Chapter Text
Despite what the others around you said, you didn’t get the worst assignment possible. Your fellow soldiers winged for you, your pod-mates said their final goodbyes as if they thought you would never return, and the Tallests, of course, mocked you for your apparent misery when giving you the assignment.
All in all, you thought it couldn’t possibly be as bad as everyone seemed to think it was. You’d take dealing with a rogue defective on some backwater planet over being a guard-transfer to Moo-Ping 10 any day of the week- the Tallests seemed to think that the goblin they were sending you to worse than any given Gellaxis soldier. Even the Tallests, in your oh-so-humble opinion, could be wrong.
-
The emotion-dampener in your PAK sure did help; if any lesser soldier, invader, or miscellaneous other third thing was on this pedestal getting eyed down by the Almighty Tallest, they might be shaking in their ill-fitting boots. Why the Tallest insisted that giving assignments must be a grand spectacle you’d never understand, but in all fairness, it wasn’t your job to.
You were second-to-last in line to receive your mission. It wasn’t your first rodeo, and it wouldn’t be your last, but the sight of the Control Brains always managed to sneak past the emotion-dampener and send a chill all the way up your spine. The Tallests stood against the glaring red lights in silhouette, arguing amongst themselves from seperate stone pedestals. The fellow before you clambered down from his assignment, looking somewhat pleased but more bared than anything- his assignment had been so boring that you hadn’t even paid it any mind.
Your attention, however, was quickly acquired when the Tallest both snapped bolt upright and pointed at you in unison. You jumped, your antennae prickling as you once again glanced at the Control Brains you had been forcing yourself not to look at.
“YOU!” Tallest Red barked, and he slouched forward to point at you once again, rather aggressively. “ACQUISITOR LUCKY.”
You blinked a couple of times and looked at the soldier behind you, who was not named Lucky- what a coincidence! That was also not your name.
“ARE YOU DEAF? STEP UP TO THE PLATFORM.” It was Tallest Purple who spoke this time, with less volume but just as much malice dripping from his voice.
“I guess your name is Lucky now.” The soldier behind you half-snickered, half-whispered, but any schadenfreude he was experiencing fizzled away quickly.
You began to clamber up to the platform that had been hap-hazardly constructed out of hard light and fiberglass. The emotion-dampening nodule was getting a fair workout today- you had no idea what you’d done to acquire the ire of the Tallests. You always did your jobs quickly, efficiently, and with no fuss, even if it was something as trivial as taking a few pennies from a custodian to get fund the Tallests’ incessant need to be constantly eating various disgusting foods. Having both of them glaring down at you from the tall stone pedestals that you were sure hadn’t been this tall before was nerve-wracking to say the least.
Now that you were in better lighting, you could see that the Tallests looked worse for wear. Their exo-suits had burn-marks and the metal had warped, their antennae moved little and sluggishly as if they were sore, there were bruises on various parts of their faces; even their posture, which was horrible on the best of days, looked worse than usual. They weren’t the only Irken that you had seen with this kind of damage, either; there were actually quite a few of your pod-mates that had seemed rag-tag as well, but you were never one to initiate conversation with people you only saw when you were going to do maintenance on your PAK or to artificially sleep in preparation for your next mission.
Tallest Purple hovered close to the lip of his platform and glared at you.
“Acquisitor (Y/N), Sector 821, well-known thief and stickiest-of-fingers-”
“That’s what Acquisitors are. That’s what
all
Acquisitors are.”
“SHUT UP.”
“You shut up.”
You stood there on the platform with your hands locked behind your back, antennae swaying slowly back and forth to give yourself some sort of stimulation.
“Acquisitor (Y/N), Sector 821, or as we’ve been calling you, Lucky Duck Jerkface,” Purple finally managed to get the sentence out of his mouth, the immature nickname earning a wave of cruel laughter. You didn’t take it too personally, every joke they made got that. “You wanna know why we call you that? Very loudly? To your face?”
You said nothing, but moved your antennae to indicate that you were listening, even if being yelled at by the overlords in front of the Control Brains was nearly causing you to disassociate despite the dampening nodule.
Tallest Red craned his back and the metal in his suit groaned. “You were one of the few Acquisitors- no, one of the few Irken to escape the trauma aboard the Massive when we shot high-speed into a Florpus hole.”
A wave of echoing boos rippled around the chamber.
You looked at them, confused. “I was on commission, my Tallests-”
“DON’T INTERRUPT THE ASSIGNING.” Tallest Purple barked down at you from his pedestal- you hadn’t remembered them being this irritable.
You tightened your grip on your arms behind your back and nodded, swallowing hard.
“As I was saying,” Tallest Red resumed his spiteful speech, “You were one of the only Irken to escape mass trauma aboard the Massive when we flew directly into the Florpus hole. You jerk.”
Another wave of boos echoed around the chamber, causing your antennae to quiver with the excess noise- you shook your head to attempt to clear it, but once again, said nothing.
“You’re also the only one of the uninjured Irken stupid and brave enough to show your face back at the Massive so soon after. So we can get your punishment out of the way! And then you can get back to stealing things for us.” Purple clapped his claws together, seemingly more concerned with the latter than the former.
A sense of dread tried to settle in your abdomen, but the dampener dulled it for the moment.
“Acquisitor (Y/N), Lucky Duck Jerkface Extraordinaire,” Red stood stock straight again and pointed once more, “Deal with the defective Zim on planet Urth.”
The confused silence that filled the room following his statement lasted a few seconds.
You held out one hand and tilted your head, “Uh… my Tallest… what do you mean ‘deal’ with him?”
“Deal with him. Your Tallests command it!”
You took a tentative step forward, “But in what way do you m-”
“Roast him, fry him, get him arrested, frame him for intergalactic tax fraud, we don’t care. Just deal with him. We’re tired of his stupid face. OH, speaking of, disable his ability to video-call the Massive when you get there. That should be the first thing you do. Now get off the platform.”
Your antennae shot up and you began to stutter out a protest, but as your voice caught in your throat, you saw one of the programming wires from the Control Brains begin to arch up and angle itself at you.
“Yes, my Tallest.” You muttered before scrambling off the stage and out of the way of their harsh, irritated gazes.
Your antennae caught every vibration in the air, sending the rattles down through to your brain, clouding your vision as you pushed through the crowd of assigned invaders, acquisitors, custodians, and various other poor irkens that had pooled on the other side of the door, all whispering amongst themselves about their respective missions. As you began to part the crowd numbly to return to your barracks clear on the other side of the Massive, a clawed hand grappled your forearm.
You hissed and reared up, bearing your layered, zig-zag teeth, but you soon quieted when your PAK’s nodule began to become better operational now that you were out of the limelight and the echoing chamber. The flash of defensive anger quelled and you closed your eyes as it reset you for the moment, but the grip on your arm only just barely loosened.
“-ello? Can ya hear me?”
The antennae on your head had been flush with your skull as the PAK administered the calming agent, but as soon as you realized you were being spoken to, they perked up just a bit.
“Yeah, yeah-” You muttered in response.
“Good, thank Irk, you looked like you were about to pass out.” Opening your eyes, you recognized the irken standing nearby, and you shook him off of your arm.
“You know better than to just grab my arm, Vitz.”
The irken let go of your forearm and held up his claws in mock surrender. There was an ever-present glimmer of mischief in his blue-green eyes, but now it seemed dull in comparison to its normal intensity.
“I didn’t know if you could find your way back to the barracks on your own looking like you were gonna puke. You really did get the literal worst mission, Lucky- can I call you Lucky?”
A chittering growl slipped from your throat and you passed him by and started to make your way through the halls, attempting to reach a transfer bay. Vitz was a fellow acquisitor, excellent prankster, and mild thorn-in-your-side. Nobody in your sect was totally unbearable, but Vitz was more tolerable than most- he was perhaps the best at what he did, but unless directly told to do so by a supervisor, he spent most of his time stealing food for himself and scarfing it down in the vents so he wouldn’t have to share with anybody once he returned to his assignments. Between the both of you, pulling mild pranks on those aboard the Massive was a fun past-time. Pulling not-so-mild and much more deadly pranks on planets they were sent to scout on was double fun and twice the reward- you both were hellions, but you were so good at getting out of dodge before you were caught that the fingers never pointed at you.
As the two of you knifed through the thinning crowds, a couple of pitying glances were thrown your way, and some angrier glances from particularly-singed irken soldiers, but you paid them no mind. You hated coming up to the announcement and control room levels anyway, too many irken loitering around and yelling for no reason.
Vitz loped along behind you but soon caught up, walking next to you once the hallway widened. He took note of the various glares and glances, his antennae bobbing as he walked. “Man, what mission did you get? Half the ship looks like it wants to kill you.”
You scoffed, “You weren’t listening?”
“I’m stuck on the stupid dome ship until the next assignment batch doing custiodial work. I may or may not have attempting to nab something that belonged to the Tallest.”
“Please tell me it was something good and not dimestore schlock.” You rounded a corner and saw the teleportation pads that began the several-stop journey to your barracks.
“It was dimestore schlock.” Vitz said proudly, “and I almost got away with said dimestore schlock. Unfortunately, the vent system hasn’t been completely repaired after that black hole. It collapsed into a PAK bay. Anyway, no, to answer your question, I was definitely not listening.”
You winced and brought your communicator up to your face so you could see better; for irken to have such big eyes, their eyesight was terrible. “Lemme see if I can pull it up.”
Vitz stopped and waited attentively for the hologram, rocking back and forth on his heels and humming something that had no tune at all. “You doin’ ok? Your antennae are still shaking.”
You gave them an experimental twitch as you fiddled with your gauntlet. “Yeah, I’m fine. It was just loud.”
“Don’t feel too bad, (Y/N)- every irken gets put on blast in from of the Tallests at some point. It’s like a rite of passage. You’re a real irken now, oooooo-” Vitz wiggled his fingers and made a faux-spooky ghost noise, beginning to laugh but cutting off abruptly as your hologram activated.
Your pod-mate stuttered, almost seeming not to believe what he was seeing. He looked at you, his eyes as wide as saucers, “You can’t be serious. Him? You’ve gotta deal with him?”
A look of disgust and mild irritation rippled his features as he glared at the hologram- an irken soldier wearing the invader uniform, just like any other (In fact, you thought that perhaps you had been mistakenly given a picture of Invader Tenn), excepting the fact that he was… small. Not the shortest irken you’d ever seen, but definitely the shrimpiest in terms of height-versus-body-mass. His bright ruby-magenta eyes seemed to glare at you both through the blue filter of the hologram, a self-confident and oh-so-stupid grin plastered across his face.
This was the defective you had to deal with? This was the goblin that had managed to catapult the Massive into a Florpus hole while you were moseying along the other side of the galaxy? Yeah, right.
Vitz, however, did not share your apparent boredom. He gave you a withering, pitying grin and patted your shoulder before beginning to walk towards the teleporter.
“Aw man, the Tallests so have it out for you.”