Most first-time visitors to the Brief family estate progressed through a highly predictable psychological sequence: arrive, observe the sheer geographical scale of the property, violently recalibrate their entire understanding of the phrase 'private residence,' fail to recalibrate fully, and spend the remainder of the visit feeling slightly dizzy.
Jordan possessed the distinct advantage of having been here before. Yet, he was still mildly impressed by the ceiling.
The ground floor alone—a vast, climate-controlled interior courtyard currently hosting actual, living dinosaurs, manicured botanical lawns, and a roaring waterfall—sat beneath a massive, domed lighting display that flawlessly simulated the full arc of natural sunlight. It offered soft, pink gradients at dawn, aggressive, warm white at noon, and the specific, lazy amber quality of late afternoon. By any reasonable metric, the electricity bill alone was astronomical. And this was just the first floor. There were at least two more massive levels stacked above it.
He followed the hovering guidance drone down a sleek, sterile corridor and emerged into Bulma's private working courtyard. It was several football fields' worth of open concrete slotted directly behind the main structure, dominated by a separate, spherical laboratory building at the far end. Dr. Brief's personal workspace, apparently. Having an entire, fully functional building nested inside your building seemed to be a core Brief family design philosophy.
The heavy steel lab doors hissed open before the drone even reached the sensor.
"Jordan! What brings you over?"
Bulma strode through the doors at a brisk, clipped pace that strongly suggested she had been elbow-deep in a complex mechanical task and had only stopped when the perimeter security pinged his biometric data. She was dressed in a grease-stained tank top and cutoff denim shorts, her bright blue hair tied back loosely. She moved with the specific, aggressive confidence of a woman who lived in this space and fundamentally owned every single square inch of it.
Jordan took in the ensemble with the quiet, evaluating eye of a man who had just recently been pondering the overarching question of Vegeta's future romantic decisions, and had just discovered highly relevant new evidence.
The prince's taste, Jordan decided, is at the very least, completely defensible.
"I'm planning to leave Earth for a while," Jordan said casually, falling into step beside her as she waved him toward the lab interior. "Going traveling. Universe-wise."
Bulma stopped dead in her tracks.
She turned to stare at him. "Wait, you're leaving already? That feels incredibly sudden."
"Not yet," Jordan clarified, slipping his hands into his pockets. "I'm waiting on you."
Understanding instantly flashed across her face. She started walking again, pulling the heavy inner lab door open and talking rapidly over her shoulder. "Right. The ship." A sharp edge of fierce, uncontained pride entered her voice. "My dad and I actually cracked the initial deciphering phase much faster than I anticipated. Alien engineering fundamentals really aren't that radically different from ours once you successfully reverse-engineer the underlying logic matrix—the specific mechanical execution is where the massive technological gap lies. We ripped out the original Saiyan components, used them as the central core, and aggressively built outward from there. Larger overall chassis, significantly better suited for long-distance, deep-space habitation. It's nearly fully assembled."
Jordan's lip twitched in genuine amusement.
Raditz had violently crash-landed on Earth approximately two weeks ago. The hostile alien spacecraft had been extracted from the crater, completely disassembled, and handed over to a Capsule Corporation research team. In exactly fourteen days, Bulma and her father had completely reverse-engineered an interstellar propulsion system and were basically finished building an entirely new, luxury spaceship around it.
"The Saiyan engines are absolutely extraordinary," Bulma continued, leading him down a sterile white corridor that opened onto a massive, hangar-like work floor covered in complex, glowing components Jordan couldn't begin to identify. "Earth's fastest conventional spacecraft would need thousands of years to cross the distances these things can cover in a few months. The physical sample size is frustratingly small, but—"
"You'll have plenty more samples in the future," Jordan promised smoothly. "Let Goku and the others finish their hellish training arc, and then we'll just hijack every single ship the invasion fleet brings with them."
Bulma looked at him, startled. Then she barked out a short, genuine laugh, finding the sheer audacity of the logic surprisingly reasonable. "God, I hope so." She aggressively waved him forward. "Come on. Dad and the ship are out in the backyard."
Jordan glanced at her sideways. "'The backyard,'" he repeated flatly.
"Yeah. The backyard."
Jordan briefly thought about Vegeta. Proud, ferocious, utterly ruthless. The absolute Prince of all Saiyans. The last royal survivor of a brutal, blood-soaked civilization built entirely on planetary conquest.
He thought about the terrifying, cosmic irony of that exact man eventually marrying into a blue-haired tech family whose casual 'backyard' was large enough to comfortably park a full-scale interstellar spacecraft.
Fallen kingdom, Jordan thought dryly, following Bulma through another set of heavy blast doors. Extinct planet. Total net worth: his own physical fighting ability. Meanwhile, the Brief family literally owns the concept of modern logistics.
The prince is aggressively marrying up, and he doesn't even know it yet.
The backyard was massive in the exact same way that every single space in the Brief estate was massive—aggressively, unapologetically, and with the settled, quiet comfort of billionaires who had stopped justifying their square footage decades ago.
Sitting dead in the center of the manicured lawn was a spacecraft.
It was clearly and recognizably descended from Raditz's attack pod in its basic design logic—sporting a spherical outer hull and the distinctive, brutalist compact efficiency of Saiyan military engineering. But where the original had been a claustrophobic, single-occupant drop-unit, this was something else entirely. The iconic Capsule Corporation logo was stenciled prominently across the polished white hull. The physical scale had been massively expanded, featuring sleek modifications that softened the aggressive alien silhouette into something actually appropriate for extended human habitation. The heavy landing hatch was currently deployed, a folding metal ladder descending to the grass.
Dr. Brief was currently climbing down that ladder.
He was a compact, intensely friendly-looking older man. He sported neat white hair, a well-maintained mustache, and a pair of round spectacles pushed high up on his nose. He carried the general, buoyant air of a man who had spent decades being intensely interested in absolutely everything, and found life highly agreeable. He spotted them and walked directly toward Jordan with the purposeful, beaming friendliness of a man who was always thrilled to meet new people.
"Bulma, you're here!" Dr. Brief reached Jordan, enthusiastically grabbed his hand, pushed his glasses up his nose, and peered at him closely. "Yamcha, my boy! You've grown considerably since the last time you visited! Has Bulma been feeding you properly? She hasn't been giving you too hard of a time, has she?"
A brief, agonizing silence fell over the lawn.
"Dad," Bulma said. She spoke with the deep, patient, grinding exasperation of a daughter who had been actively managing this specific flavor of chaos her entire life. "That is not Yamcha."
"It isn't?"
"He's Jordan. The guy I explicitly told you about at breakfast. He's the one who secured the alien spacecraft and handed it over to us for the research and development phase."
Dr. Brief pushed his glasses up a third time, leaning in to look at Jordan again with the intense, meticulous thoroughness of a scientist revising a flawed data set. "Ah! Jordan! Of course, of course!" He vigorously shook Jordan's hand a second time, presumably overwriting the initial handshake with updated, accurate biometric data. "I am terribly sorry, my boy—I did feel something was slightly off with the height! You must think I'm completely hopeless."
"Not at all, Doctor," Jordan replied smoothly, entirely unbothered. "The reverse-engineering work you've managed with the spacecraft in such a short window is nothing short of remarkable."
This landed perfectly. Dr. Brief's cheerful expression instantly shifted into the warm, slightly faraway, hyper-focused quality of an engineer thinking about his current hyperfixation. "Oh, the underlying engineering is absolutely extraordinary! Whoever built those original combustion systems had successfully solved thermodynamic problems that we are still developing the theoretical frameworks for! Using the alien engine as a central core and building our own chassis outward was—" He caught himself, physically shaking his head. "Well! You're here to see the actual results, not listen to my process. Come aboard, come aboard!"
Bulma stepped forward to lead Jordan toward the boarding ladder.
"Ah—one moment," Dr. Brief suddenly interjected.
Bulma stopped, her shoulders immediately tensing. "What now?"
Dr. Brief looked thoughtfully between his daughter and Jordan, wearing the completely innocent expression of a man who had just connected two distinct thoughts and felt it was highly relevant to share them with the class.
"Have you officially broken up with Yamcha yet?" Dr. Brief asked Bulma. He spoke in the direct, carrying, booming voice of a man who had never quite grasped the concept that certain questions possessed appropriate volume limits. "I only ask because—" he nodded approvingly toward Jordan— "this one seems quite good! Tall, well-presented, clearly possesses excellent taste in engineering. He's probably much more your type. You two haven't kissed yet, have you?"
The sprawling courtyard went dead quiet.
Bulma's face performed several rapid, violent color transitions before finally settling on a deep, vivid, incandescent red. Something resembling actual steam pressure appeared to be actively building behind her ears.
"What," she ground out, exercising enormous, terrifying physical control, "are you talking about."
"I'm just saying—"
"I haven't broken up with Yamcha!" Her voice had acquired the terrifying, high-pitched frequency of a woman speaking entirely through clenched teeth while desperately attempting to maintain the illusion of calm. "And even if anything were to change in that department, making out on a first meeting is absolutely not—" She stopped. She took a ragged breath and restarted the system. "Can we please not do this in front of company?!"
Dr. Brief looked at Jordan and leaned in slightly.
"She's really quite traditional," the billionaire confided, delivering a stage whisper that was perfectly, clearly audible to his daughter.
"Honey! Bulma!"
A brand-new voice cheerfully echoed from the direction of the main estate, carrying the specific, slightly-distracted, wandering energy of someone who had misplaced a trivial object and was currently conducting a leisurely search. "Have either of you seen my little elephant watering can? I swear I left it right by the—"
The voice rounded the corner and materialized into a person.
Jordan turned to look.
Mrs. Brief was, in the most straightforward, biological terms possible, the absolute genetic explanation for Bulma. She shared the exact same build, the exact same coloring, and represented a highly specific, terrifying version of attractiveness that clearly projected Bulma's future self. She possessed bouncy blonde hair, massive, cheerful eyes, and was dressed in an ensemble that hit the precise, impossible intersection of casual and stylish that screamed both 'extreme generational wealth' and 'genuine, effortless confidence.'
She spotted Jordan.
The missing elephant watering can was immediately deleted from her priority list.
"Oh my!" She instantly changed her trajectory, practically gliding toward the group at a brisk pace that contained a level of sheer, unfiltered enthusiasm the gardening equipment had absolutely not inspired. "Bulma, honey, is this your brand-new boyfriend? He's so much more handsome than Yamcha—"
"He is not my boyfriend," Bulma stated to the empty air, using the hollow, defeated tone of a woman who fully understood she had absolutely zero chance of winning this conversation.
"—Hello there, Jordan!" Mrs. Brief arrived, looking Jordan up and down with a cheerful, unapologetic, highly direct assessment, and clearly found the final grading satisfactory. "It's actually very good that you haven't formally broken up with Yamcha yet, by the way! Absolutely no need to rush into anything!" She paused, placing a finger on her chin and tilting her head thoughtfully. "Although... would you perhaps like to go on a date with me sometime? Just to try it out! I had plenty of incredibly handsome admirers when I was younger, don't let the current family dynamic fool you—"
"Mrs. Brief," Jordan said, keeping his voice perfectly pleasant, level, and entirely bulletproof, "that is really not necessary, but I appreciate the offer."
From the absolute corner of his eye, Jordan watched Dr. Brief calmly turn back to the disassembled spacecraft components. The older man possessed the practiced, unbreakable serenity of a husband who had been successfully navigating these exact chaotic waters for twenty-odd years, and had developed a flawless survival technique: total, absolute ignorance.
Mrs. Brief sighed with heavy, theatrical disappointment. "Ah, Jordan-kun clearly prefers young, cute girls—he has excellent taste! Bulma, you're moving entirely too slow. Don't let a prime opportunity like this just wander off the estate."
"Mother."
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