"Tarble, call out the data reader results from the A1 chip for me." Doctor Hyperion requested.
I moved my slender arm, jammed deep inside the inner workings of a giant metallic contraption. It was a tight fit, even with my little body working with me, but I managed to press the reading node against the right chip. "A1's the trajectory and tracking chip, right? Zero, Zero, One, Zero One." I called out.
"Wait, really?" The doctor scratched his head, confused, "It's supposed to be 0,1,1,0,0."
Zeck looked over his father's shoulders, from his station, where he was busy doing some basic final calculations. "Nah, dad. That's the A3 chip you're looking at. Memory and data processing. Tarble's numbers were correct, for A1." He corrected his father, pointing out some numbers on a different part of the screen.
"Hey, guys? I'm starting to not care. My hand's starting to fall asleep, and if it does, I'll probably end up damaging the inner hardware. Can I pull my arm out of this thing now?" I asked, my arm trembling minutely.
"Oh, come on, Tarble! You've got a power level of over 600,000, but you can't hold a scanning node for more than a few minutes without your hand falling asleep?!" Zeck mocked.
"Hey, I spent hours this morning holding up the whole damn ocean, so I don't wanna hear it! Gimme a break, Zeck." I complained. Honestly, Zeck would've been right… If I'd bothered skipping training this morning.
I couldn't bring myself to skip intensive training every single time we worked on a project, though. If I did so, my power would start stagnating, and I didn't want Pepper figuring out how to store Blutz Energy in her body so that she could unlock her Primal form, and suddenly exploding in strength, leaving my own power in the dust.
Just because nobody else had managed to figure out how to unlock Super Saiyan Primal didn't mean that it was impossible. It simply meant that I had a talent for wrangling my natural Saiyan instincts into something usable.
Or that they were weak, and easily overcome. Either way, I wasn't unsurpassable, so I couldn't slack off on my training.
"You can take your arm out of there now, Tarble. I think we've gathered as much data as we need. We're ready for launch." The doctor explained. After taking my arm out of the giant metal contraption, I had to shake my hand a few times to regain the feeling, as I walked over to the terminal behind the other two.
"It's really ready to send off?" I asked, looking over Zeck's shoulder at the numbers.
"As soon as I input this last adjustment… Alright! Ready to send off! In 3…2…1!" The moment Hyperion got past one in his countdown, he pressed the button without hesitation. Immediately, the metal contraption shot up into the sky, boosted by rockets. In minutes, it was completely out of view.
"We getting a signal?" I asked, staring up at the sky in the satellite's wake.
"...Yeah. Signal's coming in loud and clear. All systems are green." Zeck checked.
"High-Definition Planetary Topology Scans?"
"3D model's coming in now."
"Chi-Release Analysis Functions?"
"Yeah. It's picking Tater up in the ocean. The rest of the team's above the Dead-Man's limit." Zeck replied.
I shrugged, mildly surprised that Tater wasn't above the limit, too. "What's Tater's power level, then?"
"Eighteen thousand." Zeck replied. I lost interest in hearing that.
"Communication Functions?" I moved on.
"Well… I know we're getting Satellite TV."
"Tarble, everything's working as planned." Doctor Hyperion told me, laying a hand on my shoulder, "We'll do the system diagnostics later. For now, we did it! Doesn't it feel great, making something like this with your own hands, instead of relying on damned robots to do all of the work?!" He asked, wiping a bit of sweat from his brow, a smile on his face.
Zeck and I locked eyes for a moment, thinking the exact same thing. "No." We both replied in unison.
"...I'm going home, to adjust my terminal to the data it should be getting right now." I decided, transforming into my Super Saiyan Primal form as I left, now that the area was clear.
It'd been over a year since the 19th World Martial Arts tournament, and Goku's space pod still hadn't shown up, for some reason. It was beginning to bother me.
Had I unconsciously done something to save Planet Vegeta? It wasn't impossible… But I couldn't see my father caring about my disappearance enough to actually dwell on it, when there was nothing he could do to find me.
Maybe send out a few more teams to search, but he'd probably just figure that I was just lucky, and stop thinking about it after a while.
After all, only a weakling gives up on their home. Why would he bother dwelling over a weakling?
It might have set his rebellion plans back a bit… But still… Not more than a month. By now, Planet Vegeta should be history.
But even though Goku hadn't shown up, I'd made some serious progress in my own training over the last year, after witnessing Roshi, Gohan, and even King Chappa's fighting techniques, I'd developed a couple of my own based on the principles that I'd observed. I'd even managed to qualitatively upgrade my Regalia Wave, making it even stronger than it'd been before. Still inferior to the Kamehameha that I'd seen, but comparable, now.
Take that, Galick Gun!
And, my power level had at least doubled in the last year, bringing me past 500,000 or so by my extremely rough estimate, though I wasn't entirely sure how much of it was because of my normal training, and how much of it was because of the strides I'd taken with my Super Saiyan Primal form, which I could now hold for up to five hours at a time. Transforming into it still wasn't the easiest thing, but the longer I managed to stay in it, the easier it became to control the massive pressure that the form placed on my mind, spirit, and ki. I expected, at this rate, to have the form almost totally mastered in another year or so.
But I wasn't the only one who'd managed to make strides in my training.
Since our landing a year and a half ago, the only ones of my team who hadn't managed to at least double their strength was Pepper, who seemed to be coming up on a bottleneck at around 100,000 or so, and Tater, who still refused to listen to me and take time off from training, leading to a much slower growth rate than the rest of us due to a fatigued, inflexible mind.
On top of that, their technical fighting skills and ki control (except for Tater) had all reached entirely new levels. Pepper, especially, had managed to learn most of my own fighting techniques, though everyone else had learned the Regalia Wave at minimum (except for Tater).