Chapter Fifteen: Cerebro

Chapter Notes: -

The girl's dark hair flowed like silk along with the wind. She walked proudly, confidently, smiling coolly at people she met along the way. She had a goal. A purpose - and she was getting paid good money for it, therefore, she was not nervous. As long as it involved money, she was a professional.

Walking right up to the front desk, she asked one of the night-shift nurses, "I'm looking for a Mister Lao."

Satan City General Hospital being situated in Satan City where the culture leaned more towards the Western influence did not receive many patients with Eastern names, therefore, the girl was lucky since she didn't know Mr. Lao's full name.

After some procedures where the girl had to prove her identity, the nurse gave her a sweet smile and gave her the information that she needed.

"You're such a dear to be visiting someone unrelated to you. Ahh, it must be nice to live in a village where the community is tight-knit," the nurse commented.

Returning back the smile, the girl called Sherry bowed her head slightly in a gesture of politeness before she headed off to complete her mission.

The cold, chilly air blew gently on Videl Satan's face. Waking up and rubbing the sleep of her eyes, she realised that she was in an unfamiliar bed. She tried stretching her arms out and relax her muscles but a sharp pain shot across her whole body like an electric shock.

Curling up into a ball, trying to relieve the pain, she whimpered.

There was the audible sound of shuffling and she realised that she wasn't alone in the strange room.

Erasa had woken up for a start. She had been worried sick when she saw her best friend in pain but when Bulma came by to check on Videl, she felt reassured knowing that the raven-haired girl would be okay. Covering her mouth, worried about having morning breath, she greeted Videl cheerfully, "Morning, sleepyhead. Had a good sleep?"

Still disorientated from the events last night, Videl wondered, "Morning, Erasa. What am I doing here?"

Now, Bulma had already warned Erasa of Videl being disorientated for a bit, so she simply said, "Don't worry. You'll remember everything soon," though she herself didn't know exactly what happened and was eager to find out.

Forcing herself, her muscles screaming in pain at her to continue to lie down on the bed, Videl sat upright and slowly recounted the events that happened the other night. Someone had sent her a red access card and there was a room labelled G.R.. For now, that was all that she could remember. Shrugging her shoulders and telling herself that it will all come back eventually, she asked Erasa if she could use her shower to which Erasa said, "Sure," without hesitation.

As soon as the hot water ran, Videl's aching muscles relaxed and felt soothed slightly. She grabbed the bottle of shampoo and poured a generous dollop of it on her palm and started applying it on her hair. Then, she stopped as she noticed something.

"What the-?"

Her hair had been cut short! Suddenly, a bit more of the events last night flooded her memories and she remembered how Bulma's husband started badmouthing her and her father and how Gohan went to her aid.

"How did he cut my hair? I'm pretty sure he didn't have a pair of scissors with him at that time. Strange."

When she had finished showering, she wiped the fog that had formed on the mirror clear and spent no longer than ten seconds looking at her new hairstyle. She wasn't a vain woman and besides, she felt that she didn't have to impress anybody. Especially not guys.

"Hm, it's not bad," she commented, seeing that her hair was now a fairly decent bob cut. "Alright, let's go and ask Gohan about what happened the other night," she said, talking to her own reflection.

Breakfast was taking place by the time Videl and Erasa made their way down from Erasa's room. Videl should have been annoyed that they were late because Erasa insisted on choosing a good outfit and putting on a light touch of makeup, but she wasn't. Erasa was her best friend after all. She smiled. She could never get mad at the blonde beauty whose personality always lifted her spirits up when she was down.

When they finally reached the dining hall, Videl and Erasa sat down at their usual place beside Gohan which made the other males present very envious indeed. However, they all looked at each other, their eyes sending unspoken, hidden messages to one another. Last night, they had all decided to call on a group meeting.

They discussed about how it was unacceptable for Gohan to be hogging up all the most famous girls in Orange Star High School for himself and how it was even more unacceptable that he was a nerd. Sure, there was that time at the pool where they discovered that he was muscular, but they all concluded that it was more than likely that Gohan was using steroids to look buff so that he could gain a monopoly of the girls.

They also discussed the matter of how to make him pay for his (in their words) heinous crimes of hogging all the females. One of them suggested that they refrain from executing their plan until after the field trip seeing that Gohan seemed to be related to the Briefs.

However, another one of them looked at the guy and countered that this was perhaps the best opportunity that they will have. From his point of view, if they could humiliate Gohan in front of Bulma Briefs, it would be the ideal revenge. They all weighed down their options and, in the end, they finally agreed that there was no chance better than this to humiliate the spiky haired teen.

Everyone looked at the schedule that they were given and saw only one thing scheduled for the whole day.

Unlike what Bulma had originally written, the information sheet handed out to the rest of the teens read, "Day Two: Cerebro"

"What in the world is Cerebro?" Videl asked, looking at Gohan whom she knew knew Bulma Briefs personally.

Gohan simply shrugged his shoulders to convey the message that he didn't know. "I don't know, Videl. I come here often, but mostly to help Bulma with her technological designs."

Videl could only grumble in suspicion, though Gohan seriously didn't know.

The class was ushered by Ms. Secretary down to the basement and, as they passed by the corridors, Videl had flashbacks of the events last night. She had forgotten to ask Gohan about the incident during breakfast because she was too focused in figuring out what "Cerebro" was, but she and the rest of the class didn't have to wonder for long.

They entered a spacious room that had more than enough space to fit all of them in. Ms. Secretary herself had no idea of what was beyond here, but she received a white access card that morning with a note that told her to bring the students there.

She followed the instructions faithfully, careful not to miss out any of the steps. She found out the hard way what happens when you were complacent in Capsule Corporation. She didn't know that the note was type written out by Trunks, but it was written out so formally, the difference so subtle that she hardly noticed anyway.

In fact, Cerebro was Trunks' and Vegeta's personal playground. Tired of Vegeta breaking the Gravity Room constantly as well as Trunks playing pranks on everyone in Capsule Corporation whenever he could, Bulma decided to create Cerebro, an underground playground made with re-enforced Saiyan Steel.

Though it was a playground for the Saiyans, it was in fact, incorrect to call it that. The room was spacious and filled with various deadly looking machines and paraphernalia that Bulma replicated from Vegeta's description of the "toys" that he used to play with when he was a child so, although it was called a playground, it was more like an obstacle course of death.

The spacious room that the students entered descended like an elevator to an even deeper underground place, taking them to a large futuristic room filled with dangerous looking machinery. The first thing that Gohan thought when he entered the room was "Wow, I've never even heard of this room before!"

The Saiyan part of him rejoiced to see such a place, but his rationale side sensed that something was off. This place was far too dangerous for his classmates to be in and he knew that Bulma knew this. He then deducted that Trunks had something to do with orchestrating this event and he made a mental note to reprimand the boy later (though, his reprimanding is nothing more than a short lecture - he was too nice to do anything more than that to someone that he considered as extended family). For now, he concentrated on trying to get everyone out of this place immediately.

"Everyone!" he addressed his classmates with urgency in his voice. "I need you to listen to me."

Ms. Secretary, Videl and Erasa could see that he meant business but before Gohan could continue, a group of teenage males from his class started something.

Folding his arms, the ring leader of the gang argued sarcastically, "And why should we listen to you, nerd?"

Him and his cronies ganged up on Gohan, forming a circle around him. They knew that this the time had come to "make Gohan pay", but before they could go any further, a clear mechanical voice rang out across the room.

"Room scan complete. Members of the Briefs Family not detected. Initiating anti-intruder sequence."

Just then, all the machines in the room came to life and started aiming at the students.

Somewhere in his room, Trunks grinned mischievously.

"Heh heh. Alright! Time to see some action!"

He was delighted to finally see something going on instead of just watching the boring things teens do after they, according to him, invaded his house (though it was his idea anyway to invite them over).

He had prepared the room in advance and put all the settings of the machines down so that none of the students will get hurt. However, he knew that none of the students knew this and he was greatly enjoying the panic on everyone - including Gohan's - faces when the dangerous looking laser guns and spiked traps (which he replaced with rubber in advance) started chasing everyone around, shooting everything on sight.

However, he didn't expect one thing. One of the panicked students thought that he was smart by pulling the plugs. This was a terrible move as the systems detect a fault in the system and the machines and their settings go back to factory mode. In other words, all the safety settings that he set-up in advance were all over-ridden as the machines' settings were put back to default.

He could only utter two words that were enough to express everything.

"Uh oh."

End of Chapter Fifteen

To be continued...

(A/N: Hey guys, I've received private messages on why I haven't been active recently. I've replied to these messages and explained what was going on but I feel that it's too long to explain here. In any case, this week's chapter is a short one just to get my creative juices flowing again until next week when I'll be back with a full force of over 9000! As a side note, please do check out my other story "Romance Dawn" for One Piece. I'd really appreciate the input. ^-^)