"You're a real slave driver, you know, Tarble. First it's this, then it's that, then it's 'try this, but I don't know how you'll do it', and now you're asking me to clone endangered birds!? Do you have any idea just how much time it takes to clone a living creature!?" The doctor yelled at me, turning his desk off as he stared a hole right into my soul.
Ever since Zeck had gone and bought all of those assistant robots, Zeck, his father, and I had much more time to do our own research, instead of wasting it all on the practical side, dealing with the time consuming tasks of building whatever we'd thought up by hand.
That'd led to each of us going down our own paths and beginning our own individual research.
Zeck, having long graduated from trying to make weapons, was now looking into utilizing ki energy as a stable power source.
But the doctor and I were both working on multiple projects at once. I was doing so because I didn't really see an ending to my main project coming around any time soon, and the research that I happened to be doing was actually aiding my training.
But the doctor was simply overworked with various requests from me and the other villagers.
Dahlia wanted a better irrigation system for her garden.
And then I had three or four requests waiting in the wings for his expertise, too. Adding one more felt like a good idea at the time…
But clearly I'd just been caught up in my new project. Still, it needed to be done. "So, can you clone a Fire Eater or two? Or a hundred?"
The doctor smacked me over the head with a steel pipe, which bent against my skull.
"Ouch!" I rubbed the spot, even though it hadn't really hurt much, the idea that it had seemed to placate the doctor a bit, visibly calming his anger.
"Fine." He said with a sigh, "Cloning isn't that complicated. Just time-consuming. I wouldn't have any problem doing it, if you get me the DNA samples, I'll spit out five or so of those birds in a little over a month or so… but it'll take up a lot of my time." Doctor Hyperion shrugged, "I guess I'll just have to drop the project that I've been working on lately."
"Which one's that, dad?" Zeck asked from across the lab, where he was running tests on something he'd had the robotic assistants build.
"Oh, nothing really important. Just a little side-project of mine. A type of fabric infused with a special energy field that attracts water molecules from the atmosphere to allow density adjustment. And I'd just ordered the creation of the first prototype this morning… Oh, well. I'll just call the robots off-"
"Damn you, old man." I muttered, giving in.
A fabric that can adjust its own density? In other words, clothes that can be weight-adjusted on the fly.
The perfect fabric for weight training, given that we didn't have access to materialization magic.
A little laugh came from Zeck behind me, "Looks like you met your match, Tarble."
"..." I'd been thoroughly defeated.
"Well, you could always do it yourself, Tarble. You've been studying cellular structures, right? Cloning's not that difficult… but you'd have to put your current project off for a while." Doctor Hyperion pretended to extend an olive branch, but we all knew that it was just driving me deeper into a corner.
Between the training that took up around 70% of my time on average, and the research that I was doing taking up the other 30, I barely had enough time to sleep as it was. Half of the time, Pepper had to drag me kicking and screaming from my desk in order to force me to go to bed. Adding another project to that genuinely was impossible.
But I absolutely refused to drop my research into Saiyan cellular structure under any circumstances. Even as a last resort, I couldn't just put it off for later.
While Saiyans looked almost exactly like humans, apart from our tails, our bodies were infinitely more complex on a cellular level. I was currently looking deeply into the mechanics of the Oozaru and Super Saiyan Primal transformations and how they worked, and I'd already made significant headway.
I couldn't just place my research into that on the backburner and start using my time for this cloning project instead… I needed someone to do it for me, and it had to be a real scientist, not an AI or a robot.
I didn't even bother asking Zeck. Beyond the fact that it wasn't anywhere near his area of expertise, he had his own project that he wasn't about to put off for later.
No… I needed someone else. Someone with the brains and resources to clone living beings… That was a small list.
"Dammit." In fact, as far as it mattered, it may as well have been a list of one. There was only one scientist outside of this village who I knew could be trusted to let in on a project like this, who might actually be nice enough to be willing to help us revive a nearly extinct species for fun.