A/N: I am starting to realize this story is a bit more of a slow burn than I originally intended, and it will pick up in the next few chapters with the Saiyan saga. I may post a bit more frequently until we get in line with the original story.
Also, I am completely ignoring the entire baby saga, especially the lore, from GT. If you actually watched (or even like) that saga, I am sorry. Those are 16 episodes of time you'll never get back.
Back to the story, enjoy!
Dodoria continues fighting through the robots and Tuffle soldiers as they approach the secret base Raditz is being held at. Slowly working their way into the bowels of the planet, deep underground through a cavernous ravine. Chanterelle's plan had truly failed, and Dodoria was clearly having fun with it.
Chanterelle sighed, waiting for a path to be cleared so they could get out of here.
Although, it is safe to say that Chanterelle's curiosity was piqued at the chances of being able to finally get stronger, without wasting most of her energy to simply stay alive.
She scanned the area for any nearby Tuffles she could communicate with. For the last hour, there were only robots that remained fighting to defend this base. Finally coming up on an actually manned installation Chanterelle continued pushing forward.
Dodoria, of course, slammed the doors open, as he was incapable of using a door normally. Dragging a living Tuffle from his guard post, and throwing him into the depths of the cavern, Chanterelle dove to catch him, finally able to glean some insight into this, she tried reaching his mind, however he was resistant to her probing.
It appears this kind of shared telepathy must have consent. The old man must have let me in his head. Chanterelle surmised. Suddenly, she started draining him too, the force of him trying to free himself from her grasp appears to have triggered the draining of his ki. Chanterelle was able to stop it, and she simply let go of the man to fall deeper into the chasm.
Feeling yet another surge of energy from draining his life, she felt an immense pain surging through her body, as though her atrophied muscles were suddenly receiving the energy they were deprived of the last 12 years. She felt weak, and yet strong at the same time. She couldn't describe exactly what she was feeling. But she didn't like it. At all.
"Stop. Dodoria." Chanterelle finally spoke up. "Have you noticed anything off about my Scouter readings? Life signs, power level? I feel… off,"
Dodoria couldn't believe his eyes, her typical resting power level was a mere 400, and now it is suddenly flaring up to 5,000, and even rising beyond that. It's as though Dodoria is watching her transform. Into what, he had no idea. She couldn't be a Super Saiyan, she was only part Saiyan from the genetic tests a decade ago. Hell, the only reason Frieza kept her around is because she was most likely unable to realize a transformation if he was only part monkey.
Breaking into the base, carrying Chanterelle to the nearest bed to let her rest, her power level continued to spike to dangerous levels for the state of her body.
Her body had grown significantly from a twig-like figure to a tall, and limber, yet almost comically jacked physique that rivaled even Zarbon before his transformation.
Dodoria continued into what seemed like a medical bay, in fact, this whole base seemed like more of a lab or a hospital to him. Dodoria questioned, then, why it was so heavily guarded. What did they have in store for Raditz? Torture? Experimentation? Worse?
Dodoria reached a sealed, heavy looking containment door. On the other side, Dodoria couldn't believe what he was seeing. Raditz was hooked up to some kind of device, around millions of vats of what appear to be babies, seemingly one or two years old at most. Several other Children and even teens were also kept in these vats of liquid, multiple layers of vats lined the walls as Dodoria stared into a tower like structure, many stories high and deep.
Dodoria blasts through the door, charging into the room with reckless abandon, as he gets pelted with thousands of laser bolts from several dozen turrets.
An alarm starts to blare loudly. A female voice speaks calmly over the siren "Warning, Breach in Seed Vault. Launch protocol cancelled until repairs on the hull are completed."
Dodoria had to take cover, his armor was starting to crack, and his skin was not quite resistant to this amount of laser fire. Dodoria was tough, but not invincible.
A tuffle scientist runs out to check on the vault, seeing Raditz continuing to have his blood drained in an IV. The Scientist looked to Dodoria, and explained.
"We have no use for Raditz anymore, We have used the blood of Raditz and blood salvaged from battles with Vegeta and Nappa. You may have him back, just leave." The scientist explained.
Dodoria walked into the room, finally able to take Raditz back to the ship. The Turrets stood down as he entered the room.
You share the strength of the Tuffle race, child. A voice spoke to Chanterelle as she finally regained consciousness. You are destined to achieve revenge on the Saiyans for their treatment of us. A final flash as the Tuffle race gets extinguished, as the attempt to escape is snuffed out by Freiza, you will remain, child.
Chanterelle heard not one voice, but that of thousands speaking in a shared voice, Tuffles of all ages kept in stasis vats spoke to her. Finally able to sense her true surroundings, she started to make it into the room Dodoria had opened, as she pulled Raditz out of the lab he was kept in, having his blood drained so much he appeared ghostly, pale, and barely able to hold onto Dodoria as he got pulled out.
"Let me see what was going on here, Dodoria, wait to call Frieza to ensure his genocidal ego. I think we can get something out of him. See what he was up to." Chanterelle held Radiz's cold hand, staring at Dodoria to make sure he didn't do anything premature to have them both killed from orbit on a suddenly dying planet.
Chanterelle gave Dodoria the full death stare. "If you tell Frieza now, that he had failed even worse than we thought to exterminate the Tuffles, we'll both be thrown into the molten core of this rock. Let me see if we can salvage any useful tech or data from this lab, then we'll tell him on our way off the planet." Chanterelle deadpanned in the most serious, monotone voice she could manage.
Dodoria gulped at the idea of simply being sacrificed, that they were all so expendable to Frieza that he'd destroy them all to fully exterminate the Tuffle race.
"Take Raditz to the ship, I'll meet you there. I'll need to heal him before we take him up, but he'll live for now." Chanterelle explained.
The Tuffle scientist looked at the woman entering her lab, with the turrets fully prepared to turn her into flaming swiss cheese, but the turrets clicked suddenly upon targeting her.
The scientist stared at the computer refusing to kill the intruder. Only seeing the directive "I am not allowed to harm Tuffle life, master." Calmly stated by the computer screen.
"Computer, Explain! Now!" The Scientist screamed, as Chanterelle approached the console he was standing at.
The computer spoke its directive in a calm feminine voice typical of advanced computer systems. "I am not permitted by my operational directives to harm a Tuffle being. The woman you are requesting I target shows a primarily Tuffle Biosignature. Therefore, I cannot target her while these directives are active."
"Excuse me, but I really mean you no harm. I don't want to become the sole survivor of my race any more than you want me to. Once Frieza finds out about this facility, you along with all the tuffles here will be destroyed."
The Scientist stared at her, looking her up and down, clearly she was not a Tuffle, but she couldn't be fooling the biosensors.
She had the tail of a Saiyan, but dark, rusty blonde hair that shared a color with her tail. The tuffles knew she was a Saiyan, but then how could she control and share ki like a Tuffle?
Most strange of all, her tail was bushy and striped like that of a fox, sharing darker red stripes. Chanterelle similarly had long, tufted, outwardly pointing ears that matched a coat with her tail.
Clearly she wasn't quite a Saiyan, nor quite a Tuffle.
The Scientist gave in. "What exactly are you, you aren't a tuffle, but you share our ki, our soul."
"My parents were both Tuffles. You may have heard of Dr. Amanita, the geneticist who cured Lychee's eugenic crusade with gene therapy from Saiyan DNA?"
Chanterelle looked around the room, seeing some of the tech clearly derived from that of her mother's.
"Clearly, you are familiar with her work, otherwise you wouldn't have been harvesting Raditz's blood to secure an escape for our people. Well, she was my mother. I may not be fully Tuffle anymore, but you kind of have me to thank for not dying 26 years ago. You're welcome."
The Scientist looked at her in awe. "You know, I used to work with Dr. Amanita, she was my mentor back in college, the whole reason I went into genetics instead of botanical pharmacology in the first place. I'm surprised I didn't notice you. I've studied you extensively for my thesis, even."
Chanterelle looked at him, dumbfounded. "First, I am a person, I hated how my mom always treated me like an experiment. Auntie Fenna was the closest thing I had to a mother. Second, I've also studied in my mother's footsteps. She refused to let me do anything else with my life. My dad was a cleric of the weave, but even then, I barely had any connection to it myself until recently. Probably on account of being only part Tuffle."
The Scientist raised a flat hand to touch his nose and bowed his head slightly in a Tuffle greeting. "Where are my manners? I'm Professor Meshima. While I'd love to keep talking, we do need to figure out a solution now that Frieza knows where and what this is. Maybe we can't survive this, but you could take the gene vault with you and find a safe place to revive the Tuffle race."
Chanterelle looked confused. That the Scientist was so ready to sacrifice himself was admirable, but Chanterelle found it to be scary how easily he could doom the tuffles under his care that surrounds them.
The Professor continued. "Your mother created millions of Tuffle embryos we had frozen to research a cure within the Tuffle gene pool. She kept it around in case the eugenics crusade wiped out the Tuffle race, so we could have robots regrow our species from these vats. That we had repurposed to hide the biosignatures of survivors in stasis."
She looked around to the vats containing all that remains of the Tuffle race. "You'd really doom all of these people for the hope I can find a safe place to repopulate? Repopulate from scratch even? Just a fresh slate for our culture? No one to pass on our culture, our history?"
Meshima sighed, "There is no way we can save these people as they are now. We could send them into space in this ship, but it would be destroyed by Frieza as soon as it launched. This place could survive the destruction of the planet using the weave as a shield, but it would be found immediately."
Chanterelle had an idea. "What if we move them to a cave system, hook up the vats in the cave, what survives would just look like an asteroid or planet fragment, they would stay alive. Drifting in space, but they wouldn't draw the attention of Frieza. We could even move the engines and computer to act as a mobile habitat to eventually escape."
Meshima thought about that idea, while they could do that, it may be difficult to transfer every Tuffle they had onto the ship in time for Frieza to not destroy it. But transferring a few elders, clerics, artists, children, to these caves, splitting the cultural libraries among a few smaller caves. They'd have a chance of survival if they split everyone into a dozen caves held together by a weave shield maintained by a few clerics. Keep their eggs in many baskets.
"It's worth a shot, but we really don't have time to save many of them, at best only a few hundred could survive along with the cultural libraries, I'd rather not decide who lives and who dies." Meshima sounded hesitant, but he nodded and started the work.
"Get your robots to help with the work. I can give you 12 hours. I'll take the gene vault and a few other bits of machinery in my ship, say it's some new tech we can use. Frieza doesn't know the difference between a scanner and a jet injector, much less between a case of pharmaceuticals and frozen single celled embryos."
In a rush, the tuffle healer grabbed a few cases of drugs and the gene vault with her, running back to the ship just in time for Dodoria to get impatient.
"Where the hell were you? I was about to take Raditz and leave you to die on this rock of yours."
"I got some drugs we needed back on the ship, they're really hard to get, and the tuffles make some of the purest stuff in the galaxy. Lord Frieza will be pleased with the increase of efficiency this stuff can give." Chanterelle was annoyed, but she was able to contain her anger. "Besides, I think Raditz needs some help here. You go up to the ship, I will heal Raditz, and we'll be back up together in a few minutes. Don't want to keep you or Frieza waiting."
"Finally" Dodoria slammed the door to his pod, tossing Raditz to the ground as the ship lifted from the crater.
She dropped to the ground to catch her boyfriend. Finally able to get some time alone, she started crying as she tried healing him. "I'm Sorry, Raditz. You'll be safe soon."
After a few moments, color returned to Raditz's pale flesh as he regained his strength. Days of being hooked up to needles stealing his blood had done a number on him. His breathing went back to normal, from almost nothing to deep healthy breaths.
"Chanterelle?" He asked, looking up to see her face, after so long. He tried reaching his arms around her neck to pull himself up into a kiss, but his hands fell and he dropped back into her lap.
She chuckled at how eager he was to see her. "Easy, now. I still need a moment to heal you. Then you can hug me as much as you want. Okay?"
Raditz mumbled something under his breath, something Chanterelle barely understood. As her hands worked down to healing his chest, she scoffed at the rather annoyed and disappointed sounding gibberish.
She reached down to kiss his cheek, since his attempt failed, just to make him feel better about his annoyed rambling.
"Almost done." She called, hoping he had the capacity to understand, as she started applying a finishing touch of ki to just top him off after he can't really fight on his own now.
Chanterelle picked up Raditz and gently placed him in her pod with the gene vault and the medicine. "We're going now." She whispered calmly, before turning off the comms on both her and Raditz's scouters.
"Ee-arth, I think Frieza said. Where Kakarot was sent." Chanterelle punched in the coordinates Raditz was given to travel to shortly before his capture.
Maybe Kakarot is still around, maybe together we can stand up against Frieza.
The ship lifted off the ground of the desolate planet, as the two head back to Frieza's ship. A few minutes passed, just as they left the atmosphere, a beam whirred past their pod, making contact with the planet.
"Shit" Chanterelle squeaked, That wasn't nearly enough time for Meshima to get that set up. They're all gone…
Looking down on the planet, she felt all the energy held in the weave get snuffed out, the energy that used to be held by the remaining tuffles exploded into Chanterelle.
As the last Tuffle connected to the weave, she was left to bear the energy held by an entire race. Surging through her, the energy seared her flesh as this amount of energy was simply too much to be held by a single individual.
Chanterelle screamed as the power surged into her veins, her muscles, Chantrelle's body simply grew as the energy coursed through her. Her physical frame grew denser and stronger to accommodate as much energy as such a drastic physical transformation would allow. Her muscles bulked to a comical extreme, her legs and arms grew both thicker and longer as her body grew to accommodate the flow of energy she was subjected to all at once.
Just as she reached a physical breaking point, the energy started to leave and be expelled back into the weave itself. The interwoven soul of the tuffle race had saved her from a massive overload of ki that would have definitely killed her.
Chanterelle's hair and tail turned a solid white as her aura surged to a level unheard of even to Frieza. The raw power started slowly getting expelled back into the weave. As frieza looked on in horror, at the sheer power he thought he was witnessing, despite barely being able to sense energy without a scouter, this wave of generational, ancestral power sent a shockwave even he could feel on his own, unaided by a scouter. The energy funneling into the weave left Chantrelle's body, going back to her previously frail self.
The energy surged back into the weave, no longer using her body as a conduit to transfer power from the dying masses. For years, she had not been able to access the weave, and now, as the sole remaining Tuffle, even in part, she had felt the weave's full power, its depth.
Frieza stared at the pod, his scouter shattered from the surge of energy condensing into one singular being. After a few moments, the power normalized, as Chanterelle suppressed her energy once more, transforming back into her typical frail frame as she pushed the excess energy from her body and into the weave itself. She had no idea how to access this power, but it was no longer destroying her body, and she considered that good enough for now.
Overwhelmed, with no idea what the hell just happened to her, she sat in her pod simply trying to keep her breathing steady after her body had been ravaged by the entire race's energy at once. Having caught her breath, she tried to return to the course they had laid in, just before passing out.
Left at the mercy of a Frieza who had just witnessed a power surge equal to what he had expected of a Super Saiyan, Chanterelle slept calmly in a pod that had just launched on a course set for earth, her pod shielded by the explosion. A journey of two years awaited them, but now, at least, they were safe. Until Frieza tries to search for them once again.
Frieza stared at the ship, absolutely dumbfounded at the power he witnessed. "What the hell was that?!" He screamed, looking at Zarbon.
"I believe the planet may have had a stronger presence than we initially thought. Perhaps thousands of those shrooms went out with a bang. You know what happens when one of them dies, sir. That amount of energy surging into the next survivor, in an endless chain that was cut short." Zarbon explained.
Frieza scoffed, "Well, at least they're all dead now. Just imagine if one of those shrooms survived, with that amount of power. It's a good thing that bitch healer died in the blast. Her ship should've gotten back here if she survived."
A/N: I'm honestly a bit uncomfortable with that transformation sequence, but to be honest that amount of sudden muscle or body development in all DBZ transformations is probably extremely painful. I will work on it, though. Try making it less awkward.