Disclaimer: I do not own Dragonball Z. It and its characters are property
of Akira Toriyama and Bird Studios and were used without prior permission.
Tell No Tales
CHAPTER ONE: Filing Foul-Up
Some people wondered why they never seemed to get any breaks in life. Things like why they were born into screwed up families. Why they couldn't get a job that paid well and that they enjoyed. Why they couldn't have a romantic relationship that worked. Honestly, Kuririn did not blame these kinds of people, for he'd often been one of them himself, but he found himself wondering about something that was a smidge more important at the moment.
Namely, why he didn't seem to get any breaks in death, either.
Oh sure, this was better than how he'd ended up after his first death; that time, he remembered only a vague sense of drifting. Some side effect of having been killed by a demon, he'd been told. At least this time he had consciousness and a body to go with it. Still, things weren't going right.
He glanced about, taking in his surroundings. Things looked normal enough, he supposed, though he really didn't have much idea of how things should have looked in Otherworld. But the pale, endless sky, and the equally endless stretch of fluffy yellow clouds (which he happened to be standing upon, he noticed) seemed enough what the afterlife should look like to him. Of course, there was one nagging little problem.
Judgement. Kuririn may not have had any experience on this particular plane, but he did know that he was supposed to wait in line to have his life reviewed and an eternal living assignment (or afterliving assignment, more appropriately) handed down to him. This he had gleaned from stories back at Orinji temple, and more directly from Muten Roshi after the old master's death and subsequent resurrection.
So far, there was no line, no review, and no assignment. Just what exactly was going on here?
Souls were eternal. Kuririn knew that. But just because something was eternal, that didn't mean that it had to be patient. He was dead for good this time, and thus he might as well get the process over with. It wasn't as if he had anything else to do at the moment.
Though he no longer possessed any discernable ki, he found it surprisingly easy to raise himself into the air. He hung there for a moment, wondering which direction to choose. Finally, he shrugged. One way was as good as another, after all. He gathered himself –
"Hey, buddy!" shouted a nasal voice behind him. Startled, Kuririn fell flat on his face, bringing up a bit of cloud dust. "Where did you think you were going? We've got procedures here, you know."
Kuririn picked himself up and turned to face the speaker. He didn't know exactly what he had been expecting, but what he saw wasn't it. Only a head taller than him, the figure had pale blue skin, slicked back hair, and what appeared to be a pair of stubby horns on its head. What was even stranger was that it was dressed like an office worker, right down to the tie, and carried a clipboard in one hand.
"Sometimes I hate this job. People from the mortal world can be so frustrating," the figure – an office demon, he recalled – shook his head, flipping through the pages on the clipboard. Eventually, he paused, apparently finding what he was looking for. "Kuririn, right?"
Kuririn blinked. "Uh . . . yeah, that's right. But how did you –"
The office demon glanced up at him for a second, looking vaguely annoyed, before looking down at the papers again. "Kuririn Chestnut. Age twenty- five. Human native of the planet Earth. Killed by Frieza through the means of an explosion set off inside the body, and this is your second death." He lifted up the clipboard and tapped it with one finger. "All right here in your file, buddy."
"My file?"
"Well, of course," the office demon answered, sounding exasperated. "How did you think we kept track of things around here?"
Kuririn did not really have an answer for that. The people – or demons, or whatever – that worked here must have a lot to keep track of. Having personal files for everyone made as much sense as anything else. Actually it made more sense than most things.
"Come along now, shorty, I'm a busy demon."
The office demon turned on his heel, and began to walk away. Kuririn, not knowing what else to do, followed closely behind him. He continued to take in his surroundings, though they bored him pretty quickly. There had to be more to the afterlife than clouds and sky, right?
And this assumption proved true. In the distance, Kuririn could now see a building rising up over the clouds. A simple white, with red sloping roofs, it looked like an Earth palace. And leading up to that was a long walkway, with curious white wisps lined up upon it.
That must be Judgement. Well good. Something was actually going to go right for him for a change.
He was so busy staring at the palace, that he did not notice that the office demon had altered his course slightly, and was jarred back into reality by his voice. "Hey, buddy, stop gawking would you? We're going over here!"
Kuririn turned, embarrassed that he'd been caught daydreaming, but confused as to the situation. "Where are we going? Isn't that Judgement?"
The office demon nodded. "Yep, it sure is."
Okay . . . "Then why aren't we going there?"
The office demon stopped and turned to face him, frowning. "You ask too many questions. We're not going there because some other matters need to be taken care of first."
Other matters? Great. That was what he got for thinking for even the briefest of seconds that things were going to go his way. Why did he ever believe that? He didn't exactly have a good track record.
Still, with no other choice, Kuririn continued to follow the office demon as it headed into a tiny building at the side of the palace. He was ready for whatever strange fate was awaiting him.
The inside of the room was just as unimpressive as the outside had been. The walls were unadorned, and the floor a plain brown. The only distinguishing feature – and one that hardly filled him with confidence – was a large, clunky looking computer perched on a desk.
The demon strode up to the computer, and began pressing buttons, occasionally looking down at the papers in his hands. And the frown that slowly appeared on his face was as unencouraging as the ancient computer.
"Hmm . . ." said the demon, face thoughtful. Kuririn, for his part, merely stood still and waited for the bomb to drop. "Well, that's funny. I seem to be having a hard time accessing most of your previous files."
Kuririn frowned in disbelief. "What do you mean you can't access my old files? Aren't they sitting in your hand right there?"
The demon looked up. "Oh no, this is just the basic identification information. You know, name, origin, age, time and manner of death . . . Just the basic stuff."
"Fine," Kuririn said. "But why does that mean that you can't bring up the details?"
"You're such an impatient thing." The demon clicked a few more keys before continuing. "Your particular details were relegated to the back of the system, since you weren't under our jurisdiction the first time you died. We just made a note of it, and pushed it back. Your files must not have been transferred over to the new system yet."
Wearily, Kuririn sighed. Why was his first death always coming back to haunt him?
"Not that you were going to be heading anywhere else right away, but this will slow your case down."
Yep, just another typical day for old Kuririn. Dead or not, why should everything proceed properly? He could not even muster up the energy to sigh. He was just too exhausted, too resigned.
The office demon tucked his file under his arm. "Well no sense in delaying this any longer. Come along, shorty."
"My name is Kuririn."
The office demon did not seem to take notice of this, and Kuririn just didn't feel like pressing the issue. Yet again he followed blindly, in a spiralling staircase that progressed ever downward. The sky around him changed from the palest of blues to an unnatural red, which didn't seem like a good sign. The red sky he could deal with – it wasn't as nice as the green sky on Nameksei, but was not particularly scary after the initial shock had passed. It was more the downward part of it that worried him. Downward in the afterlife. Popular symbolism told Kuririn that this was probably not a good turn of events.
Surely he could not be going to . . . Yeah, he was no paragon of virtue, especially in his youth. He had been kind of a nasty little kid. But he had gotten over it. Sweat began to pour down his face as they continued on the downward spiral of clouds, as his mind filled with awful visions of his destination. He had thought that he'd made up for most of his past wrongdoings. Well enough to avoid getting him into afterlife trouble, anyway.
Of course, he had screwed a lot of things up. How many bad decisions had he made back on Nameksei? More than he could count. But someone had had to make the decisions. Bulma was too busy screaming about her personal hygiene problems which she blamed on the planet, and Gohan was just a child. And until recently, Goku had not even been there . . .
But maybe he had screwed up one thing too many, and that's why he was going to end up in . . .
He let out a huge breath of relief as his escort stopped descending and that he was now walking a level path. This time, Kuririn was more than happy to follow.
Of course he wasn't going to be eternally punished. The idea was silly. He'd just been kidding himself; he'd known he wouldn't end up there all along.
Still, he nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard a scream beside him. The scream came for the other side of a door, but it may as well have been right in his ear for all the volume that it produced. He held his throbbing head for a moment and asked his escort, "What in the world was that?"
"What was what?" his escort asked, looking over his shoulder.
How could the little blue demon even be asking that? "That scream that would have made my ears bleed if I still had blood."
The office demon smiled knowingly. "Oh, that. I guess I've just tuned it out over the years. Just some eternal torment going on. Ironic Punishment division."
Ironic Punishment division, huh? Darned if the afterlife didn't have a sense of humour. Sounded like an awfully weird place to end up. Weird and disturbing, though Kuririn assumed that was the whole point.
"Ah, here we are."
Kuririn turned his attention back to the world at hand as they reached a door. This one was right in from of them, as if at the end of a hallway, though there were no walls that could have completed that picture. The demon opened the door and motioned for Kuririn to follow him inside.
Kuririn complied, and his eyes were met with a very similar picture of the afterlife that he'd seen above. Only this one was populated. Most were white wisps, like the ones he had see lined up outside of Judgement, but a few, like him appeared at least vaguely humanoid. "What is this place?"
"Oh this is the Relegation Room," answered the demon, checking something off on his clipboard. "All problem cases are sent here until Lord Enma has time to deal with them at Judgement."
Ah. So he was to be brushed aside for a while. Again, not much difference from his life. At least here, there was someone to talk to. "All right then. Say, how long you figure it will take before I get in to see Lord Enma?"
"Hm?" Apparently, he'd caught the demon off guard. For whatever reason, the little blue creature looked like he was about to edge out the door. "Oh, it depends. Variables and all that. But I'm sure that it wouldn't take more than seventy or eighty years."
Kuririn nodded. Well, that didn't seem so . . . Hold on a second. "Seventy or eighty years?"
"Hey," the demon responded, just as he was closing the door, "We're really busy."
Tell No Tales
CHAPTER ONE: Filing Foul-Up
Some people wondered why they never seemed to get any breaks in life. Things like why they were born into screwed up families. Why they couldn't get a job that paid well and that they enjoyed. Why they couldn't have a romantic relationship that worked. Honestly, Kuririn did not blame these kinds of people, for he'd often been one of them himself, but he found himself wondering about something that was a smidge more important at the moment.
Namely, why he didn't seem to get any breaks in death, either.
Oh sure, this was better than how he'd ended up after his first death; that time, he remembered only a vague sense of drifting. Some side effect of having been killed by a demon, he'd been told. At least this time he had consciousness and a body to go with it. Still, things weren't going right.
He glanced about, taking in his surroundings. Things looked normal enough, he supposed, though he really didn't have much idea of how things should have looked in Otherworld. But the pale, endless sky, and the equally endless stretch of fluffy yellow clouds (which he happened to be standing upon, he noticed) seemed enough what the afterlife should look like to him. Of course, there was one nagging little problem.
Judgement. Kuririn may not have had any experience on this particular plane, but he did know that he was supposed to wait in line to have his life reviewed and an eternal living assignment (or afterliving assignment, more appropriately) handed down to him. This he had gleaned from stories back at Orinji temple, and more directly from Muten Roshi after the old master's death and subsequent resurrection.
So far, there was no line, no review, and no assignment. Just what exactly was going on here?
Souls were eternal. Kuririn knew that. But just because something was eternal, that didn't mean that it had to be patient. He was dead for good this time, and thus he might as well get the process over with. It wasn't as if he had anything else to do at the moment.
Though he no longer possessed any discernable ki, he found it surprisingly easy to raise himself into the air. He hung there for a moment, wondering which direction to choose. Finally, he shrugged. One way was as good as another, after all. He gathered himself –
"Hey, buddy!" shouted a nasal voice behind him. Startled, Kuririn fell flat on his face, bringing up a bit of cloud dust. "Where did you think you were going? We've got procedures here, you know."
Kuririn picked himself up and turned to face the speaker. He didn't know exactly what he had been expecting, but what he saw wasn't it. Only a head taller than him, the figure had pale blue skin, slicked back hair, and what appeared to be a pair of stubby horns on its head. What was even stranger was that it was dressed like an office worker, right down to the tie, and carried a clipboard in one hand.
"Sometimes I hate this job. People from the mortal world can be so frustrating," the figure – an office demon, he recalled – shook his head, flipping through the pages on the clipboard. Eventually, he paused, apparently finding what he was looking for. "Kuririn, right?"
Kuririn blinked. "Uh . . . yeah, that's right. But how did you –"
The office demon glanced up at him for a second, looking vaguely annoyed, before looking down at the papers again. "Kuririn Chestnut. Age twenty- five. Human native of the planet Earth. Killed by Frieza through the means of an explosion set off inside the body, and this is your second death." He lifted up the clipboard and tapped it with one finger. "All right here in your file, buddy."
"My file?"
"Well, of course," the office demon answered, sounding exasperated. "How did you think we kept track of things around here?"
Kuririn did not really have an answer for that. The people – or demons, or whatever – that worked here must have a lot to keep track of. Having personal files for everyone made as much sense as anything else. Actually it made more sense than most things.
"Come along now, shorty, I'm a busy demon."
The office demon turned on his heel, and began to walk away. Kuririn, not knowing what else to do, followed closely behind him. He continued to take in his surroundings, though they bored him pretty quickly. There had to be more to the afterlife than clouds and sky, right?
And this assumption proved true. In the distance, Kuririn could now see a building rising up over the clouds. A simple white, with red sloping roofs, it looked like an Earth palace. And leading up to that was a long walkway, with curious white wisps lined up upon it.
That must be Judgement. Well good. Something was actually going to go right for him for a change.
He was so busy staring at the palace, that he did not notice that the office demon had altered his course slightly, and was jarred back into reality by his voice. "Hey, buddy, stop gawking would you? We're going over here!"
Kuririn turned, embarrassed that he'd been caught daydreaming, but confused as to the situation. "Where are we going? Isn't that Judgement?"
The office demon nodded. "Yep, it sure is."
Okay . . . "Then why aren't we going there?"
The office demon stopped and turned to face him, frowning. "You ask too many questions. We're not going there because some other matters need to be taken care of first."
Other matters? Great. That was what he got for thinking for even the briefest of seconds that things were going to go his way. Why did he ever believe that? He didn't exactly have a good track record.
Still, with no other choice, Kuririn continued to follow the office demon as it headed into a tiny building at the side of the palace. He was ready for whatever strange fate was awaiting him.
The inside of the room was just as unimpressive as the outside had been. The walls were unadorned, and the floor a plain brown. The only distinguishing feature – and one that hardly filled him with confidence – was a large, clunky looking computer perched on a desk.
The demon strode up to the computer, and began pressing buttons, occasionally looking down at the papers in his hands. And the frown that slowly appeared on his face was as unencouraging as the ancient computer.
"Hmm . . ." said the demon, face thoughtful. Kuririn, for his part, merely stood still and waited for the bomb to drop. "Well, that's funny. I seem to be having a hard time accessing most of your previous files."
Kuririn frowned in disbelief. "What do you mean you can't access my old files? Aren't they sitting in your hand right there?"
The demon looked up. "Oh no, this is just the basic identification information. You know, name, origin, age, time and manner of death . . . Just the basic stuff."
"Fine," Kuririn said. "But why does that mean that you can't bring up the details?"
"You're such an impatient thing." The demon clicked a few more keys before continuing. "Your particular details were relegated to the back of the system, since you weren't under our jurisdiction the first time you died. We just made a note of it, and pushed it back. Your files must not have been transferred over to the new system yet."
Wearily, Kuririn sighed. Why was his first death always coming back to haunt him?
"Not that you were going to be heading anywhere else right away, but this will slow your case down."
Yep, just another typical day for old Kuririn. Dead or not, why should everything proceed properly? He could not even muster up the energy to sigh. He was just too exhausted, too resigned.
The office demon tucked his file under his arm. "Well no sense in delaying this any longer. Come along, shorty."
"My name is Kuririn."
The office demon did not seem to take notice of this, and Kuririn just didn't feel like pressing the issue. Yet again he followed blindly, in a spiralling staircase that progressed ever downward. The sky around him changed from the palest of blues to an unnatural red, which didn't seem like a good sign. The red sky he could deal with – it wasn't as nice as the green sky on Nameksei, but was not particularly scary after the initial shock had passed. It was more the downward part of it that worried him. Downward in the afterlife. Popular symbolism told Kuririn that this was probably not a good turn of events.
Surely he could not be going to . . . Yeah, he was no paragon of virtue, especially in his youth. He had been kind of a nasty little kid. But he had gotten over it. Sweat began to pour down his face as they continued on the downward spiral of clouds, as his mind filled with awful visions of his destination. He had thought that he'd made up for most of his past wrongdoings. Well enough to avoid getting him into afterlife trouble, anyway.
Of course, he had screwed a lot of things up. How many bad decisions had he made back on Nameksei? More than he could count. But someone had had to make the decisions. Bulma was too busy screaming about her personal hygiene problems which she blamed on the planet, and Gohan was just a child. And until recently, Goku had not even been there . . .
But maybe he had screwed up one thing too many, and that's why he was going to end up in . . .
He let out a huge breath of relief as his escort stopped descending and that he was now walking a level path. This time, Kuririn was more than happy to follow.
Of course he wasn't going to be eternally punished. The idea was silly. He'd just been kidding himself; he'd known he wouldn't end up there all along.
Still, he nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard a scream beside him. The scream came for the other side of a door, but it may as well have been right in his ear for all the volume that it produced. He held his throbbing head for a moment and asked his escort, "What in the world was that?"
"What was what?" his escort asked, looking over his shoulder.
How could the little blue demon even be asking that? "That scream that would have made my ears bleed if I still had blood."
The office demon smiled knowingly. "Oh, that. I guess I've just tuned it out over the years. Just some eternal torment going on. Ironic Punishment division."
Ironic Punishment division, huh? Darned if the afterlife didn't have a sense of humour. Sounded like an awfully weird place to end up. Weird and disturbing, though Kuririn assumed that was the whole point.
"Ah, here we are."
Kuririn turned his attention back to the world at hand as they reached a door. This one was right in from of them, as if at the end of a hallway, though there were no walls that could have completed that picture. The demon opened the door and motioned for Kuririn to follow him inside.
Kuririn complied, and his eyes were met with a very similar picture of the afterlife that he'd seen above. Only this one was populated. Most were white wisps, like the ones he had see lined up outside of Judgement, but a few, like him appeared at least vaguely humanoid. "What is this place?"
"Oh this is the Relegation Room," answered the demon, checking something off on his clipboard. "All problem cases are sent here until Lord Enma has time to deal with them at Judgement."
Ah. So he was to be brushed aside for a while. Again, not much difference from his life. At least here, there was someone to talk to. "All right then. Say, how long you figure it will take before I get in to see Lord Enma?"
"Hm?" Apparently, he'd caught the demon off guard. For whatever reason, the little blue creature looked like he was about to edge out the door. "Oh, it depends. Variables and all that. But I'm sure that it wouldn't take more than seventy or eighty years."
Kuririn nodded. Well, that didn't seem so . . . Hold on a second. "Seventy or eighty years?"
"Hey," the demon responded, just as he was closing the door, "We're really busy."