A/N: Well hello there. Been a while since I updated this anthology, hasn't it? Well, with my focus on the main New Adventures series, getting started on Ruby Pair, and a couple of other smaller projects, there just hasn't been time for it. But, all that's out of the way, so here's another one of The Cowardly Christian's prompts brought to life.
A reminder for anyone who's forgotten in the long time since laster chapter — all human characters in this story are at least 18 years old. Also, it is only semi-canon, so while it's tangentially connected to the main New Adventures universe, it is not the definite future of the series, and will only be loosely influenced by any developments in the main stories, if at all.
Also, as I mentioned in When Gamers Collide, my view of Gaz has become more nuanced ever since Enter the Florpus aired. So, going into this chapter, I'd like to remind everyone that just like in the main New Adventures, this story's Gaz is specifically based on the show version of her rather than the more humanized version from the comics and movie.
On an unrelated subject, the DA artist IEPH designed a flag for the New Irken Order, which I'm now using as cover art for the whole New Adventures series, including this fic.
And on a final, more somber note, I do hope that everyone is staying safe during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Be careful and stay healthy, people!
Disclaimer: I still don't own Invader Zim, and probably never will. I only own the OCs that appear in this story.
XxxxxxxxxxxxxxX
New Adventures: Mature Edition
Entry 3: Not-So-Fun and Games
XxxxxxxxxxxxxxX
It was a bright and sunny day in Doomsville, not that one could tell that from within the Membrane household. Specifically from within Gaz's room, where the door was shut and the window curtain drawn. The teenaged Goth didn't want any sort of distraction from her focus on what was currently displayed on her computer monitor — which, despite what most people would guess, wasn't a video game. Or at least, not directly.
Several months ago, Gaz and other hardcore gamers had been looking forward to the release of Gore of War 3: The Bloodening, the newest entry in a highly successful franchise, one of the most action-packed and violent of all time. Which was the problem, as this newest game was so violent, that even by modern standards it was considered by censors as too over the top to allow into the market. As such, to the outrage of the waiting fans, the game was scrapped.
Or at least, officially. As it turned out, the game company wasn't willing to just throw away the vast investment they'd put into making the game, and had found a way to try and recoup their loses by means of the demo copies of the game they had lying around. The company couldn't legally sell them, but there was no legal reason they couldn't give them away as prizes in a competition… that just happened to require the competitors pay for the right to play.
Which led to Gaz's current situation. Today was the day of the competition, and she was just waiting for it to come up on the company's website so she could log into it. As she did, she mentally reviewed the rules that had been posted weeks before — there was a fifty dollar buy-in, with the same to buy back in if you were eliminated. It was a trivia contest, with the subject not being revealed ahead of time, in order to ensure everyone would go into it without preparation. Any question you got wrong automatically eliminated you, and if you chose to use the buy back you'd have to start at the beginning again. Answer every question correctly and you'd get a copy of the game; once all the copies were claimed, the contest would end, and tough luck to everyone who'd tossed away plenty of good money for nothing.
Not that Gaz was worried about that outcome for herself. One of many upsides to being the child of someone like Professor Membrane was having access to a good-sized portion of his ridiculously huge fortune. And while she may spend a lot of it on games, she didn't blow through it like Dib did to finance his paranormal studies and fight with Zim. Which meant she had plenty of cash on hand, just in case.
But it wouldn't matter. She was sure that whatever the contest was about, she'd win it, and then-
BOOM
Gaz jumped as the house shook from the sound of a nearby explosion. Blinking in confusion for a moment, she scowled and jumped up from her seat, stomping over to the window. Tearing the curtain aside and opening the window, she leaned out and saw a soot-covered Dib stumbling out of the garage, smoke billowing after him.
"DIB!" she shouted down at him, making him jump in surprise, "What the hell are you doing?!"
"Sorry, Gaz!" he called back, "I was doing some rewiring on the ship, and I guess I caused an overload. Gonna take me forever to fix…"
"I don't care," she snapped, "I need total concentration up here, and you screwing around with your alien junk isn't helping! Go bug your stupid friends or something."
"I can't, they're busy today," he replied, trying in vain to wipe some of the soot off.
"Then find something else to do, just get out of the house so you don't distract me!"
"Sorry, but this is too important. I need this ship up and running if I'm going to be able to keep fighting Zim and Tak at full capacity," Dib said, though he paused as he took a look into the smoke-filled garage, "Er, though I'll probably need to wait a moment on that. Hey, I'm going to go take a shower to get this soot off, think you can let me know when it stops burning?"
Gaz grit her teeth but as she didn't outright say no, Dib must have taken that as agreement, as without another word he walked into the house. Growling to herself, Gaz slammed the window shut and pulled the curtain closed again, before collapsing into her seat with a scowl, arms crossed in annoyance.
"Great, this is all I need," she grumbled, "Of all the days for him to get caught up in something loud and annoying…"
Her grumbling only grew as she heard Dib come up the stairs and cross the hall into the bathroom, a few moments later followed by the sound of the shower starting to run.
"Why are the walls in this house so thin? I swear I can hear him breathing in there," she mentally groaned, "Dammit, I'll never be able to focus on the contest with him in the house. I mean, I'll still win because I don't lose when it matters, but if he keeps distracting me I'll screw up and have to pay more than necessary just to get back in the game. And I'm not wasting my money because of that moron. But how do I get him out of the house and keep him out?"
Gaz sat there, contemplating her perceived problem, when an idea suddenly occurred to her, something that she'd seen in more than one comedy movie. As the thought came to her, she snorted, and a cruel smirk formed on her face.
"Oh yeah, that would definitely get rid of him for the rest of the day. Maybe longer if it works out right," she mused, "Now, I just have to get it done."
Checking the computer to confirm that she had enough time until the contest started to do what she needed to do, she got out of her chair. Exiting her room and making her way downstairs, she walked out to the garage, where the smoke was clearing, and closed the door, locking it with a padlock and taking the key with her as she reentered the house. Then, she quickly made a circuit of the house, making sure that every means of entering it other than the front door was shut and locked. She then opened the front door, stepped back so that she wasn't standing between it and the stairs, and cupped her hands around her mouth.
"Hey, Dib! Bigfoot's on the lawn!" she shouted, loud enough to be heard upstairs. There was a moment of silence, and then the sound of a door slamming open, followed by the thud of running feet, and then Dib came sprinting down the stairs. As Gaz had been counting on, he was in such a rush that he'd only taken the time to throw a towel on rather than getting properly dressed. She grimaced slightly at the sight, but still smirked as he ran past her and right out the door.
"I've got you now, Bigfoot! I… huh?" Dib shouted, excitedly waving around a camera before trailing off and staring in confusion as he saw that there wasn't really a Sasquatch on his lawn.
SLAM
Click
Dib spun around, eyes widening as he saw that the door had shut behind him, and from the sound of it had locked. Yelping and blushing in embarrassment, he dropped the camera and clutched the towel around his waist tightly with one hand while he knocked hard and repeatedly on the door with the other.
"Gaz! Open the door, I locked myself out!" he shouted, looking nervously over his shoulder to see if anyone had spotted him; fortunately there was no one else outside, but that could change at any moment.
Hearing laughter, Dib turned back around to see Gaz standing at the window, smirking widely and clearly enjoying his predicament.
"Gee, Dib, you forget something?" she asked sarcastically, loudly enough to be heard through the glass.
"Haha, very funny, now let me in," Dib said, laughing nervously. When Gaz merely continued smirking at him, he gulped and decided to switch to outright pleading, "Come on, Gaz, please! Someone's gonna see me!"
"You're right, they will," she said, pulling out her phone. As Dib stared in shocked disbelief, she dialed a number, and when it connected said, "Hello, police? I'd like to report some guy streaking in my neighborhood."
Dib's jaw dropped as he heard that. And when Gaz then hung up, gave a sarcastic wave, and disappeared back into the house, he could only sputter incoherently in indignant rage. However, he also knew that there was no point in wasting time voicing his anger, especially since it would most likely only attract unwanted attention. Instead, both hands gripping his towel tightly, he ran around the house to the backyard, only to find that the back door and windows were all also locked. And with the garage closed up, he couldn't even hide in there.
Just as Dib was considering finding a rock to break a window with in order to get back into the house, he heard the distinct sound of police sirens and froze. Slowly peeking around the side of the house, he paled at the sight of a police car pulling up, the two burly cops sitting in it getting out.
"So, what are we looking for again?" one of the cops asked.
"According to the scary-sounding girl who called it in, we got some guy running around here naked," his partner replied.
"Okay, but I don't see anything," the first cop said, looking up and down the street.
"Perv probably hid when he heard us coming," the second one said, apparently thinking for a moment before saying, "Okay, we'll check the backyards. You take the houses on that side, I'll take this one. When you reach the end of the block, double back and try the other end."
"Got it," the first cop said, turning to cross the street while his partner turned towards the Membrane house.
"Shit, shit, shit!" Dib swore, panicking as the cop approached. Not seeing any other option, he turned and ran towards the fence separating the backyard from the woods behind the house. With only a moment's pause, he leapt up to grab the top of the fence, pulling himself over and letting himself hit the dirt on the other side. Scrambling to his feet, he then dashed over to a nearby tree and hid behind it.
Pressing him against the tree and forcing himself to stay perfectly still and quiet, Dib listened to the sounds of the cop searching the yard. Even after he couldn't hear anything anymore, he waited a few minutes, until he was sure the cop was gone. Only then did he allow himself to slightly calm down and take a moment to start thinking things over properly.
"Okay, so, it shouldn't take them too long to search the neighborhood," he muttered, "I just need to be patient and wait for them to leave when they can't find me. Then I can just break a door down to get back in the house. Man, I am going to kill Gaz for this, why would she even-?"
"Grrrrr."
The sudden noise caught Dib by surprise, and he slowly turned towards its source to find a large dog standing nearby and growling as it glared at him. After a moment, he recognized it as belonging to one of his neighbors, and belatedly remembered with rapidly growing panic that it hadn't liked him ever since that time that it had caught him going through said neighbor's garbage cans looking for some mole people that he'd been chasing.
"Uh… nice doggy?" he said faintly. In response, the dog snarled and leapt at him, Dib screaming in panic. Turning, he started running in a random direction, heading deeper into the woods, the dog almost literally nipping at his heels.
XXXXXXX
Meanwhile, back inside the house, Gaz settled back into her room, a self-satisfied smirk on her face. Sure, a small part of her felt a little bad about doing this to her brother, but if it kept him out of her way, she'd live with the little guilt. Besides, it was hardly the first time Dib had been publicly humiliated or arrested. He'd get over it.
Checking the time, Gaz grinned as she saw that the contest was finally about to begin. Cracking her neck to loosen the muscles, she turned her full attention back to her computer as the link on the website became active. Clicking it, she quickly entered the required information, and was logged into the system.
"Welcome, Gore of War fans!" a digital voice spoke as the series' dagger-through-a-heart logo floated on the screen, "Prepare yourselves, for the chance to be one of the lucky few to win a copy of the bloodiest game in the franchise's history! If you are truly capable and dedicated, and don't mind potentially throwing all your money away, then get ready, because the trivia competition is about to begin!"
Gaz smirked in anticipation, watching as the logo disappeared and a new page came up, listing a question with several answer choices beneath it.
"And the category for the competition is… The Supernatural!" the automated announcer said, "Test your knowledge of the paranormal, that wonderful fantasy fiction that is such a key element of our genre. If you know enough about it, you may yet have a chance of winning one of our precious few copies of The Bloodening! May the most determined gamers win!"
"…Shit," Gaz said flatly, eye twitching as she realized that she'd just gotten rid of the one person who could guarantee her an easy win in this. Still, she wasn't one to dwell on problems (least of all ones of her own making), so instead she just shook it off and refocused on the contest. After all, every moment wasted gave her competitors more of a head start, and diminished her chances of getting one of the games.
"Okay, no problem, I can get through this," she muttered, "I mean, I've been stuck listening to Dib ramble about this stuff for years. I'm sure some of it's rubbed off on me subconsciously."
Looking at the screen, she read the first question aloud, "'What is the oldest European name for vampires? A) Vampyre B) Strigoi C) Nosferatu or D) Jiangshi.' Hmph, well, that last one's definitely Asian, and that first one looks like it's just lazy spelling, so I doubt that's it. Wait, wasn't there some old vampire movie called Nosferatu? That's probably it then."
Smirking, Gaz selected answer C and hit enter… and then her face fell as the screen flashed red with a buzzer sound, the word "Incorrect" popping up with a button labeled "Buy back in?" underneath it.
"Are you kidding me?" she muttered angrily as she clicked the button to reenter the game, refreshing the page. Clicking on answer B, Gaz was able to grunt in approval as this time a chime sounded to signal it was the right choice and the page changed to the next question.
"Okay, it doesn't matter. This is just bad luck. I can handle this. I'm not going to lose to something this stupid," Gaz said firmly, determined to win no matter what.
XXXXXXX
Dib wasn't sure how long he ran, barely staying ahead of the dog the entire time, but eventually he started to tire. Realizing he couldn't afford to stop to catch his breath, he instead turned towards the nearest tall tree and leapt into the air to grab the lowest-hanging branch. Scrambling desperately, he pulled himself up to fully sit on the branch, only to yelp as he felt something tug on him hard enough to almost pull him back off.
Looking down, Dib cursed as he saw that the dog had jumped up and grabbed ahold of his towel. Now it was dangling in the air from its grip, growling at him through the teeth clenched around the material.
"Let go, you stupid mutt!" he snapped, holding himself in place with one hand while grabbing the towel with the other and shaking it hard in an attempt to dislodge the dog. However, as he did so, he failed to notice that the rapid movements were causing the knot holding the towel in place — which had rather shockingly held up in the circumstances — to loosen, which it did for several moments, before finally coming apart completely.
"Wha- hey!" Dib yelped, flushing red as he realized what had happened. He let go of of the branch to try and re-secure the towel, but nearly lost his balance as a result. In instinctive response to this, he grabbed the branch with both hands… and thus let go of the towel completely, which fell to the ground with the dog. Upon hitting the dirt, the animal blinked in surprise, before yelping and running off, the towel still clutched firmly between its teeth.
Dib could only sit there on the branch, stunned from disbelief and face growing even redder, until it looked like a giant tomato.
"That… that did not… how is my luck that bad?!" he screamed, slamming his head against the tree trunk a few times. He then forced himself to take a few deep breaths and calm down so that he could think clearly.
"Okay, this is bad, and downright humiliating, but I've been through worse," he muttered, "I just need to get back home. And somehow get inside the house. All without being seen by anyone, and while hoping those cops are gone by the time I get there. Crap."
Knowing there was nothing to do for it, Dib sighed deeply and hopped off the tree. Hitting the ground, he spotted a small bush nearby. Seeing as it was better than nothing, he grabbed and, after a few minutes struggle, managed to uproot it and hold it in front of himself as makeshift cover. It wasn't much, and wouldn't help if anyone saw him from behind, but it would have to do.
Taking another steadying breath, Dib started to walk, only to pause as something suddenly occurred to him.
"Wait, which way did I come from?" he said, looking around, but seeing no clues — he'd been so focused on evading the dog that he hadn't been paying attention to his surroundings. And the forest looked exactly the same in every direction.
"That figures," Dib muttered, before shaking his head with a sigh and walking in a random direction. The way he saw it, sooner or later he'd come across some sign of civilization, which he could use to figure out his location and how to get home from there. And maybe find some clothing, or at least better cover, while he was at it.
Some time later, however, he was still in the middle of the woods, with no sign of anything in sight.
"Stupid Gaz, stupid dogs, stupid woods," he grumbled, with a passable duplicate of his sister's trademark growl plastered on his face, "Only thing that could make this situation worse would be if I somehow ran into Zim in the middle of all this. I'm sure he'd get a huge laugh outta… AH!"
Dib trailed off with a yelp as he passed through several bushes and suddenly found himself in a clearing, surrounded by people. He blushed and instinctively pulled his makeshift cover closer to himself, only to pause and stare as he properly looked around and something rather glaring registered with him — namely, that he wasn't the only naked person present. More specifically, everyone was naked; dozens of people were milling about the clearing, attending what appeared to be various picnic activities, all looking perfectly normal, except for the fact that not one had a stitch of clothing on.
Staring slack-jawed at all of this, Dib's already shocked mind outright froze completely as a group of several quite beautiful women passed by right in front of him, chatting happily while utterly ignoring his presence and how he got a total eyeful of their, well, everything. He could only stand there, dumbly opening and closing his mouth repeatedly, muttering incoherently and dropping the bush he was carrying as his arms went slack.
"Right on, brother! Ditch those last shreds of humility and really get into the spirit!" cheered a middle-aged man with a greying bushy beard and wearing nothing but a peace symbol medallion, who was leaning against a tree nearby and smoking something that from the smell of it was definitely not a cigarette. Dib blinked as hearing that snapped him back to normal; blushing brightly, he yelped again and frantically grabbed the dropped bush, pulling it back up in front of himself again.
"Aw, come on little dude, don't be like that!" the evident hippie said, "This is what this commune's all about, after all, being able to be one with nature without any of the judgments or body-shaming that modern society forces on us. Modesty is an artificial concept, man!"
"Er, right," Dib said, not sure what else he could say in response to that, as he reluctantly dropped the bush. His instincts were screaming at him to cover himself anyway he could, but as he'd apparently stumbled upon some kind of nudist colony-slash-hippie commune, that'd probably just make him stick out more.
"So, I'm just gonna go and do… something," he said lamely, waving weakly around the clearing.
"Righteous," the hippie replied, taking another drag of his joint. Dib wasn't sure how to respond to that, so after a moment of staring silently at the man he turned and walked off further into the commune.
Walking through the clearing, Dib forced his mind off his embarrassment by putting his investigative eye to work, taking in his surroundings. Forcing himself to not focus on the naked bodies filling his field of vision in every direction, he instead took in everything else — the picnic tables, the cabins, the stage where a band was performing, all the things that made it look like a normal camp. Which just made the nudity of all present even more uncanny.
"Focus. Now, just because they're all naked while they're here, doesn't mean they don't have clothes stored somewhere nearby," Dib thought out loud as he meandered through the crowds, "I mean, they must go into town for supplies sometimes, and they can't do that naked. So, I just need to find where the clothes are stored and borrow some. Then I- oof!"
Caught up as he was in his planning, Dib stopped watching where he was going and bumped right into someone. Immediately growing flustered at making physical contact with another person while they were both naked, Dib jumped back, blushing and holding up his hands to keep from touching anything he shouldn't.
"Oh god, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to- TAK?!" he started to stammer, only to yell as he saw just who he had bumped into.
"Oh great, it's you," Tak replied dryly, scowling at him.
Dib would have been more intimidated by the death glare the female Irken was sending him if he wasn't distracted by the fact that Tak was, indeed, just as naked as everyone else. To which he had to say, damn. Her usual outfit was baggy enough to obscure most of her curves, and while her Skool gym uniform hugged them enough to highlight that they were probably impressive, seeing everything fully on display was a whole other matter — her breasts were easily C-bordering-on-D cups, and her ass was practically heart-shaped. True, it was probably all just her holographic disguise, but still…
"If you don't stop ogling me, human, I'm going to rip your 'little friend' off," Tak snarled, snapping Dib out of his leering daze, "Which should be easy with how much it's sticking out."
Dib's blush spread to his whole head as he registered what that meant, and he quickly covered his crotch with both hands, doing his best to force down his massive erection.
"Sorry… I… what are you even doing here?!" he nearly screamed, desperate to change the subject.
"I could ask you the same thing," she countered.
"I asked you first!"
"Ugh, fine," Tak grumbled, planting her hands on her hips, "If you must know, I stumbled across this place during a routine examination of the city perimeter. I thought it might be some sort of militia or cult compound and decided to investigate it more closely. And I'm sure you can imagine my disgruntlement when they forced me to turn in my clothing before they'd even let me past the line in the dirt they use instead of an actual security fence because they 'don't believe in confining boundaries' or some such nonsense."
"Yeah, I can… wait, what about your PAK? How'd you get away with keeping that on?" Dib asked, genuine curiosity overriding his hormones.
"Oh, that's easy, I just modified my hologram to cloak it. See?" she replied, turning around. To his credit, Dib only took advantage of the perfect view of her ass for about twenty seconds before forcing himself to look further up, seeing that her back did indeed appear totally bare; Tak tapped the spot where her PAK would be, and the air shimmered as the hologram flickered for a moment before clearing again.
"Anyway, it's safe to say that this has been a total waste of my time," Tak said, turning back around, "I've searched this entire place, and all that's here is a bunch of humans who like to be naked and smoke narcotic weeds while talking about granola. Now, your turn. Why are you here?"
"Gaz tricked me into running out of the house naked and locked me out, then a dog chased me into the woods, and now I'm here."
"That's it?" Tak asked, arching an eyebrow.
"Yeah, my luck's just that bad," Dib sighed, "I mean, I've been in worse situations than this before, but this is still really embarrassing."
"Oh, suck it up human," Tak snapped, rolling her eyes, "This is the first time I've been naked in decades, but you don't hear me whining about it, do you?"
"No, but… wait, what?" Dib asked, blinking in confusion, "How does that work?"
"Irken clothes are infused with nanites designed to absorb and eradicate bodily waste exuded through the skin," Tak replied, tone suggesting this should have been obvious, "As such we never need to waste valuable time on something as mundane as cleaning ourselves, with the added effect of never needing to change or take off our clothes. So, if anything, this situation is probably more awkward for me than it is for you. So stop complaining before I-"
ZZZTTT!
To Dib's surprise, Tak was cut off as the side of her head suddenly sparked, and her hologram shut off, leaving her in her normal Irken form.
"Irk dammit, not again!" Tak snarled, reaching up to fiddle with the implant in the side of her head. While she did that, Dib found himself once again staring, as he got his first look at fully exposed Irken anatomy — which to his surprise, was nearly identical to her human disguise. Aside from the green skin, everything was exactly the same, being just as big and curvy, which a part of his mind couldn't help but scientifically scrutinize. After all, why would a member of an insectoid species have mammaries?
The rest of him, meanwhile, was arguing with itself over whether or not he should find her more attractive like this.
After a few minutes of angry grumbling and tinkering with her implant, Tak managed to restore her hologram. The transition from Irken back to human snapped Dib out of his daze, and he shook his head clear, managing to regain focus before Tak even noticed that he had been leering at her again.
"What just happened?" he asked, which seemed to remind her that he was present.
"Something in all this drug smoke the other humans are putting out is interfering with my holographic interface, it keeps shorting out," Tak explained in annoyance, before adding under her breath, "Stuck naked and with a faulty disguise. Tenn is never going to let me live this down."
"Hang on, you mean you keep losing your disguise in public, around lots of potential witnesses?" Dib asked, starting to grin widely. Seeing this, Tak snorted and rolled her eyes.
"Don't get your hopes up," she said dryly, before turning towards a group of hippies sitting at a nearby table, "Hey, did any of you see a big green bug person just now?"
"Yeah man, over there playing poker with a pink elephant and a unicorn," a woman replied, pointing toward nearby spot that was completely empty of anything.
"See?" Tak said, turning back to Dib with a smirk, "They're all too drugged out of their minds to notice anything unusual. This situation is annoying to me, but not a threat."
"…That figures," Dib muttered. Then something Tak had said earlier came back to him, and he said, "Wait, you said they made you turn your clothing in when you got here?"
"Yeah, they put all occupants' and visitors' clothes in storage until they're ready to leave, apparently."
"Can you tell me where that storage area is?" Dib asked hopefully.
"I could, but I won't," Tak replied. When Dib's face fell in disbelief, she smirked wider, "We are enemies, Dib. Why would I make anything easier for you?"
Seeing as he couldn't really argue with that logic, Dib merely grumbled and stomped off, by now too frustrated to continue the conversation. As he walked away, he looked back over his shoulder and saw Tak give him another smirk and a sarcastic wave before turning and walking in the opposite direction… and did her hips normally sway that much, or was she doing it deliberately now just to mess with him?
"Dammit, focus," Dib muttered, shaking his head to ward off the distracting arousal, "This place doesn't look that big. I just have to look around, find where they keep the clothes, and take some. Then I can get out of here, find my way home, and pretend that this whole day never happened."
With that, Dib walked off to start his search, silently cursing his sister once again for causing this, and hoping with bitter sarcasm that she, at least, was having a good day.
XXXXXXX
Gaz was very definitely not having a good day. She had gone through nearly a hundred questions already, and gotten every single one of them wrong at least once, some of them multiple times, only getting the right answer through process of elimination. What probably should have taken her a half hour, tops, had taken nearly four times that, but at last she was at the final question. She just had to beat it, and she could finally claim her game.
"Okay, okay, let's do this," she muttered, sweaty and hair a stress-induced mess, "Final question. 'Name this 'demon flyer' said to be native to New Guinea. A) Fei Lian B) Ropen C) Akuchu D) Ebu Gogo.' How the hell am I supposed to know that? All these names sound like gibberish!"
For a few moments, Gaz simply ground her teeth as she tried to determine the right answer. Finally grunting in annoyance, she just picked one at random, settling on D. And, to her intense rage, this resulted in the "Incorrect" sign popping back up again.
"Goddammit! Fine, whatever, I'll just try again," she practically snarled, hitting the buy back button… only for an alarm to ring and a screen to pop up saying "Insufficient funds".
"What the hell?!" Gaz exclaimed, hitting the button a few more times in desperation, only to get the same message each time, "There is no fucking way I'm out of money already! What's going on?!"
Opening a new tab, Gaz brought up her bank account. And before she could look around it to figure out what was happening, a video file window popped up, which to her surprise was displaying her father's image. Confused, she hit the play button on the file.
"Hello, son and/or daughter," the recording greeted, "If you are watching this video, it means that you've hit the new daily limit on your bank account. You see, recently my accountants informed me that I was being far too lenient in the access I allow you in regards to your portions of the family finances, especially as you've been often overindulging in it to waste on your ridiculous fake science or pizza and video games. Thus, I have placed a cap on your accounts, specifically towards how much you can spend on any given day. If you're seeing this message, then you've hit it, and will now have to wait 24 hours for the funds to be unfrozen again."
"24 hours?!" Gaz shrieked, "The competition will be over by then! No, this is not happening!"
All she could do was yell incoherently for several minutes, raging at the situation she found herself in, and unable to think of a way out of it. However, eventually a desperate thought popped into her head.
"Dad must keep all the banking information written down," she muttered, "Probably in his lab, I know he has a safe hidden in there somewhere. I just have to find it, and I can override this idiotic block. It hasn't been that long, there has to still be at least a few copies of the game left. If I hurry, I know I'll still have time to win one."
Decision made, Gaz jumped out of her chair and bolted out of her room. Within a minute, she was down in her father's home lab in the basement. Looking around, she frowned at the various stacks of boxes scattered across the room; the Professor had been using the home lab less and less lately, turning it more into a storage area for old experiments he couldn't be bothered to keep at his main facilities. Which Gaz normally didn't care about, but right now it was making it impossible to find what she was looking for.
"Okay, if I'm remembering this right, the safe is built into a wall, near the floor. But where?" she thought out loud, tapping a foot against the floor in agitation. After a few moments of thought, she finally decided to just start moving around all the boxes until she found what she was looking, as while that seemed like an annoying waste of time it was still the only solution she could think of.
So, she got to work, pulling stacks of boxes away from the nearest wall, grunting at the exertion of moving the heavy equipment. Finding that the spot of wall she'd exposed didn't contain the safe, she scowled and moved to the next stack and repeated the process. This went on for almost half an hour, until Gaz found herself having made almost a full circuit of the room and ended up clearing a spot almost on the exact opposite side of the doorway from where she'd started.
"That figures," she said with a sigh, as she found the safe set into the wall behind the last spot she checked. Glad to have finally found what she was looking for, Gaz eagerly shoved aside the final stack of boxes… a little too eagerly, in fact, as the boxes slammed into the stack next to it, which wobbled from the impact before falling over and slamming into the next.
This domino effect continued, quickly spreading across the room. Hearing this commotion, Gaz turned around just in time to see the stack of boxes right next to her get knocked over and fall towards her.
"AH!" she yelled, instinctively throwing her arms up protectively… only to blink in confusion as nothing happened. Looking up, she found that the topmost box in the stack had smacked against the wall, and the way all of the boxes were stacked meant they were bracing against each other, leaving the whole stack precariously balanced in a diagonal angle above Gaz. She could only stare at this in disbelief, before snorting and chuckling slightly at the absurdity of the situation, letting the momentary tension leave her.
Then one of the boxes popped open and several glass vials fell out, smashing open on and around Gaz, splattering her with some kind of glowing blue goo.
"Gah! What the hell?!" she exclaimed, spitting the goo out of her mouth and doing her best to scrub it off her face. As if in response to her question, a shrill alarm suddenly sounded, the lab's lights beginning to flash red.
"Biohazard alert! Biohazard alert!" a computerized voice rang out, "Mutated yeast from Project: Super Toast detected outside of containment. Decontamination protocols now initiating, please standby."
"'Decontamination'?" Gaz echoed faintly, not liking the sound of that. Then she yelped in surprise as several metal claws attached to tendrils shot out of the walls and clamped onto her wrists and ankles, lifting her into the air and leaving her suspended spread eagle. And before she could even process this, several more mechanical arms emerged and, without warning, quickly tore all her clothes off.
"What the fuck?! What are you doing?!" Gaz screamed in outrage at whatever computer was running this, face flushing bright red as she struggled futilely against the restraints.
The system didn't respond, however, merely tossing the remains of Gaz's goo-covered clothes into an incinerator. At the same time, several large hoses emerged from somewhere and began spraying high-pressure streams of hot water at Gaz from multiple angles, covering her entire body, while several more washed the goo on the floor into a drain. And as she sputtered and struggled to gasp for breath from beneath the water, several more mechanical arms appeared and approached her, holding large bars of soap, sponges, wire brushes, and in one case, an electrical razor.
Several agonizing minutes later, the system determined that it had completed the process, shutting off the water, withdrawing the various appendages, and letting Gaz drop to the floor. Every inch of skin on her body had been scrubbed a raw reddish-pink, and her head had been completely shaved, the shorn hair being vacuumed up and joining her clothes in the incinerator.
"Decontamination complete. Thank you and have a nice day," the digital voice spoke again. Gaz, lying face down on the floor, could only moan in pain in response, in too much pain to even move her head and glare at wherever the voice was coming from.
She made a mental note to later send her robot dolls down here to smash everything, just to spite her father for building such an overzealous security system. But right now she had to move on and focus on what was important, and get that banking information out of the safe and go earn her game.
…As soon as she could move without her whole body screaming in pain, that is.
XXXXXXX
Dib was seriously starting to hate this commune. Between the alternating arousal and disgust he had at seeing the various naked people surrounding him, the inane pseudo-philosophical debates random people kept trying to drag him into, and what he was pretty sure was a secondhand high from all the pot smoke in the air, he couldn't concentrate on what he was trying to do — he was pretty sure he'd searched several spots repeatedly without realizing it, and he still hadn't found where the clothes were kept.
"Come on already! This place isn't that big, why can't I find where the clothes are kept?!" he finally exclaimed in frustration.
"They're over in that shed, dude," a hippie passing by said. Dib blinked and followed the man's pointing finger, seeing a moderately-sized shed a few yards away, at the edge of clearing.
"…Why didn't I just ask for directions to begin with?" he asked rhetorically. Shaking his head in annoyance at the oversight, Dib quickly made his way over to the shed, which was thankfully not locked. Entering the shed, he sighed deeply in relief at the sight that greeted him — numerous boxes full of clothes, all relatively freshly cleaned too, from the look of the laundry machine in the corner. That was a definite plus, he noted with a snort, as he didn't feel like wearing someone else's dirty underwear, even if he was desperate.
Choosing not to dwell on that, Dib quickly sorted through the clothes. Making sure to take the various articles from different boxes (no reason to completely steal someone else's outfit, after all), he found himself with a blue shirt, khaki pants, underwear, socks, and boots. The only thing that really felt missing was a coat, but that wasn't something he was willing to nitpick over at the moment.
He was about to put the clothes on right there, but paused as something occurred to him. How would the commune members react if any of them recognized the clothes he was taking as their own? Would they even care, with how baked they all were? With the luck he'd been having today, they probably would, and form an angry mob or something.
Deciding not risk it, Dib merely gathered up his "borrowed" clothes in a bundle which he clutched close to his chest and walked out of the shed, slowly making his way towards the edge of the clearing. Once he was in the woods and out of risk of being discovered, he'd put the clothes on and quickly make his way away from the commune; hopefully, he'd either find his way directly back to town, or at least find a landmark of some kind to point the way.
A few minutes later, feeling he was safely deep enough in the woods, he rounded one last tree just to be safe… and froze as he found Tak standing nearby, holding her own clothes and clearly about to put them back on. However, that wasn't what caught Dib's attention. Rather, his focus was entirely on the mechanical bull-sized rocket standing on a tripod next to her.
"I see you found the clothes shed," she said dryly.
"What is that?" Dib asked, ignoring her comment and pointing at the rocket.
"Hmm? Oh, that's just a missile I'm going to blow up those filthy hippies with," she replied casually.
"What?! Why?"
"Because this has been an embarrassing waste of my time, and I honestly don't think I'll be able to get the smell of their filthy drugs out of my antennae for weeks from the sheer amount I've been exposed to," she said, scowling, "Blowing them all up is just cathartic. Now scram so I can concentrate and enjoy the moment."
"Like hell am I walking away and letting you blow up all those people!" Dib shouted, pointing dramatically at her with the hand not holding his pilfered clothes, "Sure, they're weird, but they don't deserve to get blown up for it, and if you wanna try it, you'll have to get through me first!"
"Oh, is that right?" Tak asked coyly. Dropping her clothes to the ground, she placed her hands on her hips and cocked them at a suggestive angle as she flashed Dib a faux-sultry smile, "You want to get physical with me while we're both naked? How bold of you."
Dib blushed brightly as he registered the innuendo, but forced the embarrassment out of his mind, knowing that she was just trying to screw with his head and throw him off balance.
"Knock that off!" he snapped, "And anyway, us both being naked means we're not armed, so I'd say that makes us about even, so I'll take my chances!"
In response, Tak arched an eyebrow, before her PAK legs suddenly deployed and pointed at him.
"…oh yeah, I forgot about those," Dib said faintly.
"Well, can't say I imagined this being how it all ended, Dib," Tak said with a smirk, "If it makes you feel any better, I'll leave the nudity out when I retell the story. Now, prepare to-"
ZZZTTT!
Tak was cut off as her implant once again sparked, her human hologram shutting off.
"Seriously, again?! I'm not even in the vicinity of the smoke anymore!" she yelled, reaching up to grab the implant. Taking advantage of the distraction, and acting on pure instinct, Dib threw the bundle in his arms at Tak; while the clothes fluttered uselessly to the ground, the boots flew through the air to smack her hard in the face, knocking her onto her back.
As Tak fell to the ground in a daze, Dib sprinted towards the missile. Jumping on top of it, he scrambled towards a hatch near the front and pulled it open, exposing the interior mechanics. Looking over the mess of wires and circuits, he immediately knew that he couldn't mess with any of that without any tools, so instead focused on the pulsing purple cube at the center of it all, which he knew was the actual explosive component of the missile. Grabbing it with both hands, he tugged hard, and after a few moments managed to tear it out of its setting.
"Ha! Take that! …Oh crap," he said, as he saw the torn wires begin sparking, which quickly spread across the circuits, everything soon lighting up entirely. The missile moved jerkily up and down and side-to-side, before its rockets suddenly ignited and it was sent flying into the air, Dib screaming as he hung on for dear life, at some point dropping the explosives to better secure his grip.
Tak, having recovered her wits, watched with a squinted eye as the out of control missile carried Dib off into the distance, soon vanishing from view. Meanwhile, something blew up nearby, presumably as a result of the dropped explosives hitting something.
"Meh, I'll take this as a victory," she said after a moment. Chuckling, she turned to retrieve her clothes… and froze as she found herself staring at a pile of ashes surrounded by scorched earth. Apparently, the portion of ground both her and Dib's stolen clothes had been dropped on had been close enough to the missile to be ignited by the backwash from its rockets firing. Literally the only things left were the boots that had hit her in the head.
Tak could only stare at this for a few minutes, slack-jawed, before finally snapping out of it and facepalming.
"Ah, caragash… fine, whatever, I can just do what Dib did and steal some clothes from the hippies, then have the base systems manufacture some proper replacements when I get back. With any luck I can sneak in and do that without Tenn seeing me, then I can pretend this never happened," she thought out loud, before turning and walking back towards the commune, fiddling with her malfunctioning implant as she did so, managing to restore her hologram.
Nearing the commune, she paused as she heard voices.
"Hey man, did you hear something weird just now?"
"Yeah dude, something made the clothing shed blow up. I thought I was tripping, but it really happened. It was far out."
"Bummer. Guess anyone who wants to head back into town will have to streak, huh?"
As the conversing hippies walked by, continuing to casually discuss the sudden destruction of everyone's clothes, Tak could only stand there, frozen in disbelief. Then her eye started twitching, before she grabbed her head and screamed in rage.
"This can not be happening! My luck is not this bad when Zim's not involved! AARRGGHHH!" she yelled, descending into incoherent gibberish as her rage overwhelmed her. Eventually, she calmed down and pressed her forehead against a tree trunk as she took several deep breaths and thought through her options.
"Okay. So, the obvious and simplest solution is to call Tenn and have her pick me up. But then she'll know that I put myself in this situation, and she'll never let me hear the end of it. I can't contact MIMI and have her carry me back — she's not built for carrying a person at her full speed over long distances, which means she's likely to break down in the middle of the city, leaving me exposed. So all that leaves is trying to make my way back entirely on my own; I like my odds better for that, but there's still too much of a chance people might see me, and that sort of humiliation would ruin my cover reputation," she mused out loud. After a few minutes of contemplating all these options, she finally sighed in defeat and pulled a communicator out of her PAK, "Fine, Tenn it is, smaller-scale humiliation is better than large-scale. Still, I just know I'm not going to live this down."
And indeed she wouldn't. Especially after an amused Tenn later pointed out back at base that she could have just altered her hologram to pretend that she'd taken her clothes off rather than actually doing it. Then she wouldn't have been stuck in this situation in the first place.
Tak's mortification would last for days after that.
XXXXXXX
Gaz's pain had finally faded enough that she was able to slowly get back to her feet and stumble over to the wall safe, wincing as she dropped onto her hands and knees next to it. Unfortunately, that was as far as her luck went, as she found herself unable to determine the proper code to unlock the damn thing. She'd entered the Professor's birthday, Einstein's birthday, Hawking's birthday, her own birthday, even Dib's birthday (though she was 99 percent sure their dad didn't remember that one), all with the same result of a negative-sounding beep and flashing red light.
"Come on, already, I don't have time for this!" she snarled, as she entered the code for Pi and got the same result. Patience finally snapping, she got back to her feet and stomped over towards the nearest stack of boxes. Ripping several open (carefully, as she didn't want another decontamination), she searched through them until finally smirking as she pulled out a large mechanical wrench.
"Fine, let's do this the hard way," she said, a slightly manic tone in her voice. Marching back to the safe, she hefted the wrench and then brought it down like a golf club, smashing into the safe door and leaving a small dent. Scowling at the lack of serious results, Gaz brought the wrench back to swing again, only to be interrupted as an alarm suddenly sounded.
"Now what?" she demanded, as lights flashed around her.
"Security breach. Offender to be removed," the computerized voice announced. Gaz tensed at that and held up the wrench defensively, expecting more robotic arms. Instead, a tube emerged from the ceiling above her and started sucking in air like a jet turbine. Dropping the wrench, Gaz didn't have a chance to run before she was pulled off her feet and sucked into the tube.
Flying through a cramped dark tunnel and bouncing through several turns, the disoriented Gaz found herself being shot out of another tube. Blinded by the sudden bright light that filled her vision as she happened, Gaz was unable to see where she was before she fell through empty air slammed hard into… dirt?
Rapidly rubbing her eyes to clear them, Gaz looked around and yelped in panic at the sight that greeted her — she had been deposited on her front yard. As in, outside her house. And still completely naked.
Blushing brightly, Gaz jumped to her feet and wrapped her arms protectively around herself before running towards the front door. But it was only after fruitlessly tugging at the doorknob for a couple of minutes that her panicked mind remembered that every way into the house was still locked from the inside.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" she hissed, turning to run towards the backyard, "Okay, don't panic, I'll just do what Dib was too stupid to do and break a window to get in, then-"
"FREEZE, PERVERT!"
Gaz didn't have a chance to process that shouted order before one of the burly cops she'd called on Dib suddenly tackled her to the ground and pinned her.
"Ha! See, I told you pretending to leave the neighborhood would flush 'em out!" the cop crowed to his partner as he cuffed Gaz's hands behind her back.
"Yeah, but I thought the call said our streaker was a guy," the second cop said as he approached with a towel and observed Gaz as clinically and non-sexually as possible.
"Eh, I can kinda see how someone could make that mistake from a distance," the first cop said as he pulled the struggling Gaz to her feet and held her still so his partner could wrap the towel around her.
"HEY!" Gaz shouted, too insulted at that comment and angry at the situation to be embarrassed at the moment, "And I'm not the streaker, you idiots, I'm the one who called you!"
"Right, you called us on some other naked person running around," the first cop said dryly as he pushed her towards his car.
"No, I-"
"Save it for your lawyer, sicko!" the cop shouted, tossing her into the backseat of the car. He and his partner then got back in the front and drove off, ignoring Gaz's protests.
For the next few minutes, the neighborhood was quiet… and then Tak's disarmed missile, with a screaming Dib still holding onto it, slammed into the Membrane house, smashing right through the roof and depositing Dib smack in the middle of his own room. Even after everything he'd been through today, even Dib couldn't help but laugh at the contrivance of that.
Once he regained consciousness, at least.
XxxxxxxxxxxxxxX
The End
XxxxxxxxxxxxxxX
A/N: And, done. Took a while longer than I had hoped, as I had to stop and rework parts of it — the original outline made the encounter with Tak only one of several Dib had, also running into Zita (which I cut cause I couldn't make it work) and Viera (which ended up feeling tacked on and gratuitous). But since the Tak section was so much fun, I decided to just expand on it and make it the main focus of Dib's side of this, with a little added karma for her.
Hope you don't mind the change to your prompt, CC. And I hope the rest of you all enjoyed this.
Once more, stay safe and healthy out there, everyone, and until whenever the next time is, please review!
