Dragon Ball: Paradise Lost

Chayote In The Land Of Giants

Chayote stared at the random panel of her spaceship computer that announced the signal of yet another Dragon Ball being caught within the range of the ship's radar. It would take significant willpower to not smash something important to pieces when the blasted thing continued to croak its song until the ship landed on the planet that the ball was meant to be in.

This time the ship directed Chayote to a planet lush with green shades, like a proud space emerald hazy with white fluff all over that was the planet's clouds. It was tough to say much about a planet from just this much detail but given how the planet was approaching the edge of the Frieza Army colonization range, it might have been just a couple of years away from being either modernized or wiped out.

Chayote observed the tall forests of the planet very carefully. While the familiar landscape invited nausea and frustration deep in her gut while reminding her of Planet Beiko she landed on earlier, this planet didn't look to share the lemon skies of Beiko, quite the opposite, it seemed to be a living, natural paradise. Blue skies, lush forests that did not require rich leafage to drown it in shade. It reminded Chayote a lot of jungles found on Earth. Supersized, of course...

A massive bee took off when Chayote's pod landed beside the flower it was drinking from. While initially there appeared to not be anything wrong with that scenario, once Chayote closed in to both the flower and the bee she realized the reason why this paradise wasn't colonized – the flower seemed easily to be the same size as her spaceship and the bee was truthfully large enough to be like dogs found on Earth.

"Accessing records from nearby space stations... Transferring data..." the ship's computer began running down the vast array of processes it ran through. Dr. Brief had installed all sorts of functions into the spaceship, he had its systems hack into the records of nearby space stations for information on the planets Chayote visited while the spaceship took soil samples and various atmosphere and temperature measurements.

The only part of that process Chayote cared about was the part where she didn't have to do anything for all that to happen. If Dr. Brief wanted a horseback ride off of Chayote's progress, he was free to have it as long as Chayote didn't need to do anything other than fight or eat.

A thud of shaking sensations forced the Saiyan to turn around. Just in time to notice a rushing beetle that had his horn down and was ready to ram Chayote's spaceship while it worked its scientific magic. The Saiyan cursed quietly and took off.

"Damn it, my spaceship's not your dung ball!" she yelled out, kicking the beetle in the front of its head and forcing it to shake, flip over and begin spasms in its six feet while it breathed its last. Chayote wondered if perhaps this thing was edible, she could only live off of space paste for so long...

The specifics of preparing gigantic space beetles were lost on the Saiyan girl. She just sort of flung pieces of it she managed to rip off atop of the roasting flames and then picked them up to eat once she thought they were okay. The first time she tried it, Chayote almost threw up when body-temperature protein goop ran down her mouth instead of what she had assumed would be meaty. While the beetle could have used fifteen good minutes of cooking, what it did was scare Chayote off of eating bugs ever again.

This experience wasted not only the supersized body of a dead space beetle but also Chayote's time as well. The Saiyan looked into her spaceship while it ran through its calculations and downloaded information and pulled out the handheld Dragon Radar. Shit would hit the fan if she ever realized her promise to smash the computer system of the ship, annoyed by the irksome detection noise. The Dragon Radar would stop functioning, leaving her to roam each and every planet in search of Dragon Balls. Being over a week into her quest already, it would take Chayote a mandatory trip home and whoever knew how long more until Dr. Brief fixes the radar...