"Chiaotzu! This is a surprise!" Bulma smiled at the small human as she stepped aside to let him into her house. Even before Vegeta moved in, Chiaotzu and Tien were rare visitors to Capsule Corp.
Behind Bulma, Acia stood practically hopping from one foot to the other, the grin on her face threatening to split it open in her excitement. "Chiaotzu!" she squealed, pushing past Bulma to grab him in a tight embrace.
"Oh gosh!" Chiaotzu patted her elbow awkwardly and tried not to feel to self-conscious about the fact that his feet were dangling several inches from the ground.
Bulma raised an eyebrow at this unexpected display of affection – she knew Chiaotzu was helping Piccolo with Acia at the Lookout, but she'd never imagined the two were that close. "How about we take this lovefest inside?" she grinned.
"No!" Acia shouted. Chiaotzu was here to free her, finally, from the prison that Capsule Corp. had been for the last two months, and she was not going to stay for a second longer than she had to. "No," she repeated. "We have to catch up on training, so we need to leave now." Grasping the man's hand, she sprinted out the door, yelling incoherent goodbyes back at her aunt.
As soon as they were outside Acia shot into the air and made a triumphant loop. "Race you to the Lookout!" she yelled back at Chiaotzu as she sped off, spiraling in the open air.
Acia was not the only one pleased to be out of the Briefs' home. Trunks' suspicions had not abated over the course of his cousin's grounding, and he'd been waiting very patiently for this day. She was not the only one who could sneak around.
Goten had arrived in Capsule Corp. earlier that morning with the expectation that they would spend the day playing video games, but it didn't take a lot of persuasion for Trunks to get him on board with his plan to uncover Acia's sinister plot. Not that Goten believed there was a sinister plot, but he was always on board with Trunks' plans no matter how wild they may be. It was, in Trunks' opinion, one of his better attributes. And so the two half-Saiyans found themselves in Acia's bedroom, trying to find the evidence that Trunks was certain existed.
"Trunks," Goten said as the boy began rifling through her clothes, "I don't think we should be doing this. What if she comes back and catches us?"
"She's not gonna come back now, she just left!" Trunks snapped. "Besides, we'd sense her coming way before she ever got here." Turning to see his friend's concerned face, he sighed. "Look, the faster we do this, the sooner we'll be out of here, okay? Now open the closet and start looking!"
Reluctantly, Goten made his way the closet. "But I don't even know what we're looking for! And mom says it's bad manners for boys to look at girls' underwear."
"That's not the same thing."
"How come?"
"It's just not, okay Goten! Now come on, you said you'd help."
Goten sighed. He wanted to help Trunks, but this was starting to seem more and more like a bad idea. Trunks could be a little distrusting sometimes. Maybe, it occurred to him, if they searched and didn't find anything, it would make Trunks feel better.
Goten began to dutifully go through the few shirts and dresses hanging in the closet. Acia's Saiyan battlesuit was folded on a shelf higher up, and Goten floated up to sift through it, trying not to disturb it too much. Finally, after several long minutes, Goten felt like he had done his duty by his best friend.
"Trunks," he said as he got down on his hands and knees to call the older boy, who had crawled under the bed, "I don't think there's anything here."
Mumbling to himself, Trunks crawled back out and plopped onto the bed, disappointed.
Goten joined him. "You should be happy," he said, patting his friend's shoulder. "It's good that we didn't find anything. It means she's not being bad."
"But she is being bad!" Trunks insisted. "We just don't know how. I can't believe we didn't find anything!" He huffed and turned to his friend. "Are you sure you looked hard enough?"
"Yeah…" Something was tickling on the edge of Goten's senses, and he wasn't quite sure what it was.
"Goten?" Trunks waved a hand in front of his unfocused eyes. "Hello, Earth to Goten!"
"Wait a minute," Goten said, brows furrowing in intense and uncharacteristic concentration. Suddenly, he pushed his face into the sheets and inhaled deeply. He shot up. "Gohan was here!"
"What?"
"Gohan was here," Goten repeated. "Acia's bed smells just like his does at home!" He scratched his head. "But how could that happen? I thought Acia wasn't allowed to see anybody while she was grounded."
"She wasn't," Trunks said. "But if Gohan was here, that means she broke the rules." He stood up triumphantly. "Whatever she's up to, Gohan must be in on it!"
"But Trunks," Goten protested, "even if Acia were doing something bad, Gohan wouldn't help her. He never does anything bad!"
"Oh, yeah." Trunks paused for a second. "Maybe she's tricked him into it," he suggested. "Which means we have to figure out what it is before she gets him into trouble."
"You really think she's could get Gohan into trouble?" Goten asked, his lower lip trembling a bit.
Trunks paused again. It was beginning to occur to him that Gohan and Acia may very well be meeting up for reasons far less nefarious, and far more gross, than he was assuming. On the other hand, they'd just had a major breakthrough and he was not about to drop this now.
"I think," he began carefully, "that we need to find out what's going on. That way if she is getting Gohan into trouble we can stop her, and if she's not, well then at least we know for sure."
As it happened, Gohan was on his way to Capsule Corp. – on Acia's instructions.
With her training at the Lookout for the first time in two months, she'd explained, Gohan could safely make his inquiries about her scouter without raising suspicions. At least, that was her logic.
"Won't it be suspicious if I just ask about your scouter out of the blue?" he'd asked.
"You don't ask out of the blue," she'd said, "you lead the conversation to the scouter naturally."
How he was supposed to manage that, he had no idea, and he felt his muscles tense as the domed building came into view.
Bulma was all too happy to let him into her lab. Gohan was one of the few people she knew who could keep up with her scientific mind, and while the flying and punching were all very exciting, it was nice to have a conversation with words every once in a while.
"So, physics project?" she said as she sat at her desk.
"Yeah. We're supposed to come up with a proposal for a technological advancement," Gohan said, trying to hide how sweaty his palms were becoming as he started in on his pre-planned lie, "and I remembered how back when I was a kid you told me you were trying to figure out how my uncle's scouter worked."
"Yeah! That kept me occupied for a long time," Bulma said as she unlocked one of her cabinet drawers and began rifling through papers. "I figured out how to turn it on pretty quickly, but understanding how it worked was a totally different ball game. I had to get Vegeta to help me out with it."
"Vegeta? Really?"
"Yeah. We had a deal, he'd help me with the scouter, and I'd make as many repairs as he needed to the gravity room as long as he didn't blow it up." She sighed wistfully as she recalled the early days of their courtship. "But man, that scouter! There were so many features on it! It wasn't just for measuring power levels you know. Besides the communicator, it had all kinds of technological capabilities and information storage on it. It could tell you the atmospheric composition, the weather, the nearest spaceport from where you were – of course those were all run by Frieza back then – it had ID on it, I mean, just all kinds of things. Aha!" she declared, pulling out a folder and slamming it onto the desk. "See!"
The folder contained numerous sketches of Raditz's scouter what appeared to be an older model of Capsule Corp.'s trademark mobile phone. "Not all of that stuff was relevant to us here on Earth, but I took what was and incorporated it into our cell phones! They've been number one on the market since!" She grinned, leaning back and crossing her arms triumphantly.
"Wow! That's amazing Bulma!" There was a newer model of that phone in Gohan's back pocket, but the curious teenager couldn't help but be fascinated by the scientist's process and her attention to detail. Diagrams of the scouter in particular were extremely detailed, the page margins covered in notations, some in Bulma's flowery script but many in what Gohan could only assume was Vegeta's meticulous handwriting.
"I am amazing," Bulma giggled.
"So, uh, I bet Acia's scouter is even better, right? Ha ha," Gohan chuckled nervously, trying not to fidget in his seat. "You know, 'cause it's newer. I mean, I'm just guessing…"
Bulma's bright smile turned into a ferocious scowl. "I wouldn't know! That jerk won't turn it back on!"
"Vegeta?" Gohan asked, a little confused.
"Who else!" she cried, exasperated. "I had to practically beg him just to take a look at it, and when he finally let me the damn thing wasn't turned on."
"What do you mean, not turned on?"
"It's disabled," Bulma explained. "I dismantled it piece by piece trying to figure out why it wasn't working, and when I compared it to diagrams of this old one it turned out there was a piece missing. I tried to fit the piece from the old scouter into Acia's, but it wouldn't work!"
"So Vegeta took a piece out to disable the scouter?"
"Obviously! He says he has no idea what I'm talking about, the lying jerk."
"But why would he do that?" Gohan asked, confused. "I mean, what if Acia's parents are trying to get in touch with her? What if something bad's happened to them and they need help?"
"Oh." Bulma paused for a moment, her eyes drifting upwards as she considered the question. The truth was, of course, that both she and Vegeta believed that Acia's parents had left her here because they didn't think they would make it, but somehow that didn't seem an appropriate thing to say to the teenager in front of her. "Well, I don't know," she said finally. "I mean, the deal was always that her parents would come here to get her when they were ready. From the very beginning, Vegeta didn't want Acia contacting people from space, people who might be dangerous. And it's not just contact," she added. "These scouters have locator devices on them. Anyone could hack into her parents' spaceship system and use it to find her. Look Gohan," she said reaching across the desk to lay a reassuring hand on his arm, "Vegeta's just trying to look out for us. All of us, including Acia, okay? And if he was really worried about his sister I'm sure he would have found a way to stay in touch."
"Oh." Gohan wasn't sure how to feel about this. What Bulma was saying made sense, but then again, Bulma had a way of making terrible choices seem alright. This was the woman who had, many years ago, tried to convince him that abandoning his father and Piccolo on an exploding planet was a good idea.
It just wasn't fair! That year his father had spent apart from them had been the worst year of Gohan's life. Most nights he could hardly sleep, wondering what terrible things his father was facing alone in space. And now Acia was in the exact same situation, only instead of having no choice but to wait and see, her only connection to her parents had been disabled, and that too by her uncle.
Well, there was at least one thing he could do. "Where's the scouter now?" he asked. "Do you have it here?"
"No, what's the point?" Bulma said. "It's with Vegeta. Who knows where he keeps it?"
Damn.
A/N: I can't believe how long it's been since I've updated! I apologize to all of you for the huge delay. To be honest for a while I was feeling very uninspired with this story, but now I'm recharged and can't wait to complete it. I have it all planned out and I think you guys will really enjoy how these different arcs play out, so please continue to read and review!
