[A/N: You'll be pleased to know that I have indeed finished writing this series as I post this chapter! So as I go into my last week of classes, finals week, and start my summer classes you will have regular updates! I will keep you posted on the last series to come. I've outlined almost all of it, but I need to do a re-watch of the final arc before I do anything definite. So, don't forget to review, and no more than ever your feed back is especially appreciated!]

Chapter Twenty-One: Do You Know You Enemy

The elevator doors opened again and Dad stared at them for a moment.

"Are you having a thought, Dad?" I asked.

"I am," he said. "I'm getting the feeling that Garlic Junior isn't the one behind this."

"Let me remind you that everything we've been doing the past 24 hours has been based upon the assumption that he is behind all this—an assumption that you made to begin with," Vegeta said. "You can't just go changing your mind all will nilly."

"I know that it makes sense for it to be Garlic Junior, but all of this, it reminds me of someone else," Dad said. We stepped onto the elevator and felt it descending.

"Well, if not this Garlic guy, then who?" Bardock asked.

"Well, it's just that none of this makes sense at all. Who'd want to destroy everything? If you destroy everything then you're gone too, right?" Dad said.

"Hey! That's just like what Orihime and I said before," Kuwabara said.

"But that would suggest a poorly thought out plan," Uryu said.

"Exactly!" Dad said as the elevator doors opened again leading us to a short corridor at the end of which were two tall double doors. "As a matter of fact, this plan is so poorly though out and makes such little sense that there's only one person than can possibly be behind it." Dad marched right up to the doors, the rest of us in tow. He placed his hand flat against the door and gave a decisive nod. "Yes. . . I'm positive."

"Who, Dad?" I asked.

Dad pushed the doors open. I waited for my eyes to fall onto Dr. Gero on the other side of the door. That would make sense. We all assumed he was responsible for the hybrids as he was the only one with the know how to do something like that. Perhaps he wasn't just a background character, but the main character in this scheme.

"Hello, my old arch nemesis," Dad said as the master mind behind the destruction of the universe came into view, "Emperor Pilaf."

I paused, staring at the little man in front of us. He was tiny, maybe a little more than two feet tall, and he was blue. Next to him stood a dog wearin a skin tight, black suit, holding a machine gun, and on his other side a tall woman in a trench coat with black hair. If I remembered my father's stories correctly this would have been Shu and Mai respectively.

"Wait. . . Emperor Pilaf is your arch nemesis?" I asked. "Like seriously though? Out of everyone you have ever faced ever, you choose Emperor Pilaf?"

"Of course he's my arch nemesis. He was the one who came after Dragon Balls when Bulma and I were looking for them, and then he gave his Dragon Balls to the Red Ribbon Army that time, and then there was the time he tried to steal the Bansho Fan from your mother and me," Dad said.

I shrugged. "I guess sometimes quantity does count more than quality."

"Hey! I am plenty quality!" Pilaf scolded me, his high pitched voice startling me somewhat.

"Hey, Kairi, do we have an arch nemesis?" Yusuke asked.

"Technically I guess I'd say Spirit World since they're the ones who are always causing us trouble," I said.

Yusuke nodded in agreement. "True facts."

"Will you idiot kids stop your blabbering?" Pilaf shouted. "There are more important matters to be attended to."

"Yep, and we're here to stop you from destroying the universe," Goku said.

Pilaf frowned.

"Sir, you should explain what's going on," Mai said.

Pilaf groaned. ". . . We need your help."

There was silence among all of us.

"You want our help?" Ichigo asked.

"We didn't know this was all going to happen," Pilaf complained. "It's all huge misunderstanding."

"The universe is being torn to ribbons because of a misunderstanding?" Hiei scoffed.

"Yes! It's true!" Pilaf explained. "It all started two months ago when we were formulating our newest plan to exact our revenge on Goku here."

"This sounds very unconvincing," Bardock said.

"Whether our plan was going to come together or not is irrelevant because out of nowhere one of those stupid hollows showed up and attacked us," Pilaf explained. "And as were avoiding being eaten by the thing we stumbled into some weird hole that the thing had come out of."

"Wait. . . You walked into a garganta, completely by accident?" Renji asked.

Pilaf nodded.

"I told he's the only person capable of something like this," Dad said.

"When we realized we weren't on Earth anymore, we immediately started to panic, determined to find a way out, and that's when we met him," Pilaf said. "Garlic Junior found us and helped us escape from that horrible place. Upon further introduction, we discovered that we had mutual enemies. When you sucked him into the Dead Zone years ago, he discovered the hiding place of the Hollows, but among these Hollows he'd found a very special breed of them—half demon, half hollow. And that is how we formulated our plan to use them to destroy you and all of your friends once and for all. Of course the ones we found there were far too weak to use for our plan. So we had to get more energy.

"Garlic knew that if we gathered enough of these hollows together, it would break down the barriers separating the worlds. We decided to use this knowledge, to get to Hell and use Dr. Gero of the Reed Ribbon Army to assist us in recruiting others and to use his talents to create more powerful versions of the Hollows we had seen. Using Garlic's ability to create these gargantas, we waited for the opportune moment to move into Spirit World, and as fate would have it-."

"You got to Spirit World while the rest of us were busy dealing with Sensui and the tunnel," Yusuke said.

"We practically walked out the front door with the Orb of Baast!" Pilaf laughed. "We started rounding up hollows left and right. It was spectacular. And once evidence of the imbalance started to appear, we knew we were on the right track. We managed to enlist the help of Gero and he quickly discovered a way to recreate the hollows we had seen before. But then those strange spirits started appearing."

"You mean the ones that go around in white sheets?" Rukia asked.

"Yes! Those," Pilaf said. "We started swallowing them up too, we didn't discriminate."

"But then this place, the Valley of Screams, appeared right? So you moved here out of Hueco Mundo?" I asked.

Pilaf nodded. "And that's when things got bad."

From beneath us, there was a violent surge of energy, catching us all off guard.

"The hell was that?" Yusuke asked.

"When Gero first tried to create one of the hollows, the hollow he used was too powerful compared to the strength of the demon. It kept swallowing up all the other hollows. When it got a hold of Garlic we had to lock it away," Pilaf said.

"So Garlic Junior is dead?" Dad asked. Pilaf nodded. "And what happened to Doctor Gero?"

Pilaf, Mai, and Shu pointed to the small potted plant sitting in the room with them.

"Nice plant," Ichigo said.

"It's Gero," Pilaf said. "Janemba did it."

"Janemba?" I asked.

"The first hollow," Pilaf said. "It just kept growing and growing and then it started changing everything. It turned Gero into a plant."

"It's unstable," Renji said.

"Instead of absorbing all of the power from the other hollows, it's also being affected by the corruption and negative energy of them as well," Rukia said. "That much negative energy condensed into one being like that could start corrupting everything else around it."

"Probably how managed to turn that guy into a plant," Renji said.

"It's too bad Captain Kurotsuchi didn't come with us. He'd be going crazy over this," Rukia said.

"Well, we can fix this easy, right? All we need is the Orb of Baast to put all the hollows back where they belong, right?" Yusuke said.

"Well. . ." Pilaf said. "Janemba. . .Might have it."

"Of course. It's never easy," Vegeta said.

"You realize that what you've done is destroying the universe? You've caused an imbalance so huge that it's going to rip the universe apart, and on top of that, you're bridging the gap between the Soul Society and the Living World with the Valley of Screams and they're going to smash and, also destroy the universe," I said. "You have created a giant, universe destroying cluster fuck."

"I know! That's why I need your help," Pilaf said with a pout.

"Well, well, well," Dad started, "how the turntables."

Bardock shook his head. "That one was so close."

"Well, tell us how to find this Janemba guy so we can finally stop all this," Ichigo said.

"He's through there," Pilaf said motioning to the door behind him. "Before he got turned into a plant, Gero tried to put the room in a stasis, but it didn't work."

There was another violent surge of energy, this time more powerful.

Dad walked over to the door, pulling it open. Inside there was complete darkness. The light from the room we were currently stood in didn't even pierce the darkness, but the energy from the creature was apparent.

"It didn't look like that before," Pilaf said.

"What do you think's in there?" Kuwabara asked.

"Nothing good," Ichigo said.

"Let's go," I said. "We're not getting anything done by standing here."

Dad disappeared into the darkness first, as we all filed in after him. Once I stepped through the door, there was nothing but darkness. It was almost suffocating.

"Something feels weird," I heard Rukia say.

"It feels like nothing here isn't. . . Real," Chad said.

Without warning, I felt the ground disappear from under my feet and suddenly I was falling. I could hear the panic from the comrades' voices as they fell with me.

It wasn't clear when I lost consciousness, having been stuck in darkness since we'd left Pilaf. I felt a hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes.

"Are you all right?" I heard Ichigo say.

"Yeah," I said sitting up. I investigated my surrounding for a moment. We appeared to be in some strange, cartoony meadow—the ground was yellow, the sky was pink, bizarre flowers covered the landscape.

"This is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen," Hiei said.

"I'll second that," Yusuke said.

"What is this place?" Orihime asked.

"I'm guessing it was, at one point, a part of the ship, but the creature's influence somehow turned it into this weird place," Rukia said.

"I've got a bad feeling about this," I said.

"I was afraid you might say that," Yusuke said.

"Hey guys, what does that orb thing look like?" Kuwabara asked.

"It's a round, green, glowing ball," I said getting to my feet.

"Is that it?" Bardock asked, pointing.

Not too far off from where we were standing, casually lying on the group, emitting a soft glow, was the orb.

"Well, I'll be damned," Yusuke said. "This is going to be easier than I thought."

"No, it's not," I said.

"And how do you know that?" Yusuke asked.

"I'm psychic, moron," I said. "Didn't I tell you that something fishy is going on? The Orb of Baast sitting right out in the open kind of screams 'trap.'"

"Well, I'm going for it," Yusuke said. "No use just sitting here with our thumbs up our asses."

"Be careful," Orihime warned.

Yusuke walked forward, cautiously. For a few heartbeats, I thought that maybe he would grab it without a hitch. But then the ground trembled and he stopped. Of in the distance, bumbling toward was a giant, round, yellow creature.

"The hell is that?" Renji asked.

"I guess it's. . . Janemba," Bardock said.

"But it's so. . ." Kuwabara started.

"Cute," Rukia said. We nodded in agreement. Janemba was smiling as he pranced toward us and the orb. There was a childlike smile on his face and there was a playful waddle in his step.

"This thing is supposed to be made of pure evil?" Hiei asked.

"Majin Buu wasn't intimidating in the slightest and committed a planetary genocide," I said.

"Be on guard, gotcha," Yusuke said. He continued to approach the orb as he came face to face Janemba. "Well, you're cute."

Janemba smiled down at Yusuke. He didn't speak or react in any other way.

"I've got to get going, so I'm just gonna take this," Yusuke slowly and calmly leaned toward the orb. Janemba's face suddenly turned dark. He back handed Yusuke right in the face, sending him tumbling back to us. Then he picked up the orb, smiling again, and tossing it around like a toy ball.

"Well, that was painful," Yusuke said.

"You're an idiot," I said.

Just as I was finishing chastising Yusuke, I sensed Janemba charging up his energy. Still with that playful look on his face, he had a ball of energy in his hand. We all split away from each other to dodge the attack. That's when the ground began to shake again. I turned and looked back over my shoulder. A giant wall shot up endlessly into the sky and stretching out seemingly endlessly as well.

Panic set in. Who had I just gotten separated from. I looked around. I could see Yusuke and Ichigo. Uryu, Renji, and Hiei were there as well. But the others were gone, trapped on the other side of the wall.

"Is this as bad as I think it is?" Renji asked.

I punched the wall as hard as I could. When I brought my fist away, I'd barely made a dent in the stone.

"Yes," I said. "Damn it. Of course our two strongest fighters are on the other side of the wall."

"Don't tell him I said this, but when the going gets tough, we actually need Kuwabara. He always comes through when we're in a bind," Yusuke said.

"Orihime's stuck too, so I hope nobody's planning on getting badly injured," Uryu said.

"We need a plan," Renji said.

I looked over to Yusuke. "Were you able to gauge how powerful he was when he punched in you the face?"

"It doesn't feel like he's got a lot of energy, but there's something else about him that's just. . . Not right," Yusuke said. "Dammit. Of all the times for Kuwabara not to be here."

"We'll be fine," I said. "We'll just use brute force and beat him down to a pulp, and once he's exhausted everything in him, you or Ichigo can go for the kill."

"That's your approach to everything—beat it until it stops moving," Yusuke said.

"It works like 90 percent of the time," I said. "Unless you've got a plan B, Urameshi?"

We looked back to Janemba. My mouth was feeling dry now that I was remembering the vision I'd had. I knew that no matter what happened, things were going to work out in the end. That's what I'd seen. That's what Bardock had assured me—everyone lives. Only I die. I could handle that.