"...Dammit, Pep." I muttered.
Pepper was six months pregnant, and was currently using the other simulator as a way to continue her training, even if it was all in her head.
Pulling myself out of my seat, I pressed the abort button on Pepper's simulator. The fight between her and the simulated Frost Demon, projected on the screen beside her, came to an abrupt end as she slipped into her fifteen second adjustment period.
"What the hell, Tarble?" She asked, pulling herself out of the chair with indignity.
"Look at your tail, Pep."
She looked. "Oh. Damn, again?" The glowing aura stopped as she slipped right out of SSJP, back into her normal state.
Before her pregnancy, Pepper's base power level had been around two million, and she'd been able to use Ikari Mode at will, using the Blutz Energy from her tail to achieve a stable multiplier of fifteen, bringing her power level up to around 30 million or so, though she couldn't hold it much outside of combat. She'd been entirely unable to use SSJP at all. Her S-Cells simply didn't fully activate, for some reason or other.
Now, six months into her pregnancy, Pepper's base power level had jumped to something higher than mine. 3.5 million. And what's more interesting, her S-Cells had developed a habit of fully activating, forcing her to enter SSJP, completely at random.
At first, she'd been happy to finally be able to use SSJP. A power level of 35 million was nothing to scoff at.
Then, I'd turned her attention to the fact that the excess power was not coming from her pregnancy, somehow subtly awakening her bloodline or anything like that.
No. Her S-Cells were being directly stimulated by energy… from within Pepper's own body.
Yeah, the baby developing in her womb was the one going Super Saiyan. SSJP, specifically. The energy signature, while similar to Pepper's due to the obvious genetic link, was easily observable via ki-measuring devices.
My unborn child had a power level of over a million, and could already go SSJP.
Was this the Legendary Super Saiyan? I honestly had no clue what the heck was going on with the baby, in all honesty. I suspected that it had something to do with the fact that I'd consolidated a bit of the SSJP hormones into my base form over the years, but I couldn't really be sure what was happening until I took a cell sample, which required the baby to be born first.
Further testing revealed a few more interesting things.
First of all, the baby's energy was 90% Blutz in origin, recycled through the S-Cells.
This wasn't a 'sometimes' thing or a 'usually'. The baby was constantly drawing Blutz Waves through the S-Cells.
In other words, the baby was constantly in SSJP. Not Ikari Mode, the full, stable SSJP form, with S-Cells fully active. When Pepper randomly transformed, it was her own S-Cells being stimulated by the trace amount of Blutz Waves that the baby's untrained S-Cells hadn't fully managed to break down into usable energy.
An independent thing, not the baby actually transforming, but rather a byproduct of the baby already being transformed inside her body over such a long period of time. That was the reason that Pepper's own S-Cells had finally gotten over their block and managed to fully activate. They'd essentially been trained in how to do it.
This also meant that the unborn baby's base power level was technically somewhere below 200,000 or so.
Cynder, conceived by a Tater who, at the time, had a power level of only around 500,000 or so, had a power level at birth of nearly 30,000, so a child born between two people around six times as strong… the math worked out, more or less.
Within the theoretical realm of 'Okay, this makes sense', at least.
And as for the SSJP problem, it also made sense, in a way. To me, SSJP was essentially a second base form. I'd probably been in SSJP when the baby'd been conceived, in fact. If Goten and Trunks could go SSJ with power levels of 500,000 or so and a little childish outburst, then my child being able to easily go SSJP made sense.
Maybe not this easily, but none of this meant that I was about to be the father of Broly II.
Right?
The back of my mind didn't answer me.
Concerned, I brought Pepper into my lab to run more tests.
She ran. The tests did not get done. Lynn berated me for smothering Pepper again.
I berated Lynn for not being more concerned about the fact that the fetus inside Pepper was already in a stable SSJP transformation.
That was a bad idea. When one talks back to a serious Lynn…
Yeah, nobody does that. Why? Because it's incredibly stupid.
Lynn ensured that my bones remembered that fact by the time Pepper came back from griping to Cynthia about how overbearing I was being.
The next morning, I woke to my phone beeping in warning.
A high power level had just crossed Jupiter. Actually, several.
Aliens were headed for Earth.