RAYO — CHARACTER BIBLE

Name: Rayo Japanese: ラヨ Romanization: Rayo Parents: Broly and Cheelai Species: Saiyan hybrid — father Saiyan, mother of Cheelai's species Age: 17 through the standing condition described here; 18 at the departure, which is where the story opens Setting: Earth, nineteen years after the Red Ribbon remnant incident

1. CORE IDENTITY

Rayo is the only living person descended from Broly, and the only Saiyan-descended fighter in the setting who has never once released his power on purpose.

Everything about him follows from that single fact. His body is shaped by holding rather than striking. His combat range is zero because he has never learned to throw ki outward. He has never transformed, and does not know whether he can. His training, his living arrangements, his social world, and the specific way he is dangerous all descend from a method his father taught him at five years old: keep it inside.

He is not a suppressed monster. He is a competent, well-liked, mostly cheerful teenager who is extremely good at a very narrow discipline and structurally vulnerable in exactly one place — and the place he is vulnerable was inherited from his mother, not his father.

2. PHYSICAL FORM

2.1 Appearance

Rayo stands 1.78 m. He is taller than Cheelai, well short of Broly. His build reads as compact and hard rather than large: visible definition, no bulk, shoulders narrower than his father's by a wide margin.

His hair is black, medium length, streaked with white. The streaks are maternal — Cheelai's colouring surfacing through Broly's black. They are present at all times and they spread when containment fails (§8.2).

His eyes are his mother's, and are the only feature anyone identifies as hers on sight. His skin carries a faint cool undertone but does not read as her species' colouring.

He was born with a Saiyan tail. It was removed in infancy (§3.3).

2.2 Why he is dense and not large

Broly's inherited trait is that ki recruits tissue. The direction of the ki determines what the tissue becomes.

Ki built for output recruits volume. The body grows mass as a reservoir to feed release. This is Broly: every cycle of accumulation and discharge adds bulk, because bulk is what a discharge draws from.
Ki held inward recruits density. The tissue is under constant internal pressure and adapts by compacting — fibre packed tighter, bone laid heavier, connective tissue thickened to resist load rather than to deliver it.

Rayo has never discharged. Twelve years of unbroken inward pressure have compacted him instead of growing him. He is the densest Saiyan-descended body on record, and he is also one of the smallest.

This is a property of tissue, not of power. Density is what he survives. Ki output is what he can do to someone else. He leads the first category and sits far down the second, and nothing about the first changes the second.

2.3 What density buys him

Bladed steel does not cut him. Conventional firearms do not penetrate.
A full-force strike from a peak-condition human martial artist does not bruise him.
Falls, impacts, crushing loads, pressure extremes, and heat are non-events. He has no working sense of hot: he registers temperature as information, not as pain, up to a threshold nobody has located.
A serious strike from Piccolo breaks bone. Anything above that level goes straight through the advantage as if it were not there.

The advantage has a hard edge, and the edge is close: it makes him invulnerable to the mundane and does nothing at all against the people who actually matter.

2.4 What density costs him

Weight. He masses approximately 190 kg at 1.78 m. Floors, chairs, and vehicles at the house are reinforced. No vehicle the family owns will take him. Neither Cheelai nor Lemo can move him at all, and if he goes down, the only person on the property who can lift him is his father.
Water. He sinks. He has never learned to swim and cannot; he walks along the bottom or stays out.
Healing. Compacted tissue is poorly served by blood. Injuries severe enough to get through him close slowly — weeks where another fighter takes days. He has no access to senzu beans as a matter of routine.
Reach and leverage. He is short-limbed against most of what he fights. He wins inside, never outside.

3. BIRTH AND MEDICAL HISTORY

3.1 The incompatibility

Cheelai's species is not built to carry a Saiyan pregnancy on the terms Broly's genetics demand. The density that defines Rayo's body began in the womb — the foetus was already recruiting tissue under internal ki pressure, and it was recruiting from a body that had no mechanism for supplying it.

The pregnancy was medically unsustainable from the second trimester. Cheelai lost mass she could not spare. The delivery reached a point where both of them were failing at once.

3.2 Bulma

Neither the family nor Lemo had the means to resolve it. Bulma did, and moved inside a day — Capsule Corporation medical technology, on Earth, with Bulma herself directing the delivery.

This is the origin of every relationship the family has with the wider world. Broly was not adopted into the Z-fighters' circle as a warrior; his family was admitted through a medical emergency. Bulma's ongoing connection is to Cheelai first — a friendship that began in that room and outlasted its cause — and to Rayo second, as the physician of record for a patient nobody else knows how to treat. She has never travelled to Beerus's planet and has no interest in doing so.

3.3 The tail

Rayo was born with a Saiyan tail. It was removed within the first week, at Bulma's insistence and with both parents' agreement, on a single argument that no one contested. Earth has a full moon, the Great Ape transformation requires nothing from its user but a tail and a line of sight, and the household already had one member it could not restrain. It was not going to have two.

The removal cost him balance, and not in the way an amputation usually does. Saiyan motor development assumes a tail and calibrates against it; his calibrated against a limb that was not there. He spent his early childhood unsteady on his feet in a way no Saiyan child is, and the corrective work — hours of holding position, weight-shifting, standing on unstable ground — became the foundation of his fine-control training years before he had any ki discipline to apply it to. His precision is unusually good for his age because he learned it as physical therapy.

3.4 The wedding

Broly and Cheelai married four months after the delivery. Bulma organized the ceremony and the reception. Everyone came.

The gathering is the origin of the arrangement that still governs Rayo's training today. The fighters present had already been told what the child was and what raising him would require. The offer they made that day was not sentimental — it was a division of labour: education first, training later, whoever had the time. Seventeen years on, the fighters who show up at Rayo's training ground are not visiting out of coincidence. They are keeping a scheduling commitment made before he could hold his own head up.

4. THE NAME

Rayo was named by Cheelai, over Broly's silence and against Saiyan convention.

Saiyan naming runs on a fixed scheme — a vegetable root, assigned at birth, recorded by the state that bred the child. Cheelai refused it explicitly. The naming convention belonged to the institution that catalogued Broly, exiled him, and would have spent him; she was not going to hand her son its paperwork.

"Rayo" is a word from her own language, from long before the Frieza Force, meaning a strike of lightning — a thing that arrives before the sound of it does. She chose it for the sound of it. She understood what she had actually named him about five years later, and she has never said so out loud.

Broly has never objected to the name and has never explained why. Rayo has never asked.

5. PSYCHOLOGY

5.1 Disposition

Rayo sits at a fixed point between his parents that is not a midpoint.

More expressive than Broly, who was near-mute for most of his life and is still economical with speech. Rayo talks, jokes, asks questions, and is easy company.
Less extroverted than Cheelai, who is genuinely gregarious. Rayo is warm but not outgoing; he is comfortable with people and does not seek them out.
Impulsive like Cheelai, and this is the inheritance that matters. In her it manifests as talking first. In him it manifests as feeling first — emotional response that arrives fully formed, before deliberation, at a speed his training cannot outrun (§7.4).

He is unusually courteous for a seventeen-year-old, in the specific way of someone who has been taught since early childhood that his default state is hazardous to others. The courtesy is real. It is also load-bearing, and he knows it.

5.2 What he wants

To go into a city. Not to live there — to walk through one once, at ground level, among people who do not know what he is. He has been to inhabited areas twice, both times with Bulma, both times briefly, both times as a medical trip. He asks about it roughly once a year and is told no roughly once a year.
To be measured by something other than what he is holding. Every adult in his life evaluates him on containment. He wants, badly and inarticulately, to be good at something that is not the absence of a disaster.
To know whether he can transform. He says this to Bulma and to nobody at home (§9.2).
To be assessed by somebody who is not managing him. This is the one that has a date on it now, and nobody in his family knows the date exists (§19.7).
To stop being a reason his mother apologizes. He has understood since he was about twelve that Cheelai carries a specific guilt about him, and he has been working at dismantling it ever since, with limited success.

5.3 What he fears

Being the cause of a death. Not abstractly. He has a concrete, rehearsed image of it.
Being restrained. See §6.1.
That his father is away because of him. Broly has never said anything to support this. Rayo has never fully believed the alternative.

5.4 Self-knowledge

Rayo understands his own mechanics better than anyone except Broly. He can describe the failure mode accurately, predict roughly when he is approaching it, and articulate his own trigger set if asked directly. What he cannot do is act on that knowledge in the window that matters, which is under a second wide.

He does not blame his mother for the trigger. He has told her so, in those words, more than once. He considers the temperament his own property, not a defect she installed, and the reversal is deliberate — he worked it out and decided on it, rather than feeling it.

6. ANGER: THE TRIGGER SET

Rayo's containment does not fail under pressure. It fails under speed. Whether a given provocation breaks him is determined almost entirely by how fast it arrives, not by how severe it is. The same content delivered slowly is something he holds; delivered instantly, it goes through him.

This is the single most important operational fact about him, and everything else in this section descends from it.

6.1 Sudden-onset triggers (containment fails)

These arrive faster than his trained response can organize around them. Any of them can produce a leak; in combination or under fatigue, they reliably do.

Physical restraint. Being grabbed, pinned, held, or collared. This is the fastest trigger he has and the one with the shortest fuse — his response is well past voluntary control before he registers what is happening. Nobody has explained the association to him, and nobody has needed to.
Sudden harm to Cheelai. Seeing his mother hurt, struck, or seized without warning. Sustained insult to her he can hold through indefinitely; a single unexpected impact he cannot.
Someone flinching from him. Specifically the involuntary recoil — a person stepping back when they realize what he is. It is the only trigger that is purely social and it is more reliable than most physical ones.
Being lied to about his own state. Being told he is fine, or safe, or that nothing happened, when he can feel that it is not true. Small in content and very fast in onset.
Being unable to intervene. Watching someone weaker take damage while he is holding back — the cost of his restraint made visible in front of him.

6.2 Slow-onset pressures (containment holds)

He is unusually good at these, better than his father ever was:

Prolonged physical pain, including injury sustained mid-fight.
Sustained verbal provocation, mockery, or insult, including about his parents.
Exhaustion, hunger, sleep deprivation, environmental extremes.
Grief, disappointment, long-running frustration.
Fear, provided it builds.

Given a ramp, Rayo's containment is superior to any Saiyan on record. No amount of pain, insult or fear administered gradually will make him leak.

This does not mean a long fight is safe for him. There are two independent routes to failure and they run on different mechanisms: the trigger set above, which is about speed of onset, and the containment clock (§7.3), which is about accumulated load. A patient opponent who never startles him can still beat him by outlasting the second one. The temper is not what limits him in a long engagement. The arithmetic is.

6.3 What this means for anyone fighting him

Anyone who wants to break Rayo does not need to be stronger than him. They need to be sudden. A competent enemy who works this out has an enormous advantage, and the advantage is available to enemies far below his weight class.

7. THE KI SYSTEM

7.1 Composition

Ki is not homogeneous. It is the sum of three components: physical vigour, will and courage, and mind and spirit.

Rayo has no deficiency in the first — it is his father's inheritance and he has an excess of it. He has no deficiency in the third; his focus and precision are good and improving.

His entire problem lives in the second. The emotional component is the part that escapes, and it escapes on emotional timing, not on physical or mental timing. What Rayo practises is not ki control in general. It is disciplinary control over one of three components, and the other two were never the issue.

7.2 Containment

Rayo uses no external limiter. His father wore one for most of his life and Rayo will not have one in the house.

Containment is an active, trained technique. The musculature functions as retention structure: ki is kept circulating within the body rather than permitted to express outward as released power. The principle is orthodox — intensive physical conditioning expands the body's capacity to hold and process ki — but the direction is inverted. Every other fighter conditions the body to deliver more. Rayo conditions it to keep more.

It is a technique, not a state. It requires continuous low-level effort in the same way holding a muscle under tension does, and effort requires attention. Asleep, Rayo drops to an involuntary residual — enough that he does not discharge, nowhere near enough to be quiet. Twelve years of practice have not improved the sleeping baseline by any measurable amount, because the thing being trained is not available while unconscious (§7.6).

7.3 The cost, with thresholds

Condition	Containment load	Duration sustainable
At rest, emotionally settled	Minimal	Indefinite
Physical exertion, settled	Low	Indefinite
Combat, full precision	High	~12 minutes
Combat, degraded precision	Severe	~25 minutes before failure risk becomes the dominant factor
Sustained emotional distress, no combat	Moderate and rising	Hours, then sleep becomes unsafe

Past the twelve-minute mark in a real fight, containment starts competing for the same attention he is using to fight. His technique coarsens first — timing, footwork, the fine reads. He is aware of it happening and cannot stop it. Past roughly twenty-five minutes, he is holding two things with one set of hands and any sudden-onset trigger will end it.

Every fight Rayo enters is on a clock, and he knows the number. He is not fighting to win. He is fighting to win before the clock runs out, which makes him aggressive early, increasingly reckless past the twelve-minute mark, and beatable by anyone patient enough to simply not be finished.

7.4 Speed of response

The trained containment response takes roughly half a second to organize around an emotional surge. Slow-building emotion never outruns it. A sudden spike arrives at the surface before the response is in place, and by the time the discipline engages, ki is already outside the body.

This half-second is the entire vulnerability. It has not narrowed appreciably in twelve years of practice, and Broly does not believe it can be trained away, only worked around.

7.5 Masking, and how it couples to containment

Separately from containment, the household keeps its ki signature suppressed below its true level as a permanent standing practice — standard masking, to avoid being located by anyone capable of reading signatures. In practice this falls on Broly and Rayo, since they are the only two with anything worth reading; Cheelai and Lemo keep the habits that support it, which are procedural rather than physical. It is not directed at the Z-fighters, who know exactly where they live.

It has one standing exception, and it is the largest hole in the family's security. Masking suppresses output. The fine-control drills that make up most of Rayo's solo work (§12.3) consist of producing metered output on purpose. The two cannot be run at the same time, because they are opposite instructions to the same system.

So Rayo trains unmasked. The justification is the four hundred kilometres: there is nobody out there, the emissions are minute, and the alternative is not practising the only thing he is exceptional at. The family accepted this trade years ago and has never revisited it.

What it means is that for several days at a time, at fixed coordinates, the most precisely metered ki signature on the planet is broadcasting in the clear to anybody who happens to be listening.

The two systems are coupled, and the coupling runs one way:

Containment intact → masking is trivial. Nothing is leaving the body, so there is nothing to hide.
Containment fails → masking fails with it. A leak is by definition output, and output is exactly what masking suppresses. There is no scenario in which he leaks and stays hidden.

This matters because of what his signature looks like to a reader. Rayo's ki is a fraction of his father's in magnitude and identical to it in character. Anyone holding historical records of Broly's signature — and there are organizations that hold them — reads a Rayo leak as Broly, smaller. The leak does not merely reveal a strong child at a specific coordinate. It reveals a Saiyan matching a filed profile, on Earth, with a family attached.

7.6 The devices

Bulma built three fixed installations for the house — not wearables, not training equipment, and not removable. They are set into the structure: one in Rayo's room, one in the common space, one in the workshop.

Their function is narrow and specific: they cover the hours when conscious discipline is unavailable. Containment is a technique requiring attention, and a sleeping seventeen-year-old has no attention to give.

Bulma installed them when Rayo was nine. For the nine years before that, his ambient output while asleep was the household's single largest exposure, and no amount of training addressed it, because training requires being awake. The family's answer in those years was to move house twice.

The installations dampen ambient signature within the house to background levels. They do nothing whatsoever against an active leak — their ceiling is low, deliberately, because a system strong enough to suppress a real discharge would have to be strong enough to suppress Broly, and nothing Bulma has built can do that.

They are in the house. The training ground is 400 km away. Rayo trains without them by design (§11.2).

8. CONTAINMENT FAILURE

8.1 Onset

A leak begins at the moment a sudden-onset trigger clears the half-second window. There is no warning and no build. The transition is instantaneous from Rayo's point of view and from an observer's.

There is one other route in, and it is voluntary: any deliberate attempt to release — projection, transformation, anything that requires standing the containment down on purpose — produces the same uncontrolled output, because he has never built metering for what leaves his body. The emotional route is the one that happens to him. This one he would have to choose, and the results are identical.

8.2 Presentation

The white streaks intensify and spread. They widen from the roots outward across the whole head over roughly four seconds, until the black is a minority. They recede at the same rate when the leak ends. This is the reliable visual tell and it is visible at a distance.
Force and speed spike above his normal ceiling — roughly double his contained output at peak.
Precision collapses. He becomes markedly stronger and markedly worse at the same instant. Strikes that would land clean in his contained state miss, overcommit, or connect wrong. Against a technically skilled opponent, the leak makes him easier to fight, not harder.
Ambient discharge. Ground fractures under him. Loose material is thrown. This is the part that kills civilians and the reason for the 400 km.

8.3 Duration and termination

A leak runs between forty seconds and roughly three minutes. It ends when the emotional spike that caused it decays — it cannot be ended voluntarily, and attempts to force it closed extend it.

8.4 Aftermath

Immediate collapse. The fatigue is disproportionate to the elapsed combat time, because the body spent in under three minutes what containment normally meters out over days.
He cannot stand for several hours. Containment during this period is at its weakest, which makes the window immediately after a leak the most dangerous period of all — a second trigger in that window finds no defence at all.
Two to four days of physical debt before he returns to baseline.

8.5 Scale

Rayo does not lose control on his father's scale, ever. He does not have the reserve to. His ki is a fraction of the inheritance — influenced by Broly's, structurally similar, nowhere near it in magnitude. There is no version of Rayo that destroys a planet.

What a leak does is: kill anyone unarmoured within about thirty metres, flatten built structures within a hundred, and broadcast a signature that is legible across the solar system to anyone equipped to read it.

9. WHAT RAYO CANNOT DO

Rayo's limitations are not gaps in his development. They are direct products of the method, and they are permanent for as long as he keeps using it.

9.1 He cannot project ki

He has never fired an energy attack. Not a small one, not a suppressed one, not once.

The distinction that makes this coherent is one Broly drew for him at six and he has never had cause to question: emission is not projection. Emission is energy leaving the body continuously, as a field or a thrust, still connected to him and still under his hand — flight, the fine-control drills, everything he is good at. Projection is energy leaving as a discrete package, severed, travelling on its own. The first is metering. The second is release, and release is the failure state.

The reason is structural rather than educational. Projection requires deliberately pushing ki outward through the body's surface — the precise action his containment suppresses, held without interruption since he was five. Asking Rayo to fire a blast is asking him to stand down the only defence he has, and he has no metering for what comes out when he does.

He has tried, under supervision, four times. Three produced nothing at all: the reflex refused to disengage. The fourth disengaged and produced an uncontrolled discharge indistinguishable from a leak, which is why there has not been a fifth.

What follows from that:

His combat range is zero. He has no answer to anything at distance. Against a ranged opponent he closes or he loses, and there is no third option.
He cannot fight in the air. See below.
He cannot destroy anything at range, clear obstacles, signal, or fight a large or flying target.

9.2 He can barely fly, and he has never transformed

Flight is the single sanctioned exception, and it is treated as a controlled leak rather than as ordinary locomotion — a deliberate, metered emission through the soles, held as small as possible. It is one of his fine-control exercises and it is the hardest one he does.

The practical limits: low altitude, slow, tiring within minutes, and he cannot fight while flying. Any impact breaks his metering. He flies to travel and lands to fight.

Transformation. Rayo has never turned Super Saiyan and does not know whether he can.

Super Saiyan is an explosive outward surge — the transformation is a release event. Rayo's trained reflex is anti-release, engaged continuously, for twelve years. Broly's position, stated once and never revisited, is that the two disciplines are mutually exclusive and Rayo should not attempt it. Broly has not said what he believes would happen if he did.

The spreading white hair during a leak is the closest his body has come to a transformation state. Whether it is a partial form, a precursor, or an unrelated symptom is unresolved. Nobody knows, Bulma included, and she has scanned it more than once.

It is a door he has been told not to open, standing in the middle of everything he wants, and the only person who could tell him what is behind it is offworld for most of every year.

There is a second door. Rayo found it himself two years ago and told exactly one person (§16). It opens the other way.

9.3 He cannot sense ki well

Reading signatures is a receptive skill built on outward-facing ki attention. Rayo's attention runs inward by trained habit. He can detect a large power nearby and nothing subtler — he cannot track, cannot count opponents, cannot identify people at distance.

He is, in a room full of Z-fighters, the only person who does not know who just arrived.

10. COMBAT PROFILE

10.1 Placement

Contained, in close-quarters physical combat, Rayo trades evenly with a peak-condition human martial artist of the Z-fighter tier and loses to Piccolo. Leaking, he exceeds Piccolo in raw force for under a minute and still loses, because precision collapse costs him more than the strength gains him.

Against anyone in the Beerus training group — his father included — the comparison is not meaningful at any setting.

10.2 How he actually wins

Inside. Short limbs, enormous durability, no need to defend. He walks through damage that would end a normal exchange and closes distance nobody wants him to close.
On the clock. Under twelve minutes he is technically excellent.
By absorbing. His most reliable tactic is to accept hits that would disable anyone else and keep advancing. It works on everything below a certain threshold and instantly stops working above it.

10.3 How he actually loses

Range. Any opponent who can hit him from forty metres and is willing to retreat beats him without ever being in danger.
Air. Any opponent who stays airborne beats him without a fight.
Patience. Anyone who survives twelve minutes wins on the clock.
Speed of provocation. Anyone who works out §6.1 beats him with a tactic rather than with power.

Rayo is a specialist with a narrow band of effectiveness and four separate general-purpose counters, all of which are available to opponents much weaker than he is. He is not a walking solution. He is a strong, fragile instrument with a documented failure mode.

11. THE HOUSEHOLD

11.1 The house

Broly and Cheelai live in a house well outside any settlement, built with Lemo's labour and Bulma's materials. Lemo has his own place within walking distance and is the household's only regular adult presence besides the parents.

The structure is reinforced past domestic requirement — floors, door frames, and furniture rated for Rayo's mass, and the three dampening installations set into the walls (§7.6). Masking discipline is treated as unremarkable domestic practice by everyone in the house, the way a family in a dry country is careful with fire, even though only two of them have a signature worth hiding (§7.5).

11.2 The training ground

400 km from the house, in a volcanic range with no settlement inside 200 km in any direction. The cones have been extinct for a long time. The system underneath them has not — the ground steams in a dozen places, the rock is warm through the boot, and there is standing water in three of the calderas that has never been cold.

The distance is not proportioned to what a leak actually does, which is a hundred metres of ruin at most (§8.5). It is proportioned to the fact that nobody knows the ceiling. Every failure Rayo has ever had was a partial one, the reference case for a total one is his father, and Broly's reference case is a planet. Until someone can say with confidence where the top of Rayo's range is, the family treats the top as unknown and sets the distance accordingly. Broly chose the number. He did not explain it and nobody argued.

No gravity chamber and no training equipment of any kind — the family does not have it, and Bulma's contribution has always been medical rather than athletic. The only piece of her hardware that goes to the range is the logger he carries to the lake (§16.3), and it is not for training. Conditioning runs on the oldest model the discipline has: the body against the environment, which is exactly how Paragus trained Broly on Vampa before any technology existed to make it easier.

No devices. No supervision. No safety margin of any kind, by design: the point of the solo mode is that it is the honest test.

11.3 The domestic reality

Rayo is home roughly half the time. The rest he spends at the range, where he keeps a stone shelter, a cache of supplies, and no communications of any kind — stretches of four to ten days, then the trip home, which he covers on the ground because he cannot fly that far (§9.2) and which takes him the better part of a day at a dead run. Nobody expects to hear from him while he is out. The absence of any way to reach him is not treated as a risk by anyone, because nothing has ever happened out there that the four hundred kilometres did not already account for.

At home he is a seventeen-year-old who does chores, argues about them, eats catastrophic quantities of food, and is the only person in the house strong enough to move the things that need moving.

He is not treated as a hazard by his family. He is treated as a son with a condition everyone has learned to work around, in the way of a family that has been doing it for seventeen years and stopped finding it remarkable somewhere around year six.

11.4 The lake

Nine kilometres from the training ground, in the caldera of the range's largest cone, there is a lake.

It is roughly two hundred metres across and forty metres deep at the centre. The water sits at around sixty degrees, fed from below by the same system that keeps the rock warm, and it is acidic enough that nothing lives in it — no fish, no weed, nothing on the surface. The water is clear for the same reason it is dead.

Sixty degrees kills an unprotected human in minutes. Rayo found it when he was fourteen by walking toward steam, put a hand in, registered the temperature as information rather than as a warning (§2.3), and was in up to his chest before it occurred to him that this was unusual.

Then he kept walking, because he cannot swim (§2.4). He sank, which is what he always does, and he walked down the slope of the crater floor to the deepest point, and sat down.

What is down there. Not silence. Forty metres of water over a live hydrothermal system produces one low continuous note, unchanging, arriving from every direction at once. What the lake removes is everything except that note. No wind, no rock shifting, no sense of anything approaching, and no work to do to stay where he is — his own mass pins him to the bottom, so for the first time in his life holding still costs him nothing.

He can stay down between twenty and thirty minutes. He has measured it.

The ritual. Since he was fourteen, every solo session ends the same way: the nine kilometres, the walk down the slope, and three or four cycles on the bottom with surface intervals between them. He does not train there. He sits, and he stops holding everything he does not have to hold.

Why it matters mechanically. Containment load scales with exertion and emotional input (§7.3). At the bottom of that lake both run as close to zero as they ever get while he is awake. It is the only place in his conscious life where the load approaches the floor it reaches while he sleeps, and it is therefore the only place where he has attention left over.

That surplus is what made §16 possible. He was not looking for it.

Who knows about the lake. Bulma, and only because of §16 — she has never been to it, and has seen it once, from orbit, on a survey image she requested and then did not archive. Nobody in the family knows it exists. It has simply never come up, and the nine kilometres each way are why Rayo gets home later than the distance accounts for. Cheelai thinks he walks slowly.

One other person has seen him do it, from a distance, twice, and Rayo did not know he was there (§17.5).

12. TRAINING ARCHITECTURE

Rayo runs two separate curricula with different teachers, and they do not overlap.

12.1 Curriculum one — ki containment (Broly, exclusively)

For his first five years Rayo had no containment at all, because there was nothing to contain it with — the technique requires a body that can hold, and a small child's cannot. What he had instead was supervision: one adult within arm's reach at all times, day and night, for five years, rotated between three people who did not sleep properly for most of that period.

It ended the week he turned five, in the kitchen, over something nobody has ever been able to reconstruct. The discharge took out the wall, the treeline behind it, and the better part of Lemo's left hand. Broly began teaching him the next morning and has never referred to the incident since. Cheelai refers to it as the kitchen, and only to Bulma.

The technique was transmitted by Broly across the years he was mostly present, before the Beerus training cycle became regular. What Rayo practises now is maintenance and refinement of a base already handed over, not discovery.

Nobody else teaches it. Nobody else can — the Z-fighters' entire discipline is oriented toward output, and their instincts, applied to Rayo, are actively wrong. Krillin tried once, early, and made things worse.

12.2 Curriculum two — the soldier's trade (Lemo and Cheelai, split)

Nothing in this curriculum touches ki, from either teacher. The split is honest about what each of them actually has.

Lemo is a career Frieza Force veteran with decades of field service. He teaches the trade: weapons handling, field medicine, logistics, threat assessment, vehicle and equipment operation, how an army actually moves and what it looks like when one is coming. He is a mediocre fighter and an excellent instructor, and he is entirely unsentimental about it. He is also the only adult who talks to Rayo about the Frieza Force as an institution rather than as a bad memory.

Cheelai teaches what she genuinely has, which is not soldiering — she was a recruit for a matter of weeks, and she says so. What she has is everything from before: scavenging, theft, evasion, reading a room, lying convincingly, getting into things that are locked, and getting out of places she should not have been in. She teaches Rayo how to survive when he is outmatched, which is a skill she is qualified in and Broly is not.

12.3 The three training modes

Solo (default, most of the time). Rayo alone at the volcanic range. Environmental conditioning, plus fine-control work: holding position while emitting the smallest possible quantity of energy, sustained flight metering, precision drills. This trains accuracy, not force. No correction available. Progress is slow and prone to drift.

Visits (most weeks, irregular in rhythm). Frequency is dominated by whoever is Earth-side: near-daily in the months Piccolo is planetbound, down to a couple of times a month when he is not. Fighters come to him. Never the reverse — the isolation logic holds in both directions, so the travel cost is theirs. This works because a partial leak is survivable for a trained fighter and lethal for a civilian, which is the same asymmetry that makes the isolation necessary in the first place.

Correction windows (rare, a few months at a time). When Broly returns to Earth for a few months, this is the only period with sparring against someone overwhelmingly stronger — historically the most reliable generator of growth in the discipline — and the only period in which accumulated drift in the containment technique gets identified and corrected by the one person who can see it.

The result is a training history that is not uniform in quality: long stretches of unsupervised drift, punctuated by irregular outside input, punctuated more rarely by real correction. Rayo at any given moment is somewhere between "sharp" and "quietly two months off-technique and unaware of it."

12.4 The visitor roster

Seventeen years have passed since the wedding, and the roster reflects that.

Piccolo — most frequent, in a clustered pattern. He takes his own training blocks on Beerus's planet, but alone and on dates deliberately set apart from the Saiyan group (§12.5), which means he is gone for two or three weeks and then Earth-side and almost daily for months. His discipline is closer to Rayo's than anyone else's: technique over escalation. He is the closest thing Rayo has to a second teacher and the two of them mostly do not talk while training.
Android 17 and Android 18 — frequent. They do not age. 17 brings Rayo to the park boundary occasionally, which is the nearest thing to an outing anyone permits. 18 fights him at a fixed output ceiling she sets before they start and never exceeds, and inside that ceiling she is the only visitor who does not soften her technique, take openings off the table, or stop when he is hurt.
Tenshinhan and Krillin — regular but changed. Both are well past physical peak and neither pretends otherwise. They no longer spar hard; they teach form, positioning, and the accumulated technical knowledge of fifty years of fighting people stronger than themselves, which is exactly Rayo's problem.
Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Trunks, Goten — rare, opportunistic, whenever the Beerus training schedule permits a gap. Goku is the only one who arrives unannounced. Gohan is the only one who asks Rayo questions about anything other than training.
Yamcha and Chaoz — not part of the training arrangement. Present in Rayo's life socially, not instructionally.
Master Roshi — unaged, and the family's contact with him is through Krillin rather than directly.

Rayo is known and liked by all of them. He is also, to every one of them, the only person present who cannot sense who just walked in — a small recurring indignity that everybody finds funnier than he does.

12.5 The Beerus arrangement, and why Rayo is not in it

The arrangement. Beerus permits seven fighters on his planet: Goku, Vegeta, Broly, Gohan, Goten, Trunks, and Piccolo. He did not want a training camp and says so regularly. He agreed to it on one justification — that they are preparing for something specific (§12.6) — and he treats the roster as a fixed number rather than a guest list.

Piccolo is on a separate track. He trains alone, in blocks of two or three weeks, on dates set apart from the Saiyan group. This is partly Whis's scheduling and partly Piccolo's preference: his method does not benefit from sparring at that tier, and he has no interest in being the slowest person in a room for a month.

Rayo is not on the list, and there are five stated reasons and one unstated one.

1. He has never transformed. Goten was seven. Trunks was eight. Gohan was nine, under duress, and it was treated as late. A Saiyan-descended seventeen-year-old who has never once transformed is not considered a slow developer. In the assessment the fighters actually use — and none of them has ever written it down — it reads as a ceiling rather than a delay. Nobody has said this to Rayo. Gohan came closest, once, and stopped.

2. The impulsivity is a disqualifier, not a quirk. Everyone knows the trigger set (§6.1) and nobody treats it as a personality trait. At home it is a hazard managed with distance. In a shared training environment it is a discipline problem with a God of Destruction standing in it. In an eighty-fighter ring, a leaking Rayo cannot tell his own side from anyone else's, because precision is the first thing a leak takes (§8.2). He would not be a fighter who loses. He would be a fighter who eliminates his own team, at speed, for three minutes, and then falls over.

3. There is no vacancy. Earth is currently defended by more accumulated strength than it has ever held. Nothing in the present threat picture requires another body. Training Rayo to fight is expenditure against no identified return, and the people making the decision are not sentimental about resource allocation.

4. Cheelai is against it. Not permanently — she says not yet, and has been saying it for four years. Her argument is the third one above, delivered as a mother: Earth has Goku, Vegeta, and his father; it does not need her son. Rayo knows exactly what she thinks, because she has never hidden it and would consider hiding it insulting. He has never argued with her about it, which is not the same as agreeing.

5. Beerus's headcount. An eighth requires a reason. He is Broly's son is not one, and everyone involved knows how that request would go.

6. The one nobody says. Every person best placed to advocate for Rayo also understands §15: accelerating his growth moves him toward the ceiling faster than his structure can follow. Broly understands it better than anyone. Broly has never proposed bringing him, has never explained why, and has never been asked.

12.6 What they are training for

No announcement has been made. What exists is an expectation, and the expectation is the reason Beerus tolerates a seven-man roster at all.

The last time this happened, the Omni-Kings called a tournament because the lower universes were judged to be underperforming, and eight of them were made to send ten fighters each into a single ring in the World of Void. Eighty fighters, one match, roughly forty-eight minutes, elimination by ring-out only. No flight. Each fighter under the gravity of their own homeworld, so that nobody could claim an unfair stage. Attacking an eliminated fighter meant immediate erasure, and a second violation from the same universe meant erasure of the universe. The losing universes were erased outright — Gods of Destruction and Supreme Kais included — and the survivor's prize was a wish on the Super Dragon Balls, which is what undid it.

The expectation is that the next one will be the tournament the first one pretended to be. The cull already happened and was reversed by the winner's own wish; running it again would be a joke at the Omni-Kings' expense, and nobody believes they intend one. What is expected to remain is the format, the stage, the clock, and the prize: eight universes, ten fighters, one ring, and the Super Dragon Balls to whoever is left standing.

What is expected to be gone is the erasure. That changes everything about who can be risked. In a tournament where losing costs a universe, you send your ten best and nothing else matters. In a tournament where losing costs a wish, there is room to consider a fighter who might be extraordinary and might be a catastrophe.

Nobody has made that argument out loud. But everyone has done the arithmetic on the roster, because it does not come out even.

Universe 7's obvious nine: Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Piccolo, Broly, Goten, Trunks, Android 17, Android 18.

Krillin, Tenshinhan and Master Roshi all fought in the last one and none of them will fight in this one. The tenth seat has no obvious occupant. The names said out loud are Buu, who cannot be relied upon to wake up, and Frieza, which is a sentence nobody finishes.

Rayo's name has not been said out loud by anyone, and he knows the roster as well as they do.

13. CHEELAI

13.1 Her role

While Broly is away, Cheelai runs the household and is the parent physically present for the overwhelming majority of Rayo's life. She teaches curriculum two alongside Lemo (§12.2). Her bond with her son is affectionate and openly stated.

13.2 Her guilt, specifically

Cheelai does not carry a general sorrow about her son. She carries a precise, correctly-reasoned, unresolvable one.

She does not blame herself for the ki. The ki is Broly's inheritance and Rayo's body manages it competently the vast majority of the time. What she blames herself for is the trigger — the impulsive temperament that produces emotional spikes faster than trained discipline can organize against them. That is hers. It is traceable to her, it appeared in him, and it is the sole mechanism by which her son is ever actually in danger.

The cruelty of it is that the same trait in her was never dangerous. In Cheelai, impulsiveness made her talk too much, steal a ship, and save a stranger's life on a whim. In Rayo, the identical trait is the failure point of a containment system holding back something that kills people.

13.3 The division of guilt

Broly gave the body that requires containment. Cheelai gave the fuse that occasionally burns through it. Neither parent carries it alone, and neither has ever said this to the other in so many words.

13.4 Rayo's counter-position

When Rayo reassures his mother, he is not offering generic comfort. He is asserting a specific claim: that the temperament is his own, that he is not a defective assembly of two donated parts, and that she does not get to hold title to the worst thing about him.

He worked this out deliberately, somewhere around fourteen, and he repeats it because repetition is the only tool he has. It has not worked. She accepts it every time and believes it none of the times.

13.5 What he has not told her

Cheelai does not know about the lake and does not know about Shukutai (§16). Rayo's reasoning is short and he would give it without hesitation if asked.

Information is worth transmitting when the person receiving it can do something with it. Bulma can: instruments, physics, a model, a next thing to try. Cheelai cannot. She has no equipment, no background in any of it, and no way to act on the knowledge except to hold it. Telling her would add fear to her side of the ledger and nothing to his. So it does not clear the bar, and it has never occurred to him to treat that as a decision rather than as arithmetic.

He is not protecting her, and he would be irritated by the suggestion. He has spent five years telling his mother that she does not have to carry things on his behalf (§13.4). Withholding information to spare her would be the same manoeuvre pointed the other way, and he knows what that manoeuvre looks like, because he has been on the receiving end of it his entire life.

The fault in it. He applies the utility test to exactly one person in the house and to no one else. He tells Cheelai everything that has no use whatsoever — what he ate, what 17 said, how far he ran, the shape of a rock he liked. The test is in force on one subject only, and he has never asked himself why that subject.

Two things are true at once and he has not reconciled them: his reasoning is correct on its own terms, and there is no version of Cheelai finding out in which the reasoning survives being said out loud to her.

Lemo does not know either, for the same stated reason. Rayo would tell Lemo tomorrow if Lemo could do anything with it, and means that.

He will apply the same test to his mother twice more: once to the crater, and once to the fact that he is leaving the planet (§20.3). The reasoning does not change and the stakes multiply each time.

14. BROLY

Broly is now an officially recognized warrior and spends most of his time on Beerus's planet, training alongside Goku, Vegeta, Gohan, Trunks and Goten under Whis. He returns to Earth in windows of a few months before travelling out again.

He is still economical with words and still uncomfortable in groups. With Rayo he is direct, patient, and entirely without ceremony — the instruction is technical, unsentimental, and delivered in about a tenth as many words as anyone else would use.

He wears no limiter now and has not for many years. He has never discussed the collar with his son. Rayo has never asked about it, and has never been restrained by anyone in his life without something going wrong.

Broly's absence is the structural fact of Rayo's adolescence. It is also not a mystery or an abandonment — the boy knows exactly where his father is and why, and has done the arithmetic on what it means that a man with no rival left on this planet spends his years offworld training instead of at home. Rayo's private conclusion is that his father is making sure that if Rayo ever does become a problem, someone in the family is strong enough to stop him. He has never voiced this. He has never been told it is wrong.

He is also the only person who could put his son on Beerus's planet with a sentence, and he has never said the sentence (§12.5). Rayo has never asked him to, and the two of them have maintained that silence for four years without either one acknowledging that it is a silence.

15. THE CEILING

This is the governing law of Rayo's development and it operates against him.

Containment capacity is a function of physical structure, and physical structure grows slowly, through conditioning. Ki grows quickly, through training, sparring, and every correction window with his father. The half-second response delay is a function of inherited temperament and does not move at all.

Therefore: every increase in Rayo's power increases the volume containment must hold, against a trigger that stays exactly as fast as it was. Getting stronger makes him more dangerous to himself, not less. The gains compound; the defence does not.

The correction windows with Broly — the most productive training available to him — are the periods in which this gap widens fastest. The solo work, which produces the least growth, is the safest.

There is a point at which continued growth stops being survivable. Nobody in the family has calculated where it is. Broly is aware of the problem and has said one thing about it, which is that Rayo should keep training.

Zenkai. The Saiyan recovery trait — permanent power gain following recovery from near-fatal injury — has been observed often enough in the Saiyan-human hybrids of Earth that the fighters treat it as reliable. Rayo is not one of those. There is no recorded case of a hybrid of his mother's species and no way to predict it, and it has never been tested because he has never been injured badly enough.

By the logic above, a zenkai in Rayo would not be a reward. It would be an uncompensated jump in the quantity his containment has to hold, granted by exactly the kind of event most likely to leave him too damaged to hold it. Whether the trait fires the first time he nearly dies is the single largest unresolved question about his future, and the only way to answer it is the way nobody wants.

16. SHUKUTAI (縮退)

Two years ago, at the bottom of the lake, Rayo found a state nobody has ever recorded in a Saiyan, a hybrid, or anything else. He can enter it reliably. He cannot finish it, cannot describe it, and does not understand it.

Neither does Bulma, and Bulma is the only other person alive who knows it exists.

What follows is not an explanation. It is the working position of two people who have been trying to characterize something for two years with one instrument between them, and the instrument is a seventeen-year-old's body.

16.1 What happened

He was fifteen, a year into the ritual, sitting on the crater floor with his containment load near its waking minimum (§11.4). Instead of holding his ki against the inside of his skin, which is the only thing he has ever done with it, he pulled it the other way — inward, toward the centre, hard.

He describes what happened next as the floor: a point past which his body would not compress, arrived at abruptly, like stepping off a stair that was not there. And then something came back up through him from underneath, reached his skin, and died at the surface. He lost consciousness. He came to on the bank with no memory of getting there.

He has reached the floor eleven times in two years. Eleven times, the thing that comes back up has stopped at his skin. Nothing has ever gotten out.

How Bulma found out. He told her after the third one, and he did it on a calculation rather than an impulse.

Bulma is the most capable scientist on the planet, she has instruments, and she has a seventeen-year history of being useful about his body specifically — she is the reason he is alive and the reason he does not have a tail. Telling her converted a thing he could not understand into a thing two people were working on. That was a gain he could name.

Telling his father would end the lake, which was a loss he could name. Telling his mother would produce nothing he could name at all, so he did not (§13.5).

Her first reaction was to be angry at him for roughly four minutes. Her second was to ask him to describe the floor again, slower. They have been at it ever since.

16.2 Bulma's hypothesis, and where the names came from

Bulma does not know what the state is. What she has is a comparison she finds harder to dismiss the longer she looks at it, and she has been explicit with Rayo that a comparison is not a mechanism.

A large star holds itself open against its own weight by burning. When it runs out of fuel, the core falls inward, and the fall is stopped in about a thousandth of a second — not by anything pushing back, but by matter reaching a density at which it refuses to be compressed further. Neutrons packed to that point generate a pressure that does not come from heat and does not come from motion. It comes from there being nowhere left to put anything. That pressure is the only reason a neutron star exists at all rather than continuing to fall.

The core overshoots that point, rebounds, and the rebound throws a shock outward through everything still falling in. And then the shock stalls. Almost immediately, every time. The bounce on its own has never been enough to take a star apart; it dies in the infalling material a fraction of a second after it forms. What finishes the job is a second input arriving within roughly a second — an enormous flux of neutrinos pouring out of the new core, depositing energy behind the stalled front and driving it back out. If that second input does not arrive in time, the material keeps falling, the core is pushed past the mass its own pressure can support, and the result is not an explosion at all.

The figure Bulma keeps returning to is the energy of the event: roughly 5 × 10⁵³ erg released in forming the remnant — more than the sun will emit across its entire existence — of which the overwhelming majority leaves as neutrinos, which pass through everything nearby without touching it. The most violent thing in the universe short of a black hole, and almost none of it lands on anyone.

She said that part to Rayo twice. He asked her to repeat it the second time.

The names. They are hers, taken from the astrophysics, and she chose them because she had to write something on a file and refused to invent a term that would imply she understood the mechanism.

縮退 — Shukutai — degeneracy. The confirmed part: matter that will not compress further because there is nowhere left to put it. This is the state Rayo can reach, and the only one of the three either of them says out loud.
縮退星 — Shukutaisei — degenerate star. The completed version, the one with the third beat in it. It is in her notes in pencil. She has told him she will write it properly the day it happens and not before.
重力崩壊 — Jūryoku Hōkai — gravitational collapse. The failure condition (§16.6). She has written this one exactly once and has never said it aloud.

Rayo does not use the Japanese. He calls the state the floor. When Bulma says Shukutai he knows she means the floor, and when she says Shukutaisei he knows she means the thing he has been failing at for two years.

16.3 Why she cannot study him

Two years of work has produced very little, and the reasons are structural rather than a matter of effort.

There is no baseline. Every instrument Capsule Corporation owns for reading ki was calibrated against Saiyans, humans, Namekians and androids. Cheelai's species has no medical literature anywhere on Earth and exactly one representative Bulma has ever examined, which is Cheelai. One sample is not a baseline. Bulma cannot reliably say which of Rayo's readings are Saiyan, which are his mother's, and which belong to neither parent and are simply him. This has been the limiting factor since the delivery (§3.2) and it has not improved in seventeen years.

The state cannot be observed. The precondition is a containment load near zero, and load scales with external input (§11.4). An observer is external input. So is an instrument he knows is there. Bulma has attempted measurement four times — twice with herself on the crater rim, twice with sealed loggers on the lake bed — and on all four occasions he could not reach the floor at all. Those four are not among the eleven. The one thing she needs to measure is the one thing that stops happening when anyone measures it.

The knowledge is in his tissue, not his head. The floor is a property of his body, not a technique (§16.4). Rayo finds it with complete reliability and cannot say how. Asked to describe it, he produces the stair metaphor, and after two years he has not produced a better one, because there is no better one available to him. There is no instrument for proprioception.

What she actually has: before-and-after physiological scans, gross totals from a logger he carries in and switches on after he surfaces, and his account of it. That is the entire dataset.

Her own summary of the arrangement, delivered flatly and more than once, is that it is the worst experimental design she has ever agreed to participate in, and that she is participating because the alternative is him doing it with nobody knowing at all.

What this means in practice. Rayo is not Bulma's patient in this. He is her only instrument and her only collaborator. She builds the model, proposes the next thing to try, and then he goes and tries it four hundred kilometres away, alone, underwater, and comes back and tells her what happened. Neither of them is comfortable with this. Both of them have run out of alternatives.

16.4 The three beats

Beat one — infall. He stops holding ki against the inside of his skin and drives it toward the core. This requires a containment load already near zero, which is why it has only ever happened at the lake and has never once happened on land. Two to four seconds to the floor.

Visible: he compacts. The air moves toward him rather than away from him. And the white drains out of his hair until it is entirely black — the exact inverse of a leak (§8.2), which means the two states are distinguishable at a glance by anyone who has seen both. White spreading is failure. Black is the other thing.

Beat two — the bounce. The floor is not a technique. It is a property of his tissue, and no amount of practice moves it. He overshoots it, the structure refuses, and everything that went in comes back out in about a hundredth of a second.

This is the only outward output his body has ever produced that did not come from a failure. It is also, so far, useless: it reaches his skin and stalls there, exactly as the shock does in Bulma's stars, and the energy goes back into him as unconsciousness.

Beat three — revival. Never achieved.

The stalled front needs a second, separate input within about a second, or it falls back in. Nothing in the containment discipline can supply it, because containment is what stopped it. There is exactly one component of his ki that moves fast enough and carries enough energy to do the job, and it is the emotional one — the component he has never controlled, the one that produces every leak he has ever had, the one that arrives in under half a second (§7.4).

The technique does not work by overcoming his weakness. It requires it. The spike that has defined and ruined his life is the only ignition source available to him, and the difference between the transformation and the catastrophe is not whether it fires but whether it fires into a window roughly one second wide, while he is three seconds into a collapse and barely conscious.

To finish this he has to be able to become furious on command, precisely on time, having spent twelve years training himself not to become furious at all.

16.5 Limits, if he ever completes it

He cannot move. Through the infall and the bounce he is a fixed point — effective inertia goes up with everything else. The range and air counters against him (§10.3) do not improve in this state. They get worse.
One shot, one vector. The rebound leaves along the axis the collapse had. Whatever he is facing is what receives it. There is no aiming afterwards and no second attempt.
Under six seconds, start to finish. It cannot be sustained, held, or powered up.
He will not be conscious afterwards. Every one of the eleven attempts ended with him on the bank. A completed one ends worse.
It is not Super Saiyan and does not lead there. Super Saiyan is an outward surge and his reflex forbids it (§9.2). Shukutai runs the opposite direction, which is precisely why it is available to him and the other is not. Completing it would not make him a Super Saiyan. It would make him the only fighter on the planet whose maximum output is a single event he has to set up, survive, and then be carried away from.

16.6 Jūryoku Hōkai — what happens if the ceiling arrives first

Read §15 again with this in it.

The floor holds because there is not yet enough coming down on it. There is a quantity of ki above which the infall does not bounce at all, and every correction window with his father moves him toward it.

Past that point the failure is not an explosion. It is the opposite of one: everything goes in and nothing comes back out.

Bulma followed the comparison all the way to its end about eight months ago. She told Rayo, because she had decided before she started that she was not going to be a person who ran that calculation and then withheld the answer from the only one it applied to. She told him in a single sentence, in her workshop, and then neither of them said anything for a while.

He has gone for the floor four times since. He has been to the lake every week.

16.7 Who knows

Rayo and Bulma. Nobody else, including everyone with a professional reason to be told.

Their silence has never been negotiated as an agreement. It is simply the case that she has not told Vegeta, who would tell Goku; has not told Gohan, who would be correct to insist on supervision; and has not told Cheelai, which is the one she thinks about.

Her position is that the disclosure is Rayo's and he has already made it — to her, deliberately, on reasoning he can state (§13.5). She is not going to overrule a seventeen-year-old about his own body while also being the sole beneficiary of the decision she would be overruling.

The second thing she tells herself is that the day Broly finds out is the day the lake ends, and the lake is the only place on this planet where her collaborator has ever been quiet, and she is not certain that ending it would make him safer rather than only less studied.

She knows the second one is not a justification. She uses it anyway. She has also noticed that Rayo's arithmetic about his mother is doing work for her too, and she has not examined that either.

Since the injury she could not explain (§19.5), a third thing has been sitting underneath the other two: she is now keeping a secret she no longer fully understands. She knows what Shukutai is. She does not know what put a hand on him, and she did not ask, and she is aware that not asking was a choice.

Broly does not know. Broly told him not to attempt a transformation (§9.2), and Rayo has been precisely obedient: he has never attempted a transformation. He has been doing something else.

17. THE TIME PATROL

17.1 What he wants

Rayo is not neglected and does not think he is. He has more qualified instructors than any fighter his age has ever had, a mother who is present, a father who teaches him a discipline nobody else on the planet possesses, and a standing invitation from half the strongest people alive to come and be corrected by them.

What he does not have is a single fight in which anyone was trying to beat him.

18 sets an output ceiling before they start. Piccolo stops when he is hurt. Krillin and Tenshinhan teach instead of fighting. Broly corrects. Every engagement of Rayo's life has been administered by someone holding something back, and he has known this since he was about eleven.

He is also a Saiyan, and whatever that appetite is, he has it. It is the one part of his father's inheritance that the containment discipline does not touch and was never designed to touch. It does not present as aggression — he is not looking for a reason to hit anyone. It presents as a specific hunger for consequence: the wish to be in one situation, once, where the outcome is not managed and where losing would mean something.

He would not call it abandonment and would reject the word. What he would say, if pressed and if he trusted the person asking, is that everyone has decided what he is for, and what he is for is not happening.

17.2 What he heard, and from whom

When Rayo was twelve, Broly came home from a correction window and repeated, without much interest, something Whis had said in passing about a division of agents who police history for the Supreme Kai of Time.

It amounted to roughly forty words. Broly did not elaborate because he had not asked, and he has never mentioned it again.

From those forty words Rayo has built the following, most of it correct:

The Supreme Kai of Time is a real divine post, distinct from the Supreme Kais of the universe, with authority over the record of what happened rather than over any territory.
She maintains a body called the Time Patrol, headquartered outside ordinary space at the edge of Universe 7, whose work is correcting distortions in history caused by time travel and by people who want history to have gone differently.
Its members are drawn from every species and from every era. Patrollers are recruited, not born into the post, and the organization has no interest whatsoever in bloodline, transformation, or standing in any mortal hierarchy.
It does not measure a candidate by what they can become. It measures them by whether they can do a job.

That last point is the entire appeal and Rayo is honest with himself about it. He does not want to police history. He wants to be assessed by an institution that does not care that he has never transformed.

17.3 The problem with the plan

The Time Patrol does not exist yet.

Whis was not speaking about the present. Angels do not treat time the way anyone else does, and Broly, relaying it, did not register the distinction because the distinction was not in the sentence. The Supreme Kai of Time holds her post now. The Patrol as an organization — the city, the roster, the recruiting — is roughly half a century downstream of where Rayo is standing.

He worked this out at fifteen, alone, from nothing but the arithmetic of what he had been told.

It leaves him with a plan that has no action in it:

There is no application, no address, no one to approach. There is no door in his era to knock on.
He cannot reach it under his own power. He cannot fly four hundred kilometres (§9.2), cannot sense (§9.3), and has no transport of his own.
He will be sixty-seven years old when it begins, if it begins on time, and the only thing he knows about its timing is that he does not know it.

What he has instead is one lever, and it is the wrong one.

The Patrol recruits across time. It pulls people out of history — which means it finds them by looking at the record of what happened. Rayo cannot go to them. He can only be in the record when they look.

And the surest way for someone with his failure mode to end up in a record is a disaster.

He has not said this part out loud to anyone, including himself, in words this clear. But he has thought about it, and he is not stupid, and the two things he has been quietly working toward for two years are Shukutai (§16) — the version of this he could control — and being the sort of person something happens around, which is the version he could not.

All of the above was true until four months ago, and the part he got wrong was not a fact. He had every fact. He knew the Patrol pulls people out of history from every era, and he wrote it down himself, and in five years of turning the problem over he never once turned it the other way round. He worked out that he could not reach them. He never asked whether they could reach him.

17.4 Why he has told nobody

Not utility this time. He knows precisely what it sounds like.

A seventeen-year-old who has never transformed, who is not on the roster, who cannot throw a punch further than his arm reaches, announcing that he intends to be recruited by a divine organization that will not be founded for fifty years — he can hear it. He has heard it in his own head. It is the first thing in his life he has kept back out of embarrassment rather than arithmetic, and that includes from Bulma, who would be kind about it, which is worse.

The exception is that he has read about the Supreme Kai of Time, as much as anyone on Earth can, which is almost nothing. Bulma has noticed what he asks her to look up for him and has not asked why.

This is the whole of what anyone knows. Bulma knows he wants it. Nobody — not Bulma, not his parents, not Lemo — knows that the wanting stopped being hypothetical four months ago (§19).

17.5 Rime

Who he is. A working Time Patroller, field grade, roughly forty years of service counted from a point downstream. He is a member of Frieza's species, which is neither remarkable nor accidental: the Patrol recruits heavily from it, because they are long-lived, physically durable, and come from a civilization that kept excellent records. The organization's indifference to species is deliberate policy rather than carelessness, and Rime is a routine product of it.

He is not an officer, an envoy, or anyone's emissary. He is a man on a route.

Why he is in this era. Recruiting sweep. The Patrol grows by pulling candidates out of history, and someone has to go and look. Rime was passing through, not searching. He was not looking for Rayo and had no reason to; Rayo is not on any list because Rayo is not on anything.

How he found him. Not power. Rayo's contained output is unremarkable and his masking is habitual everywhere it matters. What Rime picked up was the fine-control work (§12.3): a metered emission of a size that should not be controllable at all, sustained, repeated, adjusted, held steady — four hundred kilometres from the nearest settlement, entirely unmasked, because there is nobody out there to mask it from.

Rime assumed for most of the first hour that he was reading a piece of equipment.

What he did. He watched for two days without showing himself, which is standard practice in every era he has worked in and which is going to be the single worst detail he ever has to say out loud (§20.4).

What he saw. Environmental conditioning of a kind that has not been fashionable in any era he has worked in. Fine-control drills repeated past the point most people would call obsessive. A seventeen-year-old covering ground on foot at speeds that made the absence of flight look like a choice rather than a limitation. And at the end of each day, a nine-kilometre walk to a caldera lake at sixty degrees, which the boy entered without hesitating and did not come out of for twenty-six minutes.

Rime timed it. It is the lake that decided him, not the training.

What he did not see. Shukutai. Rayo did not go for the floor on either of those days, and there was no reason he would have.

Why his first question is who are you. Because the Patrol works from the record, and Rayo is in no record anywhere. A ki of that character — Saiyan, with a filed historical profile it plainly resembles — present on Earth in this era, with no corresponding entry in anything, is not a curiosity to a Patroller. It is the exact shape of the thing they are sent to investigate.

Rayo spent five years working out how to get himself into the record so that the Patrol might find him (§17.3). What actually brought one to him was the opposite: the masking, the four hundred kilometres, the isolation, the entire apparatus his family built to keep him out of every record in existence. He was found because he is a hole.

Where he sits. Comfortably above Piccolo and nowhere near the Beerus group. A competent, experienced field agent of no particular distinction within his own organization, which in this era makes him one of the stronger individuals on the planet and not remotely the strongest. He can injure Rayo without effort and could not survive ten seconds against Broly, and both of those facts matter.

What Rime does not know. Everything. He has not read anything about Rayo because there is nothing to read. He does not know about Broly, the containment discipline, the trigger set, the ceiling, or the fact that the boy he has been watching has never in his life been touched by someone who did not already know the rules.

He believes he is being careful.

What he came away with. Not a recruit. A candidate, two requirements, and four months of verification ahead of him (§19.2) — plus something he did himself that afternoon and has not worked out how to say.

18. CANONICAL PLACEMENT

The Dragon Ball Super manga runs, in order: the Beerus arc, Universe 6, Future Trunks and Goku Black, Universe Survival, Galactic Patrol Prisoner, Granolah the Survivor — ending with Frieza's return in a new transformation, Black Frieza, who defeats Ultra Instinct Goku and Ultra Ego Vegeta with a single blow each — and finally the Super Hero arc, which adapts the film and continues into three original epilogue chapters.

The epilogue runs through chapter 103. A Red Ribbon survivor of the Cell Max incident, Carmine, attempts to rebuild the organization, attacks Gohan, and provokes the Beast transformation; the arc closes with the remnant broken and the Z-fighters at the strongest they have ever collectively been. Chapter 103 was the last chapter published before the manga's indefinite hiatus. A single later chapter, a self-contained prequel about Goten and Trunks' origins as costumed heroes, sits outside the main line. Chapter 105 was announced as the opening of a new arc and has not appeared.

Black Frieza is therefore the loudest unresolved threat in the published story, and has been for years.

This story begins nineteen years after the events of the epilogue. It does not occupy the gap; it runs forward from where the published story stops, treating everything through chapter 103 as fixed and everything after it as open ground.

Rayo was born two years into that span. The wedding follows four months later, which places it seventeen years before the present, and every date in this document counts from those two fixed points.

Black Frieza has not returned in those nineteen years. Nobody knows why, and the silence is a subject Vegeta will not discuss.

The divine offices sit outside that frame. The Supreme Kai of Time holds a post that the manga has never had occasion to mention, and the body she will eventually command (§17) operates from a point downstream of every date in this document. Nothing about either contradicts the published story; they occupy the space the published story has never looked at, which is the only reason a Patroller can walk into Age 799 without anything needing to be rewritten.

19. FIRST CONTACT

19.1 The observer — four months before his eighteenth birthday

Rayo leaves home at the start of an eight-day stretch. Nobody expects to hear from him (§11.3).

On the third day he acquires an observer.

Rayo does not detect him, and would not have even if Rime had been careless. He reads only large powers at close range and nothing subtler (§9.3), and Rime — doing the ordinary thing a field agent does while observing — was suppressed the entire time. Two full days, no contact (§17.5).

19.2 The approach — day five

Rime shows himself in the middle of the afternoon, at the training circle, without warning and without any attempt at ceremony. He asks who Rayo is. He explains what he himself is, where he is from, and who he works for.

And then he does not offer him anything.

What he says instead is that Rayo may be a candidate, that there are two requirements, and that he is going to go and check.

Legal adulthood. The Patrol does not recruit minors — not in any era, not from any species, not for any reason. The threshold used is the candidate's own culture, and by Earth's, Rayo is four months short.
A clean record. No criminal history anywhere in the candidate's own timeline. An organization that polices history does not staff itself with people who have a personal stake in changing it.

Rayo asks how long the check takes. Rime says it depends, which is true.

Rayo does not believe any of it for roughly ninety seconds and then believes all of it completely, which is the worst possible order for those two things to happen in. He has waited five years for a sentence he was certain would never be said to him, and it has now been said, and it came attached to a birthday that was already on the calendar.

19.3 Why the check takes four months

A clean record and no record are not the same thing. Rayo appears in nothing — no census, no registry, no medical system outside Bulma's private files, no record of a birth. Rime cannot certify an absence. He has to go and produce one, era by era and archive by archive, which is slow work and is most of what he does for the next four months.

And there is one file. Searching on Rayo's profile returns his father's, because the signatures are close enough that the systems do not distinguish them cleanly. That file is not clean. What is in it is an itemized account of something Broly did not choose and could not have refused, compiled by the organization that arranged it.

Nothing in the Patrol's standard makes a father's record a son's. Rime knows that. It still takes him a while to be certain, and he never mentions to Rayo that he hesitated.

The check is not what sets the date. The birthday is, and always was — Rime finishes with a few weeks to spare and spends them waiting, which he does not enjoy and does not mention either.

19.4 The assessment, and what it cost

Before leaving that afternoon, Rime does the thing a thorough field agent does with a candidate: he asks to see how the boy moves. He is explicit that it is not a test of strength, that he is not going to hurt him, and that it will take a few minutes. Rayo agrees instantly. It is the first time in his life anybody has proposed finding out what he can actually do.

Partway through, Rime takes a hold.

It is nothing — a wrap and a pin, the standard way his species controls a faster opponent, performed at a fraction of his capability on someone he has no intention of harming. Every person who has ever trained Rayo knows not to do it. They learned it the way everything about him has been learned, which is by it having gone wrong once already. Rime has read nothing, because there is nothing to read.

It is the first trigger on the list and the fastest one Rayo has (§6.1). Half a second is not enough (§7.4). It is past voluntary control before Rayo registers what is happening.

The leak runs nine minutes, three times the longest he has ever had, and the ceiling is not violated to make it do so: a leak ends when the spike that caused it decays (§8.3), and nothing that afternoon was allowed to decay. Rime — reacting correctly by every standard he has, restraining a fighter who has suddenly become dangerous — kept the trigger alive for as long as he kept hold of him, without ever understanding that he was the one supplying it.

By the time he worked it out:

The composite failure had broken containment and masking together (§7.5), and the signature — Saiyan, Broly-typed, at a fixed Earth coordinate, sustained for nine minutes — went out legible to anyone with the records and the equipment.
Rime, who sits well above the threshold at which Rayo's density stops mattering (§2.3), had injured him badly while stopping him. Injuries that get through him take weeks (§2.4).
Rayo had collapsed and could not stand for hours (§8.4), with four days of physical debt behind that.

Rime does not take him anywhere. He stays on the range until the boy can stand, says almost nothing, and leaves to begin the check.

Neither of them can do anything about the broadcast, and both of them understand this. It is the first thing they ever agree on and neither says it out loud.

19.5 The three lies

Rayo has never lied to his family. He does it three times inside two weeks and it is easier than he expected, which frightens him more than the leak did.

Lemo, two days later, on the supply run. He finds a crater at the training circle and a seventeen-year-old who cannot stand up straight. Rayo tells him the containment failed on its own. Lemo spent decades in an army and has watched a great many people lie badly. He lets it go, and he is going to think about having let it go for the rest of his life.

Bulma, the following week, because nobody else can treat him. She knows exactly what a leak does to his body and this is not only that — something hit him, hard, from outside. Rayo tells her he does not want to talk about it. She lets him not talk about it, which she has never done before, and which she does because she is aware that she is in no position to demand disclosure from him (§16.7).

Cheelai is told nothing at all. That is not a lie and it is worse.

The only reason any of it holds is that Broly's cycle put him offworld across the whole four months. A correction window would have ended it in an afternoon: he is the one person who can read drift in Rayo's technique by looking at him (§12.3), and he has seen every injury his son has ever had. Rayo did not plan around his father's schedule. He simply got the version of the year in which his father was not there, which is most versions.

19.6 What Rime decides

He certifies him.

He does it having personally witnessed the single strongest argument against it, which is a point he has considered and discarded. His reasoning, delivered to Rayo once, flatly: the standard is legal adulthood and a clean record, and neither of those means has never lost control. If it did, the Patrol would have about four members.

What he does not say is that he caused it. He has not worked out how to, and by the time he does, there will be other things to say.

19.7 The arrangement

Rime returns with a date, a place, and nothing else.

The date: eleven days after Rayo's eighteenth birthday. The place: the flat ground east of the training circle, which Rayo has walked past several thousand times. The arrangement: a ship will be there. He should come as he is.

No paperwork, no ceremony, no instruction to bring anything, no medical, no orientation. Rime assumes the family will be told, because in every era he has worked in the family is told.

Rayo does not correct him.

20. THE DEPARTURE

This is where the story opens. Everything above is standing condition.

20.1 The state of the board that morning

Broly is offworld, with about a month of his current cycle left to run. He will learn what happened when he lands.
Bulma knows Rayo wants to be a Time Patroller. She has known for two years, from the things he asks her to look up (§17.4). She does not know that a Patroller has been standing in front of her patient for four months, that a date exists, or that there is a ship. She treated the injury four months ago and accepted a refusal to explain it, and she has been uneasy ever since without being able to say about what.
Cheelai knows none of it: not the lake, not Shukutai, not the Patrol, not Rime.
Lemo knows there was a crater and a bad lie.
The signature from four months ago is still out there and has been travelling the whole time.

20.2 The last morning

Rayo does not tell his mother anything, and he does not behave normally either.

He gets up before her, which he never does. He eats slowly instead of eating fast and leaving. He does a repair on the workshop door that he has been refusing to do for a month. He lets her talk without interrupting, about nothing, for most of an hour. He does not argue about the thing they always argue about. At the door he hugs her, which he does perhaps twice a year.

None of it registers as strange at the time. To Cheelai it is a good morning at the start of an ordinary eight-day stretch, and she says something about him finally growing up, and she means it as a joke.

Every single one of those details will come back to her afterwards, in order, permanently.

20.3 The message from the ship

Rayo walks to the flat ground east of the circle. The ship is there. Rime is there.

He gets aboard. And then, from inside it, with the thing already real and no longer arguable, he asks Rime to do him a favour: go to the house and tell his mother what has happened.

His stated reasoning is the same reasoning he has used for everything else. Telling Cheelai in person would produce an hour of shouting and would change nothing, because she cannot stop him and they both know it. The argument would cost her and would cost him and would buy neither of them anything. So: no gain, no telling.

It is the third time he has applied that arithmetic to his mother — the lake, Shukutai, and now this (§13.5). It has never once failed him and it has never once been right.

What he does not consider for a second is who he is sending. Rime is a stranger, from an organization nobody on Earth has heard of, and a member of Frieza's species, walking unannounced up to the door of a woman who spent her early adulthood in the Frieza Force to tell her that her son is gone and that she cannot follow.

Rayo has met Rime three times across four months, which was enough to stop seeing what he looks like and nowhere near enough to know him. His mother gets him cold, on her doorstep, with no warning at all.

20.4 What Rime does

He goes. He does it immediately, before leaving the system, because refusing does not occur to him, and because for four months he has been assuming somebody had already told her.

He is honest, thorough, and catastrophically ill-equipped. He knows the Patrol, the requirements, the date and the arrangement. He does not know about the collar, the Frieza Force, the kitchen, the lake, or a single thing about what the sight of him is going to do to the woman he is explaining it to.

He also does not know that he is about to give Cheelai the piece she has been missing for four months — that the crater was not a containment failure, and that Rayo lied about it, and that whoever is standing in her doorway is the one who caused it.

20.5 What it costs

Cheelai carries it alone for a month, with Lemo, until Broly lands. Everything she learns in the first ten minutes has to be held in place for four weeks before the one person who could do anything about it is reachable.
Bulma has to say that she knew. She can say truthfully that she knew nothing about the ship, the date, or Rime. She cannot say that about the wish, which she has sat on for two years, or about Shukutai, which she has sat on for two and a half and now has no remaining reason to withhold except the obvious one (§16.7).
Broly lands in a month into a house that has already had the argument without him, and the thing he will want to know is not where his son went. It is who put a hand on him.
The beacon is still travelling. Rayo lit it, hid it, and left. Whatever read it is coming to a house with no Broly in it, no Rayo in it, and Cheelai and Lemo standing in the doorway — which is the exact configuration that the four hundred kilometres, the dampeners, the masking discipline and seventeen years of arrangements were all built to prevent.

20.6 The misreading

The family's inference from the crater was always available and nobody drew it, because Rayo was standing there alive when Lemo arrived and there was nothing to investigate.

That changes the moment Rime is in the doorway. Cheelai and Lemo both identify the species on sight, without needing anyone to confirm it, because they spent their early adulthood surrounded by it — and the oldest unresolved threat in this era is a Frieza who beat Ultra Instinct Goku and Ultra Ego Vegeta with one blow each and has not been seen in nineteen years.

There is no chance whatsoever that nobody says his name out loud in the first ten minutes.

They will be wrong. Rime has never heard of any of them and is connected to none of it. But the wrongness is not going to be cleared up quickly, because the person who could clear it up in one sentence is in a ship that has already gone, and because being wrong about this is going to be considerably easier for Cheelai than being right.

Whether Black Frieza connects to any of it is a separate question, and nothing in that room answers it. If he does connect, the connection runs through the records rather than through Rayo — somebody has been maintaining an archive of Saiyan signatures for nineteen years, and there is more than one party who would pay for it.

21. SOURCES OF CONFLICT THE SETTING GENERATES ON ITS OWN

The growth trap. Rayo cannot get strong enough to protect anyone without getting strong enough to be the thing they need protection from. Every hour of training he does resolves the first problem and deepens the second, and there is no version of the work that only does the first.
The door he was told not to open. Transformation is the fastest available increase in power and the single most likely thing to kill everyone near him. It will be available exactly when he is most desperate.
Range. Rayo's four general-purpose counters are all cheap. The first competent enemy who reads him wins without a fight, and the family's entire security model assumes enemies who have to come close.
The clock. Every extended engagement he survives is one he survived by luck of duration.
Cheelai's arithmetic. She is right. That is the problem — the guilt is not a distortion to be argued away, it is a correct inference, and there is no scene in which someone explains it to her convincingly because there is nothing wrong with her reasoning.
Broly's absence as a security policy. If Rayo ever articulates his private conclusion about why his father trains offworld, someone will have to answer it.
The ignition problem. The only thing that can finish Shukutai is the one thing Rayo has spent twelve years learning to smother, and he has to produce it deliberately, on a one-second cue, in the worst physical state of his life. Every hour he spends getting better at containment makes him worse at the thing he will eventually need.
What Bulma is holding. She is a non-parent keeping a survivable secret from two parents, one of whom she delivered a son for and one of whom could end the arrangement in an afternoon. Her cover is that the disclosure belongs to Rayo and Rayo has made it. It is a good argument and she knows what it is doing for her. She is also the one person in this setting everyone would believe if she said it out loud, and that gets more expensive every month.
The arithmetic about his mother. Rayo's reason for not telling Cheelai is coherent, defensible, and will not survive the first time Cheelai asks him to his face (§13.5). Two people are currently relying on it.
He leaves before any of it resolves. The transformation he never had, his mother's guilt, his father's silence, the seat he was never considered for: none of it is settled when he goes, and going settles none of it. He does not win an argument. He removes himself from one.
The messenger. Rayo sent a member of Frieza's species to break the news to a former Frieza Force recruit and did not think about it once (§20.3). That is not carelessness. It is what four months of familiarity does, and it is the most ordinary mistake in the document.
The tenth seat. There is exactly one unfilled place on Universe 7's expected roster, everyone has noticed, and the two names being floated are a sleeping Majin and a Frieza who beat Goku and Vegeta with one blow each. Rayo is the only Saiyan on the planet not in the conversation, and the reasons he is not in it are all correct (§12.5).
The wrong lever. Rayo spent five years concluding that the only way to be found was to be in the record, and the surest route into a record, for him specifically, is a catastrophe (§17.3). He was found for the opposite reason and will probably never learn that. The catastrophe happened anyway, in the same afternoon, caused by the finding.
Nobody is at fault and the damage is total. Rime did the professional thing at every step and caused all of it (§19.4). Rayo agreed to the only reasonable request anyone had ever made of him. Cheelai will draw a conclusion that is wrong and entirely reasonable from what she is looking at (§20.6). There is no villain anywhere in the sequence, which means there is nobody to defeat in order to undo it.
The thing that already fired. He wanted to see a city, meet people, and be something other than a containment system. Every adult in his life had excellent reasons to say no, and he accepted those reasons for seventeen years, and then he stopped — not by arguing, and not on a planet any of them can follow him to. Whatever the story is about after that, it is no longer about whether he goes.

RAYO — CHARACTER BIBLE ​

1. CORE IDENTITY ​

2. PHYSICAL FORM ​

2.1 Appearance ​

2.2 Why he is dense and not large ​

2.3 What density buys him ​

2.4 What density costs him ​

3. BIRTH AND MEDICAL HISTORY ​

3.1 The incompatibility ​

3.2 Bulma ​

3.3 The tail ​

3.4 The wedding ​

4. THE NAME ​

5. PSYCHOLOGY ​

5.1 Disposition ​

5.2 What he wants ​

5.3 What he fears ​

5.4 Self-knowledge ​

6. ANGER: THE TRIGGER SET ​

6.1 Sudden-onset triggers (containment fails) ​

6.2 Slow-onset pressures (containment holds) ​

6.3 What this means for anyone fighting him ​

7. THE KI SYSTEM ​

7.1 Composition ​

7.2 Containment ​

7.3 The cost, with thresholds ​

7.4 Speed of response ​

7.5 Masking, and how it couples to containment ​

7.6 The devices ​

8. CONTAINMENT FAILURE ​

8.1 Onset ​

8.2 Presentation ​

8.3 Duration and termination ​

8.4 Aftermath ​

8.5 Scale ​

9. WHAT RAYO CANNOT DO ​

9.1 He cannot project ki ​

9.2 He can barely fly, and he has never transformed ​

9.3 He cannot sense ki well ​

10. COMBAT PROFILE ​

10.1 Placement ​

10.2 How he actually wins ​

10.3 How he actually loses ​

11. THE HOUSEHOLD ​

11.1 The house ​

11.2 The training ground ​

11.3 The domestic reality ​

11.4 The lake ​

12. TRAINING ARCHITECTURE ​

12.1 Curriculum one — ki containment (Broly, exclusively) ​

12.2 Curriculum two — the soldier's trade (Lemo and Cheelai, split) ​

12.3 The three training modes ​

12.4 The visitor roster ​

12.5 The Beerus arrangement, and why Rayo is not in it ​

12.6 What they are training for ​

13. CHEELAI ​

13.1 Her role ​

13.2 Her guilt, specifically ​

13.3 The division of guilt ​

13.4 Rayo's counter-position ​

13.5 What he has not told her ​

14. BROLY ​

15. THE CEILING ​

16. SHUKUTAI (縮退) ​

16.1 What happened ​

16.2 Bulma's hypothesis, and where the names came from ​

16.3 Why she cannot study him ​

16.4 The three beats ​

16.5 Limits, if he ever completes it ​

16.6 Jūryoku Hōkai — what happens if the ceiling arrives first ​

16.7 Who knows ​

17. THE TIME PATROL ​

17.1 What he wants ​

17.2 What he heard, and from whom ​

17.3 The problem with the plan ​

17.4 Why he has told nobody ​

17.5 Rime ​

18. CANONICAL PLACEMENT ​

19. FIRST CONTACT ​

19.1 The observer — four months before his eighteenth birthday ​