Vegeta awoke late into the morning to the sound of Bulma knocking on his door. "There's breakfast for you downstairs. Come down whenever," she said. If his memory testified truthfully, she had been in his room last night. He remembered that he had had a terrible dream and that he had woken up, but what he remembered about his brief time awake remained hazy. Ultimately, he concluded that he would say nothing of it to her regardless. He hoped that he had just imagined her presence. Loathing himself enough for letting a fantasy terrorize him, he had absolutely no desire for anyone else to know of it.

He looked forward to eating Earthling food again; the smell of frying flesh had wafted up into his room. Quickly, he dressed himself in athletic pants and a sleeveless top, and he descended into the kitchen. Someone had laid out a large plate of biscuits, eggs, and ham out for him. On the side of the table opposite his plate, Bulma sat reading a printout of an article from an academic journal. "Morning, Vegeta." He had already begun inhaling his food, and did not respond.

"Hey. So. Do you want to come to the lab with me after you're done? I want to get that DNA sample. I figured now would be a good time to do it while you're waiting for my dad to readjust everything in the ship." Smiling, she peered over at him from behind her papers. A bit of relief came over Vegeta, for Bulma did not seem (at least to him) to have anything from last night on her mind.

"Why not," he replied.

"Great! I'll go and get everything started." She stood up from her chair, stacked her article together, and brushed Vegeta's shoulder with her hand as she passed him.

"What are you doing?" Turning around in his seat, he beamed a challenging glare at her.

Bulma stood stunned for a few instants, but defended herself soon enough. "Just treating you like a normal person. See you in a bit!" She trotted away quickly, giving him no time to challenge her a second time. Clearly, she had cut off any possible response of his intentionally.

A "normal person"—what a title. Vegeta didn't know what Bulma had meant by it. He could not decide whether it offended him or not. In one sense, she had implied that she would treat him with the same respect with which she garnered everyone else, but in another sense, she had implied that he was no different from anyone else, that he should not receive more respect. The immediate implication of her actions was simply that "normal" people—whatever that signified—occasionally touched each other casually. He wrote it off as a superfluous human custom. Bulma had wanted to treat him like a fellow human, then, and not as an outsider, an alien. Confusion enthralled him anew. Among his race, he had craved acceptance and deference, but he could not determine whether or not he desired the same from the human creatures. All they had shown themselves to be was feeble, letting their hearts bleed all over the place; he wished to remain outside of that, surely. In any case, he finished his breakfast and found his way to the laboratory.

"There you are," said Bulma as she saw him enter. "I'll just explain what's going to happen while I'm finished getting everything ready. Might as well, as you will have had to wait thirty minutes after eating before I collect the sample.

"All right. So I'm going to give you this test tube here"—she raised a small glass cylinder with her right hand—"and you're going to need to fill it about three-fourths of the way full with saliva. I know, it's gross, but what can I say—laboratories can be pretty gross places sometimes. Then, I'm going to mix in a special serum which will help grow the DNA into a big enough sample for the machine to read. I'll put the sample on a sensitive glass plate, and a computer will tell me the results. Growing the sample will take a while, so we won't get the data today."

"I understand," Vegeta said. He took the test tube from her, and did as she had instructed.

"You know what's a real shame? The fact that since our stupid planet hasn't discovered extraterrestrial life, I can't publish a paper on what I learn from your DNA. I would get a Nobel Prize—absolutely guarantee it. That's one of the most prestigious awards on Earth, by the way. I can't just publish a paper and then just say, 'Oh yeah—I also discovered an alien life form.' It's so stupid."

Vegeta snickered. "Your race is pathetic. To think that your brains are so large but that you nevertheless have barely achieved interstellar travel. What is holding you back, I wonder?"

"Governments don't fund science. They fund themselves. But what I wonder about is how Saiyans learned space travel. My dad and I studied the Saiyan pods. That's how we designed the ship you used to look for Goku."

The Saiyan prince thought for a moment. He sorted through all the lessons he had ever heard from his father about his race. "Saiyans have always been capable of interstellar travel. There is not one point in our legends or recorded history when it was not possible."

"So it's been a really long time, then?"

"Tens of thousands of Earth years. Our earliest legends are of the ancient Saiyan Judges and their clans, each governing a ship that traveled the universe to plunder the resources of the planets they discovered. We united under a Super Saiyan king, the first of the Super Saiyans, almost 50,000 years ago. He had conquered a world much like my father had, and our people lived together on one planet for the first time. That planet was destroyed, and my father defended our people and brought them to Planet Vegeta. I am the last of my legacy." A distant look had come into Vegeta's dark eyes, and he smiled as he relayed the story of his father and his fathers.

"Wow!" Bulma smiled at Vegeta's smile. She folded her brow and raised one hand to her chin in thought. "You've been capable of space travel for 50,000 years at least, and before that, you lived in space exclusively?"

"Yes."

"I have a theory, but we'll have to see if the information from your DNA confirms it."

"What do you hope to learn, woman?" Vegeta's eyes met hers.

"Well, there's the practical stuff for you, Goku, and Gohan—I'll be able to see if some human medicines will work on you, and I can get some help formulating new Saiyan medicines if we need to. Then, I can compare your genes to human ones. I want to see how much genetic distance is between the two species. It will tell me what makes a Saiyan a Saiyan, and a human a human. It might also tell me approximately when the two species split off from each other if there was a common ancestor. Holy shit! Why on earth can't I write a damn paper about this! Damn it, Vegeta, you have no idea how frustrating that is!" She sighed. "I might learn what gives you Saiyans an advantage when it comes to channeling energy too. In a couple hundred years, just maybe, humans will have mastered genetic modification, and I imagine that information would be very useful."

"No genetic modification will ever make a human into one of my race. Remember that." He waved his hand in disgust. "Now tell me—if you think about such high-minded things, woman, why do you conduct yourself with such uncouthness, fickleness, and impetuousness?"

Bulma processed his question for a moment. "Wait a minute. Was that a compliment?"

Vegeta laughed wildly. "Of course not."

"Whatever you say, your highness." She saucily performed a mock curtsey with her lab coat. "I might read your entire genome, but I will never understand you Saiyans. I will never know what goes on in that fucked up brain of yours. I will never really know what you are."

"I am Vegeta, Prince of All Saiyans. My identity belongs to me alone."

"Right. Say—thanks for participating in this project. I appreciate it."

"I did not do this for you. I did it to learn of my race. Do not credit your feminine charms, as you surely would have done."

Bulma rolled her eyes. "Still, thanks."