Breakdown Chapter 12
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em
Note- No note : )
*********
Celeria was getting impatient. The pain in her left arm had dulled considerably thanks to her speedy healing system and now she was trying to convince Nicodemus that she sould fly on her own. However, he wasn't stupid and did not loosen his grip. Her protests stopped abruptly, however when Nicodemus slammed a huge amount of energy through her system. Celeria's head snapped back and she gasped in pain as ki that was not her own ripped through her system.
"How-" She started, but Nicodemus sent another jolt and she shut up. She had a lot to ponder now. This was advanced ki handeling. How did he learn to do that and make it so painful? It felt like a thousand knives had ripped through her veins a few times then vanished. That wasn't natural; one person should not carry another's ki unless it was a case of fusing.
Nicodemus slowed his flight and began to descend. There were, Celeria noticed after they had landed, two very small pods well camouflaged in this desert area. Nicodemus shoved celeria into one of the single-person capsules, and, standing over the door, spoke to her for the first time since they'd fought.
"Don't try anything stupid. The coordinates are set for a master ship. Try to change them, and I blast you to Hell." Nicodemus' voice was low and threatening. His face seemed oddly twisted in some sort of pain, but Celeria couldn't understand why. Nicodemus left for his own pod and the door closed swiftly. As her ship took off shakely, she made sure she had a small ki sheild up, then made sure she had her newly-discovered mentle block up. Next she surveyed the control panel.
Celeria knew what to do to change to coordinates to somewhere safe. All she needed to do was pull up a map and change what Nicodemus had set. There were a few problems with that. One: the ship was moving very quickly to it's destination and if she was going to do something, she ought to do it NOW. The second problem involved doing it now. Nicodemus had locked the maps and she was having a surprisingly hard time hacking into them. The last thing that was preventing her from escaping was Nicodemus' threat of killing her if she tried anything. There was no doubt in her mind that this threat was idle- Nicodemus had a problem. Even from her ship she could feel the furious flux and fade of his higher-than-normal ki. Perhaps that little trick earlier had done it? In any case, she was almost certain her ki sheild wouldn't protect her if Nicodemus truly was intending to kill. She needn't have worried about all these things anyway; the journey was short- no more than five minutes. Both ships landed at a loading dock on much, much larger ship orbiting Amqui. Nicodemus opened her door and pulled her out, barking at a couple of the gaurds as he passed for some restraints.
"She's for the boss." He explained, tossing Celeria easily over his shoulder and carrying her into the depths of the ship.
"You know, I *can* walk." Celeria muttered, propping her elbow on his back and resting her chin in her hand.
"Shut up. You'll be lucky if you live through the next half an hour if you keep that up." He growled. Celeria frowned deeper. Was that a warning? She was expecting more of the knife experiance. But despite this caution, did she shut her mouth? Of course not.
"I don't see what the big deal is. Coulda just killed me." She grumbled. Nicodemus stopped.
"Is that a complaint?" He growled.
"Is that a threat?" She replied, amazed at her own stupidity. 'Shut up shut up shut up!' she yelled at herself. But something she said must have worked, because the ex-gaurd now set his captive down in front of him and held her firmly by the shoulders. Celeria braced herself for more pain, but it didn't come.
"Are you crazy?!" Nicodemus wanted to know. It sounded like he couldn't decide whether to whisper or yell.
"Maybe." Celeria said, not being able to help herself. 'Stop stop stop stop stop!' Her inner voice yelled again. Nicodemus let go of her shoulders. 'Run away!' She ignored it. "What are you doing?" She asked suspiciously.
"Run. Go on. He'll kill me for it, but I'm dying anyway, and chances are he'll find you and kill you too, but it's better to die free." Nicodemus was talking in low, breathless tones. Celeria could see madness in his eyes. Suddenly he fell face-first onto the tile. Not quite knowing what to do, Celeria was broken between running and helping him.
"What am I, crazy?" She began to bolt down the hallway back to the pods when she heard Nicodemus roll over behind her. "Damn." She turned around, picked him up, and flew as fast as she could back down the hallway, all the while swearing in every language she knew. The gaurd's bulk was making this difficult, and the scrawny gaurds getting in her way weren't helping either. Soon the entire ship would know of the disturbance. Hoping to get away, she turned down another corridor, but met a dead end. She heard the boots of the officers catching up and had a sudden brainstorm. Setting her burden down against a wall, she began focusing her energy. Her aura turned red, then blue, then purple, then vanished. Her hair had shortened to boy's length and was black. She had changed her physical appearance entirely- she was bulkier and had more of the appearance of a man. She couldn't, however, change her voice. Looking herself over, she compared to Nicodemus.
"Not bad. It's a stretch on the muscles, but I can fake the voice." Unfortunately, she wasn't wearing Nicodemus' gaurd uniform, but hopefully no one would notice. Her baggy outfit would hide some of her features that she hadn't been able to morph.
*************
"So *that's* how you did it." Goku said admiringly. Celeria blushed slightly.
"I can't make the full change into somebody else. I'll never be anyone's exact twin. I can't change into anything. I just mostly change my face."
"How?" Gohan asked, thoughtfully. Vegeta was beyond caring. He was bored. He wanted action. He wanted his tail back.
"Well, you know how when you go Super Saiyan, your hair changes to blond? Well, this was one of my experiments in ki. I thought that perhaps it was the amount of ki flowing through your entire body that affected the hair fibers. And it was. It's not worth doing for long periods of time, though. Keeping your hair a certain length and color does take some concentration at first- willpower. After you've got the hang of it, it's still not a good idea to do it all the time. It takes a very small amount of ki, but time tells on everyone." Gohan nodded. Bulma was scribbling away in a notebook and had a tape recorder catching everything. Trunks was wondering where Goten was.
************
Celeria cleared her throat and stepped into the hallway.
"She ran that way! Catch her, or the boss will be angry!" She proclaimed, hoping this was motivation enough to get the crowd of gaurds moving. A few took off immediately, some hesitated, then left. A few eyed her warily, then left. One remained.
"Where is your uniform?"
"How is that important? We need that girl!" The gaurd didn't budge. Celeria could feel his eyes scanning her carefully as if to detect some fraud. Then he tried to look past her into the dead-end hall where Nicodemus- the real Nicodemus- was stashed. She moved to block his line of vision.
"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to move now. I don't care how favored you are with the boss, if he finds out you are hiding the key his greatest experiment, he'll kill you." The gaurd smiled evilly. Celeria returned it with a genuine Saiyan smirk, which looked rather out of place on Nicodemus' face.
"Then I'll just have to kill you first." She quickly discharged a blast through the gaurd's stomache. The look of anger and confusion froze on his face as he dropped to the floor, motionless. Celeria shuddered. Her Saiyan side had taken over again. Wait, what was she thinking? She was entirely Saiyan. Better to say her blood-thirsty side had taken over.
She ran back Nicodemus, who was still unconscious and changed back to herself. Picking up Nicodemus again, she ran back out into the main hallway looking for an exit. She went the way the group of gaurds minus one had gone, hoping that if any other gaurds were coming they'd come from the other direction and thus be at her back. Multiple hallways branched off. Clusters of powers were huddled at the ends of most of them, so she avoided them. She came upon a particularly long hallway and didn't sense any powers down it. Hoping it was a shuttle dock or some way of getting back to Amqui or some other planet, she flew down it as fast as she dared with her injured burden.
The hallway twisted infinitely, but nothing branched off. No rooms, no doors, nothing adorning the bleak walls. It made Celeria nervous; she hadn't even known the ship was this long!
Thankfully, after a final turn, the hall ended at a metal door. She sensed no power behind it, and prayed this was what she was looking for. Looking around for a way to open it, her eyes fell on a panel to the right. It looked like the door opened by code. She sighed.
"This will never do," Depositing Nicodemus yet again, she knelt to examine it more closely. It was a basic panel. One code opened it, and the wrong combination of symbols would alert everyone on the ship to an intruder's prescence. She could always force her way through, but there were most likely alarms triggered with the door, too.
Tearing the metal panel off the wall, she exposed the bare wires. Now here was a surprise- the innards of this particular panel were slightly different than she'd expected. She still held the panel in her hand and attached to the back of each button were wires of all different colors. The wires went back into the wall. Each wire triggered a diffrerent sensor. If you pressed the wrong wires in the wrong order, the alarms would go off. There was no way to tell which wires were safe; they were all a different color.
"Nicodemus. Wake up!" Celeria shook him slightly and he half opened his eyes painfully. Celeria explained the situation.
"Panel's a decoy," Nicodemus breathed. "Don't, it's a trap!" And he passed out again. Celeria didn't know what was wrong with him. Fine one moment, in agony the next was not normal. Then again, nothing was anymore. Ok, so the panel was a decoy. There *was* no correct code. What did she do to get in? Did she even want to get in anymore?
"Nicodemus, get up!" She urged. She was fairly certain no one would follow her down this hall since they hadn't already, and if they did she'd hear thm coming. But she needed to get off this ship to help the King and the rest of the planet. Without warning, however, the door slid open on its own! It was totally dark inside. Celeria threw a small ki ball to light it up, but the darkness swallowed it. Taking a deep breath, Celeria realized the only way to get off the ship was through there. She hoisted Nicodemus onto her shoulder and stepped inside. The moment she was in, the door slid shut and the lights clicked on.
"Oh shit."
*******************
Goten came to some time later in a dark room, in a most awkward position. He was bound securly, his arms pinned to his sides by a rope of some sort, which, try as he might, he could not break. He was dangling, oddly enough, from the ceiling. As he struggled against his bonds uselessly, he turned ridiculously in a slow circle. He couldn't see the ground beneath him, so he guessed he was high up. He decided powering up was probably a good idea in this situation, and reached for his Super Saiyan power. It did not come.
Just as he started to build the power, an unfamiliar ki tore through his body. Goten didn't scream. He knew now that his assailent was present, and would not give it the satisfaction of hearing his pain. As quickly as it came, the ki vanished, leaving Goten feeling... wrong. One person's ki was not meant for someone else's body.
Well this was just a ducky situation. He couldn't alert anyone of his plight if he couldn't power up. And to make matters worse, the senzus he'd gotten were gone.
The end of this part ^.^ finally got it out.. certainly took me long enough. Hope you liked, and trust me, I'm almost done with having Celeria dominate the entire fic, cuz if you're not getting tired of it, I am. I just need to explain what she went through so you can understand better. ^.^ Don't worry, it's almost over. Read, reveiw, and until next time, toodles.
~mysticGohan33~
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em
Note- No note : )
*********
Celeria was getting impatient. The pain in her left arm had dulled considerably thanks to her speedy healing system and now she was trying to convince Nicodemus that she sould fly on her own. However, he wasn't stupid and did not loosen his grip. Her protests stopped abruptly, however when Nicodemus slammed a huge amount of energy through her system. Celeria's head snapped back and she gasped in pain as ki that was not her own ripped through her system.
"How-" She started, but Nicodemus sent another jolt and she shut up. She had a lot to ponder now. This was advanced ki handeling. How did he learn to do that and make it so painful? It felt like a thousand knives had ripped through her veins a few times then vanished. That wasn't natural; one person should not carry another's ki unless it was a case of fusing.
Nicodemus slowed his flight and began to descend. There were, Celeria noticed after they had landed, two very small pods well camouflaged in this desert area. Nicodemus shoved celeria into one of the single-person capsules, and, standing over the door, spoke to her for the first time since they'd fought.
"Don't try anything stupid. The coordinates are set for a master ship. Try to change them, and I blast you to Hell." Nicodemus' voice was low and threatening. His face seemed oddly twisted in some sort of pain, but Celeria couldn't understand why. Nicodemus left for his own pod and the door closed swiftly. As her ship took off shakely, she made sure she had a small ki sheild up, then made sure she had her newly-discovered mentle block up. Next she surveyed the control panel.
Celeria knew what to do to change to coordinates to somewhere safe. All she needed to do was pull up a map and change what Nicodemus had set. There were a few problems with that. One: the ship was moving very quickly to it's destination and if she was going to do something, she ought to do it NOW. The second problem involved doing it now. Nicodemus had locked the maps and she was having a surprisingly hard time hacking into them. The last thing that was preventing her from escaping was Nicodemus' threat of killing her if she tried anything. There was no doubt in her mind that this threat was idle- Nicodemus had a problem. Even from her ship she could feel the furious flux and fade of his higher-than-normal ki. Perhaps that little trick earlier had done it? In any case, she was almost certain her ki sheild wouldn't protect her if Nicodemus truly was intending to kill. She needn't have worried about all these things anyway; the journey was short- no more than five minutes. Both ships landed at a loading dock on much, much larger ship orbiting Amqui. Nicodemus opened her door and pulled her out, barking at a couple of the gaurds as he passed for some restraints.
"She's for the boss." He explained, tossing Celeria easily over his shoulder and carrying her into the depths of the ship.
"You know, I *can* walk." Celeria muttered, propping her elbow on his back and resting her chin in her hand.
"Shut up. You'll be lucky if you live through the next half an hour if you keep that up." He growled. Celeria frowned deeper. Was that a warning? She was expecting more of the knife experiance. But despite this caution, did she shut her mouth? Of course not.
"I don't see what the big deal is. Coulda just killed me." She grumbled. Nicodemus stopped.
"Is that a complaint?" He growled.
"Is that a threat?" She replied, amazed at her own stupidity. 'Shut up shut up shut up!' she yelled at herself. But something she said must have worked, because the ex-gaurd now set his captive down in front of him and held her firmly by the shoulders. Celeria braced herself for more pain, but it didn't come.
"Are you crazy?!" Nicodemus wanted to know. It sounded like he couldn't decide whether to whisper or yell.
"Maybe." Celeria said, not being able to help herself. 'Stop stop stop stop stop!' Her inner voice yelled again. Nicodemus let go of her shoulders. 'Run away!' She ignored it. "What are you doing?" She asked suspiciously.
"Run. Go on. He'll kill me for it, but I'm dying anyway, and chances are he'll find you and kill you too, but it's better to die free." Nicodemus was talking in low, breathless tones. Celeria could see madness in his eyes. Suddenly he fell face-first onto the tile. Not quite knowing what to do, Celeria was broken between running and helping him.
"What am I, crazy?" She began to bolt down the hallway back to the pods when she heard Nicodemus roll over behind her. "Damn." She turned around, picked him up, and flew as fast as she could back down the hallway, all the while swearing in every language she knew. The gaurd's bulk was making this difficult, and the scrawny gaurds getting in her way weren't helping either. Soon the entire ship would know of the disturbance. Hoping to get away, she turned down another corridor, but met a dead end. She heard the boots of the officers catching up and had a sudden brainstorm. Setting her burden down against a wall, she began focusing her energy. Her aura turned red, then blue, then purple, then vanished. Her hair had shortened to boy's length and was black. She had changed her physical appearance entirely- she was bulkier and had more of the appearance of a man. She couldn't, however, change her voice. Looking herself over, she compared to Nicodemus.
"Not bad. It's a stretch on the muscles, but I can fake the voice." Unfortunately, she wasn't wearing Nicodemus' gaurd uniform, but hopefully no one would notice. Her baggy outfit would hide some of her features that she hadn't been able to morph.
*************
"So *that's* how you did it." Goku said admiringly. Celeria blushed slightly.
"I can't make the full change into somebody else. I'll never be anyone's exact twin. I can't change into anything. I just mostly change my face."
"How?" Gohan asked, thoughtfully. Vegeta was beyond caring. He was bored. He wanted action. He wanted his tail back.
"Well, you know how when you go Super Saiyan, your hair changes to blond? Well, this was one of my experiments in ki. I thought that perhaps it was the amount of ki flowing through your entire body that affected the hair fibers. And it was. It's not worth doing for long periods of time, though. Keeping your hair a certain length and color does take some concentration at first- willpower. After you've got the hang of it, it's still not a good idea to do it all the time. It takes a very small amount of ki, but time tells on everyone." Gohan nodded. Bulma was scribbling away in a notebook and had a tape recorder catching everything. Trunks was wondering where Goten was.
************
Celeria cleared her throat and stepped into the hallway.
"She ran that way! Catch her, or the boss will be angry!" She proclaimed, hoping this was motivation enough to get the crowd of gaurds moving. A few took off immediately, some hesitated, then left. A few eyed her warily, then left. One remained.
"Where is your uniform?"
"How is that important? We need that girl!" The gaurd didn't budge. Celeria could feel his eyes scanning her carefully as if to detect some fraud. Then he tried to look past her into the dead-end hall where Nicodemus- the real Nicodemus- was stashed. She moved to block his line of vision.
"Sir, I'm going to have to ask you to move now. I don't care how favored you are with the boss, if he finds out you are hiding the key his greatest experiment, he'll kill you." The gaurd smiled evilly. Celeria returned it with a genuine Saiyan smirk, which looked rather out of place on Nicodemus' face.
"Then I'll just have to kill you first." She quickly discharged a blast through the gaurd's stomache. The look of anger and confusion froze on his face as he dropped to the floor, motionless. Celeria shuddered. Her Saiyan side had taken over again. Wait, what was she thinking? She was entirely Saiyan. Better to say her blood-thirsty side had taken over.
She ran back Nicodemus, who was still unconscious and changed back to herself. Picking up Nicodemus again, she ran back out into the main hallway looking for an exit. She went the way the group of gaurds minus one had gone, hoping that if any other gaurds were coming they'd come from the other direction and thus be at her back. Multiple hallways branched off. Clusters of powers were huddled at the ends of most of them, so she avoided them. She came upon a particularly long hallway and didn't sense any powers down it. Hoping it was a shuttle dock or some way of getting back to Amqui or some other planet, she flew down it as fast as she dared with her injured burden.
The hallway twisted infinitely, but nothing branched off. No rooms, no doors, nothing adorning the bleak walls. It made Celeria nervous; she hadn't even known the ship was this long!
Thankfully, after a final turn, the hall ended at a metal door. She sensed no power behind it, and prayed this was what she was looking for. Looking around for a way to open it, her eyes fell on a panel to the right. It looked like the door opened by code. She sighed.
"This will never do," Depositing Nicodemus yet again, she knelt to examine it more closely. It was a basic panel. One code opened it, and the wrong combination of symbols would alert everyone on the ship to an intruder's prescence. She could always force her way through, but there were most likely alarms triggered with the door, too.
Tearing the metal panel off the wall, she exposed the bare wires. Now here was a surprise- the innards of this particular panel were slightly different than she'd expected. She still held the panel in her hand and attached to the back of each button were wires of all different colors. The wires went back into the wall. Each wire triggered a diffrerent sensor. If you pressed the wrong wires in the wrong order, the alarms would go off. There was no way to tell which wires were safe; they were all a different color.
"Nicodemus. Wake up!" Celeria shook him slightly and he half opened his eyes painfully. Celeria explained the situation.
"Panel's a decoy," Nicodemus breathed. "Don't, it's a trap!" And he passed out again. Celeria didn't know what was wrong with him. Fine one moment, in agony the next was not normal. Then again, nothing was anymore. Ok, so the panel was a decoy. There *was* no correct code. What did she do to get in? Did she even want to get in anymore?
"Nicodemus, get up!" She urged. She was fairly certain no one would follow her down this hall since they hadn't already, and if they did she'd hear thm coming. But she needed to get off this ship to help the King and the rest of the planet. Without warning, however, the door slid open on its own! It was totally dark inside. Celeria threw a small ki ball to light it up, but the darkness swallowed it. Taking a deep breath, Celeria realized the only way to get off the ship was through there. She hoisted Nicodemus onto her shoulder and stepped inside. The moment she was in, the door slid shut and the lights clicked on.
"Oh shit."
*******************
Goten came to some time later in a dark room, in a most awkward position. He was bound securly, his arms pinned to his sides by a rope of some sort, which, try as he might, he could not break. He was dangling, oddly enough, from the ceiling. As he struggled against his bonds uselessly, he turned ridiculously in a slow circle. He couldn't see the ground beneath him, so he guessed he was high up. He decided powering up was probably a good idea in this situation, and reached for his Super Saiyan power. It did not come.
Just as he started to build the power, an unfamiliar ki tore through his body. Goten didn't scream. He knew now that his assailent was present, and would not give it the satisfaction of hearing his pain. As quickly as it came, the ki vanished, leaving Goten feeling... wrong. One person's ki was not meant for someone else's body.
Well this was just a ducky situation. He couldn't alert anyone of his plight if he couldn't power up. And to make matters worse, the senzus he'd gotten were gone.
The end of this part ^.^ finally got it out.. certainly took me long enough. Hope you liked, and trust me, I'm almost done with having Celeria dominate the entire fic, cuz if you're not getting tired of it, I am. I just need to explain what she went through so you can understand better. ^.^ Don't worry, it's almost over. Read, reveiw, and until next time, toodles.
~mysticGohan33~