"Tater. Tater, Tater, Tater… Tater, Tater, Tater! Pah-Tat-ur! Tater!" Tater worked very hard to resist the urge to smack the girl splayed out on the ground in front of him. It was what she wanted.
"WHAT, PEPPER?!" Tater finally shouted, interrupting his mental exercise as his focus collapsed anyway.
"It's been two days and I'm so bored! BOORED! I wanna fight! Fight me!" Tater rolled his eyes as Pepper rolled around on the ground, apparently bored of lying in one place.
"Ugh, Peps. I don't get you! Unlike some people, I actually need to meditate, so excuse me if I'm boring you!" Ki control was extremely reliant on one's mind and mental state, which made it one of Tater's weak points. As such, he'd begun to get into the habit of meditating for several hours each day. It may have seemed boring, but it'd actually been really helpful for him.
Unfortunately, some people didn't need to train their minds, because said minds were pretty much completely empty. That was Pepper. She didn't do mental exercises. Her ki was extremely restless, but in perfect harmony with her restless body. Even now, every single lazy roll across the dirt seemed to only increase her control over her energy, giving it a depth that all three of the triplets lacked.
Which was a long way of saying that she didn't need the same training regiment as Tater. Her daily routine, since they were taking time off from 'serious' training for the trials, was around half as long as his, giving her a ton of extra time to laze about.
And that was not good. A Pepper with nothing to do was basically the same as taking 37 grenades, pulling the pins, and shoving them into a wind tunnel.
"I wanna do something."
"Go find Zeck. Play with him." Tater tried.
"I don't like Zeck. He's scared of me, anyway."
"Gee, wonder why…" Tater muttered to himself, "Maybe the Doctor's working on something cool? Go bother him, and leave me alone."
"I did! He's doing something sciency with the spaceship I was on. He told me to go play with you!"
'TRAITOR!' Tater almost blurted that out, but his survival instinct saved him just in time. "Well, what did you do back when Tarble was training that weird form of his without you?" Tater went for the easy pass, but unfortunately…
"I watched him. His body kept getting all big and muscley, and his energy, like, exploded!" Tater groaned inwardly. He'd forgotten the most important rule about dealing with Pepper…
She's always a bit easier to deal with when Tarble was around.
"Oh, one day, Tarble did take me bowling. Let's do that!" Suddenly, Pepper jumped into the air, struck by inspiration. She ended up pulling Tater away by the arm, until they were standing in the middle of an empty field in front of a mountain.
"I don't want to play, Pep…" Tater complained, but Pepper acted like she hadn't heard him. "Okay, fine. We can fight."
"Too late, Tater! Now, I wanna play bowling!" Pepper stuck her tongue out. If Tarble was nearby, he would've complained that you don't 'play' bowling, but then again, if Tarble had been there, Pepper likely wouldn't have dragged Tater out here in the first place.
"Play with Zeck… Wait, when did Zeck learn to fly?" Tater noted that Zeck's ki signature was actually coming closer, flying.
"Who cares? I wanna play bowling now! Lemme show you. Do you want to play too, Zeck?! I don't know how good you'll be, though… You're pretty weak."
Zeck, who'd just landed, shook his head rapidly. As interested as he'd been in finding out what the other two were doing so far from camp, the Celatian wasn't dumb enough to play anything with those two.
After all, Zeck knew that his strength was his brains. Not his brawn.
As Zeck watched Pepper eagerly set up ten gigantic dirt 'pins', he sweatdropped, internally praising himself on his ability to recognize his limits.
Even after managing to figure out how to use his ki, a nearly unprecedented feat for his kind, the cold, hard truth was that Zeck's limits hadn't changed much. Since as far back as he'd remembered, he'd been smarter than any other kid his age, but when he'd gone to school, his first teacher had actually been disappointed in him, because he wasn't quite as smart as his father had been at his age, twenty-five years ago. He always knew his limits. He couldn't create spaceships or nearly break the laws of physics through science like his father could, so he began leaning towards weaponmaking instead.
Then, five Saiyans had shown up on his father's doorstep.
At first, his father had specifically warned him to be really careful around the five monkey-tailed humanoids, so the innocent Zeck tried to threaten them into submission, and Pepper had taken the weapon he'd painstakingly constructed… and shoved it down his throat, piece by piece.
After that, being cautious had pretty much gone down the window. As Zeck got to know them, though, he created his own little system, classifying the five aliens by average danger level.
Naturally, Pepper was the absolute top of the list. Insanely dangerous and unpredictable at all times. She was cute, though, so it balanced out.
At the bottom of the list was Tarble, who had a level head and tended to shrug things off with an understanding attitude. Above him was Tommy, who was similar, but less 'all knowing' and more 'long suffering'. Perhaps because he had two very charismatic siblings to deal with.
Honestly, Lynn, with her nice demeanor and helpful attitude would've been lower than Tommy on Zeck's danger scale, but when things didn't go her way…
She was second on his list, after Pepper. Remembering the first time he'd caught a glimpse of Lynn's temper (when he'd, having a crush on the girl, tried helping her with laundry, only to rip one of her new shirts) still sent a shiver down Zeck's spine. Being tied upside-down to a tree for three nights straight tended to do that to a guy.
Girls were scary creatures.
Tater had a pretty bad temper, too, and he was the type of guy who was always a little irritated to boot, but his fuse was a lot longer than the girls', he tended to be a lot more levelheaded, and he was terrified of the demon girls, too, so he ended up in the middle slot, as far as danger level went.
"BOOOM!"
Zeck found himself brought out of his musings by a loud sound that forced him to cover his ears. A sonic boom.
"STRRRIKE! I thought that rock was a bit small, but my record's still perfect!" Pepper was in a victory pose. The sonic boom had completely obliterated the landscape, carving a trench that passed straight through where the 'pins' had once been.
Zeck did not regret declining to join that game.
Sports should not include breaking the sound barrier.