"BEEP BEEP! BEEP BEEP!"
Lynn and I, doing cartwheels on the stone ground for some reason that I'd already forgotten, both lost our balance at the same time, as the alarm that I'd brought beeped inside of our bag. "It's already been three hours? Wow, time sure flies." I noted, plucking it out of the bag.
"Wait, really? It's time to leave already?" Pepper wondered, resting her chin on the edge of the pool that she'd been overseeing our cartwheel contest from.
Yet again, I didn't have any clue why she was the one overseeing the contest, when she'd been the one to start it.
"We pushed our morning training to afternoon today, but we can't skip it completely. Do you want to do it in the dark?" I asked.
"...Noo…"
"Then we'd better get going. This was fun, though. We should do it again someday." Lynn agreed, sauntering up to the bag beside me, and bending down to rifle through it for her shorts.
"Wait, give me a second. There's still something I want to do before we leave." I'd put it off long enough.
Going to the main pool of the spa, I dove into the water and pulled out the gigantic plug at the very bottom. Soon enough, the water from it and many of the other pools had completely drained down the hole. It'd get refilled eventually over time, once the plug was placed back in, though.
"Hey! Give a little warning next time, Tarble! Why'd you- What's that?!" Unfortunately for Pepper, the pool that she'd been lazing around in was one of the ones that'd been drained completely, leaving her sitting on the damp stone in confusion. Naturally, she began complaining, as Lynn pulled her shirt over her head, trying to figure out what I was doing.
Then, she cut off her complaints mid-sentence as she laid eyes on what I'd drained the pool to get a look at.
It was a massive pillar that stretched maybe six meters into the air, right in the middle of the spa.
Which, in itself, wasn't particularly fascinating, but it was covered with drawings, and writings in a strange language that I didn't recognize, meaning it wasn't any sort of Galactic standard that I would've come across while I'd been searching through various planets and their cultures and histories.
I'd always half-expected the language to be Namekian, for some reason, but one look, and I could tell that this carving was much older than Kami.
"Lynn, in my bag. The metal orb thing, can you toss it to me? Be careful, it's pretty fragile." Lynn complied, tossing me the sphere in question, as Pepper walked up to the lip of the basin that had once been the pool where the pillar was.
"Tarble, what is this thing?" She asked, dangling her feet over the edge of the pool as she wrung the water out of the part of her hairstyle that trailed down her back.
I held up the orb, pressing a few buttons on it before tossing it into the air. As the orb flashed three times and began hovering in mid-air, I answered, "It's called a holographic recorder. It's something that Zeck and his dad cooked up a few months ago while they were working on my desk interface. It can record any three-dimensional image, so that I can render it on my desk to analyze later." I explained, as the recorder began slowly circling around the pillar.
Pepper flicked a rock at my head. I could feel it coming, but I let it hit anyway because she tended to forget about things that annoy her (mainly when I annoy her) when things go her way.
"Ouch!" I rubbed the now-sore spot, now just as annoyed as Pepper.
"I think she's talking about that thing, Tarble. One of the random things that you shouldn't know rattling around in your head?" Lynn wondered aloud, crossing her arms as she draped Pepper's shirt over the younger girl's head.
Pepper pulled the shirt off her head and gasped, like she'd just come to a world-shattering realization. "Wait! Did you trick us into coming here so that you could take pictures of a giant rock!?"
"...The waters probably are something close to magic…" I defended my choice weakly.
"Hmph! Tell me that you believe that and I'll believe you." Pepper puffed her cheeks out.
"...The picture of the fan at the bottom is something called the Bansho Fan. It's magic. These carvings… might… be a blueprint for how to make it."
"The great warrior runs away." Lynn snorted.
"Don't you start too!" I quipped back, "I was just curious. Right now, there's only one Bansho Fan in the entire world, because nobody can figure these carvings out. That's why I'm not entirely sure that it's really a blueprint." Being here brought some of my memories of the anime back, and I remembered that Roshi had yelled at his turtle about showing Goku the book with his 'decryptions' of it because he'd had no clue what these carvings meant either, and it'd been simply filled with guesses that he'd made while very drunk.
Finishing up its recording, the holographic recorder dropped back into my hand, and I flew up out of the basin to grab my bag from Lynn's outstretched arm.
"What makes it so magical?" Pepper asked, pulling her shirt over her head as I did the same with my own shirt.
"Let's just call it… something that I'd like to have. A little challenge for me." I replied cryptically.
"Another project to obsess over, then?" Lynn muttered.
"Mm." Pepper nodded in silent agreement with Lynn.
"Again, don't start with me, Lynn. Like you have room to talk with that garden of yours!"
"At least when I go to Lynn's garden, she'll talk to me. Last time I tried to talk to you while you were doing that 'science' of yours, you spent the entire time muttering to yourself about mito-whatever-ia. I fell asleep after twenty minutes and you'd already gone to bed when I woke up!" I winced. I still remembered the two weeks that Pepper'd banned me from my study after that little incident. After all, it was only last month.
But to be fair, I'd made a pretty big breakthrough in my research earlier that week, and I'd been absolutely over the moon about building on it.
"...Put your shorts on, Pep. We should get back before the sun sets." Pepper replied by sticking her tongue out at me.