Character · Dragon Ball
Cell
Doctor Gero died before his best project finished. The computer in his basement kept working without him.
In Otakana the clue reads: Green bio-android who absorbs the androids
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Dragon Ball
- Letters
- 4 · Easy
Cell is assembled from other people. A tiny drone spent years following the cast around, collecting tissue from Goku, Piccolo, Vegeta, Frieza and King Cold, and Gero's computer grew a creature carrying all of it. That is why he knows the Kamehameha he was never taught, regenerates like a Namekian, and speaks with several borrowed voices. He arrives from a future where he has already absorbed the two androids, having stolen their time machine to reach a timeline where they are still available.
His first form is an insect the size of a man that drains people through a tail, emptying entire towns to grow. The second is faster and no smarter. The third, once he has swallowed Android 17 and Android 18, is a calm man in a green shell who takes over a television broadcast to announce a tournament in ten days, then builds the ring himself and waits.
The Cell Games arc ran in Weekly Shonen Jump through 1992 and 1993 and closes the section of Dragon Ball that most readers think of as its peak. Toriyama had planned to hand the series to Gohan here, and for one famous stretch that is exactly what happens.
Spelling CELL
CELL is the rare Dragon Ball answer with nothing hidden in it. Four letters, an ordinary English noun, doubled L at the end, and the Japanese セル is simply that word in katakana. No long vowel got trimmed and no R turned into an L. On a five-slot row it is one of the shortest answers in the set, so the difficulty is guessing it, not typing it.