An Important Sort of Meeting

"Wait, Ward healed him?" Taori interjected. He knew Ward fairly well, he felt, and that didn't exactly sound like the Shinjin he was familiar with. He was on the Kingdom's side, right? It sounded to Taori like healing Lottus was exactly counter to help maintaining the security of the Saiyan Kingdom. Did he get possessed by a demon himself, or something? Taori was going to have to talk to him about that, he supposed... "Doesn't sound like him," Taori simply concluded, though he wasn't going to assume Amara was lying.

"He was the one who gave us all those nice clothes that time, right?" Alpinia asked. She hadn't interacted with him quite as often as Taori had, though she still had maintained a relatively positive opinion of her. "Not terribly nice of him to jeopardize my cousin like that!" Alpinia gave Amara another hug, this time from behind as she snuggled her cheek up against her younger cousin's hair. "I'm glad you made it out of that mess in one piece..."

Taori snorted a bit at Alpinia's display of immense physical affection, though he calmly asked Amara, "Yemma? Is that God, or something?" He'd visited the Otherworld once, with Ward's help, actually, though he'd only spent a short while there. The concept still weirded him out, frankly. "Well, either way, I doubt he's going upstairs like you did. ...There's a downstairs, right? I'd have to imagine it's at least a little bit more securely guarded than where they were keeping you."

"Well... What else can I say?" Taori replied with a slight shrug as Amara took some offense to him saying that Ward's actions did not sound like his own. The Namek thing was news to Taori, as well. Had this all happened while he was marooned on that planet? "I'd be questioning it if I heard that you were doing these things, too." Not that he was as close to Ward as he was with Amara, but he still thought of Ward as an ally, if not a somewhat distant but reliable friend. ...He was really going to have to talk to the Shinjin later about all of these accusations.

"Oogh, he is not invited over to any more dinners if that's all true!" Alpinia declared, releasing Amara from her grasp as she did so. Her arms crossed, she continued, "I'm going to have to give him a right piece of my mind next time he pops up! And to think I offered him a standing invitation to some of my cooking." 

"Let's worry about standing dinner invitations later," Taori cut in. Amara then elaborated on the role of Yemma in the Otherworld, generally confirming what Taori's intuition was on who this Yemma figure was. He supposed he'd be meeting Yemma himself someday, then? All mortals must have. Chances were slim that Lottus had been sent to heaven, at least. That meant he was stuck in Hell... "Think he'd be opposed to a visit from me?" Taori idly mused with a chuckle, though when he got a glare from Alpinia, he cleared his throat. "...Probably not a good idea if he's as strong as you say. You can still die in heaven and hell, right?"

"Ugh, for the love of... Yemma, I guess?" Taori grumbled. Were they supposed to start praying to Yemma, now? Taori wasn't sure what good that would actually do. It didn't sound like there was any real reason to if all the god did was judge whether you were deserving of heaven or hell when you died. "I'll give him a call next chance I get and ask him if he can meet. I looked around the palace for him a bit, but I guess it makes sense he's not around if you two aren't exactly on great terms." Damn, who else was going to end up being an asshole? Taori hoped he wouldn't next find out that Vocado was a serial killer or something.

"He is not going to visit him in any place," Alpinia then butted in on the topic of Taori taking a little trip down into hell. She marched over to Taori and yanked down on his sleeve, throwing him slightly off balance and causing him to stumble.

"Whoa- Hey!" he protested. "I was just curious, is all! I don't really want to go meet the person who almost blew up half the planet all on my own." ...He sort of did, though, even if just to see the legend for himself. He supposed he probably had a few questions of his own for Lottus as well, but... Well, he wouldn't really have any way to know ahead of time whether or not Lottus would just try to obliterate him on sight. Taori kind of had a hard time believing he'd be able to hold his own against a Super Saiyan for longer than a couple of minutes, if even more than one minute.

Enough about that for now, though. Amara had her own questions for Taori. "Huh? Uh, well," Taori stroked the side of his face with his cheek as he wondered how to respond. "I did sort of lose a challenge by way of no show, right? So you're the rightful leader and all. I wouldn't want to take that away from you unless you really don't want to be here." He wasn't even sure he wanted the position back, to begin with. That depended on Amara's own answer, he supposed.

Taori blinked as Amara suddenly began to go into some obscure legal precedents that had been set way back in the days where the Saiyan Kingdom was constantly waging wars on entire other planets, and the reigning monarch would have to spend much time away from the planet their home was located on. She even had the legal jargon ready and waiting on a document she pulled up onto her screen, which made Taori furrow his brow slightly. "You've uh, really looked into this, huh?" he mused as he squinted at the fine print. Admittedly, he wasn't exactly a legal expert, but Amara was pretty smart and knew her stuff, so she was probably right.

"Doesn't that mean you two would still have to fight?" Alpinia asked after a moment had passed. "I don't know how I feel about my husband and my cousin fighting..."

Taori shrugged. "Well, we've fought before. In heaven, that one time. I don't think I did all that well, though?" He'd gotten stronger since then, of course, but so had Amara. He knew Amara was implying she'd be intentionally throwing the match, but if they didn't make it look convincingly real, it'd seem sort of suspect, wouldn't it? "I can see what you're saying, but if I don't win in a way that's convincing, I think that'd make it rather difficult for me to take up the mantle again," he explained.

Taori tapped his scouter and scanned up Amara, confirming his suspicions. "And while you might not be the strongest of Saiyans, you're certainly still stronger than me as I am now. It was, uh, kind of hard to train on that small little planet. Alpinia isn't exactly cut out to be the training partner of someone forty times stronger than her, and the only other inhabitant was literally bound and chained, so... I'm a bit rusty."

Taori supposed he did find it relatively reassuring that Amara wasn't planning on just dumping her crown into the lap of the first person to walk in the door that seemed vaguely interested in taking the job. Still, there was no way she was fond of the position if she'd looked into as many different options for abandoning it somehow as it was sounding like. He looked away from the documents and towards her, then looked her up and down thoroughly. 

She really did look tired. In every possible way he could describe, too.

He listened to her explain herself, and how her edge was really more with her technology than with her actual power and that by not using said technology, she'd be handicapping herself in a way that wasn't totally obvious to the onlookers. That, and that it was alright if Taori wanted to sprain her arm, or something, to make it look real. "Well, I'm not gonna do that," he stated, "On purpose, at least. But alright, Amara. I can tell this isn't what you want to do with your life."

Alpinia also added, "And in the meantime, why don't you get some actual rest before the fight? I think Taori and I can handle these papers for you if that's what we're going to be doing after, anyway." She sat herself down at the table and expectantly tapped the palms of her hands against it, which made Taori wince.

"On second thought, I think I'd rather all that was your problem," he said to Amara with a grin, though he very quickly added, "Kidding. Thanks for doing the job so some lunatic didn't show up and start trying to throw us into planetary wars again. That was the biggest thing I was worried about while we were stuck."

"I do remember that!" Alpinia replied, crossing her arms and frowning. "You had me worried sick! And then Taori here ran off and did the same thing too to try and impress my father since he didn't approve of my dating a lower class Saiyan." She looked up at Taori and gave him a knowing sort of smirk, to which he sighed and rolled his eyes.

"I had a lot to prove, okay?" Taori responded a bit defensively. He was arrogant and thought that war was a glorious thing where heroes were made back then, though he knew far better now. It was actually quite a pointless thing, wasn't it? In their case, at least. Sure, sometimes battles had to be fought and won, but what had they even been fighting for back then? A slightly larger slice of the planet they already lived on? Taori knew dozens of fine men and women he'd gone into battle with who never came back home for no real reason other than their pride. He was just lucky not to have been one of them.

"But anyway... Get some rest," Taori urged Amara. "I'll make sure you know it when I'm uh, 'challenging' you." Shouldn't be too hard to make it known well enough for Amara to hear about it, he figured. The problem was if some other, more problematic folks heard about it and decided to barge in to snatch the throne for themselves. Hopefully that wouldn't happen.

"Sweet dreams! I'll be sure he doesn't slack off on those forms!" Alpinia called after Amara as she headed off to her royal chambers for some much needed rest. Once her cousin was finally out of sight, Alpinia turned up to look at Taori, whose shoulders sunk. "Okay, the Hatchi relief forms are that stack right there, why don't you fill those out and then you can help me on these financial forms?"

Taori very reluctantly and slowly took a seat in the chair that was maybe a bit too short for him, exhaled through his nostrils, and got to reading. This Kingdom was lucky he cared enough about it to actually do paperwork for it...