The desert had not improved with time.
Nimbus set them down in the courtyard of a palace that had once hosted genuine supernatural spectacle and was now hosting a lot of sand. The ring in the center, surrounded by a moat of murky water, sat empty and cracked under the afternoon sun. The spectator stands had collapsed on one side. Whatever banners had flown here were long gone.
Son Gohan pressed his palms together and bowed as Nimbus lifted away, golden and cheerful, back into the sky.
Liam released Jade. She spread her sleeves, two pulses of light dropped to the ground, and Bulma and Trunks materialized on the flagstones with the mild disorientation of people who had blinked and changed continents.
Bulma stood very still for a moment. She catalogued the temperature, the dry heat, the quality of light. Then she pulled out a device that looked like a very old mobile phone and pressed two buttons.
"Syncing coordinates," she said, to the questioning look from chibi Akane. "Private satellite."
Liam thought about that. The Androids were many things, but they weren't infrastructure managers. They had no particular reason to shoot down orbital hardware. Destroying satellites would inconvenience them too, eventually, and they seemed to enjoy modern comforts in between casual massacres.
Smart, in the way that locusts never think to preserve a few fields.
Trunks did a circuit of the palace at a jog and came back looking deflated. "There's nobody here."
"Nobody home," Bulma confirmed, lighting a new cigarette. Her eyes moved across the empty ring with the particular expression of someone revisiting a place they last saw when they were a completely different person. "Baba."
She said the name quietly, not calling it out, just acknowledging it.
"I've been here before," she said. "Long time ago. Goku, Yamcha, Krillin, that whole mess." She exhaled. "Too many names."
"Wait," said Son Gohan. He was looking at the ring.
"There's nothing there," Akane said.
"There's someone," Trunks said, a second later, squinting hard.
Liam pushed his En out to thirty meters. Aura swept the arena like sonar and found a mass the size of an adult human, standing completely still in the middle of the ring.
"You're right," he said.
"I'm Transparent," said the empty air, in a voice like a man who had not had a conversation worth having in several years. "You're looking for my mistress? She's been in the Other World. Mostly. Less and less living visitors came, so she let the others go. Bat Man, Mummy, the Devil. All dismissed. She got bored. Now she goes below more often than she stays up here."
A pause.
"If you want to wait, it'll be a while."
"What about you?" Bulma asked. "Why didn't you leave with the others?"
The Transparent Man's voice, when it came, had a particular flatness that wasn't quite sadness but lived in the same neighborhood.
"They forgot about me."
Nobody said anything to that.
Akane looked at Liam. Liam looked at the empty space where a man apparently stood. He had been invisible when they arrived and had presumably been invisible, and forgotten, for some time before that.
"Mr. Transparent," Gohan said carefully, "have you ever heard of a woman who lives near Five Elements Mountain? Keeps an Eight-Trigram furnace?"
"No."
"Please think about it," Trunks said. "Did Baba ever mention anything like that?"
"I've never heard of it." The Transparent Man paused. "I'm sorry. I really haven't."
Bulma took a long drag, then looked at the burning end of the cigarette thoughtfully. The ash fell. The Transparent Man made a small startled sound.
"Sorry," she said.
Liam pointed his thumb at the sky. "Then we go up. Kami's Lookout. The Androids have no reason to have touched it. They don't have detection radar, and the Lookout doesn't exactly advertise itself."
"Kami is dead," Bulma said.
"But Mr. Popo isn't," Liam said. "He's served several generations of Kami. He's been there longer than anyone. If there's a way to reach the Other World that doesn't require Dragon Balls, he'd know it." He looked at Gohan. "And even if every other option fails, the Hyperbolic Time Chamber is there. The environment is brutal, the gravity is wrong, the air is thin. One year inside equals one day outside. If we can't reach Goku, if we can't contact anyone, that room is your backup plan. Yours and Trunks's."
Trunks opened his mouth, then closed it. He had used up all his skepticism on the Super Saiyan conversation and had run out of new objections.
Gohan went very still. His father's words, filtered through years and grief and a war he'd been losing slowly since he was twelve, rearranged themselves into something new. His father had always believed he was stronger. Not Goku himself. Not Vegeta. Gohan.
He'd spent a decade fighting at the ceiling of what he thought was possible.
He hadn't looked for another ceiling.
"The S-Cells," Liam said. Bulma's attention sharpened immediately, the way a signal spike sharpens on a monitor. "Every Saiyan has them. They proliferate slowly during periods of mental calm. When enough of them accumulate, a sufficient emotional trigger, specifically rage, detonates them and forces the transformation. That's the mechanism for Super Saiyan."
"You're describing a biological threshold system," Bulma said slowly.
"With an emotional trigger component, yes. More S-Cells plus sufficient anger equals transformation. Super Saiyan Two follows the same logic at a higher threshold. More cells, more intense trigger."
Bulma dropped the cigarette. She was already thinking in a different register, the engineering part of her brain running ahead of the conversation. "If I could build a detector. Measure cell density in real time, track accumulation rate, model the threshold mathematically..." She looked at Gohan. "I'll build you a watch. Monitors S-Cell density. Tracks emotional state. Real-time readout. You'd know exactly where you are in the progression at any given moment."
She said it the way she said all engineering promises: completely.
Gohan looked at her for a moment. The gentle boy from Gohan Mountain, the one his parents had argued over for years, one parent wanting him trained, the other wanting him educated, was somewhere underneath all of this, but not somewhere accessible. What was here instead was someone who had been fighting a losing war since childhood and had just been handed, for the first time, the specific tools he hadn't known he was missing.
"I'll leave it to you, Aunt Bulma."
Bulma nodded once, practical and certain. The relief on her face was the specific relief of someone who has been carrying a problem alone for a very long time and has just found someone willing to share the weight.
Liam summoned Jade again. Bulma and Trunks went back into the sleeves without ceremony, Bulma already talking to herself about sensor calibration before the aura closed around her.
Gohan called Nimbus down from wherever it had been waiting.
On the empty ring, the Transparent Man watched a golden cloud descend from the sky, collect two people who had appeared from nowhere, and carry them away in a stream of light.
The desert went back to being quiet.
He stood there for a while, and then went back to doing what he'd been doing before they arrived.