"That was amazing!" Dib exclaimed as he and Kat ran through the hallway to the lunch room. "I really wish that I had my camera with me. That would have perfect to take a picture of!"

"That was an alien…I just met an actual alien!" Kat finally managed to say once they arrived at the lunch room. Her eyes were unbelievably wide from shock, but a huge grin was plastered on her face as well. "I can't believe you were actually right! That's bloody brilliant! But a little green kid with two antennae? Isn't that a bit clichéd?"

Dib shrugged his shoulders. "It is pretty incredible, though. I just wish that more people would believe me. Let's find my sister first, before we start discussing Zim."

"Ok, but what about getting something to eat?" Kat had only eaten a slice of toast before she had to leave, and her stomach had been protesting for a while now.

"Trust me; you do not want to eat anything here. Starving is a better option."

They sat down at a table next to a girl with dark purple hair shaped around her hair like fangs wearing a black dress and a skull pendant. She was completely immersed in the video game she was playing, and didn't acknowledge either of the newcomers' existences.

"Kat, this is my sister, Gaz. Gaz, this is Kat. Kat's new here and she believes me! She actually ripped off Zim's wig!"

"Then you're both crazy," Gaz said without even looking up.

"Gaz…don't be like that. You know Zim is an alien."

"So?"

"SO? What do you mean? Before it was only the two of us, defending the Earth on our own! Brother and sister fighting to protect a world that did not want our protection! Now we have a third! Now there is a new hope that the people of Earth will one day soon realize that I was and still am right!"

Gaz lobbed a chunk of a mysterious white mush on her tray that may or may not be mashed potatoes at her brother with her spoon, sending him falling off the table and hitting the ground with a loud smash as Dib's head collided with the floor.

"Are you OK, Dib?" Kat asked as she offered her hand to help the fallen boy back up.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks, Kat," Dib said, smiling as he took her hand and she pulled him up.

"Why does your voice have to be so annoying?" Gaz asked. "And you're being awfully trusting of the new girl. Remember the last time some girl was new here? She turned out to be Irken and tried to eject the Earth's core and mantle, and then fill it with snacks for the leaders of Zim's stupid species."

Dib snatched one of the napkins from his sister's tray while Kat turned to Gaz with a questioning look written on her face. Gaz had already returned her attention to the video game she was playing and went back to pretending the two others didn't exist. The questionable mashed potatoes came off with little difficulty, but left a red rash wherever it had come in contact with his skin, which was the entire right side of his face and a good portion of his hands from when he had tried to wipe it off with them at first.

Are you sure that you're OK? That looks really painful," Kat commented, directing her attention back to Dib when she noticed the rash on his face.

"This happens every time someone comes in direct contact with the mashed potatoes. That rash will fade in about ten minutes. Thankfully, my glasses prevented it from getting in my eyes. That would have been bad," Dib shuddered as he began to clean his glasses with the napkin. "You do have a good point though, Gaz. That thing with Tak was awful. Prove that you're not an alien, Kat."

"What? Of course I'm no—"

"Hellooo there, Kitten," a high-pitched voice from behind them said suddenly, interrupting Kat for the second time that day.

These cat nicknames were really starting to annoy Kat, but she turned around anyway to see who it was. She saw a blonde girl wearing far too much makeup (not to mention that a fifth grader shouldn't even be wearing makeup) flashing an obviously fake smile, showing two rows of blindingly white teeth. Taking one look at the girl, Kat could tell she was a snobby popular girl. Behind her were two other girls that seemed to flank her like guards. Kat recognized the girl on the blonde's left as the one who threw a wad of paper at Dib. After sending a scowl the purple-haired girl's way, Kat directed her attention back towards the apparent leader of the group.

"Hi, my name's Jessica, and this is Zita and Penny," the blonde said in a sickly sweet voice, motioning to girls on her left and right respectively as she said their names. "You must be lost, because there is no other reason why someone would want to sit with the crazy boy and his freak of a sister. Zita here tells me that this is your first day, and you don't seem insane. Why don't you hang with us?"

Jessica held her hand out, offering it to Kat. Kat, however, looked at the perfectly manicured hand like it was a glob of the skool's mashed potatoes.

"No thanks. I'd rather sit with intelligent people rather than popular ones," Kat rejected Jessica's offer in the same calm tone of voice that she had used on Zim. As a general rule, Kat tries to be as nice to everyone as possible, but whenever someone makes a cat pun about her name, something inside of her snaps. She's been hearing them for as long as she can remember, and they are never original. She doesn't even like cats.

"Are you sure?" Jessica's voice had lost some its sugary sweetness, Kat noticed with a smirk. The blonde kept her hand out stretched as an incredulous expression appeared on her face. When Kat did not reply to the question, Jessica's expression changed again, this time to one of anger. "Trust me, Kitten; you're going to regret this."

"But what you're going to regret is calling me Kitten. Twice. My name is spelled with a 'K' not a 'C,' not that anyone at this bloody ridiculous 'skool' knows what spelling even is. Even if the three of you did have a reasonable level of intelligence, I would prefer to 'hang' with people that aren't judgemental and superficial like you. How dare you call one of the most intelligent people in this school crazy? I can deduce every detail of your life at a glance, and I know that I most certainly do not want to be your friend. And ordinarily, I would go into great detail as to how I know that you drank orange juice and ate an omelette that your stay at home mother – no, father – made for you this morning while your mother, who is having an affair with her assistant, hugged you goodbye as your rushed out the door (you were nearly late for school) upon arriving home from her night shift, but I don't feel like wasting too much of my breath on someone with such a thick skull. Now, since you are clearly not wanted here, would you so kind as to piss off?"

"You're going to regret this," Jessica repeated, embarrassment written all over her features. The rage in her voice dared to surpass Kat's at this point. "You have just made a huge mistake."

With her last word hanging in the air, Jessica turned on the spot and began to walk back to her table, her two followers keeping pace right behind her.

Both Dib and Gaz were struck speechless at Kat's actions. They were so distracted at Kat's speech, that no one noticed Zim sulk into the cafeteria, sit down a few tables away, and proceed to stare at the group with a look of utter contempt.

"Um, sorry. I kind of overreacted…," Kat began to explain upon noticing the siblings' equally shocked facial expressions. "It's just that there are always girls like that at every school I've ever attended, and I've been to a lot of schools, and always humiliate and bully the rare, intelligent students. I swear, it's like they're programmed to. I guess I got tired of them always doing the same stuff. It gets depressing after a while. Plus, cat puns annoy me to no end."

"Impressive. You have just earned my respect by doing that, alien girl," Gaz said when she recovered from shock. The slightest trace of a grin appeared on her face before disappearing in the next moment, "even if you are kind of annoying," she mumbled under her breath.

"Thanks, I guess. I'm really not an alien, though."

"Sure you're not," Gaz returned her attention to her game and once again proceeded to act as if the other two at the table didn't exist.

"I've never seen anyone stand up to Jessica like that!" Dib exclaimed. Joy replaced his shock after he processed what had happened. "She is going to try to get you back for that, you know?"

"I'm sure she will," No discernible worry showed on Kat's face. In fact, she seemed more amused by the confrontation than anything else. "What's the worse she can do to me, though? Spread a nasty rumour? I'll be gone in a few months when my dad has to move again. She can't really hurt me."

"If you say so. But 'piss off'? I didn't even know that was a phrase. And how could you have possibly known all of those things about her?"

"Oh right, my not-an-uncle uncle is from London. So sometimes random British slang comes out, usually when I'm mad. I don't even know why. He almost never got mad himself. As for how I deduced all of that about Jessica, it actually requires a bit of backstory. Do you know who Sherlock Holmes is?"

Dib shook his head. "Not a clue."

"I figured as much. He is a detective from a two hundred and seventy-six-year-old book series, after all." Kat told him. "He was really popular, though, and had many different recreations up until the mid-21st century, when most of the literature was lost and the First Internet was deleted during the Final Great War. The character practically disappeared after that. I think I have one copy of maybe the six or seven that still survive today. Uncle Mycroft gave it to me a few years ago as a birthday present. Oops, sorry, I went off on a tangent.

"Anyway, Sherlock was able to look at a person, observe things about their appearance or what they said, and then deduce things from those observations. He worked as a consulting detective for Scotland Yard, sort of the British version of the FBI, and helped solve murders and other crimes. I want to be a detective when I get out of these stupid schools, and Sherlock is sort of my role model. So I've been practicing deducing people for a few years, and I'm getting a lot better at it."

"That sounds pretty interesting, actually. Of course, it would be a lot better if there was something paranormal about it," Dib replied. "But what specifically about Jessica told you what she had for breakfast and those things about her parents?"

"Right, sorry. She had a smeared, orange stain on her skirt with a few yellow chunks still embedded in the fabric that reeked of citrus and egg, so orange juice and omelette then. The only way omelette portions could have stayed embedded in her skirt for so long after breakfast is if they were applied with force. The most logical way this could have happened is if she had spilled orange juice, and then attempted to wipe it off with her napkin that already had particles of her omelette on it. She doesn't seem like the type of girl to willingly go out while knowing her clothes were stained, so she must have been in a rush to leave, preventing her from changing.

"Either Jessica's mother or father had to have been a stay at home parent because no one with a job has time to make their child breakfast anymore. She also smelled of two distinct brands of men's cologne. While one had to have come from her father, the most likely source of the second would be someone her mother was seeing in addition to her father. Of course, it's possible her father was the one seeing the second man, but the extreme rise in homophobia since the late 21st century makes that the less likely option. Jessica seems like the type of girl from a family that is just as judgmental and stereotypical as most of the population.

"The mother having working nights is the most probable for her occupation because the lack of time such couples see each other and the distorted sleeping patterns would have driven a wedge between the two, causing the wife to seek company from someone else. Someone she worked with is most likely because her schedule would have left little time for meeting someone outside of work. The night shift theory is also supported by the fact that she would not have had time to change or shower before greeting her daughter, which would leave the man's cologne on her when they hugged." Kat concluded.

"Wow! That was great! You could tell all of that just by looking at her?" Dib asked.

"Yeah, but I can only get that much information occasionally. It's taken a lot of practice for me to be able to do that, and I'm still not very good." Kat blushed at the praise and looked down at the table to hide the red seeping into her cheeks.

"Well. What can you tell about me?" He challenged.

Kat looked up at Dib and studied him intently. Hmm… The rash from the mashed potatoes is nearly gone, but I can't see anything in particular other than that… But his glasses look a bit weird. Yeah, the metal is bent in lots of different places, and it even looks like someone tried to fix them, although rather poorly. How did they get bent in the first place, though? Knowing the way other kids treat Dib, they probably wound up in that way from Dib getting beat up. The poor repair job looks like he tried to fix them himself, so why didn't his parents help? Oh, it's because they didn't know. Maybe they didn't care. Either way, Dib clearly has a difficult relationship with his parents.

"Kat? Hello?" Kat had been staring at Dib for almost a minute without saying anything, and it was beginning to worry him.

"I'm fine, I was just thinking. I can't get much, but I can tell that you've been beaten up a lot and that you have a difficult relationship with your parents," Kat finally answered.

"Yeah. I get beaten up a lot and I see my dad maybe once or twice a year. Even he thinks I'm insane. How did you tell all that just by looking at me?"

"Your glasses," Kat said simply.

Another loud ring echoed through the entire school that signaled the end of lunch and the beginning of recess. Kids raced out of the cafeteria even faster than they did to leave the classroom.

Kat wanted to get out of there as fast as she could, eager to avoid another interaction with Zim. She had noticed him staring at the three of them and it freaked her out. The prospect of alien life somewhere else in the universe had always fascinated her, but now that she had seen it with her own two eyes…she wasn't quite so sure if the idea appealed to her anymore.

Once the three of them were outside, Gaz left them to sit down somewhere and play her game alone.

"Hey, Kat, you don't look so well. Is something wrong?" Dib asked.

"Yeah—not really—I mean—I guess the shock is starting to wear off and now panic is setting in?" she replied, unsure of exactly she was feeling. Kat didn't know how she was supposed to react. Fear? Excitement? Disbelief? The revelation that the universe was indeed populated by little green men with antennae was unsettling, to say the least. "How did you react once you found out?"

"Well actually I saw him crash his land when he first arrived. It wa—" Kat let out a long sigh, cutting him off.

"Of course you saw him land here! Why not? Why not?" she plopped down in the grass where they were standing and buried her face in her hands.

Dib sat down beside her and raised his hand as if to offer her some comfort, but eventually decided against it and let his arm fall down to his side. He wasn't good with people, and any attempt at reassuring her would probably make everything worse. They sat in silence for a while under the shade of a tree, listening to all the other kids enjoying their recess.

After a few more minutes of awkward silence, Kat finally spoke up. "You know? This is, without a doubt, the most interesting first day I've ever had—and that's saying a lot!" she said with a forced laugh. "So…what did you say Zim's species was called?" she asked after Dib still hadn't responded.

"Oh yeah! They're called Irkens. They have these robot companion things, but I'm pretty sure Zim's malfunctions or something? And their entire system of government is based on who's the tallest which really doesn't seem like that good of an idea for a basis of government, but hey, that's just my opinion. They've managed to create an entire space empire thing so I guess it's effective," Dib was so excited to finally have someone talk about Zim with without being dismissed or being called crazy! Maybe his luck was about to change.

"Hey, Dib?"

"Yeah?"

"Zim is here to take over our planet, isn't he?"

"Yeah…"

"And no one else believes you?"

"No one but my sister, and she doesn't really help me at all."

Kat suddenly jumped up. "Well I'm going to help you! I promise. You're not alone in this anymore." She held out her hand to help him and he took it gladly. As soon as they were back on their own two feet, the bell rang signaling the end of recess.

The rest of class passed by in a blur. It was full of sharing information and whispered plotting and pretending to pay attention to Ms. Bitters. School was over before they knew it and they packed up their bags and (avoiding all of the kids jumping out of windows in a mad dash to escape their prison) walked outside together.

"So remember, you're coming over to my house tomorrow after school so I can show you everything else I have collected on Zim. Once you're up to speed, we can start devising our new plan of attack on Zim!" Dib said excitedly. Kat giggled at his enthusiasm.

"I won't forget don't worry," she assured him. "Besides, I'll see you in school before then and we'll be walking to your house together; it's not like I'm going to have a chance to forget."

"Right, right, I know," they both smiled; glad to have made a friend today. "Well, I have to wait for Gaz. See you tomorrow, Kat!"

"Bye, Dib," she said waving as she left.

Eight hours ago she had been walking up this same street to get to her new school. Eight hours ago she didn't know Dib or Zim. Eight hours ago her world was so small.

Holy shit, she thought to herself. I just met an alien today.