AN: Do not fight, do not demean or attack other reviewers. Continue to do so and your reviews will be removed.
Since this is a question that's been asked by multiple other reviewers now, and won't be immediately addressed in the narrative (and most likely won't have the opportunity to be answered until other Saiyans are encountered, at best) ... Goku's tail did not regrow in the Gilan fight because he did not have the moment of panic that he suffered in the original fight. While Saiyan tails regrow every eight months while they are children, there still requires some sort of catalyst for it to happen. This is why his tail regrew at exactly the moment he needed it in the fight with Gilan, when his adrenaline was high and he was absolutely desperate, rather than randomly during that day/week. One such moment has not yet occurred for Goku.
The other thing to note is that butterflies can be good and bad. Goku being weaker than he should be at a set time is still a reaction to Sakura's presence, as much as say, x character not dying when they would have otherwise done so.
The Next Dimension
Chapter Nineteen
Brilliant light refracted across the morning dew on the grass, making it appear as if the entire surrounding hillside were full of the stars that slowly faded out of the sky above. The light danced across her skin, damp from her earlier training.
Raw chakra - no, something even more basic than what she understood chakra to be, the sort of chakra that composed tailed beasts - ki danced in a flickering ball between her fingertips. When she summoned chakra alone, without form or element, only those with special eyes would be able to see it until it was applied into some technique. Ki pulsed with all the brilliance and life of creation, tinting her pink hair, which already begun to grow long and unruly, soft white.
The front door slammed, and light scattered into the faint dawn.
Her ability to summon and manipulate ki instead of chakra was improving...but it still required utmost concentration. Her body flowed constantly with chakra, she constantly funneled every spare amount of chakra her body created into the seal in her forehead. The moment she lost her concentration, she automatically reached for chakra instead, and the ki destabilized into the air.
Goku scrubbed at his hair, expression groggy from sleep. "...You were up early training?"
She smoothed her hands across her knees and brushed the dew off of where it had collected on her when she sat. "I'm used to waking early."
He stretched and twisted his body, looking up at the sky. "Well...if you're awake too, I guess we can leave."
She straightened, and knocked off stray blades of grass from her legs, before she made her way over to the house. The wall next to the door held a small panel full of buttons, and she knew one of them locked the door, several in a code unlocked it, and another reduced the house into a capsule again.
She couldn't remember which one it was.
She rubbed at her chin and frowned, staring down at it. "What button makes it small...?"
"Um..." Goku wandered up to the door next to her and squinted up at the panel for several moments. Finally, he reached up and poked one of the buttons with...surprising speed, for his uncertain expression.
A moment and a puff of smoke later, a small capsule lay in the grass where the house had been.
"That one!"
She squinted down at him. "...Did you just blindly guess?"
He chuckled, and then turned away from her, calling for his...whatever it was. "Nimbus! It's morning, come on!"
In the darkness, she realized as it approached that it wasn't just golden in color. It glowed.
(*)
She rubbed at her arm. "No, it's definitely getting colder."
"...I thought so, too." Goku frowned down at the radar for a moment in thought. "I wonder why? It's still daylight..."
"Well..." She pointed down at the light, now much closer to the center. "I'm guessing this radar is calibrated like a compass. We were down here..." She pointed below the actual radar, and then back to the light. "Now we're up here. We must have moved very far north."
"Well...yeah, but that doesn't explain why it's colder."
She squinted down at him for a moment. He might not have gone to the academy, but surely even civilian children were taught about climates, and that the north tended to get much colder than the south, where Kame House was. "We're very far north. So far north we must be getting to where it's cold."
Goku turned his head and frowned up at her, confusion etched across his features. "It's cold in the far north? Why?"
"That's..."
...She didn't actually know. It just...was.
She shook her head slightly. "Well, it's..." She trailed off, as she looked off into the distance again. "What's that?"
"Huh?" He glanced up at her, and then turned his attention to the hazy structure in the distance. "Uh...I wonder." He looked down at the radar again. "Maybe it's where the dragonball is? Look." He pointed down at the radar. "It should be just about here."
She frowned. If they really scattered to random places in the world, like Bulma had described, then chances were far more likely it was lost in the snow fields below them than in the warm and enclosed structure ahead of them. It was probably too much to hope for it to be in the easily identifiable spot.
"Is that as close a picture as it can get?"
"Uh..." He pressed the button on the top again, and the dragonball signal jumped away from the center again, further north. "Oh! But it is close."
"It might be near that structure..."
"Yeah! Maybe it fell from the sky and landed on the top of it!"
Well...it was possible.
"Come on N-Nimbus! Le-et's go!" She hadn't noticed it before, and it was possible he just...hadn't at all yet...but he was shivering now. The cold was getting biting, especially with the chill wind blowing against them.
"No, wait." She touched his shoulder. "Let's try walking the rest of the way."
"Huh?" His eyes looked a little unfocused, but it could have been the angle they were walking. At the very least though, his teeth were starting to chatter. No, the cold wind blowing on him directly like it was with the Nimbus wasn't good. Not when he was still dressed for the warm south.
"Down." She touched the golden cloud, then. "Do you think you can put us down there?"
She...wasn't sure if it'd listen to her at all. She couldn't really figure out what it was, so the rules about how it worked were still definitely beyond her understanding. But she hoped. Goku was stubborn, impulsive, and could have been addled by the cold.
She felt a mixture of relief and surprise when the cloud suddenly slowed, and then slowly lowered them down to ground level. Whatever it was, at least it seemed to be able to think and listen to reason, even if she wasn't its master, or the one with a contract.
"Brr-" Goku curled his arms around himself protectively. "Wh...why are we here? The dragonball is further ahead."
She fished around in her belt pocket (something she'd picked up while staying with Bulma) and withdrew a decent sized rock. She held her arm out off of the cloud and let the pebble drop into the blanket of snow beneath the cloud.
...It sank to about the height of her thighs.
Damn.
"...Let's go at this height. But slowly." She nodded, turning her gaze back to the confused one of Goku. "The wind up there is too cold. If we kept moving that quickly, we'd freeze before we made it to the dragonball."
"I feel like I'll freeze like this..." He grumbled to himself, but he didn't say anything to make the cloud change from following her suggestion.
But then...he was smaller than her, he might have had lighter clothes than her, certainly less layers. And she doubted that he knew how to stimulate his chakra network to raise his body temperature. Even at a lower height with some shelter from the wind...there was reason to worry about Goku's state.
The terrain was pretty barren, it would be difficult, and maybe expose him to the cold longer, to try to find something to start a fire with, even if it were just a torch. She'd forged explosive tags, but those were worse than useless under the circumstances.
She sighed after a moment, and placed her hands over his shoulders. "Don't move."
He didn't know how to stimulate his chakra network, and it would take far too long to teach him. Medical ninjutsu, however, was very much about stimulating the networks of other people for them. She focused for a moment, summoned a burst of chakra, and heard him gasp.
With both hands, as long as he sat still enough for her to keep contact, she could force her chakra to flow through both of them in a continuous circuit. Technically, it didn't really increase his temperature. If she worked fire chakra into it she could, but involving element transformation would just increase the probability of harming him on accident.
Raw chakra, though, she could manipulate that with ease. Stimulating his cells to regrow healed the damage done by the cold and allowed his body to combat the temperature without tiring or straining itself as noticeably. It wouldn't do much to make him feel less cold, but it would make sure he wasn't hurt by the cold.
...More accurately, it made sure when he was hurt by the cold, his body instantly recovered.
"What are you...?"
"This is my secret technique. Don't tell." Her lips twitched up into a faint smile, even though he hadn't disobeyed her order and still looked ahead. "This will make sure the cold can't hurt you. Just...don't move. It won't work if my hands slip."
He fell quiet for a few moments, apparently considering her words. Healing him wasn't the only thing the chakra circuit could do, though. While she'd hooked into his network, she could trace the length of it, feel around his entire being for injuries.
And there was something.
She'd never sensed it before, actually. It didn't really make sense. Chakra gates cut off pathways through the body for safety, and because of that there were always the odd well or two of chakra that had accidentally or intentionally built up in some of those, or specialized and insufficient training left pathways that were completely underdeveloped.
His network had two most notable differences: it was completely wrong, but that could have been by virtue of being from a totally different dimension of reality, and there was an entire pathway completely unutilized. It didn't seem to go anywhere, and it didn't seem to be blocked by anything.
She frowned slightly, and as a test, threaded her healing, stimulating chakra through it. He startled and then something warm shot across her leg, tickling her skin.
She shrieked in surprise and her hands flew away from his shoulder all on their own. "Wh-what?!"
For some reason, curling along her knee and thigh in front of her, was a fresh...brown...tail. Sprouting out of Goku.
She stared for a moment more, and then tried speaking again. "-What?"
AN: Final note! A variation of the first part of this chapter was going to be in the other version of last chapter. I moved it here so the training wouldn't dominate the chapter.
You know who was under-utilized, on reflection? The white mage. Poor Dende. More Saiyans should have thought like Vegeta and hit Dende up for training shortcuts, instead of burning through emergency senzu bean stashes in peace time.