Bulma sighed happily as she looked at the three dragonballs on the desk next to her bed. Their day had been fraught with danger, but successful. She rolled over on her side and tried to fall asleep. It was no use. She just couldn't get to sleep tonight. It must be the excitement of the dragonball hunt. Hmm... Perhaps a glass of water would help. She quietly got up and dressed, hovering above the ground so as not to make any noise and wake anyone up. It had been a tiring day, and everyone deserved a good night's rest. She left her room, glancing out the window as she left. The last glimmer of light was disappearing over the horizon outside.
Slowly she tiptoed down the hall toward the kitchen. She came across a strange door on the way, and she paused. "Odd," she thought. "I've never noticed this door before." Raichi and Zarkuro were laughing about something inside. She wasn't usually inclined to eavesdrop on people, but this door had awakened her curiosity, not to mention the fact that she found it unusual for Raichi and Zarkuro to be up at this hour. She opened the door just a crack and peered inside. She was amazed at what she saw. It was an immense room, filled with computers of all shapes and sizes. How in the world could she have missed this room?
"I'm a genius," she heard Zarkuro say. She couldn't see either of them. They were on the other side of the room. Suddenly two of the strangest-looking creatures Bulma had ever seen walked into her line of sight. Bulma was so startled that she nearly cried out aloud. They looked so hideous that she didn't know whether to run, or stay where she was. But what happened next rooted her to her spot out in the hall.
"So it's decided then," the shorter one said, with Raichi's voice. "Tomorrow I'll take them to the ice cavern and leave them there. Just don't kill them until I get back, okay? I want to watch!"
The shock of what she was hearing made Bulma's jaw drop. So these two frauds planned to kill her and her friends!
"Okay," the other one said with Zarkuro's voice. "But this time we'll definitely get them. They may have escaped the acid, the tornado, the plant-birds, and even the giant, but there's no way they'll make it out of the ice cavern alive!"
They laughed boisterously at that. Bulma seethed. She wanted very badly to just smash in there and blast those idiots to kingdom come, but she thought it would be wiser to tell Kuririn and Gohan first.
"Oh yeah!" Zarkuro said suddenly. "I forgot! We've got to go to that Bulma girl's room and get her dragon radar first. We'll need it when we finally get off this miserable planet. We'll take a trip to the real planet Namek and make our own wishes. How does that sound to you?"
"Splendid!" Raichi exclaimed. "Let's go!" Bulma got ready to dash toward her room for the dragon radar.
"Wait," Zarkuro said, stopping Raichi and causing Bulma to hesitate. "Let's wait awhile longer. Our hallucination ray is inoperative now, and if she wakes up we'll be discovered."
"All right," Raichi said impatiently. "I wish we didn't have to use light to power that thing. That stupid hallucination ray only works in the daytime."
"Well, from what I can make of their spaceship," Zarkuro said happily, "they've worked out an ingenious way of using salt water as a fuel source. So that ship will work any time we want it to."
"Provided you still remember the Namek phrases you need to pilot it," Raichi replied anxiously.
"Don't worry," Zarkuro said proudly. "I still remember everything I drained from that foolish girl's brain. I'll be able to pilot that ship as well as she did."
"I hope not!" Raichi chuckled. "Or we might crash and someone will be sneaking peeks at OUR thoughts while WE'RE unconscious!" They laughed hysterically at that. Bulma was furious. She had heard enough. As quietly as she could, considering how angry she was, she stormed back towards Kuririn's room.
"Kuririn!" Bulma barked. "Get up! We've got some butt to kick!"
"Bulma!" Kuririn protested, reluctantly allowing Bulma to roll him off the bed. "I was having a really great dream! What's your problem? Why'd you wake me up?"
It took Bulma a few minutes to get Kuririn up to speed, and when she'd finally convinced him that she wasn't insane, he said that Gohan should know about all this. Bulma agreed, and she left Kuririn to go tell Gohan while she went back to her room to pack her things. They were definitely going to leave after this was over. There was no way Bulma was going to give those two ingrates a chance to get their slimy mitts on the controls of her ship!
In no time at all she had everything ready to go. She was just packing her dragon radar when she looked at the dragonballs on her desk. Suddenly she realized that they weren't really dragonballs. They were nothing but rocks! She took out her dragon radar and turned it on. There was no signal! Raichi and Zarkuro's hallucination ray must have caused her to see the signal before, but it couldn't fool her now. She stuffed the dragon radar in her last bag and capsulized them all. She had just put her box of capsules in her pocket when she heard a commotion down the hall. She flung open her door just in time to see Kuririn and Gohan knock Raichi and Zarkuro senseless to the floor.
"Hey!" She said in mock anger. "I can't believe you didn't wait for me! Hmph! Some friends you are!" They laughed. Kuririn explained to her that they had seen Raichi and Zarkuro heading to her room and weren't sure if it would be a good idea to let them barge in on her.
"What?" Bulma cried indignantly. "I could easily have handled these two! Why, their ki was so low that I barely even felt it! You two don't give me any credit."
"Actually," Gohan said, grinning, "we were more afraid that you would kill them. You do have a bit of a temper, Bulma."
"Maybe so, but I doubt that I would have killed them," she said, not quite sure if her reply was completely accurate. "I've got more sense than that, you know."
"Come on," Kuririn said. "It's not doing us any good fighting. I say we go get the ship and get off this stupid planet."
"You won't be going anywhere," Zarkuro said feebly, struggling to rise.
Bulma whirled around. "And just what are you going to do about it?" She said angrily.
Zarkuro laughed weakly, finally getting to his feet. "I won't have to do anything," he said. Raichi began to stir.
"What are you talking about?" Kuririn asked. "Why else wouldn't we be able to leave?"
"The stellar winds will keep you here," Zarkuro replied, with a fiendish grin. "If you try to fly your ship through the stellar winds surrounding this planet, you'll only lose control of your ship like you did when you crashed earlier."
"That's right," Raichi said, as he stumbled to his feet. "You three are doomed to spend the rest of your lives on this miserable planet, just like us."
"Oh, really?" Bulma said, folding her arms. "Is that so? Well, then tell me this: if that's true, then just what exactly were you two planning on doing with our ship? Come clean you two. I heard everything. You're planning to take our ship to Namek. So how were you going to escape the stellar winds?"
Raichi and Zarkuro were quite taken aback by this. They hadn't suspected that they'd been heard. Zarkuro clenched his fists, if you could call them fists.
"Nothing you could do would make me tell you that," he retorted. Raichi nodded his head in agreement.
"Wanna bet?" Bulma said menacingly. She created a rather small but bright energy ball and held it high above her head.
"Now," she said sternly. "Speak! Or you won't have to worry about what the rest of your life on this miserable planet will be like!"
They could see that Bulma was serious. They stepped back a couple of paces in fear.
"Tell her, Zarkuro!" Raichi demanded, quaking nervously. "Do you want to die?!"
"All right!" Zarkuro yelled, shaking just as violently. "All right! The stellar winds are made of charged particles sent out from this planet's closest star. Those particles create intense magnetic fields around everything they come in contact with. It would be useless to pilot any kind of ship through them. However, every few days, groups of small holes appear in the stream of particles. They're hard to see, but your ship's tracking system could easily detect them if you programmed it to search for the neutral spots in the magnetic fields. There's always a few of them that just appear at random, but the most favorable time for big groups of them will probably occur sometime tomorrow."
"That's why you planned to do us in tomorrow, isn't it?" Bulma asked. Raichi nodded. Bulma let the globe of energy dissipate.
"Come on, guys," she said, turning to leave. "We're outta here. I don't want to spend another minute with these morons."
"No!" Zarkuro shouted. Bulma turned back around. "You can't leave us here," he pleaded.
"You know," she began, shaking her head. "It's sad. But we would willingly have taken you with us in the beginning if you had only asked. But instead you tried to kill us and steal our ship. And because of that we can't trust you, and you'll have to stay behind." She motioned for Kuririn and Gohan to follow her, and she walked out the door.
Kuririn, Gohan, and Bulma walked outside and headed for the shed - which turned out to be nothing more than a makeshift shack that looked like it might topple over at the slightest hint of a breeze. They rushed in to find that the ship was in perfect condition.
"Well, here's one thing that we didn't hallucinate," Bulma grumbled, checking the thrusters again. "They repaired the ship all right. I guess they wanted to make sure they'd get away with it."
"Bulma," Kuririn said nervously. "We'd better leave as soon as possible. Raichi and Zarkuro could come out here at any minute."
"Oh, I'm sure they will," Bulma said, hopping down from the thruster panel. "I'm also sure that they'd rather sabotage the ship than allow us to get away with it. But you shouldn't worry, Kuririn. I'm sure that any one of us could defeat those two in a heartbeat."
"Freeze!" Raichi yelled suddenly. Bulma glanced at Raichi and Zarkuro, standing in the doorway. They were both armed with ray blasters of some kind.
"Care to do the honors again, guys?" Bulma asked Kuririn and Gohan, almost feeling sorry for the two dimwit aliens.
Kuririn and Gohan glanced at each other and nodded. They charged at Raichi and Zarkuro so quickly that there wasn't even time for one shot to fire. Bulma just shook her head as Gohan and Kuririn knocked Raichi and Zarkuro out with one swift blow to each one's head. In no time the two aliens were lying prone on the ground, just as before.
"Piccolo!" Bulma called out. The platform began to lower from the bottom of the ship. "Come on, guys," she said. "Time to go!" Kuririn and Gohan hopped up onto the platform, and they went up into the ship.
"Buckle up quick," Bulma said, sitting in her chair. "After I program the real Namek's coordinates back into the ship's main computer, we're taking off!"
She quickly fixed her program glitches and reloaded their destination's coordinates into the main computer. "Here we go!" She said, and gave the computer the command for blastoff. They took off immediately, ripping apart the shed/shack as they ascended.
Bulma turned the tracking system on. "Hang on, guys," she warned. "I don't know how rough our ride outta here is going to be, but I'll do my best. Let's just pray that the ship finds me a good neutral area to fly through."
She waited until the tracking system locked on to a good, solid hole in the magnetic fields above them. She told the ship's computer to fly straight for it. Instantly the ship bolted for the heavens. They were flying at tremendous speed.
"We're gonna make it!" Bulma exclaimed to herself. "We're gonna make it!"
Suddenly the computer warned that the hole was beginning to lose its stability. Bulma started to panic. There was five seconds before they broke through the winds, and no more hope of stopping themselves in time.
She grit her teeth and prayed with all her might for the hole to stay open. Three seconds left........ two........ one........ Bulma looked at the computer and saw the hole shrink to the size of a pixel on the monitor, just as they broke through!
Shaking with relief, Bulma pulled the ship onto its flight path, and turned on the autopilot.
"We made it," she said weakly. "We'll reach Namek in four days." Her exhaustion finally caught up with her as Kuririn and Gohan whooped for joy. She drifted off to sleep smiling. Maybe now things would have a chance to turn out right!
