ARC 3
This is a very long and involved ARC. Very complicated. Lot of fiddly bits going on.
(At this point, Cyrax's player departs from the group due to availability conflicts, and the character is quietly retired.)
Mato goes home and calls up Karen for a chat. This results in them melting down in spectacular fashion and Mato ending up cursed to be unable to divulge her name. This would not be noteworthy, except that the meltdown follows directly on from Karen dropping Lilli in Mato's lap. Mato takes the time and trouble to bring Lilli to Chronoa's attention, and the majin becomes a ward of the Patrol -- not a Patroller, but probably headed that way, and with access permissions to basically anywhere in the city.
Training ensues. Mato trains super saiyan until he can maintain it like a FPSSJ, but snags completely on the 900 million power level mark, a limit which persists for arcs to come. Agatha achieves and begins to train super saiyan. Cynthia begins preparations to achieve super saiyan 2. Bonny makes friends with the Patrol's Broly and Freeza, and initiates the first of many doomed attempts to get into Broly's pants. Bassoon continues to be all but a father to Appa, with the, "all but a," swiftly shrinking. Lilli swiftly develops a crush on Chronoa. Lilli is absolutely terrified of Bonny. Chronoa prompts Agatha to pry Mato's auto-genocide plans from him, prompting another lengthy philosophical discussion where Mato asserts his lack of options and unworthiness for redemption, and Agatha asserts the opposite. This basically becomes their thing, and little progress is made.
This break is shorter, however, and we swiftly move onto the next mission. We're going to Ancient Saiya, the home planet of the Saiyan Empire of antiquity (fanon, unique to this RP). Apparently the maker of the obelisks is here, and we're to shut the operation down. We know little else, most records of this time being lost. We are, however, informed that almost all saiyan colony worlds are dead worlds at this point, and that if we see somebody going super saiyan, the planet is about to explode. Bonny shows up in a guise that terrifies Lilli, prompting yet another team meltdown. These are coming closer and closer together, of late, with tensions rising in every corner. At any rate, we eventually make it into the timeline, on that auspicious starting note. Lilli watches with Chronoa and Trunks from the Nest.
Immediately upon landing, we see a Saiyan God (the red form) trashing two oozaru like they're children's toys. The child responsible, Carrak, greets us, and suggests that we follow him through a portal to his base for a chat. Lacking better options when confronted with a god, we do so. Once Mato, Cynthia, and Vector are through, the portal closes, leaving Bassoon and Bonny behind with Carrak. Simultaneously, the Time Nest is locked out of entering or even observing the timeline.
Finding themselves in a ki-shielded, refugee-filled cave and out of telepathic contact with the others, Mato, Cynthia, and Vector sense Gerrin and immediately get under cover. He establishes contact with them regardless and expresses a desire for a truce. After some deliberation, the team agrees to hear him out and goes to meet him and the rest of the Verdes. Once there, it transpires that Jennifer's acts of torture were not authorized, and her punishment is social stigmatization. The Verdes don't even defend her when the Patrollers pile on the abuse, and actively deride her. They lay out the reason for their presence: the Verdes had an agent here, a mage called Doctor Harren who made many magical devices for them. However, he recently went rogue and started making his devices for the saiyan King. They're here to shut him down, but when they arrived, they barely escaped being mind-wiped. They have worked with the local resistance -- Carrak's group, once formed around a team of saiyan gods in resistance to the King. He is responsible for the timeline being shut down -- he has a time calcifier, and this is what it does. The Verdes propose a truce. The team accepts, grudgingly. Here it comes out that the obelisks, while originally a Verde project courtesy of Harren, were discontinued long ago, and the people in the bases from last time -- and the agents going after the Tuffle President -- are not Verde personnel. They're just as much a mystery to the Verdes.
Meanwhile, Carrak takes Bonny and Bassoon to the site of a Resistance strike on a caravan. As they arrive, the Resistance is executing the last enemies. The two take objection to this and step in. An old saiyan named Toma steps forward and explains the situation -- Harren gives the King's soldiers mind control implants, making them intractably hostile. The implants admit no tampering, lethally self-destructing upon the slightest interference. Bonny attempt to confirm this with various spells and finds that they do, indeed, admit no tampering. Toma gives them a local's view of the war and makes a positive impression on them both.
Back at the Nest, the Patrol gradually panics more and more as they fail to re-establish contact with the team, with the timeline's set closing time swiftly approaching. Trunks readies the Elite squad of Freeza, Buu, and Broly, and Chronoa reluctantly accedes to using her Authority for a glance into the timeline. Despite this, they still have no means of entry. Lilli aids in brainstorming, eventually giving Chronoa the idea she needs. Chronoa settles in to meditate on her solution while Lilli chats with the Elites.
Back in the timeline, Bassoon and Mato re-establish scouter-to-scouter contact. They trade intel, and Mato learns of the implants. He goes in to request an explanation from the Verdes, implying that this is tech that they hoped to keep secret (since they had not yet mentioned it), to general disgust from them and Agatha. It is also to more particular disgust from Cynthia, who transforms, powers up to full, demands an explanation, and in so doing inadvertently shatters the cave's ki shielding, splashing the refugee camp's presence all over the map. The saiyan King immediately mobilizes troops for an attack, and the two teams prepare for a defense.
Toma reveals himself to be a master sorcerer, and he and Bonny go to take out Harren, Bonny leaving three multiforms behind. They arrive to the capital to find it emptied. Proceeding to the palace, they find Harren and ambush him. Unfortunately, Bonny runs into a trap, fails to kill Harren, and is involuntarily transformed into a misshapen beast. Mato and Agatha separately resolve to go to the city and take out Harren. Feeling the above transpire, they rush in just in time to witness monster Bonny finish slaughtering Toma. In a rage, Mato vaporizes the beast while Vector deals with the rest of security and besieges Harren.
Back at the cave, Bassoon and Richard ferry the refugees to a separate site while the others hold the line. At this time, Bonny's multiforms, who had been providing magical support, trying increasingly inventive ways of capturing enemy soldiers in the face of also-inventive ways of denying her those captures, are incapacitated by the fate of their fourth clone. Re-merging, they stumble out to join the fight, vaguely realizing that there's powerful death magic at play on the field that grows stronger the more people the teams kill. Unfortunately, she is too befuddled to communicate this in the heat of the moment, and on going oozaru and attempting to join the fight, she is swiftly knocked out. The slaughter continues, strengthening the King's forces.
The fight escalates, with stronger and more magic-boosted enemies assailing the teams. At the palace, Harren attacks and puts Mato and Agatha on the back foot. In response, Mato warns Agatha, and uses the Black Soul. It puts Harren down and ends his boosts to the army at the cost of broadcasting Mato feeling like the most evil thing in the universe across the planet. At this exact moment, Chronoa gets a window back on the timeline and is promptly sick upon sensing that. At this precise moment, the remaining saiyan gods also return, wiping out the King's army. In desperation, the King activates a failsafe set up by Harren. The missing civilian population, deep in the planet, is sadistically used as batteries to fuel the King. Monstrously strong, he prepares to slaughter the teams. Bonny, in reply, transforms and becomes the Legendary Super Saiyan. The fight ensues, with the nature of Bonny's form making it laughably one-sided.
Back in Toki Toki, Chronoa panics over Mato's use of the Black Soul and vanishes to make sure his children aren't being horribly abused. His son replies in the negative, she returns, and the people at the Nest wait for an opening to enter the timeline.
Those present for the fight against the king all pitch in, culminating in Bassoon destructively destabilizing the King's power-up. Everything explodes. The King is gone when the dust settles.
In the palace, Mato and Vector start going for the Calcifier (Toma's body has vanished) until, upon feeling the blast, Mato goes back to render medical aid. Vector continues to search, and eventually finds and destroys it, re-establishing contact with the Nest. As people recover from the chaos, there's a moment of calm before everything starts disintegrating again, with everybody finding somebody at whom to yell. Bonny and Carrak, in particular, begin to come to blows. In the midst of this, the saiyan King frees Harren and receives one last power up in the form of Harren sacrificing the entire civilian population for a massive boost. Carrak goes Super Saiyan Rage, everybody reorients to the new threats, and the fight is on. It is an affair of truly apocalyptic proportions. Everybody piles into the King, Trunks and the Elites come through and blast him, and the whole thing caps off with Richard forming a spirit bomb from the last remaining wisps of the saiyan population and nuking the King with it. This does not quite kill him, and he nearly kills Jennifer despite her transforming (through a lecture well over the line into psychological torture from Mato). She is saved only by Toma reappearing, very much alive...and revealing himself as King Verde, known otherwise as Jaffur Gokun-Vegeta, who goes Super Saiyan 4 just to execute Harren after he deals with the King.
Jaffur promptly tries to enlist the gods to his side, and a debate ensues. After a while, Lilli enters the timeline, and has cause to mention Karen. Jaffur has an exceptionally strong reaction to this and ends up threatening to abduct Lilli if she won't elaborate. In the middle of the general outrage in response to this, Cynthia sees fit to compare Jaffur to his father. Registering his objection to this characterization, Jaffur withdraws his team and leaves with a threat. Mato patches people up, and then there's but one thing left to do.
In a very difficult conversation, the team convinces Carrak and the gods to commit suicide in destroying their planet for the good of the timeline, a fate to which the gods eventually accede on the condition that the refugees are withdrawn. Mato, under orders from Chronoa, assents to this in the (to this day shared with nobody else) understanding that any refugees who might stop the complete and utter collapse of saiyan civilization will die quietly of heart attacks and assorted other maladies over the course of the exodus, as Time cleans up its mess with all of the big pieces put in place. The gods die, the team returns.
In a place beyond time, the Time Queen receives her report of the calamity and smiles at the opportunity Carrak and the others' afterlives present as bait for one of her enemies, as she prepares to resurrect Harren and begin her war on the Patrol.
The ARC ends.
ARC 4 to follow...
