A young teen glided across a mountainous creek landscape and planted his boots on the ground by a capsule home attached to a larger wooden house. Gohan entered the Son family home with hopeful eyes, looking a tad surprised to see both his parents in the kitchen. Goku was sitting at the table with a squinted pair of eyes and a rich smile. He kept his head locked on the door as if he spent hours waiting for his son to come back from school.
Chi-Chi's back was turned to her son. Strangely, she didn't turn around and react even when Gohan greeted his family upon entering the family home. The silent housewife just kept on brewing in her own enclosed world of ingredients. Her shoulders looked relaxed, almost to where it weirded Gohan out a little. It was as if his mother shut herself off from the surrounding world and focused on her cooking, but she wasn't all there either.
"Hello, I'm home…" Gohan repeated, waving his hand and taking a step closer to his absent-minded mother before Goku's grave voice made Gohan jump up and turn to his father, startled.
"Hey there, son. How was school?" Goku followed Gohan with his strangely malevolent stare. "You settling in the new place alright?"
"Umm… Yeah, Videl is incredibly popular in school, so being friends with her helps to be noticed a lot. I'd probably be lost without her, I've never really attended school before and the only people I've ever interacted with were our friends, aliens, and demons so… I'm really glad I've got her to ground everything for me," Gohan looked up, pondering of his early impressions of having started middle school in Central City while the Orange Star and East Cities were being rebuilt from being grounds zero of the Machine Mutant invasion. With some luck, Gohan and Videl might get to come back to their proper middle school next year.
"That's great! You've grown really close to that girl, you should invite her for dinner sometime," Goku leaned and rested his head on his fist.
"R-Really… Would that be okay, Mom?" Gohan turned to Chi-Chi, who still kept her back turned at her son and just really went to town on cleaving that fish and onions to bits.
"Do what your father says, Gohan-chan," Chi-Chi replied with an absentminded and floaty voice.
"Umm… Okay… Though, I'm not sure inviting her over is such a great idea. Videl-san lives in a huge mansion and has servants taking care of her home and chefs making food for her… I just… I don't know…" Gohan sighed, looking down at the spotless kitchen floor. His moderate surprise at how well-maintained the house was became shrouded by his creeping doubts and fear of what Videl might say seeing his routine of living the simple life in a modified capsule house out by the mountainside in the middle of nowhere.
"Well, think it through," Goku leaned back in his chair, at long last reminding Gohan of how his father used to act before the space trip. "I've been thinking, it's been a long while since we trained. You wouldn't want to start slipping in battle, would you? Honing your mind is important and all, but you can't let your body relax for too long or you'll start bleeding out your wild strength. How about we go for a few rounds after dinner? It'll do wonders for helping you tune out from your school routine and the fatigue will knock you right out when it's time to go to bed."
"Oh… Umm… I actually planned to go to the amusement park in the city with Videl-san," Gohan tucked his chin and bowed in apology.
"Oh, well…" Goku snickered with his mouth while his eyes never really dropped the malicious squint which they now carried around everywhere. "Some other time then."
"Some other time, Father!" Gohan bowed and darted off to the main room and up the staircase that led to his room. He had to get ready for that meeting with Videl after all.
Emeralda wrapped her arms around Yamcha, hugging the famous pro athlete, and pressed herself against his body. Yamcha's cheeks flushed with red as he looked down at the top of his girlfriend's head. She's never hugged him this firmly before. He could feel her fingers digging into his back as if they were trying to rip his back open and make it flap like wings of fleshy straps.
"H-Hey, what's going on?" he asked. In terms of signs that women sent him, he was far more oblivious than the usual guy and about a dozen times as careful before he made a guess. "Are you cold or something?"
"You should relax sometimes, you know?" Emeralda looked up with the devil herself staring back at Yamcha from her eyes. Despite the chick being nearly half his size and mass ratio total, the martial artist winced and backed up, almost dragging his clinging girlfriend along for the skid. "Can you even feel my touch when you're all tensed up like this? Love isn't like fighting, sometimes you have to be vulnerable and let people in."
"Wh-What's gotten into you lately?" Yamcha grabbed Emeralda with both hands and raised her in the air over his head before gently putting her down further away as if he was manhandling a toddler that just learned how to walk. "You're really taking charge and coming off strong ever since that party at Bulma's house."
"I figured since you let me meet all of your weird friends, you know… That we're finally getting serious," Emeralda pressed her finger to her lips, making a cartoonishly overplayed apologetic face as she playfully buckled her knees as if she was going to fall. "I'm sorry if I'm pushing on you."
"N-No… I mean… Believe it or not, I already proposed to my last girlfriend after this much time the last time. Maybe it's me that's taking it too slow and careful," Yamcha sighed, dragging his hand behind his head and running it up and down as if he was trying to activate the blood flow around his brain and figure this whole mess that was the human condition out. "Sorry, I know I shouldn't be talking about other girls with you around. I've learned that much. This isn't my first date… Umm… Well… I'm doing it again, sorry."
"No, no… This is great, we're really making a breakthrough in our relationship!" Emeralda wrapped her arms around Yamcha's arm. Wincing and shaking in tension, Yamcha's arm stiffened and flexed his biceps, inflating his arm to where Emeralda struggled to hold it as firmly pressed to her core as she did.
"W-We are?" Yamcha fumbled through a two-word sentence somehow.
"Sure! Your last relationships all went sour, so you're afraid to let people in now. It makes perfect sense. Bulma told me she had that exact problem with Vegeta. It took him a few years before he powered down around her and let himself be vulnerable when they were intimate," Emeralda went on a tangent while guiding Yamcha like a bound puppy. It was a curious sight to see to any passers-by when the "puppy" was a whole head taller and much broader and bulkier than its handler, despite the contrast in power in the relationship. "It's no wonder that you're struggling with that same thing. I'm okay waiting a few years just so I can see you let me in. I don't expect you to be more in touch with your emotions than an actual king."
Yamcha stiffened his lips and blew his cheeks out. Emeralda glared at him with arrows of allure homing in. "I don't need years to warm up to my girlfriend! I'm way more emotionally mature than that dirtbag!" Yamcha exclaimed. "You wanna find a room and see just how vulnerable I can get?"
Emeralda gave Yamcha a sheepish smirk. Her fingernails dug straight through Yamcha's skin the moment she felt Yamcha purposefully letting his guard down. Yamcha jumped up in pain and leaned to glare at tiny trickles of blood appearing in the marks where his girlfriend grazed his biceps. He wanted to object, but she knew exactly how deep to press it to make it hurt but also to make him want to ask her for more.
"Yeah, let's find someplace more… Private," Emeralda gave Yamcha a devilish smirk. "I've got something to share with you too."
"Haah!" Tenshinhan exclaimed, thrusting his open palm into his pupil's chest and sending him hurling across the dojo. With an elbow strike, he cracked another one before punching the third and the fourth out in a blink. All of his students collapsed, nursing their bleeding scrapes and bruises. "Good!" Tenshinhan gave his pupils a devilish smirk.
"W-Wow… Master's really getting intense this session. It's almost like he's not holding back at all!" a pupil whined out to his peer while caressing his swelling jaw that had a handful of missing teeth.
"It's because all of you have grown so much in the last few months that I can allow myself to get serious with all of you," Tenshinhan put his fist up before relaxing it and patting his exposed peck that had a band-aid stuck on a much larger cut than it should have been able to cover. "I've been too lax with you and as a result, my own growth has been stinted as well. A friend of mine has been able to cut me by accident during a party last week. I need to pick up my training and carry you along that path with me to where mere swords cannot cut us anymore."
"A friend cut you?" a fallen pupil who lost all will to stand up and keep on training gasped, looking at a meek cut on his master's peck that's been banded up with lackluster care.
"That's right," Tenshinhan ripped the aid off. "Though given your states, it'll be a lifetime before you can brush off the stroke of a sword with the toughness of your bodies alone. Unless I share something with you, that'll help you transcend your humanity. Now that I got your bodies all busted open, you're ready to accept the gift of your rebirth as New Tsufurians."
"N-New Tsufurians?" someone from amongst the battered students gasped. Tenshinhan's body jerked backward, bending to a freaky degree that should have, by all accounts, snapped his spine into two while his waist bloated out. The internal mass moved its way to Tenshinhan's chest, inflating the martial artist and splattering off in all directions, catching all the pummeled to a pulp students off-guard and enveloping them in a shiny metallic coating that sifted into their bodies through their wounds.
A freaky series of shrieks coming from inside the dojo terrified those chance travelers that, for some reason, wandered further off from the village and higher up the mountain pass of the central continent. The voices of terror all died down soon enough and were replaced with laughter and the ordinary ruckus of a martial arts dojo.
"Bardock-san, this was so unexpected of you to ask to meet me," Launch pressed her hand to her mouth while speaking in a squeaky voice in a shy tone. "About the last time… Maybe I felt too comfortable around you and ended up oversharing a bit…"
Before the blue-haired woman could say another word, a deafening crack and a concussive shockwave emanating through her body stunned her in place. She went down before she could realize what had happened. Even when consciousness sifted back through to Launch's brain, she couldn't understand why Bardock invited her over to his home, only to slap her with the back of his hand the moment he saw her. The woman caressed her bloody cheek while Bardock loomed over her fallen and shaking body.
"Sorry about that," Bardock muttered in an apathetic tone. "I'm not good at mincing words. I'll just go ahead and take the happiness that both of us deserve."
Bardock bit into his own hand, splattering blood all over his face and spilling a whole torrent down on the grassy wasteland in front of him. Before the blood loss could get out of control, something else burst forth from Bardock's wound–a splash of jasmine-colored, reflective metallic mass. Almost like some violet form of mercury, the blotch wrapped around Launch and covered her like an outer coating before seeping inside her terrified body through the bleeding crack in her cheek.
"There was too much baggage before," Bardock grumbled while part of Baby's flesh forced itself onto Launch, forming a corrupted cocktail of its former master and Baby. Something caught somewhere in between the two personalities. "I had Gine and my guilt over what happened with her, the whole affair with me nearly getting my entire family and the human race snuffed out, all that holding me back. You couldn't accept it because you were sharing your mind with the other you. But Baby-sama… New Planet Plant… Becoming a New Tsufurian… It gives us a chance to be reborn and have the happiness we could have never had previously. Baby can free me from my guilt, it can free you from the other you as well."
"Bardock-san," Launch looked up. As her eyes became more pronounced and the tension and shooting up body temperature and increasing cerebral processing power, all began running rampant in her body, the blue-haired gentle soul smiled and extended her hand. She was no longer afraid or confused, she reached out for the happiness that Bardock offered, that she wanted for so long but couldn't have because every time she sneezed she switched to an entirely different person.
Bardock effortlessly lifted Launch up before scooping her up into his arms with a mischievous expression plastered on his face. He turned around and kicked the door to his home open while gently guiding his new partner inside. While the light from the kitchen seeped out and illuminated the dusky evening outside, Bardock and Launch became the obstacle eclipsing its free flow out.
"I never want to sneeze again," Launch's lips whispered.
"Never again. Not unless Baby-sama allows it," Bardock assured Launch before bringing her indoors and slamming the door shut with the sole of his boot.
A futuristic hovercar station sped its way across the busy city streets, ramming other hovercars out of its way and sending them shooting off to the sides and crashing into trees or ramming into buildings. Krillin leaned to the window of his office with a terrified wince. Opening his window and loosening his tie before removing it and letting it fly off freely, Krillin swept down to catch a wayward vehicle with both hands and then put it down on the side of the street where it wouldn't obstruct the traffic.
Lazuli glanced at the other secretaries and assistants in the insurance firm where Krillin found work on. All of them abandoned any semblance of working and pressed their faces to the window, trying to glimpse at the developing situation. Lazuli closed her eyes and sighed, standing up from her chair, she picked her blazer off the office chair and bent it over her right arm, approaching the window that nobody peering through could see without breaking their sight of the developing mad driver situation, opening it and throwing herself out of it.
By the time Lazuli picked some speed up, no one could identify the bright pink and platinum-colored ray of light as her. She was simply moving too fast. Lazuli homed in on Krillin's Ki, observing him from above struggling to stop the moving mechanical tank while removing all the potential threats to people's lives that it caused on its mad dash across Central City.
A couple of bandits wearing hi-tech armor assembled from shells of busted Machine Mutant drones and driving some sort of mechanical rank that had some alien parts to it as well peeked through, turning their plasma rifles to Krillin since they saw that the crazy baldy stood a decent chance at catching up to them and stopping them. Given how he proved himself capable to sling entire vehicles around like feathers, no one amongst the bandits doubted his ability to stop the driving tank in its place with just a light bump of his hand.
"Damn it!" a bandit croaked after seeing a handful of his peers firing a barrage of rockets homing in on Krillin only for the martial artist to punt one away, then evade another pair until they hit each other and detonated in the air, then blast another bunch long before they reached their target. "Construction supplies are worth more than gold now that cities need to be rebuilt after the invasion! Some freak won't get in the way of us nicking our own slice of that pie!"
Before the hi-tech thug could pull a railgun nearly his own size on Krillin, Lazuli extended her hand and sent a bombarding barrage of Ki blasts that blew the tank's side up and forced it to tip over and nearly crash into the side of a nearby building. A stray blast hit Krillin on the side, flattening the bald, superpowered insurance agent down on the street. This left him unable to stop the uncontrollable cybernetic juggernaut from causing a grand calamity, but Lazuli swept down in front of it and extended her hand. The sleeve of her blouse ripped from the concussive shock up to her elbow and the cement under her feet crumbled in a ground crater. The glass panels behind Lazuli shattered and her hair rustled as if her scalp barely stayed attached to the Android's head, but the tank stopped without as much as a buckle from Lazuli's arm or a wince of effort.
"Saved!" Krillin sighed in relief after pulling himself out from the rubble and limping up to Lazuli while she ripped the tank's armored shell apart with her bare hands like tearing into cardboard and flung the thugs around like rag dolls. "Though you should maybe still work a little on your aim…" Krillin grumbled in complaint, feeling up the graze where Lazuli blasted his side.
"Aren't you glad I took that job in the same firm as you now?" Lazuli glanced at her fiancé. "It'd have taken you forever to stop this thing with all the stuff getting you sidetracked."
"It's not that I don't appreciate having you around, Lazuli, I do!" Krillin got himself worked up with this explanation. "It's just that I'd have never expected you to… You know… Get a job. Sounds like a very antithetical thing to your entire personality to have to do something for most of the day."
"Someone has to keep a close watch on you," Lazuli closed her eyes and patted down her dusty hands. Seeing the damage on her work clothes, she slipped on the blazer that she kept bent over her arm to hide the ripped sleeve until the end of the workday at least. "The job's nothing, all I need to do is serve you coffee the whole day and print stuff and we get way more money to spend on my needs. It's surprising how little I actually need to do when I don't push the other agents for more work like the other ambitious secretaries vying for a higher position. It's like I'm being paid to look pretty in the office. Like a blooming houseplant…"
"I should really be gobsmacked that you're okay being objectified like that, but somehow I'm not even remotely surprised…" Krillin shriveled into a disappointed slump. He jumped up when Lazuli approached him and pecked him on the forehead. He looked at his fiancé with a stunned look, completely caving in to her manhandling when she raised his scraped arm and blew into it like he was a big baby or something.
Something was off! Something cold, malleable, and sticky came out from Lazuli's mouth and began running over Krillin's skin like an external coat, covering him whole down under his lightly torn work clothes before seeping into the bloody graze and vanishing without a trace. Hearing police sirens and the speeding hovercars homing in on the location of the forced stoppage of the mechanical tank of the construction supply thieves, Krillin and Lazuli took off into the sky, holding hands with mischievous simper stuck on their faces.