"No. Good night." Slamming the door to my apartment in Goku, Chichi, and Bulma's faces, I barely managed to pull my shirt off as I strode across the living room before collapsing onto the couch in my front room, too tired to even make it to my bedroom, despite the fact that I'd been dodging Tater at full throttle mere minutes ago. Benefits of a Saiyan physiology. One can run full tilt, all out, for several days straight, but when we dropped, we dropped.
When I woke up the next morning, sunlight streamed through my bedroom window, and Lynn was pulling her shirt on, from the spares that she kept in her drawer of my dresser. The sound from the drawer opening must've been what woke me up, but I didn't mind. Based on the angle of the sun, this was at least a few hours later than when I normally woke, anyway.
Lynn must've just come back from her morning gardening.
Over the last few months, since I'd had my growth spurt, she and Pepper had been spending more and more nights over in my apartment, rather than their own. As a result, most of the girls' clothes had found their way into my dresser and closet.
It was starting to seriously grate on my self-control, but I apparently didn't hold veto power, so there wasn't much I could do.
At least the girls had been kind enough to pull my shoes off and carry me into the actual bed, rather than leaving me to sleep on the couch last night.
I yawned, rolling to the edge of the bed as Lynn sat down to pull her shoes on. "Hey, Tarble. You're up." She noted.
"Yeah, where's Pepper?" I asked, half-leaning against Lynn's back lazily, still a bit groggy.
"Well… Probably in the kitchen. She decided to try cooking lunch for us. I think she started about an hour ago." Lynn remembered.
"Euoh…" I recoiled. Pepper was great. A real ray of sunshine, but when she learned that the Fire Eaters liked her cooking, she thought that meant that she could cook for humans, too.
Could she, though?
Remember: Fire Eaters didn't really have taste buds. They just tasted heat levels. The hotter, the better. Lava was their favorite meal.
Yeah, Pepper burnt everything that she tried to prepare. It was a rather impressive, almost physics-defying ability.
"Please tell me that you helped her." I pleaded.
"Sorry. She just asked me to finish up my morning gardening early so that she could focus on cooking. I just got back." Lynn explained.
"And what's distracting Pepper from cooking, then?" I wondered.
When Lynn explained, I found myself face-palming.
A few minutes later, I walked into my apartment's little kitchen, where several dishes were burning,
A little boy with a tail was in the room with Pepper, sort-of conversing with her. "So, why can't you give us the Dragon Ball?"
"Because Tarble said no." Pepper replied instantly, without even looking from the… was that supposed to be soup?
"But why did Tarble say no?"
"Because I'm sure he had a reason."
"You could let us have it while he's sleeping, though. He doesn't have to know." Kakarot replied. Sneaky little brat. I was kind of surprised to hear a version of Goku say something so underhanded, but then I remembered that this version had been raised by Roshi since he was little. Underhanded tactics were just normal tactics, but a bit more devious, to that old man.
"Ask Tater what happened the last time someone ignored Tarble's advice. It's a no." Pepper told the kid.
"But it's just one dragon ball! We collected all the others, can't we just have that one last one!?"
"No."
"But why not?!"
"Because Tarble said no."
It felt nice that the girls trusted my decision making with stuff like that… If only they respected my boundaries half as much as they trusted my leadership skills and ability to prevent crises.
Ahh, impossible dreams of Pepper and Lynn not monitoring my daily schedule and forcing me to go to bed early when I spent too much time in the lab…
Too bad this was reality.
…
The whole story came out pretty quickly after that. Apparently, when I'd gone to sleep, Bulma had not been happy about my blunt rejection. Instantly, she'd started complaining adamantly about how much time and effort that she'd gone through to collect the other Dragon Balls, making it seem like she'd dodged death over and over again, hundreds of times, just to collect the six orbs she had.
She then went on to assert that she had a right to the final one that Tater had given me long ago because he hadn't had any use for it.
Naturally, she didn't have any right to them. Whatever her use for them was going to be, it'd probably not be much better than the original first wish, in the alternate timeline where Oolong had been granted a nice, comfortable pair of useless underwear.
A wish that had later been the foundation behind the creation of one of the Shadow Dragons in GT, something that, according to Guru, was only extremely unlikely, a difficult scenario to engineer. Not completely impossible.
Which meant that, with Earth's canonical luck, meant that even if we actively did our best to stay away from wishing our problems away with the Dragon Balls, we'd still eventually see Shadow Dragons almost exactly one tier higher than our maximum power level formed during our lifetimes.
But, not knowing (or understanding) any of that, Bulma had managed to pull Chichi and Kakarot to her side. I didn't blame them. To them, the dragon balls were basically just toys with unlimited versatility. Kakarot and Bulma really had a pretty nice adventure collecting them. Leaving without a wish probably felt really suckish.
As such, she'd managed to convince Chichi to help her try to sneak into my apartment and steal it themselves. Kakarot, knowing how stupid that was when you were in a village full of martial artists all capable of one-shotting even him, warned them against it, but they didn't listen.
So, after getting caught, the two girls had been thrown into 'Pepper's Corner', the closest thing this village had to a jailhouse.
And with no other options, since fighting and stealth would both be entirely useless, Kakarot had fallen back onto the only tried and true method he knew to get what he wanted: Diplomacy through annoyance.
At the very least, it was getting him further than the girls' attempt, but Pepper (surprisingly) hadn't quite cracked yet.