The Occult Experience
Chapter Ten.
The confrontation
Or
It was going to happen eventually.
?/\?
"Pants?"
"Yes."
"Shirt?"
"I'm gonna go with a 'Duh' here."
"I'll add some snark to my check-list. Signed suspension letter?"
"Er… No?" Dib opened his backpack, left untouched since last Thursday, and pulled out the pink slip. Yeah, this could be a problem.
"Well we could… Skip today and go find your father?" Shauna hesitantly asked. The man hadn't been seen since she'd come to this world, and that left her both nervous and upset. A child without parents or some kind of guardian… Some kind of responsible guardian, unlike Al or herself, was a child without limits.
Which could be good, or it could be bad, it depended on the kid.
"I'll be taking that." Or Al could do something. He grabbed the pink slip right out of Dib's hands and disappeared into the kitchen. Dib and Shauna followed quickly.
They caught up to him pulling the bag of supertoast out of the fridge and flipping it onto the table, flat side up.
"I love hare-brained television personalities, they leave their signatures everywhere." Dib looked closely at the nutritional information. Sure enough, under the box that listed ingredients (What was a plutonium compound doing in there?) was his fathers picture, and his signature.
Al mimed the signature just overtop of the bread-bag a few times before he signed the pink slip and handed it back to Dib.
It was perfect… Unnervingly so.
"How'd you learn to do this?"
"Walk and talk Dib, time waits for few, and not you." He was unceremoniously shoved out the door, Shauna and Al taking their places at his side while they walked to the skool building.
"So how'd you do this, Al?" Gaz was walking behind them slowly, watching her brother talking to people, or at least things, that weren't there.
"How old do you suppose we are, Dib?" Shauna asked him while Al pulled a book out of… somewhere. 'Eight Easy Recipes For You For Me' by an H. Lector.
"I'unno, you're a few hundred years old at least, dunno about him. Why?"
"I'm almost five hundred years old Dib, and Al here" Even without eyebrows, Shauna had a pretty mean glare. "Is about nineteen-thousand. I've spent the majority of that time refining the arcane arts of necromancy. Idiot here-"
Al raised his hand after flipping a page.
"spends the majority of his time around humans. He was the summoned 'Minion' to a boy in a nearby reality, tends to jump at chances to interrupt non-specific summonings, and goes through the human education system at least once a century."
"How does that matter to him forging my dad's signature?"
"The boy has a point." Another page was flipped. "That looks like it'd be good with onions…"
"I was getting to that. The usual story used by idiot here-"
"Is it really so hard to just say Al?"
"-is that he's a war-orphaned child with nowhere to go. But that has the tendency of drawing attention sometimes by school and government officials. Especially when he doesn't have any papers at all pertaining to anything, date of birth, doctor visits, anything. So Idiot here has to forge all of those papers, situate them in whatever archives are necessary, and make sure they look too genuine to be noticeable as fakes. Which reminds me, Idiot."
Dib just caught Al rolling his eyes as he closed the book and focused on the lich.
"How was your jaunt in Manhattan?"
"Worst mistake I ever made."
"Yzma."
"Okay, second worst mistake I ever made. Hey Dib, would you like an immortal purple kitten?" He looked between the two demons. Al had an over-large predatory grin, and Shauna was slowly shaking her head no.
"I don't think that'd be a good idea."
"She can talk." Dib noted the pleading in the (much) older man's voice and the now frantic shaking and clacking of Shauna's skull.
"Definitely going to go with a no." Dib honestly grinned when he heard Al 'aawww' in disappointment. It was, however, quickly removed from his face as Skool came into sight.
"YOU!" Dib was effectively bowled over by a small green, land-to-face projectile that was Zim.
"GIVE TO ZIM! RETURN IT TO ME, RETURN IT!" Zim's claws tore streaks through Dib's trench coat as Al forcibly pulled him off of the boy while Shauna helped Dib stand back up.
"Well now, that's just not appropriate behavior, boy." Gaz stared wide-eyed as her nightmare materialized, pulling Zim off her brother.
"I KNOW IT WAS YOU, DIB-STINK, I HAVE PROOF!" A leather eye patch was thrust out in front of Dib's face, which, again, Al forcibly removed.
"I wondered where that went, thanks boy-o." Zim landed gracelessly as he was dropped to the ground and Al replaced the eye-patch.
"YOU!" Say what you would, Zim was remarkably quick and agile. He'd actually climbed up Al's clothes to scream in his face.
Unfortunately for Dib, Al talking and Zim screaming at the same time made what the two were saying mostly unintelligible, but he managed to pick out a few words like "Zim" "Ship" Quiet" "Return" "Punt" and "Traffic" before Al did something that was just… Odd.
He ripped the small Irken off of his clothes, which left some unfortunately large tears in them, and literally punted him into traffic. Right out into the middle of the street and into the windshield of a car that was definitely speeding.
Dib stared as the car faded from sight, Zim screaming from his place embedded in the windshield.
"C'mon, you're gonna be la-BEEP-te. Damn."
AN/ Three references in this chapter, two from Disney and one that wasn't. Hey, ten chapters. I'm pretty happy with this, considering how easy it is for me to lose focus when being the sole-author of a story. I just get so many smaller idea, and they refuse to go silent unless put into a media like paper or word.