As Piccolo walked his way through the forest, he couldn't get past the fact that he felt…different. There was very little reason for his mood to have altered so much. The day itself hadn't changed. The sun was still lazing between the leaves, the air was as heavy as before, the forest was as generally muggy. Only he had changed.

He felt as if he'd been holding his breath for months without realizing it, and he'd only just exhaled…or as if life had been paused for a very long while and, without telling him, had suddenly decided to start again.

And alright. Maybe everyone had had a point about the grieving thing they'd all been hinting at not-so-subtly for months, after all…not that he planned to admit it, not if they set him on fire. He still couldn't deny that after talking to Goku, he felt…better. Less foggy, less tired. More awake.

So he was ALMOST prepared for the scene of utter chaos that greeted him when he walked into Chichi's house to tell her the exact date they needed to use the Dragonballs. Almost.

Piccolo had, as point of fact, never really understood why humans talked as much as they did – much less their need to do it all at once and as loudly as possible. He had likewise never adjusted to it, so the wall of sound was initially impossible for him to even translate. Chichi was yelling and rummaging through one of the kitchen drawers, Krillen was likewise yelling and waving the one arm he had available, as he was using the other to prop Yamcha up. The former desert bandit was a sharp contrast to the other two. He was deadly quiet, largely because he was sprawled on the sofa, unconscious and bleeding steadily onto the couch cover.

Piccolo thought for a brief, longing moment of just closing the door and backing away slowly – he could always make use of his new sense of momentum tomorrow.

Unfortunately for him, both of them chose that moment to notice him, and the wall of sound was directed his way. "Stop it, both of you," he snapped. "I can't even hear myself think. What the Hell is going on?"

That was a mistake, as they both started talking at once again.

"KRILLEN," he said with more force than he meant to use, feeling a bit bad about the small monk's instinctive flinch. "The Hell happened?"

"That's what I've been trying to tell you! It's a miracle he's not dead – they set off some traps underground, and he's been…"

Piccolo held up a hand to stop the flow of words. To Chichi, he said, "I'm assuming we still have senzu?"

"Only three," she said. Her scowl was truly intimidating – Piccolo supposed that if he had any sense of self-preservation at all, he would have let her talk first.

Piccolo glanced at Yamcha and shook his head. "He won't live long enough to reach a hospital. You may as well give him one."

Chichi tossed the bag over to Krillen and then crossed her arms. "Are you going to tell him what you did?" she asked Krillen.

"I told you already, she WANTED to stay," Krillen said, unceremoniously shoving the senzu into Yamcha's mouth. Results were immediate, as the former desert bandit was suddenly on his feet in the living room, flailing at invisible opponents and yelling a sounding battle cry. Krillen also yelled, though his was more a yelp of surprise as he flailed and fell off the side of the couch.

Piccolo pinched the bridge of his nose, because it was more dignified than sticking his fingers in his ears.

Yamcha, meanwhile, had stopped flailing. He straightened slowly, bewildered, and turned a slow circle. "Bulma?" he asked the empty living room.

"Pah," Chichi muttered scornfully, storming off into the kitchen.

"She's not here," Krillen said.

"The last thing I remember, we…" Yamcha's eyes abruptly widened in an expression of stark terror. "We were underground, and the walls…"

"She's fine," Krillen said, making eye contact with no one, but Piccolo didn't miss the way his hands gripped at the arm of the couch.

"What happened," Piccolo asked with forced, rigid calm.

It made Yamcha whip around to stare at him – not that Piccolo wasn't used to people reacting to him that way, but this look was especially startled. He seemed not to know how to react.

"Use your words," Piccolo suggested dryly.

The sarcasm seemed to jolt Yamcha out of his temporary paralysis. "I don't know," he said finally. "We were walking down this hallway, and we saw Dr. Gero. Bulma tried to talk to him." He shook his head slowly, scuffing a hand through his hair, his face a painful study in strained memory. "It's…it's blurry. But she tried to talk to him, and he did something, and these…these snake things came out of the walls…"

Piccolo nodded once, remembering the barbed wires that had dug into his own legs not long ago. "Go on," he said.

"I powered up," he said. "And I…there was a shock. I don't remember anything else except falling."

Piccolo looked at Krillen. "Bulma was alive when you saw her?"

Krillen, for whatever reason, was picking at something on the arm of the couch. "Alive and as loud as ever. She told me she was going to hit the next hideout with Cymbal and that I should find Yamcha some help."

"Then she's fine," Piccolo said.

Yamcha and Krillen looked at him with perfectly-matching expressions of disbelief. Chichi must have been equally startled, because he also heard a dish shatter in the kitchen. He was proud of himself for not flinching like a damned fool, which was more than could be said for Yamcha OR Krillen. "Cymbal's pissed off at me for even suggesting I could do what he's doing right now. There's no way in Hell he'll let anything happen to her. It's a matter of ego at this point."

"You are the least reassuring person on the planet," Krillen said. "Seriously, the least. There should be some kind of rule prohibiting you from going near hospitals or depressed people."

Piccolo rolled his eyes heavenward. "Are you done?" He asked.

"Yeah," Krillen said, and there was the slightest, defeated slump to his shoulders that Piccolo didn't even pretend to understand. "Where've you been, by the way? When I landed with Yamcha, Gohan told me he hasn't seen you all afternoon."

"I was…meditating," Piccolo said. "And then I heard from someone we know."

Krillen and Yamcha looked at him expectantly. He heard the sound of angry dishwashing stop in the kitchen.

I wasn't built for pressure like this, he thought sourly. "Son spoke to me from wherever the Hell he is. He says that…oh for the gods' sakes, what's wrong with you two now?"

Yamcha had the mouth-gaping, glazed-eye look of a dead carp. Krillen, however, was looking at him the way you look at a bomb that could go off at any time.

"Uh, Piccolo," Krillen ventured, "have, uh…have you been sleeping?"

Then it clicked. Piccolo's eyes narrowed ominously. "I'm fine, I'm rational, and I am not hearing voices in my head that don't exist."

Yamcha and Krillen exchanged worried looks. "How would you know?" Yamcha ventured.

"Oh, for…he was very cheerful. Do I seem like the kind of person who would hear cheerful godsdamned voices?"

"I…can't…ya know, I can't argue with that," Krillen said. "What'd he say?"

"We have less than a week," Piccolo said. "We're supposed to bring him back in six days exactly."

"Less than a week?" Yamcha asked, his face paling almost as much as it had from blood loss earlier.

Before Piccolo could answer, he heard the front door slam hard enough nearly to take it off its hinges, and then the quieter, more puzzling sound of Chichi storming off. He caught a glimpse of her through the window – her slight shoulder-hunch, the way she punched a tree on her way down the hill– and damnit, that time he did flinch. Just a little. "What just happened?" he asked the room in general.

Yamcha opened his mouth, then closed his mouth…then looked at Krillen helplessly. Krillen, looking equally uncomfortable, said, "Well, her husband's been dead for about eleven months, and when he contacts someone from the afterlife, it isn't her. So she's probably – I mean, I'm no expert on women, obviously, but that might be causing a kind of existential crisis."

"…if I do nothing about this, will it fix itself?" Piccolo asked. Because what, he could hope.

Both Krillen and Yamcha shook their heads very slowly.

With a heavy sigh, Piccolo set off after his second accidental student. He almost welcomed the arrival of the Saiyans in a way. At least THAT represented a problem that could be solved with simple violence.


Bulma checked her rearview mirror for the fifteenth time. Nothing had changed since she'd last done it two minutes ago. She still very much had a demon passed out on the bench seat of her aircar.

He was at least an easy transport – he hadn't moved in hours. She guessed it was progress, him trusting her enough to sleep in her car…or otherwise, he just didn't consider her enough of a threat to warrant vigilance. Given his usual level of supervillain posturing, it was kind of hard to tell.

Getting him into the air car the first time had actually been something of an event. They'd stood in the desert, watching Krillen and Yamcha turning into distant specks – and maybe she'd watched a little longer than she needed to, just because Yamcha'd looked so grey and she needed a minute to put that out of her head – but she was proud of the bright tone in her voice when she said, "Alright, Jolly Green, what's next?"

Cymbal raised an eyebrow at her. "I'm going to think up something horrible to do to you the next time you call me that."

"Scary," she'd deadpanned over her shoulder on her way to the car. "What direction am I pointing this thing in?"

Being among the particular group of friends she'd had, she'd become something of an expert on awkward silences, and the one that fell after she asked that question meant nothing good. She turned around, squinted at Cymbal – and he was looking very pointedly at anything other than her, which just made her more suspicious.

"Alright, what's the hitch?" She asked. "Let me guess, you've forgotten the next place, you're hungry, you're terrified of spiders and the next evil lab is guarded by a giant tarantula…"

Cymbal looked suitably nonplussed. "Where do you even get this shit?"

"I've had a pretty interesting life, pal. Seriously, though, we're burning daylight, so whatever your malfunction is…"

And Cymbal looked…pained, a little, and pinched the bridge of his nose, and she almost asked if he was feeling alright, but that would have been ridiculous.

"You go ahead," he said in an oddly resigned tone. "I'll catch up. Your coordinates are…"

"You wouldn't have given me the coordinates earlier today if someone had been threatening to set you on fire," she said, putting her good hand on her hip.

"Maybe I'm warming up to you," he said in a tone that was definitely lacking in warmth.

She was sure of it, then – he was trying to hide something from her. He shouldn't have bothered. Bulma was already doing the math, and… "Or you can't fly because you had most of your chi drained off by homicidal robots?" she asked sweetly.

For a second, she thought he was going to deny it – but then he held up both hands, a little like a gesture of surrender. "Alright, take your best shot….go on, get it out of your system…"

"Aw, you poor thing. It's a shame all we have is this slow, primitive device designed to let us inferior primates fly without chi, and I'm sure if you just ask nicely..."

"Glad you're enjoying yourself."

"I'm waiting," she said, saccharine sweet. She even put a hand to her ear for emphasis.

Watching him struggle with his ego was, objectively speaking, kind of fascinating. He paced a little, huffed, looked up at the sky as if seeking deliverance…and finally, with a wry little smirk, stuck his thumb out as if he were hitchhiking.

"I guess it's a start," she said, keying the hatch door open. "For the record, asking a lady nicely usually involves flowers or alcohol."

"I'll make a mental note," he said, ducking to get through the hatch door. "Also, this probably goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway...if I doze off and wake up in some kind of detainment facility, you better hope they kill me."

He was absolutely serious.

It was her turn to roll her eyes. "Please," she huffed, "I'm a scientist. If anyone's going to be cutting you into little pieces with shop tools, it's going to be me – seriously, I bruise my hand on your face, and someone ELSE gets the Nobel Prize? I don't think so."

"Well, I can't argue with that logic," he'd muttered.

They'd made two stops since then. And she'd noticed some things. Like that he was very GOOD at keeping her alive, which couldn't be said for most of the people she travelled with. It wasn't that she blamed them, exactly – Son, for instance, when she'd met him, was so uncannily durable that hitting bad guys with his head was a legitimate battle strategy, and explosions were just something that happened to him, sometimes. She often thought her friend just didn't understand how fragile most people were compared to him. Oh, she'd always felt SAFE with Son Goku; he would've given his life for her in a heartbeat, and she'd never doubted that. It's just that it sometimes took him a click or two to remember that she couldn't fly or that she didn't bounce bullets – she sometimes needed to remind him, at high volumes, that he needed to, say, catch her.

Cymbal didn't seem to consciously be making any sort of decision to protect her – it just seemed to happen, the same way it had happened when he'd broken the floor. She'd asked him where those reflexes had come from, since his family didn't exactly seem like the type to practice 'no man left behind.'

"I told you," he'd said, his attention fixed down the corridor, "my brother and I used to do this together. He was the only one of us who could really find people the way he does…unique skills make you valuable, and he's a little less durable than I am."

"…so how much of that was you deciding to protect your brother because you needed his abilities, and how much of it was him slipping into your head and using you like Kevlar?" she asked.

He'd given her the same kind of helpless grin she'd seen on Son's face from time to time when she'd asked him how he'd done something. "Anyone's guess," he'd said, "but it's handy now, right?"

There was something genuinely SAD about that, but Bulma made it a point not to think about it. She didn't need to start feeling bad for the guy on top of everything else. Feeling bad for people lead to making stupid decisions like wasting a perfectly good wish on someone else's problems.

She looked in her rearview mirror for the sixteenth time. He was still there, stretched across the back seat with one leg propped up against the side door. He at least seemed to have stopped bleeding, though it was hard to tell from this direction – he just seemed to accept that some bumps, bruises, and horrifying lacerations were the cost of doing business when raiding a mad scientist's secret lairs. She supposed that, whatever negative things could be said about his character (and there was NO shortage of that), he at least wasn't a whiner.

And it WAS, however slowly, paying off – she had a box in the passenger seat filled with various models of energy-draining technology. Most of what they found was useless. Abandoned prototypes, crazy designs that Gero should have known from the start were NEVER going to work, stuff that exploded when you turned it on, there was plenty of all of that. Every now and then, though, she'd find something that made Cymbal look vaguely uncomfortable and, albeit grudgingly, he'd usually tell her if there was something he recognized as particularly troublesome. Not that he was ever all that keen on admitting that a human invention could give him any kind of grief, but Bulma was gradually starting to recognize the signs.

They had not seen Dr. Gero again, or at least not yet. Bulma was glad of it, because she was fairly sure that that scraggly old man was going to turn up in her nightmares for years to come, but Cymbal seemed to be less zen about the whole losing-track-of-the-crazy-scientist thing.

"Any damned idiot can sort this out," he'd told her when she asked why he was so twitchy, "so I know he has. We're going lab to lab to pick up his old equipment. The longer it takes us to run into him, the more time he has to prep something godawful."

"Scared of a little octogenarian, Cymbal?" she'd asked.

"He almost had us that first time, ya know," he'd said. "Granted, I think it'll go better without your boyfriend around for me to trip over, but then I'm still stuck with you…"

It was about that point that she'd started carrying a wrench around with her so that she'd have something to smack him with that didn't result in HER hand swelling.

A yellow light had started flashing on her dashboard. That meant that someone was calling her. She looked in her rearview mirror for the seventeenth time – no, he was still dead to the world – and pushed the "accept call" button. "Hello?"

Yamcha's voice came over the com, and she felt something in her chest unclench that she hadn't even realized was knotted up: "Hey, are you alright? Where are you?"

"I'm fine," she said. "We're in the air over…"

"You're not still out raiding mad scientist labs, are you?"

Fifteen seconds, she thought sourly. Fifteen seconds, and you manage to take me from being relieved that you're alive to wanting to strangle you with my bare hands by getting all…judgy and parental. "We're about halfway done," she said.

"I'm coming down to…"

"No, you're not," she said firmly. "You nearly died, and…"

"We ALL nearly died."

"Details. We're fine, we're almost…"

"Bulma, don't do that thing."

"What thing is that?" she asked in a sweet tone that would've warned any man with any sense that he was starting down a very dangerous mountain road, and that he should probably start applying his brakes.

"That thing where you get offended because I don't want you doing completely unreasonable things like travelling around the planet to dangerous places with nothing but a bad guy to keep you safe from…"

"I can keep myself safe just fine, thanks – and I can handle Cymbal."

"See, you're doing the thing."

"And what have YOU been doing while I've been out here doing all the work?"

"…nothing, mostly. Waiting for Piccolo to come back. He said we have maybe a week…"

"That's about what we figured."

"I mean, I assume he's coming back. It's dark now. When did we start working with these guys? They're terrible at…communicating anything, but Krillen's pretty dead-set against going to look for him."

"Krillen knows him better than we do," she said. "I'd follow his lead on this one."

"Right…look, are you SURE you don't want me to…"

"You're breaking up," she said flatly, scraping her thumbnail back and forth over the mic. "Bye, Yamcha." She flicked the switch to "off."

The silence felt a little more absolute after that. At least until Cymbal, with his eyes still closed, said with a definite smirk in his voice, "So, you can handle me? That's news to…"

Without missing a beat, she rummaged in the box next to her and threw something at him. It made a very satisfying thud, but of course, he didn't even open his eyes. "Rude," she informed him, because maybe he needed to be reminded sometimes that he had roughly a zero on the social graces scale.

"Right, and beating on me with prehistoric tools is…"

"A coping mechanism," she said. "My blood pressure is a lot more fragile than your damned skull."

"…well, when you're right, you're right."

"Go back to sleep," she said.

"You're awfully bossy for a lower life form."

"…I'll tell Hina you were mean to me on our field trip."

"…ugh." He scowled, still with his eyes closed. "I really need a do-over on this whole month as, clearly, I've made some mistakes…"

"And that's called 'handling you.' In case you needed that clarified."


It wasn't that it took Piccolo a long time to find Chichi. Honestly, between his chi senses and the periodic dents in nature she'd left behind her, that was the easy part. The hard thing was convincing himself to step out of the trees and say something when she was so clearly in a volatile mood. He wasn't concerned that she'd hit him, exactly – but human females had a worrying range of emotions that were just frankly beyond his ability to deal with. If she started to cry or something, he sincerely feared that he'd just turn around and run.

That was going to help no one. So he stood in the dark of the trees for a very long while and waited either for her to do something he understood, or for god, literally, to send him some kind of sign. He was predictably unlucky on both counts. Kami was obnoxiously silent, and Chichi – well, she paced for a while, she kicked things, she finally flopped down to sit with her back to a large rock…and she did nothing at all after that, not for a long time.

Stop being such a damned coward, he thought finally. Go out there and get it over with.

His feet were reluctant to move. He did it anyway. He took a deep breath and walked out toward her like he actually knew what he was doing.

Once he got to her, of course, it was painfully clear that he had no idea what he should say. He just crossed his arms and hoped she'd make the first move.

It took her a while to realize he was there – but when she did, she picked up her face from her arms and said, without looking at him, "Did you need something?"

"Nothing," he said honestly. "What about you?"

She laughed quietly, and it was hard to listen to, like glass rattling around in a bin. "No. Nothing you can do, anyway."

His every self-preservation instinct urged him to say, "Okay then" and walk away briskly. He didn't. He steeled himself for the fiftieth time that day, and he said, "What's wrong."

She looked up at him, clearly surprised, and damn it, her eyes WERE wet, but she was holding on to the tears stubbornly, for which he was very, very grateful. "I'm losing him, aren't I," she said. "It's…it's already happening. Even when he comes back, he's already…"

"Chichi," he said firmly. "He was very clear about why he was talking to me. My kind…well, most of us, anyway…we're more mentally sensitive. We're already telepathic, so it's….it's just easier."

"Son Goku has never done anything easy in his life," Chichi said wryly. "And that's just one thing, anyway. That's what…that's what makes me so crazy, you know. He goes places, he does these impossible things, and…most of the time, I just have to watch him go. I can't follow him like you can. It wasn't always that way, Piccolo, but it is now, and he's…he's so different lately. Sometimes I look right at him, and I don't know him."

"Of course you know him," Piccolo said, nonplussed.

"No, I don't," she said. "I know a lot of things about him, of course, I've lived with him for so long, it's just that ever since that brother of his showed up…"

"He has been…different," Piccolo allowed, tipping his head a little. "He is different, just…speaking generally. But you didn't see his face when he thought something had happened to you. You might not have him the way you used to think you would, but I'm not entirely sure it's even possible for you to lose him in the way you're afraid of."

Chichi looked at him critically for a few seconds. "You're very calm, aren't you?" she asked. "Especially since the world is likely ending."

Piccolo shrugged. "What else is new?" he asked. "The damned thing's been trying to end for years now."

"All your life, probably," she said, still in that thinking voice.

"All…well. All one of my lives," he allowed. "And don't ask, because I don't know how that works, either."

"Do you really think, after all this – do you really think he'll come back?"

Something stopped him from saying 'yes' or 'of course,' – he couldn't have said what. The old Kami, of course, was prone to foresight, and he supposed as his other half, he was as well. Whatever the case, he pushed the odd feeling of dread aside and said, "I think that, if he has any choice at all, he will – but none of us really knows what's about to happen."

You better not make a liar out of me, Son Goku, he thought as he offered Chichi a hand up. I'm not ready for the kind of training I'd need to survive THAT disaster.

The dark feeling, if anything, got worse. Piccolo decided that was the sort of thing he'd be better off not mentioning to anyone.