Dr. Gero's lab was less like something out of a bad James Bond film and more like something Bulma might have read about in Victorian Literature. There were horrible things everywhere - parts of machinery that, to her experienced eyes, were always either weapons or bombs, delicate wires growing out of their half-finished frames like sprouts. Some of the machines had what was once a "biological component," dried out from the desert air now, partly mummified. As she turned her flashlight around the room, she thought she recognized a part of a frog, a section of rat - but the really disturbing thing was the lack of theatrics.

Bulma had met mad scientists before - when you were a Briefs, it was just about inevitable. Almost every convention had at least one self-styled mad scientists, and quite a few of them pretended to be a lot crazier than they were because, being awkward geniuses, many of them lacked social skills. They went in for cackling and theatrics, and most of the other scientists would smile and nod and hope quietly that this was a phase they'd grow out of if you ignored them long enough.

There weren't any theatrics here - just grotesque, horrible science strewn out on tables like dirty dishes after you've been cooking. No fanfare, no fancy dials, no dramatic backlighting. This had been Gero's "normal," and though she wasn't about to admit it in front of Yamcha or Cymbal, that frightened her.

Steady girl, she told herself, carefully brushing the dust from a dial.

"How long is this going to take?" Yamcha asked from the other side of the table. Her ex-boyfriend had been getting more and more restless the farther they went under the surface; he kept glancing nervous glances up, kept pacing. It made sense, Bulma guessed. He'd lived in the open desert for most of his life - he often felt claustrophobic in houses. She figured this must be a good bit worse.

"As long as it takes," she said.

"Wow, that was helpful."

"It's not like I have a written agenda for digging through mad scientist stashes," she snapped.

It said something about their relationship, probably, that Yamcha didn't even flinch. "Can't you just box all this crap up and take it with you?"

"Well," she said, "about half of it might explode, and the other half definitely will. So yeah, if you want to carry the box..."

"I was just asking," Yamcha muttered, duly chastised.

"This stuff's all useless, anyway - look at it. It's half built. If he thought it was going to work, he'd have finished it."

"How do you know?"

"Does he seem like the kind of guy who walks away from things?"

Yamcha started to poke at one of the devices and visibly thought better of it. "You might have something there," he admitted.

Bulma looked over at Cymbal. He hadn't come into the room with them; he'd just propped himself up in the doorway, visibly disinterested in anything they were doing. He was absently, annoyingly, clicking his talons together. "Where's he keep the good stuff?" Bulma asked.

Cymbal stopped clicking his talons. He smirked at her. "Thought you'd never ask," he said. "Usually the closer to the center of these places, the better the toys...'course, that's also the part of the building closest to the explosives."

"You could have shared that a little earlier," Yamcha said.

The big demon shrugged. "You wouldn't have believed me," he said. He pushed off from the door frame and started walking down the hallway, clearly expecting them to follow along after.

Bulma eyed the device in her hand and decided not to throw it at the back of his head in the spirit of taking the high road.

Yamcha scowled, but didn't throw anything, either. "Does he seem like he's enjoying himself a little too much for anyone's peace of mind, or am I just being paranoid," he muttered as they stepped back into the hallway.

"You gotta admire a guy who loves his work," she muttered back.

Yamcha gave her a sideways look. "Really?" he asked.

Bulma shrugged, then glanced forward to make sure that Cymbal was a good few paces ahead of them. "You've perked up a little bit yourself, you know," she said.

Yamcha looked...briefly uncomfortable, then shrugged. "Life made a lot more sense a few years ago," he said. "Even if I was pretty sure it wasn't going to last very long, it made sense."

She could hear the unspoken addition - we made sense then. She was proud of herself for not flinching. "Exactly," she said instead.

She looked over at Yamcha then - the strong muscles of his bare arms, the uncertain way he kept glancing over at her, and she felt better. No matter what might have changed between them, Yamcha was still one of the strongest men she knew, and she couldn't believe for a second that he would let anything happen to her.

She'd loved that about him once - not just how protective he was of her, but the way he'd always been so careful with her. She'd had to teach him everything back then, show him where to put his hands when he was kissing a girl, show him the way to touch her. She spent a lot of time actively trying NOT to remember the way he'd looked at her then, so unsure of himself, and the strange protective feeling she'd had for him since, like he was somehow her responsibility afterwards.

She'd lost track of that man for a long time - but she could see him again now, a little, in the shy way Yamcha kept trying to glance over and read her expression, and for a moment, she felt like she could laugh and twirl herself around like a ballerina. Because it was going to be fine with them. It really was. They just needed...

Up ahead, Cymbal stopped walking so suddenly that Bulma almost walked right into him. "Hey," she said, "What's the big..."

There was a man standing at the end of the hallway.

He was a tall, gaunt man with a mane of grey hair that jutted out from under the fitted black cap he wore. His face was expressionless, creased leather, and for a moment, Bulma was afraid that he was a cadaver, someone who'd been left down here and mummified by the heat, the dry air, the sand...but no, she'd seen him before, she thought, she'd seen his photos in the journals, and she didn't believe for a second that a man like that would just seal himself up in a dusty old workshop and die.

"Hi, Doc," Cymbal said in a familiar, dangerous voice that made the hairs on the back of Bulma's neck rise. "Long time, no see." The last time she'd heard him use that tone, she'd been hiding belly-down in some debris while he and Son Goku faced off in what was left of a city, and somehow, over the past few hours, she'd mostly forgotten how much he had frightened her back then. She'd played tough, obviously, but she'd been afraid all the same.

The doctor seemed less impressed. His eyes narrowed. "I thought you'd be extinct by now," he said in a bored, gravelly tone of voice that was, under the circumstances, much too calm for Bulma's peace of mind. If she'd been working in Capsule Corp and had random demons kicking her door in, she'd be a Hell of a lot more nervous, which must mean that Gero had some reason not to be worried.

"Careful," she muttered to Yamcha, who gave no indication that he'd heard her. His whole attention was focused on the scarecrow-like figure of the doctor.

Against her own better judgment, she edged forward. "Let me talk to him," she whispered at Cymbal, who glanced down at her as if he were just remembering she were there...which was not reassuring. She was starting to figure out that Cymbal might have a slight problem with hyper-focusing. She didn't like to think about what might happen if he forgot that she and Yamcha were around and decided to start rearranging the architecture.

"Scientist to scientist, or human to human?" he muttered to her without turning his eyes a jot from Gero.

"For God's sake, we're on the same side now," she muttered back. "Don't be so paranoid."

"We're on the same side for now," he said dismissively. "That's not the same thing." But he did take a step back and let her go by him, which was something

"Bulma," Yamcha hissed behind her with some urgency. She ignored him. She took a moment to ground herself...then she put on her best board-room smile and walked around the Cymbal-obstruction like she was sauntering into a conference.

"Hi there," she said. "Dr. Gero, right?"

His expression, disconcertingly, didn't change. "Sorry - you are?"

She turned up the wattage on her smile. "Bulma Briefs. Sorry to disturb you on no notice, but you're not exactly in the yellow pages."

He raised both white-grey eyebrows at her. "Briefs, you say," he said. "I don't suppose you're any relation to Dr. Briefs of West City?"

"The very same," she said with forced cheer.

"What are you doing here," he asked - and there was an edge to his voice that she didn't like.

She flipped her hair - a calculated move to make it seem like she was relaxed when she was really seconds from turning around and running down the hallway, dignity be damned. "Actually, we need your help with something. You see, there are these aliens..."

"Aliens don't seem to be a problem for you," he said coolly, looking between her and Cymbal.

"For the record," Cymbal said behind her, "If that's you two lumping me in with the damned monkeys, I won't be held responsible for my actions."

"Cymbal," Bulma said pleasantly without turning around, "you really need to shut up now."

"Monkeys," Gero said. His eerie blue eyes narrowed. "Like your little monkey-tailed friend?"

"Let's not dwell on the past, shall we? Let's just say there are these people, these not-very-nice invader sorts of people..."

"Why is he with you?" Gero asked, tipping his head at Cymbal. "And, for that matter, where is Son Goku?"

"We needed to find you," she said. "Your technology is the only thing that..."

Gero smirked. "My technology," he said, dragging the words out as if he was pulling them through honey.

"You need to move," Cymbal muttered behind her, so low she almost didn't hear it.

"You were with Son Goku before. You're with that green thing now. And you want my technology."

Cymbal's voice again behind her, more steel in it this time, but still too quiet to carry: "You're in my shot, you damned moron."

Bulma planted her feet. Because she didn't feel comfortable around Dr. Gero, because he clearly was not a sane and productive member of society, but he was a genius with the ability to build weapons that could potentially save the world, and she was NOT going to let this end in Cymbal bashing his head against the rock wall unless it absolutely had to end that way. "We can talk through this," she said out loud, to both of them. "No one needs to get crazy. We can just..."

"You can't fool me, Miss Briefs," he said. He smiled. "You and your alien friends are here because you're afraid of what I've created. You want to take it from me because it's the only thing that can stop you."

Bulma blinked. "Okay," she said, "that went somewhere strange." She gestured behind her at Cymbal. "We...can't actually stand each other. And he certainly doesn't like Goku very much. We're just...we have a common interest right now."

If Gero had even listened to what she said, he showed no signs of it. "Well, you came here to see my inventions," he said, his voice building toward what she'd started to think of, from her vast experience with bad guys, as the megalomania pitch. "Let's start with some of these."

Several things seemed to happen at once. Gero touched something on the wall. Cymbal put one massive hand on her arm and gave her a hard shove out of his way, which meant she hit the wall hard enough to make her head spin. There was a rush of air past her that could only have been Cymbal flying down the hallway at Dr. Gero. There was a whoosh-sound, and a horrible noise like a car crash, and then Cymbal was stepping back from the wall that had sprung up in front of him, shaking his head out. There was, Bulma noticed, a pretty impressive dent in the wall.

"Son of a bitch," he muttered. "Those've gotten faster."

Another wall whooshed up behind them.

"What in the Hell..." Yamcha said.

No one had time to answer. The cables and hooks came out of the walls, and then the screaming started.


Piccolo was finding meditation to be more elusive than usual. He'd left Gohan some time ago to sleep off the day's sparring efforts - the boy was holding it together for longer, but he was still too easily exhausted. Piccolo suspected that wasn't from a simple lack of endurance so much as it was from trying to fight someone while at the same time trying very desperately to suppress his inner power. It was godsdamned maddening from Piccolo's point of view, but he supposed it had to be worse for Gohan. If the kid ever did manage to get his energy problems sorted out, he was probably going to need years of very expensive therapy.

That is, if killing multiple people wouldn't have made that necessary, anyway.

The worst of it was that Goku was probably not even going to understand that his kid was screwed up beyond all repair. From what Piccolo understood, Son Goku had been merrily thrashing mercenaries (and occasionally killing them mostly by the accident of not realizing how breakable normal people were) from very nearly Gohan's age on, and he apparently thought nothing of it.

Because, as it turned out, Son Goku was an alien - from a race that seemed instinctively, genetically programmed to break things and feel little to no remorse about it. He was very likely not going to understand little things like how partly-human children might be traumatized by events that Goku would consider a part of everyday life.

None of your business, he reminded himself for the thousandth time.

Except that, more and more, it felt like his business, and that was where the meditation problems seemed to be centered.

Son Goku had been gone for a long time - nearly a year. Piccolo felt his absence as acutely as he would a missing tooth or a lost finger. He was beginning to be afraid that the same thing would happen when he walked away from Son Gohan, no matter that, in terms of trauma, he was probably the worst thing that was ever going to happen to the kid. The most sensible thing was to get out of his life as quickly as possible...maybe after having a serious talk with his father about post traumatic stress and how it was likely to make Gohan unpleasant as a teenager.

Right, having talks with people...definitely a specialty of yours, he thought, and then he scowled a little, because his inner voice was starting to sound suspiciously like Tambourine, and he wasn't sure he was okay with that.

Then it happened - a sudden mental sensation like someone had thrown open the windows of a dark room and let the (entirely unwelcome) cheer of sunlight in: Piccolo, hey! Are you talking to yourself?

Piccolo blinked. Twice. "That's it," he said out loud, "I've finally lost it."

But that was Son Goku's voice again, like a damned horn blaring through his brain, You do know crazy people talk to themselves, right?

"You talk to yourself," Piccolo said to the open air, rubbing the heel of his hand hard between his eyes in the vain hope that it would make the voices stop. "I've caught you doing it."

You aren't helping your case any, unless you're calling me...what's the word for not-crazy?

"Sane," Piccolo said automatically. "That thing that none of us are. You...sound very realistic for early-onset schizophrenia."

A laugh in the mental voice this time: Is that a real word, or did you make it up?

"I don't make up words," Piccolo grumbled. "Just...imaginary dead people. Apparently."

I'm not imaginary. I'm really talking to you.

"Prove it," Piccolo said.

Okay. You're secretly a good person. Because you are way too tough on yourself to ever think that with even part of your brain, so it must be me.

"I am not a...damn, it IS you. How are you doing this?"

Well, it's not ALL me. King Kai said you were probably mentally sensitive...said it ran in your family or something. We've been...he says we're "expanding my mind," but it doesn't feel much bigger to me. King Kai can look all over the universe this way and talk to almost anyone, anywhere. So far, I've just been able to reach you, but if I keep practicing...

Piccolo pinched the bridge of his nose. "Then you can convince all of your friends that they're going insane? Damnit, Goku, they have these things called cell phones..."

Which you would never, ever carry. Also, the otherworld doesn't have any.

"Then you must be in heaven somehow," Piccolo muttered. "Is there some point to this besides turning yourself into a long distance call service?"

Kami always says, "no knowledge is wasted."

"We both know that's bullshit."

Fair enough - look, I just was...King Kai won't tell me anything. I mean, he says things are okay, or more like, he says as much good as he can without coming right out and saying things are okay, so I'm assuming they aren't, and I was just...worried, is all.

Piccolo sighed. "You should be worried about your training, Son. Not what's going on down here."

So it's bad, then?

"It's...no. Yes. It's...well, it's a damned mess, same as always, but we're...dealing. I'm sure someone'll fill you in when you get back."

How about you fill me in now? I mean, I have to sit here and pretend to meditate for at least another twenty minutes no matter what, and I fell asleep last time.

"You fell asl...you have no blamed clue how to meditate, do you."

I know you're supposed to relax? And not snore. Apparently.

Piccolo pressed his lips into a straight line because smiles were undignified. Fortunately, the impulse passed quickly - especially when he thought at all about what he was going to try to summarize. "You sure you want to know?" he asked, hoping against hope that Son would change his mind and say no.

Trust me, whatever it is, I'm imagining worse things.

"I wouldn't count on that," Piccolo said...and he started, haltingly, to try to explain.


It was like something out of a bad horror film - the cables coming out of the walls like some kind of hellish tentacle monster, the tiny hooks that dug into Yamcha and Cymbal (but not her, not her because she didn't have a chi high enough for them to seek out) and then there was the hum of wires going live, and someone - maybe both of them, maybe only one of them, screamed like they were dying.

Yamcha flared bright for a second, instinctively powering up, and then the air crackled around him and Bulma looked away. She couldn't stand the look of shock and pain that burned into his face.

Cymbal did something different. He hit a knee in the hallway, wrapped his hand around the cables in his right leg, and yanked them out. Skin and blood came with them. Then he brought his foot down on the floor once, twice, a third time, and there was the sound of metal cracking, and the floor broke, splitting outward and downward like a wet cardboard box, and she was sliding toward a hole in the center of the floor, frantically grabbing at anything that might slow her down.

She fell into blackness, and was surprised to feel a large hand clamp onto the back of her shirt and pull her close - Cymbal, it was too big to be Yamcha. She brought her arms up to shield her head even as colliding with him shot the air right out of her lungs. They tumbled for a stomach-lurching second, and she wondered if it was by instinct or luck or design that he hit the ground before she did and rolled to cover her from the ensuing clatter of debris.

Her forearms, where they were resting against him, were wet and she realized he was bleeding from all those tiny hooks. He didn't flinch, though, when the rest of the floor came down around them.

It was impossibly loud for seconds. Then, it was impossibly quiet.

"Hey," she half-coughed through the dust-thick air, "are you okay?"

"Oh, sure, just straight sunshine and rainbows," he said in a rough voice. He shifted, uncharacteristically clumsy, and half rolled, half-fell to one side.

Bulma sat up gingerly, half-afraid that not everything would come with her when she did. She squinted up, blinking dust-tears out of her eyes, and stared at the hole they'd fallen through, nearly thirty feet above them. "So, do you break everyplace you visit?" she asked.

Beside her, Cymbal shifted again, apparently to sit up and put his head between his knees. Severed cables still sputtered and crackled where they hung limply from his arms. "Now that you mention it, pretty much," he muttered.

Bulma felt around in the dark, listening...then she felt a slow pull of dread.

"Where's Yamcha?"

"Damned if I know. Or care."

"Yamcha!" she called, then flinched at the echo.

"Right, let's both be deaf on top of half-blind and concussed," Cymbal groused beside her.

"Shut up," she told him, halfheartedly kicking debris in his direction as she pulled herself to her feet. She couldn't see any sign of Yamcha's orange uniform. "I don't see him."

"First good news I've heard today."

Bulma looked to the far side of the debris - Yamcha had been behind them when Cymbal broke the floor, so he was probably still behind them now. She picked her way over the broken pieces of ceiling and still sputtering cables, and she saw an arm and a shoulder, so dusted they were both powder-white. He didn't answer when she said his name again, so she knelt and started shifting the powdery debris with her hands.

When she unearthed his face, it was ashy-grey - but she could feel his breath against her hand. So he was badly hurt, she could see that...but he wasn't dead yet. Weak with relief, she leaned against a hunk of ceiling and chanced a look around, hoping against hope that Dr. Gero would have a big red "exit" sign hanging somewhere in his workshop.

What she saw made her mouth dry up.

Bulma was not a squeamish person. Sure, she might get a little shrill if she saw a big enough spider, but she'd been through plenty of biology classes in college, done her fair share of cutting into cold, amphibian skin with a scalpel. She still had to look away.

The basement was humming softly and blue-green lit, and it was full of narrow, bubbling tubes that brought her college lava lamp to mind - except that instead of innocent globs of corn starch, these tubes held pieces. There was an arm in one, a beating heart in another...a third was a corpse, bloated with water and preserved. The pieces, though, they weren't farm animals or lap creatures that you might expect to see in dissections. They looked like they could have come from Cymbal or Piccolo, lime green in the weird light.

"Cymbal," she said quietly, "don't look up." Because she might not like the guy, but some things, he didn't need to see.

"Relax," he said, his head still bowed, "I know what's down here. The Hell do you think I thought human beings were such a cancer in the first place?"

"So," she ventured, "you're not going to go all rage-monster and blow everything up?"

"Didn't say that." He stood up slowly, using the wall for support - and she couldn't help noticing that his color was coming back. As she watched, he went from barely standing to taking a few steps, and she thought back to everything Goku had told her about how fast Cymbal's kind healed up.

"Yamcha's going to need a doctor," she said, "or some Senzu."

"Good luck with that," Cymbal said, clearly uninterested. He was pulling the remaining cables out of his arms with a nose-wrinkling scowl of barely-contained irritation. She figured, based on past experience, he was about one stubbed toe from a full-on crazy meltdown. As she watched, he glared from one side of the lab to the other and started storming toward one of the doors.

"Wait - where are you going?"

"Finishing this," he said in an icy tone that left no doubt in Bulma's mind that Dr. Gero would be missing a few limbs if Cymbal caught up to him.

"He'll be long gone by now," she said. "Seriously, if you were him, would you be standing around up there waiting to see how long it'd take you to go after him?"

"If I were him, I..." Cymbal had started off sounding impatient. When he trailed off suddenly, though, he sounded...worried, like something was niggling at the back of his mind.

She opened her mouth to ask him what it was, but she never got to. His eyes widened abruptly in a way that made Bulma really nervous. Then he picked her up by means of wrapping one arm entirely around her waist, and she felt his muscles tense in a way she recognized from back in the day, where Son had sometimes had to throw her over a shoulder or on his back and just RUN.

"Wait!" she yelled almost in his ear, kicking her legs frantically because she didn't know why they were leaving, but she knew they were, and she was suddenly, fiercely afraid that they would be leaving without Yamcha. "Wait, don't leave him!"

"Can't even TELL you what a damn waste of resources this is..." But as she watched, he twisted a hand in Yamcha's shirt, and then he was off. She wanted to protest the careless way he was carrying an injured person, but the air was forced back down her throat when he took off. Bulma couldn't tell if he was running or flying, only that it was horribly uncomfortable when he would come to a corner. He never so much as slowed down - he'd just put his feet against it and launch in another direction like a swimmer in a pool.

"The Hell are you doing?!"

He didn't answer.

"CYMBAL! What the Hell are you doing?!"

Still no answer. She could see light up ahead of them, though, from the door they'd broken earlier. As they neared it, he physically threw Yamcha out into the sand, which she was prepared to scream at him for - but he dove out into it a second later. She couldn't help making a strangled, unladylike sound when they hit the ground and rolled, feeling vaguely nauseous at the sound of her own shoulder popping out of place, and really, the thought had just occurred to her that he might have reached his limit and decided to kill the both of them when the base blew up behind them.

That's right, she thought, watching flames shoot from the mountainside in eerie fireworks, there's an explosive device at the center of these hideouts. Cymbal told us that. Dr. Gero must have set it off.

"You know," Cymbal said finally, when the last, anticlimactic rock rolled to a stop in front of them, "you really almost have to admire the guy."

"The guy who almost blew us up?" Bulma asked, because, you know, it bore pointing out.

Cymbal shrugged a shoulder, easing away from her a bit. "Oh, sure, not saying I'm not going to wring his scrawny little neck first chance I get, but still. Can't deny the guy's got some skills."

"At this point," she said, "I'm not sure I'd stop you."

"Which was dumb to begin with," he said. "The Hell was that, anyway? Standing right between me and something I want dead isn't a great strategy for staying alive."

"You didn't shoot me," she said.

Cymbal rolled his eyes. "This time," he said. "And let's just talk about what a terrible decision that was on my part..."

Bulma scowled, lifting her arm gingerly to see if it would go back into its stupid socket. "Well, how was I supposed to know that guy was insane? I had to try reasoning with him first. Why does no one but me think that reasoning with people is ever going to work?"

"I dunno, you coulda listened when I told you he was completely goddamned unhinged?" But he was looking at her shoulder with his head tilted, and was it her imagination, or did he look a little uncomfortable?

"Right," she said. "Because you're completely trustworthy in every way. And it's not like you don't have your own trust-issues, pal, so deal with it."

He didn't answer that - he just watched as she gingerly moved her left arm with her right one and, no doubt about it, looked a little more uncomfortable.

"That's not helpful," she told him, because it was possible he just didn't know he was being a giant useless lump.

He knelt down beside her and took her wrist in his hand. "Here," he said - then he moved her arm up and there was a pop and fiery pain, and she slapped him straight across the face out of reflex.

By rights, that should have been awkward, but he moved right on as if nothing had happened. "Got clumsy on the landing," he said, carefully avoiding eye contact - holy Hell, was that an apology? - "I usually do a little better."

"Man lines for 200, Alex," she said.

He looked at her blankly.

"Saying you're usually better," she said.

They stared at each other wordlessly for a few seconds.

"There are these sounds coming out of your mouth," Cymbal said slowly, "and I assume it means you're trying to communicate, but..."

"...so you're aware, I'm about this close to slapping you again," Bulma said. She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart for emphasis.

He actually smirked at her before he stood up. Then he scowled at the sky in a way Bulma was very familiar with - it meant there was another problem headed their way.

"What is it now?" she asked.

"The runt," Cymbal said. "You know, the little bald-headed..."

"Krillen?" Bulma asked.

"That's the one - spoiling for a fight, too, from the feel of it." And he flexed his talons like he hadn't just been thoroughly beaten up, like he actually had some idea in his head of getting into a fist fight with someone while his ears were still bleeding from an explosion.

"You stop that," she told him. "You stop it right this second, Krillen is NOT going to pick a fight with you, and if he tries, you are going to be the bigger person and ignore it. Yamcha needs to go to a hospital, and YOU are in no shape to fight with anybody. At all."

Cymbal raised a brow at her. "I don't think I take orders from you," he said, maddeningly calm, so really, she had no choice.

She punched him in the arm, square over some of those still-healing cable holes, and she had the satisfaction of hearing him curse under his breath.

"I've killed people for a helluva lot less..." he started.

"Shut up and let me handle this before you wind up in worse shape than you are right now, you stubborn, egotistical asshat." she snapped. "I am NOT going to let him fight with you, so Chill. The Hell. Out. Also, as you've saved my life at least three times today, NO ONE BELIEVES YOU in the empty threat department, so just stop wasting your breath and my time."

There was a moment when she thought he wasn't going to listen to her. He was, she thought pessimistically, going to insist on throwing down with the only person within a thousand miles of them who could feasibly get Yamcha to either senzuu or a hospital in time to do any good, and they were going to kill each other, and she was going to dry out in the sun and get wrinkles and everything would be ruined forever. Then, to her immense relief, he rolled his eyes heavenward and muttered something to the effect of, "Little bastard isn't worth the effort, anyway," and he stepped aside.

Bulma smiled at him because she couldn't help it. And then she tilted her head back and waved Krillen down with her good arm. She was starting to have a good feeling about today, after all.