Chapter 7 – Looking for Hotaru
After ten minutes of flying, they noticed a small tavern on the way.
"Shall we pop by?" Goten asked. "I'm thirsty!"
Haruka snorted. "In case you haven't noticed, we're carrying a whole breakfast table with us." She reached the coffee pot towards Goten. "Coffee, anyone?"
"I just wanna see what the tavern looks like," the kid pouted. "It won't take that much time. Please?"
"Fine, I don't see any reason why we shouldn't check it out," Goku said. "Let's go down."
They landed in front of the tavern. It was small, nothing more than a little wooden hut with a big WELCOME sign above the door. But the place was crowded and many ogres were sitting outside the tavern by small tables, drinking tea or beer (depending of whether they were off duty or not).
"Hey y'all, the parking lot is over there!" one of the ogres shouted at the Saiyans. Haruka laughed and leaped off the table. "You handle it, Goku… I'm going in."
The tavern was really crowded, noisy and filled with cigarette smoke. The girl entered the tavern with Trunks and Goten right beside her. The three spent the first five minutes coughing.
"Do they think that living in the Afterworld will protect them from lung cancer?" Vegeta asked, entering the tavern as well.
Goku came in too. "I'd be surprised if it didn't. Wow, you guys have no idea what their parking lot looks like. Some people seem to be travelling with paper planes here!"
"Got a problem with that, wiseguy?" an annoyed leprechaun asked from next to his foot. Goku blinked.
"No… not at all. Ehehe… hey, there's a familiar face! Looks like we'll meet many old buddies today! Come on!" He elbowed his way through the crowd and reached a very small table in the other end of the tavern. The others followed him.
"Hello, Baba!" Goku shouted merrily. "I didn't expect to see you here!"
The grey-haired witch looked up. "Goku? That's a surprise. Are you dead again?"
Surprisingly there was a free seat by the table; the Saiyan plumped down on it and explained Baba the whole story. As he finished, Baba seemed a bit concerned.
"The whole Dead Zone? That doesn't sound good. They haven't escaped yet, have they?"
"Actually I'm surprised that they didn't come out as soon as that creature opened the portal," Haruka remarked, "but then again, it actually turned Hotaru's body into itself and I doubt thatthe other inhabitants of the zone know how to do that or use that."
"And you say that Sailor Pluto turned its own powers against it?" Baba cackled. "I've always said that she's a really smart girl."
"You know her?" Goku asked.
"Of course she does," Sailor Pluto's calm voice remarked right next to him. "We're old friends. And you're sitting on my seat."
Goku blinked and started up. "Oops, sorry." Pluto gave him a forgiving smile, sat down and put two cups on the old wooden table.
"You owe me ten golden doubloons, Baba, or fifteen dollars, pick the currency. Why are you guys so surprised? I come here often. This place is almost the only tavern in all dimensions where I get to meet my friends and where the prices aren't sky-high."
"And she calls fifteen dollars cheap," Baba commented with a frown, digging through her pockets to find the money. "Say Pluto, do you know anything about the fate of that girl, what was her name again…"
"Sailor Saturn?" Pluto sipped from the cup and shook her head. "She has to be somewhere in the Afterworld but I have no idea where exactly. Can't you Saiyans find her aura?"
"Actually I can feel it but I don't know where we would land if I'd try to teleport again," Goku said. Pluto shrugged with a regretful smile and put the cup back on the table.
"This isn't rum in there, is it?" Haruka teased. Pluto snorted quietly.
"Oh please… I never drink alcohol when I'm working. And I'm always working."
"I have an idea," Baba suddenly said very slowly. "You said that she lost her life when that demon came to your world, right? So generally that means that she died for your world. Not to mention the fact that she's a Sailor Soldier. In short, I don't think she's either in the Hell or the Heaven but…" She fell silent for a couple of seconds.
"Okay, end of effect pause," Haruka growled. "Where?"
"Dai Kaio's planet," Baba said.
"Of course!" Goku's fist smashed onto the table. "Why didn't I think of this before? All heroes that have died for their people or planet or home or something like that go there! She must be there!"
"Fine, fine, then go there but please spare my favorite table!" Baba grunted.
"There it is," Goku said. They had been flying for quite a while; Dai Kaio's planet was farther away than most places in the Afterworld; a little above the Heaven. The planet was small and blue, yet rather welcoming.
"You'll most likely meet many old friends here," Vegeta remarked to Goku who nodded with a smile. They landed right in front of Dai Kaio's palace.
"Incoming breakfast table!" Goku yelled as he tried to land the table more or less horizontally. Haruka snorted and jumped down.
"Don't tell me that we're gonna have to search this whole planet through in order to find Hotaru?"
"Actually we might as well ask Dai Kaio… if I could only find him," Goku replied. "Hey look, there's Paikuhan! Hellooo!" He jumped up and down frantically. "Over here!"
"That man really can't be let out in the public," Vegeta snorted.
The green-skinned hero came closer and smiled as he recognized Goku. "Nice to see you again. What brings you here?"
After hearing the story Paikuhan thought for a moment. "Yes, I saw her here yesterday… many people come here daily but I remembered her because, well, you don't see little girls here that often. She arrived without even using the ogres' transportation which amazed us all. She just appeared in front of the palace, looked around, asked us where she was and then went away… to those forests, as I remember."
Haruka nodded with a frown. "She must be confused and distressed because of what happened to her. I think she hoped till the very last moment that she was actually able to prevent that demon coming. Those forests, you said? Let's get moving, you guys."
"Trunks, Goten, stay with her; she can't fly as you know," Goku said. "Let's split up and search separately."
"And what exactly do we do after we've found her?" Vegeta asked. "She's dead, well, fine. Even if we find her, we can't bring her back."
"But we can make sure that she isn't trapped in some other dimension instead of being dead as any other normal person," Haruka retorted. "Trunks, Goten, let's go."
"Don't leave the table here," Paikuhan warned them, "the Kais are quite strict about following the rules. And Rule #976b clearly says that kitchen tables must not stand in front of Dai Kaio's palace."
The Saiyans stared at him. "Long live bureaucracy," Vegeta commented. Trunks raised his hands and concentrated for a while, trying to get control over the table. He succeeded after three broken coffee cups and Haruka took her seat again.
"Let's move out then," she said.
Goku went to the north, Vegeta to the east and the kids along with the table headed towards the west. Trunks was trying hard to maneuver the table between all the trees as Goten browsed around for Hotaru. Haruka was sitting on the table with her legs crossed and humming some theme from "Aladdin".
"She can't be that far," the girl remarked after forgetting the lyrics and stopping singing, "after all, she's on foot and she arrived yesterday."
"Yeah, she's not far, I can feel her aura," Goten agreed, "but there are so many other strong auras here that her weak aura gets totally lost. That should be the direction though."
Haruka had been keeping her eye on the landscape. The forest had been very small and they were already flying above a plain. Some bigger trees were growing on that plain and many long gone heroes of all sorts of races and ages were training on the fields. Many of them didn't even pay any attention to the flying table. Suddenly the girl shouted: "Stop!", Trunks gasped and the table gave surprisingly clear break screeches as it stopped in the air.
Haruka leaned over the side of the table and her eyes narrowed as she focused them on someone sitting under a nearby tree.
"Nah," she said then, sitting up again, "it's not him."
"What happened… you mean that guy over there?" Trunks looked at the man. "Come on, he looks absolutely nothing like Hotaru. As a matter of fact, he looks more like… holy cow pies!"
"That would look interesting," Goten grinned, turning to look at the man too. "Yeah, he seems a bit… familiar. So?"
Trunks and Haruka stared at him. "Whadda you mean with "so"? That guy's the exact copy of you father!" Trunks hissed.
Haruka scratched her head, looking at the man. "No, not the exact copy. Only his hair looks alike. That's why I confused him with Goku in the first place. His face and clothes are completely different." She paused for a second. "Actually, even his face…" she added in surprise.
"Let's go talk to him!" Trunks suggested and on the same second the table landed on the grass. The kid ran to the man sitting under the tree and looked up to him with a wide friendly grin on his face.
"Heya!" he said. "I'm Trunks. Who are you?"
The man who had either been taking a nap or daydreaming, opened one eye. He really had Goku's hairdo, he was wearing a greenish amour and he had a scar on the cheek.
"Get lost, kid," he suggested and closed his eyes again.
Trunks pouted. "You look like someone I know and I just wanted to know if you knew him or something. "
The man frowned slightly. "Probably not. Will you get lost now? I didn't know they let kids here."
"Does the name "Goku" ring any bells?" Trunks asked persistently.
"No. Buzz off." The man seemed annoyed.
Haruka had been picking up all the coffee cups Trunks had dropped while landing the table. Now she came to the tree.
"Trunks, you really have no interrogation skills whatsoever. These things work differently. Hey you, are you a Saiyan?"
The man immediately opened his eyes. "And who are you to ask?"
A hardly noticeable satisfied smile appeared on Haruka's face. "I asked you first. Although it seems like I already got the answer. You really are a Saiyan."
"And I didn't get my answer." The man stood up now. He was surprisingly tall; a lot taller than Haruka who wasn't short at all. He looked down at the girl as his eyes narrowed.
"Honestly, if they start letting women and children here then I'm seriously going to find a new place to live," he commented sarcastically.
Haruka's eyes narrowed too. Being a professional motocross racer, she often heard comments about how a girl should act and how she shouldn't, therefore the subject nearly always pissed her off. Usually she had her boyish look and attitude to protect her but since they had left early in the morning then she was only wearing a pair of jeans and a tight T-shirt. And she felt vulnerable. But she never forgot an insult and she always found a way to pay back. Generally very fast.
"Good for you," she replied cynically, "then they won't have to stand you here any more."
The man snorted and grabbed Haruka's throat. "Listen, you…" He didn't get any further as her knee rammed straight into… well, the nearest spot to her knee.
"And to imagine that "you fight like a girl" is considered an insult," Haruka remarked with a grin while the man was getting up from the ground and glaring at her. "Okay, I didn't come here to fight. To answer your question, my name's Haruka, sometimes known as Sailor Uranus. I'm a Sailor Soldier. I came here to find a friend of mine, I suppose you haven't seen her around…?"
The man growled. "Her? You mean a girl? Yeah, I saw one some time ago… black hair, purple eyes, skinny and pale, looked like she was about to get a nervous breakdown."
"That's her. Which way did she go?" Haruka asked.
"Somewhere over there," the man pointed towards the fields "But now she's over there," he pointed to another direction. "I've been keeping an eye on her aura. It's suspicious. Feels like many auras in one person."
Haruka blinked. "This is not good…"
"Do you think the demons of the Dead Zone are trying to get out?" Trunks asked her. The girl rolled her eyes.
"Well, duh. But I had no idea that they were able to get out even when Hotaru's dead. We need to find her, and fast. Hey you, can you help us track her down?"
The man stared at her. "You just kicked me in the… why the heck should I help you?"
Haruka shrugged. "You insulted me first. And you don't seem to have much else to do anyway."
The man frowned. "Fine then. But just because I'm bored. That way." He floated up in the air and flew off towards the distance. Trunks quickly lifted the table up, Haruka hopped on and the three followed the man.
"I didn't get your name," Haruka said as they had caught up with the man.
"Bardock," he replied without even turning the head. "Why would you care?"