Piccolo had gotten used to having Chichi respond to his presence in a fairly wide range of ways - from a cheerful wave to a clenched fist shaken his way with the kind of profanity he wouldn't normally expect from a doting mother. This, though, was new because, as he came to the bright patch of green that was her clearing, she came crashing out of the house at a full run. Her hair was only half-pulled back, her uniform was crooked, and she was waving both arms in great arcs like she was trying to signal a plane to land.
"I'm not a jet," Piccolo said as he touched down carefully with one foot - then he blinked at the obvious urgency on Chichi's face. He'd only seen a look like that when she'd been attacked by something. He was just going to ask her what was wrong when she grabbed one of his crossed arms and, with an alarmingly firm hold, started to haul him toward the house.
"Hey!" he said, digging his heels in - but she kept right on dragging him so that his feet made undignified little furrows in the ground.
"You have to see this," she said firmly, and he didn't like the sound of her voice at all.
"See what," he groused, finally getting his arm back only to have her duck behind him and shove him unceremoniously through the door. He stumbled, caught his balance, and gave her his best "do that again and die painfully" glare. He stood up straight, crossed his arms, and resisted the urge to straighten his turban - human women were, he decided, rough on the composure. It was no wonder that most human males he'd met were such damn nervous wrecks.
She didn't answer as she was already running across the room to turn up the volume on her television set. She pointed at the screen.
Piccolo uncrossed his arms slowly in disbelief.
It was cell phone footage, and it was blurry - but there was no mistaking who it was. It was unclear exactly what had happened; there seemed to be very little footage to work with. A blurry shot of something large and green standing in a dense crowd. An explosion. Screaming and running, the camera turning crazily sideways, blackness. The same thing from another camera angle, then from another, all the same - a blurry figure, an explosion, black.
The two of them stood for a long time, wordlessly watching as the cycle repeated itself.
"I thought he was dead," Chichi said finally.
Piccolo had to swallow twice before he could answer. "I guess not," he said.
"They're saying there was some sort of attack," she said.
"That seems...stupid," Piccolo said.
Chichi raised a brow at him.
"For Cymbal," Piccolo clarified. "My brother was..." he cleared his throat, "...IS a sadistic son of a bitch who has some real problems letting shit go, but he's never been stupid."
"...I hope you aren't using language like that around Gohan."
"Right, that's exactly what I hoped you'd take away from this," Piccolo said, even as he winced internally, because he DID use language like that around Gohan more often than he probably should, and...what the Hell was wrong with him, that was the LEAST of their damned worries.
Chichi tossed her ponytail over her shoulder and then chewed on her lower lip in a way that Piccolo would have discouraged if he'd had any idea how to do so - it was a nervous habit of hers that was going to draw blood sooner or later. "Why is it stupid?" she asked finally. "I mean, aside from the senseless loss of life."
Piccolo shook his head. "If he's alive, he sure as Hell doesn't want to kill me any less now than he did before. Why kick up all this fuss if he knows I think he's dead? He'd be more likely to try to take advantage of my damned overconfidence."
"He could still do that," Chichi said.
"But why risk me finding out he's alive instead of planning an ambush? It's not his style. I'd know," he added under his breath.
Chichi looked at the television again. "What are we going to do?"
Piccolo idly wondered when the humans had gotten together to put him in charge of making difficult decisions, and what could possibly be done to reverse the process. He resisted the urge to massage his suddenly-aching temples. "The timing couldn't be worse," he allowed. "Those other Saiyans could turn up any day now - the last thing I need is to be in the middle of a throw-down with big brother when they come knocking."
"But if we don't do something now, there might not be a planet left for us afterward."
"That's it, yeah."
"Krillen was...pretty clear about not wishing my husband back for a year," she said slowly. "But maybe..." She looked at him with a wistful, hopeful expression that he didn't dare stare at for too long. Because that would be so damned easy, wouldn't it? They'd had the dragonballs, Krillen had told him, for a while...it was only Kami's firm directions to Krillen and Roshi that had prevented Goku being wished back already.
Piccolo closed his eyes. Could it really be that simple? Gather the dragonballs, make a wish, let the world be someone else's problem for a little while? And wasn't it necessary, too? Goku'd always seemed to have nothing but energy. He was like a damn puppy wanting to go for a walk, bouncing around with no regard for dignity, but if ever there was a time when Piccolo might've needed a little of that enthusiasm, it was now. After nearly a year, to have the option given to him to just drop some of that responsibility on someone else like he might shrug out of his weighted clothing...it was almost too much for him.
None of which touched the simple fact that he wanted to do it. Piccolo would still rather have eaten fire than admitted it, but he could recognize it now - he wanted him back. No matter how badly they worked together, no matter how abrasive he found the other man's obnoxiously cheerful disposition, no matter how much that stupid grin made him want to punch him between the eyes, he still wanted him back.
If I live through this, he thought, I'm going to hide in the mountains for the rest of my damned life. No amount of social interaction is worth this level of effort.
And maybe, if he stayed away long enough, these unfortunate new feelings would go away, too.
Chichi touched him on the arm, and he realized how long he'd been standing in the middle of her living room like a stupid green statue. He scowled a little, just to show how LITTLE he needed her to look at him like he was...fragile or something.
"No," he said firmly. "We can handle this."
Chichi gave him an uncertain sidelong look that Piccolo had seen from Gohan a few times already. "Your confidence is really inspiring," he added.
"What's your plan?" she asked in a tone that suggested she seriously doubted that he HAD one.
It would have been a lot less irritating if she'd been wrong.
"I'm going to go find him," Piccolo said, "and I'm going to end this. While I'm doing that, you're going to go to Karin's tower...be sure you climb the damned thing, or he won't give you any senzu. If I call you, you should come. If not..."
Chichi squared her shoulders. "I'm not afraid of him," she said. "I'll help you if you need it, just...don't be stupid."
Piccolo rolled his eyes. "I have no intention of getting myself killed," he said, "so don't worry. If we can't bring your idiot husband back, it won't be on my account."
Chichi gave him a look as if he'd slapped her, but he didn't stick around to see why - he just lifted into the air and started flying south, toward where the news told him that his brother was still alive.
Cymbal had to say this much for human beings - they were fucking persistent. Ineffective, but persistent.
They'd been looking for him for days now, filling the woods with barking dogs and jumpy groups of uniformed men. Search helicopters hovered just above the trees, inching along in tight formations lest he leap out of the trees and ambush one. The night was so lit-up with flashlights it looked like a Hollywood block party.
"Like bad television," he said, rolling the kinks out of his neck. He'd been watching the whole mess from about two miles up for most of the day, hovering just above the cloud cover and relying on his superior vision to track the search efforts.
When he'd first climbed out of the river a good way downstream, he'd found a quiet place and slept for at least two days. He'd woken up feeling...good, no more chi sputters, no more trouble lifting things. He wasn't sure if his body had just finished healing at last, or if something in his head had been causing him to feel ill, but he was just as glad that it was over.
He should probably have flown off somewhere safe to recover - the Tsubris or Yunzabit. But he stayed. He stayed because he wanted to make sure that Hina and her mother didn't wind up getting carted off to jail or executed for harboring him. So far, they seemed alright - a number of official vehicles had come and gone, but no one had read them any rights or threatened them in any way.
He idly wondered what he'd do if they did.
"Can't figure they'd approve of my usual methods," he muttered, "which are, pretty much, 'everyone dies.' Could always take a page out of the old man's book and blast a car or something while cackling dramatically, but I don't know that I got the panache to carry THAT one off."
The last of the official vehicles turned its headlights on, pulled out into the road, and drove away.
A few minutes later, the back door rattled, and Hina was out in the back yard, looking into the dark woods as if she expected to see him.
Well, why the Hell not, he thought wryly. He looked left and right, made sure there was nothing close to where the girl was, and then he slowly started to lower himself toward her house.
Hina had spent most of her afternoon on the internet.
At first, she hadn't wanted to do it that way - as far as she was concerned, Cymbal was her friend, and nothing that ever could have happened was going to make that any different, but the questions had shaken her up. Every day, it seemed, a different group of men in suits had appeared, asking the same question. Has your family ever lived near the Tsumi Tsubris? How long has he been with you? Were you compelled to keep him? Did you receive any communications from anyone? Has he told you what he plans to do, has he done anything violent, do you require psych services?
Hina had answered all questions honestly, because that's what her mother told her to do. All the while, the forest and mountains around her home had filled up with grim-looking men in uniforms, helicopters, and big, mean-looking dogs with slavery mouths.
"Why is this happening?" she'd asked her mother. "Are we in trouble?"
"We aren't in trouble," Ami had said. The television was on in the background, detailing the search efforts.
"Why is the news saying that he attacked us?" she asked.
Ami poured them both hot chocolate and smiled at her daughter weakly. "I'll tell you later, sweetheart," she said, "when this calms down a little. I don't want you to worry."
So Hina had sighed, said okay, and taken her hot chocolate. Then she'd gone straight to the computer in her room, overridden the parental safeguards (mom, really, you use the same pin for everything), and she'd looked it up on her own. Within a few minutes, she almost wished she hadn't.
It wasn't as if she'd never heard of the demon wars. It wasn't as if no one had ever brought them up. It was just that she was still at that school-age where they were learning about ancient history, and while there were action adventure movies already out about heroes with machine guns and headbands taking on hordes of freakish monsters, her mother had been very firm that she wasn't going to see anything R-rated until she was old enough to drive.
She'd had no choice left - she'd gone to Wikipedia.
There wasn't much to go on. The demons, according to the internet, had just appeared one day. They seemed to come in two types, either small, toothy, brainless things, or large green ones. The small, toothy ones were hundreds strong. The big green ones, there were probably less than twenty.
The pictures were horrifying. There weren't many of the actual-fighting, just aftermath shots - whole towns and cities destroyed, with craters where the roads used to be and half-eaten people...she hurriedly clicked to the next page. Only a few of the big green demons were named, and the first one shocked her, because he looked just like a bigger, meaner-looking version of her friend, minus the deep scars on his cheek. A look at the caption on the photo showed her that he'd been called the demon king. She found Cymbal later on, in the backgrounds of photos or in blurry ones where he was fighting with some strange-looking humans. The website said he was, to all appearances, the demon king's field commander. No one seemed to know what had happened to him after the war.
"Why would he do that," she asked her room out loud. Cymbal was cranky and easily-exasperated, and he'd clearly never been taught that if he couldn't say something nice, then he shouldn't say anything at all...but she'd never felt like she was in any danger from him. He'd tolerated it when she'd kicked soccer balls at him or tugged on his ear; he'd helped her mother move furniture and carry water to the garden. He'd looked the whole time like he'd rather absorb a good kick to the shin, but he'd done it.
Some of the photos on the later pages gave her some idea. There were medical photos of demons - both the small, toothy ones and the big green ones - cut open like the frogs in Hina's science class, all with neat sidebar explanations of what they'd found.
Hina didn't understand still, not fully. She didn't have the kinds of words she needed, but she was getting the feeling that this was all a lot more complicated than "a bunch of evil guys showed up, and some good guys stopped them." Maybe it was more like, "everybody keeps doing awful things to each other, and no one knows why or how to stop." So, she figured, it was a little bit like middle school.
She'd ask her mom about it later. For now, she needed air, so she threw a jean jacket on and went outside.
The cool air helped right away - she took deep, greedy breaths and tried to think calm thoughts. The search parties must have moved farther away, because it was almost quiet...the barking dogs were distant, she could barely see the flashlights. She hoped, fervently, that they would not find him, and she wondered if that somehow made her a traitor to humanity.
"Past your bedtime, isn't it?" Said a familiar, unconcerned voice over her shoulder, and Hina spun around.
Cymbal was lounging on the roof of her house, as if he'd been there all along. She'd expected him to look a lot more nervous with half the king's army out here to track him down, but he looked as comfortable as he had earlier in the month, when he'd been sleeping in the sun in the back yard. As she watched, he straightened out and slid off the roof to land easily in front of her. He was dressed differently than he had been before - when he'd stayed with them, he'd worn a simple gi. What he was wearing now looked a little more like armor. More, she thought, like he was wearing in the photos.
She figured she should have been scared of him - but she still wasn't.
"Mom's gotten lax, what with all this chaos from your being a wanted criminal," Hina said.
Cymbal shrugged. "Nobody's perfect," he said.
"You shouldn't be here," Hina said. "They have dogs and..."
"Search parties and helicopters," Cymbal finished. He smirked at her. "Kid, if they can find me out here, they deserve to catch me. I wouldn't worry about it."
"I...looked you up," she said.
Cymbal raised both brows at her. "Did you," he said, and there was no question at all in his voice. Which means, she figured, that he knew what she'd found.
"Did you...really do all those things?" she asked.
Cymbal crouched down to as close to her level as he was likely to get. He folded his arms on a knee and looked directly into her eyes with his strange red ones. "Whatever it said, I probably did," he said. "At least, outside of eating people. Never really got that rumor, but it stuck around for a while."
Hina wondered what was wrong with her, because she wasn't really mad at him yet. "Why did you do those things."
"You have any idea how boring the Tsumi Tsubris are? What else were we gonna do on a week night?"
"Don't dodge the question," she said.
Cymbal actually looked uncomfortable. "I don't have a good reason," he said. "It's...look, my father..."
"The big guy," she said immediately, "with the scary voice?"
"Ya know, if you'd put this much research into your damned science fair project, you probably wouldn't have gotten grounded."
"Cymbal."
"Fine. Alright. My father had kind of a rough time growing up on this rock. Had amnesia to start with, and then...no offense, humans aren't exactly the most welcoming creatures when you look different than they do."
Hina couldn't argue. "Go on," she said.
Cymbal shrugged. "I wish I could tell you more, but he wasn't much of a talker. I think it made him a little crazy, growing up...by himself. Either way you cut it, though, by the time he made us, he was royally pissed off at the world and wanted it to pay for whatever it did to him."
"And you guys just went along with it?"
"He...wasn't much like your mom, Hina," Cymbal said. "All we ever had to go on was what he told us, and...most of the humans we met did a bang-up job of living down to what he'd told us to expect."
"Like I was afraid of snakes before I met one?"
"Pretty much, actually, yeah. You might have a hard time believing it, kid, but we were at least as afraid of you guys as you were of us."
"Last question, I think," she said. "How many people have you killed, exactly?"
Cymbal didn't flinch. "A lot," he said. "Does that bother you?"
"Of course it...I don't know," Hina said. "How many is that? Dozens, hundreds..."
"Thousands, at least," Cymbal said. "Maybe hundreds of thousands. I didn't exactly count."
"You sound real broken up about it," she said. "It's not like you double-parked or something."
"If you're expecting heart-felt remorse, you're talking to the wrong guy," he said wryly. "Sure, there are times I wish I hadn't done it, but they didn't exactly lose a whole lot of sleep over killing us, either."
"Just like the feudal era," she said.
Cymbal gave her an odd look. "Ya know, kid, for a human, this is a shocking lack of hysterics on your part..."
"Well, how am I supposed to act?" she asked. "It...it takes some time to process something like that. I only learned my twelve times tables last month - how do you expect me to know what a million is like?"
"Between us, it's kind of a big number for me, too," he said. Then he shook himself out, a little like a big dog. "How's your mom?"
"Worried," Hina said. "You should go talk to her if you've got a minute. She's been fretting. I mean, *I* told her you'd be fine, but..."
Cymbal stood up very suddenly. He whipped around and glared at the horizon as if it had done something to personally offend him. "Oh, perfect," he muttered.
"What's perfect?"
"I'll tell you later," he said. And he looked...agitated, just like he did in front of the bus. He took her by the shoulders, turned her around, and gave her what he probably thought was a light shove toward the house. "Go inside, tell your mom I said hi."
Hina stumbled forward several steps, windmilled her arms, caught her balance. "What's wrong?" she asked.
"Nothin' I can't handle," Cymbal said, and for the first time, she heard something in his voice that scared her. Before she could ask him any other questions, though, he walked into the woods.
Hina looked at her house - the warm, yellow light coming through the living room windows - and then she looked into the forest, all the blackness between the trees, the distant sound of dogs and men.
She took a deep breath. She tightened her jacket. And then she ran into the woods, following the tracks he'd taught her to look for, because for whatever reason, he wasn't bothering to hide them right now.
Piccolo spent most of his flight trying to decide how he was going to handle this. His common sense told him that he should have swung by the desert to pick Krillen up, but truthfully...
...well, truthfully, Krillen was afraid of Cymbal. And he didn't have the heightened senses that Piccolo did. So on the ground, in a dark forest, Piccolo didn't like his chances much. Sure, he might've made for a fine early warning system - Piccolo could have, if he were feeling properly strategic, let the little monk wander around in the dark until Cymbal jumped him, and then taken the opportunity to hit his brother from the side or the back.
The thought made him profoundly uncomfortable.
"Damned inconvenient things, feelings," he muttered. He stopped in the air to stare down at the forest. Even he was impressed at the level of chaos he found there. He hadn't seen that many search teams in his life - though his father's memories were boiling around in the back of his head. HE had seen this before, and whatever feelings were associated with those memories were making Piccolo's stomach turn. For the sake of his concentration, he pushed those borrowed thoughts down as far as he could. He didn't need anyone in his head but himself right now.
"Alright, big brother," he said. "Where are you?"
He'd truthfully expected Cymbal to have appeared by now. His brother had never responded especially sensibly to getting his ass kicked before; his tendency was to come back swinging. Piccolo hadn't planned much, as a result - he figured that as soon as his brother sensed his energy, he'd come out on his own.
Then again, Cymbal's chi senses were the least developed of any of his siblings, and he had no mental talents to speak of. Maybe he just hadn't figured out that he was around yet.
Piccolo lowered himself to the ground. Much as he hated to admit it, his brother was probably more comfortable fighting in the air than he was. If he was going to invite an attack, he was probably better off to limit the number of directions that it could come from. He landed a fair bit up the mountain from where the humans seemed to be milling around. He figured he could flare his chi some, possibly draw his brother to fight somewhere that almost no one would get hurt.
His father's memories seemed not to like that idea .They bubbled up again, full of anxiety and anger and half a dozen other distracting emotions. Piccolo growled under his breath and pushed them aside again. All this stress is doing some really terrible things to my mental health, he thought. I used to have a better handle on this shit.
Piccolo closed his eyes and took a long moment to clear his head. No distractions now, he thought. You're stronger than he is, but face it, he's meaner than you are. You can't afford to be sloppy. Now get yourself together and power up.
He took a deep breath, and flared his aura - which was still, for some inexplicable reason, blue instead of red. The ground shook, the trees fluttered - and something odd hooked into his legs.
Piccolo blinked and looked down. There was a fine nest of cables that seemed to be burrowing into his ankles. He started to shake himself loose, but then the pain happened, shooting up his legs and into his spine, something between fire and being utterly numb.
He at once had and had NOT experienced anything like it.
His father's memories were loose now, bouncing around in his head like a bunch of rubber balls that someone had dumped out of a bucket. Energy-draining tech. Thought we'd gotten rid of all of that.
His only chance, he knew (or his father knew), was to power up completely and fast, overload the batteries - but when he flared his chi again, his vision swam and he hit a knee.
He heard voices. There were people around him now. People in uniforms and visors, more pinpricks in his arms and back - cables like from a taser, but instead of putting energy in, they seemed to be taking energy away. He closed his hand around a few and pulled, watching some of the humans fly through the air, but that wasn't enough.
He could try to get in the air, take them with him, but already, when he tried to fly, the energy wasn't there.
"On YOUR side, you blamed idiots," he growled, but even to his own ears, he was almost impossible to understand.
Feelings - his own and not his own - were as suffocating as the pain and paralysis. He clung to consciousness fiercely, there had to be a way...
Off to his right, he heard the screaming start. The cables on that side dropped, so he fell to a knee and used his right arm to pull the ones on the left side out of his skin. He felt the tiny, barbed tips take flesh with them when they went, but the burning stopped, leaving him to feel as if he'd fallen into cold water. He shook his head, hard - he wasn't going to faint, he was not going to faint.
The screams and yells had mostly stopped now. There was still someone...a girl's voice?
"You can't keep solving your problems like this!"
"Why would I mess with what works?" And that was his brother.
Mostly by force of will, he squinted through his browning-vision...and sure enough, that was Cymbal, holding a soldier up by the front of his uniform. The man's feet were kicking helplessly a good two feet off the ground, both of his hands wrapped around one of the demon's wrists. The tightening of his uniform made it impossible for him to talk, but his eyes were screaming.
"Do you call this working?!" The little girl...Piccolo squinted hard, but there was no mistaking it, that was a little girl...stomped her foot and gestured to the various soldiers laying around. "Sooner or later, SOMEBODY has to do the right thing here, or this is never going to stop!"
"What in the Hell," Piccolo muttered. He put a hand to the side of his head, wondering if he had another damned concussion.
Cymbal, meanwhile, looked down at that girl, who barely came up to the middle of his thigh. "Should I comment on the irony of your expecting a demon to do the right thing, or..."
"I get it," she snapped, "they were trying to kill your friend there..."
Cymbal laughed.
The girl kicked him square in the shin. Then again. Then again. "Nothing. Here. Is. Funny!" She said through gritted teeth, punctuating each word with a kick, nevermind that she might have been punting a tree for as much as Cymbal reacted to the blows.
"Sorry, kid. It kinda is," Cymbal said. But then he rolled his eyes and cuffed the soldier in his hand upside the helmeted head. He dropped him without a second glance.
"Cymbal!"
"Relax, he'll probably live. Meantime, he's got a radio, and I don't feel like running for my damned life tonight."
The girl threw her hands up in the air.
Cymbal ignored her, as he was already looking at Piccolo. His expression was...odd, like he wasn't quite sure what to do next, either. "Flew right into that one, didn't you," he said.
"If you want to just skip the brotherly advice and fight, that'd be a kindness," Piccolo said. He subtly tested his limbs and was alarmed at how...shaky they were.
"Kindess isn't my thing," Cymbal said. By then, he was already walking toward Piccolo. Piccolo bared his teeth out of reflex and started to stand, only to blink as Cymbal fisted his hand in the front of his gi and threw him right back down again.
"Put your head between your knees," he advised wryly. "Knocks you right on your ass the first time, but it'll pass in a few minutes."
"Excuse me?"
"I want to punch you in the face less than I usually do," Cymbal said. "If I were you, I wouldn't fuck that up by talking."
The little girl put a hand over her face in what Piccolo thought was a very Cymbal-gesture. "This is not how you make people not want to kill you," she told the big demon, "in case you didn't know."
"Nothing on this planet could make this guy not want to kill me," he said. "Not saying I blame him, mind, but this is a lost cause."
"You could try apologizing. You know, for whatever you did."
Cymbal winced, visibly. "Kid," he said, "baby steps. Too much too soon, alright?"
Hina sighed and walked over to Piccolo - who was still having some trouble making her out - and said, "He's very sorry. He's just not good at social graces yet."
Cymbal shook his head and walked away - stepping over the fallen soldiers, Piccolo noticed with some shock, instead of on them - crouching down to examine some of the tech on the ground.
"Huh," he said.
Piccolo felt a new surge of alarm. Because if his brother was cursing and kicking things and throwing cars, then there probably wasn't much to worry about...but if he was quietly and calmly processing something, then it was bad. news. "What," he growled, making an effort to get to his feet - but then the world swam unpleasantly. The last thing he consciously felt was his face impacting the grass.
"Uh, Cymbal?" Hina asked from over his shoulder.
"Not now, kid - I'm in the middle of something."
"I'm pretty sure your brother just fainted."
Cymbal, still kneeling, picked the small gun up carefully, turning it over in his hand. It was smaller than anything he remembered, sleeker - a shiny white instead of a metallic silver, but still, there was no mistaking the little red lens in the front. Energy absorption tech - he'd seen it before, years ago, and he'd thought himself done with it already. "Told him to put his head between his knees for a while," he muttered. "Not my fault he never listens. Anyway, I need to..."
Cymbal felt a hand close over his right ear and yank. It didn't hurt, per say, but it was definitely annoying. He looked sidelong at Hina, took stock of her stern expression, and sighed internally. "You're going to insist I deal with this, aren't you."
"Your BROTHER just FAINTED. Don't you want to maybe take him somewhere safe instead of leaving him passed out in the forest with people who want to kill him?"
Cymbal sighed heavily. "You're worse than a cartoon cricket, you know that?" But he tucked one of the blasters into his sash, and quick chi blasts destroyed the rest. "Fine, I'll move him somewhere else...and while we're at it, I should probably take YOU home before your mother has a heart attack."
Hina had the good grace, at least, to look guilty, which Cymbal found heartening. It at least meant that his terrible influence hadn't COMPLETELY turned her into a delinquent already. He walked over to his brother, and he was just contemplating the least-difficult way to carry someone very-nearly-his-own-size, when his instincts warned him that someone else was coming in fast.
Cymbal turned slowly, squinted at the sky. It was human, whatever it was - his first thought was that it was Krillen, but...no. To tall, too much hair - come to think of it, there was something awfully familiar about that hair style, and...
"You're shitting me," he said to the world at large. Because that was sure as Hell Son Goku's widow coming at him at mach 2.
"Cymbal," Hina said slowly, watching the distant speck of Chichi getting closer and closer, "why is that lady glowing?"
"Was just wondering that myself," Cymbal muttered. "Do me a favor, kid - go hide behind my idiot brother until I see what this is all about."
Hina gave him a dubious look.
"He's the sturdiest piece of landscape we've got, and the other option is you running through the occupied forest full of jumpy human soldiers without me," Cymbal said. "Just...do it, will you?"
Hina ran off to do as she was told, and Cymbal mentally thanked the gods that she wasn't a teenager yet. Then he cracked his neck to either side and wondered why it was that even his attempts to be peaceful always seemed to end in violence.
Either it takes practice, he thought as the woman landed in front of him, her face dark with rage, or I'm completely inept.
"...Hi," he said.
The woman's expression didn't soften a jot. She looked at Piccolo, who was still, of course, sprawled out on the ground, then back to him - and was it his imagination, or did she look even MORE pissed off?
"This...actually isn't what it looks like."
Chichi moved into a familiar, offensive stance - the same kind that Piccolo was prone to, which told Cymbal all he needed to know about this situation.
"I don't know how you did it, Cymbal," she said. "But I'm going to make you pay for it."
Then she was flying straight at him, which, among other things, really cut down on the amount of time he had to work out a plan that wasn't killing another of his brother's damned pet humans and starting World War Four.
Just exercise some control, Cymbal, he thought, and dodge a lot. Hopefully he'll wake up and play referee before you fuck up and kill her.
Then she hit him square in the jaw with the heel of her hand. It was a surprisingly good shot - enough to make him take a step back, not nearly enough to drop him. He had to roll left immediately to avoid the follow-up kick.
"This is going to be harder than I thought," he muttered, tilting his head left to avoid a spear-handed strike at roughly eye level.
"Damn straight it is," she said, and was that his imagination, or was she forming an energy ball in her hand?
Life, he decided, was a lot less complicated when he'd just been trying to kill everyone.
