Gohan was beginning to realize that he and Piccolo did not speak the same language. Take the words "cleaned up," for example. When Gohan's mom said, "Let's get you cleaned up," she meant that they were going to go out back together and heat up some water in an oil drum. His mom would pile wood that his father had cut, and then she would light it with a strike of a match, shake her wrist once to put it out. Meantime, Gohan would get undressed, fold his clothes, and climb into the barrel. There would be soap and washcloths, freshly –dried towels, the smell of laundry on the line, each sheet and shirt waving like a handkerchief from the side of a boat.
When Piccolo said that Gohan needed to "get cleaned up" he meant that he would fly to the nearest small, freezing mountain stream, stick out his arm, and drop Gohan squarely into the deepest eddy he could find without a word of warning
"GAH!" Gohan cried, clawing his way to the surface. His arms wrapped around himself reflexively, and his whole body burned at once, contracting with cold. "M…Mr. Piccolo! What'd you d..do that for?"
Piccolo crossed his arms, standing dry and calm on the bank. "I felt like it," he said. "Now rinse off."
"B…but it's c..cold!" Gohan gasped out, thinking perhaps that Piccolo had not understood that part of the problem.
The larger warrior was unmoved. "The sooner you get done, the sooner you can get out," he said levelly.
Arguing with Piccolo usually went about that way. Gohan sighed. "Yes sir," he said miserably. Then he began sliding handfuls of the frigid water up and down his arms, trying to flush away the gluey saliva from his skin.
Crocodile spit, he realized, doesn't necessarily dissolve in water. Which makes sense as crocodiles spend a lot of time being wet. Still, it was pretty disappointing, and exactly the kind of thing that Gohan wished that his stupid science books had mentioned. It was beginning to occur to him that his books never told him anything useful.
"Will you hurry it up," Piccolo growled after a few seconds of this. "I got better things to do than watch you turn purple."
Gohan reminded himself that sniffling did not help with Piccolo. "I'm trying, sir," he said. He scrubbed harder, noticing that his fingers were less white and more blue.
"Oh, for…" Piccolo waded into the stream with long, angry-looking steps, not even flinching at the way the water must've felt. He grabbed Gohan's collar roughly from behind and dunked him once, hauled him back up, and began working the stuff out of his hair. "Can't you do anything for yourself?"
Gohan winced as those long talons worked their way through his hair in the same way that one might handle a tangled rope. "N…not really," he said.
"Well, it's for damn sure time you learned," Piccolo growled, dunking him again. Gohan had an interesting and unpleasant image of the big fighter scrubbing him up and down a washboard like a worn-out pair of socks. "You think your mamma's gonna follow you around your whole life with a box of tissues and a bagged lunch?"
"B…but Mr. Piccolo…"
"For the gods' sakes, stop calling me Mr. Piccolo."
Gohan swallowed. "Sir, m'only five and a half…m'just a little kid! Your parents are supposed to take care of you when you're little. Then, when you grow up, you get to do things on your own…like stay up late, and…and whatever else grownups do."
"Well then, brat," Piccolo said. "I'd say it's time to grow up." He picked him up again and tossed him unceremoniously on the bank.
Gohan landed on his butt like a sack of potatoes. He curled into a ball as the wind hit him, drawing his knees up all the way to his chest. "S'easy for you to say, sir. You're already big."
Piccolo snorted. "Are you making cracks about my weight now?"
Gohan's eyes widened. He knew from living with his mom that this could be a very bad idea. "N..no sir! I meant tall! And…um…really, really tall!"
It was only when he saw the slightly sour look on Piccolo's face that he wondered if the big warrior had actually been joking. It was hard to tell with him.
"I wasn't always big," Piccolo said.
Gohan bit his lip before he could say that he couldn't picture Piccolo as being anything other than big and scary and scowling.
"But I learned to take care of myself anyway," Piccolo said. The large warrior cracked the knuckles of one hand, then the knuckles on the other...all blending into popcorn-esque crackle. "Just like you're about to do."
Uh oh, Gohan thought. He crabwalked backward a little bit. "What do you mean, like I'm about to?"
Piccolo grinned in a very unsettling way. "Get up," he said.
Gohan's legs obeyed before his head could process that this was probably not going to be a lot of fun.
"Now," Piccolo said, lowering himself into what Gohan could sort of recognize as a fighting stance. "It's about time you learned how to fight."
Gohan sucked in a deep, fast breath. "F..fight?"
"Mmhmm. I suggest you get your guard up."
"But I don't even know the first thing about…"
Piccolo inclined his head slightly forward – and Gohan could see the planes of his face hardening into something he might have seen in a nightmare once. "You'll have point two seconds to figure it out." He drew a massive fist back, settling it right up against his chin. Gohan tried not to think about how much it would hurt to be hit with a hand like that. "Better use them wisely."
Gohan tried to answer, but it was too late. Piccolo left the ground and shot at him like a rocket. He had never imagined that anything could move that fast – first, ten feet away, then on him so soon his brain froze up.
He didn't even move when the foot came at him, beyond curling his stomach in away from it. It didn't really help at all. His feet left the ground in a jackknife position, his air left him all in a houff, and then he was on the ground, surely several yards away, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Piccolo was still right on him.
The boy doubled over, making himself as small a ball as possible, and closed his eyes. But the expected blow never came.
Instead, Gohan opened his eyes slowly and peered up, squinting against the brightness of the sun. Piccolo was standing over him with a look of outright disbelief stamped on his face.
"S…sir?" he stammered.
"What the Hell are you doing?" Piccolo growled.
Gohan sat up. "Covering up. I thought you were gonna hit me, and…"
Piccolo slapped a hand over his face. "Dear gods," he said, pronouncing each word very separately. "How does your species survive long enough to reproduce?"
"My science book says it's the advent of technology," Gohan supplied miserably, hunching over his knees. "It says that made up for all kinds of evolutionary deficiencies."
The big warrior gave him an odd look. "Excuse me?" he said.
"Well, humans are at an evolutionary disadvantage to most species because we don't have fangs and claws and stuff, so we were pretty low on the food chain until we started using tools – y'know, like chimps and gorillas do? And then we just kept getting more advanced. The book called it an 'equalizer,' so I guess it means that…"
"Oh for the love of…SHUT IT already," Piccolo practically roared. The sound of his voice was so angry that Gohan jumped. "It was a RHETORICAL question. You know what 'rhetorical' is?"
Eyes wide, Gohan nodded.
Seeing this, Piccolo seemed to calm down. He took several breaths so deep that his shoulders raised and fell, cracked his neck sharply to one side, and finished with a long, slow exhale. "Okay," Piccolo said. "Alright. You've got the fighting instincts of an anemic slug. But you like to overthink things. Maybe we can work with this."
Gohan kept quiet. He kind of had the feeling that Piccolo was having this conversation mostly with himself, and he probably didn't want interruptions.
"What we're going to do," Piccolo said finally, "is we're going to program some reactions into you." The green fighter's eyes narrowed slightly. "Some useful reactions," he amended after a second or two.
"How're we gonna do that, sir?" Gohan asked warily.
"Method," Piccolo growled. "Get into a stance."
"But I don't know any…" Gohan saw the look on Piccolo's face and thought better of whining. He stood up, dusted off his knees, and tried to mirror what Piccolo had been doing earlier.
"More weight on the back foot," Piccolo growled.
Gohan nodded for what felt like the hundredth time that day and shifted his weight back.
"Now on the balls of your feet. And for the gods' sakes get your hands up."
Gohan had never had anyone talk to him like that. But he shifted his weight a little, brought his hands up to chest level.
The former demon looked Gohan over with his hard eyes – and snorted. "Not terrible," he said gruffly. "Now watch." Piccolo also moved into a fighting stance, though it was not quite like the one he'd done earlier – a little less bend in the knees, a little more sideways.
"Let's say you decide to kick me," he said.
Gohan stood still, eyes wide.
Piccolo visibly counted to ten. "That means kick me," he said.
Gohan did not like that idea. "But…sir…I don't want to kick you."
"…why the Hell not."
"Well…you haven't really done anything to me. And Mom says I should never, ever fight unless I absolutely have to, and even then, I should try running away first."
Piccolo's eyes narrowed. "If you don't try to kick me," he said, "I promise I will make it necessary."
"Oh," Gohan said. He wondered, not for the first time this week, if he was trapped in some kind of strange nightmare. "But sir…if I kick you, won't you get mad anyway?"
"NOT as mad as I'll get if you don't. Now do as you're told before I decide to go back to my FIRST idea."
Well, when Piccolo was right, he was right. Timidly, Gohan picked up his foot and kicked; it was, at best, a sloppy attempt at something he'd seen his father do once, but Piccolo didn't complain. Instead, he brought his front foot to his back foot and executed a one-quarter turn so that Gohan's foot missed him completely.
Gohan blinked. Thought about it. Grinned. "That's pretty cool," he said. "You didn't get hit at all."
"It's all action/reaction," Piccolo said. "Nothing complicated. Now you do it."
"You're going to try to kick me?"
"Mmhmm. Slow the first time."
"Okay," Gohan said. And as soon as he finished the word, he realized that he wasn't looking at Piccolo anymore. He was looking at the sky, his knees pulled up against his body, and his stomach really, really hurt.
Piccolo's face appeared in his vision from about seven feet up – he was standing over him as one might stand over something unfortunate on one's front lawn. "What in the Hell was that?" he snapped. "Why didn't you move?"
"M..move?" Gohan gasped out in a weezy voice – his lungs didn't seem to want to open up.
"YES, brat. Move. When I kicked you. That was the whole point of the exercise."
"B..but sir, I d..didn't even s..see you!" Gohan gasped, trying to roll over onto his side. His stomach felt like it had a knot tied in it.
Piccolo slapped a hand over his eyes and slowly dragged it down his face. "Kid," he said, and to Gohan his voice sounded very tired, "we have a LOT of work to do."
Gohan decided then and there that, if he managed to get home, he was NEVER gonna complain about being cooped up in his room to study again. Ever.
"Now let's see," Krillen said, upending his sack and letting the next sphere roll out, its sides marked with three round-edged stars. "With this one, the one from Gohan's old hat, and the one under the pillow, we have…"
"Three," Bulma supplied glumly. She leaned back in her chair and sighed, running a hand through her newly-cropped hair. She was dressed simply – khaki shorts, navy-colored Capsule Corp t-shirt, a heavy belt for holding various pouches and tools. Krillen wondered how she still managed to look like she was posing for some designer's "rugged casual" line. Bulma always looked like a model, even when the world was ending. He wondered if she did it on purpose, or if she just didn't notice.
"Yeah," he said. "I'd kinda hoped we'd have more of 'em by now. What's the dragon radar got to say?"
Bulma pulled a large, watchlike-device from her hip, pushing a button in a way that made it beep. "It says we're done with the easy ones, "she said after a moment.
"No offense, Bulma," Krillen said. "But I don't think we're defining 'easy' the same way."
Bulma shot him an especially look over the top of the radar. "Well, you just look at where the next one is, then," she said, thrusting the radar at him so fast he was surprised she didn't smash it right into his nose.
Krillen's eyes crossed briefly, trying to read the bright green screen – then he leaned back some, which helped. "Wow," he said. "The rest are so far away."
"And that's not all," Bulma said. She pointed to a little orange dot on the screen. "Do you know where that is?"
Krillen peered at the blip, nestled right in a bunch of triangles that he guessed were mountains. "China?" he asked.
"Mmmhmm…look closer."
Krillen squinted at the screen, imagined himself flying in that direction… "Aw, man," he said quietly. "Castle psycho."
"Crawling with all kinds of crazed demons by now, no doubt," Bulma said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "I really don't know how we're going to get in there at all, much less sneak out with a dragonball."
"Well, we can't do it on our own, that's for sure," Krillen said. "I've never even BEEN in that place; I wouldn't know how to start, where to get in, what to do…"
"Someone has to know something," Bulma said. "Who do we know who HAS been in there?"
Krillen looked down at his hands. "Well," he said reluctantly. "I know someone. But he's gonna be real hard to find."
"That's better than going into a fortress like that blind," Bulma said. "You're just going to have to find him."
"That's easy for you to say," Krillen said, aware that he sounded more miserable than he had at any other point in his life. Because there was no way that Piccolo was going to be glad to see him. Not at all.
He wondered morbidly if his insurance covered death by rampaging maniac, and decided it'd be just his luck if it didn't. But then, all his policies were probably null and void anyway, given that he'd already died once.
And he decided that if they DID manage to wish Goku back, the very first thing he was doing was going to be to kick him in the shin REALLY hard.
Lightyears and dimensions away, someone sneezed.
