"Trunks said you recognized him and Gohan on sight." Bulma set a cup of hot tea in front of Liam and glanced sideways at the palm-sized girl currently perched on his shoulder. "Do you know them?"
Chibi Akane lit up, hopped from Liam's shoulder to the table, found her own cup, and leaned over it with both tiny hands wrapped around the rim, drinking with great personal dignity.
Bulma watched this for a moment, then decided to file it in the same category as everything else that had happened today and moved on.
She was forty-six now, and the years showed in the small ways: a little loose skin along the jaw, lines around the eyes that hadn't been there before. The eyes themselves were still sharp, still that specific shade of blue that suggested she'd been arguing with the laws of physics since childhood and winning more often than not. Her work jacket had engine grease on one elbow and what might have been soldering flux on the collar. She sat with her legs crossed, cigarette between two fingers, and somehow managed to look like someone who owned the room even though the room in question had a cracked wall and plywood over one window.
Liam stood with his tea and toured the perimeter of the house. Old habit. Know where all the exits are.
"I know them," he said. "And I don't know them."
Bulma smiled at that. "Then do you know me?"
He snapped his fingers. "Bulma. Daughter of the Capsule Corporation chairman. Genius scientist. The girl who dragged a small child named Goku out of the wilderness and started an adventure that eventually covered Dragon Balls, monster kings, alien invaders, and a man who considered himself emperor of the universe."
Her expression held through most of that. It shifted on the last part.
The people who remembered those events, who had lived through them alongside her, were dead. Had been dead for years. Their souls were somewhere in the Other World, which was admittedly more real in this universe than in most, but still not exactly accessible for a chat.
"Who are you?" she said, and her voice was level but the lightness had gone out of it.
A heavier voice came from the hallway. "That's what I'd like to know."
Gohan stood in the doorway. He'd been in the next room recovering, and he looked like a man who had done his recovery at speed and was deeply unhappy about the reason. His left arm, the one that had ended at the shoulder in a ragged mess of bone and tissue two hours ago, hung at his side with a new hand at the end of it. He opened and closed the fist slowly, feeling the tendons test themselves.
"You gave me a Senzu bean," he said. It wasn't quite a question. "Except there are no Senzu beans left. So what did you actually do?"
"Brother Gohan." Trunks appeared behind him, twelve years old and carrying approximately forty years' worth of worry behind his eyes. He'd been glued to Gohan's side since Bulma brought them both back on the motorcycle, and he wasn't happy about Gohan being upright yet.
"I've been working on a time machine," Bulma said, into the small silence that followed.
She tapped ash off the cigarette and studied Liam with the look of someone building a hypothesis. "It's still early stages. But if the research is real, then the butterfly effect could produce results before the machine is even finished. Someone arriving from another timeline, knowing things they shouldn't. That would fit."
"My name is Liam," Liam said. "Her name is Akane."
Chibi Akane waved from beside her teacup without looking up.
"Did you come from another timeline, Liam? Another version of this world?" Bulma asked. "It would explain the knowledge."
"Yes and no," Liam said, which was honest in a way that wasn't particularly satisfying to anyone. He smiled at all three of them. "Don't worry about the specifics. I have no reason to harm any of you. And the more urgent question is whether we can do anything about the two Androids currently disassembling your city one block at a time."
"Easy for you to say," Trunks muttered. Twelve years old, and the bitterness in that voice had been earned the hard way. "Even Gohan can't beat them."
"You don't need to beat them," Akane said, from beside her teacup. "Gohan has a Star Mark now. Liam can possess him, get close to the Androids, and stamp marks on both of them. Then Liam controls the Androids instead."
She said it the way someone explains that you should use the back door instead of the front. Cheerfully. Practically. Without any apparent awareness that it was a monstrous suggestion.
"What's a Star Mark?" Trunks demanded. "What did you do to Brother Gohan?"
Gohan's hand went to the back of his neck. His fingers found the pentagram there, rose-gold against skin. His expression went inward, processing something.
"You can take control of someone's body through this," he said. It wasn't quite a question either. "I thought I was imagining it. In the dreams, there was something competing for my awareness. Like a hand on the wheel."
"I can demonstrate," Liam said, and Gohan's face went still.
Then it changed. Not dramatically, not like a mask swapping out, but the expression reorganized itself into something cooler, more considered. When it spoke, it used Gohan's voice but Liam's cadence, and the sentences came out with the slight gaps of someone transmitting through interference.
"Full possession works. But the power gap is too large. Control degrades significantly."
The point proved itself immediately. Gohan's aura spiked, golden fire erupting from his skin, black hair bleaching upward into gold as the Super Saiyan transformation tore through him. Liam's grip on the controls slipped. The words coming from Gohan's mouth became fragmented, halting, like a bad phone connection dropping syllables.
Then Gohan was Gohan again, the gold fading, breathing hard. He exhaled slowly, blond dissolving back to black, and stared at Liam with something that wasn't quite anger but was adjacent to it.
"The power gap is the problem," Liam said, back in his own body now. He set his tea down. "Here's the actual issue with the Android plan. In your world, when the power difference is large enough, special abilities stop working at full strength. Guldo could freeze time, but Vegeta's team fighting back could shrink the duration."
He looked at Gohan. "You resisted my possession the moment you transformed. Androids 17 and 18 are stronger than you. So I have no guarantee they wouldn't break free the second they noticed something was wrong, which is the second I tried anything."
He let that sit for a moment.
"And there's a worse problem. People with Star Marks don't die easily. The Mark keeps repairing damage. Which sounds useful until you consider what happens if you try to kill someone who's marked. The moment you destroy the Mark itself, there's a window. Maybe a tenth of a second. Full freedom, no control, no injury carrying over from whatever you were in the middle of doing to them."
"A tenth of a second," Trunks started.
"Is enough time for either of them to kill everyone in this room," Bulma said, to her son, in a voice that had clearly done this before. She turned back to Liam. "But you said it like a man who has a different idea."
Liam's mouth curved. "Living people can't handle the Androids. What about dead ones?"
Silence.
"Goku has been training in the Other World since he died," Liam said. "The Other World is real here, and time still passes there. He's had years. A man like Goku, given years and something to chase, doesn't stay at his old ceiling. He finds a new one. Super Saiyan was a transformation, not a destination. There's more past it."
Trunks stared at him. "More past Super Saiyan?" The words came out like Liam had just suggested the sky had a second layer.
Gohan said nothing. He was looking at his hand, the new one that shouldn't exist. His expression had changed into something Liam recognized: the look of someone reorganizing their entire model of what was possible.
"If it's Dad," he said slowly, "then maybe..."
Bulma blew smoke at the ceiling.
"It's a lovely thought," she said, and the pragmatism in her voice wasn't cruel, just dense. She'd been surviving on pragmatism for years. It was the only nutrient left. "But the Dragon Balls are gone. Piccolo died. Kami died with him. No god, no Dragon Balls. No Dragon Balls, no resurrection. Goku stays dead."
She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward, elbows on knees, cigarette burning down between her fingers.