The hologram grinned. “The Dragon Balls are a curse. Every wish we make, Shenron doesn’t just grant it—he records it. He stores a copy of the wisher’s soul, their desire, their flaw . I found a way to extract those echoes. I called them ‘Yamamoto Doujinshi’—shadow copies of the wisher’s worst self.”
The tower fell silent.
“And me?” Bulma smiled, tired and real. “I spent forty years thinking being right was the same as being good. It’s not. So go ahead. Tell me I’m average. Tell me Vegeta only stays for the gravity room. Tell me Trunks is smarter than I’ll ever be.”
The third was… herself. A Bulma made of fractured mirrors, her eyes two ticking clocks. This echo pointed a finger, and Bulma’s scanner display scrambled, then displayed a single line: “You already lost. You just don’t know it yet.” Bulma Adventure 4 -YamamotoDoujinshi-
The second was a shadow-Piccolo, silent, weeping black tears, turning the air around it to cold, suffocating loneliness.
The Capsule Corporation hover-car hummed low over a sea of clouds, the last sliver of sun bleeding orange across the horizon. Bulma Briefs, heiress to the world’s largest tech fortune, tapped her fingernail against a faded, water-stained data chip. It had arrived in a locked box, no return address, just a single character etched into the metal: 山 (Yama).
She looked at her own mirror-echo. The vain, brilliant, terrified shadow. The hologram grinned
A terminal flickered to life as she entered. A hologram shimmered—a gaunt, spectacled man with a nervous tic in his left eye.
Bulma’s lip curled. “Fat. And grumpy. But he can still blow up a moon. Continue.”
“Humility, huh?” Bulma whispered.
“Yamamoto,” she muttered. “Grandpa’s old research partner. The one who ‘vanished’ during the war.”
The hologram died. The lights went out.