#Irken/Vortian | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thunderclaw100 · 9 months

Text

Bio: Nixy is the daughter of tallest Red and Eva and the third born of her siblings. Unlike her older brother, Jovian, she doesn’t take ring a halfbreed to heart. Nixy knows she’ll be treated differently, and is aware of the discrimination she and her siblings face. Nixy is a smart girl and has proven this in many way, including ring very calculating. When she was little, her mother found her toying with one of her inventions. As it turns out, Nixy actually improved it. Eva has her studying with her older sister, Bellatrix. Learning the culture of planet Vort. She’s very interested in learning more about her mother’s background. Once can believe it or not but Nixy is a genius in her own right. Given a tablet of her own from her mother, she was able to use it to her own advantage. Hacking, converting, designing, encoding. She’s using her vortian side they most and it’s leaving her with good results as she grows. Nixy’s interested in science and genetic research ever since she and her siblings learned that their father was made in a smeetery back on planet irk. Her mother sees this as a sign to get her involved with the nautralian’s lab training so that she can explore this passion of hers. Out of her siblings, Nixy has doesn’t have the best of eyesight.

That being part of her vortian side. Eva told her that some of her people have that same issue and there is reason why most wear goggles now. Her mother did offered her glasses but instead, Nixy made her own. Using the material sand soil for the lenses as well as adding other things to make it notes useful to her. Like night vision, zooming, sensing heat signatures, and she might add a laser beam for it. Nixy could be a pilot navigator but is still thinking about what she want to be when she grows up. Her mother gave her a few ideas to think over. Some that seems fitting for a vortian. Nixy wants to be accepted the way she is instead of being judged because of who her father is.

Likes: Her family, stargazing, snacks, studying, working on her tablet, her parents, vegetables, camping, video games, backing cupcakes, her crush.

Dislikes: filthy things, rude insults, fake people, being told she’s not good enough for anything, stupidity.

Personality:Lovable, benevolent, cheerful, talkative,diligent,devoted, generous, impatient.

*RELATIONSHIPS*

Eva: Her mother helped her out a lot when she was little. From moving Nixy past her own insecurities to improving her poor vision. Her mother walked her though the knowledge of her vortian side, and telling her all the good contribution her people made for themselves and other aliens they’ve allied themselves with. Accept for the irken race. During times when her mother was going to be exposed for harboring a fugitive, tallest Red. Nixy helped her out by messing with the wanted poster images and putting cryptic locks on their home security. Eva is the one person she would never cross.

Tallest Red: Meeting her father for the first time was a shock to her. Nixy was the first out of her siblings to make him feel welcome. Even going so far as to jump into his arms to hug him. Red was unsure about this whole family thing, and Nixy learned that her father is a clone made in a smeetery factory back on irk, so his father skills need work on. This cloud on improving his other lack of emotions that are not implanted into his pak system. Even after being told about who tallest Red really is and all the horrible things he’s done to others. Nixy still wants to bond with her father. Just like the rest of her siblings.

Bellatrix: She admires her older sister. Not because she resembles their mother a lot! One would say, Bella keeps the peace among her siblings with gentle or firm words of knowledge . A trait she’s got from Eva. During their earlier years, Nixy and her sister snuck out of their mother’s nest to explore a little. Bella found a rare neutralien crystal gem and kept it. It’s been used for her her own inventions and experiments. Nixy learns a lot when she’s with her sister. Bella can handle tough situations than she can. During a pak malfunction, Nixy was in a state of panic. It was her older sister who came and fix the problem. Adding a new function to the pak’s system that’ll prevent internal bugging. Bella takes care of her whenever she’s feeling down or upset. It’s hard not to call her mom when she does this.

jovian: It can’t be helped to say that he’s a thorn in her side sometimes. Like the rest of their siblings, Jovian’s reckless antics is an eyesore to the family.l and needs to be scolded. Nixy isn’t in favor of her older brother fighting himself to be better at everything. Jovian would often show up after a hard self disciplined training session with blood and bruises all over his body. Nixy can’t even count the times she had to restitch his outfits. She only covered for him him once when their mother demand what happened to him the first time he started this. Never again. She regrets it every time a new scratch our black eye shows up on her brother’s face. Other than this, Nixy and Jovian get along just fine. They are the dynamic duo. Teaming up to concur anything. This sort of happened when they were young little smeets, playing round in their mother’s nest with. They would team up against Bellatrix and Orieon to climb to the top of their mother’s head as a sort of “king of the mountain game.” She was also involved with him getting custom made pak from their mother. She thought of having different colors would be nice for a change. Seeing she learn that the majority of irken have everything match the same. Nixy’s most recent argument with Jovian was about him wanting to leave planet Neutra and explore the universe. What frightened her more was that he thought of visiting planet irk. It only took a few insults and a stream of tears to get him to stay.

Orieon: Her younger brother. He used to be the quiet one in their litter and was the last to leave the nest. It was Nixy and Bellatrix that got him to be more talkative and outgoing. Nixy noticed that her brother seems to be growing a lot faster than the rest of them. With their mother, began to keep tabs on his growth. Eva noticed his behavior patterns are almost at a match with tallest Red, and that was something to be concerned about later in the years. After having installed their custom paks, Nixy helped her brother get the hang of using his pak legs. She even saved him once, after one of them went haywire and was about to stab him in the chest. In fact she’s the one monitoring all of their paks with her tablet. Orieon appreciates Nixy and thanked her for tolerating him.

Dib: Nixy has grown interested in the human. Partly because she wants to examine him or ask a lot of questions about space, or his relationship with an Irken. Zim’s voot cruiser also caught her eye at the time. Nixy, like her older brother, wants to learn more about their Irken heritage, so they asked Zim. The human boy shared some info about what’s going on in space. Letting Nixy know that there is a brave vortian out there, risking his life as well as his team to make sure planets like theirs are safe from an invasion. At first Nixy thought that humans were uneducated and so far back behind from the res of the universe, that they’d wouldn’t bother to explore outside their own solar system. Or not even to make trading partner ls with other, more advanced planets. For a moment, Nixy was thinking like an Irken. Believing that other inferior races should just give in to the stronger ones. Dib made it clear to her and the other kids that being stronger doesn’t make you better than others because there will always be someone out there better than you. Before Dib and Zim depart from planet Neutra, she gave them a gem. Both something to remember her by and for great use in forging into something powerful.

Zim: When he and Dib landed on the outskirts of the neutralien’s refugee camp, they were following a distress signal which lead them to Eva and her children. Jovian found and brought them home with him. Nixy and her other siblings were amazed to see another Irken, other than the other two that are part of the camp. Zim proudfully told the kids about Irken culture, the empire, the function of the paks, and the ranked jobs of the Irken military. Nixy took notes of everything being said to her from him. Asked her own questions, including one that kinda caught him off gourd. She wanted to know if he’s a defective. This didn’t trigger much, other than a slight bias and a displeasing look from Zim. The young hybrid wonders if the reason for the defectivness is the park, she suggested that Zim just fix it himself or Chang ethe encoding while cutting off links to the possible downgrade that will automatically change his functional character. Zim never met anyone THIS young being able to speak this logical and smart. Nixy sees a friend in Zim and possibly a god father.

*EXTRA*

•She made an Irken uniform in inspiration of Zim.

•Nixy likes to analyze people and her work.

• Just like her brother, she’s a brainiac.

• Her mother surgically enhanced her poor vision.

• She likes to make silk fabrics for her family.

• She’s partially colorblind to some colors. That’s another reason why she got the surgery from Eva.

•Nixy gotten used to wearing neutralien

• Is afraid of horror movies but likes sci-fi films.

•Just like her mother, Nixy grooms her horns.

• Nixie and Bellatrix are the ones with four fingers.

•Nixy and Orieon both have a crush on an neutralien.

*DIALAUGE*

“I never liked being called a know it all. I am smarter than most kids my age but I don’t see myself as anyone too intelligent to be important.”

“I didn’t tell my littermates about this but….I have poor eyesight. Mom said that it’s normal for some vortian’s to have this problem due to having smaller eyes. I had to wear ugly glasses for a while. In secret, mom got to do surgery on my eyes to improve them.”

“The Neutraliens we’re pretty decent with me and my family. I only hope the other aliens who took residence here would be more accepting. Some of them are think that me and siblings are a curse.”

“You are so hard-headed, Jovian! You’re not going to succeed our father. Get a fucking clue!”

“These schismatics are amazing! It’s exactly what I need to improve our custom paks.”

“HEY! I may be an nuisance to you but I’m still a kid!”

“When in doubt, try a different approach!”

“Are they going to send us away? Why did that tall man get us in trouble, momma?”

“Doesn’t it shock you that our father is the leader of the most threatening race in the galaxy? The tallest of the Irken empire. Just try and Top that!”

“I want to make a difference in this place once I’m older. We’ll have to contribute to it one day. I hope that our father’s reputation doesn’t ruin it for us.”

#invader zim #Nixy #Irken/Vortian #Oc #Fanart

4 notes · View notes

ms-scarletwings · 1 year

Text

This Single Oversight Will Bring Irken-Kind to Its Knees

I have a little riddle for you.

What does an ant nest, a computer, and the ancient city of Troy have in common?

While you ponder the significance of this question and consider your answer, there’s a few things I want to analyze about the worldbuilding of Invader Zim.

We may have heard it said before, least I have (and agree), that the fate of the IZ universe appears to be a rather bleak picture.

Through our lens of focus, being upon Earth and an oh-so specific nutball waging his battle upon humanity, we often don’t do as much thinking about the larger cosmic war taking place meanwhile. Not between the Meekrob and Tenn, not between the Tallest and every dumb luck threat they are thrown against, but between the Irken Armada and all life in the entire universe, sentient or not.

Their intentions will not be made any more clear, between outright eradication or eventual enslavement of every lifeform they set their sights on. While they have alliances and neutral treaties, those agreements seem few and far between, as well as born from temporary conveniences. The cards have already been dealt, and all available evidence has indicated that every planet they are aware of is doomed from the moment The Massive was operational.

Though littered with inefficiencies and incompetency that could suggest an empire in internal decline, the development of the control brains and other centralized command crutches of the species suggests the Irkens can still keep a well oiled machine running, no matter how many mishaps happen along the way. At least, that machine and their plundered resources will definitely outlast the survival of their enemies, for sure.

To speak of their enemies, there has not been a single competitive race within the show that demonstrates any credible threat to Operation Impending Doom II- only those that can resist the conquest a little bit longer than others, or those who survive by appeasing Irk (or evading its detection). The fall of Vort, which stood as the homeworld of the only aliens with the technological ability to match the armada’s firepower is…. Really bad news. That’s to say the least of comparatively primitive, TINY planets like Earth or Blorch, standing zero chance in the way of what’s eventually coming. This is a war that has continued despite the death of two.. FOUR Almighty Tallests if you follow the movie’s events… and Irkens wholly are still thriving for it across the Galaxy.

So, given all of these facts, and the perception that the Irkens (like any invasive species or colonial force) don’t seem to be a society that will make responsible and/or sustainable use of their ill-gotten territory… it seems like this is how life across the universe ends in Invader Zim one day: Not with a bang, not with the whimper of heat death, but through screams muffled under the bloody boots of a dominant predator- a predator that is, itself, doomed to cannibalize its own once it hits the carrying capacity of all existence.

Bleak, concrete, and horrific as that may sound, there’s still a “however” here to consider!

Yep, that’s me about to point one of my big fat fingers to the sky and protest- Irk just might be,

Not so Undefeatable, after all!

And not only have I figured out exactly what sort of countermeasure you need to destroy these invaders, I have reason to suspect it’s a plan already long ago set into motion.

Let’s break it down,

An Irksome Achilles’ Heel

True, individually, the bug bastards are irritatingly tough to kill through conventional means. True, collectively, they are nigh impossible to outmatch. And more than most anything else, they owe this tenacity to two things: numbers, and R&D. Possessing some of most state of the art pinnacles in transportation, communications, and military equipment, the Armada found a knack for being able to steamroll most lesser planets before it.

The genius of the individual PAK unit grants each and any one Irken a theoretical path to partial immortality itself, by route of consciousness archiving. I strongly believe that kind of cybernetic progress was also one of the stepping stones that led to the creation of the Control Brains. Nonetheless, this very same strength of the Irkens’ has also proven to be the source of their greatest vulnerability.

Paks, Paks… Oh Paks. The entire race’s civilization revolves around such technology the way we do around our own brains, our own hearts, and our communicative network. For all intents and purposes, and as I’ve gone on about ad nauseum in my other spills about the show, a PAK is all and at once

• Synonymous with the holder of their soul, consciousness, being, whatever you want to call their personhood.

• Able to have their data repurposed by future generations, in the result of an Irken’s permanent death.

• A universal necessity shared by the entire population.

• Susceptible to alterations, sometimes by intelligent enough individuals (as demonstrated by the Zimvoid comic arc), but usually by a Control Brain, directly.

In addition to that last quality, there’s another way the code in a PAK can be changed, for better or worse- Via evolution. Though I am talking about digitized neurology, the actual data in a PAK is a lot more comparable to biological DNA or a “self-learning” AI than it is a rigid computer program. By this, I mean that its code is subject to certain changes over time, perhaps both directed and completely random, particularly during the recycling of its information back into the Smeeteries.

And this is actually good design on the control brains’ part, the same way not reproducing Irkens as genetically identical clones was. Genetic and digital diversity are desirable goals to keep in mind if you want a healthy and versatile stock of workers, engineers, soldiers, and everything in between. We’re talking about highly sentient, highly intelligent, and emotional organisms here. A static drone mindset is going to offer them inadequate ability to adapt to their lengthy life experiences or be unique persons. How else would social mobility have purpose in their world? How else could the cream of the crop rise so far above their peers? That positive was deemed worthy of an obvious risk, however: computational errors.

When the Bugs Get Bugs

IZ does not clearly lay out what it means for an Irken to be defective, but it gives us a general idea. Defectiveness is not something diagnosed from a code scan for this missing value or that incorrect variable. It’s not judged by one specific character trait or quality that’s abnormal for an Irken to display. “Defective” is a judgement stamp, wielded by the Control Brains when they gauge the total sum value of a life’s contribution to the species. And it’s not one given to Irkens which are merely incompetent, no. Anyone proven to be unfit for their standing is given generous opportunity for redemption or simply reassigned a more suitable occupation. If it were based on likability, we’d have seen Skoodge sent to Judgementia years ago.

Rather, it’s given to those who are viewed as so twisted that they are proven to be an existential danger to their brethren. Irkens that are so destructive to the essence of the collective that their memory must be purged from the record and their identity erased.

I adore the enthusiasm behind fans who want to view this as an analogy for disability or neurodivergence against a conformist society, but the metaphor I’m seeing is one of extreme antisocial behavior. A defective Irken screams less “adhd/autism” to me than they do serial murderers (of their own) or outright traitors. Pardon the use of a gross phrase, but it’d seem we were talking about an Irken equivalent of what the outdated gens would have dubbed the “criminally insane”. No one on screen has ever shown Skoodge or Tak the sort of concern that would get them sent to the Spike of Judgement, but when Zim was in that hot seat? NO one was doubting what his verdict would be.

^ courtesy of “The Trial’s” transcript

I think about the 40 shmillion mistakes a lot.

It’s such a vague quantity. But it sure sounds like a hell of a big one. And what mistakes… what did the lil squirt even have to compare them to? There’s no standard one person an Irken can be. Every presentation of the flaws in that code to the control brains hasn’t ended up a flaw to him.

I only started writing this because I really couldn’t stop thinking about the 40 shmillion. There’s no chronological room for bad self-modding to add up to that so quickly. DNA replication, nature’s own sloppy and random process of creating new life, can be excused around 120,000 hiccups when duplicating with a 6 billion pair-long protein. But this kind of shuffling is under a futuristic AI’s precise eye. Yes, defects happen, but as bad as him? From birth??? How could you possibly get that many detrimental deviations from the mechanical fucking god-queen(s) of their entire homeworld?

And then it hit me.

You don’t. Not from Irk.

The hot take I’ve been charging for this entire time is thus.

Zim is not defective by any random accident. In fact, I smell the tampering of foreign sabotage.

Not only is this guy the thing his kind fears more than any else, they have every right to be shaking in their stance.

That puzzle i posed at the beginning of this journey, have you seen what I’ve seen yet?

Because the answer I was looking for as to what similarity connects an anthill, a PC, and a city from Greek legend was a most effective tactic for taking them down.

Do you know the best way to deal with a bad ant infestation? Cuz you can lay down all the raid and crushing action you want, but you won’t really be getting anywhere unless you target the pests directly at their queen. To that end, liquid ant baits are marvelous inventions- a sweet substance hiding a small amount of slow acting poison. Poison to be peacefully delivered by the stomach of an ant to the rest of her colony, poisoning her kin, who sicken more members, on and on until the queen is destroyed and the entire nest perishes. An insidious toxin to do all the work while its user never lifts a finger, pretty ingenious.

And when it comes to computers, we also have ways to attack entire networks at source, from quietly and far away. “Trojan” was a category of malware responsible for 64.31% of all cyber attacks on Windows systems in 2022, and they still make up a majority of active malware hits today. The concept is deviously simple. The malicious code is hidden within an innocent looking program, maybe even within a legitimate software that does what it’s supposed to. Once the stowaway is invited into the system, it can get down to it some sneaky, nasty, destructive work on your device. As for what those acts could look like, well, malware exists to do all kinds of things. Mostly something involving trying to get money/information from you or hijacking your computer for whatever its creator wants to use it for. And some of them will just up and wreck your shit, disable your antivirus software to open you up to more infections, disable important operations, wipe your data. Use your imagination.

And as for Troy.. well, where do you think Trojan programs got their name? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So, Irkens have their Armada, bionic drones, and homeworld- in other words, the thriving swarm of army ants, the billions to trillions of computers they so rely on, and their nigh untouchable fortress, always at war.

And some damn crafty bastard(s) in the stars said

“Here is their sugar-bait,”

“Here is their cyber attack,”

“Here is their wooden horse.”

And one particular race is going to be getting the last laugh before long.

Nerds That Are GOATed With the Sauce

That’s right, I thought about this all the way through to finding our prime suspect. And let me tell you, NO ONE in the Galaxy reeked of fish like the Vortians did. Get over here and lemme show you my whiteboard with all the red circles and polaroids on it.

- The Means

In a way of tragic irony, Vort has contributed more than any else to the same Irken conquest that turned on them in the end. A natural talent for cutting edge engineering and technical development actually does not seem to be what Irk already came into the ring with. For how mighty and superior they view themselves, the greatest achievements of their military can actually be owed to Vortian outsourcing. When we would have gotten a look at Tallest Miyuki’s very own “finest minds” during her reign, notice something interesting about these guys below,

Zim there is the ONLY Irken to be found! Yes, transferred there because of the punchline explanation of ‘he breaks everything he touches so maybe he’ll have an affinity for weapons research’ but damn right he actually did! And still does; I don’t want it to go unsaid that Zim has shown MUCH more technological skill and innovation than near any other Irken we’ve seen.

Another fun thing to note about this is that Lard Nar was also part of this lineup, and in the transcript he was in the process of working on the blueprints for The Massive. (which leaves you with the cursed knowledge that Zim, Prisoner 777, and Lard were all familiar coworkers long before the events of the show) And that brings me back to what I’m saying about the real reason the Vort natives were enslaved and imprisoned instead of outright sweeped after conquering. The Armada needs their skills, because Vortian advancement is something their own scientists couldn’t come close to. Left to their own devices, Vort could have easily outmatched them at an earlier point in history. It’s a people that figured out infinite power sources and potentially wormhole technology, while PAKs were something a disfigured human tween with a lot of time on his hands was able to crack. If anyone could outpace and outsmart the defensive measures of the Control Brains, it’s going to be them. And what better, cleaner way to sabotage the enemy than from within.

The very same strings of inserted code that cursed Zim with his delusions, paranoia, lust for destruction, and horrible tactics may also have blessed him with a determination and intellect higher than almost any creature alive. The saboteur gave Irk the most powerful racecar in history, and then fitted it with bicycle brakes. No matter how hard Zim tries to conform to what will give him admiration, no matter how competent he is at keeping himself alive, it’s as if he is instinctually compelled toward whatever actions will cause the MOST damage to his allies in the process. Dib may think he’s the bulwark against the invasion when, ironically, he’s fighting against the one being that’s predetermined to be the arrow that strikes Irken leadership right in their dumb, green heels. (There is also an instance in the comics where Dib figures out that Zim is the ace in the hole for total Irken eradication but that’s another fun story.)

Oh, oh HO HO, and that’s only what he’s capable of doing before the empire’s actual immune system against defects like him wakes up and notices!

Three planetary blackouts, two dead generals, and a whole swath of dead invaders was just the fucking warm up, babey! All that is merely the kind of loud disruption that you need in order to fulfil the real thing this Trojan horse exists for in the first place.

What a celebration of hubris the Spike of Judgement was. Yeah, let’s take our method of filtering the corrupted data from the hive mind, and completely centralize it on a single planet! As well, let’s have the very purging agents also be the same ones to perform the evaluations themselves, I’m sure that it would be unthinkable for any outsider to design a worm that could make it through the brains’ firewalls. Goddamn spectacular. Like inserting an infected USB into your laptop, the Tallest never realized what kind of beast they woke up by plugging that PAK into the Spike’s mainframes. Those brains were meant to handle an expected spectrum of deviation when it came to defective Irkens, never a sleeper virus of this complexity.

From here it probably won’t even matter if Zim survives much longer on Earth, his virus has already spread to the very thing relied upon to keep things like him out of the data pool in the first place. With the Judgementia brains corrupted and no higher authority to overrule them, the firewall is effectively broken, and you know what that means? Bigger cracks for future defectives to start trickling through, both spontaneous and artificial. The ideal scenario is one where a degenerating and glitched population accelerates the incompetency of the empire to the point where it just implodes on itself; nevertheless, even a disease that only slows down Operation Doom could be a game changer, by giving the rest of the little guys more time to band together a coalition strong enough to strike back when the time is right.

- The Motive

The history of these two races’ alliance is something I lament us not having more lore to pull from- how far back it goes, what the character of the Vort was like during that time, what the Irkens had offered in return- a few among dozens of questions it rears. The implication behind how it ended lies in Zim’s creation that slayed Tallest Miyuki. Interestingly, the Empire never received the memo of what exactly went down, or, perhaps, stubbornly denied the account of the other scientists who were there that day. Neither Red/Purple nor the Judgmentia Brains had any idea that Zim’s actions led to the death of a Tallest. So, makes sense that the Vortians became the unintentional scapegoat (no pun intended) for the incident, and the rest is history.

Note: It’s also in the realm of possibility that Vort was actually the one to withdraw from the alliance instead, given that the same blob that devoured Miyuki (purely the fault of their Irken transfer) also went on to cause untold amounts of devastation. Red’s reaction to the real story stuck out to me as more telling, although.

But why am I even talking about this? Zim was decades old before war was declared on them, and either people’s regard to each other seemed strangely… respectful, if anything.

But, was Vort really a monolithic bunch? Irk was already an empire by this point, and diplomacy with those they needed something from did not mean they weren’t otherwise an aggressive force in the universe. For all we know, the alliance itself might have been coerced, or result of depraved leadership among the Vortians. Any citizen with a conscience who could see the writing on the walls would be disgusted by giving so much aid and brown nosing to such a menace, no? I know who would have seen that writing before anyone else. Brainiacs who are smart enough to build something like The Massive and all its bells and whistles would know better than anyone just what it was all capable of in the wrong hands. The collateral damage against your own people might be a sacrifice worth making in the face of the alternative.

- The Oppurtunity

So.. that’s all well and good, yeah? A why, and a what, yet this is actually the tricky part of saving the galaxy,

Sneaking your StupidifyIrk.exe file onto the assholes’ homeworld without alerting either them or your own treacherous, weak, collaborator superiors to your actions. Infecting and releasing a random Irken alive would be far too dangerous, far too noticeable to the point where they could just be destroyed outright before given a chance to wreak real havoc.

But what about releasing a dead Irken? 🤔

PAKs are only screened for criminal flaws when errors begin to affect their body’s behaviors in destructive ways. A fully competent scientist, or soldier, or navigator performing a lifetime of loyal service to the empire and then meeting an unfortunate end? Their minds’ shadows can be accepted back into the data pool no questions asked. That’s only business as usual.

That almost makes new smeets something of a reincarnation of their ancestors. Personally, I see it kind of like replaying a video game and re-rolling your stats, even if you’re reusing your character’s name and general play style.

Either way, we come full circle to my theory about Zim’s actual origin. Maybe not “our” Zim, but the previous iteration of data that was shuffled to create his person. Whoever they were, I’m convinced that they were also an exceptional individual. They were probably pretty arrogant, but it was a more earned confidence, and they were a prodigy genius, the likes of which that was drawn to work alongside Vortian allies, as another researcher. Then, an untimely demise befell them. I couldn’t say they fell victim to some unfortunate accident, considering the cockroach durability of their body. No, I find it a lot easier to imagine they met their end in one of the more embarrassing ways for an Irken to die- A PAK stolen, disabled or forcefully detached by an assailant they might have allowed a little closer than they should have. To the homeworld, it’s a small matter. One more PAK recovered by the natives of the friendly planet, brought back home to be repurposed by the smeeteries, right?

Well, that’s what one smartass might have been hoping for.

And they really were a clever cookie, because that scheming seed is fruiting beautifully.