A SKOODGE A WEEK

Week Ninety Two

Sweet, with hints of citrus, strong, burning. It makes his antennae tingle and his eyes water. He hasn’t even taken a sip yet.

He dips his tongue into the bottleneck, and tilts the bottle forward…

… then pulls his tongue out and coughs, with the tears that had been forming in the bottom of his eyes now threatening to fall as he grasps at his neck and continues to sputter.

After a long minute of him struggling to get every last drop out of his air-pipe, and he can finally breathe evenly and normally again, he only has one word in his mind.

Wow.

That was… way stronger than he was anticipating!

It tastes different from how it smells. It tastes more sour than he would’ve gleaned from the sweet fragrance coming out of the bottle. Though when he smacks his lips and flicks his tongue around the back of his teeth, actually, he finds that the sweet part of the drink is left to be found in the aftertaste.

It’s really sweet.

All things considered, it tastes great — right after getting past the mouth-watering, sour, throat-burning part.

He takes another sip, and his face instinctively scrunches in on itself from the sour burn.

Maybe sips aren’t the way to go? Is there a wrong way to drink alcohol? Is he doing it wrong?

If he were any taller, he might’ve had more experience with this.

He tries drinking it faster, in big, consecutive gulps, but his attempt is thwarted by his throat seizing up over the burning sensation and he ends up coughing a lot of the drink onto the ground and then into his hand after bringing it up to cover his mouth.

The only good thing about this situation is that no one else is around to see him.

He tilts the bottle back, finding it completely empty. Only one single last drop reaches his tongue, and after that, there’s nothing left. He lost most of it to his stupid stunt. He’s pretty sure this is undeniable proof that he would be absolutely terrible at parties.

“For your first task, whateveryournameis — you will…” Zim presses his hands flat to the table, and takes a deep breath… inhale, without exhale, as he rises and stands on the bench.

One of his arms lifts and drags in the air.

“… KILL one of your fellow smeets!” Zim shouts out, gaining the attention of every other smeet in the immediate vicinity. His hand points directly over at one smeet in particular, chosen at complete random.

Their antennae shoot up and they point at themself in confirmation, their whole body shaking as they quietly ask Zim, “M-me?”

“WHAT?!” Skoodge shouts back, horrified. He stands up on the bench, too, but only so he can reach and pull Zim’s hand down so he’s not threatening the poor random smeet anymore. “I’m not doing that!”

Zim laughs. Skoodge’s pinned antennae shake from the force of it, lifting up from his skull bit by bit.

It’s loud. It’s loud, it’s grating, demanding attention and gaining it just by existing, and it is obnoxious, and it is by all means the worst laugh ever —

But, Skoodge hasn’t really heard many other laughs before now, so he wouldn’t know that.

Listening to it now, his only thought is how cool it is.

It sounds just like the irken soldiers’ laughs in the virtual battlefield modules.

“— AH HAhahaheheheeheh…” Zim continues his unique, maybe a little bit plagiarized form of laughter, and wipes away a single bead of goop from his eye. “Heh. I’m funny.”

Skoodge huffs, blowing a single raspberry. “Are you?”

“Of course! But moving on from that —!” Zim clears his throat, and sits down. It takes Skoodge a second to realize that he’s also standing on the bench still before following suit. “You passed the first test!”

“That was a test?” He asks, squinting one eye aaaaall the way until it’s shut. His head and his antennae perk up as realization spreads across his features, and his hands slap-slap-slap repeatedly against the table’s top excitedly. “Oh-oh-oh! Was it a test on my integrity to the Empire?”

“What? No — I wanted to laugh at you and I laughed. At you.”

“Oh.”

Zim crosses his arms together and nods, completely serious. “You’re very good for laughing at. So, you pass!”

Week Eighty Seven!

“I hope we see a bunny exhibit — I don’t see any bunnies on the map, though. I hope they just forgot to put them on there instead of not having any bunnies at all.”

“What is it with you and your obsession with bunnied rabbits?”

“They’re cute!” Skoodge defends, holding the map closer to himself, causing the paper to crease and fold.

“Cute and useless.” “Perhaps I could engineer them to be not useless…” “How do toe-eating rabbits sound? The humans wouldn’t be able to stand up against us!”

Skoodge doesn’t seem all that thrilled by Zim’s plan. He mumbles a suggestion. “Maybe we can dress up as clowns while they eat toes, too.”

Zim gapes in horror. “No. Never.” Real, true, honest to Irk, horror, at the mere prospect of being a clown. “I may be evil, but clowns…” Zim shudders. “… They are the evilest.”

After a long second of Zim disassociating, he snaps back to reality, marching ahead of Skoodge.

“I will not be caught even expired with my face painted,” he chitters mostly to himself. It could almost be mistaken for fear, especially with the way his voice warbles ever so slightly at the mention of paint.

But, well. Zim is never afraid of anything.

So Skoodge doesn’t mention it at all. “You know what…” He hums, idly, redirecting the conversation in a small attempt to make up for the apparent misdemeanor against Zim and his whole entire character. “… I don’t think I’ve ever seen a clown outside of a trial.”

“Exactly!” Zim snaps, both literally and figuratively, his fingers clicking together before dropping again. “That is why they are the evilest! They are evil in an unrespectful way.” He shakes his head, his boots falling a little bit louder as the paved walking road transitions into smooth, marbled floor. “They don’t follow any rules — much less those of the Empire’s. True scum.” He doesn’t appear to notice the change in setting, too focused on the moral alignment of clowns — Skoodge, likewise, also doesn’t notice, too focused on Zim’s conversation. Zim is just that engaging.

“I never knew clowns were that bad.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m here to educate your uneducated self!”

“Yeah, I guess it —” Then, Skoodge notices. The marble floor, and the high, scaling walls, holding the ceiling above them. The little noises of life, buzzing and chirping and skittering.

He looks over to the nearest glass case, housing two praying mantises. Immediately next to it but still separated an appropriate amount as to not agitate the ferocious mantises, is a stick bug case.

They’re in the bug house.

“… When did we get here?”

“You good?”

Zim replies with a low mumble. His hands bat away at Skoodge’s, who eventually gets the idea and releases his grip on Zim. Zim huffs, crossing his arms and turning away from the other irken.

“If you do that again, Zim will do something. Something terrible.”

Skoodge grins at his forced venom. He takes the chance to play into it, coming up with an unpleasant scenario so that Zim doesn’t need to. "Like what, bite me?" He asks with a playful lilt.

Zim’s face pales. He shoots up out from his spot, waving his hands in front of him as he stumbles away from Skoodge and his playful remark.

"NOOOoo! NO BITING!"

Skoodge similarly brings his hands up, waving them in tandem with Zim, who, gradually, returns to a somewhat calm level. “Alright okay! No biting!” Skoodge crosses his arms, at least to the best that he can, and turns away with a huff. “Sheesh!”

“SHEESH yourself!”

“Okay! Okay! I’ll sheesh myself!” He relents, as his body smooths out — though his antennae remain at a cautious, raised position, one tilted up slightly higher than the other in complete and utter perplexion. “What’s the deal with you?”

“Nothing! Zim has no deals!” Zim pivots his head left and right, looking anywhere but Skoodge, his mouth firmly sealed over with his hands. “Why is it cold in here?! Computer!”

“Whaaaaat?”

“Turn the temperature up to fifty seven Urth fair-enn-height degrees!”

“… It’s already fifty seven degrees.”

Zim removes his hands, freeing his mouth from its binds, and points at a blank space in the wall and shouts “LIES!” His finger wiggles, threateningly, at the general nothing that is supposed to currently embody the Computer, apparently. “Turn it up by two!”