There's No Place Like Earth For the Holidays...

(The Illustrious Crackpot)

Merry Christmas

In the little city of...um...city of...city of...ehhh...uhhm...

Outside the children's public "Skool", snow was falling peacefully, white drifts piling up outside the door like, well, drifts. The sky was a mild gray, and all was quiet and serene—save for the harsh, raspy voice cutting like a saw through the air outside an open window.

"It's December 24th, children," Ms. Bitters was grumbling, pacing up and down in front of the classroom in her long black shroud. "Christmas Eve. Yet another religious holiday hopelessly commercialized to the point where—"

The teacher was interrupted by a small child in the front row, who made an odd squeaking sound as he raised a trembling hand. He was shaking so much that he looked almost like three separate kids sitting in the same chair and an icicle hung from his nose. "M-M-Miz Bitters?" he managed past severely chattering teeth. "C-c-c-can you please close the w-w-window?"

Ms. Bitters practically surged towards his desk as she made a ferocious hiss in return, then brought her hand down on a big red button in the middle of her desk. The floor beneath the complaining child suddenly opened up, and the small boy found himself plummeting downwards through a long, dark, dismal tunnel to the curious realm of God-knows-where. Once his screams had died out and the echoes had stopped reverberating against the classroom walls, Ms. Bitters turned back to the rest of her students. "Does anyone else have any objections?" she challenged vehemently, her thick glasses and sallow complexion making her appear positively demonic.

Huddling beneath the massive snowbanks piling up in the room, the children fearfully shook their heads.

"So—cold!" Sarah screamed involuntarily, her long purple hair frozen stiff. She wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered so hard that she began to bounce up and down in her seat. Several kids' faces were turning bright red, and those less fortunate were already experiencing frostbite.

"Oh, Ms. Bitters," Melvin whined, his spherical head just one huge chunk of ice, "can we p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-p-pleeeeeease get our jackets? I thi-th-think my spleen just f-froze!"

"NO!" Ms. Bitters snapped, glaring fiercely at him. None of the cold appeared to affect her, for some odd reason. "You should consider yourselves lucky, children. When I was a little girl, we didn't have snow. That was before the meteor hit that wiped out the dinosaurs, of course." Her eyes narrowed, blazing for a moment. "After that, OHHHH, we couldn't get enough snow! It snowed all day long! It snowed for entire years! The whole planet froze over!" Unexpectedly, Ms. Bitters sighed. "THOSE were the good old days..."

Another child screamed as a new hunk of snow blew in through the window and smacked him in the face. "THE COLDNESS! IT BURNS!!" he shrieked, jumping up and running around in circles. Unfortunately, this action only managed to send him tumbling down the same spooky tunnel as the first complaining child, at which point he reflected that perhaps the coldness wasn't quite so bad after all.

Only Dib was too irate to mind the weather as he vigorously rubbed his arms. "Does anyone besides me think it's a little weird," he huffed, his breath forming into annoyed ice crystals, "that Zim's the only one not complaining about the temperature? Maybe it's because he's—AN ALIEN?!"

(At this point, all the friction generated by rubbing his arms caused Dib's coat to spontaneously burst into flames, which gave the rest of the class happiness through entertainment and warmth until Dib screamingly put it out. This has nothing to do with the story, but it'll give you some context when tapes show up on America's Funniest Home Videos.)

Zim raised his head at the mention of his name, quickly hiding what looked suspiciously like a frozen mongoose underneath his desk. His seat was so far from the window that he had almost no snow near him. "I don't know what you're talking about," the alien replied smoothly. He leered at Dib, which somehow seemed creepier since he was wearing his human contact lenses. "I assure you, I am just as cold as all the other filthy Earth children." Zim then made a point of rubbing his arms and saying "Brrrrrrrrrr".

"Y-y-yeah, Dib!" protested another kid sitting somewhere in the back. "See? He's so cold that his skin is g-g-g-green!"

"HIS SKIN'S ALWAYS GREEN!" Dib practically shrieked, dislodging a heap of snow from his head.

"Skin condition," Zim reminded him stolidly, then gave the human a toothy grin once he was sure that no one else was looking. Inferior humans. Zim's lavender-spotted Pak automatically regulated his temperature, even in such odd and disgusting climates this Earth possessed, so the level of his body heat remained at the Irken norm no matter what. The only downside was that this guarantee didn't extend to his disguise, so his jet-black wig had become hard as a rock. Well, GIR could have some fun with it when he got home.

Dib was fully fed up. "HE'S AN ALIEN!!" he screamed, waving his hands about crazily. Ms. Bitters was still rambling about her childhood hunting woolly mammoths, and didn't pay a bit of attention. "AN ALIEN!! AN ALIEN!! AAAAAGHH!!" Then, in his annoyance Dib scooped up a handful of snow and lobbed it at Zim.

"GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!" Zim cried as the snowball made contact with the side of his head, sizzling away at his skin. Clawing at the poisonous white matter, Zim howled in pain and jumped bodily out of his seat, running in circles around the room (and accidentally getting up to his knees in more snow) before flopping, twitching, to the floor. Dib was momentarily stunned, but then remembered that snow was essentially water and smiled triumphantly.

"Score one for Earth!" he cheered, jumping on top of his desk.

"SIT DOWN, DIB!" Ms. Bitters commanded sharply, finally tearing herself away from her personal narrative. She pointed a clawlike finger at Zim, who was struggling to stand back up. "AND YOU, ZIM, GET IN YOUR SEAT! You should be thankful that I haven't sent you to the 'underground classrooms' yet."

Zim hissed under his breath, rubbing the side of his head that had been hit, and clambered back into the chair. He shot a piercing glare at Dib, who stuck his tongue out in return. "Filthy stinkbeast," Zim muttered, his three-fingered hands curling into fists. "Such revenge shall I give that...that...that a moose would be scared of ZIM! Oh, yes, yeessss, vile moose..."

Ms. Bitters, if she heard Zim, was ignoring him. Picking up a wooden pointer and a globe, the spooky teacher continued with her lecture. "Now you see, class," she rasped, jabbing the pointer firmly at the top of the globe, "this is the North Pole. Home of polar bears and little unionized elves who only exist because your parents say so." Having successfully destroyed the childhoods of most of the students in her room, Ms. Bitters then stuck her pointer onto the bottom of the globe, actually spearing the plastic model with it. "And this is the South Pole. Despite corporate insistences, penguins live at the south pole and not the north. It's all a dastardly plot that will bring down civilization as we know it." In a quick movement, Ms. Bitters removed the wooden pointer from the globe and instead held it in her two wrinkled hands. "However, with global warming to deal with, both poles will end up melting and drown us all in a massive tidal wave, destroying all life on the planet." The pointer snapped in half. "Isn't that lovely."

Dib gasped in shock and horror, then stole a glance at Zim. The alien boy was staring blankly at the chalkboard, but it might just have been an act. "This is terrible!" Dib agonized in a harsh whisper, his eyes widening. "If Zim heard what Ms. Bitters said about the ice caps, he might think up a plot to melt them and drown out human life! The entire Earth is in danger! If I don't stop him, he'll—"

"DIB'S TALKING TO HIMSELF AGAIN!" a girl named Zita shouted, the frozen particles of her breath cracking painfully against the back of Dib's head. Dib promptly shut up, though his thoughts continued the expository narration in private as his face twisted into several rather unlikely depictions of anxiety and terror.

Zim, on the other hand, was still watching the chalkboard with an expression as empty as the space inside his head. Then out of nowhere he sat up with a jolt, knocking his chair into the desk of the child behind him. A diabolical smile stole across his face as he got an idea—an awful idea. Zim got a wonderful, awful idea! "YEESSSS!!" he cried, extending his fists to the sky as he pushed back his chair and stood up. "PURE BRILLIANCE! Of course, because I am ZIIIIIIIM!!" Not noticing or not minding the stares of the other children—probably the former—Zim began to laugh in a very evil and alienlike manner. "AHAHAHAHAHAHA!!" he laughed, puffing out his tiny chest as the force of his laughter made his entire body wrack with spasms. "WAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—"

"SHUT UP, ZIM!" Ms. Bitters barked, and hit him over the head with one of the remaining halves of the pointer.

Inside Zim's display living room, the tiny robot GIR was lounging on the couch watching television. His luminescent blue eyes were wide as he stared unblinkingly at the TV set, where a blue/purple creature with a hooked nose was watching a tall man in a top hat walk down a crowded city street. A line of text along the bottom of the screen described the program as "A Muppets Christmas Carol".

"Scrooge liked the cold," the hook-nosed creature was saying in a nasally voice. "He was hard, and sharp as a flint—secret and self-contained; as solitary as an OYSTER."

GIR giggled delightedly as a chorus of voices resumed a song they had been singing before. "He got a nose like a tuuuuube sock!" he squealed, clapping his hands together.

At that moment, the door slammed open and Zim stepped in, still wearing the human disguise. Following him was a snowdrift, which had been propped up against the door and now spilled into the room. Zim was twitching from having to brave the gauntlet of partly-solidified water, and his skin was steaming in a painful-looking manner. Nevertheless, GIR looked up and smiled cheerfully. "HIYA, MASTAH!" he burbled, launching himself at Zim and latching onto his head with an insane giggle.

"GET OFF MY HEAD!" Zim barked, and GIR slid back down, bringing the human wig and a pile of snow with him. Zim's antennae popped up, cramped after being stifled for so long, and he rubbed them gingerly. The flickering light of the TV captured his attention. "More hideous Earth television?!" he demanded, taking out his contact lenses to reveal his large, crimson eyes. He stared at the TV set, then when he couldn't determine the plot after three seconds he narrowed his eyes annoyedly. "GIR, what is this?"

"'Is a Christmas movie!" GIR explained, poking the frozen wig. Once he determined that it was hard as a rock, he hit himself over the head with it. "They playin' aaaaaaall movies 'bout Christmas, 'cus it's CHRIS'MAS EVE!!"

"Yes, yes, Earth holiday trash," Zim dismissed, suddenly uninterested but still watching the screen from the corner of his eye. On the TV, the camera cut to show a green character, lizardlike in appearance, with two eyes on top of its head like ping-pong balls. As soon as he'd spotted it, though, Zim gasped in a flurry of panicked emotion and dove in front of the set. "IS THAT AN IRKEN INVADER?!" he cried, his face mere inches from the TV. "It CAN'T be! No other Irkens were given any special missions in this sector!" A terrible thought crossed his mind. "An interloper?! A friend of Tak's?!"

GIR looked up from banging his head on the wig. A slight crack had formed in his forehead, but that didn't stop him from screeching in delight as he noticed what Zim was staring at. "Kermit the Frog!" he screamed, pushing Zim out of the way and literally pressing his face up against the screen. "I GOTS HAPPY FEEEEEEEEEET!!"

Zim picked himself up off the floor as GIR began to hum a garbled, self-imagined version of "Bein' Green". Though still a bit suspicious, Zim determined that this mysterious new "Kermit" was not currently a threat. So deciding, he dealt with more serious matters first, closing the door and vacuuming up the snowdrifts already melting into dangerously acidic puddles on the floor. This having been accomplished, and not an Irken skin cell lost in the process, Zim stalked to the trash can in the back of the room and clambered inside. At the touch of his booted feet, the bottom of the can immediately receded down a tube, carrying Zim with it into the bowels of his underground base. After a moment it stopped, and Zim stepped out of the pressurized chamber and into the observatory.

"COMPUTER!" he shouted, his voice echoing across the huge cylindrical room. "SHOW ME THE SOUTH POLE!"

"Processing," a disembodied voice rumbled mechanically, and a small set of oculars descended, stopping just in front of a chair in the center of the room. Zim climbed up and settled himself on the dark red throne, leaning forward to look into the eyepiece. A large grin spread across his face, and he began to laugh maniacally again before erupting into a coughing fit and lapsing into silence.