Chapter 12: Contingency Plans

Chichi was dreaming.

In her dream, she lay on an enormous grill, tied with cooking twine. Her feet were bony and cold, like a chicken's. The bars of the grill bit into her back uncomfortably. She tried to roll, but she only turned to bump into a skewer of potatos. Really big potatos. An immense figure was approaching, dark-haired and sinister. Glancing up in terror, Chichi tried to make out the features on its face-- the long trailing bangs, the protruding ears-- suddenly it clicked into place. It was herself. A giant Chichi.

The enormous Chichi sighed, and said, "I hope this will be enough to feed them!", and reached forward.

On the grill, the trussed Chichi shuddered in fear. The giant hand was reaching for the gas lever. She tried to call out, but the only thing she could manage was: "Squalk! Squalk!" The hand turned the knob, and the putrid smell of gas filled the air.

Suddenly, over her shoulder, she saw another giant figure. This one was blazing, himself already on fire, but not consumed by it. His frame was solid, heavily muscled, and he glowed like an apparition or a god. Goku, Chichi thought, and the word was a salve to her nerves. She would be safe now. Goku would save her. He would always come for her, this golden warrior, her husband or her son. The giant hand was coming forward with a match to light the grill.

"I'll rescue you," whispered the golden Goku, and he effortlessly pulled her into his immense hand. His flames licked around her, but she didn't mind the burning.

"Go-ku," the huge Chichi said, and her voice sounded like a record played too slowly: "Nnot- ddooonee- yyet."

"Aww, mmom," said Goku, "Butt I donn't waant to studdy annymore..." the hand with her in it was lifting, and Chichi panicked. For a second time she tried to scream, but now she couldn't even move, and the monstrous giant Saiyajin was raising her to his open mouth-- as his teeth closed over her neck, she felt his stinking breath on her face and then the teeth were--

Chichi woke up, panting. Her cage was still on its side, bars jutting into her side. She would have a bruise there tomorrow. Cursing herself for having turned the cage in the first place, she pulled herself to a sitting position. Was it really night outside, or had she only drifted off? Not that it mattered-- the army controlled all her movements, even her day and her night. It was as they said it was. Even her dreams would be no solace to her, it seemed.

"You cried out in your sleep," said a soft voice.

Chichi wheeled, heart pounding. She could make out no-one; the voice's direction was hard to place. She tried to stand, but hit her head on the bars on what was now the top of the cage. Her ears rang; another bruise she'd have to remember this place by.

The voice snickered. There was something calmly sinister about it-- and something familiar, long in her past. "We are both prisoners here," said the voice; "But you, it seems, more than I."

"Who are you?" Chichi breathed. She could barely make out a silhouette, now, standing by the blinking lights of the Dr. Gero's ruined android processor. Or it might have even been her imagination.

"That doesn't matter," said the voice, silkily reassuring. "When I heard Goku was dead, I knew my time was coming. But they still don't trust me, even after I help them; so I'm stuck here for now, until all things fall to me. And all things will fall to me."

"You're no prisoner," Chichi said, accusingly. "You're in league with them! You liar!"

"Temper, temper," said the voice. "You must learn patience. As I have. And my dear, you have already brought the poison I made to its instrument-- but where it was given is not the target it will kill in the end. It is a far more complicated tool than it seems-- truly worthy of the greatest assassin in the world."

A nagging suspicion entered Chichi's mind. The blinking lights illuminated the Red Ribbon bowtie logo on the chip next to the motionless figure. She would play along, she decided; let them give her all the information she could gather, and then maybe, just maybe, she would have enough to make a contingency plan. "I don't buy it," she said. "Nobody can make a poison like that. They either kill you, or they fail."

The man hissed; Chichi held her heartbeat steady, hoping he would take the bait. Come on, she urged him silently; tell me how it works. I'm in a cage, I'm no threat; I'm the only one you can gloat to. That's why you're here, isn't it?

"It may kill him, yes, but in that case, it will indeed have failed!" the man said. "It is a poison designed for warriors. The more he fights it, the more his mind will be destroyed; in the end, I will find him a blank slate, flush the toxin from his body, and enter it as my own." She could hear the smirk in his voice. "I suppose I could have directly poisoned your son, instead-- but there's something about the crunching sensation of the windpipe of the boy who humiliated you, being crushed in your own fist."

Chichi couldn't stifle an involuntary gasp. The imagery was too brutal. Hearing her, the man laughed.

"Patience, my dear," he said. "You, too, will have the chance to feel death at my hands. Once I've shown you the corpse of your first-born son. Then the entire line of Son Goku will pay for ruining my reputation."

"Your reputation?" Chichi said, incredulously. "You calculate and plan the deaths of an entire family because of your reputation?"

"Don't underestimate it! I haven't had a job in two years!"

"Go back to your own cell," Chichi said. She managed a haughty sniff. "Some of us prisoners prefer not to listen to the useless whining of small dogs while we sleep."

There was a brief silence; then the voice said, very softly, "You will regret that comment, Mrs. Son. Mark my words-- you will not leave this base alive."

Then swift and silent as a ghost, the figure fled the room.

* * *

It was midafternoon when the now dusty and bedraggled party returned to Capsule Corp from their morning outing to the Lookout. A barely conscious Piccolo had, for some reason, allowed only Tenshinhan to carry him-- and looked disgruntled even though he had nowhere near the energy to fly himself. Gohan carried his brother, feeling the happy warmth against his heart; and Kuririn, Dende, and Chaotzu followed behind like some sort of midget brigade. All told, even with the cloth disguises wrapped around the Nameks, they'd been quite a sight when they'd reached the hospital where Vegeta was kept. The nurse had refused them entry, until Yamucha insisted that these were, really, the friends of the patient. The nurse had thrown up her hands, but remarked to a colleague when she thought they couldn't hear her that Mr. Briefs was probably a former member of their circus troupe, being something of a midget brigade member himself.

Unfortunately, Dende had been unable to rid Vegeta of the poison that wracked his brain; but he could heal the damage Vegeta's own ki was doing his brain cells.

"I'll be back again tomorrow," Dende had said. "At least if he wakes up, Vegeta will still have a mind to wake up to!"

They had thanked Yamucha for his help in watching over Vegeta, and left to try to catch Bulma before she left; but sadly, upon alighting on the grounds of Capsule Corp and cursorily searching the buildings, Bulma was nowhere to be seen.

"She never came back from the hospital!" Mr. Briefs said, poking his head from under the belly of a half-finished... spaceship? Geodesic dome? Giant Stand Mixer? It was impossible to tell. "She's always been going off somewhere..." he muttered, then poked his head back under the machinery, his words trailing off into muffled incomprehensibility. The ratcheting noise of a wrench against a stubborn bolt soon echoed in the room.

Giving him up for a lost cause, the party reconvened in the kitchen to plan without her.

"I just don't understand why that woman can't be patient for five minutes," Kuririn complained, appreciatively sipping a lemonade he'd purloined from Bulma's fridge.

"Never mind her," Piccolo said. He'd managed to get himself propped into a chair; now able to breathe on his own, his natural regenerative abilities were incredible. Already since the hospital, he'd sprouted a new antenna and two replacement fingers-- not to mention finding the time to materialize himself a spotless white cape, which the humans eyed with envy. Easy to be clean when you can have new clothes at will. "We are facing a conspiracy," he continued, "and it would be wise to pool what we know, so as to best fight it."

"Bulma's gone for the dragonballs already, so there's nothing we can do there," Tenshinhan offered, "and I don't think us going off to train and wait is going to work. We'll just be attacked again."

"With treachery," Gohan said, then reddened: "they were able to poison food that was in our house, and attack Piccolo when he had to defend a helpless baby-- they can turn us against one another. But..."

Piccolo nodded, pleased with Gohan's hesitancy. "But they may already have sprung all the traps they have prepared. Dende, how many aircraft were defeated by Popo at the Lookout?"

Dende counted on his fingers. "Between fifty and a hundred, I think," he said, "But I spent most of the battle indoors. I'm no good in a fight like that!"

"Add twenty to fifty at Capsule Corp," Tenshinhan said, "And Chaotzu was able to scatter the soldiers who survived. They won't attack us again like that."

"...but we still need to get my mother back, and we don't know where she is!" Gohan said, distraught.

"Relax," Piccolo said, turning stern eyes on him. "Our first priority is certainly determining their base. Unless the rest of you prefer to wait?"

Gohan felt foolish. Of course-- when they found the enemy's location, they would find his mother. He smiled. Piccolo was the smartest strategist he knew of, smarter than Vegeta or his father-- despite his own intelligence, it was an ability Gohan had never quite picked up on his own, train as he might.

Piccolo suddenly fell into a fit of coughing that belied his sure command of the situation; slumping over onto the table as the others leant forward in horror, he suppressed the fit, but his hands when he straightened were bloody.

"Piccolo!" Dende ran forward. "Take it easy for now! Help me get him to a bed--"

At the commotion, Goten struggled against Gohan's chest, then began to wail piteously, crying, "Ma! Ma! Ma!"

Gohan's heart leapt into his throat. There was no mother here for his brother. "What do I do?" he said, not expecting a response.

"Take him to Mrs. Briefs," Kuririn said, then turned back to the task of helping the lumberingly huge Namekian warrior to the living room couch.

Gohan found Mrs. Briefs upstairs in the nursery, taking Trunks out of his crib. Trunks, unlike Goten, seemed none the worse for his mother's absense; fairly clearly, Mrs. Briefs was more of a mother to the boy. As Gohan quietly stepped forward into the room, the light-haired boy turned in his grandmother's arms.

"Who dat?" he said, pointing at the baby struggling in Gohan's grasp.

Mrs. Briefs turned, smiling happily to see Gohan standing there. "Well, that must be Son Goten," she said. "Chichi really never visits us here now that Goku is gone, so you've never met him before, have you?"

"Funny hair," Trunks said, pointing at the spiked fuzz that passed for it on Goten's pate.

"You should talk," Gohan said, frowning in mock annoyance. He placed Goten on the playroom floor, where the latter began worming his way across the carpet, mesmerized by the new environment.

Mrs. Briefs set Trunks down. "Can I help you, dear?"

"He wouldn't stop crying before," Gohan said, "Even though I fed him earlier today. But now, he seems fine..."

Mrs. Briefs nodded knowingly. "Well, he has a friend now, doesn't he?"

Gohan looked at the pair on the floor. Goten grabbed at Trunks' foot, trying to get it into his mouth, and Trunks punched him in the head, clumsily. Goten laughed and tugged the foot, knocking Trunks to the ground, then lunging forward with what passed for a baby tackle.

Gohan raised an eyebrow. "Yes, I guess he does." He smiled, and tried to banish any regret from his own mind. He was old enough to take care of himself now.

"Ow! Moron!" Trunks yelled, and baby Goten laughed in delight.