About Time
by April CK
Part 7
The universe hosts an undisclosed number of inhabited worlds and on each of those worlds the beliefs were diverse. Gods of every imaginable form and purpose existed on more levels of heaven, hell and everything inbetween than can ever be accounted for. Yet as diverse as all the beliefs were, a common thread ran through them. Saiyans, Icejins, Nameks, humans and countless others all told the same basic story. If you took away the embellishments that each culture had added to their own versions of the tale, the universal myth went like this:
In the very beginning, nothing existed. No light, no color, no sound, no horizons - nothing. Just an empty boundless primeval darkness. And then, abruptly, there was One. Just One. A creature without shape because shape didn't exist yet. The essence of consciousness, a sudden spark of awareness. A lone mind hovering in the darkness thinking: gosh, it's dark.
It was often said that the One had unmatched power but that was self-evident and meaningless. Of course the One had unmatched power in the beginning! Nothing else had existed for it match its power against! As soon as other things had started existing, the One was no longer quite as formidable. One was never meant to be the greatest power anyway, it was just meant to be the first.
Eventually - out of boredom, loneliness and curiosity - One began to create things. Thus One became the very first immortal engineer.
Though the work was a good diversion, the creation of the universe was a large project and still a lonely one. Stars were nice for looking at but they didn't provide much in the way of companionship. Planets were just planets - barren chunks of rock floating around in space - not worlds. Nobody else was around to help or give advice. Nothing was there to say 'good job!' and the words didn't seem to mean very much when One said them to itself.
So One created the Two. The first beings to have shape. A male and a female or, in cultures that lacked gender, one aggressive and one passive. One would go on to put so much of itself into its main project that it merged with and became The Universe. Which left the Two to take on the task of creating More. While One had created the foundations - and sometimes also a handful of plants and animals - the Two were often best known for creating sentient lifeforms. People and immortals alike. Yet the Two had done so much more than that.
The Two couldn't help it. The Universe had been incredibly sensitive in its early stages, it had interacted with them on a daily basis. Everything the Two had said or felt or did created something. If they cried then rivers, lakes, waterfalls and oceans leapt into existence. If they smiled then flowers blossomed, suns shone and birds sang. That sort of thing. In addition to all this, the Two and their numerous offspring were in the habit of wandering around and defining things. So elements of nature suddenly had names and limits. Planets gradually became worlds, houses became homes.
Immortals became gods. They hadn't been gods before, they'd just been immortals and back then almost everything had been immortal so it wasn't anything special. It had taken the existence of mortals to make immortality seem divine by contrast.
From that point out, the universal myth became steadily more localized - the threads of some larger truth getting lost amid the details of cultural identity. Saiyans recited the story with Saiyan gods doing the things Saiyans valued, humans told it with human gods doing the things humans valued and so on and so forth across the universe.
But the universal myth continued on its own because you couldn't have a story that started in the very beginning... without implying that somewhere, someday there might be a story that went and in the very end....
Although, of course, when it really happened then nothing would be left to tell that one.
Stories of the apocalypse were typically pure fiction. They were also local. Apocalypse had come to mean end of OUR world instead of end of the entire universe. Every inhabited planet had their own end-of-the-world story and quite a few worlds had suffered the misfortune of finding out just how inaccurate their stories were.
For example the Tsufurujin culture - and many other such cultures that were now mostly extinct - had not expected the end of their world to involve the Saiyan Army. Likewise, the bulk of the Saiyan culture would have never guessed that the end of their world would involve Freezia. Residents of Planet Namek had always predicted that violent storms followed by the explosion of one of their suns would bring the end of their world but a giant lizard and a Super Saiyan had destroyed their original planet instead.
The Universe didn't like to be predictable, it rarely did what anyone expected it to.
There were many end-of-the-world stories on Earth. Earthlings had good imaginations and so they'd covered most of the possibilities.
Humans had a popular story wherein a large comet collided forcefully with Earth, effectively putting an end to the planets existence. In variations of the story events such as wide-spread pollution, nuclear war, alien invasion, a previously unheard of terminal illness or any sort of drastic environmental change could essentially take the role of the large comet. For the humans who craved a more mythical version of the tale there was the classic story of four empowered horsemen - who happened to symbolize everything that nuclear war, hostile aliens, plagues, pollution and natural disaster were capable of - riding out across the world and causing mass destruction everywhere they went.
It was plausible enough. Aliens, horsemen, comets, war, pollution, plagues, disaster, destruction - any of these things could happen. Why not? They existed. They'd happened before. The potential for happening again was definitely there. It was just that other things could happen too.
No one knew for sure how The Universe might end because The Universe was not the sort of thing that gave two weeks notice before quitting. So actually there weren't any legends on Earth that mentioned the potential hazards of five relatively forgotten gods battling each other. In this respect the Earth was extremely fortunate - most of its gods weren't from Earth. So most of the gods of Earth had knowledge that went far beyond the legends of the planet that they watched over.
Planets blowing up is the sort of thing that traumatizes people, even if they're the ones blowing the planet up. However the trauma doesn't always change the person since it's too much for them to comprehend.
Humanoids are so emotional. They get outraged if their favorite television program is canceled. They have nightmares about petty things like spiders and large needles and wearing the wrong clothes. Blow an entire planet to spacedust right in front of them and their tiny humanoid brains can't even begin to absorb the shock.
Vegeta had grown up watching planets get blown to smithereens. As a result, he had spent most of his life terrified. In fact the term 'terrified' was a gross understatement but it would have to do since there wasn't a word in any mortal language that did justice to the emotion. Vegeta had never expected to live to age six, much less age thirty-five. Not that he'd admit as much to anyone - not even if there had been words for it. Death was disappointing him though, he'd hoped for a change of pace.
"I think he's coming around..."
The voice that had spoken was muffled by an irritating ringing noise that Vegeta was fairly sure nobody else could hear. He wasn't able to recognize the voice or place the direction that it had come from. He couldn't sense his own ki, much less anyone elses and he didn't even want to imagine how dreadful he must look. Vegeta felt as though his skeleton was currently eighty percent bone fragments. He wondered, in a mildly detached and morbid way, if 'bloody bruise' would be a good species name since apparently he wasn't officially a Saiyan anymore.
Vegeta slowly forced his eyes open - even his eyelids ached and burned - then growled in pain and glared out at the fuzzy world. Once things stopped spinning enough to come into focus, he saw that there was a green blur and also a tan blur with small dark spikey blurs on top hovering above him.
"Acahrot ick ats ou, e swar..." The Prince began indignantly. His speech was slurred and he winced at the sound of his own voice.
"Wha...?"
"I believe he said 'Kakarott if that's you, I swear...'." The green blur translated.
The tan blur with small dark spikey blurs on top recoiled. "I don't look THAT much like him, do I?"
The green blur chose to ignore that question for the time being. "Relax, Vegeta." It tried to sound soothing instead of worried, "This is Bardock and he won't attack you again, he only did it to cure you."
Bardock nodded and spoke in an apologetic tone. "There aren't healers down here. Trust me, I know. So to get better, first you have to make it worse. It works because hell won't let you die."
"... don't... FEEL... better." By focusing on how annoyed he was, Vegeta managed to ignore most of the pain he was in and almost sounded coherant. This momentary numbness faded as soon as he made the mistake of trying to sit up.
"No. You probably don't." Bardock agreed calmly, "It doesn't heal you completely - just enough to let you really feel the pain. After all, this is hell."
Anger was another wonderful pain-killer. "THEN WHY DID...?"
The words died in midsentance because Vegetas brain reminded him rather sharply that he wasn't technically capable of moving. A fresh explosion of agony raced through what was left of his nervous system and somewhere on the fringe of his clouded perception, Vegeta was dimly aware of a scream and a flash of white-hot energy. He wasn't sure if either were his.
When the pain finally receded again, Vegeta didn't have to open his eyes to know that he was shaking all over and that something or someone was holding him down. There was a weight against his shoulders and something had grabbed both his wrists.
"Shhh. Hang in there, okay? We'll get you out of here." The green blur was still trying to seem reassuring but its voice was laced in doubt. "We might need you to be able to stay conscious for a bit though. All right?"
Vegeta didn't answer. He doubted that consciousness was such a good thing anymore. Pain gnawed around the edges of his awareness until sheer exhaustion settled in. When the impulse became too strong to resist, Vegeta relaxed enough to drift off into a fitfull sleep.
After a few moments Bardock released the Prince and sat back, crouching down distrustfully as if he expected Vegeta to have another violent seizure at any second. "Maybe we should let 'em rest a while?" Bardock suggested in a whisper.
Kami also sat back, clearly shaken. He nodded then flinched when he noticed the smears of blood he'd gotten on his white robe - Vegeta had lost a lot of blood recently and he still wore most of it. Kami hated to see others in pain, especially kids. And to Kami everyone under the age of two hundred was a kid. He often wondered why he hadn't been a healer instead of a warrior. But not that often. Kami had always known that he'd need to fight again someday. He hadn't exactly been looking forward to it either.
Still. Even without the healing ability, there was something he could do. The Namekian god of Earth closed his eyes and concentrated. The air around Vegeta blurred with colorless energy that gradually became more solid. By the time Kami opened his eyes, the Saiyan Prince looked like something that had been stolen from the depths of a pyramid. Vegeta was wrapped from head to toe in thick cloth bandages.
"Neat trick." Bardock commented.
Kami shrugged. He hadn't made use of any of his Namekian abilities in eons so it was taking him a while to recover. But all Nameks could cause cloth to materialize out of thin air, it was just part of their heritage. On Namek-sei there hadn't been much else to make cloth from.
They were sitting on the square floor of a narrow glass cube that was moving steadily downward, sometimes diagonally. Heaven had stairways but hell had elevators and this was one of them.
Kami had been visiting hell for the past three hundred and ten years. Bardock had been a resident of hell for the past thirty years. Between them, they had seen less than a quarter of hell. Right now, they were making up for it. There were countless levels of hell and the glass elevator was descending through every layer. It was all that they could do to ignore the sights and sounds outside of the elevator. There was stuff out there that would have made Vegeta seem healthly by comparison.
Bardock wrapped his arms around his kneecaps and closed his eyes. He hadn't known that it was possible to miss the level of hell that he'd been living on. "How much further?"
"Not sure." Kami did his best not to shudder at the thought of their destination.
Walls of fire, caverns of ice, bubbling swamps. Horrible tortures. Ugly demons, dangerous monsters. Whips, chains, cold coffee, spiders, large needles, paperwork, bloodstains, bad smells and screaming. That was the kind of thing most mortals thought of when they thought of hell but the original hell had been created before mortals and their stereotypes existed. The original hell was, to borrow a phrase, the real thing.
Kami had been there once before, to visit someone.
A small white oval arced through the air. The capsule fell to the floor, bounced once and exploded in a flash of light that was accompanied by the soft hissing noise of air escaping the container. A shape that hadn't been there before hovered above the floor.
Android 17 turned just in time to see a heavily reinforced door slam shut. He was, by now, frantic. Being capsulized had not been a pleasant experience. It made you feel... Alone. So very alone. Nobody heard you if you were inside a capsule. Nobody saw you. Nobody screamed and ran away in terror. There was nothing to do in a capsule, no reason to even exist. You were just a solitary speck struggling uselessly against the web of your own insignificance.
It took every ounce of discipline Android 17 had to resist the urge to attack the door while screaming that he didn't want to be left alone anymore. There were humans out there, he knew. He could sense their energy. It wouldn't do to go showing emotions around humans because emotions made you vulnerable. Robots weren't supposed to have emotions.
It's got to be a programming error. 17 tried to assure himself but even his mental voice was stammering.
Programming errors were another strictly human thing. Android 17 didn't like to remind himself that he'd been built by people because it made him wonder what they might have messed up. Kami forbid but what if they'd forgotten something important? He'd only been activated for seven days now, it was too soon to be sure that everything had been put together right.
The word 'Kami' caused so many syntax errors that 17s computerized brain threatened to shut down. He wondered where on Earth he'd heard that word anyway and decided that it must have been something his victims had used yesterday.
He was alone inside a windowless room. The walls, floor and ceiling were extra thick - Soundproof. 17 thought - and the only decorations were scattered burn marks and numerous dents. There was one door. A small computer console was set into a panel on the wall next to the door.
Above the console was a digital screen that currently read '0 g'.
What the...? Android 17 had the sinking feeling that he was about to find out.
He was right. The numbers went straight from '0 g' to '10 g' which dragged 17 to the floor with a metallic clang. No more hovering. Simply standing up was a challenge. The humans were using a computer against him! Android 17 had never felt so betrayed in all his life - nevermind that he'd only been alive for a week.
As he was trying to aim an attack at the treacherous computer, the numbers jumped again. Straight from '10 g' to '20 g'. So much for standing up.
Outside of the gravity chamber, Gohan hovered near Dr. Briefs shoulder. It was dark outdoors so Gohan was using his orange aura in the same way that normal people used flashlights. "Did Vegeta know that you had a remote control?"
"I think he knew." Dr. Briefs said. Then he blinked and glanced towards Gohan. "Don't get me wrong, I didn't use the remote against him."
"Oh?" Gohan sounded relieved.
"See this alarm? It lets me know whenever the gravity gets above three hundred and fifty in there." Dr. Briefs shook his head and smiled ruefully. "Vegeta might have been able to handle more pressure than that but the computers couldn't. Had to turn the system off before the parts melted."
The first gravity room that Dr. Briefs had ever built had come with a top setting of 100g. Goku had put the design to the test four years ago, on his way to Namek-sei, and the spaceship containing the gravity room had held together just fine until the planet had exploded.
At Vegetas less than subtle request, Dr. Briefs had built the second gravity chamber - which was the one that he and Gohan were beside now. Dr. Briefs had improved the design so that the computers could withstand 200g and then had upgraded it again, to withstand 350g.
Dr. Briefs was reluctant to take the gravity room beyond 350g. The potential health risks of such intense training far outweighed any benefit that Dr. Briefs could conceive of. Not to mention that it would also be a huge expense to research, discover and construct materials that could withstand 400g for long periods of time. Plus there were the side effects to the surrounding area. You couldn't just suddenly cause localized gravity changes without having side effects to the surrounding area. For example, the gravity room was sitting at the center of a deep crater. It hadn't always been.
Vegeta had frequently claimed that the gravity room broke too easily. But Dr. Briefs was a world renown genius. Nothing that Dr. Briefs built broke unless that's what he had designed it to do. So the gravity room had never really been broken, it had just gotten shut off by remote control.
"And the further away I could be when the gravity room shut down, the less likely I was to get yelled at by a certain warrior." Dr. Briefs finished.
"Aha." Gohan admired the remote control then became anxious again. "Errr... Does Bulma have one of these as well?"
Dr. Briefs thought about that for a few moments before he answered. "I suppose she might." He admitted. "Remotes aren't that hard to build." His fingers lingered over the buttons. "Now then. How well constructed is this android? Is 20g going to be enough to make it short circuit?"
"I don't know." Gohan sighed. "Yesterday they took everything I could throw at them in Super Saiyan mode."
"Really? Hmmm." Dr. Briefs hesitated. "They wouldn't happen to have been made by the Red Ribbon Army, would they?"
"How'd you guess?"
"Androids are not the sort of thing just anyone can build." Dr. Briefs said, pressing some buttons. "I keep track of my competition."
The universe is filled with galaxies. Absolutely bursting with planets. Beyond billions of them. Worlds where you could watch three sunsets at once and worlds where there were no suns at all. Worlds where the grass was naturally neon purple and worlds where the oceans were naturally filled with skim milk. Worlds where the gravity was so intense that the tallest thing on the planet was the dirt and worlds where the gravity was so relaxed that trees grew in midair.
The universe was a vast, vast place. Anything that could be imagined - and quite a few things that couldn't - had its place in existence.
Which begs the question, why Earth? Why should any of the gods take a special interest in Earth, of all planets? Why should Death incarnate choose to reside on Earth? Korin could have lived anywhere. Why Earth?
It was a little known fact that Earth was one of the youngest inhabited planets in existence. Older worlds lacked the energy and charisma that Earth seemed to radiate. Being younger, Earthlings were a tad more openminded than several of their alien peers - which afforded creatures like Korin a broader spectrum of influence.
On almost any other world, Korin would have been plain old Death. No hobbies, no friends, no imagination, no sense of humor. He would have still had a family but it wouldn't have been the same. Which, in retrospect, might have been a good thing.
When the Two had created More, Death had been one of the concepts brought into existence. Four other concepts had been born at around the same time. Being the eldest of the batch, Death had swiftly been entrusted with the care of his four siblings. Technically Death had tons of siblings - he was related to all the other offspring of the Two - but in his own mind, Death felt most attached to the four he'd grown up with because he knew them better. He'd raised them, kept track of them, lived close to them. The nickname Korin had been a gift from one of his siblings. Feng.
Mister Popos words replayed in Korins mind. "Just be careful all right?" The engineer had said, "They've already got Feng."
Feng. Korin shuddered as he darted across the astral plane, on his way to greet another dead soul. They would have to get Feng.
With so many mortals dying already, Korins paws were effectively tied. He couldn't abandon his duties - not even to warn his other siblings of the pending danger. Still, Korin had done everything in his power to make sure the others found out.
"Ugh..." Chaozu blearily rejoined the world of the conscious. Upon opening his eyes, he tensed. He was wrapped in a blanket and curled up on a very comfortable couch but the room wasn't familiar.
Usually it wouldn't have been much of a task for Chaozu to just look at someones mind and figure out what the heck had happened. But something in this room was different.
Humans have limited perception ranges. The best example of this is the accurately named dog whistle. The whistle makes a sound - dogs can hear it - but the average human can't hear it because the sound isn't in their hearing range. Taste, sight, touch, hearing, smell, energy detection - humanoids had very definite ranges for all of these senses. Anything too far above or below the range would be imperceptible.
Chaozu was a god and as such, he lacked a limited perception range. He could detect things that even Saiyans and Nameks wouldn't notice. Like variable magic fields. Without sitting up Chaozu pinched the bridge of his nose, pulled the blanket over his head and tried to figure out how he'd ended up at migraine central. "Ugh..." It was all that Chaozu currently felt like saying. He felt as though he'd been attacked by a hockey team armed with sledgehammers. Variable magic fields and overly sensitive psychic talents were not a good combination.
Someone poked the blanket. "Hey, are you alive under there?"
Chaozu was tempted to ask if they could check back later but instead he pulled the blanket down enough to see who was speaking to him.
"Why'd you faint?" Gohan wondered and Chaozu realized that being tense had probably made his ki spike enough for the demi-saiyan to take notice.
"Delayed reaction." Chaozu grumbled cryptically.
"...reaction to what?"
Yesterday. Chaozu thought but he knew that answer wouldn't make much sense to anyone mortal and he didn't particularly care to explain.
Chaozu was saved from having to think of a reply by the appearance of Bulma. She looked like she'd seen better days. For a few moments Bulma just stood in the doorway with the dragonball radar clasped tightly in one hand, scowling at the world in general. She radiated enough anger to make Gohan drop into a more defensive stance. Chaozu was half-expecting her to power up and go ballastic.
Instead she stepped forward and spoke, choking on the words in her outrage. "An android?" Bulma twitched. "A ROBOT? Why didn't someone come to get ME?"
"We didn't know what we were up against until we got there." Gohan explained as calmly as he could manage. "And by then it was too late."
Bulma wasn't listening. "But I could've taken that stupid hunk of metal apart and..."
Gohan interrupted her rant. "You still can. Chaozu caught one. Your father's got it trapped in the gravity chamber."
"My father?" Bulma snorted as she stomped quickly through the room, headed for the back door. "He wouldn't know a parabola from a hyperbola! How could you leave him with an android?"
Chaozu blinked. "A what from a what?"
"Math talk." Gohan informed him.
"Oh."
Bulma stopped at the edge of the room and pivoted on her heels. "Who else is dead?" She demanded.
"Vegeta. Piccolo. Kami. Krillen. Yamucha. Tenshinhan. Yajirobe." Gohan sighed wearily, sounding increasingly distant as the memories replayed in his head. "Oh, and a girl named Videl. And a lot of other people too but I don't know their names..."
"If you have an atlas," Chaozu added helpfully, "you can bring it up to date by erasing South Capital City."
Bulma stared at them both in disbelief while the weight of these words tried to sink in. "You've got to be kidding."
"We're not." Chaozu said.
"You mean, you two are IT? All the other fighters are..."
"Basically."
"Oh wonderful." Bulma growled, her voice full of sarcasm. In addition to not believing that a ten year old boy and a weird midget could survive anything that had defeated Vegeta, sarcasm was one of Bulmas coping skills. Talking aloud was one of her other coping skills. As she was stomping outdoors Bulma muttered the first random thing that came to mind. "What the hell was Yajirobe doing there anyway?"
Amid the clouds of heaven...
What the hell was I doing there anyway? Yajirobe wondered.
Sure, he was about eight hundred times more dangerous than the average person and a trained samurai on top of that but he didn't often turn up for fights. Yajirobe had better things to do with his life and besides, his presence wasn't usually needed. And that was fine. Yajirobe had been perfectly content to stay out of battles. He felt too old to save the world and too young to die and...
He hadn't been heartless though. He'd known the risks when he'd left the tower. But what else should he have done? Yajirobe had no problem with staying out of the battles when the other warriors were winning but he wasn't about to stand by and let his friends get slaughtered. Even the ones that weren't really his friends, he wasn't going to stand by and let anyone defending Earth get slaughtered. He liked Earth too much.
Still, Yajirobe hadn't intended to fight. That was just common sense. What was he supposed to do against something that had already killed Vegeta?
Yajirobe was not a coward. He was Deaths best friend for crimineys sake, that wasn't the sort of title any coward could earn. Yajirobe simply lacked both the self-confidence and the raw power to honestly believe that he could make a difference anymore. So all that Yajirobe had been trying to do yesterday was deliver both senzu beans and an important message to the other warriors. He'd just had the misfortune to cross paths with the androids first.
He had lasted about five minutes against the robotic menances. He'd spent four and half minutes being insulted and then had come thirty seconds of anguish. The next thing Yajirobe had known, his spirit had been outside of Lord Enmas office. Waiting in line to be judged.
Yajirobe wouldn't have been comforted to learn that most of the other android victims hadn't fared any better. Quite a few had fared worse.
Could have at least given me a warning. Yajirobe thought at the mental image of his best friend.
And then he admitted to himself that no, Korin really couldn't have given him a warning. Because if Korin had warned him then he wouldn't have left the tower and the timeline would have been changed or something like that. Everything happened for a reason. If he was dead then he was meant to be dead... but...
WHY? He just didn't understand it. Yajirobe suspected that the message he'd been told to give the other warriors had something to do with the reason for his being dead. But Korin had been speaking in riddles lately. Knowing the message and knowing what it actually meant were two completely separate things.
Yajirobe surveyed the vast gold-tinted cloudscape and tried to pick out the familiar energy signatures. He knew the message. Maybe they'd know what it meant.
The glass elevator sank into darkness. No fire, no ice, no swamps. No chains or whips or blood or large sharp objects or ugly monsters or screaming. Just darkness. Sheer, utter, horizonless darkness.
Bardock blinked. "This...?"
Kami nodded.
Due to his being mortal, the concept of the original hell was somewhat over Bardocks head. "But...? This is IT? Are you sure?"
"What do you see out there?" Kami said quietly, pointing with his wooden cane.
Bardock stared at the darkness for a while, trying to see something in it. Then he shook his head. "Nothing. Just darkness."
"But how do you KNOW that it's darkness?"
Now Bardock was staring at the Namekian god with increasing levels of horror and understanding.
"You recognize the darkness outside because it's also inside. Behind the eyes." Kami murmured as he stood up. "Existence is the original hell."
It was also the most personal hell and one that nobody ever truly escaped from, not even immortals. There was darkness inside and there was darkness outside. To escape both at once would require a creature to stop existing. And if you had to cease existing, then did it really count as an escape?
I've been running too long. Kami told himself firmly. He'd been over the plan in his mind a hundred thousand times. He had to do this - he was the Kami of Earth after all and Earth needed him now more than it had in a very long time. He wasn't about to let the planet down.
Without further hesitation, Kami spoke. "Either protect Vegeta or wake him up but don't just sit there. And don't be afraid either if you can help it, the ones down here feed off other peoples fear."
Bracing himself, Kami resolutely pressed a button and allowed the elevator doors to slide open. He shouted into the darkness. "DAIMIO?"
