Oh my God, I killed him, Bulma thought,disbelief freezing her feet to the metal floor, even though every instinct told her to run.
She was standing at the very heart of Gero's laboratory, next to the giant computer that seemed to be standard in every lab he built, like some interior decorating tic apparent only in evil lairs. In the center of the cavernous central room, there was something like an underground lake, where groundwater and leaking snow had formed a cavern of sorts that Gero must have built the base around. It had been eerily quiet a few minutes ago, but now…the underground lake was crackling with electricity, the cables she'd dropped into it both deceptively still. There was no sign of Gero's new android body or Cymbal, though they'd both been thrashing around impressively right up until she threw the switch that had dumped God-knows-how-many-volts into the water.
That had been her plan all along. She'd caught up to Cymbal more or less as soon as he'd reached the shore of the interior lake, and when he'd seen her there, he'd looked mad enough to hit her. "The Hell are you doing down here?" he'd asked in a particularly strained tone of voice that meant the only thing keeping him from screaming at her was the fact it would probably get him killed.
"Using my brain," she'd snapped. "You should try it sometime – yours has probably atrophied."
Cymbal's brow had creased slightly. "That is…not the first time I've ever heard that," he'd conceded.
Bulma had focused entirely on the electronics. She hadn't even looked at him. "I need you to get him into the water," she'd said. "Do what you were going to do – flare your chi, start knocking the base down, just…do me a favor and don't try too hard. Lure him out."
Cymbal had said, in a wary tone, "Exactly how sure are you that this'll work? Because I don't see you being fast enough to make the door in the event I really do have to collapse this place."
"Shut up and trust me," she'd said.
Much to her surprise, the big idiot had shrugged and waded out a good way into the water. Sure, he'd been muttering something about poor decisions being his signature move lately, but he'd done it.
It was maybe a few seconds after the first of the energy blasts that Gero appeared, and he flew out to the water to meet him, and there was a flurry exchange too fast for her to see, so she didn't bother watching. She just yanked the breaker and pulled the lever and the air had absolutely crackled.
Then both Gero and Cymbal had vanished under the surface of the lake, and the base, as Cymbal had predicted, was starting to come down around her, big chunks falling from the ceiling and splooshing one by one into the now-churning water, and she'd KILLED him.
How ironic was it that she'd been trying to do that very thing for years, and had only now managed it accidentally?
She'd thought he could take it – Gero's body, which HAD to have pretty sophisticated circuitry, would have been vulnerable to a massive electric charge, and anyway, she'd seen something about that in his plans. The doctor had built most of his newer andriods – the ones labelled as "Failures" in his files – with a failsafe. It was a way to turn them off by means of a hard reset; he had a device that would run an abrupt, intense electrical current through their circuits and effectively turn them off. They required a manual restart to get up and move again. She'd thought that Gero's new body might have the same, but she'd thought Cymbal would shake it off like a headache. She'd been sure. Shit, after the amount of punishment she'd seen him absorb in the past two days alone, she was starting to wonder if killing Cymbal was even POSSIBLE.
The room blurred, and she realized her eyes were watering – the lights around her flickered, threatening to go out and leave her down there in the dark, in a collapsing base, and she needed to start running if she had any hope at all of getting out alive.
It was just that, after everything, it felt wrong to leave him.
Shut up and trust me, she'd told him, and he had, and she'd killed him.
She kept hoping against hope that he'd stand up, but it hadn't happened yet, and setting foot in that water, even after she'd thrown the power switch off, was just not an option.
It was no use – she had to go or try to go. But just as she took her first shaky step toward the hall, there was a rush of displaced air, and Piccolo was standing in front of her, looking implacable as a damned statue.
"The Hell happened down here?" he asked, looking at the collapsing ceiling, the scorched electronics, the boulders that were falling one by one around them – all, she noticed, with a complete lack of concern she found very unsettling.
Sometimes, she thought, there's no way to make something sound sane, so you just haveto just blurt it out. "Dr. Gero turned himself into an evil energy-draining android, and…and I just killed both of them."
Piccolo's brow creased. "Both of what?" he asked – still apparently not worried about the damned ceiling. She was NOT feeling nearly as zen about it, and in fact yelped and ducked closer to him as another rock shattered into shrapnel beside them.
"Your brother and Dr. Gero!" She pointed at the scorched wires and the water.
Piccolo snorted. "I doubt you've killed him," he said. "I've been trying to do it for years."
"Well he hasn't come up for air yet!"
"Wouldn't have credited him with sense enough to remember to breathe," Piccolo said with a shrug. He was still unreadable and it unnerved her – Cymbal was volatile, certainly, but he was also expressive; she could usually tell well enough what he was thinking. Piccolo was more alien; anything at all could have been going on in his head, and that was doing nothing positive for her peace of mind.
Goku trusted him, Bulma.
She moistened her lips. "Can you help us?" she asked. She tried – and failed – not to flinch as one of the hallways off to their left caved in completely, spewing dust and mud.
Piccolo, of course, said nothing, because that would have been too easy. He just gave her a bland sort of look, like she was a watch and he wasn't quite sure how she worked.
"Please," she added, because unlike the idiots she spent most of her time chasing around the globe, SHE understood the value of a little politeness in life-or-death situations.
Piccolo squinted at the water, idly raising a hand over his head to deflect a boulder – then he made an odd gesture with two fingers, and Cymbal's body lifted up out of the water and drifted toward them.
Bulma's jaw dropped slightly – because there was being able to lift several hundred pounds with your hands, and then there was being able to do it with your brain, and the latter was far, far stranger. "If you two can play telekinectic fetch with things, why in the Hell have I been crawling around mad scientist labs for the past…"
"He can't do that," Piccolo said, matter of fact – and started walking down the hallway, giving not a damn care in the world for the rocks and machinery and debris, and Bulma thought, incongruously, that he really had no idea at all how powerful he was.
Goku trusted him, Bulma, she reminded herself again.
She followed him out into the light, and the laboratory folded in on itself behind them.
"Just do it, Krillen," Yamcha said.
Krillen looked at the dragonballs as if THEY had the answer. They glittered and gleamed and kept on laying in the grass without giving him any kind of sign at all.
"He already said he wanted you to do it."
"He said, 'don't do anything until I get back,'" Krillen said.
"And why would he say that unless he thought we might have to use them for something else?"
"Like what?" Krillen asked.
"I don't know – like bringing his brother back to life if something's happened to him. Immortality. What do these guys usually want to wish for?"
Krillen, in spite of the chaos of the situation and how serious everything was supposed to be, laughed out loud to Yamcha's visible annoyance. "He won't use them on his brother," he said.
"What, you're a mind reader now? The guy wouldn't know an emotion if it walked up and slapped him – how the Hell can you expect to know what he will and won't do?"
That thing about Piccolo not having emotions, that wasn't true at all, though from the outside, Krillen guessed he could see why Yamcha would think that. Krillen, though, had seen Piccolo show plenty of emotion before – right before Goku had died, actually. Piccolo had been damn near off his nut, screaming at him, gesturing wildly, would've pulled his hair out if he'd had it. It was a very un-Piccolo-ish outburst, but it had been reassuring on some level to see that his composure COULD crack under the right kind of pressure.
But, come to think of it, Piccolo HAD been a lot more…reserved since then. Stony, even. And sure, part of that was grief, Krillen could see that even if he sincerely doubted that Piccolo had admitted it to himself. Maybe locking down was just his way of dealing with it – reacting to emotions he couldn't understand in a way that kept them from just running away with him.
"If we ever want to wish Master Roshi back," Yamcha continued, "then we need to wish Goku back now. Hell, it may be too late, anyway."
"He said not to do anything until he came back," Krillen said.
"Since when do you take orders from him?"
"Since I got used to the idea that he was smarter than me," Krillen said. "Didn't take that long, by the way."
Yamcha's face darkened some in worry and consternation, but he couldn't argue, which was fine. They sat down together to wait for Piccolo.
If Bulma had been in charge of stopping, she thought bitterly that she would have gone a lot farther down the slope. Piccolo unceremoniously dropped his brother's body in the snow a scant few hundred yards from the collapsing laboratory, where fissures still opened in the earth around them and snow tumbled into the blackness in ways that made her skin crawl.
For his part, Piccolo continued to ignore the collapsing mountain….he just squinted down at his brother's body for a moment. Then, he blinked.
"Well, I'll be damned," he said. "You DID kill him."
He actually sounded a little impressed.
Bulma involuntarily put her hand over her mouth.
"Of all the inconvenient timing, though," Piccolo said, apparently oblivious to the fact that she was losing color. "He seemed like he was going to be useful when we fought the Saiyans. Though I guess at least this saves me having to throw down with him over wishing Son Goku back to life."
"He hasn't been dead long," she said. "If we get him to a…a hospital, or find some senzu – maybe it isn't too late."
Piccolo rolled his eyes. "They'd have no idea what to do with him in a hospital," he said, "and the day I waste a senzu on this asshole is the day I sign up to be a Saiyan tour guide."
"He's your BROTHER," she snapped, which she really did have better sense than to do, but her patience was already frayed beyond the threads. "If you have a damned senzu, you GIVE IT TO HIM!"
Piccolo raised his brows at her. "Why?" he asked.
"Because that's….that's WHAT YOU DO!"
The demon looked nonplussed. "I've never done that," he said. "Nor would I ever, because it's ridiculous."
"He saved my life just now!" She pointed at the cave as if Piccolo might somehow have forgotten that it was still merrily collapsing away behind them. "More than once, and we OWE him."
"I don't owe him for your life," Piccolo said, as if he were being the sensible one and SHE was being insane. "Also, you can't take that personally – he saved you because you were useful, and he's just as likely to kill you when you aren't. Besides it's an…" He seemed to search for the right word. "It's an ego thing with him. He said he'd bring you back, so he was going to do that or die trying."
"That's not true," she snapped, even though some part of her couldn't help remembering the dozens of times he'd said exactly that himself.
"You're projecting," Piccolo said.
"Excuse me?"
"Projecting," Piccolo said more slowly. "Human emotions onto non-humans. We don't work that way."
"You're seriously telling me you only save people when they're USEFUL? Is that why you've got Gohan?" she countered.
Piccolo blinked at her again. "Of course it is," he said. "What the Hell else did you think I was doing with him?"
There was no way that was right. Krillen didn't think that was right, Bulma knew. Goku wouldn't be friends with someone if he thought that was right. But it might be - well, she might be willing to concede that neither Piccolo nor Cymbal were exactly possessing of the kind of emotional intelligence that would let them admit things like that about themselves. And maybe they could get there, she thought irritably, with years of competent therapy, but Cymbal didn't HAVE years, so Bulma wasn't above playing dirty.
"Goku would have saved him," she said.
That had….some kind of effect, though it mostly just seemed to make Piccolo look slightly more hostile. "Right," he said. "Which may be why he's dead, and I'm still alive."
Bulma wanted to punch him, but experience with Cymbal had taught her that she would just sprain her wrist. She longed for the wrench she'd been carrying earlier, or even the taser she kept in her aircar for emergencies….
"Wait," she said suddenly, and she bolted down the hill toward her aircar.
"I wasn't going anywhere," the demon said in a particularly dry way that she was terribly afraid was his version of having a sense of humor.
The taser was in the glove box, right where she'd left it. She snatched it and ran right back UP the hill, which that big idiot was going to hear about and be damn grateful for if he knew what was good for him because Bulma Briefs was NOT a fan of cardio. "Don't touch him," she warned Piccolo.
"Again," Piccolo said, folding his arms, "wasn't going to."
She looked down at the little device in her hand. It was, of course, no ordinary taser – back in the day, she'd built it to stun the likes of Son and Tien and yes, admittedly, Master Roshi – but it wasn't an AED, and being honest, she didn't even know how demon physiology worked. This might not do anything at all.
It's not like you have anything to lose, she thought. Well, she did. But she'd lost it already.
Bulma took a deep breath, put the taser square in the middle of Cymbal's chest, and pushed the button.
There was a definite zap sound and a burning smell, and then Cymbal came up swinging because of course the last thing HE'D remember was fighting for his life in a cave, and of course the first thing he hit was Piccolo, who perhaps not unexpectedly, hit back, and then the two of them were going end over end down the mountain like a couple of cats with their tails tied together.
Bulma was too stunned to notice. "Wow – it worked," she said, looking down at the little taser in her hand and grinning.
