Dragon Ball Z: The Core

"Toby!" I screamed as I watched the truck bear down on my little brother like an unstoppable force. Not thinking, I ran out into the street as fast as I could and shoved Toby out of the way. The next thing I knew, there was a bright light and voices that weren't quite in focus all around me. Slowly, the world came into focus.

"Chichi, they're perfect."

Chichi? Goku's wife from Dragon Ball? As the world came into focus, I realized that I recognized the two faces in front of me. They really were Goku and Chichi from Dragon Ball. Chichi looked young, like early twenties young. So this would probably be about the time that Gohan was born? But it's real?  Does that mean I've been reborn as Gohan?

"WHAAAAA!!!" My thoughts were interrupted by a baby crying. Not me, but I couldn't see the one who was crying.

"It's okay, little… Goku! We need to name our babies!"

"Alright, alright, Chichi. I promise that I'll think about names… After I train."

"Goku!!! Don't you dare leave me alone with two babies!"

He, Ox King, and Chichi ended up naming us Gohan and Hanna. But I learned some things.  One, I had been born not as Gohan, but as his twin sister, and two, this was definitely the Dragon Ball universe, and Chichi was no less annoying in reality than she was in the stories.

Luckily for me, I had the canon for Dragon Ball memorized from near constant watching as a child. TV raised me more than my own parents did.

I also had every training method that they ever used committed to memory, and I had dozens of theories on how Ki worked, that wasn't explained properly in the shows, and how I could become far stronger than anyone else in Dragon Ball history, given enough time.

The unfortunate thing was that I only had four years until the events from the movie Dead Zone would start, and Chichi wasn't going to let Goku train me at all, so I'd have to figure out how to tap into my ki all by myself, and I'd have to become strong enough to make up for my lack of martial arts experience in the next four years.

Being a Saiyan baby made my ki incredibly easy to tap. Unfortunately, I wasn't Gohan.

Even though I could tap into my ki, and I had a lot of it due to me being half-saiyan, my hidden potential was leagues behind Gohan's.. Even surging my energy as hard as I could didn't impress dad(Goku) at all, at least at first.

As I grew up, I spent almost all of my time training my ki.

I had flight down pat before my first month, and I could throw energy before my first birthday. Of course, I hid most of this from my parents. Chichi would never develop a good sense for power control, and dad was pretty easy to fool, too, so long as I didn't show my power blatantly in front of him. As a result, I learned to hide my ki rather well by the time Gohan learned to speak fluently.

Unfortunately, once Gohan's 'merit scholar' personality developed, I became Chichi's 'wild child.' Dad and Grandpa's aloof personalities helped a little bit, but most of my time became 'run from Chichi' time. My training noticeably slowed, but I could still feel myself getting a little stronger every day.

I wanted to try some of the advanced techniques that Dad learns over the course of the series, like Kaioken, and the Instant transmission technique, but I quickly gave up on those due to their difficulty. 

From what I learned, there were three things that went into strength, and they were all interconnected.

There was physical strength, which was the easiest thing for dad to increase. The more physically strong you were, the more ki you could hold inside it without killing yourself.

The second thing was the amount of ki you had. This would increase the more you used it, and it wasn't just limited to obvious things, either. Basically, anything that expended stamina in any way, shape, or form increased the amount of ki you had, but it wasn't really as simple as just constantly throwing punches at full strength like dad did.

The third and last component of 'strength' was ki control. The better your control was, the more ki you could store, even if your body wasn't up to par, and the more efficiently you could use it.

By that logic, the most efficient way to increase your base strength would be to cause as much damage to yourself as possible using your ki in an intensely meditative state. It was actually kind of similar to the Kaioken technique, in fact.

I wondered quite a few times if Instant Transmission and the Kaioken were the reasons that Dad's future strength would naturally grow at a faster rate than Vegeta's, even in three hundred times gravity in the future.

To explain the reason that I couldn't use the techniques, I'll explain the principles behind the two techniques as I understand them. The Kaioken essentially squeezes the energy out of your body, enhancing the rate at which the matter in your system turns into energy.

By doing so, you're essentially converting your physical body into pure ki. That was why the technique was so dangerous. I could squeeze out a little bit, but I couldn't use it past about a 20% rise in strength without it causing intense pain.

Meanwhile, I'd completely given up on ever using the Instant Transmission that dad learns later, since it converts your entire body into light photons temporarily, to allow you to travel outside of conventional space, rather than through it.

Basically, as intelligent light, you were able to 'break' space in a small manner, literally teleporting across space at an incredibly low cost. From there, you could use your ability to sense ki as a sort of GPS, so that you didn't end up trapped outside of space.

I wasn't ever going to be able to replicate that, no matter how hard I trained. Even with the help of the masters, and the Kaioken already mastered, my crazy savant dad took years to learn it, after all.