Shiny New Chapter of Shininess! Hello, my lovelies, the wait is over! Let me know how you like this new version compared to what you remember of the old. I've only done chapters one through four so far and I suspect I'll do chapter seven as well. You'll find out why when you get there. Don't want to give anything away to new readers. As always, point out grammar and spelling 'what?s' as FF likes to spontaneously delete things. I suspect this has happened as my word count says 1585 and FF says 1577. They may count hyphenated words differently, but eh, who knows? Lel I used to think this chapter was long! I'm so silly! I lost about four hundred words in the edit, which is about a paragraph or two. Nonetheless, this is still not a fic to be committed to lightly! I know in the past I've said lots of nonsense about "regular updates" and such things, but nowadays I shouldn't take years to write new chapters.

Reason being, I recently made the discovery that I've been quietly suffering from the effects of long-term untreated mental illness! YAY! It sounds really bad, but you can't get better if you don't know you're sick yeah? So I have a doctor and prescriptions and friend-and-family support now and am doing much better. I expect this story to reflect that, as it's been around as long as I've been going untreated. To start, I chose to edit it, like, a bunch. It's been going for what, nine years now? And my writing style has changed as I've gotten older and gained more experience with the world in general, as well as arranging words to form coherent sentences with meaning.

To conclude, this is the first story I ever started writing and I want to do it justice. I want to take you guys on a fucking adventure. With llamas and explosions and lasers and shit. Hopefully these edits will bring this story one step closer to epic. Enjoy!

It was not a dark and stormy night. It was dark because it was, well, night. And instead of being stormy, it was cold. If there was someone who controlled the weather, they needed to be fired. And perhaps beaten. Because they'd managed to skip fall altogether and plunge the state straight into winter, thermometers across the city claiming an uncomfortable 42 degrees, calendars insisting it was only September.

So instead of being outside or in the ground level floor of his base, Zim had retreated to its subterranean levels where it was a lot warmer. Irkens hated the cold. Of course, you would never actually find an Irken who would admit to being able to feel cold in the first place. Feeling was a weakness and Irkens are not weak. Unless it was something like an uncontrollable case of the munchies. Is wanton violence a feeling? Those weren't feeling feelings, they were just Irken.

So Zim, feeling incredibly bored, was holed up in the main computer room.

What was once a gleaming, pristine neuron in a vast network of galactic conquest had atrophied into... this. There were miles of tangled cables and countless heaps of broken and half-repaired equipment, their insides spilling about the room like rotting animals whose insides had already been picked apart by the local wildlife. Ragged cardboard boxes full of Irk knows what were stacked haphazardly wherever it was convenient. Empty food and snack containers littered the floor and workspace as did a layer of dirt and grime. Gir had a collection of empty mayonnaise and pickle jars and pizza boxes built into a tower in one corner, on top of which stood a precariously balanced over-flowing trashcan.

Several monitors had rows of dead pixels, the largest of which hung ominous and black from the ceiling, its screen imploded inward. Most of the overhead lights needed to be replaced entirely because when they began their death-throes of mad flickering, Zim ended the desperate attempts to keep circuits complete with a violent laser blast from one of the many weapons buried under piles of garbage. The whole room had an air of violence and quiet neglect. Much of the base had fallen into disrepair such as this and the lot of it was coated in a layer of dust as thick as cake frosting. Zim, who normally was quite obsessed with cleanliness, didn't really care and had somehow come to find it quite cozy. He didn't even notice most of the mess these days.

Sprawled across a large object that, given its location in front of the screens where chairs are usually located and the fact that Zim was sitting in it, could only be a chair (but really- besides the couch foam and blankets- the fact that it was made of scrap metal, held together with wire, and had no upholstery, "chair" was a far-off guess), our extra-terrestrial passively attended the comms and monitoring systems, wondering why he'd ever thought it necessary to put audio-visual feed in the MacMeaties store room. All while musing over his life choices, the situation they had brought him to, and eating a bag of cheese doodles.

Cheese doodles were the only human snack he would eat. He would never openly admit it, but they were quite better than Irk's cheesey-doodley munchies, which was an accomplishment seeing as how Irkens have a great talent for compulsive snacking. Irk snacks were good but earth apparently knew better in this instance.

There were plenty of spaces in the base where he'd built nests well-stocked enough to justify not leaving for days, but this was his thinking space. Usually he let his mind wander to subjects like where waffles were invented and why there was such diverse speciation of cockroaches on Earth, but here in this room, his mind was kept on a bit of a leash. Today he was thinking about when -if- he would ever see Dib again.

It wasn't unusual for Zim to think about Dib. He was literally the only person he knew on the whole planet and given the stupid level of every other human he had ever met, there wasn't much else to think about. Dib had changed since their first meeting back in that horrible farce of a learning establishment. They had been in what was called the fifth grade, Dib being only eleven years old, a mere newborn by Irken standards. Zim had not enjoyed Skool. Not only had he learned of nothing useful for his conquest, there was the indignity of being harassed by children, though he did not receive taunts and teases or endure beatings from the bigger, stupider ones as Dib had.

He had sort of enjoyed- from a decidedly scientific point of view- watching Dib grow and mature from a child into near adulthood. This was something that Irkens didn't go through, at least not in the same sense as humans. There was their hatching as smeets and they got a little bigger as time went by. They had no puberty to go through; that awkward time of adolescence and teenagerdom. One day they simply became adult Irkens. Smeethood to adulthood. That was it. So it was interesting to watch Dib "grow up". Soon, Dib would come of age for his culture. Over the years, Dib had gradually given up his paranormal investigations, turning to Real Science for a short while before abandoning that as well. Zim had been watching.

He stopped rambling about ghosts and Bigfoot, vampires and werewolves. And Zim. He gave up on trying to prove that Zim was an alien here to destroy Earth and enslave the human race. This was why the alien wondered if he would ever see Dib again, because it got awfully lonely with a psychotic robot for company and no visitors, even if they were visiting to try and dissect you. Zim too, had put to rest his attempts to conquer Earth. Three years ago this would have been quite the opposite.

He'd been sending the usual transmission to his Tallest, prattling off new plans to destroy the humans the moment it was answered, when they managed to interrupt him.

They told him he was a failure. That his mission was fake.

He was useless. Everyone hated him. He wasn't even an invader, just a banished Food Service Drone with a broken SIR Unit, sent to a faraway planet no one was sure even existed. All as a joke. But it wasn't funny anymore. Regardless of the amusement he'd provided to the Armada prior to not dying horribly like they'd hoped (quietly and far far away), it no longer outweighed the nuisance he'd become. Bafflingly, Zim was too stupid to catch on to the blatant hints that he was unwanted, so they banished him again.

From the Empire.

When he had argued, they threatened him with an Existence Evaluation. They called it mercy, that they should allow him, a defective, to live after the catastrophic damages he had caused in Operation Impending Doom and after he'd killed Tallests Miyuki and Spork. It had been a shock, hearing that they'd discovered he was responsible for those deaths. "It was an accident!" he had told them, but they refused to listen. They didn't care. And with that they proclaimed him an Exile.

Of the four hundred and twenty star systems that comprised the great Irken Empire, he was allowed in precisely none of them. Any violations would result in his immediate execution, along with whoever had been moronic enough to help him.

His PAK was allowed to continue functioning and a virus was sent to his computers to block transmissions from pretty much everyone he'd ever known. Zim had bounced back from bad days before, but oh this. This was the worst. How had he blinded himself so? Was he really so desperate that he was oblivious to the revulsion and animosity of his entire species? And for what? What had he wanted, needed so badly to make him so ignorant?

The sudden void in his chest like someone had scraped out his insides and left him hollow brought him to his knees as somehow, this time, he was able to recount every damning memory with devastating clarity.

His banishment to Foodcourtia.

The Great Assigning.

Thousands of transmissions where he spouted lunacy while Red and Purple cackled in the background, his entire smeethood spent being degraded and denounced by both of them.

Tak. Tak had told him outright everything and somehow he just hadn't heard her.

What was wrong with him? Maybe he really was defective. It was the tiny voice whispering that the Tallest were right to get rid of him that firmly cemented in place a weight which both drug him down with claws that didn't even have the decency to be sharp and crushed him from above; a weight so heavy he went days without moving, his brain forcing him to gasp for breath when his PAK stopped doing it for him. Was this the real punishment? Wanting to die and not being able to? Zim didn't know.

By the time he regained enough strength to struggle under the weight instead of lying underneath it, learned to breathe despite the ache in his chest, he'd missed more than a year. Only the news Gir brought home with the groceries one hot August night had given him reason to even think of the world above him.

Dib was gone.

Hnnnnnng~ I loves it so much! 3