"Hey, look, I think it's Bulma and the others!" Goku yelled at Chayote, at some point having overtaken his fellow Saiyan and shot up ahead a good couple of paces. That was just fine, given how the two were looking for a specific island it was just fine that Goku shot out ahead and did some preliminary scouting with his childish glee and wonder at every miniscule detail that called for it in his eyes and Chayote had some downtime to look around proper.
"Bulma better be okay…" Chayote grumbled while the two dived down and stopped just before the broken down submarine that was slowly submerging and had long since drowned had it not been for the Sisyphean labor of Yamcha and Krillin to keep the water out.
"Goku!" Bulma jumped from the sub, in the heat of the moment she must have thought that the Kinto cloud would support her weight and keep her from falling but she fell right through and had it not been for her arms tied around Goku's shoulders she'd have plummeted right back down and submerged like a brick together with her busted submarine.
"Well, at least Bulma's safe… Don't you dare die before you complete my spaceship." Chayote complained.
"Yeah well… I survived, somehow…" the inventor mumbled while Goku hovered over the submarine, letting Bulma slip off his shoulders and land onto it.
"No thanks to yourself, plus, it would have been nice if you helped us remove water from the hull even a little bit…" Krillin squinted at the only freeloader in the sinking submarine.
"What was that!?" Bulma stood up, imposing her tyrannical presence over the shriveled boy who should have known better, in all honesty, than to say out loud what was on his thoughts with Bulma around.
"N-Nothing… Say, how are we going to return home anyway?" Krillin changed the subject. "Neither of us can fly on the Kinto clouds."
"Chayote's cloud should be able to keep you guys on it, although, not sure all of you will fit onto it…" Goku wondered.
"Forget it! I'm not traveling on one of those things as a passenger! It's terribly uncomfortable! That's why I originally invented the Micro-Band anyway!" Bulma shook her fist up at Chayote and Goku before wrapping her arms over her chest and raising her nose up while turning her face away from the two Saiyans.
"Didn't you guys arrive here with two submaroos?" Goku wondered, scratching his head. "Where's the other, did you blowed it up?"
"This is Blue's submarine. It is ours that got wrecked." Yamcha explained.
"I see, so Blue is dead, I take it?" Chayote wondered, extending her hand over the supposed graveyard of the bastard that very nearly cost her the return back home. Even if Chayote had not yet mastered Ki control, at this one moment in time her heart and body were all in one place and wanted the utter annihilation of that accursed man, even if that meant obliterating a drowned corpse to bits.
"Who knows… A giant octopus emerged from down under and Krillin blasted him somewhere deep down before the cave collapsed, then he emerged again but the submarine's thrusters and boosters buried it even further down. Blue must be buried under all that rock somewhere, even if the collapse of the cave did not kill him, the water pressure and drowning would eventually…" Yamcha looked down at the deep with a sense of frightful respect and dread of it.
"A cave? Did it get blowed up too?" Goku wondered, sitting onto his cloud with his legs crossed and tail waggling in hesitant excitement.
"I don't think so," Bulma growled. "The cave looked to be far larger than what we've explored. It's supposed to be the place where a gang of pirates hid their booty from a long, long time ago so it is likely to be larger than that."
"Treasure? Did this pirate clan of yours was capable of space travel?" Chayote wondered.
"Are you kidding me!?" Bulma flipped out, "They swam around in old wooden ships and fought with swords like a bunch of ruffians!"
"I see…" Chayote sighed.
"I wanna see!" Goku hopped on his cloud with a childish smile. "Wanna see the pirates and their swords and the treasure."
"Sure, just submerge eight kilometers that direction and bust your way into the cave or go one step ahead and find their secret entrance…" Bulma taunted Goku, thinking she sounded snarky but after a plumpy splash her eyes blew out of her face – Goku actually took the challenge and dived down.
"Wait! What are you doing!? You'll die for sure! Then who's going to get me back home!?" Bulma tried yelling at the darkness of the abyss but Goku was leagues below the layer where he could have heard a thing.
"Hmph, don't worry, after the grueling beating I got him through at the tournament, his body is far beyond being capable of surviving measly water pressure." Chayote sighed. That was what she was afraid of – that Goku would survive the water pressure and find his way into the cave, which was inevitable, and then he'll be lost there, gawking at stupid nonsense whole day.
"Look, Chayote, you wouldn't mind diving down with him?" Bulma looked up at Chayote. "It's a long shot but if you could find the entrance, maybe you'd find some leftover tech from all the salvagers and treasure hunters, maybe some of them would have functional submarines and capsules still with them?"
"Sounds tedious, I think I'll pass…" Chayote shook her head.
"Well, I can't build your spaceship if I'm stranded at sea, now can I!?" Bulma growled at her.
"Even if I find a submarine, I don't think I would be able to drive one if I wanted to." Chayote shrugged, preparing to dive after Goku.
"You don't have to drive it, just pull it out here somehow, plus, if you find a case with capsules in any of the wreckage, that will be fine too," Bulma explained.
A dull and neat splash later, Chayote had submerged underwater, leaving behind just a pile with clothes behind on the cloud.
"You sure have a way of bossing people around and have them work for you…" Krillin squinted at Bulma while still shoveling the water out of the busted hull by entire buckets.
"I am the inheritor of a business corporation, it's in my genes…" Bulma smirked. "Now make sure we don't sink until Goku and Chayote come up!"
Earth oceans were admirable and quite beautiful. It seemed as if their true beauty became more apparent once one penetrated a decent distance down into their endless depths, however, in a sick twist of irony, those same depths became robbed of most of the light that could reach those areas, making one only able to see a very limited amount of it, even further down, not only light but even the warmth of the local star of the system failed to reach, making it desolate and not beautiful at all, from what Chayote could ascertain.
In that darkness, it was near impossible finding an entrance. Chayote was after all just wandering from place to place, feeling up a cold and moist rock and observing the bottom for any signs of life. She could hold her breath for a decent amount of time although that time was made significantly shorter by the notable pressure down there. That same air that Chayote held deep down was beginning to run out short but judging by an absence of a child-sized, bloated and pale corpse floating around, Goku managed to find his way inside the cave somehow.
Chayote lifted her hand up, trying to create a Ki blast and light up her surroundings but failed to do so. The exact reason for her failure eluded her, she seemed to truly want to light up her path and find her way into the cave, then again, she was coerced by Bulma to dive down here anyway so maybe she was not as fully into the task as she thought she'd be. With the air running out and having no other options but emerge and face Bulma's ridicule and have to repeat the dive, Chayote delivered a powerful blow at the nearest rock formation and the rushing water pulled her in without asking the teen Saiyan for her permission.
The water rushed straight into some odd, spotted floor without having much more options for movement, Chayote slammed right down into the floor. The Saiyan heard buzzing above her and once she dug and clutched herself out of the water's clutches, she saw spear-sized arrows littering the walls. This certainly was no natural formation, she had found her entrance even if she did not quite enter by the entrance per se. Still, this hole threatened to eventually submerge what remained of the cave as well so Chayote stood up and rushed on ahead, at the nearest source of light, figuring that it might have been the direction where all of the submarines and ships might have been left over.
The rocky floor beneath the Saiyan's feet just disappeared. With a gaping mouth, Chayote plummeted down into a chasm that once opened spread much more light than the port up ahead – down below was the searing lava that even Chayote did not feel confident about being able to survive.
"Right now I feel really confident about not falling into a pit of lava and getting incinerated!" the Saiyan yelled out as she cupped her hands in front of her and let out an intense, white wave of Ki that split the pool of lava in half but also propelled the Saiyan back up. There was still a minor problem, however, even if she did throw herself back up in the air and postpone her infernal demise in the lava, Chayote was still floating up above the blazing death down below.
"Dammit!" she cursed, trying to expel Ki through every pore of her body, strong enough to perhaps create a field around her that might have held the lava at bay or just propelled her some other direction, either direction would have been fine as the footing of the ceiling or the walls to the side would have given Chayote a chance to leap to safety. Ki was a powerful force, more than capable of propelling her to a certain direction but… She didn't move either way.
In fact, she was not even falling…
"Okay…" Chayote looked around, finding herself stuck in mid-air out of the necessity to not die and thought about floating upward, with less than gentle and graceful motions, she swam upward, clutching and grasping for elevation before floating to the side. It took a good couple of minutes before Chayote realized that she did not need to "swim" in mid-air and that she controlled her aerial movement with Ki and not the physical forces of her body.
The room ahead was a port. It was just like what Bulma was referring to – a massive harbor with old submarines, boats, and ships. None of them were actually wooden or that weak, in fact, some of those looked like they were sturdy enough to not only survive emerging from down here but they might have been able to take more punishment than fancy modern subs any day of the week. Plus, the remaining ships might have served as fine military-grade equipment for Bulma to build Chayote a spaceship out of.
A mechanized sound of turning gears alerted Chayote in the last second to jump out of the way of a swinging sword. She glanced at the mechanized attacker and found herself truly gleeful for the first time in a long while – it was just what she was looking for – an actual robot, just like the Metallitrons she had destroyed back at Red Ribbon Base and like the one that Goku thrashed back in Muscle Tower.
"Hey, you've found it!" Goku laughed out, sitting atop of a storage container that surrounded the place. The boy fell forward, using the tip of his tail to cling onto the top of the container and swing himself the other way, as a playful taunt for the skull-donning Pirate Robot. "It was kind of getting old fooling around with it."
"You did not trash it…" Chayote declared, holding the robot's tail with her foot. It had prevented the robot from moving but after a few good yanks, the tail snapped and stayed sparking on the floor while the robot charged on ahead, spitting tongues of flames from an arm-mounted cannon that looked similar to the bullet-spitting weaponry the Red Ribbon employed to no effect against the Saiyans. "I'm impressed."
"Sure, you said I owed you a robot for the spaceship…" Goku shrugged, evading the flames with a casual dash back before jumping onto the container blocking his retreat and jumping over the Pirate Robot and closer to Chayote. "So how do we bring it to Bulma without thrashing it?" he wondered.
That was a good question. By now Goku might have punched right through the robot but if it hit something sensitive and explosive, like the flame-tank that supplied the flammable liquid to the flamethrower, he might have blown the robot up which would leave Chayote with just the submarines back on the island.
"I'll find the blueprints for this thing they'll show you exactly where to punch. Just keep it busy." Chayote glared at Goku who just nodded and yawned. He was beginning to grow bored of this mechanized toy, it was good that Chayote had found him when she did – he might have thrashed it otherwise, depending on how adamant the boy was on keeping promises…
The surface of the calm oceans bubbled, alarming Bulma that it might have been another aquatic predator trying its luck at claiming an alluring piece of meat swimming about. By the time that countless ancient submarines began emerging from underwater, one after another, Yamcha and Krillin had to repel multiple plesiosaurs and sharks pushing their luck for the mouth-watering reward of multiple floating people.
Chayote and Goku bust from one of the submarines. Goku was smiling from the bottom of his heart, as usual, giving his floating friends a peace sign with his right hand.
"There are some military-grade robot parts in one of these submarines. I'll expect my spaceship built in the nearest future." Chayote declared while looking away at the horizon, trying to distance herself from the bunch of Earthlings that clung to the spaceships and made their way in.
"Finally, my limbs were beginning to turn webbed from all the floating…" Krillin complained, looking at his shaking hands with a pathetic face.
"This is seriously impressive, you two, how did you emerge this many ships all at once?" Yamcha wondered.
"Turns out that the pirates had an exit for all the ships they stored, likely the same way they got those ships into the harbor, to begin with. I did not know how to control those ships so I and Goku just pushed them through." Chayote shrugged, blushing a little at the compliment and feeling miserable that she showed it.
Goku's hearty laughter thundered out, "Chayote sunk a whole bunch of ships too…" he declared, pointing his finger at the older Saiyan.
"Turns out some of them weren't designed to be used underwater. I'm not sure how they got them down there, to begin with, in that case…" Chayote admitted. The number of ships with masts and sophisticated figureheads sank like bricks or got crushed by the water pressure the moment they left the safety of the secret tunnel of the Pirate Cave. "Either way, they were useless to us anyway, too weak to survive."
"This will do. I'll need to design a control panel that will control all of those ships at once, but it should not take more than a couple of minutes, the technology here is ancient." Bulma sighed, finally looking at least somewhat content. That was good, in this current state of hers she was much more likely to get working on Chayote's spaceship. "Did you see that bastard Blue down there?"
"Nope, the rest of the cave will soon sink too so… I don't think he survived." Chayote shrugged. "The pressure down there is too much for Earthlings so it is not too far out there to say that."
"I guess but… I'd feel safer if I'd have seen the body…" Bulma sighed. Encountering that man and having a gun pressed to her head like that must have been frightening for a puny weakling like her. That was good, maybe this brush with death will encourage her to pick up some weights and start training for once, not that her pathetic power level could have been improved by much.
"Bulma… That's pretty messed up…" Krillin squinted at the young woman.
"No, quite intelligent actually." Chayote shrugged. "I'll expect you to work on my spaceship when we get you back to Roshi's island…"
"Sure thing, supervisor!" Bulma flamed at the Saiyan. Chayote turned around and looked away without noticing the irony in Bulma's eyes, taking what she said for granted.
"Let's go home, I'm hungry..." Goku complained, holding his belly and leaning forward as it growled.
"Where are all the soldiers and all their equipment!?" Chayote lost her shit back at the island.
"Some old guy with puffy blue hair and a tanned skin showed up alongside a bunch of soldiers. They seemed to be really interested in that one dead Silver guy while they just kind of shoveled all the rest into one airplane and flew away. They flew off in the direction of the Pirate Cave so I'm surprised you did not meet them..." Roshi's mental communications blared into Chayote's head out of nowhere. Communicating with the minimized old geezer this way was beginning to get old by now. "I was about to attack them but then they started just cleaning up my island so... I don't think they were affiliated with any army at all. They did not carry any symbols and kept on talking about how the Red Ribbon Army and the Ribbon Brigade Armies were all decimated. I'm not sure if they were with any of the Ribbon Brigade armies but they confirmed they're all wiped out."
"I was about to give those submarines to Bulma so that she could make me my spaceship…" Chayote grumbled with her arms over the chest like a capricious child.
"That's just fine. Those robot parts will be good enough and all the armor layers from the hulls of the ancient subs will serve as good scrap too. Right after I repair the Micro-Band and get Roshi back to normal size, I'll right on that." Bulma assured Chayote with a pat on the shoulder. It may have been the first time that the genius inventor was not mad about something with the Saiyan, it almost made Chayote want to be nice to Bulma in return.
"Forget it, by that time I'll learn how to fly home by myself…" Chayote dismissed the young woman with her hand and lifted off the ground a little bit using her Ki like before. "The gravity in this planet is pathetic, frankly, I'm surprised it took me this long to learn this…"
"Wait… So if you won't be using Dark Kinto, maybe I can reserve it?" Krillin raised his hand.
"Forget it, baldy." Chayote shook her head. "I can barely float this way, it would be slower than walking to travel like this so I'm sticking with Kinto."
"You didn't have to be this mean about it…" Krillin poked both of his fingers together while looking away and then patted his head a couple of times.
"Well, Roshi does need to go back to normal size so don't be a diva…" Bulma wrapped her arms over her chest and got in Chayote's way, had she not misread the Saiyan's intentions and had not been incredibly useful, Chayote would have blasted a hole in her gut that very second… If she could get her Ki control to work right…
"That's not what I was suggesting, I was saying that I will take care of that, you just focus on the spaceship." Chayote declared, making everyone quite shocked at that revelation.
"Really? No offense, Chayote-san but… This is the first time you would do something not completely selfish…" Yamcha shrugged with a smile.
"Well, if I collect the Dragon Balls first and wish Roshi to return back to normal size, then Bulma can keep working on my spaceship and I can get off this planet sooner and join Lord Frieza's Army. I wouldn't say it's not useful to my own goals…" Chayote shrugged.
"I see… It checks out in that case…" Krillin nodded while looking at Yamcha.
"Well then… We've found this one in the Pirate Cave, right before it caved in." Yamcha pulled out and handed Chayote the starred crystal orb. The Saiyan took it and handed it to Goku, who promptly placed it into the little sack he stored all of his Dragon Balls in.
"That makes us two Dragon Balls short!" Goku declared.
Chayote zoomed out her Dragon Radar and lifted her eyebrow with a widening smirk. "Well, well… I know just where the other Dragon Balls are located, one's right near the Korin Tower and the other one's right past the hole where the Red Ribbon Army base used to be." She declared.
"Hmmm… Roshi says I should go too, he says that climbing the Korin Tower would be good for my training so I guess I'm tagging along." Goku leaned back on his crossed arms while shaking his tail in excitement.
"Suit yourself. As long as we're clear on the goal here…" Chayote shrugged.