lwf58 wrote:

    The usual caveat: all opinions stated are strictly my own, derived from
lengthy consultation with my navel.  Ignore as it pleases you.

    C&C at all is always useful. It lets me know if anyone cares. :p

"Partially, perhaps. Something would be lost... would have to be
lost, really."

"We will have to examine more closely."

    Hmm.  In this scene, you say that you're going to merge the two worlds.
But as the story progresses, all you've done is insert Gohan into the SM
story.  Is there going to be more signs of the fusion later?  After all, the
idea you propose here is that they are trying to save _both_ worlds, not
just the Sailor Moon one.

    There's more to it later. The change was made in such a manner that not all who were involved, and every_thing_ that was involved was made clear to people who should know.

    In something this clumsy there are bound to be errors...

Memories came back in a sickening surge, reminding her of how much
was lost, how little chance she had. "Oh no... the Silver Crystal is
shattered... even if I find them, it's a doomed cause..."

    I agree with Ken Arromdee; the Ginzuishou _was_ shattered at the
beginning of the series.  By extension, that implies that even if it were
shattered again, it could be restored.  Another idea that might be better
for your purpose would be to say that it was burned out somehow.

    Acursed e-mail... I have no idea where Mr. Arromdee said this, but I can make that more clear. Broken as in 'kaput', not 'gebrocht'.

If only the Dragonballs hadn't been destroyed, then... then they
could wish everyone back, but...

    "The first time they found them"? Remember; Goku _had_ one of the
Dragonballs when Bulma first met him.  And Bulma had already collected one
or two of them before she tracked down Goku's.  If the balls were shattered
"the first time they found them", then Bulma would have discovered her first
Dragonball, realized it was useless, and gone back home without ever having
met Goku and convincing him to leave his home in a remote region of China.
And Gohan would never have been born, since Goku would never have met the Ox
King and Chichi.

    Nnng... I explained that poorly, but then, Gohan's recolection of things (based soley on what he's been told) isn't that clear, either.

    One of the possible solutions would be to say that Dende was killed in
the fighting; that would cause the Dragonballs to immediately vanish, since
they are tied to his lifeforce.  If you say that Koruman called for Earth's
greatest fighters, you could just as easily say he demanded the appearance
of Earth's Guardian as well; he could have lied by saying that he wanted to
negotiate, when all he wanted was to get all of his potential obstacles
where he could deal with them at once.

    Dende? I thought that was the new keeper for the Namekian Dragonballs, not the old keeper for Earth's... but he was dead.

    Killed when the dragonballs were broke, which, as I remember it, means they turn(ed) to stone. In this story, anyway.

    Of course, nothing in Dragonball is ever that clear-cut, though.  If
Dende did die, the other Nameks would probably know it, and would eventually
use their dragonballs to wish him back to life.  He's only been revived once
before, and, IIRC, there's no limit for the number of times Porunga, the
Namekian dragon, can resurrect people.  That's as opposed to Shen Long, who
can only resurrect twice.  In Dragonball Z, the line between life and death
gets crossed rather often.

    I recall that, too. And Porunga can be summoned more often on top of that.

When the cup was taken away, he opened his eyes, slowly. The light
seemed less intense, and he blinked up at a somber blue-haired girl.
She watched him worriedly, hovering like a mother chick protecting
its clutch. He managed to restrain his laughter. He saw many of the
women at his college look at him the same way -- few of them would
believe that he was a student there himself, since he had gotten in
so young. Thanks, of course, to his mother's pressure on him to
study, and his father's vaunted reputation...

    He's in college?  He didn't skip any grades when he was a high school
student, so he wouldn't look any younger than anyone else by then.  And what
happened to Videl, his future wife?  She isn't mentioned once in this, yet
if this incident takes place after high school, then he should be thinking
of her because she's his girlfriend.

    His training is only occasionally to martial arts. This is drawing on how hard his mother pushes him to study in canon, and then how quickly he was able to make up all of the school that he had missed while adventuring in the Frezia arc.

    As far as Videl, he was out of high-school before he met her.

He cursed his own idiocy, switching smoothly to the cultured Japanese
his mother instilled into him at a young age, "Sorry, Ami-san. I
didn't know you spoke Japanese. I need you to contact my aunt, she
owns a stake in the Capsule Corporation." At the girl's surprise, he
added, "Her name is Burifu Buruma."

    Any reason in particular why you are using the literal sounds of the
Japanese characters used in her name?  Even the creator of the series, when
he wrote her name in romaji, spelled it "Bulma".  Heck, it's even written
that way on her T-shirt when she first appears in Dragonball.

    Because I'm a pretentious sot?

Glancing at the ten thousand yen that Gohan had already given her,
Ami sighed. "Yes, thank you." She pocketed the bills, drawing her
own purse from a pocket, and counted out the change. Her mother was
fairly free with money, though she seldom found herself needing to
use very much of it. Gohan, however, would have to have his money
given back to him; considering what she had done to conceal her
suspicions from him, she couldn't allow him to spend money like
that, especially when she was trying to take care of him.

    </snippage>

    Remember, while the exchange rate changes almost daily, as a general
rule of thumb 1 yen is roughly equivalent to 1 US penny.  While that isn't
really accurate, it gives you a reasonable feel for what prices should be
like for most items, and is easy to figure out; you just take the yen value
and put a decimal point before the last two digits of the figure.  That
means that Gohan gave her something like $100 dollars.  So when you say that
eight bowls of soup cost 7,000 yen, you're saying they cost nearly $70.
That's a little too much.  Noodle soups in Tokyo average around 650 yen
judging by the menus I've been able to find online.  So we are talking about
5200 yen for eight bowls.

    Uh... 1. Dollar to 120~ yen, so that works out to closer to only 60.

    This is based on the assumption that Ami's family lives in a more upscale (and hence, expensive) area...

    And Ami's mother is so free with money that $70 is something that Ami
has no problem parting with buying out of her own pocket what should be far
too much food (she has no idea about how much saiyans can eat) even with
Usagi there?  Man, I wish _my_ mother was that rich.

    The rest being to reheat later.

At Ami's blank look, he managed a shrug, explaining, "The Dragonballs
are an old... magical collection of crystal balls. They were
supposed to grant wishes, but they were broken a long time ago by a
scientist named Gero. Gero-sensei died in the blast, and the broken
Dragonballs were scattered around the world, but they were useless,
since they couldn't grant wishes anymore.

    ???  Okay, so you are putting the fate of the Dragonballs this far back,
before DBZ?  IIRC, Goku's first encounter with Gero took place in the first
DB.  And that means that when Goku first died, fighting his brother Raditz,
that would have been it.  Game over.  No one would have been there to stop
Vegeta and Nappa from destroying Earth, and Vegeta would never have become a
"good guy".

    Should have been obvious from the implications, but that never happened.

    Vegeta was never mentioned in this fic, because he never showed up. Nor did Radditz.

    What I'm really trying to say is that everyone who has watched DB and
DBZ, and those in other countries who have seen the GT, etcetera, know
things about the history of DB Earth that you're tossing out the window.  If
you do that, then you're forcing yourself to rewrite the history of that
entire world, because you have to bring us up to speed on how things came to
be the way they are.  Call me lazy if you like, but I think it's smarter to
just use the existing history and say "Dende dies", because when _he's_
gone, no one else can play the game because he takes his marbles with him.

    That would make Gohan much more powerful than he is.

    The main point of the backstory was to result in Gohan being more knowledgable and less powerful than in DBZ canon, so that he'd mesh with the story better.

    Tuxedo the Smoking Bomber vs. SSJx Kame-ha-me-ha is kinda cheezy.

"Uh," Gohan pronounced, grabbing his wallet and flipping to his
student identification. "I went to Capsule College," he admitted.
"They're kind of... um... lenient on me because of my father's work."

    "Capsule College"?  Never heard of it in any of the episodes I've seen,
anyway.  Of course, since I've only seen the episodes that have been
broadcast here in the States, I've never seen whether or not Capsule
Corporation has a factory anywhere.  From what I've seen, the whole
Corporation seems to just be Bulma, her father, and his cat.

    I made it up. I doubt it exists.

"T-t... Tokyo?" Gohan asked, stunned. "But... how did... Um, I have
her phone number. She lives, uh, in Chiba. She's probably worried
about me."

    This is another point where you seem to have settled on something
arbitrarily.  While it's never stated openly, Goku is from China; the
mountains around his Grandfather's house are typical of a certain region of
China.  Also, the myth that Goku is based on-- the adventures of the Monkey
King-- is of Chinese origin, and even the Japanese version places it in
China.  Plus, Chichi dresses in typical Chinese women's clothing throughout
DBZ, which leads to an assumption that they still live in China.  Of course,
that _is_ deceptive, since folks near the house that Goku, Chichi, and their
children live in use mostly Western clothing styles.  However, there's no
noticible indication that they might be in Japan.

    In the series, Goku's home address is simply listed as "439 East
District".  The only references to places around it are "Lime's Village"
(where Gohan rescued the villagers from a scam while waiting for the Cell
Games to start) and "Penguin Village" (I don't know what that name actually
refers to: it wasn't defined in the reference I read.  It could be the same
as "Lime's Village".  All I know for certain is that it's the name of the
village all of the characters live in "Dr. Slump", Akira Toriyama's hit
series before Dragonball).  Orange Star High School, where Gohan goes and
meets Videl, is in a town named after the character called "Hercule" in the
Cartoon Network adaptation.  In Japanese, his name is "Mr. Satan", so I
guess it's Satan City or some such.  In DBZ, Satan City is mentioned as the
nearest town with a high school for Gohan to attend, even though it's 500
miles away from his home!

    The hesitation should have been obvious -- Gohan was lying because he's reasonably sure that that world isn't his own.

    Nnng. Well, long and short, this was an experimental piece -- almost everything I write is -- and it obviously failed on pretty massive scale.

    I'll just file it under 'mystery fusions', and go back to working on Process of Elimination.

    Thanks for taking the time to respond!

   Ja mata,
   Larry F

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