Chapter 1: Night One, New Moon 🌑
Chapter Text
From the Journal of Dr. Bulma Briefs
Entry #1: “The Shift”
Dated: Age 792 | Capsule Corp Vault Archive 8C (Private Access Only)
Something is wrong with the stars.
They’re not drifting or decaying. They’re moving. By precise degrees, and not under any known gravitational influence. At first I thought it was an overlay error in the telescope array. I’ve since run three independent scans. All came back clean.
More troubling: some star clusters are changing their own classifications. Not by random data corruption, but through overwritten glyphs. One name that keeps reappearing:
Ka-Ra-Tat
It matches a Saiyan root dialect. Gohan confirms the structure is real, though he says it’s obscure and ceremonial. The kind of word that would appear in a legend, not a manual.
But here’s what unsettled me most.
One of the anomalies is broadcasting a faint signal, just a fragment, buried in the noise. The frequency matches an old Capsule Corp security alert from Age 778. We used it to intercept leftover transmissions from the Red Ribbon reconstruction years.
That system’s been dead for over a decade. And yet the echo still flickered in. File header: RIB-0N.
I thought it was a glitch. Until I isolated the waveform.
It formed a knot. Tight. Patterned.
A ribbon.
Red.
I mentioned the glyph to Vegeta. Just the name.
He didn’t say anything. But he froze.
Not like someone confused. Like someone who had heard it before, long ago, and was waiting to see if it meant what he feared it might.
If the celestial drift holds its pattern, the next full moon will coincide with the orbital shadow on the fifteenth night. A total eclipse.
Some still call that a Blood Moon.
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s not just light we’re losing, but memory.
—
Capsule Corp, 03:41 AM.
The house was asleep. The city outside was not.
Neon signs buzzed in the distant skyline, softened by low fog. Inside her study, Bulma leaned over a console scattered with half-finished circuit designs, data slates, and a cold cup of tea. Her reading glasses sat askew. One lens caught the blue glow of her telescope screen, the other reflected the flicker of a Saiyan script she hadn’t meant to open.
She rubbed her temples. Three nights of star gazing had left her more frayed than usual. But it wasn’t fatigue she felt, it was dissonance.
The stars were moving. Not drifting, not red-shifting. Moving.
She pulled up the data again. Three constellations had deviated by exactly 2.7 degrees east. One in the southern arc had even overwritten its classification. She hadn’t touched that field.
Karas had become Ka-Ra-Tat.
The name pulsed faintly in her projection window, a thread of golden code wrapped around a deeper, darker script.
She didn’t know what disturbed her more, that it was happening, or that the glyphs felt… personal.
Behind her, the door slid open with the soft sigh of hydraulics.
“Still awake?” Vegeta’s voice, dry and low, edged into the room like a shadow.
She didn’t turn. “Since yesterday,” she said. “There’s something wrong with the stars.”
He stepped inside, arms crossed over a black tank top. His boots made no sound on the tile.
“Let the stars sort themselves out,” he muttered. “They’ve lasted this long.”
But he didn’t leave. Instead, he moved to stand beside her, frowning at the projection.
She looked up at him, sleep-mussed hair, a faint line between his brows, and something in his posture she rarely saw. Stillness.
“You feel it, don’t you?” she said.
He didn’t answer. But he didn’t need to.
His gaze remained on the screen, where the Saiyan word pulsed like a wound reopened.
Ka-Ra-Tat.
A name he should know. A name that tasted like dust and battle and something almost tender.
“I saw fire in my dream,” he said at last. “It was cold. Blue at the centre.”
Bulma’s breath hitched. “Hino Rei. She guards the flame. Maybe she saw it too.”
They stood together in silence, side by side in that small pool of artificial light.
Outside, the stars continued to shift.
—
Mizuno Ami | The Star That Changed Its Name
The room was dark, but not silent.
On the wall, the projection dome cast a map of the night sky in soft silver and blue. Thousands of stars glowed above her bed and desk, shifting minutely with Earth’s rotation. Every eight seconds, a faint tone chimed, reminding her the simulation was still in real-time sync.
Ami sat on her knees at the centre of the projection, the glow of her Mercury Computer illuminating her face in pale blue. The light softened her features, precise, composed, a mind already ten steps ahead of the present. Her pyjamas were loose cotton, pale with a fading constellation print she’d outgrown years ago, but still wore out of comfort.
It was nearly 4 a.m., the kind of hour that belonged neither to schoolgirls nor soldiers, but to insomniacs and stargazers. Tonight, she was both.
She exhaled and checked the coordinates again. There, Quadrant E12-C. A minor cluster. Four stars, typically unnamed.
Except now, one of them had a name.
Her brows furrowed. She tapped the glyph. The Mercury Computer translated automatically, but returned nothing. Not unknown. Unwritten. The star had no official name, none she had entered.
And yet, a second later, it bloomed into view, characters unfurling like petals of script:
Ka-Ra-Tat
She stared. The name wasn’t Japanese. Nor Moon Kingdom. Not even any Earth-based science script she recognised.
Then her fingers froze.
Saiyan.
She brought up the file archive, fragments of Saiyan text encoded in a transmission packet that had arrived months ago, quietly, through a subchannel in her Mercury Computer. The source? Capsule Corporation. Not the one in her Tokyo, but another, one glimpsed only through brief anomalies, field interference, and impossible readings in the stars.
The packet had been signed: Dr. Son Gohan, Age 792.
She didn’t know him. But she had read his words.
The files were dense. They spoke of constellations, of resonance, of Saiyan myth, written as though his Earth and hers looked upon the same sky, but remembered it differently.
She had filed them away, thinking them more poetic than practical.
Now, the match was undeniable.
She sat back on her heels, the cool of the tatami floor pressing against her calves.
Ka-Ra-Tat: Those who rise after the fall of the light.
The definition came slowly, like a voice buried beneath water.
She touched the glyph again.
It pulsed.
Then, just briefly, the entire projection of the sky above her shuddered. Stars flickered, faded, then returned. One shone brighter than the rest.
Ami turned towards the window. Tokyo’s skyline stretched beyond, a quilt of soft amber and neon. Above it, the moon hung in the sky, delicate and certain.
And just below it, faint and impossibly there, a second curve.
A twin.
Her fingers curled around the fabric of her pyjama sleeve.
This wasn’t a malfunction. It wasn’t interference.
This was language asserting itself.
This was the stars remembering.
—
Son Gohan | The Name Beneath the Sea of Moons
The wind moved differently here.
High above the western mountains, the trees were stilled in meditation. Pine needles shifted with grace rather than force, as though respecting the presence of the boy sitting cross-legged on the outcrop of stone.
Gohan.
He was older now, though still young, still held between identities: scholar, fighter, husband, son. His gi had been folded and set aside in favour of a sleeveless black tunic, worn and mended, paired with soft cotton trousers that clung slightly to the dew-wet earth.
He sat still, spine straight, palms resting gently on his knees. The breath passed through him with deliberate ease. Not a technique from battle. This was older. Something Piccolo had taught him when he was barely tall enough to reach the edge of this ledge.
Meditation, not for silence, but for listening.
And tonight, something was whispering back.
He had felt it for three nights now. First as a pressure, then as a flicker of displaced energy. But tonight it had shape. Subtle. Ancient. It did not press like danger, it pulled like a memory trying to surface.
He reached deeper, lowering his centre of gravity not physically, but spiritually, sliding beneath the surface of thought and instinct until only presence remained.
Then it came.
Not a voice. Not even a sound.
But a pattern.
The name beneath the sea of moons.
His eyes snapped open.
The trees had not moved. The wind had not changed. But the sky had doubled.
There, above the horizon, pale and certain: the moon.
And just below it, flickering faintly, like breath across water: a second curve. Not full. Not bright. But felt.
His heart pounded.
He stood slowly, brushing dirt from his palms, scanning the sky again. He reached out with ki, but the disturbance did not respond to power. It pulsed on a different frequency, something his energy could not grasp, but his soul did.
He had heard something that had no voice. And it had spoken to him alone.
He pulled the small data slate from his pouch, a gift from Bulma, one she insisted he carry to “keep him grounded.” A new signal blinked faintly across the top of the screen.
Language detected – Saiyan root glyph. Unclassified.
He stared at it, and for a moment, he felt that he was no longer just one person.
He was a point in a constellation.
A pattern waiting to be named.
—
Piccolo | The Sigh Beneath the Stone
The canyon had no name, which suited him.
Piccolo sat cross-legged on a stone ledge carved out by time and wind. Below him, a forest lay in shadow, the trees whispering without sound. The stars above blinked with indifference. He had come here to listen, not to the world, but to the spaces in it.
His cape hung still behind him. His arms rested on his knees. Even in the night air, he didn’t shiver.
There was peace here. But tonight, it felt… thin.
He pressed his palm against the rock. The Earth was warm beneath it. Breathing. That was how he’d always thought of it. The planet had a rhythm, and when you stopped pushing, it would speak.
It spoke now.
Not in language, but in pressure. In memory.
The stone hummed under his hand. Not vibration. Resonance. Like a name being repeated from within the mantle itself.
The name beneath the sea of moons.
Piccolo opened his eyes.
The sky was clear. Still. But in its perfection, something shifted.
He looked up at the moon, and beneath it, faint and flickering. A second curve. Not light. Not shadow. Something older.
He didn’t speak. There was no one to hear him anyway.
But deep in his chest, something moved. A memory he didn’t own. A story not yet told.
He stood.
There was a trial coming. And not all trials could be fought.
—
Hino Rei and Vegeta | The Rift in Ash
The shrine’s flame hissed. Rei had stared into its depths too long, searching for clarity. What she found instead was movement. Not smoke, but shape. A figure held in the curl of heat, arms crossed, face stern.
She reached forward. The heat did not burn. It pulled.
The world tipped. Ash beneath her feet. The sky was bruised grey, hung with thunderclouds that had never held rain. The ground was cracked stone, etched with symbols that shimmered just out of recognition.
He stood near the edge of a ruined platform, back half-turned.
Vegeta.
She didn’t speak at first. She simply walked towards him, the cinders crunching under her boots. His presence was enormous, not in size, but in stillness. A gravity.
“You’re not real,” she said.
He looked at her for a long moment.
“Neither are you,” he replied. “But I still burned your name when I fell asleep.”
The words struck her like wind in the lungs. She didn’t know what name he meant. But she felt it in her chest, like a bell tolling deep in stone.
The world began to unravel again. The ash lifted. The ground fell away.
Rei reached for him, but the space between them stretched like breath held too long.
She awoke on the shrine floor. The fire was out.
Her palms were burned. In her dream, he had held something.
A red ribbon.
Chapter 2: Night Four, Waxing Crescent 🌒
Summary:
As the moon begins to wax, Bulma and Gohan study the Saiyan glyph Ka-Ra-Tat, a word that behaves more like memory than language. Vegeta responds to it not with knowledge, but instinct. When a scorched red ribbon appears in his training gear, the team realises the convergence may have already crossed into their world.
Across a mirrored Earth, Ami receives the same signal Gohan does. A phrase activates for both: Mirror acknowledged. Something ancient is waking. And Bulma begins to question whether the name Ka-Ra-Tat is a prophecy at all, or a vow made by the one who chooses to carry what the stars have forgotten.
Notes:
This chapter is set on Night 4 of the lunar cycle, the Waxing Crescent, a phase of emergence, fragments, and memory surfacing.
If you’re joining me from Closer, thank you for continuing this journey into something stranger and more mythic. Ka-Ra-Tat is a story of silence, remembrance, and the ways we rise, not through power, but through persistence.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
Chapter Text
From the Journal of Dr. Bulma Briefs
Entry #2: “Residuals”
Filed: Age 792 – Waxing Crescent, Night 4 (Pre-dawn)
Capsule Corp Vault Archive 8D – Restricted Access
Some names return like songs. Others return like weapons.
The one we found: Ka-Ra-Tat , doesn’t feel like either. It feels like a threshold. Something you don’t realise you’ve crossed until everything behind you is different.
I used to think the Saiyan language was dead. A closed system. A culture sealed in dust. But this glyph… it doesn’t act like language. It acts like memory.
Not mine, though I feel it pulling. Not Vegeta’s, though he hears it in dreams.
Gohan says it’s ceremonial. I think it’s a call.
There was a red ribbon left in Vegeta’s training gear this morning. Not frayed. Scorched. Exactly like the old fire-seal tags I studied in ancient tech systems. Red Ribbon field markers. But older. Almost… sacred.
What haunts me is that the signal shouldn’t exist. The system it came from hasn’t functioned in over a decade.
And yet: here it is. Knot-patterned, recursive, looping like a lock waiting for its key.
The stars have begun to move again. Only by degrees. But enough. The crescent moon will reach half-shape in three days. If I’ve plotted this correctly, that’s when the first breach will stabilise.
We’re not just observing anymore.
Something’s listening back .
—
Scene One: Capsule Corp, 05:12 AM, Day 4 of the Lunar Cycle
The lab was quiet but not still. Screens cast their soft light across scattered tools, open diagnostics, and the worn cushions of two sleepless chairs. Outside, the sky was still a bruised blue-grey, the stars dimming at the edge of dawn.
Bulma leaned over the projection table, adjusting the angle of a rotating glyph.
Gohan stood beside her, jacket off, sleeves rolled, looking like he hadn’t gone to bed, and he hadn’t. He’d been staying in the west annex for three nights now. A research stay, technically, though he and Bulma both knew it had crossed into something else.
The anomaly wasn’t fading. It was growing. And the glyph, Ka-Ra-Tat, had begun to pulse in ways that couldn’t be explained by data alone.
Videl hadn’t argued. She knew this part of him too well by now. When Gohan fell into something this deep, she let him go find the shape of it, knowing he’d return clearer, steadier.
“Ka-Ra-Tat,” he murmured. “Still no direct translation. But the syntax is stable.”
The glyph spun, three syllables nested in a trifold spiral. Around it, fragmented star charts blinked in and out of alignment. Bulma tapped the control pad and overlaid a map of lunar phases.
“I’ve been tracking its appearance across orbital patterns,” she said. “Every time the glyph pulses, it matches an increase in electromagnetic drift. Not gravitational, something subtler, almost like… expectation.”
Gohan raised a brow. “Expectation?”
Bulma shrugged. “Call it resonance. The moon’s been offsetting light differently the past three nights. I thought it was atmospheric scatter. But it’s too regular. And the name keeps aligning with the lunar axis, like it’s following the crescent.”
She brought up the current phase. Tonight will be night four of the lunar cycle, a waxing crescent. The beginning of return.
“We’re past the new moon,” she said. “The sky’s remembering how to hold light.”
Gohan nodded slowly, eyes on the glyph. “The word, Ka-Ra-Tat, it doesn’t behave like a proper noun. It shifts when spoken. Like it’s listening back.”
Bulma tapped a rotating band of Saiyan script. “It’s old. Ancient structure, ceremonial root. You were right about that. It’s not tactical language.”
He exhaled. “It could be a caste title. Or a rite. Something said when someone rises again. Not from sleep. From loss.”
Bulma watched the glyph’s pulse reflect in his glasses. “So not a name.”
He looked at her. “A calling.”
Silence lingered, not empty, but charged.
Then the lab door slid open with its soft hydraulic sigh.
Vegeta stepped in, arms crossed, black tank top soaked with training sweat. His eyes locked instantly on the rotating glyph.
He didn’t speak.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Bulma asked, without turning.
“Didn’t try.”
He crossed the room with slow purpose. Gohan stepped slightly to the side as Vegeta approached the projection. The Saiyan said nothing for a long moment, just watched the glyph spin, the word turning like an orbit finding its centre.
“You recognise it,” Bulma said.
“Not with my mind,” Vegeta answered. “With the blood in my veins.”
The words came flat, but something moved behind them. A fracture in the stillness.
“It’s not language,” he continued. “It’s inheritance.”
Gohan’s voice was low. “What does it mean to you?”
Vegeta’s mouth twitched. Not a smile. Not quite a grimace.
“Ka-Ra-Tat was whispered at the edge of old Saiyan rites. Not taught. Not written. You weren’t told what it meant. You just heard it, if you lived long enough.”
Bulma stepped closer, her voice softening. “So what was it?”
He stared at the glyph, eyes unreadable.
“A name they gave you when your world ended, and you stood back up anyway.”
Vegeta didn’t move from the projection table. The glyph still rotated slowly in the air, casting faint golden reflections across the lab floor.
Then, without a word, he reached into the folded waistband of his training gear and pulled something from his pocket.
He placed it on the console beside the projection.
A strip of red cloth. Not crumpled, not torn.
Scorched.
The edges curled like the petals of a fire-touched flower. It wasn’t charred through, it hadn’t burned. But something had passed through it, something hot enough to leave its mark without consuming the whole.
Bulma stepped forward immediately. Her fingers hovered above it, then settled gently on the fabric.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“Gravity chamber,” Vegeta said. “This morning.”
“It wasn’t there before?”
“No.”
He offered nothing else.
Gohan moved closer, eyes narrowing at the pattern burned into one edge, too precise to be incidental. A looping, spiralling curl. Familiar.
“This is the same structure that flagged in your signal trace,” he said to Bulma. “RIB-0N.”
She nodded. “The Red Ribbon echo.”
She turned the cloth over. Its texture was synthetic, but old. Something used in uniforms, maybe. Not Saiyan. Not Capsule. Not Lunar.
“I thought it was a data glitch,” she murmured. “A rogue tag left behind in old Red Ribbon hardware. But now…”
She looked up at the two men. “This crossed over.”
Vegeta crossed his arms again, expression unreadable.
“It doesn’t belong here,” Gohan said. “It didn’t arrive. It… surfaced.”
Bulma studied the edge again. “And it’s not random. This burn, it feels like a mark. A message.”
“Or a memory,” Vegeta said.
The glyph pulsed once behind them, as if in agreement.
—
Scene Two: Gohan | Capsule Corp West Annex | Late Evening, Night 4 of the Lunar Cycle
The west annex was quiet this time of night. Capsule Corp’s lights dimmed in phases, not all at once, and Gohan had always liked that, it gave the building a kind of breath. A rhythm. A body.
He sat at a side terminal beneath the observation dome, bare feet folded under him, jacket slung over the back of a chair. The night was clear. Stars bright above the tinted skylight, but the moon had slipped behind a cluster of high clouds, its crescent hidden. As if watching, not yet ready to be seen.
The room hummed with gentle power. Cool air drifted in from the ducts. A pot of tea, untouched, had gone cold beside him.
He hadn’t intended to stay the night. But the readings hadn’t matched. Not the linguistic markers, not the lunar telemetry, not the gravitational resonance fields. And it bothered him more than he liked to admit.
He rubbed the bridge of his nose.
Videl had been understanding, of course. She always was. They’d spoken over video the night before, her face lit soft by the bedside lamp, hair pulled back, voice half teasing.
“If you’re going to sleep in the lab again, at least change your shirt this time.” They didn’t need to fight about it. She knew when something had sunk into his bones.
And Ka-Ra-Tat had.
He hadn’t told her how the word made him feel, not yet. Because how do you explain that something isn’t scary, but it still changes the air in your lungs?
The slate beside him pulsed.
Once.
Then again.
He frowned and pulled it towards him. The display lit slowly, not like a device, but like a thought waking up.
Incoming data stream. Unregistered protocol.
Source: Unknown.
Tag: MIRR-01.
He hesitated, then opened it.
A single glyph expanded across the screen. Not Ka-Ra-Tat. Something new. Curved, looping. Not language as he knew it. A sigil, maybe. A seal.
He reached out, then paused.
The lights in the annex shifted, just ever so slightly, as if the room had inhaled.
The screen flickered. Beneath the glyph, three words appeared:
Mirror activation acknowledged.
Gohan stared at them.
They didn’t frighten him.
But they didn’t feel like data either.
They felt like permission.
—
Scene Three: Mizuno Ami | Minato Ward, Tokyo Night Four of the Lunar Cycle
Ami sat up before she was fully awake.
Her breath was even, but something inside her chest felt… rearranged. Not alarmed. Not in danger. Just aware of a shift, subtle and certain, like gravity finding a new centre.
The apartment was quiet. Her mother was on call again. The city murmuring outside the window in that late-night hush she’d always loved. She reached instinctively for her Mercury Computer, half-expecting nothing.
It was already active.
No notifications. No alerts.
Just a dim, pulsing light across the screen.
She blinked and focused. It wasn’t a system she recognised, not in this configuration. A soft interface overlay hovered: translucent, curving lines that looked more like constellations than code.
Then a single image formed.
Not an image.
A glyph.
Three nested curves, not unlike a tide cycle or a spiral shell. As soon as she saw it, her pulse quickened, not from fear, but from recognition.
She didn’t know what it was, but it felt like something she had known once, before language. Before waking.
Ka-Ra-Tat.
The name passed through her lips before she even registered thinking it.
The Mercury Computer flickered once. A tone, not synthetic, but harmonic, played across its speakers. Not a melody. More like a memory held in pitch.
Then a line appeared on the screen:
Mirror activation acknowledged.
Ami stared.
She tried to scan the input stream. The protocol wasn’t from Earth. Not her Earth. There was something foreign, something folded in its language. Not encrypted. Layered.
“This isn’t a signal,” she whispered. “It’s a reflection.”
She stood, crossed to the window, and looked up at the sky.
The moon, still a crescent, gleamed sharp and silver. But its curve didn’t match her charts. The angle was wrong. Its arc had shifted by a fraction, as though it no longer belonged solely to this world.
Ami pressed a hand to the glass.
“This isn’t just data,” she said. “It’s… resonance.”
The screen behind her dimmed. The glyph faded, but its shape burned softly in her memory, like a tide that had touched the edge of her mind and then withdrawn.
“Someone else received it,” she said aloud. Not a guess. A certainty.
She didn’t know how she knew.
But tonight, for the first time, she was certain the stars were remembering her back. And she knew, without knowing how, that someone else had received it too.
—
From the Journal of Dr. Bulma Briefs
Entry #2c: “The One Who Stands”
Filed: Age 792 – Waxing Crescent, Night 4 (Post-activation)
Capsule Corp Vault Archive 8D – Restricted Access
Vegeta said something this morning that hasn’t let me go.
“A name they gave you when your world ended, and you stood back up anyway.”
That kind of strength, the kind that emerges after collapse, is not the kind people celebrate. It doesn’t arrive with a flare of light. It arrives in silence. After everyone’s stopped looking.
He didn’t mean to, but in saying it, he named himself.
And then… he didn’t. Because part of me thinks he’s not sure if the name belongs to him. Not yet.
But I’ve seen him rise. Not once. Not with spectacle. Quietly. Through grief. Through shame. Through the hollow silence of an entire race he’s the last prince of.
And yet, Goku rose too. Many times.
He didn’t remember the falls. That might have been his freedom. But maybe also his burden. He never carried the ashes. He just kept building forward. Light spilling out behind him like it was easy.
Vegeta carries the ruin. Goku carries the sky.
And maybe this isn’t a prophecy. Maybe Ka-Ra-Tat doesn’t choose the strongest. Maybe it calls to the one who remembers what was lost, and chooses to carry it forward. It’s not a title, but a burden.
Not bestowed with light, but taken in silence. A vow no one hears you make, except for the stars.
Chapter 3: Night Seven, First Quarter Moon 🌓
Summary:
In the first quarter moon, Rei and Vegeta are drawn into a convergence trial shaped by fire, memory, and restraint. In a dream realm of ash and ruin, they confront not each other, but the parts of themselves they fear the most.
As flames rise and truths surface, a name half remembered begins to stir in the stone: Ka-Ra-Tat.
No battle is fought, but something is broken, and something begins to burn.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
From the Journal of Dr. Bulma Briefs
Entry #3a: “Threshold Temperature”
Filed: Age 792 – First Quarter Moon, Night 7
Capsule Corp Archive 8F – Private Record (Restricted Access)
In old Namekian science, there’s a term for the moment before a dormant seed responds to heat: listening temperature. Not the point of growth. The point of potential.
That’s what this feels like.
The Saiyan glyph: Ka-Ra-Tat, has reached a point in its pulse cycle where it’s no longer broadcasting. It’s waiting. The waveform has narrowed. The light signature curls inward, not out. Gohan and I cross-checked it against known resonance behaviour in Saiyan ritual language. He thinks we’re nearing an ignition point. I think we’re nearing a threshold.
I’ve spoken to everyone I trust with something this big.
Goku stared at the lunar chart for a full minute before saying, “Feels like something’s trying to remember how to be born.” Then he laughed, like it was obvious. But I’ve learned to listen when he says things like that.
Piccolo said very little, he just watched the data loop once, and murmured, “The moon is asking for witness, not permission.”
Dende asked if I believed in names that choose their bearers rather than the other way around. I told him I wasn’t sure anymore.
And Vegeta, he hasn’t been sleeping, but it’s not the sleeplessness of tension. It’s quieter. Slower. He meditates in the gravity chamber with the controls off. No output. No resistance. Just breath.
I asked him what he was listening for.
He opened his eyes just long enough to say:
“The moon’s speaking in fire.”
I wanted to ask what it said. I still do. But something in his voice, calm and distant, warned me not to.
Maybe it’s not speaking to him.
Maybe it’s calling him back.
Gohan thinks the first real convergence breach will stabilise tonight. The lunar arc has reached symmetry. Shadow and light in equal halves. That’s when mirror trials tend to open.
We’ve been tracking electromagnetic flux since sunset. But I know Vegeta won’t trigger it in the lab.
He’ll do it somewhere the fire can answer.
And if the moon is speaking in fire…
I just hope he can come back before it forgets how to let go.
The sky had no source.
It burned in shades of rust and dim crimson, as if someone had painted flame across stone and then left it to weather under centuries of silence. The ground crunched underfoot. It was not gravel, not sand, but fine ash woven with threads of glass. A temple once stood here. The bones of it remained, blackened columns, broken steps, a scorched lintel still holding the weight of a forgotten god.
Vegeta stood at the threshold.
Arms crossed. Head low, not alert. He was listening.
He didn’t remember coming here. And yet his boots found steady ground, as if they’d walked this path before. The air smelled of burned cloth and metal long since cooled. No wind. No energy signature. Just heat without fire.
He exhaled, slow. The silence did not shift.
Then,
Steps.
Not heavy. Not hesitant.
Rei emerged from the ash haze like a figure drawn in ink. Slim, composed, walking straight through the fractured corridor as if it belonged to her.
She stopped ten paces away. No surprise in her face. No warmth, either.
They regarded each other in stillness.
“You again,” she said. Not coldly. Simply the truth.
Vegeta’s mouth curled, not quite into a smirk.
“I could say the same.”
Neither moved.
Around them, the ruin breathed. The ash swirled faintly at their feet, not blown by wind but stirred by presence. The glyphs along the ground pulsed again, faintly red, faintly gold.
Rei turned her eyes to the stone beneath them. “This place isn’t mine,” she said.
Vegeta didn’t answer at first. He took a step forward, slow, deliberate. The glyphs in the ash responded, glowing faintly beneath his boots.
“No,” he said. His voice was low. Measured. “But I think I died here.”
Rei looked up sharply. The fire didn’t flicker. It listened.
“You mean in battle?” she asked.
He shook his head once. “Not that kind of death.”
He let the silence stretch, long enough for the words to reach back into him.
“I’ve died before,” he said. “When Frieza killed me. When I let Majin power consume me. When I chose to fall with Buu…”
He looked at the scorched temple ruins, and something in his stance, his stillness shifted.
“But this…” He gestured to the ash. “This feels like the place where I stopped being who I was. The part of me that remembered what it meant to rise… it burned away here. I didn’t even feel it until the dreams started.”
A pause. Not hesitation, but reckoning.
“I carry the ruin,” he said quietly. “It never stopped burning.”
He didn’t explain.
This realm, the ash, the silence, the weight in the air, wasn’t conjured by pain or rage. It wasn’t memory punishing him.
It was memory waiting for him.
The grief, the rage, the erasure he had buried, none of it was gone. But it no longer controlled him. This was not a place of return. It was a place of reckoning.
Vegeta wasn’t falling backward into what he had been. He was facing what had always followed him. Not to reject it. To finally see it.
The ruin was not an enemy. It was his inheritance.
And at last, he stood still enough to let it speak.
Rei stood still. The heat pressed against her throat like a held breath.
She tried to summon her fire. She called it by name, by memory, by will, but it came slowly, dimly. A flicker, nothing more. Her connection wasn’t severed, but displaced. This was not her shrine. Not her fire.
The silence between her and Vegeta stretched like wire. Thin. Tense.
He wasn’t looking at her now. His eyes scanned the half ruined archways, the scorched sky, the glyphs faintly pulsing in the stone. There was no hostility in him. Only coiled attention.
She took a step forward.
“You burn like anger,” she said, voice calm, controlled. “But this place isn’t yours either.”
He didn’t flinch. “I know this fire,” he said. “I killed in it. I died in it. And still, it follows me.”
Rei watched him. No energy flared. But the air thickened around him, heavy with memory.
“Then why are we both here?” she asked.
He turned toward her, eyes dark and steady. “Because fire remembers.”
Rei’s mouth tightened.
“My fire purifies,” she said. “It strips away lies. It reveals the truth. It doesn’t follow. It calls.”
He stepped toward her, just once.
“Mine devours,” he said. “And I made peace with that. But this… this isn’t rage. It’s something else.”
It was true. The heat around him didn’t pulse with fury. It didn’t clench like battle. It ached.
Not as violence. As memory.
What burned in him now wasn’t the fire of destruction, it was the fire of what remained. The grief that never found language. The shame that no one asked him to carry, but he did anyway. The love that grew in silence, too stubborn to be soft.
His fire had once devoured to survive. Now it held. It kept. It remembered.
She nodded once. “Restraint?”
A silence passed between them, tense, not antagonistic. A silence that held questions neither had words for.
Then the realm shifted.
A low hum rose from the floor. The glyphs burned brighter, red and gold, then seared white. The air warped. A soundless wind moved between them, and suddenly they weren’t alone.
Visions.
Not illusions. Not memories. Reflections.
Rei saw herself, older, her hands folded in prayer, her eyes cold. A woman of discipline, not faith. A guardian who had forgotten why she protected anything at all.
She gasped softly. The flame around her flickered out.
Vegeta staggered back, eyes wide.
He saw himself, younger, eyes full of fear and pride, standing over the ashes of a world that had never wanted to remember him.
Then another image: Majin-branded, mouth twisted in hatred, letting power replace every bond he’d once begun to trust.
And then, deeper still, a vision quieter than all the rest:
Bulma.
Standing alone on the Capsule Corp balcony, arms braced on the railing, her profile lit by citylight, still and silent, waiting for someone who would not come.
He had left without explanation. Without honour. Without her.
In that moment, she was everything he feared: steady, certain, and strong enough to survive him.
That was what he had broken, not her faith, but the thread between them. The fragile, unspoken thing they had been building in silences and glances and near confessions.
And he had thrown it away.
Not because he didn’t love her.
But because he did.
And didn’t believe he deserved to.
He turned away.
But the flames didn’t stop.
Above them, in the sky where no stars lived, a single glyph appeared—vast, blurred, unsteady.
Ka-Ra-Tat.
It pulsed faintly. Incomplete. Flickering.
Rei stared at it, the name catching in her chest like a note too deep to sing.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Vegeta looked up, his expression unreadable.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But it feels like something I broke.”
And it did.
Not a weapon. Not a vow. Something smaller. Quieter. A bond he hadn’t known how to hold. A moment he hadn’t realised was sacred until it had passed. He wasn’t mourning a loss, he was recognising it. The feeling wasn’t rage, and it wasn’t grief. It was memory, surfacing without permission.
The ache came not from what had been taken from him, but from what he had never learned to keep.
And now, standing in the hush of ash and flame, he knew: the ruin wasn’t punishing him. It was waiting to be named.
The ash began to rise.
Not in gusts or waves, but in spirals. Soft and slow, like something returning to the sky that had been waiting too long. The ruins around them faded, their edges blurring into the windless heat. The glyph overhead, Ka-Ra-Tat flickered once more, then folded in on itself like a thought unspoken.
Rei exhaled.
The realm was ending.
Vegeta turned away from the dissolving sky, boots crunching faintly as he stepped over cracked stone. Something tugged at the edge of his vision, small, red, out of place.
On the ground, half-buried in ash, lay a ribbon.
Scorched at one end. Curled like it had been twisted into a knot and then forgotten.
He crouched and picked it up.
The moment his fingers touched the fabric, the realm stilled. The ash halted mid air. The light froze.
Rei watched him. Her voice was quiet and measured, but not cold.
“This place isn’t ours,” she said.
He didn’t look up right away. The ribbon lay warm in his hand, not glowing, but steady.
“No,” he said. “But what happened here still matters.”
The ash began to rise again, this time upward, like memory escaping gravity. The sky folded in. The name above them: Ka-Ra-Tat , flared once, then disappeared.
The ribbon burned brighter. And then it was gone.
Back in the realms of West City, the gravity chamber was still.
Vegeta lay on the floor, one arm stretched loosely to the side, the other curled close to his chest. The console lights were dimmed. No active session, no heat in the coils. Just silence, suspended breath. A body not totally unconscious, but elsewhere.
Bulma’s hand hovered over the data stream.
The lunar flux had dipped. Not plummeted, but paused. Like the moon itself was holding its breath.
Then came a ping.
Gravity Chamber: Vital Stasis Flag. No injury. No emergency.
Her eyes narrowed. She set her tablet down, pulled on her outer lab coat, and disabled the gravity field from the remote panel before she even reached the door.
By the time she crossed the chamber’s threshold, the coils had already powered down with a muted sigh.
She found him lying still on the floor, eyes closed, breath slow.
She moved towards him, crouched beside his body, and pressed two fingers to his neck. Steady. Warm.
No alarms, though it was obvious to her that Vegeta was spiritually elsewhere.
She eased down beside him, one leg folded beneath her, the other stretched out. Her fingers brushed his temple, not to wake him, but to remind herself: He’s here. He came back.
When he stirred, it was slow and measured, like someone surfacing from deep water.
When he surfaced, he didn’t jolt.
Without lifting his head, he turned slightly towards her and blinked.
“Bulma,” he said.
Her voice was soft, but steady. “Vegeta.”
A breath passed between them.
“I met Rei,” he said.
She tilted her head slightly, inviting him to tell her more when he felt ready.
“We shared a fire,” he added. Just that.
He didn’t elaborate.
Instead, he shifted slightly to let his head rest against her shoulder.
It wasn’t weakness. It wasn’t surrender.
It was the absence of defence.
And that, for Vegeta, was more intimate than any confession.
She didn’t move. Just adjusted her posture enough to hold him there, her hand resting lightly on the back of his neck.
After a long moment, he drew back a little, just enough to shift the weight off her shoulder and sit upright.
He reached down beside him, his fingers brushing the same strip of fabric he had found days ago and never let himself name.
The ribbon.
Same one. Red. Scorched. Folded.
He didn’t speak, and held it out to her, not as a mystery this time, but as something remembered.
She took it gently and didn’t ask questions.
He didn’t explain.
They stayed there for a while, side by side, just the two of them, in the blue quiet of the gravity chamber, in the silence that follows fire where nothing needs to burn to be felt.
Notes:
🌓
This chapter was written to explore fire not as power, but as memory, of what remains when survival has cost more than we know how to name.
For Vegeta, the trial is not a fight. It’s a reckoning with the ruins he carries and the silence he’s built around them. For Rei, it’s a confrontation with what happens when discipline becomes distance. Together, they reflect the dual nature of fire, what it purifies, and what it threatens to consume.
The red ribbon, first introduced in Chapter 1, continues to serve as a quiet sigil of emotional convergence. It’s not explained here, only felt.
Thank you for reading. As always, I welcome your thoughts, interpretations, and feelings. The next chapter will take us into water and thought, into Gohan and Ami’s mirrored realm of reflection and knowing.
🌓
Chapter 4: Night Ten, Waxing Gibbous 🌔
Summary:
A convergence anomaly draws Gohan and Ami into a vast, submerged archive, an echo of memory where the past is read, not recorded. As the mirrored truth of what they’ve carried alone comes to light, both must decide what parts of themselves they are willing to reclaim. Back in the lab, Bulma and Vegeta begin to piece together the convergence’s elemental pattern. Fire. Water. Three remain. Far across timelines, a signal is sent towards a future warrior who has already carried too much.
Chapter Text
From the Journal of Dr. Bulma Briefs
Entry #4a: “Tidal Encoding”
Filed: Age 792 – Waxing Gibbous Moon, Night 10
Capsule Corp Archive 8F (Private Record)
The anomalies are increasing.
Gohan and I have been studying a convergence-responsive insect recovered near one of the lunar-phase resonance fields. The field overlays an intersection point I’ve been calling the Mercury line, a location where readings often correlate with remote echoes from the other side of the convergence.
We can’t interact with the Sailor realm directly, but we’re starting to see their signatures: distinct energies, behaviours, and symbolic fragments seeping into ours. This specimen may have originated near what we believe is Sailor Mercury’s node. It moves like water, but it holds something more: memory. Resonance. Glyphs that react to the moon’s gravitational shifts.
Gohan says it reminds him of early Cell-phase coding, structures that once imitated life, but with purpose stripped away. This was different. Not monstrous. Reflective.
The water it was found in has since lost measurable surface tension. No chemical imbalance. It simply let go.
The convergence isn’t a portal. It’s a structure, and it’s building something.
-
Bulma hadn’t asked Gohan to visit for dinner, or for help recalibrating the moonphase sensor array. She’d asked because something biological and impossible was behaving like memory.
The specimen floated in a containment dish, suspended within a convergence field. It resembled a Rhagovelia water strider: six limbs, fine wingfolds, thorax poised like it was always about to leave. But it didn’t move like any insect.
It responded like it remembered, like it had been here before.
Gohan bent over the console, watching the shallow dish pulse with faint blue light. The glyphs embedded in the insect’s carapace shimmered in lunar rhythm, structured and deliberate. They weren’t cellular. They were linguistic.
“Where did you find it?” he asked.
Bulma didn’t answer right away. She adjusted a variable on the main interface before responding.
“It surfaced near a convergence point west of Mount Paozu. Right on the edge of a known lunar-echo zone.”
She pulled up a secondary screen. A resonance waveform uncurled, smooth and sinuous.
“It mirrors the Mars node’s readings from the night of Vegeta’s episode,” she continued. “Only this one overlays with Mercury’s alignment grid.”
Gohan looked up, sharply. “So, Sailor Mercury?”
“Not physically,” Bulma said. “But her signature is bleeding through. The convergence fields are more active than I expected. And they’re choosing.”
Her eyes flicked to a side monitor, one set to a passive scan feed from the guest chamber two levels down.
Vegeta was there, still. Sitting cross-legged on the floor. Not training. Not speaking. Just breathing.
He hadn’t reentered the gravity chamber since the trial with Rei. Not out of fear. Vegeta feared nothing. But out of respect.
He’d told Bulma everything he witnessed and felt. The scorched temple. The red ribbon. The name he couldn’t read but still felt burning behind his ribs. Ka-Ra-Tat.
Now it was happening again. And this time, it had chosen Gohan.
He turned back to the specimen. The water around it began to rise, not splash. Lift. Like it was no longer following the rules of mass.
“You think I’m next,” he said.
“I think it’s already happening,” Bulma replied.
A flicker passed over the dish, like a reflection that shouldn’t exist.
And then Gohan saw her.
Not clearly, not fully, but present.
A young woman, suspended in shimmer-light. Hair blue and smooth. Eyes bright with intellect and stillness.
Mizuno Ami.
“It’s reaching for her,” he said, voice distant now.
“No,” Bulma corrected. “It’s reaching through her. Towards you.”
And then everything tipped.
The light bent inwards. The glyphs glowed, then dissolved.
Gohan’s breath caught. His hands pressed to the console, but he couldn’t feel the surface. He couldn’t hear Bulma. He couldn’t even hear himself.
Then, his knees buckled. He collapsed, silent, folding to the floor of the lab as if sleep had claimed him in an instant.
Bulma caught him before his head struck the tile. Her breath stilled. She checked his pulse. Steady. Skin warm. No signs of injury. Just gone.
“It’s happening again,” she whispered.
*
The moonlight curved through the dome above them, falling across Gohan’s still form. The water in the convergence dish had stilled, but the glyphs were gone.
The air smelled faintly of something that didn’t belong on Earth at all. Salt. Light. Memory.
There was no impact. No splash. No darkness. Only weightlessness, and the soft distortion of thought trying to remember itself.
Gohan opened his eyes.
The world around him was vast and fluid, but not cold. Light refracted through something that wasn’t quite water, wasn’t quite air. The ground beneath him shimmered with the texture of glass over deep memory, transparent, but impenetrable.
Above, there was no sky. Only layers of architecture hanging like suspended thoughts. Shelves with no walls, scrolls slowly turning midair, broken clock faces and glyphs drifting like leaves in tide.
The scent was unmistakable. Rain on vellum, seawater steeped in time, the soft decay of old knowledge. It smelled like a place that remembered too much.
He took a breath. It didn’t fill his lungs. It settled in his mind.
A ripple of movement caught his eye.
Across the expanse, if such a word could describe a place without borders, stood Mizuno Ami. She didn’t look surprised. She looked seen.
Her posture was composed, arms folded lightly, but her gaze moved across the archive with reverence.
“This isn’t a lab,” she said softly, voice carrying without sound. “It’s an archive. But it doesn’t store information. It remembers it.”
Gohan stepped towards her. With every movement, the floor beneath him rippled like thought under pressure.
“Ami,” he said. It wasn’t a greeting. It was a realisation.
She met his eyes.
“Gohan.”
Neither asked how the other had arrived. They already knew. They had been chosen.
They stood in silence for a breath, surrounded by pages that didn’t fall. Each page bore glyphs that shimmered faintly, then vanished the moment eyes tried to fix them.
“You can’t read anything here,” Gohan murmured. “It reads you.”
Ami stepped closer to one. It unfolded in her direction, only slightly, and the faint curve of her name appeared. Not written. Recognised.
When her fingers brushed the page, it didn’t open. It breathed.
Images bloomed behind her eyes: Herself in school corridors, books hugged tight to her chest; conversations where she nodded instead of speaking; high scores and silent dinners; the sensation of being necessary, but never quite known.
She pulled her hand away. The memory folded back into stillness.
“These aren’t records,” she said quietly. “They’re reflections.”
Gohan moved beside her. “Of what we carry.”
“Or what we’ve buried.”
And somewhere deeper in the archive, the water began to turn.
There was no splash. No descent. Only immersion.
It was like being drawn into breath, not air, not water, but something in between. A liquid stillness that held them, weightless, as if gravity had given way to memory. Gohan felt no impact, no pain. Pure silence.
Then the sensation returned, slowly. Sound without sound. A low resonance, like the soft turning of pages underwater.
When he opened his eyes, there was light everywhere, but not from a sun. It filtered through the space like moonlight through deep water: blue, gold, and soft green, casting long, shifting shadows that moved without direction.
They were standing, not floating, not grounded, in a space so vast it had no beginning. Pillars of stone and glass rose into the endless above. Archways stretched outward into mist. Scrolls, broken clocks, suspended bookshelves, all hung midair, tethered by nothing.
The air smelled like old vellum, leather bindings, rain on cold marble.
A drowned library, Gohan thought. But not ruined. Preserved.
As if someone, or something, had placed every thought too heavy to forget into this space and let it float.
He took a slow breath. It didn’t feel like breathing. It felt like being remembered.
A ripple caught the edge of his vision.
Ami.
She shimmered into focus a few paces away, her form resolving out of light and water like a figure surfacing through fog. Her arms were folded, her body poised, but her eyes were wide. Not with fear. With recognition.
They faced one another in silence. Neither spoke.
There was something sacred about the moment. Two minds known for silence, calculation, and restraint, finally standing in a place where none of that had to be worn as armour.
“We’ve met before,” Ami said softly, “but not like this.”
Gohan nodded. “In reports. Data threads. Theoretical overlays.”
“But never in memory.”
Her voice carried like a ripple.
They stood closer now. Between them, pages floated like leaves in slow wind, some blank, some covered in glyphs that dissolved the moment eyes tried to follow them.
Gohan reached out. One of the scrolls twisted toward him. The glyphs pulsed once, then faded, as if ashamed to be seen.
“You can’t read anything here,” he murmured. “It reads you.”
Ami took a step forward. The light curved around her as if parting for clarity. She touched the edge of a book suspended midair. It opened to a page with her name, not written, but remembered.
Images unfolded, not linearly, but layered: a quiet child in a vast house, nose buried in medical journals; a mother at the far end of a table, praising scores but never meeting her eyes; silence at school, where knowledge filled the space where friendship might have been.
Ami’s hand faltered. The page folded in on itself and vanished.
Gohan watched, and then quietly reached towards his own reflection.
He didn’t see combat or accolades. He saw expectation. The weight of being his father’s son and yet not his father. The guilt of not becoming the warrior everyone thought he should be. The grief of becoming someone else entirely, and still not being sure that it was enough.
“This place doesn’t show what happened,” he said. “It shows what mattered.”
Ami turned towards him.
There was no need for explanation.
They were mirrors, not only in intellect, but in weight. In how much they carried without complaint.
And in this place, for the first time, they didn’t have to carry it alone.
Gohan reached towards a page that hovered near his shoulder. The moment his fingers brushed the surface, it unfurled, not with ink, but with feeling.
He saw Chi-Chi, younger than he remembered, her hair tied back, sleeves rolled, standing alone beneath the wooden frame of their mountain home. Her hands were rough with kitchen work and training grips. Her eyes were tired. But steady.
She was teaching Goten how to balance his stance, the same way she had taught Gohan, not for tournaments, but for discipline. For safety. For dignity.
He saw her watching him walk toward his study desk at age twelve. She never forced him to pick up the blade again, not after Cell, not after the world was saved. She had simply let him learn, let him become. That, too, was her strength.
She was a princess only by birth.
But in that moment, Gohan realised she had ruled by love.
“She made a kingdom out of discipline,” he whispered, “and never asked for a crown.”
The page curled inward and vanished.
He swallowed. Not with shame, but with grace.
She wasn’t the reason he stepped away from battle.
She was the reason he knew he could.
The archive stirred again. Gohan felt it, like an exhale that didn’t belong to him.
The focus shifted, not brighter, but clearer. The convergence had moved on.
Ami’s trial had begun.
She felt the water-thought bend toward her, the pages folding inward like petals. One hovered before her, inkless, silent. She reached for it.
It wrote itself beneath her fingers.
And from the mist, she stepped out, not a monster, not a shadow, but a possibility.
Ami’s mirrored self stood in a pristine lab uniform, flanked by data readouts and crystal terminals. She was perfect. Flawless posture, quiet breath, eyes empty of conflict. She turned towards Ami with serenity, not welcome.
Behind her, there were no people. Only instruments. No friends. Only protocols. No heart. Only order.
“Is this who I become,” Ami whispered, “if I stop listening?”
Her reflection blinked once, and turned away.
She did not speak.
The ache was sudden, sharp.
“They don’t come to you for comfort”, the thought whispered. “They come to you for answers.”
She reached for the page again, and this time it showed memory: sitting at a desk at midnight, her mother asleep in another room; standing in the corner during a battle, calculating trajectories while the others bled; smiling when praised, even when the praise felt like being put on a shelf.
“They never meant to make me feel less,” she said quietly. “But I began to believe I was only useful when I was correct.”
Gohan was beside her now, not intervening, just present.
“I know that feeling,” he said. “Being the one who’s calm, who has the answers. Who always must.”
She nodded once.
“But here,” she said, looking around, “knowledge doesn’t protect you. Not from what matters.”
“No,” Gohan said. “It reflects you.”
Ami turned back to the fading image of her mirrored self.
“Then I choose to be more than function,” she whispered. “I choose to be whole. Flawed, feeling, and fully mine.”
And with that, the mirror dissolved softly, without resistance. Not banished. Integrated.
The convergence released them, not with flash or fall, but with stillness.
A warmth at the edge of thought. The weight of breath returning. The feeling of a body remembered.
Gohan stirred.
He was lying on the lab floor, his limbs slack, but the world was no longer fluid. Tile beneath him. The hum of monitors. The soft scent of tea and dust.
A shape leaned over him. Sharp, familiar. Bulma.
“You’re back,” she said gently.
He sat up slowly. The memory of water still clung to him, not wet but resonant, like a dream pressed close to waking.
*
Later, they stood together by the window. Gohan folded his arms, watching the moon rise over the compound. Its light was sharper now. Not yet full, but awake. Like it was watching them.
Bulma handed him a mug of tea. She didn’t ask for a report, she already had the data. She’d seen when the readings spiked, when the archive simulation collapsed under the anomaly.
She waited for him to speak
“It wasn’t a vision,” Gohan said finally. “It was a structure. We saw five glyphs forming a lattice.”
“And the sixth?” Bulma asked.
“Ka-Ra-Tat. Still flickering, still waiting.”
Bulma nodded slowly.
“You think it’s leading to your father?”
Gohan hesitated.
“Everyone will.”
A beat passed. Beside them, Vegeta’s stance shifted ever so slightly.
“But you don’t,” Bulma said.
“No,” Gohan replied. “I think it’s someone who carries all of it. Fire, water, memory, restraint. Someone who has changed because they had to. Not just because they could.”
Silence.
Bulma turned her gaze back to the lattice, but Vegeta remained still. His arms were folded, but his jaw had tightened, not with anger, but something quieter.
He didn’t ask the question aloud, but it hung between them anyway.
Then why not me?
Bulma didn’t speak to it. She didn’t need to. She knew he had already asked it of himself.
“We need to tell the others,” she said at last.
“You mean the Z-Fighters?”
“The ones who’ve been changed by the convergence,” she clarified. “The ones who still feel the weight.”
“Piccolo?”
“Yes.”
She looked at him. “I think we’re going to need a guardian.”
Before leaving, Gohan paused at the door. Vegeta, seated in his usual place, looked up just once.
“Did it change you?” he asked.
Gohan didn’t smile, but he didn’t look away.
“It remembered me.”
Vegeta responded with a single nod of understanding.
*
As the waxing gibbous moon climbed higher, the moonlight slanted low through the observatory dome, casting pale arcs across the darkened lab. Most systems had powered down. Only a few monitors blinked, one displaying lunar telemetry, another replaying the glyph pattern Gohan had described.
Bulma stood at the console, arms folded, watching the lattice turn. Five points. Four orbitals. One centre.
Behind her, the door opened with a familiar sigh.
Vegeta entered, wordless as ever, and came to stand beside her.
She spoke first.
“Of the five elements: fire, water, earth, air, and spirit, two have already awakened,” she said quietly. “Fire, through you and Rei. And tonight, water, through Gohan and Ami.”
She tapped the interface. The glyphs pulsed, faint and deliberate.
“Three remain,” she added. “The convergence isn’t just testing them. It’s aligning them.”
Vegeta’s eyes narrowed slightly. “And when the last element rises?”
Bulma hesitated. “Then the centre will speak. Ka-Ra-Tat.”
They stood in silence, the map slowly rotating between them.
After a moment, she added, “I want to try something. While we still have time.”
His gaze shifted.
“The convergence is reaching further than we expected, across dimensions. I think we can send a trace signal, just enough to register resonance. A tether, maybe, to the other timeline.”
Vegeta’s expression didn’t change, but something in his voice softened.
“You mean Mirai Trunks.”
Bulma nodded. “He’s not from of our timeline, but he saved it, and he’s already survived more than most of us ever will.”
She glanced at the rotating glyphs.
“If the convergence is drawn to memory, then Mirai Trunks carries enough of it to shape a whole sky.”
Vegeta turned fully toward her, gaze sharp now.
“You want it to choose him?”
She shook her head. “I want it to see him, and remember what he’s already carried alone.”
He looked at her then, fully.
“Do it.”
She began preparing the transmission.
“What should I send?” she asked, almost absently.
He watched the screen for a long moment.
“A fragment from here.” Vegeta said.
Bulma glanced up.
“From you,” he added.
Her hands slowed on the console. She didn’t speak, but a quiet breath escaped her lips.
Together, they encoded it, not as data, but as presence. A signal shaped like hope remembered. A thread from fire to silence, from ruin to resolve.
A name that had not yet been spoken, but was already being carried.
Chapter 5: Night Twelve, Waxing Gibbous 🌔
Summary:
As the waxing gibbous moon approaches fullness, the convergence tightens its hold on both realms. Piccolo and Makoto are drawn into the third trial, Earth. They must confront the weight of guardianship and survival in a storm torn plateau of memory. In visions of failure and loss, both warriors face the truth that protection is not about preventing all pain, but about growing strong enough to endure it. As lightning meets stone and the earth element awakens, the lattice grows closer to completion. Three trials down, two remain. Across timelines, a warrior who has already carried too much begins to answer the call.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
From the Journal of Dr. Bulma Briefs
Entry #5a: "Alignment"
Filed: Age 792 – Night 12, 23:07 Capsule Corp Archive 8G (Restricted Access)
The convergence has rhythm. Night 7 brought fire. Night 10 brought water. Now, on Night 12, the models predict Earth.
The moon is nearly full, its resonance field stable, and the geomagnetic readouts align with what I've begun calling the Earth hour, a window where grounded energies peak between 1am and 3am. It makes sense in a way, thresholds of day and night, of above and below. If the pattern holds, the Earth trial will awaken tonight.
What unsettles me is who the convergence hasn't touched yet. Vegeta, then Gohan, but not Goku yet. If my models hold, one of the final alignments will inevitably reach for him. The blood moon approaches, and with it, the last window.
Two nodes already glow steady in the lattice: fire and water. Earth would be the third. When all five are lit, Ka-Ra-Tat will name the one who can carry them all.
My gut tells me this is not a crown. It's a burden. The name won't choose the strongest. It will choose the one who can carry all of it without breaking.
Last night we sent a resonance trace across timelines, a memory thread, not a message. If the convergence finds Future Trunks, I want it to recognise him.
A faint return pinged the system at 03:11. Not language or signal. More like a handshake. The lattice is listening back. I'm sure of it.
-
The night air was cool when Piccolo landed on Capsule Corp's balcony, cloak catching the moonlight like a pale sail. He felt the pull before Bulma called, a pressure that wasn't gravity, but a resonance that hummed against his skin. The convergence was tightening.
He followed her into the observatory. Vegeta was already there, silent as the dome lights washed pale over the console. A lattice projection hovered between them: five points circling a centre that flickered like a heartbeat. Two of the outer nodes glowed steady: fire and water, three outer nodes still dark.
Piccolo studied it, cloak brushing the floor, arms folded in the stillness.
"What do you know about binding rituals?" Bulma asked, her voice careful, measured.
Piccolo's eyes didn't leave the lattice. "Depends on what's being bound."
"Names," Vegeta said quietly. "Old names. The kind that choose their bearers."
A pause. The air between them thickened.
"Ka-Ra-Tat isn't just a name," Piccolo said at last. "It's a binding. All five elements:fire, water, earth, air, and spirit, must awaken in alignment." His voice carried the weight of certainty. "Each trial calls one forward. But the trial doesn't claim them."
Bulma frowned. "Then what happens to the ones who've already faced a trial?"
"They remain candidates," Piccolo replied. "The trials awaken the elements, but the bearer is chosen only when all five are lit. When the centre speaks, it chooses the one who can carry all of them. Not one. Not some. All."
Vegeta's scowl tightened. "So even if fire responded to me..."
"It might choose another," Piccolo finished.
The words hung between them, heavy as stone.
Bulma's breath caught. "And when it does choose?"
Piccolo's gaze shifted to her, then back to the flickering centre. "It won't just be a name. It will unlock power beyond what we know. Transformation, primal and old. The kind that returns what was lost."
The last words carried particular weight. Vegeta's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly, but he said nothing.
Bulma's console spiked suddenly. Geomagnetic resonance rose sharply across all readings.
"The Earth hour," she whispered.
Piccolo felt it immediately, a pull that started in his bones and worked outward. Not the aggressive summons of battle, but something deeper. Older. Like the planet itself reaching up through the soles of his feet.
"It's beginning," he said.
The lattice pulsed, harder, brighter. The third node began to stir.
-
In a parallel realm, in the Azabu-Juban disctrict of Tokyo, Makoto's kitchen timer chimed once, then fell silent.
Makoto stood at the stove, wooden spoon poised over a pot of curry that had simmered too long without stirring. Steam rose around her face, but she barely noticed. Her attention was pulled elsewhere, drawn to the window where the nearly full moon hung like a silver coin against the night sky.
Something was wrong with the air.
Not the temperature, not the pressure. Something deeper. A resonance that pressed against her ribs like a second heartbeat.
She set the spoon aside and stepped toward the window. The city sprawled below, neon signs blinking in the distance, but the usual sounds felt muted, as if the world were holding its breath.
Her hand pressed against the glass. The moon's light was sharper tonight, more focused. Like it was watching her back.
A tremor ran through the building. Not an earthquake. Something subtler. A vibration that started in the ground and rose through the walls, through the floor, into her bones.
She knew this feeling. It was the same pull she'd felt before battle, before transformation, but older. Wilder. Like the earth itself was calling her name.
Lightning crackled between her fingers unbidden. Not Jupiter lightning. Something rawer, less controlled. The static made her hair lift slightly from her shoulders.
"What do you want from me?" she whispered to the moon.
The response came not as voice, but as knowing. Deep, certain, inevitable.
Endurance.
The pull strengthened. Her vision blurred at the edges. The curry pot clattered to the floor as her knees gave way, but she never felt the impact.
Darkness claimed her like a tide.
There was no impact. No splash. No darkness. Only the sensation of falling upward into weight.
Piccolo opened his eyes to a world of stone and storm. A plateau spiralled upward into clouds black with thunder, its surface scarred with deep furrows as if claws the size of rivers had raked across it. Roots coiled through the rock under his feet, alive and pulsing with faint green light. Lightning clawed the sky, illuminating pillars like titans holding the heavens. Every crack of thunder rattled the ground, daring it to break.
The air was thick, electric. It tasted of rain that had never fallen and earth that had never known peace.
Movement caught his eye.
Makoto materialised from the storm's heart, not walking toward him but rising from the stone itself, as if the plateau had given birth to her. Her long brown hair whipped around her shoulders, clothes torn by wind that cut like blades. But her stance was square, her eyes bright with recognition rather than fear.
"You're the guardian," she said, voice carrying over the thunder. Not a question.
Piccolo inclined his head slightly. "And you're the survivor."
They faced each other across the scarred stone, two figures shaped by loss, by the weight of protecting others when protection had its limits.
"This place," Makoto said, her eyes sweeping the broken columns and furrows, "it feels like a battlefield."
"All earth is battlefield," Piccolo replied. "The question is whether anything grows after."
The storm tightened above them, clouds folding inward like a closing fist. Lightning struck. Not randomly, but with purpose, each bolt illuminating symbols carved deep into the plateau's surface. Ancient marks that pulsed with the rhythm of a sleeping heart.
Then the visions began.
The stone beneath their feet rippled like water, reshaping itself into two separate arenas, connected but distinct. Each would face their own trial, their own memory made manifest.
Piccolo's ground reformed into the Cell Games arena.
The white tiles stretched endlessly, pristine and cold. And there, small and trembling at the centre, stood Gohan. Eleven years old, fists balled, eyes wide with the terrible weight of being Earth's only hope.
Cell loomed above the boy, perfect and smiling, savouring the moment before the kill.
"Gohan!" Piccolo's voice thundered against the storm. He lunged forward, but the ground split beneath him, opening into a chasm that stretched beyond sight. No matter how fast he moved, how far he reached, the distance between them only grew.
The boy's scream cut through the thunder.
Piccolo fell to his knees, the sound tearing through him like nothing else could. "I failed him," he whispered. "I was his teacher, his guardian, and when it mattered most..."
The vision deepened. Cell's blast engulfed Gohan, and the silence that followed was worse than any scream.
Across the plateau, Makoto faced her own hell.
The stone beneath her feet had become twisted metal and shattered glass. A car, wrapped around a telephone pole, flames licking at the frame. The acrid smell of burning petrol filled her nostrils, choking and familiar.
She was eight years old again, no taller than the door handle, watching through smoke and terror as the ambulances arrived too late.
"Mummy!" she screamed, reaching for the wreckage. "Daddy!"
But her hands passed through the metal like mist. The scene replayed with cruel precision. The screech of brakes, the impact, the silence that followed. Again and again, forcing her to witness the moment that had carved her hollow.
"Why them?" she cried, falling to her knees on the broken glass. "Why not me?"
Lightning struck around her, wild and uncontrolled, each bolt carrying the weight of guilt she'd carried for fifteen years. Every laugh that felt like betrayal, every moment of happiness that seemed stolen from the dead, every night she'd lain awake wondering why the universe had chosen wrong.
The storm whispered through her bones: This is what you fear. To be left. To protect nothing because nothing remains.
The trials deepened, pulling them further into their private torments.
Piccolo watched helplessly as the vision shifted, showing him every moment he'd arrived too late. Raditz taking Gohan. Cell's perfect form emerging whilst he lay broken. Buu's rampage whilst he struggled to stand. Each failure carved deeper into his chest, a litany of inadequacy.
"I am a guardian who cannot guard," he said, voice breaking. "A teacher who sent his student to die."
But then, through the storm, he heard her.
Makoto's anguish echoed across the chasm: "I lived when they died. Every day since has been theft."
Their voices found each other in the chaos, and something in the recognition stilled part of the storm.
Piccolo lifted his head. Through the lightning and rain, he saw her, not the child cowering before wreckage, but the woman who had risen from it. Broad shoulders set with determination, hands that cooked for friends and fought for strangers, strength forged in the crucible of loss.
"You didn't steal anything," he called across the wind, his voice cutting through her vision like stone breaking water. "They gave you their love. That's why you're strong enough to love others."
Makoto's head snapped up, tears streaming down her face. "But I couldn't save them!"
"And I couldn't save Gohan from making his own choices," Piccolo replied, stepping toward the chasm. "But that was never our failure. That was their courage."
The plateau shuddered. Ancient roots burst through the stone between them, bridging the divide with living wood.
Makoto pressed her hands to the glowing roots, feeling the pulse of life beneath her palms. "My parents died protecting me. And I've spent every day since trying to be worthy of that sacrifice."
"You already are," Piccolo said, crossing toward her on the bridge of roots. "Not because you're strong enough to prevent all loss. Because you're strong enough to continue after it."
The crash scene began to dissolve around her. In its place, new images formed: Makoto's hands kneading dough whilst her friends laughed around her kitchen table. Her body throwing itself between a youma and a terrified child. Her arms wrapping around Usagi after a particularly brutal battle, whispering reassurances she'd learned to believe herself.
She wasn't surviving her parents' death. She was honouring their love.
Piccolo's vision shifted as well. The Cell Games arena cracked like an eggshell, revealing what lay beneath: Gohan as he was now. Scholar. Father. Protector by choice, not command. Standing in a university lecture hall, sharing knowledge instead of violence, strong enough to choose peace because someone had taught him that strength came in many forms.
"I didn't fail to protect him," Piccolo said, wonder creeping into his voice. "I succeeded in teaching him to protect himself."
They met at the centre of the root bridge, lightning and stone in harmony.
Makoto looked up at him, electricity crackling gently around her hands. Controlled now, purposeful. "Earth endures," she said.
"And teaches endurance," Piccolo finished.
Their hands clasped. Lightning met stone. Thunder found its foundation.
The plateau blazed with green light, ancient and patient. The symbols in the rock flared once, then settled into a steady glow that pulsed with the rhythm of the earth itself.
Above them, carved into the storm clouds in lines of living light, a symbol appeared: not Ka-Ra-Tat, but something simpler. Older.
A tree. Roots deep, branches high. Scarred by lightning but unbroken. Growing stronger through every storm.
The vision held for a moment, burned into memory. Then the storm dissolved without violence. The plateau, the pillars, the sky of thunder, all fell away like ash in water.
Weightless. Then breath.
Piccolo's eyes opened to the pale glow of the observatory dome. It was 01:47 and the hum of machines replaced the roar of the storm. The crash mat was beneath him, firm but steady. Vegeta stood at his shoulder, arms folded, expression unreadable but alert.
Bulma was already at the console, her reflection caught in the lattice projection's glow. Three nodes now burned steady: fire, water, and earth. The centre flickered faster now, as if stirring toward wakefulness.
"Three awakened," she murmured, voice touched with something between relief and apprehension. "Two remain."
Piccolo pushed himself upright, slower than his usual discipline allowed. His cloak settled heavily around him as though it, too, had weathered the storm. The memory of lightning and stone still tingled in his fingertips.
"She was there," he said, voice low but carrying clearly in the observatory's hush. "Makoto. Jupiter." He paused, searching for words that could capture what he'd witnessed. "She carries grief like armour. Not to protect herself from more pain, but to remember what's worth protecting."
Bulma turned from the console, her expression softening. "And you? What did the earth show you?"
Piccolo was quiet for a long moment, gaze fixed on the glowing third node. When he spoke, his words carried the weight of stone settling into its foundation.
"That guardianship was never about preventing all harm. It was about preparing those we protect to stand when we cannot." His eyes flicked briefly to the monitor displaying Gohan's house, quiet in the distance. "I thought I had failed him at the Cell Games. But the earth reminded me, he chose to fight not because I couldn't protect him, but because I had taught him to protect others."
Vegeta's scowl shifted, becoming something more complex. Recognition, perhaps. "Hn. The green one understands burden."
It wasn't mockery. It was acknowledgement.
Bulma brought up a secondary display. The MIRAI channel now pulsed with unmistakable strength, the signal no longer flickering but beating steady as a second heart.
"He's not just answering," she said, wonder creeping into her voice. "He's synchronising. The trace signal is pulling him toward our timeline."
Vegeta's head turned sharply. "Trunks?"
"Future Trunks," Bulma confirmed. "He's responding to the convergence. I think... I think he's coming back."
The room fell silent except for the soft hum of machinery. Outside, the waxing gibbous moon climbed higher, its light growing stronger as it approached fullness.
Piccolo straightened, folding his arms. "If the convergence is calling him, then the next trial needs what he carries."
"Which is?" Bulma asked.
Vegeta answered before Piccolo could. "Sacrifice. The kind that leaves scars."
The lattice pulsed once more, as if acknowledging the truth of it.
Three elements awakened. Two remained. And somewhere across the barriers of time, a warrior who had already saved the world twice was being summoned to do so again.
-
Back in Makoto's flat, she jolted awake on her kitchen floor. It was 02:15. The curry pot lay overturned beside her, its contents spreading across the tiles in a dark puddle. The timer had long since stopped chiming. But the silence felt different now, not empty, settled. Like the moment after thunder when the air finally exhales.
She sat up slowly, her body aching as though she'd run for miles. The memory of the plateau clung to her like smoke: the storm, the lightning, the feeling of roots growing stronger beneath her hands.
And Piccolo. The guardian who thought he had failed, learning that sometimes protection meant letting go.
She looked out the window. The moon hung higher now, its light spilling silver across her small apartment. For the first time in years, the sight didn't make her think of endings.
It made her think of endurance.
She cleaned up the spilled curry without complaint, her movements methodical, peaceful. When she was done, she made tea and sat at her small table, watching the moon continue its climb.
Somewhere across dimensions, she knew, others were watching too. Waiting for the next call. The next trial.
She was no longer afraid of it.
The earth had reminded her: she was strong not because she had survived loss, but because she had transformed it into love.
-
Later that night, when the house had settled into its quiet hours and the city hummed low beyond the glass, Bulma lay against the pillows, her mind circling the implications of what they'd learned. Three trials complete. Two remaining. The lattice growing stronger with each awakening.
Vegeta sat at the edge of the bed, still wearing his training clothes, watching the strip of moonlight crawl across the floor. He'd been quieter than usual since Piccolo's trial, his silence carrying a different quality. Not brooding, but contemplative.
"What do you miss most?" she asked quietly.
His head shifted a fraction. "Hn?"
"About being Saiyan. About what's gone."
For a long moment he said nothing. She thought he might ignore the question entirely. But then, in the dim light, his hand flexed once against the bedsheet.
"My tail," he said at last. The words were flat, but they carried weight like stones dropped into still water. "We are stronger without them. We can ascend to heights our people never even dreamed of. But the tail..." His voice dropped lower, became something closer to confession. "It was more than a weapon. It anchored us. To the moon, to our nature, to the old power that made us what we were."
He looked at her then, and for a moment, the mask of the Prince of All Saiyans slipped entirely.
"Without it, we are incomplete. The part of us that belongs to the wild, to the primal rage... it is gone. And I will never get it back."
The words hung between them, raw and unguarded. Bulma reached across the space, her fingers finding his wrist, then his hand. She didn't offer comfort or contradiction. She simply held the weight of his honesty.
"Maybe," she said softly, "that's exactly what Ka-Ra-Tat is meant to return."
Vegeta's eyes sharpened. He didn't respond, but his grip on her hand tightened slightly.
Above them, the moon continued its climb, bright and patient. The convergence was building toward something, and with each trial, the shape of it became clearer.
Three elements awakened. Two remained.
And in the space between dimensions, across the fabric of time itself, a warrior who had already carried the weight of two timelines felt the pull of a third calling.
Night 12 was ending. The trials were not.
Notes:
Hello, readers. It's been three months since I last updated Chronicles of Convergence, and I'll be honest, I nearly abandoned this story. The mythology I was building felt too complex, the pacing too slow, and I wasn't sure I could do justice to the convergence concept I'd started.
But this crossover has lived in my head for nearly thirty years. It was born from a childhood fascination with Dragon Ball's raw power and Sailor Moon's mystical transformation, and it crystallised after reading Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series. Le Guin's exploration of names that hold power, of identity forged through shadow and light, gave me the framework I needed to understand what Ka-Ra-Tat could become. It's not just a title, but a calling that returns what was lost rather than transcending it.
Something about that vision wouldn't let me give up on this story, so I decided to continue and give it the structure it deserves.
This chapter marks a turning point, not just in the story, but in my commitment to seeing it through. The earth trial explores themes of endurance and guardianship through Piccolo and Makoto, two characters who understand the weight of protecting others while carrying their own unhealed wounds.
Three elements have now awakened. Two remain. The blood moon approaches, and with it, the true test of what Ka-Ra-Tat means.
Thank you for your patience, and for those who are still here. Thank you for believing this story was worth saving. I promise to see it through to its conclusion. The convergence is not finished with us yet.
Bulmoose on Chapter 1 Tue 06 May 2025 12:10AM UTC
Comment Actions
iamakynge on Chapter 1 Tue 06 May 2025 07:01AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ninjaphile on Chapter 1 Wed 07 May 2025 12:11PM UTC
Comment Actions
iamakynge on Chapter 1 Thu 08 May 2025 09:37PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ninjaphile on Chapter 2 Thu 08 May 2025 11:48PM UTC
Comment Actions
iamakynge on Chapter 2 Fri 09 May 2025 07:15AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ninjaphile on Chapter 3 Tue 13 May 2025 07:01PM UTC
Comment Actions
iamakynge on Chapter 3 Tue 13 May 2025 09:45PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ninjaphile on Chapter 4 Mon 02 Jun 2025 05:43AM UTC
Comment Actions
iamakynge on Chapter 4 Mon 02 Jun 2025 07:30PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ninjaphile on Chapter 5 Sun 07 Sep 2025 07:15PM UTC
Comment Actions