Liam started with Namek.
He talked about Goku returning to Earth and encountering a teenage boy from the future who arrived in a time machine and cut Mecha Frieza in half without ceremony or conversation. He talked about Dr. Gero, the grudge assembled in a basement over decades, the twins who wore its results so casually it looked like a personality. He talked about Cell: first form, second form, the complete form, and the boy who carried more power than anyone had expected having to use all of it in one afternoon in front of an audience, with his father burning his remaining life to deliver a single moment of clarity from the Other World.
Bulma listened without interrupting.
He kept going. Seven years of quiet. A tournament. An old pink catastrophe that took a simple narrative about fighting and asked it some questions it wasn't prepared for.
He talked until Buu was finished, and a little past that, until ten years had passed in the story and the world had settled into something resembling peace.
Bulma was watching him. "That's not everything," she said. "What are you sitting on?"
Liam considered the ethics of this for a moment, then gave in.
"After the comic ended, the official property released a sequel. Dragon Ball Super. I didn't follow it closely because the execution was poor."
"Define poor."
"Goku." He stopped. Restarted. "In the Buu arc, Goku had earned a specific kind of wisdom. He'd died twice, trained in the Other World, watched his son carry the weight he left behind, and made peace with stepping back. There was a quality of someone who understood proportion. Dragon Ball Super apparently decided that quality was an error to be corrected and turned him into someone whose defining characteristic was not understanding what kissing was, despite being the father of two sons."
Bulma raised an eyebrow.
"I am being completely accurate," Liam said. "Vegeta, who had one of the most interesting character trajectories in the original, got flattened into a type. The writers understood 'pride' and understood 'family man' and could not figure out how to hold both at the same time, so they alternated. It looked like someone doing an impression of Vegeta rather than writing him."
Bulma laughed, genuinely, the laugh of someone who found the situation funnier because she had skin in it.
"You have strong feelings about my husband's fictional counterpart."
"I apologize."
"Don't. He is, in many ways, a bastard." She waved the cigarette. "Though I'm curious about the fictional version."
"There's a version of him who does something genuinely extraordinary in the Buu arc," Liam said. "He earns it. It cost the writers something to write it. That's the version I have feelings about."
She studied him, something calculating in her expression.
"The comic you're describing," she said. "Does this conversation exist in it?"
Liam opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"No," he said.
"Then there's your answer." She patted his cheek, once, lightly, the way you'd reassure someone who had just discovered something startling. "Human consciousness, where it originates and what it actually is, the scientific community does not have a clean answer. I barely have a time machine and I'm not done yet. If your version of our world is being drawn by someone who isn't the original author, the projection will blur. The essential shape stays close to true but the detail drifts. Goku becomes a simplification of Goku." She exhaled. "The original author's hand is closely connected to the source. A different hand can only approximate." She tapped ash off the edge of the Lookout. "Don't look for exact correspondence. Look for the shape."
Liam sat with this.
It was a more comfortable framework than the alternative, which was that somewhere above his own world, something equally indifferent was drawing equally approximate versions of him.
"You've already thought through all of this," he said.
"I've had years and a failing war," Bulma said. "You think about time and fate a great deal under those conditions." She stretched, standing, forty-six years old and carrying it without performance. "What are you laughing at?"
"I always assumed, from the outside, that you and Goku would end up together." He managed to say it without inflection. "Then his son turned four. Then a seventeen-year-old arrived from the future and his father was Vegeta, which was genuinely unexpected."
"Haha." She smiled openly, without embarrassment. "Your ship sank. I'm sorry."
"I'm getting over it."
She'd had a moment, when she was young, a brief reconsideration that had passed the way most reconsidered things passed, without ceremony and without regret. She didn't have the habit of getting stuck on what hadn't happened.
Akane descended from wherever she'd been hovering and landed on Liam's shoulder with the delicate weight of approximately nothing.
"Master. Comics. What does that mean? What were you talking about?"
"When we get back," Liam said, "search for Dragon Ball. Or ask your sister to buy the physical volumes. Start from volume one."
He said it and immediately found the thought interesting. The Hunter World had its own Dragon Ball manga. It had most of the things his old world had: One Piece, Naruto, a basketball comic he'd spent his middle school years devoted to, a mystery series that had been running since before he was born and would presumably continue after everyone currently alive had died.
It had Yoshihiro Togashi's work too, of course.
Liam walked a circuit of the Lookout's edge and arrived back where he'd started.
Bulma was still standing there, doing nothing in particular, which was apparently a rare enough state that it looked unfamiliar on her. The research trailer had been capsulized and pocketed. Roshi and Mr. Popo were in the flower garden having a conversation about soil drainage. There was nothing useful to do until Gohan and Trunks came back out of the Time Chamber.
"You want to watch Piccolo's fight," Liam said.
"Very much."
"Korin Tower has a water-viewing basin. You can observe the lower world through it."
Bulma turned to look at him. "How do you know that?"
"Same way I know everything." He held out his arm. "Hold on."
She hooked her arms around his neck, casual and practical, and Liam stepped off the Lookout.
They fell.
The wind hit immediately, enormous and loud, and Liam opened his aura into it. The transmutation worked the way it always worked: resistance became propulsion, friction became direction, the howling air that should have been an obstacle folded itself into something collaborative. He wasn't flying in any technical sense. He was falling with opinions.
The tower came up beneath them, and he spiraled in, bled off speed in a controlled spiral, and landed on the tower roof with Bulma still attached and her hair needing some attention.
She smoothed it down, looked at him, and said nothing about the experience. This was the correct response.
Korin was licking his paw when they came inside. He looked at them with the specific patience of someone who had seen everything several times already.
"Follow me," he said, and pointed his staff downward.
Three floors below, in a room that served primarily as storage for things that had accumulated over centuries of residence, there was a wooden basin, knee-high, fitted with a lid. Korin removed the lid. Clear water sat in it, rippling faintly from the draft of their entry.
"Fix someone clearly in your mind," Korin said. "Look at the surface."
Liam and Bulma leaned over it.
The water went still. Then the still surface filled with something, the way a photograph develops, edges first, then the center. A street in a ruined city, dust and broken stone, the familiar rubble-landscape of an Earth that had been worked over methodically for years.
Piccolo.
The bottom half of him was still upright, standing on the ground with a quality of baffled structural stubbornness. His upper half was ten meters behind it, on its back, purple blood running from the cross-section in steady pulses.
Bulma made a small, sharp sound.