Dragon Ball Z: Paradise Found

The Menace Of Cybernetic Revolution

A motherlode of all headaches seeped inside Bulma's brain. Electric impulses danced the devil's jig in her neurons, making it so that despite Bulma's own opinion on the matter, she had no other choice but to voice her awakening with a painful grunt. Her first instinct was to caress her forehead and twitching temples, but once she tried, the head of Capsule Corps realized that someone had bound her in steel wires and hung her like wet laundry.

"Bulma!" a voice resonated through a dark hall. Alarmed, Bulma scanned the place she now found herself in.

She was hanging inside of a dark, square chamber. Because of the limited lighting and the size of the room, Bulma couldn't be sure what the walls had been made of but they looked to be solid metal and had occasional beeps and switching colorful light patterns, shifting about once in a while. All this suggested that she may have been inside that cybernetic planetoid that had been hanging over Planet Vegeta.

"That voice... Vegeta?" Bulma groaned.

"Mom! You're okay!" little Trunks whined out. Bulma turned her head toward his voice and as she focused on it, she could make out a shadowy form of her own little boy hanging bound by those same steel wires, just like she was. His voice sounded distressed. The poor guy must have been bawling his mouth out while she was out. This must be so scary to him. They needed to find a way to escape this mechanical prison.

Before Bulma could begin formulating a plan, minute cubicles began shifting on the floor. A dark opening revealed itself in the center and in between each of the bound prisoners. Despite the ever-present electric hum in the air, soft and high-pitched mechanical thuds accompanied by automated hydraulic noises all too familiar to Bulma came from the opening that resembled something in between a conveyor and a staircase.

"So, Vegeta's concubine woke up," a silver-colored humanoid with a striking similarity to Frieza's own true form emerged from the opening in the floor. The outer layer of armored shell covering his forehead, his chest, and shoulders, and his forearms and lower body had been a darker shade of silver, almost with a hint of teal to it, whereas the inner cybernetic mesh was pale grey. Despite the limited lighting, his red eyes would have penetrated even complete darkness. "That's great. We can finally pick up the efficiency of fuel production. Scooping trash like you and bringing you all the way to the Big Gete Star was a feat in of itself, so we'll be expecting you to play your part in compensating our losses."

"You're so rude! Is that any way to treat a visitor from another planet?" Bulma lashed back at the silver cyborg, the best that her condition allowed. "I have a name, you know. It's Bulma!"

"You'll have to excuse me, Earthling. We have a habit of not attributing names to batteries. Especially ones that aren't even all that productive and quite lacking in the power capacity department," the cyborg replied with a mechanized and cybernetically enhanced voice tone that sounded sophisticated. Bulma had never imagined something aristocratic and elite sounding so serpentine at the same time. Though she had no doubts that this tailed humanoid here was a snake. She felt sure that she'd have come to the same conclusion even if he hadn't strung her and her family up like some sick and twisted gallery display of their defeat and capture.

"If I'm so bad, how come you've brought me up here instead of having your robot army blast me away like they did those poor Saiyan soldiers that came to our aid?" Bulma objected. While she didn't particularly want to antagonize whatever this silver cyborg was, since she figured that her life and that of her son and lover were in its hands at the moment, her dignity and her own unique type of pride in her accomplishments and intelligence demanded her to earn this creature's respect and shed the treatment of a worthless insect.

She was Bulma. The head of Capsule Corps, the most influential and powerful corporation on Planet Earth that made breakthroughs in technological endeavors, space exploration, and medicine daily, and rivaled even the universal conglomerates despite them being unaware of their Earthling competition. She was the mother of the Saiyan prince and was involved with King Vegeta IV. The current King of Saiyans and the most powerful military force in the known universe. If this creature disrespected that and underestimated her and her family, it was this silver cyborg and its Big Gete Star that weren't up to snuff.