The Yamucha Chronicle

ooxoo

Part 21: Too many monsters

Gohan told me what was going on in the battles. I was told that future Trunks had returned. Strangely enough, future Trunks didn't recognize the two androids that had almost killed Goku, Yajirobe and I. Which meant - oh joy - there were more androids.

Apparently future Trunks, Piccolo, Krillen, Tenshinhan and Vegeta were out hunting for androids. But there was a catch. Future Trunks claimed that the androids had been designed for the sole purpose of killing Goku. So Gohan wanted me to stick around in case any of the androids came to his house. He made me promise to get his parents out of there if a battle started. Gohan thought he could hold out for long enough on his own to buy the other warriors time to arrive. Amazing, isn't it? Goku hadn't always been around and ChiChi hadn't always been easy to get along with yet Gohan was willing to risk himself for his parents like that.

I wanted to argue with the plan but I couldn't. I wanted to tell Gohan that he was just a kid, he should be the one getting away from the battle with his parents and I should be the one that was live bait for the androids. But...he was right. Even though he doubted himself sometimes, Gohan knew exactly what he was capable of. So if Gohan thought that he could hold off the androids then he probably could. That's all there is to it.

Do you realize how strong this makes Gohan? He'd seen one of the androids beating up his father. He'd watched Super Saiyan Vegeta trading blows with one of them. And yet it didn't intimidate him. Not at all. Gohan thought that he could hold out against more than one android on his own. I don't know when exactly Gohan officially reached the Super Saiyan level but sometimes I wonder if he'd reached the level before he was ten, without telling anyone. Or maybe he was just equal to Super Saiyan strength before he went Super Saiyan. I really don't know but it's kind of unnerving that any one person could have that sort of power.

ChiChi, Gohan and I spent a few hours listening to news reports on the radio and keeping a watchful vigil over Goku. Mostly the latter. Because with Gohan and Goku both at home, the radio - and most of their other appliances - went on the fritz. Goku seemed to be having nightmares. There were a few moments where I was convinced that the guy could blow things up while asleep. The medicine didn't appear to be having much effect.

Krillen and future Trunks arrived. They said that we had to move Goku to a safer location. Immediately. They thought we were easy targets at the Son House since there were three super strong evil androids out there now. Super strong? Wait, you mean the ones that almost killed me were the WEAK androids?! Oh wonderful...

Yea. I know. I should have been accustomed to the concept of our enemies always getting stronger. It's just that usually we had finished dealing with one enemy before the next enemy shows up. And you know, if I'm starting to feel absolutely useless at battles more often - what does that mean for the 'normal' people that I'm supposed to be helping to defend?

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not the strongest guy on the planet. But just for comparison, the average power level for buff people is between 2 and 5. The average for world-class martial artists is probably around 110. My power level is in the thousands. What I'm getting at is that with that kind power there is an obligation. You feel the need to defend everyone because they can't defend themselves and the simple fact is that there's a lot at stake. If these androids had defeated me so easily - if they had stomped Goku so easily - gah. 'Average' people were just going to be massacred. You have no idea how much guilt I still carry around every day because of that. If I had just been able to defeat those two androids when I first saw them... All the lives it could have saved in the long run...

We strapped Goku to his bed - for his safety as well as ours - then carried the bed out of the house and onto a plane. We headed over to the Kame House. I don't think that was originally our intended destination. I think we'd planned just to stop there to pick up Master Roshi (you know things are getting rough when we ask him to come out of retirement), Tenshinhan and Chaozu.

On the way over to the Kame House I was informed that future Trunks, Tenshinhan, Piccolo and Vegeta had each had near-death experiences today as well, courtesy of two different androids. Krillen - who'd just so happened to still have the senzu beans - had somehow avoided being seriously injured at that battle. He didn't want to talk about how he'd kept his health. He just mentioned that he was glad there had been enough senzu left to heal everyone up. Once the group had recovered, Krillen and future Trunks had come straight over to the Son house to warn us. Tenshinhan had headed for the Kame House to warn the people there. Krillen remarked that Vegeta had gone off to vent his anger. Piccolo had also flown off and would probably try to fuse with Kami. Piccolo hadn't actually told us what his plans were but by then we did know that fusion was an option for him.

Future Trunks was really quiet this whole time. Can you blame him? As weird of a day as it had been for me, I think it must have been about ten thousand times weirder for him. He was watching history start to kind of repeat itself.

Then things got stranger. Of course. They always do, don't they? You know how the saying goes - if anything can go wrong, it will.

There was a phone in the plane. It rang. Krillen answered it but the call was for Trunks. The rest of us in the plane only heard Trunks side of the conversation but we heard enough to know he was talking to Bulma and that something had happened. Trunks expression was worth a million words - disbelief and confusion mostly. The plane also had a fax machine (definitely a Capsule Corp plane...) so Bulma sent a fax. Krillen handed it to Trunks and Trunks was in shock. He said the picture that Bulma had sent looked like his time machine. Which didn't make any sense because he HAD his time machine with him, in a capsule in his pocket.

Needless to say, I wasn't the only one that had a very bad feeling about this.

Trunks left the plane to go investigate. Gohan, despite protests from his mother, left the plane with Trunks.

The rest of us reached the Kame House and decided to stay there because the group was too scattered to go into hiding efficiently. Vegeta, Yajirobe, Gohan, future Trunks and Piccolo were all off doing their own things. If the rest of us had really wanted to go into hiding, they might have never been able to find us. (or at least, not in time to do us any good...) So we carried Goku - with the bed and all - into the Kame House.

Tenshinhan and Chaozu left the Kame House soon after we'd arrived there. They said they were going to train but I was hesitant to believe that. Maybe they were going to look for the dragonballs, I don't know. But training... An excuse like that didn't make any sense to me. What good was a few extra hours of training going to do? Turns out the excuse was a valid one. Chaozu explained this to me later. Tenshinhan was trying to get the hang of multiple kaioken. (You know, kaioken times five or something like that.) Guess Tenshinhan still had enough pride that using a plain old kaioken wasn't good enough for him. He wanted to be sure that he could use a higher level of the technique than Goku ever had, otherwise he wouldn't use it at all.

So at the Kame House it was Oolong, Master Roshi, Umigame, ChiChi, Goku, Krillen and I. Puar wasn't there at first but she arrived later. Since we couldn't detect the androids, we turned on the tv - Roshi had gotten his sister to enchant most of his appliances so that they wouldn't explode as easily when all of us were there - and watched the news. We felt that the news reports might end up being the only warning we had about the androids location. Like I said already, the group was scattered out. Krillen, Master Roshi and I stayed at the Kame House and saw ourselves as the last line of defense. We hoped that at least one of the others would find and defeat the androids before the androids made it to us.

To our surprise and dismay, the androids weren't even mentioned in the headlines very much. Instead there was a breaking news story about a town where people were abruptly vanishing. All that had been found of these missing people were their clothes. So on the news it was a bunch of camera shots of torn clothes lying on the ground. I was quietly praying to Kami to please let this not be true. Let this be a hoax - the result of some bored news reporter with bad timing that had invented the story to boost ratings.

It wasn't a hoax. Gohan and future Trunks arrived at the Kame House in time to watch the end of the news with us. They were horrified. Because the town where people were vanishing wasn't all that far away from the abandoned time machine. Gohan reported that they had found some evidence of a monster at the site.

Great. That's just what we needed. Another monster on the loose. Oi.

I felt nostalgic. I missed being young, when my biggest worry had been stuff like finding enough drinkable water to get by. I missed Pilaf - the ambitious, corny and harmless type of villain. The sort of crook that you didn't need warriors, much less Saiyans or Super Saiyans, to defeat. I missed the good old days, when the planet hadn't been seriously endangered every couple years. But missing something isn't enough to bring it back.

Our main concern was that this new monster was like the androids, it had no ki signature. At first we couldn't sense it. That changed. It was odd because we didn't feel a singular massive ki. Instead we felt several powerful energy signatures clustered together and all of them were familiar. Do you have any idea how creepy it is to know that somewhere out there, a man-eating monster is mimicking your ki? And that this monster must also be mimicking the ki of people you know... We were temporarily confused about the location of several of our friends. We sensed two each of Tenshinhan, Piccolo and Vegeta. For about half a second, we weren't sure which one was the real one. The double ki trick didn't throw us for long though. The monster was projecting all our kis from the same location so we quickly concluded that the signatures in the cluster were the false ones. This was confirmed when energies like Freezias joined the cluster.

Krillen was seriously peeved and future Trunks was alarmed. They both took off to confront this new monster. Gohan thought about going with them. However Gohan realized that the androids were still out there and so he stuck around the Kame House, intent on defending the rest of us - especially Goku - if needed.

Gohan, Master Roshi and I were able to keep tabs on the various ki signatures from where we were. We sensed Piccolo abruptly get stronger and fly towards the ki cluster. We felt Piccolos ki start to take a dive. Then Krillen and future Trunks reached the ki cluster. Tenshinhan and Vegeta were headed for the battle as well.

The cluster of fake kis took off, fading as they did so. I hoped that the new monster was already dead but Gohan didn't think so. He said the monster must know how to hide its energy. Our friends split up again. Vegeta took off by himself. Krillen and future Trunks flew together, headed north. Tenshinhan and Piccolo flew together, they changed direction a lot. This continued for the next two days. Gohan and I remained at the Kame House, watching the news and sensing everyones energy signatures as they kept moving around. I think that Goku is the only one that got a decent amount of sleep during this time and on the last day, he was finally sleeping soundly.

In retrospect, I will say that one ki signature I didn't sense very much was Chaozus and I really wish that I had. Because the monster, Cell, wasn't doubling Chaozus energy signature. I'm not sure how or why but I don't think Cell had much - if any - of Chaozus DNA. So perhaps... It's a long shot but maybe Cell would have been vulnerable to psychic attacks. Telekinesis might have worked anyway. But Chaozu was sick of fighting, so he didn't. I guess he just stayed in hiding and packed for a trip to planet Namek, in case. Another thing that occurs to me in retrospect is that Cell claimed to have Gokus DNA. So maybe Cell also had the viral heart disease that Goku was suffering from. If we could have aggravated that somehow then perhaps we could have saved a few lives but that's just speculation.

After two days - this would be day three of Goku being out of commission - Tenshinhan, Piccolo and Krillen returned to the Kame House. They were exhausted but refused to take a break. Piccolo told us about fusing with Kami and chasing Cell. Krillen explained that he and Trunks had blown up a laboratory somewhere on the other side of the globe and that because of their adventure, Bulma now had the androids blueprints. Hopefully she would find a weakness.

We all got aboard a plane and left the Kame House. We couldn't just sit around while the world was being demolished. Tenshinhan, Krillen, Gohan, Piccolo and I were aboard the plane. We were debating our plan of attack. We knew now that Cell was looking for the androids and we knew that we had to track Cell down because we could at least detect his ki. We hoped to locate Cell before he found the androids. Gohan thought we should look for Vegeta and future Trunks before we started any fights. Piccolo thought that as long as we kept ripping Cells tail out, we might stand a chance.

Guess who suddenly appeared on the plane and nearly gave us all heart attacks by doing so? Why yes, it was Goku. The medicine had finished its job. Goku was back - or so he claimed - to his old self and eager to fight. He told us to return to the Kame House and get some rest, to leave the battle to him. Then he grabbed Gohan by the arm and teleported off the plane.

We tracked Gokus ki long enough to feel that he also collected Vegeta and future Trunks. Between the four of them, we knew that we had three Super Saiyans and Gohan - who was probably just as dangerous without needing to have his hair change color. So we did what Goku had recommended. We turned the plane around and went back to the Kame House. Most of us hadn't slept in the past few days so we agreed that it might be beneficial to catch a few quick zs before we attempted to help save the world. Again.

Back at the Kame House, Piccolo ordered the rest of us to get some sleep. He promised that he'd keep guard. Yea. The demon-prince, the guy that was trying to destroy the Earth once upon a time - now we trusted him enough to let him stand guard by himself. Odd how circumstances can change people. Guess we were too tired to argue with him. And for the record, I don't know why Piccolo didn't need to sleep as well. Maybe Nameks don't sleep. Maybe that's why he meditates so much. That's something you'd have to ask Piccolo.

Anyway. I gradually fell asleep. Had some disturbing dreams that I can still kind of recall, although not very clearly. Something about dying and something else with a bunch of people that I didn't recognize even though I felt like I should know them. Nothing that made a lot of sense.

Jeez, I've been typing for a while huh? I should stop for now and heck - so should you. Maybe get up and do some stretches, stretches are good for the circulation. Sorry about ranting. I'm just trying to record all the details that I remember because who knows how much longer my memory is going to stay with me. Guess I hadn't expected to remember so much.

ooxoo