Chapter Twelve
She'd arrived just in the nick of time. The sky pulsed from deep blue to violet, and she had only minutes left until the Vile Wave crested and the latter swallowed the former.
Before she entered Crater Farm, though, Pan had to take a second to admire it from above.
It was indeed a crater; a wide crater that plunged as deeply into the soil as Mt. Paozu rose above it back home. Had this been made by a meteor? A sinkhole? Gohan would be able to tell. Pan wasn't. She did know, however, that the terraces that spiraled from the lip of the crater to the its foggy depths like the threads of a bolt; those had been built, and they were magnificent. The winding chain of greenhouses had been built straight into the stone and covered with glass like snake scales. Thick heart-shaped leaves grew inside and out. Vines trailed from terrace to terrace.
Maybe I shouldn't have come here, Pan thought. This could all get smashed.
The sky raced above. Pan sighed. She didn't have time to go somewhere else, at least not anywhere abandoned. She could only teleport to somewhere with a recognizable energy signature. She had no choice; the fight would happen at the farm. Perhaps she could avoid transforming.
Pan slipped through the door. According to Incendria, this farm had been abandoned and neglected since the end of the war, so Pan had worried there wouldn't be much in the way of light. That had been an unfounded fear. It's true the overhead lights were dark and also cracked, but a luminescent fungus grew out of the basins that had originally held them and crawled up the wall. Far from dim or eerie, the mushroom lamps were brilliant enough to give the place a hospital's brightness. They weren't the only thing that had grown haywire. The crop, a speckled gourd, had also taken over, carpeting the floor and whatever wall the mushrooms had left unclaimed. This was less to Pan's advantage than the mushrooms. The vines were covered in hairy quills that snagged her clothes as she pushed through.
"I'm too close to the surface," She said. "I'd better get further down. That way, if the fight does get destructive, I won't be letting too much of the Vile Wave in."
The cels of the greenhouse were connected, and the only thing keeping Pan from the next room was a door. Which should have been a cinch to open. Too bad that when she approached it, she saw no doorknob. Or sensor. Or buttons. Or anything but unbroken sheet metal.
"I could blast it," She said. She wouldn't be able to close it behind her, though.
Amidst the matted net of leaves and mushrooms, something poked out. A lever! So that was how it worked.
Pan yanked it.
The mechanism must have operated on some kind of pulley system. The chains and wheels creaked, threatened to break, but ultimately held and the door opened. Good. The vines that had gown around the lever came tumbling down in a ball of needly vines. Not so good.
Something small and humanoid rolled out of the ball and hit the ground with a bony crack.
Pan jumped to avoid getting sprayed. What was this? A gourd? No, only the head was a gourd. The rest was ragdoll cloth, stitched together haphazardly into a figure that would be about up to her knee if held upright. Now it lay with its legs over its head. Its eyes turned to her.
A gourd doll.
Pan stared at it. It stared at her. Not for real, but it felt like it.
"G'AH!"
She gave it a hard stomp, which broke it like an egg, and then ran through the door and grabbed the lever to close it like it was a life raft. As soon as the door slid back into place she leaned against it as if the remnants of the gourd doll were going to try to break it down.
That was silly. Pan's whole reaction had been silly, and probably rude. That gourd doll had been someone's toy, after all. She just wished it hadn't jumped out at her like that. Fallen on her, she corrected. Dolls could not jump out at her. Except when they could.
What was with Ketchyn and dolls? Incendria's dolls, straw dolls, gourd dolls; did any one planet really need that many dolls lying about? Where was Frieza? Who did that murdering undead tyrant think he was, running late and leaving Pan all alone in an abandoned farm full of creepy dolls?
Once Pan's breathing and heart rate slowed back to normal, she felt a concentration of Vile energy several floors below. Oh. There he was.
However Frieza managed to materialize in her general ballpark, he still didn't seem to be able to pinpoint exactly where she was. If she kept quiet she might be able to take him by surprise. Moving through these vines without rustling them would be difficult without flying, though, and the creaky pulley doors were right out. Pan pushed some of the vines aside. The floor beneath them was a wooden catwalk, rotten and termite-eaten. Punching through them might make too much noise, but if they were as warped as they looked, the boards may just be resting on the nails that had once held them fast in place.
Pan lifted one and moved it aside. Yes! She shifted a few more until there was enough space for her, and then she dropped to the floor below through her makeshift trapdoor. She repeated the process for the next floor, and the next, watching the color outside the window sink from violet to pitch black as she made her way underground.
Pan knew when she'd reached the bottom of the crater. She could tell from the fusty scent in the air and the vapors rising from the floor. Here there were patches of stone poking through the vines. Pan walked on those. She knew she was getting close to Frieza when Vile fog mixed with those vapors.
She ducked under a pulley door jammed half open, and through the glass at the end of this room, she saw him.
It took her a moment to recognize him, even with his distinct energy signature pouring through every molecule of this floor. He kneeled, ripping a length of vine, so Pan could only see his torn cloak and broad shoulders, but even those looked misshapen, whorled and spined like a snail shell. He stood…
Pan would have thought seeing the third form of the Asphodel palace guard would have prepared her for Frieza's, but the guard didn't have the Vile Wave radiating from him, either. With his pale armor now covered with thorns and enclosing him like an iron maiden, with his crimson eyes and fanged mouth swallowing most of his face, Frieza looked like something that didn't belong in the sunlight.
He twisted to the window and scanned the crater floor. Perhaps he was looking for her.
His tail caught some of the vines that had overgrown the wall. They dropped in a spiny green ball, and a gourd doll fell out and bobbed like a marionette before falling to the ground.
Frieza stared at it.
It stared at him (except of course it didn't, because dolls didn't stare).
"G'AH!"
He flattened it with one swift stomp of his heel and fled through the nearest door.
That was bad news. The nearest door was the one Pan herself stood behind, and he saw her as soon as he was through it.
They fell into fighting stances simultaneously.
"I congratulate you for your prowess yet again," Frieza said. "Tactically speaking, you could not have picked a smarter place to confront me. I can't dim the fungus's bioluminescence. Your earthquakes could break the greenhouse glass and turn this entire building into a raining storm of blades, and that's going to force me to hold back." He kicked another doll, whose arm was poking out from beneath a green heart-leaf. Its head rolled to Pan. "And the psychological stress of all these infernal mannequins cannot be understated. Well done. I hope you're prepared to suffer for it, because oh, are you ever going to."
"Don't blame me for these things." Pan kicked the head aside. "I didn't put them here."
"As if you didn't know it was common practice on Nightwater farms to make scarecrows from the dry gourds instead of throwing them out."
"That's not widely known where I come from, no."
"It should be!" He leveled two fingers and fired a ki blast.
That blast wasn't difficult to dodge, but dodging was exactly what Frieza wanted Pan to do. As soon as she moved, he fired six more, covering every possible direction she could possibly bank. There was nowhere to turn she wouldn't contact one of the virulent beams.
Channeling an old baseball move, Pan slid through the very narrow opening between the lowest beam and the floor. She still scraped close enough to sever the tips of her hair. The black strands flew away, sizzling with heat. Her pants rolled up at the cuffs and the vines dragged bloody scratches across her bare ankles. Frieza fired another shot as she emerged from the brush. Pan felt something in her hand and threw it. It was a gourd, and it splattered like it had been stuffed with dynamite, covering the walls in chunks and leaving a strange fermented smell lingering in the air.
Back on her feet, Pan dashed towards Frieza. She couldn't be kept on the defensive like this. She returned fire, deflecting the beams he launched at her; the Laceration he threw, she leapt, putting every bit of her momentum and strength into a punch. Frieza crossed his arms before his face. The punch still sent him flying into the wall, breaking mortar and the stone behind it.
He swept up some of the plaster and threw it in Pan's face.
She couldn't let that get in her eyes. She remembered all too well what happened when the dragon Eis had blinded Grandpa in the midst of battle. Closing her eyes, she wiped her face frantically. She couldn't see Frieza, but she could still sense him, so she knew he'd launched at her with even more power than she'd thrown at him. She had just enough time to throw out her hands and catch the kick he aimed at her.
"Be crushed, maggot!"
Even at arm's length, his foot ground her into the door. The old rusted thing couldn't stand the pressure and it broke free, giving Pan leverage to dig her feet in and push back.
"This maggot doesn't get crushed. She feasts on the corpses of her enemies," Pan said.
"Cute," Frieza said. "I hate cute."
"If you hate cute things so much, why do you have such cute feet?"
The pressure eased. Frieza jolted. "I… beg your pardon?"
She didn't know if he was stunned by her irreproachable logic or what, but at least Pan had the chance to duck through the open doorway and make some breathing room.
She needed it. This third form of his had powerful ki, and he fired it like a super machine gun. It took Pan more energy than she could afford to dodge and block, and she blocked more than she dodged.
"I see beating you within an inch of your life yesterday increased your power," He said. "Saiyan adaptability never ceases to impress. But you can't hold out forever without transforming."
Pan fired a Masenko. She might as well have flicked a maggot at him.
"Or you could stop this farce and surrender before you've completely exhausted my patience."
To show Frieza exactly what she thought of that option, Pan grabbed the nearest thing and hurled it. She'd thought it was another gourd. It turned out it was one of the gourd dolls.
He flattened his palm and stopped it mid-air. He ripped one of the arms off and flung it at Pan.
It hurled until Pan stopped it with a blast, tearing off its other arm and sending it back the way it came. Frieza smacked it and it lost a leg, and finally Pan's last energy ball hit its gourd-head and it exploded.
Frieza snickered, and Pan did, too.
That only lasted a second. They returned to fighting form.
Pan saw an opening, or thought she did. She appeared at Frieza's right flank and back-handed him once, twice, three times in rapid succession; but she'd only seen an opening he wanted her to, and he caught her arm and twisted it behind her. She slammed him into the wall. He squeezed harder.
"Years I've waited for revenge! You won't be the one to deny me, neither you nor your army of homunculi! It never stopped me before and it won't now! Do you have any idea how long it's been? What I've had to endure?"
Pan struggled against his hold, but something in his words brought back another memory. Not of one of her grandpa's moves, or some adventure they'd had, but a mundane day on Earth when Bulla had gotten a lower score than Trunks on some extra-credit test at school. She'd spent a good three hours responding to everything- question, comment, random observation about the weather- with "Apparently Trunks is the family genius, so why don't you ask him?" She hadn't gone back to normal until Pan had responded with a question of her own.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Pan asked.
"What kind of question is that? Do I look like I came here to talk? Do warriors settle their debts with talk? Did I claw my way from the very depths of hell to talk?"
ooo
"Teddy bears and dolls, marching with whimsical little teddy-and-doll sized musical instruments, sharing cupcakes and glittering the perfumed air with cherry blossoms and fairy dust every second of every day, at least as long as I as able to keep track of days. Soon it all melted together into a Bacchanalian of sugar and pastels. What kind of place is Hell for such a revolting display of saccharine excess, I ask you?"
"None at all," Pan said. "That is messed up. They shouldn't be allowed to do things like that, not even to creeps like you."
"Don't patronize me!"
"I'm serious."
"And don't act like you have any idea what I went through!"
Pan scooped up a doll next to her in the vines. She had to give it credit for not being totally robot-faced. The bumps and wrinkles of the gourd had been incorporated into its features, giving it the gnarled and wizened smile of a Halloween witch. She tossed it over her shoulder.
"You're right."
"Stop agreeing with me! I can tell by your expression you at least think you do."
"I'll disagree with you when you say something I disagree with, and not a moment sooner, thank you very much," Pan said. "Luud wasn't exactly the same, after all. Its leader had a machine that could immobilize anybody. It didn't matter how strong you were, or how well-trained. If you got in its range, it could lock you up. It wasn't like Red Wave Paralysis, either, where it wears off; you stayed that way until someone turned the machine off. I'd always thought no matter what kind of trouble I got into, my fists could get me out of it, but then that thing came along, and I… I don't know, it was like…"
Pan struggled for words, so she just stopped trying to find them.
"Like someone changed the rules on you," Frieza said.
"Exactly. I crashed on Luud while fighting the Para Brothers, and wound up confronting their leader, so I got to find out what he did with the people he froze. He played dolls with their immobile bodies. He had a room-sized dollhouse just for it. The walls were marble. The curtains and blankets were pink silk. Everything was trimmed in lace. He spared no expense making it look like a cheap plastic toy sized up. The furniture dug into my back. Grandpa smashed the machine and then me and the Para Brothers smashed his face, but I never really talked about it before now. I was afraid if I told Grandpa and Trunks, they'd think… I don't know what I was afraid they'd think. I just wanted everything to be normal again, and I thought if they found out, it wouldn't be. Is that weird?"
"No," Frieza said, picking at a vine. "You were right. After we fled the hunting grounds, my father and brother became strangers. My brother, I understand. Magmast's arrows, the arrows that struck down Queen Polrene, were aimed at Cooler. It's not been pleasant for him to know he's the reason she's dead. But Papa? What did he hope to accomplish, taking it out on us?"
Frieza stood. Pan almost leapt to her feet, thinking he'd said all he wanted to, but he only brushed the vines away from the wall. Behind them was a shelf full of gourds, polished for preservation and very dusty. He blew at one, ripped the stem off, and sat back down.
"I know your grandfather didn't drink often. What about you?"
"He always said it was up to me, but that he preferred not to dull his reflexes, since he never knew when he'd need them, and if I was serious about martial arts I'd take that into consideration, so I decided no."
"More for me, then," He sipped the contents of the gourd. "Nightwater is the only thing I missed about this irrelevant speck of space dust after I was banished. It truly has no equal, and that's coming from someone who spent a long time looking. The Bludwald, on the other hand, could be any forest on any planet, nothing special at all, and on top of that it had been razed generations previous by my stubborn ancestor Chilled. Do you see this cloak I'm wearing? It belonged to him. I don't know how I know that. I don't know why I was watching that plush parade of the damned one moment and the next I was here, wrapped in this thing."
Pan was glad she'd turned down his offer of a drink, because she'd surely have spit it out. She'd assumed Frieza knew who resurrected him, that they were co-conspirators in some kind of diabolical plot. Now here he was, casually telling her he had no idea how he'd woken up alive(ish) on Ketchyn and, from the sound of it, didn't care, either.
If Frieza didn't know, who would?
"I do know I'm not staying here any longer than it takes to conclude this sordid business. The family title was a relic of a bygone age that hadn't had any real power behind it for centuries. Had I not been banished, I'd have been lord of one broken-down little manor in the middle of a forest. Out there they called me the Emperor of the Universe, and they meant it. I'm not giving that up on some petty whim. Returning to my empire is at the top of my list. Right after avenging myself on your hateful grandfather for humiliating me on Namek and sending me to that mockery of an afterlife."
"You still don't believe me?" Pan asked.
"I don't believe Goku is dead. I'm starting to believe you believe it. Dead family is so easy to idealize. It's more comforting to think you lost him than that he simply abandoned you."
The thump and cracking that followed was Pan crushing the floor in her fist and trying desperately not to transform and cause an earthquake.
"Oh, did I hit a nerve?"
She dusted the gravel off her hands. Great, now she had some unidentified crushed mineral all over her face and her hand. She'd better remember not to rub her eyes. For all she knew it was corrosive. "Yup."
"You're no more fun to taunt than he was," Frieza said.
"Don't taunt people for fun and you won't have that problem."
"Don't tell me what to do."
"You just told me what to do," Pan said.
"That's different. I'm Emperor of the Universe. Besides, when?"
"Like, just now."
That was followed by a lot of thumps from a lot of purple hands as they reached from the darkness and clawed the greenhouse windows. There were so many they blocked the crater outside.
Pan's eye twitched.
Frieza waved his hand and they vanished. "That wasn't my fault."
"I don't know how you stand having the Vile Wave running through you all the time," Pan said. "Doesn't it hurt?"
"No more than anything else," He said. "Don't pretend you care I'm in pain. You're just trying to change the subject."
"No, I'm not. I said I'd disagree with you when I disagreed with you, and right now, I disagree with you."
"Please explain yourself. I'm not intoxicated enough to make sense of what you just said."
"Grandpa wasn't physically breathing down my neck every minute, and yes, I'm not going to lie, I'd liked to have seen him more often than I did. That… might have had something to do with why I stowed away on his ship when he went to find the Black Star Dragon Balls, although it's a good thing I did, because I found them all, and did I mention there were killer robots, and that I was wanted on Imecka? I saved one of the posters. It's still in my room."
"Oh, those are fun, don't you think? I kept a few of my own. They're old since it wasn't long before law enforcement became too afraid to post them."
"But if there's one thing I'm sure of, it's that Grandpa would never abandon me. I could always count on him to be there when I needed him, every time I needed him. And you know what? You're counting on that, too, or we wouldn't be having this conversation."
"We're having this conversation because you suggested it," Frieza said. "We can end it if you wish."
"Do you want to?"
Frieza stroked what was left of his chin. In this form, it wasn't much. "No, I don't think I'll subdue you in this form. I'll give you another day to get your hopes up and then I'll choke you with an iron fist of terror you'd never have imagined existed. How does that sound?"
"Sweet. I'm looking forward to it."
"Of course you are, Saiyan."
That was all there was to say about that. Instead, Pan told him more about evading Don Kee's forces on Imecka. She told him about flying with the giant butterflies of Monmaasu, about dressing Trunks up as a girl and marrying him to a talking fish on Gelbo (at this point, Frieza glanced at his bottle again and wondered aloud if he'd had more than he thought). She didn't do all the talking. Frieza told her about the mind-reading inhabitants of Kanassa, the molten surface of Beppa, and planet Kuhn, where the ruins were populated entirely by dogs and at no point did he help repair any of those ruins, nor did he know where she'd ever gotten such a foolish notion (at this point, Pan glanced at Frieza's bottle and wondered silently if the Nightwater fumes were powerful enough to affect her from here).
Fighting slowed time to a crawl. Minutes could stretch into hours. This was the opposite. It felt like she'd just sat down a moment ago, yet when she thought to glance at the window, she could see the crater floor in a haze of red light; so much time had passed, the Vile Wave was waning, the Red Wave cresting.
With the changing light, Frieza's shoulder opened again. He rubbed the blood between his fingers like it was an alien thing.
"I made it all the way to dawn. That's a first. Since you're so agreeable, may I ask a favor?"
"Sure," Pan said.
"Leave me. Go back upstairs. Or go outside. It's safe now, and I'd rather you didn't see where this goes from here."
Pan wasn't used to sitting for quite that long. Her legs were stiff. She almost tripped over a vine. What was the quickest way out of here? The way she'd come in, she decided, since she'd made such a convenient path straight through the floor.
Awkward as it was, she thought it would be rude not to, so before she ducked under the broken door, she turned back and waved. "Um, goodbye."
She wasn't watching where she was going and she knocked into another gourd doll, which slumped and splayed with its arms wide.
"G'AH!"
They both zapped it at once.
Pan crawled into the next room and through the ceiling before anything else could fall.