Snuff Out a Thousand Suns
Arc 1: Chapter 2
Zim blinked a few times, and started to lift a hand to touch his head. It was throbbing and in horrible pain, which made no sense. His Pak should be dispensing painkillers to stop the ache. After a few seconds, he realized that he couldn’t lift his arm, either. He slowly turned his head to see what the problem was while giving minimal irritation to the pounding in his skull, and saw that he was strapped onto a large table. The alien perked his antennae up in confusion, and tilted his eyes up as though to look at the appendages. That was weird. He hadn’t taken his disguise off before coming to the Dib’s home to steal all his hand towels, so why was he able to move them at all? He blinked again. The wig must have fallen off when Dib...
A surge of memories suddenly hit the Irken, and he hissed in fury. The Dib had attacked him! And it hadn’t been anything like their fights in the past; he’d completely overtaken the Invader with pure anger and a lamp! Zim would have to show him that no one could get away with beating in the skull of an Irken. An attempt to release the spider legs in his Pak failed, and Zim realized in horror that he was lying flat on his back. There was nothing pushing his shoulders away from the table’s surface. He wasn’t wearing his Pak.
“DIIIIIB!! GIVE ZIM HIS PAK! PUT IT BACK RIGHT NOW, LEST YOU WISH TO BE SHOWN PAIN YOU HAVE NEVER BEFORE KNOWN AND WOULD NEVER WANT TO!” the alien shrieked, writhing on the table. A few drops of water landed on his forehead, and he flinched, hissing.
“Keep it down, Zim. I’m trying to take a look at this,” Dib said, sitting a small bucket of water on the floor and turning back to the Pak. “It was a real bitch to get off, and I just managed it.”
Zim flattened his antennae against his skull in fury. “That Pak is Irken property, and you have no idea what you are doing with it. Return it to me, or you will suffer.”
Dib laughed. “And just how will I suffer, Zim? Hm? Everything you’ve ever done to me has been with this little thing right here,” he waved the Pak back and forth a few times, “and now I’ve got it.” He placed the Pak down on a smaller table he was standing at, and began picking at one of the pink panels. “How d’you open this?”
The Irken shrieked incoherently, jerking at the restraints on his limbs. “Give it to Zim now, Dib!” He began screaming in Irken as the teen wedged a screwdriver into the Pak. “Stop! STOOOOOOP! Give Zim his PAAAAAAAAAAAAAK!”
“Mmm....no,” Dib said, grinning as both panels popped up. “Ooh, they operate on the same mechanism to open, huh? What’s in here...” He started pulling various equipment out, setting aside what wasn’t attached and taking a pair of wire clippers to whatever was. Zim continued screaming for almost a full eight minutes while Dib emptied the Pak, and the teen only turned to look at him again when there was nothing left in the machine except some kind of battery-looking thing he couldn’t get out. “Okay, Zim; you want this so badly? Here ya go,” he said, tossing it onto the table next to the alien. “Have fun putting it back on.”
Zim had gone quite pale by this point, and seemed to be sweating. He quieted when the Pak landed by his side, and began wriggling. Panting, he managed to get a hip on top of the device, and started slowly squirming it towards his shoulder blades. By the time he managed to get it back into place, his eyes had gone rather unfocused and his breathing had grown even more labored. It clicked back into place, and Zim closed his eyes, relief flooding his face. His skin quickly regained its bright, normal color, and his breathing calmed. After a few seconds, the alien opened his eyes just a sliver to glare at Dib. “Never remove an Irken’s Pak, Dib,” he growled. “I will make you pay for that one.”
Dib made a little noise of interest at the Irken’s reaction to his Pak being taken, and gave a lopsided grin. “Interesting, Zim. You didn’t look too good for a minute there. Does that thing have some kind of life support system in it?” he asked. Zim stiffened, flattening his antennae again, and Dib chuckled at the reaction. “I’ll take that as a yes. Don’t worry, I’ll leave it alone. It’s pretty useless as far as weapons go now, and I’d much rather have a live study subject.”
Zim growled as Dib grasped his left glove by one finger, slowly pulling it out from under the strap keeping his arm immobile. As it came off, Zim curled his fingers into a fist in an attempt to keep it for himself. Dib sighed. “Zim, we can do this the easy way, or the fun way. Which would you prefer?” The alien’s only response was to spit at the boy’s face. The warm, clear glob landed directly between Dib’s eyes. He pursed his lips, letting go of Zim’s glove, and wiped the spit off, rubbing it from his fingers on the alien’s shirt. “Okay then. Fun it is.”
Dib crossed the room, picking his little bucket of water back up. “Hope you remembered your glue today, Zim,” he said happily, hooking the bucket up to an overly-elaborate harness above Zim’s head, where a small dribble of liquid began leaking slowly onto the alien’s forehead. Zim wriggled in discomfort, but refused to give the human the pleasure of hearing him scream. When Dib continued trying to take his glove, Zim made a fist again. Dib sighed in annoyance, reached up, and tipped the bucket so a sudden splash fell onto the Irken. Zim gave a shriek of surprise, and Dib yanked the glove the rest of the way off. As Dib started to feel the now-bare alien flesh, Zim flexed and fought against the prodding fingers, mumbling various Irken death threats.
Dib frowned at the alien, barely touching the tip of a green claw. “Okay, Zim. Y’know what? I think I have something that can make this a lot easier, but still nice and fun. Don’t run off, now.” He turned away, digging through a cabinet for a few seconds, and then sat a syringe and a small bottle on the table next to Zim’s weapons. After filling the needle with whatever was in the bottle, he came back to the autopsy table, straddling Zim’s hips and pulling his shirt up a little. The Irken started bucking and writhing like crazy at this, but Dib laid himself out on top of Zim’s body, holding his head completely still, and injected the needle in a large vein on the side of his throat. “Theeeere we go,” he murmured as the plunger forced the contents of the syringe into the alien bloodstream, carefully removing it after it was empty and hopping off of the table.
“What was that?! What have you done to ZIM you pork-smelly?! I will have your head as a TROPHY on my wall when I get out of here!” Zim shrieked, fighting his bonds even more than he had before.
“It’s just a little something to help me out, Zim,” Dib said with a little smile. “It shouldn’t hurt you.” He typed a few commands into a laptop sitting on the far side of Zim’s weapons, and the alien realized with horror that he was quickly losing all feeling in his left arm. “They’re something my dad made to use as painkillers for really sickly people who get a lot of surgeries. A kind of nanobot, that will never leave your system once injected, and can remove all feeling from any body part with a single command. Let’s move on now, shall we?” he asked, unstrapping the lifeless limb and lifting it up.
He prodded gently at the tip of the claw he’d abandoned, making a noise of surprise. “It’s not sharp at all,” he murmured, pressing on it. “It just bends right down when you press it. Guess they’re just so pointy for show; maybe kinda like a moth’s eye spots?” He pulled a small black notebook out of a pocket, jotting down his thoughts as he went. A pair of scissors were pulled from a drawer, and cut down through Zim’s shirt sleeve. “His skin’s really cool to the touch, too; but other than a slight give, it’s pretty tough. Almost like an exoskeleton. I wonder...” Dib dropped the arm onto the table, going back to his laptop. A few seconds later, Zim lost all sensation from the neck down. “Don’t worry, Zim. The nanobots should keep your...what was it you called it? Your squeedlyspooch? Anyway, they should keep that working for you.”
He picked his scissors up again, cutting down the front of the Irken’s shirt and pulling the flaps to either side of his body. “Oh, wow,” he breathed, running a finger down a long line that ran the length of the alien’s torso. About five other lines ran from horizontally across his chest and stomach, stopping at what looked like identical spots on each side. Dib quickly grabbed up his notebook again, penciling out a quick sketch of what the alien’s body looked like so far. When that was completed, he gently pushed at each of the places the lines overlapped. They had a bit more give than the rest of Zim’s skin. “Maybe he molts to grow...” Dib thought about that for a moment. An explanation like that actually made a lot of sense. It explained why Zim had only that single, rapid period of growth, and why he’d looked so...ucky afterwards. “I wonder if I could induce a molt.” Zim shrieked again in response to that thought, whipping his head from side to side. “Calm down, Zim. I’m sure it won’t hurt that badly, will it? With the nanobots in place, you won’t feel a thing. I want to study you; you don’t want me to touch you. If you molt, I can study your shed skin, and leave you alone for a while. Okay?” Dib reached around to undo the three remaining restraints, and began cutting the rest of the Irken’s clothes off. Zim hissed in various alien languages as the boy worked, trying to move anything he could, but the nanobots seemed to be doing their job perfectly.
Dib paused after the removal of the green boy’s pants, looking curiously between his legs. There was nothing there except a faint, x-shaped mark with a small anus-like hole behind it. He made a mental note to try and figure out how Zim’s species bred later. It’d be a definite benefit if his Armada ever showed up. If the humans could hold out long enough, they’d be able to sabotage whatever reproductive systems they had and hopefully outlast the remaining population.
Moving up Zim’s naked body, Dib pressed his fingers into the depression made by the middle line on his stomach and the vertical one. Slowly, he added pressure, feeling the skin starting to separate just slightly. Zim screamed something more in Irken as the separation began to grow at more pressure from Dib’s fingers, and when a one finger suddenly broke through, the alien went absolutely nuts shrieking at him. The human removed his finger, looking at the small, circular hole. With Zim’s screams in another language, Dib honestly didn’t know if the nanobots were unable to repress all the pain that he seemed to be causing, but it seemed like they probably weren’t. Ah well, Dib thought to himself. May as well get it over with quickly, then.
He wiped a bit of bluish, see-through goo that had come out of the small cavity in Zim’s skin on his finger off on his pants, and dug through a drawer of lab tools, pulling out a scalpel and a small knife. After using the knife to make the hole a bit bigger, he slid the scalpel in and ran it down the length of the line. As he cut, the horizontal lines cracked open, peeling away from the alien on their own, and after less than ten minutes, they were open all the way, in each direction, and Dib was able to reach in and start pulling Zim’s limp, sticky body out of the now-useless shell. It took a bit of squeezing to maneuver the Irken’s head through the space left by his neck, but Dib managed it with only minimal damage done to the shed skin. Zim’s Pak came out still completely attached, leaving a large, oval hole in the exoskeleton, which Dib slid out from under the pruny green flesh that was now exposed and covered in that same blue gunk, before dropping the surprisingly light body back onto the table and reattaching the restraints. He carried the skin over to the other table, lying it on the other side of Zim’s weapons. “Now, I would leave the nanobots active, but Dad said one of his test subjects died from having them on for too long. We wouldn’t want that to happen, now, would we?” he asked with a little smirk, typing away at his laptop.
Zim regained the feeling in his entire body all at once, and there was a sharp, shooting pain coming from every single inch of it. It was worse where the table and straps were touching it, but even what was just exposed to the air felt like it was on fire. The Irken began shrieking in agony, trying to hold himself still but unable to fight the instinctual need to escape the cause of his pain. This, of course, simply made it worse, which resulted in him jerking even more. Dib just plugged a pair of earbuds into his laptop, turned on some Internet radio station, and began carefully wiping the blue ooze from the skin and into an empty bucket.
~*~
Irken Round 2ZZR
Location: Matternia, The Hatchling Planet
Educational Block
“Zim, what did you do this time?”
The smeet glared angrily from the grip of a guard. “Skoodge and I were simply trying to do some exploring. We wanted to see the planet’s surface.”
Shtirk laughed. “More like you did, and you just dragged Skoodge along with you. Speaking of that, where is he?”
“He got stuck in an escape hatch. They’re trying to get him loose right now.”
The guard shook Zim angrily. “You’re lucky he didn’t wipe out half the planet, smeet! He was only a mark away from the power supply to the learning capsule!” Shtirk snorted a bit, trying to muffle his laughter, and the guard turned to glare at him. “This is no laughing matter! There could have been very serious consequences for your friend’s actions!”
Another smeet came over, looking rather nervous. “What’s going on, Shtirk? Are you in trouble?”
“Nah. Just Zim,” he replied, clearly bored by the small Irken. “C’mon, Flurn. Let’s go get some nachos.”
“All right,” Flurn said, tearing his large pink eyes from the direction the guard had gone, carrying the undersized smeet.
~*~
I don’t own Invader Zim. This is obvious. If I were Mr. Vasquez, I’d be too busy vomiting out of every orifice on my body from the sheer thought of Zim having a sexual relationship with any of the other characters to be typing this right now.
Yay torture! Sadistic!analytical!Dib is being really fun to write. I’m gonna be sad when this bit’s over; although then we’ll be getting into real fun. And I got a horribly detail-starved outline typed up for this, so I know where I’m going, but have plenty of space to flesh things out and keep from getting bored. Huzzah! Review for me, and tell me what you thought of Dib and his nanobots of evil, please! I’ll give you all Suck Monkeys! *holds out Monkeys*
Azumi: ^^ Glad to have an old reader come back! I'll keep the chapters coming, and it should go much farther than the old version did.