Raditz had now reached a certainty of what the limits of his saiyan pride were. Vegeta and Nappa had always told him that it was about how ready a saiyan was to go into battle, how willing they were to put their body on the line against the strongest opponent they could find. After hearing his brother explain what he'd been up to, he knew he was stronger than any other saiyan.
There was no physical battle that could hold a candle to the damage Raditz's mind was taking as his brother cheerfully explained his plan and the events of the last hour to him. With each twist and turn of his brother's tales, he could feel his heart rate jump, his trickles of sweat turn into rivers, and his mouth start to dry.
When his brother finally finished, cheerfully grinning at him as he escorted his hostages, Raditz felt his brain blank as he looked at the man who was somehow related to him. Was it possible for him to share genes with someone this reckless? He must've just grown out of the ground one day and his family adopted him out of pity.
Mercifully, Kakarot's story ended at the same time the five of them came to a chrome looking door that was bolted shut. Murluck pawed at the door, and Raditz looked at the hand scanner on the wall next to it.
The older of the two saiyans pinched the bridge of his nose, massaging it as he took a slow breath. Hopefully whatever was behind this stupid door was less traumatizing than everything that had led up to it.
"You." Raditz turned to Jaway. "Open this up."
Jaway's voice was clipped as she asked, "Is that how you think it works?"
"Oh, she's right," Kakarot said, "Can you open this up, please?"
Jaway stare was met with an innocent grin.
"He's always been like this." Raditz charged a ki blast in his hand and her son Tovak ran over to him, tugging on his boot as he held the sphere of energy in his palm. "Open this door or I'm blowing you away. Kakarot, release her enough so that she can get her hand on the scanner."
Tovak let out a wailing cry, and Raditz raised his hand at him. "What do you even think you're accomplishing? Go piss off and I might let you live through this."
"Raditz," Kakarot was stern as he lowered the woman down, but kept her bound. "She's injured, she can't move that much."
"Who cares how much they can move? In case you couldn't tell by your own story, we're running on a time table here. If we don't get the others and get off of this planet, either Cooler, Frieza, , the Ginyu Squad, or tuffle reinforcements are going to come down here and kill us before you can even start worrying about training some random woman and her child for a feud that doesn't even need to exist!"
Kakarot didn't budge, and neither did Raditz. Tovak crying grew louder as the Murluck stood beside Raditz, its breathing growing harsher as it bared its fangs at Kakarot.
"I don't have access to that room," Jaway said. "I'm just a civilian, I'm not part of The Spore. I can get into the base itself, but my access doesn't go this high."
Raditz glared at her, trying to suss out the truth of her statement. He'd lied over a hundred times on a hundred different planets to save his skin, and he could sense it in someone else from the slightest change in their tone or movement in their face.
Unfortunately, she was not lying.
"Damnit. Guess we'll try the old fashioned way then, everyone back up." They complied, and Raditz threw his ball of energy at the door, and watched in shock as it melted into it like butter against a hot iron.
"What …" He tapped his hand against it, it felt like normal steel. What kind of technological leap forward was this?
Raditz heard his brother sprinting towards him and sidestepped out of the way, knowing that turning his head to see what was happening would only bring his mind more anguish.
"Try wonna these!" Kakarot shouted as he leapt into the air and drop kicked the door and bounced off of it, dealing the same amount of damage and visual effect of a paper ball being thrown against it.
Kakarot rolled onto his side, looked up at Raditz, and pointed at the door. "It's made out of something strong!"
"Ya know," Raditz said, his frustration barely masked by a fake amused tone, "I was just beginning to think the same thing!"
"I'm glad we're on the same page, let me see if I have access to this thing." Kakarot got up and placed his hand on the scanner.
The machine made a long low pitched beep, then asked in a nasally automated voice. "State your identity."
"Kakarot!" Raditz was already running over to shut his brother's mouth, but he was too late.
He braced for a robot to come flying out from the ceiling, or the hand scanner to blow up, or the Murluck to suddenly have a berserker rage triggered. It was obviously a trap, what level of stupidity or sheer ignorance of one's own surroundings would tempt his brother to say his own name?
"Access denied." The screen turned red.
Kakarot returned his hand, and the screen turned green again.
"Darn, guess I'm not on the list," Kakarot said. "Bro, you wanna give it a shot?"
Incredulous at the distinct lack of imminent death, Raditz took a moment to respond before he shook his head. "I'm not touching that thing."
"What, did you forget your name?"
"Forget my - Do you understand that somebody could be watching us at this very moment?! We're deep in enemy territory, this could be raising a silent alarm, telling them where we are and sending reinforcements to kill us!"
"Oh." Kakarot scratched his chin. "So you're just chicken then."
Raditz scowled at Tovak, hidden behind Murluck as he let out a single chuckle. "Chicken? That's what you always say, and everytime it's still as stupid as the first time I heard. I'm just the only one is this squadron who bothers to try and think a step ahead."
Kakarot nodded his head, then turned to the rest of their group. "Did you know that Raditz once dressed up as a giant turtle so that he could blend in on a mission, and we found him hiding in his shell during a bombing run?"
"That was a covert operation!" Raditz said, and tried to ignore the child's cries turn to nervous giggles at his expense.
"One time we pranked my bro and told him we were going to get drafted out to the navy to fight the Sashama Pirate Guild in a bunch of spaceships, and he pretended to be sick with food poisoning for a whole month."
The giggles wouldn't stop coming at him, even Murluck was beginning to laugh as their fur bristled.
"Oh and then when we -"
"That's enough!" Raditz slammed his hand down on the scanner, and before it could even begin to speak he shouted out. "Raditz! The only warrior who thinks in this stupid squadron!"
There was a pause, and the machine made a chirping tune. "Voice pattern recognized. Welcome, Prince Raditz."
The door slid open, and a silence collected around them as Murluck casually walked into the lab, dragging their knuckles as they stepped past the stunned group.
"Did you know it was going to do that?" Raditz asked.
"Nope," Kakarot said as he walked in behind Murluck and lifted a single finger, dragging both Tovak and Jaway behind him. "I just thought it would be funny."
As the rest of them went inside, Raditz looked behind them and cupped his ear, then sensed with his ki as thoroughly as he could. They weren't being followed, somehow.
With little other options for what to do next, Raditz cursed the gods under his breath, and walked into the tuffle laboratory.
The lab was bigger than any he'd ever seen on a Frieza ship, or any base in the Cold Empire for that matter. It was like the hangar of Frieza's command ship had been converted into one massive science center, and the best part was, he could barely recognize anything.
Sure there were beakers, flasks, robots, the usual fair, but then there were things he could never even dream up.
Towering tubes that reached the ceiling were churning a chrome liquid, spinning spherical machines with both organic and mechanical eyes were scattered throughout the room, and formulas written from one end of the wall to another floated an inch off of the metal, hovering in place like magnets. It almost made the mundanity of the dozens of vents in the ceiling and safety showers spread around the room seem quaint.
And those were only the things he could see. The lab's stark white lights lights activated only in the area where they stood, leaving countless troves of technology in the darkness of the room and Raditz's imagination.
He stepped forward, but felt strangely out of place. Walking around in one's underwear, their tail ripped out, covered in dust and blood, was not the dress code of a laboratory. It was something he'd never worried about before, but now that he was actually in one, getting to do more than just hop in and blow it up like they would on any other mission, he felt an odd sense of reverence for it.
Along the wall he found a collection of lockers and and wincedm holding his broken arm as he kicked one open, thankfully they had not sprung for lining every single object in the base with the strange chrome. He found a grey jumpsuit in the locker with black and white bands around its wrist and ankle areas. He quickly put it on as best he could, his broken arm and chest hanging bare, but he was happy to feel some warmth again after running around in the nipping cold of the subway system.
He took note of the small writing on the lab uniform's collar. "Spore Laboratories: Throhbaq Division …" He mused to himself as he stretched to make sure everything felt right. The uniform was a more perfect fit than any he'd felt before.
He needed to find out more. He began scouring around, looking for a computer or scouters he could use, but only succeeded in finding a nearby pair of goggles and some strange metal stick on one of the hundreds of tables in the room. He held them each in his hand, taking turns weighing them like a scale, trying to figure out which would be the most useful before he actually tried using either of them.
"What's this?" Kakarot said as he tapped on the floor. His boot hit on a gridded space carved into the metal floor that looked no more complex than a child's tic-tac-toe board, each space on the grid already covered in strange glyphs.
Jaway spared it a glance before going back to glaring at her captor."That's the teleporter, there's dozens of them around here, it's how we get around the base and to other planets. Now put us on it."
"Okay!" Kakarot floated the pair of Jaway and her son onto it, then stepped away.
Jawa turned her head from the floor, glaring at him as she laid on the floor and her son cowered behind her.
"C'mon," Kakarot said to the pair, "go on and teleport, I need you guys to go somewhere and get stronger. Laying around the floor isn't gonna help you that much."
"The. Monitor. Activates. The. Teleporter." Jaway said.
Murluck walked over to Raditz, then to the pair, and began tapping at the bare floor in front of them with a hairy meaty finger as they looked directly at Raditz.
Raditz shrugged and noticed there was a button on the side of the goggles. He put them on by unstrapping them and then restrapping them behind his head, avoiding the issue of getting them around his hair, and clicked the button.
"M … mister," Tovak said. "You need to use that to get the teleporter working."
The lenses of the goggles glowed a dim blue and across one of the lenses Raditz read the words:
"Scouter Mark 4 Initializing
New retinal identity recognized
Enter password for activation"
Raditz smirked. They were almost making this too easy for him.
"Prince Raditz." He closed his eyes as he said it, taking a moment to relax at how quaint the change in pace was, and then opened them only to be greeted by an error message.
"Incorrect password, try again." Raditz grumbled. He looked at the rest of his group, and knew it would be a waste of time to ask them if they knew anything about it. "Kakarot, let's look around and see if they left a password written down anywhere."
"'Kay!" Kakarot said as he began aimlessly roaming around the lab.
The other three stayed where they were, and Murluck continued to tap at the ground.
"I know, I know, I'll get to that soon," Raditz said. "Make yourself useful and help us find … oh forget it, you wouldn't even know what to look for."
The Murluck looked at him blankly for a moment and then began to laugh, but each laugh was slow and measured as the goliath stared at him. "Ha … ha … haha….hat."
Being the first words Raditz had ever heard the beast say, he was confused for a moment, but shook his head. "I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the password probably isn't 'hat,' but I'll try it if nothing comes up."
"Yo! Bro!" Kakarot said as he spun one of the mechanical spheres over his head, balancing it on his finger. "Why do you think that hand thingie said you were a prince?"
"Because it's an obvious trap." Raditz looked underneath the table and found no written notes with the password on it, worth a try at least.
"A trap?" Kakarot handed the sphere over to Murluck as they came running over to him.
"I'm obviously not a prince, so the enemy must've set these things up so that either I would think that I am and get ideas of grandeur, or that the others would and cause a schism amongst us." He tried pulling apart the metal rod he held in his hand after looking it over for any engravings. He found a small button on it, pressed it, marveled at the dagger of ki that emerged, and stuffed it into his boot.
"I unno!" Kakarot got further and further away from his brother, his shouts echoing as he wandered around the lab. "Seems complicated, maybe you're just a prince!"
"Bah!" Raditz walked over to Murluck, confused at why the strange being was shaking the sphere over their head.
Kakarot stopped and turned to him. "What would you do if you were the prince?"
Raditz was taken off guard by his brother's sudden change in demeanor. He couldn't remember the last time he had heard him sound serious. "Well I'm not, so I'm not even going to bother entertaining that, and if I was, I'd throw the damn crown off a cliff and pretend it never happened. It's not worth the trouble, it only puts a bigger target on your back."
Raditz couldn't make out the exact look on his brother's face from a distance. It looked almost sad, his smile was on his face, but there was nothing behind it as he turned and walked further away. Kakarot went deeper into the lab, where there was only darkness until his footsteps entered the area, and the lights activated for him.
Raditz watched as Kakarot came to a machine covered in a large grey tarp and tugged it off. The machine was yellow in color and had a clear domed cockpit in its center. It looked like some odd fusion between a spider and a spaceship, but next to each of its leg joints was a rocket with a massive "1" on it and two words written underneath it.
"Capsule Corps." Kakarot said as he tapped it, his cheery and absentminded tone coming back as he did. "Try that for the password."
Raditz scratched at his chin. "It's probably just a group these tuffles are working with, look inside the cockpit, I want to make sure we have all the clues we could before I start guessing again. There could be a limited number of attempts."
With one leap Kakarot stood on the tip of one of the machine's propulsion rockets, and was undoing the hatch on the cockpit. He climbed in, pulled up a piece of paper, and began reading aloud to Raditz.
"Pick up groceries, botox appointment, pick up Trunks from parents' house … '' Kakarot put the paper back where he found it. "I think it's just a list of chores."
"Damn." Raditz pushed the button on his scouter to attempt to login again. "Capsule Corporation."
It buzzed negatively.
"Trunks has the big T, I think it's a name so try that," Kakarot said from the ship.
Raditz tried again, and was met with the same dismissive buzz. "Nothing, whoever this Trunks fellow is, they're absolutely useless to us right now."
Raditz walked over to the machine that Kakarot was still sitting in and ran his hand over its logo. If they had more time he would've loved to see what it could do, but no matter how interesting everything in this room was, he couldn't afford to get distracted. He didn't come this far just to get killed by his own curiosity.
He was snapped out of his thoughts just as soon as he entered them, both him and Kakarot whipped their attention to where they'd left Murluck. They heard hysterical screaming and saw the beast holding the mechanical sphere above their head.
"Hat! Hat!" Murluck shouted as they slammed the mechanical sphere into the ground.
The sphere cracked on the chrome ground, and its pristine form was ruined as a vile smelling ooze of red, black, and white liquids leaked onto the floor.
Raditz wretched as the odor hit him, but Murluck carried on, smashing the sphere into the ground again. The crack grew wider and as the viscous liquid seeped out of the machine Raditz once marveled at, a clearly defined skeleton of a hand slipped out of the sphere, trapped in the liquid that carried it. At the sight of the bones, Raditz jerked his head away, finished with whatever monstrosity he was witnessing.
"Hatch! Hatchy!" Murluck cried, and as the liquid seeped into their fur, they blubbered in a voice that sounded close enough to his own that it made Raditz's skin crawl. "Hatchy! Hatchiyack!"
Raditz threw the sphere away from it, covering his mouth with his arm as he kept his head turned away from it. Whatever was in there was too foul for him to look at or risk spending thought on, unless he wanted to add to the pile of mess on the floor.
He ran a hand along their fur to try and calm them down, but Murluck was inconsolable,violently sifting through the liquid as they continued to cry and shout the name.
He had tried everything else and he wasn't getting any warnings from the scouters about too many failed attempts, so there wasn't anything to lose. He pressed the button and spoke the name quietly, hoping that just the mention of it wouldn't drive Murluck into a deeper frenzy.
"Hatchiyack." The goggles made a singsong tune, and Raditz was greeted to a directory of options on the goggle's lenses, his attention immediately drawn to a folder titled "Research Documents."
Kakarot smacked his brother on the back, grinning ear to ear. "Whoa! You hacked in! You mainframed that database! Great going, Raditz!"
"Please stop talking." Raditz was glad that the functionality of his own scouter and this one were nearly identical. If he had to learn a new user interface while having his brother babbling in his ear, Murluck crying on the floor, and that woman scowling at him, he may've just thrown the damn thing at the wall out of frustration.
"Hey!" Jaway said, "The option to pull up the monitor should be right there on the home screen, hurry up!"
There were two folders available on the scouter, and half a dozen buttons to try out. Power button was obvious, so was the button to scan for power levels, but what were the other four that had been added on? What else could you need on a scouter?
On the lenses of the goggles themselves, he saw two folders, one titled "Teleporter & Lab Controls" and the other titled "Research Documents." He clicked on the one that interested him.
"Hello?" Jaway said, concern growing in her voice. "Why didn't the monitor show up? Was the option missing?"
There was only this one opportunity for him to do this, he just needed to see a small peek. Why were these people so far ahead of them in technology? The power level he sensed on the blade of ki earlier was powerful enough to damage Vegeta, and gods knew what else they were capable of. He'd never even dreamed of teleportation being possible before they had gotten to this planet, but here it was, as simple as some carvings on the ground.
"Raditz?" Kakarot asked.
"One second." He skimmed through the subfolders. Music Archives, Historical Texts, DNA Databases, Ki Weapon Initiative, there were dozens of them, but one drew his attention the most, Project Hatchiyack.
Kakarot walked away, but Raditz remained fixated on the scouter, not even registering the conversation happening beside him.
"Here," Kakarot said as he fished a ring out of his pocket and gave it to her. "Found this in the rubble, figured you might want it, since you're getting teleported offa the planet and everything."
When he placed the ring to Jaway's hand, a veil of white ki briefly wrapped around her body, and she gasped at the new sensation.
The mother sat upright with a groan as she clenched the ring in her hand. "You … healed me?"
"Of course!" Kakarot said, "Enough to hobble along to a doctor at least. Can't have you training if you die on the way over, right? You two promise to train up strong, alright?"
Neither of them could respond. Tovak continued hiding behind his mother while Jaway put the ring on her finger, the anger and grief beginning to wear away as she looked at it tenderly.
"Raditz, you found where that teleporter stuff is yet?" Kakarot asked.
Raditz groaned, backed out of the tab he was in, went back to the main screen, activated the monitor, tapped his foot as he waited for it to finish raising from a hidden panel in the floor, and walked over to it.
It had a list of locations pre-set for around the enemy base, and a list of off-planet worlds.
"Okay. The teleporter is ready. Do you have a preference for where to go? I'm seeing Yarth, Marbella, Agri?" Raditz dragged his finger along the monitor's touchpad, flinging through the options as he waited for the pair's response.
"Yarth is a real planet?" Kakarot asked.
"Yes. It was actually one of the places you probably would've ended up on if you didn't almost get sent to Earth. It was on the registry of low level planets for that year." Raditz looked at the pair, still not responding to him as the mother kept looking at the ring. "Planet. Pick it. My brother may be merciful but I have decisions to make so that we don't all die."
Jaway looked up from her ring. "My husband always said he'd like to visit Agri someday, the tuffle scientists used to talk to him about it when he'd come down to visit. I know he's there, I can feel it. Do you think that if we-"
Raditz pressed the button for Agri, and the family disappeared into thin air, washed away in a red haze of glyphs that circled the air around them.
"Guess they'll find out," Raditz said.
"Raditz." Kakarot looked at the spot his friends used to be in. "That was really mean."
The older brother sighed. Why was his brother like this? "It's called being practical. We can either waste time talking with the locals, or find a way back to our team. I'm choosing the one that makes sure that we stay alive the quickest. We find out where Vegeta and the rest of them are, meet up, and then get out of here. Now are you going to help me or not?"
Kakarot kept looking at the teleporter. "It's not something River would've done."
"And she's dead now, so what does that tell you?" Raditz felt the twinge of pain in his chest as he said it, and went back to his scouter, ready to ignore it in a file directory.
Kakarot turned and looked at his brother, his face twisted into an expression Raditz hadn't ever seen on his jovial moron of a brother before. Who was he to be indignant? "Why would you say something like that?"
He opened the folder on his scouter, saw that there were audio journals, and began playing the most recent one through the scouter's speakers, loud enough for the both of them to hear.
"Audio Journal of Doctor Lychee, entry number 8,760: It has been exactly twenty-four years since the fall of Planet Plant, a quarter century of suffering. But I believe today is the day that things will turn around. I've come in contact with a robot known as ELLO - E, he had heard of my work through a colleague on Agri. They said my work was quaint, and that they had their own way of dealing with the saiyan problem fifty years ago on their planet."
Raditz went to rewind the scouter, positive that he had misheard the recording. Twenty-four years from the the fall of Planet Plant would mean the recording happened one year ago, Plant became planet Vegeta after the saiyans conquered it, and then was annexed by the Cold Empire one year later. Where was he getting this ELLO - E fifty years ago number from?
Saiyans weren't known for failing missions, and if a group of saiyans sent to wipe out Ell's planet had failed, another group would've been sent to rectify that mistake. Saiyans, as a people, would not take that insult to their pride.
But Kakarot didn't care about that. He walked up to Raditz, trying to grab at the goggles on his head as Raditz dodged away.
"Why did you say that?!" Kakarot bared his teeth as he chased after his brother, the pair running in a circle around the table. "She took us in, she could've killed both of us but she didn't! She saved our lives so that we could get stronger!"
Raditz predicted his brother's lunge and side stepped him. He ran to another table in the lab and hid behind it, forcing the brothers into a stalemate as they each gripped onto their end of the table, trying to guess which way the other would go.
He never had his chance to rewind the scouter, and so it kept on playing, Raditz only picking up bits and pieces of Dr. Lychee's journal as he kept his mind focused on trying to anticipate his brother's next move. Talk of banned experimentation on Plant, in vitro fertilization to create a new species, failed forced evolution, Ell's assistance with Project Hatchiyack, and the arrival of a strange new agent called Quin-something were all nearly drowned out over his brother's screams at him.
Raditz paused the recording, fed up with missing nearly every important detail, and shouted at his brother, "Would you shut the hell up? We need this information!"
Raditz was on the floor, laid out on his back, before he could even register his brother moving over the table. Kakarot was holding the goggles in his hand. "Why would you ever need any of this, when you could've just become stronger?"
Raditz tried to kick his younger brother, swinging his boot between his legs, but he had already moved out of the way. He was standing on the table now, looking down at him.
The older brother sprang to his feet and tried to grab Kakarot by his boot, but he was too fast again, now standing at the same spot he was in before he jumped him. "Raditz, I really wish you would've trained with me."
Raditz's face burnt as he remembered all those fruitless nights on Thaw. Some people were meant to be fighters, some were meant to be leaders, some were meant to be great, and some were meant to be useless. The only way a useless person could become useful is if they used every trick in the book just to keep up. When he watched his brother and River on Thaw, he learned which of those groups he was, and some nights while he was working on his scouter, or studying about their next mission until his eyes went red, he wished he had the ignorance of never knowing.
Raditz grit his teeth as he held out his hand to his brother. "Just give me my damn scouter."
Kakarot looked at it for a moment in his palm, gently squeezed it until it made a heart stopping crunch, and then handed it to Raditz.
"What …" Raditz held the cracked scouter in his hand and watched as the lenses flickered a dim blue once, then went from dim to dead. "What the fuck did you just do?"
Kakarot's trademark smile came back in an instant, and any guilt or second thoughts he may have had about his act disappeared with it. "Gave you some motivation to train harder. We don't need any of that crap. You're my brother, and you can be just as strong as I am. I believe in you."
"Well I don't!" Raditz was so mad he wanted to throw the scouter at his head and beat him senseless with it, but he knew he couldn't, and even if he could, it would be damaged beyond repair when he succeeded. Instead he put it in the pocket of his jumpsuit and dove at Kakarot.
Without any effort at all, his brother dodged him, and he landed on his chest. He felt the tears forming in his eyes before he felt any of the pain from his fall, or tried to push himself back up.
"I just want to win," Raditz said as he got back to his feet, choking back the need to cry. "I don't want to die, what's so wrong with that?!"
He reeled his arm back to punch his brother in the face, Kakarot's chin was tilted up, ready to get punched, but Murluck grabbed him by his collar and yanked him away from their brotherly fight.
"Rah … Raditz …" Murluck had stopped their crying and collected themselves, but Raditz was so lost in his own thoughts that he'd forgotten the beast was even there.
He jerked away from Murluck and cradled his broken arm. "I couldn't even beat this thing! And you expect me to throw my life away, fighting whoever the hell made it?!"
Murluck released their grasp on him, pain showing in the beast's large brown eyes as they looked at him.
He couldn't fight his brother, he'd lost his greatest tool again the enemy, he'd hurt the dumb animal that was following him around. It was just another day in Vegeta Squadron; carry an impotent fury and hope it let you see another day.
He took another look at Mirluck, why were they still moping? Gods, they still had that disgusting goo from the spheres dripping on their hand.
" I've come in contact with a robot known as ELLO - E," Dr. Lychees words rang in his head, and as if harmonizing into one movement, the words of Ell played right after.
"This festering simian should be familiar to you given your similar natures, but I'm sure your overinflated sense of purpose will make her identity a conundrum to you.
TOO WEAK TO HELP YOURSELF. USELESS. WEAKLING. COWARD … A SIMIAN THAT SHOULD NEVER BE LOVED.
KILL HIM, THIS IS YOUR HERITAGE! A BATTLE OF THE APES!
Raditz looked at the safety showers. "Kakarot, we need to clean Murluck off."
Kakarot stared at him, blank as a white canvas. "'Kay."
Raditz and Kakarot walked with Murluck over to the shower and only had to gently nudge them in.
The creature sniffed at the handle of the shower and Raditz stepped in to turn it, putting it on a warm temperature before quickly stepping out. Murlcuk happily spun around in circles in the roomy shower, creating gallons of sludge and muck around their feet as they slapped around in it, splashing it on the windows and ceiling of the shower.
They were still spherical, a wide and misshapen blob of black fur, but it was no longer matted, filled with blood, pus, and debris. Now their fur shined proud and fluffy, as their tail emerged from their backside, free of the trappings of their own filth.
Raditz and Kakarot both watched the beast in silence, trying to understand the gravity of the situation, until Raditz finally spoke up. "She's artillery."
Kakarot continued watching, his face unreadable.
"They're just like you, Kakarot. Except they probably don't even want to be here. I don't know if they're saiyan, I want to say that it's impossible - but a lot of things were impossible before today. Maybe those spheres, maybe that's where they came from?"
Kakarot continued to say nothing, and put a hand on the glass of the shower.
Murluck slapped their palm to where Kakarot's was over and over again, grinning like a fool as they sang in an unintelligible babble.
They heard a bang against the door, and both the brother's attention jerked to it.
Peace only lasted for so long.
Raditz didn't have a chance to make a plan with his brother, by the time he opened his mouth, his brother had already sped over to the door, his ki charged to battle, and opened it.
And into his arms fell Vegeta.
The Prince was as good as a walking corpse, his armor and clothing soaked in blood, his pupils rolled into the back of his head, his skin cold and clammy to the touch. His body ran not on any level of conscious choice, but a sheer will to not die.
Raditz could sense how low Vegeta's ki was, he was basically on death's door, and he knew that meant his brother could as well. He felt split about it, but every problem he ever had was about to solve itself.
If Vegeta wasn't with him, that meant the odds were good that Nappa was dead. With both The Prince and his bodyguard dead, what were they even fighting for? Sure, there may be some way he could save Vegeta with the technology in the lab, but what would that do? Vegeta would only come back stronger, enslave his brother, and keep them under his heel until the day he died.
If they just turned around right now, he and his brother could take the teleporter to a safe planet, grab a ship, and the galaxy was theirs to live in however they wanted. No more Frieza, no more Vegeta, just getting to live their own lives however they pleased.
But they still didn't know where Broly was.
"Bring him over," Raditz said, using his good arm to clear off the table. "I'm sure there has to be something in here for when people nearly die. Did you see any healing tanks in here?"
Kakarot was gazing out of the door, far down where Vegeta had come from, before he turned back around and closed the door. "I sensed those roots we saved Nappa from, but they feel like Broly now."
Before Raditz could ask any questions, he found himself stunned into silence as the ki in his brother's body began to leave him and go directly into Vegeta, covering him in a brightly shining veil of ki.
Vegeta let out a cough of blood, weakly moaning and groaning as he tried and failed to stir himself awake.
"You can heal people?" Raditz asked as he nursed his own broken arm.
"Only a little bit and the trade off is pretty bad, I don't really get the technique. I picked it up years ago-"
"And you never used it? You never used it before to heal any of us on countless missions?"
"No." Kakarot looked at him as if he was the fool. "That would've given away what I was doing."
"Then why didn't you heal me?"
Kakarot scooped Vegeta into his arms, carrying the helpless prince as he walked back over to his brother, looked at his single broken arm, and tilted his head. "Is there a need to?"
Raditz felt that the gap between them was in more than just power levels, and with each second that he found out more about his brother, it only grew larger. "Of course. You're right. I don't need your healing. What I need is to be off this planet. Let's kill these bastards and be done with it."
He walked over to the teleporter's monitor, thankfully it still worked without the scanner.
"What about them?" Kakarot said, using his head to motion to Mirluck. "What's your opinion on Artillery, Prince Raditz?"
His brother must've sensed his frustration, but he was having none of it. He opened the door to the shower, turned it off, and guided the ape to the teleporter.
"Raditz!" It grabbed him by the back of his head and nuzzled their faces together, soaking his face with its wet forest of fur.
Once it let him go, he gave it the only response he had the energy left for; a firm nod right before he pressed a button and sent it straight to Yarth.
"Not even a goodbye?" Kakarot asked.
"Get on the teleporter. If the roots felt like Broly he's probably in trouble. We're going to the enemy's command center," Raditz said.
Kakarot skipped to the teleporter, grinning with Vegeta still cradled in his arms.
Raditz wasn't sure what his brother was thinking, and quite frankly, he was past the point of caring. He didn't know where he stood with his brother, he didn't learn as much as he needed to about the tuffles and their plans, and he didn't have a single clue for what the next twenty-four hours of his life would look like, let alone the next twenty-four seconds. But he did know that if he saved Broly, that would be at least one thing to make this soul sucking mission have at least one moment worth remembering on purpose.
He set the teleporter on a delay, hopped on, and off the three of them went.
Raditz was so busy stewing in his sullen rage that he didn't even register the sensation of being teleported away for the first time. He was barely even snapped out of it when the chrome door came flying at his head.