Dragon Ball Z: Paradise Found

A Shelter To The Crude

A party of people waited around a jet parked in the middle of a wasteland just to the south outside West City. Bulma stared off in the skies above through a scoping device she placed on her head with a triplet of goggles that let her gaze a massive distance away in the horizon and see any faraway objects or entities and track them.

Muten Roshi had been just as eager to look at the sky in the beginning, but a few hours later he settled down in a folding chair and began flipping through the pages of his dirty magazines. Everyone else's excitement seemed to have similarly dwindled. Chi-Chi gripped the edges of the wrap she had over the top of her qipao dress, being just about the only one beside Bulma to maintain interest in the matters high in space.

Her care wasn't as healthy and steady as Bulma's however, as the heart of the mother and a wife filled itself with worry. Partly because Bulma, being the genius that she was, focused on rationality and problem-solving, did a rather poor job of filling everyone in on the details. Chi-Chi only knew what was the most important: that Goku and Gohan would land here and that they were both alive. Bulma didn't spare her any explanation on if their mission had been successful and what condition they would return in.

"There. I see them..." Bulma said, staring off at a fixed point in the sky. Her voice had been calm, like that of a chess grandmaster who had an entire game in their mind and saw them realize itself before their very eyes. Calculated and assured of herself.

Before long, everyone else could see the blazing dot in the sky as well. Then another, and a few more lit up. This was something that Bulma wasn't quite predicting, prompting her to slip off her scoping mask and let it slip and fall off her face as she gazed at the sky in surprise. The spring heat brought intense sweating down her forehead, though the chagrin of these numerous arrivals made Bulma too worked up to wipe it off her brow.

The spacecrafts smashed into the ground one by one, raising a messy cloud of dust that left the Earthling greeting party reeling and coughing. Chi-Chi began rushing toward the spaceships. Bulma raised her hand to stop the woman, but Muten Roshi gently touched Bulma's hand and helped to lower it, shaking his head calmly. It was only then that it occurred to Bulma that Chi-Chi sensed familiar Ki inside those ships and that while the arrivals were many–they were still friendly if Goku spearheaded them.

"Gohan-chan!" Chi-Chi cried out, bursting into the open spaceship and wrapping her hands around the incredibly confused child who, while missed his mother and wanted to embrace her more than anything else in the world, wasn't ready for his mother to barge in like that and bring the much-awaited meeting to him so quickly.

"Chi-Chi..." Goku mumbled in acknowledgment of his wife. "I brought him home. You should have seen him... He's way stronger than any of us were in his age. All that weird Saiyan stuff all over the place, he must have learned a thing or two too." The Saiyan giggled to himself.

"Your parents?" Chi-Chi looked up, wrapping her arms around Goku next and pressing her body against his. She felt a light struggle against her tight hold though it wasn't an attempt to break free, Goku was shaking his head, suggesting that they didn't make it. Chi-Chi's stare became tamer as sadness filled her eyes.

"That's okay, grandma and grandpa only died for the first time, right? We can still use the Dragon Balls to bring them back." Gohan tried cheering his mother up, but Chi-Chi let go of her husband and kneeled to her son, placing her hand over little Gohan's head.

"That's not a healthy way to look at life and death, Gohan-chan. Dying isn't just an inconvenience for the Dragon Balls to fix. Dying brings an enormous risk that at one time your friends or family might not come back. In fact, that's how dying was always meant to be. You die and that's it." Chi-Chi pointed out to her son.