Below the aircraft, the Lucky Egg restaurant bloated and spilled over with nervous crowds, now joined by a series of futuristic domes, tents, and tanks emblazoned with the Capsule Corporation logo. Bulma's people had not been here when Videl and Eighteen had first seen the restaurant from overhead, but they'd made efficient order out of chaos upon arrival. Different pockets corralled different activities- a medical tent sat next to a series of people in fresh uniforms giving out packs of supplies, and farther out, another team of Capsule Corporation employees directed the crowd in the release of new capsule houses in an orderly fan around the parking lot. Teams of people moved debris on the outer edges of the area further from the site, and another group was hard at work clearing a space in the side of the parking lot for vehicle landings. A large sign on the roof of a temporary Capsule house displayed a frequency in bold black underneath the company logo.
If nothing else, the rescue effort's branding was incredible.
Videl picked up the craft's microphone, and turned the dials to match the sign's signal. A burp of static fizzled from her earbuds before evening out to a steady buzz.
"This is," she eyed the sticker by the controls, "PV6518-2 requesting permission to land. I repeat, this is PV6518-2, the big white civilian craft coming towards you. We have an injured passenger onboard in need of attention, and three more ready to offer assistance. We're requesting permission to land."
Someone responded.
"Copy that, PV6518-2. You're clear for landing. Look for the guy with the orange wands."
The door to the hut popped open, and a uniformed employee with a bright orange company hat and two bright orange wands hustled onto the asphalt. He shouted something, and the few people standing in the area moved to make room for Videl and her craft.
Videl put the mic back in its cradle and gently set the craft down in the Lucky Egg's parking lot. She took a second to glance over her shoulder at her passengers.
Julian lay on his side on the seat between Seventeen and Eighteen, who held him steady through the gentle jostling of landing. He was awake, but barely, and Videl was positive he'd broken a few ribs. A nasty green bruise covered part of his face.
"This is gonna… be a fucking production," he muttered as the engines finally settled down.
"It hasn't been already?" asked Seventeen. "Do tell me about how your day has been any different than mine."
"He's dressed as Saiyaman," said Eighteen. "That's what he means."
Videl's finger froze over the button to open the door. She'd entirely forgotten about that in the rush to get here- not that Julian was moonlighting as the Great Saiyaman, who was apparently Son Gohan, but that he was dressed as Saiyaman and she was Videl Satan, his public rival opposed to vigilante justice, and they were apparently working together after she mysteriously disappeared.
Crud.
"I know that," Seventeen said. "Do you think I've been living in the middle of nowhere for the past few years?"
The twins stared at one another. Seventeen smirked first.
"Because I absolutely have," he said.
"His real identity is supposed to be a secret," said Eighteen with a roll of her eyes.
She tossed a stack of blonde hair over her shoulders.
"...Or something. I don't really remember; I didn't pay much attention to the news."
"I could turn into Son Gohan," suggested Julian.
Videl whirled around. "No! Don't! Don't do that! No Gohan impersonations! Please!"
"Vegeta would come looking to kick your ass next," mused Eighteen.
He coughed, and winced. "My ass is already kicked."
"Kicked? Unkicked?" asked Seventeen. "He won't know the difference. Unless he's changed since the last time I saw him, you'll be tar before you know it."
"He hasn't changed," Said Eighteen.
"No Gohan impersonations!" repeated Videl. "No!"
A puff of smoke enveloped Julian's body, and suddenly he was Hercule Satan.
Videl stood up, enraged. "How is that any better?!"
Julian turned back into himself.
"I... can't hold it right now, anyway," he said.
"Good!" said Videl. "Now, we're going to tell the truth, except the Gohan part, just like we talked about! Nobody knows where Son Gohan is! Nobody knows that he's got anything to do with this!"
Videl nodded her head vigorously.
"The hospital, we tell them about."
She shook her head in the opposite direction just as vigorously.
"The Gold Fighters in the Cell Games, we don't tell them about. Got it?!"
"Got it," monotoned the twins.
Videl pressed a button, and the doors hissed open. A pair of uniformed crisis responders held a stretcher between them. Their hats and jackets displayed their names in the bold block letters of Capsule Corporation's branded font. Tungsten and Mercury. The pair hustled into the craft and set the stretcher on the ground in front of Julian. Videl held her breath.
It wasn't until Seventeen and Eighteen set him down that Tungsten did a double-take and said,
"Is that the Great Saiyaman?!"
"Here we go," Videl muttered to herself.
"There's not much that's "great" about him right now," said Seventeen, with a pat to Julian's unbruised cheek.
Julian glared at him.
"Waitaminit!" said Mercury. "This is Julian Naan! Julian Naan is the Great Saiyaman?! The Great Saiyaman is Julian Naan?!"
"If one of those is true, the other is, too. No need to say them both." said Eighteen. "Stop gawking and get him where he needs to go before the whole world hears you."
"Oh! Where's his mask? We've got to cover his face, or we'll cause a commotion that'll never end!"
The other responder whirled around. "Does anyone-?!"
He spotted Videl, who was already grimacing.
"Whoa! That's Videl Satan!" he exclaimed.
"Nothing gets by you, does it?" said Seventeen.
"It is! It's Videl Satan!" exclaimed Mercury.
A third responder, Nobel, a woman with her hair pulled into a neat bun, poked her head into the craft.
"What's going on? If someone's injured, we need to get them to-!"
Nobel spotted Julian.
"Is that the Great Saiyaman?!" she exclaimed. "The Great Saiyaman is Julian Naan?!"
"And Julian Naan is the Great Saiyaman," said Seventeen. "In case you didn't know."
"Yeah!" said Mercury. "And that's Videl Satan over there!"
Nobel ogled Videl. Videl screamed into her hands.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Yamcha awoke with a start, and groaned. His ribs hurt, and the skin on his face felt taut and swollen. Above him was a grid of cheap styrofoam ceiling tile, and in his ears was a soft, incessant beeping. He looked around. Two windows, linoleum floors, faux wood tables, the smell of disinfectant, tubes sticking out of his arm, bandages around his ribs. His bad leg was in a cast. A hospital. He was in a hospital room.
"Yamcha," said Pu'ar, who floated from the chairs lining the room to his side. "Yamcha! Oh, I was so worried!"
"Hey," he said, mouth annoyingly dry. "How long have I been here?"
Puar's whiskers twitched, followed by his thick blue fur. "You've been in and out for a few days," he said. "It was awful! When I heard what Vegeta had done, I didn't know..."
Yamcha let his thoughts settle in his head like sloshing water finding its equilibrium after a violent stir. Pu'ar's words made sense. If he'd slept- and he was sure he'd been sleeping, because he remembered waking up to pee- it was fitful, and full of dreams of monsters awakening from the crust of the earth to wreak havoc upon the world. He dreamed about Piccolo, back when they'd first met, and a much younger Vegeta leering at him from across a torn battlefield.
Vegeta. He'd gone to stop Vegeta from wrecking Bulma's house, and the damn idiot beat the shit out of him while sleepwalking.
Yamcha leaned back into his pillow and exhaled through his nose. He regretted it immediately as his ribs complained.
"The world's gone crazy," continued Pu'ar. "Something massive caused a giant earthquake that sent a fissure across the whole continent! People are saying they're going to drift apart. Entire towns were ripped into pieces!"
"Something massive?" Yamcha asked, scratching around the bandage on his head and looking around the plain, sterile room. A pile of flowers, balloons, and candies towered in one corner, next to a chair where Pu'ar had obviously made a cat bed out of his jacket.
"Two massive powers," said Pu'ar. "It was horrible! You were tossing and turning, and I didn't know what to do!"
Yamcha pushed the heels of his hand into his unbandaged temple.
"Two powers? That explains the dreams," he said.
"What?" said Pu'ar.
"Nothing," said Yamcha. "Was it anybody we know? Could you tell?"
Pu'ar sank into himself, and fiddled with his tail. Yamcha sighed.
"Vegeta?" he guessed.
"No," said Pu'ar. "Gohan."
Yamcha lifted his hands. "Gohan?" He propped himself up with a wince. "Who was the other one?"
"I don't know," said Pu'ar. "But Vegeta went after the other one, and then Gohan followed him, and then it felt like they got into a big fight, and-"
A sudden pinprick in the air made Yamcha stir and look up at the door. Through the thin strip of glass on the side, he could make out two figures- a hare, and a man he knew from the Tenkaichi Budokai. Melpomene, dressed in scrubs.
The hare wore a dated nurse's outfit, complete with a pillbox hat.
"Shh," said Yamcha, pointing towards the door.
"Huh?" Pu'ar's eyes followed Yamcha's finger.
"Look," said Yamcha.
Pu'ar's fuzzy face soured like he'd been slapped, and then rankled into an ugly hiss.
"Who does he think he is?!" seethed Pu'ar. Smoke billowed around his feet, and suddenly the shy little cat was a massive blue lion. "Showing his face around here after he did what he did. I should claw his face off! I should-!"
"Pu'ar! Calm down!"
"But Yamcha! He-!"
"Shh!" interrupted Yamcha. "Something's wrong."
Pu'ar sneered, but turned to watch the two figures through the tiny window.
The hare pulled something out of his dress pocket, and crept through the door of the hospital room across the hall from Yamcha's. He exited a few moments later, grinning, and hopped to the door across the hall - the one next door to Yamcha's room. Something about his expression filled Yamcha with a dread he couldn't explain.
"Pu'ar, I need you to hide," said Yamcha, adjusting his blankets. "Take the jacket and make it look like nobody's here but me!"
"Huh?" said Pu'ar, becoming a cat again.
"Please!" said Yamcha.
Pu'ar blinked uncomprehendingly, but still cooperated. He grabbed the jacket and a bag of something, and then darted to the ceiling to pop out a tile. He climbed into the hole behind it, and then set it back into place.
Yamcha closed his eyes and lay back on the bed.
Melpomene and the hare came in a few minutes later.
"Hello," said the hare in a wildly obnoxious falsetto. "Just making our daily rounds!"
Then, the hare's massive feet padded across the linoleum, and Yamcha's left eyelid peeled off his eyeball as the hare pried it open.
Yamcha didn't twitch, but his eye did roll forward to see the hare's face, and the thick makeup decorating his features.
"I know you're awake, Yamcha," he said. "But I appreciate you playing along! It's so nice when famous people let you walk all over them!"
Yamcha pulled back and lifted his arms to dive on the hare and pin him to the floor, but Melpomene's two strong arms held him fast. He struggled, but the huge man didn't budge.
"Stay back!" Yamcha shouted, still struggling.
Clio sneered like the words were meant for him, but Yamcha meant them for Pu'ar in the ceiling.
"Whatever you do, stay back!" he said.
"Oh, this won't hurt for more than a second," said the hare. "It's just a little prick. That's all. Just like you!"
He produced something small and metal from his pocket. It caught the light for a split second before the hare thrust it towards Yamcha.
Yamcha moved his head and his neck to catch the hare's fingers- and whatever they were holding- before it they bit into his flesh. He could feel the prick of metal digging into his skin, and the droplets of moisture welling around whatever point pierced him, but it wasn't deep.
"Oh come on," said the hare, pursing his rouged lips. "Melpomeeeeeene? A hand or two, please?"
Melpomene wrenched Yamcha from the bed, wrapped one massive arm around his body, locked his legs within Melpomene's own, and held Yamcha's head still. Yamcha struggled, but was powerless against Melpomene's brute strength. The metal racks holding his fluids clattered and rattled as Melpomene inadvertently dragged them along. Yamcha's body screamed in painful protest
"Stay back," Yamcha repeated, spitting at the hare and willing himself not to look at the ceiling.
"Time for your medicine!" chirped the hare, and plunged a needle into the base of Yamcha's skull.
It hurt, but not badly, even as Yamcha struggled against Melpomene's hold with renewed vigor. The hare finished administering whatever it was he had in his hand, and then sat back on his haunches. He stared at whatever he'd put into Yamcha's skull expectantly.
"Let me go!" said Yamcha.
"Oh, honey, be patient," the hare said, still enraptured by whatever was in Yamcha's head. "In about fifteen seconds, it'll take effect and we'll get out of your hair. Easy peasy."
Yamcha ignored his body's complaints and flailed against Melpomene repeatedly until the hare pushed a button on his watch and said, "You look a little tense. Why don't you relax!"
Yamcha felt a sudden, sharp zap at the base of his skull, and then his body went limp. His eyes would have widened, but he found that they closed of their own accord.
"You have no idea how long it took me to perfect those commands to keep your bowels from relaxing, too, and making you shit all over yourself," said the hare. "You should be grateful. Hoooonestly. Melpomene, we're done here. Put him back on the bed. Get him nice and comfy."
Yamcha felt Melpomene put him down on his hospital bed and arrange his limbs to keep their circulation flowing. He had the good grace to keep him on his back so breathing was still bearable.
A few minutes later, he heard the rattle of the doorknob opening and the clatter of the door closing behind both Clio and Melpomene.
Shit, Yamcha thought to himself. This wasn't good. Whatever Clio had given him made him a complete vegetable. He hoped Pu'ar could figure out how to reverse whatever this was!
As if on cue, Yamcha heard a clatter from above, and then felt a furry paw on the back of his hand.
"This is awful!" said Pu'ar. "But I think I can fix this. Maybe?"
A soft puff of air and the familiar, subtle scent of Pu'ar's transformation filled Yamcha's nose.
"This might hurt," said Pu'ar.
If Yamcha could have gritted his teeth, he would have. Alas.
A few seconds later, a sudden jolt of electricity burned through him, and his eyes flew open with the sudden pain.
"What the heck was that?!" Yamcha demanded, nose-to-nose with Pu'ar, who had become a floating pair of pliers with some kind of metal plug with a tiny bulb held in its maw.
Pu'ar dropped the plug into Yamcha's lap and transformed into a cat once again.
"Sorry," he said.
Yamcha considered the bulb.
"Don't be. I wasn't yelling at you," he said. "Thanks. I don't know what this thing is, but it made me utterly useless. I'd still be a vegetable if you hadn't done that."
If the hare had been plugging these gadgets into everyone in the hospital, the whole complex was likely comatose by now. Would it be better to take these gizmos out of patients one by one, or to follow Melpomene and the hare to keep them from doing whatever it is they were up to? Yamcha didn't know, but he knew that he had to do something.
He scratched Pu'ar behind the ears, and then considered the tubes sticking out of him.
"Guess I have to take all of these out," he muttered.
"Huh?"
"I mean, we're going to at least follow those two, right?"
Pu'ar deflated. "But it's dangerous, and I don't want you to get hurt! You're still in the hospital for a reason!"
Yamcha raised his eyebrows at his partner.
Pu'ar caved. "Alright, fine," he said. "But you'd better not make your injuries any worse!"
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
If nothing else, Polymnia's Saiyaman costume and Videl's status secured them and the twins a private Capsule house on the perimeter of the radio tower. Instead of taking Polymnia to the medical tent, a medic came to him. It was simpler than trying to transport a wounded celebrity through a disaster zone. Now, he lay supine on a pull-out sofa bed in a tasteful beige room, and listened to his able-bodied escorts plot and scheme amongst themselves. The painkillers the Capsule Corp staff gave him made his head feel like it was full of cotton. He was both totally liberated, and utterly immobilized. He was like a balloon made entirely of cement.
Whee.
"We need to kill Clio," said Eighteen, glancing at her nails like she wasn't discussing murder.
Polymnia supposed it was a good thing Eighteen hadn't named him as her would-be target, but he had no idea why Erato's personal physician should top her hit list.
"What?" said Videl. "Kill who? What?!"
"Yes," Eighteen said.
"Who's Clio?" asked Seventeen.
"The bastard responsible for those things under the hospital," said Seventeen. "Probably."
She turned to Polymnia.
"Or were they your boss's, after all?"
Polymnia raised one hand, and weakly gave her the middle finger.
"I thought the drugs would have made you a little peppier," Seventeen said. "What happened to all those awful jokes from this morning?"
"Up your ass," said Polymnia, giggling despite himself.
If anyone were to know what he thought, they'd know his suspicions rested with Hass. The signal quality on that shitty screen had been awful, but Erato looked too shocked to be directly responsible for whatever the hell he saw. If he'd had anything to do with it, it was well out of his control now. Polymnia wasn't about to ask for guidance or permission from him- or anyone- again. Instead, he wanted information, and he wanted it now.
The Orange City Circle belonged to Hass's wife, so he needed to find Hass, who wasn't in the city anymore. According to Videl, he sequestered himself on Mount Paozu just before everything went to hell in a handbasket.
Typical. The fucker most responsible had lied to Polymnia's face, and then fled.
Still, if Hass knew something, Polymnia needed him talking, which meant he needed him alive. If Eighteen knew Hass was involved somehow, she might snuff that lead permanently. Seventeen might do the same. He didn't know. He had to figure out a way to get himself to Mount Paozu without the two of them around.
Maybe he could steal a vehicle when everyone went to bed, if the medicine ever wore off and he got his shit together.
"But seriously," said Videl. "Who's Clio?
"Clio's a mad scientist living in the sewers of West City," said Eighteen."I met him once, and the things I saw in his lab make me think he's the one responsible."
She caught her brother's eye. Seventeen assured Polymnia that his cyborg body didn't give him psychic powers, but he was pretty sure some crystal clear message transferred from one sibling to another without a word spoken. Maybe it was a twin thing.
"Wow," said Videl. "What made you think to look into this Clio in the first place? I didn't realize you were so knowledgeable about—"
Eighteen held up a hand.
"Before you start thinking I'm some great detective, let me assure you: my grudge against him is personal, and extremely convenient. It's why I want to kill him instead of question him."
Videl crossed her arms.
"So you don't know for sure that this Clio is responsible?"
"Oh, no. She's certain. It's just convenient, is all," said Seventeen.
"How do you know?" Videl asked, with a suspicious tilt of her head.
Eighteen stared at one of the tasteful beige walls. Her brother tilted his head at Videl.
"Based on what we've seen, there are only two other people capable of that kind of engineering on such a large scale. One of them is Bulma Briefs. The other was Doctor Gero. I'm sure you'll agree it wasn't Bulma."
Seventeen smiled with all of his eerily straight teeth.
"I'm very sure it's not Doctor Gero."
Videl looked between the twins. Based on her expression, Polymnia guessed she felt the same chill running down her spine as he did.
"Okay," she said. "But, uh, in the meantime, what are we gonna do about them in this city? Should we go looking for more? Should we fortify this place?"
"If you act as our super powered eyes, so to speak, either my brother or myself are perfectly capable of scouting. The other one of us can stick around The Lucky Egg in case something happens," said Eighteen.
"Should we draw straws?" asked Seventeen. "Flip a coin? Take a vote? Gather a jury of-?"
A sudden knock at the door cut him off. Videl froze, and Polymnia grimaced. Even out of the Saiyaman suit, he was still a known personality. Whoever this was, it was another pain in his ass.
"Hello?" said a muffled female voice. "It's Erasa and Sharpener."
Polymnia and the twins glanced at Videl, who looked like she was holding an intense staring contest with the doorknob.
"If you don't want to talk to us, that's okay," said Erasa. "We just wanted to say that we're glad you're okay. We're okay, too." She paused. "We're sorry about what happened."
Videl pointed to the doorknob and mouthed at the twins, "Just them. Is it okay?"
Seventeen nonchalantly waved at the door, and then made for the other room at the back of the Capsule house to give Videl some privacy. His sister followed.
Polymnia stayed on the pull-out bed and felt like a happily useless piece of crap.
"A-anyway," continued Erasa, "that's all we wanted to say. If you need us, you can find us- oh!"
Videl opened the door a crack, and gestured for the girl to come in the door.
Erasa was blonde. So was her muscular friend. Videl closed the door behind both of them, and gave each of them a hug.
"I'm the one who is sorry," she said. "I'm so glad the two of you are okay! I didn't know anything until the incident at the tournament, and after that, my dad thought-!"
"Heyyyyy," interrupted Polymnia, "how did your friends know you were here?"
Erasa and Sharpener tensed, like they'd been caught doing something wrong.
"We… overheard some Capsule Corp employees talking," said Sharpener.
Gossips. Of course. Polymnia giggled.
"Were they talking about just me, or about Saiyaman, too?" asked Videl.
"...Both," admitted Erasa.
Polymnia grinned stupidly.
"Hey, Videl?" he asked. "Would it be a good idea if you pretended to be Saiyaman for a while? Make a big stir."
"Why would I do that?" she asked.
"'Cuz you can fly," said Polymnia. "People know Saiyaman was here. They don't know for sure that you are. They can't find you if they don't know you're Saiyaman."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," said Sharpener.
"Actually," said Videl, "he's got a point." She looked up. "Polymnia, can I borrow the costume?"
"No way," said Sharpener.
"Yes way," said Erasa.
"Sure, but it looks like shhhhhhhhit," said Polymnia.
"C'mon, guys," Videl said. "It'll let me go outside whenever I want, and people won't ask questions if I do start flying."
"Wait," said Erasa. "You can actually fly? Like those guys at the Cell Games?"
Videl nodded. "Gohan taught me."
"I don't believe this," said Sharpener.
"It's true! And Sevoya saw it, too!"
"Sevoya?" said Erasa. "So she found you two?"
"Yes! And she was telling the truth the whole time. I didn't believe it until I…"
Polymnia closed his eyes, and tuned the three of them out.
He'd get out of here after midnight, after everyone was sleeping and he was more in control of himself. Whatever Eighteen and her brother decided to do, he wouldn't be a part of it come morning.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
In the early hours of May 20th, Hass awoke as if in a dream. He never imagined meeting the famed mystery fighter at all, let alone work alongside her doing the one thing he could always rely on: cooking for an unreasonable amount of people in an unreasonably small space. His body took up about half of the standing room in Son Chi Chi's kitchen, and the crown of his head threatened the ceiling. The pungent onion slivers falling to the cutting board from the knife in his hands threatened to shove themselves up his nose for how close he was.
How the Ox King ever fit inside this house was a mystery all on its own.
Still, everything might have been perfect had Mark Satan not been squeezed in the tiny space between Hass and Chi Chi as the Earth's most infuriating living barrier, and had the world not fallen apart one day ago. Oh, and if his daughter's judgemental eyes stopped spearing him from the other side of Chi Chi's shoulder. Sevoya cracked an eggshell on the lip of the bowl in front of her with pointed severity every time she caught Hass looking away from dicing onions to stare. Her judgements pulled him from his fantasies like so many pinches to the pearl-pink skin of a drowsing baby.
Don't give me that look, Hass mouthed. You like her, too, right? When you ran away from home, you went straight to her.
I did not! said Sevoya's wide eyes and soundlessly working jaw. The timing is bad, okay?
Hass tilted his jaw forward and gesticulated towards the wall with his knife. The displaced limb knocked shoulders with Mark, who knocked into Chi Chi, who knocked into Sevoya.
"Don't shove me!" said Mark. "This is cramped enough as it is!
"Sorry," said Hass. "Just had to flick my wrist to keep my sleeve from falling down," he said.
"Oh," said Mark, returning to his peppers. "Okay."
Your mother has been dead for seven years! Hass mouthed to his daughter.
"Eight," Sevoya corrected him, dour.
"Hm?" asked Mark Satan, still preoccupied with poorly prepping his peppers.
"Nothing," said Sevoya, tossing aside another eggshell. "Just counting how many eggs I have so far."
Eight, repeated a furtive glare towards Hass. Yesterday was the eighth anniversary of her death. You didn't notice.
He frowned at the hem of the denim skirt she'd borrowed from Bulma and the cut of her black shirt. I haven't seen you wearing white in her honor, he might've grumbled. She loved when you wore white.
Sevoya sneered, and then reached up to toy with her emerald pendant- the last gift Manasa ever gave her daughter- before reaching for the whisk. She turned away from Hass and combined the yolks and whites of two dozen eggs into a metal bowl like marrying the past and future was easy, like everything was normal, and like an apocalyptic earthquake hadn't cleaved nearly the entire continent in two nearly five days ago to leave hundreds of people stranded here on Mount Paozu.
Hass turned back to dicing his onions, red-faced and thoroughly convinced that he was the world's shittiest father. His progress simultaneous to Chi Chi and Mark's made the kitchen sound like a belligerent rhythm section with strikingly differing opinions on what time signature they should play.
Hass knew why his daughter ran away from home in the first place. He knew that she couldn't move on any more than he could, and whenever either of them made any progress, Manasa somehow dragged the two of them back. He knew that neither of them had any idea how to fix it, and hadn't known for years. It drove a blunt, rusty wire in their relationship and infected even the parts of it that had nothing to do with her, or Cell, or the Circle of the Inner Flame.
He wanted to yell and scream at her for being secretive, for being foolish, for being totally justified in her grief, but was utterly paralyzed by the thought that, if he did, she might leave him like Manasa did. Sevoya was his daughter, he was her father, and the two of them never really talked.
His eyes watered. He blamed the onions.
"We've got a visitor," interrupted Krillin- the Krillin, the Tripitaka- from the couch.
His feet propped up his knees beneath his stomach, and his head lay flat against the cushion. The area around the stitches in his abdomen were not as red and inflamed as the day before, and slowly, his appetite had returned, but how his flesh looked inside his body was still a morbid, relevant question. Whatever Thalia did to him during the Tenkaichi Budokai must have been serious to keep him down for such a long time.
"They hungry?" asked Chi Chi.
"Dunno," said Krillin. "But they're coming in hot," he added.
Chi Chi's rhythmic cuts paused. "My son?"
Sevoya stopped whisking.
Hass zeroed in on her. Oh, so you don't like that I like Son Chi Chi because you're into her son. Is that it?
Sevoya answered with a face like a stone, and Hass realized that he had not only said the wrong thing, but the thing he said- that everything he had assumed- was wrong.
He felt like he'd opened a doorway to a room with an ocean for a floor, and crashed headfirst into its depths.
"Sevoya?" he whispered.
Her hands started to tremble, and her eyes darted elsewhere.
Son Gohan: deliverer, vigilante, student, king. All of them, the same person. He was the oldest son of two of Hass's favorite martial artists, he lived on a mountain, he wielded incredible power, he was a primary person of interest for the Cult that Hass' wife started, and he met his daughter at school. That is what Hass knew about the boy, and truthfully, that is all he knew about his relationship to Sevoya.
"No," said Krillin. "Definitely not Gohan."
Sevoya exhaled, finally, and wilted in relief. So did Mark Satan, but his sigh was much more obnoxious.
Hass narrowed his eyes. Sevoya introduced Gohan to him as a friend, not an adversary. He was missing something, here.
Meanwhile, Chi Chi's rhythm of steel on wood resumed.
"Well, they could have called first," Chi Chi said.
Sevoya turned away from the eggs to look at Krillin, and then out the window. Mark's eyes followed hers.
"Sevoya?" Hass repeated.
When she didn't answer, he looked out the window, too.
The gentle wind blew over Mount Paozu's grass the same as every morning, and the impromptu tent-and-capsule city outside slept through the easy birdsong and soft morning colors with no greater worries than they had the day before.
"Krillin, how do you know th-?" Mark started to ask, but it was a stupid question.
A white jetcopter with slashing wounds and sloshing brown burn trails scattering across its frame broke apart the morning's silence and landed in a frantic, fearless hurricane of loose grass and spiraling wind outside the Son's front door. Mark and both Anillos stranded Chi Chi at the stove with breakfast as they scrambled to the door, morbid curiosity and eager dread pushing at their heels. Mark reached the door first and threw himself outside.
From the sofa, Krillin hummed in warning. Inside the cockpit should have been Eighteen and Videl with news of Orange Star's destruction, but Hass and his daughter knew from Krillin's pensive eyes and hard-lipped silence that whoever was inside was not someone he knew.
"Who?" Sevoya asked.
"Don't know," he said, but they need not wonder long.
The jetcopter's motor cut the instant it touched the ground, and as its mechanical heartbeat faded, the frantic shouts of two men erupted on the sound of Mount Paozu- one, an unknown, and the other, Mark Satan. Hass squeezed through the doorway to see the commotion.
Leaping from the jetcopter was a wild-eyed, snarling Julian. He might have been just as handsome as his magazine photos if he sported an Armani suit and not a black eye, cuts, or a tattered Great Saiyaman uniform, and he might have been just as charismatic as usual if his fists didn't immediately ball in the collar of Hass's shirt to pull the huge man down to his eye level.
"What the hell were those things under my hospital?!" Julian screamed.
"Wh-what? Julian, I don't know what-!"
"Don't try that again with me! We almost died! Died!"
Hass shook his head in Julian's face. "I, I, I don't-!"
Mark held out his hands in a placating gesture simultaneous to Hass's stuttered denial. "Alright, let's all just calm down, and-"
Julian spared a hand to point at Mark. "Shut up, you incompetent hack. This is way above your damage!"
"There's no reason for you to treat him like this!" argued Mark with obstinate bluster as he pointed at himself with an equally obstinate thumb. "And don't call me that! I may not be too popular right now, but I'm still Hercule Satan, and I can still bash your face in! You can't even fly! You're just a regular guy!"
Julian slammed his forehead into Mark's teeth with enough force to promptly send him to the ground. Then, he turned back to Hass. A thin trail of fresh blood trickled down from his hairline.
"The Orange Star Circle didn't want death," hissed Julian. "They wanted to screw around with their bodies and become monsters!" he hollered. Beneath my hospital! In my jurisdiction!"
Manasa. Of course. It always came back to something to do with his wife.
Hass shook his head. "Julian, I don't know anything about what Manasa's Circle got up to after she died, okay? I told you! We walked away from all that!"
"Bullshit!" Julian shook Hass so fervently that he felt like a children's rodeo ride put on the highest setting.
"I swear I don't know anything!"
"They turned themselves into monsters! Why did you hide that?!"
"I didn't hide anything! How could I have known that?!"
"She was your wife!"
"I told you, I-!"
"Tell me the truth this time!" screamed Julian. His chest heaved, and spittle flew from his lips. "Right now, or I'll make you wish you were never born! Was she involved in the Cell project?!"
"No!" screamed Hass.
Julian raised a fist. "I swear to god, Hass, if you don't tell me, I'm going to-!"
A sudden beam of hot light cut through the air and burned the side of Julian's foot, and then marked a charred trail of grass about ten inches long behind him. He let out a surprised cry of pain and turned to Sevoya, who was aiming a tiny gun at his feet.
Sevoya, who was aiming a gun. Hass blinked.
Sevoya, his daughter. A gun.
A gun?!
"Sevoya!" cried Hass, horrified. "Young lady, what are you doing with a gun?!"
"That was a warning. Put him down," Sevoya said to Julian. "Put him down, or I actually make a hole in your foot this time."
"Sevoya, your mother, she—!"
"We don't know anything about my mother's side project," Sevoya said. "In fact, whatever happened after her death probably had nothing to do with her, but if it did, that secret died with her."
Julian held tight to Hass' throat. "How can you think I'll buy that?!" he roared. "I fought with them! Eighteen and Videl fought them with me! I found out your secret, and they admitted to being in her Circle!" He shook Hass. "Why won't you just come clean?! Why won't you just tell me so we could've stopped this before it got to this point?! Why?!"
The furrow of Julian's brows melted, and water gathered in the corners of his eyes. He looked like he might collapse under Hass's weight and the weight of the stress on his shoulders combined.
"Julian, what-?"
"I trusted you, Hass! I told you everything!"
Sevoya readied her gun, but the clearing of a throat from over her shoulder cut off her focus.
In the doorway behind Sevoya, Chi Chi appeared like a tranquil goddess, knife in one hand and unpeeled potato in the other.
"Mrs. Son, don't hurt him," said Hass. "He's just-!"
"Sevoya, put that thing away. There's no need to escalate this." Chi Chi's cute, clipped accent smoothed out over the field like a gingham sheet: quaint, but smothering.
"Uh," Sevoya looked from Julian to Chi Chi to Mark, and Hass watched in stunned silence as she realized she'd shot at a pair of men for starting a fistfight in the yard. Her cheeks colored, and she became alarmingly cognizant of the fact that in her hurry to grab the gun, she accidentally tucked a piece of her skirt into her underwear.
"Yes, ma'am," Sevoya said, holstering the gun and smoothing down her skirt.
Julian blinked between the two women with newfound pause, momentarily too puzzled to be angry.
Chi Chi took an authoritative ten steps from her stoop until she was in front of Julian, and deftly peeled the potato so that the skin flayed off the side in a single, thick coil. She sliced the end of it from the root's exposed white flesh with icy finality, and then swapped the peeled potato for an unpeeled one in her apron pocket. The edge of her knife balanced against it with a threatening glint.
The crowd in the yard, including the curious heads poking out from around their doorways, stared at her in wary expectation. The birds in the trees stopped chirping and let the wind blow one last awkward breeze through the silence.
"Do you-?" began Julian, but Chi Chi's knife bit into the potato and sent a small spray of juice into his face.
"Young man, do you know where you are?" Chi Chi asked. She was barely Julian's height, if that, and the neat bun on the top of her head brought her there.
Julian blinked. "Mount Paozu."
"Very good," she said, nodding, and beginning her knife's spiral around the potato. "Do you know whose house this belongs to?"
"The, uh, the Son family?"
Chi Chi nodded. "And do you know who I am?"
Julian searched her face with a dawning understanding.
"Son Chi Chi," he said, with a quavering wince.
The sharp edge of her knife unspooled the rough skin with a practiced, ominous pace, and she let the peeling fall to the ground like an unspoken threat.
"Did you know you have one of my guests by the collar?"
"Yes, but that's because-!"
"On my property? Under my watch?"
Julian unceremoniously dropped Hass on his ass.
"Ma'am," he said, swallowing, and bowed. "I am so sorry to interrupt your morning, but this man," he pointed to Hass, "has obscured something dangerous that threatens the wellbeing of everyone on-!"
Hass shook his head. "I don't know anything about-!"
"Young man," said Chi Chi, cutting them both off, "do you see all the houses and tents on my property?"
Hass and Julian nodded.
"In about thirty minutes, all these nice folks're gonna be hungry, and we've got to feed 'em."
"But-!"
"Now," Chi Chi said, and the word struck both of them like a sniper's laser attaching itself to their forehead, "Let's discuss this in a nice, calm manner over breakfast once everyone else is served."
"But, ma'am," said Julian, pointing at Hass.
Chi Chi's nails bit into the potato so deeply that the whole thing crushed into a wet pulp at the center of her palm. The mush splattered onto Julian's face and demanded he wipe it from his eyes and mouth with a horrified hand. Hass's huge eyes twinkled with ignited stars, and he ignored his daughter's open scowl.
"That wasn't up for discussion," Chi Chi clarified.
Julian swallowed, and nodded. "Y-yes, ma'am," he said.
Then, the tension in the air evaporated like ethanol in open air- practically instantly. Chi Chi smiled with enough sugar to make anyone diabetic, and gently wiped her hands on her apron. Julian let a return smile crack nervously across his face while Hass's face turned bright red and sent steam from his ears. Sevoya rubbed her temples and massaged at her eyes with an annoyed hand.
"Oh, call me Chi Chi," Chi Chi said, turning around to return to her kitchen. "I knew you were a nice young man! Do you know how to saute vegetables?"
"Uh," said Julian, furrowing his eyebrows, "kinda."
"Well, Mr. Hass can show you," she said. "Mr. Hass, would you be a dear and-?"
"He's gone!"
A frantic shout and series of crashes from the woods behind the Son house erupted through the clearing followed by two figures: Goten and Trunks.
"He's gone!" repeated Trunks, wide-eyed as he weaved through the few houses to the front door.
"Gone!" parroted Goten, launching himself into the air and towards his mother. "We can't find him! We can't sense him! He's not anywhere!"
He landed at Chi Chi's feet so quickly that his heels skidded in the dirt before bringing him to a complete stop. Trunks followed right behind him, and landed with even less control. Two cratered scars in the earth marked where he put his feet down.
"The head device isn't anywhere, either!" Trunks cried. "No monsters, no tracks, no nothing! He's just gone! He's-!"
"Boys," said Chi Chi, "slow down. Who is gone?"
"Vegeta!" cried a third voice, and suddenly Bulma came bursting through the brush. "Chi Chi, Vegeta is missing!"
Chi Chi balked. "What?!"
Sevoya looked to Hass, who winced.
Julian leaned next to him and whispered, "Vegeta? Bulma Briefs's shut-in baby daddy? The one from the tabloids? That Vegeta?"
"Yes," Hass whispered back, "but can you put it a little more delicately? At least in front of his son?"
"He's not anywhere!" repeated Trunks. "We didn't take that stupid crown thing off him, and now we can't sense him or anything, and he's gone!"
His fists trembled by his sides, and his huge, pale eyes watered in the light of the climbing sun.
"There were no creatures or dinosaurs or anything around, but because I can't sense him, I think somebody might've-! They might've-!"
"Trunks," said Goten, "we can still keep looking!"
Bulma reached her son, and put her arms around him.
"Trunks, no, it's okay," she said. "Shh. We don't know that. He might just be missing."
"Stop it!"
Trunks broke out of his mother's arms and whirled around to face her.
"That's what you all say! That's what you all keep saying! But none of this has been okay! None of it! None of it at all!"
He took a step backwards, and then clumsily turned his body and flew towards the forest. Goten called after him, and then followed with barely a look to his mother.
"Shit," said Sevoya, as she clutched at her necklace with nervous drive. The pendant's green stone flashed in the early sun like a tiny mirror from within her palm.
Chi Chi sheathed her knife within her apron pocket and reached out to the panting Bulma.
"You're sure he's gone?"
"Yes," she said. "Tien Shinhan and Roshi are already looking, but they said they couldn't pick up on him, either. There's no sign of a struggle or anything. It's like he just disappeared!"
Suddenly, Sevoya stopped rotating her pendant in her palm. Something froze her from toe to tip. Her gloomy, pensive eyes opened in wide surprise, and she backed up into the house.
"Sevoya?" asked Hass, stepping away from Julian and towards the doorway. "Sevoya, what's going on?"
OOOOOOO
"Sevoya?" her father called. "Sevoya, what's going on?"
Sevoya hurried into the Son house, cold sweat forming in beads on the back of her neck. She darted across the kitchen, breezed by the couch, and stopped dead at the foot of the stairs when she found the way blocked. Krillin levitated in the air over the first step.
"Hey," he said. "What're you hiding?"
"Sevoya!" shouted Hass, from the front door.
Sevoya turned the open locket in her hands around towards Krillin.
"It's gone," she hissed, in a strangled whisper. "The tablet's gone!"
Krillin's perplexed eyebrows shot to his fine, barely-there hairline. He looked from the necklace to her eyes, and then to Hass.
"Sevoya!" repeated Hass as he maneuvered his huge body through the forest of furniture between them.
"My dad doesn't know it," said Sevoya. "So move! Please!"
Krillin's open face wrinkled with shock.
"What?!"
"You're the only one I've told!" said Sevoya. "Move!"
Krillin didn't.
Hass circled around the couch. "Sevoya, what's going on with you?"
"Nothing!" she said, whirling around. Tiny, chilled trails of sweat rolled down the back of her neck. "Nothing, dad! I just- I just want to be alone! Okay?!"
Hass's wide face reddened, but not from Mount Paozu's dawning heat.
"Alone?!" he roared like an animal rudely slapped into sudden aggression. "Alone for what?! So you can run away again? So you can sulk in your room?!"
"Maybe!" argued Sevoya, threatening Krillin with her elbow.
Instead of moving, Krillin re-centered himself in front of her.
"Sheesh! Don't shove!" he said. "Just talk to the man, okay?!"
"This isn't your business, cueball!" Sevoya hissed.
"Maybe not, but I'm still reaping the consequences!" Krillin gestured to the bandage around his abdomen. "Do you know how ridiculous this is?! I can't just stand on the stairs like a normal person!" He pointed to his head next. "And I'm not a cueball! You see that?! That's fuzz!"
"Well, I-!"
"Sevoya!" her father roared.
The line of pictures hanging beside the stairs trembled like leaves, and both Sevoya and Krillin shrank into the floor, ire forgotten.
Hass's nostrils curled as he let loose a deep breath of obstinate air, and waited.
With a wince, Sevoya considered her necklace and her father. She held the open locket in her trembling hands like an empty seashell on the beach. The slightest force might break it in two.
She turned to Krillin. Krillin shrugged, and lead her gaze back to her father with his eyes.
Was it better to hurt someone with a secret, or with the truth?
Hass's stormy frown glared down at her beneath watery, shimmering eyes. A tremble in the hard line of his lips and a twitch of his neck warned that he might rain down tears at any moment.
Sevoya's dry tongue threatened to seal over her throat like sand falling down a sinkhole. The walls and the floor closed in on her and threatened to suck her down into the dark earth beneath the floorboards. In her mind, she fought it, but her efforts only pulled her down faster. Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears, and her breath shortened.
OOOOOOO
"Death on your terms," Sevoya's mother said, when she slipped the locket around her neck and smoothed her daughter's hair over her shoulders.
The locket glittered in the mirror with the same luster and color as the earrings hanging from her ears: earrings from her father, with stones to match Sevoya's eyes.
Her mother kissed the crown of her head, and smiled.
"It is the last and only agency you have: Let your death give satisfaction to a monster, or deny him the right and take it yourself," she had said. "Your father will take it away if you tell him. Your father will take away that power, because he says it's cowardly. But that's not true, either. He'll take it away because he's afraid to die, and afraid that you'll leave him behind."
"Are you going to leave?" Sevoya had asked her mother, and the hard lines Cell had drawn into her face.
"If it comes down to it," said Manasa, "yes."
"You're going to leave?" whispered Sevoya.
"Yes," said Manasa, placidly resolute.
"But," Sevoya said. "But what about…?"
Manasa placed a gentle hand on Sevoya's shoulder and guided her out of her bedroom.
"This is between the two of us," said Manasa. "Promise?"
Sevoya frowned. The room felt like it had no ceiling, and she was inexplicably cold even though she had started sweating. Her muscles twitched under her skin.
"Sevoya?" said Manasa. "Do you promise?"
Sevoya swallowed.
"Sevoya?"
"I want to watch with dad," Sevoya said, turning her eyes down.
Manasa drew the same enigmatic smile that she used with displeased customers to her face, or that she used on Hass when she had already decided to ignore whatever he said to her.
"Of course," Manasa said, and that is all they said about it until the day of the Cell Games.
OOOOOOO
The television in the basement flickered with technicolor trepidation as a live feed of a barren wasteland panned over its surface. The rounded hills and yellowed plateaus standing on the horizon stood at attention through the curtains of dust blowing around their feet and overhead, and over the lip of the wide, shallow crater yawning beneath a strange figure floating in the washed-out sky.
Red eyes, waxy wings, mottled green-grey skin, and humanoid limbs articulated like an insect's. Cell floated in the sky like a giant wasp. He was a monster with a man's face.
On the ground was a lone figure with hair so pale, it sparkled in the unrelenting sunlight. He was not the first to look this way; on the crest of a faraway plateau, a group of figures looked on. Three of them glittered the same harsh, hostile light, like personified heat waves lapping at the air with sinister consistency.
Hass leaned forward on the couch, quietly transfixed as their world became a science fiction special. Sevoya squeezed in next to him, watching with a careful eye the hard line of her mother's mouth and the way her brows twitched every so often.
The feed on the television lost focus, and then closed in on the single figure standing at the base of the plateau.
The lines between Manasa's brows deepened, and her expression darkened. Sevoya shrank into the couch cushions, away from her father, and out of range of her mother's furious stare.
"A child," the tinny voice from the television speakers exclaimed.
It was true. He was a child of about Sevoya's age with bright green eyes and gleaming skin. He looked like a figure made from blown glass, and then given an orb of light to hold within himself. Without the overhead sun beating down on him, he might have radiated to rival the full moon.
The boy took a hesitant step towards the monster and said something. The monster cocked its head and floated down to meet him with the leisure of a vulture circling dead meat.
The television blathered on with its own commentary, but Manasa was louder.
"A child, Hass?" she said. Her soft voice cut through the tiny basement with a rare, uncompromising outrage. "You really plan to watch a child go to slaughter in this farce?"
"He's the real thing, isn't he?" Hass said, gesturing towards the screen. "You said so! You told me you could feel energies awakening in the weeks before now, and you could tell they weren't human. That's them, isn't it? He's one of them, isn't he?"
"I said I could feel something, but it wasn't enough!"
A cord in Manasa's neck tightened.
"He may loom large among men, but Cell is larger!" She stood up. "And he is a child! Why? Why is he doing this when I see three other men just like him standing on that ridge?! You're going to watch this?!"
Sevoya squinted at the glowing figures on the distant plateau. They were men?
Hass pulled his face away from the television. "What would you have me do, Manasa?! Give up? Sit in a corner with my head in the sand?"
"Not force my daughter to sit through this, for one!"
Sevoya shrank into her seat, like the couch cushions could swallow her in escape. The framed prints of famous martial artists on the walls watched her with focused pity. Perhaps if the mystery fighter were here, she could knock some sense into both of her parents.
Hass stood up. "She's my daughter, too! And if she doesn't want to watch it, she can leave whenever she wants to! You can leave whenever you want to! I never-!"
The speakers made a deafening noise like an explosion followed by a series of curses and exclamations. The television screen held a blur of dusty scenery until it finally focused on a collapsing plateau and a billowing trail of dust.
"He's dead! My god! The monster killed him!" the television cried. "The Delivery Boy, dead!"
Sevoya looked between the screen and her parents, waiting for something. A laugh track, a collapsing ceiling, anything to prove this was a dream, and not her present.
Hass stared at his wife with gritted teeth, gutted. Whatever he had to say was immaterial, and whatever hope he'd had in the situation on the screen was almost comical to try and defend. The air in the basement chilled and grew stale, like that of a tomb.
"He's still alive," muttered Manasa, "hiding. He's a child, and he's not ready for this. I'm going upstairs," she said, her voice fatally even. "I can't watch this."
Hass reached for her arm. "M-Manasa, I-!"
She whirled around. "I'm not watching this anymore!"
Manasa riled beneath a silence so thick, the crunchy, hysterical audio of the television sounded a million miles away. The panicked whites of her eyes betrayed a frustration, uncertainty, and impatience she'd kept hidden until this moment. Manasa felt Cell and the boy in the air, somehow, in a way Sevoya would never understand. The creature crushed her mother underfoot with a presence Hass once described, poorly, and that neither he nor Sevoya could feel.
Manasa's head snapped to Sevoya. "Sevoya, come on!"
Both she and Hass turned to Sevoya, who rubbed her locket between her thumb and forefinger like it might bring forth some kind of djinn to solve her troubles.
"Sevoya!" commanded her mother, hands shaking.
Hass watched his daughter with empty eyes, and didn't say a word.
Sevoya looked at her mother, and then at her locket. Her feet joined her body on the couch, and rubbed circles against one another.
Her mother wouldn't really leave them, would she? That was only if Cell came to Orange Star, or to their house. It was still far, far away in the wasteland at the center of the continent.
Right?
She wiped at the clammy beads of sweat on the back of her neck, and stared at her locket.
"...I see," said Manasa, turning towards the stairs.
Suddenly, Manasa yelped and fell to her knees, and an instant later, the panicked chatter of the television gave way to another dull explosion. When the screen regained focus, it found the boy standing amongst rubble, unscathed and uncertain.
"Manasa," Hass muttered, reaching for her.
Manasa let out a choking sob, threw her hands over mouth, and ascended the stairs. Hass remained standing exactly where he was, and dumbly turned to watch the broadcast.
"Dad?" asked Sevoya, holding out the locket. "Did she give you…?" Her mouth dried out, and the words shrivelled.
"She'll come back," Hass whispered. "It'll be okay. We'll win. You'll see," he said, staring at the empty stairwell. "You'll see."
What happened next was something out of a dream Sevoya couldn't clearly recall if she tried. She remembered Hercule Satan, maybe, and way the cameraman stuttered as he spat dust out of his mouth. She remembered a growing sense of foreboding and the way her hands shook, and the talking, disembodied head of a giant trailing an arc of slick, red-brown ooze as someone threw it across the wasteland to land at the boy's feet. Her father sat down next to her on the couch, but she could not remember him moving from his place by the stairs. She remembered his white face and wide, shocked eyes.
She remembered Cell crushing the head of a man-shaped machine, and the pregnant pause between the boy's inhalation and the instant the broadcast stopped dead. But she remembered most the seconds before and leading up to it, when a wave of something massive and indescribable swept through her house, through her body, through her soul, and choked all of the air from her lungs. She remembered drowning in dread inside an invisible, ironclad fist closing around her, and shrieking in terror as the television went black at the moment of Son Gohan's inevitable, unignorable, inescapable scream.
She shivered in the room alongside her father in silence, riveted for what felt like an eternity, shackled by a force she could neither see nor understand. When it released her, finally, and pins and needles replaced the blood in her legs, her arms, her side, she stumbled from the couch, up the stairs, through the restaurant, and up another floor to her little sister's room, where she found her and their mother's body curled around one another on the floor, not breathing.
OOOOOOO
In the aftermath of Manasa's death, the grieving hand of Hass' sharp-eyed suspicion passed over Sevoya's deadly contraband like a blind wolf passing by a still and silent deer. Sevoya hid it in the open, with the quiet of the obvious. She pretended her father knew, and that her secret was an open one. But it wasn't, and he had her now- he had the scent, and heard her bolt.
There was nowhere to go; nowhere to escape; no way to hold still and elude what came next. There was only here, her father, her mother, and the truth.
"The," she started, swallowing the word halfway through speaking it. "The, um. The locket mom gave me. It…"
She bowed her head, pulled the chain from her neck, and held the open locket up to her father. The deep emerald on the front glistened like dew on a leaf, and the pictures inside regarded him with a cool passivity.
He looked at it, puzzled.
"It's pictures," Hass said, picking it up and tracing its inner rim with his wide finger. He stared at his youngest daughter, and then at his wife with wet eyes. "Pictures of your mother and sister."
"No," said Sevoya, shaking her head.
Hass looked up. "I don't understand."
"That wasn't why mom gave it to me," whispered Sevoya, sinking into the floor.
Inside that locket had been the deepest, cruelest secret Sevoya and her mother had ever kept from Hass, but the open chaos spreading over her father's face was undoubtedly worse. A sinister, insidious horror lay in her father's hands, invisible to everyone in the room but him, and all the more frightening to him for its disguise. Hass looked between his wife and daughters.
"What was in the locket?" Hass asked, voice low.
Sevoya stared at him, shaking, and watching as his hand trembled beneath the weight of the locket.
"What did she give you?" Hass asked. "Sevoya?"
Her breaths fell down her throat in shallow gasps.
"Sevoya?" repeated Hass, kneeling down to steady her.
"Poison," Sevoya uttered.
Hass rocked back on his knees like he'd been struck. Behind his eyes, he fell somewhere dark and deep. The color in his face drained with his soul, and soon, his pale face fell expressionless and empty. The locket chain hung limply from his hand like a dead thing. Inside, Manasa smiled enigmatically at her husband.
"Poison," he repeated. "Poison."
"She thought I would follow her when she left you in the basement," said Sevoya, trembling. "Please don't be angry. Please. Please don't-"
Hass's mouth fell open with a guttural cry. He pulled her into his arms and held her so tightly, she thought he might crush her. Sevoya's mind went blank, and then churned with all the possible apologies and details she could have said next, but what came out was nothing at all.
Instead, her father sobbed out a jumble of words that didn't make any sense until she listened very, very closely:
"But you didn't," choked out Hass. "You didn't leave. You didn't. You didn't leave me."
OOOOOOO
Clio smiled at the grey sky overhead, and the figure growing closer and closer beneath the pattering morning rain. His paws grasped the dial in his hand like some kind of remote guiding the figure's trajectory, but Melpomene knew that was nothing more than Clio playing games. He would come to the coordinates Clio set regardless of any other theatrics the hare performed.
"So we snagged Vegeta, huh? This is working out better than I expected. I thought Thalia would put it on that other one if she was going to use it on anybody. Figured we could use him to do this the hard way instead of just walking right in." Clio snickered. "I don't believe in fate, but I must say, this almost feels like it."
Melpomene blinked dumbly. He hadn't the energy to do much of anything, let alone make conversation with his captor. The machine in his mind deemed it unnecessary, anyway, and it wasn't worth the energy to fight it for such an unpleasant trifle.
The blessing was, he supposed, that the machine in his mind had no reason to inform Clio that the two of them were being followed by Yamcha and his little blue cat.
"You know," said Clio, his voice rising in pitch, "I neeeeeever thought this day would come." He scratched the stripe of fur between his chin and his collarbones. "I've spent so much time preparing, I think I might hardly know what to do with myself after this."
He side-eyed Melpomene, like he expected a response.
"All I'm saying is, space better be all it's cracked up to be, because I'm sick of all my current muses. I need a new one."
When Melpomene still didn't say anything, Clio gestured for him to lean down. Melpomene didn't.
"Cap's on crooked," Clio said, somewhere between a complaint and an explanation.
Melpomene stared straight ahead, too tired to glean amusement from the fact that his mechanical mind was so focused on efficiency, it categorized Clio's critique unnecessary.
Clio pouted, and then sprang into the air with an incredible hop. He straightened Melpomene's cap before gently settling back on the ground.
"There," said Clio. "That's more fitting for a Capsule Corp employee, don't you think? Better for the setting," he said. "Fits the heist!"
When Melpomene still had nothing to say, the hare pouted.
"Oh, come on! Have some fun with this! Get into character! You're the henchman of the hare who is about to break into the home of the owner of the largest, most famous, most profitable, most cutting-edge company in the world! Please! Show me some," he made a grandiose gesture with his paws, and took a bow, "theatrics, daaaahling!"
He held out his arms, as if he could gesture to the entirety of the Briefs' complex rising behind him. The walled lot around it stood out amongst the towering skyscrapers of West City, even in the hazy air left by the rain. It was a time capsule from nearly fifty years ago, when Doctor Briefs first bought the lot and built a massive mansion in the shape of his domed, portable homes. The curved building sported a great blue tarp over the side where Vegeta had blown a hole several days ago. Mechanical and human security was at a maximum around the building, especially during such a time of crisis, and Capsule Corp employees and construction workers milled about in the wet weather like agitated ants.
The two of them fit right in. Clio 's latest disguises for the two of them consisted of the billed hats and iconic, lettered jumpsuits of the Capsule Corporation's technicians and mechanics. Melpomene's spelled out his real name: Cray. Clio chose it for him on purpose.
Once upon a time, Cray set out on a journey to let go of his ego and be as one with the world. He sought to be at peace, and without arrogance or pride. He thought the self an illusion.
Now, he had nothing, not even his free will. He missed it, and everything he had worked to give up. He would trade anything to be an undisciplined, selfish child again- obsessed with himself and his feelings, and all worldly concerns. Now, he only pondered the sufferings of others, and silently hated himself for his shortcomings.
Melpomene's eyes watered, even though his face didn't move. Why, in this moment, crying was the one thing he could do when everything else escaped his power, he didn't know, but he couldn't change it.
"So you are still in there," observed Clio, with a sly, sinister chuckle. "And here I thought I succeeded in choking you out like a weed."
He pantomimed choking himself, and gagged. Then, when he overdid the joke to his satisfaction, he patted Melpomene on the arm.
"I'm not worried. You'll give up eventually. And besides, this won't take long. All we have to do is rearrange this place and take a few things, and then wait for the pick up. Who knows! If you're good, I might take your brain and put it in Vegeta's body. Wouldn't that be something?"
Clio's buck teeth gleamed as he grinned, even in the miserable light. His strained eyes looked smaller without his goggles to magnify them and lessen the deep circles underneath. If Melpomene didn't know the hare personally, he might have pitied him. Clio looked less like a mad scientist and more like a tired, overworked manager in the middle of a crisis. The role was perfect.
Vegeta's boots clicked on the ground as he landed. He stared at the skyline of West City with glazed eyes.
Was he awake? Melpomene wondered. Was he aware of what was happening? Did he know Clio had control? Was he fighting it? He had no way of knowing.
Clio clicked a button on the control in his hand, and held it up to his face. Melpomene noticed a microphone in the bottom edge. What the hare said next, Vegeta said, too, in a taciturn monotone.
"Hello. My name is Vegeta, and I smell like a tuna fish sandwich. I feel pretty in spandex. Toodle loo loo loo. How do you do."
Clio clicked off the receiver and took Vegeta's hands in an enthusiastic handshake. Vegeta stared through Melpomene, into the distance.
"Jolly good of you to arrive," said Clio, puffing up his chest and putting on the airs of a smarmy aristocrat in a period movie. "Jolly good. And so prompt," he added. "We should make for smashing business partners, you and I. Now!"
He gestured to the Briefs residence, and the tarp on the roof.
"Would you kindly escort us into your home?"