Raditz continued fiddling at his desk, tapping away at his keyboard that was plugged into his scouter that he'd taken off his head and pointed away from him, nestled between all of the bananas, oranges, and pouches of seeds from all over Frieza's planets. The Ginyu Force always had some way to mock them, but at least the "monkey food"wasn't rotten this time. In fact, it was in pretty good shape; The bruises were minimal and Recoome had only taken a bite out of a few pieces.
He sorted out the fruit by most to least bruised, then discarded the half-eaten and unpeeled bananas, and got back to his work.
There was one truth of the world and Raditz always repeated it to himself when he was working: anyone who thought they had power was primed to be proved a fool. That was why he was always to pleased to figure out that Frieza was just as dumb a bastard as he always thought he was.
The scouters were something the emperor would never have the brains to make, but he'd always rely on as the end all be all of how he would run his empire. Each movement they took, everything they saw, everything they said, it was all recorded on the scouters. Every warrior under Frieza's rule had been trained to use them from the age they could walk, they were considered just as much a part of them as their own eyes and ears.
However, these scouters would never be equal to eyes, ears, or his own cunning. They were just a tool that could be manipulated as simply as any other.
The first thing to note was it's primary weakness, it saw only as much as he did out of the eye that he had it on. The scouter rested on the left side of his face, so he tested its limits by shutting his left eye while he did minor infractions with his right hand out of sight. Stealing goods for his own personal use, writing messages on walls for survivors of their onslaught.
He would return to Frieza's ship, shaking in his boots out of fear that he would be reprimanded. But the punishment never came.
The next step was that when he went to planets, he would take their books on basic hardware and programming. Luckily the Cold Empire had spread a galactic common language thousands of years ago to most of the galaxy or else reading the books would've been impossible, but thankfully the Colds were instrumental in providing tools for their own destruction.
It wasn't mandatory to sleep with the scouters on, so after he smuggled the books back onto the ship, he would immediately go back to their quarters and smuggle them under his bed. When night came, he would make a small light with ki to read.
After a few nights of his secret bedtime reading, he realized how suspicious this could be if he was ever caught, and started stealing much more mundane books he nabbed from planets they conquered. Cooking books, fairy tales, biographies, he'd read them when they got back from missions and where his fellow soldiers could see him to help build his case. Being caught reading if no one knew you read at all could cause a stir, but having his fellow saiyans catching him reading under the blankets after bed would just be embarrassing.
Given how much Vegeta poked at him about how he was probably reading fairy tales to lull himself to sleep, he knew that he'd been caught a few times, but not caught learning about radio waves.
He'd always wondered how the Cold Empire could have Frieza soldiers, Cooler soldiers, and King Cold soldiers all together, but never have their communications interfere with one another. It turns out that each of them had a specific radio frequency range.
A frequency range was basically what it sounded like, the range that someone could communicate on. Say there was a range of 300 points, then each of the Cold family would take up 100 points, and use those points to distribute all of their communication channels. Of course the points were actually hertz and there were far more than 300 of them, but that and much more were not details that were necessary to know for Raditz's invention.
He had discovered a frequency that the Cold Family wasn't broadcasting on, and much more importantly, he had found a way to display different streams of what his scouter was picking up on. While he may be looking at his desk now, with a click of the button on his keyboard, he could set it to be in a loop of footage from a different time period, and then set it to his own private frequency.
This would be perfect, next time he went on a mission he could just do a couple of circles around a planet, then set his footage to Frieza on a loop, and then do whatever he needed in private on his own frequency.
It would take some work and experimentation, but if he could make it look convincing, then he could make the modifications to Broly's scouter too. Maybe Vegeta. Nappa and Kakarot though? They'd probably blow it the second they got it and get all of them killed though.
It was a shame, but he knew his brother was not that reliable with secrets. The only secret he'd ever been good at keeping is what happened to them on planet Thaw, and that was for his own benefit. The damned fool, wasting his time with such nonsense, but if he thought it could really happen, who the hell was he to stop him?
River had told Raditz that he had a way with tools, so maybe she was on to something.
This was no time to daydream about the past and those days they spent being held hostage though, he needed to think. There had to be a more convenient device to carry than an entire keyboard before their next mission so he could actually test his modified scouter out. Maybe some sort of handheld trigger he could store in his armor, but then he had to risk it being crushed if he took too hard of an attack. Modifying his scouter directly, maybe? No, somebody on the ship may notice it looked different, it would have to be subtle.
As the long haired saiyan was getting lost in his thoughts, he heard the sounds of two distinct grunts coming from outside of the door. It was the sound of Nappa and Broly, obviously struggling to get through the claustrophobia inducing hallway at the same time.
Knowing the two of them would be wearing their scouters and could record what he was doing, he quickly unplugged his scouter from the keyboard, put it back onto his face, and turned it on. It was always risky to turn it off and on, probably raised a flag for some tech cruncher somewhere, but at least he always timed it for when the battery was running low.
Broly came sailing into the room, tossed in like rubbish as he landed on his face. Nappa, his face searing red, came stomping in after him.
"Do you want to explain just what you're doing?!" Nappa shouted at Raditz.
Raditz looked to his keyboard, then to Broly, to Nappa, and finally back to his keyboard. "Hopefully not getting involved in whatever this is. If you're wondering who ate your last protein bar it was Kakarot. Now could you give me a minute to-"
Nappa slammed his fist down onto Raditz's desk so hard that all of the fruit went airborne and landed on the floor with squelching splats.
"Vegeta's tank was defiled!" Nappa said, "We need to do some training pronto and get some respect on our names! We'll squash those insects so hard on the next mission that even the Ginyu Force will respect us!"
"Really? You've gotten this old and you still think that's how this'll play out?" Raditz asked as he picked up the once perfectly fine fruit from the ground. It was going to take forever to clean all of this up.
"I've gotten this old because I know it's what's going to happen," Nappa said, "It's a saiyan's destiny to be powerful, where's your pride?!"
Broly finally started picking himself, shrinking himself down to as small as he could to docilely pick up the fruit. If Raditz wasn't so sympathetic for the poor giant, he'd say that it was impressive that someone taller than any of them could make themselves look so meek.
"We're a proud saiyan race and you two are cooped up inside of here wasting your time doodling and," he glanced at Raditz's keyboard, "playing with instruments! Should be training!"
"What? You have to know what this is. Why would you think this is an instr-"
"Enough blabberin' and more battlin'! I can't find that clown of a brother of yours but there's a planet only a five minute ride out from here, I'm sure it has somewhere we can practice. Let's go!"
Knowing that it wasn't any use to try and argue and already having a hand around both his own and Broly's collar, Raditz stayed quiet as the two were dragged to the door. Nappa propped both of them up at the entrance, shoved them from behind to keep moving, and soon enough they were on yet another desolate planet of Freiza's that was under renovation.
They had attacked this planet, what …. Five, maybe seven weeks ago? A few months? They all started to bleed together after a while. Raditz did know however that he'd definitely been on this planet before, it was difficult to forget the red clay that spread all over the planet. The only water on the planet were the rivers and lakes that spanned the entire planet's brackish and misty deltas that went for miles and miles. It was obviously some geo-engineering project that had gone awry, leaving only the mutated reddish brown namekians on the planet.
The sight of them was odd to behold, Broly wouldn't stop with his sketches of the namekians drinking water directly out of the soil to keep themselves hydrated. All of the abandoned houses pointed to the fact that their society was on the decline, holding only a fraction of the population it was built for. Wiping them out of the galaxy was probably a twisted mercy. Well, at least the ones he knew were accounted for.
Before he could continue bothering himself about the mission on Frieza Planet 897 (1206? 977?) Nappa was already hurling an energy blast at his head. Raditz lept out of the way and then stood shoulder to shoulder with Broly, their feet planted firmly in the sinking soil.
"What the hells the big idea, you aren't even going to give us a warning?!" Raditz said.
"Nope!" Nappa hurled two more blasts at their feet and both of them jumped into the air as the muddy clay soil was hit with an explosion so hot that it instantly turned into brick.
"Plan," Broly asked in his typically detached way.
Raditz looked at the grey metal collar around his neck; the gem inside was still blue. Good.
"Here it is," Raditz said, "When he charges in, we flank him, wear him down until-"
Nappa had suddenly appeared in front of them, his speed overwhelming the pair.
"No planning!" The brutish bodyguard flipped in the air and slammed the heel of his boot on Raditz's forehead, sending him spiraling into the water.
Nappa went to clothesline Broly, but the young man blocked it with his forearm. Nappa gave a slight smirk. He had the reflexes, but the runt never had the strength.
He continued his attack as he reached out with his other hand and grabbed Broly by his hair before driving his head into his knee. Holding his knee in place, he slammed Broly's head into his knee over and over and over again until his annoying screaming had stopped, and then chucked him towards Raditz.
Broly was barely able to fly as he lazily drifted towards the dazed Raditz who was ascending out of the water.
Raditz caught Broly and wrapped his arm around his shoulder to help keep him up. Using his free hand he fired a flurry of blast Nappa, but the older saiyan didn't even bother deflecting them. Instead, he took each one as a direct hit until a cloud of smoke from the explosions formed around him.
Knowing the blasts probably didn't even leave him with a scratch, Raditz blasted off with his teammate, trying to get out of range of the scanner before his assault began again. But it was no use, as soon as he started getting away, Nappa appeared in front of them again.
Broly freed himself from Raditz's help and threw a punch at Nappa, but it was easily caught. Nappa squeezed the fist until he could hear the points popping and then held his palm up to Raditz signaling for him to stop.
"Listen," Nappa said. "When we first got you, you seemed to have potential, but this…" Broly was wriggling in his grasp, punching at Nappa's arm with his free hand, barely even doing damage to him. "This is pathetic. Show me your anger, show me the rage of a saiyan! Scream out your power!"
Broly let out a pathetic yelp, his voice cracking as his power level barely increased and a light white aura blew around him. The gem's color stayed blue; it had barely even changed its hue.
Raditz was glad to see that the design he'd modified was working, but it wasn't so helpful to have it working to help the two of them get beaten to a pulp.
He put his hands behind his back and began charging a sphere of energy, pouring everything he discretely could into it, a perfectly matching amount of energy in each hand. Nappa was a fool to think that he needed to scream to show his power level, and he was about to show him why.
When Nappa grew bored with Broly, he merely shook his head before yanking the low-class saiyan towards him and headbutting him on the bridge of the nose, knocking him out instantly.
The moment he began dropping Broly from his grip, Raditz dashed forward, slamming his energy blast into Nappa's chest with all of his might, shouting his attack as it landed "Paired Stout Sundae!"
The explosion echoed around them and as the smoke cleared, Nappa stood tall. Only palm sized burn marks on his armor.
"Well, better than usual," Nappa said as he looked at the stunned Raditz, "You actually managed to make it look like I was in a fight this time."
As if to add insult to even more insult, Nappa only reeled back his hand and slapped Raditz on the button of his chin. That was all it took to beat him. All of Raditz's muscles failed him, leaving him limp as he lost his ability to keep himself in the air and seeing doubles as he fell to the ground.
For just a moment though, a fraction of a second, he could've sworn he'd gone mad if he hadn't seen Nappa have the same reaction. His scouter skyrocketed, somebody had a power level of 7,000.
But … that must've been impossible. His own was 1,200, Broly's was 1,000, and Nappa's was 4,000. He could see Nappa do a double take, his head jerking into the direction of the power level.
Raditz would never know exactly what Nappa did next though as the second he landed on top of Broly, he found himself disgracefully drifting off into unconsciousness. He struggled to keep his eyes open, straining his eyes at the dull orange sky as Nappa dashed away, wondering why he couldn't just be left to his work. He knew It was all he would ever be good at anyways.