Apprx. Date -/Age. 789\August-September/ Apprx. Gal. Sect. Co-ord/s: [Y-Axis: -] [X-Axis: -] [Z-Axis: -] Apprx. Gal. Sect.: Unverifiable – No Reference Point

We stand at the brink of an overwhelming chasm, stuck somewhere within space, time, and the chaos in between. I'm looking into a void that yawns so deeply into infinity, that to give it more than a spare second glance would invite a slow, inexorable madness. So I don't. I give the horizon my fullest attention. It's filled with the swollen orb of some bloated sun, giant and carmine, crusted with thick dark splotches across its southern pole and so distended it was just managing 'ovoid.' Strangely, it looks backlit; like the effect of a glass ball planted in front of a candlewick brazing the air with heavy heat and light. But that's where we are. Atop a cliff face formed from splinters of cobalt, flint, and slivers of unrefined copper, attached to a mountain that's taken us a hard week just surmounting. And we're gifted fliers, mind you.

It's like something out of an old fashioned 'human' epic. A band of heroes, boggling landscapes, a noble quest, with victory or death certain at the end. To my left are the 'commanders', astride atop a sharp outcropping that's forming a dizzying point above the thick pitch shades of void below. Goku. Vegeta. Gohan. You couldn't ask for more talented warriors. I did, though. To my left are a few sitting in a dried basin-bowl or standing at the cliff edge. Young Trunks and Goten. With Krillin, Tien and Yamcha. The sons and the friends. Especially the latter three. They came on a favour. Yamcha's gotten back enough of his brazenness to willingly stride through viper nests. And Tien. Despite his own protests, he has marked talents that have done serviceably in the years past. He's better than he knows. Then there's Krillin. Diminutive, stocky, questioning, doubtful, longing for home. The most normal of us; but don't dare relax your guard with him. Ex-monk or not… He has a way of surprising you.

I reserve my thoughts from idling and gauging my companions. An old habit, from old days. I look back across the chasm of darkness and towards the deathly star. We're atop a mountain rivaling Olympus Mons of Mars. It's just the nine of us, chasing after a damnably elusive quarry. To say we're a long way from home is an understatement. At the back of my mind, Kami whispers 'Dende'. I swallow and remark to myself that I'll see the boy again. We all will. It's just a matter of carrying on. But we are so very far out and where I cannot begin to imagine. We've failed in contacting King Kai, or any others. Which means one of two things. Firstly, we're maybe in an uncharted sector of the North Universe. Secondly, that maybe we're not in the North Sector at all, and have somehow slipped through a spacial crack that's spawned passage from one plain of reality to another. I'm banking on the latter.

But what are we doing so far from home, on a perilous chase through even the fabric of reality spheres, you ask? It's simple. Bra. Little Bra, second child of the mighty Prince of All Saiyans. Vegeta's baby girl and Trunks' kid sister. They've taken her. 'They' we don't quite have figured out. But they have resources and wills of iron to match our own. That, and monstrously powerful magic combined with deadly minions. I have many questions, most which have gone unanswered. This is bleak and a shade dark. But I don't doubt we'll win this yet. Not with Goku, Krillin, Gohan, Trunks, Yamcha, Tien. And Vegeta. Vegeta, especially.

And myself. I am the Nameless Namek. They call me Piccolo. And know this. We are finding little Bra. We are taking her back, then finding our way home.

And I will kill anyone who stands in our way.

Chapter 1

Age 789 - August 10th

'Satan' City. Cosmopolitan and Metropolitan in every facet. Flood Street ran a square kilometer through the cities heart, lined on either side by financial institutions that governed the flow of Earth's cumulative wealth. The architecture were wildly variant; one structure observed had the likeness of a two-hundred story Taj Mohall, next to it a tower of dark glass, shale-steel, a flying-V insignia traced out of burnished stainless alloys and affixed to the roof's crown. Beyond the banking and share-trading were the administration centers, great domes of webbed tube-struts riveted to crystalline etched panes, surrounding high-scrapers ending with multi-pronged communication stacks and tele-poles. It was all magnificent. Impressive. The intended effect. Satan City was, in effect, a slowly hulking hive. Another quarter century and the technophile mindset at root in the central districts would worm out in the neighborhoods, the foundries, the refineries, the factories. Everything would be high-end and neon.

It was summer and a warm Thursday. Edgewater was a small neighborhood, towards the west, nestled with suckling contentment beneath the sun-shadows of Flood Street and all her bloated junket skyscrapers, building ravines, and inordinate greed. It was 'Edgewater' for its precipice of paved levies and embankments built against the rushing Red River, with two roads that mimicked one another down to the slow loop near the river before curling back and winding a trail into the inner-city labyrinth. The houses were short and only under a dozen broke four-stories. The well-to-do mini-clans, with hundred thousand plus Zeni air-cars, brat-kids with idle time, and the few idealist millionaires thankful, grateful, and a tad trite at their luck with money.

Ludd & Co. Banking had hoisted a small branch there, for simpler convenience and for tying up local investment for that sector. The building itself was unassuming. Three stories, faux-brick, tan and brown and unimaginative, with utilitarian squares and a general ooze of bureaucracy and cash. The front steps were three low flights of mixed quartz and grey stone, barred with sleek banisters that had a touch of craftmanship with bulbous, neatly curled 'pixie-boot' twists end-grips. An unassuming bank branch, in a quiet neighborhood, on a Thursday like any other.

So no one paid particular heed when a rust-bucket jalopy pulled up before the Ludd & Co. Bank. It was an older heavy-duty model, mounted a chassis with antique, rusting wing-springs and sporting an arboreal 'camo'-job for paint. That too, was accented with deepening gouges of rust along the fender rims and cab door hinges. It squawked along, windows half-rolled and trailing some sorrowful guitar acoustics and a 'Sorry-For-Himself' singer. The driver kept an arm leaned over the window, a cigarette half-smoked and lazing between thick, yellow fingers. His forearm was gauzed with thick curly hair-strings that had bleached white, tattooed with a pattern of fading blue-ink, some tacky inbred mark. He rolled the jalopy, on a slow cruise, into an open parallel park. His right-hand, a fist of scarred meat, clenched around the manual gear-rod and shunted into 'Park'. At his nod, the three passengers, each wearing an oversized baseball cap and ripped denim, exited and began to walk briskly.

A woman, with a proud bust and a blue dress to let everyone sink in their own observations, turned to make eyes at one of three who caught her with his rugged handsomeness. She smiled, deep lips, long lashes, dark skin and black hair done up in a neat knot against her neck before falling to the middle of her spine. He smiled back, cheeks grimed with the previous days' stubble, a little sallow but his arms previewed strength begotten from a hard life. His wife-beater hugged against his chest. The woman winked, her flirt finished, her visage indelibly stamped on the poor boy's brain. She was turning to keep up her high-heel trot, when she noticed what was gripped in his right fist. A grip-stock pump-shotgun. He winked back at her, pulled on the underslung primer, grinned something evil and lecherous before he and his compatriots waltzed through the banks double front doors.

They made it apparent their aptitude for violence. The First Robber, head bald and waxed, face inked to resemble a ghoul, pulled double-pistols from his low-slung pant waistbands. He twisted at the hip and shot the security guard to their left, just inside near the right-hand set of doors on the way out. The man's baby-blue shirt tore out with hot bursts of red blood and pink gore, managing just a pained scream before sliding dead down the wall. The screaming started. The Second Robber collected a machine pistol from an underarm holster hidden by his ripped jacket. At the sound of the first gunshots, he turned and kept them cover, steadying his bulged arm.

Public reception was a tall hall tiled with thick slabs of gray marble, covering across the floor and up the walls by three-quarters. A long central row carpeted by smooth velvet ran from the doorway to the back transaction tills. A trio of guards burst from a back door laid flush against the marble. The Second Robber caught the tell-tail sigh of the hinges and hugged back on his pistol trigger. It sprayed a cone of lead that sent two guards rolling back with eviscerated upper chests and throats, and the third fell back with chunks missing from his right arm. The Third Robber hefted his shotgun and blew him off his feet. A nearby teller squealed when the guards' demise spattered his face with high-pressure gore sprays. Then he died too, when the Third Robber pushed the gun barrel to his temple and spread his brain-matter across his high-chair.

"Everyone!" The First Robber screamed. "Hit the floor! Hands on your head! You mess with me, and you're done! Comprende?"

There was a shuffle of stumbling feet, flopping knees, and to the trios satisfaction, the dozen or so visitors of the day sunk to the floor and hugged the tile like leeches. The Third Robber kept a wide cone of vision over them, letting the First and Second handle the tills and the cash. The Second Robber stuck his machine-pistol in a young woman's face. She could have been no more than twenty three at the latest. Her eyes bubbled with tears and her bottom lip was beginning to swell from the hard bite of her lip. His breath was a coy mixture of cheap whiskey and mint. He shoved a thick duffel bag, Kevlar straps and all, into her chest.

"Get back there," He ordered, motioning to the heavy pad-locked doors and the vaults beyond. "You got two and a half minutes to fill the bag. Greenbacks. 'Twenties if you don't mind. Every fifteen extra seconds past will cost you one of your friends here."

He motioned his Glock down the till-line, where her fellow staff sat back with upraised hands. She tried not to cry when they begged her with pleading stares to hurry. She swung off her high-chair and ran, cheeks red and wetting, making for the back rooms and the holding vaults. The First Robber had gone back to idly patrol the front doors. His work-boots squelched and tracked blood from the first guard kill. He strained to hear outside, where what small crowd that had been gathering to see what the bloody racket had been about dispersed at his first sight. He grinned, relished the fear, and kept an ear cocked for the reedy siren howls of incoming cop air-cars. His fingers idly played with the trigger guards. He looked to his wrist-watch. Forty-five seconds. Bitch better hurry up or—

A padlock door slammed open and the Second Robber nearly shot till-girl out of surprise. His high arched face spat a distasteful glare and he rattled her with an acute, stinging tirade of slurs while motioning to get a move on. She trundled up to the counter, slid the duffel across the slick laminate like the thing had caught disease, and stepped back onto her high chair. The Second Robber hefted his precious bundle, felt the solid weight of paper cash and began to back away. His eyes had beaded into paranoid slits and his right hand kept the machine pistol trained on the girl.

"We're done," He signaled vocally. His co-conspirators kept flank before shooting out the glass doors and escaping out into the afternoon. There were sounds of muffled crying. Civilians were picking themselves up from the ground, others just laid there. Someone, a man, middle-aged with a slight overhang gut, was leaning over a guard corpse, shaking his head, staring blankly.

The wheelman was already gunning the rough cough of the pickup's engine block. Sirens were picking up a raggedly wearing tune, coming from the south. Light-specks flashed, like distant pulsars, above a low row of nondescript office pre-fabs. The gunmen rushed the sidewalk stair flights, one making for a good cocky show by sliding arse-down a swooped banister and back onto his feet. All were chuckling with an adrenaline high. They'd barely cleared into the pickup cab when their driver stabbed a fat barefoot into the gas pedal and accelerated. The truck squealed from the parallel parking cell, onto the sidewalk, smashing down a foot row of public flower boxes, and onto a north-side street embanking along the Red River.

"Well?" The driver asked. The First Robber in front passenger seat zipped open the duffel. The driver whistled a sweet tune at the thick cash bundles shoved chunkily in.

"Damn. Damn, that's nice. Real nice," His wide face beamed. The Third Robber was busy chatting up in the back seats, stowing his shotgun on a rack nailed roughshod to the rear window.

"Man, Hue, you check that bitch in the blue dress?" He grinned.

Hue shared a gapped smile. "Ohhh yeah. Little Curly here was gonna score himself some poon'. Money first, though, Curl."

"Money first. Chicks second," Curl recited. "Whiskey on the truck home."

"Learnin' good, Curl," said the wheelman.

"Real obliged, Jesse… Ohhh shit, Jesse!"

Curly stabbed his arm forward, pointing in alarm. Out of the blue, with a snap of air, a man in a black bodyglove and green belted tunic was standing little over a square meter from the truck's front grill. Jesse, the wheelman, felled perhaps by the shock, didn't bother to break. The First Robber at his side yelled and shut his eyes against the coming meat splatter. Save it never came.

Saiyaman raised his right arm and opened up the palm. The truck was a good five tonnes of old-fashioned steel chassis. It didn't matter. Like paper and Styrofoam, it just ripped and crumpled in against his hand until Saiyaman was half-standing inside the engine block, the six-litre itself curled open and spurting high-fountains of crude oil. Gas heating to vapor escaped from exposed pistons with high-pitched whines. Amidst clatter of falling components and the smashed, sagging front axels, Saiyaman took a hop-step back. He tugged an adjustment on his white-headband, pressed his shades a quarter-inch higher on his nose-bridge, then crossed corded arms and surveyed the scene.

Jesse, Robber Number One, Hue and Curly were all half-conscious in the ruined cab. Jesse's flat pate was stickled with glass and his nose was contorted and squeezing blood down his lips. Robber Number One and Hue were leaning against their seats, faces bruised and half entrapped by the warped doors and deck-floor. Curly was the only one beginning to extricate. The boy was swearing gutturally up and down his list of impolite terms, dragging body and shotgun from the backseat. The cab-door finally gave when he planted his boot to the door-catch a third time. Saiyaman observed him waddle out unsteadily. Police air-cars were rapidly gaining, one or two from the local precinct hovering uncertainly overhead.

"What-I-You…" Curly gasped. One arm was hugging his diaphragm. His denim jacket was finally just rags left on the backseat, his wife-beater dirtied with browning dust and his own blood. There was an unhealthy swelling over his left ribs. Regardless, the thug primed a shell and aimed the shotgun square for Saiyaman's solid chest.

"Sumbitch!" He hollered. Saiyaman, face impassive, returned nothing. The silence egged Curly on, blood hot with pain, anger and adrenaline. "Screw you, 'Superhero'! This close, you hear me? Coulda just let us ride by! 'Hell's your problem, you got my friends killed!"

"First of all," Saiyaman finally spoke. His voice was soft but strong, brooding with a caged danger. "You wouldn't have gotten away. There's a cordon a quarter mile up the road. You could have tried gunning your way through, but the Police would have cut you in half. Secondly, no. I could not 'just let us ride by.' You murdered four men back there. They probably were just waiting for Friday to enjoy the weekend. You sleaze. And thirdly, my 'problem' is punks like you."

Curly's finger stiffened on the steel trigger, but there was something intimidating in the 'laugh-less' style exuding from Saiyaman. Each time the crime-fighter took a step in, Curly stepped back, aim shaking and sweating bad from his tanned brow.

"It's your attitude," Saiyaman went on, arms still folded but his eyebrows fixed in grimly. "It's maddening. Just the arrogance. The casual murder. And then the nerve to get your oats up when justice catches up to you. And I did. Those are people's savings you got there. You're holding lives, for Pete's sake. And they earned it fair and square. Back from where you're from, Hicksville or somesuch, they never taught you the value of a hard day's work?"

"Taught me to never take buck," Curly answered coldly, and tried taking a step in. To intimidate 'the Great Saiyaman.' The man opposite didn't budge. He just kept his shaded stare, jaw set and arms still folded. "Taught me, that if you want something, then go out and get it. So I am. I'm gonna shoot you now. Then grab the money and run."

"And leave them behind?" Saiyaman crooked a thumb to the twisted jalopy. The other three were pitifully groaning.

Curly grimaced but steeled himself, shaking his head, getting up his nerve. "S'what happens. S'what you gotta do sometimes, some days. It ain't nothing personal…"

"I don't think they're going to see it like that," Saiyaman was smiling slightly. "Maybe I should mention that when they wake up. I'll tell them you were going to leave them behind, rob them of their shares, and leave them for the courts. I can think of a few choice things they'll have in store for you, once they get their hands on you at the county cells."

"Shut it," Curly screeched, youthful voice breaking in pitch. The shotgun was shaking badly now.

"You know…" Saiyaman murmured a little distantly. "You remind me. Of a horrible foe I fought years back. He was like you. He took what he wanted without apology. Evil to the very core, so evil it was almost childlike in its chilling purity. Point is he was an aggrandized thief. Blinded himself with arrogance so he never had to look at it like that. Sort of like you."

Curly's jaw was a little slack and he blinked.

Saiyaman loomed forward and leaned in, staring the boy down just a little deeper into the ground. "And you know what happened to him?"

No one saw the punch land. Curly's nose just broke open with a pressure-spurt of blood and fell back four meters and tumbled. His shotgun clattered away into the ditch. Languidly, the Red River gurgled and washed along a few yards away and across the paved levies. Saiyaman tucked his outstretched fist back to his side and stood a moment listening to the waters and appraising Curly's limp body. The cop air-cars began to wail closer in and land outside the ditches. Saiyaman's last thought for the whole affair was a dissatisfied headshake.

Now he remembered why he'd simply retired five years prior.

He stepped from the asphalt and was flying high, waving to the officers as they congregated the scene while paramedics flew in low and landed behind their cordon. Saiyaman took the chance to glance over the quiet Edgewater streets, hemmed by a hundred miles of raw greenery still untouched out there in the west. He tried to shut out his hearing. There were muffles of strained crying, roars of grief, choked sobs trying to comprehend the voids now ripped in their lives. Now he remembered why one day, he just walked away. Gohan felt his ki-aura flare with a violent shudder, one that rocked the neighborhood as he took off streaking for the deeper hinterlands.

A bowl of Videl's gumbo and a hug from little Pan would end the day on the note he needed.

Their home was a compound, nestled in a neat valley atop the low Mount Pao. The hinterland was 'wasteland'. Spans of deep forest and tall plains, high mountains leveling out into deep swells of sand and desert, the very deep of 'the middle of nowhere'. The air breathed was a sharp mixture of loam, pollen, animal, and a sweet tang of fresh water. The summer was proving to be agreeable this year, Gohan noted absently, photographic memory relating that this day, three hundred and sixty four earlier, was thirteen degrees cooler. Now the sun was unburdening warmth, scalding the higher plains and sending a few outcropped villages into water conservation methods. The scholar jinked down from the sky into a grassy hill-land and blazed the air with aura-trail.

The Son Compound was a series of tall rockcrete domes, a partial blend of igloo and pueblo temperaments. The original domes were the smaller huts, fashioned from local sandstone and super-heated clay. Where he'd been born, raised, fed, trained, and learned. Gohan unknowingly smiled. Everything about the old haunts was rustic and well-worn, lived in by a more than rough-and-tumble family. A ghost-visage of Chi-Chi came hurdling out from the kitchen window, heavy pan in hands, chasing a rapidly apologizing and assuaging Goku, yelling at her lung's formidable capacity that, again, his clumsy Saiyan hands had wrecked another chinaware dish.

Gohan would have chuckled harder to himself. Save that the memory wasn't a distant memoir from his pre-teens. It was last Monday.

The second, larger domes were his abode now. Chi-Chi and Hercule Satan had come head to head, and nearly blow to blow, when the issue of where the newly led Son Gohan and (now) Son Videl were to bunk after their exhaustive honeymoon. Mr. Satan's bravado and ego had tried to step over the housewife, promising to relinquish them one of his more opulent country mansions and bequeath the servant army to their care. He personally blanched at the offer. He'd had felt a tad more worse for it, had not Videl similarly sigh and tell off Hercule that she had no use for a hundred maids what she herself could accomplish in less fastidious manners.

So, it was settled. A shared complex with Goku, Chi-Chi, and Goten. He, his brother and father spent the following Spring erecting the high central dome, then the bedrooms, the kitchen, the living rooms, the spare closets. He'd specifically asked for a study. At that moment, five years prior he turned and expected Goku to be shaded with a bemused smile, how his warrior son was now the scholar son. Yet… Just an open smile, honest, plain, goofy. So Goku. So his father. Neither of them said a word when Gohan hugged him and near cried. Goku just hugged back. Some moments, the simpler ones, were a difficult lot. For none of them dared to take them for granted.

Gohan landed with a breeze-wisp at the fore-stones of a winding lawn path, set against a trimmed yard specked with ember-red blossoms and craggy, hardy ochre thistles. The tall library-dome, gray-tinged and pored to allow condensation a chance to seep out rather than freeze behind the rockrete and cause general havoc come winter thawing, rose up high by nine meters. A modest, stained dip-birch and glass windowed door was hung with a quaint 'Home Sweet Home.' Videl spent an August morning sewing that. Gohan recalled kissing her gently punctured fingertips that evening. The scholar-fighter was not beyond allowing himself a private, carnal smile and stepped in towards the door. It opened with a creak of ungreased hinges.

The center-study was first to greet him. Three stories of stacked shelves, carved from fiercely knotted timber that had been devilishly, sadistically difficult to manipulate through carpentry. Gohan unbuckled the heavy leather belt struck around his washboard stomach, then tossed the belt and emerald tunic unceremoniously onto the second, book and paper stacked desk on his right. Ordinarily, he kept four tables spread over the dark, navy-blue carpeting of the study floor. Each was stacked with dozens of books devoted to a singular subject. The first desk: chemical physics and physical chemistry, nonlinear science, spatio-temporal pattern formation. The second desk: cold mathematics, Abel's curve theorem, Copson's Inequality, cork plug, computation, quadratic curve, dot product, double contraction relation, the z-axis. The third desk: nanotechnology and nanoscience, the subtleties of bionanoparticles, supperlattices. And the fourth: astronomy and astrophysics, angstrom units, gas in galaxies, luminosity functions, solar system formation, magnetospheres, ionospheres…

It was all very thick stuff and ordinarily, the sheer input of shunting in so much learning on such manifold topics would adversely affect the mind. Yet, Gohan relished it. Videl was at a loss for explaining it to their friends, how her husband could whirl back and forth across the thousands of books and come away no worse for wear. His dark eyes glinted with shards of an enormous, burgeoning intelligence. Bulma, the great scientist-heiress herself, was rumored during Kame House's usual Sunday poker game to be considering signing him on to a permanent research post for Capsule Corp. But would Gohan take it? That was an entirely different problem.

Dressed now in just white boots toed with gold, long forearm gloves, and a tightly hugging charcoal bodyglove, Gohan rubbed lightly on his nose-bridge. The heavy felt and cushion down of his study chair accepted his weight with supporting gratitude, allowing the scholar to kick back on the chair rollers and skim to a more darkened corner of the center-study. Just a moment's contemplation, he told himself, staring off with a thin, humorless smile.

There was a knock at the study door, from outside the compound. Something tall with a physically imposing bearing blocked the light from the door window-lattices, rattling the dip-birch with curt knuckle-raps. The visitor didn't wait for Gohan or anyone of the house to approach or give a call to let his or herself inside. The brass knob seized with a light vibration, then twisted clockwise and allowed the door to swing on screech-pitched frame hinges. Gohan tensed, scattered loose paper aside with a light flare of ki, eying the intruder in a state of taut attention.

The man was physically arranged with a loose, deep purple training gi, belted at the waist with a tight length of baby-blue sash. The length of his tall, muscular frame was caped with a cloak of cream-white, stretched over heavy shoulder guards. His sculpted, bald pate was caped with a violet, top-curved fez wrapped in a similarly cream-white turban. The most striking feature, however, was not the man's garb. He was immediately, visibly, Namekian, his skin a proud tint of jade green, his facial visage sharp with hard cheekbones, a thin, jutting chin, and bright, nearly luminous eyes. Gohan's ki whisked back with a backwash whisper in the air and he mustered a kinder smile.

"Sensei," He greeted softly.

Piccolo, arms folded sternly, nodded but traded a small grin and walked closer to the recliner.

"Gohan. …I thought Pan was the one who preferred Pajamas around the house."

Gohan patted the stretched lycra over his pectorals. "Bulma's treating Videl and Pan to a sociable at the Capsule Corp. complex. Just a luncheon, but a luncheon 'with a lot of sweet gadgets'. So… I had the day to myself, so… What the heck? Why not? Put on the old spandex, grab the shades, go out and defeat some evil."

The Namek smirked. "So I saw."

The half-Saiyan noticed his jawline had grown warm with a blush. "You were watching? …Wait, you live on the Lookout. Of course you were watching."

"And I saw your usual cheer had been robbed," Piccolo added quietly. He had walked in behind the rolling recliner, a hand on his old student's thick shoulder.

"People," Gohan murmured.

"What?" Piccolo had heard him perfectly well. Now was needed clarity.

"Humans," He elaborated. "When I was born… I took for granted that I grew up feeling perfectly normal."

Piccolo's high brow arched. He'd heard the stories.

"…As normal as I could be, okay?" Gohan laughed. "I mean… Mom and Dad would sit me down sometimes; explain what was right, what was wrong. And to me hearing it made perfect sense. Don't hurt people, don't say mean things unless someone's being a jerk, don't steal…" He listed them out on the digits of his left hand. "And then…"

His bright face turned blacker and he looked away from Piccolo, eyes mixed with something sullen, brooding, and brackish anger. "…And then four men drive up to a small bank and murder their way through for the sake of a couple thousand Zeni. And then look at me and say 'How dare you!' when I step in. There are worse things, Sensei, I know. But when it came to violence, I was fighting on the side of justice. On keeping the world safe, on beating the bad guys. Making sure they'd never be able to commit the evils they did ever again."

Piccolo's frowned, yet nodded in his sage way. "And you're thinking 'What was their excuse'?"

"Yeah," He sighed, folding a fist beneath his top lip and lining the gloved knuckles to his eyes.

"…I don't know," The Namek put it, simply, in his uncomplicated manner. "Because there isn't. It's greed, pure and simple. Of having but not having enough, and reasoning that, by virtue of boldness, you can take what you want and not have to pay the consequences. That's where ones, like you, your father, our friends… That's where we come in. We may not step in every time a corner store is held up… But we don't let the greater evils pass us by. Not Raditz. Not Nappa. Not the Ginyu's or Frieza. Not Cell. Or Majin Buu."

He felt Gohan shudder in his grip. Majin Buu. Super Buu, as the moniker came later when the evil had grown so swollen it was like a force unto itself. Frieza would have violently defecated had he faced him, for all his spouting about inherent superiority, his monarchy, his status as supreme 'bad-guy'. Majin Buu was darkness in concentrate. Totally selfish, arrogant to the ultimate extremis. Nigh untouchable, on the point of potent invincibility. A creature that refused to die, that seemed to come back from every attack that sloughed through him, rending limb from socket and gooey bowels from his pinkish innards. He'd taken himself, Goten, Trunks, Gohan, their friends and families. Ate them and gathered his might from their combined powers. A thief, without a shred of moral compulsion. A ki thief. Gohan felt something abject and righteously pissed off roil behind the hard beat of his heart. The bastard. The total bastard, the rotten fiend. Through his youth, through his teens, well into his adulthood, he fought and clung to every shred of ability he could muster. Hours of practice. Hours of study and contemplation. Ten years of trying to keep up and be the man his Father had been. To make him proud. Buu? Cast from a lurid spell, by a degenerate wizard the Eastern Supreme Kai later turned into a corpse of smoked bone and fried flesh. Gohan only allowed himself room to truly hate a few key individuals. Cell and Super Buu vied for the position of his most loathed enemy.

Unconsciously, he pulsed his energy. There was a solid, sub-sonic knoll that shook the air, warming it. The dome walls for a moment bore condensation, sweating. The lamp-strips and high glow-lites dimmed, dancing spiral trails of electrochemical arcs back and forth. He heard Piccolo step back and softly gasp. It had been just a bare mote of what he had welled away, just a translucent shade. What he had trapped away was vast, mystic, and overwhelming. He stood up from the chair, fist clenched and watching the muscles along his forearm ripple in response. Gohan had been lean in his younger days, a boy in high school. Now: His chest was barreled out, legs denser and arms coiled with svelte musculature.

"He's still a trigger thought," Piccolo murmured from behind an impassive face, arms refolded around his waist. He was regarding Gohan almost wearily; trying to reconcile a totally inept lad he'd taken out into the vast plain-wastes to the uber-fighter who could rip mountains apart. Without a sweat.

"Hmmn?" Gohan looked up. "Majin Buu?"

"Yes."

He frowned, paused, then paced across the study floor and rested his knuckles against the second desk. A paper, entitled to a study of quantum chromadynamic gauge in variental Lagrange, was opened to page nineteen beneath his fingers. He stripped off a glove and touched the bare skin to his smooth chin. Gohan was still frowning when he turned back to his former mentor.

"He was a nightmare," He almost whispered. "As if every deity of deceit and chaos belched out their refuse and let it coalesce into… what… he became. A fat-man, no better than a child and irresponsible. Then a second form, a second variance, one with intelligence and the deviance enough to use it to broker as much power and ability that he could get his hands on. Then eat. …And then just a diminutive brat. But robbed of everything save enormous power, equaled only with his enormous lust for violence and total insanity."

"He still stalks my dreams, now and then," Gohan added.

The study grew quiet. A book resting on the north third story window sill spilled a page back and forth at the caress of a warm wind. Piccolo passed his eye over the myriad subjects, wondering how Gohan could reserve so much mental energy for the exercise of learning. Especially with his memory, honed now to be as if photographic. A feeling touched him. The Namek looked across to the half-breed; half Saiyan, half human. Once, in a moment of utter privacy and swearing him to an eternal oath of silence, Vegeta confessed a very rare relent.

"For a half-breed?" He bored his infamously powerful stare up at Piccolo. "…I think he got off lucky, having the best of both."

He envied Goku, now. Eternally cheerful, possessed of a kind of wanderlust and always able to choose a course through even the muddiest waters. Some called him an idiot, due to his simplicity in nature, totally devoid of avarice or greed (save for a devouring appetite), so easy to smile and laugh and get the most out of life. The truth of it, really, was that only he could appreciate just what he had. His power. His abilities. His wife. His children. Especially his wife and children. Piccolo walked up to Gohan's back and patted his wide palm over the man's shoulder blades. He then turned, cape fluttering against the back of his calves, walking to the door.

"You're leaving?" Gohan spoke up. He sounded a note disappointed.

"For a time," Piccolo drew his glance back over his shoulder staunch, lips turned up in his enigmatic smile. "I stay any longer and your Dad will have me convinced to go for a few sparring rounds. Right now, Gohan… Look after yourself, and your own."

"I will," He promised a solemn note.

Piccolo gauged another smile, halfway through the door, charging his aura for the long flight to Dende's Lookout. "And don't worry. The way this Universe works, we'll be up to our necks in some foul business before long. In the meantime, brace yourself. I can smell Chi-Chi's curry meatloaf from here."