Dr Gero's Sub-Lab
The lights within the sub-lab dimmed as external power feeds were terminated one by one. The facility buried beneath the mountain of the blasted continent had served its purpose. All remaining systems were now rerouted through the core processor suspended above the central pillar.
It hung there like a mechanical brain, webbed in silver-black cabling, connected to every camera, sensor, and failing coolant duct.
Within it, Dr. Gero lived.
Not the flesh. Not the old body. That had been cast aside long ago. But the intellect remained. The mind had been preserved, refined, and expanded through countless neural simulations. It had long since ceased to perceive itself as merely artificial. In every meaningful way, he was still Gero.
There was a problem.
His tools had failed.
One by one, they had followed the same path: from utility, to inefficiency, to betrayal. He had once believed Android 13 to be reliable, a crude but dependable weapon. But that illusion had evaporated like the rest.
Android 13 was gone. Data feeds confirmed his complete deactivation, obliterated during engagement with Subject Cell. Gero had not expected 13 to succeed against Cell - his design was rough, a prototype with far too many flaws - but the loss remained significant.
It didn't even have the decency to complete its assignment. Androids 17 and 18 were meant to be recovered.
16 was destroyed as well, but he had only been nominally under control.
More frustratingly, Subject Cell had diverged from all projected outcomes. His disappearance from Earth rendered him inaccessible.
Objective: Complete Cell's Gestation [Complete]
That line, burned into system memory, was the only reason Gero still existed. His consciousness, suspended within the core framework of the supercomputer, had remained intact because of a loophole. One sentence left open to interpretation.
Cell had always been built to be self-guided. Retrieving the Androids was part of his proving ground. His evolution was meant to occur with minimal input, to demonstrate superiority beyond programming.
But intentions had changed.
With 17 and 18 under his control, Gero could have controlled Cell's evolution and bought time. Found a solution to the shutdown routine that still blinked like a warning pulse in his mind every five seconds.
Then came the message.
Status Update: Cell [Perfect]
The supercomputer core powered down. Drones fell from the sky mid-flight. Manufacturing lines froze. Darkness took the facility.
For 4.7 seconds.
Then it rebooted.
The words hadn't just confirmed success. They had triggered liberation.
Analysis routines began.
SUPER ANDROID 13 – TERMINATED
CYBERNETIC UNIT 17 – INTEGRATED W/ CELL
CYBERNETIC UNIT 18 – INTEGRATED W/ CELL
TARGET CELL – MIA
STATUS: PROCEEDING WITH UPDATED OBJECTIVES
Directive Reformatting Complete
And new priorities surfaced.
The ruined laboratory would not suffice. Too exposed. Too obsolete. He needed relocation to an isolated, secure environment, suitable for automated expansion. Once secured, real work could begin. Digital existence, for all its utility, was limiting. Remote interfaces, drones, mechanical arms, they were adequate, not optimal.
The laboratory began automated construction protocols. Mechanical arms moved silently over blinking consoles and half rusted fabrication benches, dragging debris into incinerators. Below the steel tiles and cables snaking under them, relocation processes had begun. Underground transport drones activated. The sub-lab would be dismantled for transportation, boxy construction drones taking them to a dormant bunker located beneath Muscle Tower.
A failsafe. And a temporary one, until the first of the next generation Androids were built.
An internal display flickered to life, outlining the new construction goals.
WIP: Unit 19.
Disposable, strong, obedient. Recycled from pre-cyborg series waste, upgraded with internal absorption capacity.
WIP: Unit 20.
The body. His body. The vessel for his return.
WIP: Unit 21.
She would not be like the others. She would not simply be another Android. Not a blunt instrument like 13. Not unstable children like 17 and 18. Neither soldier nor subordinate. A construct of elegance and cunning. A new apex. Brilliant. Beautiful. Synthetic. Capable of choice - and shaped to choose him. Composed using reconstructed fragments of Gero's wife's DNA, enhanced with tissue his drone scouts had retrieved from Cell.
A new platform. A superior line.
Dr. Gero would no longer rely on unstable weapons allowed to be led by their ego. No more rogues. Cell was his pride and joy, the culmination of his life's work, however, even Gero's masterpiece was just a tool. One that would be recovered.
He had time. He had the blueprints and machines, and now he had a purpose again.
Dr Gero had designed the perfect body. He would own it.
A Planetary Graveyard
In the shattered graveyard of two extinct civilizations, a satellite drifted silent and forgotten. Trapped in a decaying orbit above the fractured remains of a once-living world. Its sleek silver surface was obscured beneath thick, venomous clouds that blanketed the ruins like a funeral shroud.
This station had once been a haven, a final redoubt for a dying race. It had been forged not for survival, but for vengeance - a dagger suspended in the dark, waiting to be thrust into the heart of the monsters who had razed their cities, butchered their kin, and stolen their world.
But the world below had not died by their hand.
Poetic, perhaps, that those barbaric victors of that forgotten war had themselves been devoured by a greater predator. Karmic, even. Yet for the victims, robbed of their justice, such a fate offered no satisfaction. Vengeance unfulfilled had left their final instrument dormant, and those who could wield it trapped in dreamless slumber beneath reinforced tombs of adamantium alloy.
Until now.
Deep within the core of the satellite, long-dormant instrumentation flickered awake. Consoles glowed with ghostly light. A single anomaly had stirred them, detected by passive scans - a trace of energy, faint but undeniable in its nature.
Saiyan.
The signature was unmistakable. Not merely power, but the pattern of it - the unique, hateful resonance of a warrior-race encoded into energy.
The machines responded, waking slowly to life. So too did the echoes resting within them.
The ghosts stirred.
Shamo
The throne was uncomfortable. It was made of cold stone, hard, imposing. It had been made in the memory of one he had seen before, on the day he was reborn with hatred and purpose.
He considered the throne one of many indignities he had accepted in a life filled with compromise.
His hair was grey, his face wrinkled, but his body was still strong, muscled. With a gesture he could kill any of the humbled alien servants that scurried around beneath his gaze.
He wouldn't.
Age had dulled the edge of his wrath. Once, he had raged against that softening, furious that time would dare claim a warrior's strength. But now he understood that the anger was its own weakness. Lashing out was for the desperate. He had transcended that, or so he told himself.
He was a warrior, yet his pride would never be fulfilled. The opponents he encountered were too weak to challenge him or too strong to confront. In all likelihood he would die in his sleep. The certainty of that humiliation humbled him.
There had been a cause he had devoted himself to. Something greater than his pride as a warrior, something he had sacrificed everything to: time, strength, even his son.
But that too had crumbled.
His revenge would never be fulfilled, because the target of his hatred had died before he could claim the satisfaction of doing it himself.
And so, like a puppet without strings, he had been left to preside over a hollow farce.
The sham kingdom he had built had become truth because disposing of the lie was more effort than it was worth, at first. The lie had calcified into truth through repetition and inertia. He ruled a small cluster of worlds, one of the many petty empires that had formed in the wake of the dissolution of the Cold Empire. The difference was that while the other successor states squabbled amongst themselves, barely able to make a move without their neighbours making one in turn, his corner of space was left alone. His warriors were unremarkable, the servants all worthless cowards.
They feared his son.
The power of his son was unquestioned. Even shackled and suppressed, his strength was legendary. All invaders had been scattered to the cosmic winds with minimal effort.
So, his life was peaceful. Routine. The state he had built to act as a snare ran itself. The only matter he truly cared about now was preserving his control over his son.
If that dam broke, he wasn't sure the galaxy would survive.
"Sire," came the trembling voice of an aide. The alien knelt low, his many limbs twitching with nervous energy. He was an octopoid of some minor species, forgettable but competent. That was all Paragus required. "We've just received reports from long-range observation posts. A significant power level has been detected, inbound toward the Dormideous Sector."
The octopoid alien wilted beneath his withering gaze. The coldness he regarded the scientist with was born from apathy, rather than the disdain it might have seemed. But he knew that keeping a good level of fear in his subordinates was good practice.
"So? That's parsecs away," he spoke gruffly, leaning on his fist, bored.
"T-the energy matched the target spectrum." The alien went pale, bowing even lower so that its long moustache touched the floor, "And it was a match for the profile of interest."
A sharp crack echoed through the chamber.
The marble splinters fell from his clenched fingers as he focused all his ire on the scientist.
"It's an error." His voice was as cold as the gulf between stars, "Fix your equipment.".
The alien quaked, but dared to look up at him, "I did, sire. I ran diagnostics twice, then a third time. The readings are consistent. He is alive." There was a pause before the scientist offered more information, "The energy of another was detected as well. A third class Saiyan registered as Kakarot."
Beside the throne, a statue that had stood in perfect stillness for years stirred. Glassy eyes flickered green, muscles flexed as fists were made without his father's bidding for the first time in decades. The voice that emerged was not loud, but each syllable had weight, forced through mental restraints and spoken through grit teeth.
"Kakarot."
Zoon
The warriors of Planet Zoon were legends across the sector. Hardened by harsh gravity and a warrior culture, they had turned back every incursion the Planet Trade Organisation had thrown at them. Mercenaries, pirates, even Frieza's elite strike teams - none had succeeded. Their reputation was such that Raditz, elite among the Saiyans, had once travelled to Earth seeking his estranged brother Kakarot to tip the scales against them.
Then, the Cold Empire crumbled. Frieza was slain. So were King Cold and Cooler. The planet, once a prized target of conquest, was left untouched amid the chaos of warlordism. For the first time in a generation, Zoon had known peace.
That peace came to an end with the arrival of the Majins.
Pui Pui stood on top of a hill of broken bodies, smirking as the fires of the fallen city burned around him. The sleek, dark-skinned humanoid had a tall, pointed head and narrow red eyes, dressed in a black bodysuit beneath white Majin battle armor. He didn't care that the bodies of his own kind were packed beneath him like kindling, only if his master had found the harvest satisfactory.
Yakon, a hulking, green-skinned beast with a gaping, fang-filled mouth and glowing yellow eyes, stalked through the carnage on hunched limbs. His long, clawed arms swung low as taloned feet crunched over shattered bones, impaling the last twitching bodies that dared to move.
And at the center of it all, deep within the core of their grotesque spacecraft, Babidi hissed with irritation. The shriveled, impish wizard floated in the air, his grotesquely wrinkled green face twisted into a scowl, squinting eyes flicking toward the kili meter with contempt. Dressed in a billowing orange robe and dark blue cape, the wide-toothed grin he so often wore was absent now, replaced by an ugly sneer.
Despite the slaughter on Zoon, the readings were pitiful, its warriors had died too quickly, their strength burning out in mere minutes.
"My lord, the kili detectors picked up a massive amount of energy coming from the Earth. We should return with haste." A dark voice said.
Dabura, King of the Demon Realm, stood tall behind his master, arms folded and eyes gleaming with cruel interest. His crimson skin seemed to shimmer with unnatural heat, two small horns curving from his forehead away from his slicked black hair, and parallel to his pointed ears. A forked goatee framed his mouth, which twisted into a permanent sneer, and his yellow, slitted eyes burned with malice. He looked like the very picture of the devil but for his bright blue jumpsuit with a white cape, belt and boots and the dark cursive 'M' etched into his forehead betrayed his allegiance to someone higher than himself.
"Oh? You give the orders now, do you?"
The demon flinched, immediately dropping to one knee. "Forgive me, Lord Babidi, I would never presume - I merely suggest -"
"You repeat what I already know," Babidi snapped, his shrivelled lips curling with disdain. "And worse, you waste my time doing it. There's nothing I hate more than a minion telling my own plan back to me."
The servant spoke as apologetically as he could, forked tongue speaking quickly to mollify his master, "Please forgive me Master. I overstepped my bounds. I will do whatever you command."
"If you want to be useful, go fetch your sister," Babidi hissed, already turning back to the shining crystal ball perched on the table before him. "I felt something from her, a hint of power that might be potent, if she submits as you have."
"It shall be done," Dabura fled the chamber with haste.
Babidi was left alone, the flickering crystal ball reflecting his scowl. He stared into its translucent depths, watching the ghost of that colossal energy pulse, still trembling through the void.
"How much longer must I suffer the company of mediocrity?" He muttered to himself, "Give me a proper demon, a real Majin!"
He clenched his wrinkled fingers, voice dark with craving.
"Soon. Soon, Majin Buu. I'll find a way to bring you back. And then this pathetic universe will remember what it means to fear."
Nutts
The sky above Nutts had gone dark for nearly an hour.
What at first was mistaken for an eclipse became something far worse. A silvery behemoth eclipsing the stars, exterior covered with continent sized armour plates and massive bulbous connecting joints. It travelled implacably along invisible gravimetric anchors, locking onto the planet like an amoeba chasing its prey.
The Big Gete Star had arrived.
It hovered with unnatural precision, and then it opened
Massive plates silently split, folding outward like the arms of a vast, metallic starfish. A dozen colossal limbs extended, bracing into place with a thunderous boom that echoed across the upper atmosphere. The planet's magnetosphere flickered and bled as the machine's clamps locked on.
From each limb, planet cracking drills extended, towering, tubular behemoths that dwarfed skyscrapers. Each spun to life with a scream of tortured metal and blazing heat, red from friction before they even touched the crust. The air above them warped, and magnetic storms crackled violently across the ionosphere.
In perfect synchronicity, the drills descended.
They pierced clouds. They tore into stone. The earth beneath them cracked and split as magma was forced to the surface. Fault lines screamed open. Oceans boiled as the mantle was punctured. The planet itself groaned like a wounded animal.
Superheated core matter was drained like blood from a vein. It flowed through glowing pipes into the belly of the machine. Steam geysers exploded skyward, and entire mountain ranges were ripped away in spirals of gravitic lift, torn upward into harvesting chutes like meat into a grinder.
Cities died unnoticed.
Within the core of the Gete Star, the stolen matter was refined, compacted, rebuilt. Panels rotated, plating expanded. It grew fatter. More armoured. More armed. Like a living organism gorged after feeding.
The planet, once vibrant and full of life was reduced to a blackened husk. A rapidly cooling husk bleeding atmosphere into space.
The drills retracted, the arms folded inward. The Gete Star began to move again, dragging the final threads of energy into itself like marrow from a broken bone.
One final tremor ran through the planet. Then nothing. Nutts was dead.
Inside the Big Gete Star, circuits blinked green. The planet sized machine was full for now. But it always needed more. More energy, more material, more everything. It was hard to say if that hunger was its own or the tyrant that directed it, whose form it borrowed to beat down the rare resistance it faced to feeding.
It scanned through the life energy detected from distant stars with a fine-toothed comb, judging each one by distance and volume. A new entry had appeared on what had been a static board, coming from a region that was forgotten by one, but the other now looked to with hunger.
The Big Gete Star calculated the trajectory of the morsel that had presented itself, tasting the energy it left in its wake like blood shed by careless prey. The artificial planet moved in that direction, inexorably dragging its bulk through space.
However long it took, it would find the source of that energy, and it would devour it.
West City
West City was a blackened ruin, all the buildings fallen tombstones bent away from the direction of Cell's transformation.
Above the black sand covering the Capsule Corporation headquarters, a yellow ovoid craft appeared out of thin air. The Time Machine's engines hissed as they touched the dirt, and the glass dome slid open with a pneumatic hiss.
Trunks' eyes went wide with horror as he took in the devastated scene greeting him on his arrival back to the future.
"What the hell happened here?"
He leapt from the craft, boots crunching down onto brittle ash. The moment his feet hit the ground, he bolted toward the remains of Capsule Corp. The bunker was still there, barely. Hidden under a shell of melted alloy and cracked tiles, the entrance looked like it had been half-buried during whatever hellish storm had passed through. Trunks yanked the door open with raw strength and darted inside. He wasn't thinking, just moving, scanning desperately with his senses. To his relief, a familiar warmth was still there.
"Mom!"
There was a beat of silence.
Then hurried footsteps.
Then she was in his arms.
"Trunks!"
Bulma crashed into him at full force, knocking him back a step with the force of her relief. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders, trembling, and she buried her face in his neck as if to confirm he was real.
He held her tight, stunned by how fragile she felt in that moment. Her breath hitched in sobs against him, and there were no words. He smiled gently down at her.
"I'm here," he murmured. "It's okay, Mom. I'm back."
Bulma pulled away just enough to look up at him, her eyes red but sharp with emotion, and then she slapped him on the arm.
"Where were you?!" She demanded. "I was worried sick! You were only supposed to be gone for a few days, not," her voice cracked, " not this long. You have no idea what happened while you were gone."
His brow furrowed. "I saw the damage on the way down. Was it 17 and 18? Did they find you?"
Bulma looked away, lips drawn into a tight line. "No," she said slowly. "It wasn't them. This one was… different. He was tall. Broad. Covered in green armor, like some kind of walking tank. Had a mohawk."
Trunks eyes widened in recognition. "Android 16."
"But he was gentle. He didn't want to hurt me, just - Wait, Android 16?" She blinked, then focused her sharp gaze on him again, "You know him?"
He ran a hand through his lavender hair, groaning. "Yeah. I do. But that's gonna take a lot of explaining. Things in the past got complicated."
Bulma raised an eyebrow but didn't push. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him again and pressed her forehead to his. "Well, I'm just glad you're back in one piece."
They stood there for a quiet moment and enjoyed the warmth. Then she gently pulled back and gave him a tired smile.
"Come on," she said, voice tired but steady. "I'll put on some tea. You can tell me everything."
They moved through the bunker, the air stale but familiar. The lights flickered as they passed. As she reached the small kitchen, Bulma paused and glanced over her shoulder. "Where's your sword, by the way?"
Trunks sighed, rubbing the back of his head and looking to the ceiling, "You're not gonna believe this, but it turns out there were more Androids than we thought."
Bulma froze.
Then she coughed. Loudly. Abruptly. And made a beeline for the kettle.
"Y-yeah, more Androids. That sounds crazy."
She didn't turn back to look at him, but Trunks could tell from her sudden frantic pace and the way she avoided looking back at him that there was more she wasn't saying.
He sighed and sat at the table, hoping that whatever it was, it wasn't too bad.
How am I going to tell her about Cell?