"Mimi O Hineru!" The small, green-haired version of me on the screen punched upward once.
Tommy's avatar, based on Tater, got closer, so I pressed the button again. "Mimi o Hineru! Mimi o Hineru!"
"Oy Oy!" My avatar punched twice. The Tater avatar ducked twice, shouting some weird thing, as my avatar punched it in the face.
Tommy bit his lip, but soldiered on. "Try the low kick now."
"'B', right?" I pressed the button twice.
"Tsumasaki no Tsumami! Tsumasaki no Tsumami!" Shouting meaningless nonsense, my avatar slammed its foot down on the Tater avatar's leg exactly twice.
"Arf! Arf!"
"...Did he just…?"
"Yeah, it barked. Like a dog. When you kick Tater, he barks like a small dog." Tommy deadpanned.
"Weird. When I do it in real life, he just punches me in the face." I said, confused.
"Back the thumbstick twice and press 'B'." By now, Tommy looked dead inside, but he still gave me the instructions for the energy wave command.
Out of curiosity, I did it. The version of me on screen cupped his hands together as if he'd begun charging the Kamehameha rather than the Regalia Wave. "Ookina Geppu!"
"Eek! Eek! Eek!" The Tater avatar squealed thrice, like a little girl.
I pulled out a small device and repeated that phrase into it. By now, that was the only sound in the room, as Tommy and I were both silently dying inside from both irritation and secondhand embarrassment. "Ookina. Geppu."
"Big Burp." The device replied.
"Mimi O Hineru." I said.
"Twist Ear." The device replied.
"Tsumasaki no Tsumami." I said.
"Toe Pinch." The device translated the last one with solemnity.
Without another word, Tommy tossed his controller to the ground.
Apparently, he hit the 'ki blast' button as he did, because the Tater on screen raised his hand and declared loudly "Wet Willy!"
The blast slowly traveled across the screen and hit my own avatar, which cried out, "Pear!"
"...At least it's in a language that people actually speak." This Earth, for some reason, mostly utilized a single spoken language: English. Any other languages, like this one, were regional, and nobody really spoke them. They must've used them simply to make it seem cool or something, but it had the opposite effect from Tommy and I's perspectives, made worse by the fact that they used the common tongue on the ki blast ones, and it still sounded like the ravings of an idiot.
As an aside, Earth's written language was mostly uniform, too, slightly different from the galactic common that we'd used on Vegeta, but we'd all gotten a handle on it pretty easily.
"Wet Willy! Wet Willy! Wet Willy!"
"Pear! Pear! Pear!"
"Is that your controller?" I asked, only to notice that Tommy had already disconnected his controller completely. The game was just glitching out in a very irritating manner.
"Wet Willy! Wet Willy! Wet Willy!"
"Pear! Pear! Pear!" My character finally died from the glitched out barrage with a single, final "PFFFFT!"
"The death sound… is a fart noise, and they're barely using my artwork at all." Tommy analyzed.
"Okay, what sort of garbage company sent this crap, and why did they want your art if they weren't going to actually use any of it?" I asked as Tommy took the disk out of the console.
At least the cover of the disk used Tommy's artwork. The game's graphics… and overall gaming experience in general, was awful, though.
"Apparently they were just idiots that wanted to use my name and characters. But they aren't going to use it on this garbage." Tommy muttered, popping the disk back into its case and holding it like it was something that he just wanted to chuck deep into the nearest ocean and then slam a ki blast into the water for good measure.
Which was probably what he honestly wanted to do.
Tommy's career as an artist made him one of the most popular reclusive geniuses on the planet, according to what I'd observed. You couldn't walk down a street in any large city without being assaulted with the guy's art in manga, anime, even television commercials, he'd released several dozen stories and each and every one had been a big hit.
But none had been bigger than his first release, his longest-running one, which used characters based on each of us Saiyans, me, Tater, Pepper, Lynn, there was even a goofy Zeck-based character who'd constantly find himself getting into weird trouble.
So when the company that'd originally turned it into an animated series decided to make it into a video game, Tommy hadn't thought too hard about it. He'd simply sent in the artwork to aid their graphics department, and asked for final approval on the project to ensure that it was up to his standards when they finally released it.
The result was that garbage. I couldn't blame Tommy for being angry at it. I was angry at it.
They had our avatars yell 'Wet Willy!' when we fired off energy blasts.
That was not in Tommy's comics. He'd given them alternate names, sure, but the alternate names at least weren't as stupid as those.
And why did the avatars shout 'Pear!' like the fruit, when we got hit with them?
Personally, I'd have preferred if they shouted 'Apple' or 'Banana' instead.
Or, you know, not used a fart noise as the death sound.
In the end, Tommy and I personally flew over to the game company in East City and ensured that they scrapped every bit of the weird garbage that hadn't come from Tommy's comics, and all of the art that wasn't Tommy's was replaced with Tommy's own designs.
The game made waves upon its public release. Until the sequel came out around two years later, it was touted as the 'greatest fighting game of all time.'
During that incident, I learned just how seriously Tommy took his artwork. For the first time since he'd decided to quit being a fighter, I finally sort-of grasped why a Saiyan like him would make the choice to give up combat. He was simply channeling his Saiyan drive into something else. And he was incredible at it.