"Are you still messing with that thing?" Said a soft voice as two, strong arms wrapped around her. She scowled and wriggled out of his grasp, but didn't turn to meet his eyes.

"The answer is here, Yamcha. I know it is." Her voice was soft and flat, as though someone far away were speaking through her lips.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. Frowning, he looked over her shoulder. After a few minutes, he sighed again. "It's been months, Bulma. If you haven't figured that thing out by now, there's nothing to figure out."

When she didn't respond, he shook his head. Still, he waited. After a few more minutes, he turned and walked towards the door. Just before walking out of it, he turned his head towards her. "Life is waiting for you outside this lab, Bulma. I'm waiting for you. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

When she didn't answer, he threw his arms up and left her.

Silence. Stillness. And suddenly, hours later, a mental click.

"He was trying to tell me something. It was worth his life and he wanted me to know what it was. I just have to see what I'm not seeing," she said to the empty air. When nothing but the quiet answered her, she turned her head to scan the room. Frowning, she shrugged and focused again on the device. In recent weeks, when she bothered to speak at all, she didn't know if she was talking to herself or someone else.

In a sudden wave of exasperation, anger, and self-pity, she threw the enigmatic piece of equipment on the desk and thrust her fingers in her hair. Tears burned against her eyelids and she shook with the effort to contain her emotion. Screaming her bitterness and defeat, her voice became hoarse. "What the fuck am I missing? WHAT?"

Pacing, she went over again the moments just prior to the alien's death. She had pressed a few buttons and had seen a numerical pattern. That seemed to please him; as though at that moment, she were already close to solving the puzzle between his language and hers. She knew it was about language. Before Piccalo had erupted in a firestorm of energy and thrust it out in a concentrated attack, he had spoken to them in English. But if English were known to him, why at the moment of his death could he not tell her – whatever he had so desperately wanted her to know? It had to be because he couldn't actually speak English. Which meant this thing had somehow done it for him. Why he had to wait until the thing malfunctioned to say anything important was infuriating.

He had said nothing useful when he first confronted Goku. He had given little away that could be useful or used. He had only said that he was called Radditz, and came from a warrior race; a race that included Goku. She came to an abrupt stop.

Goku is an alien. She laughed at herself, still surprised by what should have been obvious from the first time her eyes beheld the weird little runt. Not so little, anymore...

Pacing again, she let her mind wander. Saiyans. They are Saiyans. And all of them are warriors.

Blowing her bangs out of her face, she scrunched her eyebrows. He never explained why he was there. He had tried desperately to goad Goku into following him. When that hadn't worked, he had snatched Gohan and ran towards his ship. To… what? Kidnap the son to force the father to fight? Or kidnap the son to entice the father to follow? Maybe take them both to – go home? Join a cause? Sing Christmas carols?

She shook her head. That was the blaring hole that she couldn't fill. Everything make sense, but only up to why he was really there. Everything had been flowing in a specific direction until the attack. At first, he had seemed so desperately relieved to have found Goku. Again and again his only words implored Earth's greatest fighter to join him; become the warrior he was meant to be. That implied Goku was a warrior who wasn't fulfilling a specific purpose as a warrior. Was finding Goku and revealing that purpose the reason the alien had come?

It seemed it was, but that was before all the madness. Before her friends conspired to neutralize the threat. Until they attacked, Radditz had ignored all but Goku. How shocked he had been to discover there existed other warriors on Earth.

She frowned. He had seemed limitless in his power, but he hadn't really used that strength. Right before he was hit with the blast that killed him, it had seemed as though he were toying with her friends. Or maybe…. testing them. But why? To make them reveal their strength?

She sucked in a breath and held it briefly before letting it whoosh out. Saiyins are warriors. Who knows what their motivations are. If Goku is any indication, food and fighting and nothing more. She winced in sympathy. But if ChiChi has her way, Gohan will be more scholar than warrior…

She put her back to the wall and slid down to the floor. Closing her eyes, she let herself drift. Too bad Radditz wasn't a scholar. He could have told me how the hell the 'math, the universal language' can actually function as a real fucking language.

She wasn't sure how long she sat there. Perhaps she was resting her eyes. Maybe she had drifted to sleep. Either way, her eyes popped open. "They're warriors. Not scholars," she whispered. Shaking, she shot off the floor and ran to the alien device. "Just like words are not numbers! Complete opposites!"

Her fingers flew over the keyboard, creating a virtual intelligence that could dance between forms and figures using abstract, intuitive randomness rather than calculated patterns and applied mathematical extrapolations. Beings were not machines. Languages are full of words, and meanings are not precise as they are in numbers. Interpretation is applied, not finite. Children learn to speak in a leap of spontaneous genius. They don't really learn, they just one day… know. The rest of their lives are spent learning new words, but the basis of language was there.

Hours later, eyes bloodshot and raw, she hit enter for the last time. Suddenly as terrified as she was excited, she raised the contraption to her face and looked through the glass. Slowly, she hit the button.

An alien language, guttural and animalistic filled the room. She hit the button again and the words…. Changed.

"…They come for you. To enslave. To destroy. To kill… He comes as I came…you will know him…Watch for him…"

She dropped the device and was running out the door before it fell to the floor. They had been wrong about him.. so wrong. And now she didn't know how long they had.