Disclaimer: I don't own Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball GT, Dragon Ball Super, or anything else related to the Dragon Ball universe, or any of its characters. They are all owned by Akira Toriyama.
He was living in wonderful times.
The civilization that humanity had managed to build so far simply amazed him.
He really hadn't appreciated it living in isolation on Mt. Paouzu with his parents. He had read about it all back at home, but seeing it all for himself was something else.
The things that the people on this planet had invented were amazing.
The internet especially.
That was probably ranked second, in his view, on the list of the most important and influential inventions ever created.
It had started out decades ago as a way for the military to communicate over long distances, and had only been released to the public when its widespread usefulness became more evident, and computers had gotten more powerful.
Strangely enough, it was widely agreed that King Piccolo had been the cause of its inception.
After he had been defeated some three hundred years ago, and Earth's global military had been created and unified once again from the ashes, humanity had begun a massive technological revolution to try and make sure that a threat of that scale could actually be dealt with the next time.
And eventually, after almost three centuries of rebuilding, repopulating, and extensive research and development by the surviving population, computers had come out. And the internet had been short to follow.
That's how the story went, anyways.
And once it was out, and in the hands of the public, there had been no going back. Out of the military's hands, it had doubled in power, size, scale, and potential, every single year since then without pause, and was in the process of doubling again.
Right now, it was predicted that about half of all sentient beings on Earth, had access to it in some form.
But that wasn't enough apparently. He had read an article recently, online, that had astounded him.
There were organizations, and entrepreneurs across the world coming together now under a movement simply known as "The Internet For All." Which was a movement that did exactly as it sounded.
Make access to the internet a basic right for all citizens.
Human or otherwise.
There was such a diversity of sentient species spread out across the planet that had been cut off from each other since King Piccolo's reign of terror. And possibly even since before then.
But with the rise of widespread, instant communication, all it took was one random person with access to satellite internet, to stumble upon a previously untouched population of people, and to initiate first contact.
And by the next day, it would be all over the news.
Hundreds of these populations had already been discovered. With them, massive funding into satellites with cameras pointing down, and for expeditions into unmapped territories, had appeared. All in order to find the rest of these scattered peoples.
And when these populations were finally found, every time, they would be given access to this world wide network at no charge.
The money just wasn't needed. Instead, when they linked up with the rest of the world, these people would bring their culture, their history, and their knowledge with them, for the rest of the world to share in.
And with all of this new data, the internet was pushing back every known barrier in knowledge at once.
It had once been thought impossible to know for certain, what humanity's history beyond three hundred years ago entailed, for instance. Almost all of it had been lost in the Piccolo Wars. So much in fact, that one of the most common conspiracy theories that people actively believed in in the world, was that they hadn't even happened at all. That it was just some bedtime story.
Yet more and more evidence arrived by the day by people all around the world. And all of it was being published online.
Uncontacted populations from around the world would be found to share the same story. Of a demon with great power bringing the old world to its knees. The details were nearly exact between them too, with only a handful of discrepancies. Minor mistakes, really. Ones that were to be expected, when a story like that was preserved orally from generation to generation for centuries by such small, isolated communities.
Small mistakes would be introduced all along the way.
But this wasn't the only thing humans were learning from this arrangement. In this... quest for knowledge, many of humanities preconceptions had been overtly challenged.
Many diseases that the medical community had never been able to defeat before, turned out to have simple, primitive, herbal remedies by some of these isolated communities.
Now there were medical researchers, with advanced degrees, travelling around the world to visit these remote locations to learn how they worked.
The tree of life, and the fossil record, which made up the foundation of humanity's knowledge on how they had come to be, had been shown to be totally inadequate. Thousands of new species had been found, and more were being discovered almost daily. Each with weird new properties that had never been seen before.
There was now a huge effort by the scientific community at large, to re-categorize them all, and update their understanding of life, accordingly.
Humans have been shown to be hardly unique in their intelligence, too. And this was the lesson that seemed to have had the most significant societal impact, recently.
Humans were not the only sentient species on Earth with intelligence. Not even close. Nobody knew how many there were for sure, but there were thousands of others.
Some were very closely related to dinosaurs. Some were related to bears. Others were tiger-like. Some had wings, and some lived in the oceans.
But when you took a random sample of humans, gave them a test to measure their intelligence objectively, and compared those results to those of other intelligent members of other species, they were often indistinguishable.
Humans weren't special in the way that they thought they were. In fact, the only correlation known to be unique to humans had to do with the variation on their intelligence.
All other known intelligent species had members in them that were not even self aware, despite being genetically similar. Animals, essentially, with the same genetics as other members of the same race, that could carry on perfectly lucid conversations with any human.
Humanity itself didn't have this trait. There were no animal-minded humans, who ran around acting on instinct. Not to the extent of every other intelligent species anyways.
And science had yet to explain that.
But smart people everywhere were trying to figure that one out, too.
...
The internet had started it all, and this worldwide learning process was only going to get faster in the future.
Recently, websites had appeared that allowed anyone to record and upload video footage.
Which actually made him a bit worried. What was going to happen when his dad fought in the public eye again? When he started throwing around massive energy blasts? All it took now, was a single person to pull out a video camera.
There were already forums online, full of people talking about the infamous World Martial Arts Tournaments. But good quality video footage hadn't been widespread back then, so most of his dad's group of friends, and their abilities, were currently being openly debated. With the only people believing any of them to be real, being past spectators of the fights.
But that would change eventually. Once some more thorough, public investigations started to take place, and everyone started to realize that there was unanimous agreement between all of the past spectators of those fights, people who would swear on their life about what they had seen, and once high quality video of his dad fighting appeared… well, he wasn't actually sure what would happen.
Most of the best martial artists were pretty secretive people. So much so, that the public at large was mostly unaware of how strong the strongest people actually were. And they didn't know a thing about Ki, or about magic.
He was pretty sure that the World Military was aware of it all. It was their business to know those sorts of things after all. But the average person didn't seem to.
So when it became evident that there were essentially gods walking among them, what would the people do?
He had no idea.
As it was, the strongest people currently recorded on the internet databases were a joke.
That person he had arm wrestled back in the city? He had been declared one of the strongest. Not the best, but probably in the top fifty for sure…
He had looked him up, afterwards.
And he had buried that guy into the ground with basically zero effort.
He had actually been a bit concerned when he had seen a local news article about that. One about that guy's defeat by "some kid". He had read the article pretty thoroughly himself, but there hadn't been any cameras around at the time thankfully, to see his face.
But the part that worried him was the fact that the public had actually believed the story. That's how effective this new wave of internet backed journalism was becoming.
It was getting harder and harder for the average person to remain ignorant of these things.
There had been published photos of the crater he had made with the guy. Forensic scientists had even appeared to look for any crucial evidence he may have left behind in the area, and there had even been a forum online, of a random guy, or group, analysing the photographs and throwing around physics equations to determine with a scary amount of precision, just how much force had been required to make such a crater.
It had been two and a half feet deep into concrete. Most of the sentient dinosaur species couldn't pull off a feat of strength like that. And they were widely considered to have the most physical strength on average, of any currently known sentient species.
People were debating the science behind impact craters now, at least in that particular corner of the internet, and analyzing the guy's leaked X-Rays to look at the kind of damage present in the shattered bones there.
Gohan did feel a little guilty for putting him in the hospital after seeing those images himself...
And the people that had seen the event first-hand, were being interviewed. But the description they had given, of "a small child with long black hair," had been pretty much unanimously declared by the online internet sleuths as "totally unhelpful".
At least he had had the foresight to hide his tail under his clothes at the time. If he hadn't, these people would have been able to give a description of him that would have turned out to be much more effective.
There weren't too many people in the world to his knowledge, that looked like a totally normal human aside from a monkey-like tail extending from their lower back.
He had to be careful now. He could no longer perform some seemingly remarkable feat with the knowledge that only first-hand witnesses would believe it had ever happened. Now the news of anything seemingly unbelievable, was investigated with a determination that was a little frightening.
It made him dread the article that would inevitably come out about the massacre he had committed back in that clearing.
That'd catch the internet's eye like nothing else.
He had been a bit surprised that it hadn't come out already, in fact. But it was probably in the pipeline somewhere…
And when it came out, there would probably be a firestorm. There always was whenever a murder took place.
...
But, yeah.
He'd call the internet, as great as it was, the second greatest invention by humans.
But to be fair, it did radically amplify the power of the first best…
The first had to be Dino Caps. Without a doubt.
Nobody had seen them coming when they had first been released. And they propelled Capsule Corporation, and Dr. Brief in particular, to the most well known names in history.
For Dr. Brief's incredible intellect, his friendly demeanor, and of course, his surprisingly ruthless business practices.
The release of the first Dino Caps had been controversial to say the least. It had been the first time ever, where knowledge of fundamental physics was owned by a company rather than shared for peer-review by the scientific community.
Dr. Brief had designed a destruction mechanism inside every single one of his capsules. One that completely halted any attempt to reverse engineer them, or to understand how they worked. It would activate the instant someone tried to dissect one, or take one apart. Instead, upon breaking one open, all you would find is a chunk of worthless metal.
They were introduced forty nine years ago, and in all that time, still nobody had figured them out.
But, perhaps controversial wasn't the right word for them.
The release of that technology, and the subsequent withholding of the physics behind them from the public at large, had nearly started a war.
Especially because Dr. Brief had used his new technology to shatter nearly every monopoly held by a corporation at the time.
He released a capsule house, at less than half the market value of a normal house.
At that point, who needed the housing market, when you could just pick up a capsule house?
It essentially single handedly collapsed the industry, while throwing a massive wrench at the government's ability to tax a person for owning a property. Nobody needed one anymore, because they could just carry all of their belongings in a capsulized house and move anywhere on a whim.
He released the first capsulized car too, to much the same effect. Ruining an industry there as well.
And the first capsulized motorcycle, and the first capsulized storage containers, and the first capsulized boats, submarines, airplanes, and a whole host of other capsulizable products.
There had been such an outcry from large corporations, and so much lobbying, that what he had done had nearly been declared illegal by the World Government.
But there hadn't been any anti-monopoly laws at the time. So what Dr. Brief had done couldn't be punished until a law could be written up, first. And since the situation had been totally out of left field, and absolutely unprecedented, they had been unable to come up with one for a few years due to the extensive bureaucratic hoops that needed to be navigated, and by then, Dino Caps had been totally ingrained into society. Other industries, crucial ones, had depended on their existence by that point, so a simple ban of all Dino Caps wouldn't work anymore.
The best anyone could really hope for at the time, was a law demanding Dr. Brief and Capsule Corporation to hand over the designs at the very least.
And that's exactly what had been tried.
Dr. Brief had refused of course.
After showing up in person to meet with the King, and going through all of the security in the building, the story went that he had simply opened up a suitcase containing a hundred or so capsulized, and fully active nuclear warheads. A suitcase that had seemed harmless to the security detail, all of the X-Rays, and all of the metal and chemical detectors that he had had to bring it through.
Demonstrating to the world just how terrifying the technology could be in the hands of not only the military itself, but any madman at the head of an organization with any significant power behind it.
It was a combination of technology that could not be defended against by any means. You couldn't tell, from the outside, what was contained within any capsule. You needed more information for that. With millions of capsules worldwide, any of which could contain anything, the government had no choice but to back off.
Leaks happened all the time in the government. It couldn't keep a secret to save its life, and the government itself, or rather, the King at the time in particular, knew it. If they had such designs in their possession, they would get out to the public at some point.
It was inevitable.
Despite that though, the World Military had still tried to get Dr. Brief to release them anyway. So the King himself had to step in to veto the newly proposed law.
Ordinary nuclear weapons did exist by different groups around the world, but they at least had to be delivered by aircraft, or by a ballistic missile. But those could be defended against.
There was no way to stop an attack if one could just be capsulized though, and literally carried through airport security onto a plane in someone's back pocket. Which would absolutely happen, if capsule technology was understood by the public.
All it took was one person to do it, to cause untold damage.
Instead, Dr. Brief proposed a different solution. He offered the government a complete database of all capsules in existence, and a killswitch for every last one. The killswitch would activate a capsule's destruction mechanism, turning it into a chunk of harmless metal. The database extended automatically too, every time a new capsule was made.
With it, they had the ability to take down any madman using the technology for nefarious purposes.
In theory anyways.
Because there was no way to know for sure that every capsule was actually on the list. They all seemed to be, but Dr. Brief himself could have secret, or prototype capsules off the grid, and the government would have no way of knowing about them.
They basically had to trust that he wouldn't do anything dangerous, and admit that they couldn't stop him from doing so if he tried.
They were basically forced to admit that the Capsule Corporation was more powerful than the World Government.
But thankfully, in the forty nine years since their release, nothing bad had happened yet.
People used these capsules every day, and nobody knew how they actually worked.
But something had changed about a decade ago. Dr. Brief, despite not being the original inventor of the internet, saw its potential to change the world, and single handedly spearheaded another revolution.
In the nearly forty years before this new plan of his, he had perfected his methods of mass producing capsules, and as a result, they had become very cheap to produce.
He had literally been inflating their prices artificially just because that was what the people were willing to pay for them.
Why sell a capsule house for five hundred zeni, when people would pay five hundred thousand for it? Capsule Corp. was still the cheapest option either way.
But, despite Capsule Corporation being the cheapest prices for essentially everything, the other competing corporations, had managed to adapt. By focusing on higher quality, or niche items, they could still manage to make a lot of profit despite being twice as expensive, or more.
And Dr. Brief had seen an opportunity there.
Capsule Corporation was a company that focused on cutting edge research and development. It had never been about making the best houses or vehicles. That had just been where the money was.
He really hadn't intended to waste so much of his company's resources improving the quality of these capsulized items. He just wanted to push the front line of cutting edge physics again.
So he started making some backroom deals with his competitors.
He let them lease a product from him known as an Empty Capsule. And another one known as a Capsule Printer.
The Empty Capsule was exactly as it sounded. Nothing was inside it.
But the Capsule Printer, allowed a three dimensional computer design, to be downloaded into one. Which would allow the Empty Capsule to become something new.
This allowed these other corporations to use their resources on improving the quality of these capsule products, instead of Dr. Brief having to use his.
They had already been making higher quality items than him, his had only been the norm because of their complete portability, their ridiculously low prices, and because they were good enough for most people.
But this partnership, allowed a fusion of the two aspects.
Now the Capsule Corp. logo was on higher quality items, and Dr. Brief basically had his former competitors working for him to make better and better products. This freed up his own resources and allowed him to do other things.
And his competitors had jumped at the chance they were given, because it destroyed the monopoly that Capsule Corporation had held over their markets for so long.
It seemed like a suicidal move at first, to an outsider, but with the new resources Dr. Brief had freed up, the first thing he did was create the Open Source Network.
Those deals he had made, had really just been a beta test for his Empty Capsules. To see if they would work, and to see if other corporations and people, would do what he had predicted with them.
And they had, so he released them to the public directly.
He got rid of his artificially inflated prices, and sold both his Capsule Printer, and Empty Capsules at as cheap a price as he could manage, directly to the public.
Then he allowed anyone with internet access to freely access the Open Source Network he had designed.
And that decision completely changed civilization.
With it, anyone with a basic knowledge of the capsule design software, could literally design and print out their own capsules for the cost of an empty one, and with access to a Capsule Printer.
The thing was though, the printer itself didn't have anything special going on inside it. They had been taken apart by people to see if they could finally glean any insight on how capsules worked, but they were really just a powerful electromagnet.
All of the magic went on inside the capsule, just like it always had. And just like always, the capsule would cannibalize itself if anyone tried to dissect it.
The Empty Capsule hadn't even been a new invention either. Neither had the printer, for that matter. Dr. Brief had been using them for years in his factories.
All capsules started out empty. All he had done, was give up his exclusive ability to download designs into them.
And since nobody knew how his empty capsules were built, everyone would have to still come to him to buy them.
And just like with the internet, when the public got their hands on this technology, they immediately started pushing its limits.
The Capsule Printer was immediately obsolete upon its original release, as planned by Dr. Brief. There was nothing special inside them really, so they had been taken apart, and a design for it had been uploaded to the capsule network by an anonymous user, who had released it for free.
The first few printers, essentially, printed out the next generation of printers for the price of an Empty Capsule each. Which made it unnecessary for anyone to buy one anymore at its original price.
And with these capsules becoming so cheap, the number of people who could afford them had been radically increased.
But so too, had the number of people trying to figure them out.
Dr. Brief's plan for the widespread release of his capsules came at a bit of a cost. A few details in their construction that had been carefully hidden from the public for decades inevitably leaked out.
They weren't infinite, for instance. You couldn't design a capsule for an object the size of West City, for example. They were actually limited to about the size of a skyscraper. And only then, by making some serious design concessions.
There was a finite amount of mass that any capsule could create. But people rarely ever needed to design something so large, so the limitation was hardly restrictive, and most people could make due with it.
Empty Capsules were restricted the most instead, by what was known as 'The Complexity Problem.'
Capsule designs were created on computers, by people using the software. So unless someone knew the atomic structure of every last thing in the design, it couldn't be created from scratch.
Food, plants, and organic material were prime examples of things fitting into this category.
You could still seal these things inside a capsule, so long as they were small enough to fit inside the capsule's expanded volume, but you couldn't create them from scratch yet. And wouldn't be able to until biology and organic chemistry was more thoroughly understood.
Because it turned out that a plate of spaghetti was far more complicated on the atomic scale than a microprocessor was.
So people could nowadays, for example, buy an Empty Capsule for dirt cheap, download a fully furnished house into it, print it out, expand the capsule out to its true form, import organic material into it, like plants or food products, then reseal the capsule, and these things would be waiting for you in the exact state that they had been in when they were originally sealed.
Organic matter could be placed inside after the capsule was printed out and expanded, but only if it fit inside, obviously. It just couldn't be designed from scratch yet.
And time was effectively frozen inside. So food wouldn't get mouldy or rotten.
That aspect had actually been thoroughly tested by scientists long before the Empty Capsule had ever been released, because it seemed to violate a lot of fundamental ideas in science. Highly accurate atomic clocks had been placed inside and capsulized, as had other instruments like radio transmitters, video cameras, and a whole regime of other equipment, to try and figure out what was happening during the miniaturization process.
And they basically had to accept the fact that time seemed to be frozen on the inside. Radio transmitters could not communicate to the outside world when they were capsulized, and atomic clocks would stop ticking until they were expanded again.
Gohan had taken advantage of these properties himself, with the house he had bought back in the city a few days back.
The store he had went to, had had pre-packaged capsules for convenience. This was to prevent a customer from having to go to the Capsule Printer to print out every last item that they needed to get, individually.
Instead, the staff at the store had printed out a house, a vehicle, a set of dishes, kitchen appliances, and a giant storage container, which was basically a giant refrigerator, and put them all into an easy to buy package for only a slight markup on the price of the same number of individual Empty Capsules.
And he had picked one of those up for the same reason that most others did. It had been quick and convenient, he didn't have to deal with any computer software, and the price markup had been barely noticeable.
He did end up with some things he'd probably never need though, as a result. The motorcycle for instance. What was he going to do with that thing?
Same with the kitchen set, and appliances. He didn't need those either, really.
Most houses from the Open Source Network were designed to be modular, and spartan. To prevent people from ever finding themselves in a situation where they really wanted to buy a house, but wouldn't because of a really ugly stove inside, or because they were being forced to buy a set of dishes with it that they hated, most houses were designed to have only the bare necessities inside. With everything else just being downloaded and printed out in another capsule.
His own house had been no different. And he had had to bring inside all of his kitchen appliances, and dishes separately.
The capsules that they had been contained in, had just been boxes with the dishes placed inside, so now he had a couple of extra empty storage containers to carry around with him after he had emptied them out and moved everything into his house
And there were a few inconveniences involved there.
You could not capsulize other capsules, for instance.
He could not leave any capsules inside his house, and then capsulize said house as a way of carrying them around. The house would simply fail to miniaturize, and do nothing.
The same thing would happen if there was not enough space for a capsule to expand.
In both cases, it just wouldn't. And the capsule would do nothing.
For some reason, that was just a fundamental limitation of them. There was some speculation about it in the scientific community. Saying that since they were clearly messing with matter at a subatomic scale, a miniaturized capsule should have an enormous amount of energy just sitting inside. If one was broken down by being inside another capsule that was in the process of miniaturizing, it could all be unleashed at once.
E = mc^2, after all. It could very well be a serious safety concern.
But only Capsule Corporation knew the real reason. Everyone else was left guessing.
So, he was stuck carrying his capsules around in a case everywhere he went, or leaving them inside his expanded house.
You also couldn't capsulize anything sentient. Like living animals or people. That had also been tried in the past by a handful of ridiculously curious people, but again, nothing had happened in those tests. You could get away with plants, and plant-like things like mushrooms, or even bacteria, but even spiders, insects, or rodents, couldn't be capsulized.
There didn't seem to be an iron clad rule classifying everything that could or could not be capsulized, and it was likely just a database upheld by Capsule Corp, that was constantly updated to include any new things that might be thought of in the future.
But despite all that, they were so useful, and so cheap. Most of the money he had spent at that store, in fact, had been on his food.
He had bought what he estimated to be about a year's worth. He had bought it all in bulk, and avoided anything fancy, sticking to the basics like eggs, and rice.
When it was all capsulized in that giant storage container of his, it all stayed fresh because of the time freeze it experienced, and he wouldn't have to worry about it expiring.
Still, it had eaten up pretty much all of his prize money from the competition he had won. Leaving just enough for that pack of capsules that his house had been in, and a few extra empty ones that he had used the store's printer on.
He had downloaded a weight set that someone else had designed on the network with one of them.
It had been designed for some of the larger species on Earth. As a result, they were made to be scaled up much more than any similar weight set meant for a human.
They were big, in other words.
They appeared to be body weights mostly. That was how his dad trained, so he had decided to emulate it himself. And it was possible to add more weight to them as needed. He would just have to print out some more from a store in another capsule.
As it was, he had several tons of weights in reserve for if he ever got strong enough to carry them around. In the meantime however, his weights were nowhere near that heavy, and he had yet to even try them out at all.
The rest of his capsules had been used for getting some equipment for a few basic experiments that he had wanted to run.
Nothing too fancy, really.
He had picked up a really powerful magnet, a very precise scale, and some solar panels for his house. Those were basically the only big things, and he had only picked up the solar panels because he was living off grid. Since so many people did that, it was pretty common to do, and they had a very easy set of instructions to follow, as a result.
It was all step by step, and he hadn't needed to know much of anything about electronics at all. His house had been designed to support the capability, and it had been refined by the designer to make it easy to set them up.
The only other thing he had gotten was a toolbox of assorted items. Some wire, hammers, screwdrivers, steel wool, a multimeter, and various other items that he didn't know the purpose of and probably would never use.
It was like a general purpose kit of everything he would need to live on his own, with some other stuff thrown in. He hadn't really looked through it all yet, but there was a lot there.
He had picked up everything he could really think of, to prevent him from needing to go back into the city again, and everything he could think of to answer his list of questions.
It was a pretty big list at the moment. One that had been on his mind, every day.
Every time something weird had happened around him, he had made a note of it, and now that he had a house, and a place to rest, and even a computer, he had started to write it all down.
It wasn't complete, and he knew that he was missing a few things, but he expected that they would come back to him at some point. And he'd write them down then. That always seemed to happen.
The first one on his list had been about his dad of course. Why had he let Raditz's tail go?
No matter how much he had thought about it, he couldn't think of a justification. But he had become a little more open minded now that item number two had been crossed off his list, but he basically had to admit that he had no idea.
Number two had been about why Piccolo had told Raditz about the Dragon Balls. There had been no reason for it at the time, logically.
But, he had been in a similar position himself just a few days ago when that huge guy back in the clearing, the leader of the people who had kidnapped that girl for some reason, had asked him to explain what he was, in his dying breaths.
He had nearly answered… and nearly became a hypocrite as a result. He understood the compulsion of wanting to get one last shot in at your opponent in their last moments now, especially now that he understood that death wasn't even real at all. That they would just stew in that knowledge for eternity, after being relocated to the other world.
He couldn't fault Piccolo for it anymore. Well he could, but he understood why, now. So he was pretty sure he had number two crossed out.
Number three had been about why he knew Piccolo had told Raditz at all. What was up with his ridiculously vivid dreams? Were they even dreams?
It was possible, now that he had thought about it for a while, that Piccolo hadn't even told Raditz at all. Dreams were after all, pretty bad sources of objective information.
But everything he had been told, had fit. And that dream with those two saiyans had been absurdly realistic. It still messed him up a bit whenever he thought back on it.
The number of things that had to have happened in succession by coincidence for him to be able to write that off as just a dream were mind boggling.
And if it wasn't a dream, he had bigger problems than the saiyans on their way, he was pretty sure. People fast enough to circumnavigate the globe nearly instantly like that were dangerous, to say the least.
So, number three on his list was basically an explanation for all of the various dreams he had had. Why did he have them? Was the information he had learned from them, accurate? And why did he stop having them?
It was as if that forest he used to live in, had been just this magical place out in the wild that induced them. He had had two different ones in just a few weeks out there.
His first one being that one on his first day. That was the one he had had about Piccolo, and about finding the strength to survive on his own.
The closest thing he had had since, other than his saiyan dream, had been that weird hallucination with the puzzle pieces the day he had been nearly eaten by that dinosaur.
What did they mean? How did they occur? That was number three.
Number four was all about the first of the two confusing explosions on his list, the one where he had woken up naked in that crater. The place where his old cave had been.
The place had been absolutely devastated. Craters were everywhere, and there had been so many that he had thought that some military organization had initiated a bombing run, or a weapon test.
What had happened that day?
He simply had no idea.
Number five was all about the conservation of mass. The law of physics that his dad violated all the time.
Gohan himself, had violated it that one time in the clearing with those deer, a while back. After that hellish run through the forest in his search for food.
He had eaten three of them in rapid succession, and had felt no heavier.
He had no idea what had happened, and since he had seemingly violated the laws of physics that day, it made his list.
This particular item however, he might be close to answering.
He had printed out a scale after all.
So after training himself into the ground one day some time in the future, he intended to eat ravenously after weighing both the food, and himself beforehand of course, and then weigh himself straight away again, afterwards.
The results of that particular experiment should be interesting.
But he had yet to do it. His leg was still a bit sore from his fall off that mountain a while back, and now that he was no longer fueled by adrenaline, running for his life, or living inside a dinosaur, the pain had kind of caught up with him recently, and he had taken the previous few days off to finish healing.
He had skipped the hospital visit, after all, so he wanted to be careful.
Number six was that whole situation with the giants in the forest. What were they doing out there? Why had they kidnapped that girl? What was the massive hole in the ground for? Why were they digging it?
None of that made any sense to him at all.
Had that police officer managed to find that clearing from the instructions he had given him on that note?
He would be kind of irritated if he learned that after all of his worrying about the public reaction to that massacre he left behind, the officer had just thrown out the note as soon as he had happened by a garbage can. Writing the whole thing off as some random kid's imagination.
...
And why was that group carrying around a severed head? Who even does that?
Putting aside the fact that it was pretty much at the very top of the list of the most evil things someone can do, it made no sense from a practical standpoint. Even assuming that they were the most vile sort of monsters imaginable, isn't carrying something like that around just totally inconvenient?
And he had just left it back there himself afterwards, too…
What was he even supposed to do in that kind of situation? What should he have done with it?
...
Number seven was kind of wrapped in with number six, but he counted it separately anyways. It was the second of the confusing explosions that had happened around him.
Why had all of those buildings in that very same clearing exploded after?
It had actually killed one of those giants. It didn't make any sense. Especially not if it was intentional.
If it had been caused deliberately by whatever organization that giant had been from, then he would have been killed by his own team members.
That giant had actually made him smile too, and Gohan kind of wanted him to live because of it.
Good old Number Four.
That had been the same giant he had met back in the forest after fighting his way out of that dinosaur. The one that had run away, while his three friends had attacked him.
The very same one to give him that clever one liner about the word 'set'.
Gohan had never learned his name. Simply referring to him mentally as Number Four, as he had been the fourth giant he had noticed back then.
In any case, he had no idea why that explosion had happened either.
Number eight was all about his hidden power. And he was still no closer to figuring that out than when he had first started trying.
His body seemed to be in control of it, not him. So he may never be able to freely access it.
...
Number nine was about the organization, structure, and hierarchy of reality itself.
Why does the other world exist? Who is in charge of it? Why don't they intervene in this universe? Was reincarnation possible?
There were a lot of unknowns wrapped up in number nine. It was likely he'd never find the answers to them either until he died. And perhaps not even then.
He could possibly ask his dad at some point in the future about it though. He may know.
Number ten was all about the rest of this universe. The saiyans exist, or existed at the very least. How many more species like them were spread out throughout the universe?
How many potential enemies did Earth have?
And finally, number eleven encapsulated everything about the mechanics of reality. This included his desire to know all of the laws of physics, as well as a complete mathematical description of both Ki and magic.
And this one, surprisingly enough, was the one he had made the most progress on recently.
He had seen a lot of weird things done with energy in the past. Both by his dad, and by Piccolo. And he wanted to know how it all worked.
...
He had actually just finished up a series of experiments that he had been wanting to do, pretty much since he had first unlocked his Ki.
He had had a hunch for a while now, about what Ki actually was, but he hadn't had the equipment at the time to prove it.
Well as it so happens, he had picked it all up back at that store in the city a few days ago.
And about an hour ago now, he had done all the experiments.
He had performed the series of experiments outside, seen the results, and then he had come into his house for a drink of water.
He had finished about half the glass, and then, while still pondering the results, the glass had exploded in his hand as three rapid fire world altering revelations had hit him one after another.
He had just been staring at the table for the past twenty minutes or so now, in silence. Watching as the puddle of water from his spilled drink slowly dripped from the table, onto the floor.
He was still there, in fact. Just trying to sort his mind out.
And letting it fly all over the place like it usually did.
...
It had never happened before. He had never had that many revelations in such a short period of time. Usually he would only get one at a time, on the rare occasions he got one at all. But three? That was just ridiculous.
He was absolutely sure that he had just glimpsed a secret of the universe, too. Possibly one that his dad may not even be aware of.
He could in fact be the first person to ever know the things he had just learned.
And it was a lot to take in.
Gohan glanced down at his hands.
…
They were shaking. His hands were still shaking.
His left was still bleeding a little bit from the glass he had unintentionally crushed with it, but it was of no concern to him, really.
But he was actually shaking. And he didn't really know what he was feeling either.
Was it excitement? Or anxiety? Or some mix of the two? He wasn't really sure.
His mind was just wandering all over the place now. Without direction.
..
He really needed to focus.
And that, admittedly, took him a significant effort to finally pull off.
Gohan took a deep breath, and sighed.
…
Then he went over it all again.
He had wondered what Ki was, ever since he had first seen it. What was its composition? How was it created? Where was it stored?
What state of matter was it, even?
Most of those things he hadn't been able to figure out directly, but he was able to figure out that last one easily enough. In fact, one of his experiments was meant to answer that question specifically.
A ball of Ki kind of reminded him of a water balloon. It felt sort of like a solid, but it was too malleable, and it could change its shape. Which really ruled it out as a possibility.
It wasn't really a liquid either though. It was very easy to compress and expand. And if he dropped his control over it, it would disperse rather violently in all directions, rather than fall to the ground like a liquid normally would.
So he had pretty much narrowed it down between either some sort of gas, or a plasma before even starting his experiment.
Well, he knew that a plasma was composed of freely flowing electrons and ions, and as a result they could be influenced by electric or magnetic fields.
So to test it out, he had made a ball Ki, grabbed the magnet that he had printed out at the store earlier, and put one next to the other.
...
And he discovered that Ki could be directly influenced by a magnet.
It arced, in the exact way that he had predicted it to arc if it were an actual plasma.
That explanation had fit every observation he had ever made of Ki. It made perfect sense.
And this had been his first revelation. Ki was just plasma. It didn't just act like a plasma, that's what it was. There was nothing at all special about it. And that was the truly amazing part.
He had then assumed that, because he was able to manipulate his Ki so easily, that he had another ability, one that granted him some control over electromagnetism.
So he had grabbed a handful of iron filings- he had actually spent a couple of minutes with his magnet filtering some from the dirt outside, to see if they would arrange themselves along the magnetic field lines that he was apparently creating with his ability.
...
And nothing had happened.
He had tried and, tried. Making balls of Ki near them, manipulating his energy in weird ways, and generally just doing whatever he could think of to make the filings move without directly pushing them around.
And he had gotten a null result that he didn't really understand at the time. But that follow-up experiment had given him his second revelation.
His ability to direct Ki had nothing to do with electromagnetism.
...
It was fundamental matter manipulation.
He literally had the ability to move matter around telekinetically, somehow. His Ki- plasma, just happened to be the matter that his body was set up to move around the easiest, for some reason.
And as far as he was aware, science had no explanation for something like that, yet. A process that could move all types of matter indiscriminately. Maybe whatever it was, was what was used inside those dino caps.
And then he had gotten his third revelation.
And it was so large that he had immediately called it 'The fundamental theory of Ki.'
There had been a divide in his mind for the longest time before that point. All of the supernatural stuff that happened around him was on one side, and all of the objectively proven scientific facts were on the other.
He had made some progress in acknowledging it, and knocking some of it over, but it was with these experiments that he had knocked it down almost entirely.
He had given that divide a good and solid whack, and to his surprise, the whole thing had just dropped.
Both Ki and magic, were now accessible to science.
He was pretty sure he had just figured it all out with that particular revelation.
...
And he had to rethink everything.
There was no such thing as a ball of Ki. That phrase, was like talking about a ball of gravity. It just made no sense at all.
Ki was some sort of abstract potential energy that he had access to. It was like a bank account. And his body could make withdrawals from it, with which, he could use to make other forms of energy.
It was an exchange of values.
X amount of joules of Ki, get converted into X amount of Joules of another type of energy by some unknown process that his body could do naturally.
And this was where magic came in.
He had two distinct types of these abstract potential energies in his body. Each of which, had different properties. Properties as different from each other as mass-energy, and kinetic-energy were from each other.
His magic energy did nothing more than facilitate the exchange. It created this invisible thing, that he couldn't detect. But he called it a 'Fundamental Energy Transform,' because that's what it did.
It was like a black box. He couldn't see the machinery inside one, but he could input Ki into one, and he would get an output of a different form of energy.
When he created a ball of what he used to call Ki, what he had really done was create this invisible magic black box, an energy transform, that converted his input Ki energy, into mass energy in the form of plasma.
And as far as he knew, he could make two different types of these transforms.
The other one he could make did the same thing, allowing him to input Ki energy, but it converted it into kinetic energy instead. Not a physical object. This type of energy being the type that was associated with the movement of an object.
He could directly subtract Ki from his reserves, and instantly, that exact amount of energy he subtracted, would be applied to an object he was focusing on by increasing its speed.
Like a bank account transfer. Where the accounts were the different forms of energy, and where the electricity cost was paid in magic.
When Piccolo had made that sword back then, he had, very likely, tapped into his own magic pool, used it to subtract energy from his own Ki stores, and added it in the form of mass energy on the ground. Then through some precision kinetic energy manipulation on the atoms he was creating, Piccolo arranged this new mass, into the form of a sword.
So there were likely other types of energy transforms that Gohan didn't know how to make yet. He could make plasma, and he could edit an object's kinetic energy, but that was it.
Piccolo could make raw protons and neutrons somehow, and arrange them into the form of complex molecules.
That was the sort of thing he needed to learn how to do himself at some point. He would also probably need to get a few books on particle physics. That was an area of study that he hadn't really started in on yet. He knew a couple of the surface ideas, but none of the math yet. He'd have to learn that in all likelihood to understand a little more of what was going on.
So, his Ki pool was just a number. It was just some sort of abstract potential energy sink. Some amount of Joules that could be added in any form to basically anything, but that couldn't be accessed without his other pool of energy. His magic.
...
Did that make him a god?
He had some authority over what happened in the region of space around him. If he wanted mass to suddenly appear in front of him, he could make it so, bringing it forth seemingly out of thin air.
He could control the distribution of all forms of energy around him, theoretically. He could increase an object's mass if it was near him, or increase its kinetic energy.
He could probably do a lot more, too. Those were just the two forms of energy he knew how to make right now. This whole series of ideas that had hit him since he had witnessed those experiments was just the tip of the iceberg. He could feel it.
His theory was incomplete, but he was pretty sure he was finally on the right track now.
And most importantly, he had covered enough ground to allow him to verify all of this through the scientific method.
A process he had seen summarized quite nicely in a random comment he had read on a forum on the internet.
Science was the process of throwing everything imaginable at an idea to try to prove it wrong. If you couldn't do it, and if nobody else could do it, and if the idea was at least possible in principle to falsify, then you had to keep it. Otherwise, you had to throw it out.
He needed to try and prove his new theory wrong.
How?
By objectively measuring how much energy he contained.
How much was in his Ki pool?
...
He had a few ideas to calculate this.
His first was to get a vat of full of water, measure its temperature as carefully as possible, make a ball of plasma, then submerge it in the water until it dissipates completely. Then he'd measure the temperature change of the water.
With some math, that should get him the amount of energy in one ball of energy of that size.
Then he'd create the same sized ball of energy over and over again until he couldn't anymore, and count how many he had made in total. That final count, with some more math, would allow him to get a rough estimate of the size of his Ki pool, in theory.
And once he had that number, all sorts of doors opened.
He could use a fraction of his Ki pool to move an object, to see if Ki energy could be converted to kinetic energy without any loss, as he currently expected. Does X number of Joules of Ki, produce X number of Joules of kinetic energy when converted through a transform? Or was there some energy loss?
Or, he could calculate how big an explosion he could make with the energy he had at any moment.
He could feel his Ki energy. He had used it so many times already that it was trivial to estimate how much he had left at any time. But only in vague terms like "more than half," or "about ten percent."
So if he learned just how many Joules were in ten percent of his energy, he could calculate the maximum explosion size without expending any energy at all.
He could also measure how much energy it took for him to fly, which would give him some insight on how that process actually worked.
How efficient was he using his energy when he took off? Was he using the bare minimum? Or was he wasting a lot unnecessarily?
He would also be able to find out what the most efficient way to use his energy was.
If he wanted a ball of plasma some distance in front of him, what used more energy? Forming it directly at that distance, or forming it in his hand, then telekinetically pushing it there?
Was there even a difference?
He could form a ball of Ki a few feet away from him directly, out of arm's reach, but it was noticeably harder to pull it off.
There was so much he could learn with this information.
He potentially had a way now, to attack these problems mathematically. The supernatural element was just gone now.
..
And that left him with so much work to do…
Months Later
His meeting with Piccolo had been an interesting one.
He had lost track of the days during his time in isolation, and he had forgotten what day it had been when his dad had taken him to Master Roshi's island for that reunion. He hadn't even remembered what month it had been at the time. So he couldn't look at the current date to compare, and calculate the number of days he had been out there so far.
All he knew, was that he had been living in his capsule house for about two months before Piccolo showed up.
In that time, he had focused solely on his experiments, and on his training.
And he had learned so much from those experiments.
He had actually been in the middle of another one when Piccolo had finally arrived.
He had determined that he was likely going to be almost useless at the fight with the saiyans. He just didn't have enough time, and he didn't know how strong everyone was. So he had figured that he would try to create a special ability.
He had decided to create a one-off. An ability so powerful it drained his entire energy reserve at once, taking himself out of the fight. But, if unleashed as a total surprise, one that might take at least one of the saiyans out with him.
His size would likely cause them to underestimate his strength. They would probably conclude that since he was so small, he would try to make use of his maneuverability, and become really good at evasion and dodging.
He would do that, in all likelihood, but he had wanted something bigger.
...
A laser.
He wanted a laser.
A really big, really powerful laser.
Coincidentally, he had also been using his laser tests as a way to measure the size of his energy pool. By estimating the destruction, and comparing it to the amount of TNT required to make that same amount of it, converting it to joules, then measuring how much energy he had depleted with it.
Which again, gave him so much useful information.
He had a computer with satellite internet to look up a lot of the known values for TNT yields, and to look up how to do some of the more complicated calculations he was trying to do. So he had some pretty decent estimates.
He had been in the middle of one of these tests when Piccolo had arrived.
It had been his first successful one actually. He had emptied about eighty percent of his reserves, if his math was right, and he had nearly burned down the entire forest nearby, with it.
The laser was strong.
Since it was supposed to be a sort of surprise attack, he had decided to not use his hands to make it, too. He wanted to be able to fight with both hands, and still be able to fire it off.
His feet obviously didn't work either for the same reason, so he had decided to form it just in front of his mouth.
It was pretty difficult to make it form from there, and it had taken a lot of attempts, but he did eventually manage it. Now he just had to learn how to make it in a reasonable amount of time.
Because it took him a couple of minutes at least, to charge up.
...
He had also almost knocked himself unconscious from exhaustion with that test.
He remembered seeing the burning forest through his blurry eyes, and then suddenly, a massive gale of wind had arrived and the fire was gone.
Then Piccolo had landed in front of him.
...
That had been an interesting meeting, for sure…
Training had started the next day.
A/N: Please excuse any grammar and spelling errors, as I have no beta reader at this time.
- LeviTamm