Hey folks. This is my first ever Invader Zim fic. And you know what's weird? I only know about this cartoon from other stories on this site, information on Wikipedia, and a scattering of vids on YouTube. But although it may be a gamble, I believe I know enough about the show now to write a decent fic. I hope you all like it! The chimpanzee's name BTW, came from an amazingly annoying and moronic song I remember my daycare providers subjecting us to.

A half moon hung in the cloudless summer sky, silvering the grass and trees of Blithering Idiot State Park. It had been dry and hot for the past week, with no rainfall, and the lack of water to burn into his flesh was a distinct blessing for Zim as he strolled under and among the maple trees.

Childlike yet electronic giggling punctuated the cool air above and around the Irken as, his cyan eyes twinkling with merriment and excitement, Gir bounced from bough to bough, or ricocheted off of tree trunks like a squirrel. Normally, the manic android would've been clothed in his customary dog costume to escape notice by the humans. Out here though, deep in the woods and under the cover of darkness, with no one but wild animals to see him, Gir could enjoy the privilege of showing his true form outdoors.

Zim however, was not out in this forest, in this part of the park for a simple stroll. Oh no, he was ZIM, and Zim did nothing frivolous! No, he'd discovered on the news that in this very park, this very Sunday, there was going to be a performance by the massively popular band Armadillo Pee, playing their inferior ear-torturing human music to hundreds of stink pig fans!

When the mediocre human news program had ended, the channel had then played an old movie unimaginatively titled "The Blob." But oh, how Zim had loved it! How wonderful it'd been, even if pathetically stimulated with inferior effects, to see the humans shrieking like the doomed fleshmonkeys that they were and running in panic from the squishy, crimson thing that administered instant DOOM to them on contact!

And in a serendipitous moment of inspiration that could only have been seized and appreciated by ZIM's dazzling intellect of dazzlingness, the Irken realized he could doom some of these planet's humans in a similar fashion! All he would need to do was make an enormous batch of smothering cherry Gell-O blobness, and then place it in an area of the woods above where the concert was going to take place. When the badly doomed human pig smellies all arrived on Sunday and became caught up in their excitement, the great Zim would unleash a Jell-O flood of DOOM upon them from the hills! Barring the efforts of that Dib-stink, the Irken didn't see how this plan could possibly go wrong!

First of all though, he had to scout for a suitable spot to construct a holding tank for all that Gell-O, which was why he was wandering around out here in the first place.

"Look at me master! I'm a bat!" Gir squealed, diving down in front of Zim and hanging from a low branch by his metallic ankles.

"Very nice Gir," was Zim's unimpressed reply as he strode on, examining the land around him.

"Do you think tree bark tastes good? I wanna try some!" Gir suggested enthusiastically as he dropped from the branch and crashed to the forest floor on his back. Giggling, the robot righted himself, went over to a red oak, and ripped off a slab of bark, which he promptly took a bite out of.

The things that android eats, thought Zim.

A delighted expression flowed across Gir's face while he chewed. "Hey!" he cried. "This bark stuff tastes really goooodddd! I'd better share some with Pig and Minimoose."

"That's such a nice gesture of you Gir," Zim distantly said.

As the Irken trotted down a gentle slope, he suddenly picked up a faint, coppery, protein-rich scent with his superior, flawless Irken senses. He'd smelt it before, and knew that it was the odor of an Earth-mammal's blood. Freshly shed at that.

It came from a little open place, thick with dogwood bushes, raspberry canes, and long, herbal-smelling grass, a couple hundred yards away. Forgetting his reconnaissance for the moment, Zim curiously turned and headed towards its source. It was from something dead, but what?

During his time on Earth, the Irken had learned that life on this planet was dizzyingly complex, and often cheap. Whether human or animuhl, its creatures lived hard and fast, intense, competitive, and usually short lives. Everything fed on something else.

Whenever Zim had had reason to go outside the city, into the fields and forests, he'd occasionally come across the remains of some inferior prey animuhl that had been killed by a mighty flesh eater, or even a human smelly with their pathetically inferior projectile weapons. Deer, calves, or sheep that'd been torn by masterless dogs, coyotes, bobcats. Rabbits that had fallen victim to foxes, hawks, owls, the scattered feathers and bills of birds who'd been pierced by the talons of their predatory cousins or whose flight hadn't been enough to save them from a quick land predator. The scales and bones of fish snatched by ospreys, bald eagles, otters, mink, black bears-all just one more casualty in the never ending, raw struggle to live another day.

Even Zim had personally experienced the harsh, dangerous side of the planet's beasts once, in a different park than this. Several months ago, Ms. Bitters had assigned each member of her class to go out and find wild animal poop over the weekend for a science activity. As much as it had disgusted Zim to search for and touch filthy revolting smelly poop, he still had to keep up appearances as a normal human student. So he'd gone out with Gir to Deerfly Bite Regional Park and walked the trails to look for some.

Going over one rise in a path, Zim had come across a stocky, tubular, coal black animuhl coiled up in a loose heap, with a drooping pillar of what looked like weird pebbles attached to its tail. Seeing the Irken approach, the alien creature glared at him and rapidly shook them, producing a sound that sounded like something being dissolved by acid.

This was clearly insolent behavior, and no pathetic Earth-beast that was even lower than a human displayed insolence to Zim! Miffed, he'd howled, "What? You dare to block ZIM'S path, and then defy him by shaking your tail?"

Approaching the tubular black being, he'd hoped to intimidate it into moving with his superior tallness. Instead though, it had continued to glare at him and raised the front part of its body off the ground as the Irken stepped closer. Zim then noticed that the creature was not only refusing to move, it was sticking its tongue out at the great ZIM!!

This was the last straw, and Zim had whipped out a laser. Bending down to the animuhl, he'd stuck it right in that scaly face, screeching, "Prepare to be doomed by superior Irken technology, writhing Earth crea-AAHHHH!!"

The Earth lifeform, which Zim later discovered was called a timber rattlesnake, struck then, lashing out like a whip to plant its fangs into the cyborg's arm. Its venom had felt like twin injections of acid and being hit with a metal pole at the same time as Zim dropped his weapon and screamed, jumping and running around in terror and agony. Gir had been little help, considering it all one big joke and mimicking his distressed master's actions, laughing wildly and even saying at one point, "What a funny pet this would make!"

Leaving the discarded ray gun behind, Zim had torn away down the trail shrieking like a deranged parrot, hoping he could get to his base and its medical bay before the venom overcame him. When he began stumbling and falling to his knees, he'd firmly implored Gir to take him home upon his back and not to dare stop for anything. Amazingly, the defective robot had actually followed both orders, transporting his suffering master back home successfully.

Taking the elevator down into his hidden base of operations for Impending Doom, the Irken had hooked himself up to a special filtering machine and run all of his blood through it to remove the venom, the cleansed results going back into his body via a second tube. Even so, Zim had had a small batch of additional blood produced by the machine, based on the information contained in his DNA, and gave himself a transfusion with it.

It'd taken him three whole days to fully recover, all the while pondering how it would've been so pathetically humiliating above all humiliatingness if the mighty ZIM had been DOOMED by some legless inferior scaly worm beast! (As for the laser he'd left behind, an escaped circus chimp named Bobo Skee Watling Tautling came across it a couple weeks later while she was on the run from animal control and police officers, using it to engage them in a running battle that culminated just below Rolling Goat Head Dam. Unfortunately, a stray shot on Bobo's part resulted in her, the officers, several families having picnics, a class of fourth graders on a field trip, and two-thirds of a small town's population all perishing in a watery flood of doom. Oh well.)

Yes, danger and doom ran riot out here, in the wild places, Zim thought as he strolled over to the place where the blood stink came from. From the amount of it, he was more or less certain now that the dead beast was a deer.

What he saw in the moonlight, sprawled limp between two dogwood bushes and screened by grass, was totally different, and came as a complete surprise.

It was the body of a woman.

In her middle thirties, she was Hispanic, with cocoa brown skin, her long, wavy black hair held in place by a pink barrette. Zim saw that she was dressed in blue jeans and a light purple T-shirt with the red-nosed kat from that older kartune series that Gir and many young human wormbabies liked to watch on it-what was it called? Luny Tunes or something like that?

Great patches of soaked-in blood showed dark on her clothing in the moonlight, and the scent of fear-sweat lay heavy over her. She seemed to have been killed only a few hours ago, from what Zim's senses told him.

Frowning, the Irken cocked his head thoughtfully as he regarded the body and surveyed the immediate area before coming closer. He wasn't all that disturbed by the discovery-from the green-skinned alien's perspective, this was hardly any different then it would be for the human hiker that came across a dead whitetail doe or vixen fox-or worried about being in danger himself, just puzzled by this mystery.

What on this dirtball had killed her? Zim remembered hearing on the news several months ago about how on the other side of the large stone island, in "Kalifournia," a woman had been killed by a very large kat known as a "kugrrr" while hiking. Maybe one these "kugrrrs" had also done the same thing to her.

It was only when he went right up to the woman's dead body that he realized. No animuhl had done this human female in. Her throat was marked by great, terrible spreading bruises, almost like fingerpainted wings. She'd been strangled and stabbed to death by one of her own kind.

Second and last chapter to be posted soon! R and R please.