Mameko : Mother of Goku - Vegeta-sei Revisited
by Aoi Kami Sarah
Chapter One
They had sat in the waiting room for a few hours before the studio was ready. Chi-chi claimed that she was skeptical and talked mostly about the fact that it was a beautiful day and that she’d rather be outside in her garden. Gohan on the other hand was very excited to see the medium.
They hadn’t been able to get a private session. The waiting list was months long, but they had just made it in time to get tickets for the gallery. Mameko sipped a bottle of water and ran her hand over her rounded belly.
“I wonder what this John Edward guy is like,” she commented.
“I bet he’s flaky and new-agey,” Chi-chi muttered and flipped through a magazine.
“I’ve seen the show,” Gohan reminded his mother. “He’s a normal guy.”
“Except that he can talk to dead people,” Mameko smiled and poked her daughter in law. Chi-chi laughed.
The large group of people was escorted into the studio and they were seated down in front due to Mameko’s very large, pregnant lady’s belly.
Immediately the trained fighters felt a charge rip through the audience. Everyone there was expecting to hear from their dead relatives. Their senses were heightened.
“So that’s how he does it…” Gohan muttered.
The women raised a brow.
“He must be able to read the people, not the dead.”
Chi-chi and Mameko frowned, but had to stare when the young man at last came out and introduced himself to the audience. He was casually dressed and had a soft tone of voice. The women were immediately set at ease.
“Hello and welcome to Crossing Over, I’m John Edward. I may not get to you all, but please take what I do for others and reflect on it in your own lives.” He put his hands together and sucked in a breath. “Ok, I’m... I’m right over here.” John pointed directly at the Son Family.
Gohan nudged his mother. “Watch this,” he whispered.
Chi-chi waved him off.
John paused. “I’m getting a very strong older male I see as being a father or grandfather figure. He’s... foreign. He’s not from here. I’m getting like a flute or a fife...?” he asked.
“Or a Piccolo?” Gohan asked.
“Yeah.”
The half-Saiyajin folded his arms, but nodded.
“He’s got a strong attachment to... rice?”
Gohan, Chi-chi and Mameko laughed.
“That’s me.”
“You’re rice?” John asked. “Ok...” The audience laughed. “Well, he’s saying something about... lemme guess, you got a relative named Bread?”
“Yeah!”
More laughter.
“Still living?”
“Yes.”
“There’s something that happened recently, a transition of some form to do with Pan that the musical foreigner is saying congratulations...”
“She just started 1st grade last week.”
John nodded. “Congratulations! This is his way of saying that he’s around....” The medium shook his head. “It’s getting sorta crowded here. I have a bunch of people... men, women. They’re all trying to get through at once. Wow. I mean like LOTS, folks.”
Chi-chi and Mameko exchanged interested glances.
“And they all wanna go through me!” he laughed nervously. “I’m getting a sever sense of trauma. Like they were all there and then… whoosh.”
Gohan blinked. “For us?”
“I think so... I’m getting... something about vegetables.”
Mameko gasped.
“What is it with you people?” he asked. “Never mind. I don’t wanna know.” He took a deep breath. “Wow. I’ve never heard anything like this before... There’s like a chorus of people. It’s like they’re trying to say the same thing. They’re showing me a crown, which I would see as being related to royalty, someone related to you is royalty or you are...?”
“I don’t think so...” Gohan stated.
“Bejiita Oujisama…” Mameko whispered.
“Friend?”
“Prince.”
“Ah.” John furrowed his brows and concentrated. “They’re expressing their thanks to the prince... is there more than one prince? They’re showing me the younger male royal.”
Still doubtful, Gohan nodded.
“Something he did made these people very happy. Wow. There’s honestly like millions of people... wacky. You guys know what I mean, though, right?”
“Yes,” Mameko whispered. Not wanting to lead the medium, she kept her comments to herself. ‘My people... The Saiyajin. Bejiita-sama said they were all killed at once… and later, it was his son who killed Freeza…’
The audience didn’t seem to care how crazy that was to be true. They all sighed in sympathy and awe.
“They’re pulling back their collective energy. Please let the royals know what they’ve said here today. Thank you.”
The audience applauded. John moved on, but he couldn’t shake the intensity of the chorus he had heard: an entire nation fallen at once, reaching out to give their thanks for vengeance.
*
A few weeks later Mameko gave birth to her second son, Akira. It wasn’t for another 2 years that she would remember the medium’s reading. Although Gohan had done his best to dispel its validity, saying that Edward was simply a good telepath, Mameko couldn’t help but think it was real. She hadn’t been thinking about her people at all that day. He had pulled them from the blue.
As she was folding the laundry one afternoon two years after their session, she saw a commercial for “Crossing Over With John Edward” and remembered. Mameko sat on the couch and watched the show as she watched Akira play on the floor. Inspired, she made plans to visit the Oujisama’s at Capsule Corp.
*
Mameko sat across from Bulma and munched a biscotti.
“I’m so glad you’re back to work here, Mameko-san. We’ve missed you,” Bulma stated.
Mameko blushed. “Thank you. Is Bejiita-sama at home today?”
“Mmhm. What, thinking of a little spar?”
“Oh, no. I think my training days are over…” She blushed some more, thinking of the ‘exercise’ she was getting at home. “Besides. I have this little monster to attend to.” Her son, Akira reached for the cookie. “No, no. Eat your Cheerios.” Mameko handed him a zip-lock baggie that clearly did not interest the child. He pouted.
“Oh, biscotti won’t hurt him. Hell, Trunks ate stuff you wouldn’t believe when he was a little boy.”
“That’s because you were a rotten mother,” Vegeta grumbled as he entered the room. His wife smacked him on the arm, lightly.
“Like you were around to know!” She took Akira from Mameko and baby-talked to him.
Mameko’s whole head turned bright crimson. “Ano… Bejiita-sama. Good afternoon.”
“Hey,” he answered and furrowed his brows at Akira. The fact that his mother was the one person left alive who knew him as a Prince kept Vegeta from making a snide comment about the boy’s half-Jinzouningen heritage.
“Bejiita-sama, I meant to tell you something…”
“Mm?” He raised a brow.
She explained to her skeptical prince as best she could about the medium’s reading. “It was very odd that he should know such things. Gohan-kun is convinced it’s just a trick; that he didn’t really channel our people at all.”
“Even so…” Vegeta sat on the arm of a sofa and looked out the window. The setting sun turned the sky dark orange.
“It’s a pity. You’re so strong now, Bejiita-sama… You could wipe Furiza out just by looking at him!” Mameko cheered and clenched her fists. Vegeta’s chest swelled noticeably. Bulma rolled her eyes.
“I still don’t see why you don’t take the time machine back and do that very thing!”
Vegeta and Mameko practically fell over.
“TIME MACHINE!?” the blue haired Saiyajin cried. “You mean you still have one?!”
“Oh sure, the one that that poor Trunks who got killed by Cell had. Cell used it to come her from the future. It’s a little beat up, but since I monkeyed with Mirai Trunks’s one, I can get ours up and running.” Bulma continued to play with Akira, mumbling baby talk and making him giggle.
Mameko looked to Vegeta with huge, watery, puppy-dog eyes.
“No.”
“No!?” the women shouted. Akira looked where they did and screwed up his mouth.
“But WHY, Oujisama!?”
“Earth would be a ruin if I…” he snarled a bit, but admitted, “and Kakarotto were to never arrive.” He turned back to the window. The sky was growing redder, just before the dusk.
“It’s true. The time machine works in two ways. It travels through the 4th and 5th dimensions. It logs the signature of the dimension it comes from, you set the time to go back to, it arrives, and instantly creates another string of reality. It then logs that signature, which is why Mirai Trunks was able to come back and visit us that time.”
Vegeta seemed unmoved by his wife’s explanation. Mameko gnashed her teeth. “I’m sorry, Bulma-san. I still don’t understand.”
“If you were to go back and kill Furiza, Vegeta-sei would be saved. Vegeta and Goku would grow up on their planet. They’d never come here. The whole world would… hm… hehehe…”
Vegeta raised a brow and cocked his head just enough to see his wife laugh. “What’s so funny about that? This world would be destroyed!”
“Well. No. Probably not. Let’s see. Pilaf would have gotten his wish to be emperor of the world. The Red Ribbon Army would have taken over soon enough… but Dr. Gero, having not been defeated by Goku would never make such powerful Jinzouningen, so there wouldn’t be a Cell either. Oh. Conceivably, Buu would have eaten the galaxy by now, I guess…”
Vegeta scoffed.
“Ok, so you’re RIGHT! THERE! I said it.”
Still, he looked out the window. Bulma looked to Mameko, who was also staring out the window from where she sat. Quietly, Bulma took Akira into the kitchen.
“It’s one of those sunsets, ne Bejiita-sama?”
He nodded slightly.
“Now that I know it’s possible, I still really want to do it.”
“What, go back and save the world? We would be dooming this one... this world we now call home and all the people on it.”
Mameko furrowed her brows and stood up. “But we could warn them…”
“Warn who? Yamcha? Muten Roshi?” he scoffed.
“No. We could warn you, Oujisama.”
Vegeta straightened up. They watched the red fade to black as they made their plans to go back to Vegeta-sei.
Next : Mameko and Vegeta head back in time!
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