Author's Note: Finally bit the bullet and started writing Invader Zim fanfiction. What you have before you is the admittedly short beginning to what I hope will pan out to be a very interesting little epic. So, if you like what you see here, my suggestion would be to stick around. This is something of an experiment. I'm going to try to release relatively short chapters like this approximately once a week to see if I can meet a deadline and still be relatively entertaining. So, without further ado...
"I've never had too much, I've never had to lie, I've never had to sacrifice, my life. One of these shapes is not the others, one of these shapes is not like the others, one of these shapes is not like the others, I'm socially unacceptable, unexceptional, unacceptable..." -Mindless Self Indulgence, Unsociable
I hate you, Zim.
Four words. Four little words seem hardly enough to describe what one has had for lunch, let ALONE the defining emotion in one's existence. Language is such an inadequate tool to use when trying to describe one's soul... one's self. Further inferior is the written word in emphasizing the depth of feeling. Words spoken... at least there is an undertone, perhaps an inflection, whether whispering from heart to heart on the barest breath of wind, or shouting the depths of one's passion to the mountain tops. Words written are sterile... cold. They reflect nothing. They require the reader to give them life, to emphasize them with emotion. Ah, but that emotion can be false. The mind can twist the written word into a shallow mockery of it's intended depth, or provide false intensity to the most purile of phrases.
Think written words can't be twisted? Ask the Christians, while you're at it, ask the Muslims about that.
Still, I hate you, Zim. Kinda hard to mistake that isn't it? As inadequate as those words are, they reveal much. All that's left, really.
Some days, especially when it rains on this hellhole, those four little words are all that keep me going.
It wasn't always like that. Oh no... not at all. Some would tell you... well... perhaps if there had been any witnesses to our struggle... if anyone had really cared, (and wasn't that part of the problem as well?) that I hated Zim on first sight.
That simply isn't true. In those days... I didn't hate Zim at all.
First of all, it was hard to hate Zim, honestly. You'd have to be cruel to hate him. I mean, yeah, he was sent to destroy the Earth, or at least all the peopley bits to it, and yeah, he is about as inhuman as you can get (go figure, him being an alien and all) but he always seemed so... so clueless... so lost... so fucking PATHETIC. I mean there he was, supposedly part of the Irken Elite (and didn't that little phrase get old quick) and he gets horribly lost not five blocks from his house, starts to decompose with even the barest touch of water, and can't even silence the accusing, annoying, incessantly probing attempts to reveal his existence by a 12 YEAR OLD...
Yeah. You'd have to be a really sadistic bastard to attach something as all consuming as hatred on such a clueless sack of... whatever the hell Zim is made of.
Still, incompetant as he might seem, Zim's light-years ahead of the apathetic, blind grown-ups that occupied the world around him. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that no one else put two and two together. Growing up, my fantasies were all I had really, just like Gaz had her gameslave thingy, and Dad had his science, with it's spider robots and probings and such. I grew up thinking the best thing in the world to be was a hero, fighting for justice and freedom, and since I was a kid, I always had to know why things were the way they were. Skool tried it's damnedest to plug the requisite garbage needed to turn us into carbon copy wage drones, but I always had to know why. WHY damn it. All too often they had no answers for me, openly mocked or punished me for my questions, so why is it so strange that I had to turn to other sources for answers? Why paranormal? Ask yourself this... why normal?
Why COULDN'T there be a little magic... a little preternatural in life?
Why did it all have to be so... banal? So mindblastingly dull and trivial?
The world needs heroes, because they are interesting. More than anything else, I wanted to be interesting.
Still, a hero needs a villain, right? So when Zim appeared...
Hate him? Hell, he was the answer to my prayers. Proof that there was a bigger world than this mundane, screwed up, idiot filled one.
Proof that I wasn't crazy.
My villain.
So began the game. Oh it didn't feel like a game then of course. It was like wearing blinders, I was too excited, too young really, to realize the truth, and it all seemed so terribly important at the time, but really it was a game. At least to me. It should have been easy, after all. I mean revealing Zim shouldn't have been that difficult, sitting here now, brooding on it all, in those times between the mad scrambling to find the next source of food, the next safe spot to sleep, I've come up with countless plans that would have worked.
I never implemented them. Never even considered them.
It would have ended the game you see.
So it became a story for me. I was a hero, and better, I was a MISUNDERSTOOD hero, so I was noble. All the mocking laughter, all the accusations of insanity, from my skoolmates, from my FATHER, it was all ok, really it was, because I was saving them! I was saving them, and one day they'd see what I did and they'd all praise me and feel really bad that they'd shoved me into my locker, that they'd called me names...
That they'd laughed. You don't laugh at heroes.
You just don't.
Feh. Fucking pathetic. I was just as deluded as they were. Even though I could see a world they remained almost willfully ignorant to, I was still just as fucking pathetic.
Because it wasn't a game. Not to Zim. It never was.
And he was never really as dumb as I thought he was.
So I have to wonder what it was like for your average citizen when the skies filled with dark shadows... morbidly, I wonder... did realization strike them, a thunderbolt of terror as the veil that protected them rent assunder, as their worst nightmares from science fiction and horror coldly loomed like the magnifying glass must loom to the lowly ant, alien, unknowable and terrifying over their heads? Or did they all just ignore it, file it away as unimportant, as the lasers scoured a planet that was green and growing... even if humanity did sit on it like a scab. The Irken dreadnoughts scoured my planet... my home, until it glowed, coldly beautiful, a perfect sphere of dark, dead glass.
Earth, destroyed.
Earth, a parking planet.
Here lies the human race. It hardly knew itself.
But humanity wasn't dead was it? Not really. Because someone had to witness it. Someone had to see the game that was never a game end. Had to watch, from the confines of a cold glass-that-wasn't-glass tube filled with god only knows what alien liquid, as that gloved claw descended on that shiny, ridiculously huge red button.
I watched my entire race die that day, watched the only planet I'd ever known become a cinder...
I couldn't even cry. What ever that stuff was that they had me in, it wouldn't let me.
And here's the punchline, here's the goddamned miserable last gutbusting practical joke the universe played on the human race... you know why they decided to obliterate us as a species rather than enslave us?
Because we were too tall.
Too. Fucking. Tall.
***
I never got to see them turn my home into a parking structure planet. Thank god for small favors I guess. I only know that's what they planned from what Zim told me afterwards.
Zim always was an amazing source of information. Get him on one of his infamous rants and he'd tell you everything you ever wanted to know.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret, something that REALLY amuses me. I have to stop writing for a second, or I start giggling, and I'm afraid I might not stop.
Ok. I'm better now. The secret.
Zim's leaders hate his guts.
I don't know how he doesn't see it. It's really all just one big joke to them. The truth is, Zim was never really intended to soften up the Earth at all. Bees aside, what possible effect could a species not even capable of interstellar travel have on one that had not only braved the great unknown for most of its recorded history, but turned whole planets into shopping malls for Christ's sake? The truth is... the Almighty Tallest, as Zim called them, happened across earth by chance, having selected it seemingly at random for it's next victim of conquest. Zim's presence there was incidental, but he did play some part in the Tallest's knowledge of the planet, and being the whimsical bastards they are, they actually let him have his request before they sent him god knows where on another suicide mission.
Still, I'm no stranger to contempt, to scorn, and while Zim might have been blind to it, I saw it. It was so pathetically obvious, even though I'm no expert on Irken facial expressions, I know hatred when I see it.
Believe me, I knew it. Maybe not as well as I do now, but I was starting to learn.
So there I was helpless, locked in a tube like a fetus in formaldhyde on some scientists shelf, staring into the cold orbs of my species' murderer.
It may be petty of me, but I still derive some small amount of comfort from the fact that even at the tender age of 14, I still had to look down to do so.
"So here we are, pathetic Dib beast. Finally you see the truth that has stared you in the face for so long that it has developed a facial tic and squinty eyes."
"SQUINTY!" He raised his fist at shook in in front of himself, his antennae quivering.
"Your species is nothing but little puffs of stinky earthy vapor... stink, and here you are, at my mercy... and I have NONE!"
"No mercy for Dib. You are obsolete! Worthless! I cannot even get 5 monies for your refund!"
He stopped and pressed his face against the glass, distorting his already hideous features into further unpleasant shapes.
"What Dib human? No fancy retort? No witty comeback? I'm surprised at you Dib... has the monkey stolen your- GET OFF MY HEAD!" The alien screamed.
"Awwww. Big head boy looks all sad..." That robot that follows Zim around, now sans pathetic dog costume, hopped down from Zim's head and tapped the glass a mile a minute.
Zim looked annoyed. "Of course he is sad, Gir. It is a very weak humany feeling, something that we Irkens are incapable of comprehending, though... we... comprehend everything... yeah."
Zim sighed. "Anyway human, I tried to think of an appropriate place for trash such as you, and I could think of only one place. I shall not kill you, though we Irkens have no room in our vocabulary for a weak word like mercy, I shall extend this thing to you, only because it amuses me to think that you will forever be forced to realize that I, ZIM, have defeated you, and only through my magnanimousity... ous... ness..." he blinked. "Eh, I'm sending you to the planet Dirt."
He grinned. "Enjoy your stay, earth stink. You will make the planet even LESS attractive with your presence."
"Any last words?" he whispered.
I would have liked to have told him exactly what the Tallest thought of him, exactly what his place was in this insane, messed up empire of his.
I would have liked to tell him he'd pay one day... that I would have my revenge.
I would have liked to, but it's kinda hard to talk when your surrounded by viscous jelly-like fluid and two inches of think glass.
I don't think he ever figured out that I couldn't talk to him. In any case it hardly mattered.
"Fine then! Enjoy your stay, on planet DIRT!! MWAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! MWAHAHAHAHAHA! HEH HEH. HEH. WHAHA HEH HEH HA HEH... oh what's for lunch?"
The last thing I heard before I was shot into space at breakneck speeds towards a planet named Dirt was that friggin' robot.
"Awww... I wanna go too!"
***
"I've never had too much, I've never had to lie, I've never had to sacrifice, my life. One of these shapes is not the others, one of these shapes is not like the others, one of these shapes is not like the others, I'm socially unacceptable, unexceptional, unacceptable..." -Mindless Self Indulgence, Unsociable
I hate you, Zim.
Four words. Four little words seem hardly enough to describe what one has had for lunch, let ALONE the defining emotion in one's existence. Language is such an inadequate tool to use when trying to describe one's soul... one's self. Further inferior is the written word in emphasizing the depth of feeling. Words spoken... at least there is an undertone, perhaps an inflection, whether whispering from heart to heart on the barest breath of wind, or shouting the depths of one's passion to the mountain tops. Words written are sterile... cold. They reflect nothing. They require the reader to give them life, to emphasize them with emotion. Ah, but that emotion can be false. The mind can twist the written word into a shallow mockery of it's intended depth, or provide false intensity to the most purile of phrases.
Think written words can't be twisted? Ask the Christians, while you're at it, ask the Muslims about that.
Still, I hate you, Zim. Kinda hard to mistake that isn't it? As inadequate as those words are, they reveal much. All that's left, really.
Some days, especially when it rains on this hellhole, those four little words are all that keep me going.
It wasn't always like that. Oh no... not at all. Some would tell you... well... perhaps if there had been any witnesses to our struggle... if anyone had really cared, (and wasn't that part of the problem as well?) that I hated Zim on first sight.
That simply isn't true. In those days... I didn't hate Zim at all.
First of all, it was hard to hate Zim, honestly. You'd have to be cruel to hate him. I mean, yeah, he was sent to destroy the Earth, or at least all the peopley bits to it, and yeah, he is about as inhuman as you can get (go figure, him being an alien and all) but he always seemed so... so clueless... so lost... so fucking PATHETIC. I mean there he was, supposedly part of the Irken Elite (and didn't that little phrase get old quick) and he gets horribly lost not five blocks from his house, starts to decompose with even the barest touch of water, and can't even silence the accusing, annoying, incessantly probing attempts to reveal his existence by a 12 YEAR OLD...
Yeah. You'd have to be a really sadistic bastard to attach something as all consuming as hatred on such a clueless sack of... whatever the hell Zim is made of.
Still, incompetant as he might seem, Zim's light-years ahead of the apathetic, blind grown-ups that occupied the world around him. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that no one else put two and two together. Growing up, my fantasies were all I had really, just like Gaz had her gameslave thingy, and Dad had his science, with it's spider robots and probings and such. I grew up thinking the best thing in the world to be was a hero, fighting for justice and freedom, and since I was a kid, I always had to know why things were the way they were. Skool tried it's damnedest to plug the requisite garbage needed to turn us into carbon copy wage drones, but I always had to know why. WHY damn it. All too often they had no answers for me, openly mocked or punished me for my questions, so why is it so strange that I had to turn to other sources for answers? Why paranormal? Ask yourself this... why normal?
Why COULDN'T there be a little magic... a little preternatural in life?
Why did it all have to be so... banal? So mindblastingly dull and trivial?
The world needs heroes, because they are interesting. More than anything else, I wanted to be interesting.
Still, a hero needs a villain, right? So when Zim appeared...
Hate him? Hell, he was the answer to my prayers. Proof that there was a bigger world than this mundane, screwed up, idiot filled one.
Proof that I wasn't crazy.
My villain.
So began the game. Oh it didn't feel like a game then of course. It was like wearing blinders, I was too excited, too young really, to realize the truth, and it all seemed so terribly important at the time, but really it was a game. At least to me. It should have been easy, after all. I mean revealing Zim shouldn't have been that difficult, sitting here now, brooding on it all, in those times between the mad scrambling to find the next source of food, the next safe spot to sleep, I've come up with countless plans that would have worked.
I never implemented them. Never even considered them.
It would have ended the game you see.
So it became a story for me. I was a hero, and better, I was a MISUNDERSTOOD hero, so I was noble. All the mocking laughter, all the accusations of insanity, from my skoolmates, from my FATHER, it was all ok, really it was, because I was saving them! I was saving them, and one day they'd see what I did and they'd all praise me and feel really bad that they'd shoved me into my locker, that they'd called me names...
That they'd laughed. You don't laugh at heroes.
You just don't.
Feh. Fucking pathetic. I was just as deluded as they were. Even though I could see a world they remained almost willfully ignorant to, I was still just as fucking pathetic.
Because it wasn't a game. Not to Zim. It never was.
And he was never really as dumb as I thought he was.
So I have to wonder what it was like for your average citizen when the skies filled with dark shadows... morbidly, I wonder... did realization strike them, a thunderbolt of terror as the veil that protected them rent assunder, as their worst nightmares from science fiction and horror coldly loomed like the magnifying glass must loom to the lowly ant, alien, unknowable and terrifying over their heads? Or did they all just ignore it, file it away as unimportant, as the lasers scoured a planet that was green and growing... even if humanity did sit on it like a scab. The Irken dreadnoughts scoured my planet... my home, until it glowed, coldly beautiful, a perfect sphere of dark, dead glass.
Earth, destroyed.
Earth, a parking planet.
Here lies the human race. It hardly knew itself.
But humanity wasn't dead was it? Not really. Because someone had to witness it. Someone had to see the game that was never a game end. Had to watch, from the confines of a cold glass-that-wasn't-glass tube filled with god only knows what alien liquid, as that gloved claw descended on that shiny, ridiculously huge red button.
I watched my entire race die that day, watched the only planet I'd ever known become a cinder...
I couldn't even cry. What ever that stuff was that they had me in, it wouldn't let me.
And here's the punchline, here's the goddamned miserable last gutbusting practical joke the universe played on the human race... you know why they decided to obliterate us as a species rather than enslave us?
Because we were too tall.
Too. Fucking. Tall.
***
I never got to see them turn my home into a parking structure planet. Thank god for small favors I guess. I only know that's what they planned from what Zim told me afterwards.
Zim always was an amazing source of information. Get him on one of his infamous rants and he'd tell you everything you ever wanted to know.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret, something that REALLY amuses me. I have to stop writing for a second, or I start giggling, and I'm afraid I might not stop.
Ok. I'm better now. The secret.
Zim's leaders hate his guts.
I don't know how he doesn't see it. It's really all just one big joke to them. The truth is, Zim was never really intended to soften up the Earth at all. Bees aside, what possible effect could a species not even capable of interstellar travel have on one that had not only braved the great unknown for most of its recorded history, but turned whole planets into shopping malls for Christ's sake? The truth is... the Almighty Tallest, as Zim called them, happened across earth by chance, having selected it seemingly at random for it's next victim of conquest. Zim's presence there was incidental, but he did play some part in the Tallest's knowledge of the planet, and being the whimsical bastards they are, they actually let him have his request before they sent him god knows where on another suicide mission.
Still, I'm no stranger to contempt, to scorn, and while Zim might have been blind to it, I saw it. It was so pathetically obvious, even though I'm no expert on Irken facial expressions, I know hatred when I see it.
Believe me, I knew it. Maybe not as well as I do now, but I was starting to learn.
So there I was helpless, locked in a tube like a fetus in formaldhyde on some scientists shelf, staring into the cold orbs of my species' murderer.
It may be petty of me, but I still derive some small amount of comfort from the fact that even at the tender age of 14, I still had to look down to do so.
"So here we are, pathetic Dib beast. Finally you see the truth that has stared you in the face for so long that it has developed a facial tic and squinty eyes."
"SQUINTY!" He raised his fist at shook in in front of himself, his antennae quivering.
"Your species is nothing but little puffs of stinky earthy vapor... stink, and here you are, at my mercy... and I have NONE!"
"No mercy for Dib. You are obsolete! Worthless! I cannot even get 5 monies for your refund!"
He stopped and pressed his face against the glass, distorting his already hideous features into further unpleasant shapes.
"What Dib human? No fancy retort? No witty comeback? I'm surprised at you Dib... has the monkey stolen your- GET OFF MY HEAD!" The alien screamed.
"Awwww. Big head boy looks all sad..." That robot that follows Zim around, now sans pathetic dog costume, hopped down from Zim's head and tapped the glass a mile a minute.
Zim looked annoyed. "Of course he is sad, Gir. It is a very weak humany feeling, something that we Irkens are incapable of comprehending, though... we... comprehend everything... yeah."
Zim sighed. "Anyway human, I tried to think of an appropriate place for trash such as you, and I could think of only one place. I shall not kill you, though we Irkens have no room in our vocabulary for a weak word like mercy, I shall extend this thing to you, only because it amuses me to think that you will forever be forced to realize that I, ZIM, have defeated you, and only through my magnanimousity... ous... ness..." he blinked. "Eh, I'm sending you to the planet Dirt."
He grinned. "Enjoy your stay, earth stink. You will make the planet even LESS attractive with your presence."
"Any last words?" he whispered.
I would have liked to have told him exactly what the Tallest thought of him, exactly what his place was in this insane, messed up empire of his.
I would have liked to tell him he'd pay one day... that I would have my revenge.
I would have liked to, but it's kinda hard to talk when your surrounded by viscous jelly-like fluid and two inches of think glass.
I don't think he ever figured out that I couldn't talk to him. In any case it hardly mattered.
"Fine then! Enjoy your stay, on planet DIRT!! MWAHAHAHAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! MWAHAHAHAHAHA! HEH HEH. HEH. WHAHA HEH HEH HA HEH... oh what's for lunch?"
The last thing I heard before I was shot into space at breakneck speeds towards a planet named Dirt was that friggin' robot.
"Awww... I wanna go too!"
***