Author's note

Hello 😊,

I can't believe how long its been since I started writing this fanfic and I'm happy to see how it has turned out.

I got the inspiration to write this after I finished watching the Tournament of Power saga in Dragonball Super. Watching the big epic fights, Ultra Instinct Goku versus Jiren, ideas were starting to come into my head about writing a story that took place where Dragonball GT started, after the five year skip after the end of Dragonball Z.

As I was writing it, news came out that there was going to be a new Dragonball movie coming out with Broly as the focal character involved and the more I got to read up on how different he was than his earlier villain counterpart from the Z movies and the introduction of Cheelai and Lemo, the wheels began spinning in my head that I could completely re-write Ascension into a much stronger story, but not without tackling a personal project of mine. I follow artists on twitter who've drawn great artwork and even their NSFW art looked amazing, showcasing their creative talent and writing ability as they wove a narrative behind these characters we've loved over the years.

I wanted to write an adult fanfic before I'd go back into re-working Ascension and Spiced-up Broccoli was what emerged from my brain onto computer screen. I do intend on re-writing the story into a non-adult prequel to Ascension, adding more depth to the growing friendship between Broly, Lemo, and Cheelai, because I really love writing these characters, especially Lemo XD.

I'm happy that Toriyama left it open to interpretation with regards to these characters because anyone can write them how they see things happening and the major consensus is that we've all pretty much shipped Broly and Cheelai as a couple. I took that idea and ran with it and throughout my writing of Ascension, I was able to build characters through their children and how they're able to interact with the Dragonball cast.

I needed to set this at the start of Dragonball GT. GT brought to us cool concepts during the first major arc but because the major criticism of the series was that GT = Goku Time, it made it hard to bear seeing great secondary characters not get the proper development they deserved and I honestly didn't like how Pan, Bra (Bulla), and Uub were portrayed. They became side characters to Goku's story again and I wanted to give them an arc for themselves, and what better way to do that then a world tournament (Budokai). I wanted to bring back the fun battles that were done in Dragonball and writing fighting sequences between characters challenges me as a writer to dictate a narrative for a shounen fight you normally see in anime, especially when it comes to a Dragonball fight.

I also really like the concept of the Baby arc and the Tsufurian race and wondered how I could incorporate this into the story and have it make sense and the idea came to me of the bio-android creations made by Cooler.

Then you also have more characters introduced in the Broly movie such as Berryblue and like Lemo and Cheelai, there's more to her than you initially see and I see her play a much larger role in the Freeza Force, something that will be explored further in Part 2 when I get around to writing it.

I've held onto the name of Kelerot for a Saiyan name since way back in the early 2000s when I first began writing fanfics, being a DBZ fanboy during the early English dub era with the Falconer soundtrack. I geeked hard on the Cell saga and I loved the characters of 17 and 18, easily becoming my favorites. Seeing them brought back to the limelight in Super with their respective roles was awesome to see and I knew I could fit them in easily throughout.

My first draft of Ascension pegged Kelerot in a more villainous role and looking back on it I didn't like it and writing this over again made me flesh him out in a much better format where his progression into a villain made more sense as I was writing him. I knew he was going to become the principal antagonist of the story but I didn't want it to be solely about him, knowing how easily you can incorporate original characters into a pre-established world. I had to carefully write him in a way that his interaction with the Dragonball characters made sense and writing from their point of view had to also make sense.

While no one can ever completely match Toriyama's style of writing and humor for his characters, I did my best to stay as faithful to the characters as I could, making sure that those we've seen in GT got better development. I knew that I wanted Pan and Uub to be together, I see them have great chemistry and for Bra/Bulla I wanted to develop her character as a healthy mix of Vegeta's desire to train and fight and Bulma's intelligence and beauty, something I feel Bulla occasionally loves to boast about.

Now to address a few topics I'm sure my readers have been wondering about:

1. Power scaling.

This was tricky to write. If I had to bring in Cooler into the story, he definitely needed to be scaled up considerably to even have the ability to handle his own, but against someone like Broly he had no chance, lol. True form Tundral is essentially a Cooler redesign with extra features to the exterior plating, with Tundra and Glacial being the separate beings that were designed to merge as one when the need arose to create a formidable opponent. Tundral served as the main antagonist for the Z fighters and I knew he/they needed to be defeated by the end of Part 1, leaving the consequences of their actions to spill over onto Part 2, which will be the main plot point of that part (there'll likely be 3 parts to this Ascension arc).

Jiren is for all intents and purposes a really bland character. I'm sorry to the Jiren fans out there but writing him was far more challenging than anything else in the story and I honestly had no real good ideas to work with. He's the generic strong man of the group with a tragic backstory that is as basic as you can get. Killing him off was a last-minute decision of mine when I wrote the chapter of the fight between him and Kelerot, because I was playing around with some ideas of whether he'd stay alive, or he was found by Goku later and Goku motivated him to get back up and fight back and the two would team up against Kelerot. Those were very early ideas I had and I'm glad I didn't go that route.

In terms of power levels, GT's model seems about as accurate as you can get. Gohan cleverly balanced his training with his scholar career so he doesn't come off as weak again like he was at the beginning of Super. He's at least as strong as True Golden Freeza by this point in the story with his Ultimate power but it could be limitless as far as I know. He's also a team player which was why I didn't write him defeating Tundral by himself.

Bulla and Pan's fusion into Bulpan was something I wanted to have realized when I thought of Bulla as more a fighter in this timeline than her "shopping obsessed" persona in GT. Super Saiyan 2 Bulpan (which might still happen 😉) is stronger than Tundral when she goes all out, but because he had been weakened over his battle with Choi and Gohan, he was easier to handle with simply base form Bulpan and Super Saiyan Bulpan to finish the job. They have similar confidence issues like Gotenks but doesn't play around when its time to get serious.

Goku is about the same in strength as he was in the start of GT and writing him the way I did I tried to make as much sense about his power as I could. He still holds a desire to train hard but knew that he saw Uub as a worthy successor to protect Earth from danger and he decided to take on a mentor role for Buu's reincarnation.

As for Uub, it bothered me how he was completely wasted as a character in GT. Why build up the notion of Goku wanting Buu to be reincarnated as a good person if you weren't going to do anything more with it at the start of GT? How would Uub react once he found out he's the reincarnation of an entity created from all the evil of the universe and wrecked havoc killing people in the trillions over millions of years? I knew I had to write how he handled the news and how traumatic the experience was, but the interaction between Goku and Uub as teacher to student was necessary and a vintage Goku character moment. As for whether Majuub will be a thing, I do plan on having that happen in Part 2 when Uub plays an even bigger heroic role in the story.

2. Transformations.

I know a lot of us had reservations over how many transformations we've seen in Super. Super Saiyan God, Super Saiyan Blue, Super Saiyan Rosé, Ultra Instinct Sign, Mastered Ultra Instinct, Golden Freeza, the list goes on and on.

Crystal Freeza I felt was something he needed to achieve to keep him as a force to be reckoned with when it comes to powerful characters like Jiren and Broly, and even the Destroyers. We still honestly don't know how powerful the Destroyers really are since Beerus has never fought as full power (and never will because he dead now, lol). I know I can't write him as being too OP but lets just say you need to hit him really really hard to crack his crystal plating XD.

I knew Goku needed to lose badly in this fight. It wasn't because he's gotten weaker or relaxed too much while training Uub, it was just that Freeza's a prodigy in his bloodline and he did a considerable amount of mental training over the time period between the current arc of Super and the beginning of GT, so roughly less than ten years. If he can scale up quickly in four months to unlock Golden Freeza, imagine the kind of power he would wield if he was training for ten years 😉.

With regards to Vegeta, I got the idea from Masako X's Super Saiyan color theory series on his youtube channel and purple/violet hadn't been explored yet. There's still a couple of colors that hadn't yet been introduced in the main cannon and when I researched the color of purple in terms of chakras, it fit the kind of character Vegeta was and I felt that this could be his highest tier Super Saiyan God transformation, True Super Saiyan God, or Super Saiyan God 2 or Super Saiyan Violet/Purple. Since there's so many mutations in the mortal version of Super Saiyan, having a similar tiered structure and stages would also be a factor in God ki when they started being able to tap into it. Vegeta has been training non-stop for ten years to perfect God ki as much as possible and it was hinted earlier in the story that he was close to unlocking True Super Saiyan God when the moment came. Factoring in his Spirit Control training from Yardrat gave him a better understanding on how to control God ki and merged the two forms of training together to unlock this new form. This puts him on par with the Destroyers and at full power he would actually be strong enough to defeat Jiren, strength for strength.

Early on, I incorporated the bit from the end of Super that Goku forgot how to tap into Ultra Instinct, and as I'm reading the Moro arc of the manga, it was shown that Goku can tap into the sign form at will and I had to adjust the narrative a bit. Because there's a long gap between when I first wrote Goku forgetting Ultra Instinct to knowing how to do it, I know I have to re-write the early chapters to put everything together so it all makes sense. There's a reason why he couldn't tap into Ultra Instinct during his fight with Freeza and I dropped a hint that he and Broly might not be dead just yet 😉.

3. Where to go from here.

So basically, I'm going to re-work the early chapters to fit more with the later chapters since it's been months since I wrote them. Then I can say this part will be complete and I can start working on Part 2 later.

I have other writing projects I want to work on, such as a series of scenes from the actual show that I want to narrate in a novel-style format, a sort of writing exercise for me to practice with so I can improve my ability to write better.

Write a SFW version of Spiced-up Broccoli and expand on it a bit to incorporate more space adventures with the lovely trio from Vampa 😊. It'll also serve as a decent prequel to Ascension where I can expand a bit on the world building of the seventh universe.

Two adult fanfics, one involving Chichi and Goku, and the other with Bulma and Krillin during their trek across space to Namek early on in DBZ after the end of the Saiyan saga. It'll be interesting to write this one, lol.

Once I've got all of these out of the way, I can go into Part 2 with a clear head and a goal to achieve. I've got a couple of plot points in mind for Part 2 but the rest of it will be uncharted territory. I plan on giving a lot of the main Dragonball cast screen time so the mystery of what happened to Kelerot remains up in the air.

Despite all the chaos that's been going on around the world, I want to use this time to focus on writing and getting these ideas down on the computer screen for my followers to read and enjoy.

Take care and keep up to date. Make sure you follow my profile for up-to-date fanfics and chapters, I'll do my best to keep updating.

Cheers.