The compact, metallic prison in which Muten Roshi and Bulma found themselves imprisoned in rumbled, shaking up the pair of captives that it held within. Shortly thereafter, light seeped into the compartment as gravity took its toll and forced the shaken up pair to roll out in an unflattering position onto the frozen, ice floor. It was tough to say which prompted Bulma to jump on to her feet first, the embarrassing position of her tumble or the freezing steel which she faceplanted onto. With the inventor wearing nothing but a dress and a blazer, the woman began rubbing her hands and blowing hot air into them almost immediately.
"Welcome! Welcome to my laboratory!" the brain inside of a submarine that was Dr. Wheelo declared. The underwater vehicle began morphing until it took a more stationary position and then connected to a spot on the wall where it could have interacted with his captives better.
"You presumptuous ass, what did you need to take me here for!?" Bulma shook her fist at the gigantic configuration of robotics hosting Dr. Wheelo's massive brain. "I'm no martial artist. If I get a cold, you're gonna get it!"
Muten Roshi felt astounded and even a tad inspired by how fearless Bulma was. The enemy wielded enough strength to believe that he was able to defeat all of the strongest martial artists in the world and the genius to reverse-engineer and even improve on the design of the Saibamen that Saiyans used in battle in a matter of days. And yet Bulma was as fierce standing against him as she would have been bullying poor Yamcha.
"I apologize if the conditions aren't ideal for your fragile human body. I assure you that I do not intend to pit you against my Bio-Warriors. However, you and your father are esteemed scientists and superstars of the scientific community. While I do believe your achievements to be vastly overrated, I would be a fool not to acknowledge your prowess and respect your family and therefore I have taken up on this curious opportunity to have you be a witness to my scientific breakthrough." Dr. Wheelo explained as Muten Roshi began looking around. The entire laboratory had been sunken in shadows but he couldn't help but feel dread in the air as wicked Ki began creeping into his sensory range. They weren't alone here.
"A witness?" Bulma wrapped her arms over her chest. "Explain yourself!"
"Well, I am but an intellectual marvel, I am no brutal ruffian. I shall not tolerate unnecessary brutality and therefore I do not wish to resort to ripping off heads so that I can prove my point to the skeptical scientific community. The word of an esteemed prodigy in the field of science such as yourself will more than suffice when I report on my stunning breakthrough in the field of bio-engineering," Dr. Wheelo did as requested.
"You said that you were targeting all of the World Martial Arts Champions, correct?" Muten Roshi wondered. "Whom else have you brought here?"
"Sadly, most champions I have contacted have allowed their human bodies to fail them. We could not locate the Devil Man or any martial arts champions from tournaments earlier than the 19th World Martial Arts Tournament. Champion Baragon has abandoned his fighting ways and he now lives in luxury in a mansion filled with adoring female fans. Both of them are embarrassments to the art, they failed to defeat even the scouting party of Bio-Men. Nevertheless, I am a thorough professional, I shall locate Chayote and Son Goku promptly," Dr. Wheelo pointed out as he displayed pictures of a giant bipedal dragon monster with massive ears and a horn of his forehead with hunter-green skin and King Chappa, both beaten and broken with Baragon's adoring female fans and King Chappa's apprentices alike weeping over their defeated idols.
"Good luck with that," Bulma looked proud of herself as she made that declaration. "Son Goku is off-world at the moment, training in the Otherworld though Chayote will pummel you and your silly Bio-Men flat in no time at all."
"Dr. Wheelo…" a shrieking, senile voice came from a frozen platform up above the giant machinery sustaining Dr. Wheelo's brain. "There is a slight complication in the plan. As Bulma-san stated, neither Son Goku nor Chayote are anywhere on Earth. We simply cannot locate any signal of their existence, similarly how we couldn't find Devil Man or other deceased champions."
"You must be joking!" Dr. Wheelo's voice boomed over the lab, cracking and shattering layers of ice that had covered some of the long-unused devices and lab tubes inside of his laboratory. "We cannot afford a sloppy experiment! Our conclusions will be rendered null and void with a sample size of only one World Martial Arts champion!"
The other voice belonged to an elderly man of paled out gray skin and a head misshapen by its age and marked with male patterned baldness. It would have been a daunting task finding someone who recalled the times when this man still had any teeth in his mouth. The man's features had been twisted by his unnatural age, there were no signs of bulk, and his ears and eyes vastly outmatched the other, shriveled features of the man's body.
"This is Dr. Kochin, the only assistant to whom I could have entrusted the task of operating on my precious brain," Dr. Wheelo introduced the interloper to his guests. "What a disgrace… To be foiled by the fragility of the human body again, why couldn't all of you sickly martial artists last just a little bit longer? No matter, we have proof that my Bio-Men have beaten Baragon and Dr. Chappa. Let us proceed with the experiment and present those photographs as proof, our situation could not have been helped."
"Yes, Dr. Wheelo!" Dr. Kochin bowed and cupped his hands by his mouth. "Bio-Warriors! It's your turn to fight now!"
Blitzes of pink, green and yellow danced across the laboratory stage, forcing Muten Roshi to brace himself for an impending attack and take a fighting stance while Bulma cowered behind him. The three rampant Ki signatures settled in place, finally allowing the sum of their features to take form before the weathered martial arts master.
One of them was a tall, pink brawler with red hair that laid tied behind his back in a ponytail. The other one was a human-sized reptilian of green skin and sickly, red dots all over his body. Whatever creatures were spliced together to create this warrior, the reptilian possessed all of their collective features, including pointed ears and dorsal fins down his back. The third one was an enormous yellow blob with a face full of sluggish features, thick lips, and antennae hanging low from his face.
"Behold, the Bio-Warriors! Created by my hand, guided by the brilliant intellect of Dr. Wheelo, these are the finest testaments of Dr. Wheelo's genius. Magnificent in every way and unburdened by the limits of their humanity!" Dr. Kochin praised the trio as they loomed over the distressed Muten Roshi.
"Okay, so Dr. Kochin is clearly just a robot, right?" Bulma poked fun at the evil scientist, forcing him to lean back in fright that he could have been accused of such a thing.
"How dare you!? The very idea…!" Dr. Kochin shook his fist out. "I am the trusted assistant to Dr. Wheelo. Without me, this entire operation would have been impossible! For years I've sought a way to free Dr. Wheelo from the icy prison of his laboratory as I was out for groceries in North City when the frost sealed it off. Finally, during a cataclysm in the northern region, the ice was destroyed and I was finally able to access the laboratory and tend to Dr. Wheelo… For you to accuse me of…"
Dr. Wheelo erupted in thunderous, robotic-sounding laughter. The spread of cheer and joy through the entire area sent more ice-shattering shockwaves across the stage.
"What an intelligent young lady. Truly you shall transcend the narrow mindset of your father. Tell me, Bulma, what gave it away?" Dr. Wheelo wondered sounding amused.
"Well, nobody in their right mind would ever buy into your vanity project and second your arrogance. It takes a robot programmed to sing praises to you to compliment someone who's so busy doing it himself. Plus, you said that you trusted the only man you could to operate on you and you're too full of yourself to ever trust anyone else but yourself. The only way anybody could have done that surgery is if it's a robot guided by yourself," Bulma crossed her arms and pouted, pointing out her observations.
"You're doing an excellent job, Bulma, keep him talking…" Muten Roshi's telepathic signal rung in Bulma's mind, surprising the prodigious inventor for a second but she was quick to regain her graces. She didn't think much of such a task as it was pretty much accomplishing itself.
"Ebifurya, Kishime, Misokatsun, pummel that old buffoon into submission and kill that woman too!" Dr. Kochin snapped, grabbing the railing in front of him and shaking it violently. "Dr. Wheelo… How could you…? I thought that I was your assistant Dr. Kochin, not some lowly robot wearing an old skinsuit."
The Bio-Warriors shuffled in between each other as they rushed toward Muten Roshi all at once. This was not the plan which Dr. Wheelo intended and the floating brain let it be known with loud and unintelligible objections. Ebifurya slammed his entire body into Muten Roshi, taking the old man off his feet and sending him flying back and stunned. Kishime's reptilian body began vanishing in snaps all around the laboratory as he raced toward the blown back martial artist but only Muten Roshi's afterimage dispersed after Kishime tried breaking his spine with a kick from the back.
Muten Roshi returned to his senses just in time to dash aside and avoid a falling body slam from Misokatsun. The veteran martial artist quickly cupped his hands together and channeled a Kamehameha at the flopped Bio-Warrior who still laid on his blobby belly but the Ki attack just bounced off of his gelatinous body as Misokatsun smacked his bulk with an expression that was as overjoyed as it was malicious.
"Dr. Kochin, what are you doing? You are sabotaging this entire experiment!" Dr. Wheelo finally started making some sense when the static from his laboratory tech cleared out. Muten Roshi continued to hold his own against vastly superior opponents, hoping to hold out for as long as he could but even a single one of them would have proven to be a daunting challenge for him. "Establish order back into it and reset it, I order this!"
Dr. Kochin appeared conflicted with himself. Jolts of electricity burst forth from his body as he appeared to be wrestling against his own body but he then lifted his hand up and, as if responding to a direct command, the Bio-Warriors all backed out of the fight and lined up in an orderly fashion.
"Dr. Wheelo… I did everything you asked for. I gathered and bought up explosives from defunct Red Ribbon army members to blow the ice off of your lab, even if the cataclysmic event that freed you wouldn't have taken place, the explosives would have freed you anyway. Do you mean to tell me that nothing about me is real?" Dr. Kochin lamented as he moved and acted as a mere puppet to his master's will despite speaking something entirely different and quite rebellious.
"Do not be silly, of course not. Do you think I would have let a mere uneducated robot do my bidding? I had you acquire multiple PhDs in medicine and engineering from an online university so you have two legitimate doctorates, Dr. Kochin. You've served me adequately in all tasks but one, eliminating those pesky bats from my lab!" Dr. Wheelo objected as a lonely bat thrashed about in the air, looking for a way to escape the laboratory in its predicament. Dr. Kochin shook his metal cane in the air, trying to swat the flying mammal out of the air.
"This is nonsense, bats don't even live in this area of the world!" Dr. Kochin objected as the bat flapped away from his sight and hid somewhere.
"You must have brought it back with your groceries then, the poor little thing…" Dr. Wheelo replied. "Either way, let's proceed with the experiment but make it fair. Crush this feeble old man one at a time and don't touch Bulma-san. I will not allow any harm to come to such a bright young mind."
Ebifurya stepped forth, cracking his knuckles. This was troublesome as Ebifurya was the most powerful of all three Bio-Warriors judging by his Ki signature alone though something told Muten Roshi that things weren't quite so simple. Even with a tremendous Ki such as Ebifurya's, he'd not have been able to shrug off the Kamehameha as Misokatsun did. These Bio-Warriors possessed individual talents of their own as well.
The pink brute threw his hand out, firing a simple Ki blast in Muten Roshi's direction and prompting the martial arts master to leap away from the blast so that he could avoid any damage. Bulma hurried to a remote corner of the lab as well as the shockwave from the blast threw her a good distance back. The fact that Bulma was affected by a blast of someone so powerful yet didn't suffer any damage alarmed Roshi – that suggested that Ebifurya didn't put all too much Ki into his attack which was a bad sign suggesting distraction.
"Freezing Fist!" Ebifurya shouted out, pumping his fist out into the air and forming an intense ice wave that rushed at Muten Roshi and froze him into a frigid block of ice that fell flat onto the ground, breaking off a few chunks though, fortunately, none of them carried any limbs or pieces of the frozen martial arts master though it gave Bulma an almost lethal scare.
"Hmm… Disappointing indeed if that is all from the world-famous champion of the 13th World Martial Arts Tournament, Muten Roshi." Dr. Wheelo proclaimed. "What's this? It appears that he still has a quite vigorous heartbeat even when frozen solid… How amusing. I very much look forward to having a body that defies our understanding of the laws of physics and human anatomy like that. Ebifurya, take care of it! I can hardly wait!"
"Yes, Dr. Wheelo!" Ebifurya nodded with a rich smirk on his face and extended his hand again, blasting Muten Roshi with another blast of frost, then another, building onto his chilling grave with each frosty airwave that passed it.
"This is going too slow! His heartbeat is barely slowing down!" Dr. Kochin objected to the chosen strategy of his Bio-Warrior. "I understand that you are eager to show off your spectacular Freezing Fist technique to Dr. Wheelo so that he chooses you as his new body but Dr. Wheelo will not stand a body that cannot do the job despite having the largest power out of all the Bio-Warriors."
"Fine…" Ebifurya blew out his cheeks, evidently being caught red-handed as to the strategy that he had chosen. He generated a couple of Ki blasts in his hands, preparing to reduce the massive block of ice into oblivion but his attack froze in mid-motion. It stopped disrupted by Dr. Kochin's shriek.
"What is it, Dr. Kochin?" Dr. Wheelo wondered what warranted such an ecstatic reaction from Dr. Kochin.
"Dr. Wheelo! We did it! We found Son Goku! The champion of the 22nd World Martial Arts Tournament! Evidently, he survived the Tournament of Doom incident!" Dr. Kochin declared. "This is odd… His life signature is somewhere around Kame Island where we picked up Muten Roshi from."
"That's odd, we never told Goku about the meeting. We thought he'd still be training in the Otherworld," Bulma muttered.
"Very well, quick, eliminate this chaff and let us move on to testing Son Goku. If my Bio-Warriors can overcome him, then there can be no equal to their power and I shall take the body that strikes the finishing blow!" Dr. Wheelo proclaimed, encouraging Ebifurya to wrap up here. The pink brute extended his hand to decimate the ice block to pieces when a loud pop distracted him once more.
"Drat!" a squeaky voice alerted all present toward the more precise location of the popping closer to the computer panels of the lab. "My transformation timed out…"
"That bat, it's no bat at all! It's some pig!" Dr. Wheelo stated the obvious.
"He's no pig, he's an Animal-Type human!" Dr. Kochin paled out. "You, step away from that console!"
"Heh, heh…" Oolong made a malevolent expression with his face as he began mashing the buttons on the panel in a mad flurry. The entire laboratory sunk into a disarray of beaming red light as sirens began shrieking all over the place before their wear and tear muzzled them in an unnatural conclusion to their disturbing song.
"That madman set off the explosives!" Dr. Kochin's jaw dropped.
"What!? Why is our own laboratory rigged with explosives?" Dr. Wheelo lost his cool, realizing that his precious work and possibly even his mechanical body might have been as good as gone.
"It's for the ice, Dr. Wheelo, I planned to use them to blow up the ice in your lab," Dr. Kochin pat his balding head, looking apologetic.
"B-But why leave them there then once the cataclysm freed it from the ice already?" Dr. Wheelo asked with a stumped tone.
"B-But what if another mad arctic storm hits and your laboratory freezes over again? Better be safe than sorry…" Dr. Kochin chuckled, fully realizing the error of his thoughts now.
The electricity in Kochin's body intensified, sending the poor robotic doctor down on the ground as the burst of his own sparks from various openings in his mechanical body blinded the doctor. In his mad struggle, Dr. Kochin tore off his fake human flesh from his joints, exposing his metallic endoskeleton in those areas.
"Dr… Dr. Wheelo! What are you doing!?" Dr. Kochin begged his master for clarification why Dr. Wheelo was sending surges of electric signals through Dr. Kochin's robotic body that utterly paralyzed him in place.
"One thing that I cannot stand, even from you, Dr. Kochin, is incompetence. Despite your doctorates from an online university, you've proven to be just as disappointing as those fleshy humans. That's alright, after all, as a mere robot I did not expect excellence like that of a bio-engineered warrior. Your fate was always meant to be this, Dr. Kochin…" Dr. Wheelo pointed out as he detached from the laboratory wall and took the shape of a submarine again. His mechanical tail rotated in front of him and drilled through the ice, letting Dr. Wheelo escape the demise of his laboratory.
As the Bio-Warriors flew up and blasted their own way out, Bulma ran up to the hole that Dr. Wheelo dug up, trying to crawl into it and back up onto the surface of the glacier but Oolong started pulling her by Bulma's dress.
"Stop! We've gotta pull out old-timer too!" he objected.
"It's your fault we're in this situation so you do it!" Bulma snapped back but then she realized that Muten Roshi had already been resurrected with the Dragon Balls meaning that she needed to drag that massive block of ice out somehow. A square beam pierced through the ceiling of the lab, melting it away without much effort as Tenshinhan, Chiaotzu, Yamcha, and Krillin descended onto the lab.
"We've sensed Muten Roshi's Ki all the way up here and wondered what could have happened…" Chiaotzu proclaimed as he extended his hands and used his telekinesis to move the block of ice that Muten Roshi was encased in out from the lab while the rest picked up Bulma and Oolong and pulled them out too.
"Sorry, you'll have to stick around until we beat these guys," Krillin gave Bulma a confident smirk after putting her down on a flat surface of a glacier floating over the northern ocean.
"Who even are these guys anyway?" Yamcha wondered.
"Some crazy scientist with a bunch of bio-engineered warriors by his side. He was freed from his lab when Bardock and Piccolo fought each other and wrecked the northern region up," Bulma gave him the short version. "You'll get the details from him, trust me, he doesn't stop talking about himself."
"That's just fine. I just love shutting up the mouthful types." Tenshinhan fixed his wristband and took a fighting stance, preparing to take on Dr. Wheelo's Bio-Warriors.
"Well, well… More martial artists. You just won't do, I'm afraid," Dr. Wheelo proclaimed as the landmass where his laboratory was located blew up behind him, dying the entire area in outbursts of red light and thick, blinding smoke. "I need strong champions for my experiment, not some rejects that got themselves eliminated halfway…"