Dragon Ball: Space Adventures
Chapter 7
Snail Pace III
Bulla casually worked on the C.C. I. 0.5 project. She felt, at the current moment, very pleased with the ship as it stood. The water system worked flawlessly, the gravity machine operated at full capacity, and the washing machine could clear any dirt that would ever exist. There were some slight adjustments to be made, mostly on the areas of the position windows, and in the ship's landing programmer, supposedly, the ship landed as smoothly as it could, per her mother's opinion, but she felt like that could be improved further. Quickly, Bulla raised one finger as her brain activated, and wrote down another improvement, another bathroom. Now that was something no one could have anticipated, how was she supposed to plan ahead for the (now apparent) problem of all three integrants wanting to use it at the same? It was madness, and not really her fault either. After all, she had one bathroom in her dormitory, which she always used and even took it with her for school and all the other social goings. But now, the girl had a clear and new perspective in life, one that involved a life of waiting and staring alongside that horrendous girl.
—Why are you staring at me?
Pan said with those dark eyebrows lined unhappily like hills going down. Another thing Bulla had learned, is that Pan was one of those girls that really deserve the use of those very foul words. If annoyed deserved to be compared with losers and outcasts or to gently reminded of how immature they are, it was her.
—I'm not. I'm just looking your way.
—Then why don't you look somewhere else?
Pan hadn't always had that friendless tone. Sure, when she was younger the girl was a bit of a rebel, but usually people grew out of that, Bulla herself admitted that she even was entering that circle, yet the difference was obvious, one was for the greater good, Pan was just a horrible girl. How far had been the days of the other girl going around town beating criminals and stopping bank robberies all on her own, now, instead, the girl seemed to have stopped all of that in the place of expending her days in videogames arcades and plain old juvenile banditry like throwing rocks at cars, sneaking into concerts or bars that are far beyond her age, and only god knew what other horrendous things that girl got up to when the times of boredom became truth. She shivered in thinking what the daughter of Son Gohan could do just to avoid the leisure times of monotony. It was one of the reasons Eschalot didn't went along the girl, when they were younger they were pretty strong friends, but as time passed that line simply seemed to fracture and grow larger. The girl had other things in her mind too. While Pan did… well what she always did, the blue haired girl was tremendously focused in doing all the things the daughter of Bulma Briefs should do. First off, she had to finish her education. Her mother had finished everything when she was as young as sixteen; High school, college, university. She had even gotten the time to learn how to knit and assemble cars in her spare time, not forgetting of radio technology capable of detecting energy beyond things like storms, planes or planetary systems, no, that'd be too simple for her mother, she was talking about the Dragon Balls.
She'd been the first person in the entire planet to be capable of detecting it. It was too much, it was above a novel prize, above anything that anyone had ever done, and it was just the beginning of her career as a scientist. Eschalot sometimes felt overwhelmed by it, by all. Her father had conquered worlds at her age, and her mother had discovered worlds at her age. And what had she done at their age? Solved the Riemann hypothesis? Proved the Gold Bach's conjecture? The girl had so much work to look forward, and all she had were this tiny bits of progress that absolutely no one cared about. Who in their right mind would care about this math problem from the eighteen century? Who would have spent entire days trying to knot the answer like she had done, probably no even remembered it existed? It was why she had done this in the first place, throw herself into the utter most dangerous of voyages, all of it, because she had to prove not to her parents but herself that Bulla Eschalot Briefs was at the same level as the ones before.
That had proven to be harder than done, as she stared into Pan once again, she realized that life had quite literally told her that hadn't been enough.
There was this project that she had done some time ago. One based on a jet fighter she had seen from a show called dogfights. Watching it, she got a great idea, what if she got into developing fighter jets? Surely it couldn't be that hard. All she had to do was to learn about avionics, engine development, aerodynamics, weapon development, thrust to force ratio, radar technology, and etc. A walk in the park.
After all of that, she grabbed a piece of paper, and started planning things, measuring them, ordering them in the place they belonged and making sure that her designed worked, that the wings were just the right length, that the engines had enough thrust to get the thing out of any jam just by speed alone, that the guy piloting it could be comfortable in it.
Before she knew it a prototype had been designed. So she got to work. Bit by bit the places fell just where she wanted it, some had to be changed, and so they did. Laser guided munitions, air to air missiles, better engines, better avionics, all of it was moving off the assembling line she had built by herself and it was roaring alive like a zombie raising for the grave where it had rested the rest of its life.
Of course, and just like writing, the process of work is a binary system, you need to have someone to look at it—to make It real, to dignify it, if not, how does anyone know it even existed on the first place? How can you say you wrote if the thing you did was to sit down on your chair on open up word? Working for a group of people is maddening, working for yourself is flagellation, you have to sit down and pick someone to work for, so who are you working for?
Bulla sat down on the chair as dozens of uniformed men quietly grabbed the food and drinks as the waiters roamed around in their dark suits and calm faces. Because after all the work, came the display, and for that, she had called up a myriad of government officials to get their approval for the project; The F-47 was a supersonic-two engine air superiority fighter, capable of remaining undetected under enemy radar, and engaging boogies up to a distance of a hundred kilometers. And it was, by all accounts, a marble of modern engineering. By all the metrics the girl could find, nothing in the world came close to it. Nothing could be as fast, nothing could turn as hard, nothing could even stand a chance.
And so the time came for the show, everyone sat on their seats perhaps drinking more wine than Bulla thought it was right, but it was too late for that, the plane rolled out the hangar shining with its blue paintjob and aimed itself near the runway, pointing down with its engines and releasing a shrieking noise that was like someone scraping their nails through a board, or a god screaming blood.
Fire leaking from behind, and that unearthly noise silenced everyone aboard. The plane began to move, it's wheels slowly turned through the airbase and it mere moments that miracle of progress lifted off. Releasing itself from the ground into the air no different than a bird, probing to anything that exist that man could not be contained to that small spot of dust in the universe. For a moment, the girl was proud, proud of her design and progress. She had done it, succeeded in something so complicated as making a functioning jet figh—Why is it banking? Where the last words she thought before the plane crashed into the ground, making a massive fireball and ruining the lovely batch of land that previously existed where it chose to suddenly land.
The girl couldn't even muster the ability to think of what just had happen. Words seemed to have strung out of her body and become and inanimate object. That was not part of the plan. It was horrible to try and make explanations, it was horrible to try and muster a smile to all the people that had come to see her lovely design. My god, her father was there, what could he even think of her? The sole thought haunted her so deeply that she expended entire nights having nightmares of how disappointed her father was of her.
It was measure in weeks the time she expended fixed the prototype, day and night sunk into the madness of design, trying to understand how or why it had happened, how something so perfect could have failed so badly? At last, the answer appeared like a gust of wind in front of her eyes, the sort of thing that only Is revealed to you once the brutal father of life teaches you a lesson. But it was too late. Because the air force wanted nothing to do with her, dubbing the whole thing "a waste of their time" Not even that, but they made sure to let her know that even if they were willing to give it a go, the chance of the project passing congress were nil to none. It was too expensive, too ambitious to even try, costing up to seven hundred million apiece. At last, and expending her own money, Bulla made sure the F-47 was as good as it should have been. Despite everything, it worked, it really did, but it was too late for anyone to care.
Staring into Pan, she wondered if things could have really been different, if maybe both girls could have been better friends— but it was too late for that.
After she went to the bathroom, the girl shutter herself into her room and activated the system.
The room as we had once seen had completely disappeared. There were no beds or tables, no chairs or even the beige walls, it all had disappeared and been replaced by a metallic wall that went around every wall and ceiling and floor like a mattress covering it all. This was the personal gravity room. And for the remaining of the trip the girl was going to dry it up until there was simply nothing worthy for her here. For she had something to take care of. Bulla had already taken off and crashed, now, she had no room to fail. She was going to succeed.