This is the chapter where things start diverging from canon. Buckle up, and I don't own Invader Zim, but I do own a very nice looking cactus, which is pretty much the same thing, but quieter!
Difference #2: Dib is actually schizophrenic. It doesn't show often because he takes his meds.
"…Doom! Doom doom doo doom doooooom!"
It had been six months.
SIX. MONTHS. WITH THAT GODAWFUL SONG. Where did that thing keep all of that energy?
On the bright side, all of the muscle relaxants and tranquilizers that had been in Zim's food during his little stay on Foodcourtia had worn off, finally enabling him to think. To think! Oh, and to plan.
"Doom doom doo-doom!"
Well, not think that clearly.
"GIR… would you… stop… singing." No signs of GIR slowing down any time soon. "'Go commit genocide,' they said. 'It'll be easy,' they said. Well, they can go suck a-"
Right as Zim was reaching over to strangle the little bugger, the voot's controls flashed. "Proximity warning: planet ahead."
"GIR! We're here! Finally!"
GIR held up a finger. "Doom doom doom the end! Ooh, what's that?"
"Planet… Earth!" Zim read off the information panel. "This must be the place! Okay, first, we need a base of operations."
"Hee-hee!"
"Focus, GIR! This is where your information gathering skills will come in handy."
"Yes, my master!" GIR said as his eyes started turning red again, but quickly flashed back to blue as he pressed himself against the voot's windshield. It descended through some clouds, getting closer to the ground.
"You have to observe what these… earthinoids… call 'normal.' Then, based on your observations, we make our disguises, and our home."
The voot sped toward a large, but eerily empty city indicated by a flickering neon sign that read "Welcome to Leave!" As in, welcome to the town of Leave, Michigan.
As they flew by, they passed over things like plastic flamingos, the 105.5 FM Wake the Fuck Up radio station, a lawn gnome, and multiple dark houses, before stopping at a gap between two houses and lowering into it creating a cloud of dust.
"Here! We build here!"
Zim marched out of the voot with a fairly serious expression, which was rather quickly wiped off of his face. "Whew! That was easy! GIR, what did you learn?"
"I saw a squirrel!" …What in the chicken fried fuck? "It was doin' like this!" GIR made some weird squirrel noises, which was pretty much the point where Zim realized that this thing was fucking useless.
"Concentrate, GIR! It's time for disguises!"
"I want to be a mongoose!"
"Shh! Quiet."
The voot started setting up to create the disguises. Zim looked around on the control panel for some disguises, including Jhonen Vasquez.
"Too ugly! Too stinky! That one looks good," he finally said, pointing at a picture of himself with contact lenses and a toupee. The voot opens up, enclosing him in an egg-shaped pod. "Augh! Why does it hurt?"
He emerged, looking like the misbegotten child of Elvis Presley and Larry the cucumber.
"Master? Master, where'd you go?"
"I'm right here, GIR! It's me! And keep it down, are you trying to wake up the whole planet?"
"Yes."
"For you, I'm thinking, maybe, a dog."
"Can I be a mongoose dog?"
Zim choose a disguise before pushing GIR forward. "Today… we become… the enemy!"
The pod closed around GIR, made an ominous shaking sound. It opened to reveal… a fucking green dog. Perfect, Zim thought. Beautiful! No. No, Zim.
"Ingenious! Now, all we need is a home!"
He pulled out a capsule that unfolded into a drawing tablet and a pen. Zim started doodling a house on it that might have looked fine… if, firstly, he'd colored the house himself and not let the tablet do the work, and secondly, lived in the 50s. "Some windows, a couple of little animal things in front. There!"
He collapsed the pad back into a capsule, which ejected a drill out of the end. After pushing the capsule into the dirt and letting the drill do the rest, he scrambled behind a fire hydrant and called out "GIR, hide!"
GIR simply squeaked his merry way over to the sidewalk.
A house grew out of the ground. That's really the only way it can be described without typing excessively. First the framework, then green walls and a purple roof. A fence and lawn ornaments sprouted from the dirt, while an underground lab expanded downward. Tubes shot out of the sides of the house, attaching to the neighbors' houses and stealing whatever electricity that they were using.
Some lights in the neighborhood turned on, but not many, as this was the quiet side of Leave. Babies cried, car alarms went off, someone screamed "my car!" Zim disregarded all this, choosing to stride toward the front door.
"Welcome home, son!" A pair of badly disguised robots exclaimed as he opened the door.
He paused. "Whoo! Step one went smoooothly."
He marched through the house, stopping in the kitchen to flush himself down the toilet. The toilet dropped him into an elevator, which he chose to monologue in.
"The Tallests were wise to choose me," he said to no one in particular. "This planet won't know what hit it after I've learned its weakness- ow, these lenses are all scratchy!"
The elevator opened to a cockpit-like area with a computer- merely temporary until the rest of the lab was set up. The base was finished outwardly, but was still growing underground. He proceeded to type with the keyboard, intent on finding info.
"Now, to find the best possible way of 'learning' about this sad, filthy little planet. The more we know, the sooner we can conquer this spinning ball of… filthy… ugh! …Dirt."
The next morning, Ms. Bitters stood in front of her class, introducing the new kid.
"Class, I would like to introduce the newest, hopeless appendage to the student body. His name is Zim. Zim, if you have something to say, say it now, because after this moment, I don't want to hear another sound from you!" She hissed before slithering back to her desk.
"Hello, friends. I am a perfectly normal human worm baby," he said as his classmates looked tired and uninteresting, except for Dib, who pointed at him accusingly. "You have nothing, absolutely nooothing to fear from me. Just pay no attention to me and we'll get along just fine."
"Take your seat now, Zim." Zim walked with his arms outstretched in pride to an empty desk. "Today's lecture is about outer space… and how it will eventually implode in on itself!"
Zim waved his arms in the air.
"Yes, Zim?"
"Two questions. In the event of, say, a full-scale alien invasion, how prepared do you think this planet's defenses would be? Teeell me."
Ms. Bitter paused. "As I was saying, the universe is just doomed. Doomed, doomed, doomed!" Et cetera, et cetera. She only stopped when she left to get some more coffee.
Dib finally spoke up. "Okay, am I the only one here who sees the alien sitting in class?" The students looked around, clueless. "There! Right there!"
Zim sweated. As a member of a military organization, pointing fingers made him very nervous. "That's no kid! That's an alien! An alien! One of the monsters I've been talking about!" He quickly pressed a button on his sleeve, revealing a self-destruct button. Well, nice knowing me, he thought. "He's here to conquer Earth!"
The girl behind him objected. "Aw, not this again. You're crazy!" Some other students whispered things like "schizo" and "must be off his meds." Zim relaxed and booped away the button. No one would believe this kid.
"What about his horrible green head!" Dib yelled, getting up.
"Insolent fool boy! It's a skin condition."
"And he's got no ears! Is that part of your 'skin condition,' Zim? No ears?"
Zim looked embarrassed, which he'd practiced in the mirror a few hours beforehand. "Yes."
The student looked at him angrily. One boy said, "Man, Dib. You think that just 'cause someone's different, you can call them an alien?"
Another one commented, "I guess you and Old Kid are aliens too, huh?"
"How's it going?" Old Kid called from the back.
Dib dashed for the board, then sketched a man labeled "our people" and then an Irken labeled "not our people."
"Okay, see, this is us-" He pointed to the man. "-now over here, over here is Zim," he said, pointing to the alien. "See the difference? Anyone? Anyone? Questions?"
Zim had one, how did he know what an Irken looked like? He and his people were none of that boy's business! At least nobody believed him.
"Yeah, what's wrong with you?" Another classmate replied. "All you talk about is aliens and ghosts and seeing Bigfoot in your garage."
"He was using the belt sander!"
"Yeaaah, he's always saying stuff. I remember that one time-"
"Hey, you just got here! Don't let him trick you! I know what I'm talking about, and it's sitting right there!"
"Well, he does look pretty… weird." Oh, no.
"Yeah! And he is sitting!" Oh, hell fucking no!
"You see? Actual proof that all the things I've been saying are actually right! Finally, a way to prove that I'm- that I'm-"
"I'm crazy!" Zim muttered, mocking Dib.
"Now that makes sense," the girl behind him remarked.
"Man, we almost believed him!"
Black bars appeared above and below Dib's face, making it appear widescreen as he stared at Zim.
"What are you doing?" Ms. Bitters had returned with her coffee.
Dib put down his black textbooks, which he had been holding around his face. "Um, letterboxing. It's dramatic."
"Sit down."
As he did so, Zim raised his hands again. "You didn't answer my second question."
Ms. Bitters sighed. "Make it quick, the bell's about to ring."
"I found this in the bathroom, what is it, and is it explosive or flammable?" Zim held up a plastic baggie with something green inside.
"Do I need to call the police on you, young man?" Shit, he'd done something illegal? His classmates were doing an awful lot of giggling for some reason, and the girl behind him had made an "oooooooh!" sound.
"No, no. These are, um, grass clippings! I see it now."
"The bag says 'marijuana' on it in capital letters."
Zim's blood pumping organ skipped a beat.
"That is my nickname."
The bell rang and students rushed out of the Skool, some even climbing out of the windows to escape. Zim slowly went down the front steps, nearly walking out into traffic before somebody caught him.
"Hey! I can't expose you to the world if you get hit by a car!" Dib snapped, hanging onto his collar.
"What is a car?"
"Should've let him cross," Gaz snickered, not looking up from her Gameslave. "Thin out the herd."
"Let go of me, earthboy!"
"You think your cruddy little disguise can fool everyone, but I know the truth!" Dib wasn't letting go of him.
"No one will believe you."
"They'll believe if they see you without your disguise!" Dib pulled some odd-looking handcuffs out of his jacket, which his classmates had seen in there whenever he gesticulated too much. But they never said anything about it because, hey, his personal life was his own business. "I ordered this from one of my UFO-zines."
"Ooh, pretty. What is it?"
"Sleep cuffs. Guaranteed to render anything with a brain unconscious."
So it doesn't work on humans, Zim thought, unaware that his thought was such a great burn that he'd probably have to call a hospital. "How do you know if they work?"
Pause. "I'm going to find out right now!"
He attempted to jump Zim, but missed, letting him run off. The two dashed down the street. "Leave me alone! I just want to go home and be normal!" He made it into an alleyway, grabbing a bra on a clothesline and slid down, only to see that Dib had somehow wound up on the other side. He let go of the bra, falling into a crate of oranges and slowing Dib down significantly, along with snagging the bra on Dib's pointy hair.
Okay, home was only a block or so away. He could do this. In the middle of an otherwise rather quiet street, he grabbed one of those "car" things and climbed to the top of a fake ice cream cone. Through speakers, the "car" boomed that people's existence were meaningless without ice cream.
Leave was a very odd town.
Dib attempted to follow him on the street as Zim jumped onto a passing school bus. Unfortunately for him, that was when the tube of screaming children approached a stop light. Dib followed suit, scaling the side of the bus and approaching him with the sleep cuffs.
"Maybe they'll name your autopsy video after me!"
Suddenly, the traffic light turned green, launching Zim off of the roof of the bus and onto a fence. Hey, he was alive! "Ha! See you, Dib! Pitiful huuuuman- augh!" He was cut off by a rampaging dog attacking him.
Dib hopped off of the bus and ran across the narrow rail without hesitation. Jesus, this kid must've been in the circus or something. Like, I understand that Zim could do that because he has military training, but the other guy has no excuse!
Zim crawled out of a bush, looking a bit beaten up, but an encounter with a guard dog could've gone worse. While Dib was looking around in the bushes for Zim, because he had to come up for air at some point, Zim pushed him off of the fence and took his place.
Zim opened his communicator and yelled into "GIR! I don't have much time, get over here!"
"Yes sir!" Seconds later, GIR was hovering next to him via some kind of jet propulsion.
"Get me out of here now, GIR, now!"
"Okeedookie!" He squealed before putting Zim on his back.
"Wait a minute- what are you- what the- AAAAAH!"
In the same timespan that it had taken GIR to get to Zim, they hit the door of his house.
"Good work, GIR," he mumbled, adjusting his weird pompadour thing.
"There you are!"
Oh. Oh shit, he knew where they lived now! "GIR! Get inside! Hurry!"
"Welcome home, son!" The roboparents announced as they rushed themselves inside. Dib looked fucking pissed, what with being beaten up, dirty, and having a bra on his head.
"You can't hide forever!" They heard him through the door. "And if you can… then I'll wait forever! I've been preparing for this my whooole life-" He was cut off by a gnome vaporizing his sleep cuffs, leaving him holding nothing but a bra. "…I'm going to go home and… prepare some more!"
"I feel good about today!" He said cheerfully. Good for him, because he was probably the only major character that did so at the moment.
On the Massive, the Irken armada's flagship, the pilots were going about their business, measuring speed and core temperature and radiation levels and countless other variables when a call came in.
"Incoming transmission from… Earth?"
"What is… Earth?" Tallest Purple wondered.
The pilots answered the transmission, which put Zim's face on the screen, calling from the newly constructed lab. "Invader Zim reporting, sirs. The mission goes well. But surely you expected that from me."
Purple's jaw came unhinged; Red dropped a perfectly good soda. "Zim? You're alive?"
"Yes. So very alive!"
"Hello!" GIR said, peeking his head into the top of the screen. The robot was okay, too? They didn't think that thing would activate, much less last for more than five minutes!
"And full of goo! Miiision goo! Don't be surprised if I take care of the humans before the armada even gets here! Well, I've much work to do, so: Invader Zim, signing off!" GIR fell from whatever he was holding onto, crashing onto Zim. "Oh, my spine!"
Red and Purple glanced at each other in disbelief.
"Hey, you've got another call from Therockia!"
"What, the prisoner of war planet? What do they want?" Red asked.
"Only one way to find out," Purple sighed, hoping that this wouldn't be more bad news.
What appeared on the screen was a prison, roughly. Prisoners were rioting and attempting to scale the walls, as a good chunk of the roof had been blown off by a bomb. A panicked warden screamed into the mic, "Code 19! We need backup! Make sure that nobody gets off the planet!"
"Look behind you, you're not doing a very good job of that."
A Vortian in the background was going for an escape pod. The warden whipped around, shouting "OH NO YOU DON'T, YOU SMEET MURDERING PIECE OF-!"
The transmission cut off into static as the warden tackled the Vortian into an open escape pod, which sealed and launched out into space.
The Tallests gaped.
"This is just perfect."
Ten minutes later, a drug addict was raging.
"THIS IS JUST PERFECT!"
The warden was becoming a serious problem. Som Tam looked up. Wherever they'd landed, it was cold and wet enough to snow, and the warden was ducking under a tree. But Doctor Tam did not care! Fuck the warden, she was her own person again!
"I'm free! I can eat whatever I want and not that gloppy stuff from prison!"
This period of joy did not last for long. "You! You ruined my life!" The warden had pulled a laser and had it pointed at her. "I just lost my career, my home, and my tranquilizers! Do you know what the side effects of tranq withdrawal are? Nausea, fever, sweating-"
"Hey, wait-wait-wait- your, your thing is beeping!"
The warden rummaged through her PAK and fished out something that looked important. Huh, looks like something really was beeping.
"There's another Irken on this planet! Yes!" She aimed the gun towards Som Tam again. "South! We're going south."
"Okay, okay, I'm going!" Doctor Tam grumbled as the warden marched her along, neither of them knowing that the gun's batteries were depleted. The two began their journey south, out of Canada, and towards an angry pickle gnome named Invader Zim. And the "invader" was silent.
Reviews are appreciated! The pilot's up next, though it's, uh... it's going to be an editing nightmare. You'll see what I mean.