Nothing to say, read on and review. I love the feedback... and don't worry about the point of view changes, I think this will be one of the only chapters that does it this much. Enjoy.
Chapter 8: Spiders
The control room was live with activity. Minions of every colour and body shape moved around, making sure the ship stayed active and on course to its next destination: home base. There were no windows; they did not need windows for all they would see was the long, black abyss and distant stars. In the centre of the room on a lifted platform stood a throne-like chair reaching towards the single story roof. The armrests had the illusion of stone snakes and vines engraved in the metallic substance, winding towards the floor and a few slithering upwards along the headrest. The workers stayed a safe distance away from this structure as not to anger the creature sitting on it by venturing too close.
Frieza sat above his slaves, not even watching as they worked. If one tried to sabotage the space journey, they would be launched into the vacuum, and that was the easy punishment. He tapped his lizard-like white foot on the foot stand boredly, his clawed hand of the same nature resting against the slick side of his face. Aside from the running of the control panel and small, random orders spoken across the room, the atmosphere was dead silent, fear thick in the air. And Frieza liked it that way.
Suddenly Frieza, with a slight rasp to his voice, boomed out, "Where are my prisoners?"
After the workers had gotten over their shock (many had jumped), Burter stepped forward. "They've been placed in Cell 148. Would you like us to retrieve them, my lord?" he asked with a slight bow, his tall form perfectly tense.
"Yes," he replied, "Bring them to my centre room. I'd like to introduce myself." Frieza let out a small chuckle, sending shivers down Burter's back. The blue man bowed again and left the room, Jeice following closely behind.
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Vegeta and Chester sat opposite each other, Chester examining his burn marks, Vegeta playing with a small energy ball in his hands. They had long since broken out of the cuffs as Vegeta realized he could deactivate them with his own energy. The prison guards apparently didn't think he could use it yet. Chester's bright face suddenly looked up to Vegeta's. "What if you..."
"We can't burst through the door or walls, idiot. You don't think they would let an explosion go unnoticed?" Vegeta interrupted like the question had already been asked many times, and continued bouncing the ball between his hands. Chester's face fell and he resumed examining his hands. He decided to take a new approach to escape.
"Well I don't see you coming up with any great ideas, Veg." Vegeta began to glare at his friend and disintegrated the ball in his hands. Chester, who started to play with his fingernails, ignored the look he was receiving. "Do you expect one to magically pop into your head, Veggie?" Chester asked, staring at Vegeta directly in the eyes.
Vegeta lowly growled at the nickname. "You aren't the only one with a problem being here, Chester. Maybe if you decided to move a bit faster back on Earth we wouldn't be here," he said with venom in his voice.
Chester's face fell slightly at the mention of Earth, but he stuck to his hard demeanour. "Well we didn't have to stop off at your girlfriend's house. Actually we did, BUT you two didn't need to be alone. Who knows what you two were doing in that room. Were you even hacking into the system, or made all that up on the spot?"
Throughout Chester's accusations, Vegeta grew more and more angry. By the end he had launched himself across the four feet between them and began to wrestle the other boy. Chester didn't expect Vegeta to actually start attacking him and yelped as Vegeta's hands snaked around his neck. Chester slammed down on Vegeta's elbows which released the grip on his neck, and punched the dark-haired boy on his already tender cheek. The two began wrestling, bouncing around the small space. Chester started pounding on the door with his free hand and soon enough a guard opened the door to separate the two. Chester yelled, "Blast him, Veg!"
Vegeta looked up at the intruder and obeyed Chester's order. The being cried out and fell back against the wall, clutching his burnt face. Vegeta resumed beating Chester after blasting the man. The two rolled into the hallways, still fighting.
"What are you doing!" Chester screamed as he struggled. "Go!" Vegeta looked up again and noticed the extra space. He quickly got up with Chester following him and started to run down the hallway. The scenery was all the same, metallic door after metallic door, so the duo didn't know of they were going the right way.
"We have to get out of this hallway. I think it's the main one," Chester said. He noticed the doors had hand recognition keypads and were named above the pad, but were written in the alien's language. He stopped suddenly in front of a door on the inner curve and asked Vegeta, "Can you read these?"
Vegeta spun on Chester and pinned him against the wall. "Was getting me pissed off you big plan to escape?" he said, lifting the boy slightly off the floor.
Chester choked a bit and replied, "Kind of. I was sort of winging it." Vegeta glared at the blond and let him fall on the floor with a small thump. He resumed walking down the hallway.
"By the way, Chester, that's a storage closet."
Chester whispered and embarrassed "Oh," and followed Vegeta's strides. Vegeta was now paying attention to the symbols written above the access panels, trying to decipher something that could help them escape. Many were other cells like their own, others were control rooms, but finally a door labeled 'stairwell' was discovered. "Now to test these access pads," Vegeta muttered, placing his hand on the vague outline, obviously intended for many hand sizes and shapes. The door opened upwards as Chester stepped beside Vegeta, revealing a short stairwell with another door on the other side.
"Ah, good job, Veggie," Chester said as he walked passed the boy and began to climb the stairway. The door on the other side slowly began to open, revealing feet from behind the door. Vegeta's eyes widened as he recognized the shapes and pulled Chester back on to their floor, his hand covering Chester's mouth. He pulled the blond further down the hallway, muffling Chester's cries of protest. Vegeta quickly found a room labeled 'pod storage', which he opened quickly and hid against the wall, all the while listening to the two aliens descend the stairs and make their way to Vegeta and Chester's cell.
As Vegeta noticed they were far enough away, he silently crept out of the room to retry the stairwell. "Uh, Vegeta?" Chester's voice from the room echoed.
Vegeta turned around and re-entered the now lit room, this time taking in what the pod storage actual was. He froze in the doorway and looked down the rows of miniature space ships.
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Jeice and Burter turned the corner silently, their feet marching in step. In the distance they began to hear moans of pain which caused the pair to quicken their pace. Soon the injured prison guard came into view, lying on the floor with Vegeta and Chester's cell door wide open. Jeice let out a groan of frustration then disintegrated the guard with his own energy for letting the two escape. He motioned for Burter to continue down the hallway and search, and watched as Burter disappeared from sight, moving so quickly Jeice couldn't even follow his movements. Jeice, on the other hand, spun around and ran back in the opposite direction.
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Vegeta sat in one of the pods with the window portion of the ship open, resting on the ground, trying to find the power button. "Maybe it's voice activated," Chester suggested while leaning on the top of the dome.
"Turn on, you piece of shit," Vegeta muttered still fiddling with the buttons.
Chester sighed and said, "You have to be nice to it, Veg." An onyx-eyed glare caused Chester to turn to another ship and open it with the latch they had found beside the door. He sat inside the compact pod and was thankful for the cushioned seat. To the left of his head, Chester noticed a mechanical box with a coloured piece of glass jutting out of the side, intended to stretch over the user's eye. On a humanoid at least. Chester picked the object off its holder and examined it. "This could be useful," he thought aloud.
A sudden humming sound and Vegeta cursing loudly caused Chester to jump forward and look over to Vegeta's ship. With the door slowly closing and the lights on the control board flashing, Vegeta yelled to the blonde, "The green button with the R-shape on it is power!" The door hissed as it closed and began to hover off the ground while Vegeta leaned back into the seat. He watched the buttons flicker one last time before stopping to light up some of the board. Vegeta saw the scouter placed on its holder, but the sudden jolt caused him to grip the armrests instead. "This is going to be interesting," he said.
Chester quickly located and pressed the power button, and sat back as his ship mimicked Vegeta's.
A small latch in the roof opened, wide enough for the two ships to launch, Vegeta's ship shot through the hole and into space. As Chester felt his ship lift and relocate to follow, he looked out the porthole to see Jeice standing in the doorway shouting at him, though he could only see the orange man's mouth move. Chester quickly flipped the man off before he too launched into the black abyss, the door closing behind them.
Chester noticed his ship was following Vegeta's through the vast blackness, which was a relief. A thought crossed the duo's mind at the same time: Where are we going now?
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Jeice watched the two pods launch with panic running through his veins like liquid nitrogen had been injected. He had just watched the prisoners escape, doing nothing to stop them. Please say Frieza won't see it that way, he thought, still standing in the doorway.
"Who had the authorization to launch?!" Frieza's voice boomed over the intercom, anger evident.
Jeice gulped. "That was uh, the Saiyan and his, um.. friend..." he said uncertainly, waiting for the backlash. Burter zoomed in beside Jeice, quickly moving to the room after hearing the pods take off, and paranoia filled the room from their superior's tone.
Frieza's voice had changed to deathly calm with a hint of rage, "Get up here. Now." The pair muttered "Yes sir," then slowly obliged to the order.
The control room was quieter than the last time Jeice and Burter had left it in. Frieza stood in the center of the room, back facing the door with his arms crossed behind him. His tail lashed at the air around it; a positive sign that he was extremely pissed. The pair stood a few feet away from the thick whip, straight as a column and silently waiting.
Frieza cut through the silence with ease, "Do you know why I wanted the Prince to be brought in?" Without turning around or waiting for an answer, as he knew he wouldn't get one, Frieza slowly continued, "I knew he was still missing and living, and his mood swings would cause some notable damage on the planet he was on. Do you remember how every once in a while your translation chips get reformatted? Since he's been missing for almost 13 years, his hasn't, causing him to be quite violent... and uncontrollable."
Frieza's tail slowed it's movements to a slight twitch. Jeice, misinterpreting this movement as Frieza calming down, stepped forward. "Sir, its been known that you wanted to use the Saiyan to become another assassin, but if he's so uncontrollable how do you plan on that happening?" he asked with a slight hunch in his shoulders.
Swiftly the tail lashed to motion again, hitting Jeice across the face with crimson liquid covering both the tail and Jeice's face. Jeice stumbled back and clutched the open wound on his cheek. Frieza turned to face the pair, causing Burter to tense up even more with his arms straight at his sides, not moving to help his comrade. "Find the Saiyan. Alive," he exclaimed with another lash of his tail. Jeice and Burter bowed and ran out of the control room.
"He'll be lucky if he gets that thing back alive," Jeice muttered as he wiped the blood streaming down his face. Burter grunted to respond and the pair made their way to the radio room, intending on getting back-up to track down Vegeta and Chester.
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The pods shook as they entered the atmosphere, leaving a trail of fire from the speed. The domes crashed into the ground with a force causing craters to form, though the pods were not dented or even scratched. The occupants groaned from the crash though, not used at all to the forced landing. The screens in front of them slowly flashed to reveal diagnostics on the atmosphere, showing a breathable amount of oxygen and temperatures and gravity very similar to their home planet. Chester couldn't read these symbols even if he was conscious, the impact knocking him out. Vegeta slowly opened the pod door and climbed out into the sunlit crater. He groaned slightly and began to walk up the slope.
Feeling the need to remove the thin clothing he was wearing from the heat, as it was the end of summer when they left the Earth and here it felt like a heat wave passing through, Vegeta finally stood at the mouth of his pod's crater and stared at the vast jungle beyond the clearing before him. Ghost-like figures suddenly filled his vision and acted out a scene in front of him. In the middle of the gathering, a man stood pointing and talking to the men around him though Vegeta heard nothing. They wore similar outfits to the ones in the alien's base, but were all human aside from the large monkey tails waving from their backsides. Vegeta shot the men walking by him a confused look, and as quickly as the apparitions appeared his vision blurred and they disappeared. Vegeta looked in a daze to the center of the men to see his father, almost a mirror image of himself but older, looking at him, then turning away to join the other dissipating forms.
Vegeta slowly blinked and rubbed his eyes to find the jungle and clearing empty, not even wind blowing though. Staring through the hanging vines and branches in the distance, he whispered, "I've been here before."