Top of the Line (Editor-Bug)

Top of the Line is an Invader Zim oneshot by Editor-Bug on FanFiction.Net. Based on the unproduced canonical episode of the same name, it features Zim forcing his way into a tournament for Invaders and their SIR Units, and the chaos that unfolds. Especially when Tak shows up as well, intending to one-up him for good.

While originally meant as a standalone story, it has since grown into a series, as Editor-Bug keeps coming up with more oneshot sequels set in the same universe. They are as follows:

• Top of the Line 2: The Rematch: Tak arrives on Earth, demanding a rematch between her and Zim's SIR Units. However, things quickly spiral out of control.
• Top of the Line 3: The Remedy: Zim encounters Tak on the mechanical planet Aggrage 9. Convinced she's plotting something, he investigates, and just ends up creating a bigger mess.
• Trading Dismay: As part of an ill-devised scheme, Zim swaps places with Tenn in order to spy on Tak.
• Overbuzzed: Zim talks Tak into another SIR match, only to face a scheduling conflict as he has to also give a presentation to the Tallest at the same time.
• Ploy With Me: A bored Tak decides to visit Zim, who talks Dib into helping him stage a fight to impress her.

Tropes in this series

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In The Rematch, the space station that Tak hijacks is controlled by a supercomputer called Space Case (SC for short). When reactivated, it reveals its purpose is to rid the universe of all evil by killing everyone it considers to be such.
• Accidental Misnaming: The Tallest accidentally call Tak "Zack" during the final round of the tournament.
• Artifact Title: Only the original story has anything to do with the canonical episode it's an adaptation of, and past the second story the series stops being driven by competitions between SIR Units (even the fifth story only has it as one of two equal plots). Editor-Bug eventually acknowledged this, hence why from Trading Dismay onwards the titles drop "Top of the Line".
• BFG: MiMi's upgraded form in The Rematch is built around an enormous blaster contained within her body.
• Blatant Lies: When Zim ends his Role Swap Plot with Tenn at the end of Trading Dismay, Skoodge pretends that he knew about it the whole time, even though he's clearly shocked by seeing them swap back.
• Brick Joke:
  • At the start of the first story, it's mentioned that all non-Invaders have to pay extra for parking. At the end of the story, Tak realizes that having lost the tournament (and thus her chance to finally become an Invader) means that now she'll have to pay the extra fee.
  • Early in Trading Dismay, when Zim is forcing Tenn into his Role Swap Plot, he tries to also do a Clothing Switch so that they'll have each other's musk in order to really sell the illusion, but she refuses. When they switch back at the end of the story, Skoodge tries to claim he wasn't fooled by it by saying he could tell by the musk.
• Chekhov's Gun: Midway through The Rematch, Tenn mentions a sensory overload machine that Tak used to torment her into agreeing to work for her. At the climax, they hook Space Case's wires up to the machine to overload and shut down the AI.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: After Zim and Dib's staged fight to impress Tak in Ploy With Me is over, she reveals that she just wanted to spend time with Zim, and while she enjoyed the fight, it wasn't necessary.
• Cut-and-Paste Note: Tak leaves one behind when she abducts GIR in The Rematch. Skoodge questions why she'd even bother making one if she was just going to sign it anyway.
• Deus ex Machina: As Zim struggles to figure out how to get past the tournament's security, which won't let him in because he's not really an Invader, it suddenly turns out that Skoodge stowed away aboard the Voot underneath Zim's seat, allowing Zim to use him to get past the security. GIR even cheerfully refers to it as a "Skoodge ex machina".
• Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat: If Tak hadn't felt the need to sabotage all the other SIR Units, GIR would have been eliminated from the tournament early on. Instead, letting him get to the last round gives Zim a chance to win with GIR's Ultimate Duty Mode.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Zim admits this to himself in Trading Dismay about his Role Swap Plot with Tenn, acknowledging to himself that while he thought about how to get close to Tak, he didn't put any consideration about what to do after that.
  • In Overbuzzed, Zim does everything to prepare for another match with Tak, except upgrade GIR for it despite knowing that MiMi likely will be. He only realizes this when Skoodge brings it up right before Tak's arrival.
  • In Ploy With Me, Zim realizes midway through getting curbstomped by Dib that staging a fight to lose in front of Tak maybe wasn't a great idea.
• Dressed in Layers: In The Remedy, Tak is eventually shown to be wearing her usual clothes under her Aggrage 9 mechanic's uniform.
• Drives Like Crazy: When Zim switches places with Tenn in Trading Dismay, he takes her GELL Fighter jet to fly back to Aggrage 9. Not being familiar with how to fly one, he ends up crashing into various space objects on his way there; later, he also crashes into his own base when he returns to Earth.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Purple doesn't take the tournament as seriously as Red does, pointing out that the whole thing is just something they put together at random for their entertainment.
• Enemy Mine:
  • During the climax of The Rematch, Zim and Tak (and by extension Skoodge and Tenn) have to put aside their differences to escape from Space Case.
  • Similarly, during the climax of The Remedy, the four team up against Erbium when he decides to melt them all down.
  • Invoked by Zim in Ploy With Me, where he convinces Dib to help him stage a fight in front of Tak by stating that as a mutual enemy, Dib should want to one-up her. Dib agrees, but really only because he's bored and for a chance to test out some new gadgets on Zim.
• Everyone Has Standards: Tenn is offended by Tak cheating in the tournament by sabotaging the other Invaders' SIRs, seeing it as making her unworthy of being an Invader.
• Eye Scream: At one point in The Rematch, Skoodge has wires go into his eyes when SC starts draining his life energy.
• Fantastic Racism: Erbium, Tak's supervisor on Aggrage 9, clearly hates Irkens and makes it clear he only hired her to help him meet his quotas. He constantly talks down to her and takes any excuse to berate her or insult her species in general.
• Fireball Eyeballs: When Tak sees that Zim has managed to sneak his way into the tournament, fires light up in her eyes, hot enough to melt the snow cone she's holding.
• Flat "What": Tak's reaction when Zim declares his belief that she's in love with him.
• For Inconvenience, Press "1": Zim has to deal with one of these to get onto Aggrage 9. It's actually a fairly easy and straightforward example, but he's still annoyed by it.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: At the end of Ploy With Me, after Zim and Dib's staged fight for Tak is over, the three of them and Skoodge, GIR and Tenn go to get ice cream together.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: By The Remedy, Tak has gone from Zim's dangerous rival to working as a lowly mechanic on Aggrage 9, being constantly berated by her bigoted boss. Zim is deeply offended by this and tries to rile her up back to her old self. By the end of the story, she's brainwashed said boss and is now running the planet, intending to eventually return to her old lifestyle once she's bored of this.
• Human Shield: Or Irken shield, as it were. In The Rematch, Zim drags Skoodge along and specifically labels him a "meat shield". Oddly, Skoodge has no problem with this.
• Mind Rape: Tenn explains that Tak did this to her prior to The Rematch in order to force her cooperation in upgrading MiMi for the titular match, by means of hooking Tenn up to a machine that overwhelmed her senses with nightmarish stimuli until she broke. They later use the machine to defeat Space Case.
• Mechanical Animals: In Overbuzzed, Zim tries to impress the Tallest with "cy-cadas", cybernetic cicadas with various upgrades.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: For a given definition of "hero", Zim ends up making the plot of The Rematch needlessly more complicated when he spitefully destroys the remote Tak uses to control her space station, meaning there's now no way to open the hanger doors, leaving everyone stranded onboard. Then he and Tenn turn the station's central computer back on in search of a way to open them, inadvertently awakening Space Case, who tries to kill all the Irkens.
• Not Hyperbole: When Tak says that people on Aggrage 9 work for peanuts, she means they're literally paid in peanuts.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Skoodge tries to say this about Zim and Tak in The Rematch, but she shuts him up before he can even finish his sentence.
• Oblivious to Hatred: Zim, as usual, doesn't grasp that his whole species hates him. And on a more personal level, he's convinced that Tak's obsession with him is because of being in love with him, rather than despising him.
• Oracular Head:
  • At the end of the tournament, MiMi is reduced to just a head after GIR destroys the rest of her with his Ultimate Duty Mode.
  • GIR is blown apart by MiMi's BFG in The Rematch, leaving only his head remaining afterwards. He stays like that for the rest of the story.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • The Role Swap Plot in Trading Dismay is enabled by Zim stealing Tenn's eyelashes and rearranging his antennae into the curly shape of hers, while she straightens hers out to match his. While GIR and Skoodge are tricked, it turns out at the end that Tak wasn't, and just played along to have an excuse to boss Zim around.
  • Ploy With Me establishes that Skoodge's human disguise is as bad as Zim's, just being a Groucho wig and glasses. By contrast, Tenn has a holographic disguise like Tak's that blends in perfectly.
• Planet of Hats:
  • The planet that the SIR Tourney is held on, Arenia, is an uninhabited barren rock with nothing on it but a dilapidated colosseum used for the tournament.
  • Aggrage 9 is an entirely mechanized planet that serves as a giant mechanics shop for spaceships.
• Role Swap Plot: Zim forces Tenn to switch places with him in Trading Dismay so that he can spy on Tak (though Tenn thinks he's just bored and living vicariously through her). Zim thus spends the day working under Tak on Aggrage 9, while Tenn is stuck carrying out one of his world domination schemes on Earth.
• Series Fic: While each fic is a standalone story, they follow on from the ones that came before them.
• Shipper on Deck: Skoodge fully supports Zim and Tak as a couple, even when it's clear they hate each other.
• Ship Tease: By the later stories of the series, Zim and Tak do actually start showing signs of attraction, in a Belligerent Sexual Tension sort of way.
• Side Bet: The terms of Zim and Tak's SIR fight in The Rematch are that if Tak wins, she not only takes his mission, but he stays trapped on her space station forever. Skoodge and Tenn, who were respectively dragged along by them, are allowed to bet on the outcome of the match, with the loser being stuck on the space station too. Tak wins, but the resulting fight with Space Case invalidates the bet as the four of them have to work together to survive him, then call a truce and leave together.
• Space Station: Tak took over an abandoned one prior to The Rematch in order to use as an arena for her rematch with Zim, intending to strand him there after she wins. It turns out to be the vessel for the AI Space Case, which turns it into a death trap when reactivated.
• Straight Man: Between Zim's egotistical mania, Tak's obsessive need to one-up him, and Skoodge's naivety, Tenn tends to be the Only Sane Man reacting to all the insanity around her.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Skoodge for some reason shares Zim's misconception that Tak is in love with him.
• Stunned Silence: When Zim declares his belief that Tak is in love with him in an attempt to publicly humiliate her, the whole tournament goes completely quiet and stares at him.
• Super Mode: The "Ultimate Duty Mode" that Zim creates for GIR for the tournament, which makes him an unstoppable force of destruction, but is meant as a one-use last resort due to how much power it uses up.
• Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Lampshaded for laughs in Trading Dismay, where Zim arranges his Role Swap Plot with Tenn by means of ripping off her eyelashes (which she refers to as her "defining characteristics") and wearing them on his own eyes while also curling his antennae, while she straightens hers to match his usual look.
• Took a Level in Badass: MiMi is rebuilt for the tournament to be taller, bulkier, and overall more dangerous. In The Rematch, Tak upgrades her to be even larger to give herself an edge.
• Undying Loyalty: Skoodge is completely loyal to Zim, despite Zim clearly not caring in return.
• Unknown Rival: Played with in regards to Zim's view on Tak. He initially doesn't recognize her in the first story, only for it to come back to him a moment later. He still remembers her at first in The Rematch, only to forget her a few scenes later and needing a reminder. After that, he never forgets again, something she notes with annoyance considering they've declared a truce by then.
• Whip of Dominance: Purple happily whips the construction drones building the tournament arena's challenge areas, more for fun than to encourage their work.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • In his own twisted way, Zim develops a view of Tak as this, which is why he's so offended in The Remedy by her actually moving on from their rivalry, and even more offended by seeing how browbeaten she's gotten from her job on Aggrage 9.
  • For her part, despite hating him, Tak is still willing to admit that Zim provides a challenge that her life would be lacking without.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Red is less than pleased to see Zim show up at the tournament.