The Massive was anchored at Kriskrem, the Piping Hot Donut Pleasure Planet, when the transmission from Earth came in.

"Aww, NO..." whined the Tallest collectively. Expecting the mad bright eyed visage of their most insane soldier ever to appear on the 50 foot main communication screen, they were surprised to see the mad bright eyes of something completely different peering at them instead.

A large-headed pale smeetling was doing the peering, and his peering was intense and focused. His face was splattered with streaks of pinkish goop and black smoke, and his clothes- mostly black- had a ragged, just-torn-open quality to them. Small angular wisps of steam coiled off the top of his head and strange pointy hair. He was gasping, the grey bored-face icon on his blue t-shirt rising and falling swiftly, contorting with his breath: smiling, frowning, smiling.

Tallest Red drifted closer to Purple before addressing the strange lifeform on the screen. " Heeeey...Don't we know you from somewhere?"

The alien (well, alien to the Irkens anyway) cleared his throat, then began to speak. Though his speech was halting, and grammatically incorrect, and read with the help of a battered piece of paper he pulled from one pocket, the alien spoke in Irken, and his eyes were defiant. "Attention... monsters of the Irken Empire... Your invasion attempt... has failed completely. I have detected..." He struggled and frowned at the next few words, mouthing them silently to himself. Dl'kva? no, that's drone-level present plural indicative... stupid Irken language...

Tallest Purple helpfully spoke up. "Uhm, we can speak your language, y'know."

Red nodded. "We can speak every language ever invented anywhere by anybody."

Purple nudged his co-ruler. "Except Spanish."

"Well, yeah, okay, except that."

Half a galaxy away at the other end of the transmission, Dib flushed briefly and blinked, mentally switching gears back to English. He was slightly annoyed though, he'd spent a good ten minutes working out a properly dramatic speech and there it all went, leaving him feeling flustered. "OH. Uhm.. that makes things easier, I guess, then. So... yeah. Basically, Zim's dead, and don't bother sending another one or I'll just kill him too. Okay?" So much for dramatic speeches, he thought.

The abrupt silence that swelled on the bridge of the Massive was so profound you could hear the silence breathing. Antennae were quirking upright all over the deck.

"Whoa, whoa whoa whoa... did you just say that Zim is..." Purple paused on the last word. Tasting the disbelief on his tongue. "Dead?"

"Can it really be?" Red whispered, eyes opening fully.

"How about this?" Dib leaned out of the camera's field of vision and grunted as he reached to something below. Grunting again more loudly, he gritted his teeth and dragged something upward into view. Zim- or, the remains of Zim - dangled lifelessly from the human boy's grasp. Gore crusted the edges of the Irken's mouth, his snakelike tongue dangled limply out between two curved teeth, his artificial eyes had darkened to black, and his skin was a dull, sickly splotted green. A substantial amount of his head was simply... gone.

Dib would have loved to have been able to throw the Invader's corpse at the feet of his alien leaders. It would have been SUCH a cool, dramatic touch, he thought. And he could stand there the proud, defiant, intrepid hero, Dib triumphant, victorious at last. He couldn't do that in an interstellar communication though, so he settled for shoving the corpse as close as he could to the screen to let them -see-.

What he had not anticipated was the sudden ROAR of sound that erupted from the Irken side of the link. It was so loud and so long and so HUGE that it took him by surprise; he actually stepped back from the monitor, as if the sound could reach out and strangle him. And he completely misinterpreted it for the first four seconds; thought it was a roar of anger. That would have made sense, after all.

It turned out the Irkens were actually... cheering. At the top of their lungs.

It took him another three seconds to realize that the sound was APPROVAL, and that it was meant for HIM.

The Tallest were grasping onto each other and crying and LAUGHING, dancing up and down stupidly, while the Massive's bridge crew burst into a devastating volley of APPLAUSE- the size and scope of which Dib had NEVER heard before in his life; not even when he stood on the sidelines when his Dad made some big public announcement about some new invention.

Dib went pink with pleasure and embarrassment and managed an ackward, smoky bow toward the screen.

Breathless Red managed to wheeze, "...you, what's your name again?"

"Dib...?" He replied as if it were a question, as if he weren't sure.

Red nodded. "What planet're you on again... Earth? Right.. you stay right there.. we'll come get you...! We'll have a parade!"

Purple waved his claws around to the bridge crew again. "All hail DIB, the bigheaded destroyer of Zim! Oh YEAH!"

A tiny tear of joy slid down Dib's left cheek.

Things were finally going right.

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A/N: No particular point, just always wondered what the Tallest's reaction would be if Dib contacted them with proof of Zim's demise. :)

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