Gohan gratefully exhales, and says, “Glad you’ve come around. So what happened?”
She thinks of her cousin, how she must be hurting right now, where she would go, and then she puts two fingers on her head, “Tell you when I can.”
===
https://youtu.be/AV0OnZtHHz4“And then you teleported away…” you jot down. You can’t help but ask, “Why not spill the beans about Izumi to the others?”
Peppa shakes her head. “It wasn’t my secret to tell.”
“Not even if giving it up would clear up this misunderstanding? Keeping mum soiled the others’ opinion of you.”
Peppa frowns. “I don’t think trust should be weighed like that.”
“But it did weigh you down, didn’t it?”
Peppa rubs her arm. “I’ll admit, it was… frustrating, having that misunderstanding I couldn’t clear up, and I do think it’s annoying whenever you see that in dramas, like, ‘Why don’t they just talk?’ But living it out…” She takes a drag, and sighs.
“Though if I’m being honest, I didn’t think it would be that big a deal at first. I figured it would simply be something I could talk out with Izzy, or at least get the others in on once she let me, and then this would all just take an evening to sort out and we’d be back to normal the next day.”
“And did it go like that?”
Peppa shakes her head.
===
Peppa sifts through the chaos of the teleportation zone her technique takes her through, a place both separate from time and weaved within it, moving forward and never backward, falling upward and not forward, and always twirling, twirling, twirling into chaos. The Yardrats who came up with the technique treat going into the zone the same way as seeing if a baby chick can fly for the first time. If the traveler has it together, they’ll succeed for sure! But if their spiritual control is out of whack, what control do they have over chaos?
Peppa considers that as she spirals into and out of nothing. Thoughts of those she cares about let her phase back in, and then those same thoughts of Videl and Gohan unravel her. But eventually, in one of the fleeting moments that her dreamlike existence gets lucidity, she thinks of her cousin, the thoughts of whom crystallize up an actual crystal, and Peppa reaches for it.
Snapping back into reality, Peppa hits the wall, or is that the ceiling, then meets the floor. She remembers what gravity is before her eyes do, and picks herself up. She looks up to see Izumi standing by a running sink, looking down at her.
“Hey Peppa.”
“Hey Izzy!”
…
“That hurt!” Peppa says, standing up, rubbing her head.
“Do you need a band-aid? I have some.”
“No, just bumped my head is all.” Then, Peppa’s face twists into a sadistic smirk. “Now give me your planet, Earthling!”
With her thumb. Izumi squirts the faucet at the invader. “Peppa, no.”
“I give, I give!” Peppa sputters.
Izumi mercifully relents, while smirking a little.