The silence in the air car was beyond uncomfortable. Bulma did her best to keep her eyes on the sky in front of her and not to even glance at the jerk beside her, because Yamcha would assume that meant that she was glad he'd come along or something. Which she wasn't.

They'd fought badly outside the baseball stadium. She'd been waiting for him there because he was the nearest Z-fighter she could find when she'd tried on Raditz's overhauled scouter. She'd found him in the parking lot, looking arrogant and bored, signing autographs. . Bulma couldn't help but notice that most of the people in his line were women.

I don't care, she'd thought. We're over. He can do whatever he wants. He can sign the legs of all the barely-dressed women in North City. I do. not. care.

Only she must have cared a little bit, because right after she'd told him about the Saiyans and the special training he needed to report for at Karin's, she'd let slip what SHE was going to be doing next - which was raiding old Red Ribbon Army hideouts with Cymbal.

She'd hoped that Yamcha would overreact, because that would mean that he still cared. She'd been paradoxically annoyed when he did, because damnit, he didn't trust her to do anything.

"Chichi says it's perfectly safe," Bulma had said breezily, ignoring Yamcha's flushed face and clenched fists.

"Chichi's crazy!" Yamcha had said. "And so are you if you think you're going on a world tour with that monster without me!"

So they'd argued. She'd accused him of being a shallow player who wouldn't care if she got killed, anyway - he'd accused her of being a vindictive bimbo with no sense of self-preservation.

"I can take care of myself, you know," she said finally, as they came into view of the small house on Mount Poazo.

Yamcha shook his head. "Not against that," he said. "I don't know what they're even thinking."

"They're thinking that there are chi-draining devices in Dr. Gero's labs that we need to stay alive, and Cymbal's the only one who's actually BEEN in one."

Yamcha rolled his eyes.

Bulma thought, If Cymbal does try to kill us, I'm tripping you.

She steadied her hands and landed the air car. Chichi was waiting for them in the front yard, her black hair pulled back in a severe pony tail. Her bare arms were more muscular than Bulma remembered; her legs, under her dress, seemed a little more sturdy, and Bulma told herself firmly that she was NOT going to feel inferior. She was, after all, a genius and a bona-fide knockout, and there was more to life than being able to punch through walls like the boys.

She saw Yamcha sit up a little straighter and pretended she hadn't. Since when is he into bruntettes? Not. That. I. Care. She made sure she was smiling when she opened the glass dome and stepped out into the yard. "Hi," she said.

Chichi's smile was tense. "They're out back," she said. "Hope you have earplugs."

"They?" Yamcha ventured.

"Cymbal and Piccolo."

"Oh yeah," Yamcha said, "that's a great idea. Did you make them lunch, too?"

Chichi shrugged. "If you want to try to make them leave, be my guest."

Bulma blinked, because she could definitely hear yelling by then - or more like ranting, from the sound of it. She edged toward the side of the house and peered around.

Sure enough, there were two big, green monsters in the back yard. She recognized them both right away - Cymbal was, if possible, even scarier-looking than she remembered, but there was no mistaking the scars on the side of his face. Piccolo, in contrast, looked a lot calmer than she remembered him... and a lot more put-upon.

Cymbal, predictably, was blowing his top. "No! Bad enough I'm going in there with no damned support, I'm not taking a handicap like..."

A sigh from Piccolo. "We've been over this," he said.

"Then we'll damned well go over it again!"

A little girl was sitting under a tree, watching the back and forth like a spectator at a ping-pong match. She was sipping at what looked like a lemonade.

"We need that tech, Cymbal, and neither one of us knows how a damned microwave works, much less..."

"WHEN did I agree that we need the damned tech?!"

"...how to sift through plans and decide what we can and can't replicate," Piccolo finished with admirable - if strained - patience. "If you won't do it, I'll have to, which means you'll have to work with Gohan..."

Cymbal dragged a hand down his face. "You," he said, his tone very flat, "stand a better chance of learning to do the godsdamned Macarena than you do of coming out of one of those labs in one piece."

Piccolo smirked. "Good thing I have such a caring and cooperative older brother."

Cymbal fisted both hands in the front of Piccolo's uniform and hauled him practically off the ground. "Now you open your ears, you stupid..."

The little girl cleared her throat loudly.

Cymbal visibly gritted his teeth and put his smirking brother down.

Bulma chose that moment to step around the side of the house. "Well," she said cheerfully, "now that that's all settled..."

Both brothers turned and looked at her with expressions that, to her mind, meant that both of them were under entirely too much stress on a daily basis. Cymbal's eye was twitching a little bit. Piccolo dragged his hand down his face in exaggerated frustration.

Cymbal spoke first. "You know," he said, crossing his arms, "the last time I saw you, you were aiming a rocket launcher at my head."

"And the last time I saw you, Son-kun was kicking your green butt all across the wilderness," she said. "What say we just leave the past behind us, huh?"

Cymbal's red eyes narrowed.

"Bulma," Yamcha muttered, elbowing her in the side.

Bulma swatted at him irritably and gave Cymbal her most charming grin. "I'm ready when you are," she said.

Cymbal gave her a doubting look that made her want to slap him. "We'll see," he said. He jerked his head in the direction of the little girl. "Got a quick errand to run, then we should be all set."

The little girl ran up to him. She didn't, Bulma thought, show any fear of him at all - she just held up her hands expectantly.

Now, not to brag, but Bulma was a genius - so she spoke more than a few languages. She was surprised when the girl spoke in one of them.

"Do I have to go home?" she asked.

Bulma was even MORE surprised to hear Cymbal answer in that language, as she'd always kind of viewed him as a muscle-headed idiot...not exactly the kind of person who studied other cultures in his spare time. "Yes," he said, scooping her up as if he did such things often. "Your mom's going to end me for keeping you out all night - waiting longer isn't going to help that any."

"Before we go, can you ask your brother's girlfriend if she'll teach me martial arts?"

"...if I had a year, I couldn't tell you everything wrong with that question," Cymbal said. "First, you are NOT learning martial arts, you're a big enough pain in my ass as it is..."

"Hey!"

"Second, my brother doesn't HAVE a girlfriend - if anything, he's got a boyfriend, who I may actually approve of less..."

Piccolo looked justifiably horrified. "Cymbal!"

"The truth hurts, kid. Third, no new hobbies until you pass science, and as I don't see THAT happening..."

The little girl crossed her arms in a pretty good Cymbal imitation. "Mom says if you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all."

"Yeah, and yet you complained back when I was pretending to be mute." Cymbal took to the air with the little girl. "Be back in a few," he said, and then he shot off into the sky, leaving his sputtering brother in his wake.

Bulma managed not to snicker with some effort. "So, " she said to Piccolo in her own language, because she had never been good about keeping her mouth shut around powerful people who could snap her in half with their little fingers, "Who's the boyfriend?"

Piccolo turned his head very slowly to glare at her. She thought that she had never seen a living creature look that sour. "If we survive the Saiyans," Piccolo muttered, "I'm going to kill him."

"Your brother, or the boyfriend?"

Piccolo rounded on her, a vein twitching ominously across his forehead. "I do NOT have a..."

"No need to be embarrassed," Bulma chirped, enjoying herself far more than she had in weeks, "lots of people have one these days."

"Bulma," Yamcha hissed, putting his hands on her back and forcibly steering her toward the house. "She's sorry!" He called over his shoulder to Piccolo.

Bulma managed not to dissolve into hysterical laughter...at least, until the door was safely closed behind them.


Kami Sama stood at the edge of his lookout, gazing over a world that he still considered his - at least, for a little while longer. He knew that he wasn't alone, but he didn't turn his gaze from Mount Paozo - not even when the dark figure stepped up beside him in an eerie imitation of his posture. They stood there for a long time, their arms crossed behind their backs, looking at the world spread out beneath them.

"Counting the days?" Tambourine asked.

Kami narrowed his eyes, but he didn't do his younger counterpart the respect of glancing over. "Until the Saiyans arrive?" he said.

Tambourine gave him a sidelong look. "We both know you've seen it," he said.

"My death, you mean," Kami said.

"That's the one."

Kami was quiet for a long time. It wasn't because he needed the time to collect his thoughts - it was because he'd found out years ago that such long silences were monumentally annoying to others. "If you're here to offer me some sort of deal in exchange for my life," he said, "you've come to the wrong place."

Tambourine shrugged. "Worth a try."

"Not that you can change such things, anyway," Kami said. "You can alter the way it happens, perhaps - but some of the stops on the path of life cannot be avoided."

"Who knew that god would be such a defeatist?"

"There's a certain dignity in accepting one's fate."

Tambourine raised a brow ridge at him. "If you say so."

"You've seen it too, then?"

"I have."

They were quiet for another few long minutes. "Is that something you're looking forward to?"

Tambourine's lip twitched. "Ask me no questions..."

Kami turned his eyes toward a particular patch of the wilderness. It was where Piccolo had taken Gohan, but...it was also a place that held a different kind of significance. Years ago, Piccolo had flown there after a certain martial arts tournament. He'd fallen in a heap in the desert, gasping for breath, struggling to move.

That had been one of the more difficult nights of Kami's life. He'd lain in his bed, cold to the bone, breath as short and pained as if he'd been fighting for each lung-full though sand and dirt. He'd ached inside for the man who was his other half, for the miserable way that he was dying...but he'd thought at the time that it was for the best.

Then Son Goku came along, and everything changed.

The cave was dark as a tomb, even at midday, and Piccolo was glad of that, glad of the darkness around him that served as a barrier between himself and his old enemy, who was, of all damned things, heating water in half a gourd to rinse out his wounds for what must have been the fifth time.

"...I can't believe they just left you."

Feeling nothing was a skill Piccolo had spent a long time honing. He didn't even flinch. "I can. I was past my usefulness."

"Don't say that."

Son sounded angry enough that Piccolo risked a glance at him. He'd stopped prodding at the gourd and was looking at him like he wanted to slap him - which was honestly not that unusual a way for Son to look at him. "People don't run out of being useful," Goku said.

"I'm not people," Piccolo said dismissively, wondering why he was bothering to argue with his idiotic enemy in the first place.

"Who told you that? You're as people as I am."

"Said the monkey-boy," Piccolo said dryly. "Bet that made you real popular at parties, didn't it?"

He could feel the scowl burning into the side of his head - so of course, he kept going. "Bet no one ever even glanced at you in public, am I right?" he asked, dripping sarcasm. "No pointing, no commentary, no one ever called you a freak..." Because of course they had - of course they had, and Piccolo didn't know what point he was trying to prove anymore.

"...you're as people as I am," Goku said again, quietly.

"That doesn't even make any damned sense - haven't you ever learned to talk?"

"Nope."

"And so you're relying on feelings to save the world?" Tambourine asked quietly, and Kami jumped slightly from the past he'd been reliving - because, being part of Piccolo, he had a clearer perspective on what had happened than most would.

"Mostly," Kami-sama acknowledged.

"That's a shame," Tambourine said. "Feelings are made of cobwebs and bad air, Kami. They're sad things to trust in."

"Don't knock it until you've tried it," Kami said.

"We should ask Cymbal what he thinks of it so far. It's certainly caused him no trouble at all."

"No one likes change at first," Kami said. "Give him time."


Bulma scowled when Cymbal tapped on the glass of the air car. It surprised her as much as it annoyed her - they were roaring along at damn near top speed. The wind shear alone should have kept him from doing anything but fly with an arm over his eyes. She rolled the window down slightly and yelled over the roar of air, "What?"

"Can't this thing go any faster?" he asked. He had the nerve to sound like he couldn't quite believe this was the best they could do.

She resisted the urge to defend her aircar - because Capsule Corp made the fastest ones on the market, and his ego didn't need that information. "Well, aren't we impatient," she said.

"You two are going to grow old and die before we get to the first stop," Cymbal said. "Not that this'd exactly put me in mourning, but you could at least hand me a map first."

Bulma smirked. "So you can go skipping around the planet and destroy everything before I get a good look at it?"

"Have some compassion," Cymbal said. He flipped effortlessly onto his back, as it was easier to look at her that way - still, she noted with more annoyance, keeping pace just fine. "I haven't been this damned bored since your boyfriend gave his 'you can't do this to humanity' speech at the Budokai."

Yamcha made an offended noise in the seat beside her. Bulma swatted him out of habit.

"Tough it out," she advised Cymbal. She rolled the window up over the sound of his longsuffering sigh. The demon drifted effortlessly to one side, found his stability again, and kept right on flying.

"That isn't right," Yamcha muttered.

Bulma raised an eyebrow at him.

"How long have we been flying?"

"A few hours now," she said. "Why?"

The former desert bandit scowled slightly. "Does he look tired to you?"

Bulma peered out the window at Cymbal, who was apparently bored enough with their pace that he was zigzagging slightly.

"No," she said. She looked at Yamcha sidelong. "You're telling me you guys can't do this?"

"We can fly," Yamcha asserted. "Just not for that long. Crap, Bulma, even Goku uses his cloud if he's going to be flying for a long time. It wears you out."

"But not him," she mused, "and apparently not Piccolo, either."

Yamcha sighed. "I know that voice," he said. "This isn't a science project , you know."

"Not to you, maybe," Bulma said, scuffing her hand through her recently-cropped hair. "They ARE aliens, Yamcha. Maybe flight just comes more naturally to them."

"That makes me feel loads better," he said. "I still can't believe we're doing this. We can't trust him."

Bulma shrugged. "Who said anything about trusting him? Listen, Dr. Gero was famous for being really paranoid. He set traps like they were going out of style, and he was as well known for his ability to make high-end explosives as he was for his biological experiements." She winked. "If he's left some bombs laying around, what's wrong with letting Cymbal find them for us?"

Yamcha crossed his arms. "I can't argue with that," he said, "but what if he trips something big enough to kill all three of us?"

Bulma said, "It can be your job to grab me and run. And if he's not fast enough to follow...oh well, couldn't be helped."

Yamcha smirked at her, almost just like the old days. "You never cease to amaze me, Bulma," he said.

Then their GPS beeped. "Looks like we're close," she said. She started to steer her aircar down toward the shifty desert sands beneath them.

The soft ground made for an easy landing - and fortunately for them, the constant scouring of the wind had left the door to the lab exposed like bare bones. That, though, was where their good fortune ended. The door was metal, heavy-barred and thick, with bolts the size of softballs anchoring its daunting frame to the solid stone of the mountainside.

"Great," she muttered after the three of them had stared at the door for a little while. She opened her tablet and started scanning for some kind of clue as to how Dr. Gero got into his own damned labs.

"Could try blasting it open," Yamcha mussed. "Or maybe it's like the old Red Ribbon bases, and there's a keypad in the..."

Cymbal dug his talons into the metal of the door like he was gripping rubber. He ripped it off its hinges with one sharp jerk of his shoulder and tossed it carelessly behind him. It hit the sand and rolled twice.

Giving both her and Yamcha a vaguely disgusted look, he walked past them into the darkness.

"Ya know," Yamcha said, "it doesn't take a whole lot of work to hate that guy."


"She did WHAT?!"

Piccolo blinked down at Krillen, nonplussed. The runt was usually jumpy as Hell around him - was only JUST getting to the point where he'd talk to him without stuttering. The yelling was...new and disconcerting. "Bulma went to research energy-draining technology with..." he began.

"With your homicidal older brother?!"

Piccolo considered pointing out that Krillen's description wasn't very good as ALL of his older brothers had been homicidal. He decided against it. "With Cymbal," he clarified.

"What is WRONG with you?!" Krillen fair-bellowed, waving his arms. Even Gohan, who had been watching the spectacle from a nearby boulder, seemed impressed at the outburst. "She can't go tromping through some evil geinus's basement with somebody who used to crush people's heads as a hobby!"

Piccolo tilted his head - because he'd never dealt with people who weren't fighters, he was having a hard time understanding why Krillen was having such a...well, a fit. "Why not?" he asked.

Krillen stared at him blankly. He sputtered, waved his hands again, and Piccolo had some real concerns that he was stuck that way before he erupted with, "BECAUSE IT'S SUICIDE!"

Piccolo managed not to take a step backward. Because that would have been silly. "It'll be fine," he said.

Krillen dragged both hands slowly down his face. "How," he said. "How is this going to be fine?"

Piccolo crossed his arms to eat some time, because he wasn't ever very good at putting his thoughts straight into words...and maybe he'd been a bit spoiled in that regard by Goku and Gohan, who always just seemed to KNOW what he was thinking, or by Tambourine, who could read his mind if need be. "My brother isn't subtle," he said. "Think about it, Krillen. He's not the type to...apologize for what he's doing. If he were going to kill her, he'd just kill her. He wouldn't drag her halfway around the world and try to make it look like an accident."

"Great, Einstein, but what if there IS an accident? Cymbal might not kill her himself - and that's a big might - but do you seriously think he's going to stop something else from doing it?"

He had to admit, he hadn't really thought of that...but then, he was slowly realizing, not everyone had been raised with the same "every man for himself" mentality that he had. "She has what's-his-name with her," Piccolo said.

"I hope you realize how unhelpful that is."

Piccolo waved a hand, wracking his brain for the human's name and coming up utterly short. "The one with all the hair," he said.

Krillen looked a little bit like he wanted to throw a rock at him. "Yamcha?" he asked, incredulous.

"That's it," Piccolo said.

Krillen did not hop up and down in agitation, but he looked like he was damned close. "That is the worst possible person she could have with her! That hothead'll pick a fight with your brother right off the bat and get everybody killed."

"My brother's a little tricky to pick fights with of late," Piccolo said.

"He'll manage," Krillen said fatalistically. Then he lifted off the ground. "I'm going to go find them before something terrible happens."

I see, Piccolo thought but did not say, and exactly how long have you been in love with her? Because that, he sensed, was the real problem. That's what had given Krillen the nerve to yell at him - that's what was giving him the guts to deliberately track his brother down in gods-knew-what kind of horrible situation. That was why nothing he said was going to keep Krillen from going after her, no matter how bad an idea it was.

It reminded him uncomfortably of the way that he'd followed Son Goku square into the most obvious trap on the damned planet. For the sake of his mental health, he promptly decided that the two situations were in no way similar.

"Don't do anything stupid," he advised.

Krillen grinned at him crookedly. "Really? You've seen my life, right? It's waaaaay too late for that." And then Krillen was zipping away, gone into the clouds.

Piccolo felt a tug on the leg of his gi. He looked down to see Gohan peering up at him. "Mr. Piccolo," the boy said in a hushed voice as if he were sharing a secret, "I think he's going to do something stupid."

Piccolo couldn't help but agree - and he felt weirdly, well...upset about it. Almost enough to follow along.

Gods, not him, too, he thought sourly.

"You can go if you want to," Gohan said. "I need to practice my energy blasts some more, anyway..."

"Nice try, kid," Piccolo said. "Not gonna happen."

But as Gohan gave him a 'can't blame me for trying' grin and settled into a stance, Piccolo made up his mind that he was going to devote at least a little of his energy to tracking the energy levels on the southern side of the planet. Just in case.


The lab had been abandoned for a long time, and it apparently hadn't been as airtight as Bulma had originally thought. There were faint drafts that sent the stale air puffing through the underground, tiny slivers of sand chasing each other like sidewinders across the floor. There were cobwebs everywhere, spun by tiny, hairy desert spiders that her lantern kept casting as larger-than-life shadows on the crumbling walls. It was, in a word, the creepiest place Bulma had ever been.

If it bothered the other two, though, it didn't show. Cymbal was walking down the long hallways with the irritated stride of someone who's thinking of at least a thousand things he'd rather be doing. Yamcha was following with a fair-aggressive storming gait, so determined not to be outdone that he was probably oblivious to the damned spiders. Her ex-boyfriend was spoiling for a fight; she could see it in the way he was carrying himself, and while she couldn't exactly blame him for holding a grudge, she hoped he'd have sense enough to wait until they got a feel for Gero's hideouts.

Cymbal stopped so suddenly that Yamcha actually ran into him. Bulma winced at the loud sound of impact in the otherwise-quiet hallways. It must have been a Hell of an impact, because it set Yamcha bouncing back slightly as if he'd run into a wall. He rubbed his nose and scowled. "The Hell was that all about?"

Cymbal ignored him completely. He knelt down in the hallway, squinting at a stairwell ahead of them. He began sifting his talons through the sand underfoot as if he were looking for something.

"Don't you ignore me, you overgrown..."

Cymbal found a stone about the size of his hand. He flicked it down the stairwell as if it were a marble. Yamcha trailed off as the three of them watched that stone bounce down the steps with a ping, ping, ping, only to settle anticlimactically at the bottom of the staircase.

Yamcha crossed his arms. "Well," he said, "that helped."

Cymbal rolled his eyes. Then he leveled a hand and fired a chi blast down the stairwell. It was, Bulma guessed, just a little one, but still sudden enough to make her jump. The results were crazy and immediate. The walls, which had seemed dead before, came alive as tiny cables fired out with miniature grappling hooks glittering on the end. They crossed each other at the base of the stairwell, some pinging sparks off the walls, others chipping hunks from the floor. When they found nothing else, though, the web of cables retracted with faint whirring sounds like half a dozen fishing rods.

The big demon smirked. "Triggered by chi, not pressure - same as the old design."

He stood up slowly, ignoring the dust on his knees, and gave Bulma an elaborate bow. "Guess it's ladies first."

Bulma stared at him in naked disbelief for several seconds. She was just about to tell him exactly where he could take THAT plan and shove it when Yamcha beat her to it.

"Are you crazy? No, wait, that's a stupid question, of course you are. There is no way I'm letting Bulma go down there with those...those things in the walls!"

Cymbal raised both browridges at Yamcha. "That's funny...am I misunderstanding a human custom? I kind of thought it was up to her." He gave a head-jerk in Bulma's direction. "But if it's your permission I need to be asking..."

Bulma felt a surge of annoyance fit to match about anything that might've come out of the walls. "I don't need his permission for anything," she said coldly.

"Oh for God's sake, Bulma, are we really going to do this now?" Yamcha asked, turning to look at her with such an annoying expression of disbelief that she wanted to slap him.

Cymbal grinned and took a step or two back out of the direct line of fire.

"I don't know - are you really going to answer for me every time he asks a question?"

"Why do you always take these things so personally? I was just..."

Bulma almost tore into him for real - about how if he'd really cared so damned much, maybe he could have been a little more reliable, how she'd gotten by just fine before she met him when all she had to keep her safe was the most dysfunctional twelve-year-old on the planet and her own wits, but...then she happened to glance over at Cymbal, who was camped out against one of the walls, idly examining his talons with a tiny smirk on his face, and...oh.

She'd underestimated him, she realized. She'd underestimated him because he came across as such a damned brute, but he was apparently smart enough - and subtle enough - to have gotten them fighting each other already.

Waving off Yamcha's stuttering explanation, she turned to Cymbal. "Tell me what you just said again - activated by chi, not pressure?"

The big demon shrugged. "It makes sense, if you think about it. Dr. Gero had no chi of his own, and most of the people trying to kill him did. He wanted to be able to run down these hallways unimpeded, so instead of setting traps to respond to someone walking on them, he set them to respond to chi. Which means that, of the three of us, you should be the safest."

"Assuming, of course," Bulma said, "that he uses the same design here as he did before?"

Cymbal flashed her a toothy smirk. "Assuming," he agreed. "And if his design holds true, there should be a control panel near the bottom of this thing that you can use to shut off the defenses behind you."

"Fine," Bulma said, ignoring Yamcha's immediate protest, "on one condition."

Cymbal quirked an eyeridge at her - though he seemed amused instead of angry. "You get that I can just pick you up and heave you down this staircase, right?"

"You," she said, "have to admit that I'm not a handicap. In fact," she added, "you have to admit that you can't do this without me."

"Or we could toss you down the stairs," Cymbal said. "I could also put my hand through that wall over there, yank some wires, and hope for the best."

"That might work," Bulma agreed. "Or you might electrocute yourself. Seems a silly amount of pain to go through over admitting I'm a genius."

"You're seriously overestimating my ability to reign in my ego," Cymbal said.

Bulma smirked. "I'm waiting," she said.

"I'll go as far as to say that you might have the potential to not be as completely useless as you seemed five minutes ago. That's all you're getting until we're outside and alive."

"Done," Bulma said cheerily - and she wasn't sure where the audacity came from, but she gave Cymbal a pat on the arm as she walked past him. "Don't worry, big guy - I'll take care of those scary old traps for you."

She could almost hear him rolling his eyes behind her.