Nimbus hit its ceiling somewhere below the top of Korin Tower.
The cloud slowed, drifted, and stopped with a quality of polite refusal, the way a well-behaved vehicle declines to drive off a cliff. The tower continued upward without it, and Kami's Lookout was still somewhere above the clouds.
They jumped off onto the upper platform of the tower.
A white cat sat on the railing, leaning on a gnarled wooden staff, watching them land with the patient expression of someone who had lived for several centuries and was not particularly startled by unannounced visitors. He looked at Gohan with the focused attention of recognition.
"You have your father's face," Korin said.
Akane materialized on his nose before anyone could react. She crouched there like an extremely small gargoyle, examining him at close range.
Korin looked at Liam. His whiskers moved slightly, some old instinct cataloguing what his senses were telling him and finding no matching category.
"The Lookout is higher," Korin said, pointing his staff upward. "Mr. Popo lives there."
Gohan leaned over the edge and looked up. Then he looked at Liam.
"Can you fly?"
"Not in any way that would impress you," Liam said honestly.
So Gohan hooked Liam's arm over his shoulder, Akane grabbed hold from the other side, and Gohan said a quick farewell to Korin. Then his aura spiked, white-hot and enormous, and they left the tower behind like it was standing still.
Liam paid attention to the energy as they moved. It was worth studying. In principle, it was the same category of thing as Nen, life energy shaped by will and training. But the texture was different. Nen, at its root, was a Transmutation-type base, malleable and personal, shaped by the individual's nature and restrictions. Gohan's ki had a different character, older somehow, less defined by rules and more by sheer accumulated force.
Interesting, in the way that comparing two languages was interesting. The grammar was completely different, but they were both saying things.
They arrived at the Lookout in the time it took Liam to finish the thought.
The Lookout was a vast dish of pale stone suspended in the sky above the clouds, a platform the size of a small town, serene and isolated and untouched. The air up here was different. Quieter. The quality of light had changed.
Mr. Popo was watering the flower beds.
He wore a white turban. His skin was the deep black of polished coal. His eyes, when he looked up, were empty in the way that very old things were sometimes empty, as if whatever they contained had moved past the need for ordinary expression. He looked at Gohan first, then at Liam, then at the air where Akane hovered.
"Son Gohan," he said. "You look like your father."
Gohan bowed. "Mr. Popo. I'm sorry to arrive unannounced."
Liam released Jade. Two pulses of light dropped to the stone, and Bulma and Trunks were back. Trunks turned a complete circle, taking in the sky in every direction, the absolute absence of ground, the clouds below them. Bulma crushed a cigarette butt that had somehow survived the transition and tucked the debris into her pocket out of habit.
She looked at Mr. Popo and stopped.
"I remember you," she said. "After Vegeta's attack. We were all in the hospital with no way off the planet, and you just appeared and handed us a spaceship. You also taught me Namekian."
"Long time no see," Mr. Popo said. His voice carried something heavier than the words.
"Mom knows him?" Trunks looked between them.
"Gohan should remember too." Bulma managed a smile. "It was a long time ago."
"Now even Kami is gone," Mr. Popo said. "I have been here alone."
Liam walked to the edge of the Lookout while they were catching up. He leaned on the railing and looked out over nothing. According to everything he knew about this place, Kami and Mr. Popo could observe every living being on Earth from up here. The entire surface, visible as if proximity meant nothing.
All Liam could see was clouds.
He supposed that was probably about divine authority rather than altitude.
Akane landed on his shoulder, turning slowly to look at everything with the joy of someone encountering the impossible for the third time in one day and still finding it interesting.
"Your Butterfly Hatsu," Liam said. "Is it consuming aura continuously, or did it only cost energy at the start?"
She frowned, tilting her head. Processing. "It feels like it's been running all along. But I'm not tired. So maybe it only used energy at the beginning? It's strange. I can't quite tell from inside it."
"You developed a Specialization Hatsu," Liam said. "The fact that you don't understand it is completely expected."
"What is this place, really? Is it a different world entirely?"
"I still want to know that myself."
Bulma called them back.
She was spreading her hands in the universal gesture of someone delivering mixed news efficiently. "Mr. Popo can't contact the Other World. Only a god can do that directly." She paused. "The good news is that the facilities here are intact. The space is enormous. I can set up a laboratory and start the S-Cell research right now."
"And the Hyperbolic Time Chamber is still here," Gohan said. He said it the way someone names a last option that has just become their first option. "When Aunt Bulma has results, Trunks and I can go in. One year inside, one day outside."
Bulma was already rummaging through her capsule case. She found the one she wanted, threw it onto the pale stone, and stepped back. It detonated into a research trailer roughly the size of a bus, fitted with equipment that had no business traveling in a capsule. She peered through the window, made a small satisfied sound, and began rolling up her sleeves.
Mr. Popo continued apologizing quietly. He was thorough about it, the way only someone who genuinely cared and genuinely couldn't help would be.
"Only gods," he said. "Only gods can travel to the Other World and return. Mr. Popo is very sorry."
"Then we'll just have to find one somewhere else," said a voice from above.
Everyone looked up.
A small old woman descended from the sky on a floating crystal ball, pointed hat, face like an incredibly well-preserved piece of ancient leather, eyes sharp and amused and working. She looked at the group below her with the expression of someone who had just won a bet with herself.
"Fortuneteller Baba," Gohan said.
"I was playing cards in the Other World when something told me to look up." She touched down, crystal ball bobbing gently, and fixed her gaze on Liam. The gaze had weight to it. It stayed on him longer than was comfortable. "A premonition. I saw the future, and it had changed. The one who saves this world isn't the one I expected."
Trunks straightened up. "There's a savior? Then where are they? Why haven't they come?"
Liam kept his expression neutral.
He knew exactly who the savior was. A twelve-year-old boy standing right there, who would in a few years watch his teacher die, inherit a time machine, travel to a different past, and arrive in a stranger's history carrying a sword and a warning. The young man who had cut Mecha Frieza in half without blinking and then calmly asked for Goku.
Trunks, asking where the savior was, while being the savior.
The universe had a very specific sense of humor.
Baba's gaze moved off Liam, slowly, and settled on Son Gohan.
"As for choosing a new god," she said, and her grin pulled deeper lines into an already complicated face, "don't look around wondering who's suitable. Your father was offered the position and turned it down. Now it seems it's his son's turn to inherit the debt." She cackled. "Son Gohan. How does 'new guardian of Earth' sound to you?"