Piccolo's head hurt.
It was the kind of headache that made him want to bury his head under his arms and pretend to be dead for as long as it took to go away, the kind that throbbed and pulsed behind his eyelids. Nothing, he thought, could be worth getting up today...except that something was niggling at the back of his mind. Something important.
It would be easier to think without all the noise.
Seriously, the Hell had he been thinking? There were lots of nice, undeveloped stretches of wasteland he could have gone to sleep off a headache in that were full of white noise and chirpy goddamned birds, and absolutely no muffled curses, impact sounds, crashing branches or chi blasts whizzing around...
Piccolo's eyes flew open. He sat bolt upright, swiping the back of a hand fiercely across his eyes to clear his vision. Beside him, a little girl yelped and scrambled backward. And in front of him, Chichi was fighting with Cymbal.
That couldn't be right - but it was. They were trading blows on the green patch of high grass before the trees. She was trying her best at the moment to gouge his big brother's eyes out, and she seemed at least not to be bleeding much...and Cymbal, against all expectations, seemed to be on the defensive.
No, he realized suddenly, that wasn't what was going on - Chichi was trying to kill his brother. He'd been right about that. Cymbal, though, was trying NOT to fight, which was clearly a new and awkward experience for him. It was also an experience that was going to go fatally wrong for Piccolo's student very soon, because Piccolo couldn't imagine that his brother's control was better than his, and his hold on his temper was by far worse.
"Son of a bitch," Piccolo muttered, rolling to his feet.
"Oh, yeah, you're brothers, alright," said a voice beside him - it sounded funny to him, like it was underwater or backwards, but then he realized it wasn't in Japanese. It was some language he didn't know. He could only guess that his father had spoken it.
Piccolo glanced to his left, then did a double take, because the girl from earlier was sitting beside him, watching the fight (or the not-fight) with some interest. She was a stocky little thing with cropped hair, and she looked up at Piccolo completely without fear. "Has anyone ever told you that you sound alike?"
"No," Piccolo said numbly.
"Well, you do." The little girl looked back over at the not-fight. "Your girlfriend's pretty tough," she said with unfeigned admiration, "but I don't think you should let her keep fighting with Cymbal like that. He doesn't know his own strength sometimes."
It was the worst possible time to be frozen on the spot, but there he was, in the middle of a forest overrun by hostile humans, twenty feet from a fist fight, and his goddamned brain was giving him nothing but a 404 error. This, he thought dizzily, is what an aneurism must feel like. "I don't sound like my...we don't...and that's NOT my girlfriend!" And he was painfully aware that he was changing colors like a damned traffic light.
The little girl gave him a sympathetic look. "He said you were all stiff and awkward," she said, "but I thought he was probably exaggerating."
Piccolo decided that what he needed to do right at that second was to stop listening altogether, because slipping into madness (which he could kind of feel happening more quickly than he was comfortable with) was not going to save the damned world. He needed to prioritize, focus...
"Purple's a weird color to blush."
...focus, and do the most important thing. He had to stop the fighting before it attracted more attention, or before someone got killed. The problem was that a fight like that is a damnably hard thing to break apart, and he was running out of time, before...
Chichi overextended, and he could see his brother's arm coming up flat-palmed underneath her for what would either be a rattling strike, a rib-crushing strike, or a rake of the claws - and two of those things were fatal. He had a split-second to decide what to do.
HIs decision was based on logic. Letting Chichi take that hit was not a chance he could take. Flying in between them would just get HIM taken the Hell out, and if he tackled Chichi, he was likely to break at least half the bones in her body between the initial impact and the landing. That left him with only one option - so he tackled his brother instead, because even though he clearly wasn't the aggressor, he was the only thing in Piccolo's field of vision that he thought he could hit without breaking.
In all fairness, he only intended to knock the two of them apart, break their line of sight - but he'd made a critical error in his plan. Cymbal, for whatever reason, was trying not to hit Chichi, but the big demon had absolutely NO compunctions about hitting HIM. The difference was crazy, like watching a cat go from idly poking at something with its paw to trying to rip it to shreds.
Piccolo's reflexes saved him some as he and his brother went tumbling across the ground - he countered a high slash with his forearm, cursed as Cymbal's forehead cracked against his teeth, and brought the flat of his own hand down against the other's ear. Then he felt Cymbal's talons dig into his chest - he expected him to tear at his skin, and was shocked when he threw him aside instead. Piccolo mostly righted himself in the air, but he still bounced off a tree painfully before he found his feet again.
Cymbal, of course, was right on him. "Next time," he said through gritted teeth, speaking in a low, rough voice that only Piccolo could hear, "I'm letting the primates turn you into a vegetable."
"I just had to break you up," Piccolo growled at the same volume, digging his elbow into his brother's sternum with a satisfying crunch. "It's not my fault you went batshit crazy the second I touched you."
"Right, you panic and blindside me while I'm trying NOT to murder your mental-case protege - what the Hell is it with your students and trying to rip my face off? - and I'm the one who's being all unreasonable. That makes perfect sense."
"I don't want to fight you," Piccolo said, even though it wasn't necessarily true.
"Who do you think I am," Cymbal hissed, ducking under a wide swipe, "Son Goku? I'm not going to drop my guard just because the guy trying to kill me says he wants to play nice now."
Piccolo decided to let THAT one fly right past him. "We'll stop on three," he huffed, narrowly sidestepping a nasty-looking kick.
"...You are not fucking serious."
"Got a better idea?"
"Fine. Three and then stop, or stop ON three?"
"...now I don't know what the Hell you're talking about."
"Oh for fuck's sake," Cymbal said. He fell back three steps and dropped his guard. "There. Now are you..."
Chichi's flying side kick caught Cymbal square in the face.
Piccolo barely had the presence of mind to snag Chichi by the back of her uniform before she could follow up. "Cut it out," he said to her, giving her a slight shake for emphasis. "We're done," he added when she fixed him with a shocked stare, and he fervently hoped that was still true. At that point, it wouldn't have shocked him if his brother were having another one of his berserker episodes, and he wasn't completely sure that he could blame him.
"What do you mean, 'we're done,'" She groused at him, stepping out of his hold. "After that maniac attacked you..."
"That wasn't what it looked like," Piccolo said. "I think...I think this may have just gotten away from us a little bit." He peered with some concern at the trench Cymbal had dug with the upper half of his body. His brother wasn't moving, and he first thought, crazily, that he'd dropped his guard so completely that Chichi had managed to knock him out.
But no. He was conscious. He was pressing the heels of both his hands over his eyes, and his lips were moving. He was...
"...Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty..."
Piccolo blinked. His brother was counting.
"Mom told him that counting to ten helps you keep your temper," the little girl - who Piccolo had almost forgotten - said. "But after tonight, I'll be surprised if he calms down before he gets to like...five hundred."
Piccolo decided to just...go with the crazy for now. "I'm sorry...you are?"
"Hina," the girl said, offering him a hand. He ignored it, as was his way - she just shrugged and put her hand back in her jacket pocket as if it didn't really surprise her that much. "I'm with him," she added, gesturing toward Cymbal.
King Kai wasn't sure whether he wanted to laugh or cry.
He hadn't, in the past, spent a lot of time looking in earth's direction. It was such a sad little planet, always torn up with war and famine, floods, and terrible reality television. The past twenty years or so had been especially bleak, and as there hadn't really been much that King Kai could have done to fix anything, he generally just tried not to dwell on it.
He was looking now, though, as a favor to his latest student, who had a gift for looking as sad as a rained-on puppy. "Just keep me posted," he'd pleaded in a very un-Saiyan way. "I don't need to know everything. It's just that I left at a very bad time."
So King Kai had given him a stern lecture on respecting his elders and not trying to use them as a telephone. Then he'd shoed him out to train and taken just a quick glance at first. You know. A tiny peek, just to make sure that the bad-luck planet hadn't exploded or something.
As it turned out, though, he might've been better off to keep his eyes on earth all along. If he had, he might have realized that many an addiction to "Pageant Moms" or "Project Runway" had come from just that - a quick peek. Curiosity. Flipping channels.
He hated to admit it, but he was kind of hooked. Cymbal and Piccolo were supposed to come from a peaceful planet, but he'd never in his life seen any two creatures so incapable of getting along.
"It's less diverting in person."
King Kai turned slowly.
There was a Namekian in his kitchen, sitting at his table, drinking a cup of his tea. He was an odd Namekian, though - tall and thin, dressed all in black instead of white, with the most piercing grey eyes he had ever seen. He held the tea cup and the saucer delicately, with the sort of manners he never would have expected from one of Piccolo's brothers - because even though he hadn't watched earth in a long time, King Kai couldn't mistake who was paying him a visit.
"Like watching a pair of birds fly into the same window over and over again," the Namekian said, coolly well-bred, never breaking eye contact.
"You know," King Kai said, "it's usually good manners to wait for an invitation before you start meddling around in a high-god's kitchen."
Tambourine shrugged carelessly. "If I waited for invitations, I'd never have gotten anywhere."
King Kai pressed his lips together.
Tambourine tipped his head toward the window. "How is he doing?"
"For being dead," King Kai said in his flattest tone of voice, "he's fairly lively."
The Namekian sighed. It was the most perfect I-am-surrounded-by-idiots-sigh that King Kai had ever heard. "No, really," the Namekian said.
"I'm not sure that's any of your business," King Kai said.
The Namekian stood very slowly to his full height. "From where I'm standing," Tambourine said, his tone bored, "He still doesn't measure up to Vegeta."
King Kai had, around Goku, been driven to screaming, flailing, and various other behaviors not given to deities who want to be dignified. He'd never believed in all the pomp of godhood, but he could, when he set his mind to it, bluff with the best of them - so he barely betrayed his shock, save for a slight twitch of one of his antennae. "You know you're not supposed to do that, right? Look at the future?"
The Namekian tapped his index finger against the table top in a way that set King Kai's teeth on edge. "Born with it, I'm afraid," he said. "I think sometimes that I'd stop if I could."
"Scrying?" King Kai said.
"No," Tambourine said coolly, as if such things were completely beneath him.
But it wasn't that surprising, was it? King Kai had only limited dealings with the Kami of earth, but he knew that particular deity was prone to clairvoyance. So far as he knew, Piccolo wasn't prone to it, and neither were the other brothers...but it existed in the family line somewhere.
"Hell of a recessive gene," King Kai said finally. "You still aren't supposed to do it."
Tambourine tapped his index talon against the table again, visibly unconcerned. "I'll be expecting the citation in the mail. Meanwhile..."
"...Vegeta's in a class by himself. Which you already know."
Tap, tap, tap went the talon.
"Well," Tambourine said, "that's too bad."
And King Kai had a very awful feeling, suddenly, that he understood a little of what had been happening. "Tell me," he said slowly, "that you didn't kill that man outside just so that he could get special training and save the world."
Tambourine put a hand over his chest and bowed very slightly, though his eyes didn't drop a jot. "You have quite the reputation as a sensei, " he said.
"And what you did to your brothers..." King Kai said.
Tambourine smiled, if you could call it that - it was just the barest upturn of his lips."This is the part where you exploit my narcissism so I can tell you all the finer details of my master plan?"
"The thought had crossed my mind, yeah."
The Namekian - or demon, maybe - shrugged. "I always wanted to be an only child."
"Or you thought Goku's boy needed a little push to show Piccolo what he was capable of," King Kai said quietly.
The Demon King gave a modest nod of his head."Thank you for your hospitality, North Kioh," he said. He took a step back into the darker part of the room, and King Kai could not have said later whether he blinked or the dark got deeper, but his visitor was gone.
"Polite boy," King Kai said quietly. "Shame about that sociopathic streak, though."
Goku, as if on cue, poked his head through the door. "King Kai," he said, his brow knitted up in concern, "are you talking to yourself again?"
"Uh...yes, Goku. Yes I am."
"Should you be doing that?"
"Probably not," the deity said, rubbing the heel of his hand between his eyes. "Aren't you supposed to be training?"
"I was just...wondering if you got anything from earth?"
King Kai pursed his lips and tried to think of any single blessed thing that he could say about what was happening on earth that would NOT set his poor student into some kind of guilt-induced panic attack and promptly decided that there was nothing. "They're all training very hard," he said with a straight face, somehow. "And, uh...networking. Right. Preparing. All very complicated. Get back to work."
No grown man should, King Kai thought, be able to pout like that. "That won't help you," he said sternly.
Goku grinned and shrugged. "Worth a shot," he said, and then he went back outside to keep training.
King Kai poured himself a cup of tea. "My nerves are never going to be the same again," he muttered to Bubbles, who hooted sympathetically.
Chichi was making tea. She wasn't making it, mind, because she thought anyone actually wanted tea. The atmosphere in her kitchen more closely resembled a bunch of people trying to diffuse a bomb than a quiet afternoon book club, but she had to do SOMETHING to calm her nerves.
Making tea was a soothing process - the familiar kettle, the low fire over the stove. It almost helped her forget that she had a pair of demons and a little girl stolen from God-knew-where in her house.
They'd all at least - once Cymbal had stopped counting - been able to agree that they should move their conversation to somewhere they were less likely to be swarmed by the king's soldiers. Then, Cymbal had had a very heated exchange with the young girl that Chichi hadn't understood at all. The girl, she couldn't help but notice, was completely unafraid of the much-larger Cymbal - who had looked as if he would have pulled his own hair out, if he'd had any.
"What's going on?" Chichi had whispered to Piccolo.
Piccolo, who looked quietly baffled, said, "Cymbal wants to take the girl home."
That by itself had shocked her. "That's very...responsible," she ventured.
"Yeah, but it's not happening. The girl doesn't seem to trust him to behave himself if she's not around to keep an eye on him. He...can't really seem to find much fault with her argument."
Cymbal had finally thrown his hands up in the air and picked the girl up. "She's coming along as a moderating influence," he'd said in the flattest tone Chichi had ever heard.
Piccolo had opened his mouth, closed his mouth...given up on talking entirely, and taken to the air.
Somehow, her house was where they'd ended up, so Chichi was making tea - while Piccolo stood, as stiff and unsure of himself indoors as he always was, and Cymbal lounged much-more-comfortably in one of the kitchen chairs with his feet on her table, which she was ignoring in the spirit of compromise. It was odd, she decided, to see them that close to each other; Piccolo still held himself like he was afraid of breaking everything, whereas Cymbal seemed as easy about draping on furniture as he had about tossing the soldiers around like ragdolls.
"So," Cymbal said, speaking very slowly, "you're telling me that our monkey-tailed wonder is actually from a race of space-ape-pirates, some more of which are coming here to kill us all?"
"Could you not put it that way?" Piccolo asked, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"What, the way it actually is?"
Even Chichi found Piccolo's ensuing not-amused look impressive.
"Fine," Cymbal said with a shrug. "And your brilliant plan for surviving this, because I'll just bet there's a plan, is...?"
"We've all been training for this," Piccolo said, "for nearly a year now."
Cymbal raised a brow at him. "Which don't come close to cutting it if you're being straight with me about how strong these Saiyans are. What else have you got?"
Piccolo peered off.
Cymbal took his feet off the table - and Chichi realized that some kind of valuable information had just passed between them, even though no one had spoken. "You aren't serious," he scoffed.
Piccolo said nothing.
And like that, Cymbal was ready for a fight. He started to stand up, visibly stopping himself from slamming a fist down on the table, which likely would have splintered it. "If you think for one damned minute I'm going to allow that..."
"You don't have a choice," Piccolo said coldly. "None of us do."
"We finally get rid of that..." and Cymbal sighed as the little girl punched him in the arm and glared at him, but then he visibly took a moment to rein in what had to be an impressive string of profanity... "...person, and you actually want to gather the godsdamned dragonballs and bring him back?!"
"I'd like to see you stop me," Piccolo said.
Cymbal seemed like he was going to do just that, and Chichi resigned herself to seeing an explosion right in the middle of her kitchen, but the girl tapped Cymbal's arm and firmly shook her head.
Cymbal's expression reminded Chichi of nothing so much as a big, stubborn dog being forced to drop a bone - but he made himself sit back down in the chair, deliberately put his feet back up again. "Right, I get it. You and I spend a damned month fighting over that, neither one of us wins, the space-monkeys kill us all."
Piccolo looked amused. "You're a lot less stupid than I used to think you were."
"Don't count on that," Cymbal said. "So, alright - assuming, and that's a big assumption, I wouldn't rather have us claw each other to pieces than let you wish golden-boy back - what else do you have."
"Is that you agreeing to help?"
"That's me agreeing to hear you out," Cymbal said. "Kind of mood I'm in right now, I might be willing to break out the damned popcorn if some alien dropped by and promised to destroy this place."
"We don't have much else," Piccolo admitted. Then, he nodded toward Cymbal's sash. "Except possibly that."
Cymbal removed the small, white gun from his sash and put it on the kitchen table. "This?" he asked.
"You said it drains chi - felt like it worked pretty damned well to me."
Cymbal raised both brows at him. "You do realize they invented shit like this to kill us with, right?"
"I don't see why we can't use it to kill someone else," Piccolo said.
"Because that means it exists," Cymbal said flatly. "And as long as this exists," he continued, tapping the gun for emphasis, "someone is going to keep poking at it and screwing around with it until they find a way to improve it. This thing here - this is survivable. The next version might not be."
"Priorities, Cymbal," Piccolo said. "This thing might kill us. The Saiyans definitely will."
"There's all kinds of dying," Cymbal said. "Some kinds are a lot more fun than others."
"Well, that's certainly morbid," Chichi said. She handed a full tea cup to Piccolo, who took it as if he thought he might break it by breathing on it, and one to Cymbal, who took it with practiced eased and a very incredulous look her way.
"Morbid," Cymbal agreed finally, "but accurate. I'd rather get blown up than slowly tortured to death any day."
"Which still only might happen," Piccolo said, "as opposed to the certain death that the monkeys represent. We need more of these." Piccolo nodded at the gun. "And we need better, if they have it. Who makes them and how?"
Cymbal was quiet for a long time before he spoke again, tilting his head back as if he were searching the ceiling for answers. "Was a guy," he said, "in the Red Ribbon Army. Ya know, that group of Nazi-wannabes we were fighting with before we discovered monkey boy and his posse? They were mostly useless, but they had a scientist with them...Dr...something. Hang on...something to do with Gears...Gero. Some kind of mechanical genius, I guess. He started developing tech that'd absorb our energy blasts at first, and then he worked his way up to tech that'd pull it right out of our bodies. Tell you the truth, though, I'm surprised he's still around. I was pretty damned sure we'd killed him."
"Guess not," Piccolo said. "Or someone else has picked up where he left off."
"Don't think that's very likely," Cymbal said. "Way I understand it, this is complicated stuff."
Piccolo walked the length of her kitchen twice before he spoke again. "We need to find whoever this is - see what else they have."
"Yeah," Cymbal said, "and how exactly are you planning to pull that off?"
"You found him last time, didn't you?"
At that, Cymbal looked...uncomfortable. "Not exactly," he said. "He's a scientist, not a fighter...he doesn't have a chi we could look for."
"Then how did you know where he was?"
Cymbal seemed to withdraw into himself. He looked down at his tea cup as if the answers were somehow written inside it. Chichi was starting to think that he wasn't going to answer when he finally said, "Tambourine and I - we did it together."
Piccolo looked startled.
"Yeah, he's got you snowed pretty good," Cymbal said in a rough tone that was almost sympathetic. "But before he went all wino-pacifist on us, he was one of dear old dad's top assassins."
"But he doesn't have a..."
"One, don't mention the low power level thing to him. He gets touchy about it. Two, he doesn't need it. He's a crazy mental talent - can make average people forget how to breathe if he feels the need, can make 'em eat their own gun barrels if he wants to be dramatic."
"And he can pick one human mind out of six billion?" Piccolo asked quietly.
"In an afternoon," Cymbal said, and the calm intensity that he said it with made Chichi very sure that he wasn't exaggerating.
If she hadn't known Piccolo as well as she did, Chichi would have thought that he didn't react at all to what his brother said - but she did know him now, well enough to read the subtle lines around his eyes...well enough to realize he was as unsettled by the news as she was. "I'll ask him if he can do it again," Piccolo said quietly.
Cymbal's expression darkened some. "That's...kid, listen, that way lies nothin' but trouble, trust me."
"Right," Piccolo said, "Because the person at the top of my 'people to trust' list has always been..."
"I have never lied to you," Cymbal said.
"No, but when you weigh that against leaving me for dead..."
"I told you I would," Cymbal said with a shrug. "Don't go getting indignant because you didn't believe me."
"And in the next breath, you suddenly have my best interest at heart..."
"Enough," Cymbal said, rubbing at his temple. "I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but...I think we need to talk."
Piccolo raised both browridges at him.
"Alone," Cymbal said, standing up from the table.
"Anything you have to say," Piccolo said, "You can say in front of..."
"No," Cymbal said, "I can't." His expression said he wasn't going to budge on it, either.
` Chichi felt a sudden rush of nerves at the thought of the two of them going off by themselves. She even thought at first that Piccolo would refuse, but then he gave her a sort of apologetic nod, and he walked out the door.
Cymbal said something to the little girl that Chichi didn't understand, and then he walked out the door as well.
Piccolo was relieved that his older brother didn't seem to want to walk that far away from the house. They'd always fit together badly, and right now, the tension between them was so thick that it was downright claustrophobic in the back yard. He didn't want to prolong this encounter for any longer than he absolutely had to.
"You had something to say?" Piccolo asked, crossing his arms, projecting unconcern.
And Cymbal seemed...uncomfortable. Looked at the trees, the grass, everywhere but Piccolo for what felt like a damned year.
"While I'm still young," Piccolo said, though he was beginning to be afraid that Cymbal WAS going to try to apologize. He hoped not. He didn't think either one of them was ready for THAT.
"...he put me under," Cymbal said, finally, in more of a blurt.
"I...don't follow," Piccolo said.
Cymbal made eye contact then, and he was almost someone that Piccolo did not recognize - quiet, calm, none of the frothing-at-the-mouth crazy that Piccolo had come to expect from him whenever he was dealing with conflict. "After that godawful mess with the giant monkey," he said, "I went back to the fortress. And he...I don't have words for it. He put me under."
"He made you sleep?"
Cymbal rubbed a hand across his eyes. "Right, I'm going to put myself through this conversation because our brother gave me the mental equivalent of a sleeping pill," he said. "No. I don't...what I'm telling you is, I have some gaps."
"All fairness," Piccolo said, "this hasn't exactly been your year. Maybe you're just repressing some of the..."
"If I repressed unpleasant memories, I'd be damned lucky to remember my name," Cymbal said, his tone impatient. "It was...mind control of some kind. Now I'm not saying I wouldn't have done the same thing under other circumstances, but...I might've had sense enough to wait until I'd healed up first."
Of course, Piccolo's first instinct was to dismiss that outright. It seemed like such a stretch - Tambourine wasn't exactly the most proactive creature on the planet. He'd always acted like their struggles and squabbling were beneath his dignity, always preferred to shut himself up in his room and read old books, except...
...except that, if he really tried to remember their arguments, if he really thought hard about it, he couldn't actually remember whether Tambourine had been in the room or not. And Piccolo was the kind of person who would always know that sort of thing.
"It's one thing to make mental suggestions," Piccolo said. "Are you saying he could actually control one of us?"
"I'm saying it's probably not the first time it's happened," Cymbal said seriously. "I'm also saying it probably won't be the last. If I really think back, if I concentrate...stuff blurs together that shouldn't, and it's usually right before something godawful happens. Now it could be I have a few more concussions than you do. Could also be your brain's a little stronger than mine, but...are you really willing to risk that?"
Piccolo experienced an uncomfortable, cold feeling in his gut. Steady, he told himself, it could all just be in his head. Literally. "Then we'll try it on our own first,' he said, "but I'll be damned if I have any idea how you're going to go about tracking down a human scientist without a telepath."
"Can't say as I do, either." Cymbal shrugged. "But humans find each other all the time - can't be that damned hard to track one that's building death-machines. Maybe the crazy lady..."
"Chichi," Piccolo corrected absently.
"...the crazy lady," Cymbal said with peculiar emphasis, "being human, might have some ideas. Or we could just put Hina on the damned internet and see what happens. That usually works out pretty well."
"About that," Piccolo said. "You and that girl...does that seem like a good idea to you?"
Cymbal rolled his eyes. "I'm decades ahead of you," he said. "Ten years from now, she's asking me to be a dear and bring her the heads of all the popular kids on a shiny silver platter. You can't give a teenager that kinda power - they got no idea how to wield it responsibly."
"...you could always try saying 'no,'" Piccolo suggested dryly.
It was rare that, looking at Cymbal, Piccolo would get the uncomfortable sensation that the older demon really HAD lived a lot longer - but this was one of those times. Cymbal gave him an almost pitying look and said, "Yeah? How's that strategy been working out for you so far?"
Piccolo broke eye contact first. "You may have something there," he admitted. "I'll ask her if she has any idea how to find this Dr. Gero." He turned to walk back into the house, but...there was something else tickling his brain. Something his brother had said earlier just didn't add up.
"Cymbal," he said without turning around, "when you said you thought that Dr. Gero was dead."
"Yeah?"
"...you always taught me to find the body," Piccolo said. "You always taught me to be sure."
"Yeah."
"But you don't know whether or not you two killed him."
"Afraid not."
Piccolo turned just enough to see his brother's face when he asked, "Is that one of your gaps?"
Nothing could have been less reassuring than the smirk he got in return for his question - bitter-edged and cynical and a little sad. "Now you're catching on," he said.
Piccolo felt a strong urge to bang his head against the nearest hard surface he could find.
"Oh, and Piccolo - one more thing."
Piccolo turned his head to ask "What" just in time for Cymbal to punch him square in the face. It was, frankly, a Hell of a shot - especially as it was the last thing he'd been expecting. Piccolo saw stars briefly and shook his head out. "What in the HELL..." he snapped, clapping a hand to his bleeding mouth.
"That," Cymbal said, "was for not killing me when you had the chance. You have. no. idea. how much you had that coming. I've spent the last six months up to my pointy ears in human popular culture. I will never," he said with dark emphasis, "forgive you for that."
"Tack it on the list," Piccolo said, resisting the urge to rub at his jaw.
"I will."
