracks per limb, and had to take out two limbs off the average Blorchian remnant before he could safely call out a collector to forcibly move the soul onward.
Stupid critters with their basic shamanistic beliefs. Their totems had all been destroyed by the armada, the world itself was a casualty, there was nothing left that they could do. Not like the idiotic beasts would listen to him and pass on peacefully, no~o, that'd make things too darn simple.
Stupid doomed tribescritters and their stupid vengeance pacts.
"Boss!" It had taken Shin a fair few days to track him down. One day of paperwork, two days of hunting down a Frenchman, and more than a few hours trying to convince someone to open a gate here. It would have been a lot faster for her, except that Blorchians didn't have demons in most of their tribal shaman beliefs, and the ones that did had ones too weak to open a gate, so instead she had to try and deal with one of their many gods and... That's all a story for another chapter.
Shin didn't even bat an eye when she felt something sharp poking her exposed midriff. The boss and that damned pole-arm of his, but she could understand his mood somewhat. Cleanup duty sucked.
"Shauna's having a bit of a crisis. I was-"
"Hoping I'd go there and take care of it. Later alright, whatyername, I'm kinda being kept busy by these little green things lately." The blade tip left her stomach as he swiftly swung and crushed another Blorchian's skull using the flat of the blade. A red, three legged, three eyed dog-thing popped into existence out of his shadow, closed it's mouth around one of the rat-like creatures arms, and disappeared without so much as a flash of light.
"You taught them that?" Most creatures left some kind of trace when they teleported.
"Later, alright? Kinda- Kri-k-k-k-k-ick! Hah! Five that time!" Shin resigned herself to waiting, Hatch would never bother paying enough attention while he was in the middle of whatever little work he actually did.
Now where in hell's name was she going to find a chair on a giant, empty parking lot?
?/\?
It had been roughly a week since Shauna had shown up at Dib's front door one morning. It had been four days since she'd become a couch potato.
Bright lights, vivid color, easily understood plot lines, what's not to like? Heck, one channel was even training the next generation of murderers to avoid capture. Such a shame this 'Miami' place was fictional...
A quick channel flip and Shauna was trying to make a decision. The Days of Our Lives, or The Simpson's?
The Simpson's, Shauna decided. If she wanted poorly scripted drama, she could just go and haunt the Hi-Skool for a while.
?/\?
Dib made a lot of mistakes in his life so far. He'd be the first to admit it, though actually remembering anything but the biggest ones left him sitting in his room for hours. The mind prioritizes, and unfortunately between figuring out when's the best time to run very far, very fast, and determining where the best place to hide is, some details tended to get lost.
One of many mistakes, the boy realized, was asking questions of the extraordinarily unusual Miss Bitters.
Especially when that question is "Can I see your degree or license thing that says you can teach?"
The petrified silence of the classroom had been broken when the rest of his classmates started asking each other what a teaching degree was, or else attempting to mock him for his big head. Inversely, Miss Bitters, who was normally very animated and muttering "Doom!" was frozen in place.
For the last week, Dib had been unusually quiet. There hadn't been any events of his screaming his head off, proclaiming the alienness of Zim, or asking why nobody believed him. The boy had actually fallen into a depression.
The truth, especially the none-too-fun kinds, had a bad habit of doing that to people.
So instead of attempting to convince his classmates, acquaintances, and strangers he met on the street that the world was bigger than they acknowledged, he instead chose to ask himself why he tried to do so. Not being an adult, he didn't follow adult reasoning or suffer from the jaded worldview so many chose to enclose themselves in. Thus he couldn't understand them, he couldn't change them, and the dim, near realization of this fact truly bothered him.
But none of that really led up to today's event. No, that was something entirely different. Today Zim returned. Zim and his 'I AM ZIM!" "WORM BABIES!" "I AM NORMAL!". Whether it was simply Zim's presence, or that he was simply that last piece of a truly confusing puzzle, it really hit Dib.
Nobody saw Zim, because nobody wanted to see Zim. He was a paradigm shift to an otherwise solid and stable worldview. Zim was proof that they were wrong, wrong about what they believed, wrong about what they "Knew", and most importantly for Dib, wrong about that crazy kid with the big head.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, what was so bad about being wrong? Everything Dib learned from and about Zim proved that something he'd thought to be truth was not.
Protector of Man-Kind? Feh, man was not kind enough to deserve protection. Every right he'd given them came back with countless wrongs against him.
All of this lead Dib to one decision, it didn't change much, not within him, not with his choice of actions, but it was a starting point.
"I'm not going to help them anymore. I'll stop Zim for me, not them. This is my home!"
But he needed time. Time to plan, time to set things up, and time to make these changes reality. Which is why he's currently questioning his wraith of a teacher, three extra days of free time, three days of suspension, would be either a good time to either do these things, or get things started.
"Why, child, do you need to see my teaching degree." Dib nearly jumped as she hissed out the words next to his ear. He'd barely seen her move!
"Because I don't call your doom-preaching teaching. Huh, that rhymed." His chair screeched as he pushed himself away from his desk and stood up, moving a little closer to the wall.
"DETENTION!" Which proved to be a good idea as his desk disappeared into the black abyss of the underground classrooms. Dib's eyes narrowed as he watched his current opponent, his eyes trailing her shadow instead of her face.
Wraiths, demon shadow creatures, came in many varieties, from shadow-cloaked rotting bodies, to literal shadows able to stand on their own and move faster than the human eye could normally follow. Dib figured the Bitter one was the latter, and prepared himself accordingly.
...There! Her shadow was moving around the desks, almost serpent-like, until it was forcibly stopped by ramming into a very powerful beam of light. In Dib's hand, producing that light, was a twenty-thousand candlepower floodlight, and on his face was a grin usually reserved for Zim.
"SUSPENSION! Out, get out!" By now Dib was beyond caring about whether or not people considered him crazy. He may be depressed because in a world of billions, he was alone, but somehow, at the same time, he was also happier.
Dib didn't quite understand why, but he had a sad grin on his face as he left the school, pink-slip in hand. He had no idea how he was going to get Professor Membrane to sign it, family day wasn't scheduled to happen for a long, long time.
AN/ Um... Wow. I told myself that this story is about Dib, and that means I can't turn him into a side character. I guess whatever part of me likes to write agreed wholeheartedly. I'm not really sure where all of this came from... and it's definitely not as humorous as I want it to be.