But he was mighty glad to be back alive.
He and Tien celebrated in the barren wasteland where they'd been revived, but after a few minutes they felt Kami coming towards them. They turned to wish him joy as well, but he was flying with speed and purpose, and his face was serious.
"Tien! Chiaotzu!" he called as he flew overhead. "Follow me. We have urgent business."
With only a glance at each other, Tien and Chiaotzu rose into the air and did as Kami bid.
"What is it, Kami?" Tien called as they sped toward the ocean.
"If I am alive again," Kami said grimly, "then that means my counterpart is as well."
Tien and Chiaotzu glanced at each other again in alarm, and asked no more questions.
Soon they arrived at Kame House, and Chiaotzu remembered Roshi had planned to bury the rice cooker on his island, in the hopes that he could protect it. As they approached, a loud squealing bombarded their ears. They landed on the beach and rushed toward the house, but before they got there a body was hurled out the window with a loud crash. The person that landed on the sand wore a Hawaiian print shirt— Master Roshi.
"Oolong!" he shouted. "Get that blasted— rice—" He dissolved into loud hacking coughs, and as Chiaotzu ran toward him he could see the front of his shirt was soaked with blood. Roshi saw the three of them and smiled painfully. "Thank… goodness…"
The old master closed his eyes and sighed, but before Chiaotzu could check for a pulse, the door slammed open and Oolong ran squealing from the house, a rice cooker held over his head. When he saw Tien and Kami he dumped it at their feet without stopping and made a wide circle around the back of the house. As he rounded the corner, the door slammed open again, and from it emerged the gigantic form of Demon King Piccolo.
Chiaotzu had never seen him in person, had in fact only ever heard him described, but the words 'eight feet tall' did nothing to convey the sheer size of the monster that ducked through the doorway of the little pink house. He looked like Kami, but older and more nasty, and when he caught sight of his counterpart he stopped and grinned.
"There you are," he said. "I suppose you've come to stop me."
"Indeed," Kami said with, to Chiaotzu at least, remarkable calm. Piccolo grinned wider.
"Being dead was very instructive, you know. I learned quite a lot during my time in hell. I imagine I'm as strong as you've managed to become in my absence. I wonder if you have the guts to face me yourself. Or are you once again going to let other hands get dirty in your place?"
"I will take care of you myself, rest assured," Kami said, still serene. "But I have learned things too, these past few years. One of them might interest even you." Piccolo opened his mouth, obviously to deny any interest in what Kami had to say, but Kami finished with, "I have at last learned where we came from," and Piccolo snapped his mouth shut.
The two Namekians regarded each other warily. Chiaotzu took the opportunity to check Roshi's pulse: weak, but steady. He placed pressure on the wound, using telekinesis on the areas his hands couldn't cover, and let Tien's gentle telepathy distract him from the squelchy mess under his fingers. Roshi would probably live— if they could get him to a hospital. Why was Kami just standing there talking?
"We come from a planet full of beings just like us," Kami said, and the emotion in his voice was palpable. "We have a people, Piccolo. A home we came from."
"A home that cast us out!" Piccolo shouted. "A people that abandoned us! Don't seek to distract me with sentiment, Kami, not when you kept all such things for yourself and left me with only ambition and cruelty. I will rule this world as I have always planned, and I will not let you stand in my way!"
He leaped forward, and without flinching Kami raised his hands in the air and shouted, "Ma-fu-ba!"
Instantly Piccolo was caught up in a torrent of swirling green energy. Tien knelt swiftly and popped open the rice cooker, and Kami lowered his hands in a sweeping gesture, channeling the stretched-out specter of King Piccolo down into the empty bowl. The lid slammed shut.
"The charm!" Tien called. "Where is the charm!"
"Po–cket," Roshi wheezed. Chiaotzu reached into his shirt pocket with telekinesis and floated the piece of paper (spattered with blood, but still legible) over to the rice cooker and slapped it on. The rice cooker rattled once, and then fell still. The whole island let out its collective breath.
Oolong poked his snout around the corner of the house.
"Did we win?"
Later, at the hospital, Roshi looked cannily at Kami, who was sitting demurely in a folding chair wearing a hasty disguise. Oolong had let him borrow his baseball cap which read "HOT BUNS" in big red letters, and he was borrowing one of Roshi's collared shirts. He returned Roshi's gaze with politeness.
"Yes?"
"You tried to talk to him," he said. Kami looked away. Roshi smiled from where he lay with his thin, bony torso swathed in bandages. Chiaotzu didn't like to see the old master looking so frail, but he was watching god with a knowing twinkle in his eye. "Thinking maybe he's not a demon after all? Now that you know who you really are?"
Kami sighed impatiently.
"He's a demon, alright. His victims still wander the afterlife, unable to find rest. Demons can be made, as well as born, after all."
"Then why reason with him?" Roshi pointed out. "Why even try?"
Chiaotzu sipped his orange juice as quietly as he could, watching unblinking as Kami looked pensively out the window for several moments.
"Perhaps," he said eventually, in a voice so low Chiaotzu had to strain to hear, "I was hoping it was not I that had made him into a demon, but himself. That he was not, as I had long believed, a vessel for the dark castoffs of my soul, but another, separate being of his own. One that could," he nodded at Roshi, "be reasoned with."
"And now?" Roshi asked, his eyes still twinkling. Kami looked up at the ceiling, eyes tracing the outline of an old water stain.
"I don't know," he said.
A week later, when the ship containing Yamcha, Bulma, and eighty-three Namekians landed at Capsule Corp, Chiaotzu watched Kami stand stoically by as Bulma did crowd control and made introductions. To anyone who didn't know him well, he looked impassive, even forbidding. But to Chiaotzu, who had trained with him for a year and spent part of his afterlife with him, he just looked nervous.
The Namekians pouring off the ship didn't seem to care either way.
"Brother!" they greeted.
"Cousin!"
"Well met, son of Katatz!"
Hug and handshakes, crowds and questions— Kami grew more stony through it all, clearly overwhelmed. He didn't even flinch when a small boy perched himself on his shoulders and held on by his antennae.
"Now, now, everyone, give him some space." An older Namekian, portly and kind-faced, waved off the pressing crowd of eager Namekians and faced Kami. "Greetings, cousin. I am Moori. May I know your name?"
Kami blinked, shifting his grip on his staff. "I… have no name." A ripple of confused murmurs echoed through the crowd, and he looked even more nervous. "I... go by Kami, here."
"I see," said Moori warmly. "I am given to understand you do not remember your past, is that correct?" Kami nodded. Moori put a gentle hand on his shoulder. "I may not know your name, my friend, but I believe I know the name of your parent." Kami blinked rapidly, but otherwise did not react. Moori went on. "Our Grand Elder told me of a Namekian, long ago, just before the great calamity, that sent his child out into the universe in the hopes that they would survive, even if the rest of our people did not. The name of that Namekian was Katatz."
"Katatz," Kami repeated in a whisper. Chiaotzu leaned unobtrusively against Tien as they both watched the Guardian of Earth cover his eyes with his hand in a futile effort to hide the tears that spilled down his cheeks and dripped off his chin. The entire crowd of Namekians gathered around their long lost family member, comforting him, welcoming him, claiming him as their own, and Chiaotzu could see, before Kami was lost to sight in the crowd, that underneath the tears, he was smiling.