This story is brought to you by Mysterious Prophetess and ShadowMajin
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Chapter 1: Things Best Left Buried
The sound of brushstrokes filled the air, sweeping aside dirt and dust that had long since lay dormant here. With every stroke, the grime was pushed aside, revealing dull colors that hadn't seen the light of day in ages. Of course, that meant the dust had to go somewhere,
A choked cough rang out, onyx-colored eyes began to blink rapidly to shield out the dust. Fortunately, nothing got into them and he was able to look at what was best described as a mural. Just the sight of it made a smirk appear on his face. Reaching to a pocket, the youth pulled out a notebook, the words Karato Son crudely written on the cover. Pulling out a pen that rested in the metal coil, he flipped open the notebook and began scribbling out his observations; after all, that's what a good archaeologist does.
Eyes glancing from side to side, Karato pieced together just what he was seeing, puzzling out the meaning behind the intricate design. Pausing for a moment, he then pulled out his digital camera and began snapping photos of the mural, for later study of course. It would've sucked to get home and not have anything to show for this trip.
It was then that something caught his eye. Hesitating, Karato slowly focused on a specific design, one of a sphere or orb with four stars on its surface. That...that couldn't be. He hoped it was, but he must have been seeing things. Hurriedly, the young man reached to another pocket and nearly ripped it out as he clutched at his recorder. Clicking the record button, he began to say:
"The emblem appears on every prominent surface, indicating that this is a temple of the former Suu Shin Chu Cult. With how dilapidated the ruins are and the fading of the paint, it would be logical to conclude that these ruins are from the short period of prominence this religion had during the Dark Ages. Evidence of looting is seen in marks on the walls, indicating there had once been a gold overlay to the symbol of the Suu Shin Chu." Karato pressed the stop button and pocketed the recorder before taking a few more pictures of the entrance chamber. He stuffed the camera in his bag as he glanced around the room, still in awe of what he had just found.
"Man, I was lucky that there were a few fruit bats left who worshipped this religion," Karato said stepping back and looking up at the ruined architecture.
'Without their help, I'd have never found this place—' There was a sudden click! Karato looked down to see his foot was on a stone that had sunken into the floor.
'What the—' Karato caught movement out of the corner of his eye, prompting him to duck just in time for an arrow to barely skim over his head. The young man stood that way for a moment, his heart nearly beating out of his chest before he straightened up, panting as he realized the sunken stone he'd stepped on had to be a switch of some sort. Was...was this a booby-trapped temple?
'You've got to be kidding me!' Karato thought as he took a step back. That's whenever he, once again, heard a now familiar click! 'Oh no.' Had he stepped on another one? Windmilling his arms, Karato tried not to trip as he avoided more arrows as he took off running across the room, setting off multiple traps with each step; even zigzagging wasn't helping.
Left, right, up, down, down! With a diving leap, he narrowly dodged a series of arrows, each one hitting a wall one after the other. 'At last,' Karato thought, 'I'm free of all those arrow traps—'
He cried out as he tripped on an arrow he'd avoided being acquainted with earlier. He landed hard on a larger tile and unfortunately heard a snick!
"Oh no," Karato groaned. He'd accidentally set off yet another trap. As he sat up rubbing his neck he looked over to see a huge stone rolling his way. Frantically, Karato scrambled to his feet.
"Oh, come on!" He dodged to the side and landed on a tile that already seemed have been depressed by an earlier step, except it sunk even lower. Karato heard a few clicks, which made his stomach drop.
"Another one!" Karato prepared to outrun another barrage of arrows when he felt something pull on his shoe a second too late: one of his shoelaces had gotten snagged on an arrow embedded in the ground. Feeling his foot pulled back, the young man lost his balance and crashed onto the floor; just then he felt something pass over his back and heard it thud into the wall. Looking up, Karato found he had just barely avoided being impaled by a spear. It was then that Karato remembered his shoelace was still caught on the arrow. He began to tug at it to get free. One tug too hard and heard the dreaded sound of a click! again. Karato had landed on a switch on his back for the second time that day.
He looked up to see a spear flying right at him. The archaeologist let out a cry as he rolled out of the way of the spear, only to set off the triggers for two others, forcing him to continue to roll about on the dust and grime-coated floor. He jumped up and growled whenever he heard the tell-tale snick of yet another trap being set off.
"Ever hear of the term 'overkill?!'" Karato shouted as he ran from yet another giant stone rolling after him. It was then, much to his horror, that he noticed his notebook lying on the floor. Going into a slide, he slid on his knees and grabbed it before it was trampled over. Behind him, he felt air beat at his back as the boulder rolled right on by and crash into a wall. Letting out a sigh of relief, Karato felt that at long last he was safe. Unfortunately, that feeling vanished when he looked at the large rock, finding that it had rolled right into the exit. Just great, now was he supposed to get—
That's when he felt something on his shoulder. Frowning the youth turned his head and found a steady stream of sand piling up and falling off his shoulder. Looking up, his frown became more panicked as he realized there were more sand streams, along with large spikes. And the worst part was, the spikes were falling towards him.
"Ahhh!" He jumped away as one of the spikes landed right where he stood. "Did the person who designed this place watch Illinois James a bit too much or something?!"
Karato dashed towards a doorway, skidding into a new room, making sure to check his footing to see if he'd stepped on another switch. Fortunately the floor turned out to be a solid layer of stone. Unfortunately, he heard a screeching sound, which made him look all over for the source. Eyes shooting side to side showed the walls were also mostly solid, with metal things on the wall. So, he looked up, only to see a spiked ceiling dropping down on him. Karato was not impressed by this, and his face showed it. This trap, unlike all the others he'd set off before it, was moving extremely slowly to the point of making it more of an annoyance than a danger. Casually, the archaeologist walked out of the room, coming to a stop in the next one. Taking in this new chamber, the young man found himself looking up to see moss and other growths had grown in the tracks of the trap.
As he examined the growths an idea struck him.
'Don't you need moisture for moss?' Karato mused before he heard the sounds of something buckling. He looked down to see he'd stepped on another trap's trigger, which caused him to facepalm. Just how many traps were in this place? He could've sworn he hadn't activated any when he first entered this place. Turning around, Karato was just in time to get a face full of water, and nasty tepid water at that. His balance thrown off, the archeologist leaned back too far and was swept off his feet by a surprisingly strong current. He was washed through a couple of chambers before he had the chance to regain his bearings. Incidentally, the pressure set off more traps, but most of them didn't work quite so well underwater.
Except for the darts of course. Spotting their dark shapes in the water Karato twisted and turned his body to narrowly avoid a few darts from nailing him in the family jewels. That was the last thing he needed, to have his privates butchered in a ruin that hadn't had human contact in centuries.
Suddenly, his water-forced trek came to an end when he felt his back slam into a wall, the water continuing to push up against him for a few moments. The pressure of the water seemed to last an eternity before it let up, making him wonder if it was ever going to quit.
With a wet flop! Karato slid to the ground in a heap, panting heavily.
He coughed for a good couple minutes until he had seemingly brought up all the water in his system. His lungs and throat burned a little as he panted.
Slowly, Karato shakily stood up and reached into his pack to pull out a wet sopping mess that had been his field journal. His recorder was found in his pants pocket in pieces, likely the impact against that stone wall via water had been the cause of death, if the water hadn't already ruined it. The camera was cracked but it turned on for a few seconds. If the memory card was okay he'd have something he could salvage from the trip into his own booby-trapped adventure.
Karato took a few experimental steps forward but stopped short when something whizzed past his face: A blade. To no surprise to him at all, he had just stepped on yet another trap's switch.
Karato sighed. He looked at the blades and saw they were at a certain height. Karato wrinkled his nose at the conclusion he'd reached: he would have to crawl on the dirty, sandy floor in his sopping wet state to avoid becoming julienned human.
"The things I'll do for a grade," he mumbled as he dropped on all fours and began to belly crawl past this latest obstacle. Because of this, he made a startling discovery: a section of the floor had letters engraved into it.
"Letters?" Karato said confused. He searched around and found a bit of rubble which he rolled across the next flooring to find nothing was activated.
'Could I really be that lucky?' he thought as he carefully rose to his feet. Extending a leg out, Karato took a step—and nearly went through the floor. 'Nope!' Karato immediately lunged backwards, landing on his backside to avoid plunging through the floor. Taking a moment to let his heart rate slow down, he then began studying the markings to make sense of them. It took a few minutes as he stood there analyzing them, but eventually he realized that they weren't letters but were, in fact, symbols of the language of the ancient Suu Shin Chu Cult. After remembering a certain film, he knew what he probably had to do to pass through alive.
'I hope I don't find an old knight or Nazis at the end of all this,' he thought.
Taking a deep breath, Karato placed a foot on a symbol that would be the word "Four" in his language. Finding that he wasn't plunging through the floor, he quickly brought his other foot to stand next to his other. Okay, now for the next one. Glancing around, the young man soon found the next word, "Star." With a hop, he went for the marking, only to accidentally step on the symbol for "Pearl" and nearly lost his life. Most of the floor collapsed in on itself, taking Karato with it, causing him to let out a surprised cry. Shooting a hand out, Karato desperately grabbed for a handhold and—somehow—found one before he fell completely through the floor. Looking to see what he snagged, he found he had managed to grab onto a stable floor tile, much to his relief. Hanging there for a few moments Karato then tried to climb back up, hauling his tiring body out of his self-made pit. The moment he was topside, he sat down on the "safe" flooring and panted loudly. Because he'd been so preoccupied with not dying, Karato had no idea he had grabbed onto the stone upon which the word "ball" was etched.
The next room was a cavern with, seemingly, no way across. Karato began to search for evidence of a rope bridge or something, failing to do so. There had to be someway across this; no way that it all ended here. Twisting this way and that as he craned his head to look at the walls stretching out from either side of him, he lost track of his feet and ended up tripping and fell forward.
"Ahhhh—!" he shrieked...no, yelled. A manly yell just so you know. Completely not like a—"Ouch!" Pain throbbed in his face. That had hurt more than just his face—his dignity as well. Slowly Karato peeled himself off the hard surface he'd landed on and just sat for a moment trying to collect himself after his most recent near-death experience. He was rubbing his face when he realized he was on a cleverly painted rock bridge that was nearly invisible to the naked eye. Deciding to make no more comments about the originality of the trick, Karato got onto his hands and knees before he crawled across very carefully: his near spill into oblivion extremely fresh in his memory.
Once on the other side, he stretched, ridding his body of the kinks and tightness that formed from the uncomfortable posture of his crawling. Karato looked around the platform he was on, checking for any further traps. Finding none, he decided to proceed through the rather crumbled doorway before him. Barely visible on the lentil was the symbol of Suu Shin Chu. Upon entering, Karato took in the details of the newest chamber. The colors, while faded were richer than anywhere else in the doomed temple, and there was evidence of having one had precious stones embedding in a few paintings on the walls here and there and some borders of what might have been tarnished silver. Time had won, though, and it was now faded. In the center rested a round orange object shining in the sunlight that streamed through a crack in the roof.
Was...was that? No, it couldn't be, could it? No, after all he'd been through, it had to be. The Dragon Pearl! It was real! Karato checked the ground and saw it was solid stone. No more triggers for him! Karato could just see the look on his classmates faces whenever he showed them a real Dragon Pearl.
'We're sorry we called you crazy!'
'This changes everything we know about the Lost Age!'
'You're the greatest archaeology student ever!'
Oh yeah.
Karato's daydreaming was interrupted when he tripped on an uneven part of the floor and snapped a rope: a trip wire. Damn it, how had he missed that?
That's when he heard another sound, one that made him look up.
"Oh shit!" Karato tried to dodge but the cage slammed down around him just a foot from the Dragon Pearl. It was a crosswork of wooden bars, all tied together by rope at random intersections. Grabbing the lowest bar he could, he tried to lift the cage up to no avail. Damn it, no! He couldn't be trapped in this century's old cage!
Sounds! "Scuttle! Scuttle!" not unlike the sounds of bugs on hard floors. Karato looked around and saw the shadows were moving. Shapes shifted and flickered before they peeled out of the shadows with spears. Men and women in tattered garments from a long gone era surrounded him. They poked their spears between the bars; Karato squirmed out of the way the best he could.
"Kai'-idth bulb?"*1
"Vi-Kwitaun! Stislak! Nenatqom'i Khau!"*2
"Nenatqom'i Kahu! Ra tu tvai Nenatqom'i Khau! Nenatqom'i Khau wu ma'toi!"*3
"Nenatqom'i Khau!"
'Nenatqom'i Khau? But that's one of the names for the Monkey King!' Karato thought.
"Hey! I'm not the Monkey King!" he protested. "I'm just a guy!"
"Nenatqom'i Khau tevalik! Nenatqom'i Khau la! Nenatqom'i Khau ti! Nenatqom'i Khau nem-tor Suu Shin Chu!"*4
"Tu nem-tor ri Suu Shin Chu, Nenatqom'i Khau! Suu Shin Chu t'etwel!"*5
"Suu Shin Chu t'etwel!"*6
"Suu Shin Chu t'etwel!"
"Suu Shin Chu t'etwel!"
...
"What exactly do you hope to find out here, Bloom? The legends don't even speak of any settlements here for hundreds of miles!"
"Wu, if everything was where stories said they'd be, then our job would be too easy."
"Still what would even be out here?" Dr. Wu Kong stared at his bluenette friend as she leaned over a table, deciphering an old book of legends.
The woman didn't even look up from the book as she replied, "According to this story, there was a 'portal' or 'mouth' of Hell that spat out a demon so powerful, not even the fabled Monkey King could defeat it without aid from his son." A pause. "Or it might have been "the Sun" depending on how you translate this glyph right here," Bloom said, pointing to the passage in the book.
"You actually want to find a hellmouth?" Wu asked incredulously. "Are you insane, woman?"
Bloom finally looked up at her friend, giving him a deadpanned look. "Wu, you know there's no such thing as monsters or magic or even hellmouths. What this could be, however, is someplace or something the people of the Lost Era objected to and I need to find out what that was."
"I have a bad feeling about this," Wu said as he turned away and looked at the site. Bloom shook off her small friend's concerns; after all, she was having a good year.
First there was the big find at the West City site, and now she was on the cusp of finding out if there really was a "portal to Hell" at this site. Archeologists of the world, eat your hearts out.
Bloom heard a yell, tearing her away from her table and looking out towards the source. She ran out to join the dig team, adding evidence to the fact that she didn't exercise enough. By the time she reached the team, she was sweaty, icky, and completely out of breath. This is what she got for not using a treadmill more.
"What's going on? What do we got?" she demanded once she came to a stop, huffing and puffing as she leaned forward, bracing herself up with her hands on her knees.
One of the workers looked to her, shaking his head in disgust. "Someone thought they felt the ground shake. It's nothing."
Bloom stared at the man. "You're joking. You've got to be joking right?" When the guy shrugged, the woman had to repress the urge to strangle someone. All that running for a false alarm. She needed to work out her frustration.
Grabbing a nearby pickaxe, she hefted it over a shoulder and trudged over to a wall. Something was going to be broken today and that wall was as good as anything.
...
It stirred in the darkness. It had been a long, arduous wait, but the time was at hand. Amidst the permanently dust-encrusted, cracked screens, rust eaten pods, mangled bits of other machine bits, and evidence even centuries later of scorch marks marring the cavern, it had waited. Yet, amongst this carnage and solitude, there was something calling to him. Something activated it, some sort of stimulus that was close by. This required further investigation.
...
"Out of the way! Out of the way!" Bloom shouted, jackhammer in hand. In response, her team scrambled about, heavier equipment moving forth towards a pile of innocuous-looking rocks. X-rays had shown they were nothing but rocks, but to a trained mind like Bloom, they screamed "Break us! We're hiding something!" Why argue with such a plea?
"Dr. Briefs, are you sure you can handle that jackhammer?" a crewmember asked cautiously.
"I'll be fine." Bloom waved off the worker's concerns and turned on the machine, feeling the hum of the tool through her arms.
"Thududdudud!"
Not to mention the familiar pounding sound like in the cartoons.
Unfortunately, one could be overzealous with a jackhammer. Who knew, right? Before the bluenette knew it, what had been a pile of rubble became a dank, dark hole, one that she was falling face first into.
"AHH!" she screamed just before a pair of arms wrapped around her, stopping her fall. The same couldn't be said of the jackhammer as he disappeared into the abyss before her.
"You alright?" the worker asked, pulling her away from the hole.
"I'm fine! It just got away from me," Bloom said apologetically, stepping away to compose herself. Absently she dusted herself off.
...
Light poured into the cavern for the first time in over a millennium.
Whirring gears whined as it crawled into the daylight.
Gero was back.
Gero's systems finally booted up fully once in the presence of sunlight. His systems ran a scan on his surroundings. His lab had been destroyed. The pieces were...oddly corroded. However, the scorch marks left behind allowed his processors to fully comprehend whom had trashed his lab: ki users. There was a high probability it was saiyan ki users. Further scans showed remains of his bio android before it could have ever been born.
'Curse you, Goku!' he thought clenching his mismatched fists. Gero's damaged sensors picked up on lifeforms above him.
'It is likely they are intruders,' Gero thought.
He flew up out of the hole, blasting it larger.
...
Suddenly the ground shook and Bloom heard something coming from the cavern below. A cracking sound led to split second decision, Bloom throwing herself on her team to protect them from falling rubble. Hissing from the bumps she was sure she'd have, Bloom barely looked back at the hole when something flew out of it. The next thing she knew, Bloom heard something landing in front of her and the team. She looked over her shoulder and gasped.
The mismatched pile was humanoid in shape; the left arm was rusted and bulky, clearly meant for a larger form while the right was shiny but too thin and short for the cobbled together torso. The legs were the same length, but one was clearly feminine in design while the the other was bulky and masculine, both as rusted as the left arm. The torso was a bunch of parts welded together in the vague shape of a human chest. Its face...its face was horrible to behold; three quarters was exposed machinery, the last quarter synthetic flesh and a gray crazed looking eye. The top of the head was part clear dome and part fake skin, with a plume of white hair barely clinging to the skin. The scrap-man lurched towards Bloom and her team with extremely jerky movements.
He seemed to be focusing on her, and she could swear the mechanical eye "flashed" for a few moments during his scan. The hodgepodge machine man smirked at her. The lopsided grin, terrible to see.
"Saiyan blood 0.000000006%. Potential Saiyan ancestor: Vegeta. Threat level: negligible." His voice was a garbled mix of computer detachment and human smugness, something that set the bluenette on edge. What the hell was it babbling about? Saiyans? Vegeta?
Before she could even think to blurt out the questions, the machine man blasted off into the sky, sending dust flying all over the place, forcing those left behind to shield their faces. Then it dawned on Bloom what he'd said.
"Saiyan? What do you mean threat level 'negligible,' you rusted bucket of bolts?"
"Bloom, what was that?" Wu had run out of the main tent. Bloom saw the tangled tent flap and put two and two together for what had...detained her friend. Wouldn't be the first time Wu had lost to a tent flap whenever he was in a rush. The levity from that memory evaporated whenever the situation at hand came crashing back.
"I-I don't know, Wu." Bloom said. She had a bad feeling about that ma—no, thing. A thing that had flown out of a hole she had made.
'What have I done?'
...
1*: What is that thing?
2*: Intruder! Monster! Monkey King!
3*: What do you mean Monkey King?! Monkey King dead!
4*: Monkey King here! Monkey King Liar! Monkey King take Four Star Ball!
5*: You take not Four Star Ball, Monkey King! Four Star Ball belongs to us!"
6*: Four Star Ball belongs to us!"
So, I was too lazy to make up my own language, I used/bastardized Vulcan.
"Nenatqom'i Khau" doesn't actually mean "Monkey King." It would have been too easy to HAVE words for that. -_-
The elements I used to make it are the words for "prime," "human," and, "rule."
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