Ch. 1
It is such a normal day. So hideously normal. Clouds gather in the sky, blocking the awful earth sun that dares blemish Zim's perfect Irken skin with little darker green specks and threatens to overheat his pak. Zim had been forced to put in a whole new coolant system of his own brilliant design, engineered to make the earth heat less miserable. The disgusting, heat-ridden earth. And this isn't even one of the hotter parts. The Dib claims that there are hotter deserts and rainforests (terrible, awful rain! Another remarkably painful, inconvenient flaw Zim intends to free this planet from), and their eldritch skool teacher Ms. Bitters confirmed that Zim's base was in one of the chillier parts of the planet. And reminded him that it was currently the cold season.
How revolting.
If the tallest hadn't sent him here SPECIFICALLY, on an extremely important, TOP SECRET mission, Zim would have taken one look at the unsightly, overheated, germ-covered earth, projectile vomited, directed his voot to Invader Larb's target planet, and hijacked their mission instead. The Universe's Comfiest Couch sounded so appealing, and was likely far more balmy (maybe even comfortably cold with nice cozy blankets!) than the ball of sludge and filth and heat Zim currently resides on (sitting on an unsatisfactory, semi-comfy couch, no less.)
Yes, Zim deserves far better couches. Particularly after his incredibly efficient destruction in Impending Doom One.
Yet here he sits. On earth. On the subpar couch. Watching subpar earth entertainment on his base's television unit, begrudgingly pressed against his subpar SIR unit (no, his specially made GIR unit from the tallest) and his own magnificent creation, Minimoose, engaging in what Gir called "snug-cuddling." Squished, semi-comfy, and unamused. Definitely not waiting for a subpar earth monkey to show up and save him from his superior Irken boredom.
It felt like days, possibly even years of the 'Floopsy Bloops Schmoopsy' marathon had passed, hours upon hours upon hours of incessant squealing and hugging and pastels.
And then, there is a pounding at the door. And the yelling begins.
"GET OUT HERE ALIEN SCUM, I KNOW YOU'RE HERE! COME OUT AND FACE ME!"
Thank Irk.
He waits a few seconds to let the Dib know that the mighty Zim has MUCH to do, and is NOT simply waiting around for the pathetic, sniveling little worm baby all day. It is increDibly gracious for Zim to lend the disgustingly, gracelessly tall human even a few seconds of his busy schedule. When Zim has proven his point, vaults off the couch, to the disapproving wails of Gir and Minimoose, and struts to the door, his sparking, janky roboparents wheeling out from their compartments to follow him. The brilliant, beyond convincing facsimile of a human father pulls the metal pipe out of its hinged mouth, its rusty joints creaking. "Now where do you think you're going, young frog? You still haven't eaten your toothbrush!"
The mother-bot rolls up behind the father caricature and slams into it. Zim makes a mental note to put some sort of braking system on the roboparents. His walls are full of wheel holes, and paint peels off both the robots and the walls, scraped off by the incessant malfunctions. Caring for four robots while planning world domination is exhausting, and Zim's priorities lie with upkeeping Gir to avoid him devolving into further insanity, and keeping his beloved Minimoose in top Moose Condition.
The sparking, twitching 'mother' bends over, trying to stare disapprovingly into Zim's eyes. Unfortunately, her eyes point in opposite directions, neither looking forward, and Zim is too busy throwing on his wig and contacts to pay her any mind. The Dib whines often about how unconvincing Zim's human disguise is, yet Zim seems to convince everyone of his humanity but Dib and his smaller, scarier companion, Gaz. Zim is often grateful that the pathetic Dib had chosen to become his enemy rather than Gaz, who seems to be an unstoppable force of rage, whenever she bothers to look up from her Gameslave. Gaz would be troublesome. But Dib? Dib he can deal with easily.
Zim opens his front door and sneers up at his nemesis. It is OUTRAGEOUS that Earth smeets grow so tall, yet remain so obnoxious and useless. All that height, wasted on the Dib.
"Dib."
"Zim."
"Go to your ROOOOOOM-AHHSHDJbzb. Bzzt."
Dib stares, aghast, past Zim. The little green alien's robot 'mother' lays on the floor, smoking after taking a direct shot from Zim's phaser cannon. The cannon retracts impossibly into Zim's metal, egg-shaped, glowing backpack-thingy. Nuts and bolts pour out of the robot 'father's' eyes like tears as he falls to the ground and cradles his 'wife.' He turns to Zim, pointing at the little menace with metallic venom in his voice."What did we say about SHOOTING YOUR MOTHER, young man? INTO THE GROUND WITH YOU!"
Zim rolls his eyes and steps out of his mint green, incredibly wrong-looking house, a place Dib knows must be teeming with alien tech, from the checkerboard floors to the cable-laden ceiling. Tech that he could steal and study and maybe even repurpose, if only he could get his hands on it. Zim slams the door shut (it's still marked as a fucking bathroom, the little dumbass hasn't bothered to make it look anything like a normal front door after nearly 6 years).
"Excuse Zim's parents, they are bad right now," Zim announces as he walks up to Dib, kicking his feet forward as he takes impractically huge strides in comparison to his tiny body. Everything about Zim is the definition of compensating for something. He has to tilt his head to look up at all 6'5" of the human boy, and yet he still looks so smug. God, Dib wants to punt him like a little green football.
"They aren't bad parents. They're shitty robots."
"WE'S GOOD! WE SWEAR!"
"NYA!"
The high pitched protests ring down from above. Dib looks up to see Zim's robot-toddler-dog-thing's glowing blue eyes peering down through a half open window that must lead into an attic or something. Just above him hovers the weird-purple-moose-thing that dib initially thought was a plush toy. It had scared the shit out of him when it squeaked and started firing lasers. Fucking Zim and his fucking robots.
"Not you, Gir, I was talking about Zim's parents!"
"Oooooooooooooooh, okay!" Gir chirps happily. "I love you, Mary!"
"GIR!" Zim glares up at Gir as the robot waves delightedly at Dib. Dib gives an awkward smile and raises his latest gadget in a half wave. "Stop fraternizing with the stink beast! And you! Explain what this garbage you are holding is."
Dib's newest magnum opus looks like a version of Zim's phaser cannon, but built from scrap metal and blue nail polish rather than a gleaming weapon from retro-futuristic science fiction. He had made it himself, from dangerous, sharp, science-y parts he found lying around his father's basement. Dib rationalized the unapproved borrowing by telling himself the great Professor Membrane wouldn't miss the literal junk, and his father would never invent anything again if Zim was allowed to run free and take over the planet.
Dib begins to charge up the weapon by typing on its cracked, barely-attached touch screen input system. He ignores Zim's demands to know what the new thingy is, continuing to type in commands, leering down at the space-bourne freak. "It's been fun and all, fighting you every single day for all these years –" Dib pauses to correct a mistyped command. "But unfortunately, it ends today. This," he announces to an indignant Zim, "is a weapon of MY design."
"Looks primitive."
"Well, it isn't. It's called the Separator. Or the Severance gun, I haven't really decided," Dib gestures with the weapon again, towards Zim this time. "And it's going to cut your freakish weapon holder-backpack-thingy –"
"My...pak?"
"Fine, your PAK, RIGHT off your ugly back."
With no further warning Dib shoots, and Zim dodges. The shot neatly separates one of Zim's security gnomes heads from its body.
The good news is that it works, the bad news is Zim is extremely agile. The weapon's kickback is a lot more than Dib anticipated, and he is thrown back, his gangly body slamming into the fence bordering Zim's yard and sliding to the ground. It's nothing out of the ordinary for Dib to get a little dinged up during fights, he even has an entire drawer in his dresser devoted to post-fight first aid supplies. He should really start wearing armor or something.
Zim, grotesque as usual, unfolds six unsettlingly long, spider-like metal legs out of his pak and skitters over to hover over Dib, giggling madly. He kicks Dib in the nose before Dib can even catch a breath to insult him, his tiny body wielding far more strength than it reasonably should.
As Dib reels in pain, blood running down his face, Zim snatches away the Separator/Severance gun. "Stupid dirt child! It really shows your lack of intelligence, thinking you even stood a chance against the almighty Zim with this pathetic toy, Dib-stink." His own phaser cannon extends from his pak and blasts Dib's latest invention to smithereens.
That invention took weeks to craft. Blueprints. Scavenging. Trial and error. All amounting to nothing.
Dib hates him so. So much. And his nose hurts. He decides then and there that after he wins, he is going to rewire Zim's dna, make him grow a nose, just to kick it into his stupid green face twice as hard. He is thinking about this, workshopping his plan as Zim monologues about his superior Irken intellect and skills and how sad and pathetic and red and fleshy Dib is.
Just as Dib perfects the ideal exterior for the dna modifier (aesthetics are important, and torture devices should look both properly clinical and terrifying, in the event he can get his hands on decent parts. Nobody wants to sell dna modifier parts to 18 year olds), the first raindrop falls. Then another. The third drop to fall happens to land on the spacebug, who reacts to his sizzling, smoking skin with a yelp of pain. Dib doesn't even register the noise, too dazed with pain and delusions of grandeur/victory/torture.
Zim clears his throat. "Well Dib-thing, it is time for you to return to your wretched home –" Another raindrop hits him. He chokes down a squeak and starts backing up, still using his pak legs to make sure Dib knows Zim is indeed taller, and thusly superior. "And consider doing better next time. Yes, it was a good attempt, for you–" The rain falls faster, more raindrops finding their target as Zim reaches for the front door. "But it was still Dooky, Zim is still superior, and why is this door locked GIR COME DOWN AND UNLOCK THE DOOR THIS INSTANT!"
Gir leans out the attic/voot hanger window. "WHAT YOU SAYYY?"
Something slams into the front door. Robodad's voice yells out something about the ground in a broken, utterly wrong attempt at conveying some kind of parental emotion. Caring? Anger? Disappointment? It mostly just sounds unsettling. Zim wishes, not for the first time, that he had built them himself. Minimoose is perfect. Gir cartwheels through life, leaving disaster in his wake, unchallengeable as a creation of Zim's Tallests, the roboparents are AI-generated garbage, a combination of Gir's assumptions of what human parents were like and what Zim's computer was able to build. Zim makes a note to yell at both Gir and his computer later.
Robodad's shrill, awful voice cuts through Zim's brilliant contemplation. "Did you HEAR ME SON? As punishment for your MOMMY MURDER, you're GROUNDED and your fishes are locked in TIME OUT upstairs."
Zim tries to out-yell Robodad in a desperate attempt to get him to listen, while alternating between shaking the doorknob and pounding on the door. "She's FINE, 'Dad,' she's standing right there. Now let me in, before I get wet and catch a human babycold! You don't want that, do you?"
Robomom's eyes roll around as she glares in Zim's general direction through the ground floor window. "Yessss we DO. You need to learn a LESSON. You're GROUNDED, that means you GET in the GROUND young man! In you go!"
Robodad jerkily nods in agreement, tapping his pipe against the other ground floor window for emphasis. "YEAHHHH. Listen to your mother and START DIGGING!"
Dib finally looks up groggily to see the ridiculous mockery of a human family fighting.
An unearthly chorus of distressed, mechanical whining attacks his ears, making Dib's brand-new migraine (courtesy of Zim, as they all are) even worse. Dib looks up to see Zim's horrible pets? Creations? Gir and Minimoose looking through the attic window. Dib is still unsure how the little bots seem to have genuine emotions, let alone an attachment to their heartless green weasel of a master, yet they seem worried for him all the same.
Gir slams his face against the window and screams. "Quick! Master, come inside for a tea party or you gonna get WATERSICK again!" Minimoose bonks off the top of the window over and over, squeaking frantically in agreement.
Oh. That's right. Dib had almost forgotten Zim's simplest weakness: water. After the first rain the alien had encountered, and the resulting, catastrophic water balloon fight, Zim had been very careful to avoid touching any liquid without first coating himself in protective paste. Dib had completely forgotten how Zim's skin burns after coming in contact with nothing but plain, natural H2O. He wishes he could get a skin sample to find out what the actual reaction is, but Zim seems to like his skin and appears to be intent on keeping it.
As Dib reminisces on his old skooldays and violent pranks, the rain pours down harder, and Zim gives up on opening the door. He tries the windows, but he's panicking, his gloves slipping on the glass, the water streaming down the windows making every attempt to break them HURT. He needs to be inside. Safe. Now. And he's going to dismantle those useless parentbots.
If he survives long enough to get in.
Zim's eyes dart around, praying for a solution to pop into thin air. He has no idea if his paktools work in the rain; they might backfire and blow him to smithereens or electrocute him (skool had taught him that anything robotic MURDERS things when submerged in water! Horrifying, awful, water). Electrocution is beginning to look like a viable option, though, compared to the steadily growing pain the toxin-filled rainwater is inflicting on his perfect Irken body.
The nonstop wailing and squeaking from above draws Zim's attention upward, a glimmer of hope in the form of the voot hanger window, cracked slightly open. His remaining loyal robots peer down at him, encouraging him to get to safety and begging the DIB, of ALL people, for help. Disgusting. Embarrassing. Future Zim will have to program them to never, under any circumstances, ask the Dib for help. But current Zim needs to focus and survive.
Zim screams at his computer to send over one of the remaining security gnomes to help boost him up, and at Gir to open the window so he can get in. In a rare stroke of luck, both listen. The security gnome slides over, scraping across the ground. The gnomes are little more than pointy-headed, metal turrets disguised as human lawn decorations. Slick with rain, they make terrible stepladders. But it will have to do.
Dib watches, bloody and amused, as Zim awkwardly scales the security gnome. Surely this won't work, surely Zim KNOWS this won't work. And yet, Zim succeeds, because of course he does. Why would normal laws of physics apply to Zim? Oh look, he's using his pak to try to climb up.
Still gripping the imitation lawn gnome for dear life, Zim reaches up with his spindly pak legs. After a minute of trying, he hooks one onto the attic window ledge. Gir and Minimoose cheer. The roboparents are going crazy about their 'son's defiance.' Zim begins to draw himself upwards.
Dib sighs in defeat. Zim is escaping an atmosphere built to melt him alive in the most precarious fashion possible, and yet it works. Zim will live to fight another day, to annoy a future Dib. Typical. Dib picks himself up off the ground, resigned to go home and come back tomorrow, resigned to Zim's defiance of all natural law and order. Stupid bug.
And Zim slips.
Dib blinks. Zim is three feet above the ground. His pak is impaled, and Zim is being rained on. His clawed hand never touched the windowsill. The metal spider leg slipped off the windowsill, Zim fell back, he never met the ground, and his pak is impaled on the metal lawn gnome he used as a stepladder.
Nothing makes a sound, nothing but the patter of rain. Then thunder rumbles, lightning strikes somewhere, and a chorus of joy and terror breaks out from inside the freakhouse.
Zim does not move.
Dib does not move.
The robot parents dance as if all their prayers have been answered.
Gir throws himself out the window and lands on Zim's body with a sickening thud, screaming the whole while. A purple blur swoops under Zim and tries to lift him up and off the metal spike Zim had brilliantly decided to position underneath himself as he climbed his rain-slicked house with almost no leverage. More rainwater pelts Zim's body, smoke rising off his limp form; he appears to be melting, surrounded by pak shards and wires and sparks. The autopsy 12-year-old Dib had planned upon meeting him would have been far more pleasant for both of them.
Dib has triumphed; his enemy is dead. By Zim's own stupidity, no less.
Dib doesn't move.
Zim doesn't move.
The robots wail in terror and shriek in celebration.
The shattered pak spits Zim off. Or out. His tiny body falls to the wet pavement, Gir and Minimoose following him down to try and rouse him, to drag him to safety. Pitiful.
Dibs eyes flick between the little robots, nudging Zim towards the door, and the impaled backpack, dripping neon-pink goop from its freshly exposed wires and tubes. It seems like they used to run the entire length of Zim's body. Was that his nervous system? His fucking spine? Both? Was there room for anything else inside him besides those bio-mech things? Was he just another robot?
Dib finally forces himself to take a step forward.
Zim's eyes fly open. He doesn't move. Doesn't blink. Doesn't twitch. He just lets out a wordless scream.