Chayote's feet planted firmly atop a tall skyscraper rooftop. The Saiyan approached the edge of the roof to stare at a laboratory complex in front of her in the heart of the rebuilt West City. Gohan landed not too far behind while creeping up to Chayote from behind to get her attention so that he could straighten something that occupied his mind out.
"Chayote-san… Do you really think that letting Videl-san come along is a good idea? She is powerful for an Earthling martial artist, but she is out of her depth against Artificial Humans," Gohan spoke up.
"Not at all. By all means, she should've stayed behind," Chayote shrugged while staring down at the security personnel down below, wondering how to best handle this. If Bulma would try to hack into the lab complex, she'd be discovered and the full brunt of repercussions would hit her head-on. That meant that Bulma needed to get her hands on the information she was interested in from within the facility.
"Then why…?" Gohan freaked out before getting startled by Videl just landing beside him.
"Wow, you guys fly so fast!" Videl exclaimed while patting down her outfit and approaching the same edge her mentor was scanning the laboratory complex from. "So, is this the place?"
"Yes. This is going to be troublesome. The fact that we're not just facing a tough enemy we need to pummel, but are actually trying to avoid attracting attention is a hassle," Chayote sighed. "All on its own, avoiding scanners, and the human eye is simple. With a speed that surpasses the speed of light, you quite simply cannot be picked up by the human eye. Video capturing technology fails way easier than that. If need be, we can overclock security systems in the entire facility with a surge of Ki. The problem is that we need to stay still in order to operate the control panels, and computers and to transfer data."
"If you're worried about that sort of thing, you should've just let my dad handle it," Videl crossed her arms. "He's the world's greatest security specialist, remember?"
"That is true, I know of a few agents, including your father, that could've handled this operation. The problem is–this is a state governed facility and we can't let this stick on Satan Security. That means that no agents, especially not the head of Satan Security, can be seen even remotely close to this place," Chayote explained.
"But aren't you too an agent of Chayote… I mean… Satan Security?" Gohan pointed out.
"I'm on maternity leave. If I get captured, it won't stick. Not that I intend on leaving anything to stick anything on us standing in that case," Chayote closed her eyes with a grumpy expression. This problem truly was a unique one. Problem was that with Artificial Humans being involved, this was a problem of premiere importance.
"Let me handle it!" Videl cracked her knuckles with a confident smirk on her face. "You've been preparing me for something like this, so let me at it."
"Chayote-san… Why did you let Videl come along on such a dangerous mission? She risks getting injured or killed," Gohan leaned in to whisper to Chayote's right side.
"It'd have been a major hassle trying to convince her otherwise. Plus, she's your responsibility now, so it's you who has dragged her into this…" Chayote crossed her arms, washing her hands off of the responsibility. Gohan freaked out, exclaiming unintelligible grunts as he failed to form his thoughts into anything cohesive. Chayote approached the young Videl and patted her on the shoulders with both hands, entrusting this responsibility.
"Are you sure?" she asked. "Artificial Humans can give the two of us some trouble and if these are some new models transcending into the realm of Super Androids, they'll put the entire world at risk again."
"That's okay. This is a stealth mission, isn't it? If I see any trouble, I can just back out of it, right?" Videl nodded vigorously.
"It's not that you can back out. It's that you absolutely must back out and leave the rest to us, no questions asked. If Artificial Humans truly are involved, our hands are untied from being as loud and destructive as we want until they're smashed to bits," Chayote raised her clenched fist, pressing it so hard that it tested the integrity of the fingerless leather glove on her hand. Videl gulped and nodded.
"Is this really a good idea? Videl-san is the daughter of Satan-san!" Gohan interrupted the two from the side.
"Exactly. I'm not affiliated with Satan Security. I don't yet work for my dad! This'll be fine!" Videl calmed Gohan down with a nudge of her fist against his chest. After the female martial artist hopped onto the railing at the edge of the roof, ready to dash off at the labs to infiltrate them, Gohan gently nuzzled the spot on his chest where the girl nudged him while seeing her off with a pair of worried eyes.
"She snagged the pachinko ball with Bulma's access codes right out of my pocket…" Gohan sighed.
"Yeah, she's a troublemaker. That's why you two would make such a good team–you'd keep her in line and teach her some more respect and decency, through example. She's already mellower and more considerate, and you haven't even trained together once," Chayote snickered while observing her pupil at work.
"Shit!" Videl panted as she dashed across the entire parking lot and made it to the corner, pressing her back against the wall. It was too frightening to take a single peek. The moment she shimmered into the scene, the guards picked her up immediately. It was as if they had some sort of unruly awareness scanning technology.
"Chayote and Gohan were wrong, just speed won't do…" the cornered girl muttered to herself. These guards didn't seem like much and she felt confident that she could take them out pretty quickly, but Chayote said that they shouldn't be taking anyone out.
"Halt!" a robotic voice made Videl jump up. A flash of light blinded her. It came from a flying drone that swooped in like an insect buzzing out from the hive and rushing the intruder. By the time her sight returned to her and her eyes stopped watering, the guards were all over her. Videl didn't resist their attempts to control her and press her to the wall, but she pushed her hand in a position where it didn't hurt when they twisted it behind her back.
"Who are you? What are you doing here? This is a government facility. Kids can't be here, don't you have to be in school at this time?" a guard began drilling Videl. From the looks of it, they wouldn't let her go until she shook their suspicions off.
"I'm home-schooled actually," Videl excused herself with a light tone of voice, playing this off like she was a wrong brat at the wrong place. Given how the circumstances were kind to such a version, it wouldn't be tough to pull off. "I wasn't aware that this was a government facility. This used to be a Capsule Corps laboratory… Hey, no need to get touchy!"
A guard slipped his hand into Videl's pocket and pulled the pachinko ball with Bulma's access codes out, showing it to the rest of the crew. The inquisitive guard picked the ball up and slipped the cybernetic vizors off to examine it. Upon an elementary visual inspection, he laughed out and slipped the ball back into Videl's pocket.
"And here I thought for a second that we've troubled an intern or something… You're just some gambling brat, aren't you?" the guard's tone lightened. "Sorry, we've kept the pachinko machines working, but civilians aren't allowed on the premises, so you'll just have to find another place to get your game on in, kid."
"Wait, do I know you?" one guard scratched the back of his head at an angle that made his helmet dangle awkwardly on one side of his head. "Drone, can I get an ID here?"
The drone swooped down and lined itself up in between the guard and Videl, opening up a display panel as its beaming light once again flashed in Videl's face. This time it was less of a blinding flash and more like an intense ray scanning up and down. It didn't take long for the guard to become all lively.
"Ah! I knew I recognized you! You're Videl, Mark Satan's kid, aren't you?" the guard snapped his fingers.
"Videl? Seriously? That Videl?" another guard slipped his cyber-vizor up to get a better look at the girl. "Now that you mention it, she looks familiar. Now it makes sense why she was moving so fast. Without these vizors, we'd have had no hope of making her out. Probably how she tricks the video cameras to slip in and gamble here…"
"Who would've known that Videl-chan, Mark Satan's daughter, is a gambling hooligan? Don't worry, girl, if you get us all your dad's autographs, we won't tell anyone," another guard laughed out, inspiring a wave of hilarity to wash around his peers. Videl could feel heat pulsing in her cheeks, but then she noticed that Chayote's and Gohan's Ki were no longer where she last sensed them. It was then that she noticed the fact that none of the guards were wearing their vizors anymore.
"They used me!" Videl's eyes shot wide open in shock as the thought boomed in the confines of her mind so loudly that it washed away all other emotions or conscious thoughts.
"Come on, Mayo, give the kid a break. As if you haven't broken into any places at her age…" the first guard placed his plasma rifle on his shoulder while turning to his colleague.
"Yeah, I used to break into the arcade all the time during the after-hours. The older kids used to hog all the time on the arcade machines after-school so nighttime was the only time I could get to play…" the guard referred to as Mayo laughed out, overcome by a wave of nostalgic memories.
"I'll kill them, I swear…" Videl closed her eyes and clutched her tiny, shaking fists by her sides.
"Shouldn't we have helped Videl-san?" Gohan kept on harassing Chayote all the way as they shimmied from one oversized lab machine to the next, eluding any attention. The local scientists were too fixed on their jobs to notice much of anything, so, once they got inside, the situation felt much easier than Chayote theorized it to be at this stage of infiltration.
"Nonsense, they won't hurt her. She's a kid, plus, they physically can't hurt her," Chayote dismissed it. "She did a good job distracting the guards."
"You knew she'd fail?" Gohan didn't let it go. "Then maybe we shouldn't have let her snag the access codes… We'll have to send the files over to Bulma-san manually now."
"I didn't know she'd fail. I was just fine with either outcome. If she snuck in and did our jobs for us–that'd have been fine. If she got herself captured, that's fine too. It gave us the opening we needed and it will teach her a thing or two about humility," Chayote replied.
Suddenly, all the lights focused on the two of them, right where they were about to dash off. Chayote and Gohan stopped in place, pressing their backs against each other as they prepared for trouble. The scientists all stiffened up and froze in place.
"Those scientists… Chayote-san, they're all robots of some sort…" Gohan pointed out.
"You thought you were being so darned clever, didntcha?" a voice distracted Gohan and Chayote toward a platform higher up where neither of the two could sense anyone looking at them. This fact let them put it together that they were working against yet another Artificial Human. "Moving too fast for cameras to pick up, talking so fast that only you two could register it… Too bad I'm one step ahead 'a ya all."
"You're an Artificial Human, aren't you? What's the meaning of this? Is this another one of Dr. Puri's schemes?" Gohan called out for answers after realizing that the only way they'd be getting any would be if the villain pontificated said answers back at them.
"Sorry, kiddo. Now that's just plain wrong," a muscular man with greenish-blue eyes and long white hair hopped over the railing and landed on top of a halted conveyor belt. "My momma raised a merciful young man though, so how 'bout you guess again?" he straightened his back out while pointing his finger at Chayote and Gohan with a rich smirk on his face. Judging from the look, he enjoyed keeping the two in suspense somewhat.
"So… Dr. Puri isn't in charge of this. This is a government facility so, most likely, the government decided to put some of their own Androids together. Why? Just to flex on everybody else?" Chayote crossed her arms while beaming a mean stare back at the clothed in a military-style outfit Artificial Human. It was because of his camo cap and military trousers kept over his muscular yet lean body by a pair of suspenders and a plain sleeveless vest over chiseled, adamantine muscles that were on full display that the Saiyan shot in that direction. The man's appearance and complexes told the whole story better than he ever could.
"Not quite…" a familiar voice that Chayote kept repressed in her memory made her stare blank out as a hi-tech steel lid slid off of what at first appeared to be a pillar. The formation revealed itself to be a lab tube with complex wire systems attached to a suspended human head, the looks of which were all-too-familiar to Chayote.
"Dr. Gero!? But how…?" no matter how much Chayote believed she'd be unimpressed by the true meaning behind this facility, the revelation of Dr. Gero being mixed up in all of this government plot widened her gaze by a significant margin.
"Never mind him. He's just our brain fund if you will. There ain't even enough 'a him left to call him by that name, but his wrinkled face certainly still has some authority 'round these parts. You see, when the good doctor done blowed himself up, some semblance of his brain matter remained intact. Since it happened near Aru Village, the constant frigid temperatures allowed that brain matter to survive long enough for the fleeing White Ribbon Army operatives to scoop it up. Once the whole Rainbow Brigade went under, their assets became government property and eventually accessible to private contractors looking to participate in their fine auction house activities. None of 'dem government shills knew what it was they were selling in that pretty medical box thingamajig, but me and my brother from another mother, a pair of Red Ribbon army enthusiasts, knew just fine. From there, it was just a matter of transplanting the surviving, frozen matter into a fresh set of a deadman's brain, melting a metal skull together and scalping the good doctor a human-looking face, then filling up the blanks with Dr. Puri's remaining research to complete the full picture," the Artificial Human replied.
"You built him a head and let this speck of brain matter tinker on you? If you wanted to be an Artificial Human, you should've just stayed converted…" Chayote rolled her eyes.
"Aww, but we both know that ain't the real deal. Everyone knows they put control chips inside 'a our brains to brainwash us when we were that way. Thing is that we had to upgrade ourselves and since one good doctor was positively nuts and let her motherly female hormones impede her mission, me and my good brother knew we wanted absolutely no part of that pie. Our mission for worldwide security is based entirely on facts and logic. And so, we waited until that hysteric affair was over with until we rebuilt Dr. Gero, though just in his head form. His aspirations and dreams are of no interest to us so we allowed ourselves to not bother giving him none 'a those boring things. He's just a means to an end, a breathing Artificial Human knowledge database," the military-pants Android elaborated.
"You said you and your brother were Red Ribbon Army enthusiasts. So your goal is the same, world domination, or are you in it to kill my dad and Chayote for destroying the Rainbow Brigade?" Gohan took a neutral fighting stance, preparing to fend off the Android that revealed himself to them since he noticed how circumstances were heading in that direction and the teen wanted to be ready when the fight breaks out.
"I may have admonished our beliefs rather wrongfully, boy. For that, I do humbly apologize. You see, it's not that we wanted to join the Red Ribbon Army, let alone the splintered mess that was the Rainbow Brigade. It's just that I and my good brother agreed with a lot of their ideas. We wouldn't have minded finding our company and working under the Red Ribbons' rule, but that just ain't the fruit life's dropping us from the apple tree if you catch my drift. We just needed Androids to protect the world from all dem aliens dropping down from the skies and causing trouble to our Earthling way of life, not to mention, other Androids that are mucking it up all the same. And just so our sacred beliefs didn't get filtered out and forgotten over the years, my good brother and I had to immortalize ourselves as Androids too, just so we could stay in charge of our company forever and not let some diversity quotas or investors tell us what's best for the company our daddy built for us with his God-given, lottery-won money," the white-haired Artificial Human replied.
"That's pretty great," Chayote yawned.
"You're yawning? Excuse me, are you YAWNING at us?" Dr. Gero began frothing oil and some unclear bio-goop from the mouth in his lab tube.
"Yeah. I think it might be just about nap time for Navy and I tend to nap alongside him so my biological clock is getting all messed up. That's why it's pretty great we bumped into the head honcho in mullet-man here," Chayote waved her hand in dismissal of the robotic, floating head confined to the lab tube.
"He did say that he and his "good brother" were in charge…" Gohan nodded. "That's a neat observation, Chayote-san."
"You seem to be under some sort of misconception that you're something more than rats wandering into our barn to nibble on our scraps. So how about I make the situation as clear as possible to you?" the Artificial Human cracked his knuckles. "Just be advised that my brother and I have been both raised in an orderly, God-fearing household and our daddy upheld traditional family values in our house the proper, knuckle-dustin' way, so neither of us are above roughing-up females."
"Good to know I don't need to feel bad, no matter how hard I hit you," a vein popped out on the right side of Chayote's forehead as the ground trembled underneath her feet. There was plenty about this yokel she disliked and a mother's life was giving her plenty of frustrations she needed an escape from.
