Zarbon hit "enter" key for the fifth time and watched the "wait" bar fill up again.
He didn't expect the results to be any different from the other four times. But when you're going to tell Lord Frieza something that he doesn't want to hear, you had better be damned sure that it's at least accurate.
The numbers scrolled, reflected on his face like a map. He drummed his fingers on the console, face a careful blank – though he noticed that the techies had been moving farther and farther away from him with each press of the "enter" key.
The screen smoothed into a map of local star systems. Four dots. One on a small, previously insignificant planet somewhere in the west galaxy. Two close together, moving that way. One more coming up from the south. All Saiyan. None of which had been responding to radio contact for at least two months.
"Damn," Zarbon said without inflection.
Not that any of them were that dangerous, really. Not even the little prince who'd started the entire wretched populace talking about the next Super Saiyan. There had been, as far as Zarbon was concerned, only one VERY dangerous Saiyan, and he had died around twenty years ago on the wrong end of one of Lord Frieza's fits of pique. What was his name, Barack…Bardock. Something like that. A nobody third-class who had somehow or other become strong enough to survive a point-blank blast from Dodoria. Who had, if Zarbon's scouter had not been malfunctioning (and it never was, as he was one of the few soldiers in Frieza's army with enough gods-given sense to get the thing serviced on a regular basis – what part of every six months or 6,000 clicks was so bloody hard to fathom, anyway?), flickered at the very end at a power level that would put him above half the Ginyu force.
A nobody third-class. Imagine.
That was very possibly why there were no more third class Saiyans – nobodys or otherwise. Just four. Raditz, who had been a Saiyan of first class or so; Zarbon could faintly recall him in that he'd seemed more savage from the rest, a step above a natural predator, but not much beyond that. He mostly remembered the way the large warrior had had of pulling his lips back and grinning in a way that was almost a snarl – which he did a lot in Frieza's presence, more in his. Zarbon had wondered on more than one occasion if the big Saiyan had been trying to decide what he would taste like.
Well, he thought, pity he never decided to find out. That was one of the downsides of being Frieza's personal ataché – it was one of the most frustrating and dangerous jobs in the empire and, paradoxically, the one in which you were LEAST likely to ever get to hit anything again.
Then there was Turles, the other first class that was drifting about somewhere in the south – unlike most Saiyans, he had a head for subtlety. He wasn't one of Frieza's soldiers; he worked for lord Cooler instead. As far as Zarbon knew, he'd been running around the south galaxy with a small retinue of fighters weeding out anything that the older icejinn thought needed weeding. It struck Zarbon as dangerous, of course – wasn't that how Bardock had happened? - but what Cooler wanted to do with his galaxy was his business. Zarbon just hoped he had a decent insurance plan and quietly thanked whatever gods were listening that, when the shit inevitably hit the fan, he was at least going to be spared the paperwork.
Then there was Nappa – a brute of a Saiyan that exemplified everything that Zarbon found obnoxious about the race. Powerful enough that he didn't need technique, powerful enough that he didn't want it, either. Not in Zarbon's league, of course, but there was something about him that made him nervous all the same. Perhaps it was the temper, he thought. That kind of rage made people stupid, but it also made them unpredictable. And Zarbon had no use for unpredictable things, be they computers or giant, bald-headed Saiyans.
Then of course there was the little prince with the unusually high power level (who should have died with his damned planet as far as Zarbon was concerned, but there was no reasoning with Frieza when he found something entertaining). To Zarbon's understanding, he'd been what had gotten the whole savage populace babbling about the next Super Saiyan in the first place. Not that Zarbon had ever put much stock in THOSE rumors – one of those half-wild monkeys could never handle so much power. Hell, even he, who had his emotions fully under control, needed a lower energy form and a higher energy form in order to keep from vaporizing ships or crushing tea cups. And don't get him STARTED on how hard it was to avoid snapping hair-ties.
But then there had been Bardock, and Zarbon had started, for the first time, to wonder.
Zarbon stared at the screen for another minute or two and willed it to change. Willed it to go white with a flashing "error" message. Willed it to explode.
No. Two dots up north. One to the south. One on panet 36-11-3. Chikyuu. Earth, he thought the natives called it in their radio broadcasts. But that one had been very still for a very long time.
Zarbon sighed and hit "print."
Krillen was beginning to really WORRY about Piccolo.
The big demon – Namekian, he corrected himself – was, to borrow one of Yamcha's words, pissed.
"If you DON'T defend yourself, I'm GOING to kill you!" Piccolo literally bellowed at the boy at the top of his lungs – it was a sight to see. The normally-composed warrior was all but waving his arms in sheer frustration, drawn up like one of those birds that puffs around intruders. "What about that is so damned HARD to UNDERSTAND!"
Gohan qualed in the face of his mentor's rage, putting both hands up in front of his face as if to deflect a blow which, Krillen thought dismally, wasn't completely outside the realm of the possible. His lower lip started to quiver.
"Don't. You. Dare." Piccolo said severely.
"Sorry, sir," Gohan said miserably.
Krillen would not, a month ago, have been willing to say anything about it. Like, for example, that alternating between beating on the kid and screaming at him might not be doing such great things for Gohan's development. But he'd been watching the other warrior carefully all this time and, much to his surprise, was beginning to think that Piccolo might not actually WANT to kill Gohan after all. "Aw, Piccolo,' he said before he thought better of it.
Piccolo rounded on him with alarming speed – kind of like a snake when you poke it – and it occurred to Krillen that while even Piccolo might have some compunctions at all about battering a defenseless kid, HE was another story. "Don't you "aw Piccolo" me," he snapped, "we don't have TIME for this!"
Krillen hastily put up both hands, but didn't shut up, which was a concept he decided he was going to work on immediately if he lived long enough. "It's not really his fault! I mean, he did nearly kill you like a month ago, and three people besides – it's a LOT for a little kid."
Piccolo's eyes narrowed further. He seemed to be thinking. Though whether he was weighing the weight of Krillen's words or trying to decide how far he could punt him, Krillen wasn't sure.
Then, Piccolo grinned. "You're absolutely right," he said.
Krillen blinked. "I am?"
Piccolo grinned more. Krillen could see teeth. "You are."
Still grinning – he'd NEVER looked so cheerful, Krillen thought with some alarm – Piccolo turned back to Gohan. "Alright, kid," he said. "New plan."
Gohan looked up hopefully from between his fingers.
Piccolo said, "I'm not going to hit you anymore."
Gohan perked. "Really?"
"Really."
It was too good to be true, Krillen decided. Piccolo wasn't the give-up type.
Even Gohan, it seemed, had his suspicions. "What are we gonna do instead?" he asked warily, looking at Piccolo the same way that most people look at street magicians.
Piccolo was positively beaming. "From now on," he said. "I'm going to hit him." He pointed straight at Krillen.
Krillen's eyes briefly crossed as he found a very sharp finger pointing square at his nonexistent nose. Then the words sank in."Hey!" Krillen exclaimed.
Gohan blinked. "What?" The boy looked as startled as Krillen felt.
"Are you out of your mind? I can't fight with you!" Krillen all but blabbered. "You almost killed me LAST time and there were RULES AGAINST IT!i"
Piccolo winked at him. Yes. Winked. "That's a shame," he said, even as he threw his weighted clothing aside. "Guess it's been nice knowing you."
Oh, Krillen thought. I get it. Piccolo thinks that Gohan will use that energy if I'm in trouble. Which means that the only way to save the world…
…is for me to get my ass kicked. "This is such bullshit," he said more adamantly than he meant to with Gohan around.
"Think of it more as 'taking one for the team'" Piccolo advised as he rolled his neck to either side, loosening the vertebrae. And, Krillen thought grimly, he's enjoying this WAY too much.
"If it's so important," he grumbled at Piccolo as the other launched at him talons-first (causing Krillen to duck and scramble for his life), "how about you let me beat on you, huh?"
Piccolo just smirked more. "How about you try," he suggested.
Piccolo opened his eyes and found himself staring squarely into the desert sun. Blinded and annoyed, he put his hand over his face and tried to decide what in Hell made him take a nap on burning sand in the middle of the day.
"Holy freaking cow" Krillen said somewhere a way off in the distance. Wherever he was, there was also a high-pitched, irritating ringing. Piccolo made a mental note to stop that as soon as possible.
Piccolo sat up.
Krillen, roughly fifty yards away, also sat up.
Gohan, of course, was crying again.
It was time to backtrack, Piccolo thought. Let's see. I was beating the bejeezus out of the little monk over there – check. Lots of acrobatic escapes and oh-geeze-I'm-gonna-die's and but-I-never-even-got-a-girlfriend whining – check. Gohan yelling stop it at the top of his lungs. Also check. Bright light squarely between him and Krillen knocking them both in opposite directions.
Oooooooh. "Gentlemen," Piccolo said with more cheer than anyone who had nearly died by his student's hand (again) had any right to show, "we have found our solution."
Krillen flopped right back onto the sand. "Whoopie," he said, deadpan.
Piccolo decided on the spot that he might actually be starting to LIKE the little freak. But, he consoled himself, that's probably the concussion talking.
*author's note – this is a dream sequence.
The sky had been red for almost a week. Not sunset red or sunrise red – dark clouds stretched from horizon to horizon, the undersides lit up with distant fires, pulsing and dancing like smoke from a billows. Cymbal caught himself glancing up at it more and more as the days stretched on, wondering if it was ever going to rain again.
He was standing on a small hill, trying not to inhale. Down below, the lesser demons – goblin-like creatures with webbing between their fingers and bulging fish eyes – were herding the humans that had once lived in the now-burning village into a large pen in what Cymbal supposed had once been a rice paddy. They were scruffy and hunched, these humans, knee-deep in water, just masses of blankets with bundles, stumbling toward the open gate. He didn't expect any trouble from them. They were broken people, their warriors (if he was feeling nice enough to call them that) were collecting flies among the burning huts, and he seriously doubted any earth military would know about this until it was already much too late. They'd be off to another village by then, stamping out humanity one village, then one city, then one country at a time.
Not that the military was worth a bucket of warm spit anyway. Big, slow machines with big, slow bullets.
Cymbal tipped his head back all the same, habitually scanning the sky for planes. But of course, there was nothing. He figured they'd have to run out of the damned things soon, anyway.
"What do you think, T," he said, consciously keeping his voice around 'bored.' Because even though he wasn't looking, he knew his brother was behind him, no doubt watching the scene below. Probably counting how many damned humans they were killing by the hour, weighing that against how many were left, how long the whole enterprise would take. Tanbarin had a fascination with mathematic projection that Cymbal had asked him to explain exactly once. The resulting headache had lasted for three days. He had simply pronounced his brother "fucked in the head" and never thought about it much again.
"That this is a waste of a perfectly good set of trees," Tanbarin said, in reference to the pen.
Cymbal snorted. "You know that and I know that," he said.
Tanbarin wasn't standing next to him. He was down a bit below, standing up against the hill so that he wouldn't leave a silhouette – wouldn't be so easy to pick out from the small foothills, the far-off rocks. Cymbal figured he, in contrast, made quite the target…a large figure, clearly a ranking demon, standing out like a sore thumb against a burning village. Which was part of the plan.
"Where are they, T," he said – he kept his voice very soft.
Tanbarin did not ask who he meant. "You always expect me to know," he said. He sounded borderline annoyed.
Cymbal snorted. Partially in contempt, partially to clear his nostrils of the scents of fear, urine, smoke. "Thought you were the big-shot telepath."
"I thought you didn't believe in that…what did you call it…touchy-feely new-age bullshit."
Cymbal chanced a glance over at his brother. The man – boy, he figured, technically, as he was all of six months old, but he was too…something…to be a boy- was standing quietly, arms crossed, expression a study in blankness.
"Stop being so damned difficult," he said. "Where are they."
T shrugged again. "Too much interference," he said. He cast an annoyed look at the no-doubt-frantic pen of human beings. Some of the more enterprising creatures were patting at the firm slats of the fence.
"Bullshit," Cymbal said.
Tanbarin shifted his too-pale eyes just enough to peer up at him. He smirked, just faintly. "North by northwest," he said, "Approaching. Only two."
That would be Son Goku the monkey boy and the old turtle master, Cymbal suspected. "Give me an ETA," he said.
"Fifteen minutes."
Down below, the lesser demons were pulling one of the humans out of the pen. If Cymbal squinted, he could see that it was a woman – he thought, anyway, she was too swaddled in cloth to REALLY tell, but the legs he saw occasionally as she kicked and writhed and tried to run were certainly more female than male.
She had a bundle of something in her arms. Probably some useless trinkets she'd thrown in a pillow case before the demons had herded her out of her home, dragged her by her skirts, sleeves, or wrists through the dusty, smoke-filled streets. She was screaming something in a language he didn't understand – but then, he didn't need to. "Help, someone, please." Maybe names that she thought would useful. Mother. Father. A husband who was probably already dead.
Of course, no one could help her now. The lesser demons were already licking their uneven, jagged teeth. They were hungry, in a foul mood from actual work – they were bored. And, Cymbal knew, they were going to rip that woman into tiny little pieces.
Normally, of course, he would have vaporized the whole pen in one go and been done with it. There were too many humans on this mudball to go picking the little bastards off one at a time.
But then, there were other things to consider. Like that his sire, Lord Daimao no Pikoro, wanted a strangely-powerful little human with a monkey tail brought to him alive or dead immediately. That this gawky little kid – barely a teenager, just now growing into his damned LEGS for the gods' sakes – could somehow fight any of them and live, much less HURT them was an affront to him. Worse, the boy was still growing. Was stronger every time they fought him.
Not that it was a crisis by any means – not yet. But Daimao no Pikoro didn't get to be the demon king by taking stupid chances. He wanted that scrawny little brat put out of his misery before he grew into a REAL problem, and he'd appointed Cymbal to do it for him.
That had been easier said than done. Son Goku knew that he was no match for him. He'd learned that the hard way. They boy never stood and fought with him for long for that reason. He was, Cymbal admitted to himself, damneably annoying. He would pop up out of nowhere, attack him. He'd distract him long enough for his little friends to play hero and save a small group of worthless, simpering survivors – and then he'd break and run through the trees or the foothills. Press his chi down to nothing. Run so that you couldn't see him from the air and would have to follow on foot.
Cymbal had learned quickly not to follow the monkey boy when he ran. He'd instructed the lesser demons not to do so as well. He'd learned that they would run far ahead, set ambushes. Learned that even desert bandits, deformed assassins, and blue-haired sluts can be dangerous when you don't see them until they're on top of you. Tanbarin's predecessor, a lanky demon whose name Cymbal couldn't remember, had died that way on the second day of his life. Cymbal had nearly gone with him.
You could say what you wanted about him – Cymbal didn't ever make the same mistake twice. He'd decided instead to make his quarry come to him. It was a pathetically easy thing to do. You just get enough humans together and let the demons take them apart one at a time. Because, while the boy seemed to understand that he needed to survive long enough to become a real threat, he seemed to have a real problem watching that kind of thing for very long without interfering.
Of course, there was always the question of how many humans they'd have to go through before monkey-boy broke cover and took a shot at one of them – probably Cymbal, as he was making such an effort to be a target. And of course, no matter what, Son Goku wasn't going to arrive in time to save this human. The demons were already ripping at her – she was curling in on herself around her bundle. Candlesticks, probably – candlesticks and silverware and some old jewelry. It was always that. Cymbal made a quiet bet with himself as to how long it would take for her to die.
The bundle in the woman's arms began to scream. Cymbal wondered briefly if she'd been smuggling a cat, but not – it was a baby human. It waved its stubby, frantic fingers as the lesser demons pulled it away from the woman, who reached for it, grasping at air and making noises that Cymbal didn't have words for. The last thing he saw before they dragged her toward the bloody, flat piece of land where she was going to die were her eyes. She looked up at him – him, of all people – with a pleading, hopeful expression (he supposed because he was more humanoid than the reat of the creatures roaming around). Like she actually wanted HIM to do something about it.
"Not a lot of sense, these humans," he said to Tanbarin.
The woman shrieked as they stretched her out on the ground, licking their broken-off teeth.
"Not a lot of sense on this planet," Tanbarin replied.
Neither of them flinched.
Cymbal opened his eyes.
He'd been napping on the lawn for the past hour or so, he figured, by the position of the sun. GETTING outside had been interesting. He'd finally hauled himself out of bed (two weeks, as it turned out, didn't TOUCH the amount of time he was going to have to spend flat on his back in recovery) earlier that morning and stumbled as far as the window. He moved like a drunk, legs still stiff, and it took him a minute to open the damned window; the glass felt heavy.
Then he realized he was on the second floor. Staring down at a perfectly kept little yard and a stand of trees. And if he could barely walk yet, there was no way he could fly.
He took a deep breath. He weighed a painful impact with the ground against the worry he was feeling because not only did he now know who Darren was, but he knew exactly what he'd done to Maria and he was afraid that he was starting to care…
Well, there was nothing for it but to take a deep breath and fall out a window. He hit the ground between his shoulder blades and flopped out and thought it was the most refreshing damned thing he'd done all week.
After he'd stopped seeing double, he'd more or less dragged himself to a quiet spot in the yard that got some direct sunlight, put his hands behind his head, and slept like the dead. The sun helped. It felt good on his shoulders, his busted-up abdomen, his newly-grown limbs. He tried to remember when the last time was he'd just napped in the sun for any length of time and decided he never had before. Too busy for one. For another, not a lot of direct sunlight in the frozen mountains.
He decided that he liked sunlight. And lazing around half-asleep in back yards.
Then he felt something light roll against his side and actually bothered to open an eye.
It was a soccer ball.
Instinctively he looked up. And yep, just as he'd expected. There was the little girl, hands on hips, staring down at him with an expression that hovered between expectant and hopeful.
Like she actually expected HIM to do something about it.
He closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep again.
The girl sighed and prodded him with her toe. She said something that his brain obligingly translated to "please."
"Beat it, kid," he said without opening his eyes.
She prodded at him again.
"What," he asked, resigned. He sat up on an elbow. "What could you POSSIBLY want now." Because they were no longer within reach of video games or weird plastic horses or books full of inane cartoon animals or any of the other millions of things that the little human had been determined to torment him with since he'd come to this hellish place.
The little girl put the toe of her shoe under the soccer ball, kicked it up in the air, and bounced it lightly from her knee to her head. Then she plopped it back onto the ground, kicked it his way, and looked at him imploringly.
"There aren't enough soap operas in the godsdamned WORLD to make me think THAT'S a good idea," he said.
The girl sighed more heavily than before, her small shoulders hunched forward until they almost touched.
"Demons don't play peewee soccer," he told her. "Now go find some other spastic little mammal to chase a ball with, will you?"
The girl didn't understand his language any more than he understood hers, he was sure, but she got the gist of it anyway. She picked her ball up and went to the other end of the yard to practice, and he stretched back out in the sun. And he wondered idly why there weren't any other spastic little mammals around for her to chase a ball with. Didn't the damned creatures live in packs?
The thought troubled him for some reason. But he had no idea why.
Across the yard, the little girl (Hina, his not-so-helpful brain supplied, because in spite of himself, he'd managed to pick up her name – her name and her mother's, which was Ami) kicked an imaginary goal and cheered for herself, jumping in circles and clapping. She tore up two handfulls of grass, threw them like confetti, and did a victory lap of a rose bush.
What a messed up breed of people, Cymbal thought. He would have been VERY annoyed to realize he was almost grinning as he thought it.
i Piccolo vs. Krillen, 23'rd Budokai
