~Chapter 11: Seperation~
Well, we were all really happy for a few seconds after Goku was declared champion, but then we remembered that Goku was so badly injured that he'd probably be dead within a couple of minutes. He couldn't move, and he was bleeding a ridiculous amount. Luckily, that was when Yajirobe decided to show up. I really don't know how he got there. He didn't enter the tournament as far as I can recall. If he had, I'm sure that he would either have gotten past the qualifiers or been defeated by one of the fighters(me, yamucha, tenshinhan, Goku, Piccolo) that we were watching. Maybe Shen took him out. I dunno. In any case, it was very lucky that he showed up then. He had senzu - Yamucha and I had already used all of ours, having been convinced that it was just a special kind of food. He gave one to Goku and he was instantly healed. Not just healed, but downright chipper. That was a shock. Those senzu are miraculous. I'm not sure exactly how they work, but I'm grateful for them.
Goku sprung into the air and celebrated his victory, but we weren't out of trouble yet. Piccolo was still alive. Kami-sama prepared to kill him, but he was stopped by Goku, who reminded him that if Piccolo died, then he would die as well. There was a really intense moment there where we just didn't know which way things would go. Kami-sama tried arguing that after he and Piccolo died, we could just use the dragon balls to resurrect only Kami. Goku came out with another startling revelation - Kami-sama was the creator of the dragon balls, and if he - and therefore, if Piccolo - died, they would stop working. Why do things always have to be so damn complicated?
We all stared at Kami-sama. It seemed pretty much his call as to what would happen next. Everything became very quiet and solemn, and he raised his aged, weary head toward the sky.
"I should have done this a long time ago," he said. "I created Piccolo, the great evil. I deserve to die."
Wow. What do you say when Kami-sama says that? I was still having a hard time accepting that he could die in the first place. Almost immediately, though, Muten Roshi took the opportunity to make one of his awesomely inspiring speeches. I figure that he's got maybe one of those in him per decade, and they're amazing. I think that that man could move mountains with speech. Basically, he told Kami-sama that all that he'd done had really been worthwhile. Kami seemed convinced. He made Goku a new Kame School uniform, saying that Goku was lucky to have such a wise master as Muten Roshi. Goku agreed and said that it's just too bad that he's such a perv. Heh heh. Those were my feelings exactly.
After that, Goku did something really frightening. He asked Yajirobe for another senzu, and he gave it to Piccolo. Yes, he gave a bean of which the mere act of eating restores one to full health to Piccolo, the monster that he'd barely defeated and that had held us all in a grip of terror. Piccolo, of course, was healed instantly. Goku said that he didn't want Kami-sama to die, which is noble, but he also said - and knowing Goku, I'd bet you anything that this was his real motive - that he "didn't want to lose his nemesis". Argh. Okay, at this point I was just pissed off. I'd dealt with Goku being stubborn about the match, but savior of the world or not, he had no right to endanger everyone like that. I believe that I shouted something to that effect. Goku ignored me. Piccolo spouted some random threats and flew off. Goku looked after him, and we were stunned by the confidence in his face. He was sure that he'd always be strong enough to handle Piccolo. We all just gaped, Kami-sama included. Right then, Goku seemed very, very imposing. He never quite lost that quality after that.
Suddenly, Chichi ran up to Goku, picked him up, and swung him around, much to Goku's alarm. She was really happy that he was okay. Goku, on the other hand, was just really uncomfortable with being touched and squirmed a lot. I think that Chaozu showed up around then. Tenshinhan was just in bliss when he saw that Chaozu was okay. Those two share some kind of friendship that I'm not sure I'll ever comprehend the depth of. Of course, Chaozu's arrival went pretty much under the radar for everybody but Tenshinhan in the face of what Kami-sama said next: He offered to have Goku take his place as Kami.
Wow. Just wow. Goku was 19 years old, and here he'd already been offered the position of Kami of Earth. Goku acted as if it were some kind of bad joke. He didn't even consider it. I have to admit that Goku was right not to take the job - he'd have been just terrible at it. I mean, Goku sitting around Kami's lookout, watching Earth all day? I bet you that he'd make it maybe 10 minutes before going crazy, 20 if there was food. Hence, Goku stuck his tongue out at Kami-sama and took off on his Kinto'un with Chichi clinging to his side. "See you later, everybody!" He shouted. Yeah, sure.
After Goku left, that same feeling of being let down from a pedestal washed over us. It was worse than ever that time. The situation had a great feeling of finality to it, as if the 23rd Tenka'ichi Budôkai were the end of the adventure, and the rest of our lives would be nothing but anticlimax. It felt like the end. In reality, it was only the end of the beginning.
We were soon surrounded by law enforcement and press. Tenshinhan, Chaozu, and Kami-sama all flew away when they saw them coming, and I wished that I could do the same. The new arrivals gawked at the wreckage of the arena.
"What happened here?" we were asked. None of us really knew how to respond to that. The announcer raised his fist into the air and said, "The greatest tournament final of all time." Yeah, that was a nice way of putting it. After we managed to escape, miraculously, from that mess, we all had a big meal and then went home. We were all very tired. Sometimes, excitement alone is enough to exhaust you to the point where you're ready to pass out. Muten Roshi, Lunch, and I got back to the Kame House in the evening, and I collapsed. I woke up around noon the next day, still dressed in my Kame School uniform, to a loud commotion outside. Goku had come to the island on his cloud, dressed in a nice white suit.
"Ah, Kuririn!" he said. "Do you want to come to my wedding too?"
That woke me up. "Wedding? When?"
Goku rubbed the back of his neck and smiled. "Uhm.... today?"
So, that was a pretty frantic day for us. I had to get some decent clothes for myself. I didn't really have anything nice to wear, as I'd only been my current height for about a month. It was only a few hours later when we got to the shrine where the ceremony was held. Goku had invited about half of the planet. The ceremony itself was quite small and quiet, though. Chichi would only let Goku have three of his friends in there, so he picked me, Yamucha, and Muten Roshi. Chichi's relatives were there as well, including her father Ox King, who turned out to be a rather polite, if enormous, man despite the stories about him. Kami-sama was there too, which made it pretty special. I mean, you ask for Kami's blessing at most weddings, but for how many has he actually been around to deliver it personally? All in all, it was a very sweet ceremony if a little weird. Goku looked as if he was starting to get a bit more comfortable with the idea of marriage, although he was a bit antsy for the part of the ceremony where they kissed. Chichi, meanwhile, looked as if she'd die of happiness. She looked lovely, or as I would probably have phrased it at the time, "really hot." I was still a little jealous of Goku.
In contrast to the ceremony, the reception was bustling. Goku had brought just about everyone that he could think of. I think that in total, the guests included me, Lunch, Muten Roshi, Yamucha, Bulma, Pu'ar, Oolong, Umigame, Tenshinhan and Chaozu, Kami-sama, Karin-sama, Yajirobe, Bora and Upa, Android Number 8("Call me 8-Man") and his adoptive family, a strange looking girl named Arale, and probably lots of other people, even including the Tenka'ichi Budôkai announcer, whose real name is Akira. Goku probably saw him when he went back to collect the prize money and decided that he should come too. I'm surprised Goku didn't invite Piccolo. Seriously, I wouldn't have put it past him. Someone, probably Bulma, had managed to line up some refreshments, and a lot of people expressed high opinions of Goku and wished the new couple luck. I thought to myself that I'd probably never get married. Actually, I got married about 14 years later. Of course, I learned in the intervening time that marriage isn't something that you have to do, nor is it something that guarantees happiness. It's a serious and permanent bonding between two people, and you have to be sure that you've found the right person before you go through with it. I know that I was. As sudden as Goku and Chichi's marriage was, and as little as they knew each other, they're lucky it didn't turn out badly. Okay, public service announcement over. Sorry.
After Goku's wedding, we all split up for real. No "let's keep in touch", no "we should get together at such-and-so time", just "well, see ya." I went back to the Kame House where I lived with Muten Roshi and Umigame. Lunch took off in search of Tenshinhan, and I've never seen her since. She left behind nothing but some crazy memories and a huge stockpile of guns and other weapons that we STILL find lying around the Kame House to this day. Sometimes I wonder how things turned out for her. Knowing her, I'd say that she probably found Tenshinhan. Whether anything happened from there is anyone's guess.
Let's see, now. The 23rd Tenka'ichi Budôkai took place in May of 756, and Raditz didn't arrive until October of 761, so more than 5 years went by then during which nothing too distressing happened. Actually, someone named Garlic Jr. did try to take over Kami-sama's throne, but he was stopped by Piccolo, Goku, and Goku's little son Gohan, but I didn't realize it at the time. I didn't even know that Gohan existed, that's how out of touch we were. For some reason, I fell out of touch with everyone. I don't know why I let that happen. It would have been easy enough for me to visit my friends, or vice versa. So many wasted opportunities. I regret them now that they're gone forever.
I was twenty years old when I got back to the Kame House, and I took a serious look at where my life was going. I didn't know that I was just biding time until the next time something terrible happened. To me, those were the first days of the rest of my life. I made a conscious decision to live permanently at the Kame House. Muten Roshi was fine with that, he'd gotten used to having me around. I guess that I vaugely intended to get my own house someday, but I never really got around to it. In fact, I still live there. I don't view that as a failure or anything. After all this time, I consider Muten Roshi to be my family almost as much as my wife and my daughter. He's kind of like the father that I never had, to use a common phrasing. Anyway, back on topic, I intended to get a job, I really did, but I never landed anything for very long. Since Muten Roshi had plenty of money saved away to support us and to keep him freshly supplied with dirty magazines, it didn't seem too urgent of an issue. The upswing of this is that I had a LOT of free time, and I wasn't really inclined to spend it the same way that my master did. I did a lot of stuff to keep myself occupied. I became somewhat of a neat freak. I did the cleaning and cooking around the house. I took up cards. I got my driver's liscense. After I passed the legal drinking age, I became one of the regulars at a tavern-like place in town. I enjoyed hanging out around there, especially as the people became familiar with me and would actually greet me as I came in. It feels nice to belong, doesn't it? I also took to drinking a bit, although not heavily. I never got really drunk. Well, hardly ever.
It was there that I met Maron. I remember thinking how odd it was to see such a young and beautiful girl in there - I mean, it's not like it was a dirty or seedy place, but we didn't get that type much. She was a bit younger than me, and she was very attractive, although a bit bubbly. When I saw her, I desperately tried not to be seen. I was so intensely focused that I didn't notice when she sat next to me, or that she'd been staring at me thoughtfully for a few minutes.
"Hi," she said, "Do you always look straight down into your drink?"
My heart did a flip. She'd spoken to me! "Heh. Not really," I said, trying to sound like I wasn't nervous. Pretty soon we indroduced ourselves. She was just passing through town, although why or by what means was never exactly made clear to me. She suggested that we go have some fun, so we did. She was impressed by my background and by my ability to fly(I'll explain that in a moment). We had a few fun nights together, nothing serious. We ate a few meals, saw a movie, danced a bit. It seemed like magic, as many relationships that are too short for you to actually get to know the other person do. Really, my attraction to her was based 10% on the fact that she was cute, and 90% on the fact that she'd actually noticed me. Seriously, I was four and a half feet tall, bald, and noseless. Add to that my low self-esteem and withdrawn shyness, and you can see why girls noticing me was a pretty rare occurrence. She left after a few days, and I didn't think that I'd ever see her again. I was wrong.
Finally, I spent a good amount of time training. It wasn't strength training so much, or anything strenuous, like I'd always done before, but more technique-based. The first thing I did was teach myself to fly. I could already float around a bit, so it wasn't a huge leap, figuratively speaking. That made getting to and from town a lot simpler. I also spent a lot of time experimenting with the ki blast. It's a very fascinating and useful phenomenon. I usually don't like to admit this, but almost anyone can create a ki blast at least powerful enough to knock over a soda can from a foot or so away with some practice. You need a lot more power to do anything you could use in combat or even see, though. There isn't really a lot to generating a ki blast. You don't have to stand in place and yell or say "Kame... Hame..." or anything like that. All you have to do is focus your ki and release. I find that these techniques generally fall into two categories: blasts and spheres. There are some that don't really fall into either of those, but that covers most of them. You can put a lot or a little bit of energy into any type of ball or attack. You're drawing directly from your life force, so there's a feeling of being drained - almost as if you've just expelled a piece of yourself. In the case of blasts, they're usually formed from the hands or the fingers, although you aren't really generating the blast from there most of the time. The hand position is really more for projection than anything - I could do a Kamehameha with gloves on. This is a good thing, because if that was really coming out of your hands, it would probably hurt a lot. Low-power blasts tend to take a conical shape and disappate if you launch them too far away. With a greater concentration of energy, though, you can make the blast constant and a bit more controllable, although at the sacrifice of speed. The Kamehameha and Dodonpa are both examples of this, just the area of the blast is changed. Spheres or balls of ki, on the other hand, are something completely different. They tend to require more concentration and are more difficult to produce because in the case of a blast, you're just expelling energy, but with a ball, you're trying to create an object with your energy. Also, ki balls really are generated from your hands. You can feel it coming out. It actually feels kind of cold, but if you leave it at that stage for too long, you can burn yourself. Ki balls really aren't as powerful as blasts, but they're more versatile. You can make them extremely controllable, like Yamucha's Sokidan, or you can change their shape. That's how I created one of the most deadly things I've ever seen: The Kienzan.
Like I've been saying, I had a lot of time to mess around with this stuff. I found that by creating a simple ball of ki and crushing it in on itself, I could make it flatten out a bit. When I did this, sometimes it tended to spin. By making it spin more quickly, I found that I could flatten it out into a razor-sharp disc with its energy concentrated at the edges because of centrifugal force. That's kienzan. I've made about 90 or so of those, and I've never once seen one stop before it disappated. They'll cut straight through absolutely anything. Pretty nasty. I never, ever use the kienzan unless there's a real danger present. I also developed a couple of decorative moves. I found that I could change the color of my ki blasts to just about anything in the spectrum. As far as I know, I'm the only one who's noticed this. I made one that I call "sparkler", which is basically like a firework made of ki, and another slightly more involved one in which I make two precise, white blasts from my index fingers so that they meet each other in mid-air. That way, I can actually write sparkling letters in the air that stay there for several seconds. It's a hit at parties.
All in all, I enjoyed those years to myself, but it seemed like something was missing from my life. I felt that I had to find a definite direction and go with it, and I was having trouble doing that. Well, my decision was made for me. Bulma called me one day in October and said that she'd be coming to visit us at the Kame House. I hadn't seen Bulma in nearly two years, so I thought that the day of her visit would be a pretty exciting day. I had no idea.
--END OF CHAPTER ELEVEN--
CLUNKY CONTINUITY NOTE: You don't have to read this. Just play along and you'll be fine. However, if you really care, Kuririn's description of Garlic Junior in this chapter is a brief summary of the events of DBZ Movie One, with one big difference - in the actual movie one, Kuririn helps fight Garlic Junior. I've changed that here because Kuririn isn't supposed to know that Gohan exists yet. Okay. Hope that straightens things out.