Dragon Ball Z: Paradise Found

Different Planet, Same Sh*t

Bulma oversaw a smooth carrying of the Capsule Corps spacecraft through the atmosphere of Planet Vegeta. The suspicions and an awkward, nagging feeling in Bulma's chest started almost immediately after breaking through the uppermost layers. The head of Capsule Corps took over the controls meanwhile navigating through the public information on Planet Vegeta's atmosphere.

"Something's wrong. The skies on Planet Vegeta are meant to be a blend of beetroot-red. Something way drowned them out. I'm picking up much higher air toxicity and pollution levels as well," Bulma scowled while multi-tasking. While it felt weird reporting this stuff to an actual three-year-old, the toddler proved to have far more maturity than other kids his age due to both his Saiyan heritage and the prodigious intelligence he gained from his mother's side of the family.

Because of the violent culture of the Saiyans, their young had to be on their feet and in combat condition as soon as possible, which was why many Saiyan younglings started serious training and soldier-like conditioning from the age of four. That, combined with the intelligence that ran through Bulma's family's bloodline, made for a combination of a three-year-old that sometimes seemed to be more functional than some of Bulma's friends.

"Is that bad?" Trunks wondered, leaning back on the makeshift pillow of his own hands. Due to how smoothly Bulma was handling the landing, he had little trouble staying on his feet the whole way through.

"We shouldn't suffer any adverse effects short-term, but if we stayed to live here–we'd have an elevated risk of heart disease and tumorous growths. I'm also picking up a certain spike in radioactivity in certain centers of the planet that spits out harmful radiation all over the surface. We should handle it for a brief stay, but we're guaranteeing health disorders if we stay here too long," Bulma reported while shifting her focus from the data readings of the scanners and handling the landing.

Having found a station to put the spacecraft down in, the blue-haired pilot swooped through an open hatch, looking surprised to see not a single soul overseeing their landing. This was beyond odd. Nobody asked them to identify themselves over the comlink when they approached the planet's atmosphere. No one asked a single question during the entire landing procedure and now it seemed like not a single soul would point blasters at them and grunt out Saiyan signature landing greetings either.

Something seriously wrong was transpiring on Planet Vegeta.

Bulma had a gnawing itch to ask her son to stay on the ship as the bad feeling in her gut began pulling chunks of this itch to feed on and grow larger. Despite that motherly instinct to watch over her boy, deep down she knew he was her only chance of pulling through and out if any threat presented itself as out of the two of them, Trunks was the one with a head hard enough to withstand blaster fire and instincts to dodge it if need be and carry his mother out of a dangerous predicament.

"Let's go meet your dad, Trunks," Bulma chuckled uncomfortably.

Little Trunks' eyes shined with marvelous splendor from the moment he got off-board. The young one blitzed around the empty landing station, taking in the sights and floating up to examine various parts of present, inactive spaceships that looked like they had been halfway stripped for parts and hadn't flown in months. Bulma scratched the back of her neck, not liking this sign one bit. Why would the Saiyans keep their largest landing station as some scrapyard of half-dismantled ships?

"Huh?" Trunks turned his attention to a single dot of red light that lit up far away in the distance. In a shadowy corner by the wall that extended to the gate, leading deeper into the landing facilities. A mechanical hum of cybernetic activity followed by clockwork ticks and automated thumps and squeaks followed as the red light began beaming around. "I think something here is active!" he pointed at the light before taking off from a busted spaceship and floating toward the source of the red light.