Chapter Text
“Introducing the New Almighty Tallest Spork!
All Hail Almighty Tallest Spork!
Long may his shadow fall!”
Pinq stood frozen in the middle of cooking. She was still like a rabbit before a gun, like a mouse in front of a cat, like a deer in head lights- a prey animal that knew exactly what fate awaited it.
She hadn’t been worried when the screen had first dropped from the ceiling. She had just thought that the boys had once more managed their rare and lucky moments to be in reach of the Empire’s signal again, that it was nothing more than a quick social call. Just a little pleasant extra diversion where she could see the boys and enjoy the complements to her cooking.
But it hadn’t been the boys.
She had stilled like a statue when instead of her usual chorus of loud voices and high-pitched demands for new or old flavors, there had been the achingly familiar Irken Empire jingle.
A little series of notes that was a cross between an anthem and a newscaster’s intro.
A sound that jerked any Irken’s attention from their current task and made them focus on what was truly important-
An Empire wide announcement.
Tallest Miyuki was dead.
Long may Tallest Spork’s shadow fall.
. . . it was so odd.
To be in such a warm kitchen.
But to feel like all of her guts had been filled with ice.
Pinq’s hands were still raised in the air, still holding steady. Stuck in the position as she measured out the sugar for the jam she was making for the lackadaisical heralds for what she now knew was the, much closer than formerly assumed, end.
For the meaningless treat she had been making for the twin trumpet wielders of chaos and destruction.
Her hands full of empty calories made of precious sugar.
The cup had more than overflown by this point falling into the bowl below, building a tiny mountain that just kept rising as she stayed still.
Her lack of action making a gentle “shhh” noise as more and more sugar fell into the bowl from the rim of the cup.
Which was funny, because the hush of falling sugar was suddenly the loudest sound in the room.
Despite the canned cheers that were blaring through the speakers on the screen.
Despite the rushing of blood in her skull.
Despite how the end of the universe was so much closer than she had first assumed-
All she could hear was the sound of the sugar falling.
Pinq finally managed to force her hands upward, stopping the pour of sugar, and casually dumped the over filled cup into the bowl as well. The bowl that was more than half full of sugar.
She gently put the nearly empty bag of sugar on her counter. She laid the measuring cup next to it.
Her arms felt like pipe cleaners, light and swishy and like they could bend into a grotesque shape if she even gently tapped them against something.
All hollow, full of air, and fragile.
Pinq, with careful and precise movements, took a step to the side.
She was now in front of some bare counter, no longer standing in front of the bowl over filled with sugar.
Pinq took a deep, chest straining, breath of air.
Let it out with a hissing whoosh.
And then she collapsed face first onto the counter with a long whine.
The sound was pained, was sharp. Like it was less of a noise from an organic body and more like a stressed machine pushed far past it’s safety measures and giving one final warning to the operator before it tore itself to pieces.
Pinq managed to gasp a breath into her lungs, managed to raise her chest from the concave dent that it had turned into. Trying to keep her body alive as she realized that the end of her quiet life was coming so soon.
Pinq had expected more time.
She had expected much, much, much more time.
She had expected another- another twenty years- at least!
The boys- last time she checked the official height list- were tall.
Tall for soldiers, tall for their age, and even growing at a rate that was impressive!
But they weren’t tall enough!
Red and Purple weren’t ANYWHERE NEAR TALL ENOUGH.
They hadn’t even breached double digits yet! Not even close to being ten feet, much less the former Tallest Miyuki’s height of twenty-three!
Pinq stared down at the floor of her kitchen, tried to accept the coming end of what she had always known would eventually die.
The end of the entire Irken Empire. The end of her life, of the lives of millions!
She slapped her hands down, dragging her claws across the surface of the counter with panting breaths between noises as her meat and her PAK dumped a violent mix of chemical cocktails into her blood stream.
Her PAK was pumping happy neurochemicals into her while her meat body was trying to trigger her fight or flight response.
Her PAK, her metal mind, was producing whatever the Irken equivalents of oxytocin and dopamine were.
Trying to get her happy about a new Tallest, trying to make her overly attached, trying to make her devoted and worshipful of this new leader of the Irken Empire!
All hail Almighty Tallest Spork, long may his shadow fall!
Her meat brain on the other hand? That gelatinous lump of nerves and fat that was sitting pretty in her skull?
That fucker was freaking the fuck out.
All hail Almighty Tallest Spork, long may his shadow fall!
Because it knew, Pinq knew, that this was the signal for the end. That in just one short year, Red and Purple would be declared the new Almighty Tallest.
That they would suddenly be in charge of the Empire, that they would take the wheel with the short-sighted confidence of teenagers on a joy ride with their daddy’s credit card.
That they would crash and burn.
She had thought there would be more time!
All hail Almighty Tallest Spork, long may his shadow fall!
Pinq was panicking, panicking, panicking.
Whatever alien equivalent to cortisol was so thick in her blood it was turning it to syrup.
Adrenaline, fear, stress, love, and pleasure were all mixing thickly in her blood. Leaving Pinq to ride out the effects like a bad drug trip.
Elation-
Horror-
Euphoria-
Fear-
Pleasure- panic- pleasure- PANIC!
ALL HAIL-
Pinq’s shaky knees gave out, and she slid down the side of the counter. Her claws, already cutting shallow grooves in the metal, slide with a shrill noise as she sank down.
Soon she was sitting on the floor with her legs awkwardly spread, trying to breathe through the highs and lows of her intense emotions.
Pinq was pressing her forehead to the edge of the counter, her antennas slapping the hard surface before rebounding to her own head, going back and forth like a broken metronome trying to keep time to the fastest song in the world.
She couldn’t even feel the pain of the impact though the ocean of chemicals already in her veins.
Pinq sat on the floor riding out the horrible mix of a panic attack and a chemically induced ecstasy.
The world grayed out around her, her muscles loosening from pleasure even as her fingers and toes twitched, jolting as small bursts of panic popped through her body.
The only reason she didn’t go to Auto-pilot was because it was her own PAK that was causing half of this reaction. She had to be fully aware in order for the chemical cocktail to make her attached to the newest Tallest.
But that didn’t mean that the meat itself couldn’t do its own version of “Auto—pilot”.
Pinq didn’t know how long she was on the floor, her eyes open but her mind not truly behind them, but eventually some other stimuli seeped into her brain.
Pinq slowly became aware of noise. Of two discordant tones that were echoing around the kitchen and drowning out the sounds of cheering from the screen.
There was a glass shatteringly high trilling noise of distress. A sharp hissing sound of warning and panic. The type of noise that an animal in a trap makes as it sees the hunter approach.
But below the high notes of stress and fear, there was a deep buzzing noise of pleasure. A sound that was more a feeling than a noise, that shook the air and made her think of warm skin, full bellies and tight hugs.
Like a content beast in a den, all cuddled up and fat.
Pinq could feel a strained tension at the back of her throat that matched with the trill.
She could feel an ache like a well worked muscles at the edges of her ribs that pulsed in time with the rumble.
Pinq was gasping, her body dragging air in like a bellows in order to have enough for both sounds.
It hurt, it stung.
Pinq had never- never made sounds like that before.
Never felt so deeply and violently that her body responded to what was in her mind.
Pinq had never- never sounded like an alien before.
The trilling somehow gained more volume, went even pitchier as her panic rose, stealing even more air from her throat as her ribs continued to rumble in pleasure.
That last bit of breathlessness seemed to be the nail in the coffin, the bolt in the barrel.
Because the next thing Pinq was aware of was the pain in her throat and ribs, like she had been strangled and punched in the sides.
The room was quiet, the screen having gone dark and retreated at some point, the motion activated lights having turned off as well.
She was no longer leaning against the counter, but slumped on the ground in a sprawl of limbs.
Her body ached from what must have been a long period of time on the floor.
Pinq hadn’t gone into an Auto-pilot.
She had straight up fainted.
Pinq took a deep breath, her lungs aching from the abuse that had been visited upon her.
She felt-
She felt terrible. Cored out and scrubbed with a wire brush. She felt hollow and tired, wrung out like a wash rag.
She had felt so much, and now it was like she didn’t have any other emotions to feel.
If she was still human, still completely oganic, she would go drink a tall glass of water and go to sleep.
But she wasn’t.
Pinq was an Irken. Her metal counted for more than her meat.
And she could already feel her PAK heating up, beginning to fix what damage her episode had done to her body.
So, she dragged herself back to her feet and restarted the recipe she had been making, but doubled to include all of the sugar that would have gone to waste otherwise.
Her hands were a little shaky, but it wasn’t like this recipe had to be exact.
It was just going to be some jam, and that was really done by weight anyway.
Pinq moved like that factory she was in charge of.
Slow, ponderous, and uncaring. She moved like two-ton machinery that would as soon as crush a body as finish a job.
Pinq knew the weight of the ingredients, knew exactly how the cups should feel in her hands.
The memory passing from one life to another, the meat remembering despite the biological differences between one species to another.
Well, that and the fact that she had sent lots of barrels of jam to the boys since she had begun.
Many of the ingredients that Pinq bought ended up being some variation of berry.
And jam was an easy option to use up her stock.
Pinq poured and measured on-
Not instinct.
NOT auto-pilot.
But- by route?
It was familiar. It was known.
It was an action that she didn’t have to think about.
So, while her body moved with purpose, her mind raced like a headless chicken.
My time is up???
My time is up, but my plans-
No, no no, what plans? I wasn’t making plans! My plans were “Make them like me!” And all I’ve done is send snacks?? Is that enough? It can’t be enough, right??
Not that it matters! I already know that I can’t change anything! Anything I do just plays into the story! Is just controlled by the narrative.
But what’s the narrative?? The boys aren’t nearly tall enough to be Tallest!
I’m taller than they are, how are they going to be at the top of the list by the time the year is up??
Wait.
How tall were they when they became tallest? 13 feet? 9 feet?
. . . shit, I don’t know.
How tall is the tallest non-Tallest Irken?
How many Irkens are between them and the title? How tall do they need to get?
What can I feed them, what can I do?
Do I need to do anything??
How the hell are they going to outgrow- how many is it- how do I put in heights-
FIFTY-TWO THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-TWO IRKENS?!?!
. . . ok, so in the scope of the entire empire, that not too bad, but fuck! they aren’t anywhere close? There are irkens that are like 15 feet tall and they have only barely gotten to 8!
They would need to almost double their height!
How the hell are they supposed to double in height in a single year??
Are they supposed to find a super food? Get experimented on? Bask in in some weird sun’s radiation!??
This is a cartoon, right? So, what isn’t comically violent is comically stupid! What would be the stupidest way for them to be tallest? Would they just get a broken measurement bot?
Would they be hit with like, a growth ray?? Would EVERYONE ELSE be hit with a shrink ray??
HOW THE FUCK WOULD THEY BE THE TALLEST-
No.
No.
It didn’t matter.
It would never matter.
The how wasn’t important.
Just the fact that THEY WILL BE the Tallest.
Somehow, someway.
It was going to happen.
It wasn’t Pinq’s business.
It wasn’t for Pinq to understand.
She just- just had to keep going.
Keep cooking for them, keep up what little contact she had.
She just had to keep being a small contact, to be mostly unimportant but for when they were eating her snacks. Nothing but a blip on their radar, just another Irken that they met in their long- short-
. . . how long did the boys live anyway? How long did they last before they too were taken out by the universe’s punchline?
They lasted longer than Tallest Spork, didn’t they?
Yes, yes, much much longer than Spork,
-but no where close to how long the last tallest- Tallest Miyuki- lasted.
Was it ten years? Was it a hundred?
Fuck, Irken ages were such bullshit!
What frame of reference did she have?
Fucking- nothing! Nothing nothing nothing.
All she had was- was the Invader Zim memories, and they just started, what? A year? Two years? Before the end!
Her memories were-
They didn’t have any worth! They were stupid memories of a children’s cartoon! They had almost no rhyme or reason or time line!
But-
But did she need them? Did she need to know? Did Pinq have to know exactly how long the empire would last?
She was a manager in the middle of nowhere! A manager on a space lube planet that had fuck all to do with the rest of the universe
Even if the Irken Empire collapsed, no one would try to attack this place.
Hell, Pinq could probably just continue on as always and just sell to other aliens if the Irken Empire did crumble.
When the Irken Empire crumbled.
She probably didn’t need the Empire to survive.
She just needed to be forgotten by everyone in it.
By the universe as a whole.
Unimportant, unimpressive, unnoticeable.
Just another Irken who was serving the Empire!
No reason to look at her at all.