Kingdom Crossovers

by HVK

A reformed Invader Zim has been chosen by the Keyblade and travels the multiverse alongside Calvin the magical alchemist and Hobbes the tiger knight, while in the shadows, a hidden conspiracy seeks to conquer the multiverse with monsters born from a dark titan with a hollow heart.

3. Death of A World

Hi, y'all, once again! I sincerely hope you like this chapter, and I beg of you, please leave signed reviews so I can reply to reviews! PLEEEEASE! Everytime someone leaves an unsigned review, I do something CRAZY! Don't let my psychiatrists go insane again! Even though it's funny...

Disclaimer:I do not own anything except for my unique spin on Kingdom Hearts, or the following poem. Even though it sucks.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

-T.S. Eliot

The shadows come.

From nowhere and everywhere they have originated,

every wound they leave stays bleeding and numb.

Everyone they touch fades, their light blown out as the dark hunger is sated;

The earth quakes at the approach of such unnatural beasts

And everything their tainted claws touch crumbles

their marks are nothing, leaving it a sorrowful salve at the least

And to grasp at their simple fact, the heart stumbles.

Their monstrous visage defies logic and reason,

their absence of such easily shown.

And they feed upon nothing brought by the turn of the seasons.

But hunger carving them hollow is all they have known,

and mercy a concept they know naught

From the dark skies they descend,

Upon us, until the last battle with us has been fought.

They desire to cease hungering, and there is they will feed

Within each mortal there is a light, and it is this that they so desperately need.

But within the fading confines of a dying world,

there is one last soul whose light calls.

Another fate has yet to be fully unfurled,

And he has no desires to take that most dark of eternal falls.

They come for him, and flee from him,

As he lies unaware of the world's demise

they feast on the burning lights within the unknown. He awakens, going to the world's rim

Thus, a journey begins as so many others fade into nothing, and the darkness grows in greater size

And the world falls and is rent within Oblivion's dark maw, and one hears the light's call.

For the most part, the night was quiet. Even at Zim's house.

Gir got it into his head to watch a movie, which was why he had been relatively quiet.

Zim wasn't aware of this at the moment, being in his basement and operating on his Pak. He had a vauge idea of installing a holographic map in it, for reasons he forgot about five minutes into the installation process. It had something to do with keeping track of things and not getting lost in Mexico again.

He'd finished the new installation about the time Gir was the middle of the third viewing of the film.

Zim cracked his neck and rubbed his wrists; his joints always got sore after a while of doing this sort of thing. He leaned back against the chair, groaning contently. Zim wasn't exactly sure why he did this until it hurt; it was just one of the characteristics about him that he just accepted and went with. Granted, this ambivilant attitude of his was part of the root of his problems, but that was something he was working on.

He grunted and stood up, turning around as the light from the lights in the room glinted off the two vertically postioned metallic ports in his back; they were shaped a bit like the three 'spots' on his Pak, but those were much wider, whereas these were narrow and hollow.

Apparently reacting to some kind of signal, the Pak floated up in the air, hovering to the appropiate location; magnetic clamps secured them on as thin cable slid out of the ports on the Pak and into Zim's body, connecting into the cybernetic bases within Zim's spinal column. The dull spots on Zim's Pak turned a red coloration as the biocurrent in his body flooded into the Pak, activating it; he felt a brief rush as his two minds connected, becoming a smaller louder and better one.

He clicked a button on a nearby computer console; a port opened up in it, the controls moving away from it. One of the spots on Zim's Pak opened up, and a thick tentacle ending in a clamplike thing slid out; plugging into the port.

Zim closed his eyes as a screen lit up, a thoughtful expression on his face as a blue cursor sped down a selection of dates, ending at today. The screen flashed bright magenta, revealing an empty computer document as the light flash disappered.

A crease appeared between Zim's eyeridges as words rapidly appeared on the screen, scrolling down as they appeared in a rapid speed most writers would give their eyeteeth to be able to perform.

A few minutes later, he abruptly stopped, disconnecting the Pak-arm from the console. The port in the console disappeared, and Zim overlooked the document a few times, deciding it was satisfactory.

After his pilgramage, he'd decided to start a journal to record his thoughts on the day; he believed that doing so might aid his already formiddable discipline(unfortunately, his ephininy only seemed to open his eyes to the abombinable way he regarded the world and everything in it, and not his other flaws). That, and for the sheer nostalgic joy of looking back on one's own past thoughts.

As to why he did it on a computer, that was a simpler question. Doing it electronically was much easier and less of a hassle than doing it by hand, and besides; it was cool. And it was true he could simply record his thought literally on his Pak and up-load them later, but what was the fun in that?!

Deciding that today's entry was good enough shortly after completing it was a little odd, but he had a strange compulsion to hurry up and get upstairs for some reason.

Then he remembered; it was Gir's Movie Night. Of course, with Gir, every five and a half seconds spent in front of the TV was his Movie Night when the robot was so inclined, but this was a Zimandate, and as such, deserved his complete and total attention.

On a sudden impulse, he turned around and looked at the room.

It wasn't large, big enough to serve as a private workspace for his more theoretical works. He kept his record computer station here, and a few hologram projecters for his thinking sessions, but that was it.

He had plenty of work to do. Work that could make them rich! And famous!

On the other hand, Gir loved spending time with him, no matter what the occasion. He rarely noticed when Zim wasn't there, or if he'd sent a robot double to fool Gir, but it was the principle of the thing.

"Ooh, what a quandary!" Zim moaned. Work or Gir? Work or Gir?

And, as things often did for Zim, the situation resolved itself. In a manner.

Admist a short and energetic guitar riff, a small sunburst cloud appeared by Zim's shoulder, gradually dissapiting to reveal a small tiny version of Zim, about a foot tall, with brighter versions of his clothes popped up by his shoulder floating in midair through a pair of disembodied feather-furry wings with a bit of a dragonfly-ish look to them, sitting right by the little guy's Pak. He had a small aura of light emanating from his skull, and his eyes were light red. His hands were folded demurely behind his back, below a yellow-gray electric guitar slung over his back on a bandolier, possibly the one that was strung while prepicipating his arrival.

Initially mistaking the sound of it's arrival for an intruder with a penchant for noise, Zim wildly looked around the room, than saw the small cherubic entity that had popped out of mid-air and was currently watching him patiently. Seeing it, Zim visibly relaxed. "Oh, it's just my shoulder angel." The aformentioned shoulder angel gave a friendly salute.

"You should go upstairs and have fun with Gir," Zim's shoulder angel suggested in a higher pitched though more muscial voice than Zim's that for some reason had a bit of a South-western accent. "It's the right thing to do! And it'll definitely be interesting, if not outright fun."

"Don't listen to that guy!" An equally high-pitched though Nevadean voice said from mid-air before the Irken could reply to the cherub's suggestion. Another small figure appeared, popping into existence from a smokey cloud that made Zim start hacking. His clothes resembled Zim's and might have been dully darker versions of his clothes under all the filth, dust and soot caked over them. And that was disregarding their horribly frayed condition. His eyes were so dark red they were almost black, his hands terminated in sharp claws, and a pair of ragged leathery wings with ragged fur coupled with beetle wings poking out of the apex's of the wing's 'finger bones' through the fur. A big spear with three angled blades was sheathed on his back, with a whole lotta notches on it. If Zim had the sort of mind that made random trivial connections, he might have noticed that the darkling had a slight resemblence to the psychotic being that had evidently gotten it's name from the medieval list of The Seven Deadly Sins from his dream a while ago. Actually, Zim did have the sort of mind, but he barely remembered the dream anyway, so the connection went several feet over his head.

The dark apparation pointed at Zim's shoulder angel acuusingly. "That loser's trying to lead you down the path of righteousness; I wanna lead you down the path that's fun!"

Zim's shoulder angel snorted.

"Hey, what's that supposed to mean?" Zim's shoulder devil said angrily.

"Oh, you have to be kidding me. You basically say that the path of Justice is boring and stupid, and you ask mean why I disparage you? Here's your sign." The angel flew by the devil and laid a big I'm Stupid roadsign on the miniture sociopath's neck.

"Hey! You're a conscience! What the heck does this mean?!"

"Surely ye jest! It's a sign to warn people away from you! Don't you watch Bill Engval?"

"I know what it is! All I'm saying is that it's rude!"

"Oh, boo-freakin'-hoo. Good is about doing what's right. That doesn't mean you have to be nice about it." The angel said smugly, holding up a bumper sticker that read I'm a righteous jerk and proud of it! There was a smaller typeface at the bottom of the sign, following an equally small asterick; But not in the bad sense.

"You hypocrite!"

"Ooh, I haven't heard that one before, loser!"

The shoulder devil zipped up to the angel's face right in front of Zim's neck as the Irken watched the two glare at each other. "Wanna say that again?"

"What, you're so pathetic I need to enunciate, loser?"

"Say that again."

The angel grinned as he emphasized each syllable of the insult. "Lah-ooooh-za-er!"

The badly dressed devil sputtered inchoherently as the angel floated away, looking pleadingly at the Irken. "Come on Zim. Look at him. He can't even dress himself in clothes that don't look like there home to over twenty-thousand species of lethal germs and bacterium. How could you possibly listen to him?"

The devil scooted up. "Because my way is easier and more fun! And I have to dress this way; I'm evil!"

Zim waved his hand in front of his face. "You don't bathe much either."

The angel crossed his arms. "Hygiene. It always comes to that, you know. Spiritual cleanliness may or may not be Godliness, but it never hurt to take one measly shower."

"Shaddup! Listen to me, pal! You could go up there and waste the rest of the night with that dumbass robot, oooor you could spend on things that will make you a legend!"

"Hey!" Zim and his personal angel said at once, equally infuriated. "He might be a-okay, he is a dumbass, but he's my/his dumbass!"

They looked at each other. Zim's shoulder angel gave him a big thumbs-up.

The shoulder devil groaned in annoyance. "See what this guy gets you? Cheap sentimentality. Now if you'd listened to me, you'd be practically ruling this joint!"

Zim and his angel looked at him with mostly narrowed eyes and identical crossed arms; the effect was not an angry but a disparging one that pretty much translated to What are you? Nuts?

"Ookay, bad example. Look, all I'm saying is: riches and fame? No bad thing. Though I do love bad things."

"Which explains the mirror obsession," the angel muttered.

"Jerk."

"This is going nowhere," Zim sighed.

"Now listen here, big guy!" His angel pleaded. "If there's one thing I know, it's that excessive money brings only complication! Too much wealth will call the unscruplelus and money-hungry to you!"

"Sounds like you're advocating selfishness," the devil muttered.

"Am not! And if you're famous-"

"You'll have people practically worshiping you and at your beck and call!"

"And you'll have the tabloids and reporters hounding your every step, waiting for the slightest slip-up so they can report it and make ill-gotten money over your misfortunate lack of good judgement!"

"Hey!" The Irken said indignantly.

"Oh, come one, Zim," the angel said wearily. "You know it, I know it, he knows it, and Gir knows it, Okay not Gir, but everyone knows you have almost no ability to judge situations and act accordingly. So fame and riches: not all they're cracked up to be. Like evil."

They looked at the tiny mini-devil. He was scratching his armpit, oblivious to their attention. He suddenly plucking a tick-flea hybrid from regions best left unmentioned; he squeezed it momentarily, disappointed at it's inability to feel pain and stuffed in his mouth, chewing with his mouth open and scattering the contents of his mouth with his needless messy mastication. "What?" the devil said with his mouth hanging open and a leg sticking out of his mouth, noticing their looks of revulsion. Zim blanched and slapped him away, but carefully; he didn't want that thing's diet anywhere on him.

The angel fluttered to Zim's shoulder(which didn't make much sense, as he always seemed to be flying without the aid of his wings, which were always moving anyway), alighting on the raincoat and causing a high-pitched voice to squeal "Oh physically attractive female paaaramour!". Ignoring this, he looked at the misfortunate anti-conscience and laughed. "Stupid, stupid devil. You keep trying to sway Zim's heart to your side again, but this territory-" he took off again and landed on Zim's head gracefully-"is officially a no-smoking zone!" He pulled a bazooka out of mid-air and blasted the anti-conscience for no reason other than he happened to dislike him with intense venom, which was as close as the embodiment of Zim's good side could come to long-term hatred.

The devilish spirit lay in the tiny crater, his charred limbs twitching momentarily.

Shaking himself and somwhoe discarding all the damage incurred from the missle,, the devil flew up to the angel, realizing the angel's metaphor.

He stuck his face right into the angel's, who recoiled from both the invasion of his Me Space and the devil's atrocious odor. "Ugh, what have you been eating?!"

"I don't eat! Much."

"You don't sweat either, but you still manage to put off some serious B.O., brother!"

"I ain't your brother!" The devil protested as Zim lost interest in the argument.

"True," the angel aquicsed, "but we are related in a sense, as we are the hallicinatory manifastions of Zim's internal moral conflict, the externalized form of his internal discussion."

"Yeah, but that's besides the point!"

"You mean like how my insults are way better than yours dispite the fact that I'm the angel and you're the devil's advocate?"

The devil blinked. "Did you just call me a lawyer? That is low, man. Even for you."

The angel looked shocked. "I-I didn't mean like that!"

"Well, that's what I heard."

"But I wasn's saying-"

"It's too late." The devil turned around huffily. "Now you hurt my feelings."

Zim's shoulder angel laid a hand on his arm. "I'm sorry."

The little sociopath's eyes turned to the hand slowly, seemed to consider it...

And grabbed it over his head, propped the surprised conciounse up with his head, and threw him across the room into a wall. Since they were hallucinations that Zim was no longer paying attention too, they no longer made any impact on the surrondings.

"You back-stabbing traitorus rapscallion!" The angel flew upwards, the light of his head turning into a plasmic flame not unlike what the sun threw off on an average basis. But, y'know, not DEADLY.

The devil blinked. "Does this guy come with subtitles? You'd think you could afford a few lessons with a sissy harp." He drew his trident.

The angel rolled his eyes, the solar flames from his head casting shadows around his shoulders. "We've been over this: I play an electric guitar, and you know it!" He brandished the instrument in question like it was some sort of weapon; the broad part of it sprouted sharp blades like that of an axe.

The sociopath was not particularily impressed. "Simpering sissy!"

"False-confident moron!"

"Lunatic!"

The angel stared at him blankly.

Zim's shoulder devil quickly recalculated. "Lemme try that again. Misguided lunatic!"

"Moron!"

With a mutual roar, they threw themselves at each other, weapons flung back for the first strike in a long drawn out and really friggin' fraggin' cool epic battle between the respective sides of good and evil within a single person.

And smacked right into each other full-bodily, falling down to the floor and sliding away from each other.

The angel got up first, grabbing his guitar. He flew at the devil, who dazedly grabbed his trident.

Angel hit devil, and the two of the rolled around on the floor, madly kicking, hitting and senselessly attacking each other as they rolled around the room, trading insults.

One couldn't exactly call it a fair fight with a straight face; more like a basic battle of equal lunatics.

They bounced around the room with their fight obscured by a small dust cloud, theologically based weapons long since disgarded as their grand battle degenerated into a Three Stooges fracas.

Zim was unaware of the whole thing; he was walking around the room shutting things off, turning machines inactive and generally setting things into a inoperative status.

He stopped to observe that the room was fine and started to leave it for another day.

He paused as the small dust cloud of war rolled over his foot, leaving a trail of filth and glowiness. He followed the trail to it's begining, frowning at the aftermath of the pointless fight.

He reached down and bravely stuck his hand into the dust cloud, grabbed the first solid thing he felt, and pulled whatever it was out.

He pulled it up to eye level, holding his shoulder devil by the leg; the devil had a choke hold on the angel, who undeterred had his arms and legs wrapped around the devil's body. Zim's anti-conscience had taken advantage of his one free limb by repetively punching the conscience wherever he could reach. This was counterbalanced by the fact that the angel was manicially and extremely rapidly biting the devil's arm like a rapid-fire bear trap; from the look on the devil's face, he was finding this both extremely painful and irritating.

"Ah-hem," Zim coughed loudly. The devil stopped punching his eternal enemy and looked up, appearing embarrased and releasing the good advisor from his choke hold. The angel continued snapping away at the arm like a psychotic hyena, unaware that the fight was over. Seeing this, Zim laughed loudly, lightly slapping his forehead at 'his' own antics.

The Irken quickly moved his inner sociopath away from his maniacal inner hero, forcefully disentagling him from the angel's grip; it made no difference, as the otherwise limp angel kept snapping at thin air.

Zim shook him and dropped the both of them; they both ignored the obvious intent behind that and fluttered up to his shoulders, his consciences(or lack thereof) dusting themselves off. His more obnoxious advisor only managed to spread the mess around, but you had to give him points for effort. Seeing that Zim was in a stable mood, they nonetheless floated away to a nearby shelf.

Zim's consciunce started to inhale heavily, thought it was probably more for a realistic benefit; as a hallucination, he had no lungs and therefore no need to breath. Seeing an oppertunity, Zim's anti-conscience raised his voice. "Just so you know, it might be good if-hey, why's everything off?"

So it all was. All of the machines had been deactivated, considerably dimming the room.

Zim glanced back at him through the corner of his eye. "It's simple, my inner sociopath; I made up my mind. Soon as I deactivate the base's non-vital devices, I'm going up with Gir."

The devil slumped to the ground, clutching his head. "Damn aching head!" He suddenly winced, flinching away from the angel, who looked bewildered. "What?"

"Aren't you going to hit me for swearing or something? The union's probably going to beat me for admitting this, but that guitar thing hurts."

The angel put his hands together, interlacing his fingers and tapping them against the backs of their respective hands. "Well, damn is a swear word per se. It basically means that which is cursed within the sight of God, so considering your nature..." he let the sentence trail off, allowing all to put two and two together.

"I get it. Alter boy."

"Monster."

Ignoring his external internal bickering, Zim cracked his knuckles in preparation. "As soon as I hit this button," he declared loudly, gesturing grandly to an important looking button, "The unimportant aspects of the base will shut off and I will be free for my night!"

"Who's he talking to?" His inner devil whispered to his shoulder angel.

"Haven't a clue. Certainly not us." he whispered back.

Zim raised his foot in what he thought was a dramatic fashion, holding himself in that fashion for reasons relating to an ancient Irken martial arts that also stimulated energy flows as to strengthen the body and spirit as one. Considering his weightly sandals, that wasn't easy. It was also pointless because his Pak regulated certain chemicals in his body in order to stimulate a minimumly optimum physical condition.

He stood there in that position, eyes closed and breathing softly.

Then his eyes flew open and he slammed the slates of his sandal down on the button.

Unfortunately, he neglected to consider that one: he was a lot stronger than he often realized, and two: the sandals were heavier than normal sandals were.

The result of those unconsidered things were that he hit the button way too hard, causing the console to tear itself out of the ground and flip into the air; in surprise, Zim tried to scoot away until he tripped out of a sandal and fell on the ground as the console fell on him.

The two of them winced at the loud whack!

Zim dazedly crawled out from under the wreckage and put his sandal back on, walking uncertainly towards the shelf.

The two hallucinations raised up two placards: the evil one held up a sign saying 6.7. The good one held up one that said It's A Boy! in bright blue letters. He looked up, blanched as he realized his mistake and flipped it around, revealing a big 7.9.

Zim shook himself out of his dizziness, noticing that the consciences were still there; they hurredly whipped their signs away; whistling innocently.

Zim frowned. "I already dealt with the issue here. So..begone! How do I make you guys-"

"That'll work," They both said as one, disappearing in their respective flashes.

"Whoo," Zim said in a tone approaching relief. He wondered momentarily exactly why he was getting visted by those guys more and more lately; he shrugged it off and walked up into a nearby elevator, totally unaware of the fact that he had just witnessed a harbinger of sorts.

Gir was situated in front of the TV as he had for the past three hours, chewing on something he'd found on the floor. Luckily for the world, it was a meatloaf that had recently begun to achieve sentient life and spontaneously devoulp the ability to sever molecular bonds on a large scale as well as delusions of granduer and a desperate need to replace humans(and humanoids)with organic meat by-products as the Earth's dominant life form. And people say miracles don't happen.

As Gir sat watching the TV, a mobile sack of bacon walked in through the door; it's burlap eyes were rimmed with fatty crusts, it's toungue was a wad of pork, and it's eyes were...well, we really don't need to know what it's eyes were made of.

The sack straightened it's mass of bacon hair, looking off-handedly arrogant. It didn't actually have a face and so lacked the ability to form expressions, but the feeling was there.

"Sir!" It called loudly. "The troops have finished their preparations! The taco elite are in position to crush the mass consumer's under their shells, the soda Aerial Patrol is prepared to spray sugery napalm upon the unspecting fools, the churritos have finished their sea military training and the submarine construction, and the little twisty cinnamon things are ready to be pathetically crushed underneath to make way for the glory of the Fast Food Empire!"

One of the aforementioned little twisty cinnamon things ran up by it, wearing a little target on it's head. "Um, sir, we in the infantry are protesting against our unfair treatment. We're called-"

"You'll be called whatever I damn please! Now what is the status report?"

The thingie sighed. "We're all ready to die in the most ludicrously pathetic fashion possible,"

The sack of bacon laughed evil-like. "Ah ha hah hah ha! Excellent, excellent! The front line of the enemy will laugh themselves to death, paving the way for a brutal onslaught! The Empire will remember you...for the first three hours of it's existence, that is! Ah ha ha ha hah! Isn't it funny?"

"Hilarious, sir." The flat tone went so far over the sack's head it was comparable to when a airplane misses a Ludicolo. Wait, that made sense at all.

"Precisely-ah, why do I bother? You're duller than a sack of potatoes."

A bag of french fries waltzed in. "I see last weeks sensitivity seminar still hasn't taken hold yet," it said in that sterotypical tone of voice attributed to flamboyent alternative lifestyles. You know who you are.

"We've been over this, Frank! Not in the middle of a world-domination rant! Now where was I? Ah yes. Ah hah hah hah ha! Ah hah hah ha ha!"

The villain's irritating laugh was cut short by an afro with legs pushing the fries aside("Well, I never!" the affronted fries said). "Yo!" it said in an accent. You know the one. I hope. May the crusty toenails of Hoch Pah Tooei help you if you don't. "I have come to rain musical doom upon you for your sins as my duty as a card carrying member of the Too Bad Sucker Revenge Union! Now you'll regret kicking that bum's hat just 'cause it was in the way!"

A horrifyingly catchy tune started up as the afro started to sing...and the sack of bacon stepped up. "Excuse me, Frightening Hair Piece of Melodic Disaster. Did you say something about kicking a hat?"

"Uh, YES I DID!"

"Not anything about world domination!"

"Indeed, misfortunate being!"

"You'll want next door. They're the kickers of derelict hats."

"Ah!" the afro exlaimed, running out the door. From the next house, the lights came on and people wearily got up. "Wake up, ya ingrates!"

"Huh?"

The afro started singing as it's muscial powers as a Bringer of Ultimate Doom! kicked in, and the snacks shuddered.

"Huh. That was weird. Anyway," the sack went on. "we are ready to conquer, my master!" It bowed, than looked up. "Master?" It looked around the room rapidly. "Hey, where...are...you."

It saw the last scraps of it's master, boss and all-around crazy leader go down Gir's gullet.

It sweatdropped. "Oh, this is so not good."

"What is it?" Every single member of the army it had mentioned in passing popped in the doorway, all unaware they were on the List of Gir's Favorite Food. "Is something the matter?"

And apparently, 'is something the matter' is the sentence that get's a robot's attention.

Gir turned around, noticing the invaders for the first time. He looked back at the TV and whipped his head back to the worried looking snacks as he took their reality in. Their existence dawned upon the robot's mind.

Gir's jaw went slack as he stared at them, nanobrain marveling at his good fortune. For about three point five milliseconds.

Than he jumped into the air with a cry of "SWITZERLAND!" and flew at them; the snacks stared incomprehendingly as their doom came to them, his eyes morphed into upside down simplisitic triangles to express his joy.

And then there was a loud crashing sound followed by the screams of the damned.

Five minutes later...

"Whoo!" Zim exclaimed as the elevator door opened. "What a horrible battle with the mutanted pig monster from the MALL! At least I'm home and-eh?!"

He stepped out, incredulous; he saw before him a huge mess from the door which sharply terminated a few feet from the door; it was a horribly greasey disgusting disaster area that trailed onto Gir in a more-or-less straight line from the mess area to the robot himself, who was covered in all manner of repulsive by-products.

"YEEEK!" Zim screamed, backing away from the mess and accidentally hitting the closed elevator door. Hypochrondiac thoughts raced through his mind as he raced off into the kitchen; moments later, he returned, decked out in his 'Howard Hughes' garb; a hair net on his head, a pair of microscope goggles over his eyes, pink sanitation gloves on his hands, a safety apron covering much of his body, and a pair of boxes, their insides wadded with tissue paper to pad his feet.

His Pak morphed into a bizarre contraption; a large forward facing nozzle extending over his head grew from the top, the middle of it became a round container for a thick greenish liquid, and two levers equiped with bright blue grips extended from the sides and ended at his reach.

Zim rushed to the mess, pumping down on the levers methodically as he bent down, the nozzle pointing directly at the greasy disaster area; the liquid bubbled as it flowed into the round structure affixed between the nozzle and the container itself.

"Prepare yourself," he said to the stuff staining his carpet, "to meet the delicious cleansing DOOM OF MY...THING I HAVE YET TO COMPOSE A NAME FOR!" He pressed on the levers harder than he had before.

A greenish foam spewed out of the nozzle, covering nearly the entire room in front of Zim in a light green substance. There was a brief moment as the foam came into complete contact with the germs, bacterium and other such filthy things. Then it suddenly puffed up, dissolving into vapor; the carpet appeared pristinely clean, if slightly moist.

Zim breathed a loud sigh of relief, looking with pleasure at the cleanliness around him. He stuck his tongue out; he stuck his tongue back in, satisfied with it. "Ah, pine fresh victory is mine."

His antannae twitched; he looked back at Gir. He saw the horrid mess Gir was in, caked in a horrific amount of repulsive stuff.

About five seconds later, Gir found himself, the couch, and most of the room covered in the green foam, his blinking eyes the only things that could be seen in the otherwise indistinguishable mass.

It vaporized, taking the grime with it.

Eyes twitching with paranoia, Zim abruptly tore through the house, spraying every single square inch with enough cleaner foam to eradicate a derelict homeless shelter's worth of bacterium.

He zipped back to Gir, exhaling deeply on Gir's head; he wiped the area in question with a rag; Gir giggled to himself at the attention.

The spray solvent nozzle disappeared back into the pack as Zim tore off the 'cleaning uniform', revealing that he'd been wearing his clothes right underneath it the whole time; Gir jumped on his back, pressing as many emoticons as he could reach, rejoicing in the many annoying noises; it sounded like a radio talk show massacre.

Zim ignored what Gir was doing; occupying the robot with the noises was one of the reasons he'd made it in the first place. The second reason was that he liked the noises, and he took a pleasure in driving others insane with noises being made every single time he moved. To date, he was publically forbidden from six dozen public walkways, at least with a body-wide megaphone.

He looked at the TV, eye's opening wider with a start as he recognized the film. "Is that Pulp Fanfiction?" he said, sounding incredulous.

"Uh huh!"

"And...you've been watching this movie for the past three and half hours?"

"I guess so!"

"Dispite the fact that it's only forty-five minutes long?"

"Yup!"

Zim stared at the robot on his shoulder. "You never cease to amaze me."

"And it's all for ninty-ninety six!"

The Irken's twitched. "How can you stand to watch the same thing over and over and over and over again!" he demanded shrilly.

"I dunno!" The android said cheerfully.

Zim's antannae shot straight up as the movie started running again. "That's it, I'M TURNING IT OFF!"

Gir fell to the ground, staring at Zim with such horror it was funny. "No.." he whispered melodramatically. "No, you can't! YOU CAAAAAAN'T!"

"I can."

"Wow, really?"

"Yes. Really." Zim said in a tone that gave new meaning to dead pan.

"Cooool. Wait. Oh yeeah: NOOOOOOOOOOO!" the robot shrieked, banging his legs against the ground.

"And!" Zim held up a forefinger to accentuate his remark. "I'll put on..." he paused to allow for dramatic build-up. "...A NEW MOVIE!"

Gir stopped crying instataeneously, holding his arms up and squealing for joy. "YAAAAAAAY!" he yelled, running into the couch on accident and falling down. He got up again, yelled "YAAAAAAAY!" and ran back into the couch, falling down. He repeated himself in thus manner as Zim went into the movie vault behind the living room.

It was the size of a secret vault for holding bootleg videos; it's walls seemed to be shelves housing video cassestes, DVDS, and more advanced formats lined up in obsessively alphebatized order.

Zim selected a more recent film, one he'd actually been in.

He looked at the aquisition, laughing madly. "AaaaHAHAHHAAHHAHAHA! BWAHAHAHAHHAHHAAAAAH!"

He suddenly broke off, coughing loudly. "Ah, that felt good."

He walked back into the living room and stared at it as the vault slammed shut behind him. It was covered in contained snacks in nearly every shape and form, all cluttered around the couch.

He raised an eyeridge. "Gir, where'd you get all these snacks so fast?"

The robot's head popped over the rim of the couch, smiling widely with upside-down triangle eyes. "It was an invasion! They were all like BWAHAHA! And you were like..." Gir was silent for a moment. "And the talking afro was like I GONNA YELL A LOT! And I was like SNACKIES! And the afro went away and I got the snackies with the DEATH RAY! And then, the squid man came back to tell us he was married to the mutant squid!"

Zim stared at Gir. "Uh...huh." he said.

"Do you think he'll come?" the man in a badly frayed police uniform said hopefully as he walked down the sewer tunnels.

A large gray cybernetic monster squid next to him roared loudly.

"Yeah, your father just has to give you away at the wedding!" the squid with a man's body said desperately. "I don't think we've should've told the robot."

The bigger squid roared again. Several robot zombies(supposedly, anyway; they didn't LOOK like zombies at all)rushed up and patted her sadly on the side of her head.

The squid grabbed the man with a tentacle, violently slamming him onto the ground.

"Ow! Honey-ow!-I know-ow!-you're ha-ow!-ppy but-ow!-not until-ow!-the-ow!-wedding!"

"Anyhow," Zim said, totally unaware of that interesting diversion. "You have forgotten the most important snacks of all: popcorn! WITH SALTED BUTTER!"

"Ooh yeah." Gir agreed. Then he screamed as if he was experianced a severe seizure. Then he stopped. "Where'd you get it?" the android asked curiously, pointing to the video.

"This?" Zim said, shaking it lightly. "Oh, that. Well, it's a long story."

Gir sat down on the couch.

Seeing an oppertunity to exercise what he saw as his flawless storytelling skills, Zim started pacing around the couch as he talked.

"First, a while back, I was approached by the human Thomas Pickles. He had found one of the mystery scripts-"

"What's that?" Gir asked innocently.

Zim looked back at him. "Interesting question. Ever hear of the Apportion Phenomonon?"

"Uh uh."

"Well, about a year or so ago, things started appearing. Images of ourselves as we are, might be or could be, video game conceptions, and scripts. Scripts that also came with stories. Stories of us: many people around this world, though not all.

"When they first appeared, no one knew what to do with them. At first, we thought they were just some one fooling around with reality altering devices, but all those who had such capabilities professed ignorance. They stopped using them for a few weeks to prove it, and sure enough, the things kept coming.

"I still don't know where they come from, or why they keep appearing, but we have made use of them: the best one's we keep for ourselves, mass-producing them and keeping them among friends." Zim nodded his head towards a picture of himself and Gir, on a green background with the Irken Empire's insignia in white; Zim was grinning broadly and extending a thumbs-up towards the viewer. Gir, in his dog disguise, was simply smiling with his tongue out and his eyes closed, arms wide open and a bunch of hearts around him.

"The stories are another matter. The worst of them are forcibly used on prisioners, making them read them in their sleep and even more horrible things. The best we keep for ourselves, the scripts auctioned off to the most capable producers and movie-makers.

"Anyway, one of the people that makes a lot of them is Thomas. He came to me a while back about one he kind of liked; this one." he tapped the movie he held. "He asked me and a few other people in the movie to play the parts; not much later, we had a movie! And this is it!"

He liked this movie; it reminded himself of the way he was now, though Dib disliked his villanous role in it. As he once put it once...

"Most of these movies make me look like a loser with delusions of grandeur!" Dib complained.

Zim stared at him, struggling to keep himself from laughing.

Dib glared at him. "Very funny."

"So, prepare the popcorn!" he announced loudly.

Gir zipped away, to the kitchen as Zim followed him.

"Master!" Gir yelled. "Mommy and Other Mommy gave me a recipe! For you!"

The Irken looked at Gir, attempting to deduce exactly who Gir was talking about. Gir would consider his parents the people who made him. So let's see, hmmm, that would be...ALMIGHTY TALLEST PURPLE AND RED?!

Zim gaped at Gir, utterly speechless. "The...the...the Tallest gave you a recipe? FOR ME?!"

Gir shrugged. "I guess so!"

Zim started twitching, then he squealed happily, making wordless sounds of pure joy.

Gir started banging his head against an invisible wall.

"Where's me floaty frog? I WANTS ME FLOATY FROG!!"

"The TALLEST! MEEEE!"

The overexcited duo ran into the kitchen, both yelling madly.

"Okay, Gir!" Zim said, wearing an apron and a chef's hat; he'd gotten a LOT of Earth clothes since he first came to conquer it, for reasons only Zim could possibly comprehend. He was standing on top of a miniture stepladder so as to reach the table. "Preparing the popcorn and the waffles should only take about...fifteen minutes! Let us begin!"

Fifteen minutes later!

"Wow, that was fast!" Zim remarked, holding a large plate of waffles.

"MOVIE MOVIE MOVIE!" Gir screamed, holding a huge bowl of popcorn.

They ran into the room and landed on the couch squarely; both of them put on those little drinking hats, Zim's extending from their hats, Gir's from the top of his head. Both were filled with alien soda.

Zim inserted the disc into the organic looked player that protruded out of the TV, and by extension the wall, hungrily tearing into the snacks as Zim Fandango began.

They watched the film, unusually quiet.

Both Zim and Gir were not known for their ability to remain silent. There were only a very few things capable of making them silent; a good movie was one of those things.

Gir watched in complete silence save for the sounds of eating; it was a new movie and Gir liked new things.

Zim, on the other hand, had already seen the movie before, but that didn't lessen his love for it.

They quietly watched the movie, enjoying each other's company.

About twenty-five minutes into the movie, Zim felt a certain lightness in the lower regions of his mind. The kind of lightness that came from artifically induced conditions of being pushed to the bring of sleep. Realizing what that might have meant, he retained the presence of mind to retract the sippy things before they could spill.

Zim yawned prodigiously. His people slept only rarely, requiring much less sleep than humans did. So he wondered why he was suddenly so tired.

He thought in a vauge sort of way that he wasn't really tired, just extraordinarily drowzy.

He shifted slightly in his sleep, and the world faded away as he fell into blurry sleep, a last thought on his mind: What was in those waffles?

A few minutes later, Gir turned towards his master, sensing something had changed. Zim was reclining into the couch, head bent backwards against the cushion as he breathed softly.

An idea, or what passed for one, danced around in Gir's brain. He inclined his head, thinking.

Master had eaten the special waffles. The waffles were special because they had the special sauce on them. The sauce had been given to him by the Mommies to be cooked into it. They had been laughing about the 'Lepidopterran Liquid Sleep Pollen Sauce' when they gave it to Gir. Master had eaten it and fallen asleep. Gir had eaten them, and had not.

That line of thinking was interrupted when Gir realized the waffles were gone.

Why are the waffles gone? Gir thought sadly. I loveded them! I LOVEDED THEM SO MUCH!

A thought occured to the insane robot.

Crouching down, he snuck down towards Zim dispite his complete and total lack of anything remotely resembling stealth; he kept falling over himself, laughing as he did so. He kept trying to sneak up on Zim like this for a moment or two, when he fell over and rolled onto Zim's side.

Initially surprised at gravity flexing it's collective muscle, Gir looked up at his Master. Zim was still snoring softly, sound asleep. This was strange to Gir, since in his experience, Zim always tried to push Gir away whenever he did something like this.

Gir giggled happily at this new turn of events. He remembered vaugely a long time ago when Zim tried to fix him by making stuck in Duty Mode; Zim had learned the hard way that a smart robot that wished to kill him was a bigger burden then a stupid robot that loved him and that in the end, he much prefered Gir when he was 'normal'. Normal for Gir, anyway.

Zim twitched momentarily from the feel of Gir's cold metal skin. In a way, he knew what Gir was. A unique thing on their world; a soul with no flesh to go with it. In some ways, Gir was a defect, something that was improbable and ought to have never been created at all; there was no purpose for such a creature. And yet, in many ways, he was just like Zim. Both defectives from their nature culture, born with an individualism banal to their 'parents'. Somehow, they had ended up together.

Gir had long ago decided to stay with Zim forever. No matter what. In his dim brain of garbage, Gir knew that such a promise was improbable and could never be permanent.

But the rest of him was too stupid to understand it, and so he lived it anyway.

Gir curled up against Zim's side; the Irken shifted in his sleep towards Gir, and probably would have fallen down were it not for the support Gir provided. Gir hummed happily, slightly more happy than he normally was.

After a moment, from Zim's crazed dreams, he echoed the robot's sentiment, in his own way.

Noticing this, Minimoose squeaked quietly to himself. He squeezed himself inbetween the two of them, nestling between Gir's head and Zim's shoulder, squeaking happily and dragging a blanket over Zim and Gir's bodies as he did so. A camera in the wall took a picture of them, downloading it into Minimoose's databanks.

And for a while, all of the three slept, dreaming dreams no one could guess at.

Gir kicked his feet rapidly, not unlike a dog that was dreaming.

He yawned loudly, opening his eyes. Seeing that the movie was over, he turned for a nearby a remote and turned it and the TV off; Master always yelled at him when he left the TV on.

Seeing movement from beyond the window, Gir grew curious and rolled off the couch as Zim fell off onto the floor; Zim curled into a little ball, still snoring.

Unaware of this, Gir waddled over to the window and peered out.

And sat back down, not liking what he saw. It was horrible doom. And not good doom. It was baaaaad doom.

Turning around, he realized that his master had fallen down. "Awwww," he said sympathetically. Getting an idea, the crazed robot ran off into the kitchen.

He came back in with a large packet of syrup. He opened it and dumped the content's on the blissfully sleeping aliens feet so that he could dance, dance, dance like a flaming hedgehog!

Delving into Gir's mind is not a advisible proposition.

Sadly, his Master did not immediately wake up and perform The Dance of A Hundred Excessive Capital Letters. Gir felt himself drowning in an immense ocean of misery; disappointment clung to his leg like a trillion-ton weight, dragging him to the depths of the sea where his puny body would be reduced to nothing at all. For about three point six milliseconds.

Gir rolled around on the floor, collecting dust.

"Huh?" Zim muttered in his sleep. "What's that? Oh, yeah. I like cake, Rana. I deserve, 'cause I'm so amazing. I even got the Amazingly Amazible Award Of Amazing Amazingness; I'm just that good. What? No, GIR, NO! STAY AWAY FROM THE POWER AMPLIFIER! THE SPONGECAKES! THEY BUUUUUUURN!" He rolled over.

"Awwwwwwwww!" Gir said, clasping his hands together.

He saw something outside. He decided to go outside and ran into the wall, rebounding off the floor. He got up again, running into the wall with the same exact result. He repeated himself in this way several times, until he accidently ran out the door.

Feeling sad that he no longer had a wall to run into, Gir saw something else; it happened to be the creepy thing Zim had saw in his dream, but Gir didn't know that.

Gir smiled at it. "Friend!" He held his arms out.

Not understanding the gesture, the thing bared it's claws and without a sound, jumped at him...and bounced off his hard metal exterior, falling into his opened arms.

It looked up at the robot, dimly wondering as best it could how it had failed to harm him, Gir hugged it as hard as he could, which meant hard enough to make it flop out of his arms and landed a few feet away in the mud.

It stared at Gir blankly. In his deranged mind, Gir saw it as a little black rubber piggy with light-up eyes with a little sign on it that said chase me.

Sensing danger, the thing ran away; Gir immediately starting chasing it, accidentally kicking it away with his feet.

Gir kept running, scolding his feet. "Evil feet! Bad evil feet!" He caught up to the thing again, kicking it once more.

They continued on like that for a while, Gir continually kicking it away.

Gir finally jumped into the air and landed upon it with a loud crushing sound.

Gir stood up, feeling...sick. The smokey black stuff on him made him feel bad. Not sad bad, but...bad bad. He didn't like the stuff at all.

He yelled something incomprehensible wiped it off and looked up, suddenly smiling brightly.

"Hi Uncle Bighead and Scary Mama!" he said to a confused looking Dib and Gaz.

As the city burned behind them, the night was rent with one single cry.

"MY HEAD'S NOT BIG!"

Back in his house about fifteen minutes later, Zim was still sleeping.

Then he suddenly woke up, albiet with one heck of a nasty hangover.

He sat up, unable to discern many of the blurry shapes from the others. Grumbling to himself, he sat up and stood up, wobbling uncertainly.

Remembering vaugely that his dream had had something to do with Rana from Zim Fandago, he wailed, "No, NOOO! I WANNA GO BACK! Eh. Whatever."

He peered around the room; for some reason, he was finding it extremely difficult to concentrate. He starting walking around the room, trying to get his bearings. Then he bumped into a flesh-eating zombie.

"AAAAAAAAHH!" He yelled, pulling a gun out from his Pak and started shooting wildly.

His vision cleared up somewhat, revealing that what he thought to be a flesh-eating zombie was just Minimoose, and his spectacularily bad aim had luckily missed Minimoose, instead carving out a connect-the-dots life-size portrait of Almighty Tallest Purple.

"Wow, my aim stinks!" he said, much impressed with himself. "Wait, that doesn't sound right."

Minimoose shook his head-well, actually, his entire body-and sat on Zim's head, as he was in no condition to protest, though the added weight made him stumble slightly.

Zim sat down on the couch, blearily thinking about something. The something. It was important. It was something he should act on immediately. He stood up, as he prepared to do just that when he realized he had forgotten it almost instantly. He walked over to a wall and started pounding his head against it methodically, struggling mightily to remember whatever it was that he had remembered and forgot, hopefully without forgetting what he had forgotten to not forget what it was he had forgotten to remember. (Try saying that five times fast.)

Zim held his head up, sure about something. It was always a safe bet when something insane as this was going on, it always had something to do with Gir.

"Ooooh," Zim moaned angrily. "What it is eludes me like a brain worm clamping onto my brain; painfully, and with acid venom! Wait, that made no sense at all."

He groaned to himself again. The last time he'd had a hangover like this the morning after the Christmas party last year, when he'd drank too much punch, which, as it turned out, was alchoholic to his bodily functions. He punched out a lot of people, terroized everyone, and overturned a barrel of filberts and other nuts nobody really likes. Suspecting some sort of trick, he thought hard about who he knew that would do something like this: he stopped quickly, as thinking made his head feel like a snail in the grip of an slowly closing industrial vice, and making a list of enemies and people who just plain didn't like him would take several hours to compose.

He ignored it for now, walking to the bathroom.

He noticed a series of round indentations in the ground out the window ending in a small scorched area as he walked into the bathroom. He walked up to the sink, turning the faucet on and wiping his face as he looked out the window and saw a big whirling thing coming at him from quite a distance away. As he registered it, his Pak silently started tinkering with the chemical imbalance caused by the waffles, slowly correcting his physiological problem. Considering all it had to get through, it wasn't what you'd call a simple proposition.

"It must be a hover-disc," he mused. "No, a giant frisbee. No, wait! A kitten with an expanding stomach that ate the Massive! No, it's the banjo of the flying Dutchman!" Minimoose, tiring of the babble and fairly concerned with what was going outside, landing on Zim Pak, attaching several clamps onto the ports on it; it suddenly stimulated certain chemicals in Zim's mind, causing him to spontaenously. Also, the creator of reality TV spontaeneously combusted for no apparent reason except possibly as a random act of me, ranking among such other oddities as the decision to create the universe with a large degree of absurdity, the invention of the TV, and ancient caveman abruptly realizing that it was not a good thing to stick your head into a sabertooth's mouth on a dare, at least not without a really good helmet.

Zim shook his head, slightly dazed by his sudden sobriety. He looked out the window, some confusion still intact. Pleased that his job was done, Minimoose retracted the interface clamps and floated off.

An extremely large tree suddenly burst through the wall directly above him, plastering him in plaster and dust as it stopped. Zim's big eyes, the only part of him visible through the conical pillar he was in, blinked.

He shook himself, looking as clean as before, oddly enough. He scratched the back of his head lazily. "What's a tree doing in my bathroom? And for that matter, why is there a cloud of swirling doom that I had absolutely nothing to do with?"

Then the little gears in his head snapped into place. Several things had occured to him as he wandered back into the living room and looked more throughly outside.

Gir had mysteriously disappeared.

There's little round indentations outside that end in some exhaust marks.

There is a storm outside. Which Gir is in somewhere.

"Shazbot."

Zim ran back into the bathroom; he came out a moment later, tore his raincoat off a hanger, and ran back in.

A few minutes later, Zim's small purple spaceship flew out the top of his house and zoomed off.

Looking over the landscapes quickly, referencing the on-board scanners and thinking quickly, Zim came to the conclusion that something really very bad was going on. He attempted to deal with this in a calm and mature manner.

The ship suddenly started flying around in circles around a random building, screaming in sheer terror loudly, incidentally ramming several evil things, not that he noticed.

The ship hit the building in a spray of sparks, sliding down to the ground with enough noise to make anyone wish they had no sense of hearing. It flew off again, as Zim applied his incredible powers of deductive reasoning to this difficulty.

The Voot Cruiser soared into the sky, hanging up like a weird mobile.

The sky was shrouded in shifting oilly black clouds, silently roiling across the landscape. They released no thunderbolts or anything like that. It was disturbing, and curiously frightening.

Zim's eyes widened for a moment, then narrowed as he realized something.

The storm, if that was what it was, was centered over his island.

Something was threatening his island, and by extension, the potential world-ending thing on it.

For once, he didn't rant about it. For one thing, there was no one to hear him. For another, he couldn't think of anything to adequately express his anger, his rage at this infraction. At least for the moment. Later, he would publish an addentum and mail it to the Nicktown Foghorn. They always bought the articles he wrote from time to time, though he had no idea why.

And then he was gone, only a purplish speck in the distance.

As he approached his island, Zim's earlier suspisions became more intense.

The storm clouds, thinner and more wide spread in the mainland, were thicker here, like an oil spill. They roiled ominously, making Zim involuntarily think of something drowning. But that didn't make any sense at all, didn't it?

And as he came to the dock, he realized he wasn't alone.

The Voot came over the dock, throwing sand over the Dibship. It clumsily crashed to the ground, it's cockpit flipping open and the sole occupant flopping out unceremoniously; Zim scuttled over to the Dibship, shocked that it was here of all places.

Starting to suspect something, he looked the ship over.

It was heavily damaged, though only on the surface; some of the sand he'd thrown over it when he flew down, marks from what might've been a crash landing, scars from Dib's usual life, and oddest of all, claw marks.

Zim traced his own fingers across it; the marks were slightly ragged and dragging, mostly in the center; it was smooth along the edges. The claw marks seemed more remnisciant of knives or another weapon; they didn't look natural at all.

Strangest of all was the severed limb of whatever had caused those marks, lying under the ship.

It had been detached from whatever it had been originally attached to; the stump, curiously enough, wasn't dripping anything at all. It simply terminated at the point that was probably just below the shoulder, assuming that whatever this belong to had a humanoid body structure; it almost looked like it had been formed that way.

Zim bent over to pick it up when it exploded in his face, disappearing in a burst of...smoke? No, it was thicker than that and much darker.

Weird.

Zim turned around, noticing some tracks in the sand behind him. He hurried over to them, realizing there were three sets; round little ones barely five inches apart, larger ones that looked like boot imprints, and the third were only slightly smaller than the boots, looking like oblong prints with almost no tread at all.

"Dib, Gaz and Gir are here too," Zim murmured, as his other sidekick floated out of the Voot, squeaking affirmatively.

Zim looked around the beach, his suspicions confirmed.

Something terribly wrong was going on.

Everything was...darker. More subdued. The sand around him was being propelled by a constant wind from the storm above, though a one that was much milder than one suspected from a storm of this caliber.

The trees quivered in a way that reminded him of...hands. Yes, that was it. Hands reaching up, but whether it was a gesture of despair or a plea for mercy, it made a good metaphor for what was going on around here. The sand at his feet was becoming more violent in it's movement, abruptly smashing against the obstacles around it, such as Zim and the trees, like waves against rocks in a turbulent sea. They did so with very little force, yet it disturbed Zim greatly.

As the wind blew by, he pricked up his antannae, realizing that the wind was nowhere near strong enough to make the waves do that. It was more like the sand had been invested with some strange form of life, and a despairing one at that.

He looked aside at the waves; they weren't behaving like the sand as he had expected, but seemed to be receding and drawing closer at the same time. He thought about what had caused such a bizarre sight, then decided it might have been the way they were growing thinner and thicker. He didn't know how or why, but he felt a deep relief that he hadn't traveled by sea. With that came another thought: what was going on beneath the waves?

As in in response to his thoughts, the tide came in again, carrying a strange object with it, washing it against the shore as the thick wave dragged sand away in their grasping pull.

Zim picked it up and looked it over, frowning. As far as he could tell, it looked like a tiny building shaped like a pineapple; it had a few windows and a little door at the base on one side. He muttered something unintelligible and threw it aside, not understanding the significance of it; the thing had felt vaugely familiar, but he couldn't recall ever hearing about anything like that. It had looked like a domicile, but who in their right minds would live in a pineapple under the sea?

It hit the water with a thick sound that didn't sound like a regular splash; it sounded like liquid quicksand. Zim's hydrophobia acted up as one of the voices inside him told him to get the HELL away from the water.

Never being one to disagree with his head-voices, he hastily retreated, hitting one of the trees. He flinched, expecting to be hit with another coconut and made an expression of bewilderment mixed with slight relief when nothing happened.

He looked up, and saw small yellow light among that shadows, and movement.

He jumped away just as a blurry dark weight slammed into the ground where he had been standing, scattered sand everywhere.

Zim would ordinarily have started running for the higher ground and hopefully something very heavy he could drop on it, but he was currently occupied with staring in astonished recognition.

He knew what it was perfectly well; there was no forgetting it's yellow lamplike eyes from within it's round head, the simplistic body, the minute claws and jointed antannae.

"It's the monster from my vision!" he yelled at it, certain details coming back to him in an unpleasant flash.

Admittingly, it didn't look much like a monster; it looked almost cute and seemed vaugely perplexed, evidently surprised by it's fall.

Then it sat up, stretched up to it's not-particularily-impressive height, and looked at Zim, body stretching a little.

"Oh no." Zim said matter-of-factly.

It suddenly jumped at him, claws out stretched...and slid off his raincoat, unable to get a decent grip on the slick matarial.

Mind boggling at his good fortune, Zim took a large step and crushed it underfoot; it was initially resistent, then simply gave, dissolving into a familar smog.

Just like that arm.

Considering all the things he'd seen, excluding the slaughter he was still oblivious of, he started walking around in an attempt to puzzle out what was going on.

And then he saw it, giving him a pretty good clue to his question.

It was above the skeletal remains of the Portal Generator, hovering high enough in the sky to qualify as the eye of the storm above him, then again, it probably was. It was a huge ball of darkness, with various reds, purples and blues swirling through it in a phantasmagoric display that made his stomach churn; random flares were flickering from it's sides into the storm around it, filtering through a massive field of shadow directly around it. In the center was...well, he didn't know what it was, but it looked a little bit like a galaxy of some kind.

A group of things descended from the cloud above him, popped out of flashes of darkness and appeared from the shadows shed by the taller things around him. Several were almost identical to the one he'd just crushed, but others were obviously better suited to fighting; they were about the same size, except for a few that flew. He arbitarily decided to call the walking ones Soldiers and the fliers Air Soldiers.

Thinking quickly, Zim withdrew a gun from his Pak; it was a dark purple color, resembling a pistol in basic design. It had a barrel about as long as his forearms, with a scope half that length near the base of it right in front of the red disc that held it's ammunition. The gun itself had squarish sides, and the symbol of the Irken Empire rendered in black along the grip. He pointed it at the enemies in front of him, hoping that his weapon might dissaude them.

He looked into their identical yellow lamp eyes. What emotion he saw was as alien as it good, and he saw nothing remotely approaching fear. Hunger for certain, and maybe a little interest at the sight of unique prey, but no fear.

He cocked it, the little disk spinning rapidly; one of the fliers suddenly rushed at him, causing the smaller Shadows and Soldiers to follow it, the latter almost dancing as they moved, the former melting into shadows on the ground that moved at him fairly slowly.

In sheer surprise, he fell backwards, pulling on the trigger; the first Air Soldier stumbled as the red-blue beam that lanced out of the barrel of Zim's gun struck it's leg, vaporizing it's leg; thrown off-course by the impact, it fell to the ground, skidded across the ground and smashed into a random tree, collapsing into smoke.

At this, the various things paused for a moment, the Soldiers just stopping whereas the Shadows rose out of the ground, then the Soldiers twirled away backwards, dancing away from him while the smaller ones rushed at him shortly before being vaporized.

He heard a sound behind him.

Zim ducked as a Soldier spun at him, it's decidedly functional claws marking the circle of it's spin; only his lightning fast reflexes saved him from getting much more than a flesh wound on his shoulder.

He stumbled to the ground as several more things came running, the cowardly Soldiers emboldened by their comrade's success. Zim rolled to his feet, randomly shooting in all directions; he got a few, but what he was gambling on was the moment of confusion that commenced.

That done, he mentally debated what to do: stay here and die horribly, or run for his life?

The things stared as he ran off, a little cloud of sand following him.

He stopped behind a rock, panting from his run. He winced and tenderly grabbed his wound: it didn't hurt exactly, but neither had the being's attack. It had felt as if he'd been cut by a precise knife of some kind, one that wasn't sanitary. Zim grimaced: the would didn't feel infected, but he felt dirty all the same.

He looked up at what remained of the Portal Generator: on the edge of it, standing atop the platform's central area, was a single figure. Even this far away, he knew who it was.

"Dib?" He ran off as more Shadows manifasted from where he was standing; he made it across with surprisingly little trouble; he bounded across the bridge, landing on the platform with a small thump.

Dib continued staring outwards, looking about as aware as a rock.

"Di-" Zim stumbled in his haste to reach the human, running for a moment all four limbs before he righted himself. "Dib!" He came to a walking stop as the human remained standing there, his coat flapping in the breeze.

"Zim." Strangely, the human didn't move an inch.

"Dib, what-what is all this? What's going on here-WHAT IS THAT!?" Zim shrieked, pointing to the big spooky ball thing.

He heard the sound of Dib's coat rubbing against his neck; the human turned his head to look around at Zim, a wan smile on his face, his yellow-brown eyes strangely listless.

"It's ending." Dib said quietly, as if a decidedly less interesting Apocalypse was going on.

"What are-"

"Look at it." Dib swept an arm to the sea, and by extension, everything. "You didn't see the slaughter, did you?"

"What slaughter?"

"Those things...they keep killing people, and with everyone that dies, another one rises. You'd think I'd have prepared for this, but..." Dib let the sentance trail off with an undertone of 'ah well'.

He looked up from the ground. "You remember all those times we used to go around town, just plotting elaborate schemes to get back at our enemies, destroy evil, that sort of thing? We'd always end up talking about who we really were, why we were here, what our purpose for being was, if we really did exist."

Dib looked at Zim pointedly and then looked at the floating orb of darkness. Zim copied the gesture.

"I think we're looking at part of the answer." Dib said softly as they both looked at the dark ball, hovering silently and somehow radiating malevolence.

Zim stared at it for a moment, then looked at Dib's gazing at it. He shook his head quickly. "Dib, we have to do something, we have to kill all of those things before they-how did this happen?" Zim demanded.

Dib looked back at Zim harshly; the Irken flinched, to his displeasure. There was a strange look in the human's brown eyes, almost as if something important had gone out the window. "The door opened," he said simply.

"'The door'?" Zim said cluelessly.

"The door to the world. It opened, and they came in. And we never had a damn chance," the human said with a hint of anger. For one thing, he had swore. Which he didn't do very often at all.

The alien was about to say something when something extremely important occured to him. "Wait, where's GIR!? And Gaz?"

No flicker of concern crossed Dib's face. He was as impersonal as a hunk of rock, and not the personable kind you find in old craters either. This was the kind that people used in stoning executions. "They're coming with us."

Zim blinked at Dib's lack of emotion. "Are you out of your mind!? Where exactly are we supposed to go?! Or anyone else for that matter?"

"Away. To the other worlds. There won't be anything left to return to...but I'm not afraid."

Dib grinned in a way that was not healthy for his mentality. "I'm not afraid of the darkness."

He turned to Zim. "And neither should you be."

He held his hand out, rain dripping off his hand and making the eyes behind his glasses blurred.

"Trust me."

"Dib..." Zim said uncertainly. Something was wrong. Very wrong indeed. For one thing, Dib Vael, of all people, was being calm. Calm was not something Dib did well. Crazy, yeah. Irrational, indubitably. But giving calm discources was not one of his strengths. That alone was a bad sign. A very bad sign indeed.

And his eyes...the little black part of the eyes humans had had been swallowed up by his brown pupils, which had became a few shades paler. He didn't understand it, but that was another bad sign.

Suddenly, the ground they stood on shifted ino a dark rift of shadow. Zim looked down at the shifting pool of dark-blue-purple-black and recoiled. This was wrong.

The living shadows of the pools slowly rose, covering the paranormal investigator's legs and reaching higher, much like the bitterness that plauged his heart. Dib continued holding his hand out, staring at the world impassively.

This was wrong.

Danny had wondered whether or not they were truly friends at all; even now, even in the calmest of moments, their friendship had a remarkably competitive edge to it. Rivals they had once been, and in many ways they still were. But that didn't matter now. He was not about to just stand here and let Dib fall into those thing's grasp.

He tried to run to him, but his feet were glued to the ground by tiny rootlike tentacles extruding from the ground. He gritted his teeth, tearing his sandals from the ground with all the strength in his legs. They stubbornly clung to the ground, tearing loose with a sound like a suction cup coming off; he repeated this process with the other one, taking one step after another after another. He seemed so far away, dispite being reletively close. Dib continued to stare at him, the shadows now creeping over his shoulders and evouluping most of his arms.

And then he tripped.

He stood up as fast as he could, but only his left foot; as he had fallen and the knee of his right leg had hit the ground, the darkness had reached up for him, securing itself around his ankle and knee, gluing him to the ground and spreading over him.

His breath jumped out in a shocked gasp, the hand he'd thrown out having been claimed by the living shadows. Dib's glasses started to dim as the shadows creeped over his jaw.

Growling in fury, he pulled forward with all his strength, throwing everything he had into a bid for freedom; the darkness held fast, their grip much looser on him than on the nearly cementlike form covering Dib. He lunged as best he could, stretching his arm out to grab the human's hand and pull him out of there.

His fingers came inches close of Dib's as the darkness swallowed the human completely; he saw the human disappear under the living mass of darkness just as his vision turned complete black and he fell.

And the one thing he knew as he plummeted was despair. And rage. Rage that this darkness was here at all, that it had swallowed Dib so easily, that he had fell to it, and there was nothing he could do about it.

He saw light.

And there was a greater light than he had ever known, save perhaps in his dreams. A light that was right beside him as he realized there was a considerable weight in his hand, one that felt...right.

With a shock he realized he was where he had stood before, on the platform, the darkness dispelled by the light. All his attention was on the thing in his hand as the light faded, revealing the weapon he bore in his right hand. He held it up and couldn't help staring in awe and shock.

It was about two and a half feet long, the grip he held it in was black and built precisely for his hands, feeling as though it covered a thick piece of metal. A strange hexagonal shape was around it, the grip going through the middle of it; at the base of it was a large round shape, culmanating in a sideways ring, from which hung a large simplistic silver keychain that ended in an silver object that was identical to his neckcharm. The hexagonal shape itself was a beautiful metal that was similar to gold, but superior in every possible way. The front part of it elongated into a strange bar extending from a shorter tube like the one the ring came from, but smaller in shape. The bar looked as if it was made from silver, but a silver that was as superior to the ordinary metal as the hexagonal's material was superior to gold. The bar was about as wide as the grip, in other words about half of Zim's arm diameter. It's end was flat, but on it's side were several odd shapes: The first one, nearest to the end, was a upwards-curving spike that curved back down in a smaller spike, terminating in a prominent shape that had a small spike curving backwards and a larger curved front that looked slightly like a wedge. The first shape curved into a flat spike with a small curving one that faced the first one's small spike; there was another curve shape like that one. The last shape was the simplest, almost just a straightened crescent.

Zim held it before him, wondering just what it was before he realized what it's singularally lethal weight meant. It was indesputably a weapon. He swung it in the air, noticing that it left a red trail in the air, following the 'blade' part of it. Oddly enough, it wasn't at all heavy for him to weild; it almost felt like an extension of his body than a weapon.

"It feels like a sword. But it looks a lot like a key..." Zim looked it over again. A word resonated in his mind, quietly rising out of one of the deeper parts of his mind he didn't understand and rarely questioned. "A 'Keyblade'? Yes..that sounds correct."

He balanced it's point on the ground, looking back over to the island. A small gang of Shadows were milling around the secret entrance to Gir's little place.

His eyes narrowed. "'The Door'..."

Without another word, he ran off to it; the Shadows leaped at him again, only to be met by the buisness end of his new weapon: he spun around on a foot, catching one on the crown as he used his momentum to smash another, killing both of them. Another was split in half by a quick blow, followed by another strike to an inattentive Shadow.

He carved a swath through them as they scattered, tentatively following them.

He ran through the short tunnel, ignoring or killing any of the invaders that literally dropped on him. Strangely, as he got closer and closer to the room, they became fewer to none-existent.

He burst into the room, to see a strange sight.

Gaz and Gir were standing in front of the door, looking almost utterly exhausted. Gaz was wavering slightly on her feet; Gir, held in the air by Gaz via his foot, was barely moving.

"...Hey, you guys?" Zim said uncertainly.

At his words, Gaz slowly turned around, making Zim start in surprise. She looked curiously distant, as if her mind was not here. Remarkably, she seemed almost completely unharmed. . Gir looked a little worse off; his body was heavily dented and even more worn down than usual, but from the looks if it, that was due to Gaz using him as a bludgeon. Considering his empty head and hard body, that was a role he served well at. His various lights were a little duller, but he seemed otherwise unharmed.

With an grunt, Gaz dropped Gir. The robot rolled to his feet with his usual energy, standing up with a slight wobble. He looked up at Zim, literally lighting up with a huge smile.

"MASTER!" He yelped happily. Everythings going to be okay! the innocent little robot thought excitedly. I'll be with Master and nothin' scary will happen. Gir started running to Zim, intent on jumping on his and not letting go, for he didn't know, a few years, give or take another mind-blowing disaster.

Behind them, the door suddenly swing open, releasing an immense gale that literally blasted them off their feet; Zim saw them smash into him and saw a sudden burst of purplish energy as he was propelled through the cavern, his eyes shut close.

He was blown all the way to the platform, landing on the hard metal unceremoniously, bouncing off the ground and smacking into a broken down spires. Zim groaned at all the chaos around him and slowly sat up,

Gaz was nowhere. And Gir was also gone.

Zim extended his spiderlegs to better look around. Maybe he'd just be blown past him.

The platfrom was devoid of all things except for him and Minimoose.

"Gir?" Zim said in a very small and quiet voice.

Okay, Zim rationalized, maybe he just fell into the water.

He peered over the platform and into the water. There was nothing there, and it looked so thick that anything falling into it would have undoubtedly left a trail of some sort.

Maybe he just became spontaneously invisible! Zim rationalized crazily.

Gir couldn't be gone. This couldn't be happening. Not to Gir. The robot was the only one who'd ever stayed.

All the other friends he'd ever known had left. Kuuk had been a madman, the cadets at the Academy loathed him for being short, every single Irken despised him for being a defective, and even Dib was gone, lost to the darkness. Of all the 'friends' he'd ever had, Gir was the only one that had stayed true to him. The only one that didn't hang around him like a parasitic bat to torment him when he'd failed like everyone said he would. The only one who didn't hate him for being weak. The only one who never treated him as nothing more than a resource or study project. The only one who didn't start out as an enemy. Gir was the only one who'd willingly gone with him and the only one, the only one, who'd ever stayed with him. Gir was the only person Zim had ever known in his long life who'd ever truly just liked him.

And he was gone, to regions he knew not.

"Gir?" Zim said in a voice too small to really be his.

He looked down at the ground, quaking in silent terror. Not fear for his own life, but fear for never seeing Gir again. Never being exposed to his impossible foods. Never hearing one of those inane songs he heard or came up with. Never being attacked by a random flying hug. Never being surprised by Gir's surprise entrances. Never seeing Gir again.

"This is all wrong!" Zim yelled to no one. "I'm going to find out who did this, and I'm going to destory their plans, destroy their base, destroy their evil, and then I'll DESTROY THEM!"

He looked up at the floating dark ball and raised his fist.

"Wherever you are, I'm going to find you and get you back! NO MATTER WHAT!"

He stared resolutely out to sea, his coat flapping in the wind. He would have look cool and dramatic if he hadn't look so ridiculous, but that fact was lost upon him.

He had made a promise in this damned shore. And though Zim was a short-tempered, easily enraged, short-sighted freak with the inability to truly percieve all, he knew one admirable about himself.

Zim always kept his promises.

He was alone now. And it wasn't like he had any thing to hinder him.

"Squeak?"

Zim paused, turning around.

Minimoose stared at him, his electronic eyes somehow conveying sadness and worry?

I'm alone? No, that's not completely true. Zim thought.

I've got Minimoose.

"Squeeeek!" Minimoose squeaked, huddling against Zim's head and finally allowing his fear to overtake him, sqeaking in sheer terror.

Zim sighed, allowing the robot to cry.

Any futher dramatic action and thought was interrupt by something big under the platform.

Minimoose paused, looking down. "Squeak?"

Zim looked down and backed away; something huge was casting an immense shadow, something he couldn't see.

Wait. That was wrong. He realized that the sand was passing through where it would have to be in order to cast such a great shadow, and it was utterly unobstructed.

He looked down again and saw it moving.

It flowed away from him, a huge shadow easily four times as big as he, and stopped at the edge of the platforom opposite him. The shadow flowed upwards, like the Shadows he had fought so recently, but this one was different. Much different.

It didn't struggle to form itself, apparently better at ease in the fluid form that was hard to mantain, but it smoothly rose upwards, forming hard muscle and bones under it's dark flesh. Bizarre organs beat under it's monstrous form, leaving an all-too imaginative mind to ponder what lay with it.

It's fluid flesh continued to form, raising it's incomplete arms with the air of someone fully rested and ready to exert themselves. It's massive claws flexed once or twice, leaving black trails in the air that faded away after a moment.

Behind it, in the ground, immense cracks ripped through the ground, tearing the trees from their roots and causing the sand to pour into them. The mountain behind them crumbled, flattening into a flat range as any secrets they had hidden since time immemorial faded into obscurity.

The platform they were standing on suddenly quaked, and Zim felt a huge shift from underneath them as something vital gave way. And the island suddenly moved further away, retreating into the ocean-

Zim realized that was just his perceptions changing, and the platform was flying into the sky, closer to the dark ball.

And it stopped, hanging in the air in open defiance of gravity.

The orb above them pulsed, looking like a dark sun that was slowly drawing all into it's grasp. It seemed larger than it had been.

Squeaking in terror, Minimoose hit a seqeuence on Zim's Pak, opening it up. The android moose flew inside, shutting the Pak behind him.

Zim growled, holding up the Keyblade. It didn't look anything at all like a weapon, more like a large toy, but he knew more than anyone that appearences could be very decieving.

The dark monstrosity's body suddenly ceased movement.

It was twenty feet tall, exactly, and nearly as wide as it was tall. It's body was lined with thick musculature that seemed more like flesh, moving slightly as the shadows that consisted of it's body pulsed along it's mass. It hunched slightly, and along with it's overhanging arms, it made Zim think of it as a kind of satantic gorilla, the kind of beast an idiot bunch of psychotic humans would worship or at least curse in the name of frequently. The features of it's face were unclear; not because it's face was indescribably hideous and terrible to behold, but simply because it was hard to discern it over the swirling darkness over it's face. It was angular, very wide, and had blankly staring eyes. Not yellow lights, like the other creatures, but more like purple pits of blankness. The back of it's head had not hair, ears or antannae, but several twisting tentacles. It's legs were somewhat animalistic, like the legs of a human that had been broken in several places and forcibly made like that of a beast's. It's feet were bent-back, and had three claw-toes it stood on. Several large spines protruded from it's back, shaped in a way that suggested crystalline structures. Smaller spines like that were all over it's body, protruding from it's elbows, protecting it's joints, and covering it's vulnerable areas, but not in the profuse quality the monster from Zim's dream had had.

It raised it's gnarled fists and pounded them into the ground, one after another, denting the hard metal. It rolled it's undiscernable head and probably would have roared hoarsely if it had possessed lungs, vocal cords, or the state of mind to vocalize.

It peered down at Zim. It stood up on it's legs, rearing up to it's full admittingly impressive height. Now it was maybe thirty feet tall.

Zim stared up at the immense beast, this veritable juggernaut. From the looks of this thing, it could go one on one with a Frontline Battle Mech and tear it apart with no fear from the energy backlash. It could easily rampage through large city with no fear of reprisal, or at least any that could faze it. There was a vauge hunger in it's eyes, and an odd trace of fear as the Keyblade gleamed, reflecting Zim's feelings. It raised it's arms, looking down on what must've been to it, a tiny insect.

And Zim laughed. "MWAA HAHHAHHAHAAH! HAH HAH HAH HAH HAH!" He laughed some more.

He kept laughing until he had to use the Keyblade to give himself some balence.

He caught his breath, stood up, and pointed his odd blade at the enormous beast.

He grinned.

"Heh heh heh heh! You call this a threat!? I have seen more frightening things in the dwellings of my fevered imaginations! Come and face me, you..you..."

Zim realized it needed a name. One came to him from the same mysterious place the word 'Keyblade' had.

"Darkside!" he pronounced. "Come and face me, for I am your horrible doooom!"

And with that bizarre death threat, Zim ran at it, waving the Keyblade around.

It looked down, raised it's massive fist, and swung it into the ground directly where Zim was headed; he was flung back by the concussive waves, landing hard on his back again. "Ow!" he yelled, not disencouraged in the least.

He rolled to his feet, running to the sides, suspecting it would be too stupid to see a sneak attack coming on.

He was proven considerably wrong when it turned around, swatting him away; the only thing that kept him from falling to his watery doom was a spider-leg clutching the edge of the platform.

Zim crawled up it, all four legs extended. He glared at his foe, moving much faster than he normally would be able to.

It swung again, missing him as he rolled underneath it's ludicriously slow blow; he retracted the legs as he jumped, swinging the Keyblade at the exposed leg.

And went "Whaaa?" when he passed right through it.

He hit the ground hard, bouncing off it from sheer momentum. He got to his feet, rolling out the way of an errant kick from Darkside. He ran at the foot, slashing right through it but not in the 'struck a really good hit' way.

He aimed a hit at it's overhanging arms. That failed to worked too.

So did the next ten attacks.

"Okay, new plan!" The wrists might be a weak point, he thought. And the eyes too. The face was always a weak point. No defenses could be trained of upper facial muscles, after all.

"Hey!" he yelled up at it. "Look at me! I'm too small and fast for a big dumb thing for you to hit!"

It stared at him uncomprehendingly. Nonetheless, it struck out again, missing as Zim moved out of the way.

This time, it's tremendous strength worked in Zim's favor; it's fist smashed into the ground, getting itself stuck in the cracks.

Zim laughed maniacally, running at his gigantic foe. He jabbed it in the lovingly, pleasingly solid wrist. It sunk in deeply, passing through it as the dark flesh quaked; Zim repeated the attack, slashed upwards through, jabbing so the the Keyblade poked through it and wrenched it up, and smashed the crown part on to it with a particularily hard strike.

It swatted Zim away, getting damaged as Zim held his weapon out so it was injured by it as he was thrown backwards.

It threw a punch at Zim as he ran under it, holding the weapon straight up. Darkside pulled back again.

Zim scooted back, expecting another counterattack. Darkside gave none, instead staring at him.

It suddenly pounced, encircling Zim with a big hug. Huge spikes shot from it's arms, thudding into the ground.

The cloud of darkness that produced faded away, no small threat emerging from the small forest of spikes.

It started to stand up in order to smash it again, rearing up on it's feet. Zim's force field bubble suddenly bounced away from a hollow made from it's poor strategic abilities, bouncing off one of the flat tops of the spikes and bounding up, fading away as Zim thrust the Keyblade directly into it's stupid face.

He spun, the Keyblade imbedding him in it as the creature slowly raised it's hands to swat him off. Zim put his feet against it's face, jumping off and leaving what could be a wound. Though they quickly sealed up, he felt that they hurt it quite a lot all the same. His weapon appeared in a flash of light, and these things were nothing but shadows. And what banished shadows, but a shining light?

He activated his force field again, bouncing right up into it's unprotected face, repeated what he'd just done with more of a slash to the face followed by a jab. And this time he fell towards the wrists, slashing it on the way down. His bubble thudded on the ground, disappearing as it bulged outwards to smooth out the kinetic discharge.

Darkside raised it's fists, slamming them into the ground.

Where they sunk into the metal, a pool of darkness spread, not unlike the one Dib had disappeared into. Shadows appeared out of it, popping up like freaky versions of the Whack-A-Mole game.

Zim started at the side. "It can summon reinforcements?! Could this get less unfair?!"

The Shadows melded together into Soldiers and Air Soldiers as more Shadows appeared, copying their predessors.

Zim stared at that. "Note to self," he said calmly. "STOP GIVING THE ENEMY IDEAS!"

A Soldier jumped at him, doing that spinning in mid-air trick as an Air Soldier flew from behind him, claws outstretched and trailing dark energy; Zim rolled sideways, causing them to kill each other in a classic Comedy Killer Move. He ran to the pool, striking down all of the dark things that were there before repeatedly hacking at the wrists again, jumping onto it's hands and running up it's arm. It pulled it's hands back and the pool faded as he raced up, slashing at the face once he reached it and jumped back down, using his force field to safely hit the ground.

It continued in this vein for a while: Zim would hit it when it least suspected it, run aways as it spawned some more shadow things, he would run up it's arm and hit it's head and run away.

Hit it, run away from the things, run up the arm, hit head, run away.

Hit.

Run away.

Spawn shadow things.

Run up arm.

Hit head.

Run away.

And so on and so forth.

Zim had just been knocked away as it stampeded around the platform with it's huge feet and scooted into a remained spire, waiting for one of it's old tricks again.

And then it jumped up, slamming into the platform with all it's strength.

Not unsuprisingly, Zim was flung high into the air as he helplessly waved his arms and Darkside waited for him to come within reach.

And then he stuck the Keyblade out, moving past it's claws, and slashed right through it's head.

The impact slowed him enough to allow him to hit the ground with his spider legs safely, scuttling away from it as best he could.

Unfortunately, that wasn't good enough as it slammed his hand on him, crushing him into the ground and shattering his spider legs.

It exerted all of it's considerable strength, slowly smashing him into the recessed ground. It pushed harder, pushing his breath out with a few well-timed palm smashing.

Stupid, Zim thought weakly. Letting yourself get caught like that.

It started curling it's fingers inwards, it's massive claws piercing his flesh. He knew that when it finished what it was doing, those claws would rip his body apart like a ripe orange under a falling planet.

Am I going to die like this? he wondered mildly.

His body hitched as the claws went in deeper, digging into him.

And at the periphery of his vision, he thought he saw Gir.

"No," he hissed, his sore voice rising to a yell. "NO!"

He raised the Keyblade as best he could, his arm trapped between the fingers of the enormous hand, and pushed it right into that hand.

The hand suddenly dissapated, and Zim rolled away, coughing hoarsely. He stood to his feet, the remains of his legs retracting into his Pak.

He glared venomously at it, it's hand already reformed.

He felt angry at himself for allowing himself to almost die before he could go rescue Gir. He felt angry at the nameless force that had invaded his home, and he was angry at the shadows that were tearing his planet apart.

But to hate yourself is more than pointless; it's stupid. Self-loathing wasn't really his thing. His anger at the invasive force was well-placed, but he had nowhere to direct it. It made as much sense as yelling at the sun for being hot. And the shadows seemed to be that: shadows. Nothing but mere shadows.

But this brutish thing...

It summerized all his enraged feelings about this ugly invasion. It was a big, stupid and really convient target for all the righteous fury he felt flood his heart and and racing through his body, making the Keyblade shimmer red-white-yellow. He felt his heart burn with rage at Darkside, and he wanted it to burn.

The Keyblade shimmered.

And flames flickered around it, radiating heat around him that curiously didn't bother him in the least. It was hot enough to make the metal he was standing on recede and his feet sink into, but it didn't burn him at all. As a matter of fact, he liked it.

The flames increased in intensity and more appeared, running up and down the Keyblade, pooling around into a round ball of roiling flame.

Zim gaped at the fireball, finding the Keyblade shaking and becoming more difficult to hold; he pointed it at Darkside, suspecting this was going to be fun. The fireball grew in size, the air around it combusting in gas-flame blue color and flowing into it as more fire.

Zim held it up, not sure he could continue to hold it for much long as the small fires along the Keyblade grew, still feeding the fireball.

It was getting almost impossible to hold, but it felt warm in a way he didn't understand, but that didn't preclude him from liking it. It warmed him in a way he hadn't felt in a good long time, and he liked it. Pulses of fire flickered away from him, as if the air was starting to burn.

His inner pyromanic and his inner angel yelled in exultation.

Zim looked through the fire and dimly saw Darkside start to charge. Funny; it looked smaller from this side of the flame.

"FIRE!" He yelled, and the burning missle launched, knocking the Keyblade and Zim away into a spire in a kind of recoil.

It flew through the sky, igniting the air behind and around it as it flashed to it's target, illuminating the platform like a miniture sun; if someone had seen the floating platform, they might have thought that a Light was emanating from it. A Light that was going to completely obliterate the great darkness around them.

It struck the uncomprehending Darkside directly in the face.

There was a huge blast of fire; it rippled away from the platform, large streams of flame combusting around it's part of the platform, like a really, really, really small supernova.

Zim gaped at the explosion, the boring part of his mind wondering how he could stare at that explosion and not go blind while a less boring part of his mind wondered how he'd done that and if he could do something like that again real real soon.

After a moment of amazingly intense illumination, it faded away, leaving only a large scorched area and a lot of melted metal that had sunk into a rounded depression. There was a lot of heat coming from it, but not as much as one might think.

Zim shakily stood up as Minimoose carefully exited his Pak, hoping he'd missed the dangerous part. Zim stared at the crater he'd made, and he blinked, wondering what he should say to commerate this unbelievably and almost spiritual moment.

"That was COOL!"

Minimoose sweatdropped, or he would if he'd had sweat glands.

Zim glanced back at the Keyblade. Something, in his mind, felt different. Not unlike someone making a piece of art and discovering that the process was becoming easier.

His mind felt different. Something was different, in a deeper and more fundamental way than he could see. He knew something was different, and in a definitely good way. He knew it in his heart.

He knew it in his soul.

The power to create flames appear from midair; perhaps from hyperaccelerating air molecules, causing them to burst into flame, perhaps simply making fire appear. And perhaps, there was more to this than just pyrokinetics without a flamethrower.

He wondered how to project flame for a moment. He wondered how to make this new ability of his work.

He truly felt different. As he had done when he had finally realized that the only way to pick up that shattered remains of his rediculous pathetic life was to brush it away and start anew, with a mind to never repeat the mistakes of his sordid past.

It was like when his heart had been lit anew.

Any further rumination on this matter was interrupted when the island below tore free of it's moreings.

And he himself was sucked into the sky.

"WHOOA!" he yelled, grapping the tip of a spire just in time.

He hung there, his tenacious grip somehow winning against the darkness's fearsome pull.

And then he heard a terrified squeaking; Minimoose was also being pulled into the dark sun, and he had nothing to use as a safety line.

"No!" Zim yelled. Throwing all caution to the wind and letting it get hit by some cliff, he threw himself off the spire, grabbing Minimoose and tightly holding him so that the squeaking robot was uninjured by the whatever.

He didn't fail to take into account that he was therefore condemning the both of them to an uncertain doom. He didn't care.

"Better to die this way," he hissed, "than like a pathetic coward!"

Minimoose squeaked his terrified gratitude.

And they flew into the dark sun, definitely not in Nicktown anymore.

Well, so much for the DI portion of the story. Next up is Traverse Town, and if you thought this was nuts, you ain't seen nothing yet! Hope to see more reviews soon!