"She's really pretty," Hina said.

As this statement came right in the middle of a thorough dissection of why the red team's offensive players were completely incompetent, it took Cymbal a second to register what she was talking about. "Who," he asked, "the center forward? You were just telling me she kicked like a girl."

"No," Hina said. She tipped her head toward the house. "Bulma." And she was looking at him the way humans tended to look at him when they were deliberately having two conversations at once, the spoken and the unspoken kind, and expecting him to follow both.

"In the primate world, sure," Cymbal said. "And what's worse, she knows it. It's part of what makes her such a pain in the ass. Where are we going with this?"

"She's a lot prettier than mom," Hina said, and there was some uncertainty in her voice that probably meant –

Oh. Oh, this was THAT conversation. "Let me just stop you right there," Cymbal said. "My kind, we don't work that way."

"You don't work what way?"

In Hell, Cymbal figured, they probably made you have conversations like this all the time. "Not gonna lie, I was kind of hoping we weren't going to need to have this talk for a few years."

"What talk? Do demons not notice when people are pretty?"

"Not my kind of demon," Cymbal said. "Or I guess we notice, but it's more in the way you notice the sky is pretty, not in – "

The kid was giving him a blank look. And here, Cymbal supposed, it would've been really useful to have the kind of father figure who had sat him down and walked him through this kind of thing, because if the right words existed, he didn't know them. "Look, the whole romantically-falling-in-love with somebody, that's a pretty mammalian idea. We," he gestured to himself, "don't' do that."

Hina raised a dubious eyebrow at him. "You're telling me demons don't have girlfriends?"

"I'm not even sure we have girls," Cymbal said wryly.

"So how do you – "

"Eggs, solo, and that is all I'm telling you about that until you're at least sixteen."

"Oh!" Hina said. "So you're like a wasp. We learned about those in science classes. Or maybe you're more like a starfish…"

Cymbal was beginning to feel like this had gotten away from him. "I…guess?" he hazarded. "Except for the part about growing clones from severed limbs. If that's a thing we do, I haven't seen it yet."

Hina nodded thoughtfully. "But isn't that, I dunno…really lonely?"

And there it was again – that stupid species barrier, because if Hina was like him, then she would just understand, without needing any of the wholly inadequate human words. Back when most of his siblings, and of course his father, had been alive, back before one too many knocks to the head had left him with a pretty staticky connection to most things mental, lonely wasn't really a feeling you could have. It wasn't a hive mind, exactly, so much as connection. You could close your eyes and feel them in your head, without any of the sloppy gestures and hand-holding that humans seemed to find necessary. Cymbal had never really formed that connection with Piccolo – either because he had never been in the right headspace, or because he'd lost the ability somewhere along the line, or maybe Piccolo was just too aggravating. He was pretty sure Piano and Drum weren't capable of it – certainly they'd never shown any of the signs of congruency with their younger brother that would've spoken to an established mental connection. Cymbal was a little afraid that he and Tambourine might still have one, buried in the general bedroom clutter of his brain, shoved in the back closet where he wouldn't have to look at it because, being honest, T's brain scared him and always had.

But then, that was something ELSE to worry about that had never occurred to Cymbal until that very moment. Maybe Piccolo had never experienced that kind of connection with anyone. It would sure as Hell explain his general emotional constipation. And maybe it explained some other things as well.

Now very uncomfortable, Cymbal poked with the mental equivalent of a stick at some of his least-often-examined memories. The way Piccolo had thrown himself in front of that tiny little half-Saiyan boy in the desert. The way he and Son Goku had seemed able to anticipate each other when they fought together, despite having never trained together so far as Cymbal knew. Cymbal did not think that human beings, or at least that most human beings, were capable of that kind of mental connection, but as it turned out, Son Goku was no more human than he himself was. The monkey-tailed freakshow was an alien in his own right, from a species they knew next to nothing about, which might very well have their own version of that kind of a mental link. Maybe it was sort of the way that you might hear a baby monitor on a cell phone: two things that had never been meant to work together that still, inexplicably, did.

It was also very possible that Piccolo, being something of an idiot, might not be able to work that math out for himself. That he might not really grasp what was happening the first time he started to really experience someone else, not just in his head, but almost as an extension of himself. For the first time, Cymbal had cause to really regret the fact that he'd left this kind of "amorphous bullshit" to Tambourine to explain. "I'll teach the brat to fight," he'd told his younger brother. "You handle the cerebral crap – it's your wheelhouse, anyway."

And Tambourine had given him one of his thin cat-smiles, put his hand on his chest and bowed exactly as he used to when addressing their father, except he'd managed to make it look sarcastic somehow.

Shit, Cymbal thought, I just KNOW there are a few vital details he's deliberately left out.

He fought down the very real desire to move to the nearest tree and bash his head against it a few times. Because he hadn't even met the Saiyans, and he'd already rather fight them four times over than have a sit-down talk with his youngest brother about birds, bees, possibly wasps if Hina would let him borrow a science book, and the very real possibility of alien beings just wandering into his head if he let them.

Calm down, he told himself irritably. You're jumping to a lot of conclusions. Let's not turn this into a problem when it might not be one.

"Uh, Cymbal?" Hina ventured. "Are you okay?"

He shook himself out. "Oh, sure, fine –"

And at that moment, Bulma came tearing out of the house like a cat with her tail on fire, yelling his name and waving her uninjured arm.

"Saved," Cymbal muttered under his breath, and he turned to face her.


Bulma had no idea what the Hell she'd expected when she blurted the entire story out to Cymbal. She used THEIR language, not the one Hina would understand, and she could hear the slight edge of hysteria in her own voice. She kept expecting, through the whole crazy outburst, for him to hold up a hand and ask her to slow down and potentially to lay off the caffeine. She expected him to begin to get angry, too – one of his signature bouts of horrible temper where he punched through something solid and cursed in a language she didn't know. He did none of those things. He just STOOD there, his head cocked slightly to the side like a big, dumb DOG, and he KEPT standing that way even when she'd finished and leaned forward, putting her hands on her knees to catch her breath.

"Well, SAY something!" she snapped.

"Huh," Cymbal said. The big demon folded his arms across his chest, clearly deep in thought, and he kept right no not doing any of the things he should have been doing, like freaking out at least as badly as she was. "Well, that's…a lot to absorb."

"A lot to absorb?" Bulma repeated incredulously. "Cymbal! Your crazy brother can SEE THE FUTURE and set up this whole…" She gestured helplessly at the house, the river, even the stupid donkey.

"Half of that's old news," Cymbal said.

"Not to me!" Bulma snapped. "Your brother is CLAIRVOYANT and I'm only just now finding out about it?"

"We were never really sure how that worked," Cymbal said with a maddeningly even shrug. "I mean, we knew he knew more than he should have, but he always claimed it was kinda unreliable, which, not at all shockingly, turned out not to be true."

"Cymbal!" She yelled, resisting the urge to try to shake him. "Listen to me, this is NOT. OKAY. Why the Hell would he do this?"

"Yeah, that's the part that's bugging me, too. I mean, I knew he set me up. He did something to my head last time I passed out in that place; I dunno what, but I woke up feeling….really sure about what I had to do, and really foggy at the same time." He shook his head wryly. "The mistake I've been making up to this point was thinking that his plan was to have the whole lot of us kill each other off for him. I just figured I'd somehow accidentally survived."

"Oh, right, that's so silly of me," Bulma said, "thinking you ought to be getting worked up over a little thing like the fact that you legitimately thought your brother brainwashed you and tried to get all of his surviving family members to wipe themselves out of existence, and it turns out that it's actually much weirder than that."

Cymbal looked pensive. "Well, I mean, two outta five is a pretty bad success rate for him. Or four…I figure he would've wanted the kid to survive, given what he can do. My only questions at this point are, why did he want me to live through that, and why did he want me to do it this way?"

Bulma said flatly, "Right, and no questions at all about why he wanted to kill you?"

"Hell no, he hated all three of us – me maybe slightly less than Piano and Drum," Cymbal said. "Always thought he had kind of a soft spot for Piccolo, but the gods know I've been wrong before. I just figured he wanted to try out being an only child."

Bulma pursed her lips and counted to ten, because words were failing her at this point. There was too much to unpack, and even HER head hurt, because the implications of what she was looking at – that someone had been deliberately pulling strings for at least this whole past, awful year, and who knew how long before that – that someone was probably still pulling strings, making them all dance to a jig that only he knew the tune to – that was the kind of worst-nightmare shit that could keep a girl up at night.

How could Cymbal be standing right there, looking at the same evidence she was, and NOT understand how colossally messed-up it was?

"We have to tell the others," she said.

Cymbal blinked at her like SHE was the one suggesting ridiculous things. "Why?" he asked.

"So many reasons!" she snapped. "I mean, for one, if he can SEE THE FUTURE, do you think there MIGHT POSSIBLY be one or two TINY LITTLE QUESTIONS we might want to ask him?"

Unexpectedly, Cymbal laughed.

"Nothing here is funny!"

"Sorry," Cymbal said, "It's just, that was spoken like somebody who's never had a conversation with the guy. Either he won't answer, he WILL answer and he'll leave out some critical details, or he'll outright lie. Or maybe he'll tell the truth," Cymbal continued, absently popping his neck to either side, "shit, we won't know until it's too late. And which of those things do you think is gonna be the most useful?"

"You can't MAKE him tell you?" she asked dubiously.

"Look, patience isn't exactly a virtue I've got," Cymbal said dryly. "You think I've never threatened to beat information I wanted out of him before? Trust me, it would've been a genuine pleasure."

"Did you ever try to beat information out of him?" Bulma asked.

"Shit, dozens of times," Cymbal said.

"How did he survive that?" Bulma asked. "Given as…" she gestured up and down to indicate all of Cymbal. "You two aren't exactly in the same weight class."

"Funny thing, Bulma," Cymbal said. "Every time I decided to punch him for being too cryptic, which was kind of often, if you've gotta know – something would happen. Either somebody would interrupt asking something so stupid I had to deal with it, or you and your little rogue squad would decide to try knocking on our door with a rocket launcher…and I just somehow never got around to it."

Bulma stared at Cymbal for several long seconds. "Get in the aircar," she said finally.

Cymbal smirked at her. "You turn into my mother suddenly? You just snap your fingers, and…."

"Get IN the aircar, you are WAY too close to this problem to grasp it, or else your damned Stockholm's syndrome is just too advanced. EITHER WAY, you don't get to make any more decisions today, come ON."

"Still not completely getting how you think you're going to make me."

Bulma produced the taser from her pocket.

Cymbal raised a brow at her. "Nice bluff," he said, "but I literally just died by electrocution a couple of hours ago, and you seemed pretty upset about it. There's no WAY you would –"

Bulma pushed the button, and the taser made an ominous sort of zap sound. She had the satisfaction of seeing Cymbal jump slightly. "Try me, pal," she said flatly.

"Look, I've done a lot of stupid shit this past year," Cymbal said. "Crossed a lot of lines I didn't think I'd cross, but if you think I'm going to let you yank me around by the ear – "

"Fine," Bulma said. "I'll go back on my own. And I'll tell my boyfriend all about how I had to save you from the mad scientist, and how you swooned and everything…"

Cymbal sighed. To Hina, in her language, he said, "Tell your mom I get it. I'm not mad" And then he trudged toward the aircar. "You'd have made a great supervillain, Bulma Briefs!" He called over his shoulder as he got into the back seat.

"Eh," she said, putting the taser back in her belt, "Maybe I'll try that when I hit my forties."


Piccolo was, as it turned out, still standing outside the Son house when he spotted Bulma's air car coming up fast. It was, he noted, travelling at the kind of speed that most people would have judged thoroughly unsafe – so he wasn't completely surprised when it landed badly, skidding across the front yard before coming to an off-center, dirt-splattering halt just shy of knocking over one of the trees.

"Huh," he said.

Both doors of the air car opened at about the same time, and the argument was apparently already in full progress.

"Hey, I have an idea. When the Saiyans show up, we can just have you offer to show them around the planet. Five minutes of your driving, they'll both have heart attacks and…"

"Oh, I'd like to see you do better. I've seen you crash into PLENTY of things without even having to worry about driving a stick shift, you –"

"How did you crash into DIRT with a FLYING. CAR."

Piccolo rubbed two fingers against his temple. The sun was just daring to peek over the tops of the mountains, and he had half a mind to warn it to hit the celestial snooze alarm, as today was already off to a bad start. His headache from yesterday had never fully gone away, and he could feel it threatening to surge right back into the forefront of his brain.

The door to his right opened, and Chichi came out, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. "What's going on out here?" she asked. "It sounded like a train wreck."

"Actually," Piccolo said, "it's two of them."

Chichi blinked at him. "Two tr…" she looked over where Bulma and Cymbal were getting out of the aircar and, from the look of it, fighting over who was going to carry which box of electronics. "Oh," she said. "I thought they were going to Capsule Corp."

"So did I," Piccolo said.

"So this is probably bad news."

"Probably."

"I'll go put the coffee on," Chichi said, walking back into the kitchen.

"We're going to need it," Piccolo said.


There were entirely too many people in her house for its square footage – especially since two of them were over seven feet tall and nearly half that wide. Chichi wondered if Krillen had to constantly worry about being stepped on in this crowd.

Yamcha was, predictably, the last to arrive – he threw the front door open with too much force and said, "What the Hell happened out front? There's an air-car crashed into the – "

"No one asked you!" Bulma yelled from where she was pacing behind the couch.

"Oh, I forgot," Yamcha said, "That's just how you park."

Chichi decided that food was in order, as every single one of her husband's friends (with the exception of Piccolo, who seemed not to eat) became as cranky as snapping turtles with their tails caught in mouse traps if they didn't get enough to eat. She edged toward the kitchen.

"The next person who talks out of turn loses a limb," Piccolo said.

It worked, maybe just because the way he'd said it left no doubt that he meant it. Then, Piccolo turned to Bulma. "All right. What is it that everyone needs to hear?"

Bulma looked significantly at Cymbal, who was leaning against the back of the couch. "Well?" she asked pointedly.

"Oh no," he said. "You're the one who thought this was a good idea. You tell them."

With a sour look that said, clearer than words, that men were useless and she had to do everything herself, Bulma launched into an explanation. As she talked, Chichi could see her own shock and disbelief slowly growing on the faces of, well, everyone – even Piccolo looked shaken, though she doubted anyone else would have noticed, as his version of "shaken" was just a slight paling of the skin and digging his nails a little more into his arms than usual.

Chichi realized that the rice she'd put on was threatening to boil over and moved to turn the heat down, and then she heard everyone behind her shift from stunned silence to all talking at once.

Krillen, high-pitchend and near panic, "No way that's right, that's just some freaky coincidence or guilt leading to nightmares, no one can – "

Bulma, an edge in her voice, "I know what I heard, and that woman was telling me the truth."

Yamcha, loudly threatening to go have a word with the guy RIGHT now and get some real answers.

"Here, I'll watch this," and that was Cymbal beside her, reaching past her to turn the stove down, as he could reach past the oversized pot without needing to levitate or use a stepping stool. "You can go back to what you were doing."

Chichi just stared at him for a moment.

"Yes, I know how to make rice, and no, you shouldn't ask. I can also work a knife and a cutting board if that helps."

Chichi decided, in the spirit of cooperation, that if she could believe that Tambourine could see the future and manipulate their lives like a low-level god, then she could just barely conceive that Cymbal might be capable of helping in the kitchen. She wordlessly slid him a cutting board, a knife, and some vegetables as she went back to preparing the meat.

"Everyone, calm down." And that was Piccolo again, cutting through the nonsense with his usual sharpness. She was profoundly grateful that he was here. "We don't have time to ask why right now. It doesn't matter WHY he did what he did, or IF he did it. What matters RIGHT NOW is what he knows that we don't, and whether we're going to do something about it before the Saiyans get here."

Chichi could hear Cymbal beside her murmur, "Oh boy, here we go."

"I'm going to talk to him," Piccolo said. He shot a warning glare at Cymbal. "And I don't want to hear – " He trailed off. "Are you cooking?" he asked, as if he genuinely found that more disconcerting than the thought of upcoming alien genocide.

"Prepping," Cymbal said. "She's cooking. Can you focus, please?"

Piccolo opened his mouth, closed his mouth, and shook his head, visibly regaining equilibrium. "I don't want to hear any arguments. Tambourine hates me slightly less than he hates you, so he MAY be willing to have a conversation."

Bulma gestured broadly at Piccolo while looking at Cymbal as if to say, HA! I told you!

"I wouldn't," Cymbal said.

"We all know YOU wouldn't," Krillen said wryly, "your conflict resolution skills basically come down to 'can I punch it.' "

"Don't even snap at him, he's right," Bulma said.

"No argument," Cymbal said. "But whatever Tambourine's got to say, we're better off not hearing it. We should do this on our own."

"Explain why," Piccolo said flatly. "Use small words."

"I don't have words," Cymbal said. "Seriously, how are you like this? How do you not get it?"

"If the world's about to end in two days," Piccolo said, "and he knows of a way to stop it, won't he tell us? He's too fond of himself to want to die in a planetary apocalypse."

"Humans talk a lot about the Plan," Cymbal said, after a moment of more-aggressive-than-usual chopping. "You know. Things are meant to be, and that should be reassuring. Except sometimes, you know, the great plan, while it might be for the GREATER good, isn't so good for you. Like, you die, and the world's a better place for it, but that still kind of sucks for you, doesn't it?"

"Nothing about you makes sense lately," Piccolo said.

"If our brother wanted to help us save the world in the best, least selfish way possible, wouldn't he be here?" Cymbal asked. "What's best for him is what he's doing, Piccolo, maybe not what's best for you, me, or them." He gave a tilt of his head to indicate the humans present. "So we can't trust anything he says. If your pet monkey was here, he'd tell you the same."

"Well, given as he's not here – because you killed him, by the way – "

Cymbal stopped cutting. "I what now?"

Piccolo rolled his eyes. "Nevermind. The point is –"

"No, back up," Cymbal said. "Rewind. Don't get me wrong, I was TRYING to kill him, but the last thing I got real clear recollection of was midget boy over there cutting me damn near in half – " he jerked a thumb at Krillen, who, predictably, flinched – "and then flying off while I was holding most of my guts in. When I left, Son Goku was still very much alive. I just assumed he died from his injuries after he stopped being King Kong."

"No," Piccolo said, "there was an energy blast. It came from the direction you flew off in…" Piccolo trailed off.

Cymbal smirked. "Oh, I just bet it did," he said. He held up a chopstick from the drying tray. "About this wide, bright red?"

Piccolo didn't answer, which was all the answer any of them really needed.

"That little shit," Cymbal said. He sounded almost admiring. "If the Saiyans don't kill us, remind me to try to rip his head off, will you? Mind, he can see the future, so there's no way I'll ever catch him unless he wants me to, but I just feel like I owe it to the universe to try at this point."

"But that doesn't make any sense," Chichi said. "If that's what he did – if he killed Goku, then why didn't he do anything to stop us from wishing him back? More than that, he gave Goku a dragonball when he showed up and asked for it…"

"Oh, so that's what happened to it," Cymbal said with a maddening lack of surprise. "Should've figured."

"Stop having a psychotic break," Piccolo said to him flatly, "it's distracting." To the rest of them, he said, "Chichi has a point. What's the point of killing him just to –"

"Isn't your pet monkey getting some kind of over-the-top training in the afterlife?" Cymbal ventured. "I mean, I don't know – I'm just assuming."

Piccolo looked at Cymbal with dawning alarm.

"Maybe the kind of training he needs to beat the Saiyans who are on their way? Come on, Piccolo." Cymbal smiled in a not entirely nice way. "I thought you were supposed to be the smart one."

"I'm not buying any of this," Yamcha said. "And anyway, believe it or not, I'm with him." He jerked his thumb at Cymbal. "We don't need a crystal ball to tell us what to do next. We have aliens to fight. Let's not overcomplicate the situation."

"I think that's the first intelligent thing you've ever said," Cymbal said to Yamcha. "Honored to have been here for it."

"Yeah," Yamcha said, "I still hate you."

"This isn't constructive," Piccolo pointed out with surprising aplomb.

"Do you think Goku needs to know about this?" Krillen asked Piccolo. "I mean, if you can reach him."

Chichi blinked as Cymbal rather abruptly cut himself with the knife he'd been using perfectly skillfully just a second before. He muttered something under his breath that she'd heard Piccolo say before – she assumed profanity of some kind – and snagged a dishtowel to hold to his hand. No one else seemed to notice.

"I don't know," Piccolo said dubiously. "Forewarned is forearmed, but –"

"Are you all right?" she asked Cymbal under her breath – not that she much cared, but politeness insisted she ask, and she really WAS a little worried that he was having a psychotic break of some kind.

"Peachy keen," Cymbal said, still holding the dishtowel to his rapidly-healing hand. He looked awful.

"Wait," Bulma said, "you can communicate with Son in the afterlife?"

"He can," Krillen said with a sharp nod toward Piccolo. "None of the rest of us get it, but – "

"I think I need some air," Cymbal said.

Please don't faint in my kitchen, Chichi thought, opening a window just in case a breeze might help.

"One," Bulma said, "I have some questions for him, as this is clearly nobel prize territory. Two, while he's there, you know, just happening to be in the neighborhood of probably all kinds of powerful god-types, maybe you could suggest to him that a little divine intervention from somewhere might be nice?"

There was a sudden, sharp knock on the door. Everyone turned to look at it at once.

"Now what?" Krillen asked.

Piccolo's face darkened into a real scowl. "That'd be the divine intervention," he said. "Right on cue."

The door opened, and Kami stepped in.