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The Secret of the Dragonballs

ONCE, A VERY LONG TIME AGO, there lived in the wilderness of Earth a lonely old man named Gohan. This elderly man had always spent his years training in the art of fighting, for acts of delight and justice, since he stepped his first steps. A wise old man who believed in goodness and love for all those whom he met, he felt it his responsibility to instill all with a sense of peace. Love…

One twilight night, when the final buds of the cherry tree had blossomed under the hypnotic light of the slow, spring sun, he had gone on his every day walk into the thickly forests near his timber home, which he had build from the very trees which he walked. As he ambled, his hands gripped behind his warped back, he saw from the treetops a spectacular sunset whose strange spectrum light smiled towards him.

As he walked towards the fading light of the day, his foot caught--ever so slightly--and slipped from under his feet, so that he fell towards the rocky ground and onto his face with a massive beat. When he came to his feet, embarrassed and wiping the dirt from his silken clothes, he noticed the strange object that had caused his awkward plummet with a glare.

“Hmm…what’s this?” he said, bewildered.

From under a few decrepit leaves left from the previous fall and beaten halfway into the ground, a shining glimmer captured his intriguing eyes in a noticeable river of wonder. He leaned down onto one knee, painfully, and dug his hands through the dirt and under the beautiful object, slowly lifting it from the ground. It was, from what he could see through the caked layer of brown dirt, a golden-yellow orb, only the size of his hand.

He wiped it clean with his precious jacket sleeve and discovered, from under the filth, a design of four stars, bright yellow, embedded onto a section of the globe. Ignoring the sunset, he walked homeward again and set the strange ball on his bed, staring wildly at it.

“What could it be, I wonder?” he said to himself, for he lived with or near no one. “It could not have been dropped. An odd form of ancient jewelry, perhaps? A magical ball? A genie awaiting return to the world, forever imprisoned in a small, cramped little ball…!”

Nothing seemed to make sense, especially the four, small stars engraved onto the sphere. What could they mean? he thought. He held it many different ways, examined it from many different angles, but nothing changed.

“How strange indeed…”

After many days, Gohan decided to lock it up in a small black box, trimmed with silver, and never think of it again. However, his honored safe would not remain locked for very long.