A/N: As promised, for those of you who were not comfortable with the adult themes in the last chapter, here's a recap. Vegeta and Co. arrived back from the purge to find out that the mission hadn't been executed as planned. Someone (Yamcha) had failed to take out a city and it had caused some financial blowback to Kali. As you can imagine, she was not pleased but, rather than killing Yamcha, she decided to kill Chiaotzu in a rather grisly fashion. Bulma's detainment turned out to be a result of the botched purge mission and not her hacking. She remains undiscovered. She and Vegeta have a tender/steamy moment. Now... on ward.

Chapter 10

Somewhere in the deepest, darkest corner of the Geminon citadel, an ancient ritual was underway. A cloaked figure chanted in a long dead language and worshiped at the altar of a forgotten evil. At the center of the sinister sacrament was a woman. She lay astride a creature with the body of a man and the head of a horned beast. It bucked and bayed beneath her as she raised a blade above its breast, poised to strike.

"Rise Baphomet! Hear my call!" the woman plead. The air itself was alive with a dark unseen presence. It whipped her hair about her face and rattled the chains holding the beast to the altar. "Speak my name in the undying tongue and I shall have everlasting life!"

The creature raged and strained against its shackles, snorting and foaming at the mouth. Suddenly and without warning, the dagger fell, and it let out an unholy scream. The women pushed down slowly until the blade was buried to the hilt. The beast gagged and spat blood past its forked tongue, writhing in agony until she gently twisted the weapon and it went still.

"Whoo!" she shivered as she leapt off the dead animal. "I love that old-time religion!" she sang, raising her bloody hands before her face, examining them, before looking down at the rest of her body. "Am I supposed to feel different?"

"The effects should be immediate, Lady Kali." The cloaked figure lowered his hood and bowed as he addressed his mistress. He was a scabby looking man who looked like he had spent the better part of his life involved in one kind of malevolent pursuit or another.

"Should be?"

"I've done my best to translate the Verbis Aeternum but ancient Piconese is an extremely complex language. There are multiple interpretations of…"

"I hired you because you're supposed to be an expert in all of this voodoo crap!"

"I am a high priest of the Cult of Byzantium, a member of the Coven of Capra, and a necromancer of great skill. Please believe that I exist only to serve you and all of my knowledge of the dark arts is at your disposal. For you are the great evil that my people have foretold for generations. You are the dragon that will engulf all the universe in flames and…"

"Great. So, am I immortal or not?"

"The text calls for the repetition of the sacred verses and a sacrifice of a creature born to man and beast. The mortal who completes this ritual will be granted eternal life by the demon Baphomet."

"And we did all that…"

"Yes. Your science department produced the creature via gene splicing. We recited the Piconese scripture. According to the text, you should be immortal."

"Only one way to know for sure," she shrugged as she ran the edge of the knife she was gripping from the tip of her finger and across her palm. When she came to her wrist, she dug the blade into her skin with purpose, causing a fount of deep crimson to stream all the way down her arm to stain the satin of her gown.

"Well, would you look at that," she said, clenching her fist, causing the blood to gush from her wrist in a torrent. "I'm bleeding out."

The man stood in a shocked stupor as he watching the life drain from his mistress.

"A little help here!" she demanded as she pressed the satin of her gown to the wound. The underling immediately sprang into action and pressed a rather smelly herb concoction to her wrist, staunching the flow of blood and leaving behind no trace of the injury.

"Explain shit stain," she grit through clenched teeth at the terrified priest.

"We recreated the ritual exactly." He unfurled the ancient dusty scroll he had been reading from and poured over it again. "The only thing I can think of…"

"Yes?" the empress said testily, crossing her arms across her chest.

"The word for 'life' and 'fertility' are the same in ancient Piconese. It is possible that the ritual is intended to grant the subject eternal youth, to remain in the peak years of fertility for all time."

Kali fixed a deadly stare on the man, and he cowered under her gaze.

"My lady, it is my understanding that you wish to achieve eternal life. The ritual we have performed tonight has brought you one step closer to that goal," but she continued to look at him as if he were something nasty on the bottom of her shoe. "If I have displeased you in some way, if I have said something to earn you ire, I beg you to rip out my unworthy tongue."

"Gimme," she said, holding out her hand expectantly. The man approached hesitantly, hoping against hope that she hadn't interpreted his words literally. He shook with relief and retreated as Kali yanked the scroll from his hands rather than his tongue from his head.

"Do you know what this is?" she asked, not waiting for a reply. "This is absolutely fucking useless to me!" she exclaimed, ripping the artifact to shreds. "I could wipe my ass with every eternal youth spell you occult types have tried to sell me!"

"But my lady!" The priest fell to his knees, groveling before the empress. "I can see now, it is clear, you look unmistakably youthful! You are positively radiant!"

"Of course, I'm radiant, you twat! I haven't aged a godsdamn day in three hundred years!"

"Please. Lady Kali. We will find another way," the sorcerer prostrated himself before his mistress as he begged for mercy. "I can help you obtain true immortality, but I just need more time!"

Kali rolled her eyes as she advanced on her groveling minion. "That's what they all say," she murmured in disappointment as she snapped his neck.

It was unsettling how quickly things returned to normal after the incident in the throne room. Tien remained his stoic, introverted self in the wake of Chiaotzu's death, refusing to share his grief with anyone, except maybe Yamcha. Remarkably, the two men had actually grown closer after everything was said and done, eager to make amends for the damage they'd caused the other. The rest of the group carried on much as they had before, regarding the grisly event as just another drop in the enormous bucket of trauma they'd been shouldering for months.

Bulma remained tense for some time after her successful hack into the classified database. She'd been convinced she was caught red handed that day she'd been taken into custody. It hadn't even occurred to her that her short-lived detainment and her covert work were unrelated until Kali spelled it out. She'd miraculously made it out unscathed but remained paranoid that, any minute, they would correct their mistake. It had taken her several days to work up the nerve to analyze the data she'd collected and form it into some kind of cohesive plan.

"It's not going to be easy," she whispered to Vegeta in their bunk, long after lights out.

"Of course not. It's not like the gods owe us one or anything."

He held her against his chest as it rose and fell steadily and wiped the thin line of perspiration from her brow. They'd just finished making love and he'd hoped she'd allow him a few moments of silence but she'd been too eager to start plotting their escape.

"There's no way to remove the chip. It's just not possible without significant risk of brain damage. But I think I can partially deactivate them with the access codes I found."

"What do you mean partially?"

"I can increase the ki caps, maybe even remove them entirely. I can disable that awful neural stimulus Jaeko used on Gohan. I think I can even disrupt the location beacon long enough for us to get the hell out of here and far enough away that they won't be able to track us."

"And how long will it take you to do it?"

"It depends. Since I'm not going to go digging around in your skull, I'll have to connect to the chip wirelessly. The only way to do that is with a devise recognized by the PTO's network."

"That shouldn't be a problem. Don't you have access to a computer at work?"

"Yes, but it would only take seconds for them to trace it back to me. I tried rerouting through a proxy but…" The fingers that had previously been drawing invisible figure eights on Vegeta's chest went still as she remembered her nameless coworker's brains splattered all over the office window. "I can't do that again."

"So, what are you suggesting we do?"

"I would need a decommissioned devise. Something reported as lost or stolen would have its network access suspended. I could reestablish the connection and they wouldn't even know where to look for me."

"Lost or stolen? You mean black market."

"I'm sure it won't be that hard to find. I've heard the gossip in the mess hall. Soldiers strip their pods bare, sell everything they can to turn a profit, then report the thing as damaged during a mission."

"And I suppose you're expecting me to find this thing for you," he huffed in mild annoyance.

"You could look around for something on your next mission," she suggested. "Where are they sending you anyway?"

"Some bug planet out in the far west quadrant."

"Ew, bugs?"

"Giant ones. Big ugly cockroaches," he teased as he walked his fingers down her bare back like a five-legged creepy-crawly and sniggered when she squirmed in disgust.

"Are you going to tell the others once you ship out?"

He knew she was eager to tell her friends about her breakthrough, but he'd convinced her to keep it between the two of them, at least for now.

"No."

"I don't know why we have to keep this secret," she said as she turned over onto her side and fluffed her pillow. "Don't you think they deserve a morale boost after everything that's happened?"

"We'll tell them when we have something to tell," he deflected, trying to dodge her elbow in his face as she attempted to find a comfortable position on the narrow cot. "If this plan doesn't work out, what do you think that will do to their morale?"

He didn't want to tell her his concern was less for the deterioration of their optimism and more about the possibility of a renewed rebellion. He'd just barely convinced them of the necessity of following orders and obeying their captors. If they knew an escape plan was in the works, it might make them sloppy. Or worse, it might make them impatient and irrational. They couldn't afford another fuck up like their last purge mission.

"Have you found anything about Trunks?" he asked hesitantly. His certainty that his son was still alive was tested and waned a little every day that he searched for his ki and felt nothing. He'd thought maybe Bulma would succeed where he failed but it seemed even her brilliance was not enough to bring their boy back to them.

"I'm still working on that."

"We can't go anywhere until we know where he is. Even if he's dead we can't leave until we know."

"Don't say that," she turned and rebuked him in a whispered hiss. "Don't even think it. He's alive. I would know if he was gone. I would feel it," she insisted, tearing up at even the suggestion that she would never see her baby again.

"I shouldn't have said that," he recanted and pulled her closer to him. "He's alive. I know that."

"There was something in the secured files. The whole system shut down when I tried to access it. It has something to do with Saiyans. Does Project Bunker sound familiar to you?"

"Never heard of it."

"Whatever it is, that's where we'll find Trunks and Goten," she said with conviction. "What do you think it is? What… what do you think they're doing to them?"

"If they're important enough to Kali to keep under such tight security then I'm sure they're being well taken care of," he soothed into her ear, hoping against hope that he was telling her the truth. "Try to get some sleep."

They shipped out the next morning with an ass kicking and a stern warning from Jaeko that anything less than a flawlessly executed mission would result in their grisly, painful deaths. Vegeta made no attempt to haggle on payment this time. Their wages from the last mission had been docked by half but he was not about to press the issue. They were lucky to have been paid at all. Frankly, they were lucky to be alive.

Their second purge went off without a hitch. The population was ki wielding but primitive. They'd neutralized any real threats with the same electromagnetic wave that felled them before the attack on Earth. Culling the civilian population seemed to be far less psychologically taxing on the earthlings this time around as the species more closely resembled enormous insects than any kind of hominid. Humans, Vegeta had learned, could be truly barbarous under the right circumstances. They were capable of even the most heinous acts of torture and slaughter if they found the victims to be sufficiently dissimilar to themselves. This race of people spoke in a chirping language rather than Standard and it was hard to interpret the noises they made as pleas for mercy, though that's what they were. These creatures were sentient, had homes, families, and an organized society. But this time around, they barely needed any encouragement to complete their mission.

That didn't mean Vegeta was going to be as careless as he was the last time. He'd paired them up before sending them off to their respective sectors, an added layer of oversight just in case one of them decided that giant bugs were people too. He'd done a thorough sweep of the entire planet and scanned for any possible signs of life, including communication frequencies, before he was satisfied the job was done.

While the rest of the squad purged, Vegeta was busy hunting for Kali's latest magic trinket. When he found the thing, it was guarded by a legion of the planet's most formidable warriors, though they could do nothing but writhe and squirm as they fought against the incapacitating wave emanating from the beacon he'd released in the planet's orbit. He'd almost felt sorry for them as he collected their race's most prized possession right from under their noses. It was not a good death for any warrior. He'd killed them cleanly at least.

Vegeta looked down to the floor of his pod at the thing that had been so heavily guarded. It was disgusting. A glowing, squirming sack of what looked to be larvae. He'd been hesitant to touch it at first, fearing the contents would escape their enclosure and crawl up his arm. A whole planet full of giant cockroaches were fine by him but worms… that was something else entirely.

The autopilot pinged and alerted him of their imminent touchdown. They were stopping over on some backwater to refuel the pods. The planet was on the outer edge of the empire and barely populated. It was so remote, it hadn't even warranted naming, appearing as Planet G-21155 on the navigation system.

The pods landed smoothly and Vegeta stepped out onto the deck to count heads. They numbered seven this time, now that Eighteen had been returned from her assignment as a guinea pig. He looked around the docking station for an attendant and saw a young man approaching at a leisurely pace.

"What can I do ya for?" he drawled, rolling the toothpick in his mouth from one side to the other.

"They need to be refueled," Vegeta responded, motioning to the pods on the landing strip behind him, still smoking from atmospheric reentry.

"That'll take a while. These babies take premium dilithium crystals. Can't just plug a hose in um and guzzle 'um full a gallium, you know."

"How long is it going to take?"

"I can have 'em ready by tomorrow."

Vegeta narrowed his eyes at the man distrustfully. He didn't like being delayed and he liked the idea of leaving the pods with this slippery little shit even less.

"I'll expect them to be fueled and de-radiated by no later than 0800."

"Sure thing, mister. And how do you intend to pay?"

Vegeta pulled the fuel requisition order from his breastplate and handed it to the attendant. The kid huffed and folded the paper in half dismissively. He couldn't exactly blame him for being peeved. The order meant he was obligated to refuel seven pods with premium fuel for nothing but loose change on the credit, to be reimbursed at some unknown date by the Empire. He was going to have to grease the wheels if he wanted to return the following day to pods that hadn't been stripped down to the metal frames.

Vegeta reached into his pocket again and pulled out a hundred credit chip. He tossed it to the attendant.

"Make sure those pods are in one piece when I return, and I'll double that tomorrow."

"Sure thing!"

It was not a small chunk of change, especially considering they'd been paid next to nothing for their last job, but it was less costly than the beating he would take from Jaeko if he had to return to Geminon in a commandeered craft and explain how he'd lost seven pods on his way.

"Is there a place to stay around here," Vegeta asked the attendant, who he assumed was a local based on the twang in his accented Standard. "Somewhere cheap."

"Only one inn on this planet, The Buckhorn Tavern. Tell Dolly I sent ya. She'll treat 'cha real nice."

Vegeta followed the man's directions and they headed for the center of town. The planet was bleak and desolate with the exception of one small strip of land that had been terraformed to be barely habitable. The locals they passed on their way were just as wretched as their planet. It was a misfortune to live in a place like this, one that was inherited from parents and passed on to children. The majority of people who ever stepped foot on this rock were soldiers, refueling to get to or from somewhere more important, or criminals trying conduct shady dealings somewhere no one was watching. On this trip Vegeta was both. He kept his eye open for a pawn shop or consignment broker. Every planet like this had one, a place you could go to buy and sell things you weren't supposed to have. As they entered the tavern, he took note of the green store front across the main street with gold credit symbols painted in the window.

"Welcome to Buckhorn, sugars." They were greeted by a buxom older woman with a voluminous blonde wig. "I'm Dolly. How can I be of service to you handsome gentleman?" she said, waving a tattered lace fan over her plump face, "and beautiful lady," she added, when she noticed Eighteen.

"We need beds for the night," Vegeta requested gruffly.

"We certainly have plenty of those, and some of the prettiest girls this side of Deadwood Nebula to keep them warm for you." The madam pulled back a red velvet curtain revealing a smoky saloon. The scantily clad women interspersed amongst the carousing, hard drinking clientele perked up and posed salaciously when they saw the drape drawn. "Fair prices for fair ladies. Lotta and Lola are double the rate," she said, motioning to a scaly woman with two heads on her shoulders.

"Just the rooms," Vegeta said, looking pointedly at the men behind him.

"Sure thing," she said, ushering them through past the curtain. "Make yourselves at home while we get your rooms ready. Someone will be around to bring you a warm meal and a stiff drink."

Vegeta found them a table near the bar. When the waitress came around, he ordered them all the cheapest, heartiest thing on the menu.

"And maybe a round of," Yamcha stopped to flash his most debonair smile at the girl, "what would you recommend?"

"Well," she smiled and bat her eyes, "the amber rye has a nice smooth finish and is strong enough to kick your teeth in."

"Seven of those please," he ordered with a wink.

The service was quick. The waitress left and returned to the table a few minutes later with their drinks.

Gohan picked up the glass of brown liquid set before him, trying his best to hide his excitement, as if being served alcohol in an establishment of ill repute was old hat to the teenager. He sniffed the drink discreetly and readied himself to gulp down the fowl smelling concoction.

"Gohan," Piccolo interjected before the adult beverage could pass his lips. "I think you should let someone else have that."

"Oh, come on," Yamcha advocated. "He's practically an adult by now. How old are you, Gohan? Eighteen, nineteen?"

"Fifteen," Piccolo said, an edge of warning in his tone to both Yamcha and Gohan, who was still eyeing the drink longingly.

"Sixteen, if you count the year in the time chamber," Gohan said defiantly, setting the glass down but not yet willing to take his hand off of it.

"Well I don't count it," Piccolo answered.

"I'm sure one drink isn't going to kill him," Krillin chimed in, and to the Namekian's immense displeasure, gently elbowing Piccolo in the ribs. He huffed in annoyance, accepting his defeat and sipping from his own liquor.

"You can have one," he emphasized, glaring at the boy, cautioning him against abusing the indulgence he was being granted. Gohan didn't need to be told twice and immediately took a much larger gulp than he was prepared to handle, stifling his grimace of disgust lest he break the illusion of grownup sophistication.

Another round of drinks followed the first, though Gohan still meekly sipped from his first glass under Piccolo's watchful eye. The stiffly poured drinks on their empty stomachs were enough to lift their spirits and loosen Vegeta's tightfisted grip on their budget, a move that Vegeta expected was intentional on the part of the establishment. They ended up ordering several more plates of food and far too many rounds of drinks. Within a few hours, Krillin was sitting on his Wife's lap while they necked like teenagers while Tien and Yamcha were drunkenly slurring their song requests at the house band, trying to get them to play something called "Freebird".

"I think it's time to switch to water," Piccolo remarked, as he rose from the table and stumbled to the bar to close their tab. Vegeta looked over to Gohan and pretended not to notice as the boy snuck sips out the remnants of half finished drinks strewn around the table.

"Hey there soldier," a tiny, vibrantly pink skinned girl sat next to Gohan, close enough that her knees touched his. She ran her fingers through his course hair as she fluttered her eyelashes at him. "Haven't seen you around here before. How about you and me go upstairs so I can give you a proper welcome?"

"Umm…" he stammered, trying to form something resembling a coherent response. He looked over to Vegeta, as if he might be able to remind him of the answer to the lady's very simple question but the other Saiyan pretended to be occupied by the cold food still left on his plate. He watched the boy from the corner of his eye as he turned a shade of pink, almost as garish as the girl who had since moved to sit in his lap. Gohan had obviously never experienced anything so forward from a woman and looked caught somewhere between abject terror and stupefied wonder. Vegeta could practically hear the gears of his higher brain function grinding to a halt and the mechanisms of his other brain sputtering to life. He was about to interject and remind the horny little bastard that, whatever the girl was offering would come with a hefty invoice, but he stayed quiet. This moment was something of a vital juncture in a young man's life and Vegeta, for some unknown reason, felt disinclined to embarrass the kid. He also felt a small twinge of regret for not having better prepared him.

It was only a few years ago he'd been roped into giving Gohan what Earthlings colloquially called "the talk." Bulma relayed that the boy's mother felt the information was best discussed man to man and Piccolo had opted out, claiming to have no knowledge of such things, though he suspected that was just a convenient excuse to save the Namekian from an embarrassing discussion. Vegeta had awkwardly explained the mechanics of how men and women fit together and the basics of reproduction, at some point realizing he wasn't telling the boy anything he hadn't already gleaned from an anatomy book. What he had been totally unprepared for was Gohan steering the conversation away from the sterile scientific facts to the art of wooing women. The kid had looked at him as if he should have all the answers, much like he had moments ago.

The truth was Vegeta knew next to nothing about pursuing women. He'd never had to do it before. Since the time he was Gohan's age, maybe even younger, there had never been a shortage of women offering themselves to him on some kind of transactional basis. The first time he'd ever seen a pair of breasts he'd been twelve. Nappa had paid a bar wench to take her top off for Vegeta and Raditz to 'find out if their willies were working yet.' His first sexual experience had been in an establishment much like this one when Raditz bought him a girl for his fifteenth birthday. Not every woman he'd slept with had been a professional, but they'd all had some expectation of remuneration, whether it be cash, status, or protection. Bulma was the first woman he'd ever had an interest in that didn't want anything from him. She was the first woman he'd ever had to actively seduce.

Vegeta remembered how flustered he'd been trying to think of some nugget of wisdom to impart on the boy and feeling like nothing in his limited experience would ever be relevant. Gohan, he'd imagined at the time, would learn what sex was all about with some flat chested debutant in the back seat of her father's car, not in a way station whore house like he had. He couldn't have predicted that Gohan's adolescence would so closely mirror his own and now Vegeta found himself wishing he could go back and have that conversation all over again.

"I um… I'm alright. I shouldn't. Thanks anyway though… You're very pretty… I just…"

"That's alright honey. How about a dance instead?" she giggled at his nervous stuttering, "On the house."

She took her time lifting herself from Gohan's lap and led him out to the dance floor where he placed his awkwardly long arms around her waist and began to sway to the music.

"I'm gone for one minute," Vegeta heard Piccolo grumble behind him as he set down his glass and the room keys he'd retrieved from the bar.

"Relax grandma. He's fine." Vegeta responded with a smirk.

Piccolo sat in the chair next to him and observed the scene of his ward clumsily two stepping with the girl as she dragged his hands from her waist to rest on her rear end.

"So, are we going to address the elephant in the room?" Piccolo asked.

"Good gods. I did the best I could with the little hormone monster. You know you could have talked to him yourself if you…"

"I was talking about Bulma's breakthrough."

Oh. So, he knew about that. Of course, he did. It was impossible to keep anything from that nosey asshole.

"How much did you hear?"

"Far more than I ever wanted or needed to." Piccolo responded, taking a long sip of his cloudy glass of water. "I agree it's best not to discuss it with the rest of them until we have something concrete to work with."

Vegeta blushed at the confession that the Namekian had been privy to his and Bulma's nighttime activities and was grateful for the segue back to the matter at hand. "So, you'll keep it to yourself for now? Including from young Casanova over there?" he said, nodding towards Gohan and taking Piccolo at his word when he nodded in confirmation.

"We're on the lookout for a decommissioned network devise," Vegeta reiterated, whispering conspiratorially to the man next to him.

"Did you see that pawn shop when we walked in?" Piccolo asked.

"I suppose that's as good a place to start looking as any." Vegeta rose to his feet but stumbled before he could correct his balance, just now realizing how drunk he really was. "You coming?"

"I don't know who needs my supervision more right now, him or you," Piccolo said, rolling his eyes and turning back to check on Gohan.

"He'll be fine," Vegeta waved dismissively. "If we find what we're looking for, I'll need someone to stand around looking huge and menacing so I can negotiate."

Piccolo took one last distrustful look towards the dance floor before following Vegeta across the street.

A/N: Thanks again to bitchytimemachine for taking the time to read through my mess before its posted and for being a very patient sounding board as I work through this story. In case you missed it last chapter, I shared some gorgeous fanart I commissioned from Rutbisbe. Unfortunately, due to recent changes at Tumblr, the post was flagged for depicting "female presenting nipples"... (¬_¬). So you can now find it on my Twitter brinker6. It's the only thing on there as I've never actually used Twitter before but it looks like I'll be getting some use out of the account now that the exodus from Tumblr has begun. As always, I am forever grateful for your comments. Keep them coming!