Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Crossroads ❯ Prelude ( Prologue )

This is my first fanfic, A/U set in the three years before the androids. Has a bit B/V, but the main focus will be on two original characters.

I apologize in advance for probably not being able to update regularly, but I have exams next month *gulps*

No flames please.

I dedicate this story to Hella, because without her encouragement I wouldn't have managed to do it. :-)

Disclaimer: I don't owe DBZ and don't get paid for writing. But I do own my two original characters. Don't sue, please

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Bulma Briefs was standing in front of her latest invention, excitement clearly showing on her face. Impatiently she shifted her weight from one foot to another while supervising the technicians who were doing a last check-up on the contraption standing in the middle of the big lab.

"Can't this be faster?" she muttered to herself nervously and pushed her hair out of her face. She sighed. She knew everything had to be checked thoroughly and they were working as fast as possible. There mustn't be the slightest mistake, even a tiny one could endanger the machine and probably their lives as well.

The machine… She gazed at it and couldn't suppress a rush of pride.

It didn't look very spectacular. A big rectangle made of specially enforced hollow steel bars stood in the middle of the room like a doorway, the ends fastened to the floor. Leading from holes drilled into the bars thick cables ran to a big computer right next to her. That was it. Not exactly an impressive sight.

But looks can be deceiving and that was certainly the case here.

Bulma smiled to herself. The real impressive thing about it wasn't visible to the eye. If it worked…

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Rather by accident than on purpose she had discovered that different kinds and amounts of energy combined and directed at a special metal alloy had a similar effect like Goku's Instant Transmsission. The only difference was you didn't have to concentrate on a certain Ki to get to that person, it was enough to calculate the point where you wanted to be.

She had been very enthusiastic about her discovery and made Goku come as son as he could to find out as much as she could of his technique. Unfortunately he hadn't been a big help.

"Ummm, sorry Bulma, I really don't know how to explain what I do. I just do. I concentrate on someone and then I'm there."

"But you *have* to know how you do it. Those people taught it to you, right? So maybe you could teach me…" she asked eagerly but her friend interrupted her shaking his head.

"No, that doesn't work. I could teach you if you had enough Ki to do it but you haven't."

"But couldn't you try and describe in detail what you do and when you do it?"

"Hey, it's not that easy, I can't just put it in words when it's like a reflex, I just do it without thinking so much about it."

"Hmpf…" Bulma glared at him annoyed, she still wasn't convinced he couldn't do it. She knew it was easier to learn something you had the capability to do, like, flying for instance. But she still thought anything like this could at least be explained if not experienced.

She had bugged Yamcha years ago telling her how to fly and he had given her a vagues description about Ki flowing and directing it in a certain way. Needless to say, it hadn't helped her a bit, but at least he had tried. On the other hand, maybe he had just told her something to stop her bothering him about it, she thought narrowing her eyes but dismissing the thought at once. She'd been getting way too paranoid lately.

"Goku!"

"Huh?" said her startled friend who had patiently watched her thinking on high speed. You could always tell when Bulma was thinking hard on something, she had this glazed, faraway look but she could instantly snap out of it, like she had then.

"I have a brilliant idea, how about this: You're doing your instant transmission and I monitor you?"

"Monitor me?" asked Goku warily, "how exactly?"

"Oh", Bulma waved her hand dismissively, "I guess I'd need to connect you to some machines scanning your power output and stuff…"

"No needles!" he stated flatly.

"Sure, no needles" she replied.

"Okay, no problem", Goku smiled at her, "but how are you going to scan my power output?"

Bulma blinked at him, she hadn't thought of that yet. "I know!" she exclaimed. "That old scouter from Radditz, I still have it and maybe if I can modify it a bit and…." she trailed of. "I'll call you when I'm ready, okay? Maybe Vegeta will help me a bit with that thing. He used it all the time after all."

"Yeah, sure Bulma, just call." Goku smiled and waved at her, put two fingers on his forehead and a second later he was gone.

Bulma ran happily out of the room in search of Vegeta. He had to help her with this.

In fact Vegeta had helped her a lot. After she had explained her idea and told him what she needed he'd been was quite forthcoming about the scouter, smirking smugly and explaining the device to her, enjoying the fact that for once *he* was the one explaining a technical device to *her*.

There were lots of tiny technical details one had to take into consideration when working with a scouter, he'd had to learn everything about them so he could repair it himself if needed. Usually nobody in Freeza's army had a spare scouter, so knowing the device inside out had been essential. Callibrate one thing wrong and the next you knew was the scanner exploding in your face or indicating wrong power levels.

Inwardly he was sure she could've found out by herself, but he'd never admit that aloud. And if he was honest he'd had to admit he liked the fact that she'd come to him and ask about it rather than figure it out by herself.

She hadn't minded his superior attitude at that moment, for one he showed that almost all the time and secondly she had enjoyed sitting next to him discussing things with their heads bent and almost touching, looking at the tiny insides of the scouter. She'd had to concentrate hard, him being so near gave ideas that were very far from science. He had obviously noticed that, his voice betraying his amusement and one of his hands straying to her knee to tickle her. 'Sadist' she fumed inwardly but enjoying his touch too much to do something about it. 'Just wait, tonight I'll get you for that.'

And she had.

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"Are you daydreaming? Or didn't you get enough rest last night you're sleeping standing?" Vegeta's voice snapped her out of her memories, his breath tickling the hair behind her ears. She jumped a little and turned around, seeing him in his usual pose, arms crossed, feet apart, radiating 'I'm better than all of you'-waves and smirking at the fact he'd starled her again.

'Jerk!' she thought, 'you know exactly I didn't sleep much. And guess who's fault that was?', ignoring the fact he'd been not the only one guilty for her lack of sleep. Or his, for that matter.

She growled playfully at him and grinned, too excited to be annoyed he'd caught her off guard again.

At the voice of her father she turned around "Allright Bulma, the honor is yours." he said, his moustache twitching in anticipation. "Do you know the coordinates?" She nodded in affirmation.

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The first tests with Goku and the machine she'd built according to the principles of the scouter to scan his power had gone well. After some hours of Goku doing repeated instant transmissions she'd gotten all the data she'd needed, and Goku had been visibly relieved the experiment was over. Not to speak of all the other people Bulma had begged into helping, staying in the exact location she'd told them so the results could be exact. They'd sat Muten Roshi in front of a television showing aerobics, so if anybody else had moved, Bulma would still have Roshi's results to compare to the others. The chances of that old hermit going anywhere with that kind of program on TV were nonexistent.

The only downside of the tests she'd afterwards run was that she didn't get the same result as Goku.

'Must be a Ki-thing' she thought, and try as she might she hadn't been able to do the same in the simulations. She only could calculate the bigger area, not the exact place. And the nearer the wanted location was the more inexact the results were. So no revolutionizing Earth's transport systems at this point. But aside from that point everything was perfect.

Now the only thing to do was to test it in the field. They didn't want to really go to another place in the first test-run, they only wanted to see if they could see the place, like through a window. Or a doorway.

They had decided trying on Earth could produce lots of problems when you don't know the place you would come out. People's bedrooms for example.

Vegeta had helped out again, after having finally achieved SSJ he was in an incredibly good mood compared to his usual sarcasm-dripping self.

Afer he had reached his goal he eased up a little bit. Not much, he was still like a walking spring-coil, ready at any moment to explode like planet Namek, but it helped. Bulma had been glad, he hadn't exactly been Prince Charming but the angry and bitter sting she'd heard in his voice before had lessened a bit. That fact had been good for their relationship that had started some time before, he was still tense whenever other people than Bulma or her parents were around but he didn't act like she was a contagious disease anymore as soon as someone entered the room. That attitude had pissed her off to no end and had been short of developing into a serious problem.

Under Frieza Vegeta had been to many planets and knew a lot about them. So with his help they found the perfect planet: Lokran. Having been purged from anything resembling sentient life some decades ago, low on any valuable materials that could be mined or salvaged it was the perfect planet for their experiment. According to Vegeta no one ventured to this place, so they could conduct their experiment without any disturbances.

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"Allright!" Bulma said, rubbing her hands together in anticipation. "Power it up."

The monitor on the machine's computer showed several now slowly increasing columns indicating energy levels, pressure and other things, a hum filling the air as energy was flowing into the veins of the device. The steel bars being the boundary of the 'window' to the planet seemed to vibrate a bit as the humming sound increased.

"Have you decided on a name for the device?" Bulma's father asked her when he came over to stand next to her.

"Um.. no not yet." she admitted. "I want to see if it really works first, I think."

Her father chuckled, he hadn't expected otherwise. "We'll see very soon." He smiled proudly at his daughter.

"Required energy level reached" announced a technician. Bulma took a deep breath and reached for the keyboard, her stomach clenching in anticipation.

"Okay. Here it comes." she said, pressing the button that started the instant-transmission-machine… thing… Damn, she had to think of a name very soon.

Like everybody else she looked at the doorway standing in the room. The air between the steel bars seemed to flicker and shimmer a bit and suddenly she saw something. It must have been a building some time ago, she could see the corner of two walls, the one wall she saw completely had a big rugged hole in the middle of it, probably from an explosion. A bit of roof was obviously still intact because the area directly in front of her seemed a bit darker than what she saw of the outside through the blast hole. Pale yellow ruins and rubble, partly overgrown with plants resembling moss, above them a grey sky with ominous dark clouds.

She was snapped out of looking at this strange landscape by the former humming sound of her invention getting louder and higher in frequency until it was a shrill screeching.

Somehting had gone terribly wrong.

From the corner of her eyes she saw a blinding flash in the doorway and suddenly it seemed like another landscape was where the first on was at the same time, overlapping each other. Like two different pictures on the same part of film in a camera, or like having one wrong contact lense in your eye so your mind struggles to make sense of two different pictures at the same time.

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That's it for now. What do you think? Comments? Suggestions? Anything? Please?