It was in the mountains where things really went wrong. Bulma supposed in retrospect she should've seen it coming, as Cymbal had been even jumpier than usual from the moment they set foot on the slopes.
This lab was in a cold, lonely place – bare stone and scrub pines clinging to the side of a mostly-frozen lake. The wind howled between the rocks, cold enough to make Bulma fold her hands into her armpits even in her Capsule parka and glare resentfully at Cymbal who, in just his gi, seemed barely to notice the single-digit weather.
"I don't like this," he said.
"This was never meant to be something you liked," she said. "It's work, not a vacation to Bermuda."
"You have a whole damned crate full of energy-draining tech," Cymbal said, still eyeing the terrain mistrustfully. "You think whatever's out here is worth dying for?"
Bulma brandished a chi spectrometer at him. "This is at least five years old," she said. "Are you telling me Gero wouldn't have developed something better in five years?"
Cymbal scowled. "Maybe he's been branching out. You know, going to senior night, playing bingo, whatever the Hell humans do when they're -"
"It makes sense he'd put his most valuable stuff in the hardest place to find," she said. "Now stop being a giant pansy and find the door."
"You know," he said conversationally as he walked toward one of the cliff walls, "they would absolutely never find a body out here."
"Why bother hiding it? You're pretty much the only suspect."
"I could make up some half-assed lie," he said dryly, hooking his claws in a thin crack in the mountain and ripping open what seemed to be a well-disguised door. "She stepped on a landmine. I swear, I tried to stop her."
Bulma snorted. "No one would believe for a second you tried to stop me – and you're a terrible liar, by the way."
They stared together down the very dark hallway, watching the snow blow into the blackness.
"Okay," Cymbal said after a long moment, "I'm not going in there."
"Why," she asked, "do you sense something?"
Cymbal scowled a little and shook his head. "Not that that means anything," he said.
"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked.
"My chi senses are…rough," he said.
"Rough as in what," she asked. "Wait, you CAN sense chi, can't you?"
The silence that followed meant nothing good.
"Do you mean to tell me I've been stumbling around underground with someone who can't sense chi?!"
Cymbal rolled his eyes. "I can sense chi," he said. "Just…not very well. It's like being nearsighted. With energy."
"And you didn't think to mention that earlier?"
The big demon shrugged. "Shockingly," he said, "I don't make a habit of advertising my weaknesses to people who might want to kill me later. I suppress my energy fine, lot of trial and error there, and I can sense something big if it flares up next to me. Otherwise – like I said. It's rocky."
"But both Piccolo and Tanbarin can…"
"I had a lot of head injuries early on," he said a little sharply. "You might remember a few of 'em."
It did not in fact take a lot of work to remember some of the especially nasty shots to the head that she'd seen him take over the course of the demon wars. Oddly enough, she'd never thought much about that at the time; he'd always come back, always seemed fine. She'd never considered there might have been some sort of side effect to taking that kind of beating on the regular.
"So, if you haven't sensed anything – I guess this is just cold feet?" she asked smugly as she brushed past him and turned on her flashlight.
Cymbal scowled. "Your boyfriend was actually right about something," he said. "There's a thing. And you're doing it."
"He's not my boyfriend!" Bulma threw the words back at him over her shoulder.
"Right, obviously," Cymbal muttered behind her. She flipped him off absently and continued forward – though she couldn't help wondering if he really would just let her go into this place by herself. She wasn't sure if he was making her nervous or if there was genuinely something more creepy about this lab than all the others, but she didn't know if she had the nerve to go much past where she could see daylight by herself.
She heard him mutter something about humans and death wishes, though, and he followed her.
"Seriously," she said mostly to cover her own nerves, "you're not afraid of the dark, are you?"
"No, I just get a teensy bit nervy in trap-riddled hideouts I've been trying not to die in since I was born," he answered. "Also, you're one to talk dysfunctions, lady. The Hell kind of early trauma in your life pushed you into this instead of playing Paris Hilton and launching a damned cosmetics line?"
"None of your business," she said sweetly. "There a reason I'm going first, by the way?"
Cymbal snorted. "Was kind of hoping you'd blow yourself up on a trap, but I'm not that lucky today, I guess."
She smacked him square in the chest with the flashlight. "Man up," she said, and she gestured down the hallway.
He shoved her flashlight back at her. "Nothin' wrong with my night vision," he said flatly. "You keep it."
They continued on in silence for a while. Cymbal stopped often, tilting his head as if listening for something, but then he would start on again and she would follow.
She could hear water dripping somewhere. The echo was eerie. They kept walking. Finally, the corridor seemed to open into something wider – a control room of sorts with a sealed door. "Don't you think it's weird we haven't seen any traps yet?" she whispered to Cymbal, who was eyeing the door with undisguised wariness.
"Not if this part is the trap," he said.
"You think it is?"
His voice was grim."Yep."
They stood in silence outside the door for several more seconds.
"But we've come this far," Bulma reasoned.
Cymbal raised both browridges at her. "Let the record show," he said, "that I was against this plan from the damned start."
"So you keep reminding me." She gestured at the door. "Are you going to open that?"
He sighed, put his hand on the door, and shoved it down. And standing in the next room was Dr. Gero. The old scientist stood with his arms at his sides and an uncanny grin on his papery face. His icy blue eyes, though, looked slightly more manic to Bulma. "Welcome, both of you," he said. "I was starting to wonder if you'd ever get here."
"Great," Cymbal muttered, "he's lost it."
Looking at his manic expression, Bulma had to agree. "You were saying something about killing him earlier?" She muttered back. Not that she exactly wanted to encourage Cymbal's more dysfunctional tendencies, but this one time…
"No," Cymbal said, his voice still low, "something's wrong."
Bulma had to agree with him on that front, too. Even if Dr. Gero had lost his mind, she would have expected the doctor to show a lot higher level of concern when confronted with Cymbal, who had practically made a career out of trying to kill him.
"What do we –" she didn't have time to finish as Dr. Gero disappeared. She'd seen that happen often enough in her life to feel a sharp surge of panic, but before she could react at all to the fact that a diabolical evil genius had just phased out in front of them, Cymbal shoved her. It wasn't much of a shove, she figured, for Cymbal, but it took her clear off her feet and skidded her across the floor. She realized why he'd shoved her a split second later, though, because Gero had hit him.
Whatever Gero struck Cymbal with happened too fast for her to see, but she heard it – it sounded like someone dropping a watermelon. Then she saw Cymbal fly across the room and hit the solid steel wall, which his skull bounced against with a sickening crack. The wall itself buckled in under the force of the impact and left him laying there, half-imbedded in it like a broken crash test dummy.
Gero smiled, looking down at his spidery hands, flexing them once or twice. "Yes," he said, "much more responsive than expected. This new body will do nicely."
New body? Gero specialized in mecha and androids. In fact, when she'd been downloading plans from some of his other computers, she'd thought she'd seen a few that were humanoid in shape. Surely he hadn't –
The mad scientist gave her a cool sort of appraising look as if he sensed what she was thinking. He smiled. "Well," he said, "who wouldn't want to live forever? And now, like this, I can." He opened his hands and closed them again, watching his own fingers move with a kind of reverence that Bulma found disturbing. "It's only fair," he added, "when you think about how many years were stolen from me."
She glanced over at Cymbal again. He hadn't moved.
A lot of old head injuries, he'd said.
Gero followed the direction of her gaze and smirked. "I wouldn't worry about your friend," he said. "Believe me, he's seen worse, and I have no intention of killing him yet. It would be such a waste."
"What have you done to yourself?" she asked him.
He was looking at her the way she might look at a rat that was learning to run a maze. Then he reached out, too fast for her to see, and he took her wrist in his hand. She flinched instinctively, because his hand didn't feel like flesh and bone anymore, but rather like those expensive "real-skin" dinosaur toys that have latex over top and a metal skeleton underneath. And in the middle of his palm, there was a lens, one that felt eerily similar to the energy-draining lenses she'd seen on some of the newer guns…
Oh God
"What have I done?" he asked. "My dear, it would be faster to show than to explain – the last two human subjects didn't go so well, but as a fellow scientist, I'm sure you'll understand. Sometimes you just have to try these things a few times to get them right."
He started walking toward Cymbal. Bulma instinctively dug her heels in, but the doctor didn't even notice. He just walked along, dragging her behind him as if she were skiing. His grip on her wrist was as solid as a manacle.
"This model, my current one, absorbs energy," he said – and that was eerie, too. In the time before he'd sold out to mercenaries, Dr. Gero had been a respected scientist. He had done a number of podcasts on androids, artificial intelligence, regenerative technology. Bulma had watched every one of them two or three times, awed by the man's raw brilliance.
He sounded like he was giving another podcast. Only instead of talking about how mechanical limbs might one day give amputees a chance to walk again, he was talking in a matter-of-fact way about chopping Bulma up to make her an android and also sucking the literal life energy out of an unconscious victim to up his performance specs.
"It stores it," he continued, "in batteries, but the energy then depletes rapidly. I got enough from your friends initially to power this form, but I don't know how long it will last. So my quandary here is…do I drain your green friend dry in one go and see what a full charge does for my circuits, or do I keep him alive for a bit until I can find a higher-energy charging station." He smirked. "It's quite a dilemma. A full charge is tempting, and I must confess I've wanted to kill this one for some time, but practically…well, I have some things downstairs that would hold even him, and we have to think long-term about this sort of problem…"
Bulma thought about all those decaying bodies she'd seen in tanks in the last lab and her stomach turned slightly. Then, without meaning to, she thought about what Cymbal had said to her days ago: If I wake up strapped to a table in some underground facility, you better hope they kill me.
She'd thought he was joking. Now, she wasn't sure. He hadn't been surprised when he'd seen those bodies. He had known, all along, that this might happen.
"It doesn't matter to me," she said, "But he's kind of irritating. Seems to me you can grab somebody a little less obnoxious to charge your batteries with?"
Dr. Gero gave her an odd sidelong look. "Perhaps," he said. He flexed the hand that wasn't holding her, then slowly started to extend it toward Cymbal, who was still laying on the ground like something dead. She could see the shiny red lens in his palm, which glittered in the dim light.
Inexplicably, Bulma felt her breath start to catch. It wasn't, she told herself, that she was actually worried about Cymbal – it was that, if something happened to him, she was pretty much going to have to resign herself to a new life as the prettiest science project around. Get up, stupid, she thought, he's going to kill you!
If he heard her, it sure to Hell didn't show.
"Wait," she stammered, "his energy is…well, it's demonic, I think. Have you thought about how that might affect…?"
"You're stalling," Gero said placidly.
Then Cymbal sat up, so suddenly Bulma couldn't register it properly, and he splayed his fingers on either side of his head in a familiar pattern. Bulma barely had time to close her eyes before the bright light – not as bright as the sun, they were in an underground laboratory after all and relying on the watery light from a skylight – flared around them like a strobe.
Gero screamed, letting go of her wrist to slap both the heels of his hands to his eyes – after years of that technique, Bulma knew that sound well. She didn't dare open her eyes, but she heard a pair of thuds and the next thing she was consciously aware of was Cymbal picking her up and running. "You goddamned inconsiderate asshole!" She shrieked at him, pounding on his back with her good hand for emphasis. "You couldn't have given me some kind of SIGN or…"
"Great," he said, "I get to die with that shrill-ass voice as the last damned thing I hear in this world."
She opened her eyes. They were barreling down one of the hallways at the sorts of speeds people normally reserve for formula one races. Cymbal paused briefly to close one of the big sliding metal doors and promptly rip the control screen out of the wall.
"You are such a defeatist," she snapped. "We are not going to die."
Gero's hand punched through the door between them.
"Like I was saying," Cymbal said flatly, ripping a chunk off the wall and jamming it into the space between Gero's arm and the door so he might have some trouble yanking it back out.
"Shut up and run," she said.
Chichi had never read as especially stable to Piccolo, but the past few hours had really started to make him wonder if he might have actually broken her.
It was his own damned fault for bringing her son by to see her. He'd always thought of humans as very emotionally fragile creatures, but Chichi had seemed different to him, and anyway, he'd wanted to get any nasty emotional side effects out of the way before they had to engage in a life-and-death battle with evil alien warriors.
When he brought Gohan more or less unannounced into her house, she'd run to her son, dropped to her knees to clutch his face, and there had been such overwhelming emotion in the air that Piccolo had immediately started to feel claustrophobic. Then both she and the boy had started crying, and Piccolo had beat a hasty retreat to the back yard. He'd stood out there for half an hour, ear twitching at the unfamiliar, squishy, uncomfortable sounds of two creatures he was rather more attached to than he wanted to be leaking all over everything, and he'd sincerely regretted every decision he'd ever made.
He was still standing there when Krillen drifted down beside him – and he held his hand out to stop the monk from walking into the house. "I wouldn't," he said with sincere emphasis.
Krillen raised a brow at him. "You brought Gohan to see her like you said you were going to?"
Piccolo gave a solemn nod.
"How long?"
"Thirty-eight minutes, fifteen seconds," Piccolo said flatly. "You could've warned me this would happen."
Krillen shrugged. "You did punt me yesterday," he said.
"That's fair," Piccolo said.
They stood awkwardly side by side for several more minutes.
"So are they…"
"No sign of wrapping up, no," Piccolo said. "So while we have some time on our hands…"
"I'm not sparring with you," Krillen said.
Piccolo rolled his eyes. "I thought we might have a wish to make."
Krillen blinked at him. "I thought we had to wait for three more…"
"We do," Piccolo said. "I see no reason we can't ask the dragon to resurrect him in three days' time."
"You want to do it while your brother's halfway across the planet," Krillen said – he was, Piccolo reflected, probably the only human present who would have gotten that right away.
"In theory, he's behind it," Piccolo said, "or he's at least accepted it, but he's always been…" he struggled for a moment to find the right word, "impulsive."
"Anyone ever tell you that you have a gift for understatement, big guy?"
That, Piccolo ignored. "I think if it came right down to having to watch us wish Son back to life, he wouldn't be able to go through with it, and we'd wind up killing each other."
Krillen seemed to understand that Piccolo wasn't exaggerating. "For what it's worth, I'd bet on you," he said, "but I see where you're coming from. So, where are the dragonballs?"
Piccolo, resignation heavy in his heart, just tipped his head back toward the house behind them.
Krillen paled. "Oh," he said.
"It's a brave thing you're doing," Piccolo said, putting his hand between Krillen's shoulders and giving him a shove toward the house.
Krillen flailed briefly to catch his balance, then whipped around to face Piccolo, gaping like a trout. "Wait, wha – no! Why me?"
"Because I'm not going back in there," Piccolo said.
"No way, I'd rather fight the Saiyans by myself!"
Piccolo shrugged. "Well, I guess that's an option."
Krillen clasped his hands together in what Piccolo thought was a needlessly-overwrought way. "Piccolo, have a heart, I'd rather die!"
"Well, don't look at me," Piccolo said, folding his arms. "Just how much experience do you think I have with hysterical sobbing?"
"But…"
"Walk through that door under your own power, or get thrown through it," Piccolo said. "Your choice."
"You are NOT a team player," Krillen said to him severely as he started toward the house. "And when we wish Goku back, I'm telling him he has lousy taste in friends."
"You're his friend," Piccolo pointed out.
"…Damnit," Krillen muttered, and he trudged toward the house like a man condemned. Piccolo, in turn, moved a few feet further from the house, just in case the level of sound he was so pointedly ignoring found a way to ratchet up somehow. Better him than me, he thought fervently.
Cymbal stopped running very suddenly, skidding on the damp, cracked tile in a way that threw Bulma forward against his shoulders uncomfortably. She gave him a resentful thump on the arm just because – but for once, he didn't bitch about it. He just reached back, snagged the back of her shirt, and scruffed her like a rabbit, pulling her off his back and setting her down on the floor. "Go on," he said.
She could see daylight reflecting off the walls up ahead.
"Not far now," he said, giving her what amounted to a little shove that way – but he wasn't looking at daylight. He was looking back the way they'd come with a grim expression that Bulma knew all too well.
"No way," she said, taking one of his arms with both hands and pulling. "We're ten yards from outside. Come with me, stupid. Live to fight another day."
"You really think he'd let us leave?" Cymbal asked, maddeningly calm. He glanced down at her hands on his arm, watching with detached interest, kind of the way you might look at an ant crawling across your skin. "He's smarter than me, maybe smarter than you, and even I know enough to be watching your aircar at this point."
"He might not have thought of that," Bulma said. "He might NOT have, Cymbal, just because someone's smart doesn't mean they think the same way you do, and even if he did think of it, what could you possibly - "
"Way ahead of you," Cymbal said. "Damn base is built inside a mountain – that's a lot of negative space under a lot of weight. Pretty sure I can bring the whole thing down from the inside if I go deep enough."
"And who's going to dig you out if I'm flying away? The National Guard?"
Cymbal gave her a sort of pitying look that said, clear as day, that she was a poor, addled, lesser creature that was completelyincapable of understanding anything important, and then she understood what he was really suggesting.
He shook her hands off and started walking away, back into the dark.
"So that's it?" she said, loud as she dared. "Things get a little dangerous, and you just give up?"
Cymbal stopped walking to peer back at her. "Who's giving up?" he asked. "This job was never about living, Bulma. It was about an objective, same as it always is, and you can do a Hell of a lot more with that box of broken toys out there than I can. More'n that, I don't like the thought of leaving Dr. Frankenstein roaming around free with a brand-new energy-drinking robot body. I can't beat him, which you'd know if you'd stop being a damned drama queen long enough to admit that to yourself…but dropping enough rock on him might contain him for a while. Given what we've got to work with, 'contain' might be the best we can hope for."
"So forget the air car," she snapped. "Sneak us down the mountain and fly away. We'll go back and get your brother…"
"And that thing may damn well kill us both," Cymbal said. "Or he'll have enough time to rig up the gods alone know what to meet us, or even if we somehow beat him, there's the little matter of incoming alien invaders to deal with, and we won't be in any shape to fight with them." Cymbal ran his hand absently across his antennae the way a human might through his hair and, unexpectedly, laughed.
"Damn," he said. "I don't actually know what's worse – this Gero or whatever monkey-race Son Goku fell out of. What I do know is that if I were Tanbarin, I'd probably be thinking some way to turn them against each other so I don't have to lift a finger, and if I were Piccolo, I'd have…he's got a damn near photographic memory, did you know that?...I'd have seen something I could've used by now, but that's not the hand we got today. I'm here, they're not, and this is the best I can come up with."
He was walking away again, and there was nothing she could do to stop him.
"What the Hell am I supposed to tell Hina?"
Cymbal stopped only for a second. This time, he did not turn around. "Tell her I'm sorry," he said, offhanded, like he was apologizing for forgetting a lunch date and not for committing suicide by homicidal super-genius. "She won't like it, Bulma, but she WILL understand." Then he kept walking. "Also, don't go anywhere near that damned aircar until you hear me get started down below."
She stood in the dark and tried to listen for his footsteps, but as he was uncannily quiet for such a big guy, she didn't hear him for long. He was gone.
I'll have to call the others, she thought. Just as soon as I can get outside and find a signal. Tell them we're one down.
Only something was bothering her.
Something she'd seen when she was downloading all those plans from all those computers.
He's going to bring this place down, Bulma. He told you that. This is NOT the time to go scrolling through 3 gigs of…
She had already plugged the USB into her palm computer. Because since when did she take orders from demons? Since never.
Dragonballs were surprisingly simple things. Piccolo, having never seen all seven together, was surprised at how underwhelming he found them. Why did arguably the most powerful artifacts on the planet have to look so much like baubles you'd buy for a few yen in a tourist shop?
Beside him, Krillen seemed much more suitably awed - awed enough that he was no longer openly traumatized from whatever he'd gone through to retrieve them. "You ready for this?" the monk asked.
No, Piccolo thought. "Does it matter?" he asked out loud.
Krillen, who was better at sensing his moods than Piccolo figured either of them was comfortable admitting, scuffed one of his ridiculous slipper-shoes on the ground. "…do you want me to do it?" he asked.
Piccolo raised his brows at the smaller man, who shrugged. "I don't get it," Krillen admitted, "whatever it is you're tripping over. But you've clearly got, like, your own problems with…hey, it took me years to admit to myself that I didn't much care if I got rich anymore, so if you like, if you want to just take a walk or something…"
"Right," Piccolo said flatly, "this is clearly too much for me. I'll go lay down on a nice fainting couch while you handle the heavy lifting."
Krillen looked predictably horrified – which wasn't fair, Piccolo knew, he knew what the human was asking and it had, if he was willing and able to admit it, been…actually kind of a nice gesture, especially given how many times he'd punched him in the past week alone. He just resented needing to be asked, which was Son Goku's fault entirely, but as he wasn't around to take it out on…
…wait, what was that?
Krillen had felt it, too. In fact, the small human damn near gave himself whiplash turning around to face the distant chi surge, which felt more familiar than it probably should have. Whatever Cymbal was doing, that level of energy expenditure couldn't possibly signal anything good.
"Shit," Piccolo muttered under his breath.
"The Hell is he doing?" Krillen asked.
Piccolo shrugged as if he didn't find what he was sensing as worrying as Krillen did. "Either fighting for his life or he stubbed his toe and is having some kind of tantrum. It's honestly hard to say with him."
Then the chi-flare snuffed out completely.
"I don't think it was the toe-thing," Krillen said grimly.
Behind them, the door to the house crashed awkwardly-loudly. Piccolo hoped for a second that this meant that Chichi and Gohan were done being dramatic, but it was only Yamcha, stumble-running and swiping the sleep out of his eyes.
"Did you feel that?" He demaned of Krillen after casting a wary sideways look at Piccolo. Yamcha seemed genuinely distraught – his voice was on the verge of cracking, his hair stood in every possible direction.
Krillen held up both his hands – a gesture he seemed to make often in an attempt to calm the people around him, though Piccolo had yet to see it do a lick of good in any direction. "Yeah, Yamcha, we're on it, we were just…"
"Bulma's out there," Yamcha snapped, pointing in the general direction of the mountains. "The Hell is he doing?"
"Don't know," Piccolo said in his most bored tone of voice. "Was just thinking of asking him."
Krillen looked understandably grim. "Right behind you," he said.
"The Hell you are," Piccolo said. He pointed at the Dragonballs, still spilled out around them like mardis gras beads. "How many times do you idiots have to have those damned things snatched from under your nonexistent noses before you learn that not all of you have to go rushing off at the first sign of a chi disturbance? No. You two stay here and keep an eye on them. Do nothing until you hear from me."
Krillen didn't argue, but he did shake his head. "Could be a trap, Piccolo," he said. "And if we lose you…" he cast a significant look at the stupid orange balls that lay scattered out on the grass, stubbornly refusing NOT to look like cheap plastic.
Piccolo rolled his eyes. "If I'm stupid enough to fall into any kind of trap that idiot set up, then I deserve to die," he said. "But on the off chance I'm wrong, I'll call."
