King Kai was a planetary administrator with a galaxy to manage, a cold-joke curriculum to complete, and exactly one deceased Saiyan as a permanent houseguest. He had been generous with his telepathy for the better part of an afternoon.
The line, when he closed it, closed politely but firmly. Goku's laughter lingered in the collective memory of everyone on the Lookout for a few seconds, the specific warmth of someone who had genuinely enjoyed the conversation and would genuinely not worry about it afterward, and then it faded.
Roshi shook his head.
Bulma looked at the sky a moment longer than necessary, then got back to work.
"Time Chamber," Gohan said to Trunks. "Let's go."
Trunks punched the air by way of response.
Before they left, Liam flagged Gohan down and explained what he was about to do. The Star Mark was still active. Once Gohan stepped through that door into a separate dimension, the connection would cut.
Liam couldn't get the mark back passively. He wanted to go in first, briefly, just to see it, and then he'd remove the mark on the way out.
Gohan considered this for approximately two seconds. "You have my permission."
Liam took possession.
Gohan's body moved differently from the outside than the inside. From inside, it felt like standing in a room built for someone who had spent their entire life learning how to hit things very hard. The muscle memory was extraordinary, every motion pre-calculated by years of training, the body anticipating physics before it happened. Liam had possessed people before. This was the first time he'd felt like he was borrowing something genuinely engineered.
Mr. Popo led them into the temple's depths, down corridors that grew quieter as the ordinary sounds of the Lookout receded, and stopped in front of a door that looked like it led to a supply closet.
He opened it.
The heat came first, dry and immediate, the air thin enough to notice. Behind the entrance was a small living area, spartan, designed for function rather than comfort, with provisions that would generously be described as nutritionally complete and honestly described as grim.
Trunks stepped in and made a face. "It's a furnace."
"Dozens of degrees during the day," Mr. Popo confirmed. "Below freezing at night. The atmosphere is approximately one-third normal density."
Beyond the living area, they walked into the actual Chamber.
The white started where the floor stopped being ordinary and became infinite. Left, right, forward, back, up, the same unbroken pale nothing in every direction, completely featureless, extending to a horizon that didn't exist because horizons require something to end against. The door they'd come through sat behind them like a piece of furniture someone had left in the middle of a blank canvas.
Liam, from inside Gohan's eyes, looked at all of it.
He had known intellectually what the Hyperbolic Time Chamber was. Knowing it and standing in it were two different experiences. The silence was the kind that pressed.
He released Gohan's body, touched the Star Mark, and removed it cleanly. The connection ended. From Gohan's perspective, a sensation dissolved; from Liam's, a thread went slack. He was back in his own body, outside the door, with no means of sensing either of them until they came back out.
He walked back out to the Lookout's edge and stood there.
The sky above the Lookout was the same sky as everywhere else, clear and wide. Somewhere below it, Piccolo was fighting. Liam extended his En out of habit, got thirty meters of stone and open air, and put it away again.
He thought about his Manipulation training instead.
Bisky had explained the core of Manipulation development as expanding the number of controlled targets, a quantitative benchmark. He'd accepted that framework and trained accordingly. But standing here with nothing to do and an unquiet mind, the framework looked different from a new angle.
The target count wasn't the destination. It was the exercise. You trained for quantity the same way you trained muscles not to stockpile muscle but to get stronger. The accumulated ability to manage more targets at once stretched the ceiling of the Manipulation system, and a higher ceiling meant that things which had previously required heavy restrictions, careful conditions, costly tradeoffs, could be done casually.
The restrictions that made strong Hatsu balanced also became lighter as the ceiling rose, not because the rules changed but because the gap between what you could do and what the Hatsu asked of you widened.
He turned this over for a while and found it consistent.
"I don't know how Piccolo's getting on," Bulma said from beside him. She'd appeared quietly, cigarette in hand, one step back from the Lookout's edge in the way of someone who was not afraid of heights but respected them. "Can he win?"
"He can win," Liam said.
"I'd feel better if I could see it."
"Use the satellite scouter. Find Piccolo's position."
Bulma exhaled. "No combat power detector on him. The Androids don't register on standard sensors, so nobody installed the scouters after they appeared. There was no point. I can add a tracker to Piccolo now, but it won't help me watch the fight in real time." She looked at Liam sideways. "You knew about the scouters."
"I knew about Raditz. The original arrival, the whole sequence. Your first dragon ball hunt, the Red Ribbon Army, Kami, Piccolo, the Saiyans, Namek, Frieza, the Androids." He paused. "In my world, everything that happens here is a story in a comic book."
Bulma didn't say anything for a moment.
Then she said, "A higher-dimensional observer. External to this spacetime." She took a long pull of the cigarette, thinking. "There was a scientist. Strange man. He used to say he was a character in a drawing, that someone above was writing his life. Everyone thought he was either brilliant or broken. He once told me that the readers of his story had terrible taste." She flicked ash over the edge of the Lookout. "I owe him an apology, apparently."
"You accepted that very quickly."
"I'm a scientist. I deal in evidence. You knew about Raditz. You knew about King Kai, the S-Cells, Fortuneteller Baba's location, Gohan's potential." She shrugged. "The hypothesis fits the data. I don't need to be upset about it."
Liam looked at her. "Most people would be upset about it."
"Most people aren't me." She stubbed the cigarette against the stone. "Does it bother you? You fell from somewhere real into a story. Now you're wondering if your own world is also a story."
He had been wondering exactly that, in the corner of his mind where the genuinely unsettling things lived.
"I've decided it doesn't matter," he said. "Whatever I am, I'm me. Whatever the substrate is, the experience is real. If there's a higher world looking down at my world the same way I'm looking down at this one, then whoever's up there is welcome to watch. I'll try to be interesting."
Bulma laughed, short and genuine.
"So," she said, picking up a new cigarette and pointing it at him like a stylus. "The comic. What was supposed to happen if you are not here?"
Liam sat down on the stone at the Lookout's edge, legs hanging over a kilometer of open air.
"Skip the early parts," she said, settling beside him. "Little Goku, the wish-hunting, all of that. I lived it. Start from just before you arrived."
He thought about where to begin.
Cell was probably the most relevant starting point. Then the tournament. Then Buu. Then Super, which was technically filler in some interpretations and canonical in others, and Liam had opinions about which was which.
Bulma lit her cigarette, crossed her ankles, and listened.
Below them, somewhere in the ruined city, a battle was finishing.
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