"I just don't understand," Dende said as he sat, half slumped, on the bright white tiles of the Lookout. Piccolo had just finished filling him and Mr. Popo in on the events of yesterday's spar between Acia and Trunks, and now he and Chaiotzu were levitating near him while Mr. Popo stood nearby, hands behind his back, expression as stoic as ever. "Where would a girl like her learn such a dangerous technique? I mean, didn't you say she was a mercenary? They're not exactly known for this kind of thing."
"Where and how she learned to do it is not our concern," Piccolo said. "The important thing is making sure she never does it again, at least while she's here."
"You're right," Dende said. "Who knows how many times she's done it to Trunks already? He's only a child, he won't last long."
"I do not believe that Trunks is in danger," Mr. Popo said suddenly. The other three turned to him; he was now standing near the edge of the Lookout. "He is not normally a meek or submissive child. Any side effects will be noticed quite quickly." Mr. Popo paused, looking down at the world below. "No, I am more concerned about the girl. She is quite young, and is unaware of the danger she is in."
"I suppose that's possible," Dende said. "Whoever taught her to do that is probably a pretty unscrupulous character, I doubt he would have bothered to go over the fine print." He looked up at his fellow Namekian. "So what's our plan here?"
Suddenly, Piccolo noticed that everyone, including Mr. Popo, was looking at him expectantly. He groaned inwardly. Why was he the one always having to come up with ideas? "I don't know," he said, trying to convey his frustration with an expressive glare. "If I had a plan, I'd have told it to you already."
There was a pause as everyone considered the options.
"We could go to Vegeta," Chiaotzu suggested. "He'd scare her straight."
Piccolo shook his head. "She's not so easily intimidated. Besides, Vegeta has no way of knowing if she's doing it or not. The only people who would know are the four of us, and we can't watch her every second of the day."
"So we'd have to convince her to stop doing it. Of her own free will," Dende said. The irony was not lost on him. "We have to talk her into it."
Piccolo considered this. "That seems to be our only option right now." Chiaotzu was looking extremely skeptical.
"Bring her to the Lookout," Mr. Popo said. "Dende will speak with her." Dende straightened himself up.
"Dende?" Piccolo said.
"I can do it," the young Guardian said confidently. "If there's a way to reason with her, I'll find it."
"Alright," Piccolo said. "We'll all meet back here, same time tomorrow. I'll bring the girl."
"Wait, all of us?!" Chiaotzu said, panicking. "Me too?"
"Yes, you too."
"But what do you need me for?!"
"It could help our cause for her to know that more than one person knows her little secret." Dende nodded at this. "Leverage," he said.
"But…"
"Chiaotzu I am not having this discussion with you!" Piccolo's patience had finally broken. "You will be here tomorrow if I have to drag you over myself!"
Chiaotzu huffed. "Oh alright fine! I'll be here, but I won't like it! If anything happens to me, you're the one who's going to have to explain it to Tien! And I hope he kicks your butt!"
Mind control is, in fact, a very dangerous technique, both for the one who practices it and for the one on whom it is practiced. For the victim, the most obvious downside is that he or she is forced to do (or not do) things against their will. However, the effects do not stop there. Repeated exposure to mind control can, over time, erode the victim's natural willpower and self-control, resulting in sudden outbursts of erratic and often dangerous behavior, contrasted with an extreme submissiveness. As their willpower begins to crack, victims will often experience memory loss that stretches over periods of times ranging from hours to days. Eventually the strain becomes so great that victims are driven to insanity, and many commit suicide or are killed as a result of their destructive actions. How long these effects take to manifest themselves varies depending on the person's resistance to mind control. Those with awareness and resistance to the technique have been known to last for months, sometimes years, under repeated mind control attempts before showing symptoms of mental breakdown. But for those with no awareness or resistance in place, especially children and less intelligent creatures, a few times under the effects of the technique can be enough. Rehabilitation, when it is possible, is often long and brutal.
The effects on the practitioner are, in some ways, even worse. Mind control is like a drug – the more you do it, the more you want to do it until it transforms from a desire to a desperate need that must be fulfilled. The mind is no longer content with control over its own self, pushing instead for control over others, the stronger the better. If left unsatisfied, the practitioner experiences severe anxiety and insomnia – some people have been known to collapse and even die from sheer sleep deprivation. When they do satisfy their need to control, their tendencies become more and more violent and they are more likely to cause their victims to injure or even kill themselves and others. Such effects take longer to manifest themselves on mind control practitioners, sometimes years, but once they begin to take hold they are virtually irreversible. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the very possibility of mind control is a well-guarded secret kept among only those species capable of the highest and strongest forms of telepathic communication.
Unfortunately, Acia knew none of this. The Saiyan teen had found mind control the way normal people find loose change in their pockets. It was an experience she would never forget.
Telepathy was a technique she'd learned as a child from Quaorin, a fellow mercenary who hailed from Planet Quelda – he had light blue skin covered in swirling blue and purple tattoos, the mark of a warrior among his people, a pair of broad feathery wings, and feet that he could transform into claws.
On this particular day Quaorin as not around, nor, in fact, was anyone. This was four years ago, back in the good old days when her parents were actually willing to leave her alone for more than two minutes. The Crusher Corps had landed on a trading outpost after completing a particularly brutal mission, and while the rest of the troupe had gone out to purchase supplies and get a few drinks, 13-year-old Acia had elected to stay on the ship and rest. Once everyone was gone, however, she'd found that she couldn't get to sleep, so she'd decided to go out and see if she could catch up with the group. Instead she was distracted by a squirrel-like creature that she followed into a wooded area a few miles away from the ship.
She'd sat on a tree stump, watching a group of squirrels wrestle each other, and found herself wondering, in that way that children of all races do, what squirrels think about. Unlike most children, however, Acia was able to find out.
Finding a squirrel's mind was harder than she'd thought it would be, since their minds were all jumbled together in a series of, to her, unintelligible thoughts. But once she'd managed to latch on to one, it was only a matter of seeing how far she could take it. And Acia took it all the way. Once inside, penetrating the deepest parts of the squirrel's mind was almost too easy, and the teen found that once she'd gotten that far, her thoughts were transmitted not simply as thoughts but as orders, seemingly from the squirrel's own mind but actually from hers.
Acia had a lot of fun with the squirrels that day.
Somehow, Acia instinctively knew that there was something…strange about what she'd been able to do. A little uncomfortable with the new technique, she sought some information about it.
If she'd gone to Bain, the Corps' resident Namekian, she could have saved herself and a lot of Earth dwellers a lot of grief. But Bain was a relatively new addition to the group and he intimidated her, with his constant bored expression and his persistent detachment from the non-fighting activities of the group. So she'd gone to Quaorin instead, tentatively asking if it was possible to use telepathy to access the part of the mind that controlled willpower.
"No," Quaorin had said. "You see, the brain has layers, like an onion."
Anatomy had never been his strong suit.
"The first layer is where the thoughts are that you can access with telepathy. The second layer is the thoughts you can't access. Then the third layer is where the will is, where the mind controls what goes in which layer." Quaorin paused to consider the metaphor, then nodded with satisfaction. "Yes, exactly. So obviously you can't get past the first layer."
"Why not?"
"Because the mind just doesn't let you. It would take too much energy to do that, and even if you could manage it, there wouldn't been anything you could once you got in there."
Acia gave him a skeptical look. "Are you sure about this?"
"Of course I'm sure!" Quaorin said with his usual confidence. "We Queldans are experts in telepathy. If such a thing were possible, we'd definitely know about it."
As it happens, neither of those statements are true.
So Acia continued to indulge in her newfound skill, mostly with animals she encountered on different planets. Later she tried it on children, making them dance and do tricks as she laughed at the chaos she created. It seemed harmless enough; the kids looked confused but happy as they danced like puppets on a string, and since she never saw any of them again, Acia had no way of knowing what kind of side effects resulted from her game. But playtime ended quickly.
About a year after she'd had her fateful encounter with the squirrels, Acia found herself on a planet fighting for her life. The Crusher Corps had been in the middle of decimating the rebel army they'd been hired to put down when they'd been ambushed by another mercenary group, and suddenly the battlefield was consumed by chaos. Caught unawares, Acia found herself fighting one-on-one against one of the terrifying creatures apparently hired by the rebels. The thing was at least twice her size and resembled nothing short of an engorged insect, with four arms, muscular legs, pincers for a mouth and a long tail that came to a sharp, threatening, dagger-like point.
Despite its size, the creature moved with unbelievable speed and before she knew what was happening Acia found herself knocked to the ground, her body bruised and bloodied from the fight. The thing pounced on her, pinning her to the ground as she struggled against him. With a rapid movement, the creature whipped its tail around, aiming its sharp point directly at her face. Desperately, Acia wrapped her own tail around it, squeezing hard and trying to force it back. It was inches from her face now, and Acia's whole body was possessed by a kind of fear she had never felt before. Tears rolled down the side of her face. This thing was so much stronger than her, her parents and troupe were nowhere near her, completely engrossed in their own life-or-death battles, and she knew then that she was going to die.
She was fourteen years old.
But no, she was not going down like this. Desperate to save herself, driven by fear and rage, Acia used the last of her energy to penetrate the creature's mind.
It hadn't seen it coming, so she got in easily enough, but she could tell from the look in its eyes that it could feel her in there and knew exactly what she was trying to do. The two wills battled together with a force and intensity that rivaled anything Acia had ever experienced physically, the creature desperate to prevent her from taking over its willpower. But Acia had the element of surprise on her side and, finally, she forced the creature to turn its weaponized tail in on itself.
As its tail began to curve inwards, away from Acia's face and towards its own chest, the creature had struggled harder against her, fighting her will in its mind with all the energy it could muster, loosening its grip on Acia's arms and legs. But the Saiyan refused to relinquish the control she'd fought so hard for, and she continued to work her mind against its own, her tail never loosening its hold on the weapon she aimed at the thing.
The two lay in the dust on that gods-forsaken planet for what must've been over an hour, locked in a desperate struggle for survival. Acia's heart pounded in unrelenting terror as she fought off the creature's attempts to regain control of its own mind, and the pointed tail moved, inch by agonizing inch, towards her attacker, until finally, finally, the tip pierced its bare chest. She pushed harder, with her tail, with her mind, until the creature's own tail had gone in and through it, its dark blue blood gushing out over her still immobilized form. Dead finally, the creature's body slumped over hers as she crawled out from under it, covered in its warm, sticky blood, the stench overwhelming her, the taste of it in her mouth. Dragging herself away from the body on all fours, she'd vomited, violently and uncontrollably, before passing out.
When she'd come to in a healing tank on her father's ship, she did not know what time it was or even what day. What she did know was that the technique she'd acquired by sheer luck was not a parlor trick to be wasted on animals and children.
No. It was a weapon.