"...His car… had a dead battery?" I deadpanned, staring at the old man tied up in front of me. Something about that explanation made me feel dead inside.
Apparently, he had a secret garage way down here.
The mountain range was stupid large. The chances of a single search actually being able to find Gero's lab, with how well it was concealed, was slim to none. So, when we'd originally begun looking, the old man hadn't been particularly worried. He'd simply continued his work on whatever his current project was, trusting his security and concealment measures to work.
But when Zeck had actually managed to find the lab, the trust had instantly evaporated and the old man's natural paranoia had swung back full force. In the minute or two between Zeck finding the place and Tater and Lynn making it down to the basement, he'd already abandoned his project, set the base's self-destruct (which I'd accidentally shut off by blowing the reserve power for the upper level), and was in the process of starting his car.
But, unfortunately, the car battery was dead, and the car wouldn't start. So, instead, the bushy-eyebrowed old man sat in the passenger seat, trussed up like a hog by his own cables, as he slipped in and out of consciousness.
A psychotic, paranoid genius, caught because he let his car battery run down.
Someone so smart that he managed to create multiple entities stronger than Frieza himself, despite having only observed up to the Saiyan Saga, done in by a dead car battery.
At least it was a nice, red sports car with a dozen illegal aftermarket modifications, including a rocket engine that was attached to the trunk. A car fit for a genius.
If only it didn't have a dead battery.
In the end, while I considered options on how to potentially deal with Gero without outright killing him, Tater put a 'ki bullet' in the doctor's brain.
Unfortunately, while I hesitated to do it, I agreed with him that it was the most logical choice. Even if a normal prison would hold the guy, he was probably smart enough to either break out, or get used for someone else's evil plot, neither of which were particularly appealing possibilities. Besides, while his weapons had harmed people, Dr. Gero himself hadn't done anything but build them. Technically, the legality there was rather questionable. At this point in time, he hadn't even begun abducting people and experimenting on them. Every single android he'd worked on so far, except for Cell, were completely mechanical beings. Honestly, the only crime I knew could've been shoved onto his head was the illegal modifications to his car.
And nobody cared about that. He wouldn't be the last person to attach a rocket to the back of a Capsule Corp vehicle.
Beyond that, our only other options were to either send the dude into deep space (and screw that), hold him in the Celatus Village (Another big no), or execute him.
After considering all of that, I knew I would've made the same call Tater did, anyway.
Once the doctor himself was executed, there was the matter of his lab. His research.
According to the hard drive on Gero's upper computer, Android Eight was only here for fabrication and preliminary assembly, things that had fallen on the wayside upon the downfall of the Red Ribbon Army. Apparently, the android's code had been finished sometime along the way by his partner, but it'd been shoved aside and forgotten in favor of Project Cell.
The dude who'd been collaborating with Gero to make Eight had left dozens, maybe hundreds of angry emails in Gero's account since then, but they, like Eighter himself, had been completely and summarily ignored.
In the end, Zeck and I agreed to send Eight up to the doctor in Jingle Village, so that the guy could finish building him. After parsing Eight's code, the only change that we felt we really needed to make was taking Gero's 'explosive' little calling card out of Eight's chest.
Eight would make a good guardian for that village… or maybe a construction worker or something, we didn't particularly care. His total energy readings wouldn't even put him in Zeck's category, in terms of fighting abilities, after all.
We also found the beginnings of a project titled 'Android 9'. Apparently, Gero had spent around a year and a half, maybe two years on Cell, and had only recently realized how long Cell would take, leading to him reasserting his attention over to his android projects.
9 was supposed to be a completely different type of android compared to his previous ones, which were all about weapons and bluster. 9 was supposed to be an energy absorbing type, disguised as a little boy.
The idea was, one let their guard down, the boy touched them, and they were instantaneously drained of all of their energy. Then, the boy would have more than enough raw power to simply kill them and be done with it. Effective, even potentially against Tater.
Fortunately, right now, it was just a bunch of half-finished designs and schematic files, and a fabricated head that I used to freak Lynn out.
She crushed it. Then beat me with it.
And as for Cell, his was a… trickier situation.
Already, the tiny bug-like thing was alive, and it had Tater's genes, along with mine, Pepper's, Lynn's, and Roshi's. It may not have been aware yet, but killing that thing would essentially be the same as slaughtering a baby because it could be evil in the future.
Lynn wouldn't stand for it.
So, instead, I ended up reprogramming the computer that was 'raising' the thing, completely shutting down the weirdo AI that was apparently dead set of taking samples from every strong thing that existed and molding it all together repeatedly for all of existence, while the things it grew constantly listened to Gero's voice telling nursery rhymes like "Remember. You are my greatest invention." And "Don't forget. Your job is to kill the one known as Tater, and ultimately achieve perfection."
Now, it'd slowly de-splice Roshi's DNA, and it wouldn't have access to the outside world at all. It'd just watch and grow Cell, until Cell was ready. Any new DNA to be introduced into Cell would need to be manually introduced from the lab.
Once that was done, we put Cell's 'nursery' in a capsule and brought it back to the lab in our village, so that we could keep a closer eye on his development.
Cell would still be born, and I had no clue what his power level would be, or even what he'd look like when he was, but he'd be on our side.
Personally, I was kind of hoping to inject some Namekian DNA into the little guy and have him take over for Kami as Earth's next guardian.
But it'd take around a decade for him to grow big enough to be able to leave his pod, so who knew?