About Time
by April CK
Part 2
Kings are people. Mortals. Most kings can trace their ancestry back to some notable inventor, wealthy merchant or war hero. Thus the kings, the first kings, had probably gotten their right to rule from the local people who had seen the notable inventor, the wealthy merchant or the war hero and who had been so inspired that they'd made that person their leader. That's how kings came about. Good kings, anyway.
Emperors are a bit more complex because empires were often made up of several kingdoms and so an emperor typically ruled over several kings. Thus emperors had to get their right to rule from higher authorities than people. Divine authorities to be precise. Usually a would-be emperor had to carefully select a patron god from the local pantheon and then proceed, in a relatively convincing fashion, to claim to be the descendant of that god. Which of course meant that the emperors themselves ended up being considered minor gods and because of this an emperor held as much influence in religious circles as political ones. So minor god, high priest, king of kings - that was what an emperor was expected to be. All of those titles combined.
The consensus of the general public was that an emperor only became divine when he - or she, as the case may be - was officially coronated. In other words, the person only became a god when they were crowned the emperor. Which was, as Chaozu knew for a fact, false.
At least in his case it was false. Crowned or not, Chaozu had always felt that you couldn't just up and declare yourself to be a minor god one day. Not if you wanted respect, at any rate. No. In order to become a proper emperor you had to be born a god. Even though words like 'born' tended to have vastly different meanings to supernatural beings.
Chaozu had a handful of extremely hazy memories about his birth carefully stored in the back of his mind where they wouldn't bother anyone. He wasn't sure how long ago the joyous event had been but from what he recalled, the process had involved a paintbrush and something about the way moonlight had struck a sentient waterlily. He wasn't entirely clear on the rest and honestly, he wasn't sure that he wanted to be. It was generally best not to question ones own creation.
He'd been a god long before he'd ever been an emperor.
Oh it was true that Chaozu wasn't invincible. But unlike so many emperors who'd only claimed to have divine blood, he actually had it. He was immortal. He'd died more than once before although on such occasions the term 'dead' had only ever been an accurate description of his physical condition. Mentally and spiritually and so forth, he'd been fine. If his friends hadn't wished him back to life the last couple times then he would have eventually found his way back anyway. He always had before. And after a while with a routine like that, Chaozu had accumulated enough knowledge of the past to become aware of the future.
Futures. Chaozu hovered in place and wrinkled his nose in a way that had nothing to do with twigs that he'd been gathering from the forest floor.
Time was such an indecisive bugger. Predicting the future was - if you simplified the entire process so that it could be described in a mere four dimensions - comparable to standing atop a skyscraper and dropping a penny over the side. You knew that the coin would fall, you could count on that much, but you just wouldn't always be able to tell where or when the penny had landed. It wouldn't always be clear right away whether the coin was heads or tails or on its side or embedded into someones vital organs. Time didn't plan that far ahead. Time was, in its own subtle way, unpredictable. You could get the general gist of time if you tried but the details tended to remain sketchy in a manner that could occasionally reduce even the best of psychics to guessing.
It was during uncertain moments that rituals provided a sense of comfort.
Chaozu glanced at the bundle of narrow leafless sticks he had collected and nodded with approval. That should be enough. He tied the stack of twigs together at one end with a length of bark and drifted away from the trees, out into the city.
Or at least, it had been city. Now it looked more like what could happen if a hurricane got ahold of a cement mixer during a violent earthquake.
His friends were here somewhere, what little was physically left of them anyway. Chaozu shivered as he did his best to NOT think about how a corpse might look after being slammed through a city block, blasted repeatedly and buried under a few tons of shattered glass and jagged concrete. He had no intention of going in search of the bodies. He preferred to remember his friends as more than whatever was currently left of them. The sheer amount of wreckage in the scene around him offered enough closure on the matter.
Least it was quick for most of them. Too fast to be very painful, certainly. Chaozu reasoned. He let a minuscule amount of energy leap from his fingertips to the unbound tips of the twigs. Immediately the air was filled with the mingled scents of ten different woods burning.
Incense was one of the only things that Chaozu had ever liked about temples. He'd felt that this gesture - the burning of incense - would be an appropriate way to acknowledge the changes. He couldn't mourn the dead. He knew that their souls were okay. But some of them had been good friends and he would miss their company. But you're in good company now, aren't you? Chaozu thought as if addressing the souls of the deceased.
Yes, that was a fact. They'd have company whether or not they liked it - a lot of people had died yesterday. And creatures had been dying for rather a long time, too. So everyone would get to meet at least a few of their ancestors. Tenshinhan would finally get to see his parents again. Yamucha would eventually locate his siblings. Yajirobe would be reunited with his whole samurai clan. Krillen was going to be up to his neck in the spirits of temple cats that he'd considered pets while growing up. Plus of course Goku would be there, with some relatives of his own, waiting to greet all of them.
Piccolo and Vegeta. Well... Chaozu decided not to speculate. It didn't actually matter which way they'd gone, they wouldn't be among strangers.
That was one of the catches with divinity really. Mortals had it nice. Being dead wasn't so bad when you could share the experience with friends, enemies, family, pets and anyone else that happened to be around. With the exception of his last two deaths, dying had always made Chaozu feel a bit like misdirected luggage. Nobody in the afterlife had been waiting there to greet him because minor gods weren't expected to die all that frequently. And even if anyone ever did wait...
Chaozu sighed inaudibly. He didn't want to think about that possibility right now.
He held the burning twigs in such a way that he appeared to have a fragrant wooden fan that was rapidly shrinking. He muttered a few blessings that he'd memorized from his days trapped at the temple then tossed the bundle reverently onto the ground in front of him. The flames flickered but once the twigs were gone, there wasn't anything left to burn. The small fire gradually went out with a gasping sound and thin stream of perfumed smoke.
Everything flammable about the city had been turned to ashes yesterday. Though in some places - at a former gas station, for example - the fires continued.
An idea crossed Chaozus mind. All things considered, burning the remains of the city to the ground could only be an improvement. A fire would take care of the corpses before they had a chance to start a plague. It would clean up the landscape as well. If there was nothing left of the disaster to look at then...
No. He wouldn't do it. Not yet, anyway. The rest of the world needed the disaster area for now - it was a warning to them. It made the situation real.
Well... actually... No, it didn't. Chaozu was all too aware of the fact that the majority of the worlds human population had gotten up, pulled on their clothes, drank their coffee and gone to work as if it was just another day. Which it was, for them.
South Capital City had been reduced to roughly thirty square miles of charred rubble. Most of the world hadn't noticed yet. In distant places - primitive villages scattered in the mountain regions - the people might not ever notice. In more modern places, the people probably wouldn't notice until they picked up a phone and dialed a number that had been in South Capital City. And even when they couldn't get the call to go through, they wouldn't understand what it meant right away.
People didn't always notice things like missing cities. Chaozu knew this from experience. Twenty-two years ago he'd been sitting on the throne of an empire that was now, for the most part, long forgotten. The few mortals that had survived the revolution generally hadn't made it with their sanity intact so not even they remembered much about the former empire.
That had been a bit of a disappointment, the revolution. The empire'd had so much potential - he'd had all kinds of plans for it - and then voosh. The whole thing had gotten wiped out of existence just because some army of heavily armed thugs had wanted to skip a few steps on their way up the ladder of success.
Aw well. Chaozu dusted ash off his dark green tunic and flew back towards the shade offered by the trees. Nothing lasts forever.
And it was better that way. Being psychic, Chaozu had formed some very strong opinions in regards to time and it was his firm belief that clinging to the past would only serve to mess up the future. However it was remotely possible that time was circular. So maybe the past and the future were really the same thing.
Chaozu tactfully opted to think about something less disturbing for a while. But as he flew along, he couldn't help noticing that a few humans from South Capital City had survived. He could see them.
A battered cluster of refugees that sat in silence, crouched around a small camp fire and listening warily for sounds of danger. Wearing ragged clothes and equally ragged expressions. A few of them were clutching tree branches like weapons. Most of the people had probably never seen each other before the android attack had caused unlikely paths to cross...
... Near a cave. Of all the places the refugees could have gone after fleeing their decimated city - they'd gone to a cave.
Mentally, Chaozu flinched.
Mentally, Gohan flinched. He was at school in Satan City, slumping forward in his seat near the back of the classroom and gazing out the window with his chin resting on his arms.
There hadn't been any reason not to go to school. Satan City was intact and so life there was going on as usual. The residents weren't aware of how much the world had been altered in the last twenty-four hours. South Capital City was... or rather, had been... on a completely different island continent. Nobody in Satan City had seen the damage done and even if they had, seeing wasn't necessarily believing.
Ultimately Gohan had gone to school because he hadn't wanted to stay around the house. Staying home would have just worried his mother and ChiChi had enough to worry about without adding her sons mental health to the list. Gohan hadn't even told her about the other warriors being dead yet. He'd meant to say something about it to her but the words eluded him. Gohan almost wished that his mother was as sensitive to energy as he was - then words wouldn't have been necessary at all.
He wasn't paying attention to the biology teacher. As fascinating as the lecture was, Gohan couldn't bring himself to focus on the lesson. He was too busy trying to figure out if yesterday had actually happened. He was fairly sure that it had but... If evil androids had really truly blown a city flat then he shouldn't be sitting in biology class, should he? And yet there he was.
It was the androids fault. They weren't like other enemies. If he'd been able to track their ki - which he wasn't because androids didn't have ki - Gohan would have hunted them down in a heartbeat. Which probably would have been a fairly stupid thing to do. Because for some inexplicable reason the androids didn't seem capable of feeling pain. Not even when a Super Saiyan assaulted them.
That part bothered Gohan a lot. He'd put everything he'd had into his attacks yesterday and the androids had barely even noticed his presence. Evil enemies were one thing but invincible evil enemies... Gohan wasn't used to that. It struck a bad chord. There was something off about those androids. They shouldn't be as strong as they were and it wasn't just his Saiyan pride telling him as much, it was science.
Gohan knew that he was the energy equivalent of a thermonuclear explosive. The androids, at their very best, shouldn't have been much more resistant than... than... Well. They shouldn't have been anywhere near as resistant to damage as they had managed to be. They were just robots, after all! Human-shaped clumps of metal. And metal was not supposed to be capable of withstanding the kinds of stresses that a very upset Super Saiyan could introduce.
If yesterday happened at all, Gohan thought resolutely, it should have happened differently.
But it hadn't. And Gohan was at a loss to work out why.
Another section of his brain was preoccupied with an ongoing internal debate about death that was slowly giving him a headache. Death had to be a bad thing. It had always been a bad thing before. And yet... Gohan had to admit that if nobody had ever died, the world would be an awfully crowded place. So maybe death was only moderately bad or only bad for some people or something complicated like that. Which wasn't an easy concept for a ten year old to accept.
Lately though, he'd been thinking several things that were difficult to accept.
The blue sky abruptly flashed neon orange. The ground shook. All of Gohans philosophical ideas came to a screeching halt that left one terrified little thought cringing by itself in his skull. They're here!
Waves rippled outward in concentric circles as the submarine surfaced. The vessel wasn't simply coming up, it was also traveling forward. Entering the shallow waters around the beach as it rose above the waves - so that by the time the entire vehicle was exposed, it was parked on the white sand. A creaky hatch swiveled open.
The first figure to hop down onto the beach was a short creature in overalls with pale pink skin, a snout and floppy ears. He was muttering a variety of curses about submarines in general. Which was only natural. Pigs were not seafaring creatures. No matter how humanoid Oolong had become, he would always instinctively dislike being underwater.
The second creature that exited the submarine did so without once setting foot on the sand. It was a small blue-gray rectangle of fur with a round head, pointed ears, a white-tipped tail and a tanned underside that hovered about five feet off the ground. "Is it over?" Puar asked in anxious tones, her whiskers twitching as she drifted forward. "Did anyone else... I mean... you know?"
Chaozu made a face. "I'm not sure at the moment." He reluctantly admitted, attempting to sound reassuring despite the circumstances.
"Not sure?" Oolong echoed in disbelief. "But... you're psychic! How can you not be sure?"
Two more figures stood by the submarine now and it was these that Chaozu had come in search of. The taller of the pair was an elderly fellow clad in a loose floral print shirt and khaki shorts. He had a giant turtle shell strapped across his back. The hair on his head took the form of a short white beard, a matching mustache and a pair of bushy eyebrows. He leaned on a wooden cane that had a knob near the top. He wore sandals on his feet and was rarely seen without a pair of dark sunglasses obscuring his eyes.
"Ah, good to be back on land." Master Roshi stretched and expertly snatched a magazine out of thin air. "More light to read by out here."
Roshi had always claimed that he was just a martial arts master but Chaozu knew better. The harmless looking wooden cane was a staff. Roshi was a wizard. Not a very talented one but a wizard nonetheless. Magic ran in his family. Most of it had run to his sister.
She was there too, Uranai Baba. A woman three foot tall and clad in a pitch black robe with voluminous sleeves. The wrinkled yellowish skin of her face was hidden by the wide brim of a pointed black hat. Bright red hair reached down to her shoulders. Beneath her feet levitated a crystal ball.
One look at that crystal ball confirmed Chaozus worst fears. Because usually when you looked at a crystal ball you saw the future or the past or a colorful but mysterious swirling mist or - if the crystal ball wasn't in use - your own bent reflection. But this crystal ball, when you looked into it there was just static. So something WAS wonky with time then. He'd been afraid of that. History repeats itself. Chaozu thought with a shudder. He'd always heard people say that it could happen but now that it was actually happening...
"Not quite." said Uranai Baba.
And because she'd spoken aloud, the shapeshifters each arced an eyebrow as if to say 'huh?'.
Chaozu on the other hand, was immensely relieved. He'd had a long interesting life but there were more than a few parts of it that he didn't care to relive.
Uranai Baba wasn't merely a skilled witch that specialized in fortune telling with the occasional reincarnation. She'd been a witch for eons. No one was quite sure of Uranai Babas age but there were rumors claiming she was older than the local gods. Which was why the gods hadn't ever been ashamed to turn to Uranai Baba for a second opinion on things. She always seemed to understand what was going on. She didn't often get involved in the events of Earth but she always understood them. It was her business to understand things and an incredibly profitable business too.
"There IS a time distortion though, isn't there?" Chaozu ventured.
Uranai Baba nodded. "It's because of the time machine."
This remark earned her more than few awkward stares.
"WHAT time machine?" Oolong eventually blurted out.
"It hasn't been built yet." said Uranai Baba. "It'll be finished sixteen years from now."
Oolong and Puar remained utterly confused. Roshi remained completely absorbed in his reading material which didn't actually require a lot of reading since it was mostly pictures. But Chaozu was bright enough that his brain made the connections.
Time travel... time travel... You'd have to go lightspeed of course because at lightspeed everywhere was technically the same place and everyWHEN was the same time. That was common knowledge nowadays - it was the whole e=mc2 thing, the most famous science formula in existence. Energy(e) equals mass(m) multiplied by the speed of light squared(c2). You didn't have to be a scientist anymore to appreciate that energy moving at the speed of light just naturally distorted gravity, mass, space and time so that items could arrive before they had technically left.
There was the one other relevant formula and that was just basic algebra. Distance(d) equals time(hr) multiplied by the rate of acceleration(mph). Lightspeed meant traveling 200,000 miles per second which translated to covering a lot of distance very quickly. Although you might not think that you'd gone anywhere. And come to think of it, how on Earth would you survive hitting the brakes on a vehicle that was moving at 200,000 miles per second? And actually, for that matter, what if you didn't end up on Earth at all?
Anyway. When people had broken the sound barrier for the first time, they'd discovered an amazing side effect: the sonic boom. Noise that could only be heard after it had been made instead of while it was being made. So if people started running around at lightspeed on time machines then the logical side effect - aside from people being reduced to extremely small particles if they made any sort of steering error - might be ripples in the very fabric of time. Ripples that happened before they'd been made.
"Yes, sort of." Uranai Babas voice was deceptively calm. "It's like dropping a penny off the side of a skyscraper, watching it fall towards the ground and then having it land on your head. The dimensions get twisted."
"... I think I'll go back in the submarine." Oolong grumbled as he climbed through the hatch. "Somehow the prospect of being trapped underwater in an airtight container doesn't seem as frightening anymore."
Puar was a tad more stubborn in these types of situations. The diminutive shapeshifting cat spoke with her fur bristling and her ears flattened back. "Would someone please tell me what the HECK is going on?"
"Well apparently I can't see the future," Chaozu said, "because the past hasn't been wholly decided yet."
"That's the trouble with time machines." Uranai Baba asserted with a grave nod, "Takes the stability out of things. It's as if time itself has become a shapeshifter."
"Oh." Puar relaxed. "Is that all?"
Uranai Baba bowed her head. "No."
And right then, the blue sky of the northern horizon flashed neon orange. And it didn't take a psychic to realize that the androids could track ki and that Gohans ki was among the most visible on the planet.
Chaozu mentally swore in a language that hadn't been used for a couple thousand years.
"We can take care of time-space." Uranai Baba almost sounded nervous. "But you've got to deal with them."
Elsewhere... The ground was lava. Dark red liquid fire that oozed, boiled, bubbled, spat and hissed. In a few places just below the surface the fires burned bright white and yellow. Wisps of black smoke and grey steam hung close to the ground, creating a dense curtain of drifting fog that made the area humid and even less pleasant to smell. The stench of decay filled the air with the pungent aroma of sulfur woven in. Muffled screams and a wide assortment of ominous creaking sounds echoed throughout the caverns. Occasional flashes of light would briefly illuminate sights better left unseen.
A tall, somewhat elfin figure hovered above the lava. It clutched a wooden staff with three clawed fingers. It wore a long white robe that was trimmed in black thread. The symbols for the creatures name were stitched in red on the front of the robe: Kami.
He frowned at the scene around him and tried to get his bearings. Hell. Kami thought with disgust, loading the word with a thousand unspoken meanings. Having been the Guardian of Earth for the past three hundred and ten years, Kami tended to have strong feelings on these issues.
Kami did not approve of the existence of hell. This was largely because Kami didn't understand why any living thing would want to damn its deceased peers to this sort of place. It didn't make any sense. Punishing dead souls didn't make things better. Kami often wondered if the humans - and any other species humanoid enough to understand the concept of hell - would ever realize just how awful they'd made the place. The area he was in now, the dark caverns with the lava swamp floor, was considered one of the most mild levels. Kami knew this because he took it upon himself to visit hell in the same way that people on Earth might visit hospitals and for basically the same sort of reasons. You never really appeciated your health until you went to visit a hospital. Never really appreciated your blessings until you came to a place where there were none.
Out of the mist a gruff voice remarked. "You don't belong here."
"Nobody does." Kami replied without looking for the owner of the voice that had spoken since he wasn't sure what he'd end up seeing.
The unseen speaker snorted in mild amusement. "Yet they say everyone's down here for a reason." Light flashed through the cavern and for an instant, a shadow was outlined against a section of fog. "What's yours?"
Kami relaxed slightly. What he'd seen of the shadow had been familiar enough. His robes rustled as he turned. "Aha. I thought it was you."
"And I thought you said that you wouldn't be back for a couple weeks." The figure was standing nearby, a muscular human shape only a couple inches taller than Kami himself. It had spikey dark hair and appeared to be wearing a chestplate of faded blue-grey armor. Black fabric worn under the armor enhanced the warriors ability to blend in with the surrounding darkness.
"Circumstance has made me liar." Kami said. "Besides, the boy wonders about you."
There was a polite silence between them while this last remark was absorbed. Kami understood how much the words meant to a soul trapped in hell.
Staring upward, the figure made a noise that was a cross between a wistful sigh and a bitter chuckle. "Yea...? Well maybe someday I'll get up there and introduce myself to the kid."
"Bardock, if you help me then I may be able to renegotiate your fate with Lord Enma. Perhaps get you some time off for good behavior." Kami twitched each of his two antenna in turn. "Does that sound like a fair deal?"
For a skeptical moment Bardock stared at the Namekian god of Earth. Then he nodded. "Eh. Sure. Why not?" He muttered, thinking that while alive he'd taken orders from stranger creatures without expecting much in return. "So what are you up to?"
"A lot that I can't explain yet. Currently what I require the most is a guide and a translator." Kami smiled and added in a half-joking tone. "By any chance, are you fluent in Saiyan?"