Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Shiryou: Wicked Wishes ❯ Chapter 1 ( Chapter 1 )

Shiryou: Wicked Wishes

The book was written long ago, when the seas ran red with blood. It was this blood that was used to ink the book.

The book served as a passage to the evil world beyond. Bound in human flesh, this ancient Sumerian text contains bizarre burial rites, funerary incantations, and demon resurrection passages. It was never meant for the world of the living.

It is called the 'Necronomican'. Literally translated: 'exclusively pertaining to the named dead', i.e. The Book of the Dead, and at the moment, it was spinning its way through a tear in time and space toward a certain unsuspecting household.

~<~>~

"Dinner!" She had barely gotten the words out of her mouth before two forms dashed into the kitchen and sat at the table.

The older man was fitted in a dark blue spandex body suit and had black hair that stuck straight up like a flame and included a widow's peak, which he insisted was a distinctive trait of his family. His chiseled, tanned features were hard and uncompromising, but the scowl that was usually present was not as noticeable as it had been nine years ago.

The younger was wearing casual clothes, a little loose fitting. His straight, lavender hair framed his face, two of the locks stubbornly insisting on falling in his blue eyes. His features contained the happy, carefree nature of all youth. He grinned at his mother with a charm that was quite endearing.

Both males were sweaty and disheveled from their workout.

The light blue-haired woman turned to the table and put both her hands on her shapely hip, wrinkling her nose as she glared at them with cerulean eyes. "Oh no you don't! Upstairs. Both of you! No food until you wash up!"

The younger scrunched up his six year old face, but quickly moved to comply. It wouldn't do to anger his mother.

The older, however, wasn't so inclined to spare Bulma's feelings and sat at the table, glaring with coal-black orbs. She matched him look for look. "That means you too, buster, and none of your 'I'm the Prince of all Saiyans' garbage either!"

The spiky-haired alien snorted but said nothing else, pushing himself up from the table and following his son upstairs. Let her think she'd won this round. He'd show her tonight.

Bulma turned back to the stove and pushed back a blue strand of hair as she filled up a plate for the two who had just left the kitchen, making sure to fill both as full as she could. It wouldn't do to have to get them seconds before she'd even taken a bite of her own food.

She sighed. Every night it was the same. She had to tell both Trunks and Vegeta to wash up. Maybe Trunks could be excused since he was only six, although his half-Saiyan heritage made him seem older, but Vegeta was a grown man. For a Prince, he sure seemed to have a disinterest in his own hygiene. She supposed that was a male thing. It was up to the females to make sure a man looked presentable.

Not that Vegeta needs much help in that department, she thought with a wry grin. She had only to look at him to know she could never regret inviting him to stay with her ten years ago. It was more than just looks that attracted her to him, though. Okay, maybe their first time had been looks, but after his archrival's death Vegeta had no reason to stay on Earth. Yet stay he did. He even trained his half-breed son in the Saiyan warrior ways.

He may not show his feelings. But there's something there. Doesn't take a genius to figure that out. Which I am one! She grinned and sat down at the table with her own plate of food.

She hadn't even stuck her fork-full of food in her mouth before her son dashed into the room and took his own seat, inhaling his food; literally. She ate her food quietly, marveling at even a half-Saiyan's capability to eat anything and everything in sight and still be hungry. At least he had his father's manners. If he hadn't, she wouldn't have been able to eat around him.

As if the thought had called him, Vegeta too entered the room, although with more dignity than his son, choosing to strut in front of Bulma first, smirking when she stared, not that he wasn't looking at her too. Oh, yes. Tonight will be busy.

He sat down and ate, complaining every few bites on how atrocious her cooking was. He ate more of the 'atrocious' food than Trunks though, impossible as that seemed.

Bulma was just finishing off her dessert when Trunks, cleaning his tenth plate of food, stood up and excused himself from the table, saying something about calling his best friend, Goten.

Bulma chuckled and met Vegeta's raised eyebrow, "He gets excited about the silliest things!"

Vegeta snorted softly, "Sounds like you, woman."

Bulma huffed with aggravation, "After all these years you still can't say my name!"

Vegeta smirked at her, "Point proven."

She flushed with a not-quite mock anger and rose from her seat. Vegeta followed her movement with his own so quickly that she blinked to find him standing almost nose-to-nose with her. She scowled at his smirk, "Jeez, don't you think of anything else, Vegeta? I'm not an automaton!"

Vegeta looked surprised, "With that mouth? What mad scientist would have dared?"

Bulma wanted to slap him but knew she wouldn't even touch him. Sometimes she hated that Saiyan speed. She had her own ammunition though.

"If a scientist would have been mad than you must be a raving lunatic. Trunks is proof enough of that. Or are you just losing your control?" She played a hand teasingly up his side.

Vegeta wasn't about to be goaded, "I believe you're the one who can't keep her hands to herself."

Bulma winked and stepped lightly away from him, "We'll just have to see who has more control, eh?" With that, she made her way to the lab to finish her work. Being president of the biggest company in the world, Capsule Corporation, was hard work.

Vegeta smirked after her swaying form and left the room, planning on doing his own grueling workout now that Trunks was done for the night. He stopped in front of a door and punched a sequence of numbers in the keypad to the side. The door slide open with a hissing sound and Vegeta entered the round, white room with a grin of anticipation.

The Gravity Room had been made courtesy of Bulma and her father when Vegeta had first stayed here. It not only simulated Earth's gravity but also increased it. Vegeta had found it a great way to boost his power. As of now, he was at four hundred and fifty times Earth's gravity. He thought he'd shoot for five hundred G's today.

He entered the correct sequence of keys on the console and readied himself as red light bathed the room, signaling that the gravity was in use. He'd start off with some basic katas, before going to the more complicated ones and finishing up by sparring with the small, round, robots. Then he'd teach the woman a thing or two about control.

Bulma similarly entered another room on the opposite side of the building. This room, however, was designed in a style that she felt would inspire her, not that she paid much attention to the décor when she was in the lab. Too many unfinished projects lay around that would catch her eye and demand her attention.

She sat at her desk and began to create masterpieces of her technical genius, letting time pass as it always did when she worked; fast.

Something startled her out of the blueprint she was studying and she glanced at the clock. Her eyes widened. It's two in the morning? Already? She sighed and put down the blueprint, thinking that a breath of fresh air would energize her. She was glad she had installed a door in her lab. Walking through half the building just to go outside for five minutes and then walk back to the lab was pointless.

She opened the door and drank in the night sky and the millions of stars that dappled it. She stepped outside and cursed as she tripped, barely catching herself.

She looked back to see a square, brown thing right on her doorstep. She frowned. The door had also been installed so her shipments wouldn't be misplaced on their way to the lab. She wondered why the deliveryman hadn't waited for her to sign for whatever it was he had left her.

She picked up the object and felt over its rough and bumpy surface. Unfortunately, the stars did little to illuminate what she held. With a shrug, she entered the house again and firmly closed the door.

She went to her desk and put the book under the light a lamp there afforded. With a startled squeak she dropped what she held.

It was a book, and although that shouldn't have caused her to react so violently, what was on the cover did.

Whoever had made the cover had been morbid to the extreme. The brown leather of the front had been stylized into a monstrous face that was twisted into an ictus of pain that made it look inhuman. She brushed her fingers against the cover and shuddered. It even felt like skin.

Swallowing a sour lump in her throat, she used one finger to push the book open, trying to touch as little of the book as possible.

Her scientific curiosity took over at what she found inside. She leaned in to inspect the black ink. It had a red tinge to it. She wondered for a moment, with distinct disgust, if the person was so morbid as to ink the book in something that looked like blood.

What the ink outlined though, was much more interesting to her at the moment than what it had been inked with. The writing was unknown to her. And Bulma was pretty sure she knew every language there was. She even knew some Saiyan. This writing though, looked crude and archaic. She turned the page again and leaned back with a soft gasp of revulsion. There was a drawing of a skull with detailed skin hanging from it and a leering grin, the following page had what looked to be an anatomical drawing of the back of a demon, complete with wings.

"Okay, this is weird. Why would someone write-Oh! Maybe it's a book on demonology!" She certainly wasn't into that field, but she knew some people who were. They'd pay a lot to get their hands on this. Or, more to the point, they'd trade a lot. Capsule Corporation certainly wouldn't suffer from this.

With a grin she picked up the book and took it to her computer. She'd just created a program that would translate any unknown language into a known language. It simply took in the similarities the unknown had to various known ones and deciphered it from that. Sure it wasn't accurate, but she was working on that.

She hooked up the program and opened the book to a random page, letting the program scan the page and begin its search. She estimated that it would take a day for it to translate even a paragraph of the book, but she was sure it would be worth the wait.

With a satisfied smirk, Bulma turned off the lamp and closed the door, heading to her and Vegeta's room. She passed the gravity room on her way and stopped to peer inside.

Vegeta was bathed in the red illumination; sweat pouring over his features as he batted away a yellow beam of light and energy that had reflected off one of the twelve bots surrounding him. The beam collided into another bot that must have been hit repeatedly already, its integral structure compromised, for it blew up on contact.

Vegeta held up one hand and Bulma watched with peaked interest as a ball of the same light and energy formed in his hand and flew out to strike one of the bots. Vegeta began dodging and weaving, trying to attack the bots while defending himself, as this beam began the round of Russian roulette that would either cause another bot's destruction or result in the Saiyan to have to pick himself off the ground.

No matter how many times she saw it, Bulma would always be in awe at the power that Vegeta and the rest of Earth's guardians, not that he would consider himself a part of that group, could literally fling from their hands. She had even tried to study what they called 'ki', some kind of pure energy. They claimed that everyone had it. She shrugged, watching Vegeta decimate two bots with one ki blast. If she had it, she didn't have the training for it and wasn't sorry for the loss. She much preferred mechanical things to fighting.

While humans could use ki to a limited extent, only growing so much in their power, Saiyans took that use to an extreme that could go so far as to change their genetic makeup, turning their hair blonde and their eyes teal and making their mass almost double while the amount of ki they could manipulate quadrupled. They called it Super Saiyan.

Vegeta himself, despite being the Prince of his race and the one destined to attain this level, the Legendary, had had a hard time reaching it. He had, in fact, been surpassed by one of his own race; albeit of a lower rank then him. This only half explained his enmity with the one he called his archrival. He had finally become what he'd always wanted, only to find that what he'd thought was the goal, turned out to be only a goal.

His son had a long way to go in his father's eyes to reach that much desired level, yet Bulma secretly thought that it wouldn't be long before his son joined the ranks of the Legendary.

With one more look at Vegeta as he finished off the last bot, Bulma turned and continued up the stairs. She wanted to be ready to 'seduce' him.

Vegeta called the program to halt and smirked as he watched the woman start up the steps. He'd known she was there. Besides being able to manipulate the energy, he could also sense a person's unique ki 'signature'. Not only that, but he could repress his own so that someone trying to see how much energy he could manipulate would get an inaccurate assessment of his power.

Vegeta grabbed a towel and used it to wipe the sweat off his face and body. The door to the GR slid open and he exited to follow Bulma's trail, smirking as he entered their room and leaned on the wall across from the bathroom with his arms crossed. His smirk widened as Bulma came out of the bathroom in a white negligee that barely covered her and pushed himself off the wall to change, brushing past her to show that she wasn't effecting him.

Bulma watched as Vegeta stripped down right in front of her; changing into the boxers he preferred sleeping in, although with his lack of modesty, he'd probably sleep nude if she allowed him.

They stared at each other for three long minutes before both came to the conclusion that if they 'lost control' at the same time neither could hold the other to it.

~<~>~He looked out over the horizon, finding it strange to be on a cliff overlooking a desert. He didn't remember coming up here. He didn't even know where here was.

He was not surprised when Bulma walked up to stand beside him and gaze at the same scene he looked upon. She had ever been intuitive to his moods and now he wanted silence. Trunks came up to stand on the opposite side of him, although his gaze was focused more on his parents than the view.

Vegeta finally turned to his mate and smirked, but she placed a finger to his mouth to silence him. Her eyes looked anguished and his brow furrowed in question. What about the place they were made her distressed?

She stepped back from him letting the finger trail down his chin to fall at her side and turned her sad eyes to Trunks before looking back at him. She seemed about to say something, but suddenly doubled over in pain, blue hair covering her face as if echoing her physical agony.

He moved toward her, trying to say her name, unsuccessful for the sudden fear that lurched into his throat. His son also stepped forward but stopped in confusion and looked back at his father, eyes pleading for him to stop this.

Vegeta continued to move forward with just that in mind, his hand reaching out to grasp her, when her head cracked back up. Vegeta, despite all the horrors he'd seen and been through, flinched back at her visage.

There was a horrible leer on her mouth, the corners stretched upward unnaturally. Her eyes, once a beautiful blue, were now white, 'soul-less' pupils staring right through him. A cackle, inhuman and piercing, came from her now blood-red lips. She raised hands that bent crookedly and ended in claws poised to rend and tear. Her hair flew back from her face only to billow around it again, as if alive. It seemed to reach out for him, eager to grab him and pull him into her embrace.

He took notice of his son then and so did the monster that wore Bulma's face. She leered at him and took shuffling steps toward the still boy, whose eyes were wide open with their own horror. Vegeta moved quickly, stepping in front of the boy and facing the monster who merely cackled and launched herself at him with a shriek.

Wincing at the pain of the yell to his sensitive Saiyan hearing, he threw an arm out and instinctively flung the monster away. It skidded to the edge of the cliff and Vegeta noted with an impassive, warrior mentality that she had broken her arm.

The chuckling sound that came next from the monster had Vegeta back on his heels as she rose to again confront him, acting as if the pain coming from the arm that had bone clearly jutting from it felt wonderful.

Still cackling, the monster lifted her now useless arm and put it to her mouth, chomping down on it as he remembered chomping down on chicken legs. A white liquid oozed and squirted out, but it only caused the monster to grow more ravenous as it continued to gnaw its way through flesh and bone.

Vegeta couldn't look away from the gruesome sight of his mate tearing off her own arm with her white delicate teeth that were now becoming stained with black blood. Luckily, years of killing and plundering allowed the objective part of his mind to kick in, though he still grimaced in revulsion. He was glad he was shielding his son from this.

With a quickness he'd not thought possible, Bulma threw her now amputated arm to the ground and reached the good one out, latching onto Vegeta with a grip he could not disengage. She hadn't been that close! She shouldn't have been that fast! She couldn't have been that strong!

He shouldn't have found himself hurtling over her madly laughing self and over the cliff with Bulma's grip on his arm and her fanatical cackle in his ear.

As the ground rushed to envelope the whole of his vision he clearly heard Bulma's sane and soothing whisper in his mind. 'There is a way.'

His eyes snapped open and he lay still reaching out with his senses quickly and breathing out a sigh of relief as he found his son's ki calm, indicating that the boy was asleep. Bulma was nestled up against him, head on his chest, a warm lump in his side that curled perfectly around and on top of his body.

He absently ran a hand through her hair as he felt for any foreign ki's that would've caused him to awaken so suddenly. Not finding anything he frowned into the darkness. The dream had woken him up, but no dream, no matter how horrible, had ever waken him with a pounding heart and fear knocking at his mind's door. He took a few breaths of the air that was flowing in from the open window and felt the cobwebs of the dream clear from around him.

He didn't think much on it. It was, after all, only a dream. And the feelings it had invoked…well, Vegeta not being comfortable with feelings, these certainly weren't welcome.

With a mental shrug, Vegeta willed himself back to sleep, despite a nagging doubt that insisted that this dream was different.

~<~>~

Ashley J. Williams forced a smile onto his face and kept himself from running his fingers through his short, dark brown hair in frustration as the customer again went over the many and myriad reasons why he should be allowed a cash refund for the third time.

Inwardly he groaned, while outwardly his fake smile continued. He nodded every few sentences to indicate he was listening while actually wondering about the foxy blonde that had been here ten minutes previous to this idiot.

After the retelling he allowed his face to look very remorseful, "I'm sorry, sir. But it is not our policy here at S-mart to give cash refunds. We do however allow you to exchange the product or you can take the handy S-mart money, good for any product in S-mart worldwide."

Truthfully Ash thought the whole deal was bull. He certainly wouldn't have been told that he had to buy something from the store when it was the store's product that was defective. Obviously the customer agreed, for he snorted and walked off.

Once the customer was out of sight, Ash let his smile fall and had to repress the urge to give the man the finger. He had to remember the security camera at his back. He knew management would probably let it slip because of the other little problems he took care of, but it never did hurt to use a tiny bit of control. Use the expletives when it was really called for.

Ever since he had been 'promoted' to Customer Service, life had stunk more than usual. As if taking care of some of the not-customers wasn't enough, now he had to take care of the live ones.

Speaking of which, there's one now. Ash grimaced as a female scream sounded. He hefted up his sawed off double-barrel from below the counter and placed his hand on the countertop, using it to heft himself over, taking off at a run toward the sound that was still in the air.

The sight of a man running down the aisles with a gun held in his hand made the customers shrink back and walk quickly away. It wasn't until he switched the gun to his other hand that they began to run. Something about a metal hand unnerved people.

Ask skidded around the corner to see a man in blue overalls holding a squirming, shrieking woman high over his head, preparing to throw her into a glass showcase full of crystal. Ash winced. That would hurt.

The man changed his mind when he saw Ash and turned toward him.

It was, of course, exactly what Ash thought it was: the deathly pallor to the face; white, pupil-less eyes; leering grin; unnatural cackle. It was a Deadite, one of the living dead, in his store, again. Before he could react beyond recognizing the monster, the man hurled the still screaming woman at him.

Ash barely had time to catch her, and they both landed in a heap on the floor in a position Ash didn't mind at all from the red-haired beauty. The woman, however, was more interested in getting up and away from the monster than what compromising position she was in.

Upon seeing Mr. Overalls striding toward them with the shuffling gait characteristic of all Deadites, Ash was only too happy to help her. He couldn't shoot the demon with the woman on top of him, after all.

He set her carefully to the side, "Stay there." She nodded wordlessly at him, eyes wide as she watched the dark-haired, nicely muscled man turn to the demon that had been torturing her. She finally peeled her gaze from his rear as he launched himself forward at the heavyset, bald man.

He spun around the man at the last second, avoiding a clumsy grasp at his person, unloading shells into the rotting body and watching in grim satisfaction as the monster lurched back after each shot. As Ash finished his spin, the monster again charged, words finally coming out of the mouth in an unnatural version of a human voice, "I'll s-swallow your s-soul!"

Ash rolled his eyes and continued to pump lead into the corpse, standing still in an obvious mockery of the demon's charge. "All these years and you still haven't gotten new lines." Swinging the gun around so that he was holding the muzzle, Ash met the Deadite's charge with his own, whipping the gun around and burying the butt of it in Mr. Overall's face.

The head snapped back, a crack indicating that the softened tissues had allowed the neck to break. While the head wobbled unsteadily back and forth, the body continued on its regular course, which meant Ash had to quickly spin the gun around and shove it in the man's gut, letting it go off and spraying the unfortunate girl with blood and gore, which made her shriek all the more.

The body hit the floor with a thump and lay quite still. Ash met the girl's gaze, "Hey, babe! Mind giving me that axe behind you?"

The girl complied with shaky hands, "But-he's dead, isn't he?"

Ash shook his head, "Nope. He was already dead. Have to dismember him." So saying he took the ax up with both hands and swung down on the Deadite's arm.

The Deadite's eyes shot wide open and it screamed in a sound that well outdid the girl's previous one. As Ash again struck the ax down into the stubborn but slowly dismembering arm, the demon locked eyes with Ash own brown ones, "Williams-s. Yes-s, know you." The grin turned strangely triumphant, "We have los-st this-s war, but we win another."

Ash snorted and aimed the ax at the thing's head, "Whatever." With one good swing, the axe went through the Deadite's mouth, silencing him while Ash finished his work.

An hour later, Ash looked up to see the girl still standing there, gaping at the bloody, twitching body parts on the floor, the blood-soaked man before her, and her own blood dripping form with a twitch in her eye.

Ash leaned against the axe handle, "So, wanna go out for some steak after I clock out, baby?"

The girl looked stupefied until his words kicked in. She let out a bark of laughter that quickly turned hysterical and turned to walk out of the store, probably never to return again, to either the store or to sanity.

Ash shook his head and twirled the axe up to rest on his shoulder, bending down to pick up the gun. He glanced down at the body as he straightened and gave a shuddering leg a good kick. He always seemed to lose more dates this way. He wondered how long it would be before a call would be placed to the cops about a girl covered the blood walking aimlessly around.

He glanced up to the clock, "Well, another day done." He made his way back to clock out and tell the guys that there was a mess in aisle sixteen.

Walking from his car to his apartment building not even an hour later, Ash pulled his coat closer against him to ward off the sudden chill in the air. Another Deadite, another day.

If only he and his five friends hadn't gone to that stupid cabin. But how were they supposed to know that it belonged to an archeologist who had found a certain book? How were they supposed to know that the recorder they played back, the strange words that Professor Knowby's voice had repeated, would awaken whatever they had awakened, some sort of evil in the woods? An evil that hadn't stopped in just taking over the woods, or even the cabin they were in, but had, one by one, consumed each of his friends, torturing those left, starting with his sister and ending with Linda, his girlfriend, soon-to-be fiancée.

They had tried to get him, but each time something had spared him. He laughed mirthlessly. Maybe 'spared' was the wrong word.

Ash cocked his head to the side and stopped in front of the door to the apartment complex, looking up and down the deserted street, which wasn't uncommon for this time of night. People would've said that Ash was crazy for walking around alone like this, that is, if he hadn't already been crazy.

A faint whooshing sound reached his ears and he stepped away from the door so that he couldn't be trapped by whatever was coming. He set his feet and allowed his hand to stray to the gun strapped to his side, concealed by the coat he wore. The chainsaw on the other side was a comforting weight.

The air in front of him crackled and flashed with white energy and Ash's eyes widened in horror at the familiar sight of a swirling hole that popped in front of him. "No!" So saying, he spun on his heel and made a mad dash for the corner, hoping it would keep him from the black hole-like pull of the vortex.

He found, instead, that his feet were moving backwards instead of forwards and strained with all his might to resist the pull that already had him. "No! No! No!" He looked frantically around for anything to grab a hold of as his feet began to lift from the ground and lunged at a mailbox, wrapping his arms around it just as his feet were lifted parallel to the ground.

He clung for dear life onto the mailbox, knowing that the same scene that happened last time would repeat itself this time. "Nonononononono!"

"Nooooooooo!" With one last long shriek, Ash's arms were yanked from their hold and he was sucked into the portal, which winked out of existence seconds after the man was out of sight.

Several yards away from Capsule Corporation, a vortex similar to the one Ash had been pulled into, opened up and Ash's form was spewed out to land with a thud onto the ground. He sat up slowly as the vortex winked out of existence again and rubbed his back in remembered pain.

He cursed. Well, here he was.

He took stock of his situation. He was in some sort of woods, with a faint light coming from in front of him. It was dusk. He still had his gun and chainsaw. Speaking of which….

He stood and lifted the arm with the metal hand up, which gleamed in the low light provided. He twisted the hand and it easily popped off at the wrist, leaving a piece of the metal behind.

It was into this piece that he fitted the chainsaw, which had been modified for exactly this reason. Ash grinned as he started it, reveling in the clean sound of the shiny, red chainsaw revving up. His boss had gotten him the new chainsaw as a 'raise'. It certainly helped his boss more than giving Ash money would have. He had even gotten a set of chains for it, just in case.

Well, he was here for a reason, time to find out-

The sound of a child's scream that rent the air in the direction of the light source told Ash exactly what he was here for. As he sprinted through the woods toward the sound, he reminded himself of his itinerary. Kill Deadites, go home. Check.