The spot Piccolo chose was a hole of sorts in the side of a bluff. Scrub grass and stunted shrubs covered most of the mouth, and the hole was shallow – enough for him to sit in, with his back propped against the wall, and enough that he could stretch his legs out, but no more than that.

Still, even in the mid-morning sun, it was almost cool, and it had a good view of the ravine where Krillen had been struggling to teach Gohan energy manipulation. They were wavery at this distance, the size of his thumb, barely visible. He should have been closer.

Should have been, but wasn't.

Piccolo closed his eyes for a moment, drained – was it really so hot out there, he wondered, or was he still worn down from the fight a few days ago? – and tried not to chide himself mentally for his carelessness in leaving his charge with a stunted human.

Alright, so that wasn't fair. Krillen was an exceptional (if still stunted) human.

He also didn't seem to be having any better luck with chi manipulation than Piccolo had. He could see that clear enough from where he was…Krillen, animated, would all but dance around in circles, making expansive, round gestures with his hands, then crouching and pantomiming the way that most people focus and gather their power. It looked more like interpretive dance than martial arts instruction, and it was a degree of idiocy that Piccolo would never have been able to attempt himself.

Gohan, he could tell, was watching this display intently, wide eyed, like Piccolo imagined other children watched television. He even mimicked a few of the gestures, shy and small. But each time Krillen opened his hands to him – an invitation to try it – the boy shook his head, probably biting his lip in that damneable way of his, and Krillen slumped each time, visibly.

Piccolo could sympathize. Just watching it was exhausting.

He let his head thunk back against the cool sandstone and tried not to think about how much they might need this to work. How, if what Kami had said to him had been real and not some pain-induced hallucination, they had more Saiyans to fight, and how Gohan might just possibly be the only one among them strong enough to be of any help.

Krillen flared briefly with light, and Gohan hid behind a shrub. The monk stood baffled – Piccolo couldn't see the face, exactly, but he could see it in the sudden fall-forward of the head.

Piccolo could easily imagine the sigh.

At least it meant that Krillen didn't have any more idea than Piccolo how to overcome Gohan's fear of his own energy.

Piccolo suspected that the problem was the same. Deep down, Gohan trusted both of them (perhaps, he thought, unwisely). Krillen would never put the boy in danger to start with. And he, when he did, failed just as surely because Gohan believed so strongly that he would never let anything happen to him.

They were both, Piccolo realized, too nice. Which, in Krillen's case, probably couldn't be helped, but *he* should have known better.

He closed his eyes again. It was nice, so easy not to think.

I was never like that, he thought for maybe the hundred and fifty third time since meeting Son Gohan. I was never so damned trusting.

Then again, he'd had no reason to believe that Cymbal would NOT cheerfully let him bounce off the rocks when he dropped him for HIS first flying lesson. Hell, the big bastard might have made a few choice jokes about his inadequacy while he was falling. And he'd certainly never failed to block a punch out of some misguided assumption that Cymbal wouldn't hit him. Or knee him, or kick him, swipe him with his claws, send him rolling with a well-placed energy blast. Probably because every time Piccolo dropped his hands - even if it was because his vision was swimming brown or because his arm, from one shot or another, had gone numb – Cymbal did hit him. Hard. Harder than Son Goku hit him before the monkey figured out exactly what he could take.

He winced internally at the thought of employing those methods with Gohan. How many times would he have to actually hit him – actually DROP him – before the boy believed him? And would he survive the lessons long enough for them to work? Because while Piccolo knew what was inside that boy, he wasn't so sure about the outside. Its durability. Its resilience.

Or maybe the boy would never believe it, no matter how many times it happened. Just as Son Goku had so staunchly believed, no matter how many times Piccolo broke his knuckles on the man's face, that he "wasn't so bad."

Stupid monkey, he thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid, so strong you don't have to worry about anything, aren't you? No, you can just run around rescuing demons and kids and whatever else strikes your fancy and nobody ever gets hurt because you're so strong. And you were so damned sure I had your back that you dropped your guard like…

But his mind closed off that path before he had time to finish it. And instead, he found himself thinking again about the desert, about his first three years of life. He tried to imagine Gohan taking that kind of punishment and couldn't. The boy would simply curl up in a ball and die, probably whining all the while about math tests and how much he missed his mother.

It was hard enough to imagine for himself. A blur, more than a memory, a smear in the back of his head of air so think he almost couldn't breathe it, sand grinding itself into the cuts in his hands, the salty taste in his mouth after a bad shot to the gut.

You realize he'll hate you for this, he remembered. Tambourine had said it one hazy afternoon when Piano and Drum had already called it a day and gone home, when Piccolo lay on the sharp scree at the bottom of a cliff face, his vision sometimes clear, sometimes full of rust. Cymbal stood beside him in the sand, his hands stained purple up to the wrists.

He can hate me all he wants, Cymbal had said carelessly. Hell, the more the better.

But now that he was really thinking about it, the person who'd stood with him the most often afterward – the pair of boots he most often saw when he finally opened his eyes again – were Cymbal's.

Piccolo had always thought that he waited just to grind his face in the sand one more time before he took off. Or to see if he really HAD killed him this time. But he supposed he could have been keeping the vultures away. He just didn't know.

A distant hum told him that someone – Krillen, he knew, though he didn't open his eyes to check – had fired a chi blast. He put his hand over his eyes, and for a moment, he envied humans their tear ducts. Not because he wanted to be able to shed tears, so much as because he wanted to know if he wanted to.


Son groaned out loud when he opened his eyes. His head felt like it had been used to break down a few doors the night before, and the air in the room felt heavy on his chest and face. He put a hand carefully over his eyes – the middle of his nose hurt from the light – and tried to let his vision filter back slowly. His eyeballs felt too full; painful, too much pressure.

He wondered briefly if he HAD been opening doors with his head again.

But no. He was in bed, a rich person's bed, someone who liked a lot of bright colors. He sat up slowly – a wash of dizziness took him, so he had to try twice. Then he trailed his hand over the sheet, cool to the touch, and looked around subtly to see if he'd broken anything yet.

The floor was some kind of marble; there were pillars, cloth-paintings on the wall, and it occurred to Son Goku that wherever he was, he definitely didn't belong there. Heck, he felt awkward enough in the house with Chichi sometimes; even the simple surfaces, the kitchen utensils, they felt awkward in his hands, like trying to write left-handed when you're a rightie, and he always felt like he was going to rip the handles off the drawers. A place as, well, fancy as this – especially after he'd spent most of his life in the woods – it was like being in a glass house.

He wondered if he'd tripped and fallen into Hell again. Only as far as he remembered, Hell didn't have tapestries. Just funny trees and ogres and lava fountains.

Goku put his hand to his forehead, narrowed his eyes, tried to think. "No," he said out loud, "that's not right." He'd been running – forever, felt like – then something had happened next. He'd seen a building, and the building was full of strange women with scaly clothes and blue skin, and he'd thought one of them was King Kai.

She wasn't, though. She was Princess Snake, and this was her house. She'd been nice enough even after he judo-threw her at the ground; she'd offered him dinner. He could remember there was tea, a whole table full of things he couldn't really name, and then after that…

…after that, nothing.

Son swung his legs out of bed and wondered briefly at his lack of clothes. Had he pulled a Roshi and left them somewhere? No – they were folded on a chair beside the bed, perfect creases like he never did when he folded clothes.

Which didn't exactly mean he hadn't pulled a Roshi. When the old turtle hermit got drunk – which happened more than most of his students were exactly comfortable with – he would sometimes go running down the beach, leaving a shoe here, a pair of shorts there…

Had he been drinking, though? He didn't think so.

Did he take them off himself? He didn't know.

Goku felt his face heat up and, as he often did when faced with this kind of thing, decided promptly that he was done thinking about it. In fact, it might be a good idea never to think about it again.

All he had to think about now was how to get out of this mess – as the girls sure put up a fight when he tried to leave. Beginning to dress – he still felt weirdly muzzy, and his fingers were having a hard time with ties – he started wondering about the best course of action. He'd never really had to plan an escape before , or at least, when he had, it'd been escapes he understood. Take off through the trees, try not to look back. Fly into the direction of the snow; that way, whoever's following you can't see very good. Sure, that kind of thing he understood. But escaping nice women who kept shoving drinks at him? What was he supposed to do?

He couldn't tie his belt right. With a sigh, he jerked an awkward, lopsided knot in the damned thing and fell back on the bed wrong-ways, arms spread out to the side. "Okay," he said. "Think. What would Chichi tell me to do."

Goku thought about that for a moment – about what Chichi would think of this mess – and winced. "She'd kill me, that's what," he said. Which he probably deserved for getting himself captured by a beauty pageant girl, but didn't help him get out of there, beings as he was already dead.

Krillen?

Goku sighed. "Faint, probably," he admitted to the ceiling. "And then propose to like three of them, and get discouraged, and wonder what I would do if I were there." And that line of thinking, he decided, was making his headache worse.

Yamcha?

…Goku dragged both hands down his face. "He'd live here," he said. "He'd ask for a room and live here forever, and Bulma would never, ever stop yelling at him."

What Roshi would do, Goku decided, wasn't even worth considering. Unless he decided to get thrown out as a last resort.

Which pretty much left him with trying to decide what Piccolo would do in this situation. At least that was easy to do. Piccolo would never have gotten himself into a mess like this in the first place. He would have taken one look at this palace type thing and said "Son, if you think I'm setting foot near that thing, you're brain dead," and he would have kept right on running. Might even have snagged him by the back of the gi and hauled him along if he didn't keep up. And definitely would have grumbled for half an hour about how he doesn't know how he managed to survive so long without adult supervision.

Goku sighed. "Just lucky, I guess," he said.

Okay. So if Piccolo had maybe taken leave of his senses, or hit his head recently, or was (for some reason) following him temporarily and landed in a mess like this, what would he do?

"He'd sit up. He'd get dressed. He'd smack me a good one upside the head for getting him into another mess. And then he'd forget all about being polite and either blow a hole in the wall or run like crazy."

Son chuckled, and sat up. Then, he smacked himself a fair one on the back of the head and said, "Okay. Run like crazy it is."


Regrowing the limbs had been painful. Cymbal couldn't remember much about it when he finally returned to consciousness for good, but he remembered that it hurt like Hell. He could even sort of remember thrashing around on the bed that damned woman had eventually managed to harass him into climbing into, as there was frankly no way in Hell either she or the donkey was getting him into it otherwise.

So he'd hauled himself up on the fresh, white sheets, and he'd bled and convulsed like he was having a seizure. He'd screamed wordlessly – wordless only because he hadn't had the presence of mind to form profanity – as fresh limbs shot out along his left side.

Then, of course, he'd passed out again.

When he woke up, much to his irritation, his ankle was actually tied to the footboard of the bed, apparently with a belt pillaged off a godsdamned rain coat. Pretty much like an assylum patient, which he figured made sense, as it already felt like he was losing his damned mind.

Cymbal growled to himself and started to sit up – only to have a tray crack against his sternum. He blinked. On it was a cup of tea, a plate of some kind of cracker, and a little container of green jello.

The demon blinked. He followed the tray with his eyes to the hand that held it, and followed the hand to the arm, and the arm to the shoulder, and the shoulder to the face of the very stern-looking soccer-mom-librarian-lady who had "rescued" him.

Cymbal looked down at the tray, then at her. He put two fingers against it and slooowly pushed it away. "No," he said, "sorry, not interested."

He started to sit up again. She put a hand on his shoulder, looking down at him with clear concern, babbling in that damned broken-up language he didn't understand.

Cymbal tried, briefly, to push through her hand, but his new arm – which he hadn't properly broken in yet – gave out under his weight and he found himself right back on his back again.

Okay, so maybe he wasn't ready to get up yet anyway.

The woman very gently put the tray back in his lap, and Cymbal dragged a hand down his face. He entertained a brief, satisfying visual of taking the tray away from her and beating her to death with it. "I'm not an invalid, lady," he said. Which wasn't exactly true, but he wasn't all that concerned with the truth.

But the woman took no notice of his scowl, his wild gestures, OR his tone. She was already chattering at him pleasantly about who-knew-what, bringing a pillow or two over so that he could sit up. And then she held up a calendar with a day circled.

That day was two weeks in the future.

She smiled, pointed at it, pointed at him. Then she pantomimed a walking motion.

"…two weeks," Cymbal said. He held up his right hand, raised two fingers.

The woman nodded and grinned.

"Right here," he said. He pointed at the bed.

She clapped her hands together and nodded again, clearly thrilled to be communicating with the alien thingy.

"What the HELL am I supposed to do for two weeks!?" Cymbal erupted. "Twiddle my thumbs? Knit a damned blanket? You're out of your mind!"

The woman blinked several times and took a step back. Then, seeming to realize what he was ranting about, she held up a finger as if to say wait.

Cymbal, curiousity be damned, waited.

The woman winked. Walked over to a small television set that had been balanced precariously on a dresser. And turned it on.

Cymbal stared in utter disbelief as a man and a woman on a screen shouted at each other over organ music. No. It couldn't be.

It was.

"You want me to lie here for two weeks and watch soap operas," he said. Even to his own ears, he sounded completely defeated.

The woman patted him on the head, set the tray back in his lap, and stirred his tea for him. Then she left.

And he couldn't reach the damned knob on the television…and probably couldn't blast it, either. The man and woman had gone from screaming at each other to holding on to each other and sobbing. The organ music shifted to "sad" and, if he'd had enough energy at that moment, Cymbal was pretty damn sure he would have flown straight to Hollywood or Bollywood or wherever-the-Hell-was-responsible-for-this-shit and strangled the bejezus out of an organist. And probably, he would have strafed a Starbucks or two out of spite – that's where producers hang out, isn't it?

Cymbal groaned out loud and slumped back against the bed, bringing a hand up to rub over the aching bridge of his nose. "At least it can't get worse," he said. "No matter what else happens to me, it can't ever get worse."

He felt a depression on the side of the bed. "Don't you ever go to work or…" but wait, that was too light even for the woman. He peered through his fingers.

The little girl was sitting on the side of the bed. She had a book balanced in her lap that was nearly as big as she was.

Cymbal eyed her with some alarm, still peering between fingers. "What are you doing here," he asked.

The girl grinned, and opened her book. It was full of small, colorful cards decorated with cartoon animals. She pointed to the first one and started chattering at him excitedly. The very first one was a greenish lizard sort of thing that appeared to be scowling.

Cymbal wondered if he had enough dignity left that yelling for help would actually damage it.


Master Roshi heard the air car coming from a long way off. He picked up his cane (not that he really needed it) strapped his turtle shell to his back (not that it really helped much anymore) and opened his door, fully prepared to meet either a solicitor or an evangelist, as those were pretty much the only people who ever made it out as far as the Kame house.

Instead, he saw a woman – a pretty one, long black hair, a purple dress – hopping out of a battered air car. One of her arms was in a sling. The other was clenched in a fist by her side as she stormed up the beach like she was scaling Normandy.

Roshi squinted through his sunglasses. He'd been meaning to greet her with something like a "Hey there, pretty lady," but she looked familiar. Very familiar. And although he hadn't seen her in something like five years… "Hey there," he said, "Aren't you Goku's girl? What're you doing all the way out here."

Chichi stopped walking. She planted her feet shoulder width apart like a soldier and said, "You're going to be my teacher, Kamesennin."

Roshi blinked. "Excuse me?" he said.

"You're going to be my teacher."

"No, I heard you," he said. "And in the first place, young lady, I don't think you're striking the proper tone, and in the second place, I can't be your teacher anyway, so you might as well go home."

Chichi crossed her good arm and scowled at him. "Why not," she said.

"I've never had a female student before," he said. "It's just not done."

"Well," she said, "then I'll be the first."

Roshi rocked back on his sandalled heels. "I thought you didn't want your boy or your husband fighting."

"I don't," she said. "But if they're GOING to do it anyway, then I'm going with them."

And Roshi looked at her still-purpled face, the particular break on her forearm, and sighed heavily. He could see that no matter what he said, she wasn't going anywhere. "Fine," he said, and he wondered when exactly he'd started to sound like a tired old man. "Let's see you run around the world four times. Then we'll talk."

He turned his back on his shocked expression and shuffled back toward the door. "Turtle! Oolong! Get the spare room ready – we got company!"