AN: I too suspect that the dog king was the first person to successfully make a wish to the dragon. Also, on the flip side of the zero down time between the tournament arc and the red ribbon army arc, between muscle tower and the next saga are a few actual filler chapters.

One whole chapter is dedicated just to Goku wandering around the city not knowing where he's going, getting into street brawls to fill up space, and another is mostly just scenery porn of Bulma's house featuring her silly family.

The Next Dimension Over

Chapter Twenty-seven

The trip back to the city took a bit longer than the way there, as they stopped in another small village to eat and rest, rather than use the house. By the time they arrived back in West City, it was near sunset.

"Ahh..." Goku frowned as he hopped off of Nimbus. "This place is still so confusing."

She propped her hands on her hips as she looked around the bustling city. "Well...I know the way to her house...but I don't recognize any of the landmarks around here."

"Huh..." He wandered ahead of her down the sidewalk. "Maybe we can ask someone here where to find it."

"Maybe..." She did, apparently, live in Capsule Corporation's headquarters. It was a fairly large complex.

He ambled over toward one of the girls passing on the street. "Hey! Do you know where Bulma's house is?"

"Uh...Bulma...?" The woman blinked down at him.

She stepped up next to Goku before the woman could respond. "Capsule Corporation Headquarters?"

"Oh..." The woman tapped her chin. "I think that's in the center of the city. I don't really go there, though..."

"The center of the city..." She nodded. It wouldn't be too far to go. And it would be near enough to the complex that she'd be able to find her way to the house from the center of the city.

"The center is..." Goku frowned for a moment, and then pointed off in the distance. "This way, right?"

She nodded. "Let's go."

The quickest way was probably to ride the cloud into the center of the city...but with all of the traffic in the air, it would be difficult not to crash into some of them, or to cause others to crash. But the city wasn't so large they couldn't just run there quick enough.

"Wanna race?" Goku glanced up at her with a grin as they sprinted down the street.

"Hmm...sure you can do it without running into anyone?"

"Yeah!" He grinned, and raced ahead with a burst of speed.

(*)

He settled back in the cozy chair. When he first came to West City, he had trouble getting used to such luxury. Cutting his hair, dressing 'civilized', going to school...somehow those things were less jarring than living in a rich house with rich people, where he could have anything he wanted without needing to steal or fight for it. At some point, he'd begun to get used to it.

That was a little jarring, too.

He shook his head. He hadn't been abusing Capsule Corporation resources, but...even so, it bothered him that all of his efforts of digging up information on that Ino Yamanaka - anything at all - had turned up nothing. Where she came from, where she went, who she was...sometimes he'd find what seemed to be leads, but they'd end up someone completely different.

How exactly did someone so strong appear just before the world tournament, enter it and almost win, then vanish from the world? He couldn't find any records of her training under any masters, any records of other feats or smaller tournaments, and nothing about where she went after.

It was a pet project of his, maybe it was a waste of his time...but it bothered him. He'd gathered up at least a little information on all the other competitors while he was looking for hers, and yet she seemed to appear from the ether and vanish into a wisp of smoke just after giving up in the final round. From a position of strength.

He rubbed at his hair and shook his head.

Maybe...he was wasting time and resources just so he wouldn't have to worry about Goku and his friend wandering off on their own to gather the dragonballs. Was there seriously some other world full of people that looked human? How did someone just fall through to here if that was the case, anyway?

Goku was totally going to be okay on his own, right?

"Yamcha!"

He startled out of his thoughts, and looked up at the teal-haired woman at the door. She looked...a little peeved, but he'd seen worse. She must have just been calling him for a few moments before she'd shouted like that. "Uh...sorry. I was lost in thought."

She clicked her tongue and shook her head in exasperation. "I was trying to say we've got visitors."

"Visitors?" He frowned. The Briefs got pretty much constant visitors for all sorts of reasons, given their connections and financial weight in West City, but most of those weren't really of any importance to him. At most, her father would politely nudge him out of sight from time to time.

It was a little odd she'd be the one to go out of her way to let him know about visitors, under those circumstances.

A small figure peered around the door into the room. "Ah, Yamcha!"

He blinked. "...Goku?"

(*)

They'd ended up arriving at a pretty good time, apparently. That school Bulma attended had already let her back home by the time they made it to the house, and she'd been working on something in the front yard when they arrived. Whatever it was must not have been all that engaging, however, as the younger woman didn't appear to have any problem at all with Goku's request to drop all of that and fix the radar instead.

She propped her chin on her hand as she watched the woman work. Goku and Yamcha were in the other room, but the conversation had mostly been Goku's retelling of the adventure she'd just lived through, so she was more curious about watching exactly how the strange device worked.

"You know, this is a delicate piece of machinery." Bulma tutted, glancing up at her. "I know I made it look cool and durable, but you can't just bang it off of the wall and floors without expecting it to break like this."

She puffed air through her cheeks. "Normally it's not part of the plan to do that." She pinched her fingers together. "But I think Goku might have actually enjoyed it a little bit."

Bulma shook her head and sighed. "...I've seen him do that before."

She didn't immediately respond, and the room lapsed into silence for a while, save for the soft clicking of the other woman's tools. She tried to understand exactly what the woman was doing, but beyond the barest mechanical understanding of some of it, none of it made any sense. It was way beyond anything she'd seen before waking up in this weird version of the world.

If she didn't need to leave as quickly as she could, she'd have the urge to find a way to learn it all and keep it for when she did get home.

"...So...Goku has his tail."

She blinked, jolted slightly by Bulma's voice cutting through the silence. "He's had it before?"

"He did when I met him." Bulma nodded, speaking carefully. "How long has he had it?"

"A couple of days." Ever since she'd healed him from the biting cold in the north. It felt a little bit longer than two days, but maybe it was because Goku seemed to be so comfortable with it. Outside of muscle tower, he'd been using it as an extra appendage so often she'd almost forgotten to find it strange.

Bulma set her tools down onto the table, though she still stared down at the radar. "It's almost the full moon."

She frowned over at the blue haired woman, expectant. Why should the phase of the moon affect Goku's tail...situation?

"Listen to me, because this is important." The woman glanced up at her finally. "Whatever you do, wherever you are when it happens...do not let Goku outside when the moon is full."

"What...?"

"Close the windows, make him go to sleep early, whatever you need to do." Bulma turned in her seat slightly. "Just don't let Goku ever look at the full moon when he has his tail."

She frowned over at the other woman for a moment or two. "...And why wouldn't I let him do that?"

"I..." Bulma bit her lip and glanced away briefly, before shaking her head, steadying herself about something. "I realize this sounds a little bit unbelievable, but there's more unusual things to Goku than just having a tail and being unnaturally tough. I used to know him when he had it before. And...when he looks at the full moon with that tail, he turns into a giant, bloodthirsty monster."

"A...monster?" Her stomach flipped. But...no. She'd checked Goku's chakra network when she'd healed him, and there wasn't anything like Naruto's. He couldn't be some kind of Jinchuuriki. Even if he were, Kaguya had all of them in her already, right? Why would she allow someone to exist in some other world of hers with one?

Bulma crossed her arms and nodded. "Mm. I didn't believe it until I saw it. Apparently..." She shook her head, expression softening into something like regret. "Apparently...Goku was raised by his grandfather. One night, he didn't listen to the warnings his grandfather gave him not to look at the moon, and when he woke up a monster had killed his grandfather."

Before she could say anything, Bulma spoke right over her. "And I saw it. We were in a death trap on our last adventure for the Dragonballs, and while we were there he looked at the full moon. Right in front of me, he turned into a giant monkey! It was huge and violent and...it was like he didn't recognize us anymore while he was the creature. Or he didn't care." She bit her cheek, and looked down at the ground. "When we cut off his tail, he turned back into a kid...and he didn't have any memory of it happening again. Which means..."

The one who killed his grandfather was almost certainly himself.

She crossed her own arms. It did sound uncomfortably like an unfortunate Jinchuuriki story. Not everything lined up: the ones who lost control of their beasts didn't generally get control again, and they didn't usually have actual tails. But..this was a different dimension, where people handled chakra in a completely different way, and did things she couldn't even figure out using her normal knowledge.

Yet...it didn't change the fact that she didn't find anything in his network to suggest there was another hidden one somewhere, or another entity lurking and waiting for a full moon (of all things) to awaken inside him.

Other than all those unused extra chakra pathways running throughout his body.

...They couldn't be for that, though. If she'd stimulated those pathways instead of the one that regrew his tail...just exactly what effect would it have on him? Would it have...?

"Hey." Yamcha's voice cut through her thoughts, and the man lingered in the door, standing next to Goku himself. "How's the Dragon Radar coming?"

Bulma immediately turned her attention back to the device with an annoyed huff. "There's a few pieces these guys absolutely shattered! I had to completely replace them with new ones. But I'm almost done."

Yamcha tugged at his hair with a grimace. "Are you guys gonna head right back out immediately afterward?"

She nodded, glancing over at the man, rather than Bulma. "The sooner that we collect these dragonballs, the better."

"Well, yeah, probably. Especially if anyone else decides they want to take a crack at the legend. Sooner or later I guess that's bound to happen again, since we did it in the first place." He shifted from foot to foot, falling silent for a few moments, before he finally spoke again. "So, uh...considering that...do you guys mind if I come with?"

Bulma spoke before anyone else in the room could. "You want to what?"

AN: Dearest me, sometimes I suppose I forget to forget Yamcha.