Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Garrulous and Gritless ❯ I, 3: Bulma ( Chapter 3 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: ShiningMoon 
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Action / Comedy / Drama / Psychological / Romance | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 01.15.2011 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.6K | Visits: 258 | Status: Completed
Anime/Manga: Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Adventure / Action / Comedy / Drama / Psychological / Romance | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 01.15.2011 | Pages: 2 | Words: 2.6K | Visits: 258 | Status: Completed
NOTE: You know how sometimes when you're writing, the characters just do whatever they want with no regard to what you had in mind? Yeah. Way to screw with my carefully planned pacing, Bulma and Raditz. Thanks. XD
...
Hah. Cute.
The guy thinks he can walk.
He collapses down onto the ground and I hold my hand out, waiting. Take your time, buddy. Only what may be the greatest opportunity for development of space travel in the history of the world awaits me.
He seems a little too stupid to be able to operate such a fine piece of technology, but I guess they could've dumbed it down easily enough. Anyway, maybe stuff like this is common out there—out wherever he came from.
I really don't want to put him in the hospital. For one thing, I don't trust him there.
For another, it makes it a hell of a lot tougher for me to observe him.
I never paid attention to Son's body, well—not when he was a kid, at least. The tail was an enigma, but I figured, well, he's not exactly the only walking talking thing on Earth with a tail. Maybe the fuzzy ears skip a generation. Whatever. I was always a little too afraid to ask, anyway, for fear he'd peel my shirt off in the middle of town just to check for where my tail used to be.
So it turns out Son's an alien—I'm not surprised. I'm excited—yeah, because it was my luck to get in just this place, with this alien's technology and his own self right here for me to look over! I can see how he might be Gohan's uncle—I'll bet given time that cute little kid's hair would become a mess like this guy's.
I wiggle my fingers to remind him they're still there. He spits a string of insults at me and I can't help giggling a little bit. He clearly doesn't have any fight left in him, and if I had to guess, I'd say he's hungry, too—well, if he's anything like Son, he's probably always hungry.
Lucky for him I'm taking him back to my lab out of the goodness of my heart. I'm sure Dad will understand; he'll pay to feed him so that I can study him. It was silly for me to think I'd let Son take him in—for one thing, I doubt Chi-Chi would allow it. I wonder what her fortune has dwindled to trying to keep up with Son's appetite and penchant for accidentally destroying things. I wish Son would have come to live with me, sometimes—at least I can afford him. Well—his loss.
This Raditz guy doesn't have Son's boyish good looks, that's for sure. From his weird armor (or lack thereof) I can see his legs are all scraped up and scarred (which, y'know, might not happen if he had the good sense to cover them—I mean, if I were a vicious space pirate I would cover my bases—but—that's me). His eyes have the same mischievous sparkle as Son's—maybe it's a, what was it, Saiyan—thing—but they're about a billion times meaner. Well...not now, though. Hah. Nope.
He looks disgusted as he grabs my hand, and uses it to help pull himself up. I nearly topple over under his weight—is it his muscles, or his hair?—and he glares at me for it. "Some warrior," he scoffs, and he's looking at me.
"It's okay," I tell him, stepping closer so that he can lean against me a little to support himself, and I can't keep the serious face as my lips crack open into a grin, "don't be so hard on yourself."
He swears some more and swings around like he's going to let go of me and punch me. Then he does let go of me. And before he can hit me (thank god), he crumples back onto the ground. I can't bite down my laugh and, well, hell, it's not like he can do anything to me for it, besides scream at me and then wheeze a little bit and then start coughing up blood. Oh, shit, this is more serious than I thought it was. I pick him up before he hacks his lungs out—well—I mean "pick up" in the loosest of terms. I sling his arm over my shoulder and after a couple more poisonous glares at me he plants his feet against the ground to help me pick him up.
"I'm staying with my pod," he asserts again, wheezing some more.
"We'll see," is all I say. "If you can behave yourself I might let you visit it sometimes." He doesn't think that's nearly as funny as I do, but he doesn't make the same mistake as last time and just keeps ambling along, somehow managing to lean against me while making himself very far away.
From where I am I can get a closer look at his armor. It's definitely beat up, but it must've been pretty sturdy to hold up in a battle against Son—especially with how awful he and Piccolo looked, and they're the ones who won.
I'm sure Son will get little Gohan before Piccolo can do anything to him—I'd thought about following, but it's not as if I could do anything. Besides, there's a space pod to dissect...
I should look at the armor, too, and see if I can make something like it. Might come in handy. But he must've taken a pretty hard blow, to get hurt like this, and even his armor can't deflect blunt force, I'm sure. I think some of his ribs might be cracked, among other things.
"Stop talking," I tell him about the fifth time he tries to ask me something about a freezer. "Just shut the hell up, okay?" He opens his mouth again and I smack it. "You can have ice cream when we get back," I tell him, and I have to giggle again, because this guy is nothing like Son. He looks at me like I was the one who fell out of the sky. Except, angrier.
Eventually, we make it to the boarding platform, which is fantastic, because I think I'll die if I have to drag him another step. For one thing, he's bleeding all over my favorite white shirt, and for another, I am tired. I pretty much toss him down the first second I can, and he yelps and screams something about a "healing tank."
"Whatever," I say as we get ready to head back home. My father looks over his shoulder from the pilot's seat and I grin a little. "You can look later, Daddy," I tell him, and hope that he can keep his eyes on the sky rather than what awaits him in the spaceship-pod. I'm about to go talk to him, and block his view to the ship while I do so, but then I notice that Raditz has this sneaky look about him, and he keeps stealing glances at the pod.
Well, fine. Two can play at that game.
I sit down in a chair a little farther back and stare at him, this ridiculous-looking man kind of lying there pathetically on the floor. I don't think I can move him another inch, and anyway, I don't want him bleeding all over our nice cushioned seats. So in the hopes that somebody can entertain me while Raditz fumes on the ground and I guard the pod—just in case he's faking it—I look around for Yamcha, who'd helped load the thing up in the first place, but he's not here anymore. "Dad," I call up to the front.
"Yes, dear?" he twists around, probably just as an excuse to look at the pod again.
"Where'd Yamcha go?"
"Something about a, ah, a, what's it...a game of some sort..." he mumbles.
"Baseball," I tell him, sighing. "I'd forgotten. Oh well, I'll thank him later."
Meanwhile, Raditz has passed out. I guess that means he'll complain less when I move him into the lab.
...
But before I move him, while he's still asleep, I tuck the scouter away in my secret little place right by the Dragon Radar, in a box locked away in a separate little area of my lab. And Dad and I put the pod away, too, where we can study it. Then, when Raditz wakes up, well—he won't know where a damn thing is, and I feel a lot better about it that way. He says, I guess, that he has a couple of bigger, badder friends who will come and avenge him, so as far as I'm concerned, it's in our best interest to figure out as much as we can, as fast as we can. Maybe I'll discover something that'll help Son fight off the others.
I still have no idea where to put him, but my father suggests making a little hospital room out of one of the walled-off portions of my lab, and I have to admit that it's a great idea. I don't know how quickly this guy will recover, but I call in a crew to start reinforcing the walls just in case, and building a nice, strong window into the side so that I can look at him from the outside if it's too dangerous to go in.
I get the feeling he is not going to be pleased with this arrangement. Oh well—serves him right for trying to kill Son and kidnap poor little Gohan.
Before he gets better I'll have to work out a better system to keep him down. I figure Son is a pretty safe point of reference, so I just need to think up something that could hold Son down even with a cupcake dangling above his head.
This will be a challenge.
But, I'm pretty excited. We could be mere years from efficient interstellar travel! What's more, I can learn a bit about the Saiyans from this guy. A couple of men haul him into the room on a stretcher, and I step in with them. I'll have to call for medical assistance from time to time, I'm sure—I'm an engineer, not a doctor—but at least with me there he'll be less likely to, I don't know, mangle the help. I tuck away a tranquilizer gun in a nearby locked drawer—just in case. But, I think I should mostly be able to handle him. It doesn't seem like he'll be too keen on the normal medical protocol, anyway—and him lashing out at personnel won't be an issue if they're never there.
...
When he wakes up I nearly stab myself in the eye with a screwdriver.
"Oh gods!" he wails from the closed-off area across the lab from where I am, "Get me to a healing tank!" I can hear it through the walls, and then some, so I can't imagine how loud he was actually yowling. I pace over to the little window in his room and look in on him, tapping on the glass. His mouth slams shut and he stares at me. I hold up my hand to tell him to wait, and round the corner and step in.
"What's going on, here?" I don't know why I think it's so funny, that he was just wailing in agony and now he's not making a peep, but I have to try my damnedest not to out-and-out grin. I have no idea when he's going to recover—when he'll be able to hurt me if he doesn't like what I say or do. Maybe I should ask Yamcha to come in with me from now on—but I doubt he'd volunteer.
Raditz practically hisses at me. "Are you trying to torture me, or what? I'm in fucking pain here, you bitch. Just put me in a healing tank." It looks like he's valiantly attempting not to wince as he shifts his weight like he wants to stand up.
"Well, space-man, here on Earth we don't have anything called a 'healing tank,' so sit your ass back down," I tell him. "I can have you bandaged up, if you like, and bring you something to eat, but so help you god you will not move off of that bed."
"Like you care," he continues on his way, his toes brushing onto the ground. I've taken the liberty of removing his armor to study it, and put Raditz in some of Yamcha's spare clothes that he leaves here for when he stays with me. They definitely don't fit—Raditz is taller and his shoulders broader, so the shirt is so tight it practically rips every time he moves, and the pants are just the same—and don't quite reach his ankles.
It's at this point he seems to notice that he's not wearing boots. "What?" he looks at his toes, wiggling them like he's never seen them before, and then he turns to me, narrowing his eyes. "Where are my boots?"
I gesture to the lab outside and he growls and glances at his hands. "My gloves!" He pauses and I brace myself for it. "What the hell is this?"
"Look," I close my eyes, like I'm better than seeing his reaction, and explain in a condescending voice I'm fairly sure will drive him up the wall, "I'm studying your armor, so you'll have to be patient about getting it back. Right now you're wearing some of my boyfriend's clothes, but I'll get you something, er," I'm about to say 'better,' but, damn, he's not actually that bad looking in those clothes despite the ridiculousness of it—better than his armor, at least—"looser, later."
"I'm not letting you clothe me," he snarls, scratching at the pants. "I fucking hate having something on my legs," he whines. Well, he more grumbles it, but I've come to decide that's his whining voice and nothing's proved me wrong so far.
"Suck it up," I say, turning on my heel. "Just lie down and get back to sleep, huh? Would you rather I have left you there naked?" He seems to consider it, opens his mouth, and I crinkle my nose and add before he can answer, "It was a rhetorical question." He lies back down and stuffs his hands over his chest, nostrils flaring as he huffs at me.
Hah. Cute.
Converting /tmp/phpGp8h6K to /dev/stdout
...
Hah. Cute.
The guy thinks he can walk.
He collapses down onto the ground and I hold my hand out, waiting. Take your time, buddy. Only what may be the greatest opportunity for development of space travel in the history of the world awaits me.
He seems a little too stupid to be able to operate such a fine piece of technology, but I guess they could've dumbed it down easily enough. Anyway, maybe stuff like this is common out there—out wherever he came from.
I really don't want to put him in the hospital. For one thing, I don't trust him there.
For another, it makes it a hell of a lot tougher for me to observe him.
I never paid attention to Son's body, well—not when he was a kid, at least. The tail was an enigma, but I figured, well, he's not exactly the only walking talking thing on Earth with a tail. Maybe the fuzzy ears skip a generation. Whatever. I was always a little too afraid to ask, anyway, for fear he'd peel my shirt off in the middle of town just to check for where my tail used to be.
So it turns out Son's an alien—I'm not surprised. I'm excited—yeah, because it was my luck to get in just this place, with this alien's technology and his own self right here for me to look over! I can see how he might be Gohan's uncle—I'll bet given time that cute little kid's hair would become a mess like this guy's.
I wiggle my fingers to remind him they're still there. He spits a string of insults at me and I can't help giggling a little bit. He clearly doesn't have any fight left in him, and if I had to guess, I'd say he's hungry, too—well, if he's anything like Son, he's probably always hungry.
Lucky for him I'm taking him back to my lab out of the goodness of my heart. I'm sure Dad will understand; he'll pay to feed him so that I can study him. It was silly for me to think I'd let Son take him in—for one thing, I doubt Chi-Chi would allow it. I wonder what her fortune has dwindled to trying to keep up with Son's appetite and penchant for accidentally destroying things. I wish Son would have come to live with me, sometimes—at least I can afford him. Well—his loss.
This Raditz guy doesn't have Son's boyish good looks, that's for sure. From his weird armor (or lack thereof) I can see his legs are all scraped up and scarred (which, y'know, might not happen if he had the good sense to cover them—I mean, if I were a vicious space pirate I would cover my bases—but—that's me). His eyes have the same mischievous sparkle as Son's—maybe it's a, what was it, Saiyan—thing—but they're about a billion times meaner. Well...not now, though. Hah. Nope.
He looks disgusted as he grabs my hand, and uses it to help pull himself up. I nearly topple over under his weight—is it his muscles, or his hair?—and he glares at me for it. "Some warrior," he scoffs, and he's looking at me.
"It's okay," I tell him, stepping closer so that he can lean against me a little to support himself, and I can't keep the serious face as my lips crack open into a grin, "don't be so hard on yourself."
He swears some more and swings around like he's going to let go of me and punch me. Then he does let go of me. And before he can hit me (thank god), he crumples back onto the ground. I can't bite down my laugh and, well, hell, it's not like he can do anything to me for it, besides scream at me and then wheeze a little bit and then start coughing up blood. Oh, shit, this is more serious than I thought it was. I pick him up before he hacks his lungs out—well—I mean "pick up" in the loosest of terms. I sling his arm over my shoulder and after a couple more poisonous glares at me he plants his feet against the ground to help me pick him up.
"I'm staying with my pod," he asserts again, wheezing some more.
"We'll see," is all I say. "If you can behave yourself I might let you visit it sometimes." He doesn't think that's nearly as funny as I do, but he doesn't make the same mistake as last time and just keeps ambling along, somehow managing to lean against me while making himself very far away.
From where I am I can get a closer look at his armor. It's definitely beat up, but it must've been pretty sturdy to hold up in a battle against Son—especially with how awful he and Piccolo looked, and they're the ones who won.
I'm sure Son will get little Gohan before Piccolo can do anything to him—I'd thought about following, but it's not as if I could do anything. Besides, there's a space pod to dissect...
I should look at the armor, too, and see if I can make something like it. Might come in handy. But he must've taken a pretty hard blow, to get hurt like this, and even his armor can't deflect blunt force, I'm sure. I think some of his ribs might be cracked, among other things.
"Stop talking," I tell him about the fifth time he tries to ask me something about a freezer. "Just shut the hell up, okay?" He opens his mouth again and I smack it. "You can have ice cream when we get back," I tell him, and I have to giggle again, because this guy is nothing like Son. He looks at me like I was the one who fell out of the sky. Except, angrier.
Eventually, we make it to the boarding platform, which is fantastic, because I think I'll die if I have to drag him another step. For one thing, he's bleeding all over my favorite white shirt, and for another, I am tired. I pretty much toss him down the first second I can, and he yelps and screams something about a "healing tank."
"Whatever," I say as we get ready to head back home. My father looks over his shoulder from the pilot's seat and I grin a little. "You can look later, Daddy," I tell him, and hope that he can keep his eyes on the sky rather than what awaits him in the spaceship-pod. I'm about to go talk to him, and block his view to the ship while I do so, but then I notice that Raditz has this sneaky look about him, and he keeps stealing glances at the pod.
Well, fine. Two can play at that game.
I sit down in a chair a little farther back and stare at him, this ridiculous-looking man kind of lying there pathetically on the floor. I don't think I can move him another inch, and anyway, I don't want him bleeding all over our nice cushioned seats. So in the hopes that somebody can entertain me while Raditz fumes on the ground and I guard the pod—just in case he's faking it—I look around for Yamcha, who'd helped load the thing up in the first place, but he's not here anymore. "Dad," I call up to the front.
"Yes, dear?" he twists around, probably just as an excuse to look at the pod again.
"Where'd Yamcha go?"
"Something about a, ah, a, what's it...a game of some sort..." he mumbles.
"Baseball," I tell him, sighing. "I'd forgotten. Oh well, I'll thank him later."
Meanwhile, Raditz has passed out. I guess that means he'll complain less when I move him into the lab.
...
But before I move him, while he's still asleep, I tuck the scouter away in my secret little place right by the Dragon Radar, in a box locked away in a separate little area of my lab. And Dad and I put the pod away, too, where we can study it. Then, when Raditz wakes up, well—he won't know where a damn thing is, and I feel a lot better about it that way. He says, I guess, that he has a couple of bigger, badder friends who will come and avenge him, so as far as I'm concerned, it's in our best interest to figure out as much as we can, as fast as we can. Maybe I'll discover something that'll help Son fight off the others.
I still have no idea where to put him, but my father suggests making a little hospital room out of one of the walled-off portions of my lab, and I have to admit that it's a great idea. I don't know how quickly this guy will recover, but I call in a crew to start reinforcing the walls just in case, and building a nice, strong window into the side so that I can look at him from the outside if it's too dangerous to go in.
I get the feeling he is not going to be pleased with this arrangement. Oh well—serves him right for trying to kill Son and kidnap poor little Gohan.
Before he gets better I'll have to work out a better system to keep him down. I figure Son is a pretty safe point of reference, so I just need to think up something that could hold Son down even with a cupcake dangling above his head.
This will be a challenge.
But, I'm pretty excited. We could be mere years from efficient interstellar travel! What's more, I can learn a bit about the Saiyans from this guy. A couple of men haul him into the room on a stretcher, and I step in with them. I'll have to call for medical assistance from time to time, I'm sure—I'm an engineer, not a doctor—but at least with me there he'll be less likely to, I don't know, mangle the help. I tuck away a tranquilizer gun in a nearby locked drawer—just in case. But, I think I should mostly be able to handle him. It doesn't seem like he'll be too keen on the normal medical protocol, anyway—and him lashing out at personnel won't be an issue if they're never there.
...
When he wakes up I nearly stab myself in the eye with a screwdriver.
"Oh gods!" he wails from the closed-off area across the lab from where I am, "Get me to a healing tank!" I can hear it through the walls, and then some, so I can't imagine how loud he was actually yowling. I pace over to the little window in his room and look in on him, tapping on the glass. His mouth slams shut and he stares at me. I hold up my hand to tell him to wait, and round the corner and step in.
"What's going on, here?" I don't know why I think it's so funny, that he was just wailing in agony and now he's not making a peep, but I have to try my damnedest not to out-and-out grin. I have no idea when he's going to recover—when he'll be able to hurt me if he doesn't like what I say or do. Maybe I should ask Yamcha to come in with me from now on—but I doubt he'd volunteer.
Raditz practically hisses at me. "Are you trying to torture me, or what? I'm in fucking pain here, you bitch. Just put me in a healing tank." It looks like he's valiantly attempting not to wince as he shifts his weight like he wants to stand up.
"Well, space-man, here on Earth we don't have anything called a 'healing tank,' so sit your ass back down," I tell him. "I can have you bandaged up, if you like, and bring you something to eat, but so help you god you will not move off of that bed."
"Like you care," he continues on his way, his toes brushing onto the ground. I've taken the liberty of removing his armor to study it, and put Raditz in some of Yamcha's spare clothes that he leaves here for when he stays with me. They definitely don't fit—Raditz is taller and his shoulders broader, so the shirt is so tight it practically rips every time he moves, and the pants are just the same—and don't quite reach his ankles.
It's at this point he seems to notice that he's not wearing boots. "What?" he looks at his toes, wiggling them like he's never seen them before, and then he turns to me, narrowing his eyes. "Where are my boots?"
I gesture to the lab outside and he growls and glances at his hands. "My gloves!" He pauses and I brace myself for it. "What the hell is this?"
"Look," I close my eyes, like I'm better than seeing his reaction, and explain in a condescending voice I'm fairly sure will drive him up the wall, "I'm studying your armor, so you'll have to be patient about getting it back. Right now you're wearing some of my boyfriend's clothes, but I'll get you something, er," I'm about to say 'better,' but, damn, he's not actually that bad looking in those clothes despite the ridiculousness of it—better than his armor, at least—"looser, later."
"I'm not letting you clothe me," he snarls, scratching at the pants. "I fucking hate having something on my legs," he whines. Well, he more grumbles it, but I've come to decide that's his whining voice and nothing's proved me wrong so far.
"Suck it up," I say, turning on my heel. "Just lie down and get back to sleep, huh? Would you rather I have left you there naked?" He seems to consider it, opens his mouth, and I crinkle my nose and add before he can answer, "It was a rhetorical question." He lies back down and stuffs his hands over his chest, nostrils flaring as he huffs at me.
Hah. Cute.
Converting /tmp/phpGp8h6K to /dev/stdout