#squidgeta

°°°One°°°

“You shouldn’t leave things like this in the kitchen!” Vegeta’s voice was angry, but small, like he was yelling through a cell phone with a bad connection, or like he was down the hallway. He wasn’t, of course; he was at Bulma’s feet in the kitchen, looking brutally angry - even in this strange new transformation. 

“You shouldn’t eat and drink everything in sight!” Bulma yelled back, resisting the very real temptation to poke him with the pointy toe of her high heeled boot. “Learn to read a label!”

“What if this would have happened to the boy! Or if your mother had mistaken it for baby food and given it to Bulla!” Vegeta’s scowl deepened and his flesh flashed rings of bright blue against his newly purple skin. Bulma knelt down and gingerly picked her husband up from the floor. She lifted him easily, now that he was an eight inch by eight inch Blue Ringed Octopus. 

Bulma had been working on a new Capsule Corp project for space saving technology. As she thought about new ways to improve Capsule tech, she thought about the way the octopus at the aquarium could squeeze his way into the tiny cracks and crevices in his environment. Bulma began to poke around with a sample of DNA from a blue ringed octopus, choosing that species because of its ability to camouflage at times and flash bright blue rings of warning or alarm at other times. It seemed useful, but in what way, she hadn’t yet decided. 

This was Bulma’s way when inventing or experimenting - she would allow her mind to pull on any string it found, let the puzzle unravel, then put it together in surprising and amazing ways. As she let her mind wander over the puzzle of the abilities of the octopus, she decided it would be best if she could just… talk to one. There were talking animals all over the world, of course, like Oolong and Puar and why shouldn’t she have a talking octopus? 

So, she set about meddling with this DNA and that DNA and this chemical until she found a combination she was sure would, given to an octopus, allow it to speak to her. She placed the clear mixture in a tall glass beaker and walked it to the refrigeration unit in her lab - but it was broken.

And that’s where Vegeta’s trouble began. 

He’d trained hard, rising before the sun - and before his son - to get in a real training session in the gravity room. As soon as the boy was up, he’d want to train with Vegeta, but Bulma had recently forbade Trunks from training with any of the dangerous laserbots Vegeta used to hone his own battle skills. So, Vegeta trained twice a day now - once with the intense gravity and murderous robots each trying to rip him apart, and a second time with his son. He used the less intense training with Trunks to hone his accuracy. 

Vegeta emerged from the gravity room steaming, starving and thirsty. He made his way, as he always did after training, to the kitchen. He threw the cold food cabinet open wide, and there at his eye level was a small pitcher of ice cold water. He snatched it up and gulped it down in one swallow. As the greasy sizzle traveled down his throat, Vegeta realized his mistake - but too late. 

He was already feeling the poison, or whatever this was, crippling him. Vegeta gripped the counter, hard enough to crack the granite, trying to regain control of his body. But it was pointless. Vegeta’s grip slipped away from the countertop, and he crumpled to the floor. And so, when Bulma went to the refrigerator to collect her little potion, she found the situation like this:

The glass beaker, drained.

The kitchen island, cracked.

A saiyan training suit, empty.