deercountry | The Building Blocks and other assorted tales!

Now that Zib's back to... well, whatever passes as "normal" for a Zib from his own recent shedding incident, he's taken to being out and about rather than hiding again. Albeit, the thicker coat he's begun wearing lately seems to be kinda off around the middle chest area for some reason (is he actually that cold that he's keeping his arms inside the coat entirely rather than using the sleeves?), but he otherwise approaches Luz when he sees her, and takes note of the graffiti.

"Did... you draw those?"

Hey, that was a good idea. It was something Luz might do herself, actually, but right now she's clearly focused on her work right now, but she nods in Zib's direction. She was definitely glad that Zib seemed more like himself.

"In a manner of speaking? Basically I was a different version of myself. At least she chose nice colors?"

"Oh."

Guess he wasn't the only one who wasn't acting like himself lately. He almost wishes he had seen what this other Luz had been up to, but... then again, Zib wasn't exactly the best version of himself for the last week until now.

"Any idea why the other you would be drawing those?"

He points to the crude hand gestures and such. He's no stranger to seeing rude graffiti before, or just practically nonsensical things given the town he lived in, but it's still a bit surreal to think that another version of Luz would draw those when the Luz he's met here doesn't seem like the type to do so.

It was complicated. She knew her other was aware she was on borrowed time, so she'd tried to live up as much of the day that she could. Some of that just happened to include getting into bar fights, petty tagging and fighting a snake.

"It's graffiti. She was trying to leave her mark before she left. I'm pretty sure she wasn't the one that drew all the male...appendages, but some of the swears and the glyphwitchy stuff is her pseudonym."

Clearly that Luz was still a little meticulous about such things.

"Huh, I guess that makes sense to want to do. Kind of."

But, then he frowns as he looks down at Luz's cleaning supplies.

"If that's the case, then why are you getting rid of them?"

"Don't ask me. I didn't do that."

She scoffed. "Because it's one thing to do a mural because people asked for one, and another to just start tagging things no one asked for. Also, it's generally rude to accompany your graffiti with crude drawings of guys', uh, appendages."

Luz knew at least that part wasn't her, that she must have had some cohort, however immature.

"Fair enough."

Zib can't say that he would want anything he wrote or drew to be associated with such immature art either.

"Do you want any help cleaning this off?"

"Hm? Oh yeah, definitely! This is a pain in the neck!"

Luz had been scrubbing for a while now and was starting to feel a little of the strain.

"So how are doing after the whole Dib/Zim situation? Is he more or less gone again?"

A familiar PAK cable slips out from under the hood Zib is wearing over his head. Unlike a few days ago or so, however, he seems to have perfect control over it as he has it picking up a sponge to start scrubbing at graffiti located at a high spot on the wall here.

However, at the question, he momentarily pauses, clearly caught off guard and needing a second to decide how to answer before he finally speaks.

"Ah... yeah. They're--Zim isn't here anymore."

For some reason, Zib almost sounds a little sad about that, perhaps, but only for a second, because then, his tone slips into one of spite instead as he glares at the wall in front of him.

"Good riddance. Things are already complicated as they are, I don't need nor want his irritating voice to deal with here too."

Oh, right. Luz did jump a little at the cable, mostly because it had been spitting lasers out at her before, but relaxed once it started picking up the brush.

"I didn't think so. You can definitely use the pak all on your own again."

She'd gotten so used to Zib doing that that when he had lost control, it had made Luz aware of how much he came to rely on it. She was glad he was able to use it again.

"If he hadn't been so violent and murder-y towards you, I think I would have liked him. He's like Darth Maul if Darth Maul was screechy and loud and violent."

One out of three was enough though.

"He is--was like that toward everyone."

Zib corrects, referring to Zim in the past tense now. His concentration is on cleaning the wall rather than looking at Luz while he talks.

"His whole reason for coming to Earth was to try to either destroy or conquer it for his alien overlords. So he was always coming up with plans and dangerous weapons to make that happen. I ended up being the only one able to fight and stop him, so as a result a lot of his hatred ended up directed toward me, and vice versa as we constantly fought over the fate of humanity."

"He sounds like a real handful."

Truthfully, Luz would at least have liked to see some of their adventures unfolding. Luz by now had seen quite a few villains in Trench and Deerington, but definitely not anyone as over the top as Zim.

"So, he couldn't make up his mind which one he wanted to do? Also, no one else could help you? That is a lot for a kid to do! You must be pretty smart to be able to outsmart him every time he tried to put the world in danger!"

That or Zim was just stupid, but that couldn't be the reason.

"No one else wanted to do anything about it."

However, Zib preens a fair bit at the compliment as he ends up adding further.

"But even if they did, I don't think they would have been as smart as I am. So it's only natural that I would be the best person to be the defender of Earth, especially since I did end up eventually succeeding in the end."

"Huh. That must be pretty infuriating."

Luz knew she would have been frustrated that no one lent her a hand or had any kind of help.

"Glad you don't need your own hype man," Luz joked, both amused and a little put off by Dib's boast, if only because Luz was not a girl about talking up herself, especially being keenly aware what came about when pride took center stage.

"Succeeding. You mean when you, um, killed him."

"No."

The word comes out immediate, a protest on his lips--I didn't kill him, I defeated him, there's a difference--but he holds his tongue and forces himself to move on to work at a different spot on the wall rather than continuing to scrub at the same spot over and over again that he had been doing for the last few minutes now.

"Even with his defeat, the Earth still wasn't really saved. After all, the Armada he served still existed. His leaders wouldn't have taken too kindly to finding out that a human had bested one of their own once they found out. So it was necessary to make sure that they wouldn't invade Earth, so I did everything I could think of to keep fighting for the fate of my world, even once Zim was gone."

"No?"

That wasn't specific, so she wanted to know exactly what he was referring to.

"What exactly did you do then? I figure if an Armada was going to come for Earth, that'd be a pretty hard thing to avoid."

"Well... even if Zim was gone, I still had his PAK that was left behind. All of his knowledge of the Irken Empire and their Armada was stored within it, and I realized that I needed it in order to find their weaknesses."

The PAK cable finishes cleaning the next spot, dropping down back to eye level with Zib as he checks his work here.

"So... I fused with Zim's PAK once I was certain I could recode it to fit my needs how I desired. It gave me all the information I needed to reverse-engineer all the tech in his lab, and learn how to create powerful electromagnetic pulse weapons that could disable and destroy anything that came in contact with them."

After a moment, Zib's mouth quirks into a slight smile as if remembering a funny joke.

"I suppose the easiest way to explain the end result is that I ended up building the world's largest bug zapper, so to speak. It fired a beam from Earth strong enough to hit the Irken Empire and wipe them out entirely so that they could never destroy or invade another planet again, let alone Earth."

This gave Luz pause. She remembered from her history books about Hiroshima and Nagasaki: how Japan at the time was at war with the Allied powers, and to ensure a victory, an atomic bomb was dropped on the two Japanese cities to pressure them to end theire involvement. It was meant to be seen as a necessary evil, and in the right eyes, maybe it was.

But Luz didn't see it that way. As someone who had killed to make sure certain evil people did not get to do the things they liked, Luz had at least been subjected to their kind of torture. It was cruel and traumatic, but she knew, even as she regretted killing them at all, that it was done to stop them from doing it to others.

"I get it. You used their technology against them. So you were sure they were going to go after Earth? They were there, ready to unleash their armada and everything?"

"Yes. Zim's PAK had also given me access to some of their communication networks, and I was able to find out when the Irken Aramada would be traveling in the direction of Earth during their march across the galaxy to destroy or conquer any and all planets they come across."

Although... Earth (or "Urth" as Zim had taken to calling it) didn't seem to show up at all on their radar during Irk's current plans... but Zib had not wanted to take any chances on them suddenly noticing the little planet that happened to be just off to the side of their conquest map when passing through. Besides, it had been easy to convince himself at the time that it was better to strike first before they could even think of striking back.

"Hmm."

Luz was going to have to think about this a bit. She definitely didn't think that killing off a bunch of aliens, despite what menace they might or might not have had for Earth, seemed like it should be talked about so casually. Of course, he had disposed of Zim, so maybe he just figured that a whole armada of aliens like Zim would have been far too troublesome.

"So you saved countless planets. That's pretty good, then."

It certainly wasn't something Luz thought she could have accomplish on her own. The question being, of course, if she could have brought herself to do it.

"Was there no way to cloak planets then?"

"Not really. Besides, it wouldn't have helped the planets they had already rudely taken over and forced to work for the Irken's own needs, like Foodcourtia: the Armada invaded and converted that entire planet into, well, their own personal food court."

Although, from what he has been told, some of the food they had there was actually pretty good, even if it wasn't healthy for you.

"A food court. Zib, has anyone told you that your reality is super weird?"

Like everyone's. Really, just sift through and there will be something that's crazy about it.

"Although. I. Would TOTALLY want to visit a planet that's a food court. I mean, we're talking food throughout the galaxy, right?"

"You would not be the first to tell me that here."

Varian has also said something to that effect a few times whenever Zib talked about his home. That said...

"Yes, it is. Other races of aliens would come to try whatever cuisine they could get their hands on. Although, the staff was typically made up of whichever aliens got banished there as a punishment for pissing off the Irkens, if I recall correctly."

"I'm sure that's true. Of course, you could say that to just about anyone's world. We do have a Snow White here after all, and in my world she's like, one of the oldest fairy tale characters that have stood the test of time."

Luz was also pretty fond of her and wanted to protect her, if she was honest.

"Working as food court staff is a punishment? No, wait, now that I think about that, that's an ingeniously horrible thing to do, from what I hear about the service industry."

"Oh, you have that fairy tale in your world too? It's been ages since I last even thought about 'Snow White', but now that you mention it, I do remember seeing someone with that name posting to the network a few times..."

He had thought maybe it was just someone named after the fairy tale character, not... the actual person themselves. Huh. Maybe he should try talking to them himself sometime. As for Foodcourtia, though...

"Yeah. I've seen what it's like on Earth, I can easily imagine how much worse it is in Foodcourtia when you're having to work on behalf of the Empire as opposed to just simply trying to make a living, you know?"

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imaglyphwitch - 2022-02-15 18:09 (UTC) - Expand

The Building Blocks and other assorted tales!

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If the Tallest had known Dib killed him, they might have sent him a gift basket lol

oh definitely but dib didn't know that or was in denial about that part lmao

Re: oh definitely but dib didn't know that or was in denial about that part lmao

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