Chapter Seven
Pan extended her hands. She cleared her mind. She drew a deep breath.
Deep inside her there resided a well of conviction, void of conflict and contradiction, the place where Pan was her purest self. She focused every thread of her immense strength, mental and physical, on reaching inward and drawing from that well. It flooded her body, her limbs, her head. She could even feel it in her hair as it flickered from black to gold.
Now let's see how long I can stay this way without anything… unfortunate… happening, she thought.
At the outset, Pan only walked, continuing to her destination as if she hadn't transformed. It was a good thing she asked for a map, and maybe she should have requested a compass to go with it, because Ketchyn really was paper-flat, nothing like Mount Paozu. There were precious few landmarks to navigate by. The one she'd picked was a copse of trees on the horizon.
Two, three minutes. Everything remained quiet.
Maybe her little problem had finally gone away.
Pan had just decided to test her luck and hover a space above the ground when a shriek ripped from the copse of trees. Not bothering to land, Pan flew the remaining distance, burning through the snow with a trail of golden energy like a comet.
Now that she'd landed, she found there was much more to the copse than she'd been able to see from the road. A kaleidoscope of butterflies took to the air as she landed. A spring trickled from deep in the woods to a lake so big Pan couldn't see the far shore. She could see, however, the water of the near shore frothing with the gyrations of a squid the size of a bus.
In its clutches was a baby tyrannosaurus about the size of a large dog. The tiny reptile thrashed and dug its feet into the dirt, but it only broke off in clods as the squid dragged it closer and closer to the water… and its waiting beak.
Pan would have found this tragic under any circumstances, but as a Super Saiyan overwhelmed with Super Saiyan temper, it was outright intolerable.
She had to think fast. She couldn't pull the baby free; those tentacles were ringed with blades that would peel its scaly hide right off. Instead, she rocketed at the tentacles, severing all four with one open-handed strike. The tyrannosaurus, pulling for its life, yanked so hard it tumbled head-over-heels across the snowy grass. The squid reared, thrashing the water to a red boil.
As Pan faced it, four new tentacles sprouted and flew at her like arrows.
She didn't need to dodge. Her power surged. She blocked right, knocking all four aside at once. A sucker cut her arm. She punched the squid right above its beak, between its eyes.
A rumble like thunder issued from below.
Oh, no.
Both Pan and the confused squid stopped as the rumble became a vibration they could all feel. The tyrannosaurus slipped. The ground began to shake.
As quickly as she could, Pan depowered. Her golden hair faded to black. The light left her eyes.
No sooner did the glow fade than the quaking stopped.
Pan wiped her forehead. "Whew!"
The squid, however, saw an opportunity. Maybe it sensed its prey's power had dropped, or maybe it simply thought she wasn't paying attention, but it rose out of the lake as one gelatinous mass, hurtling at her.
Far from helpless, Pan linked her fingers and bump-passed the squid as if it were a volleyball. It sailed to the center of the lake and landed with a cannonball splash.
This time, it didn't come back for another try.
Pan saw the ground littered with cracks. The damage wasn't as bad as it could have been, or as it had been before, but still…
"I guess my little problem did not go away," She said.
The tyrannosaurus sat upright with both feet out, gnawing the tentacles that still wrapped its body. Pan flew to it and gently unwound one. Fortunately, severing it had released it so she was able to remove it without much trouble. The skin beneath wasn't too damaged, either; the suckers hadn't made much headway through the lizard's tough hide. She saw a few shallow scrapes and only a little blood.
That could be trouble enough if the squid was poison. How would she tell? Wait, of course; it had grazed her, and she wasn't feeling any burning or numbness. The wound wasn't turning red.
"You look okay to me, little guy," Pan said.
It roared a high-pitched baby roar, opening its pink mouth wide, and hopped to its feet.
"Still, we ought to wash that blood off," She said. "And I don't want to risk getting the water from the lake."
Nearby, the spring water trickled.
"That's probably safer," She said.
Hoping the lizard would follow, Pan took a wide step.
Her foot came down on a severed tentacle with a squish. It wasn't a light squish, either. It was a blurpy rude sound like a whoopee cushion.
Pan stared at the tentacle. It twitched. She could feel her face getting blue.
The tyrannosaurus nudged the tentacle with its nose. On the other hand…
Pan scooped up that tentacle, then gathered the other three she'd cut off. "You wanted calamari for lunch, right?"
ooo
That was how Pan wound up sitting cross-legged beside a rocky spring, stoking a small campfire and munching squid. She'd found an animal that looked like a cross between a squirrel and a crab gnawing on large red nuts that reminded her of tulips and decided that meant they were edible, so she'd picked an armful, some to eat now, some for later. They tasted like potatoes.
The tyrannosaurus wasn't interested in them. He just wanted the fish. Pan tossed another chunk into his mouth and he gulped it down.
Psst, she thought. Bonpara, are you guys safe yet?
The lull made her nervous.
When she got an answer, it was from Sonpara. We ducked into a pit on an asteroid and shut everything down. It isn't comfortable for us, but it worked; they passed by. The ship isn't gone yet, so we don't want to fire back up, but we're confident they didn't spot us. If they are following us, maybe they think we used warp drive, because they aren't searching or changing course.
Can you see what kind of ship it is? Pan asked.
It's a nondescript little cruiser, the kind the Galactic Patrol used to use before they switched to the saucers. It's not just missing its ID signature, it's been scrubbed of anything that could qualify as an identifying mark, Sonpara thought.
What's all that mean? Pan asked.
It means they're definitely up to no good, whether it's got anything to do with us or not. They might just be smugglers or escapees. Bonpara and Donpara are occupied maintaining the ship, so that leaves me.
But you're all safe?
For now, Sonpara thought.
I'll leave you alone, then, so I'm not in your way. Pan broke the connection.
Two saber-cats wandered up to the spring. One slumped on the stone and dunked its paw into the water, licking it from its claws. The tyrannosaurus paid them no mind; maybe this had been where it was going when the squid attacked it. Drinking holes and burrows found predators and prey interacting with comically good manners.
Pan sloughed out of her backpack, rummaging for her map, when the dinosaur snatched it between his jaws and danced into the trees.
"Hey! I need that. Come on, this is no time to play."
She chased it. It darted away from her.
"I'm serious," Pan said.
The tyrannosaurus dropped the backpack and circled it. Even when Pan had pulled it back over her shoulders, the dinosaur continued to run circles around the trees.
"You want me to follow you?" Pan asked.
The tyrannosaurus stopped dawdling and vanished into the trees. She guessed that was a yes.
Deep in the copse, there lay a mound of stones. Beyond the stones, a pit. Pan approached the chasm and found it was actually a sinkhole, and a recent one. A combination of damp, cold, and some magnificent weight had torn the ground and poured dirt into the hollow chamber of an underground cavern system below.
A muffled roar tore out of the hole, and Pan knew exactly what straw had broken this hidden cave's back.
"That's your mom down there, isn't it?" Pan asked the dinosaur.
Pan formed a small ball of energy for light and jumped into the hole.
Not only was she right, the situation was worse than she'd thought. Ruts in the mud led her along the adult tyrannosaurus's path of descent, and at the end of it lay the lizard, breathing hard beneath an avalanche of rocks and dirt. The mud had solidified and frozen, trapping the creature in place. She struggled as Pan approached.
That was a bad situation. The ground was unstable as it was. Pan couldn't just blast the dinosaur out; she remembered the Cold family catacombs, and if this was anywhere near as deep and winding as they were, she might bring the whole copse down. Pulling the tyrannosaurus free might not be safe, either. The ceiling might not survive it, and then they'd both end up buried.
At least this was one of the rare occasions Pan's curse had its uses. She tapped her Super Saiyan power again, not long enough to bring more tremors, but a few seconds. It was all she needed to feel out the cavern. Huh, that was odd. The stones that held the walls looked natural, but they were molded brick, painstakingly disguised as the real thing. The floor behind the dinosaur, too; in her current state, Pan could feel the difference in the material. Why go to the trouble to do that, and then to bury it further? She didn't have time to wonder. There. To the upper right of the cavern. A weak spot where the stone cracked. If she propped that up, she should be able to safely rescue the tyrannosaurus.
Pan crawled back out of the hole. She punched a tree. She pulled up a few small boulders. She carried them down into the dark.
The tyrannosaurus didn't like the looks of that and snapped. Pan patted her side, hoping that would calm her. Once she was still again, Pan pushed the tree into the dirt, propping up the cavern ceiling. She fortified the tree with the boulders. That should keep.
"All right," Pan said. "One, two, three!"
Pan pulled. The dinosaur got the idea and pushed, digging into the ground. She couldn't keep up, though, and slumped, panting.
"Just a bit more," Pan said. "Maybe if I…"
The dinosaur had managed to dislodge enough to leave a crack between Pan's hasty support and her body. Pan might have better luck pushing her from behind. Pan squeezed through it.
It was bottom-of-the-ocean dark behind the tyrannosaurus. Pan had to make another, bigger ball of light, and not even that could reach the walls. It would be enough, though. Flying just above the dinosaur's tail, she flattened her hands on its hide.
"Again," She said. "One, two, three!"
Pan shoved, and the tyrannosaurus clawed, and with a pop the dinosaur burst free.
"Yes!"
The support shuddered and held.
The dinosaur was ragged and exhausted, but that didn't stop her. She clawed up the incline, slid back, and climbed again until it burst over the lip of the hole, to her child. The baby nuzzled its mother, letting out a sound that sounded for all the world like purring.
"Aww," Pan said.
Then the false ground beneath her crumbled.
The whole thing happened so fast, she didn't have time to fly, so she fell the whole way and crashed into what felt like gravel, if gravel were sharpened. She landed flat on her back, arms out, and as she sat up she could feel bits of… stone? Wood?... falling off her. She dusted the biggest chunks away.
Ouch. She'd forgotten about the floor.
The opening above glared with yellow light. Was it that late already? At least getting out of the pit would be a simple matter of flying. She'd better make more light, though, so she could see where she was flying.
Pan spun a third ball of light and it illuminated a skeleton slumped against the wall beside her, mouth hanging open. Cobwebs hung thick between its fangs. A tarantula crawled out of one eye socket.
Pan screamed. It echoed.
There wasn't just the one. What she'd fallen into, what she'd thought was gravel, it was more skeletons; a lot more, at least a hundred. Elongated skulls, tails coiled into spirals, outstretched fingers, aged brittle and weathered by time and insects. They weren't laid out on slabs or inside vaults, merely tossed into the chamber as if the only concern in laying them to rest had been minimizing the space it took.
These bodies hadn't been buried. They'd been hidden. Tucked away beneath a forest where only wild animals roamed and separated from even that company by smoothed dirt and fake rock.
Pan had to get out of there, but the thought of powering up to fly and blasting these people- whoever they'd been- to even smaller bits revolted her.
Standing as carefully as she was able, Pan jumped at the cavern wall, vaulted, and took off mid-air.
The first thing she did when she reached the top was pile dirt over the opening. She could remember where this was if she had to, but for now, there was no sense exposing the bodies to the elements on top of everything else.
Pan emerged from the hole with muddy hands and a dazed expression. The baby tyrannosaurus nudged her, and then so did his mother. She tossed them the rest of the squid. Her mind remained at the bottom of that pit.
One look at the yellow sky reminded her the Ketchian day was only a few hours away from being half-over, and she had a lot of ground to cover before nightfall. She'd better get back to walking if she wanted to be safely behind doors before the Indigo Wave crested.
Pan left the copse and its inhabitants, seen and unseen, behind.
But she didn't think she'd ever be able to forget them.
ooo
Carved from the bank of a river prone to equal parts flooding and drying up, the town of Blendarr spent its first few years struggling just to keep alive. The arrival of the king and his hunting parties had, for a time, bloated it with opulent new buildings bearing the kind of acoustics designed to muffle screams. After King Flare's death it had contracted once more, empty mansions and stores torn down to make room for smaller homes that nevertheless managed to look ancient and a mill that creaked even in still air. There it stayed, a picture of timid and uneasy quiet.
That same kind of quiet gathered under a willow just outside town. Pan curled against its bark and napped fitfully. Sweat beaded on her face. She made no sound, but there was no mistaking; she was having a nightmare.
The man who approached her could be forgiven for thinking she needed someone to wake her, and that doing so would be difficult, but he stopped cold when she turned her head, opened her eyes, and fixed him with a perfectly alert glare.
Some part of her was still dreaming, because she said, "You aren't my brother."
He tucked his hand behind his tendril-head. "That I'm not, miss. Was he supposed to meet you here?"
Pan blinked. The Sutova boy looked about her age. His smock and shorts were covered with washed-out paint stains, and in spite of the snow-dusted ground, his feet were bare.
"No, I, uh…" The truth was, Pan had decided she wouldn't feel safe sleeping while the Vile Wave crested and, having reached town with time to spare, decided to get as much as she could before the Indigo Wave hit. The sky was still blue. She'd hoped for another hour, but this would have to do. "I was on my way to visit the ruins, and I thought I'd catch a nap first. I'm not trespassing, am I?"
"Not at all," He said. "I just came here to work."
Pan saw what he meant by work. A wooden easel now sat beside the willow, blocking her view of the shanties and the mill. "You're a painter. Can I see?"
He laughed. "I haven't started yet. There's nothing to see but a blank canvas. Normally, I paint the ruins, but I was drawn here tonight. Good thing, too. You looked like you needed someone to interrupt that nightmare."
"Tell me about it," Pan said. "There are nights I think dreaming should be illegal."
"But then you'd never have good dreams. Besides, I don't think there's any enforcing a law like that." He bent over his paint kit and clicked it open. Pan tried to duck under his arm to see what he was doing in there, but he only pulled out a paintbrush. "I know. Here are some paints. Take control of your nightmare. Trap it on the canvas, and it can't get you out here."
"Look, I don't want you to think I'm selling myself short, here," Pan said. "But there are things I really suck at, and art is one of them."
He shoved the brush into her hand. "You don't have to think about it. Just feel what the canvas is telling you."
Pan was sure the canvas was telling her to hand off the brush to someone who knew what they were doing, because that's what she'd be saying if she were the canvas. Still, she dunked the brush in paint. She'd seen painters on TV and Gramps Hercule had dated one once, so Pan tried to do what they did. Mostly this meant she made a lot of serious faces and chopped the brush across the canvas in broad strokes, pausing occasionally to slather it with more paint, and once she formed an L with her fingers. She had no idea what that was supposed to accomplish, but artists always did it.
She stood back to admire her handiwork.
Her handiwork amounted to a brush-stroked black canvas with a tiny blue dot in the upper left-hand corner.
The painter gaped at it. "That's…"
Pan was about to snap she'd told him she was no good.
"Minimalist brilliance! It must go into my gallery. But first, you have to sign it so everyone knows what master created it."
She wasn't sure he was looking at the same thing she was, but all the same, she wrote 'Pan' in the lower right-hand corner (so it wouldn't unbalance her minimalistically brilliant dot).
"Excellent, excellent," He said. "By the way, would you like to come to the gallery before you visit the ruins? I can show you where I will hang this."
The boy didn't look strong and wasn't registering much battle power, but Pan knew neither meant anything. Even so, a gallery was a public enough place, and looking at pictures might take her mind off her bad dream.
"I'd like to," Pan said. "But first, when you sign paintings, what do you write?"
"Flint," The boy said. "Nice to meet you, Pan."
"Nice to meet you, Flint."
The gallery was one of the few buildings from Blendarr's expansion that still stood, although it stood in desperate need of repair. It bone-pillars showed cracks highlighted in grime, the walls warped and needed painting. It was cozy, though, and didn't have that haunted house look old buildings were prone to developing. A few visitors milled around the porch, chatting.
Inside, the walls were covered with paintings. Most of them didn't make much sense to Pan. She liked them anyway, though. The blotches and shapes piled thick in angry dark colors made her think of the graffiti in the train station, and she liked looking at that even if she couldn't always read it. She thought some of the pictures were of people, although they were also blotches and shapes so maybe it was just her mind filling in blanks. It was in a small blank patch of wall at the end of the hall where Flint hung her picture, next to what she thought was a painting of the road outside but turned out actually be the road outside through a small rectangular window.
"Here we are," Flint said. "May your nightmare be too happy in its new home to bother you again."
"I'll try to dream of some of these prettier paintings instead," Pan said. "But not tonight."
Flint said, "Because you're going to the ruins of the hunting lodge, right? Say. If you're really interested in the history of that place, perhaps you'd like to see some of my work. I got it in my head to paint everyone who'd ever participated in the late King Flare's hunting parties. Unfortunately, I got bored after finishing the participants for the year 664, but that in itself was enough to fill a hallway."
"Sure," Pan said. Maybe she could glean something about the lodge from the artwork.
That wouldn't be possible. Flint turned Pan around a nearby corner and she found all the paintings were portraits. Photorealistic ones, too. She passed a painted Sutova labeled "Magmast," felt his hooded eyes on her all the way to the next portrait, a Brenchian with cropped hair, followed by a Reizomorph in a full-face mask and a man like Grandpa's friend Ledjic.
"These are amazing," She said. "They look alive."
"It's difficult to find material to work with," Flint was saying. "Records simply don't exist. I don't mean they're hard to find or hard to read, I mean they just aren't there. That's uncharacteristic of King Flare. The hunts had volumes of rules and breaking them meant disqualification, so they had to write them down somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can find where. The royal family is suspicious of anyone digging into their business, so I got most of my references…"
Pan missed where Flint got his references from. She ran to a portrait, this one not of one man, but four: one rugged and frowning pale violet Reizomorph man, a dark purple woman with downcast eyes, and two children. The first was a scowling child who looked a lot like the woman, and the second…
Pan was afraid to ask. King Sulfuri had instilled in her just the tiniest bit of doubt. What if he was right?
"That's Frieza, isn't it?" Pan asked, pointing to the second boy; younger, but otherwise the mirror image of the man she'd fought last night, down to the smile.
Her heart sank when Flint laughed. But then he said,
"You picked him out on your first try. I'm impressed. Most visitors assume it's the other boy, I suppose because he's meaner-looking. But, you're right, that is indeed Frieza. The one beside him who looks like he's swallowed a mouthful of gravel is his older brother, Cooler. The adults are King Cold and Queen Polrene."
I knew it! Pan thought. Show her a picture, she'd asked King Sulfuri. Well, now she had one. Although in her opinion, Cooler didn't look "meaner" at all. That the other three Colds' faces were varying degrees of miserable made Frieza's easy grin the most menacing thing on the canvas. "So they went on these hunts with the old king?" Sulfuri said they never got along. Maybe it was like those politicians back home who hated King Furry but still had to sit next to him at public dinners.
"Just the one year," Flint said. "I imagine they wouldn't have wanted to attend a second after the accident."
"Accident?" Pan asked.
"The one that killed Polrene," Flint said. "The participants were fond of their rules, and kept devices in place to enforce them. One of the mechanisms malfunctioned or… something. Like I said, the records are incomplete. The long and short of it is that Cold's queen never came back from the hunt."
Frieza's mother was killed? There went Pan's prime suspect in his resurrection. Polrene couldn't very well bring him back if she was dead. Pan leaned towards the canvas. The woman's red eyes remained fixed on her painted hands. How old were Frieza and Cooler in this picture? Pan remembered the times Videl had stayed awake all night because she had a fever, or watched some saccharine puppet movie four times in a row with her, or let her dress up in her Great Saiyawoman costume. "That's sad," She said.
"A tender heart isn't always a virtue," Flint said. "There are people on these walls who deserve your sympathy, but those monsters are not among them. Not after what they did on Vegeta and Namek."
Monsters or not, it was still sad. Besides, Grandpa told Pan compassion was for everyone and not to be earned or deserved. Then again, he also told her he didn't understand why Master Roshi had been so upset that time he'd opened the door to a guest with the frank admission his venerable instructor was "on the pot taking a dump." Grandpa didn't always see life the way other people did. But she thought he was probably right about the compassion thing, even if the pot thing was just weird.
Pan glanced out the window. The sky was darkening from blue to indigo.
"Was I here that long? Thank you for the tour," Pan said, "But I have to be leaving if I want to get to and inside he ruins before… you know."
"I do," Flint said. "Fortunately, they aren't far. Thank you for visiting, and for your marvelous contribution."
There were fewer people in the street when Pan left. That had to be why she found a muddy footprint outside the window. The Para Brothers' last call must have been making her paranoid, because she thought for a second maybe she, too, was being followed.