"I thought you were in a hurry, keep up, slowpoke!" Trunks flipped over to glide through the air on his back while saluting Videl, who was pacing behind him. It didn't take long for Videl to realize what Kami Upa and the rest meant about searching for the Dragon Balls being a unique form of training. It wasn't until she began traveling the world in search of magical star-decorated marbles that she realized she wasn't a very good flier. Not as good as Trunks was, anyway.
It was only when Videl reflected on her training that the reason became apparent to her. Most of her training was stationary. Training from inside the gym in the mansion with Chayote or Gohan or training atop the God Temple or inside one of Kami's mystical training rooms. She was lucky to take the fight into the air a few times, but pacing about and trying high-speed flight was an alien experience to her. It felt like being asked to run after spending her entire life lifting dumbbells while sitting on a couch.
"Where even are we? Are you sure that the Dragon Ball is here?" Videl changed the topic. It wasn't entirely just a deflection. She had never seen or heard about these parts of the planet. None of the maps she'd studied at school or when taught by private tutors back home showed that there were so many landmasses past the Red Sea. As far as maps were concerned, there wasn't supposed to be anything south there, just endless oceans until the glacier regions of the south pole.
"Yup, says so right here, look!" Trunks tilted the Dragon Radar and pointed its screen to Videl as if she could make anything out of it at this distance. As if fully aware that she couldn't make anything of it, Trunks pocketed the radar immediately and focused on flying onward. Videl felt her gut burning up with fatigue and numbness passing down her muscles, but she didn't want to say anything to deprive the cocky brat of the satisfaction.
He'd have probably agreed to stop for a break or to stuff his face full. He loved doing that himself, and he'd have jumped at any opportunity to loaf around and eat up. Still, he'd look at her as if she was the child among the two and have that odd sass in his look that'd make Videl boil up inside. He'd start asking those weird questions as if she was a child or an elder with that ridiculously overblown tone, asking her if her feet hurt and if she needed another break. Videl had entertained the possibility that he was genuinely looking out for her, but the smug expression he had when asking her said it all.
Videl had become so immersed in her reflections of the past few hours and the day before that she nearly missed Trunks seizing a dive onto one of the larger islands in the uncharted archipelago far south of the Red Sea. The young Saiyan landed while looking around as if checking where exactly the Dragon Ball signal was coming from. When Videl touched the ground with her boots, Trunks was zooming in on the signal to see where they'd need to go on this island.
"Is it really here?" Videl wondered.
"Yeah… But now that I zoomed in, we may need to walk across to it. Could be good four-hundred kilos, I think…" Trunks grumbled, clearly dissatisfied by how their landing went himself.
"You know, if you didn't race it around the world like a hothead, you could've zoomed out while you were hovering in the air and made a more accurate landing," Videl pressed her knuckles to her waist, lecturing the young man. She didn't want to nag him and aggravate their relationship even further but if there was a chance to fix his need to prove how much faster, stronger, and more experienced he was than a girl triple his, admittedly, unimpressive age, their quest for the Dragon Balls would be so much easier.
"Gee, thanks for the advice, mom!" Trunks barked back at her before sticking his tongue out and making a mean grimace Videl's way.
"Really mature…" Videl shook her head in frustration. A strange rumble coming from nearby made chills go down Videl's spine. Trunks didn't seem to notice it, looking too busy making faces and deviant gestures in Videl's direction to realize that a high-pitched noise was coming from one of the grassy hills nearby.
"I'm not supposed to be mature, I'm four and a half years old, dummybutt!" Trunks pointed out while flipping Videl off before finally realizing that something resembling a tremor-inducing cackling was coming from right behind him. The young man jumped up and turned around, suddenly coming face-to-face with a grassy hill with an anthropomorphic pair of cartoon-like eyes and a full, smiling mouth. Teeth and all included.
"That wasn't in any of my textbooks!" Trunks jumped back, dashing up to Videl's side and adopting a frightened fighting stance.
"D-Did we take something bad with our breakfast or something?" Videl shivered, looking down and realizing that the flowers were swinging in a rhythmic wave as if dancing alongside a tune. Trunks looked up and went pale, dragging Videl's sleeve frantically, as if hastening her to look up. Seeing the reaction of the young Saiyan, Videl almost didn't want to.
"T-The sun is in on it too!?" Videl shrieked out with the feeling of lightheadedness taking over and butterflies shuffling through her gut when she looked up only to see the sun guffawing it up with an overjoyed cartoonish expression on its surface.
"This is… This is all your fault!" Trunks pointed to Videl, realizing that he couldn't punch the sun out if it ever ate him up with that oversized and ecstatic anthropomorphic mouth of its.
"Oh, it's my fault the sun and the hills have a human face and the flowers are singing along to the hills' tune!?" Videl freaked out, turning to the little boy while grinding her teeth to prevent herself from smacking him across the back of his head for being so rotten.
"That's right! You made breakfast today and dinner yesterday! You must've added something to the pancakes!" Trunks pointed an accusatory index finger at Videl. Before he was finished venting his frustrations, the young boy shifted his expression into a long face of befuddlement when an anthropomorphic pig in a suit and a bowtie and thick spectacles bounced onto one of the living hills and stared off into a blank point in the sky.
"It's afternoon in Penguin Village!" the pig announced with a proud and low-pitched tone before bouncing off the hill the same way it came.
"Hmm… Penguin Village?" Videl scratched her chin. Rumblings came from the distance behind the two, followed by brown dust clouds. The two turned and stepped off the trodden road to let the car pass, but the vehicle roared and hurled over the hill, hovering directly above Videl and Trunks. The two shocked visitors of the Penguin Village exclaimed in shock that someone could've been this reckless of a driver.
Trunks soared upward, catching the car and landing on his feet with the tires still humming in the air as the car spewed dirty fumes despite being deprived of its ability to touch the ground and speed up. A red-haired lady in a blue shirt and a green blazer with a logo of a kettle on the right side peeked through the passenger side window to check and confirm that she was indeed in the air and over a child's head while Trunks held the car suspended firmly above his head.
"Huh? Did I get into an accident? Oh, my… That never happens!" the redhead gasped and opened the car door. Videl exclaimed and tried to stop the woman from jumping out of an accelerating vehicle that Trunks still held in the air over his head, but there didn't seem to be any stopping her. She just landed on the ground and patted down her yellow and lined skirt.
"With driving like that, I sincerely doubt that!" Videl crossed her arms and turned away with a mean pout. "You almost threw yourself off the road. If someone would've been standing there and letting you pass, you'd have crushed them!"
"So… Do I put this car down or…?" Trunks tried to peek from under the car to look at one of the two young women talking over the unfortunate accident. Neither of them seemed to be at all concerned about his situation, so he just kept on holding the car. While it wasn't too difficult for him to be holding this much weight, standing with a stiff back and being unable to see anything from underneath the car bothered Trunks more than the car's mass.
"That would be great. I'm in a bit of a rush really…" the redhead noted, leaning down and looking under the car. "I had a coffee bean delivery to pick up, and I've got to make it back to the café before the end of the lunch break."
Despite Videl's unintelligible warnings and stumbling through her words, Trunks put the car back on the ground only for it to shoot off wildly in a random direction and off over the hill. Shooting off into the air, Trunks followed the vehicular rampage all the way to a small village behind the hill with a surprised look on his face, wincing every time the car crashed through a building or nearly ran someone over. Eventually, it hit a black, square-shaped, safe-like-looking building and bent it out of shape. The crash stopped the uncontrollable car, however.
"Oops… I forgot I wasn't in the car. Got into an accident twice today, what are the odds?" the café owner sighed and slumped her shoulders. "Although I am surprised, I've not seen anyone like you two around Penguin Village, and this boy's unnaturally strong. He can fly too! Is he a robot or an alien or something?"
"Robot?" Trunks wondered, bringing himself to the ground while scratching the back of his head. "Did your little cartoonesque village get ransacked by Androids too?"
"Trunks is neither, he's closer to an alien though…" Videl waved it off before leaning up to the woman to get as much information as she can. "I'm Videl. We're looking for a Dragon Ball here and we think it's around these parts, but we're not familiar with this island, or this village, for that matter. Did you say it was called Penguin Village?"
"Yeah, Penguin Village on Gengoro Island," the café owner nodded a couple of times. "Hey, you two, my name's Kimidori Aoi."
The polite yet klutzy Aoi extended her hand to Videl for a shake, though Videl could only accept it haphazardly, wondering what they were getting themselves into with this woman since she just nearly wrecked her whole village on a casual trip for coffee beans yet appeared entirely unaware of it.
"I am Videl and this is Trunks. We're looking for these things called the Dragon Balls, and we think one might be in your village. Have you by any chance seen an orange marble with red stars on it?" Videl shook Aoi's hand, yet the unlikeliness of what she was asking to be true made her wince as if bracing herself for the impact of a negative answer.
"An orange marble with red stars? Are you sure that such a thing is in Penguin Village?" Aoi wondered, pressing her dyed nail to her plump lip and rolling her eyes up in a genuine attempt to recall seeing anything of the sort.
"Trunks has a Dragon Radar. It's a special device meant to track the Dragon Balls and…" Videl began explaining before Trunks yelled out to grab their attention and pointed to a short and chubby man getting dressed inside of a phone booth right behind them.
"Why is there a man getting dressed inside of a phone booth, do you know him?" Trunks wondered. Before Aoi could answer, the chubby man flopped his plump belly at the phone booth door and fell out of it, holding a skateboard in his right hand, and struck a flashy pose.
"Allow me to answer your question, foul villain, who likes to throw innocent cars at unsuspecting buildings and ruin everyone's day! I am Sourman, a Hero of Justice and Protector of the World!" Sourman switched between a handful of extremely poster-worthy poses despite lacking the body to draw an allured eye. "I have come here to put an end to your despicable villainy!"
"No, seriously, who is this guy?" Trunks turned to Aoi while wincing and pointing at the chubby man in a blue bodysuit and a red cape he clearly made of a blanky he tied in a bowtie knot around his neck. Complementing his suit were the red rubber gloves like those beloved by housewives around the world and rubber boots meant to protect one's feet and socks from muck and rain. "And why is he wearing his underwear on the outside?"
"I am glad you asked!" Sourman dropped his skateboard and flexed his nonexistent muscles by stretching and bending his thick arms. "To the unassuming eyes I am a modest and mild-mannered reporter Kuraku Kenta, however, once I eat a sour plum, I undergo a heroic transformation into the Protector of Good and Justice - Sourman!"
Feeling himself more like a man of action than a man of words, Kuraku Kenta slipped a shriveled plum from underneath his underwear into his mouth and shifted it around in his mouth. Videl's eye twitched in disgust and disbelief that this man calling himself a hero of justice just ate a shriveled prune that came out of the inside of his unwashed underwear.
"Sourman!" Sourman called out by shooting his fists out into the sky before striking a heroic pose by pressing them to his waist. "Having unlocked all of my hidden superpowers as a wondrous child of Planet Okakaume, I now possess the unbelievable power of flight! Ume, ume and Suppai!" Sourman took a daring dive and belly-flopped onto his skateboard, shooting off toward Trunks by riding his skateboard by lying on it face-down and posing heroically like a superhero in flight.
Trunks pushed his leg out and stopped Sourman's "flight" by having the grown man bump into the sole of his boot and begin to swim pathetically in mid-air in a vain attempt to overcome the trap put in his way. Aoi chuckled while Videl scratched her cheek in utter tumult.
"What's that? You mean you transformed already? What a joke…" Trunks pouted his lips by pushing them off like a little duckling. "You didn't even change at all. I thought you would go Super Saiyan or something. Some hero of justice, where were you when the Androids attacked?"
"Trunks-kun, please don't take this man very seriously. Sourman is a bit of a troublemaker and a menace, but despite his dangerous-looking stunts, he's incapable of harming anyone in Penguin Village," Aoi waved her hand in dismissal of Sourman's antics. Ticked off, Trunks pushed Sourman's face lightly and sent the poser superhero crashing into the phone booth where he changed into his superhero persona.
"What was that?" Sourman rubbed his red and bruised face while standing up with a tattered uniform from all the glass cuts. Videl's gaze focused on a curious detail as, despite Trunks possessing incredible strength that he still didn't fully know how to restrain and Sourman, a relatively unimpressive man, crashing into a glassy phone booth, the irritating man didn't seem to have any injuries on him whatsoever. "You make fun of Truth, Justice, and the Sour Way?"
Unexpectedly to everyone, Sourman's hand slipped under his underwear again, but this time he didn't pull out a plum, but a hand grenade. Pulling the pin, the wanna-be hero lobbed it in the general vicinity of the trio. Videl's aloof attitude shifted in a second as she tensed up and dashed to the grenade with a soccer kick that sent it flying and blowing up harmlessly in the air.
"That was amazing, Videl-san!" Aoi clapped with a friendly cheer. "Are you some sort of alien too?"
"No, I'm just a trained martial artist. Our quest for the Dragon Balls is actually a pilgrimage of sorts," Videl glanced back at her newly met acquaintance before turning back to Sourman. "I was willing to entertain your antics at first, but your silly games are getting dangerous. It's best that we put a stop to this charade."
Before a single punch could be thrown, police sirens began blaring over the hill. "Crud, it's the fuzz!" Sourman hissed out and made a heroic dash toward the wreckage of the phone booth that he burrowed down under and began stripping his sweaty uniform in a poorly disguised attempt to get dressed in his usual beige suit and fedora.
"Ew, what's so hard to get about underwear going under!?" Trunks stuck his tongue out and closed his eyes to look away from the miserable sight of a short and chubby middle-aged man burrowing through the wrecked glass and wooden frame and slithering inside of a shirt and trousers.
"I begin to understand why this place remains uncharted…" Videl deflated in disappointment. Somehow, she knew that this day would only get stranger even though she couldn't possibly fathom how anything could triumph over anthropomorphic hills and a sun with a cheerful human face, a bespectacled, formally dressed pig that took the time of day to announce the time every hour from the top of said hills, the worst driver in the world and the poser superhero.
A pair of rectangular and old-timey SWAT cars swerved from under the hill and made a living barrier with a quartet of police officers spilling out of the parked vehicles. A short and stout police officer with curly dark blue hair and stubble ran up to the demolished phone booth and aimed a handgun at Sourman's butt crack.
"Halt, hairy, butt-faced alien, it's the end of the road for you!" the police officer yelled out in an authoritative tone that meant business.
A tall and slim police officer with a hairdo almost identical to that of Mark Satan's slipped out from the same car and stepped out in front of it with a revolver in his shaking hands that he aimed at the other three. An older, short, and round-bellied man with a balding head and spiky black hair around the sides, interconnected by a bushy mustache, joined his quaking colleague. He didn't have a gun in his hands, though he appeared the most experienced out of them, and felt like just pointing his hand in an imposing manner would make the crooks and hoodlums surrender in the name of the law.
"That's enough ruckus out of you for one day!" the balding man, who seemed to be the most important officer out of the handful, yelled out. "A car totaled all those buildings without a driver to arrest. We were lucky enough that you wouldn't stop at blowing up our village to smithereens, now you have to detonate grenades up here too!"
"I am innocent of this, officer!" Kuraku Kenta lazily rolled out from the wreckage with his shirt sticking out from his trousers and only halfway buttoned and only one of his arms stuck in the sleeve of his suit. One spectacle of Kenta's glasses laid fallen out and his hat hung wearily and tipped sideways over on his head. "I am no crook and that's not my face but my hairy rear! I am just Kuraku Kenta, a polite and mild-mannered reporter!"
"I see… It's impressive that you got here before the police but it's dangerous to start reporting before the police actually arrested the criminals," the police officer who was aiming his gun at Kenta's butt crack fixed his hat and holstered his handgun. "You're lucky we got here when we did."
"Arrest? Cut the fricking crap, ey!" a strawberry blonde bombshell in an armored vest and holstering a submachine gun rolled out from behind the vehicle and unloaded a barrage of gunfire, picking no targets. Videl gasped and rushed out in front of Aoi, scooping the bullets out of thin air while Trunks scratched his head, just letting them harmlessly bounce off of his body without any bite to them.
"Damn it, Polly Buckets, you're a loose cannon!" the balding chief howled, smacking the back of the gung-ho policewoman's head so hard that she flopped face-first. Sadly, not even that stopped her from firing yet, completely spitting in the face of the laws of physics, Polly Buckets' stream of gunfire elevated her off the ground and into the air as if she was a firefighter riding the high of a concentrated stream of pumping water. "Cease fire at once!"
"It's no use, chief Gyaos, we both know Polly Buckets only stops firing when she runs out of bullets!" the tall policeman slipped his police hat off his head and smacked it onto the ground before diving behind the police car to hide from the blizzard of lead flying wildly in all directions.
"Darn it… Alright, Gala, you're with me, let's follow Polly wherever the stream takes her and help her get up. Pagos, arrest these two and book them for the night back in the HQ!" the chief issued the orders while running off alongside the shorter and chubby, night-blue-haired police officer after his trigger-happy officer.
"W-Wait? Arrest us?" Trunks jumped up. "What for? You should arrest that chick and that fatso over there! They were the ones that caused all this mess!"
"Yeah, right… Good one, kid…" Pagos took his hat off the dirt and secured it in a shaky hang over his head while approaching Trunks slowly without taking the aim of his gun off of the young preschooler for a second. "If we booked Aoi, who'd sell us all coffee every day? Without Kuraka Kenta, we'd have no paper to read with our coffee!"
"Ugh… Now it makes sense why she's still on the other side of the bars being such a crappy driver…" Videl facepalmed while raising her hands over her head.
"What are you doing, Videl? These guys are wimps. We can easily take them down," Trunks pointed at the cowardly policeman who jumped up and fell down on the ground from the mere excitement of being pointed at by a preschooler.
"Sure, but they're going to take us to Penguin Village anyway, and that's where the Dragon Ball is supposed to be. It might be easier to search for it if we play along. This place has a weird ecosystem that I'm just now beginning to understand going on and it's best we don't disturb it," Videl groaned, almost hating herself for saying it.
"It's a good thing for me that you're a little kid, you aren't old enough to have rights yet, sport!" Pagos smirked to himself while cuffing Trunks. Pouting in rebellion, the young Saiyan shattered the cuffs with no effort whatsoever, which made the police officer shriek in terror and crawl back into the car. Flushed with red over her entire face, Videl and Trunks stepped inside the back of the SWAT car and slammed the door shut from the inside.
"Oh, my…" Aoi gasped, covering her mouth. "Bye, bye, Videl-san, Trunks-kun! I'll make sure to visit you in jail!" she yelled as the SWAT car rolled off the hill and hurried to the Penguin Village police department to book the two strange aliens that have come to disturb the ordinary chaotic routine of the small village on their quest for the Dragon Balls.
Unbeknownst to the two very embarrassed passengers of the police vehicle, a curl of black began spoiling a puffy cloud over the Penguin Village that began spreading across the other clouds, puff by puff. Something wicked was coming to Penguin Village as if it had followed the pair there.
