A Brief SI (Dragonball Bulma SI)

What a nerd.​

It was almost midnight and the gang was all tucked in in Oolong's House-Wagon—the gang being Oolong the perverted kindergarten-dropout of a magical pig, Goku the wild monkey boy from some ass end of nowhere, and me, Bulma, the spunky adventuress, heiress, genius, philanthropist. We were all huddled up around on the first floor of this doubledecker trailer, though the only one who had already passed out was Goku, who had stuffed his face in a hurry before passing out.

I hadn't ran like these last few days ever in my life... I've never had to run for my life before. Everything from my neck to my shoulders down to my ankles and toes was sore. I didn't bother holding back a moan of pleasure as I arched my back and stretched, then I stood up and checked Oolong's refrigerator again. A part of my mind kept whispering in the darkest corners of my sanity that I could tear this thing apart and rebuild it into a giant—“Oh hey! You have Hetap!”

He spared me a sideways glance before snorting, “Aren't you a little young to be drinking beer?”

If it had been any other circumstance, I would have retorted. I could have made a remark about him being a pig or how I was already a scientist and a doctor with multiple degrees or anything, but I knew that line of conversation would eventually end up back to something silly. I still wanted to retort, but I couldn't bring myself to spend that effort after everything, after going through the life changing adventures in these last few days. And to think, it wasn't even over yet. I shuddered, vaguely remembering what was to come, before plopping down beside the magical transforming pig of sarcasm. “Say, Oolong, I've been meaning to ask you something about your abilities...”

“Don't hurt yourself,” he snarked.

“Oh, ha-ha,” I rolled my eyes at him before taking a sip. “You learned your skills from that best kindergarten in the world, the Shapeshifting Academy, according to Puar, right?”

“Uh huh...?”

“When you turned into the Ramen Robot,” I furrowed my brow in thought. “You turned yourself into a robot and a bowl of ramen and you burned your finger in the soup, even though the soup is you, right?”

“... You got a point to all this? 'Cause I want to sleep too,” he said, but he turned to face me. At least he was taking my questions seriously, I thought.

“You can change your mass and density and temperature, and yet you can't—”

“Bulma, don't hurt yourself. It's magic, just don't question it.”

I pouted, “... I bet you taste delicious.”

“Aaand I'm going to ignore that racially insensitive remark,” He yawned again. “Now, if you're done interrogating me, I'm pretty tired, especially since Muten Roshi slobbered all over me because of you!”

I jumped up immediately, “Hey! You're the one who did all that on your own volition! Besides, I just wanted to start conversation. I thought we should talk. Or something.”

He picked himself up and pulled the blankets out of Goku's grasp. “Oh no, no-no-no... I know what it means when a girl says that. I'm not looking for a fight in the middle of the night. Besides, you probably don't even really mean it...”

In some part of my mind, I knew he had a point. I knew for the most part I had forgotten the script I was supposed to follow, but I remembered the central character of the character I was reincarnated as and I acted to suitably. Things seemed to be going exactly as the story went and we had hit all the plot points that I could still remember after a reincarnation and fifteen years living as a super genius teenage girl.

That was to say I couldn't remember a thing, than that I was supposed to be a spoiled princess who ran away from home.

“... Noo, I meant it. Go on, ask me anything,” I beckoned him on.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Really?”

“... Really.”

“Okay, I'll bite.” He leaned back and folded his hands behind his head, “Why are you really looking for the Dragonballs?”

“What? I can't just be looking for a perfect boyfriend?”

“If your wish is for a perfect boyfriend, then mine is for a pair of panties,” he replied.

I leaned back too and held back an urge to yawn. It was getting late. I stretched my legs onto the couch enjoying the bare smoothness of things and closing my eyes. Why did I follow through with these motions anyway? I peered over my chest at the tired pork and decided—since I was drunk anyway—I might as well say what was on my chest for a while now. “... I was scared.”

“Oh? Of what?”

“Uncertainty. What else is there? It's such a cliché thing to be afraid of, but... if I didn't do this, if I didn't do that, what should I do?” I heaved my chest and rolled over to face the ceiling. “What if... I don't look for the Dragonballs?”

He snorted, half-laughing in incredulity. “Is that all? Life will go on, the world will keep spinning.”

“Are you sure about that?” I smirked, as if I knew something that he didn't.

“Yeah.” He replied immediately and without hesitation. Then he flipped over. “What, did you think I was going to buy your acting all mysterious act or something. Come ooon, I thought you said you wanted to talk.”

If he wasn't going to listen to the truth, I thought with some sadness, then there was nothing I could say to convince him otherwise. “We don't know each other very well, do we Oolong? I mean, I know you're a pig by most definitions of the term, and I know you can transform. You know I'm an inventor who can make gadgets and an adventurer, of sorts.”

He nodded, “Of sorts. Sure. I get where you're coming from. Why, are you going to tell me your heroic backstory now?”

“Sure,” I replied immediately. “I'm rich. I'm pretty sure I'll go on to own half the world sooner or later, and pretty much... oh, say, 90% of that effort isn't even going to be me.”

“... Wait, you're rich?”

“... Yeees.”

“How rich?”

“Like 'I'm going to own half the world' rich.”

“... Bullshit.”

“You want this heart-to-heart or what, Oolong?” I grumbled irritably.

“Oh, sure, regal me with your story, Princess,” He smirked sleepily before taking another swing of his Hetap. “So that's your super power if you were a hero? Money? Ha!”

I picked up the tin and downed it all in own gulp. Ah, that sure did taste like piss. Mass marketed beer sure was the same no matter which universe I was in. “I... I can make great things... hic... m-mad science. I'm Bulma Briefs, g-god damn it. B-But you don't get it...”

“Uh huh...” Was he falling asleep already?

“I... I take away my science, take away my money, I still wake up every morning,” I muttered to myself. It was a key difference between me and the girl I was pretending to be. It was something that I held in the deepest part of my heart. It was my identity, the only way I knew I wasn't just copy of the same character who shared my name. “Urp... I wake up every morning, and uh, I think to myself, urp, I'ma take out a mother fucking god today.”

Oolong snored across the trailer, but I didn't care.

It felt good letting it out. And also drinking beer for the first time, again, was nice.

Heh.

Whoever got to say that and meant it?

“... So what I'm an selfish, egotistical bitch just like... like...” The drowsiness was getting to me too. I slipped into my blankets and rolled over, still muttering, “I'm... I'm going to pimp slap freezer and scrape myself up to the top no matter what happens... Probably get me some delicious character development somewhere along the line... Development... Mmm...”

Tomorrow was going to be a new day, full of adventures and trying to keep Oolong from using my wish on stupid ass panties.

Mmm... pandas...

 

It was the three of us driving down a surprisingly well-paved road in the middle of Diablo Desert. Yes, the place was actually called Diablo Desert, filled with people who dressed like they were from the Middle East and giant, thirty-meter-tall mushrooms. The hovercraft we were in was an older model, but it was sturdy and had two machine guns mounted in the front (I didn't know why Oolong had such a weaponized vehicle, and it didn't really seem all that weird to ask, when the last town we visited was run by a human-sized rabbit mobster with magical Midas-touch powers... if everything he touched turned into carrots instead of gold... don't question it, it's magic).

Anyway, I was just enjoying the wind in my hair and wishing Goku would stop poking my side with his power pole. No, that wasn't a euphemism. His growing staff fell out of the car a few times when he leaned it away from me so, with limited space in the hovering car, he just strapped it on and it's constantly poking me in the ribs.

Seriously, this kid never could stop moving around. He shuffled his ass again and nudged the seat in front of him with a foot. “You're a real scaredy-pork, you know that? Whenever something little dangerous happens, you're always the first to run!”

“Gimme a break,” Oolong rumbled over his shoulder from his driving. “Not all of us are bulletproof... that reminds me, Bulma, what was your wish going to be?”

I blinked. “You don't remember?”

He shook his head, “Nah, I fell asleep before you said anything, right?”

Well, to be quite honest, I wasn't sure what I wanted. With my 'Spark-like' genius perpetually on, there wasn't a lot of materialistic wishes I couldn't have... thinking back, the original story's Bulma's wish for a perfectly wonderful boyfriend made sense to an extent. It wasn't like she was going to just grow MILFs in the basement like Dad, after all. But... I was supposed to be a teenage girl with a sort of arrogant silliness, wasn't I?

I wasn't about to break from the genre, after all. “Hur hur! Haven't I already told you? A boyfriend, obviously an amazing boyfriend!”

“What? A boyfriend?” He actually believed it this time. “We're risking our lives for a stupid wish like that?”

“Hmph! It's not stupid, you just don't get it because you're not adult enough,” I replied. Even though he had a flying car with machine guns mounted, he was still a kindergarten dropout. Still, I was pleasantly surprised how great my acting must have been for him to buy this wish so easily, where as the conversation the previous night was met with such skepticism.

Goku, thinking nothing of this since he probably had nothing to be greedy over, yawned and made to take a nap.

However, Oolong turned over and started yelling at me, “Don't you know how much trouble we've gone through to collect these things? We should use them for something cooler!”

“What, like panties?” I crossed my arms.

“Yeah! Exactly like—”

“Ah, ha! You... you... you pig!”

Before he could retort, the car exploded.

“Oww...”

“Oink, oink, oink... What happened?”

Goku finally perked up. “Ah, that was a surprise!”

And then mechanized robot suit piloted by a corgi in a ninja outfit jumped out from the head of a giant mushroom and stole our dragonballs... “Sorry, we're taking the dragonballs! Sayonara!”

“What a strange person...” Goku gawked.

I slipped then, and gawked with him. “That puppy was surprisingly polite though...”

“W-What are you waiting for, Goku?” Oolong shouted from behind both of us where he was huddled up, “He stole the dragon balls!”

Goku reacted immediately and called down that golden, divine solid-cloud of his to fly him after the... ninja corgi in a giant robot. “... Shit I'd never think would be strung together into one sentence.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, I was just thinking, ah, of course there's other people who know what the dragonballs are.” Then I got to work immediately on the wreckage.

“Hey! What are you doing with my car?” Oolong jumped over.

“I'm just salvaging some of the scrap, you never know if I need to MacGuvyer my way out of something. After what we've been through, I ought to be prepared,” I added, before grabbing the gravity module, guns, and the still usable circuitry and other bits.

He frowned, “Hey, hey... aren't they pretty dangerous? We should just give up.”

“Nu uh.” I shook my head and used the backups to make the salvage shrink... it wasn't small enough like the mass produced capsules, but it was small enough. I certainly wasn't going to carry this!

“Fine, how about I be your boyfriend?” Somehow he actually looked hopeful.

“Sorry Oolong, I'm not into interracial. Or bestiality. I'm not actually sure what it is considering the world we're on, what with the talking dog for a president...” Thinking about that, I had to say that this Earth was definitely more progressive and tolerant than my last Earth. Though... I haven't seen any cats in office... Strange...

“Yo!” Goku flew back.

“Hey, how'd it go?” I stood up and slid the large proto-capsule in through the top of my top. It fit pretty snugly and didn't seem like it could be noticed, probably. “Did you get him?”

“I beat him up!” He sounded so proud of himself as he jumped off his Kintoun.

“What?! But he was just a little puppy!” I shrieked, but then I corrected myself. “Wait, and what about the balls?”

“They're gone,” Goku turned to me like he was talking about the weather.

“Then why did you come back?!” I yelped.

“I still have mine.”

“... Hm, so we lost the car, they stole the dragonballs... and the capsules, oh I forgot we put those in with the balls!” I paused for dramatic effect. “Crap!”

“Whoa, what a big coincidence! What are you three doing here?” Yamcha the Desert Bandit and his transforming cat Puar suddenly showed up, just as planned.

“Ah! Yamcha!” Goku perked up happily. “Somebody took our dragonballs and blew up Oolong's car!”

“Oh, what an amazing coincidence that I found you all here in the middle of the desert then,” Yamcha replied with the smooth suaveness of a plastic Ken doll. Seriously, did this kid think he was some kind of actress like I obviously was?

“Yes, what an amazing coincidence that you found us in the desert with nothing around for at least a two hour drive, and nothing else,” I replied.

We jumped in his car immediately and I pointed the direction to go with the dragonball radar. Oolong had to hold onto the trunk of the car since it was just a two-seater, but he was surprisingly accommodating about it.

“You really saved our butts.”

“N-Nooo... it's just a... coincidence. That's all... ha ha...”

Firstly of all, I had to say that I didn't like how he smelled. He dressed poorly too, and if you looked closely, his forehead is too goddamn big. And while he was decently talented (but some how weaker than Krillin at pretty much moment of their lives), his head was probably about as smart as Goku's. Now then, it wasn't that I was attracted to Yamcha (seriously, who is?) but I knew he had one weakness at this point in the story. He had a fear of girls, like some kind of blushing virgin who lived in the middle of a desert under a rock... or something.

So obviously, I was going to mess with his head. Since I was sitting next to him, I draped an arm over his shoulder and leaned close. “Hey, I just wanted to say how much I appreciated your help, Yamcha...”

“GWAAAAHHWAWAWAH!!” I really didn't see what the original Bulma saw in him. Then again, she settled for Vegeta of all people, so her judgment for potential life partners was zero out of two anyway.

“Wait! WAIT!” I pushed Yamcha off of the gas.

“W-what? AHHH!!” He blinked, before realizing I was literally on leaning on his lap. He jumped out of the car and started dry heaving.

“What's this about?” Oolong asked as Puar flew.

I was about to point out that, holy shit, the magical transforming cat could fly—was Yamcha a magical girl?—but instead I got out of the car and ran to the now empty robot power suit that was just abandoned in the middle of the desert. “Seriously? They just left this here? Oh thank god you didn't smash it into pieces, Goku.”

“... You're welcome?”

“Now... hm... there we go, I knew they couldn't just carry this around,” I fiddled a little before closing the lid. It was a little too warm and tight inside and it smelled of dog, but I raised dogs before... and this was still a functioning armored mechanized suit... albeit a bit small for me. After a click, it turned into a capsule. “There.”

“Why did you want that?” Goku asked curiously. “It's so weak!”

“Well, you can never be too careful, Goku!” Pet his silly, little head.

Ten minutes later, we arrived at this surprisingly Turkish looking castle, ran straight in and into a dead end, before a wall fell down the other end and trapped us in. Yeah, you could never be too careful... unless I wanted them to trap me in here! BWAHAHA! I'm not trapped in here with you!

You're trapped in here with me and my...

SCIENCE!

 

“Damn it! We're totally stuck in here!” Yamcha banged his probably-magical-girl fists against the brick walls. Ah, the last couple of days had mostly grounded me, but it was still hard to imagine that this kid was going to be powerful enough to destroy planets in a decade or two.

“My punch won't even break it...” Goku blinked and sweated a little. Now his surprise was a bit more of a surprise for me.

Well, I was about to go completely off the rails of the 'canon'. It took me years of dedication and planning. Finally... I can make a wish. Now if I could only remember what I wanted to wish for. I knew what I wanted when I was first reincarnated, almost fifteen years ago, but time flew. I mean, I was the girl who repaired faster-than-light spacecraft when I was five years old! It was a long time!

While I was pondering on what I wanted when I won, Oolong complained about how he was right all along. “This is why I said we should have just given up!”

I rolled my eyes and went back to my thoughts. Was I being too much of a cliched super villain? It felt like I was doing the whole 'gloating before I won' bit that James Bond villains always did. But I was a heroine... I was THE heroine of the story.

How did it go for heroines in this genre? Why couldn't I remember?

Yamcha, with absolute seriousness, turned away from the group. “Hey guys, you know what they say... a man's home is his castle, in a manor of speaking!”

“... What?”

“Huh?”

“Lord Yamcha,” Puar, who I was now convinced was a talking animal sidekick, blinked and whimpered, “Wah... what was that just now?”

Maybe it was time to think of how I would make her make me a magical girl after all of this was over. I certainly wasn't going to settle for Oolong to be my magical girl animal sidekick!

“... A joke,” Yamcha replied.

“If you got time to make stupid puns, then how about figuring how to get out of here?!” Oolong roared.

“I thought it was good!” Yamcha retorted.

He was just like Minako, from Sailor Moon. Hm. Thinking of Sailor Moon has gotten me to want to go to there.

“I-I was just trying to calm us down!” Yamcha stuttered.

Suddenly, an intercom turned on. It made that sort of whiny, ear-piercing screeching that badly optimized intercom systems did before the previously powerless little screen on the wall lit up with a little blue kid dressed in a sort of Chinese Kid Emperor outfit, but with those medieval neck ruffles or whatever those were that made people look like idiots that everyone wore back then. “Hey! Hey! Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Ahh!” I jumped. I was startled, okay?

“Ah, good. Hey, stop telling stupid puns and listen to me, I am Emperor Pilaf!”

“You stole the dragonballs!” I accused. “My dragonballs!”

“Yeah, uh, so about those dragonballs, like, there's one missing,” He smirked, completely ignoring me.

Behind me, Goku, being the typical kid raised in the mountains and under an Idiot Rock, asked Yamcha, “Hey, if we break that window, could we get out?”

Yamcha huffed. “That's a television, you moron...”

“Hey! HEY! Pay attention to me, damn it!” Pilaf banged his table, causing the intercom to screech again.

I winced, but glared up at the little, blue troll who had no association with King Kai, “No!”

“I know you have the four-star ball! Give it to me now...” He yelled even louder into his microphone, “OR ELSE!”

“... Or else what?” I smirked.

“Fine! If you must, I'll do something perverted to you!!” He grinned angrily.

Then a trapdoor opened in the ceiling of this hallway trap and a giant robotic claw came out of it. It grabbed me by the waist and I had to admit, I yelped a little like the little bitch I was. “Kya!”

It brought me to another room... which meant this wasn't far from the room we were trapped in.

There was a humanoid corgi in a ninja cosplay outfit and a rather sexy looking Asian girl behind Emperor Pilaf here, and I noticed they had all sorts of weapons on. The corgi had a sword strapped to his back, but the girl had a pistol holstered to her waist. It was clearly visible, which kind of puzzled me. She looked like she was from the Red Guard, he looked like a fucking ninja, and the little blue troll looked like he was from the 1600's.

“Fu fu fu! This is your last chance to tell me, girlie, where is the dragonball?” Pilaf pointed at me rudely.

I struggled a little in the claw, but it was too tight, I couldn't even pull the capsules from my cleavage! Resigned, I tried to kick his face, only to fall short by a meter. “I'll never tell!”

“I see... so it's a humiliation you desire...” He brought his hands up to his chest and made gropey gestures at me. “Then I guess I have no choice...”

Struggling, I gasped and tried even harder to get out of the robot claw.

Pilaf brought his little, tiny hand up to his face and pressed it against his lips lewdly. Then he blew a kiss at me.

He blew a kiss at me.

… What the hell?

“... Eh?”

Why were his minions suddenly blushing and turning away? They wouldn't even look at me anymore! How was I seeing the dog blush through his fur?!

Even Pilaf's face was red!

How?!

I thought he was blue blooded or something!

“H-How's that? Bet you really want to me tell me now, don't you?” He smirked before turning away, almost as shy as Yamcha.

“... You only blew a kiss at me...” I blinked in a daze.

“Only blew a kiss?!” Pilaf gasped aloud.

Behind him, his minions were acting even more like Japanese school girls than he was.

“Kyaaa~!”

“How perverted~”

“Don't say it out loud desu~”

“... So?” I sighed audibly. “Was that all? You aren't going to ask me to strip, or try to motorboat me, or do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel, or like one of those silly Justin Bieber songs... all of which are things that Muten Roshi actually did ask for?”

“What a lewd woman!”

“S-She's a pervert!”

The minions held each other as if I was a leper who would infect them by touch.

Pilaf leaped back, his eyes wide, “W-What a lascivious woman! I don't even know what a Justin Bieber is but I know it's got to be banned in almost every country in the world!”

I felt really disappointed.

Like, this was what my fifteen years of preparations built up to?

This?

THIS?!

“Yeah, okay, I'm done,” I deadpanned.

“What?” Pilaf blinked.

“I'm done.”

“Wha... oh! Ooh, you're giving up, are you?” He rubbed his hands together like a covetous... er, like a greedy person.

“No. I'm done. You're boring me. This is a disappointment.” The robotic claw loosened and I fell out of his grasp.

“W-WHAT? How did you escape?” He gaped.

But I wasn't paying attention to him so much as the minions behind him. I knew they were obviously stronger than I was, and even if they weren't super people like Goku already is, they were better than me. The dog alone could probably slice me up in the blink of an eye. The woman had a gun. I wasn't stupid. They'll only stay that way if I kept them off their feet. I didn't bother making any obvious or threatening movements, but I knocked on the metal claw twice. “This? This is what you're using to hold me? Who'd you buy this pawn shop tiered stuff off of? Doctor Collie? Doctor Mashirito? Doctor Wheelo? … Gero? It was Doctor Gero and the Red Ribbon Army wasn't it?”

“... How...?”

“Just because we scientists are also profiteers from war, doesn't mean we make sub-par junk! He should really stick to androids...” I shook my head. “Look, are you some kind of Bond villain? Because I want to know if anyone is before hand. Seriously, why would you even bring me here?”

Pilaf picked himself up first and he was the first to overcome his shock somewhat. “B-Because you're powerless against us?”

“... Really? REALLY?” I silently congratulated myself, I was an awesome actress!

“Really!”

“Yeah, I'm going to stop you right there,” I reached in my top for one of the capsules, only to stop and realize it wasn't that the weapons I was bring to bare were frightening, but that Pilaf and his minions were turning away from me because they thought I was going to... what? Lewd them to death?

Were they retarded?

Was I in a slapstick universe?

I tossed out that capsule that contained the modified gravity module salvaged from Oolong's wrecked car. It was self-contained like a grenade if I tossed it out like this, which was exactly what it was for in this situation. With a click, I threw it at the three stooges who were purposely not looking at me.

It was just...

Look, they were idiots, but they weren't terrible people, alright? I was pretty sure this girl was gonna grow up to be robbing Trunk's cradle—ah, wait.

Wasn't Trunks going to be my son?

… I blinked.

Well, the capsule was thrown already, and I didn't want to murder them with the gang watching me still through that monitor/intercom system that Pilaf had installed into his trap... like some Bond villain. The gravity module was unstable as it was, but it still had certain fail-safes built in, like all vehicular modules. It was the law, after all, and meant to keep the citizenry safe or at least compliant.

Still, the machine grabbed the girl, dog, and blue midget in its field of effect and started wobbling. Up and down and up and down, faster and faster... “You're probably not bad people,” I said before they lost consciousness from the tossing. “Well, actually that rocket probably could have killed us. So... if you die from the increasing speed, well, uh... good luck!”

With that, I only stayed to watch until they started throwing up before I grabbed the stolen dragonballs and marched out. It wasn't like I was enjoying their suffering much.

Well...

I stayed to sing them a song while they puked, “Now this is a story about how my life got flipped-turned upside down. And I'd like to take a minute, just sit right here, I'll tell you how I became the the princess of a planet called Earth. In West, West City born and raised, in the laboratory was where I spent most of my days—oh, come on, you just splattered puke on me!”

In a huff, I turned and stomped back to the gang.

“Yamcha, if you want to cure your awkwardness around women, without being brainwashed by a mystical dragon who grants monkey's paw wishes—no offense, Goku—I'll buy you a therapist, that'll solve all your problems.” I stormed into the silly trap and grabbed Goku's dragonball. “Oolong, if you want something, I'll buy it for your later, but if you screw this up for me, I'm turning you into a pair of pig-skin panties.”

“... Uh, none taken?” Goku blinked.

“Wha-wha-wha...?” Oolong boggled.

“Puar?!” I turned with that same intensive to the cat.

“Y-Yes?”

“... good kitty.”

I stomped out, still mad that I'll have to smell like vomit for what's probably going to be a long road home, and tossed the dragonballs unceremoniously onto the ground. “Eternal Dragon! Get your punk ass out here and gimme my wish!”

There was a light show and the dragon appeared.

What? Did you actually want me to describe it? No. I just wanted my goddamn wish.

“I AM THE ETERNAL DRAGON,” He whispered. “COME, TELL ME YOUR WISH. I SHALL GRANT ANY ONE WISH YOU HAVE...”

Looking back a Puar one last time, it became clear to me what I wanted. I wanted to be a magical girl. I didn't want some punkass power levels or something stupid like that. That was like asking to become a Kryptonian. Those kinds of alien powers were untrustworthy, unlike human potential. I didn't want to be a goddamn god when I punched out a god, I wanted to be a human! But I couldn't just ask for it, like Sayaka pretty much did from Kyuubey. That would have been silly.

“COME ON. I DON'T HAVE ALL DAY, YOU KNOW.”

“Alright, fine!” I grumbled grumpily. No one liked being rushed. “Make me a goddamn princess!”

“... YOUR WISH IS GRANTED.”

Then he turned into his balls and flew away.

“Well?” Goku was the first to ask, “What's a princess taste like?”

“Like how any other girl would taste like, Goku,” Oolong snarked, but he turned to me too. “So do you feel any different, Bulma? I'll say, that's a better wish than getting a boyfriend, but I have the strangest feeling of deja vu...”

I looked down at my hands. I didn't feel any different. There weren't any parades or stuff like Aladdin got from his Genie when he became Prince Ali. The cogs within my mind clanked away.

I blinked.

I looked up at the now-clear skies.

I looked down at my body, which had not changed at all.

Horror dawned on me.

“... Wait a minute... That fuck mothering dragon lawyered me out of my wish!”

 

There was some awkward silence, but people were apparently in a talkative mood that morning after everything was said and done. Yamcha, being Yamcha, was first to poke the giant gorilla in the room, “So are we just going to ignore the fact that he can turn into a giant—”

“Yes. Shut up. We don't talk about it.” I glared at him.

Behind him, Oolong made a noise with his mouth that sounded like whips for some reason.

We ignored him.

“So can I take off Yamcha's scarf now? It smells really Yamcha,” Goku peeked out from the orange scarf that covered his eyes. “Why did I have to wear this anyway?”

“Because if you didn't,” I took a deep breath. “I'd have to cut you, Goku. You wouldn't like that.”

“I wouldn't?”

“Exactly.”

He blinked, confused.

“... And yes,” I decided to take the conversation into a different direction. “It does smell really Yamcha. Now, we're going to the city, where I'm getting Yamcha hookers and blackjack, are you sure you don't want some?”

Goku tilted his head, “Nah, I'm going to go to Kame Sennin's house for training.”

I nodded, “Alright, just come find me when your tail's back. I'll built a giant robot so we can have some fun on a full moon night. Did you want the dragonball radar to find your four-star ball?”

“Yep!” He nodded with a wide smile.

I thought with a chest warm at his face aglow, what a simple child. So I ruffled his hair a little, ignoring how spiky it was on my soft, delicate fingers, and handed the radar to him. Thinking about it further, I thought, maybe it was time to make a miniaturized version of this device—which was basically just a magical radiation/miasma locator anyway.

That threw my mind off on a tangent as I realized I had already identified one type of magical energy/signature for scientific... research... but I brought myself back to the present. If the ditzy, original Bulma could make a watch that shrunk her like Antman in a couple of days, why couldn't I do the same kind of permanent miniaturization to every technology at my disposal?

It was something to think about anyway; this world, while advanced in many ways, was far behind on others. The internet was still in its infancy here and personal devices amounted to just only giant walkie-talkies. Sure, robotics was ahead, but that was similar to how the game Fallout had giant super robots while their best computers had less than a dozen megabits of memory.

We set off soon after, and it was saddening to see the golden trail left by Goku's Kintoun.

He and I... we had become friends over the past couple of weeks. The adventures we went through were life changing. It was one thing to see it in a comic and anticipate it, and it was a whole different thing to experience it first hand.

Now, if I had not been preparing myself for this and depriving myself of all the technology I had at my disposal to make this as real of an adventure as I could, I would have had only one thought on my head: I could have died.

Every day, there was a dozen different ways I literally brushed against death. Goku could mostly ignore bullets, Oolong could turn himself into a rocket and fly away, but what did I have other than the same bits and pieces every other human had?

The reality of this Earth had never really sunken into my mind before, because I grew up in the lap of luxury. The city I lived in was the capital of investment and technology for the whole world, like the Silicon Valley and New York City of this world rolled into one. I grew up with literally personal islands and an army of maids, butlers, laboratory assistants, bodyguards and lawyers at my every beck and call.

… Sure, you could have that on my last Earth too.

But what was the most dangerous situation there? You might have had the conflicts in the Middle East? You might have had secret societies? You might have had black operations and secret police?

Here?

I was chased by a big, fucking dinosaur.

I was turned into a carrot by and was almost eaten by a humanoid, magical rabbit mobster boss.

Sure, we had our dictators and secret police too. The Red Ribbon Army was pretty much the North Korea of this world, with super science and androids... and a super martial artist named General Tao Pai Pai. They had actual telekinetic psychics and ninjas.

It had dawned on me through these adventures that outside of the walls of civilization, this Earth was a deathworld.

That might have been my first thought and the only thought I could concentrate on, if not for actually living through these events. You couldn't keep complaining about things if your life was on the line, after all. But as it all ended and I was returning to West City, was preparation the only thing I could think of?

No.

No, a thousand times no.

Why did I miss Goku, already? The original Bulma didn't. She rejoiced in having a Yamcha fulfill her goals, she was happy to return to her life and return to being a socialite and living the life of a rich heiress. How? How? HOW?

How did she deal with this nagging, insufferable tightening in her chest? It felt worse than leaving my dog home before I left for university... It felt a hundred times worse. In some respect, Goku was like a loyal, superpowered puppy with opposable thumbs and the ability to talk. Sure, he liked to fight, but that was better than a puppy who ate his own poo, right? I felt my lips twitch in a watery attempt to smile.

It felt so hard to feel accomplished after everything, like I was losing something rather than gaining something even though I had accomplished the first step of my goals and experienced the life changing adventure with Goku... it felt empty with him not coming home with us.

Why did I feel this way?

Did I miss him already?

I knew that it'd be almost a year before he showed up again, at the World Marital Arts Tournament. It was only a year, I said to myself. I'd see him soon. Time passed quickly for someone my age. Right?

“Hey, what's wrong Bulma?” Oolong oinked behind me as I stared off into the distance, through the cold glass windshield of Yamcha's airplane.

I brushed the back of my hand against my face and hid my reflection from my view, before sighing, “It's nothing Oolong. I just had something in my eye.”

“So what are you gonna do once you're back home?” Yamcha peeked over at me, with a strangely red face, from the pilot's seat. Considering I had used the wish he was probably also chasing for, I was surprised he was so pleasant.

They were so peaceful and content with their lot in life. They were so sated that the adventure was complete.

It reminded me of how I was the only normal human being in the vehicle.

They reminded me of how weak I was.

“... I've a lot of work ahead of us.” I was filled with determination. I wiped away my tears. “Say, Yamcha... Oolong, did you ever count how many times we could have died?”

“Uh...”

I didn't give them an opportunity to answer. “Because I did. I can remember every time we almost died, if it wasn't for Goku. And you know what I realized? This isn't even a frontier for civilization... yet this is something people face every day.”

The cockpit was silent now. They were rapt with attention.

I was a terrible speaker, but how could I stop now? An unreasonable fanaticism filled my heart. I repeated myself, “There's a lot of work ahead of us. I don't know how to train or how to use magic, but if I have time, I have science. I can make things. I will make things...”

I was not going to be that vapid little girl who just wasted her time away. The next time I met Goku, there would not be that same little Bulma. I wasn't going to be a little damsel in distress ever again.

Never again.

 

“Bulma, honey, are you here?” An old yet smooth voice called out from the top of the stairway. It was bright outside of my laboratory, making discerning who it was by looks alone difficult. However, I know that voice. It was Dad, or as the rest of the world know him as Doctor Briefs.

“Yeah, Dad, I'm just putting on some finishing touches to the drones,” I called out without looking up from my screen as I typed away.

I was working in a massive underground complex that I had originally been one of the largest basement bowling alleys in this side of the world. It was later redecorated into a parking lot due to the fall of bowling's popularity, but I had taken it since it was just a block away from Capsule Corporation Headquarters... making siphoning data and power easy.

The costs of running such a laboratory was something of a difficulty. If I had rented it, just the data costs alone would have doubled the upkeep, not to mention the amount of power I needed to use some times.

But this was infrastructure, and this was what separated developing countries from developed countries. It was also something that separated me from quacks like Doctor Gero.

“Honey, I noticed your drones are rather small and can be used for... well, industrial espionage,” Dad walked down the stairs his expression slowly becoming visible as he walked out of the light. He seemed to be in a good mood and sounded so too.

“Well, it's not like it's an original idea... besides, Gero used tiny drones to steal shit first,” I muttered, finally finishing and saving the work I had done for the last hour and looking up. He was holding a bag of doughnuts! I reached for them immediately while still not standing up from my swerving chair.

“Ah, ah, ah,” He held them up just out of my reach. “I'm not going to ask what you're going to use them for, even though it looks like you've been working on stealing an entire small nation's worth of information lately. Just remember...”

I rolled my eyes and said in sync with Dad, “Snitches get stitches!”

“That's a good girl,” He petted my head just the way I liked it and handed me the paper bag filled with glazed doughnuts. I liked them just with plain glaze, none of that fillings or extra toppings crap. I thought it was probably a holdover from my previous life, when the first taste of America I had was one of those plain glazed doughnuts. It was an acquired taste either way.

“Hey, Dad? How do you feel about wearing a black turtleneck and a pair of worn blue jeans?” I asked as I bit into a warm doughnut.

“I'm impartial to that, why do you ask, honey?” He blinked through his glasses.

“Well, I was just thinking we could sell the personal mobile devices I designed for mass production... as a new style of living,” I had actually said this to him a few times, but Daddy never really had a mind for markets and marketing. He was more of an inventions man, who reminded me of Tony Stark without the alcoholism—wait, no, actually Daddy still drank, but it just wasn't crippling. Whatever the case, I was surprised no one had tried to steal everything out from under him yet, but it was probably also related to how humans were blatantly not at the top of the food chain on this Earth.

“I don't really get this stuff, like when you started listening to those boy bands—”

“It was a phase, Dad!”

“... Right,” He nodded, completely unfazed. “But what does it even do?”

I rolled my eyes. “It lets you listen to music and watch videos and helps you navigate and chat all the time and take pictures and film and socialize and search for information, Dad!”

He shrugged, “Honey, I'll support you on this but do we really need it all in one device? People can listen to music and watch video just fine on cassette tapes, and we have maps and cameras and yellow pages for that other stuff.”

“Ugh!” I threw my hands up in the air. This thing took me literally half a day to make, software, hardware, and all, yet it's been like a month of constant board meetings and this vice president of strategy or that vice president of marketing messing with me. “Look, it'll work!”

“I just had to ask again, Bulma. You know how it is, if it doesn't then the executives probably won't support another one of your little projects for a long time to come,” He wagged a finger before booping the tip of my nose with it.

It was these little gestures that, even with my entire previous life in my mind, kept the 'Doctor Briefs' label out of my mind and only left him as 'Daddy'.

I was both unembarrassed and embarrassed to say that I felt my face flush with heat the moment he did that. A part of me loved that side of Dad—it made me all warm and fuzzy inside how often he took time from everything, even my older sister, to spend time with me. The other part of me just wanted to crawl into bed and hide under my sheets.

“Thanks Dad,” I stood up and embraced him, taking in the smell of cologne and tobacco smoke that lingered on his lab coat. This was Dad's smell, and even if I had two lifetime's worth of brainwashing to hate tobacco, I still loved the smell. I pulled away, “but you know, I know it'll work. I've sat through eighteen meetings on how to sell this already, so everyone else should know too.”

“Sure, sure,” He smiled tenderly. Then he jumped onto the seat beside me and spun around in the swerving chair. “Sooo... how's my little girl doing?”

“I'm sixteen and a quarter now, Dad,” I reminded him.

“How's my little girl doing?”

I rolled my eyes.

“How's... what's his name? Yumcha?”

I huffed out the breath I didn't know I was holding. “Pfft... Yamcha. He's just a friend, Dad.”

“Uh huh.”

“I totally friendzoned him.”

“Is that what the kids are calling it these days,” He wagged his eyebrows at me.

“I told him I only wanted to be friends!” I was completely red now, I knew it. Wait... did I tell him I only wanted to be friends? I... No, I was sure I did. Didn't I?

“Well, I'm just making sure. He does seem to have a lot of fans these days,” Dad remarked offhandedly while studying my reaction.

I nodded, “Yeah, I told him to go into sports. I'm pretty sure I was even his wing man... wing girl? Wing woman? A few times. He's a... what do you call them?”

“A lab mouse?” Daddy supplied helpfully.

“No! We don't say that anymore, Dad. He's an intern. Yeah, that's it.” I nodded in self-satisfaction.

“So what are you working on now?” He peered over my shoulder at my screen.

If this was before the whole dragonball thing, I probably would have blocked my screen. It wasn't like I didn't want him to know what I was working on, but it was the sort of feeling an apprentice had when a true master had come to examine what the apprentice was working on. Ah, right, it was a different form of embarrassment—the emotion that Dad could so easily induce in me no matter what he did.

“Looks like an armband,” He nodded.

“It's, ah, a work in progress. A bracelet. I haven't gotten around to miniaturizing it, but I need to have some more data points before I can make world destroying androids,” I smirked.

Daddy chuckled, probably amused by my intent no doubt. “And where is this data going to come from?”

“Well,” I pondered on this. There were a lot of ways to gather this data, but most of them had me waiting years if not decades. It was ultimately too long of a wait. “I was thinking about having Muten Roshi the Kame Sennin wear one. I'm sure if I had data of his internals after he competes in the World Martial Arts Tournament next year, I'll get the information I need.”

“And how will you do that?” Daddy asked, “This Roshi fellow was a myth even when I was your age, you know?”

“Eh, I met him while I was traveling,” I shrugged.

“Huh.”

“Yep.”

“Now, Bulma sweetie, I have a serious question to ask you. I've been watching your progress for a long time, and I feel like you're ready, but you must be the one to decide this life changing decision. It is a choice, and I'll say right now, that even if I might be disappointed if you choose otherwise, I can understand, okay, honey? So...” Daddy suddenly grew stern. There were few times in my life that I had seen him this way. This must have been something awfully serious. “Do you think you're ready to drink coffee?”

 

Ding dong!

“Oh god,” I rolled off the dissection table, which had doubled as my bed for the night, and fell on to the floor. My throat was dry and my lips cracked and muscles I didn't know even existed ached. My thighs were killing me. Everything like... well, not exactly on fire, but it was like... never mind, it doesn't really matter.

Ding dong!

“Goddamn it, just come in!” I croaked before climbing out of my sheets only to crumble like a loose pile of limbs. Then I tripped on my sheets and fell face first into something that was also on the lab table. It was surprisingly soft, though somehow it still hurt my face to land face first into it. My muffled voice came out of that softness as I stopped struggling in the sheets and remembered my etiquette, “Oh hello.”

“Hi,” A surprisingly smooth voice replied immediately. It was a lady's voice.

“I'm Bulma.” I introduced myself without picking my face out of what I presumed to be flesh.

“I know. You told me last night, remember? Do... you still remember?” She sounded concerned.

And I felt like I had spent a week being a mad scientist. There was a difference between a mad scientist and a scientist, mainly one was mad. There were vague flashes, but it was mostly a blur. The world was still ringing like my skull had been turned into a bell and struck with the power of a thousand exploding suns. I peeked up at the pretty voice to a slightly haughty, but mostly confused face. Her brow was creased slightly in worry, but what did I say but, “Not really, uh...”

Ding dong!

That noise did not help. It was like a jackhammer to my skull.

The cute girl sighed in relief and laid back down on the table where I thought I remembered cutting things up and sticking things in other things and doing something or another. That was probably her I was cutting up, but what was it that I put in her? In the distance, I could see screens fulled with diagrams that foggily reminded me of the research and works of Doctors like Norimaki, Frappe, Gero, as well as some more exotic sources of data. There was some flashing and beeping, because the data displayed seemed to be live information. It was almost like I had released some technologies specifically to spy on everyone in the world.

On that end, I did remember finding it hilarious that this weird of flying cars was still hopelessly behind on information technologies. So I owned and created what was equivalent to this world's Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Amazon, Internet Service Providers, and well, that stuff. No big deal, right? … And I did some games and video content and, ah, questionable content. It wouldn't be the internet without, ahem, what made up of the vast majority of what the internet was, wouldn't it? Well, I didn't bother with it, just letting some applied artificial intelligence built up the content library for me, so there wasn't much I could even remember of that from this past week.

Anyway, she rolled over on her pillow and smiled at me in a way that made me feel weird. Sure, I felt all sorts of tingly inside, but it also made me question what I did to her to make her so friendly to me. It was a look of something akin to the utter adoration I often gave Dad, but you know, more like how I looked when I was cheering stupidly for stupid boy bands. She leaned close, smelling of the operating table and lavender, and studied me.

“Oh, thank god you're alright.”

“Huh?” I blinked again, still not quite woken up yet.

“I mean, I'm Lazuli. Do you remember that?” She asked with more concern. Seriously, why did she even care about me? What did I do to or for her?

“... Nice to meet you, I think?” I frowned as my vision came into focus. Why was that name familiar?

She was a blonde—was that natural? Her hair looked natural, albeit very straight and glossy, almost as if she had walked straight out of a shampoo commercial or some mad scientist had spent an ungodly amount of time making her look pretty rather than functional... She was my age and surprisingly thin in a starving orphan sort of way... and she seemed meek from my attention like a nervous lab mouse just before an experiment... no, there was none of that fidgety darting about. No, she was looking at me as if just thinking about me caused selective endorphin types to be released in her brain or something.

Hm, did I mess with her head meats?

I slumped down and rolled belly up on the floor. I really wanted to take the weekend off and just sleep. It was too early for anything but either more coffee or a long, hot shower. But at this moment, I just waned to slow my eyes again.

It probably wasn't sanitary sleeping next to tools that I used to... ah, some memory came back. I use that to cut her soul open. Did that even make sense? I had the strangest feeling of deja vu, like I had met this Lazuli before too...

Oh well, I didn't care. I had no coffee on hand.

“... Uh, yeah, you kept calling me Android 18? You said you'd help me find my brother, right?” She got up and her bare legs swung back and forth as she looked down at me from up there. She frowned at flexed the fingers of her left hand. “I don't feel like a robot...”

It was like a light bulb had been turned on, oh! That was why I kept thinking I knew her from somewhere—

Ding dong!

“Oh, for fuck's sake...” I grumbled as the door bell interrupted my train of thought and climbed up. My legs were wobbly and I wasn't exactly seeing clearly so I was obvious exhausted. Listing out my number of symptoms in my head, I concluded that I was dehydrated, famished, and... well, from the smell, I had probably been subsisting off of coffee for the past week and I probably haven't bathed in that long too.

“You need help there?” Lazuli jumped down and stabilized me by throwing one of my arms over her shoulder. She was a little taller than me, which made this a bit awkward, but what really interested me was that she was wearing some kind of black, skintight suit.

Brief flashes of insight told me that it was something I had made while trying to copy what Vegeta wore around, but without the original material that was a difficult problem. I also had a primary concern that I did not like clothes that kept having a bunch of holes in them, a primary staple of this universe, it seemed.

Thus, not only did I endeavor for a women's line of space armor, but also one that didn't make me feel inappropriately indecent when some asshole blew something up. At the very minimum, I didn't want to die with half of my clothes vaporized.

It hadn't gone to the stage where I could customize the looks yet, so all we had was this black skintight suit... which left as much to imagination as normal tights might.

“Hello?”

“Huh? Oh, right, yeah, thanks.” I blinked.

“Were you just...?”

“What? No!” I shook my head. “Anyway, let me get the door.”

I slapped my cheeks. Focus, girl! Don't let the pretty girls get to you, Bulma! I padded over to the entry, slipping on a similar outfit as the other girl's and a lab coat. Mmm, lab coat.

The door slid open.

At the other side was a Yamcha and a Puar, and it looked like he had just come from a baseball match, considering he hadn't even bothered changing out of his uniform yet. He also stank of sweat. “Uh, Bulma, w-wow!”

I tilted my head. Why was he so flushed? I had thought a martial artist of his caliber didn't have to worry about exhaustion from a simple baseball match. “Hi, Yamcha. Sorry for the, ah, wait. What's up?”

He blinked. “Wait, didn't you tell me to come as soon as possible?”

“I did?”

“Yeah!” Puar bounced beside him.

My eyebrows raised. “Huh, maybe I did. Well, since you're here, I can get some good data. Come, come, might the stairs. By the way, it's nice that you cut your hair. Looks good on you.”

“... Thanks.” He followed me into the lab, and then he was somehow even redder in the face if that was even possible. He started scratching the back of his head and looking away from me and... oh, that's right. “Er, h-hello...”

“Ah, this is Mercy.” I introduced the haughty looking blonde in the room.

“Wait, I thought I was Android Eighteen!” She turned to me, having a blonde moment.

“Really? I thought you wanted to be Lazuli?” I poked at her.

“I... Why are you calling me all these different names?”

“There's no point in being a cool cyborg without an awesome designation,” I reasoned and nodded to myself. It seemed like she wasn't buying a single word I was saying. “Besides, that asshat who kidnapped your brother off the street and brainwashed him into a murdering psychopath is calling your brother Android Seventeen. So, like, calling you Eighteen is just kind of in bad taste. After all, you're mine now.”

“That doesn't explain why I can't just be Lazuli,” She pouted, reminding me that this wasn't Android Eighteen. She hadn't yet been brain wiped and she had not experienced the tortures and years of imprisonment and slavish oppression at the hands of Doctor Gero yet. She was a shy girl just a little older than me...

With that thought, I pressed a finger on her lips. “Lazuli was the name you had before you, hm, ascension.”

“Wha—”

“Shh. You. Mine. Now.” I pressed a finger against her lips. She didn't pull away, though I had expected her to. This had something to do with my stealing her from Gero's lab probably, wait what, I stole from whose lab—

“Um.” She struggled against the mental programming I had instilled and broke it rather easily, it seemed. She smirked slightly and shook her head, “No, I don't want to. That's a silly name.”

“But... but... but... I could be like, if I'm sending you after my enemies, then they aren't getting any mercy from me,” I whined. Besides, I always wanted an Android Eighteen to be my head maid. Now that I had one, I wasn't about to let her escape my grasp, ever!

“Whatever,” She huffed and sighed, as if my attempt at wittiness with words had hurt her more than any blow. Then Lazuli crossed her arms and pouting at me before she turned to Yamcha, “Call me Lazuli or else.”

“Um ... Should I come back?” Yamcha asked.

I turned to him and smirked, “Oh, Yamcha, since you're here... strip.”

“WHAT?” His eyes bulged comically.

“I don't mean it like that.” I rolled my eyes and sauntered over to my workbench, before tossing him a bracelet and a suit of under armor. “The skintight suit can block a... hm, it'll keep you alive for the Saiyan Saga, hopefully.”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing, just hoping that things won't turn disappointing,” I waved his concerns off. “Anyway, you can wear it under practically anything, and it'll enhance your movements or whatever you fighters do. I'm thinking about trademarking it as 'Under Armor', like a sports clothing brand to hide that it's actually for interstellar combat. Anyway, wear it for a while and tell me how you feel about it, okay?”

Yamcha, for the first time since I've known him, stared at me as if he didn't quite believe my words. Of course, I knew he had done this without me noticing, but usually he was too much of a pansy to let me know of his incredulousness. I guessed he was growing up, which left a warm feeling in my chest, like watching a puppy learn to walk for the first time.

How adorable.

“Uh, Bulma, what about the bracelet?” He asked meekly.

“Oh, it's a monitor for your health. If you need a doctor or catch a cold or something...” I beckoned him over. “Anyway, put that on and ah, use your Rogafufuken on the dummy over there.”

He obeyed like any intern would, which was nice.

I turned to my computer and adjusted so I could collect some nice data. The equipment had been calibrated so that even a fluctuation in my power level, however low that is, is able to be recorded. The thing is, I used my own “power level” as a baseline, because I thought I was a regular human. It seemed to fit, seeing as Yamcha immediately registered as, like, eight Bulmas or something.

An image of an angry, ravenous wolf appeared to overlay onto Yamcha as his internal life energy fluctuated and he attempted to do his attack. “ROGAFUFUKEN!”

I leaned back against my chair, while my Mercy clapped enthusiastically. “Again, if you will.”

“ROGAFUFUKEN!”

“... Again.”

“ROGAFUFUKEN!”

“Yamcha, is this a joke to you?” I asked suddenly.

“N-no?” He sounded confused, as if he was asking what answer I wanted him to provide me.

“Then would you please go at it with your full strength? That dummy's made from the same material that makes the Under Armors. It doesn't even have a scratch.” I watched as he was about to retort, but I gave him no opportunity. “If you only go at it as strong as you think you are, then what happens when you meet an enemy that's stronger than you?”

“I...”

“Go at it again. Go on,” I sighed.

“ROGAFUFUKEN!”

I wasn't sure if he actually tried to use his full strength this time, but he certainly did yell his technique louder this time. It was somewhat heartening that he couldn't break the dummy, but on the flip side, I was sad that this was the best he could do... This was like the beginning of a long string of disappointments. I peered over at him, “Have you been slacking off since starting sports?”

Before he could answer, my Mercy—“I know that look, you're thinking of me as Mercy.”

“How do you know this,” my eyes narrowed at her and I asked slowly.

“You're really easy to read. LA-ZU-LI. Get it in your head,” She walked up to the dummy and punched.

The dummy, and the wall behind it, exploded.

I would have said that was impressive, but Goku could do the same thing after a year at Roshi's.

“Huh.” I nodded before turning back to my computer and inputting more commands on how to use the data we just gathered.

In a very, very tiny voice, Yamcha let out a sort of pathetic noise that I had only attributed to the Krillin I haven't even met yet. “Ah... a-ah... w-what...?”

Mercy—ow, okay, stop pinching me—Lazuli smirked with superiority, before twirling, taking a bow and flexing. “I'm not quite sure myself. Something about magic, technology, and life energy.”

“Well, if I went all out, we'd probably have lost half the city,” I remarked. “Now put on this French maid outfit I made for you.”

“... Does it protect me better?” Lazuli quirked an eyebrow at me.

I snorted unceremoniously, “Of course not, it's just the same material as your under armor. If something can tear through one layer of that, two or three more layers won't really make too much of a difference.”

“Then what's the point?”

“It's cute.”

“Cute.” The laboratory's temperature dropped by a couple degrees. Huh, did I already figure out a mechanized magical aura organ that worked with Gero's and Frappe's android designs? That was interesting.

Obviously, I ignored her tone and suddenly frosty demeanor. I turned my nose up and said imperiously through my shivering, “Y-Yeah. Cuteness is more important than any power, obviously! Now go put it on!”

“Right,” Her lips quirked to one side cutely. “Is that all?”

“... some tea, please.” I whimpered at last.

Lazuli nodded and left wordlessly, apparently already more familiar with my kitchens than I was.

Finally, I turned to Yamcha, who for some reason was still here. “No, Yamcha, I don't have a maid outfit for you.”

 

I tried to blink the blurriness out of my eyes. Lazuli was wearing a lab coat over the maid uniform. “Where did you get that?”

“I had it made,” she replied smugly.

“When did you have the time to do that?” I frowned.

“Literally all morning while you moaned on the couch,” Lazuli placed another cup of tea in front of me. She pushed her hair back a little before sitting down opposite of me in one of the office chairs rolling about. Her posture belied her tomboyishness, sitting with her chest pressed against and resting her chin atop the back of the chair.

“... Where did you get the materials for that?” I wondered. There wasn't any spare fabric in the lab.

She stared at me queerly before pointing at one of the machines behind her. “It's your matter fabricator, remember? You said you made this first so you could have the stuff and tools to make everything else.”

I didn't really remember that. It must have been during the initial surge of the first chug of coffee. I still remembered what that tasted like on the tip of my tongue and the action of drinking that first cup, but everything after was a blur.

After Dad had left, I stared at the steaming cup for more than five minutes. He had taken his time to show me how he made this cup of coffee. It was made French and with grains courser, mechanized as was all things in our household, and he used some kind of thickener that wasn't cream or xanthan gum or anything like that; it was a special concoction of Dad's own design. A scent of vanilla and hazelnut and something else drifted out that made my spine tingle and my toes stretch outward.

I yearned for it even before I even tasted it, this tall cup of coffee. It sat before me on my desk like the holy grail, and it beckoned to me, making everything else seem dark and small and insignificant. Of course, some part of me wanted it for more than a subconscious urge; before he left, Dad had said, “Tights couldn't get into science, so she became a novelist. She's quite like your Yamcha in that regard.”

So, sure, I wanted to drink this divine elixir. Sure, I craved it after not touching anything like it for the past sixteen years. And sure, it was hypnotizing just watching the steam waft out from the rims.

But I also wanted to prove myself better than my sister! Deep down, I still wanted the approval of my father.

So I chugged the whole thing in one go and...

“Uuugh,” I resisted the urge to vomit.

Lazuli sighed and rolled her swivel chair over and started rubbing my back slowly. The wheels on that chair were loud and was like sandpaper to my brain meats. It was that moment that I decided that every chair in my office would be floaty like Freezer's. “You probably shouldn't drink coffee again, Bulma.”

I glared at her and her blasphemy, “Are you kidding me? Nothing in the world can stop me from drinking it again. I mean, I won't react this terribly next time. You'll see.”

“I think you have a drinking problem,” she didn't stop rubbing my back. It felt really good and it calmed me down just a notch.

“Urp...” I covered my mouth and curled up into a ball. “I can quit whenever I want!”

“Uh huh.” She nodded, not believing me at all.

Thinking back, I had pretty much taken her everywhere like a grounding influence to my madness. It was nice knowing that even on a coffee high, I still had some semblance of sanity. So knowing that she knew what I had planned, I asked her, “What's on the agenda today?”

“Maybe you should just sleep in?” Lazuli suggested.

“No, no... there's still science to be done. What's still progressing?” I asked; there were a lot of servers a level lower in the basement of my basement. The hum of their activity had never ceased and I was curious as to what tasks they were still working on.

Lazuli pulled out a clipboard and started tapping on it. Oh, it was one of those glassy, touch screen clipboards that I had suggested to Dad. So he finished it, huh? “Well, the AGI that you wanted is still compiling, so that will take a few days. You haven't named it yet too.”

“What about Glados?”

“Glad OS?”

“No, no, Glados.”

“That's a silly name. Is that another reference to something?”

“Yeah, but... alright, how about a nice, nonthreatening name like Shodan?”

“It's your artificial intelligence, Bulma, you don't need my approval for a name.”

“Then it's settled, and we won't have to worry about it again,” I nodded in self-satisfaction. “That was easy. What's next?”

Lazuli peered up at me and paused in an awkward silence. She looked like she was deep in thought, as to whether or not say something. Then she took a deep breath and tapped a tab that she had bookmarked on her tablet. “Bulma... I was Briefing up—”

“Wait, hold on, Briefing?” I held up a hand in puzzlement.

“Y-You created it and you don't even know what it's called?” Lazuli sounded equally puzzled. She pulled up a new tab, which looked like the Google homepage, but with the letters 'BRIEF' where the Google logo should have been.

“Huh.” So that was a thing. So my living in a laboratory for months on end had caused me to miss out on modern lingo. “Sorry about that... what were you saying?”

“... I was Briefing my brother.” Lazuli said with some unease, as if expecting me to overreact. She didn't look up into my eyes and her gaze was rather pointedly stuck to the floor. “And Bookface's kind of weird, you know, well... a-and...”

“And? Why are you stuttering?” I leaned over and stared into her deep, blue eyes, wondering if one of the modifications I made to her brain had been malfunctioning. I made a mental note to give her a thorough... check-up... later.

“You know what? It doesn't matter, I'll... I'll figure it out,” She closed the tab hurriedly.

“That doesn't sound like it doesn't matter. Are you sure you're alright?” I poked her cheek.

She rolled her eyes, but she didn't slap away my finger. “By the way, you wanted to know when the World Martial Arts Tournament was to be held. Well, it's coming up next month.”

“Oh! Yeah, it's been almost a year since I've seen Goku!” I perked up immediately. I had to bring some gifts for him, considering his success in getting training from Muten Roshi, but what could I get him? “Oh, that's right. We could sponsor the tournament. I'll get Dad on the line, it'll be a blast.”

Lazuli was skeptical, however. Being the bad girl that she was, she didn't really care about these other things so much. “Are you sure? It doesn't seem to affect your plans if you don't bother.”

I had to waved her concerns off immediately. “Oh, it'll be no hassle. Besides, 500,000 zeni as a prize? That's just one large meal at an overpriced restaurant for Goku!”

Lazuli leaned back incredulously. “What... h-how much does he eat?”

 

The day began as any day might have begun, with them skipping school and haunting the local mall. There wasn't really anything special about that; they did that all the time. It wasn't like they were actually hurting anyone, they weren't gangsters, they were just delinquents.

It wasn't even their fault, really. As much as that man and that woman claimed to be their parents, she knew they weren't. She and the boy who became her brother were adopted from the same orphanage after all, but her little brother didn't even remember that. It wasn't her fault for being blonde. No one told her being a foreigner was bad. She didn't ask to be born like this.

She never fit in. Everyone else in the Chinese Amish Tribe were like her brother, black haired and black eyed. That she was taller than the other girls, as well as matured sooner, only drew their ire. And that ire materialized in bullying.

Now, it wasn't like she was really hurt by it. They didn't pour juice down her back or lock her in a locker or something, they only excluded her from activities or talked about how she was seducing the boys they liked. No, that didn't hurt. She had grown used to it; she couldn't be weak, not with her brother counting on her.

He had no one else.

Not their parents, certainly.

And besides, two could play at that game. She had begun skipping physical education, smoking behind the locker rooms, and soon that escalated to outright skipping school. She hadn't intended for her brother to follow her, it just happened like that.

It wasn't her fault that they had already decided she was a delinquent before she knew it. And her brother? Well, he was one by association.

So there they were, hanging out in the mall, while her brother took selfies in front of dog poop or some truck or whatever he found interesting in the parking lot. She still could remember what she was doing that day, what she was thinking and even the citric taste of the morning wind. She was thinking about how they couldn't even be called Chinese Amish anymore; they had a mall, everyone used C-Phones, and the only cars in the parking lot were the ones that no one drove anymore.

Everyone had a flying car that could shrink into the size of a pill these days.

“Hey Sis, look, I got a trucker hat!” Her brother shouted excitedly at her as he found one of the trucks unloading supplies to the mall parked outside with its window down. He wore it immediately before frowning. “Ew, it's all sweaty.”

She took a drag, not bothering standing up, “Put that down, bro. You don't know where that's been.”

He complied goodnaturedly.

They got along.

She could still remember it...

When the green portal opened up suddenly from across the parking lot. There weren't many cars there, and the light, flash, and whirling sound of the portal had drawn her attention immediately. It didn't exactly pop, it sort of bounced... like the surface of a lake or jello pudding, or sort of like goo. It was a bright, unnatural green color, with blinding flashes of white swirling in around, like a cup of mocha.

Then the girl with the blue-green hair walked through it, the girl who would change her life. She didn't know it then, of course. She thought this girl was just another one of those crazy scientist types, from the way the girl stashed away what looked like a portal-gun into her holster.

Even the Chinese Amish Village had one of those; their local scientist had a spaceship and farming robots made of sticks and straw to prove it too.

The girl had these thick, coke-bottle goggles, which she had not taken off or slid to her forehead. It obscured her eyes, making her expression unreadable and it was impossible to tell what she was looking at. She had this thick, white lab coat on, its edges stained and worn, and these thick boots that went up over her shins. There was a black bodysuit under that, but it was hard to tell; it was not reflective and seemed to swallow up the light around it. All in all, the girl was curious, she had thought then.

“Hey kid! You have the divine physic and bone structure of a martial arts genius,” The blue haired girl spoke loudly and immediately. Her voice echoed without anything to bounce off of and as the green halo of the dissipated portal disappeared, the girl still had this sort of sheer presence that made it difficult to look away from her.

“What.” Her brother wasn't exactly the smart type.

“World peace is in your hands! This is the pamphlet of the Crane School of Martial Arts!” She held up a tiny booklet with the word 'CRANE' stamped on its cover. There was an old man depicted under the word, wearing a little crane hat and sunglasses. “You can have it for three hundred and fifty zeni!”

No one could blame them, the blue haired girl had terrible presentation.

She turned away from the girl immediately, know that some other loony would come along and take care of things. This wasn't their problem, and the manual was probably a scam.

As she turned away, the blue haired girl shouted, “Wait!”

Instinctively, she stilled. There was power in the girl's word. It was like she had grown up commanding others. She thought of an unlikely scenario, what if this girl was a princess or someone similar to that? She stopped and turned around, only to see the girl holding more pamphlets.

“You want more?” There were five pamphlets, each with different martial arts names and titles printed on them. If she had even cared about this or was a nerd for that sort of thing, she thought she might have recognized them. “I got pamphlets for days!”

“No,” she had told the girl. There wasn't much to say then. She remembered that she had focused on the girl's hair, how it was so straight and prim and proper. It reminded her of her classmates, who acted like they were good girls while saying words of spite behind her back. It pissed her off.

“Aw, but sis! I wanna be Kung Fu fighting!” Her brother protested, throwing some mockingly silly punches in the air.

“Let's get out of here,” She replied. She tossed a capsule on the ground. It wasn't something she was proud of, having a motorcycle like this, but it was the only one they could afford. Gasoline vehicles that couldn't fly were dirt cheap these days, since no one wanted to use them anymore.

They left the crazy girl from the green portal and drove into the mountains, to get away from it all. There was a campsite not far from their town, and they were on the border of a national park.

She'd traveled up there to a lake only an hour's ride away on the weekends, when no one bothered her.

Her brother had used to love the outdoors so much, but these days, he had all sorts of silly games to play on his phone. It just wasn't the same anymore.

A part of her wondered then, as the wind whipped her hair against her cheeks, if any kids before or after her generation would know what it was like to grow up during the spread of the internet. It certainly was a topic the classrooms discussed on the days she did attend. They made it sound like she was lucky to be born.

She hated it all. She knew she was still living well enough, there were people with worse lives than her, but she still hated it.

Her life was just so... monotonous.

When had everything become so predictable and mellow?

Just riding her bike with the wind in her face, she felt at peace. It was usually these times that she could be introspective, but it only made her despise herself more. She hated that she craved stronger emotions. She hated that she wanted to hate her life.

She hated that she thought everything revolved around her, that her life was about her desires and her desires alone.

She hated being a teenager.

And perhaps hate was too strong a word to use.

They parked below the slopes of the mountain overlooking the park. It was late in the afternoon when they had arrived; they had taken the long route there. She knew her brother liked it too. There was something about the open road that appealed to him.

She just wanted to clear her head...

… If only he'd stop taking pictures of everything, including his groin, for some inane social media application on his goddamn phone. “Are you done yet?”

“Am I ever?” Her brother preened before the screen. “Look, let me take a picture of you, Sis.”

“Don't you dare.”

“It'll be great! They came out with this new filter. You could be a dog!”

“That's stupid, and you're stupid. Ugh.” She flicked her hair, but she didn't turn away. It was useless while he was in one of these silly modes.

Then her brother paused. He looked up at her and then looked back down at his screen.

It took her a moment, but she realized that he was looking at something behind her.

When she turned around, an old man was standing behind her, only inches away. He had the wrinkliest, ugliest face she'd ever seen. There was a sinister glint in his eyes, and he wore a giant hat, like the one the Pope wore, but completely black with a silly looking logo on it. She'd seen it somewhere before, on the older car models, with the cute, red ribbon and the capitalized 'RR' on it.

He worn a tiny vest, and a sickening grin. “Yes,” he muttered to himself, as if seeing two items he wanted at a grocery store. “These bodies will do nicely.”

“What the hell is your problem, old man?” Her brother reacted first. He swaggered up to the strange old man, with his hands in his pocket. Even though her brother didn't really fight, he knew he had a bad reputation. It allowed him to intimidate others, which he liked to use often to get what he wanted.

But the old man either wasn't listening, or didn't care. It looked like he didn't even know who they were.

She felt like a pit of ice had grown in her belly, and she felt her feet skid back towards her bike.

The old man reached forward, and as casually as one might pick a vegetable, his hand gripped her brother's neck and picked him off the ground. The old man studied her brother's body like some sickening pervert, smirking so confidently that nothing would happen to him.

And she thought perhaps he knew about them, and that was why this old man picked them. Perhaps he knew they had no one to care about them but each other. Even their parents had all but given up hope for them, the reputation of being delinquents overriding what little parental instincts they had.

“Let him go! Can't you see what you're doing to him?” She ran up to the old man and kicked him. It felt like she was kicking an iron wall, and she fell, grasping her tingling, injured ankle. It felt broken.

“Oh, don't worry.” The old man's smirk grew. “You're next.”

Her eyes darted back and forth. The sun was already setting then. It was already getting dark; it was late in the fall season... and she knew no one could possibly find them, help them, before the old man did whatever he wanted to do.

She felt despair.

Then she felt the cold, wrinkled hand grip her neck. It felt like she was being sapped of her concentration.

She couldn't keep her eyes open.

So this was why her brother didn't struggle. That was her last thought then.

The next time she awakened, she was surprised she awakened at all. She immediately tried to get up, to check if she still had all her organs. She was still untouched. Even her clothes were still the way she had worn them. However, she couldn't get up...

Next to her, her brother had yet to awaken. He was groaning in pain. She could still feel the pain in her leg crawling up her spine.

They were strapped into an operation table.

She couldn't sit up, but she could look around.

This was a brightly lit room, filled with electronics. There were a thousand things here, all sharp, beeping, and painful looking. It was like a hospital made for torture, with a hundred different instruments to fulfill any horrific fantasy.

“Awake already?” The old voice spoke. He wore a scrubs uniform that in any other circumstance might have filled her with relief. Doctors were supposed to be good things. But she was only filled with fear as the first thing he picked up was a drill. It whirled loudly with life. He smirked as he came into her field of vision. “Well, it won't make a difference if you are awake or asleep. I'll have to cut you up all the same.”

He placed the drill beside her with a clatter of metal against cold operation table.

It was just inches away.

She felt cold terror seep into her chest. In a small move of spite, she tried to push it off the table. The leather straps that held her down didn't even allow that.

The old man saw this and chortled. “Hopelessness is the first step to acceptance. You should be happy, young lady. I am helping you.”

“Helping me? From what?” She hissed incredulously.

“From freedom, you silly girl. From these illusions. You'll become a greater part of a whole... it will be glorious.” He stared into the bright lights, almost with a religious-like fervor. “Humanity's next, greatest step...”

“You... you're insane...” She struggled against her restraints. They only felt tighter with each motion.

“The genius vanguards of the future are often called insane, this is true. But you don't need to struggle so needlessly. You have no hope of escape.” He picked up his next instrument, a saw. It was an old one, clean, but worn and completely lacking any mechanical function. It was just a serrated, sharp edge.

Then he placed that too just inches away from her face.

Her heart beat quickened. Her breathing was almost painful and breathless. Her eyes darted more frantically about. It felt like the walls were closing in on her.

“Please...” She whimpered and stared from the corners of her eyes at the boy lying beside her. The dark, purple imprints of the old man's fingers around his neck were so visible. The bruises alone almost forced her to shriek.

“Oh? Who is this? Your lover? Your boyfriend? Your family?” The old man asked, as if he didn't already know.

“He's... my brother. Please... take me... let him go... please...” She begged. It was hard to see, everything had gone blurry. It took her a moment to realize, but she was crying.

“Ho ho?” The old man smirked even wider. “We can't have that. I took so much time out to acquire new specimens. No, no, we can't have that. But how about this? I'll cut him up... first.”

“No!” She shrieked. “Please!”

“He'll be Seventeen. You can be Eighteen.” He spoke without pause, as if she had not uttered a single sound. Then he picked up his tools, and placed it on the operation table beside her brother.

“No. No. No...”

“Please be quiet now, would you?” The old man sighed. “That will be quite irritating if you distract me and I accidentally kill your brother before his time.”

“No, no, no...”

He turned back to her with a look of disgust. It was so arrogant, so superior, that it made her feel like she was a worm before him. “As much as I'd enjoy your suffering, it will have to wait. You can wait in the storage room while I work on him. It'll be something to look forward to, and I'll watch your reactions later.”

“Please, please, please...” She couldn't stop shivering, yet it wasn't from the cold.

Then he wheeled her out, to a room of coffins. There were other bodies locked away, with only a glass showing their sleeping faces. The coffins were numbered, and the seventeen and eighteen coffins were the only ones empty.

“Can you hear me? Heh. Well it doesn't matter. I know you can. Look upon my creations while I work on your... brother.” He strode out of the room, oozing confidence in his task and himself.

She couldn't breathe. She felt like she was suffocating.

It seemed like days had passed before any sound other than the clattering of her teeth and the shortness of her breathing filled the cold, dead room of corpses and coffins. She was starving and delirious and dehydrated.

And there was no hope left inside her, she felt her will broken.

… a green portal appeared just an inch beside her.

That weird, blue-haired girl jumped out without a sound, looking around the room and then down at her. The sheer presence of the girl's being seemed divine to her then, like a warm aura that electrified her soul and rekindled something she had just thought dead within her.

“Huh.” The blue-haired girl blinked and poured out a tiny vial of something like black, glistening oil, which seeped into the corners and crevasses of the room before disappearing, as if they were never there.

“Y-You? Please, you've got to help, get, call a... call the police. Someone!” She whimpered and struggled against the straps holding her to her seat. She felt every muscle of her being burn despite having no power left in herself, desperate to get the girl's attention.

“Psst.” The blue-haired girl suddenly squatted down. She was swaying a little, as if she was drunk and her eyes were glazed over. She smelled like... very rich mocha. And she whispered to her, “Psst, hey you. You want some superpowers?”

“... Yes.”

 

… Did you ever count how many times we could have died?

Yamcha couldn't sleep those nights. It was nights like these, when his adventures following Bulma Briefs for the past year came back in the form of dreams that... he felt better if he kept himself awake. He kept recounting the moment he decided to follow Bulma into civilization. He hadn't counted the dangerous the girl had faced; he wasn't there for the most of it to begin with.

But ever since the first day he entered this vast, concrete jungle that was a human city, Yamcha began thinking about his life. He began thinking about what he was doing with himself and how could he was to that edge.

Bulma acted like the dragon had not granted her wish, since everything she showed him she acted like she already had before the wish.

Maybe she was right.

But Yamcha knew that wasn't the whole story, when they walked through the halls of Capsule Corporation that the sheer fear and reverence Bulma commanded in the people around her sent shivers down his spine. The guards in their blue uniforms, the assistants in their white laboratory coats, and the receptionist with the big breasts, they all shied away from Bulma's view.

As she strode into her home, butlers and maids bowed to her every whim. They acted as if they existed to serve her. And the buildings around them, were all taller than the tallest trees he'd ever seen, yet they were all subservient to the main Capsule Corporation building. They circled around it like cavemen huddled around a flame, needing the Briefs' company to thrive and provide themselves with sustenance.

Bulma showed him some of her factories on the first day. Every gesture she made was with practiced ease, with an elegance that spoke of confidence and practice. Each of her off-hand comments shook Yamcha right down to his toes.

“We make 40% of the cars in the world, that's two out of every five.” She had remarked as if speaking about the weather, “I'm sure we'll get to a hundred percent in a couple years.”

Yamcha would have questioned it, but he was too shocked.

This was the girl he wanted to court? She was the one he wanted to date?

He felt then like a frog in a well, staring at the moon. No matter how he jumped, no matter how hard he reached for what was above him, he couldn't do it. Yamcha felt something in him break, and his stride ever since had not had the same self confidence as it had. He couldn't do this, he thought to himself.

This girl was out of his league...

… but that was just his first day in West City.

Thankfully, Bulma hadn't bothered to surprise him like that for a while since.

She left him to his devices, and allowed him to settle in with a healthy stipend and her assistants were more than happy to answer any of his more technical questions. He felt he could live in the city; it wasn't lonely here. But Bulma rarely spent her time with him.

It might have saddened him once, a few days ago perhaps, but now he just felt relief that he didn't have to stare into her eyes and talk.

Sports came easily to him, and he joined some high school level sports team, which had its ups and downs, but apparently baseball was popular enough that he was never without someone who wanted to be his friend on his merits alone. For some reason, that wasn't enough for him. He had gotten over the shock of the city by then, and he had almost regained his confidence.

Looking back, he could only laugh. How could he have been so stupid?

What happened next broke any resolve to chase after the girl.

She allowed him to visit her, seeing nothing wrong with it all.

He wanted to prove himself, so he asked his questions and tried so hard to be competent.

“What's this?” He had asked.

“Oh, that? It turns anything I'm thinking about into reality. Well, that's the gist of it anyway.” She didn't even look up from her work. It was like she was just talking about how tomorrow was going to be partly cloudy.

“I'm not sure I understand,” Yamcha tried for clarification.

“I took the concept from Norimaki, but there's like a dozen other inventions by other scientists that can supplement it. I call it a matter fabricator, but anything I can think of—it doesn't even have to be exact—I can turn into something real. Like a reality machine, if it wasn't spawned in a gag manga, I guess.” She tucked a stray strand behind her ear. This motion made him yearn for her then, again, and yet not. It was humanizing that she still made these gestures but...

But... he thought more and more on the subject, and it became more and more obvious to him that he was just a regular human being in a very scary world. Maybe if she had not urged for him to think along those lines, he never would have but now...

He was afraid.

Bulma could literally create anything from her dreams. She was like a faerie queen of the legends, who was so strange and yet literal and scatterbrained and powerful. She ruled her realm, and there were no questions or objections allowed.

Goku was a monkey boy who turned into a giant gorilla large enough to be the stuffs of nightmares. He couldn't be hurt by bullet or sword, and he was constant growing, constantly making Yamcha feel so inadequate.

These were the people at his side, Yamcha thought. These were monsters out of legends, and he was just an ordinary man.

He looked back at Bulma, who was humming some childish tune while bashing together some new contraption.

How could he have ever dared yearn for her?

The very sight of her felt inhuman to Yamcha.

He didn't even dare speak more than he needed around her. Every word might give her an idea to turn her attention towards him. He had seen her weirder, more organic experiments. He didn't want to end up on the operation table.

At the same time, he knew he thought of Bulma as a friend.

And of course, boner never helped.

It was all very confusing.

Now, months later, Yamcha felt antsy and stifled and scared. Sports and schooling seemed to occupy his time, but he felt like they held nothing of substance to him. It felt like he was wasting away here, where Bulma left him. Every so often, he tried to practice a little of his martial arts, and he felt like that ferocity was slipping away from him in this cradle of civilization.

He wanted to do something, he wanted to work with his hands. Baseball didn't allow him to bash the opposing team with his bat, so he had to work off that stress somewhere else.

Bulma tried to encourage him to meet other girls, but really, which girl could compare to her? Fear boner didn't help either. Apparently his school classes told him that was a natural reaction. So maybe schooling wasn't useless, but he still didn't like it. He knew he couldn't have her, so it confused him so much that he was only attracted to something he couldn't have.

Maybe it was nice that he was actually able to appreciate that he was so introspective now, due to his experiences. Maybe if Bulma would stop showing up in his nightmares, he could think clearly.

At least he could admit now that those were nightmares.

He started working as a handy man, and then he used his instincts and enhanced senses, which all of course paled compared to Goku's senses but were vastly outpacing that of the people around him, to solve problems. It allowed him to get into fights with what few gangsters lounged around in West City. It allowed him to develop a consultant-like relationship with the local police. It was nice to do this sort of work—even if it was dangerous, even if sometimes he had to leave the city to kill dinosaurs or something, it was better than to glimpse into the dark abyss known as Bulma's mind.

It let him work off that energy and he was happy for dreamless nights. Not that he wouldn't show up if Bulma called, but he hoped to just avoid her whenever possible, for those dreamless nights. So Yamcha engaged himself in these small, meaningless tasks and he relished in them. He even had a name card these days.

Lord Yamcha
MARTIAL ARTIST
Lost Items Found and Supernatural Investigations
Consulting and Advice
Reasonable Rates
No Entertainment or Performances​

It was a nice little inane piece of paper. But holding it seemed to give him some semblance of control on how he defined his life. He felt better for it. He'll just ignore the phone call obvious from Bulma for just another minute. Yeah, he could just close his eyes and imagine he was an ordinary handyman, who knew he was too small to solve the big problems in life, so he could just not. Yeah, no Bulma...

Yeah... maybe he could have the next batch of name cards embossed. That'd be pretty awesome.​

 

“So where are we going?” Lazuli was dressed in something other than a maid outfit because I told her we were going out and that was obviously a dress for indoors and when she was in my doors. More importantly, I thought it'd be nice to have her dressed like an Average Japanese Highschool Student.

It was a cute look, okay?

“Oh, you know, I just thought we ought to have some awesome adventures... relax a little, get away from the office. I've been in this place for too long! It'll be like a vacation! Look, and we don't even have to sit on an airplane for like ten hours.” And I was certainly dressed for a vacation!

“That didn't answer my question, Bulma. Where are we going?” She tapped her feet and leaned against the wall, all delinquent-like and cool.

“Some other worlds—not like space travel though! This is dimensional travel, it's totally different! Watch this, kaboom a portal!” I spun the portal gun out of its holster and shot a portal into the air before us. Little did she know, I had practiced this move in the mirror for a couple of days. It took me some time before the portal gun would stop falling out of my fingers the moment I took it out.

“This is like magic...” Lazuli blinked.

She walked up to the portal with an obsessed and crazed gleam in her eyes. Then she turned back to me before tracing a finger along the edge of the green, gooey portal. It was almost like she was in a trance.

I snapped my fingers before her eyes.

That seemed to do the trick, so I added, “It is magic. Well, partly anyway. Part of it is science, obviously.”

“What's the difference between this and your science? That's also very... magical. Don't think I didn't notice the portal gun was running on a fake AA battery!” She pointed at the portal gun.

I smiled sheepishly. “Oh, not, that's Magical ™ , it's trademarked and a marketing thing for our tech.”

“That's not what I mean, and you know it, Bulma.” She harrumphed and crossed her arms.

“Fine, fine... so science is learning the rules of the universe and bending it over the kitchen counter and fu—”

“Bulma!”

“Okay, fine. Our technology is from learning more about the world. We find out what we can and cannot do and try to push those boundaries. Magic is where we define the rules. I learned that after learning how to track the Dragonballs, actually... you can't impose anyone else's logic on magic. You can't impose the rules of the universe on magic. Whoever makes with the magic is the only one who can set the limits.” After saying so, I twirled my fingers like so, and a swirl of glistening sparkles filled the air, like in that Disney movie from a long, long time ago with Cinderella, when she first got her dress made for her.

Lazuli chewed on this for a minute. “That's a very fancy way to say a whole lot of nothing...”

“Magic has no rules.” I repeated, “That's all. If you want to do magic, you have to start by embracing infinity and accepting everything is possible.”

“Sounds like you learned magic?” She peered at me curiously.

“Oh no, of course not. Don't be silly.” I waved her off.

“Then how did you know that...?”

“I have people to do that for me.”

“... Of course you do.”

I shrugged, I knew her long enough to gauge her reactions by now. “That doesn't mean I can't take what they learned and use it. I suppose it's similar to the C-Phone; people who make the nifty little bits know more about those bits than me, but I can still use the thing—”

“Hold on a minute... that doesn't make any sense.” She pointed at me, leaning dangerously close. “You make the phone. You made every part of it, it's all part of your, ahem, 'marketing'. Even I know this!”

“Right.” I rolled my eyes again, “But it's not like it's a stagnant device, besides, we want users to replace it every year or two.”

“That's... well, kind of evil, Bulma.”

“Oh, come on! That's lawful neutral at best!” I protested.

“I'm not going to have this conversation...” She tossed her hands in the air. “I'm not going to have this conversation... Look, so you can do magic, right?”

“Eh... approximately.” I shrugged again.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” She turned back to me. “Don't make it confusing, just tell it to me straight.”

“It's sort of like one of those classic roleplaying game wizards—”

“Nerd.”

“Ahem. You wanna know this or not?”

She sat down, knowing this was going to be a longer conversation than she thought. “... Yes, but can you, like, not talk about your roleplaying games? You already talked my ear off with your obsession with, what was that word again? Cosplay? Don't start that again.”

“What's wrong with cosplay?” I pouted.

“Look, can we just...?”

“What's wrong with cosplay, Lazuli?!” I pounced upon her and held her down by her shoulders.

“N-Nothing! Look, it's just a bit much okay?” For some reason, she kept looking away from my face. “I'm fine if you wanna dress up as a sexy angel or a sexy doctor or whatever, but why do I have to do it too?”

“Why not?” I whined. Wait, no, I didn't whine, I, I was just complaining. Yeah, that was it.

“You... you're really going to make me say it, huh?” She was a bit red now, and it reached down to her neck. Was she mad at me?

“I can't read your mind—wait, actually, you know what, I-I could but that's not the point! I can't tell what you're thinking if you're like this!” I stared intently into her eyes, promising myself to learn how to read minds like Muten Roshi in the future.

“... And I'm just going to ignore that and tell you straight. I can't act. I can't roleplay. I. Can't. Act.” She enunciated each syllable with painful slowness through her gritting teeth, almost like she was growling at me.

It was kind of hot, to be honest.

“Yes, you can.” I poked her cheeks, “You're totes cute doing it too, don't be shy!”

“S-Stop! Just, just stop it!” She slapped away that offending finger, “Let's just talk about something more normal, like magic, okay??”

“Fine... what do you wanna know...?” I backed off.

“Can you do magic?”

“... Yes.”

“Stop pouting, you know I don't like surprises.” She crossed her arms, “What can you do with magic?”

“Well, I can do just about anything, I guess... probably?” I waved my hands around animatedly. There was a lot to say on the topic, but I didn't really want to bog us down when I was time to head out and have some fun. “Within reason. The more complicated, the more rules I'll have to make, so simple things are better. Like if you told me to erase every bad person who'll try to destroy this planet from ever coming into being, well, I'll probably never finish casting the spell!”

“What about this... traveling to another dimension? How does this work?” She looked over at the portal, which was now wavering and probably going to blink out soon. It was one of the many, many safety measures I had placed into it, for good reason too.

Still, that portal wasn't going anywhere dangerous. It was like, you know, Cross Epic or whatever that crossover one shot was. It was safe, probably. “Oh! You mean like... ah, well don't worry about it. We're going to just other Shonen Jump worlds, it's fast and easy. They crossover all the time anyway.”

“... Bulma, I couldn't understand a single word you said.” She deadpanned.

“Erm. Timey-whimey-magically-don't-question-it-it's-magic?” I shrugged, not for the first time that day.

“Bulma...” Lazuli hissed.

I raised my hands in submission, “Look, the answer you're looking for is dangerously close to breaking the fourth wall. Now, if you have any other non-universe breaking questions, I'll be happy to answer them.”

“... So basically you have magic, but you can't use it. You know the explanations to these hows and whys, but you can't tell me.” It sounded like she was working up to a rant. “Okay. Okay. Fine. Can you at least tell me why we can't just fix all our problems with magic?”

“Lazuli, look, magic is without rules,” I said again.

“I know that. You just told me,” She laughed.

“No. Magic has no rules.” I held her down, and stared at her, hoping I could convey all that I wanted with these words. There was no concise way to say it, no way to say it accurately. Any explanations I could give would only fall short.

“I... don't understand?” She was looking away from me again. Why??

“Yes, you don't.” I tried, “Magic has no rules, Lazuli.”

“Stop that, you're creeping me out.” She wasn't laughing anymore, more like a nervous hiccup than even a giggle now.

“Magic has no rules. Magic has no rules.” I was inches away from her, and I felt my heart jump when I saw the intensity of my eyes reflected in hers. It made me back off.

I realized I couldn't... I shouldn't try to impart upon her the depths of magic.

It wouldn't end well.

I didn't want to lose my friend.

“You're just repeating the same thing over and over again! That doesn't tell me anything!” She shouted back at me, almost as if she wanted to push me away, but couldn't. That was a silly thought; she was tens of thousands of times stronger than me after all.

“It's simple.” I waved my fingers helplessly, not quite sure how to explain it simply. “Just like I have to make the rules for each magic so that they do what they do, so too would I need to make the rules on what it can't do. Or else we're boned.”

Lazuli blinked, her eyes were wide. “Like... like if we had a magic spell to make fire, but it didn't stop or there was no limit to how much fire it makes every second? Is that what you mean?”

“More, Lazuli.” I nodded, “More. More. You can't just have logical limits, there are also limits that are, well, outside of the box. How else do you think the dragonballs could grant nearly any wish? Imagine if the fire that spell made was fire you couldn't see but it still burned. Imagine there was a duplicate of that fire made somewhere else every time you made one. Imagine it took someone else's fire away from them when it you make it yours. Imagine that fire brought more than just fire into the world. Imagine that the fire was taken from a different time rather than a different place.”

She covered her forehead with her palm. “Okay, you can stop now, Bulma. I'm going to lie down and forget this conversation ever happened.”

I crept up behind her and whispered in her ear, while holding back a giggle, “The fire burns, but I can't feel it!”

She slapped my face.

 

“Are you sure we're safe?” Lazuli asked not for the last time probably. She tugged on the high cut of her short Japanese Highschool Student uniform skirt. It was a dark navy sailor outfit with white and red embroidery, which was kind of the look I liked.

I patted her hand in a manner that I thought was reassuring. “Look, no one will know us where we're going. We're just... picking up some samples. It'll be quick, clean, and we can hang out and relax after. What could go wrong?”

We stepped through the portal.

The world we walked into seemed, for the most part, similar to the one we left. It had less technology than the economic and social boom that I had caused, but that was because this was a world that was more static and similar to the world that was to be.

There were definitely still skyscrapers every so often and apartment complexes lined the streets—all in all, it was very like Beijing or Tokyo or New York. You know, it was a metropolis.

It had concrete buildings and asphalt roads. It was... well, not eerily like my current Earth, but it was eerily like my past Earth. The street signs that lined the road, the technology being sold in tiny, street-corner shops, and even the way the sky was not littered with flying cars all reminded me of an ancient time. This was a world more socially ahead than the world I was from, at least by a few decades.

At least, that was what I had intended.

Lazuli looked around, and was amusingly trying her damnedest to not look like she was gawking. It was kind of adorable in a sort of ignorant, country girl sort of way. “So what exactly are we here for?” She asked at last.

“Oh, we're going to find some fat guy and take his goo.” I frowned at the words that came out of my mouth. I turned to Lazuli, whose jaw already lowered slightly, and shook my head quickly, “Not like that. You'll get it.”

“... Ew?”

“No! No! Not that like that either!” I slapped my forehead. “I just meant you'll understand. Come on, let's see if we can get an information hub or something to—”

A random passerby walked by us and remarked, “Huh. Is that a Bulma cosplay? Neat.”

We stopped and turned.

It seemed like an average, albeit nerdy looking, person who said this.

I raised a hand, “Excuse me? C-Can I ask what you just said?”

The passerby turned, and we were surprised by the serious, heavy intent on his visage. If looks could kill, he probably would have killed everyone in his path, because he had this sort of grim expression that spoke of a thousand battles, with his hair slicked back and three, white scars over one of his eyes. If it hadn't looked goddamn like he actually suffered an injury to get those scars, I would have thought he was just trying to be edgy.

The man furrowed his brow, shrinking in on himself by his posture, but puffing out his chest and straightening his shoulders as if... as if he were bluffing. “Yes? You're a cosplayer right?”

“How do you know I'm a cosplayer?” I asked.

“You look like you're from a post-apocalyptic timeline, you've got a bunch of fake high-tech gadgets strapped to yourself,” He replied matter-of-factually, though he seemed strangely relieved and his shoulders slumped just a centimeter. “You're cosplaying Future Bulma, right? Look, if you're going to get random people to notice you like this, it's going to set back cosplay because this is exactly what people on the internet mean when they say cosplayers are just a bunch of girls showing off their tits.”

“I... Whaaa...?” I couldn't really formulate a response.

Thankfully, Lazuli seemed to have a lot of experience in... responding... apparently. She gripped me by the waist and pulled me aside, before smiling apologetically to the passerby, “Look, she's new at this, so, well, I'm sorry for taking your time, Mister...?”

“King. Call me King.” He nodded, before that sort of frightful body language was back. He stared at us with his eyes narrowed suspiciously, “You don't know who I am?”

“... Should we?” Lazuli asked.

“Huh.” Mister King blinked. “Well, it doesn't matter. It's decent cosplay anyway, though that anime's a bit... old.”

“Is that so?” I found my voice and prodded, “I thought people ought to appreciate the classics a bit more, you know what I mean?”

He nodded, shifting his weight slightly as he relaxed a little. I noticed that he was holding a plastic bag full of video games, and I decided to have my devices scan them while we talked. King shrugged, “I agree, but with Origins, it's kind of obscure because they spent so long talking about aliens and magic and stuff instead of the reason why it was called that.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, you don't know?” He smirked smugly like a nerd would when they thought they had some information no one else had, having an opportunity to improve his nerd street-cred. “The anime, 'Origins' was named that because it was based on that origins story that Cell monster told way back during his Cell Games. They really spent too long talking about Fake Namek and stuff, but we all know that story isn't real, but so many people were watching the Cell Games back then that anime producers had to cash in on it.”

“So, that actually all happened?” I boggled.

“Well, the Cell Games obviously did happen, but that other stuff? I'd say that was probably all a tall tale or something. It's most likely all fake.” He laughed, “Aliens? In West City? Pull the other one.”

“What about the, erm, earlier stories?”

“What? That Red Ribbon stuff?”

I blinked. “Oh, that was all part of it too?”

“Yeah,” King nodded and scoffed, now completely into his nerdy rant. “But it's even older anime, back when they were really trying to cash in, so the producers didn't think it'd sell without jokes and gags. They hired some bird guy to draw a gag manga about it to test the waters. I mean, really? A wish granting dragon that appears after you collect seven balls? That can't be real.”

“... Huh. How long ago was this Cell Games?” I asked, trying to bring the conversation back to our focus. “I thought the search for the dragonballs was kind of romantic.”

“Like, more than ten years ago?” King shrugged again, completely ignoring my last comment. “I was in middle school back then, I think.”

“Oh, no wonder I can't remember it, I wasn't even in school yet.” I nodded. “Thanks for the, ah, enlightening backstory, Mister King.”

He nodded, “Sure. I'm a hero, after all.”

“Right. Hero.” Lazuli wasn't impressed. She was looking at the man like how she looked at me when I suggested we should go cosplaying and roleplaying. Ah, well, I picked my battles carefully on that one.

“Bye,” We said our farewells.

After he left, I turned to Lazuli. “I think I may have made a miscalculation on which dimension we're in.”

“You think?” Lazuli's eyebrow rose. She smirked and tossed her hair back, “Nevermind. I know you too well Bulma. Can we still get what you want here or do we have to go somewhere else?”

I still wasn't quite over it though. I muttered under my breath, “This is like the fucking Twilight Zone...”

“Hello? Bulma?” She poked me again.

“Wha? Oh! Yeah, we should be fine, I'll jack into a terminal and we'll find our target, since having the Cell Games occurring approximately ten years ago is one of the requirements for this universe to have my delicious, delicious goo...” I smiled.

Lazuli made a face. “That's disgusting, Bulma.”

 

(Short because I typed this on an airplane. Spent basically 12 hours on one so too tired to fix it.)

There was a giant meteor.

It was going to crash into the city, which was probably a problem, like that one movie where Aerosmith sang some nice songs about.

But before that could happen, some caped bald guy jumped up and smashed it into a lot of little pieces, causing the debris to splatter all over the city like some celestial bukkake.

Lazuli groaned. “You have a way with words, Bulma.”

“Well, what would you call it?” I whined.

“Everything is on fire. I can't believe I have to be the one to say it, but you should have some pity on those poor sods!” She pointed at the wreckage spread across several blocks. It looked kind of like the ending of the first Avengers movie, where there was a lot of stuff burning and crushed due to some stuff that fell from the skies.

I pouted, “But it could be more on fire...”

Lazuli closed her eyes and counted to ten. Then she turned back towards me, “Didn't you say you wanted something from here? Well, what did you want?”

“Isn't that caped baldy interesting?” I pointed at him as he jogged comically away in his yellow suit that seemed to be a size too big for him. “Let's take it.”

“Bulma, that's a person.”

“You're right.”

“Oh, thank god—”

“But where do we find that much peanut butter?”

“—Oh my god!”

“What?”

“Why do you even want him?” She pressed a hand on her own impressive chest, “If you want someone who could do that, I could do that. You're talking about taking a human being, Bulma!”

I pouted and hugged her tenderly. “But you're already mine, Lazuli. Besides, I care about you! I wouldn't care if I cut that guy up! Oh, hey look, he has a friend! And that friend's a cyborg like you!”

That got her attention. “Wow, he's really obvious about it. Those are some impressively armed arms. Oh god, you've got me talking like you already.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “Don't you know? Boys dig cannons.”

Lazuli turned to me and gripped my arms. She looked rather upset. “Bulma. Serious question. Do I have cannon arms?”

“... why would you want that?” I blinked.

“I don't want it. I want to know if you secretly put it in me,” She replied matter-of-factually.

“Don't you have energy blast—oh, we haven't even reached that point in time yet. Huh, that's kind of hard to keep track of.” I nodded to myself. I did a double take and gasped, “Wait, you don't want cannon arms?”

“Yeah, and you aren't making any sense,” Lazuli shook me.

“Y-y-you c-c-can s-s-still b-b-blow p-p-people u-u-up by touching—” I ducked and dodged her attempts to hold me accountable for not making her as cool as the stereotypical cyborg and slipped behind her. Then I held her in a Full Nelson! “—by touching people's pressure points.”

“What.” She gaped, but she was still struggling in my capable hands!

“Yeah, I took it from analysis of this guy from that one village with the penguins and stuff. It was supposed to be a parody, but you know, its got basis on the real thing, so you're programmed with Hokuto Shinken!” I deflected proudly. “Besides, I didn't put cannon arms in you, I just put rockets in you!”

“Oh my god.” She paused, her eyes glazing over slightly as she analyzed her internals. “Oh my god!”

“Yes, I am your god!” I puffed out my chest proudly, but seeing her distress, I tried to comfort her, “Look it's not even that intrusive, and besides, I didn't put rocket hands on you like that idiot Gero did to his robot not-son.”

Lazuli snapped out of it. “Wait, what? No, actually, don't tell me. Stop talking in tangents. Bulma, you made rockets propagate out of me from nothing...”

“What's wrong with that? It's cool,” I pouted.

“... from my chest! It looks like the rockets are coming out of my chest!” She yelled.

I pouted harder. “It's from your center of mass, so it was either that or from your hips.”

“That pouting isn't going to work on me,” Lazuli sighed. “Fine, I can see how rockets coming out from between my thighs could be worse. Do I really need all these different kinds of rockets? I feel like a very violent Doraemon.”

“I can't believe you know what Doraemon is,” I muttered under my breath.

“What was that?” She turned back to me.

I cleared my throat loudly, “Anyway, let's go meet that caped baldy!”

“I suppose I could test myself against that cyborg friend of his,” Lazuli sighed and stopped trying to escape me. She pounded her fists together, making a small shockwave. “Though, can we like, not kidnap people, please?”

I rolled my eyes, not that she'd see me do it from behind her, and nodded. “Fine, but I reserve the right to deck 'em in the nose.”

“Wait, but, you... No, Bulma. You're not a fighter!” Lazuli leaped out of my hands and floated above me in the air. “You don't have any augments! You didn't make yourself a cyborg!”

“I did make myself a cyborg, and that's you, remember? And I have tricks too! And protection! When getting in close and personal with a boy, always use protection, as Tights always say!” I smirked proudly and made a stance. Then I frowned, why did I even care what Tights said? “... And besides, what's he gonna do? Beat me in one punch?”

“Bulma, no.”

“Bulma, yes.”

“Is there something wrong with your head? Because I can slap it until it's fixed. I hear that's what they do with machines that malfunction,” Lazuli glared. She didn't seem very happy.

“Come on, come on!” I grabbed her hand in mine and skipped over, dragging her along. “Stop being such a worrywart, Lazzy! What's the worst that could happen?”

 

(Here, to make up for the silly snippet, I'ma end the arc.)

“... What just happened?” I blinked the stars out of my eyes.

Lazuli sighed, “You used a spell that basically froze time, which apparently you learned from some kind of green alien dog? You were gloating a lot and then the bald guy with the red cape punched you out.”

I shook myself and tried to get up, only failing and laying back flat on my back. The ceiling looked rather nice. I counted the tiles and noted that we were back home now. “How... how did he do that?”

“I don't know, he just punched,” Lazuli shrugged.

“B-but... you can't punch if you're frozen in time.” I tried to roll onto my side. I failed at that too and decided to just lay back for a while. “Also, ow. Everything hurts.”

“I told you not to do it,” Lazuli replied. “He didn't really say how he did it. I thought I could follow him, but after a while it became just his after image. Do you think he has some kind of ability to incrementally increase his power?”

I never thought I'd see this side of Lazuli—one that was curious and interested in dissecting her potential opponents. She honestly sounded like she was trying to study this bald, cape wearing specimen. I felt a strange warm feeling in my chest knowing that I had gotten her interested in learning. Maybe she was even interested in science, but I wasn't willing to push it.

Still, I smiled up at her and shrugged. “It's possible. Maybe we can have Yamcha try it out.”

Lazuli looked vaguely unhappy about it, but she nodded and scooted her chair closer to my bed. “So... I we didn't get your goo. I had to bring you back here, your protocols were very specific about it.”

“Mm. Yeah.” It had been a pretty long day too. I yawned, “But it's fine. I got it.”

“... wha? When?”

“While we were buying those anime discs.” I raised a wrist and showed her the modified version of the wristband personal device that I wore. From it, several small, tick-sized drones flew out. If it wasn't for the light and my focusing on the device, I wouldn't have seen it either. “Speaking of which, we should watch that Origins anime.”

“Ugh,” Lazuli rolled her eyes. “It's a weird show. Goku looks like a monkey and nothing like the kid in your database. And then when he grew up, he became a high school student. Muten Roshi has hair and looks like, what's that actor's name? Jackie Chun. And you... well...”

“Well, what?” I felt a sense of dread droop over my heart.

“Why don't you have a look yourself?” Lazuli took out her C-Phone and scrolled over to a scene.

The title played, 'Bloomers and the Monkey King'...

… A chubby little monkey started waxing poetically of all the martial art skills inherited...

… A Marilyn Monroe lookalike with blue hair jumped out of the flipped over car and shrieked daintily...

… then a two meter tall, muscular pig with a mohawk struck a pose, “I AM THE GREAT OOLONG!”...

I slapped the C-Phone out of Lazuli's hands. “Get that abomination away from me. I'm going to bed.”

Lazuli nodded and walked out of my bedroom. As an afterthought, she turned around at the door and added, “Oh yeah, you've been sleeping for a while so I just wanted you to know that today's the day of the tournament.”

I fell out of bed.

 

Yamcha had expected an old temple monastery filled with a crowd of people. That was what the previous World Martial Arts Tournament had looked like in the replays and videos on BriefTube. The location was still filled with people, that much was true, but it was something vastly different from the previous year.

The World Martial Arts Tournament took place on an island, which had its own, small airport and more than one harbor in the chain of islands that came with it. These islands did take a large portion of their economy from tourism, but much of this tourism wasn't from the tournament.

There were chocolate-color skinned girls, whom Yamcha had never seen before in his lifetime, dressed in the skirts made of long leaves and tops made from local coconut shells and wearing necklaces of flowers dancing about. There were people juggling and blowing fire into the air and performing all sorts of the local traditions. There were film festivals and beauty pageants too. There was, of course, also the many sugar plantations along these island chains.

He had taken time to play the part of a tourist before the tournament, already knowing in his head that he wasn't here to win, but to learn and to experience more of the world he had so long ignored.

Yamcha had thought he had not seen much of the world, but after this past week of traveling from island to island, climbing mountains to see natural wind tunnels and deep diving to peek at coral reefs, he felt vindicated but also so very small. There was so much more than he could have imagined in the world and if he had just dedicated himself to training or living a luxurious life of a sports star drowned in cocaine and hookers and blackjack, he would not have seen any of this. Not for the first time, he thanked Bulma for bringing him out of his shell, and then he shuddered just thinking about her.

“Whacha thinking about Yamcha?” Puar asked beside him. They had grown closer over the past months, though his kitten still couldn't get a read on him at times. She had taken to training with him sometimes after they had gotten into dangerous scraps that nearly ended their lives. Dinosaurs and undead littered the parts of the world without civilization, and they were all a part of the 'problem' that he as a 'problem solver' had to face.

He didn't turn to Puar, merely petting her as she sat down on his shoulder. “Just how majestic this place is.”

And it was.

The monastery was still there at the foot of the mountain, but a larger, monolithic structure had been raised above it, covering the entire mountain. It was almost Gothic in design, yet with the East Asian reverence to statues of ancient gods of storms and lightning and other elements, a very image of the a cathedral dedicated to the pursuit of martial arts... if it had not been made of steel and glass. It was an unholy mix between such a massive, modern skyscraper and an ancient temple, and it left Yamcha breathless in awe.

He couldn't comprehend the power and time it must have taken to raise such a towering colossus. And that was where he was going to fight? A shiver ran down his spine in anticipation. He felt, well, to be honest... honored. It was a feeling of, despite being made to feel insignificant, being a part of something massive.

“Well, we should register soon. You never know how long they'll wait, right?” Puar said on his shoulder. She was also craning her neck up just to see the top of the building, which had what seemed like a hundred different viewing screens flashing with different ways to say welcome at the same time.

“If we could get through this crowd,” Yamcha replied with a thin grin.

The crowds were massive here, much more than the previous tournaments led him to believe. Perhaps it was because news had spread that this year's award was—instead of just 500,000 zeni—a grant of 500,000,000 zeni plus an entire private island to build and fund a dojo to the winner's style. Or perhaps, unlike the previous events, this time there were many layers and levels to the event.

Rather than having everyone stand at the same level, even the area outside of the main structure was tiered with a dozen floors and spaces. Of course, many of these spaces were also ports for airships to land at, and that alone had brought a sense of mystique to the location. Yamcha had been to several cities by now, but not one of them had been designed for private air travel to be a part of the city planning. It boggled his mind to even contemplate what it must have taken to have created this island as it was.

As he reached the entrance, he saw a large screen displaying a pretty redhead with fox ears sitting at a desk like one of those shows that analyzed his baseball plays. He hadn't thought martial arts—the art of fighting and stealing and killing—had this sort of play-by-play commentary though. Then their words filtered from his ears to his brain, “And welcome back to the coverage of Capsule Corp's World Martial Arts Tournament, brought to you by Capsule Corp and the delicious drink of Hetap, a Capsule Company, I'm your host, Koto and—”

Yamcha turned to Puar. “Just when I thought I was free... I guess freedom is just an illusion...”

Puar turned to him and petted his head. “It's okay Yamcha, it's not like Bulma's right here, right?”

“Hey, Yamcha! I see you've arrived at the Tournament!” Bulma's voice suddenly called out.

They jumped and looked around, but they couldn't see any blue haired girl.

“Down here, I'm talking to you through your wrist device,” She said, as if actually watching them from some place. “Yeah, I'm watching you through the cameras. Don't bother trying to find them though, I have them everywhere.”

“Oh, um, hello Bulma,” Yamcha replied cautiously. “Are you attending as well?”

“Nah,” She replied, filling his heart with relief. Then it was dashed away. “Well, not right now. I'll go soon. I see you've been working on your skills, very nice. Slightly stronger, slightly higher chi, and oh, is that a new skill you made from fighting undead zombies? Neat. Anyway, I gotta give you something and tell you something.”

Something stun Yamcha in the back of the neck. He winced and slapped at it, only to find it was some kind of tick-like bug, but it was sparking with electricity. “... Is this yours? Sorry if, um...”

“Don't worry about it,” Bulma's digital voice replied casually. “I just injected you with some stuff, but it'll take like three years before it can take effect. Let's call it Hot Blood if you must call it something. You gotta, hm... let me see my notes. Ah, right. You gotta do a hundred push ups, set ups, squats and run ten kilometers every single day. Oh, and never use air conditioning... I'll just make all the air conditioning turn off the moment you walk into the room from now on, for three years. Right, you'll be fine otherwise.”

“... Why?” Yamcha boggled. She could do that? That's... well, that sounded insane. Why did she even wish to be a princess?

“Think of it as training! But if you must, then do it, or else I'll come find you!” She replied as if she had not just said she could control all of the electronics in the world somehow through her techno-magistry that Yamcha had no understanding of. “Gotta go, seeya there!”

“This couldn't have waited until after my vacation?” Yamcha groaned. “Aaand she's not listening anymore.”

“I'm always listening.”

“A... a... always?”

“Yes, Yamcha,” She paused. “And you should be ashamed. Bulma out.”

“... Hey Puar?” Yamcha muttered after a few minutes of relative silence in the crowded entrance hall to Puar. They sat there on a bench, watching the tens of thousands of people milling about, and feeling lost.

“Yes, Lord Yamcha?” She whimpered.

“This world is really scary,” He muttered.

“Yes, Lord Yamcha.” She nodded.

 

As Tien Shinhan finished his registration paperwork, he sneered at the people behind him. They were hobbyists and enthusiasts. They joked and joshed in line as if this was merely a social gathering and not a matter of pride. They were not true martial artists.

Tien Shinhan's lips twisted with a soundless growl before he caught himself and schooled his features into an expressionless mask. They only grew into martial arts. He was born into it. He was raised by it.

The furnace of hatred that burned within the pits of his stomach were lit from his first memory.

His first memories were of being tossed about by Master Shen. He was taught many skills, and they all came with one simple lesson: only through hardship could he grow. Tien Shinhan had learned at an early age that this was a world where the strong ruled and the weak knelt. Every scar, every drop of sweat and tears, and every wound he suffered were to grow into the disciple that Master Shen wanted.

Tien did not allow those early memories mar his face anymore. This was not the time, and he knew such an act of defiance would only earn him beatings later from Master Shen.

After his fellow disciple, brother Chiaotzu, had finished registration, they nodded to each other and approached their teacher. “Master Shen, we have finished registration. Shall we return to the hotel until the date of the preliminary rounds?”

Master Shen was a thin, wrinkled man with bony fingers and a crone-like back. His hair was white, but he had dyed it grey, thinking dying it black was too pretentious but keeping it white was showing his age. These were the small, petty aspects of the great teacher that puzzled Tien. It was hard to see the powerful man hidden in this shadow, but it was a facade that his teacher indulged in. Though, if what Tien Shinhan had learned was true, his master had conquered the secrets of longevity and had lived for hundreds of years already. Master Shen did not bother hiding he knew what Tien Shinhan was thinking, he merely smirked.

There was an odd, elder style to Master Shen's wardrobe that puzzled Tien Shinhan. He still wore the robes of the ancient martial artists from a time before the proliferation of technology. Yet while he was devious in hiding his intents from his prey, Master Shen never hid his Crane School from view, holding it proudly on his chest like an emblem. Even his headgear was the shape of a small crane, with his hair styled back like wings.

Perhaps when all martial artists rose to a certain level of knowledge and power, they would gain quirks, Tien mused.

“No,” Master Shen was abrupt in his wording, which was rare in Tien's experience. He was frowning and stroking his chin, and not quite paying attention to his surroundings. Tien thought perhaps this was just an illusion to trick him and any others paying attention to his master into a false sense of security. It was hard to tell.

“Master?” Chiaotzu was younger than Tien, thus he was more belligerent and naive. He would openly question their teacher like this, but only when he did not realize what he was doing.

Chiaotzu was a spectacle onto himself at this gathering of freaks, monsters, martial artists and common rabble—being like a little doll and floating midair. He had the wear of an ancient prince; it was a formal robe that he had rarely had the opportunity to wear.

But then again, this was a rather formal occasion.

“We will be meeting the host of this event, apparently,” Master Shen drawled and trailed off, snapping back into focus and strolling leisurely towards the elevators.

“Master, we don't need to use biased referees to win,” Tien spoke out, realizing what tactic Master Shen was intending. “I can defeat any comers. None of them can even use chi.”

He had the distinct feeling that he had overstepped, but when their teacher turned to them, he merely rolled his eyes. Well, Tien Shinhan thought their teacher did; Master Shen wore thick rimmed wayfarer sunglasses, so it was difficult to read his expressions at all. “We have been... cordially... invited to a gathering. Now come, I understand the last bit will have some security.”

And it did; by the time the elevator door opened to the top floor, Tien Shinhan saw what must have been dozens of men in uniform. They did not ear any symbols for the monks of the World Martial Arts Tournament nor were they employees of the Capsule Corporation. These were professionals donning only tuxedos, fedoras, and sunglasses—all black except for their white tie. It made them difficult to see on this floor nearly entirely made of polished black granite, with architecture of strange, non-euclidean shapes and sizes, and pillars that seemed to move whenever his eyes weren't on them.

None of them reacted to Tien's group arriving on this floor, but he felt hundreds of stares on him. It made him feel naked with so many prying eyes. This was an empty lobby otherwise, despite the still towering architecture... that belied more floors hidden above. However, Tien Shinhan's focus and attention was on these men and women in black tuxedos, because the more he studied them, the more he realized that there were many of their number hidden amongst this island.

They were watching him since he had arrived. He found it difficult to comprehend, but he could only excuse himself by pondering on their cold postures. It was as if they were machines, with how little they moved. He couldn't even tell if they were breathing.

Master Shen scratched the corner of his mouth and frowned. “Hm. It seems like we are in need of directions. Go, get a guide,” he commanded.

Chiaotzu was quicker and more eager to take action. He floated up to a nondescript uniformed man in the similar black tuxedos as the others on this floor. “Hey, hey you. Listen! Hey!”

“Yes, Prince-Emperor Chiaotzu?” The man's neck turned ninety degrees to face Tien's junior disciple brother. “How can I help you?”

“Yeah, how come there's no one else here?” Chiaotzu asked, rather than asking directions. Perhaps this was why Master Shen allowed Chiaotzu a degree of freedom with words; he was always asking questions that their teacher also might wish to know the answer to.

“If they are not invited, the button to this floor is not visible to them on the elevator,” the man in black replied. He tilted his head. “Are you in need of directions to the conference?”

“No,” Master Shen interrupted. “I think we'd like a place to rest and some refreshments, if that's fine with our host.” It was not a request.

The man nodded and motioned towards an outer edge of the floor lobby, where the strange geometry was least visible, beside a giant window with a balcony looking over the entire island.

From the black marble floor, a table rose, twisting and turning into shape.

Then a girl, also in a black tuxedo, walked over carrying a tray of china cups and a matching kettle with steaming tea. This puzzled Tien the most, because the tea smelled awfully familiar.

Tien was not the only one to notice.

Master Shen was not smiling when he remarked, “Ah, Red Robe Tea. I had not told anyone this was my favorite. Very nice. It is only raised in a single village in the mountains too.”

“Master? What's so special about this tea?” Chiaotzu asked.

“Hmph,” Master Shen sat down and began sampling the tea, and only then did he allow his students to also take a seat. “It's a long story, but we have time. This village was burned down two hundred years ago, student. I burned it down.”

“Oh,” Chiaotzu's eyes were wide.

“Yes, and it was because I didn't want to share. It was cultivated by one specific clan of martial artist tea herbalists. I slaughtered each one down to the last member.” Master Shen added, as if talking about how the clouds were especially white today. He turned to the lady who had brought over the tea. “How, then, I wonder, do you have this tea?”

Even Chiaotzu knew it was a rhetorical question. Master Shen did not want to know the answer, because there could be no face-giving answers. Any answer given would only lead to more questions.

The lady merely smiled and bowed low. “We are happy you are enjoying the refreshments. Please call my associate if you need anything else.”

Then she left.

Tien Shinhan stared after the woman, her movements robotic and silent. She, like her associates, all glided across the lobby as if they weren't there. He couldn't even hear the sound of her body displacing the air as she moved.

It surprised him, but it also frightened and excited him. He turned to Master Shen with a shaking but growing grin. “Master, perhaps I will not spend this tournament dully curbstomping every opponent.”

Master Shen too had leaned back as if he was too occupied with his tea to truly pay attention. But a grim perversion of a shark-like smirk erupted on his face and his body emitted a bloody aura that cast a shadow on the blackness around them, “Yes, this has become rather interesting, hasn't it? Now take care and lower your presence, and let us see who will also arrive... I have a feeling that I will meet an old acquaintance...”

“... I hate old acquaintances.”

 

“Lord Yamcha?” A stern faced man in a black tuxedo approached him. Yamcha couldn't see the man's eyes through his sunglasses, and that made him nervous. He didn't like it when he couldn't see a person's eyes; it made those people seem like they weren't human in his mind.

“Yes?” He asked after taking a drag of his cigarette. It was a bad habit he had picked up recently. The little spent stick of tobacco was one of the many little, inane things that helped him forget. He threw the faggot on the dirt and grounded it down.

The uniformed man in black stared at him for a moment unnervingly. Then he extended a hand, “Miss Briefs wishes to see you now.”

“I... see.” He like he was falling down a dark pit, each day there was less light. In a way, Yamcha was already resigned to this fate, he couldn't bring himself to fight it. So he grabbed Puar and asked, “Where does she want me?”

“If you'll follow me?” The man turned about without waiting for Yamcha's answer.

Well, Yamcha knew his own answer before he heard the question too.

With shaky fingers, he pulled out his packet and tapped the little box on the end twice. Another cigarette butt peeked out. He raised it to his lips and flicked his fingers, making a spark from his inner strength.

The climb was long and silent, with only their footsteps and the occasional puff of smoke to punctuate in between. It felt like forever, climbing these marble steps... like he was ascending to heaven. But Yamcha had no wish to die just yet.

They finally arrived onto a floor that was utterly glassy and white, so much so that it seemed like every part of it glowed. The whole of it seemed contradictory to the theme of the tournament. Yamcha felt there was something futuristic about the place.

And it was empty.

Their guide motioned to a wall, which opened up with a sharp ding. It looked like a round elevator made of glass. “Please.”

Yamcha walked in and paused when their guide didn't. “You aren't joining us?”

“No,” the man replied simply.

Then the door closed.

The elevator rose at a rate Yamcha couldn't feel, but his ears popped and felt similar to how his first trip on an airplane made him feel. He was nauseated and dizzy.

Ding.

The door opened, and who was it but Bulma Briefs herself.

She was dressed in a simple, white cardigan with black sleeves and black collars, a stylized Capsule Corporation logo made up of each of its buttons. Under that, she wore the same black body suit she had shown him last time they met, though she was wearing short shorts over that and for some odd reason she was wearing light-up sneakers that, while similar in color, did not match up with the sort of boutique and rich elegance of the rest of her cloths.

Bulma saw him stare too, to which she pouted and immediately crossed her arms. “What? I can wear whatever I want! Light up sneakers are cool!”

Resisting the urge to call her a nerd, Yamcha sighed and scratched the back of his head, turning his vision anywhere but to Bulma. “Sorry. What was it that you wanted to see me about?”

“Eh,” She shrugged. “You're a... witness. Yeah. Come, follow me, stand behind me, and don't say anything. Also, give me Puar.”

“What are you going to do with Puar?” Yamcha's eyes narrowed and he placed a protective hand over his kitty.

Bulma rolled her eyes at him, and spoke as if she were speaking to a child. “Nothing, I want her to sit on my lap. It fits the whole evil genius theme I'm going for today. Look, at least I didn't order McDonald's for everyone to compliment their meal. Anyway, gimme gimme!”

“Yamcha, I'll be fine,” Puar said, though she was shivering.

Reluctantly, Yamcha handed over his oldest friend, knowing that there was nothing he could do. He hated himself for being weak, though he could never bring himself to hate Bulma. He owed her too much.

And that just made him hate himself even more.

They walked down a brightly lit corridor, to a glamorously furnished conference room. At the center of the room was a domineering round table that had room for ten parties. There were already several people seated, though their identities shocked and confused him... what kind of meeting was taking place here?

Yamcha only recognized some of the people here, and each one was a personage greater than he.

At one end of the table, there was Muten Roshi, sitting leisurely and playing with a Capsule Tablet, one of those new, larger touch screen computers that Capsule Corporation had announced to celebrate the World Martial Arts Tournament. There was a perverted grin on the old man's face, and he was drooling a little. If it was just this, however, Yamcha would have glossed over him; the old master was also emitting a thin aura of energy that was vaguely visible to the naked eye. Beside him a bald boy stood stiffly as if he were as frightened of this room as Yamcha was.

Next to Muten Roshi's small group were the Ox King and his daughter, along with one other dignitary that Yamcha recognize as a fellow warlord that the Ox King had conquered some years ago. They were all armed, and their muscles twitched, as if ready to leap into action at a moment's notice.

The only other person Yamcha could recognize by name was at the other end of the table. This was a man that everyone in the world knew: President King Furry. President Furry was a blue furred dog with a white mustache, and he was the president of most of the world. Behind this man with the most political power in the world was his bodyguards and an aide who was whispering in his ear.

When Yamcha walked in after Bulma, President Furry turned to him immediately. The pressure of the man's stare caused Yamcha's heart to skip.

He turned away from the President's gaze immediately.

There were others in the room, but Yamcha did not recognize them. He did note that one of the parties was a group of people all wearing the Red Ribbon Army symbol, but he didn't know enough about the powerful entity's leadership to be able to name their names.

What were these people all doing here? Yamcha wanted to ask, but Puar was in Bulma's lap now. He could only walk stiffly behind her, trying to keep up and trying not to piss himself. Each of the people in this room had enough power at their fingertips to change the world. It wasn't like the joke of an education that was taught in the high school Yamcha attended, which taught that if each student worked hard enough, they could accomplish their dreams and change the world.

That was a sack of dinosaur shit.

But Yamcha knew, each person here was capable of reshaping the world with a few simple words.

He also knew that they were possibly the most powerful people in the world, either on their own or through the groups they represent. He wanted nothing more than to turn around and run out of the room right now, but he couldn't. Not with all these eyes on him, as the room quieted down after Bulma strolled in as if she owned the place.

… As if she owned the place.

Yamcha's eyes widened a fraction and his feet felt frozen on the spot. He swallowed thickly and clamped down on his emotions. With wobbling hands, he tried to reach for his cigarette, only for it to fall onto the floor.

A man wearing a crane-themed uniform who sat at the center of the group beside Muten Roshi's group look up at Yamcha the moment his cigarette dropped to the floor. His voice was like nails to a chalkboard, “Hmm... youngsters shouldn't ruin their bodies like this, but what do I know? I'm not the Turtle Hermit.”

One of his students, a boy with three eyes, noticed Yamcha watching their group and returned the stare. As if to speak without words, the three-eyed boy turned his chin upwards and sneered down at Yamcha.

Before Yamcha could formulate a response, Bulma walked up to the head seat and plopped down with her feet on the table. Then she started audible counting, “Roshi? Ox King? Red Ribbon? Wheelo? Furry? Shen? Pilaf? Garlic Jr.? Lazuli? ... yeah, I think everyone's here, we can start now. By the way, Yamcha don't smoke in here, I don't like the smell.”

Yamcha swore from that moment on that he would never quit smoking.

 

(Haha, I got really carried away with this time, so I guess we're going off the rails of what I planned.)

“Welcome to everyone at the table,” Bulma Briefs clapped her hands in childish giddiness. She smiled naively, like a civilian who had never faced true combat and hardship. Tien Shinhan knew she was born into luxury and inherited everything she had. Her words meant little to him, though her possessions meant something. “I would like to first thank the Men in Black and their representative to this event, Miss Lazuli, for providing security. I am Bulma Briefs, representing Capsule Corporation and its subsidiaries.”

She nodded towards a woman beside her, who couldn't be much older. But there was something colder in that woman than human. She wore the same black tuxedo and black sunglasses as the other creatures below, only she had no hat and her gloved hands were folded before her as if she were a good student in school.

“What have you gathered us here for, little girl?” A blue demon with the body of a child asked. He was backed by three larger, muscular demons of a similar race, but they seemed to quiver whenever his attention seemed like it might turn to them. “What makes you think you can even call upon me?”

“Eh hehehe! I know why I came here!” Muten Roshi interrupted immediately, placing the tablet he was fiddling with onto the table and showing everyone that he had been watching a muted video of some televised aerobics course, with instructors with especially wide thighs. Of course, it was practically softcore pornography.

Tien Shinhan couldn't quite believe it, though he did turn away as his face grew hot. This was the master's fellow disciple? “Master, are you sure this is Roshi?”

“He is Master Roshi, and don't you forget it,” Master Shen turned to Tien, causing his heart to skip a beat.

“O-Of course, Master Shen,” Tien stuttered.

“That is better. That... is... better...” Master Shen leaned back, releasing the tension that had been held between them.

Throughout this exchange, Bulma Briefs did not make a fuss nor did she even react. She sat back and allowed a small smile to grace her face. It was only then that Tien Shinhan noticed that the blue haired girl—who couldn't have been older than him—was the only one in the room without anyone behind her.

She didn't even spare Tien Shinhan a look... and this galled him more than he'd like to admit. What made her feel so confident, so special, that she thought she could ignore Tien Shinhan?

She stood and answered the elfish demon child, “Garlic, son of Garlic. You have been on Earth long enough to call it home. This... congress... concerns the fate of this planet, yet do you see Kami here?”

Garlic's teal, squat face twisted as if to unleash an overwhelming pent up blood lust. For a fraction of a second, even Tien Shinhan felt like he could not breath, like he had been held within the grasp of a giant, unyielding fist that slowly crushed him into paste. But then the small demon smiled, and all the wrinkles along the edge of his eyes and the corners of his lips creased visible. His voice was unreasonably high pitched, yet with an undertone of what must have been insanity. “Very well. You know things. I wonder, is that enough, little mortal? Hm... call me Garlic Junior... but I am interested and I shall stay and watch.”

Tien hated to admit that he didn't want the interests of this demon. Beings like these, they had no reason to coexist with other earthlings, and all they did was indulge in their insane urges... and now Tien discretely looked around the room, wondering if the rest were the same.

Then a robot stood from out of the corners of Tien Shinhan's eyes. It was a grotesque monstrosity of rusting, black metal, with twisting spikes and screeching, mechanical gears, yet there was power in its motions, as if a simple twitch would cause it to collapse this entire building on their heads. Behind the robot stood monsters of varying shapes and sizes, each more disgusting in physic, smells, and behavior than the last.

Yet it was the robot that was the most upsetting of them all, for at its head was a giant tank where a brain the size of a golden retriever sat, bubbling in its embalming fluids and pulsing in wet, squishing sounds with visible arteries of purplish blood throbbing all over the exterior.

And perhaps what was most off putting was the robot's voice, the voice of a sophisticated man, that echoed through the conference hall. It was the voice of an educated man, perhaps even a teacher as insidious and cunning as Master Shen.

“I am Professor Johnathan Wheelo, surgeon, head researcher and the new dean of Miskatonic Mastiffchusetts Institute of Technology. You may call us The Institute, if that suits you better.” It made to make a gesture similar to a low, regal bow with one hand over its 'chest', only the sounds of twisting metal made it seem all the more awkward. “Please—”

“Johnathan Wheelo? Didn't you disappear some forty years ago?” A balding old man interrupted him. It seemed like this old man was a simple scientist in a white laboratory coat, but on his chest was the logo of the Red Ribbon Army.

The robot waved its hands—almost as if it weren't used to using its robotic body. “Yes, well, there were some mishaps, but thankfully, things were cleared up and now I represent a coalition of unaffiliated scientists, Doctor Gero.”

“Ah,” the old man smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. “You know of me.”

He did not speak like he was asking a question. And yet, there was a feeling of pride in the old man.

“Hmph. Yes, I've been going over the reports. Your Red Ribbon Army took quite a few of our number to be your personal... interns. How disgraceful.” If a robot body could scoff, it just did. “If not for this location being stated as neutral grounds in our invitations, I would have torn you limb from limb.”

As if to accent the Professor's disgruntled speech, the monsters behind him roared in animalistic and undecipherable rage.

“Okay, settle down,” The blue-haired girl clapped twice so loudly that Tien's ears rang. It happened so suddenly and so unexpectedly that everyone stopped what they were doing.

He watched her, only now reminded of Bulma Briefs being an inventor of some renown—her unkempt behavior had thrown him off into thinking her just another teenage girl. It was clear he was wrong about this, but Tien knew himself well; he would admit he was wrong... as long as no one knew he admitted it.

“So there are two key agendas on the table today. I think the more important one is the one we ought to discuss first, which I hope we can come to an agreement and then we'd be able to make this a regular gathering,” She smirked toothily.

“World councils have been attempted before,” President King Furry spoke up at last. He technically held the most military, economic, and industrial might at the table and his voice was perhaps the most influential, but he was constrained by bureaucracy. He held little true power, he couldn't act as he wished, and every action he wanted to make had to go through his Diet of senators.

That, and Tien knew the old dog was just a regular person. Tien could literally kill this old fool any time he wished...

… but the old man had a point.

World councils had been attempted before.

All of them ended in failure, which was why the vast majority of the world was under the powers of kings and emperors once more. And even if there was a council, a single supernatural being could end it.

Too many of those happened; Master Shen was one such supernatural power, and Tien Shinhan had little doubt there were others, not even present at the table here. He felt himself standing, because he wished to prove his worth to his teacher, and because if Bulma could lead this meeting, why couldn't he have input? Wasn't he better than this girl in nearly every way?

“Yes, not a single one of these councils even had true power. Why should anyone present yield to a powerless entity?” Tien Shinhan smirked proudly; Master Shen had taught him more than just martial arts. If fighting could be won with words, if he could turn allies against each other, why wouldn't he do it? Tien puffed his chest out and looked down on the naive girl, “Democracies are worthless. The strong eat the weak, that is the way of this world. If you don't have the power of martial artists and demons, then all you have are silly armies of toy soldiers. And toy soldiers... break easily.”

“Don't be so quick to start a fight, Tien Shinhan,” Bulma replied immediately. She was still smiling, with such confidence. It made Tien Shinhan want to wipe that grin off her face... he wanted to defeat her, to dominate this little jumped up tinker. “The first order of business is to examine the consequences of if any one party at this table were to fight against another one here. I think we all know what that could end up as.”

The stoic Ox King finally spoke, “You are speaking of a conflict that will engulf the world.”

“And what is this buffoon doing here?” Doctor Gero sneered, “He's a king without a kingdom. This 'Ox King' is barely more than a warlord with a small army... I refuse to believe he is on par with my Red Ribbon Army.”

“I am not alone, Doctor Gero. While I am here, I can speak for many warlords of the world,” the Ox King replied evenly.

The old doctor smirked and postured, “Ah, yes. More of these 'warlords'? Each a tiny, third-world nation on their own? Aren't you what this little girl wants to make in the first place?”

“There is a difference, Doctor Gero,” Bulma interrupted.

“Then enlighten me, girl,” Gero sneered.

Beside him, a short, stout man with flaming-red hair and an intimidating eye-patch grabbed Gero by the sleeve and whispered a few harsh words into Gero's ear.

Doctor Gero looked like he swallowed a lemon, but he nodded and wordlessly sat down, fuming.

“... As I was saying, the purpose of the warlords' alliance is to give these smaller nations a voice that could be taken seriously. They nominally yield their authority to their current representative, the Ox King, due to the need to have a greater impact upon the world and the be able to compete with other powers. However, due to this, there is a great deal of bickering and individual interests are often placed ahead of the interests of the group entity, as there is no group identity to truly bind them together.” Bulma waved her hands, and floating holograms flew into the air as solid light constructs.

At the center of the room, a global spun slowly with small, red specks scattered all over it. These were the member states of this warlords' alliance, Tien realized.

From the way the Ox King's lips sealed tightly, Tien knew the girl was poking at a sore spot.

Bulma nodded and continued, “Seeing as this group is already on the verge of dismantling, you might question what right do they have as a whole to be at this table? That is because there are greater threats than neighboring kingdoms... but I will get to that in a moment. The purpose of council is less to decide a way to rule Earth and more to decide... an accord, let's say. A way so that we can interact without destroying the Earth, our home. A way to settle disagreements... a set of rules and etiquette, as well as to lay the ground works so that we can have a unified identity.”

“And what identity is that, girlie? You're a human girl. You'll live, what, another hundred years at best? You are mortal, fragile, and you break from the slightest touch. I am a demon and the antithesis of what you humans believe in.” Garlic Junior stood, his voice slowly growing deeper and darker as his skin changed from what looked like smooth baby's skin to a slightly scaly hide of a blackish hue.

His body grew, ripping his white robes to shreds and leaving only a muscular form that was larger and thicker than even Master Shen at his best. The lights in the room dimmed and the table shook.

“Well, girl?” Garlic Junior leaned close to their host, his black breath only inches away from her face. He cackled madly, “How can we be alike? How can you get me to care about the puny earthlings?”

Somehow, Bulma Briefs had the gall to examine her nails. “You were raised on Earth.”

Garlic Junior's laugh echoed through the halls, even the birds outside were shaken. “So? Is that the best you can do? Maybe I should just kill everyone here and take over the world right now!”

“You wouldn't,” Bulma replied, standing up and walked up to the demon who was now more than twice her height.

“And why not?” Tien knew this was a pivotal moment... if Bulma did not give a satisfactory answer, the chi being built up in Garlic Junior's body could kill her. More than that, there was enough power pent up in his torso that even if he were the most novice of practitioners, he could explode outwards and wipe clean this entire room.

“Simple... you hate Kami.” She stood. “You despise him. You want to kill him.”

The room was silent, reeling. Kami?

God?

These were people of power, megalomaniacs the whole lot of them, but even if they weren't and they were actually sane like Tien, Tien knew none of them believed in God. There was no God, no good or evil, only power in this world.

“But you don't, you can't. Not yet, and perhaps not ever.” Bulma turned away from Garlic Junior, and sat on the edge of the table. “You'll want to trap him in the dimension of darkness... you think there's some kind of poetic vengeance in that. And you tell yourself and your minions that you want to free your father.”

“I do!” The beast roared, but he didn't move to smash the girl into a pulp. He could though, Tien knew, from the way Garlic Junior threatened with his back hunched and ready. It was a posture and yet... was he merely posturing?

“No... you don't. And you know exactly why... amongst your monsters, your demons, you are a king. But with daddy home, you are only a prince—you will have lost all authority. What, did you think daddy would just pat your head and say you did a good job freeing him?” Bulma chuckled. “If you were your father, wouldn't you ask... why did it take you this long? But you hate Kami. As well you should. And not just you... even you, Roshi. Shen. You hate that same being.”

“W-What?” Roshi was the first to respond to her.

She slinked up to him with a sway of her hips and a coy smirk on her lips. There was a shine in her eyes that was so mocking, as if calling everyone else ignorant. “Your teacher, Mutaito, remember him? His... last... moments.”

“Bulma, how do you know him? There's no... no records left of him, of...” Roshi spoke as if too reluctant to remember that distant memory. It was as if he had just relived a nightmare.

“Garlic knows. The duality of man, well, has nothing compared to the duality of Kami and his other half, the one you know as King Piccolo.” Her voice was just a whisper as she trailed off. But then she turned and address the table, “The thing is, beings like those are not from around here... they aren't from Earth, they aren't from a hell dimension, and they certainly aren't from the Afterlife.”

There was a moment of silence as the notion sank in, and then...

“... You're speaking of aliens,” Gero scoffed.

“You expect us to believe in aliens?” Tien Shinhan sneered at the arrogant girl at the other end of the table. A cold draft drifted into the room, though there were no opened windows.

She smirked, that insufferable smirk that Tien Shinhan wanted to punch into the earth until nothing is left. That damnable vulpine grin... he held himself back, only finding himself more and more irritated by the girl and her way of doing everything.

She waved again, and the picture of a strange, pod-like ball appeared in the middle of the room. It was old, as if it had been buried in dirt for a decade. Pock marks littered its white surface and age defined it... yet there was an unmistakable sense of futuristic technology seeped into it.

“This is known as a Saiyan Attack Pod. Some twelve years ago, one such alien had arrived on Earth. It is currently walking amongst us, but it is just the vanguard of an invasion by an intergalactic empire that thrives in the enslavement of entire planets or the extinguishment of all life on entire planets.” She pressed a button in the air, and something that vaguely looked like genetics floated up besides the 'Saiyan Attack Pod'. “These were the only remains of genetic samples that I could salvage from the wreckage... and they indicate that the alien was in its youth.”

“Hold on,” Professor Wheelo held up a hand. “I can see that these are probably alien genetics, but what does this have to do with Garlic Junior's psychological issues with this, ahem, 'Kami' figure?”

“Kami, the guardian of Earth, is also an alien. He is green and... well, perhaps Muten Roshi or Master Shen can enlighten you on what he looks like,” She added. “After all, neither Piccolo nor Kami has died yet.”

Tien watched as Muten Roshi, the man who was supposed to be the strongest in the world and known as invincible, stutter and shake. He watched the old turtle hermit fall onto his seat and breath uncontrollably. The old master's face was plain for everyone to see, like he had just seen his death warrant.

Tien Shinhan scoffed. This was the rival of his master? This? This frail looking old man with boogers rolling down into his beard?

He turned to his teacher to...

… Tien's brain stopped to a screeching halt.

This was the first time Tien Shinhan had seen his teacher speechless. And not just rendered speechless, there was a slight, almost unnoticeable shake in Master Shen's pinky. He didn't say a thing, merely stared at the Briefs heiress as if he was staring at his own death...

Master Shen was afraid.

But Tien... Tien couldn't see it. He couldn't understand it. This whole event was something equally beyond him as a joke and beneath him for any serious consideration.

This was a conference with a rich girl, a president, a couple scientists, a couple military dictators, a couple martial artists, and a couple demons. It was... he couldn't help it anymore. He laughed. He laughed and laughed at the inanity and silliness of it all. “This is stupid,” he said at last, after the last laugh had escaped his lips.

Bulma watched him curiously, her eyes sparkling. Well, keep watching, you arrogant, insufferable...

“You bring old men and little kids here, and you tell us there's big, bad aliens out to get us. What's next? Mars being destroyed nine years ago was also due to aliens?” Tien Shinhan felt like something had cracked and broken only to be mended. He huffed. He puffed. He grounded out, “Fine. Say we believe you, say you provide your pieces of evidence... these scientists tell us everything checks out. Say you even convince Garlic “Daddy Issues” Junior to join up as one of the earthlings, instead of going back to whatever hell realm that spawned him—”

“Makyo Star, it's a planet that comes around like once every five thousand years,” Bulma said, pulling out a hologram that showed a diagram of two stars coming into orbit and their planets coming dangerously close to each other. “By the way, that's coming up soon in a couple years.”

Tien wanted to ignore her, but his jaw just hung open. He collected his thoughts and continued, “Whatever! What is really your goal here?” After he said those words, he felt like his spirit was spent. He slid back down into his chair and his shoulders drooped as he realized what he had just done.

“Tien Shinhan.” It seemed his teacher had finally stopped shaking at the name 'Piccolo'. There was a definite edge to Master Shen's voice. “You will be silent or you will be unconscious. Choose.”

“I... yes, Master Shen,” Tien's three-eyed gaze dropped to the floor beneath his feet.

Master Shen nodded and said to the rest of the conference, “What my student has done is an utter breach of courtesy. I will apologize to our host for this... but he brings up a good point. You've been dragging us around for a while now on information that you have been privy to somehow, Miss Briefs. What is your real objective?”

There was a moment's silence. It was punctuated by a shuffling of clothes, and Tien looked up from the floor.

Bulma Briefs had steepled her fingers and finally her grin grew into a full smile. It was not a pleasant smile, and Tien felt like... that would be what his smile might look like, if he ever smiled. She leaned back and turned to the woman representing the 'Men in Black'. “Miss Lazuli, if you will?”

The lady stood and pulled out a briefcase. After fiddling with its keys for a minute, it unlocked with a click. Then this Miss Lazuli—never once even twitching a muscle on her face—pulled out a scroll from within.

It was long and thick, and emitted a thick layer of chi and power and something else that was elder and more twisted than anything Tien Shinhan had ever sensed. It was only because of his third eye that he could even see it, this palpable aura of something deep. There was something beckoning about its power that Tien found impossible to look away from. He felt like he was going to be lost in it...

… in the words and symbols carved into the scroll. How they danced and crawled as if ants on human skin...

“Everyone, I present to you...” Bulma paused for what must have been a very dramatic moment. “... The Tenkaichi Accords.”

 

(Been pretty tired, so I'll cut it short because I'm tired. Tired.)

“I can't believe that worked,” Lazuli said the moment we were alone. She plopped down on the sofa and rested her head against mine and we both flailed like we were boneless.

It had been an exhausting day to say the least.

I laughed as tension left my body and I enjoyed the look of bewilderment on Lazuli's face. It was good that I had nanomachines to help me stabilize my hands—I didn't honestly think I would have been able to sign my name so smoothly at the end. “Well, you know me.”

“You pull miracle technologies out of nowhere and combine magic with science, there's nothing in your dossier about being able to negotiate,” Lazuli sniped. Still, she didn't bother moving—even if her body never grew tired and even though her mind technically couldn't exhaust, there was a certain stress placed on her today that was something I could hardly understand.

I shrugged against her shoulder. I was just happy to sink into my fluffy couch and feel the heat of her body against mine. I blinked a couple times and then yawned. “Didn't know you were keeping a dossier on me...”

“How did you do it?” Lazuli asked, ignoring the question with her pesky free will.

“I cheated, silly. Did you really think I could convince them with words and evidence?” I nestled deeper into the fluffy pillows. This was marshmallow heaven.

She sighed and scanned the information that I had embedded into her about the other signatories of the Tenkaichi Accords. I knew she would do this, though she seemed to have mastered doing it wirelessly and with thought—faster than I had anticipated considering most of her body and mind was preserved the way she was. That was to say she wasn't a... ghost in the machine. “Wheelo you freed and have some open cooperation with, so I can see him stand on your side, and you've had past dealings with Muten Roshi... but Gero and Shen should have canceled them out. How is it that they aren't even trying to start their own faction within this Accords?”

“Oh, Lazuli,” I petted her pretty blonde hair on her silly head. That was always something I envied her about; I loved the silky, golden hair and I would only love it if it were natural. There was a certain... prestige to being natural. Though, being naturally blue-haired wasn't anything to sneer at either. “There's more to cheating than a simple give and take.”

Lazuli didn't look happy at my cooing at her, frowning and standing up. She motioned and summoned holograms of dossiers and information packets, along with multiple angles of spy cameras watching each party that had left earlier. “I can see Roshi and the Ox King are affiliated... but that shouldn't be enough. The Ox King's coalition is something that President King Furry wants to actively dismantle through peaceful negotiation, and for the most part it is working. He would fight against their political empowerment... instead, look at him.”

He viciously chewing out his aide on the video.

“Sir, shouldn't we worry about these Men in Black? I think my wife saw one watching her sleep through our bedroom window a couple nights ago,” the aide and suggested.

The blue dog ruffed and barked, “That's nothing! I have more important things to worry about! My Doggocratic Party was probably thinking about replacing me if this conference didn't yield anything positive. How are we supposed to tell the people about aliens? The Repuglicans are going to make a puppy show of this... probably going to suggest replacing me with some jumped up billionaire!”

“Well, at least they'll get laughed out like the last term,” the aide smiled. “Shouldn't we worry more about the capabilities of the Capsule Corporation, all things considered?”

King Furry slapped the man up the back of his head. “You idiot! This isn't four years ago! Besides, CC will be trying to hold this Accord together and the people want change! The Bone Party is suggesting a cat for their candidate! A cat! Even our own party wants a cat to replace me... when did we become so politically correct?”

“Sir...” The aide sniffled.

“I got more important domestic issues to worry about anyway! What's the progress on our plan to push down No Puppy Left Behind?” The president asked.

“... And there you have that,” Lazuli deadpanned.

“So...?” I buried my face between pillows and peaked out at her from such pure fluffiness.

“Something's going on. Is it magic? I can't see magic, so that's my guess. Can you tell me?” Lazuli asked finally with a tone of resignation. “How... did you cheat?”

“So many ways,” I replied and counted them off with my fingers. “Commander Red is easy to deal with, and his Chief-of-Staff, who practically runs his whole show by the way, already knows there isn't much of a future from the way their economic investments failed so miserably to meet their KPI this year. Gero, thus, becomes a non-issue, see?”

“But doesn't Gero control the vast majority of the technology of the Red Ribbon Army?” Lazuli turned back to her analysis.

“You're working off of pure numbers, so you think he's in control, but... well, first, his son is still under Command Red's direct command. Secondly, there are other supernatural beings within the army who do not rely on technology. Thirdly, Gero's entire manufacturing depends on the logistics of the Red Ribbon Army, which wouldn't be such a problem if he wasn't such a nasty perfectionist. This means he doesn't have lesser drones and robots making things for him and he builds his robots and cyborgs by hand.” I emphasized that last bit. It was rather important—Doctor Gero was capable of surviving after the destruction of the Red Ribbon Army also due to this trait of being an obstinate perfectionist who did everything himself.

But it was also his biggest flaw, and he knew it on some level. This gave Commander Red, a silly, simple man so easily subverted and controlled, an unreasonable control over the good doctor.

“Well, okay, so I stacked the deck a little.” I admitted sheepishly, telling her the most obvious bit of underhanded tactic I used, “The Ox King couldn't simply represent a group of warlords and be so important. Even if there were ten of their number, they couldn't amount to half of the President's forces... they'd just about equal the Red Ribbon Army, but they wouldn't have such cohesion. See... the Ox King is also representative of the various, smaller martial arts schools scattered throughout the warlord nations. This is the one thing they have that the President's nation does not.”

Lazuli's eyes lit up and she seemed to understand immediately. She turned to me and gasped, “So the Ox King was also representing the Turtle School?”

“Exactly,” I smirked.

“Then who did Muten Roshi represent?” Lazuli bit her bottom lip. She flipped through hundreds of information packets in an instant, but she could only find contemporary information on Muten Roshi. She couldn't know.

I flicked these holograms away and answered her, “His sister... Lazuli, the world is older than you know. There are great, mystical powers around before I came into being, you know? Where Muten Roshi is known as the World's Strongest Fighter, his sister is known as the World's Greatest Mystic. This Accord cannot function without the input of magical authority, after all. Well, whatever the case, the purpose was not just to corner the majority vote, but also to keep an opposition faction from forming. So much to do, so little time.”

“... What did you do?” Lazuli stared.

“Who, me? Don't worry, I didn't do much.” I hopped off the fluffy couch, once more into the fray. As an afterthought, I added as I just remembered some minor detail, “Anyway, isn't there a tournament happening? Can't miss that!”

 

It took the rest of the evening to put my nerves to rest. When I closed my eyes, I could still see all the ways that the conference could have gone wrong, especially towards the end. Other than Pilaf, Commander Red, and President King Furry, each party could have splattered me into unrecognizable meat paste with a thought.

I woke up at 3 AM in the morning that day, having slept only a little over an hour. It wasn't even that I had been instilled with instincts to awaken at the lightest sound from my travels, I just couldn't keep myself in bed.

I had turned and turned until the sheets were wet with sweat and I was feverishly dizzy. Nanomachines that swam in my system couldn't really do much in this case, I hadn't built them to fix every little problem of my body and it wasn't like they were some kind of panacea for every problem.

So I stood up and flicked on the lights with a switch.

My room wasn't at the hotels where everyone else was staying on Tournament Island, it was an isolated location within the Battle Tower. I could see most of the island from where I was this high up, and there were still lights and sounds below as very festivities went on into the early morning. There was no curfew for this island; there wasn't even much of a government before I decided I needed to own and control everything. There was maybe twenty monks on the island living off of the land as well as tourism and donations... this place wasn't really that big of a thing, really, compared to what I had thought it was like from the comic books.

The restaurants that used to open here were seasonal shops that opened right before the tournaments and became abandoned right afterwards. There were some civilians that lived on the island not as monks, of course, but I could count the number of families living here with two hands before I got my fingers into the island. Now, it was actually capable of accommodating the two hundred thousand visitors that came in the past week.

Not that the majority of the viewers are on the island, of course. Much like everything else I learned from my previous life, I knew that broadcasting and streaming was a way of the future. Compounded with my owning the video and hardware platforms, I actually had a need to provide my users with more and more content.

People weren't just satisfied with what they saw on BriefTube, nor were they satisfied with what I was able to license from film, television, and other media companies—which was actually more expensive than I'd have liked to get into. The amount of money I spent to license shows for just a measly five or ten years on Brieflix, my shows streaming platform, was enough to fund a moderate sized nation for a year. Perhaps it came back to bite my ass that I jumped the gun on making the platform, perhaps these media companies thought I was an easy target for milking money from since I didn't actually have experience in the industry, thus I didn't know the actual value of things, or I was a shitty negotiator when it came to spending money... it could have been a number of things.

Whatever the case, I found that to maintain my monopoly over the world's technology industries as well as maintaining the Google-like good reputation Capsule Corporation and I both had with the general public, I had to provide people with content.

Well, so the tournament was a thing I was going to spend money on anyway, even if my executives were pissed off at me for wanting to own the thing. They simply thought I should have offered the tournament a licensed deal such that we could broadcast it, or perhaps obtained the hosting rights.

It sounded ludicrous to me, of course, because I knew that the only way a media platform could succeed was due to quality content.

But, we all knew how executives were. They watched out for short-term profits first, the investors second, and way down the line, maybe in near the end of their list of priorities, board members and executive level personnel might care about the company creators and the company itself. It was probably due to their owning a rather nice chunk of stock... but it surprised me nevertheless. You see, I always thought, because of the way how Dragonball had been made by the Japanese, its world would have a Japanese culture...

… How naive of me, really.

While it was true that entry level and middle management employees were of that type of traditional Asian corporate culture—the type to world their whole lives in a company and basically follow the flow like everyone else, the executives of any company were a different sort of creature.

Even at 3 AM in the morning, I saw my e-mail inbox fill up with random messages from my board members and various vice presidents. Due to the nature of Capsule Corporation being what could be translated as a conglomerate that spanned more than two dozen industries, we had a whole cornucopia of vice presidents.

Each one of these vice presidents were equal to another in ranking, and in the company structure, they were only second to Dad, the President and Chief Executive Officer, and perhaps me, the Chief Operating Officer.

Ah, nepotism.

Ahem.

So, with some thirty to fifty (I didn't even both keeping count at this point due to the rapid expansion of the past year) vice presidents, we had a little more internal strife than the average conglomerate. By 'a little', I was measuring in 'shit tons'. Most of that was quashed by Dad or me, when I had the time, but much of our labor only caused these new assholes to more creative and subtle in their ways of claiming more company resources. It was starting to feel like a fiefdom with fifty dukes trying to curry favor or sabotage each other, mindless of external threats.

It was my fault, really. It had to be. I was the one who created the subsidiaries that now house more than three quarters of these assholes, and I was the one who set the key performance indicators for each of them. It was my fault they were fighting for resources, because each of them had to satisfy their own KPIs or else they wouldn't get their stock options or get replaced, or something.

Really, it had to be, I told myself... ignoring that if they were really, actually good executives, they would have tried to create value with what resources they were allotted rather than try to obtain more to make their jobs easier. But then again, humans were always the same in this regard... I had experienced this kind of bullshit in my last life too.

“Fuck it,” I murmured and rubbed the little pink gumball in my hands a little more. I was going to bury myself in bullshit magical science to keep from thinking about company politics... real politics were a headache and a half. Somehow, people thought my voice mattered in this or that election. I was just a fucking fifteen and then some years old girl! What did I know about politics? I didn't even have my fucking Quinceañera yet!

Speaking of which, I needed to schedule in a Quinceañera. I had the perfect pink dress design in my head already, one which would make even Frieza jealous!

I fed my little gumdrop another strawberry and mulled things over. Of course, I had more important worries than my companies or having a best party ever, or any of that. “Now, what name do you want? Gumdrop or Strawberry? I'm leaning towards Gumdrop, because it's cute, sweet and rolls off the tongue. Aren't you just adorable?”

“MEEP,” she replied adorably.

“Yes you are, you're my little cutie, aren't you, my little Gumdrop?” I nuzzled her against my cheek.

“MEEP.” She rolled around on my palm.

“Hungry? Well, I'll have some candy brought up for you, okay? Be a patient girl for mommy, okay?” I petted her a little more before turning back to what was in the Petri dishes before me. They were mostly finished products already, but I still needed to decide on which one... so many important decisions. I stifled a yawn and peeked over at my watch.

4:18

There was still like three hours before the contestants started gathering for the preliminaries. What was that? Bunker down, you said? Well, I had time for maybe one more little creation. “Come, Gumdrop! Onto the next mad science project!”