Disclaimer: the idea and characters of Dragon Ball are owned by Akira Toriyama. This is a simple non-profit fan parody.

Chapter 9 - Snakeway to Heaven

From his vantage point on a cloud, high in the sky, surrounded by the whooshing air as he travelled faster than he ever had, Goku saw the scene play out in silence. One moment, Bulma was talking to the dragon, and he drew a sigh of relief, sure to have made it in time; the next one, a red stain appeared on the ground, and her body was falling like a ragdoll, as arms and legs gave up without life coursing in them any more.

A jumble of violent thoughts, of anger, fear and guilt as he understood immediately what had happened flooded his mind, and he lost control over his meditative state. The magic cloud gave in under his feet, and the kid fell to the ground. He caught himself just in time, stabilised himself with the help of both limbs and his tail, and managed to land on his feet, not without some pain.

"BULMA!"

He ran to the body, but it was only to confirm the obvious. There was not much left of her head at all. The impact, whatever had caused it, had been violent and sudden. Goku imagined this must be another weapon that he was not aware of - perhaps a bigger, deadlier version of those things that shot small metal chunks at him, the guns. He moved a bit aside, and amidst the messy bloody bits, on the ground, he found indeed a bullet. It was at least three times bigger than anything that Mai or the goons of that rabbit guy had ever fired at him.

"You must be her friend." said a resounding voice, coming from the sky. Goku raised his eyes to meet two glowing, red, inhuman ones peering at him from above.

"I was." said the boy, in a flat, emptied voice. "What of it?"

"Well, I have a proposal for you. See, I really need to just go already, and I am sure you must be devastated by her loss. It just so happens that I am absolutely omnipotent, and ready to grant any wish you may have."

"Are you saying that you can bring her back to life?" asked Goku.

"What, do I need to wink or something?" blurted out Shenlong, having quickly run out of patience. "Of course I can. Ask me here and now so we can get this over with!"

Goku felt a wave of relief overcoming him. Of course it wasn't permanent; it could be fixed; there was nothing to fear. He opened his mouth to speak.

"Dragon..." he started saying.

Two things hit him. The first was the sudden realisation that there was something wrong with this, that Mai and whatever weapon had killed Bulma must be still out there, ready to strike, since she had not come to ask her wish yet, and that reviving Bulma in this situation would only likely lead to losing her again.

The second was a sniper rifle bullet, hard, right in his throat.

At first, it was a feeling of sharp pain, but it only lasted a moment. It was followed by unconsciousness; and then, suddenly, hyper consciousness. Bulma's mind felt flooded with an array of sensations clearer, sharper than she had ever felt, and the input that these sensations arrayed to her brain, or rather, her mind, since her brain proper was still all over one square meter of desert on Earth, was so wildly incongruous she did not know how to process it. She felt yanked and pulled around. Accelerating upwards, or possibly falling. Tumbling through dimensions that escaped her ability to perceive them, shifting perspectives, landscapes that rotated themselves into completely different landscapes, she felt like she was travelling the space of thousands of galaxies in the blink of an eye, and yet not moving at all. Then it all came to a stop.

"Would you like to queue, please."

Bulma looked around, shocked, and grasped her chest. She expected to feel her heart thump inside it, but she had no heart any more. She should have been panting and wheezing, but she had no lungs. She felt like she had a body, a solid self she could touch and move, but it was nothing like before - this felt just like an empty shell for the wriggling energies of her mind, so light and agile it would conform directly to her thought, without the need to pass through the slow bottleneck of a nervous system to tell the sluggish flesh what to do. It felt like having lived all her life driving a car, and only now find out how much more natural it is to walk on your own feet, except your feet in this example would be also several orders of magnitude faster than the car. Her thoughts process were similarly unhinged from all limitations. No more need to burn energy and fire neurons. Her thinking was fast, and streamlined, like when she hit her best moments of flow while creating something.

And it immediately came to the only relatively logical explanation for what had just happened to her.

She was dead, and this was what came after.

"Miss," insisted the voice, slightly annoyed, "would you please join the queue."

The girl turned her head to look at whoever had spoken. It was a wimpy looking man. He wore glasses, an office suit, had a brush haircut, held a clipboard and generally looked like the lamest, most boring, most down-on-his-luck salaryman who had ever lived. He also had a red skin and small horns protruding from his forehead, so he was most likely a demon.

Bulma burst into hysterical laughter.

"The queue," he repeated, diligently, waving a pen towards the girl, "it is important."

"I am sorry, it's just all so... different from anything I ever imagined." said Bulma, still laughing so much that she would have had to dry her eyes if she had still owned tear ducts. "I will queue. Where is it?"

She couldn't see any queue, really. She looked around and found that she was standing on a road with a jagged edge, suspended like a viaduct over a seemingly infinite expanse of yellow clouds. The road was covered in a crowd so dense, she couldn't make sense of it. It looked like an amorphous, infinite sea, without a beginning or an end, composed of billions of all the most improbable creature designs she could think of, while all retained enough humanoid appearance to appear recognizable as sentient beings to her eye.

The afterlife existed, and so did aliens. Quite a way to learn the answer to two of humanity's biggest questions.

"You are looking at it." said the clerk.

"This is the queue?" asked Bulma, stunned. "From where? To where?"

"From there," answered promptly the other, pointing at an empty spot as far as the orbit of Saturn, "to there." he concluded, pointing at a building as far as the closest star system.

The distances might have been a bit hyperbolic, but Bulma was still genuinely surprised that her sight could make both spots out. Her squishy human gelatinous eye bulbs wouldn't have managed such a feat.

"That's going to take forever!" she whined, loudly.

"That does not matter much anymore to you, I believe." commented flatly the clerk. "Plus, you will find out that time is a relative concept around here. Now please take your place in the queue. You will be processed and sent to your final destination as soon as possible."

"Final...?" stuttered Bulma, but the man was already scuttling away, welcoming other new arrives and pointing them to the beginning of the queue. She had to go, or someone else would take her place, and the only thing worse than being the trillionth in a waiting list to find out where her soul would spend eternity surely was to be the trillion and first.

To her surprise, she found out that she could walk approximately two point three astronomical units per second if she so wished, and so reaching the beginning of the queue was not as annoying as she feared it would be. Perhaps the wait wouldn't be so terrible either, then. The clerk had been right, distance and time did not seem to be as rigid and stuck up here as they were on Earth. And it's not like she didn't have ways to entertain her curiosity.

"Hello, my friend!" she said, cheerfully, to a creature that looked like a cross between a jellyfish and a sumo wrestler. "How is the weather on your planet?"

The creature answered with a series of gurgles and bubbling sounds coming out of a floppy aperture corresponding more or less to its mouth. Clearly, despite her newly expanded cognitive abilities, the language barrier was still a problem.

"Well, blurb glub to you too." she concluded, shrugging.

She switched to just waiting. She found it was not too hard to do, as her now unimpeded thought processes could just be easily switched to contemplating any matter of her liking, and even focusing amidst a crowd of alien ghosts waiting to be judged at the gates of the afterlife wasn't hard. There were no humans in sight, but that made sense - with how many inhabited planets there must be in the universe, and how many sentient beings dying on each of them every second, there would probably be another hundred kilometres of queue behind her before someone else from planet Earth arrived. The situation certainly filled her with questions and a proportionate need for answers, but she couldn't help but also feel that this probably warranted a bit more worry than that. She had just been murdered after all; and leaving all material concerns behind her, while appealing on the face of it when flooded with these many new discoveries, didn't feel like the right thing. Besides, she would have been more inclined to do it if she had reason to consider her situation irreversible; but as it happened, she had died just in front of the one thing in the whole world that could bring her back pronto. And if Goku was not a complete idiot - and luckily, he was all but - he would come to the same conclusion. So she would only have to wait for a while and soon she'd found herself yanked back to Earth, with a newfound knowledge of the metaphysical truths of the universe.

Goku would love debating this.

It should happen any second now.

How much did a second last, again?

She really couldn't know for sure. Her heartbeat was gone. No watches to be seen. And her inner sense of time was completely messed up by the loss of the cerebral waves it relied on to tick more or less regularly. And even if she could measure a second, nothing guaranteed that a second of proper time in this far removed metaphysical dimension had anything to do with an Earthly one. She sighed, and decided she should be prepared for a very long wait. Or a very short one.

The queue behind her was still pretty sparse, but suddenly, she noticed, it got far denser. What really struck her is that, unlike the rest, the mass of the newly arrived was all composed by individuals of the same species. Thin, tall creatures with a crystal-like skin through which their inner organs were visible were crowding more and more. Their group seemed to extended to where the eye could see. They were chattering among them - Bulma couldn't make up the words, but by how fast the exchanges were, she suspected they were still excited or scared. And why wouldn't they be? Obviously, whatever had happened to them must have been a major cataclysm. She could make out hundreds, thousands of them. Perhaps more. She couldn't count. It was impossible to understand what they were saying, and yet, she couldn't help notice, there was a recurring word that they kept saying over and over, enough that she eventually caught the sound. Well, not really a word in the human sense of the term. The sound was like a whisper, a rolling of the tongue and a hiss, in close sequence. Somehow, just listening to it sent a shiver down her back. Probably because it was something associated with so much death, she decided, it could not be a good thing. Whisper, rolling, hiss. In human sounds, it probably would have been an F, an R, and a Z. Frz, frz, they kept saying.

"Excuse me!" Bulma waved her hand to draw the attention of one of the clerks, who was patiently showing the way to the new arrived.

"Yes?" he asked, courteous. "Is there anything I can help you with?"

"Oh, well, it's nothing major." she said, dismissive. "I was just wondering, uhm, how many of these people have just arrived. Seems to be a big group. How come they're all together, but I can't see anyone of my species?"

"Oh, that." the employee checked his clipboard. "It's because they all died at the same exact moment. There's three billion, seven hundred million of them, more or less."

Bulma chuckled nervously. "Come on," she said, "that's not possible. That's an entire planet worth of people. How would they die all together like this?"

"Well, their planet was blown up." calmly replied the demon, with a smile. "Happens all the time. That's the entire species behind you."

The girl looked at the crowd of the crystalline creatures. Being here, she could accept that death, on its own, might not have been such a big deal after all. But genocide? Extinction? Knowing that there would be nothing after you, that the world you had grown up on and loved was now only dust and asteroids? She had studied the kind of cataclysms that could do something like that to a planet, but it always had been mere speculation. She remembered seeing a supernova shine in the sky through a telescope as a child, and thinking it was very pretty. Yet perhaps she'd been staring at this - the death of entire species, erased from the cosmos. Looking at it in the face, seeing the billions literally flock to the gates of heaven, really gave the measure of how much tragedy that was.

"That's terrible." she said, shaken. "I guess that the word they keep repeating... fr... fz..."

She couldn't figure out how to pronounce the sound, and decided to add some vocals approximating the way she heard it to make it more friendly.

"...fraa-za, is the name of whatever hit them, then? What does it mean? Asteroid? Gamma burst?"

"Fra...? Oh, no!" the clerk laughed "That would be a person. Most races in the galaxy who possess the adequate phonetic apparate pronounce his name as Frieza. It was him."

A moment of silence.

"A person," asked Bulma slowly, "can blow up planets?"

"More than one. But it's usually him." confirmed the other. "He doesn't really care for people who defy him, or disobey his orders, or just offend his sensibilities, I guess."

He thought about it for a moment.

"In fact, I'm not sure he really needs a motive at all."

"He doesn't need a motive." hissed Bulma. "To blow up a planet. With people on it."

"Well, yes."

All kinds of alarms fired in sequence in Bulma's mind.

"Where does this individual operate?" she asked.

"Oh, are you worried for your home planet? You're here now, it's not like it would affect you if..."

"Please."

The clerk looked at her a bit transfixed, then smiled and shook his head.

"You're from a place called Earth, right?" he checked on the clipboard, browsing a couple of pages before finding the information he was looking for. "Oh... I didn't even know there were inhabited planets in that area of the galaxy, you know? I learned a new thing today! It's really out there in the boons. No trade routes or anything passing by, so it's unlikely that you will ever draw any attention. Not a strategic location or anything like that. Though however... good temperature range, abundance of water, lovely flora and fauna. It's a very nice piece of real estate. Don't worry, miss, Lord Frieza would never blow up such a pretty planet without good reason."

The girl didn't look very reassured, but seemed to ease up a bit.

"Though if he found out, I'm pretty sure he would kill everyone on it and conquer it. Which for us is usually even more work, because they trickle through instead of arriving in a single batch." he added, annoyed.

The girl shrieked in alarm.

"Are you serious?" she said, grabbing him by the shoulders.

"Miss, please." he firmly removed her hands. "You are here now. You should not concern yourself any more with things you can't change or affect, in the other world. Worries are for the living, is what we say! Just relax, and if anything were to happen, think of the positives - you would get to see your friends and family sooner than anticipated!"

"It's my planet! I need to talk with someone in charge... how can something like this be even possible!"

"Well, you will meet King Enma soon, for the judgement." said the clerk. "You could raise the matter with him, if it concerns you so much. But I would not advise that you upset him."

"We're talking billions dead - I sure hope he does get upset at that! How can no one have been informed or have done anything... this is absurd!"

The girl seemed to be a bit overloaded now, and she started mumbling and fidgeting nervously with her fingers, as if running quickly thoughts and calculations in her head, and the demon clerk took that chance to slip away. Unfortunately, given the nature of his job, dealing with people in a state of shock or with extremely unstable minds was the norm. Eventually, they would settle down and come to a more peaceable state of mind, as eternity blurred their mortal worries away from their mind - at least if they managed not to get on Enma's bad side. All problems of the material world seemed less important when put in perspective, and soon, even this new girl would learn that Lord Frieza blowing up the occasional planet was not such a big deal.

After all, he thought while walking away towards a new group that had just arrived and welcoming them with a smile, it was not like it happened more than once or twice a year.

It was a day of cold, sharp rain.

The girl was thirteen. She waited huddled in a corner, in the small shelter she and her companions had carved for themselves under a bridge, as water dripped all around through the makeshift walls of plywood and cardboard. In her hands was a knife. She toyed with it, turned it around, looked at the gleam of its blade under the faint light. A creaking noise came from outside.

"Yue, is that you?" she asked.

It wasn't. Yue was a small, lively black cat. This was a ragged boy of her age, clothes and hair drenched in rain, face bloodied.

"Mai, we have to run." he said, breathless. "We tried to steal some bread from the usual place. But master Zhang was really pissed. He said he wouldn't put it up with it any more, he has a family to maintain. He managed to take us by surprise, he grabbed Li and started beating him, he beat me up too..."

Mai rose to her feet. "Calm down. Why do you say we should run?"

"He's bringing him to the police, Mai!" the boy was crying as he grabbed her wrist and pulled it. "You know what they do to - to kids like us! He will talk, and they will come here. I don't want to lose you too!"

The girl contemplated the situation for a second. She was unmoved, and slightly repulsed by the pathetic display of frailty in front of her. The boy liked her, and she knew it, though he would never say it out loud. But this was unsightly. Her fist clenched around the knife's handle, and she knew what she had to do.

"We will leave, you are right that this place is not safe any more." she said. "But first we will visit master Zhang. You will distract him, pretending to be stealing again. And when he comes to beat you, I'll take him from behind and stab him. Forget the bread, we can take all the money in his shop, and running away will be much easier."

The boy looked hesitant. Scared. Weak. "But he could die." he objected, feebly.

She glanced sideways, at Yue, who had entered the shelter. The adorable creature walked around with her usual curious, elegant gait, holding the mangled corpse of a mouse in her jaws.

"Sure he could." said Mai. "That's how the world works. Let's go."

Through the scope, she saw Goku take the bullet in his neck, she saw him falter. She did not see him fall and die.

"Fuck." uttered Mai through her teeth, and prepared herself for another shot by pulling the bolt mechanism.

The boy tried to speak again, clenched his throat, in obvious pain, coughed blood. At least the hit had been somewhat effective. With some luck, she may have crushed his windpipe, which removed the risk of him wishing anything to the dragon. He now was coursing his neck with his fingers - yes, the bullet had somehow jabbed itself into his flesh, like an arrow, without fully piercing his skin. What a monster. Now he was pulling it out with his bare hand. The moment he managed to rip it, he let some pain show, and Mai waited for it to shoot a second time. This one got him in his arm. The kid's eyes widened, but now he knew what to do, and managed to rip off the second bullet before Mai had time to reload and fire a third one.

When she did, he jumped aside at the last moment and dodged.

Her mistake. She had been too perfect for her own good. The timing of her shots had been too regular - all he had needed was to jump randomly at the exact right moment to avoid the hit. This time, she let a bit more time pass, then she fired two shots in quick succession, chambering the round as fast as she could and sacrificing accuracy. She got him once, in the foot. Goku now was bleeding copiously, and his step slightly less sure. The pain must be having some effect even on the little monster.

She saw the kid turn towards her. By this point, he must have realised the direction the attacks were coming from, and must be racking his brain for a plan to counterattack. Come at me, kid, thought Mai. I've still got plenty of this stuff.

The bullet was the last of her magazine, so now she needed to reload. Too bad she had such a limited capacity rifle, but she usually wasn't in the business of firing at people who survived the first hit. When she got back to looking at Goku, he was doing something weird. Standing still, his eyes closed, facing her direction.

Mai had heard that some martial artists could perceive tiny changes in air pressure, vibrations, to detect hits before they touched them, and react. She chuckled. If it was air vibrations he was looking for, this boy was in for a harsh lesson about the speed of sound. Her bullet would reach him before any vibration caused by it.

She fired, aiming straight between his eyes, and saw him instantly thrown to the ground a few metres behind. The bullet rebounded. When he got up again, his forehead was bleeding, but it was relatively intact compared to the other parts of his body she had hit. Evidently, he was concentrated enough that he had managed to move - almost matching the bullet speed! - and toss himself backwards to lessen the impact as soon as he felt it touch his skin. Still, it had not been enough. But now the boy looked like he was getting angry. He was in the right mood.

Mai smiled. The only way this would end was with one of them dead on the ground.

The office's proportions were ridiculously out of scale. A ceiling loomed as tall as the sky, and above a mountain-like desk that looked like it was made of solid mahogany - if not for the fact that no trees of that plant could possibly produce logs big enough to build something of that size - were building sized office implements, such as a stapler and a dangerously full letter tray. It would have been certainly majestic enough to be what Bulma would have expected from the court wherein all the deeds of the souls who passed on are judged if not for being, well, an office.

"Next!" announced the red-skinned, bearded man sitting at the desk in an unkempt salaryman outfit. He plunged his hand into a messy bunch of documents and somehow, miraculously, extracted the right file, and started skimming through it. "So. Bulma Briefs, from planet Earth, age of death: 16 home world orbital periods and change. Ethical record..."

"Excuse me!" shouted Bulma, hoping that her voice would be heard from across the immense distance that separated her from the giant's ears.

He glanced downwards at her, annoyed.

"What is it? I'm working." he said.

"Well, yes, on the matter of deciding the fate of my immortal soul, so I feel like I should be involved." answered Bulma. "But never mind that, I want to make a report."

The divine clerk put down his file and leaned down a bit, peering from above the top of his desk. His eyes fixated on the girl, and his forehead corrugated with a frown. "A report. From you. Sure, go ahead, let's hear it."

"Ahem, thanks, your honour." Bulma tried to assume a formal attitude. "So, while queueing for this audience, I have learned that someone, in the mortal world, has the ability and the willingness to destroy an entire planet. And they appear to have just done so - as a whole species is in fact due to come to judgement right after me. I don't know what the gods' policies are with respect to the mortal realm, but surely, I would expect that an event of this magnitude should warrant some kind of action..."

"Sure it does," growled the giant, angrily, and then, turning towards his right, "PAPE! ALEPPE! You two care to tell me why no one has informed me of this matter?"

Two smaller demons in suits paled and begun stuttering. "Lord Enma... we didn't..."

"You know what the procedure is!" roared the divine judge "We need to file an Extinction Report in triple copy when stuff like this happens. Bring me the forms already! Or the archives will get up in a bunch when they realise they're still tracking a race that doesn't freaking exist any more. I don't even know why I don't send you two idiots to man the Spit-roasting Pits down under. Turning souls over the boiling magma may be the only thing you'd possibly be good at."

Bulma was speechless. "That was it...?" she finally managed to say.

"Well, yes, what else?" said Enma. "But thank you, that will spare me some time. Let's say we'll strike off your record that one time you 'borrowed' your dad's motorbike when you were thirteen and crashed it against a lamppost thirty seconds later."

"A broken motorbike." repeated Bulma, in disbelief. "Someone out there destroys planets, and I get judged over a broken motorbike. That my father was too forgetful to ever notice that was missing to this day, I'll add."

"You get judged over what you did, miss. When Frieza's turn comes, he will be judged accordingly too. I expect that will be a very short hearing."

"And when will it come?" asked the girl.

"We don't know the damn future here, miss. In your planet's units, his natural lifespan would probably allow him a couple thousand years, a few centuries more if he starts watching better what he eats. Obviously, he has lots of enemies who would be more than happy to speed up the process. They usually get a few points from me for at least trying. Now, on to our business. When you were six, you modded a clockwork mouse and sicced it on your mother to chase her from the kitchen and steal some cookies. Ingenious, but devious..."

He kept listing inconsequential sins and equally inconsequential good actions, occasionally writing something down on a form, ticking boxes, taking notes. Bulma watched and listened in bafflement as this ridiculous act of celestial bureaucracy played out, while the demon clerks zoomed back and forward with mounds of papers in their arms, carrying books and folders in what looked like the most pointless job that had ever existed, turning people's lives into scores and storing them in some forgotten celestial vault that surely no one would ever open again. Behind her, just outside the office's door, came the unintelligible wailing of an entire species who had just met its demise.

"This is stupid." said Bulma, flatly.

A gasp and a stunned silence overtook the office. The demon clerks stopped mid-step and turned their eyes to the two main actors of a play that seemed to be on a quick route to become a tragedy.

Bulma looked up, defiant, into the eyes of the God of the Underworld.

He looked back, burning with anger.

"Excuse me?" he growled.

"I said that this is stupid." she repeated, calmly. "I don't see in what way could this judgement be morally superior to that imparted by any fellow human of mine who were to read an abridged bullet point account of my life. Meanwhile, you're in front of one of the greatest evils that a mind could possibly imagine, and you ignore it, because it's not your job."

"That is correct." said Enma. "Now shut up and don't open that mouth to say something even stupider, because I guarantee, if you keep pissing me off and wasting my time, I..."

"You what?" screamed the girl "You will send me to Hell? For talking back to you? When someone is down there blowing up planets and you won't do a damn thing to stop them despite having the power to..."

A light of realisation dawned in her eyes.

"But you don't." she said, slowly. "That's why."

The clerks turned their glance down and scampered out of the office.

"Woman." growled Enma. "I warn you. Not another word."

Bulma continued, undeterred. "You can't. You're not strong enough. You said earlier that you don't know the future. Heck, you have to read a file to know about my life. Your power is not infinite. In fact, it's so limited even a mortal can get the drop on you, if they're strong enough. This Frieza person can do what he wants because he can literally kill the gods."

"THAT IS ENOUGH!" roared the judge. His angry voice alone was like a searing hot supersonic wind. Had Bulma still possessed flesh and bones, the former would have been charred and ripped off the latter. As it was, she didn't suffer any consequences, but the feeling wasn't too different. She was wheezing in pain when she saw with a corner of her eye Enma ripping her file in half and tossing it in the trash bin.

"I don't need that anymore. Miss, you're going down. And for your information, you're right - even if I could leave my post and descend into the mortal realm, I would not be able to put down someone like Frieza. But there are those who could. There are scores above me who are stronger and greater, great enough to create and destroy on scales that your puny mortal minds can barely appreciate, and you know why they don't do anything? Because for all of your little conceited ego, miss Briefs, you matter nothing. You are just grains of dust in the wind of time, pointless and without consequence until they get in someone's eye. One of your lives is nothing to the truly great ones."

"One," gasped Bulma, still feeling like her skin was on fire, "or three billion, seven hundred million of them."

"That's right. You should be grateful for what you have. Your life counts for naught. You come here, you get one shot at eternal leisure - and you wasted yours. I hope that regret will make your pain more acute in the eons to come, if such a thing is even possible."

His hand hovered on a big, red button, on the side of his desk.

"Joke's on you," muttered Bulma, with a smirk, "send me wherever you want, I'm going back to Earth soon."

"That is very rare, but not unheard of. But no matter how hard they try, everyone comes back here, eventually. And I have very good memory for little brats like you."

The girl stood, trying not too successfully to straighten her back a bit.

"That's where you're wrong." she said. "I swear I'm never coming back here again."

"So they all say. Good riddance."

Enma pushed the button. A trapdoor opened under Bulma's feet and she started falling down, away from everything that is light, life and joy, into the darkness.

It was a day of hot, scorching sun.

Even just standing in the open training field was almost unbearable, but Mai was preparing to fight as if it had been a fresh summer evening. She put on her gloves and bit down on her mouth guard.

Her opponent was gearing up in the other corner of the square. A friend who was acting as his second made a gesture pointing at his mouth, and the other shook his head, then aimed a dangerous grin at Mai, across the ring. He was cocky, and had reason to. The match up was as unbalanced as they come. He was three times her size; taller, broader, heavier, more muscular. Their training sergeant had pegged down Mai as having a problematic attitude - too brash, he said, and aggressive, and prone to insubordination if it came to that. She knew all too well what he thought, and she didn't care. She also knew he was putting her through the grinder in the hopes that she'd either finally give up or die.

She didn't care about that either.

It was the day in which Commander Red came to supervise the training, to get down and meet the troops, as he put it. She saw him in the corner of her eye - amiably chatting with the training sergeant while Staff Officer Black stood awkwardly on his side.

Battles are won by making the best use of one's surroundings.

The match begun, and Mai attacked quickly, bringing herself too close for the opponent to hit her back. Surprised, he tried to bearhug her, but his arms were slippery with sweat, and she managed to break free. She thrust one elbow upwards, straight towards his mouth. The hit was devastating. Two whole teeth and various fragments of others flew out of his mouth, together with a copious amount of blood. Her follow up broke his nose, and finished the deal. The hulking man was crouching on the ground, whining in pain like a baby.

The training sergeant ran towards the scene, alarmed, as soon as he realised something was wrong. Commander Red and his escort followed suit at a more leisurely pace.

"What just happened? Explain!"

"It's quite simple." said Mai. "I could not hope to win a fight of attrition. He had forgotten his mouth guard. So I finished this in a single strike."

The sergeant's face was flushed with anger. "This is unconscionable! This is cheating!"

Mai didn't flinch. "This is winning." she replied.

Commander Red broke into laughter. "This is what I want from our soldiers! Guts, creativity, and no mercy! Eye on the prize, eh, girl? I hope to hear good news from you. You'll get far in the Red Ribbon!"

Mai nodded, saluted, and hinted a smile. Staff Officer Black sent her a worried look, but said nothing. Embarrassed, the training sergeant mumbled something about acknowledging what obviously were the values of their army and maybe even a promotion.

She felt satisfied. This was right - inevitable, even. After all, this was how the world worked.

Goku was slowly advancing in her direction, now. At regular intervals, he would clap his hands so fast that they produced a powerful shock wave. The sound was like the steps of a giant advancing towards her - a regular deafening boom getting closer. It worked as an active sonar for him, and disrupted the incoming bullets' flight just enough to kick them out the supersonic regime, at which point, they lost precision. Mai had missed all the shots of her last cartridge. She would try to time her shots so that they arrived right before the kid had time to clap again, when his previous one was dying down, but she also needed to not time them too precisely or they would be easy to dodge. In addition, as Goku came closer, parallax made his sideways jumps more effective in throwing her aim off.

But he had been drawn away from the dragon by a few hundred metres now, so that was all just as planned.

Mai left the rifle on the side and quickly went back to the controls of the plane. In hovering mode, it was incredibly stable, and the jets did not emit much light. She had ripped off her coat and hung one half of it on either side of the plane to conceal them from Goku's view. Nothing could been done about the noise, but there was plenty already, with all the thunder falling from the clouds and now Goku's own defense technique, so she didn't worry too much about being pinpointed with that. Smoothly, slowly, she moved the plane just a dozen metres to the left. By this time, Goku must have noticed that the onslaught had stopped for longer than usual. She embraced the rifle again, took aim, shot.

The bullet whizzed past his cheek and left a red streak on his face. He had managed to dodge and disrupt it, but the unexpected change in direction had thrown him off.

Again. Mai went back to the controls and repeated the procedure, this time moving a bit back to the right. The same distance she could reasonably cover on foot in that same time frame. Chamber, aim, shoot. She got one in this time - in Goku's right arm. Relentless, the little monster ripped it off, kept clapping, kept advancing.

No problem. Now that she had established a pattern, it was time to break it and strike at her true objective.

She maneuvred the plane at higher speed this time, and circled behind the dragon, letting its blinding light obfuscate the one produced by her jets. She positioned herself diametrally opposed to where she was before with respect to Goku, in approximately the same time that her much smaller movements had taken her before. She picked up the rifle and carefully took aim. Now she had all the advantages. Goku probably still expected the next hit from a place she could reasonably reach on foot. The disruptive effect of the clapping was minimised at his back. And she could see his spine, the nape of his neck, right in her scope. Until now, her bullets had only managed to penetrate no more than one centimeter deep into that kid's flesh.

If she could hit the right spot, that would suffice.

Mai took aim for a spot right above Goku's second cervical vertebra and shot.

The fall was endless and painful. It was like plunging through an ever denser mass of sharp gravel, needles and acid rain. And yet the awareness of the pain that would come after the fall urged the mind to treasure every instant, as every instant was the least painful you'd ever experience from that moment on. The worst of it was, just like her consciousness, every feeling was heightened, unimpeded. She didn't need a body to suffer harm in order to appreciate it, it was all directly telegraphed to her mind. This was not simply the occasional physical accident that is mundane pain, this was the essence of pain. This place was pain, and she was burrowing deeper and deeper into its rotten core.

A stench rose from the abyss. A stench of sulfur and blood and iron and burnt flesh and excrement and more.

Bulma screamed, and her scream was a chorus with that of the trillions below her.

They had ran for almost half an hour, or rather, the Ox King had. Pilaf had merely been perched on his shoulder, grabbing desperately his cape for added safety, too terrified by the speed at which the air slammed on his face to even feel the nausea from the continuous bobbing up and down and occasional sharp turns to avoid an obstacle. It sort of all came to a head when they halted, as the Ox King planted his feet in the ground and stopped with a screech and great raising of dust.

"Yer all right, Pilaf?"

"One, moment, please." he muttered, clearly not all right.

He climbed down from the man's shoulder, helped by his hand, and took a moment to assess the situation. The sky was still dark. They had travelled for a while, but neither Goku nor Mai were visible, and outside of the local circle of blinding light, it was hard to even see due to the sheer contrast. More importantly, the light rose from the Dragon Balls, gathered in a nice formation of seven on the ground. And from them, up, up and above, rose the...

"Dragon?" asked Pilaf, gaping in awe at the sky.

"No, I'm just a lizard who underwent a sudden growth spurt." boomed Shenlong's voice from above. "OF COURSE I'm the dragon! Heavens, you are even denser than the girl that was here earlier. Can any of you pathetic mortals just express a wish already and let me go my own way?"

Pilaf looked around alarmed. "Wait, the girl? The blue haired one? Where is she?"

The all-powerful dragon sighed. "I'm not even trying to get you to express that question as a wish. For the sake of the brevity of this conversation, she's there, at my feet. Except for the bits of her that are approximately one meter to the side."

Pilaf lowered his eyes and finally saw Bulma's corpse and her splattered brains.

"WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, MAI!" he screamed.

A loud bang echoed through the air.

"Someone's shooting." the Ox King looked around, concerned. "Not good. The soldier woman must be around here. We need to take cover."

"Oh, no, you don't!" roared Shenlong "You're not just going to bail on me and hide somewhere! You're staying here until you express ONE DAMN WISH and then you mortals and your petty power squabbles can all go screw yourself once and for all! I've spent more time summoned today than any time in the past, combined! This is getting physically painful, and I didn't even know I could feel pain! SO YOU WILL ASK ME TO PERFORM A MIRACLE FOR YOU, UNDERSTOOD, YOU PATHETIC BLUE MIDGET?"

Pilaf stared at the creature in disbelief.

"Understood." he managed to whimper, at the end.

This was it. The moment he had fought so much for, delivered to him on a silver platter against the plans of both his rivals and his own ally-turned-traitor. Unlimited power, ready at his beck and call.

"Dragon," he started, "I wish..."

Power he would earn literally over his dead enemy's body.

"...for you to..."

Not too far, there was an explosion. Pilaf didn't hear it. He only heard his own voice, as it spelled the fatal words.

It was an average day.

Colonel Green's codename was one of the really obvious choices. He was literally green. Many of the Red Ribbon army soldiers were either human or some other kind of mammalian non-humans. This, however, was the first time that Mai met a pterodactyl serving in the force.

Sadly, since he was her own one-person court martial, the meeting wasn't likely to be especially cordial.

"According to article 35 of our code, in cases of particular urgency a superior officer can assume the full duty of assessing a case, judging the evidence, and dealing out punishment for insubordination on the battlefield. This has been invoked for your situation, Lieutenant Indigo. On my request." The old reptile put aside the files he was reading and his large beak twisted in a grimacing smile. "Assume that I know everything about the case already, and assume that your life and future in this army are in my hands. Tell me your version of the facts."

Mai stood on attention with a defiant look, but didn't hint at any other kind of reaction. "I was ordered by Major Crimson to tell my men to retreat when I believed one last push would conquer the position we were targeting. I refused to follow his orders. I pushed through, forcing the others to back me up to avoid disrupting our formation. I conquered the objective. I won the battle."

She paused for a second.

"I called him a feckless, lurid coward." she added.

She thought she saw Colonel Green barely suppress a chuckle, there. "I see. But I feel like there's more to this. We don't fight for glory, or our country, or an ideal. We are mercenaries: we fight when we're paid to do it. If your commander says to retreat, what's in it for you in disobeying? What was your real motivation, Lieutenant?"

Mai hesitated for a moment. "Permission to speak freely, sir?"

"Granted, of course."

"I believe the Red Ribbon as it is now is a waste of potential. We have immense power, great technology, brave and skilled soldiers. Yet all we do is act as the deciding factors in petty disputes between local powers, in a gray area in which the world government will tolerate our existence, if not acknowledge it entirely. A world government, I believe, we have enough power to topple."

She stared straight into Colonel Green's eyes.

"Strength that is not used is wasted, Colonel. That is what I believe."

Colonel Green broke into laughter. Of all the outcomes she considered when stepping into this office, this was not one of them. "Well said, Lieutenant. You passed my little test brilliantly. You are exactly what I was looking for. By the way, I completely agree with your assessment, Major Crimson is a feckless, lurid coward, and I will see that he's removed. There are no means within the rules to do so, but when in battle, accidents happen all the time."

Mai could not believe her ears. Colonel Green got up from his desk and walked towards her.

"You see, Lieutenant," he put a hand on her shoulder and leaned in so that he could lower his voice, "there are people within the Ribbon who think very much like you, and who share certain... other objectives which might serve our purpose, and of which I will talk to you later. We used to be able to steer this organisation, but after the current Commander Red took charge, well. You know him. And Staff Officer Black isn't much better - far more competent, but not nearly as willing to make the hard calls as you or me. Now, we believe it is time to act, and we have set our eyes on a prize that would make our plans come to fruition much faster. Would you be willing to help us?"

Mai's eyes sparkled. She straightened up. "You don't even need to ask, sir."

The old lizard laughed again. "Wonderful! This mission will need a lot from you, but it will be best if left to someone who's as removed from any suspicion as possible. You will have to feign loyalty for a long time, and be far less insubordinate - for the sake of a greater good. Do you understand that? Now, I will have to order you shot for your actions - it would look suspicious otherwise, and this is all part of the plan. On the side, we will arrange things so that you can escape, and steal a significant amount of valuable capsules from our armoury on your way out. Then, we have tracked down a certain man whom you need to convince to fund a peculiar enterprise..."

The bullet missed. Barely. Goku was hurt, but one second later he had ripped the bullet out of his neck - right to the side of the spine - and had turned around. By this point he must have caught on that she was flying. Which meant he'd take the obvious countermeasure. Mai had seen it when he first arrived; a yellow, incredibly fast cloud he could apparently ride on...

Through her scope, she saw Goku shouting, calling something. The cloud came with a whoosh. At the speed that thing travelled at, she'd be exposed in seconds.

She pulled the bolt again, took aim. This was going to be her last shot. It was victory or death, in the next few instants.

Goku took off. He had spotted her now, probably had recognised the sound of the plane that he'd never heard from outside until now. He flew in a straight line - as if all his planning and strategising now was out of the window, and he could only pursue the simple objective of getting her. Maybe he was angry, it didn't matter. It was the perfect chance.

Mai shot. Goku was hit right in his chest, the bullet's speed compounding with his, and the recoil alone tossed him off his little magic cloud. She had waited for him to be close - he would have a few metres to fall before hitting the sharp, hard rocks below. She readied a second shot to finish him off.

The cloud made a loop in mid-air and pursued Goku, cushioning his fall and grabbing him just below. Mai fired frantically her second shot, but it missed and went right through the cloud, disappearing in a puff of yellow smoke. The cloud now zoomed towards her, Goku, half covered in blood but still plenty conscious, was charging in fist first, and suddenly there was no more time to try anything.

She resisted the instinct to close her eyes at the last moment.

The impact tore a clean hole through the hull of the plane. In a blaze of heat and fire, as the jet's reactors exploded, Mai felt yanked violently upwards, so fast that she let her rifle go, and wondered for a second if that was how it felt to die, before realising all that had happened was that she had been pulled away. The plane was exploding below her; she was on the cloud, or rather, slightly above it, only lifted through a fold of her jacket that Goku was grabbing and kept lifted above his height.

Mai screamed incoherently in rage and extracted her side arm, unloading its entire cartridge point blank on Goku. He grabbed and deflected most bullets with his free hand, then wrestled the gun out of her hand, denting the metal with his fingers' clutch. Mai unclipped and armed the grenade she held at her belt, keeping it between their two bodies. With blinding speed, the kid broke her wrist by pinching it between his index and thumb, then deftly grabbed the grenade from her now limp and pained hand to toss it away, where it exploded harmlessly in mid-air.

"FUCKING DIE!" screamed Mai, flailing with her legs in an attempt to kick him, "OR FUCKING KILL ME ALREADY!"

She grabbed his arm with the hand that still worked and lifted herself to try and bite him. The kid shrugged it off with a quick gesture, hitting her on the side of the neck hard enough to stun her while leaving her conscious. Mai groaned in pain, but at this point, she was too groggy to do much else.

"I killed your friend," she mumbled, "why don't you just kill me?"

He didn't answer. The most enraging thing was that it looked like he wasn't even there - his eyes lost in the distance, his mind focused on some thought other than her. She wasn't even worth his attention?

Then it happened. All of a sudden, daylight burst into the sky again, as the dragon disappeared in a flash. The Dragon Balls rose into the air, hovered for a moment, then rocketed off into seven different directions.

Goku stared, and his expression, for the first time since he had destroyed Mai's plane, showed something.

A second later, he lost his footing and fell through the cloud. Mai was pulled by his weight, and hit the vaporous yellow stuff, and somehow was stopped by it. It was like laying down on a soft feather mattress, except a corner of her jacket passed right through it and was pulled by Goku's whole weight, as he was now dangling under her. She couldn't get up nor move. She was immobilised, face up, forced to look into the sky.

"What the hell is this?" she exclaimed.

"I lost focus." said Goku "But you really want to kill me that much. You have nothing else in your mind, apparently. Your heart is pure."

"Sure I do! I want to kill you like I did your friend! And I don't know what happened to the dragon - but she can't come back now! Feel like killing me yet?"

She wished she could see his expression, but he was under her, under the cloud. So all she could hear was his voice - a neutral, detached tone.

"No."

And suddenly, the weight pulling her down was gone. Mai rolled on her back and peered over the cloud, just to see him falling, spinning his body in a position of least resistance to accelerate and direct his motion, pointing as much as he could towards the place where Bulma should have been. He hit the ground running - a small, black, careless dot.

Mai remained alone on the Kintoun for a moment, in the vast empty sky. There was, finally, silence. Her body was in pain, her ears ringing, her head empty after so much struggle and rage. She had no purpose, no pride, no face to present to those who had counted on her success. For the first time in her life, she felt the full extent of her weakness.

Your heart is pure.

She started laughing. At first a chuckle, then a loud, hysterical laugh, and as she laughed, she lost her footing on the cloud, fell through, fell to the ground, still laughing and laughing, until she hit.

The only thing she could appreciate, for a while, suspended in a mere dream state, was the lack of pain. Then, as her brain got accustomed to it, and recovered from the shock, she regained consciousness, and saw Goku's eyes peering over her.

Bulma screamed. "Goku! You've been killed too?"

"It's fine." answered the kid. "It's okay now. I'm alive. And you're too."

She stopped for a moment, trying to reorganise her thoughts - something that now felt, again, surprisingly difficult and sluggish. She got up sitting, pushing against the ground to lift herself. One of her hands felt like it was touching something warm and sticky, and as she checked, she realised she'd just plunged her fingers into her own formerly owned brains - which caused her a moment of existential confusion immediately followed by a strong need to puke.

She did puke.

When she finally felt like she had a grip on her physical body again, she looked around, feeling the air and all those other tiny sensations on her skin and through her body.

"Thank you." she said, looking at Goku. "Thankyouthankyouthankyou OH MY GOD THANK YOU YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT WAS LIKE!"

By this time, the kid had to push her away a bit to loosen her tight hug which was getting really quite painful for his sore, bleeding body.

"I'm glad you're happy," he said, "but it's not me you should thank. It's him."

Bulma followed the finger Goku was using to point in some direction, saw Pilaf at the end, checked back the finger, followed it again, Pilaf again, put herself behind Goku, lining her eyes up with his finger as if it was a sextant, still Pilaf.

"Him?" she asked, incredulous.

"Ever so grateful, aren't you?" scoffed the blue imp. "Do not concern yourself. We have no appreciation for the likes of you, but let it never be said that we do not take responsibility for the misguided actions of our followers."

"He's a softie is what he is!" laughed the Ox King, uproariously, "But I like that. Gotta be ready to know when to be magnanimous when yer a King."

"You regularly decapitate people with an axe for trespassing." pointed out Pilaf.

The giant shrugged. "Eh, being a King ain't easy."

Bulma looked at Pilaf transfixed for a second, running scenarios in her head trying to figure out what the hell could have happened while she was dead. Then she bent herself in a perfect bow.

"Thank you," she said, "Your Majesty."

"Well, uh, ah," stuttered Pilaf, confused, "it's nothing, really. Let's not make this awkward."

She got up.

"I agree," she said with a smile, "let's not."

She asked about what had happened, and Goku and Pilaf both recounted their own experiences. They also recovered and replayed the camera's memory card, which had recorded the entire thing, including Bulma's death and resurrection. All said and done, they got a picture of the whole timeline. When asked, she told about how the dragon had considered her first wish impossible to grant in its current form, and how the entire thing had taken so long as to allow Mai to catch up in the first place, and this part of the story was found to be very funny by Pilaf. They tried a few guesses at what Mai's own intentions for a wish to express may have been, but they could come up with nothing. They assumed that given her Red Ribbon past it may have something to do with granting more power or resources to them, and this could have been a covert mission for her, but then Bulma encouraged to not speculate too much and risk closing one's mind to alternatives without adequate information, Goku agreed, and the matter was dropped. She didn't recount anything of her experience after her death, though, and any questions about that soon were understood to be a taboo. Both her first reaction after her resurrection and her current silence suggested it hadn't been pleasant - though of course, that excited everyone's curiosity even more.

"What now?" asked Goku, finally. "You know that the Dragon Balls work, but you didn't get your wish. I still am not sure whether I should use them to bring back to life my grandpa or for something else, and as we discussed whether there is an afterlife at all..."

"There is." said Bulma. "I can tell you that much. Sorry, I need... time before discussing that properly. There's so much inside my head right now, I'm just trying to shut it all down."

"Oh." the kid pondered for a moment. "Then we need to talk about it. It may affect my decision. Either way, if you don't mind, I will stick with you for a while."

"Mind? I need you to!" laughed Bulma. "We have so much work to do. I need to figure out a lot of stuff, understand how you and your power work, and also find a way to make myself immortal!"

"Immortal? How so?" asked Pilaf, smugly. "Did you and your charming personality manage to stir so much trouble with the gods of the underworld in the short time during which you were dead, they've now sworn to throw you in Hell if you so much as show up there again?"

"Look," snapped back Bulma, "I had a very good reason at the time!"

The only thing she could appreciate, for a while, suspended in a mere dream state, was the acute, burning pain. Then, as her brain got accustomed to it, and recovered from the shock, she regained consciousness, and saw Colonel Green's eyes peering over her.

Mai blinked. "I'm still alive, am I?"

"Yes, you are, Lieutenant Indigo. Well, we should really get you a new codename now since you're not in the Ribbon any more." he added with a quiet chuckle.

She was in a bed, inside some kind of mobile hospital vehicle. She tried to get up, and couldn't immediately. Her right arm especially felt sluggish, dizzy, and burned ferociously at the shoulder whenever she put some weight on it.

"Careful," said the pterodactyl, "that's a prosthetic arm. Some of your body was too mangled to recover. You took one serious fall, Lieutenant. I expect a full report soon."

The woman lowered her eyes. "I failed," she said in a raspy, pained voice, "because I was weak. That's all the report you need. You may as well kill me now."

"And waste all the good work and money spent on putting you back together? Nonsense." The reptile looked at her with an inscrutable expression. "Mai, you've just entered our organisation, and yet you already embody our ideals so well - perhaps too much so. You must learn to be more elastic. Strength always triumphs in the end, and yet the weak can use their own cowardly, underhanded methods to earn some fleeting, temporary wins. We would not be trying to rescue and free our Maestro again if it was not so. I knew that you had been defeated, or I would not have found you bloody, mutilated, beaten to an inch of your life in the middle of the desert. That was three days ago, by the way, right after one of our spy satellites picked up the dragon being summoned. But I also know that whatever the Dragon Balls have been used for, it's not something that has put a final stop on our plans. And that fool, Pilaf, is not King yet. So you must have done something. I am still ready to believe in you being a potential capable member of our organisation... conditionally, let's say."

Mai shook her head. "You don't get it, Colonel. That wasn't cowardly or underhanded. I was beaten, fair and square, by a straight up monster."

"Then all the more reason to make a full report." said Colonel Green. "That sounds like a potential danger. We believe in strength, but not all those who are strong do. And those hypocrites who don't, more than all, must be suppressed."

She answered nothing to this. She finally managed to get up, and take a full look at her new body. Most of it was like the old one - but where she could see her skin, it was covered in stitches and bruises, and where she couldn't, she felt them due to the continuous throbbing pain. But her right arm was cold metal now. She commanded it to move, with her thought, and it did. The fingers followed her every order with unerring precision. She realised she could probably do all that she'd ever learned to do with it - even more, perhaps. She had a sense of touch and of pain through it too, but it was dulled, and she thought that might actually be a feature. Once she got used to it she could react and protect it from harm without ever being paralysed by extreme pain. She gripped the edge of the bed, squeezed hard, and realised her newfound strength when she saw that her fingers had left dents into the metal.

"This is amazing." she muttered. "What is this from?"

"The Ribbon's science division, and specifically, our most genius bionicist, Dr. Gero." answered the Colonel. "Such spare parts for wounded soldiers are now standard issue to all our units. Too bad that the good Doctor himself isn't a member of our faction, he would be a great asset. But I'm afraid he's too taken with his scientific interests to be a reliable follower of any kind of higher ideal. The only thing he could earnestly put his life on the line for would be revenge on someone taking his funding from him." he concluded with a chuckle.

"Where are we going now?"

"I rescued you under the guise of a regular Red Ribbon operation," explained the other, "but of course, I can't bring you into just any of our bases, with your status as a defector. We will take you to a prison facility that is entirely controlled by our own - oh, yes, Lieutenant, we do have that much sway. It may have been a good thing that you didn't succeed this time. By next year, we will be in an even better position and will be able to move in full daylight. We won't need any subterfuge any more. Anyway, you'll be technically a prisoner there, but don't worry, you will have plenty of freedom. You will recover, and train, and have a chance to better learn about us, what we believe, and what we want. Oh, and, what is your favourite musical instrument?"

Mai blinked, confused by the sudden jump in topic. "I'm sorry, sir, what?"

The colonel laughed. "For your new codename, Lieutenant. After all, as we say: he is our Maestro, and we are but his Instruments. Mine is Piano, by the way. You can call me that from now on."

She stared into nothing for a while. "I don't know. I have never spent much time thinking about music. Choose one that you believe suits me, sir."

"Well, I say we go with Violin, then. Feels more... feminine."

"Won't you run out of names at some point?" asked the newly baptised Violin.

"We certainly have a lot of duplicates. But since we're not the type of organisation where you have frequently large assemblies of people talking all together, confusion is seldom an issue. By the way, you should know our salute before you get into the base. Will make you fit in quicker. Bit of a ritual, builds a sense of comradery and all that. So, when you see someone that you know for sure is one of our members, and providing you're absolutely, positively alone or only in presence of other known members, you beat your chest with your fist, like this," he demonstrated, "and then hold it in place, with the arm horizontal, like this. One of you says, He is our Maestro, and the other responds, And we are but his Instruments. And then both, all together: The world to the strong. Let's try this."

Mai moved her right arm, and she realised she had to exercise more care than she usually would have not to hurt her own chest when doing the gesture. Still, it came out pretty okay.

"He is our Maestro," said Piano.

"And we are but his Instruments," followed suit Violin.

The reptile smiled.

"The world to the strong!" said their voices in unison.

The mobile hospital van kept running on a sandy road, towards the hidden prison base.

And here it is, the final chapter of the Pilaf saga! This was really dense and really long, but I couldn't really find a good point where I felt like breaking it in two, so here we are. It also pretty much sets up a series of conflicts that you can imagine will have very far reaching consequences.

For anyone wondering: yes, Piano is THAT Piano. If you know Dragon Ball well enough, you should know who he is and who he serves, though his name is almost never said out loud in the original. What I did with him and his faction is a huge retcon compared to the original story, really, but I felt it was necessary to create more grounded motives for them, and also fix some inconsistencies that otherwise arise later in Dragon Ball Z (due, I'm sure, to Toriyama not originally planning all future developments).

As I said, I'm going into a bit of a hiatus now. The upcoming arc will be significantly more light-hearted than this chapter. I'm still in the planning phase but should get down to writing soon. I can't promise a specific update date, but hopefully in a month or so I'll be up to speed again. See you soon, and thanks for all the reviews!