"Hmm… So, this is that Dark Planet?" Goku pressed his face to the porthole, trying to get as close of a look at the approaching gas giant as he could. Gohan sighed and shook his head, frustrated at his father's naivete, thinking that he could get any better of a look if he only shoved his face harder into the tempered glass. "I can't sense any Ki signatures on it. Are you sure that it's got strong guys to fight?"
"That's not why we're here, Kakarot!" Vegeta grumbled with his arms crossed. "This is the planet from which Destron Gas hails. It's capable of producing monsters and Ghost Warriors by absorbing emotions and thoughts from its environment. It's been causing Videl and Trunks trouble but, if left unchecked, it might become a nuisance for the whole Planet Earth."
"Huh? Really!? Videl-san? Is she okay?" Gohan jumped up, realizing that it may have been a few days since he last checked up on his lively and passionate student. He's been so absorbed in training with his father and grandfather and preparing to study at a normal school for the first time in just a few weeks that the fact he and Videl had a deal completely vanished from his mind.
"Your and Chayote's little pet project is fine," Vegeta rolled his eyes, looking as if he was almost disgusted by the belated care that the young teen showed. "Luckily, the Ghost Warriors she fought were some bunch of pathetic losers that bothered Earth, whose emotional baggage still lingered in the atmosphere. From what I've heard Trunks brag about, they faced some blue demon monster, some Namekian pirate, and that renegade Saiyan Turles."
"Blue demon monster…?" Goku scratched his chin while scanning the ceiling over his head to figure out what Vegeta may have meant by that. "Maybe it sounds a bit like that Garlick guy, though it could've been one of Shura's lot. And the Namekian pirate has got to be Slug!" the excited Saiyan slammed his fist like a hammer at his open hand.
"Really? Videl-san handled Slug already? That's impressive!" Gohan exclaimed in surprise. Before the conversation could continue any further, a powerful shock rumbled the spacecraft and would've tossed the onboard party of Saiyans around if it weren't for their ability to fly. Staying in control in the face of extreme turbulence, Vegeta hovered over to the porthole and looked around.
The spaceship had entered the outermost layer of the Dark Planet's atmosphere. For whatever reason, violet electricity currents had been surging all over this thick layer of black gaseous clouds and ceaselessly cracked at the spaceship's surface, lighting the entire spacecraft up and threatening to short-circuit its electrical systems and drop it dead on the planet's surface.
"Damn it! What the hell is that!?" Vegeta ground his teeth while shaking his fists. Despite all his power, he couldn't have felt more helpless. Even if the violet lightning storm tore the entire spaceship apart, it was a safe bet that the three of them could've survived, though it remained unclear what the conditions on this Dark Planet were. If the gas was treacherous or poisonous for them, they would've been in a bunch of trouble and all three of them probably had skeletons in their minds that they wouldn't have liked to see as Ghost Warriors opposing them. Not to mention, with the spaceship being torn asunder, they'd be left stranded on this forsaken gaseous dump.
"Doesn't this spaceship have Destron vacuums?" Gohan hovered up to Vegeta while the ship's electronics shot out sparks in all directions and sent electrical jolts arcing from one system and transmitting the electromagnetic malady to the others.
"Not enough to purify this whole stupid planet! Look around, twerp, this entire planet's atmosphere is all pure Destron!" Vegeta moved aside a little to get Gohan to get a look. "We don't have a choice, we have to ride this ship for what it's worth. If it holds, we'll see where we can find some safety from all these currents, if not–we'll fly off to whatever cover from Destron we can find here. Wait… No one said anything mind-numbingly stupid in a while. Where's Kakarot…?"
"Oh, no…" Gohan went pale before pushing himself off of the porthole only to float through the rumbling spacecraft's interior onto the other side. The teen pressed his face to the porthole only to see his father, wearing a Capsule Corps spacesuit, standing on the edge of the spacecraft and fending off various opponents he had faced throughout his martial arts career.
Red Ribbon Army officers, Demon King Piccolo and his Evil Tribe descendants, Slug, Frieza, and even Vegeta's doppelgänger surging with a malicious Destron aura all were attacking Goku at once only for the Saiyan to evade their combined assaults effortlessly and dispose of them with a single strike. By the time the Ghost Warriors reformed, the spaceship had flown far away from that area, though Goku's endlessly hungry-for-challenge mind had formed new sparring partners for himself.
"Phew! This is AMAZING!" Goku shrieked out with excitement while his innovative mind began wandering off to opponents he didn't have the opportunity to fight himself as well as creating doppelgangers of enemies he had disposed of but left behind already to beat again.
"What is that asshole doing!?" Vegeta growled, hovering up to the porthole and pulling on his hair. "He's going to doom all of us!"
"Don't worry, Vegeta, I'm just doing some light warm-up. It's not like there's anyone strong to fight on this planet otherwise…" Goku let out an innocent and a bit apologetic chuckle before being blasted aside by a strident energy wave of a golden-haired Ghost Warrior Vegeta.
"Damn…" Goku cackled to himself with a more serious look on his face, feeling up the damage on his spacesuit. "You weren't able to go Super Saiyan back then, so I didn't think your Ghost Warrior self could either. Alright!" he yelled out, pressing his arms by his side and ripping through the dark clouds of Destron with a radiant golden aura as his own hair sizzled with white sparks and colored golden as well.
"Dad! You need to stop thinking of new challengers already! This gas is unpredictable! The mind doesn't work rationally, just the smallest slip can lead you to make some seriously terrifying Ghost Warriors!" Gohan tried disciplining his father but Vegeta plunged to the control panel and struggled against the electric current flows taking over the spacecraft to wrestle manual control off of the ship.
"Work with me, damn it!" Vegeta cursed. "Find us someplace away from all this Destron. There has to be some place…!"
"Dark Planet's analysis is complete. Dark Planet is comprised of 66% pure Destron Gas. 34% is the planet's artificial core in the center that's maintaining the consistent output of Destron into the atmosphere and keeping the planet's consistency intact," the ship's AI relayed through a choppy transmission.
Grumbling through the struggle all the way through, Vegeta wrestled the controls to steer the ship straight toward the core. Because of the vast influx of Destron Gas where the atmosphere was becoming thicker and thicker with it as well as Goku's ceaseless new challengers that were getting out of control even to the battle-hungry Super Saiyan, the King of Saiyans pointed his spaceship toward the most active electronic signature in the area as the core was putting out some immense electronic activity signals that one could track from the other side of this star system back to it.
"That was a rough landing, Vegeta. Just 'cause I'm tough, doesn't mean I don't feel pain, you know…" Goku rubbed his exposed head and spiky hair while laid out in some engine room of an abandoned mechanical complex with a hole in the ceiling that was plugged only by the ruins of the Capsule Corps spaceship.
"You imbecile!" Vegeta lost it. "It's because of you that our spaceship's totaled! How do you plan on returning to Earth now!?"
"If this station is anything like the Big Gete Star, it must have a powerful communications station. We can send a signal with our coordinates to Bulma-san and have her ask Yamcha-san to pop us out of here and back home," Gohan grumbled while comforting his own helm-splitting headache.
"If you listened for one more minute, I'd have pointed out to you how these Ghost Warriors have a different Ki signature that you have to get used to in order to sense them. For all we know, whoever's controlling this Destron Gas might have the strongest Ghost Warrior reserved for us while you were fooling around and making a whole army of annoying gnats!" Vegeta got up in Goku's face. The Earth-raised Saiyan only chuckled with a goofy laugh.
"You just shit-talked yourself too, Vegeta. Your Ghost Warrior copy was in there too…" Goku explained what he found so funny.
"If you pulled this stunt on Earth, you could've doomed that planet to its end. Destron can't be easily contained, and it spreads like wildfire. In just a few hours, the entire planet becomes stuffed with it and the planet's own inhabitants imagine its untimely end and bring it to life," Vegeta turned away with crossed arms, looking disappointed at the immaturity of one of his subjects as opposed to the pure frustration he showed earlier.
"It's that serious, huh?" the smirk vanished from Goku's face while he stroked the back of his head.
"Well, it doesn't look like this planet's in any danger of Destron overwhelming it. Not that it wouldn't be better to blow it up and be done with it!" Vegeta sneered while slowly advancing to the mechanical door and seeing if he could interact with any of the systems aboard this cybernetic star coated with layers upon layers of pure Destron Gas.
With the station's systems refusing to cooperate, a shiny energy blast flickered in Vegeta's right hand. The Saiyan royalty thrust his hand forward and blasted the door away, confidently strutting through it alongside Gohan and Goku, who just followed the infuriated Saiyan with their heads down. The father and son were looking around for signs of biological or artificial life around them while Vegeta confidently strut on ahead with a one-track mind.
"If that's the case, how come you didn't blow it up from space? It could've saved us the trouble of that troublesome landing," Goku asked.
"Just blowing this planet up isn't enough," Vegeta answered in a bitter tone. "We need to find the mastermind of this whole Destron Gas attack and find out what their plan is and why they sent Destron to Earth. For all we know, they might be working for someone bigger and much worse than them."
A round mechanical orb lit up with a lamp of red light in its center and turned toward the direct path in front of King Vegeta. The path's red light illuminated a humanoid shape. It belonged to an elderly humanoid, half-man, half-machine with a rapidly balding head of long and unruly hair and a modernized version of the space battle armor with similarities to the version Frieza Army wore. The humanoid was floating above the ground in a meditative position and stared ahead. It had no irises or pupils in its eyes, so it just blankly stared ahead, as if looking right through whoever it was talking to.
Vegeta's first twitch instinct was to shoot a Ki blast at the emerging holographic shape illuminated in front of him by the mechanical drone but the blast went clean through the image of the modified Tsufurian scientist and detonated with a ripping blast somewhere off in the distance. Yellow lights, lined up like a pair of eyes lit up in the shady corners of the desolate cybernetic complex as robots in white battle armor with vaguely skull-shaped helmets and orange pads on the backs of their heads and their arms emerged from the shadow. Goku and Gohan stumbled back in awe before the emerging robots took aim at the Saiyans and opened fire from their arm cannons, shooting a barrage of plasma bolts at them.
"You shouldn't have done this. I built these Godgardons a long time ago to protect this planet's core from attack. Back then, I didn't have the options I have now. I have updated and upgraded myself countless times since then so not even I can fully control them at this point…" the holographic humanoid said.
"It doesn't matter. Those two were itching to get into a fight anyway," Vegeta sneered in dismissal of the threat that these "Godgardons" posed while Goku and Gohan engaged them in battle.
"How very Saiyan of them…" the holographic shape teased Vegeta, carrying a certain lick of hatred behind that word as if the name of an entire race could've been used as an insult.
"Who are you? Are you in charge of this star?" Vegeta looked around, signifying that he meant the entire Dark Planet. "I will not waste my time treating with some lackey."
"Treating? Do the Saiyans concern themselves with the façade of civility these days?" the meditating bio-mechanical humanoid teased the King of Saiyans with another insult. "You are correct in your assessment, though. I am Dr. Lychee, the last Tsufurian and the mastermind of the Four-Stars, the conductor of the Dark Planet Star you stand on. I'd say I'm pleased to meet you, but that would be a lie. I'd rather see you dead."
"Tsufurian, you say?" Vegeta gasped in wonder and staggered back. "Don't be ridiculous! The Tsufurians went extinct centuries ago!"
"It's a matter of semantics. In some ways, perhaps you are correct. My contemporaries truly did not consider me a true Tsufurian. They exiled me away from Planet Plant before they were extinguished," Dr. Lychee shifted his massive, swollen head to the right, almost as if he struggled to keep its excessive weight hanging straight.
"Exile? That's incredibly crude of Tsufurians. I've heard that they were soft and didn't even punish their criminals. You must've been a truly bad egg to get that treatment," Vegeta regained a semblance of control over his bewilderment at the fact that he meant a self-proclaimed last survivor of a race that the Saiyans had extinguished before the ascent of the first king of the Vegeta bloodline.
"As I've said, the council didn't consider me Tsufurian. They saw my experiments with cybernetic augmentation and bio-engineering and they condemned my predictions that the Saiyans would one day eradicate the Tsufurians. According to them, my obsession with shedding everything that made me Tsufurian and the adoption of a bio-mechanical body is the true threat to the Tsufurian race. Despite what it sounds, I do not foster hate toward my extinct peers. History itself proved them wrong enough, and your savage race did so graciously punish them with extinction," Dr. Lychee replied.
"I couldn't care less about your little projects and feuds with whomever. Tell me why you've sent the Destron Gas to Planet Earth!" Vegeta stepped up, shaking his fist in demand to know the truth. "Is it just because the Saiyans have moved to Earth, is that it?"
"As I've already told you, it's not as simple as just mere revenge. I knew the Saiyans would succeed the Tsufurians back when you were just a tribe of stone-flinging cavemen whom we viewed as just another species of local fauna of our Planet Plant. I saw firsthand the lunacy and short-sighted faith in mercy and diplomacy that my inferior peers planned to treat you with. I am in no way surprised by the ultimate outcome of my race. That being said, the corruption and destruction of the Big Gete Star put your faraway rock in my crosshairs. That insult, I cannot stand," Dr. Lychee said, shaking his head.
"You… You built the Big Gete Star!?" Vegeta jumped up in amazement.
"Vegeta!" Goku yelled out in complaint. "Aren't you going to join in too?" he whined while racing the fusillades of plasma bolts coming in hot in his direction from the platoon of Godgardons that began swarming from the entire cybernetic star and all of its facilities, laboratories, and engine rooms.
"Correction, I've built four stars: The Dark Planet Star, codename M-1, The Machine Mutant Star, codename M-2, The Luud Star, codename M-3, The Big Gete Star, codename M-4," Dr. Lychee corrected. "All of them were integral to my plan, all of them had separate objectives and roles to play, and you got in my way. I see now that I was wrong to dismiss you Saiyans, I was wrong to refuse to blame you for the role you've played in the eradication of my people. I should have eliminated you first thing… Perhaps my predecessors were wrong and more Tsufurian traits remain in me than they claimed?" Dr. Lychee stroked his chin.
"Hmph…" Vegeta closed his eyes with a cocky smirk.
"Could it be that your primitive, savage race can see the cruel irony in my story?" Dr. Lychee's eyes widened.
"Don't be ridiculous, scum. I don't give a crap about anything you just said. I was just worried that you were working for someone far stronger and more terrifying than you. Now that it's all cleared up and I know that you're the head of this whole Destron thing, I can't wait to blow you away," Vegeta punched his open palm with a direct threat and a grimace that was just as excited as it was intimidating.
"What a fool I am. To even now expect progress and civility from the Saiyans. When will I learn? When will the Tsufurians learn? When will the universe learn that your lot needs to be wiped clean? I will not even feel remotely bad about it. This will not be genocide, you lack the intelligence, and the emotional complexity, to be victims of genocide. It'll be like tending to a garden and rooting out all the weeds," Dr. Lychee's holographic image flickered. "Come then, come to the core engine chamber and meet me face-to-face. I shall make it easy for you so that you don't get lost, like a rodent in a childish maze."
"Tsk… Dare to mock me!?" Vegeta hissed, turning around and extending a hand to blast an energy wave clean through a Godgardon behind him, which left the twitching machine guard with a hole in its chest area, causing it to convulse and erupt in flames and sparks before blowing up. "Come on, Kakarot! It's time to finish the job the Saiyans started centuries ago! As usual, it takes a Vegeta to do something right!"
Note: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Holidays everyone! :3