-1Chapter Fourteen

That night, Hera sat up in the spare bedroom at Goku's house. She couldn't sleep. Too much had happened to her. Perhaps she was afraid if she slept she would miss something. Perhaps she was still wondering that if she fell asleep she would wake up and find it was all a dream. Dream or not, she didn't want it to end. And she didn't want to miss anything this world had to offer.

Giving up on ever falling asleep, Hera padded down the hall. She could hear snoring coming from two of the three rooms. She figured Goten was too small to snore yet, but if he grew up to be just like his father and older brother she hated to think what the sound of all three of them would be like!

Quietly, she opened the door and wandered outside. The sky was full of stars. Thin wisps of cloud were strung out here and there and the moon was half full. She took a deep breath and let the clean country air fill her lungs and clear her mind. Not too far away was a stream. Hera sat on a large rock and listened to the water gurgling by. She closed her eyes and sat very still. How long had it been since she'd done this? Far too long. Not since she left home for college.

For a moment she didn't move. Her breathing was very even. Then, she began to sway, back and forth, imperceptibly at first and then a bit harder. A breeze stirred up from deep within the woods. She felt it brush past her arms, through her long braid. It tickled her nose and made her smile. As the wind played around her, the leaves began to rustle. They yawned and swished, seemed to her ears to just be waking up after a long nap. The song that came to her was groggy, but it familiar. Yes, yes she could still do it! She could still understand the wind talking with the trees. Her heart elated, she listened as the woods told her tales of squirrels and foxes, rats and badgers, deer and rabbits. Of large, reptilian creatures she could only describe later as dinosaurs, though she knew that couldn't be right. But when had the wind been wrong before?

Probing deeper, the stream offered to her it's own tale, of Gohan fishing as a child, splashing and playing along it's banks. Of Goten and Trunks blasting rocks for fun and Chi-Chi yelling at them when they did the same to fish. It laughed and told her to be careful, people would think she was weird, spending all her time talking to the wind and a small stream. She smiled; Hera didn't care what people thought about her. Especially not here. People here could fly! She knew they were capable of much more interesting things than that, especially after all the stories Trunks and Gohan told her.

She bid farewell to the stream and turned her attention up. Up, up into the sky. The stars. They were her favorite. When she was small, she used to sneak outside and lay in the grass, watching the stars and the moon. That was when she first noticed she could hear them. It was a wonderful thing. She was so excited to tell her mother. Only her mother didn't think it was so great. She'd slapped Hera across the face and told her to stop lying. Things like that didn't happen. If she insisted on speaking of things like that her mother would make sure she went to counseling.

Hera shook her head clear. That was all in the past, she told herself. This was here and now. She was going to absorb as much beauty as she can. Just in case she had to go back. She didn't want to admit that it was a possibility, but what if her being there some how put this time in danger? She didn't want to harm her friends. She would gladly go back if it would keep them safe. But Trunks was here, from the future. No one made him go back.

Hera smiled as the first whisper of star song trickled through the night sky towards her. Yes. Trunks was still here. And if someone could come to the past from the future and stay, why couldn't someone from the past live in the future? Her smile broad, she let the songs of the stars engulf her. They were louder here, and much more pure than she'd ever imagined. Maybe the air is clearer in the future? She mused. She knew it was much more clear in the country than where she was from. O…to hear them sing on top of the Look Out? She wondered with a start how loud that would be. And didn't Gohan say the Dende admitted to being able to hear them as well?

Hera opened her eyes and stopped swaying. Someone was nearby. She could feel them. Staying still, she reached out deeper and found that whoever it was, was familiar to her. In a strange way. There was an unfamiliarity to it as well, as everything in this time had to her, but she was suddenly overwhelmed by the familiarity of what she was feeling.

She turned around and slid off the rock.

"Hello?" She whispered to the trees. "I know you're there. You may as well show yourself."

She didn't fell threatened. Had she, she would have run back to the house and awakened Goku. If he had saved the earth as many times as Gohan said, he could surely keep her safe from someone lurking in the trees.

A large shadow appeared, then stepped into the moonlight. It was Piccolo. Hera exhaled loudly, out of relief. "Piccolo! What are you doing spying on me?"

He walked a few steps closer to her and stopped. He was still wearing his turban and cape, his arms crossed over his chest. He was looking at her, not with the scowl she saw before, but with a probing look she recognized as the same one she had on her face when she was reaching for someone, something, trying to understand it better.

"Where did you learn to do that?" He asked finally, his voice deep like thunder.

"Do what?"

"Listen." He cocked his head to one side. The wind, which had stopped abruptly when she'd been alerted to his presence, crept back out from behind the trees, almost as if it was curious to see this Namek from the Look Out.

"I've always been able to do that. As long as my mother wasn't around, that is."

Piccolo kept starting at her. "Who taught you?"
"No one."

"Your mother?"
Hera laughed. "My mother? Please. She used to hit me if I mentioned anything out of the ordinary. Especially if I could do something out of the ordinary. I learned very quickly to keep most things to myself."

A thought occurred to her and she asked, "Can you hear them to? Gohan said he asked you once and you said there was enough noise in the world without hearing the stars too."

"I can hear them. All Nameks can."

Hera nodded. "I'm not Namek."

Piccolo said nothing. He walked closer to her, so close she had to look straight up to see his face. "You say you came from 100 years in the past?"
"Yes. I did."

"Have you been here before?"
"Um…I don't make it a habit of jumping through time."

"Have you ever met a Namek before yesterday?"

Hera shook her head, "No. Until yesterday I'd never even heard of one."

"Not even one named Kami?"
Hera was a bit taken back. There was the name again. "I must confess to you, Piccolo, that name sounds awfully familiar to me, but I don't know where I would have heard it before. No one I've ever known was named that. Everyone I ever came in contact with had boring names."

"Unlike you."

Hera smiled. "Yes. Unlike me. I've often wondered about that, to be honest. Why would my mother, who was so afraid and skeptical of things that were different, name me after the queen of the Greek deities. Especially since she'd changed her own name to Susan. "

"Good question." Piccolo grunted. "Maybe your father named you."

Hera laughed out loud, "My father could not have cared less if I'd died when I was born. I'm pretty sure it was my mother who named me."

Piccolo nodded. Finally he looked up at the moon. "I think you should come back to the Look Out. Soon. Dende has been looking in the files for any reason why you should not stay."

Hera asked nervously, "And has he found a reason?"

"No." He started to walk back into the woods.
"Have you?" She asked, hesitantly.

Piccolo stopped. He looked as if he was trying to pop his neck. He turned and looked at her. Then the strangest thing happened. Something about him changed. His facial expression softened, his eyes seemed to be looking at her from far, far away. And when he spoke it was not his voice at all but one she didn't recognize. It sounded as if it was coming from a dream. "No." And with that Piccolo turned and disappeared again into the trees from which he'd come.

Hera stood outside a bit longer, trying to figure her strange encounter out. Why would Piccolo, who seemed not to care too much about what earthlings did, come all the way from the Look Out to Goku's house in the middle of the night to talk to her? How had he known she would be outside at that moment? Maybe he had been there all day, watching the house, waiting for a moment to talk to her alone.

With a shiver, Hera turned back to the house and went inside. She sank under the covers and watched the wind continue to play through the leaves through the open window. As she drifted off to sleep, she heard the strange voice again. "No." Was all it had said, but it had been so distinctly different it shocked her. Must have been the wind. But as she was about to fall asleep another thought occurred to her. One that she would ask Gohan about in the morning. Maybe it was the old guardian, the one Gohan said Piccolo absorbed. Maybe he had spoken through Piccolo at that moment. But why? Why would an old guardian who now inhabited someone else's body speak to her in the middle of the night? And why, came her last thought, did that name Kami still seem so strangely familiar?