Chapter 29 – Tails of Invention Part 1
"Miles Prower! What do you think you're doing?" Bulma was standing in the doorway of Tails' lab, hands on hips, glaring at the fox in question. The morning sunlight was spilling in through the window, but it just illuminated the mess.
Tails slowly stirred. He'd been slumped over his desk, reference books and stacks of notes piled up around him while at several computer monitors flickered from standby as his movements jolted their computers' input interfaces. One was showing a rotating wire-frame of some sort of complex shape that folded in on itself then expanded, and another was reading out columns of numbers.
There were things unrelated to his work too, a stack of unopened fan mail teetered off to one side, delivered by the mail screening service the Briefs family used, and several half-finished mugs of mint tea were scattered around the disaster zone. The fox himself was face down in a plate full of half eaten chicken sandwich.
"Uhh... Oh, good even... morning Bulma." He yawned as he pulled a particularly tenacious piece of lettuce off his face.
"Good morning he says..." Bulma heaved a long suffering sigh as she strode over. "This is the tenth time in the last three weeks I've found you like this!"
"Actually, no." Tails looked thoughtful. "I'm sure last time it was a ham sandwich."
"This isn't a joking matter!" Bulma maintained her air of annoyance.
"I'm not joking, it really was a ham sandwich!"
The blue haired wrench wench gave another deep sigh, and sat down on a nearby lab stool. "Look, Tails, I know just how eager you are to solve all the problems with building your dimensional generator, but working yourself until you drop isn't the right way to go about it. I've pulled the occasional all-nighter myself when I had some idea in my head I had to put together, but you're doing it night after night.
"If you're tired, you're going to make mistakes, and even if you manage to get everything right, by the time you go home you won't be fit for anything. You haven't sparred or even trained since we came back from Master Roshi's..." She sniffed. "For that matter when did you last bathe? Or have a meal that didn't come between two slices of whole-wheat?"
"Uh..." Tails thought about it, and Bulma cut him off. "I thought so. You are coming with me mister, even if I have to drag you! You are going to clean yourself up, and then you are going to sit down to a full cooked breakfast!"
Tails started to protest, then his stomach made it's own views known with a gurgling rumble. He got up, stretching and working his shoulders to work the aches and pains of his unusual sleeping position out. "I'm sorry, I was just finishing something."
He rummaged through the debris on a nearby bench and handed her a device with a bare circuit board with various various components attached, all mounted on a backing board. The whole thing was about the size of a hardback book.
"It's fairly basic, but it proves the concept. Press the button and drop it."
Puzzled, Bulma found the obvious push button in the centre of the board and did as Tails asked. There was a puff of pink smoke, and in it's place was a metre square crate.
"You made your own Capsule? But how? Dad doesn't let even me see the designs!"
"I didn't use anyone's design, I built it from first principles!"
Bulma shook her head. Capsule Corps monopoly on Capsule technology was what had made it the world's biggest company. Dad was going to want to see this. But that didn't mean she wasn't going to drag Tails to the bathroom to get cleaned up, and down to breakfast with the family first.
After breakfast had been cleared away (Bulma's mother was relaxed about most things, but she had an iron clad rule about no technical discussions during meal times) Bulma explained what Tails had done, and the fox in question demonstrated his working model. Doctor Briefs was stunned.
"I never imagined anyone else would... The big question is why?"
Tails picked up the proto-Capsule and turned it over in his hands as he explained.
"Several reasons. To start with, it's implicit in dimensional theory, the creation of pocket dimensions I mean, and a fairly simple application of it. While I may have all the knowledge I need to design my portal generator right now, there's always things you only find out when you apply the theory to real hardware. No matter how neat the theory is, or how pretty the design, until you can press a button and see it work, it isn't really real."
The pair of Briefs, father and daughter, nodded. They were engineers and inventors themselves and understood exactly where Tails was coming from.
"The fact that you already build them indicated that, unlike the portal generator, a Capsule could be built with contemporary technology. Building one myself actually helped me figure out a couple of ways to use local tech where I was sure I'd have to develop Mobian systems. Plus, now that I have my proof of concept, I was hoping I could compare my development notes with yours, to provide another reality check for the theory side of things."
Doctor Calvin Klein Briefs sighed. "I'd be only too happy to, except for the fact that there _are_ no notes. I developed the original Capsule system by accident while trying to design a better coffee percolator. I spent five years developing it by trial and error to figure out how to make a practical product. I understood what it does well enough, but not how it does it."
Bulma looked as surprised as Tails. Even she'd never heard this.
"Well you do now." Tails recovered quickly and gestured towards his workshop. "All my development notes are on the computer in the lab. I've worked out the parameters to pretty much design a pocket dimension to order. Actually, it's also given me ideas for developments, things that would probably be useful in themselves, and help me develop the portal generator. First there's the Capsule detector. It should be able to detect an active Capsule within a dozen or so metres, maybe more, and more importantly, identify a particular quantum resonance signature."
Seeing their inquiring looks he explained. "Every universe has a unique pad-print, a quantum resonance pattern embedded in it's structure at the vacuum energy level and created when the universe is first formed. For a Capsule pocket dimension, the signature will be primarily determined by the reaction of dimensional energies on the molecular flaws in the emitter."
"So, each Capsule has a unique signature that is embedded in the very structure of the device?" Doctor Briefs mused. "I wish I'd known that back when we were first developing capsules. Red Ribbon Technologies almost managed to lobby us out of existence because there was no secure way of tracking a particular capsule or even detecting one."
"Well there is now, or there will be." Tails replied brightly. "And developing it and testing it on Capsules will help me develop the techniques for detecting parallel universes and creating a dirigible emitter array to interface with them."
"The second idea is a multi-pocket array, like the one I built for the Sea Fox batteries. But rather than being just a load of independent Capsules strapped together, this will be a single Capsule system, and only slightly bigger than a regular one. Rather than needing a Capsule for each item, you could sell related sets of items. It would be like a Mobian Army knife."
He started to explain the reference, but quickly found out that while the name was different, they had a similar thing on Chikyuu. So he moved on.
"The last idea I had was what I call the endless fuel tank. You create a big pocket dimension, and keep it active. In it you can store a liquid or gas, and since the pocket is all the space there is, you wouldn't even need a containment vessel. Apart from quantum tunnelling, nothing gets in or out, so there's no heat exchange or leakage. So you could store cryogenic liquids or high pressure gasses as easily as water."
He gave a wry smile. "Even radiation doesn't cross the dimensional barrier, which means I didn't need to mess about with Faraday cages to hide the dragon-balls. As long as they were in a Capsule, they were undetectable. But that's not important any longer. For the endless fuel tank, you do need some way in and out. The answer is a little pocket dimension that flips back and forth several thousand times a second, synchronising first with our dimension and then with the container dimension. The whole thing would look like a valve about the size of this sausage."
He picked up a left-over sausage with his fork and held it in front of him. "Of course, it would only allow passage of a continuous medium, anything solid would get chopped up when the interface disconnects from one universe and connects to the other."
He bit into the sausage, possibly as a demonstration, and continued (after chewing and swallowing, of course).
"It would be the first step towards generating and synchronising a stable dimensional interface that I could take a vehicle through. And from my tests so far, all these things can be built with present day technology. It's like I can't build a suborbital spacecraft, but I can build hot air balloons, and the data they'll give me will help me to build the sub-orbital spacecraft when I have the materials."
Doctor Briefs had been impressed with the fox before, and was now even more so. If Tails could deliver, and the gadget in his hands said he could, all three inventions seemed eminently practical, and massively profitable. Plus, more importantly, he could invent even more awesome things based off them.
"That's as may be." Bulma wagged her own fork at Tails. "But from now on you only spend eight hours a day in the workshop, nine at most. Are we clear?"
The little orange fox who had faced robots, monsters and armies without showing fear, quailed at that fork of admonition. "Yes, I'll be good."
Once Bulma put her expensively clad foot down, his daily routine changed. She made sure he followed the eight two one rule. Eight hours of sleep, two proper meals, and one shower. She also made good on her intent to limit his work day, hauling him out bodily, or rather getting Yamcha to do it, the first couple of times.
That convinced Tails to put at least a couple of hours a day into keeping up his training. He was still strong, fast and tough beyond the dreams of any regular human, but the ease with which Yamcha man-handled (or rather fox-handled) him showed how he'd let the hard trained edge that he'd built up during the dragon-ball hunt slip.
It was during one of those before breakfast morning sessions that Bulma came to find him. He was out on the massive open lawn that surrounded the Briefs residence, surrounded by training robots, most holding disposable targets that he was demolishing with great gusto as he jumped, flew and spun around the area.
She cupped her hands to her mouth. "Tails! I need to talk!"
He dropped lightly to the ground in front of her, barely breathing hard, and she saw he was wearing a harness with a small backpack over the training gi he normally used.
"Hey, isn't that one of the lift belts they were developing?" Bulma grinned. "I didn't think you'd ever need any help flying!"
"That's not what I'm using it for." Tails took her hand gently and pulled it towards him, and she felt it get heavier as it got close to him. "I reversed the polarisation, so rather than creating a pocket of zero gravity or even inverted gravity, it creates increased gravity. It's like Master Roshi's Turtle training, but more so as my own body is the extra weight. I've currently got it set to twice normal. That way I can get the most out of my training time.
"At first I thought I might have to build a room like the ones they're building for micro-gravity materials manufacture, but this was more efficient. I mean, it would be pretty wasteful, building a huge high gravity chamber just for martial arts training, especially as it might get damaged if you were training at a high level. I'm hoping to reach three gravities before I go home."
That made Bulma pause for a second. Tails was normally so self-effacing and polite that you tended to forget he was a world class martial artist. The fact that he'd been pulling off Tailspin Attacks, jumping twice his own height and doing Shadow Images at a gravity level most people would find it hard to walk in hammered that fact home. However, he needed someone to protect him from other hazards.
"Okay, that's pretty impressive, but that wasn't what I wanted to talk about. You know those companies who've been making merchandise with your name or picture on it?"
"Oh yeah, there was stuff like that in South city. What about them?"
"Aren't you mad? They're making a ton of money off your image, and you're not seeing a zeni from it." She might never have wanted for money herself, but that didn't mean she'd stand by and see someone else being robbed, and what these crooks were doing was robbery.
Tails didn't seem worried. "I've hardly spent any of the money I had from the pirate treasure, even with all the gear I got for going back to Mobius. In fact, if I read that report those trust fund people sent me, investing it in Capsule Corps means I've now got more money than I started with!"
While Bulma was the trustee for the fund, the actual management was taken care of by professional accountants. She'd been worried about their decision to invest it in her father's company, afraid it would seem unfair, but Tails had been happy with it. After all, a lot of the expansion the funding would assist was due to technologies Tails had given them, and as he said, if he wasn't willing to back his own ideas, why should anyone else? She got back to the matter at hand.
"Still, they're stealing from you, so I got in touch with the legal firm Capsule Corps has on retainer, Howel, Gutham and Chou. They're a real bunch of wolves. If anyone can make those crooks pay up, it's those guys. They're ready to go collect, but they need your go ahead."
!"What do they plan to do?"
"Sue them to get all the money they made off you illegally, of course." Bulma looked satisfied.
Tails thought for a moment, and then about how he'd seen Capsule Corps worked. "But it's really the people in charge we want to punish. If you take too much money, won't their whole company shut down? I don't want people to lose their jobs just because they're working for the wrong person. To be honest, I don't mind if they make stuff, as long as it's good."
Bulma shook her head. "I guess I should have expected you'd say something like that. Okay, I'll talk to the lawyers and make sure we punish the guilty without hurting their employees."
"Great!" Tails agreed, then went back to his training routine.
In fact, Bulma was wrong. Only the senior partners Mr Howel and Mr Gutham were wolves, Mr Chou was a bulldog. But it was Mr Howel who personally served Goldmine Manufacturing, one of the biggest offenders, with the writs they'd compiled.
He entered the office of one Sora Oudoukou, the managing director of Goldmine, over the protests of his secretary.
The MD was reading through the monthly sales reports. He'd been worried that since Miles Prower had failed to do anything suitably photogenic or blatantly newsworthy in the last few weeks that the various merchandising lines might start to fall off in popularity. He needn't have.
It was well known that the fox was holed up in Capsule Corps, and combined with the spate of new products Capsule Corps was announcing, it was clear to the densest person what he was up to. All this had combined to give him an air of mystery and coolness that had increased sales. The demand for fake double fox tails was enough that they should really ramp up production...
"Mr Oudoukou?"
He looked up to see a lean wolf who's grey fur matched the grey worsted of his immaculate business suit.
"Who are you? I don't remember any appointment!" Sora glared at the intruder, but it washed off the wolf like a gentle wave off granite.
"I am Mr Howel of Howel, Gutham and Chou, and as I explained to your secretary, it would be to your advantage to see me now, rather than later, in a court of law."
"Court of law?" Soar blustered. He knew of the law firm, but weren't they... "We don't have any dealings with Capsule Corps."
"While my firm handles various legal matters for Capsule Corps, in this case we have been retained on behalf of one Miles 'Tails' Prower. You have made a considerable sum off his name and image without his permission. Fortunately, our client is willing to be lenient."
The wolf opened his briefcase and dropped a sheaf of paper on Sora's desk. "Twenty five percent of all profits from the sale of goods past and future using his identity, plus an additional punitive payment of a further twenty five percent of the profits on all products sold before this date. All payments to be checked by an independent form of auditors, of course. Oh, and veto authority on all current product lines and any future products."
"WHAT!" The MD roared. "You can't just come in here and extort money out of me like this!"
"Extort is a very specific legal term." the wolf replied evenly. "You are, of course at liberty to refuse my client's extremely reasonable requests. In which case you will be presented with this instead."
He dropped a second, even thicker sheaf of paperwork on Sora's desk. "Cease and desist order for all manufacturing of Miles Prower branded products. Order to impound all existing stocks of such products pending a court determination of their legality. A writ to command your presence in court to answer a civil case as to what right you had to use Mr Prower's image, an order to hand over your books to a court appointed auditor..."
The managing director spluttered out. "This is lunacy! This is madness!"
"This is a subpoena." Mr Howel responded. "Of course, if it goes to court, your company, and you personally being reduced to penury by the fines will be the least of your worries. After all, this is likely to be a very public case and the fact that you've used the identity of an adorable pre-teenage child, who also happens to be one of the world's most beloved heroes, for your own personal gain will undoubtedly become public knowledge."
He watched with pleasure as the colour drained out of his prey's face. This was so much more fun than just ripping their throats out. He loved being a lawyer. Time to deliver the coup de grace. "Of course, all of it can be avoided if you comply with our requests. You will continue to make Miles Prower products, and a profit. A smaller profit, true, but better than the alternative. Far better."
He finished off with what might be charitably called a smile. Uncharitably it was more of a snarl, one which said, 'do not test me on this, for I will strip the very flesh from your bones, then crack them and drink the marrow thereof.'
It was a smile that had a lot to say for itself, and the cause of many a damp pair of underwear when employed. It certainly convinced Sora. He reached for the smaller stack of papers with a defeated slump to his shoulders. "I'm not the only one doing this, you know."
"I do, and believe me, you're getting off lightly. You make branded memorabilia that is almost certain to be approved for future production. Companies like Tied Hen Adult Novelties won't." The lawyer's smile when he stated that could only be described as wolfish.
Tails was spared the details of the legal manoeuvrings, which was probably as well. The Capsule based products required relatively little further development, as much of it was taken over by Capsule Corporation's own R&D people when he released his work. All he had to do was sit back and work with the results.
However, his eight hour work day was packed with plenty of other stuff. The various materials fabrication processes were getting into full production mode, though the demand was so high that despite the fact that ground based micro-gravity manufacturing plants were coming on line due to gravity polarisation, it was still worthwhile to run the orbital factory too.
As he'd promised long ago, electrophilic super-polymers and graphene allowed him to product molecular stressed storage power cells that, by storing power in the distortion of molecular bonds rather than a chemical reaction, gave several hundred times the power density of any existing battery. A modification of the technology, optimised for fast discharge gave hyper-capacitors with similar capacity.
Organo-metallic composites gave him dura-steel, cera-metal and high temperature super-conductors, while omni-mimetic alloys provided nano-scale actuators and power emitter arrays, equally useful for projecting kinetic or energy reflective forcefields. These had another application apart from the obvious one of stopping things that hit them.
A diffuse energy forcefield matrix combined with interference based photon emitter arrays allowed stereoscopic volumetric image projection, and molecular circuit based poly-processors gave the processing and storage power to generate realistic images in real time with something less than a truck full of computer hardware.
Of course they also provided far more compact computing power for other purposes, such as designing the computing core for a dimensional portal generator or nano-fabricator system. This was necessary to produce the primary emitter and the dimensional resonator crystal, which would have to be manufactured on a molecular scale, and would also useful for prototyping practically any component that could fit in it's production chamber.
The requirement for a compact, high power energy source had him develop a micro-fusion generator based on deuterium fuel. Since this could be refined from any source of water it would be ideal for a dimension travelling vehicle, as it was becoming clear from his experiments that he'd probably have to travel through a number of intermediate universes to reach his own, and water was almost certain to be available in any liveable environment.
The reactor exhaust was stable helium 4, and the overall reaction process produced no neutrons, though some of the intermediate stages did. The reaction chamber and the entire primary confinement system had a dura-steel shell, with kinetic forcefield jacketing that reflected any stray neutrons back into the heart of the device, where they were 'burned up' in secondary stages of the reaction chain. A combination of magnetic and gravitic pinch-bottle confinement contained the reactants and a W particle nuclear intensifier reduced the temperatures and pressures needed for fusion.
A combination of magneto-hydro-dynamic and direct thermoelectric energy conversion allowed the device to convert over seventy percent of the energy produced into electricity, while even the remaining waste heat could be pumped into a secondary heat exchanger system, or dumped via the helium exhaust. The whole thing was about the size of a medium sized suitcase, with a nominal power output of about five megawatts, which meant a few litres of deuterium mix would give months of continuous operation.
It's design also meant it was inherently safe, as only a volume a few micro-litres across was ever at fusion temperatures, and de-activating the nuclear intensifier would quench even that. Venting it would produce a short-lived plume of steam-hot but only slightly radioactive gas, and the only radiation that could escape the system in normal operation was like cosmic rays, too penetrating to be ionising.
Out of all the things he developed, the stereoscopic volumetric image projector, or holo-display was the only thing that wasn't ultimately critical to the final design of the dimensional portal generator or it's carrier vehicle, but it was for a secondary project that would make the vehicle more useful. Besides, while the touch screen display of Bulma's pocket computer was quaint, he longed for the sort of interface Nicole had.
As he collated data from the various advanced Capsule technologies he'd developed, he worked on other things. He redesigned and improved his goggles with improved range and sensitivity, including a more flexible voice interface, and rebuilt the pocket computer with Mobian components as they became available. It now had a holo-display capability and voice interface.
The Sea Fox was next, he stripped it down and rewound the stator on the induction motor with Mobian super-conductors and added better power and control systems, which combined with a 'whale-skin' low friction hull coating, allowed it achieve super-cavitation and so double it's speed underwater to 130 knots. The jet engine power-plant and lead acid battery array were replaced by the micro-fusion reactor and MSS accumulators.
Underwater it ran purely on accumulator power, and the primary jet nacelle had a molecular filter bypass that filtered deuterium molecules out of the sea water. Tails also replaced the open cycle aqua-lung system with a full closed circuit life-support system, and with the energy densities MSS accumulators could achieve, it's endurance was over a hundred hours even at full speed.
On the surface it used the fuel it collected to power the micro-fusion reactor. This replenished the accumulators and drove the gravity polariser hover-system that had replaced the under-jets. Waste heat and helium 'exhaust' plasma from the reactor system was pumped via the heat exchanger into the jet engine, heating the air and replacing the synthetic chemical fuel, 'liquid planium', powered combustion chamber. Indeed, with gravity polarisation it was now capable of true flight rather than relying on surface effect to keep it aloft.
The devices he'd built, as always, acted as valuable demonstrators for applying the new materials and technologies for the rest of the Capsule Corps R&D team. They also acted as test-beds for components he'd need for his dimension travelling vehicle. As he worked with the collected data, it was becoming clearer that it would have some limitations he hadn't counted on.
Tails was pondering the issues while at the beach. One of the ways Bulma had decided to take control of his life was to make it a personal project to have him experience the things a normal kid would have. He discovered the joy of Saturday morning cartoons, and watching sci-fi flicks with the family. Of course, this being the Briefs family, half the fun was snarking at the scientific inaccuracies.
He'd also gotten to go to with Bulma and Yamcha to the new Dream Land amusement park, and a circus, and finally had a proper day at the beach, without being interrupted by assassins or wish-granting dragons. They'd tried going to the Kame House to use Master Roshi's beach, but that hadn't worked out so well. Between Bulma's swimsuit and a hard fought game of beach volleyball with Lunch on the opposing side, Master Roshi ended up having to be taken to hospital to get a blood transfusion.
"Tails, put that computer away and try the sea!" Yamcha was away getting them ice-creams, and Bulma had just come back from an excursion on a jet-ski. She was dressed in a bikini, and putting away the jet-ski capsule in a capsule case. Tails was lying in the shade of the umbrella they'd set up, and was tapping away at the holo-interface on his computer. "Weekends are relaxation time, not work!"
Tails cancelled the projection and looked up apologetically. "Sorry, but I've run into some problems with the portal design. I thought I might have a solution, but it's not coming together."
Bulma dropped down beside him on the beach lounger and grabbed a soda from the cooler between them. "Okay, just this once, tell me, and let's see if we can figure it out."
"It's to do with the reason you can't capsulise something with an activated capsule already in it. The existing folded space interferes with the new folded space you're creating, and the whole thing collapses, or rather never forms. My latest data suggests the same thing will happen if I take an active capsule through a portal. So I won't be able to carry the tons of supplies and equipment I put together through it, or even the Sea Fox."
"Why not just build a big vehicle and carry stuff normally? I know you want to have a flying vehicle to avoid any differences in ground height from world to world, but with gravity polarisers you could lift an entire cargo ship."
Tails shook his head. "A large portal generator would take a lot longer to design and calibrate, years possibly. When I have a lot more data on actual transits, maybe I could speed up the process, but for now if I want to get moving any time soon I'm going to be limited to a light aircraft. I'm already stuck making a lot of small jumps rather than one big one, and that's going to take time too."
Bulma nodded. "Yes, you said, dimensional sheer, wasn't it? And the fact that the quantum resonance scans of your items from home were fuzzy."
Tails huffed. "Oh, if only I'd known sooner! I didn't expect to get a clear reading from my own body, after more than a year it's replaced a lot of the original material with this world's, but I thought my boots or that radio-detonator would give a good signal. However, the resonance signature of this universe is interfering. So the only way is to make a best guess and keep refining my aim.
"That means I've got to stop over in each universe for days, maybe a week to make comparisons using my home universe materials. Which is another reason I'm going to miss capsules. It's going to be a long haul, months, maybe a year to find my way home, and I could really use the storage capacity for supplies. As it is, I'm going to be relying on foraging in each universe, and while that shouldn't be a problem as far as food and water goes, a simple breakdown could hold me up for months."
I've just finished working out that this isn't a fundamental problem in theory, a Capsule could be made to compensate for the quantum resonance signature of a particular other capsule, but I also managed to show that it would have to be done by crafting it into the emitter system when you were building it."
Bulma thought about it. "That is awkward... wait! Your emitter has to be configurable anyway. Could you include the compensation in the programming?"
Tails looked at her blankly,then his mouth dropped open. "I never thought of that... Yes, it would be an index shift, but assuming I had the characteristics of the capsule... I could only do it for one, maybe two before the computational requirements would become unmanageable, but if I could only take the Sea Fox and the Tornado, and fill their cockpits with stuff, it would give me a lot more gear to work with."
He sighed with relief. "Thanks Bulma, maybe now I can go relax properly. I think I'll try building one of those sand-castles you told me about before I go swimming. After Master Roshi's training, I don't feel right about swimming unless I have a forty kilo turtle shell on my back, and I'm being chased by a shark."
Bulma blanched. "That's barbaric!"
"It's not like we hurt the shark! Okay, Goku bopped it on the nose a few times to get it to loose interest, but it was nothing a bandage couldn't fix."
"Not the shark, I can't believe Master Roshi put you through something like that!"
"Well it's not like anyone forced us to do it." Tails shrugged. "I'd do it differently if I were training someone, but he's the Master, not me. Anyway, building sandcastles sounds like a fascinating application of engineering, so I'll go try that..."
"Yeah brat, why don't you buzz off, so the lady and I can get better acquainted!"
The new speaker was an over-muscled young bruiser in swim trunks. Normally the sight would have interested Bulma, but his attitude was a total turn off, and besides she and Yamcha had gotten a lot closer, in part because they kept taking Tails on these outings.
"I don't remember asking you to join us in the first place buddy!" She said, in tones that despite the summer heat should have frozen him solid.
"C'mon babe, there's no need to play hard to get." He strode around to Tails' side and grabbed the lounger Tails was on, tipping it sideways and dumping the young fox onto the sand.
"Hey!" Tails sat up scowling and brushing sand off. "What'd you do that for?"
"I'll need this, so beat it kid, before it gets beaten for you." The bully sneered.
"I don't think you will. Bulma said she doesn't want to talk to you." Tails flipped up onto his feet. "What I do think is that you should leave."
"Yeah, yeah, who do you think you are, Miles Prower?"
Tails had arrived with one tail wrapped up inside his trunks and a Capsule Corps baseball hat to hide his fringe specifically to enjoy the day incognito, but both had become dislodged when he'd been dumped, so the thug should know that was exactly who he was. "Count the tails."
"Nice try kid, but half the rug-rats on this beach are wearing a pair!" It was true, Goldmine Manufacturing had been busy, and fake tails were a popular novelty item. Most off the people wearing them weren't even foxes.
Bulma was half ready to stalk over and make the guy sing soprano, but she decided Tails deserved payback more. She hooked a finger upwards and gestured out to sea. "Tails, I think this guy needs to cool off."
"Ha! I already said I'm not buying... whaaa!" The guy suddenly found himself hanging by one arm about forty feet up in the air. Said arm was locked in a grip of steel by the fox he'd been disparaging, who was holding him up seemingly without effort as his twin tails blurred in a disc.
"Ahhh! Help!" He tried to peel his hand free, but it was about as effective as trying to break a steel shackle with a toothpick. Then he glanced down and had a 'what in Kami-Sama's name am I doing?' moment. They were sweeping over the beach and then over the sea, people pointing up at them.
He looked up, all bravado gone. "Okay, you're the real thing! I'm sorry, I'm sorry! Please put me down!"
"Okay!" Tails chuckled, and let go. He'd dropped down to a dozen feet before doing so, so the drop into the sea wasn't harmful. The guy landed with a beautiful splash, then started splashing around on his own account. "Help me! I can't swim!"
Tails rolled his eyes and dived down to tow the guy back to shore.
