AN: Ah, man. I am excited about the start of the RoF saga in Super. But that sure is a long way off.

Like really long.

The Next Dimension Over

Chapter Thirty-Three

Splitting up probably wasn't the best decision to make in an unknown situation like this one. They didn't exactly have any way to communicate with the other half of the party if one of them fell into an actually dangerous trap or encountered some other trouble.

Admittedly, Goku (and himself) could probably deal with any threat that showed itself in the cave, and from what he'd seen and heard Krillin and Sakura could deal with whatever they ran into, as well...but there was always the chance of some kind of really difficult trap. And they didn't have Pu'ar and Oolong to help get them out of something like that this time around.

But Krillin had been determined to go looking for that treasure, and it was even worse to send just one person off alone. At least it probably wasn't likely to be that dangerous so deep into the base. Unless part of it had just started to collapse.

"Huh?" Goku's voice broke through his thoughts. "It's just water...?"

Ahead of them, the path ended abruptly in a wall and a square...well in the ground. Yamcha blinked, and looked over at Bulma, who stood a step behind him, looking down at the radar. "Hey, are you sure this is the right way?"

She frowned. "Well, yeah. It's only a little ways past this wall."

"So we'll just break through it!"

"No wait!" He took a step forward in an attempt (that might have been futile) to prevent Goku from going on and doing just that...but fortunately the small boy actually did stop as soon as he shouted. "Let's not break through any walls down here."

Unsurprisingly, Goku looked unconvinced, frowning back at himself and Bulma. "...Why not? It's just on the other side of the wall, right?"

"If you break the wall you might destabilize this whole place and crush us." Bulma spoke before he could, clearly having caught on as well. Or...already knew from the start and just hadn't spoken as quickly. She was the smarter one, after all. "Obviously we can get through to the other side just by swimming, It's weird...but that must be what we're supposed to do."

Yamcha shrugged slightly. "Well...that or it's just a bottomless pit, and the way we were supposed to go was the other one..."

"Yamcha!"

(*)

"I don't need an escort."

He'd said this already. He felt the need to say it again, because she'd ignored him the first time he'd said it, just staring off into the distance like he wasn't even there. It didn't even make sense why she decided to come along: she didn't want the treasure and he was totally capable of taking care of himself. What were the chances that they'd run into anything at the level of the fighters who were in the World Tournament? Anything less than that, he could handle without even really trying.

Honestly, the fact that she was sure he needed someone to babysit him was a little more annoying than that she was only even in an underwater pirate base for her stupid 'wish' and not for the boundless treasure hidden in it.

This time, at least, she didn't flat out ignore him. Green eyes flickered down toward him, and she offered a faint smile. "Are you sure? Didn't you say something about keeping all the treasure for yourself at some point?"

"Uh-" He coughed and blinked up at her. Had he said that out loud? Maybe. Between looking for the dragonball and just not believing him that it was a pirate base until they were attacked by an actual pirate robot (maybe slightly before that, but it was such a short time it hardly counted) he was pretty sure no one even cared about the treasure but him anyway.

She didn't make any effort to elaborate on her comment, and the echoes of their footsteps took over as the only sound in his ears. Which was kind of creepy, actually, because shouldn't he be hearing the others on the other side of the hallway? Cave? Whatever.

"...Why do you care, anyway? You're leaving, right? You can't just take treasure from one world and spend it in another."

She squinted down at him. "Can't I?"

...

Could she?

She seemed unfamiliar with zenni but she'd never grabbed any kind of common rock and acted like it was valuable, or anything. That made sense if she was from some other country, but if she was from another world, wouldn't things be inherently different?

Not that she was from another world.

Because that. That would be dumb. She looked human, she spoke the right language, and she recognized almost everything a person from Earth should.

He stared up at her. Hard. "What's the name of your planet, huh?"

She blinked down at him. "What...? A name?" She rubbed at her hair expression screwing up slightly in thought. "It's just...the world. It's not like we've needed to name it..."

"Ah!" He pointed at her, feeling a surge of triumph. It made sense now. sort of. Maybe somehow she just got displaced from some far off place he'd never heard of, and that's all that happened! "So you don't know you're on another planet! This could be the same world after all!"

She crossed her arms and tilted her head to the side. "...The dragonballs scatter all over the world. If this is the same one, I should see somewhere familiar while looking for them."

Well, at that point, she'd just feel dumb going on some quest to get a magical wish just to waste it on a really dumb wish, wouldn't she? He was about to point that out, but she spoke again before he could.

"How much treasure would you be able to pack into one of those things before the rest of us find the dragonball and leave, if you're on your own?"

-Wait. The subject was about her and her dumb wish, right?

Right.

He stared up at her in confusion. "Wh...what?"

"Expensive treasures are bulky and fragile most of the time." She waved a hand. "Alone, you'd get to carry much less of it than with someone else."

"Are you expecting me to believe you're just here to help me carry treasure?" That...that was even less believable than that she wanted some for herself. Nobody did the pack mule work just to make sure someone else got to have more treasure.

She didn't get to answer, though, as they turned a corner and walked...right into a dead end.

"Aw, come on!"

Why would a pirate base waste this much space on some dumb dead end? There weren't even crates or barrels of rum littering the hallway and using it as storage space! What the heck was wrong with these pirates, anyway? Impossible booby trapped hallway hidden in a random underwater cliff side, robot defenders with way more fuel than they should have had, and wrong way hallways!

Aside from being pirates in the first place, something was seriously wrong with whoever it was that had this base.

He gave an annoyed grumble and marched up to the blank wall. "There's got to be something! No one just builds a pointless dead end like this!"

"Well, it could be a maze." Even Sakura sounded a little bit skeptical, and he liked to think that was because that idea was just stupid for a base hidden in an underwater cliff side. There were spacial constraints! And they were pirates! What kind of pirates sat around and thought up mazes to put in their base? Dumb ones.

Dumb pirates who got caught after hiding their treasure and never got to spend said treasure.

The ground clicked.

Dumb pirates who liked floor traps. Like trap doors that were pointlessly stuck right at the end of an obvious dead end and opened up when a person stood on them long enough.

"Aww-"

(*)

Mostly, she just didn't feel comfortable with Krillin wandering off in a potentially decaying underwater cove alone. She wasn't all that comfortable with Bulma and Yamcha doing it, either, but Goku had proven to be incredibly hardy while they were going through the tower, and likely more than capable of looking out for those two. And Yamcha wasn't exactly a slouch in most situations they might encounter, either.

It wasn't that she doubted Krillin's abilities...but he hadn't shown quite the same level of resilience as Goku yet, and as one person alone it would be more difficult for him to simply avoid any danger that sprung itself on him without warning.

Like, for instance, a trap door.

"Krillin!"

She jumped forward as his shout echoed through the hall, but he had gotten too far ahead of her, and he was already out of her reach by the time she reached the hole. It was too dark to see what was down at the bottom, or even how far the drop went. Given it was a trap, however, the likelihood that the fall would be safe was very unlikely.

She immediately launched herself down after the vanishing figure.

(*)

The swim wasn't all that long, but the water was so weirdly cold that by the time he broke the surface of the water on the other side of the dark well, he found himself gasping for breath. So...at least it wasn't some kind of bottomless pit, or a death trap that led people into a deep tunnel and then didn't give them a place to get back their air.

Because that would really suck.

Things that didn't suck so much, though, included the rather large wooden chest sitting on the shore not far from them. "Hey, guys! Check it out!"

Bulma, who had surfaced last and looked understandably more worn out by the swim than Goku, shook the excess water out of her hair and then looked in the direction he indicated. "Oh, wow! A treasure chest!"

Goku swam on ahead and climbed to the shore a few moments before he himself climbed up out of the water.

"What do you know..." He scrubbed his hand through his hair to shake out some of the excess water, just in case he also looked a bit like a water logged puppy as Goku did. "I guess Krillin was right."

Goku glanced over his shoulder in the direction they came from, expression thoughtful. "What was the way Krillin looked?"

"Probably the living quarters." Bulma's tone was dismissive, as her gaze seemed pretty firmly on that treasure. Yamcha couldn't really blame her, though, his bandit instincts made the prize, now that it was present, pretty important.

He marched over to it and pushed the heavy wooden lid open. With...only a little bit of help from Goku, who was so short that he physically couldn't do too much to lift it if he were on his own anyway. Inside a wealth of treasures sparkled up at them in the dim light of the cavern. It was such a small room that only one light hung from the ceiling, but it was still enough to display the dull sheen of the gold, and make the diamonds and other gems sparkle impressively.

And damn were those some huge gems. How did the pirates even get their hands on this stuff, let alone lug it all through that path and swim with it?

"I don't see the dragonball in here..." Goku's voice sounded disappointed enough that it was clear he'd actually thought it might be there. Despite the impossibility of the ball landing inside a completely intact box.

"Oh, no." Bulma shook her head. She dug the radar out of her...panties. If anyone other than Goku actually was around for her stripping down to go swimming he'd be a bit uncomfortable with all of their respective states of undress, honestly. But then, it wasn't as if any of them had expected to need to go underwater on a short trip out, so they were probably just lucky not to have had to strip down before that point. "It's a little bit further on. Probably in that puddle over there."

"Over there?" Goku turned toward the far corner of the room she indicated, just as a shout echoed from the distance.

A rather familiar and feminine shout.

Yamcha turned toward the direction of the shout without really thinking. It sounded close by, but they should have been quite a distance away. Then again, the other path could have twisted and turned in any way. "That was..."

"Sakura and Krillin!"