Bulma was quite certain that the demonic mauve aardvark dancing polka and playing the bagpipes on her nose was yet another product of her over-taxed, sleeping super-mind, much like she hoped the blaring noise that she suspected was her alarm clock announcing that tomorrow was already upon her happened to actually be something she was not perceiving.  She tightened the straps binding her logic to its bed—“I don’t want to get up and stumble upon the latest cataclysm Vegeta has so thoughtfully left for me to clean up, so you just stay right there,” she told it—and engaged the aardvark in a wonderful conversation on various quandaries that were perplexing the great physicists of the world.  “Maybe,” she thought, “he can resolve the befuddling dispute the aluminum cow and I had last night over the Higgs-Boson.”

    “Is that what I think it is?  That is so cool!”

    The rather rude wail sent the aardvark fleeing into the fading depths of her dream world and horrid, alarmed feelings of dread crashing into the place it had hastily vacated.  She knew that terrible sound hadn’t been imagined because she was quite cognizant that she wasn’t having a nightmare, and since such awful things were prohibited by her from entering her happy dreams, she made the deduction.

    “Oh, Kami, please don’t let there be another Armageddon Warning in effect.”  She disgustedly contemplated on how that situation would affect her day; she’d have an awful time bringing all the flowers indoors before the nuclear winter set in.  “It would be so nice to not wake up to this every single morning,” she muttered, hoping that her men would take that comment to heart, but knowing very well that they probably couldn’t hear her over the sirens and explosions she was expecting to wake-up to, yet again.

    She anxiously climbed out of bed to tend to the sights that dawn was unveiling.  She didn’t smell any smoke as she put her slippers on, which was always a good sign; there could be no fires or explosions without smoke.  A million other calamities could be in progress, though, and the temporary pebble of hope that she had stumbled upon became worthless as visions of bodies strewn across city streets and radioactive fallout tumbling out of glowing green clouds crowded her head.

    “I hope it’s nothing that’s punishable by death; I really don’t want to have to go through that with the judge anymore this year.  I’m just too old for it now.”

    She deeply inhaled, swallowed hard, and thrust the bedroom curtains aside, inviting the light of the rising sun to blind her eyes, maybe, she thought, generously preventing her from having to see what was going on.

    “Please don’t let there be any new craters, please don’t let there be any new craters, please don’t let there be…” she prayed until her eyes adjusted to the luminescence and she began begging herself to really not be seeing, “Piccolo handing Vegeta one of those!  Oh, Kami, no!”

    Vegeta heard his wife screaming inside and therefore looked up at her through the window—beating her head against one of the bedroom walls—with a contented smile.

    “What’s wrong with her?” Piccolo asked—although he very well knew the answer from last time.  He experienced a wonderful warmth within his heart as he gazed with subdued pleasure.

    “Oh, she’s just getting ready for the day,” Vegeta amusedly replied.  “That convinces her that she isn’t dead yet.”

    “Oh…how…odd…” Piccolo stated, masking his excitement as confusion.  Then Piccolo spoke, almost distractedly and absent mindedly, as if he wanted to quickly resume his business but first needed to dispatch a meddlesome bother: “Here’s a B-52 for you to play with, Vegeta.”

    “Wow!” Trunks exclaimed, beaming as only an adolescent boy with sugar for blood and enough power in any given finger to wipe out several billion people could.

    The boy instantly plunged into an enormous pit of hyperactivity as his assumption was proven true and his fantasies proven possible.  He shed a tear of excitement as Piccolo, captivated by Bulma’s continued attempt to demolish the wall with her skull, handed Vegeta the monstrous Boeing war machine free of any concern, absolutely oblivious to the horror he was unleashing on the world or too happy to worry.  Bulma’s derangement was more entertaining than he had imagined, and certainly worth giving Vegeta a little toy to see.

    “Piccolo, you do realize that you scare me?” Vegeta asked.  “A lot?”

    “I sure do,” Piccolo automatically answered with gaiety, still gleefully watching Bulma rhythmically collide with the wall.

    With a quiver in his throat and staring eyes elatedly locked on the megatons of havoc attached to the bestial Stratofortress, Trunks asked, “Where do you get them, Mister awesome Piccolo, Sir?”

    “You don’t want to know where, how, or why,” Piccolo said, somewhat annoyed that Trunks had interrupted his fabulous enthrallment but detectably angry that the woman had ceased to ram her head against the wall in favor of punching it with her face, which hid the lovely expression of disgust he so craved to behold some more.

    Vegeta eyed his new object of amusement with interest, ecstatically noticing that it was armed well beyond being capable of delivering to the world a large box of unpleasantness neatly tied up with ribbon in fuzzy lynx wrapping paper via a bioluminescent beluga on a crisp late-November morning.

    “Well…umm…thank you very much,” Vegeta told Piccolo after a moment’s pause to cavort through his aforementioned fantasy world.

    “No problem.  In fact, I should be thanking you.  I’ve run out of room to stash these things and I’m not too keen on trying to find any more places to bury them on the lookout,” the Namekian replied, averting his eyes from Bulma’s disappointing continuance of the face smitings and focusing on Vegeta instead.

    “Why don’t you, you know, just…put them…” Vegeta couldn’t quite put what he wanted to say into words because he couldn’t manufacture his idea into a verbal form without laughing himself sick.  He instead opted to make hand gestures at Piccolo’s jewelry and stare at the Namekian oddly, for it was extremely unusual, even for Piccolo, and it had somehow managed to escape Vegeta’s detection until this moment.

    “Well, Mr. Popo isn’t exactly happy that I’m going about with the third XB-70 Valkyrie glued to my forehead, an F-105 Thunderchief welded to my right ear, and an S-3 Viking stapled to each of my antennae, so I’m trying not to bury all my planes in his garden and get smacked with a newspaper for doing so; I call that logic.”

    Vegeta eyed Piccolo and his unique adornments for a moment and then managed only to nod in an understanding that actually escaped him.  When not in battle and unable to occupy himself contentedly with meditation, Piccolo was a lunatic, he assured himself.  A very kind lunatic, however.

    “Yeah…well, I need to go; I suspect the A-10’s will be here in a moment, and I really don’t want to cause any unnecessary damage unless I have my special outfit on, which you may be thinking I do, but this is my violet one and I need to have my fuchsia one on or else it isn’t much fun and, well, you know.”

    Bulma pressed her face against the window in complete disbelief.

    “I can’t believe Piccolo is doing this again…”

    Bulma drowsily made her way to the kitchen with visible strain.  She hadn’t been able to sleep all night and her head hurt more severely than she could recall it recently suffering, and it had hurt horribly many times before, such as, she remembered, when she tried to think that one time.  It hurt terribly and she didn’t have a clue as to why.  She fumbled her way to the coffee machine in hopes that a whopping caffeine-ingestion would obliterate the boulders using her head as a trampoline.

    “Whuh?  Someone already made a pot?”  She was confused, which helped her headache a whole lot.  No one ever jumped out of bed before her…unless something she didn’t want to know about was afoot.

    Regardless of any impending doom, she poured herself a cup of coffee and walked over to the window, expecting to see the SWAT Team in action.  That was the usual reason that Vegeta or Trunks, or both, got up early and made her coffee.  She redeemed the situation with assurances that it would be a nice day to sit on the porch and eat croissants, biscotti, and scones over a warm glass of wombat milk with the SWAT Team.

    What she saw was worse than what she thought she was going to see, partly because it wasn’t what she thought she was going to see and partly because it was worse than seeing Vegeta associating himself with something perilous, which was what she expected to see but wasn’t seeing because what she was seeing was beyond perilous.  The sun was high in the sky, setting ablaze the form of a mammoth.  A massive airplane—it had wings that could span the sky, figuratively—sat in the driveway.  Two nacels, each carrying two enormous jet engines, hung under each wing, as did tons and tons and tons and tons of bombs, so many that Bulma thought Chi-chi must certainly have piled a small portion of her arsenal where empty space should have been.

    Vegeta, of course, thrilled beyond description and frolicking in a meadow of happy, was floating beside the craft, a paintbrush in his hand.

    Bulma walked outside, without blinking, and stared up at the boy-man she had somehow become married to.  Vegeta was painting something in big black block letters on the side of the camouflaged metal titan of the air.

    “Honey, what in the name of Avogadro are you doing?” Bulma asked as politely as she could, which happened to be a primal scream with foaming at the mouth.

    “You don’t want to know,” Vegeta coolly replied.  He continued to gently stroke letters onto the fuselage of the plane.

    “You’re right,” Bulma sighed in response.  She could not fully fathom the consequences of what was before her, so she let it go.  “Let me go get you a First Aid Capsule Kit.”

    Bulma wandered back into the house, dazed, ignorant that she had known very well what was going on until the aardvark answered her Higgs-Boson question and she went back to bed for further discussion and to hide from the world, or what bit of it Vegeta would fail to destroy.

    Vegeta finished what he was doing.  He moved back a bit to see StratoSaiya-jin written on the side.

    “I love today a lot!” he loudly proclaimed to the world.  “Piccolo, you crazy man, you are a great man!”

    “Honey, catch!” Bulma called.  Vegeta caught the small box and shoved it into one of the many pockets of his camouflage spandex, where he would likely be unable to find it if he could move enough to use it were anything painful to happen to him.

    “Holy cow, dad!” Trunks screeched.  He flew up to his father and gave him a big hug.

    “You get any closer to it and I’ll kill you, insect.” Vegeta warned.  “I do not know who you are or why you dare touch me, but I am too busy at the moment to care.  Now scat and let my baby and I take flight unless you wish to provoke my wrath!”

    Trunks flew away screaming and whining.  Vegeta didn’t notice because he was too busy being a happy monkey; Bulma didn’t notice because she was too busy rummaging through the house in search of cyanide and something with which she could satiate her sudden appetite for an omelet, namely some au-gratin potatoes.

    “Oh, how the world is rewarding me for all the idiocy I endure,” Vegeta chuckled.

    The Saiya-jin Prince hopped into his jet bomber and let the engines roar their thunderous battle cry.  With amazing precision, Vegeta backed the monster out of the driveway and onto the road.

    Cars frantically swerved off of the road as Vegeta barreled ahead—though he never forgot to stick his hand out the window and signal as he repeatedly changed lanes to pass slower vehicles, such as Ferraris—gaining the necessary speed for take-off.  Horns honked as cars smashed into trees, power poles, houses, and other cars, drivers gaping at the nightmare unfolding before them and very susceptible to spontaneous death, which, sadly, their insurance policies covered if and only if Vegeta were involved in the dying.

    “Up, up, and away we go!” Vegeta shouted.

    The B-52 Stratofortress—a giant Oozaru’s mouth painted on the nose, each wing bearing the emblem of the Saiya-jin monarchy—moaned and groaned as it hauled its great enormity up into the fragile sky.

    The StratoSaiya-jin was soon over Satan City, cruising just above the tops of the skyscrapers slowly and very loudly, luring crowds of people out from the tedium of their offices to stare up at the sight of a killing machine controlling a killing machine.  They were not safe, but little was.

    “Boom time,” Vegeta sang, slightly off key but decidedly G sharp.

    He fretted none over the fates of the innocent people about to become part of his merriment; he instead reveled over their fates, for they were about to invigorate him somewhat parabolically but slightly exponentially.

    The bomb bay doors on the bottom of the plane’s fuselage swung open, subjecting the masses below to the glare of countless megatons and the professional-quality painting Vegeta had applied to the interior of the sky mastadon—combat-ready porpoises and giant chlorine gas molecules, which, being Vegeta, he’d already sent to production at the wallpaper factory.

    “Thank Kami for dragon balls,” someone cognizant of this said below, “for I can wish for some of that wallpaper after I’ve spent all of my monetary assets repairing my body.”

    One small bomb fell from the plane and several hundred big bombs followed it downwards like some dangerous swarm of explosive metal containers plummeting to Earth under gravity’s attraction.  The bombs smashed into the middle of Main Street—as well as all other streets in the city—letting a massive nuclear explosion—consisting of a bright light, giant shockwave, deadly radiation, and other nuclear offerings—and a number of larger nuclear explosions stampede through the city, almost instantly erasing it from existence, but not very well; the city was smudged more than erased, making a big, radioactive mess on the paper of the planet.

    “Thank Kami for EMP-resistant airframes,” Vegeta said, “and for fine oriental silks, such as those I am now wearing to compliment my armor.”

    “You let Vegeta just take-off in a nuclear bomber?” Gohan screamed.  “Again?  Are you that stupid?”  He frantically paced about, pulling at his hair and colliding his fists together and wondering if there would be any stores left to sell him SPAM after the ordeal.

    “What would you have done?” Bulma sharply asked.  “Told him no?”

    Gohan put his Great Saiyaman sunglasses back on and took to the sky violently to find Vegeta, maybe to play a rousing game of tag, or maybe to kill him, but definitely to, once more, prevent widespread death.

    “Hey, Trunks?” Bulma called into the house.

    “What?” Trunks whimpered from somewhere, still distraught over his father’s words.

    “I’ll be back later.  I have to go hide in Mexico for a little while.  Have fun being subjected to your father’s disregard for love or sanity or anything at all.”

    “So that was a nuclear explosion…and without me!”  Pouting, devastated, Trunks went back to applying some of his mother’s make-up and humming Kansas songs in Swahili.

    A dark shadow crept over the dairy farm; it was that of a sky monkey.

    Bombs continuously fell from the plane’s wings and cavernous fuselage, punching small craters in the pastures and demolishing farm buildings before vaporizing oodles of matter, an occasional mushroom cloud varying the mix.  Fireballs filled the air and thick smoke rose high above the land, staining it with the foul odor of war.  The frenzied cattle bolted erratically about as the hulking metal bird passed and continued its trek with an unrelenting deluge of annihilation.

    “Breaking News, now!  Reports are coming in that a massive explosion has totally razed Satan City!  Our field reporters are getting descriptions of a killer bird with a fabulously painted stomach from the countless wounded...”

    “Vegeta,” Goku sighed, knowing very well what Piccolo had once more done and more concerned about the rice he’d have to postpone eating than the ruthless bombardment of the land.  “I assume Gohan is going nuts and Bulma is fleeing the country.  Guess that leaves me and you, Goten.”

    “You have got to be kidding me!  I don’t want to!” Goten howled.  “I don’t want to die!”

    “It’s that, or you stay here with your mother all afternoon.”

    “So, how do we stop him?” Goten enthusiastically asked.

    “Well, first we have to pay the Namekian Air Force a visit.”

    “Oh, look!  A hospital for mentally deranged meat by-products!”

    Vegeta let loose a hideous laugh as the building below exploded.

    Piccolo complied peacefully so as not to incite Goku’s anger and find himself again locked in the Saiya-jin’s kitchen cabinet with the majority of his body either roasting, broiling, or simmering under Chi-chi’s ferocious guard.

    Once Mr. Popo had been distracted by a dime Piccolo rolled across the lookout floor—Mr. Popo was fond of chasing currency about—Piccolo led the Sons to the majestic garden where things were always happy and Mr. Popo’s loving care produced merriment and peace for the whole world.
    Piccolo, on all fours, hurriedly clawed at the ground, in the process demising a significant bit of flora and lobbing several hundred trillion picograms of soil at the mildly amused father and son per second.  Upon carving out a pit deeper than the lookout was tall, Piccolo emerged from his chasm with one in each hand.  He felt useful.

    Goku and Goten tore through the sky inside of their jet fighters, Goku in a trusty F-15 Eagle and Goten in the vicious F-16 Falcon.  Mach two and pushing it farther; Vegeta had to be stopped quickly.  They screamed along at an altitude of well over an inch, inverted and down the main street of a rather bustling metropolitan area, but—considering the intelligence of the two pilots—uncannily in great control.

    “Vegeta, when I get my hands on your plane, you are going to be wearing one large metal diaper for a long time,” Gohan growled as he flew over the ruined hospital and the emergency crews scrambling about it, desperately attempting to resuscitate the meat, realizing the task hopeless, and then indulging.

    The scenes he had witnessed in Vegeta’s wake infuriated him more than anything else in his life, except for when Cell killed Goku, Android 16, and Trunks; the time he thought Freiza had killed Goku and when Krillin was impaled by that monster’s horns; and when Radditz was essentially causing Goku death.  Other than those times, Gohan had never been so angry.  Well, there was the time the local grocer told him he was too young to buy SPAM, but that problem had been remedied, so it didn’t nag him very much anymore.

    “There he is!” Goku announced to his youngest son, via the radio.  He pulled back on the stick hard, used the Eagle’s tremendous amount of thrust to rocket vertically higher and higher, pulled back again and did a swift aileron roll, and then used the dive from the half-Cuban Eight to scream down at Vegeta’s mechanized killing machine from above, perfectly ignorant that his stunt—still at mach two—would have mutilated a normal man with its gravitational forces and coolness.

    The tail gun on the B-52 moved.

    “You shall not deny me pleasure!” Vegeta laughed.

    A stream of bullets was let loose from the tail gun, each more than capable of causing great destruction; they did not appear so, however, because Vegeta had dressed each one up in a pretty skirt and blonde wig.  Goku banked when confronted with the projectiles and dove under Vegeta’s plane, yet the bullets followed him.

    “Good distraction, dad,” Goten cheered.  He dove down from way up in the sky, machine guns screaming, missiles launching, and stomach growling.

    “You interfering imbeciles!  Let me have my fun!” Vegeta screamed.  He pressed a really big red button marked in the cockpit: The Martha Stewart Ultimate Redecorating Manly Men.

    Hundreds of extremely aerodynamic, black, laser-guided rockets detached from the war machine to redecorate the StratoSaiya-jin’s assailants in a great flaunting of manliness.

    “There they are,” Gohan snarled.  He gave a hand signal and hit the deck, assured that this incident would soon end like the last one and everything could again be restored to normal.

    The entire military force of the country let loose a barrage of anti-aircraft gunfire, anti-aircraft missiles, and lots of other destructive things, none of which would have responded to a woman named Vasco standing in the middle of a field, surrounded by butterflies, screaming, “Enrique, come quick and gander at this sight!”

    “No!  Engines are failing!  Wings are falling off!  The fuselage is damaged!  Air pressure is vanishing!”

    Vegeta was unhappy.  He abandoned the controls of his stricken ship, regretfully.  From the bomb bay he plummeted, holding a disturbingly large bomb in his arms.

    “Big Bang.”

“And that, Johnny, is why it is always winter now.”

“Thanks, Grandpa,” Johnny gleefully said.

“Yeah,” his other head said.

“Anytime,” Grandpa replied.  He leaned back in his big chair and stretched his arms, legs, and tentacles out.