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

Chapter 10 - Cake and the city

If departures are often tinted by excitement, returns are affairs usually pointed by either melancholy or weariness. Having come back from a metaphorical and literal trip through Hell and back, Bulma felt very little of the former, and an extremely concentrated dose of the latter. With an eye on the instrumentation she counted every single kilometre that separated her from home, her house, her things, even her obnoxious parents. They all seemed so far away by now, they barely felt real, even after just two weeks of globetrotting.

It is also said that you never truly return from a trip, because the you that comes back is not the same that departed. That, too, was a feeling Bulma was acutely aware of. Besides the part of her grey matter that had literally been magically replaced by a dragon deity after having been shot out by a renegade mercenary sniper, her entire worldview had been shaken to the core. She wanted to rest, sure; but she also was not sure whether she could rest, at this point, or ever again. There was so much to do. And nothing exemplified all the things which had completely revolutionised her world quite as much as the little boy who was sleeping, curled up in the seat next to her, snoring slightly, a magical wooden staff thrown across his shoulders and a monkey's tail dangling out of his trousers and occasionally reacting with small involuntary contractions, perhaps as he dreamed, either of the music of the celestial spheres or of punching someone.

Bulma grabbed the boy's unruly hair and gently pulled it. He opened his eyes.

"What happened?" he mubled, still sleepy.

"Nothing. But there's something interesting I want to show you."

Goku opened his eyes wide, suddenly attentive. "Where is it?"

"Not yet here. In a moment."

The kid pulled up on his chair, and one second later he seemed so fresh you wouldn't have been able to tell he was sleeping soundly just until moments ago.

"Is that our destination?" Goku pointed at a red dot on the navigation map that was getting discernibly closer at every moment. "Looks like we're almost there."

"Yes, just a few minutes now. And boy, am I happy to return home. Well, I am the one who's returning, of course." Bulma glanced at the compass, then slightly veered to the right. "For you, the trip is just beginning. There's so much I need to show you! In fact, I look forward to it. It'll be so much fun!"

She chuckled, but Goku stayed unfazed.

"I don't know if I'm going to be that surprised, you know." he said, brooding. "I have already gotten used to a lot of things. I had never seen capsules or flown, but now these are normal things to me. If I think about it, it's almost sad how quickly the novelty wears out."

"You sound like an old man." Bulma made a grimace that was her best impression of an old toothless granny. "You're supposed to be younger than me! You're, what? Thirteen, fourteen?"

Goku shrugged, and Bulma let the question fall.

"Anyway," she continued, "don't be too jaded. I'm ready to bet that I can still amaze you like never before!"

"But," Goku made a thoughtful face, "I wonder if any of that will truly help me understand better what I would or should do with a wish from the dragon. Perhaps it just is not something one can ever be sure about. I can not even decide what would be right to do about my grandfather, for example, your rather outrageous account of the afterlife notwithstanding."

"Don't start again with that!" cried Bulma, exasperated. "You've made your opinion quite clear. Of all people, I swear, that you wouldn't believe me..."

"I am just applying what you taught me." said the boy, calmly. "That claims require to be backed up by evidence, especially if they are extraordinary. It would not be epistemologically sound if I just let my friendship affect my judgement."

"How intellectually honest of you." snarled the girl. "You're really a great pupil. I swear, I get it, in principle I understand your point of view, but when you study the scientific method and learn to be wary of anecdotal evidence they never really bother taking into account the anecdotal evidence's feelings!"

"You said you could give me proof anyway."

"I said I could give you evidence." corrected Bulma. "Not final proof, perhaps, but I can make a verifiable prediction that could back up a part of my story. If that happens, I would really like it if at that point you brought into the whole thing also a little bit of trust."

Goku looked out of the window, carefully avoiding Bulma's eyes. "We'll see." he said, noncommittally.

"Yeah, that really reassures me. Let's forget about this business for now. Time for some amazement. Remember when we were in Oolong's village, and you asked me if that paltry assembly of a couple dozen people in mud huts was a city?"

"Yes."

"Well, open your eyes and look down there, as soon as we turn around that mountain."

Goku looked, and his usually plain expression slowly morphed into pure awe. His eyes widened and his jaw fell open.

In front of him were 600 squared kilometres of roads and concrete; thousands of skyscrapers over 100 metres tall, culminating in spherical summits; hundreds of thousands of vehicles, cars and planes, zipping across the buildings, their lights leaving streaks and trails in the darkening air of the twilight; and more than seven million people and their whole lives.

"That" said Bulma "is a city. West City. Welcome to my home."

Having lived for more than twenty years in the same house as her husband, Mrs. Panchy Briefs had made it a habit of hearing strange noises yet being unfazed by them. So, for example, on that day, she was baking a juicy sachertorte when she heard a mighty explosion that shook the house to its foundations.

"Honey," she asked, probing the cake with a toothstick to check whether it was ready, "is that you?"

"Yes, nothing to worry about, cutie pie!" answered a voice from the environmental speakers. "By the way, where did you put the fire extinguisher in the organic synthesis laboratory?"

"Oh, I believe it's under the fume hood table." she sighed. "You always leave those things where I trip on them."

The speakers went back to playing relaxing nature noises mixed to random musical chords, and Panchy decided that the sachertorte could still use five minutes in the oven.

Later on that day, Panchy had just washed her voluminous blonde hair, and was now applying hair mousse to keep it voluminous (the blondeness, thankfully, was still all natural). A blaring siren sound made her jump ever so slightly on her chair, but she quickly composed herself.

"Honey," she asked, still twisting her hair curls between her fingers, "is that you?"

"Yes, everything under control, cutie pie!" answered the speakers again. "Anyway, it would probably be safer if you didn't breathe for the next thirty seconds or so."

Panchy had to delay the inevitable sigh for a while, as she apparently needed the oxygen. She didn't mind too much anyway, as she couldn't stand the smell of the hair mousse. The music from the speakers was overcome by the noise of the powerful venting system kicking in and expelling all the air in the house to replace it with fresh one from outside. She was sure she had left some napkins out in the open in the kitchen - now that was going to be a disaster, they would fly all over the place.

It had come time to water the plants in the greenhouse when the powerful whoosh of landing jets almost made her spill some of it on the floor.

"Honey," she asked, with only the slightest hint of annoyance, "is that you?"

"No!" came a surprised voice from the speakers "It must be Bulma."

"It hasn't been Bulma for a while." pointed out the woman.

"Approximately two weeks, cutie pie. Go check on her."

Panchy left the watering can next to the greenhouse's door and reached the house's entrance. After thinking a bit about it, she went back to the kitchen, cut a big slice out of the freshly made sachertorte, and put it into a nice porcelain container, then walked back to the entrance. That nothing says home like a slice of handmade cake was one of her dearest beliefs.

Even before reaching the entrance, she heard the first thing that genuinely surprised her in that whole day - Bulma was chatting.

With a boy.

"...and how can they all eat anyway? The land is not enough!"

"Well, we import food from farmlands all over the world, there's thousands of trucks and trains that every day... hold on."

Bulma walked to the corridor door, stealthily, then suddenly opened it with a quick movement. Panchy stood in the arch, the porcelain container in one hand, smiling.

"Oh, please, I didn't want to interrupt." she said. "You seemed adorable."

"You've heard us for all of fifteen seconds and we were talking about the logistics of urbanisation, so I seriously doubt that." answered Bulma, sour. "What? Is this your welcome, mom, after I'm back from a two weeks long trip during which I intentionally avoided all communication with you?"

Panchy stood silent for a second, dumbfounded. "I brought cake!" she said finally, holding up the porcelain box.

"Well, thanks, that settles it!" Bulma threw her hands into the air. "Were you not worried? Not even a little?"

"Oh, my girl is super smart. I'm sure you can fend for yourself. Don't you agree she's smart too?" she said, addressing Goku.

"I do not have enough experience to compare her with a reasonable average," answered the kid, "but for what it's worth, she certainly seems very capable to me, if a bit reckless."

"Don't you help her now!" hissed Bulma under her breath.

"What? Am I supposed to say that you're stupid instead?" asked Goku puzzled.

"Yes! I mean no! Just say nothing at all. You will make things worse."

"He talks like a book!" squealed Panchy, delighted. "Bulma, where did you find yourself such a cute and clever boyfriend?"

"He's not my boyfriend!" snapped back the girl.

"I'm a boy and her friend," specified Goku, "but not for the purpose of mating."

"GOKU, I SWEAR IF YOU SAY ANOTHER WORD..."

The woman chuckled. "You're bantering! You're basically a couple already. You know what, I think I will leave you to it. Show your boyfriend around, Bulma, I'm sure you can have a lot of fun. Your father is downstairs in the lab as usual. You'll tell me how you met later, but good job there, I was really beginning to worry for you, you know?"

At this point, Bulma Briefs exploded.

"Oh, now THAT makes you worry!" she shrieked "Not the fact that I disappeared for two weeks after spending months studying old tomes and mumbling stuff about ancient lost magic and summoning eldritch dragon gods! Not the fact that I did not give any news of myself for all this time, and that at least three people tried to kill me, and one succeeded!"

Panchy at this seemed about to interject, but was submerged by her daughter's now completely unbridled outburst.

"Scratch that - I'm not explaining it, you'll have to figure it out by yourself. No, what made you really worry was the prospect that I could possibly end up a lonely spinster and never give you a grandchild - the horror! So yes, whatever, if this is what you want to hear from me, sure! Goku is my boyfriend, we had a long romantic holiday together, and now I'm not showing him around the house, we're going upstairs to my bedroom and staying in there for the rest of the afternoon!"

And said this, she snatched the dish with the sachertorte from her mother's hand, made a half turn on her heels and walked towards the stairs, pulling Goku behind her by one arm, basically dragging him.

"And if it wasn't clear," she screamed when she was midway up the ramp, "WE'RE HAVING SEX!"

"Well you be careful, Bulma." said Panchy, melodious. "I can do without a grandchild until you're a bit older."

"I didn't get that." said Goku, who had been reduced to silence by the unfamiliar feeling of not having the faintest idea of what the hell everyone was talking about. "What are we having?"

"Cake." muttered Bulma, throwing him a furious look. "We're having cake."

Goku wasn't sure what cake was either, but at this point he didn't feel like asking was the best course of action.

"Welcome home, Bulma!" said Dr. Briefs' cheerful voice through the speakers.

"You heard all of that, didn't you, dad?" asked Bulma. "Why didn't you say anything? What's your excuse?"

A long silence. "It felt like a very mother-daughter thing." said the speakers, finally.

"Ha, sure, dad. Whatever. I need to perform some rather advanced data queries and analysis, I'm going to access the Capsule Corporation servers, do you have a problem with that?"

"Not at all. In fact," he added, "you might help me put Caroline to the test."

"Caroline? What, you have a secretary now?"

"In a manner of speaking, sweetie." said the man. "Caroline is our new AI assistant. She runs the servers and handles data access, plus is an excellent help around the house. Caroline, say hello to Bulma!"

There was a second of static, then the speakers talked with a calm, smooth, feminine voice: "Hello, Bulma. Nice to meet you. I'm Caroline, and I will assist you in your searches."

The girl frowned a bit. "Uh, nice to meet you, Caroline. Dad, how intelligent are we talking about? Should I worry about not hurting her feelings or making her work unreasonably?"

"Nothing that drastic, don't worry, sweetie. She's absolutely safe. Her hardware is very powerful, but it's overkill; she's just clever enough to pass for a human in a trivial conversation, is all. And anyway, she's boxed out in her own machine and does not have any admin passwords to the vital stuff. If she were to try and make three mistakes on any of them, there's a physical switch that will explode and destroy her hard drive."

"You do realise" said Bulma, alarmed, "that the fact that you felt the need to install these security features is not reassuring, yes?"

Dr. Briefs paused for a moment. "She's safe." he repeated. "What is it that you wanted to access anyway?"

"The Radio Astronomy Monitoring database."

"Oh, but you don't have access credentials, now, do you? You can use my account. The password is yours, mine, and your mother's birth dates hashed together with a MD5 algorithm and chained with..."

"The password is 'bubblegum'." interrupted Bulma. "At least the one I set up for my backdoor account when I cracked the system for fun one year ago. And you shouldn't set up paranoid security systems with ludicrously complicated passwords if then you're going to spell them out on a wireless unencrypted speaker system that anyone could listen to, Caroline included."

"Oh, dear." said Dr. Briefs after a moment's thought. "Now I have to change them all over again."

The speakers shut down. Bulma pinched her forehead and took a deep breath, then sighed loudly.

"Are you alright?" asked Goku.

"Sure." she shook her head, and led Goku to her room. "Let's look for that evidence I promised."

Goku's jaded certainty that he would not be amazed by anything any more quickly crumbled in front of the various items he found inside Bulma's room - in turn a Newton's cradle, a plasma ball lamp, a slinky, and a giant bunny plushie that was, in his own words, "the softest thing he had ever touched". Bulma suggested that if he wanted to, he could keep it, given that her recent experiences with rabbits made her feel uncomfortable about sleeping with one in her bed; that brought back some memories that made Goku gloomy, so in order to cheer him up and make up for her blunder, Bulma introduced him to the wonderful world of toy drones. Goku recognised it as something similar to what Shu had used to invite them to Pilaf's palace, except this time he could control it. It took him a few minutes to get the hang of it, and then he was able to fly it almost perfectly. His hand-eye coordination and sense for precision movements were so brilliant that Bulma started dreading the possibility of ever introducing him to videogames, and whether that would mean creating with her own hands a monster that she would never be able to beat. Regardless, she needed to turn the computer on now, and not for the sake of playing. After booting was over, Caroline's beautiful voice resonated throughout the room.

"Hello, Bulma. What do you want to do today?"

"Please access the Radio Astronomy Monitoring database for me. Give me a prompt to input the credentials."

"Understood. Did you know? Passwords entered through this system are encrypted end-to-end and I can not read them."

"Fantastic." Bulma quickly typed something and pressed the return key. "Do your thing."

Goku walked up to the girl's chair, casually commanding the drone with one hand so it would hover placidly around his head.

"What are you doing? Is it about the evidence you mentioned?"

"Indeed it is. I'll have to explain this one. Remember when I talked to you about electromagnetic waves, how they travel and all that?" "Yes, pretty much." confirmed Goku.

"Perfect. Caroline, show us the radio astronomy sites map."

A low colour world map appeared on the screen, a few dots here and there coloured in bright red. "This is a map showing the positions of the main satellite dish facilities owned by Capsule Corporation. These are big antennas, devices meant to receive electromagnetic waves from space. We use them for communication, mostly; to record radio waves sent by our own devices in space. Remember space?"

"The place where you said this Frieza guy is?" asked tentatively the kid.

"That, but this part of it is much closer. It's just a few kilometres above our heads. You could get there with your cloud in a few minutes if you travelled upwards... uh, now that I think about it, that's an interesting experiment to make. Anyway. Thing is, now and then, we've happened to catch some signals that covered and mixed up our transmissions. Any guesses as to what that was?"

Goku thought about it for a while. "Other transmissions?"

"Not all of them. Most were just random natural phenomena - stars and stuff. But some did indeed sound suspiciously like transmissions from space. Which seemed a pretty big deal to us, so we set up a radio astronomy program - using our satellite dishes to scan the entire sky and see where and when did these disturbances come from."

"But if they're from space, does that mean there's other people up there who uses the same machines to communicate that you do?"

"Similar ones, at least." Bulma shrugged. "But thing is, we never got definite proof. We certainly mapped the disturbances, and we had a strong feeling that they were artificial in nature, but couldn't decode any of them. So we couldn't rule out that they were just some random natural form of noise. Weird, but possible. Now however we have something to search for. Caroline!"

"Yes, Bulma?" answered promptly the AI.

"Perform a phonetic match search. Tolerance level medium, pattern spelling: F-R-I-E-Z-A."

"As you wish."

The computer started processing, and a progress bar appeared on screen.

"Prediction:" announced Bulma, "if I am not lying, that name must be an important conversation topic out there, and must appear in a number of them. I know that's how it's pronounced because I was told that explicitly."

"You could have heard it sometimes while searching the database," suggested Goku, "and then dug it up from your memory for your vision."

"Ha-ha, clever but no. The entire database is several terabytes of audio data, more than I could have listened to in multiple times my life. We must always search it automatically. So if it pops up in enough different soundbites, it's going to be highly unlikely or outright impossible that I did the extrapolation work all on my own. It's not water tight, but I hope you can take this as a serious enough hint that there's at least something true in my story."

Goku thought about it a bit. "I agree," he concluded, "the only alternative I see is if you were trying to deceive me, and I don't think you would do that."

"Your trust is touching. Now let's wait for a few minutes."

Bulma tapped her fingers nervously and kept throwing glances at the progress bar as it filled, hoping that somehow her extremely intense stare would speed up the process. Goku had his drone perform loop de loops, a feat it was never designed for. It managed two before crashing on Bulma's head due to having spent too long in a stall position.

"Will you stop... oh, it's finished!"

An endless list of hits filled the screen. The confidence for each match exceeded 95% as far as she could see.

"What the..." Bulma kept pushing the down arrow and scrolling the list, and the matches were still almost perfect. The total number apparently was over ten thousand.

"That's a lot." commented Goku.

"No joke. Let's try listening to one."

The sound was disturbed, but they could still distinguish some structured vocalisations amidst all the white noise. It was that they necessarily sounded like voices, but they definitely sounded like something. They would say something resembling a normal syllable, and then just a bunch of unpronounceable noises. And then they said Frieza. It was distinctly recognisable amidst all the gibberish. One, two, three times; they seemed to speed up their talking, even, as if they were getting heated up.

Bulma pushed the cursor a few lines down. "Let's try another."

In this one, the voices were far more high pitched. Their pronunciation was sharp, long and slightly broken, more like Freee-za, but it was still obviously the same word.

Bulma quickly skimmed through the next few clips. They heard voices that sounded like wet gurgling and shrill metallic scratching, fast and slow, but all of them managed in their own way to pronounce that word; Frieza. Bulma also noticed that many of these, even from different vocal apparatuses, seemed to speak in patterns that had something in common among themselves. If there was a universal lingua franca, there was some hope of at least capturing the essentials of its phonetics and syntax by running a cross-referencing analysis over the entire database. They had tried something like that, of course, and some correlation was found, but she should go over it again and run more in-depth analyses now that she was reasonably sure there actually was something to it.

"They sound scared." observed Goku, fascinated. These two voices were like the frantic clicking of a telegraph.

"Don't let appearances deceive you." warned him Bulma. "You're anthropomorphising and projecting your expectations on them. We don't know how these aliens sound normally, what are their cues. It's impossible to tell if they're scared, happy, or what."

"I see." the boy nodded. "But can we tell then if this Frieza person is truly dangerous? For all we know, they may be praising how wise and just his rule is."

"Heh, doubt that, just out of a reasonable statistic extrapolation for emperors, overlords and tyrants of various sorts." said Bulma, sneering. "But good point anyway. I think I know how to check. Caroline, compute basic statistical measures and a monthly time histogram of pattern occurrence frequency for all sources."

"Running now." answered the machine.

"I'm having it compute a few stats on these results." explained the girl, spinning her chair backwards to face Goku. "Some of these sources have been recorded constantly throughout the years, but some have disappeared."

"If they were killed by him," said Goku, "you expect them to have mentioned his name right before the end?"

"Yes, obviously. They would be giving orders, trying to mount a resistance, something. Hold on. Here's the results. Average life of each source after the name is first detected: ten years, which is pretty good considering we've been recording only for twelve, but that includes a lot of sources that are simply still emitting, and not all of them have been recorded since the beginning of the program. Number of disappeared sources where the name is detected with a highly increased frequency right before the disappearance..."

She became pale.

"That can't be right. Not in such a short time."

Goku tried to read the screen, but there were too many numbers. Bulma silently pointed at a spot in the screen, where the result was.

19.

"Nineteen planets? That's more than one per year." muttered Goku. "Is that a lot?"

"A lot? Goku, a planet is... we're on a planet, okay? Everything you've ever seen, everyone you've ever met, is just in a small corner of one single planet. Imagine all of that, and all that you've never seen in this world, destroyed. Times nineteen."

Goku was silent for a moment. "I can't." he concluded.

"Exactly. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuck. We need to start figuring stuff out. We needed to start, like, yesterday. Let's go downstairs and begin." Bulma got up from her chair brusquely, sending it spinning. She then turned to Goku, and saw him fidgeting with his hands, very composed, but his eyes were sort of straying here and there.

"You want to say something." she stated. "What is it? I can give you five minutes. Tops."

"That thing you said we're having..." started the boy.

Bulma squinted. "Cake."

"That. Can I see what it is? I'm curious. I know it's important to go but..."

"Oh, yeah, no problem. It's just a really good thing you can eat. It's there."

She pointed at the porcelain container that she had taken from her mom's hands. Goku carefully lifted the lid, and found himself in front of a wonderfully smelling, still warm slice of sachertorte, oozing melted chocolate and apricot jam. He gulped audibly.

"It does not seem healthy." he said, weakly.

"Goku, with your feats, you probably have the metabolism of a small power plant, and I swear I'm going to give you the workout of your life today. So just wolf down the damn thing and don't think about it for once."

"Ok. Here I go..."

Now that she had finished baking, caring for her hair, and gardening, Panchy could finally get some well-deserved rest in her couch, watching her favourite TV program. Like an old friend, the host, Mrs. Homely, appeared on screen and announced today's topics. They would interview a master baker, discuss an innovative permanent technology with one of the chemists that had created it, and report from the annual Best Flowerbed Championship. The opening theme had just started playing when an exalted cry echoed from upstairs.

"SO GOOD!" screamed the boyish voice.

Panchy smiled and shook her head. Ah, to be young!

"Experimental subject #1!" Bulma, arms spread, stood in the middle of a vast underground lab, littered with heavy equipment bolted into the floor and smaller devices mounted on carts. "Herein begins our scientific venture. You have the privilege of being the first test subject in what will possibly be mankind's most important journey of discovery since the taming of fire. In these rooms, we will unlock the deepest secrets of power, push the human body beyond its limits, seek the strength necessary to defend this planet from any evildoer who might want it gone, and ultimately aim at defeating death itself! In you, subject #1, is the potential to do all this! It will not be easy, nor painless, nor quite as safe as the standards of ethics-approved academic research would require it to be. But here, subject #1, we write history! Today, I declare open the the Capsule Corporation Human Enhancement Program!"

Capsule Corporation Human Enhancement Program, day 1

"That sounded like you may have set yourself some exceedingly tall objectives." observed Goku.

"Always start ambitious!" proclaimed Bulma, proudly, arms perched against her sides. "If you don't shoot high, you will get nothing at all."

"I see your point. But what's this about not being safe?"

"Oh, that. I don't have any machines dedicated to measuring human strength," explained the girl, "and even if I did, I doubt they'd have enough range to measure yours. So we're going to improvise with these around here. I'll build new stuff more fit for purpose as we go."

The room was littered with massive, extremely tough-looking devices. Most of them looked like the maws of mechanical monsters, full of jagged teeth and tubular ligaments and muscles made of hydraulic pistons ready to clench and chew.

"What are these used for usually?" asked Goku.

"Uh, crushing concrete, ripping metal bars to shreds." answered the other casually. "That sort of stuff."

"Why would you do that?"

"To test how resistant they are. Naturally," she hurriedly added, "with you we will take a different approach. Now, we need to decide on a working plan. First, let's fix our objectives. I already stated mine. Do you have anything that you plan to obtain? It would be nice to work around your interests too."

Goku thought about it a bit. "I have never considered my strength as anything unusual." he said. "So I would need to know how exactly it is different from yours to know better what to look for. But if you think I have some special factor or power within me, I guess understanding it better would help me create new techniques."

Bulma had pulled out a notebook and started writing down. "Alright. That sounds feasible. Anything that you're interested in on a more... theoretical level? Some specific knowledge you would like to acquire?"

The boy shrugged. "To lack knowledge also often means to lack knowledge of what is best to know. I can not tell beforehand what will interest me. If I have to think of something - I already know my body very well; I would not be much of a martial artist otherwise. But it would perhaps be more correct to say, my body knows itself. My conscious self knows little about those workings, except how to instinctively rely on them. Any more explicit knowledge could be both useful and dangerous to me."

Bulma frowned. "Dangerous? How so?"

"Overthinking slows down reactions, in battle." explained Goku. "My grandpa always said, if you ever think that you should use a certain technique, don't. The only right technique to use is the one you don't even have to think about. Knowledge alone is not sufficient to reach that stage - that is mastery. Something he really had much more than me."

"Well, so you will have to be wise about this - something I believe you shouldn't have much trouble with. Good thing that you shouldn't really fight anyone in the foreseeable future. But that's some excellent starting points for our work! Understanding your body is something that definitely falls within my interests too, so we can work on that. This also gives me some pointers on where to start for your education."

"Education?"

"Well, sure. Books, Goku. Loads and loads of books for you to read. I'll work you to the bone with experiments and tests, but meanwhile you also need to study. You're too clever not to give a hand, and your own perspective should be extremely valuable once you know what we're talking about. As a starting list, I'd say you need the fundamentals on medicine, physiology, biology, and probably chemistry. Putting together all the things we already know about the human body and its abilities, so that we can start from there."

"However, this is knowledge about the human body." pointed out the boy. "I have a tail, that no one else seems to have. I may have powers that make me... dangerous. On certain circumstances. That points to the possibility of me not being human. That knowledge might not apply."

"Perhaps," said Bulma, "but I would not be so drastic. For someone who is not a human, you look, act, and function an awful lot like a human. You eat, drink, sleep, and, I assume, uh..."

"Excrete." completed the boy.

"...yeah, exactly. You talk and think like a human too. Consider this: if you were not a human, what could you be?"

Goku thought about this for a while. "I could be another animal of some kind. Just very human-like."

"Ok. Or? More hypotheses."

"I could be a human that has changed into something else. Possibly, as the effect of some kind of magic."

"Not bad. Anything else?"

"You said there are other creatures out there, in space. We heard their voices." remembered the boy. "I could be one of them, who happened to end up here."

"Well, let's consider these three then. You're a non-human animal, you're a mutant, you're an alien. Out of these three, two mean that you're still very closely related to a human. Animals are similar to humans, some more than others, and apes are the most similar of all. If you were some other kind of ape, you would have a lot to share with us. As for mutants, magical or not, they would be humans with some extra steps. So, our knowledge would still be relevant. The alien hypothesis is perhaps the most interesting. All the aliens I saw in the afterlife were very non-human in looks, and as you heard, their voices are equally unusual. What do you think would be the likelihood of two species of aliens completely independently getting to the point of looking perfectly alike, except for a tail?"

Goku thought about it a bit. "Not much, I imagine. Unless the gods created us on purpose this way."

"The gods are a possibility I now have to consider," Bulma pouted a bit at this, "and that's bad because they throw a wrench in every reasoning - for every question the answer could always be 'the gods did it' and leave it at that. But if I never even realised they were around, there's a reason, and that's that the world seems to tick perfectly fine without their intervention. So from now on I will operate under an assumption that I will call divine minimalism - the gods, whatever their motives and numbers, mostly do their own business and are content with not intervening, except in extraordinary cases and for unfathomable reasons. Under this logic, I think we can safely say that it's much more likely that you are simply some kind of mutated human, or at least related to us, rather than an alien."

"It could be wrong, though." noted Goku. "This assumption is purely your own idea - in fact, it sounds like it is your own wish."

"It could be wrong, but then, what could possibly be right?" she sighed. "If the gods like to play havoc with the most common rules of logic, we're done for anyway. What usually gets us through day in day out isn't relying on the gods, but figuring stuff out for ourselves and using it to live better. It works, one way or another, so I'm not ready to give it up just yet. Anyway, since we're talking about being human... I have a test we can do immediately to have a better idea of this. Come with me."

They walked out of the heavy equipment lab, and into a smaller one. There were a lot of flasks and cans ordered on shelves, a sink, a fume hood, a glovebox, a microscope and various other chemistry implements.

"This is our preparation lab. Not usually meant for biology, but we have all the basics." Bulma grabbed a sterile syringe and ripped it out of its envelope, then only took its needle. "Would you mind if I just prick your finger?"

In response, Goku extended his hand and index finger, and exposed it to the needle. Bulma tried to sting it multiple times - each time, she would push, and the needle would just bend without penetrating the kid's skin.

"You know what? You do it." she said, handing the needle to Goku. He deftly picked it between thumb and index fingers of the other hand, pushed, and quickly drew a few drops of blood without any fuss.

"How is it that when I do it you... nevermind. Just let the blood fall on this piece of glass, there. Push it well. Okay. Now I will put it inside this microscope - this is a lens that allows you to see stuff magnified to a really amazing level. So you will be able to see how your blood looks like if made one thousand times bigger."

"How should it look like?" inquired Goku. "Like blood, right? It's just... a red liquid."

"Hah! You'll be surprised. Put your eyes here, see..."

Goku put his eyes to the microscope's twin eyepieces. Inside, thousands of red disc-shaped objects floated and stacked themselves on top of each other. They formed columns in various directions counting each dozens of them. Some other things were smaller, other were clearer. At one point, an amorphous blob slid through the spaces between the other things. It stopped one moment, like a hound sniffing the air for prey, then it deformed itself into a nearby opening and kept flowing around, like a living puddle.

"I've got things!" said Goku, alarmed. "In my blood."

"That's normal." Bulma laughed. "I'll tell you more. That's human. Or at least, pretty common for creatures born on this planet."

She leaned on the microscope and looked for herself.

"Yep." she confirmed. "I'm not a doctor but to me that looks like human blood. Well, there's much better exams to try, but this is a beginning."

They walked back to the other laboratory. Bulma started listing a series of books that Goku should check out of the Capsule Corporation library and start reading, covering the various topics he needed some knowledge on. By the time they arrived, she had already assigned him basically two college degrees worth of books. Goku didn't do much beyond nodding at each new title.

"...and that's why I think it would be really useful for you to read Advanced Quantum Field Theory." she concluded.

"I will try to keep up with all this. What is your plan for today, though?"

Bulma walked to one of the machines - a massive hydraulic press.

"We will start with this I think." explained the girl as she patted the metallic cylinders. "I want to get a sense of your strength, first thing. I also have some trigger sensors so we can time your running speed."

She grinned.

"You'll see." she said. "We will get this all sorted out in no time at all!"

And I'm back from my hiatus! Sorry for the wait, but I needed some time to put order in my ideas - hopefully it'll be fruitful. This new arc will be rather lighthearted, and it will take the place of Dragon Ball's original training arc on Muten Roshi's island. It's also going to be a bit of a challenge because I will try to make Bulma's research as realistic as I could possibly think researching spiritual energy could be, while still keeping the story engaging. I hope you will keep enjoying it!

Chrono Mitsurugi: I can see why you'd find that particular development anticlimactic... I guess it feels a bit like there's not much payoff for all the effort that was put in. But consider that, had Goku not fought off and defeated Mai, she would have been the one to get to the wish anyway. I also wanted to use it as an opportunity to develop Pilaf's character. This won't be the last we see of him.