A/N: Just wanted to mention to CatDemon1 that I thought about her question and tried to address it in here. I had wanted to mention that whole thing earlier but I forgot. So, yup.
Chapter Three
…
: the best laid plans
:
Somehow during the night I had managed to actually achieve a state resembling that of sleep and in the morning I awoke to the bright sun shining into my eyes as my brand spanking new sensitive Saiyan nose sniffed the air where a tantalizing smell was lingering, playing over my senses like a bow upon a violin. I blinked, clearing my eyes of those crusty little things that conjugate during the night, as I tried to figure out what I smelt. My mouth salivated as it recognized the aroma of roasting meat and I looked around for the source. Below me, Mike and Zar were seated underneath the tree, roasting what appeared to be a large haunch of flesh. I tentatively climbed down the tree to join them, remarking, "Damn, that smells good! What is it?"
"Dinosaur," Mike answered, pointing to his right where the large body of the now-dead purple dinosaur from the night before lay.
"How'd it die?" I asked, walking over and poking it with my toe to make sure it was dead. I doubt if it had been alive it would have let the boys peel a piece of its flesh off without a fight but it was always good to make sure.
"Dunno," Mike shrugged.
"Any ideas?"
"No."
I sighed. I should have known better than to question Mike in the early morning. He never really woke up for a couple hours and spent his the time in between sleeping and waking in a near mono-syllabic haze, unwilling to speak much, if at all. I turned to my brother. "How'd you get the fire?"
"Mike's a boy scout, remember?" he replied, giving me a look that said, He's your friend. You should know these kinds of things.
"Oh, yeah."
Without a word, Mike took the meat off the fire and offered it to me. I thought for a moment how to attack the food and settled for tearing off a large piece of it. The meat was kind of hot, but not enough to really burn my skin. I was kind of surprised at that considering it had just been roasting in the fire but brushed it off as some weird side-effect of the whole alternate universe, turning-into-Saiyan thing.
That reminded me of something I had to ask Mike. I glanced at him but he still had the half-glazed look in his eyes as he mechanically ate the roasted dinosaur and so I settled with saying, "Mike, hurry up and wake up. I have a question for you and the answer will involve the use of your brain."
He grunted in reply and continued eating. I blew on my meat for a few moments before digging in. It was surprisingly good, although somewhat lacking in flavor. Ketchup would have gone well with it. Dinosaur and ketchup, mmmm…
"Zar, did you guys find any type of other food?" I asked as I finished the meat. Mike was already putting another hunk on to roast.
Zar shook his head. "No. I looked for fruit trees or berry bushes or something but I couldn't find anything."
"Damn…" All the information I had absorbed from my Health class and, strangely enough, my Chemistry class was flashing before my eyes and I suddenly had visions of us going without fruits and vegetables for a week and dying from vitamin deficiencies or some such health issue.
"I don't mind," Zar said.
"You need healthy food, brat," I told him, "or else you're gonna get some serious health problems."
"But we're Saiyans now," he pointed out. "Aren't they almost totally carnivorous? Can't we live on only meat now?"
I thought on that for a moment. I looked at Mike but he was still pretty dead to the world. So I thought on it some more. Finally, I answered my brother with the best educated guess I could muster:
"Maybe?"
"Awesome!" He grinned and jumped to his feet.
"You going somewhere?" I asked, looking up at him.
"Gotta pee!" And in a blur, he was gone.
I sat for a moment, wondering how he ran so fast but finally gave up on the thought. I turned back to stare at Mike, who was looking decidedly more awake. He stared back at me and we sat like that for a while before he said, "You had a question?"
"Oh… hang on…" I thought for a moment, backtracking everything that had ran through my head that morning before I found it. "Why aren't we cartoon-ized?"
"What?" He stared at me with a blank expression.
I waved my hands around, trying to get him to see it. "You know. How come everything's three-dimensional and all normal? I thought it'd be like DBZ. You know. Like anime. Big eyes! Sweatdrops! Crazy weirdness! Yes?"
"Oh… I guess it's got something to do with the same reason when Goku and Vegeta and all them were in all world and they looked normal, at least how we perceive normal. It would have to go something like we only saw them as animated on the TV show because that's how they were drawn but in this world they are really living and breathing and such so they look real." He paused for a moment. "Either that or it has something to do with how our brains interpret what we're seeing. For all we know, we could be appearing anime-like to them and when they watched themselves on the TV, they looked 'real' to themselves."
I tried to figure it out. "So which one is it?"
"I have no fucking clue," he answered, taking off his glasses and rubbing his face with one hand.
"I think we all need to go back to sleep," I said, yawning and leaning back against the tree.
"I'm still hungry," he protested, turning the meat over the fire.
"So eat!"
Zar suddenly popped out of nowhere, or not exactly nowhere seeing as he kind of ran up to us, bearing an armful of fruit. "Food!" he exclaimed, dumping it on the ground.
I stared at one that he handed to me. I was kind of suspicious because he had just complained about not wanting to eat fruit and they were vaguely reminiscent of peaches and I hated peaches. But I was actually still very hungry and hungry people will eat just about anything. Deciding to put a little faith in my brother and be a little more adventurous than usual, I took a bite out of the fruit and found that it actually wasn't half bad. "Where the hell did you get it?" I asked as I took another bite.
"I took a whiz on this tree and while I was looking at it, I saw it had fruit it in," he answered with a grin.
I bit into it again and chewed it, then thought about what he had just said. After swallowing, albeit tentatively, I asked, "So… you took a piss and then touched this fruit?"
"Yup!"
"Oh, god. Gross!"
…
"Remind me why we're walking again?" Mike asked, his feet dragging listlessly as he and Zar followed me through the woods.
"We're trying to find someone or some building or something," I answered.
"Just randomly in the middle of the forest?"
"Why?" Zar piped up.
I turned and looked at him. "Got any better ideas?"
"Not really," Mike said and Zar shook his head.
"So, why not walk?"
"Okay." Mike shrugged.
"I don't want to walk though!" Zar protested.
"Shut up. Exercise is good for you," I said before turning and continuing walking.
"What makes you think we're going to find someone, anyway?" Mike asked.
"We will." I knew the confidence in my voice would make his eyebrow lift with surprise even though I wasn't looking at him.
"Like we're just going to randomly run across someone? The odds of that is bad. Very bad." He paused for a moment to think before saying, "We've got like a one in a hundred thousand, five hundred and twelve chance of actually running into another person out here!"
"Is that your educated guess?" I quipped.
"It's a rough estimate," he answered with another shrug.
"But that's how it would be for home," I pointed out. "We're in the DBZ universe now. We're guaranteed to run into someone."
"How do you know?"
"Coincidences are the bread and butter of television. In TV shows, things like Murphy's Law apply: if anything can go wrong, it will. Just like a random coincidence will happen that will reunite us with Vegeta and Kakarot and the others. That would be a bad thing for them, so it's going to happen."
"But how do you know? For all you know, we could walk for another week and not even find a sign of civilization! We could even be on the opposite side of the planet from where they live!"
"But we aren't."
"Goddammit, Bo! How-"
"That," I said, pointing at a house that we had come up to. It was set in a forest clearing and looked very familiar.
"Is that…" his voice trailed off and I nodded.
"Kakarot's house."
After a talk about what course of action to take, we finally settled on just ringing the doorbell and taking it from there. Hopefully, Goku had neglected to tell her what we looked like exactly and so she wouldn't recognize us. Mike reminded us we should curl our tails under our clothes or else Chi-Chi would notice them and go whacko on us and it took us a good five minutes to wrestle our uncooperative newborn appendages into submission. Finally, we were ready and after scrubbing a little bit of dirt on our faces and clothing for appearance's sake, we rang the doorbell to the house.
It took a few moments for her to answer the door but soon enough, she was standing there in all her scary raging harpy glory. "Yes?" she looked at us with a face that betrayed the suspicions she held.
I quickly put on my best pity-me-please face I could muster and, as I told him to, my brother sniffled pathetically, sounding as though he was on the verge of tears. "Excuse me, ma'am, I'm so sorry to bother you but we were hiking the other day and we got lost. We've been looking for help for the last few days and I was wondering-"
"Oh, come in!" Just as I had suspected, Chi-Chi's maternal instinct kicked in and she swooped down on my brother, almost picking him up and carrying him inside her home in her rush to take care of him. Mike and I trailed after her, I shooting him a little grin as he gave me a look that said "You disgust me."
"I bet you all are starving!" Chi-Chi exclaimed, sitting us down at a table as she zipped over to her stove where food was cooking. She quickly served up bowls of soup and we all dug in without protest. She hovered over us while we ate, refilling our bowls when we finished and asking questions and clucking over Zar who was soaking up the attention like a sponge. I answered her as best I could, telling her we were from Satan City and had been on a hike with my family when my brother wandered off and so Mike and I chased after him and somehow we all got lost and had been that way ever since.
"Well, I want you all to clean up and then I'll get you some fresh clothes while I wash yours," she said and, against my better judgment, I found myself actually starting to like the woman. She was being awfully nice to us and I could be a sucker for nice people.
"Do you live alone out here, Ms….?" Mike asked.
"Oh, excuse me! I never introduced myself!" She laughed. "I'm Son Chi-Chi and I live here with my husband and our two children."
"Where are they now?"
"Goku, my husband, and Goten, my youngest child, are over at a friend's house and Gohan is right upstairs. Let me go get him…"
She left the room and I took the opportunity to turn and hiss at Mike, "What now?"
"I don't know. Don't you have a plan?" he whispered back.
"No, I don't think ahead! That's your job!"
"Well, use your head for once and think of something!" he growled and then sat up straight as Chi-Chi walked back into the room with Gohan.
"Hubba-hubba!" I whispered as I saw the grown-up demi-Saiyan. I thought he had been attractive on the show but damn, he looked fine!
"Gohan, meet Bekah, Mitch, and Zed," Chi-Chi said. We had told her false names because Goku had most likely at least told her that about his stay in our universe.
"Hey. My mom tells me you got lost. I'll give you a ride into Satan City if you need one," Gohan offered, smiling pleasantly. That's not the only ride I'd like from you, my mind cackled and I had a hard time keeping the grin off my face.
"That sounds great," Mike said. "Thank you."
"No problem," Gohan answered, putting his hand behind his head and grinning that Son Grin. Being in the room with a smile like that was like staring at the sun for five minutes straight. I had to look back at my empty soup bowl after a moment for fear that I would go blind from the sheer wattage.
"Well, let's get you all cleaned up so Gohan can take you home," Chi-Chi said cheerfully as she busied herself cleaning up. "Gohan, can you show little Zed where the bathtub?" Her son nodded and started leading my brother off but as they left the room, Chi-Chi called out after them, "Oh, and Gohan?"
"Yes, mother?"
"I need to come with you to drop something off at Bulma's too while you're in the city."
"All right, we'll do that first thing."
At this, I shot a slightly panicked look at Mike. Bulma was at Capsule Corps and at Capsule Corps was Vegeta and I doubted that the Saiyan Prince would be very happy to see us. Suddenly, the thought of seeing him, Goku and everyone else again didn't seem like such a good idea after all…
