Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ If The Future Holds ❯ Book One: Fire With Fire ( Chapter 1 )

If The Future Holds - Book One: Fire With Fire
By Moonraker One

copyright © 2004 Moonraker One. All rights reserved.
All Dragonball Z characters are trademarks of FUNImation and other respective companies
This book may NOT be altered or sold

NOTE: This story takes place within Trunks's future timeline, before his trip back to the past was made.

CHAPTER ONE

Mornings always made Bulma jittery.

Even though her son, Trunks, was indeed a Super Saiyan, the possibility of complete, instant annihilation never faded away. The origins of the current state of affairs could be traced to several events, probably the most well-known of which was the arrival of the androids, a pair of teenagers that were cybernetic in body and destructive in nature. Seventeen years prior, the Earth's best hope of combating threats to the peaceful blue mudball died of a heart disease in his bed just a short time after arriving home from a successful journey to defeat one of the universe's most notorious tyrants, Freeza. With him, it would later seem, any hope of restoring order out of chaos and destruction died as well. Nonetheless, his allies rallied themselves in an all-out struggle against the pair of androids which ultimately ended in the deaths of almost all of the Earthen warriors. Only Gohan, son of the mighty protector himself, and Trunks, who wasn't even born until a short time before the arrival of the duo, lived to tell the tale and continue the war against the devastating duo that ran amok, atomizing anything they came across, and playing games where the only goal was to see who could rack up the most kills by running people down with cars.

The never-stilling air of the almost completely ruined city seemed to break as whooshing could be heard. Bulma pushed a graying clump of light blue hair out of her face and headed towards the door, in desperate hopes that her son managed to elude the machines another day to provide food for himself and her, mostly himself. Pushing the door open, her mouth fell to the lowest position her jaw would allow; the very devils she hoped her son had avoided, were standing right in front of her.

"We decided it would be in order to pay a visit to what's left of the world's greatest company," joked Juunanagou. His malicious grin caused the middle-aged woman to simply quiver in terror. A bit of anger boiled to the surface, and with her anger, she plunged a fist directly at his face. Almost the instant her hand flew she regretted it, for he snatched her wrist before the fist could even go far. She yelled in pain due to his intense grip. Far too quickly for her eyes to see, he brought his knee up into her stomach, letting go of her wrist as she fell to both knees and supported her weight with her hands. She was lucky he didn't break her arm. The dark-haired male android looked at Bulma, then at his sister. "I thought women were saner than men."

"I guess there's always an exception," roused Juuhachigou. "C'mon, let's bust up the place, got nothin' else to do."

Bulma shrieked; she couldn't let them discover her project! It was the only hope for the world!

"NO!" she screeched, and reached for a gun in her pocket. Although useless against these kind of foes, it kept the bandits away from Capsule Corp. ruins. While Juunanagou destroyed the time machine she was working on, his sister whirled around and hoisted Bulma off her feet with one hand around her neck. A swift motion of her arm launched the female scientist all the way across the room, shattering a wooden table and leaving a large impression in the wall as she slumped down to the floor, unconscious. Her non-awake ears didn't hear the sounds of equipment shattering and glass breaking as the androids ran amok in her laboratory. Quiet hours went by after they abruptly left, satisfied there remained nothing to break in the lab.

"M...MOM!" one particularly loud yell echoed, bringing Bulma slowly to back to the land of the wake. "MOM!"

"Wh...wha?" she tried to ask but abruptly her own strength to talk gave out on her. "What..."

"Don't try to talk too much, mom, or your strength won't keep up." Trunks's calm warning seemed to make sense, so she complied. "Now, the androids attacked you, right?" Nervously, she nodded. Predictably, her son gritted his teeth in anger. "That project you were working on...the time machine...they wrecked it, didn't they?" Again, she nodded. He patted her on the shoulder. "Don't worry, mom, just lie there."

"Trunks..." she gathered the strength to say. "Don't go after..." But she was cut off by her abruptly falling asleep due to exhaustion. Although she knew he'd gotten her off the floor, she fell out of awareness far too quickly to realize she was on her examining table, for it was the most sturdy table in the room at that moment, since it managed to avoid the androids' reign of smashing property.

Bulma violently jerked out of her slumber once she felt a fly land on her face. A quick glance at her watch indicated that six hours had passed since she'd fallen asleep. She leapt off the table with a bit of effort, and dashed towards the second room where Trunks slept, hoping desperately that she'd find him lying there, peacefully sleeping. Although barely awake, she flung the door open with force, and gasped; his sword and battle attire were both gone. She shook her head and made another dash; this time for her hovercar outside. That is, if the androids hadn't demolished it. Thankfully they'd left it alone and her key still slid easily into the slot, the sound of compressed hydrogen gas being burned inside the vehicle's fusion chamber signaling that all systems were a-go. That's when the problem hit her; she had no clue as to where her son would be.

Dammit, she thought, then quickly realized it. Yes! I remembered I installed a GPS system in Trunks's watch! Although he could find no purpose behind it, she knew it would be times like these that she needed such a device. The vehicle tore off into the night with one quick stomp of her foot on the pedal.

Dozens of miles flew by quickly as she pushed her accelerator to its utmost limits. Using her portable light, she searched the ruins for any sign of her son, as she awaited for the satellites that hadn't been used in a long time to initiate. Her attention turned to the calm beeping on her radar screen as his position revealed itself to her; she turned her wheel a bit to the left and floored the engine.

Once she got to the location, she could barely believe what she'd seen. Trunks was lying on top of a piece of granite, face down on his stomach. He didn't seem to move. She pulled the car to the ground near him, and leaped out of it. The only thing she could feel was her heart beating like a automatic drum, then at one particular moment, as she reached for his neck, it stopped cold in her chest.

He had no pulse, which could mean only one thing.

He was dead.

Her heart fell limp within her chest the moment felt no pulse. Her jaw refused to pull up when she flipped him over and saw the look of sheer terror, frozen eternally on his face. Tilting back she let a loud scream into the air out of desperation. For a brief instant she felt completely numb to all feelings; a sensation that didn't last long, for she quickly found herself caught up in not wanting to believe it. Mysteriously, there was no blood or puncture wounds, just a part on the back of his neck which indicated he'd died from a blunt impact to the back of his head. She turned him over, then drove a fist into the ground. This can't be happening, was all she could think. The worst part happened when it finally sank in. All at once she drove her fists onto the ground and shouted into the night, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! It was horrible; in one single word that seemed to go on forever, her anger and heartbreak echoed through the ruins.

"NO! MY ONLY SON! WHY, YOU MOTHERFUCKERS?! WHY!?" Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, not a soul heard her shout obscenities into the night, for there was no one about. It was almost five whole hours worth of crying before she found herself fully able to get in her car and go back home. By the time she was through what was left of the front door, the sun began to peak through the horizon. In her grief she'd decided not to take his body home with her, as that would only warrant more emotional response.

Why am I still pushing this fight, she thought, lying on her couch, staring into the blankness of the wall in front of her. It was stupid to even try to protect ourselves; these machines are all-powerful. She reached underneath her cushion and pulled out the one thing she'd hope she never had to use again; her gun. Except this time, it wouldn't be aimed at an intruder; she put the barrel to her right temple.

What happened next took her completely by surprise.

In the second before she'd have applied enough pressure to the trigger to blow her brains out, a wire inside the gun slipped, and the clip fell out, taking all the bullets with it. Thus, when she pulled the trigger completely, the gun clicked. However, only one bullet at the top of the clip bounced out and began rolling. Nothing about its trajectory of rolling across the floor seemed weird, except its disappearance.

What the hell?! In her grief-filled state, she did happen to see the bullet that rolled across the floor disappear through what otherwise had to be a rock-solid section of floor. All the laws of science, at least the ones that she knew about, didn't allow for such a thing to happen. For at least a brief couple of moments, her sorrow took a backseat to confusion, which she welcomed; anything to take her mind off of her most beloved's death was a welcome. Wasting not any time at all, she stood up, put down her gun, and approached the exact spot in the floor where she saw the piece of ammunition fall through a solid section of floor. Setting her foot on top of the spot yielded nothing, for her foot merely came down flat on top of it without falling through. Kneeling down, she tried her left hand, but it too came down solid. Must be my imagination, was her primary conclusion.

Then she tried to get to her feet, and slipped.

When she came down, her knee attained a bruise when she came down on it, mainly because she expected her right hand to come down hard on the section of the floor in question, but instead it passed through like there was no tile there at all. Okay, is this the Twilight Zone? Because I'm about to freak out here. Pulling her hand up, it came out of the floor; somehow, there must have been a solid hologram on this part of the floor, but she couldn't remember installing one. Her right hand, it seemed, was the only thing capable of passing through the hologram, so she pushed it back through the floor, and groped around beneath the image of the tile that wasn't there, and found a small switch. One clean flip, and the image of the tile itself was gone. Aha! Discovery always warranted the same feeling from Bulma, no matter how much pain she had bottled up inside. A ladder built into the wall led down into a very dark room, whose pitch blackness could only be defeated by what looked to be a dim light source from a room below. She began the thirty-five foot descent into the dark room.

What the blue hell is THIS?! The dim light came from an unmistakable source; the glow of a computer screen, which looked attached to a series of large, biology-type equipment pieces. The screen of the computer displayed a question:

What is your command? Save? Cancel?

Although she didn't properly understand what the hell had gone on in these mysterious lower reaches, her experience with computers told her to save, so she did. Once she did, the program closed, leaving behind the desktop screen, which had one icon in the upper left hand corner, labeled, READ_IN_CASE_OF_EMERGENCY. Not one to leave anything to question, she double-clicked it. Her eyebrows went from questioning furrowed to questioning wide open.

Dear Bulma,

ifyou are reading this, no doubt you've forgotten one of the less-important projects you were working on when you were younger. You began this when you were in high school, and worked on it through college. I programmed the computer to have an uninterruptible power supply and never shut off, and every day I recorded my progress on a file on this computer, so you'd know where I left off. This project began on a whim; after seeing a science fiction movie, you decided one morning it would be fun to try and create...well, let the work log tell you what it is. Ciao,

Bulma

Once she closed out of the message, and loaded up the work log, thoughts began to flood back to her; how could she ever have forgotten?! Apparently, she recalled, a nasty collision with a drunken driver in college jarred her thoughts and the project got ignored for quite some time, as did the room she so desperately tried to hide from her parents, to great success. Reading the log for the first time in nearly thirty years made her feel giddy; she actually found, by the end, that she could remember it all! The project almost drowned out the loss of Trunks, but nothing could ever accomplish that end.

What it was, was a project she'd always thought would be interesting. She knew from a young age that a certain Doctor Gero had his eyes set on finding a way to make a human being into a machine by turning living bone and organs into cybernetic components, while keeping most of the skin and several major organic parts intact. Bulma had a better idea, and this was it. Something that eluded even her father, the great Doctor Adam Brief.

Nanotechnology.

She hoped, desperately, that she could find a way to make a person biologically cybernetic-bio-mechanical for short-and merely have robots much smaller than the size of the nucleus of a cell running the body. Apparently, she'd spent years designing the first nano-bot and programming it with every action in mind, but couldn't get the second part-injecting it into a nucleus-free cell-down pat. That didn't take long.

Okay, cheek cell, she told the scraping off the inside of her cheek, as she looked at an individual cell under a microscope. Using a needle no bigger than a millionth the circumference of a strand of hair, she invaded the inner space of the tiny life form, and extracted the nucleus with ever-so-gentle precision. Her unsteady hands would be a downfall, so she kept herself as calm as possible. Then, the gutsy part began; the frail robot-which was so small the slightest breeze would destroy it-slid easily into her needle. Natural gravity pulled it down into the center of the cell, where it quickly seemed to activate and go to work as soon as she extracted the needle. Feeling gratified, she scraped the cells into a petri dish and put it under a scanner so the computer could keep track of it, then slumped over in her seat, falling asleep on top of her desk.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! Startlingly loud beeping noises from the computer woke her up with a fright, almost causing her to overturn a microscope. According to her computer screen, the petri dish's first layer had been coated with a surprising number of cells that completely covered the bottom. Not wasting a moment, she scraped some cells from the dish, and layed the down on a blank slide. Her smile widened. YES! Apparently, the cells had learned to allow the robots to be a permanent part of the cell, creating new nanites with each division. She looked back at the dish, noting another particularly interesting aspect; although she scraped the cells out a few moments ago, already the layer was full again! That meant the nanites caused instant cell regeneration, not a pathetic twenty minute division time. Now that the basic test had completed, there stood only one course left to follow: human testing.

She took an injection gun out of her medical kit, put the cells into a blood-friendly fluid, and closed her eyes. Ready or not, she joked, pulling the trigger, and injecting a few thousand nanite cells into the nearest open blood vessel. Initially, nothing happened.

Dizziness and fever quickly began to set in. A hasty decision was made by her to ascend the ladder and find her way to her room to sleep, because otherwise she might pass out in the underground lab. As she began the slow ascent up the ladder, blood began to trickle gradually from her nose. Each rung seemed harder to reach than the last, yet by the sheer will of a middle-aged woman-and the memory of her son, Trunks-her arms that seemed to weigh more than boulders she forced up to the next rung. I have to get up there, dammit! Even with her vision beginnng to get blurry, she yanked her feet (which seemed like dead weight) up each step.

Until near the top, her foot came down on air, and the entire of the ladder zoomed past her on her way down.

AAAaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh! She hit the ground with a slam, leaving cracks in the floor as blood seeped out of her cracked skull. Death came cold and swift.

CHAPTER TWO

Light came streaming in through a thin line that extended across a visible field, slicing in half the pitch blackness. As it became brighter, Bulma opened her eyes and as the colors returned and the image sharpened to fullness, a single piercing thought raced to the front of her mind: W...wait, I'm...alive?! It almost seemed like a cruel act of fate, that she live and die paralyzed from starvation instead of being with her son right away. At that particular moment, what seemed to be an act of God told her that perhaps she wouldn't die of starvation after all: she twitched her finger. She didn't turn her head to see it twitching, but her brain kept telling her, Girl, you can move your finger! She clenched and loosened her entire right hand; when it didn't surge in pain, she lifted her entire right arm to where she could see it without moving her head, and again, no pain. She'd soon discover that not only could she move her arms, but her entire body as if her spine hadn't been crushed by a thirty-five foot fall onto a hard concrete floor. A question emerged; how, considering the circumstances, could such a thing be possible?

It was about that moment she noticed it.

In her otherwise normal field of vision, two particularly new additions jumped out at her: two distinct meters. In the lower corner of her vision, there was one tiny vertical bar that seemed more like a horizontal blip, and a separate vertical bar that rose high above the first one. They were small, and each a different color. Next to them were numbers: six for the first one, eleven million for the second one. Each bar also was labeled: Natural Ki, and Artificial Ki. Confused, she forced her entire body to a standing position, and marveled at the fact that her aging bones didn't feel the least bit rough on the uptake. That alone made her all the more apprehensive; she hadn't felt this alive in some ten years. Moving her hand behind her head revealed that her cracked skull had been repaired completely. According to her internal clock (whose presence caused her more concern), only four minutes passed since she fell. Her mind ruled out all possibilities save for two: either she was dead and in a warped heaven, or the nanites worked.

Her mind banked on the latter.

While she looked around at her surroundings, a mesage appeared directly in front of her field of vision, it maintaining its translucency in order not to block her vision. It read, Combining program data with memories from neuron connections:, below which was a progress bar that seemed to shoot from zero to a hundred instantaneously. She found, the instant the message vanished, that she knew how to work the nanites according to her will. She decided to give it a try. Show martial arts programs, she commanded mentally.

None available from motion capture, her system responded instantly, Therefore, default martial arts program is opened. Activate?

Yes.

Mode?

Highest available.

Default program activated in Expert Mode.

Almost immediately after seeing the message pop up and then vanish, she knew at least ten years' worth of skill, although she'd never fought a day in her life. She came to the conclusion that the only thing to do from this point forward would be to use her newfound abilities in order to kill the androids. Activate all knowledge on usage of artificial ki, she told her system.

Activated.Initiate Natural and Artificial Ki Sensors?

Now THAT was something she didn't expect. She knew that warriors could sense people's ki, but she never knew a radar could be built that would allow the detection of artifical spirit energy, activating both nevertheless. Yes.

All sensors activated. CAUTION: Two artifical ki signatures reported, one rating at thirty-five million, another rating at forty million. Raise artificial ki level to equalize?

In her mind, she felt where the two androids were. Apparently, Juunanagou and Juuhachigou were thousands of miles apart; it seemed that they decided to go in search for Humans in separate districts. The earliest Juunanagou could come to the aid of his sister would be twelve minutes, and that'd be more than long enough for Bulma to get what she wanted; information. Clutching her fists at her side, her aura caused by her artificial energy flared up as her power level surged to thirty-eight million. Of the android twins, the sister decided to search the ruins of West City for humans still alive, while her brother went up north to the colder districts. Juuhachigou had the less power of the two, so she'd be the first target.

Juuhachigou lifted slab after slab, eager to find people she could maim and vaporize, but she and her brother had already done enough damage; she found only a scarce one or two, here and there. The most fun she had was when she found a family of three underneath a ruined building, but even that only gave her a few minutes worth of action. Maybe, she figured, that game where she and her brother ran humans down with cars was more fun than searching.

WHOCK!

A flying kick nailed her directly in the back of her head, propelling her through about six different piles of rubble. Getting up, the female android searched all around, shouting her question into the air, "WHO THE HELL DID THAT?!" Then her eyes set on the figure approaching her. B...Bulma?! the question lingered on Juuhachigou's mind; for all she knew, the human scientist was nothing more. Since when did SHE learn how to fight!? She barely dodged a fist that sailed directly at her face, but couldn't dodge a kick aimed at her side. Bulma, taking initiative, sent a rising knee at the android's chest, which sent her back a few meters. Her next assault was a rapid flurry of punches that slammed into their target with powerful malice. For Juuhachigou, she could hardly believe that the woman whose house she helped ransack could fight back against her not even a couple days later. Bulma's primary goal in this particular moment had two particular motives: mainly, she wanted to motion-capture the female android's fighting style, and secondly, she felt that she could at least put some fear into the duo that took her son away from her. The blonde-haired Juuhachigou saw an opening in her opponent's assault and countered with a kick to the side, which unfortunately for her, didn't break the cycle of attacks coming from the scientist. Bulma could sense that she greatly outmatched Juuhachigou, so she used that information to her advantage in the form of an axe-handle smash that sent the blonde cyborg through several buildings. She made sure she pursued the droid no matter where she went, for this time, the tables were turned and the prey became the hunter.

"How...How'd you possibly get this strong!?" Juuhachigou's demand of a question brought a grin to the face of Bulma. Instead of giving an immediate response, she made sure to first move quickly over to her opponent's position and throw a jab to the stomach that caused a decent amount of pain.

"You wishing you were more powerful, all of a sudden?" Bulma said, lifting her opponent off the ground by her neck. "Suddenly, you're not as cocky as you usually are? I'm slightly disappointed; you kill my son, but here you are, losing to me. That just blows my mind ."

Motion capture complete; saving information on Juuhachigou's fighting style.

Excellent,thought Bulma. Use fighting style on Juuhachigou to predict future actions.

Affirmative.

Bulma threw her opponent to the ground, and with her eyes, flashed a blinding light that allowed her enough time to escape. Even if the blonde android went to Capsule Corp., it would be useless now that sleep no longer was needed. Flight, a new action for Bulma, made her feel more alive than she'd ever been.

Juuhachigou took it upon herself to find her way to her brother in order to tell him the news. That is, when her vision returned, she would. Once she could properly see again she flew north with all the speed that she could muster. What she didn't understand was how exactly could a woman who'd never fought back before suddenly wield power greater than one of the two most powerful people in the universe? The blonde-haired cyborg couldn't comprehend it; if she had the power earlier, why didn't she use it quite a bit ago? No, she figured, if Bulma had the power earlier, she'd certainly have used it a while ago, or at least before her son Trunks got killed. That meant that she had to have developed a method of getting the power on her own. Juuhachigou cursed herself for not ensuring that all the potential saviours of the world were killed.

Juunanagou finished his run of destruction upon a small northern village, slowly and painfully killing every citizen of the four thousand person population. He almost headed off in the direction of another village further north when he turned to see his sister, who'd visibly taken quite a beating, zoom in. From her torn clothing and scratches on her face, she'd been given a good run for her money. The thought of someone being actually strong enough to take her on seemed strange to him.

"Juuhachigou!" he shrieked. "You got the shit beat out of you! Who did this?!" Although his abnormal sense of caring took her by surprise, she did not care except to tell him the truth as soon as possible.

"You won't believe me when I tell you this..." she began.

His mouth turned downward into an angry frown. "Try me."

"Bulma did this to me. She somehow was really powerful."

Juunanagou really couldn't help himself at the sound of that. "You're kidding. What, were you knocked over the head by a falling building, or something?!"

"Brother, I'm NOT lying! Come with me to Capsule Corp., and I'll show you!" His lack of belief over her statement upset her, because both of them knew that neither of the two androids ever lied to each other.

"Fine, let's go. I still don't believe that woman can fight, but I'll take your word for it."

At the ruins of Capsule Corp., Bulma instinctively noticed that she had both of the androids headed in her direction. Neither of them could sense exactly how powerful she was at any given moment, thus she thought of a plan that could possibly buy her a little more time before she made her move. On her mental radar the duo rushed as fast as they could to get to their destination with little time wasted. The entire way there, though, the two androids argued with each other over every detail of how such a simple human woman could possibly gain the degree of power Juuhachigou said she had in such a small period of time. Bulma snatched a small fake blood caplet from her halloween supply cabinet (which hadn't been opened in years), and slid it under her tongue in case they decided to fall for her plan.

Sure enough, a banging was heard promptly followed by the door being forced open. In stormed the two androids, Juuhachigou thinking she was finally going to prove her point to her brother, Juunanagou thinking that this whole thing was a gigantic waste of his time. Bulma made sure to put on her best angry look, while inside, she was jumpy out of eagerness to fight the two.

"So, you decided to be like a cockroach and stay around?" he asked, driving his knee into Bulma's gut. She acted as though it hurt, even going as far as to crush the blood caplet in her teeth and splurt fake blood on his black shirt. He wiped the fake red stuff off with disgust, taking offense to it and uppercutting her in the face, sending her sailing over the couch to slam against the wall. She was no idiot; she kept her eyes shut and played dead, and despite all her opinions, it worked. Juunanagou looked at the woman and at his sister, whose jaw seemed to hang out of confusion. "Sis, look. She's pathetically weak. She couldn't possibly have beaten you up!"

"Dammit, brother!" she yelled, then noticed she was two inches from his face gripping his collar, so she released him and backed off. "I'm no IDIOT! I think she's lying, but the fact is..."

Her brother cut her off. "THE DEAL IS..." he interrupted, suddenly becoming angry, "that you're wasting my time with this bullshit!" He began to storm away. "You can find your own colony of humans to destroy; don't come near mine." Shooting him an angry look, and the bird, she watched him leave.

"FINE!"

Once her brother was completely out of shouting range, Juuhachigou whipped her body around to face the woman who pretended to lay unconscious against the wall. She took the woman by the neck, and lifted her off the floor. "I STILL think you're a lying piece of..."

She found herself interrupted mid-sentence by a vicious elbow to the gut, immediately followed by a right hook to the face that sent the android stumbling backwards. "Don't you love it?!" egged Bulma. "All these years you and your brother kill whomever you please, and now I'm outmatching you."

"YOU THINK IT'S FUNNY, DON'T YOU!? LET'S SEE HOW MUCH YOU LAUGH IN A FEW MINUTES!" Juuhachigou angrily took a swipe at the middle-aged woman, who ducked beneath it easily. On the uptake, Bulma violently shoved her fist into the female android's stomach, forcing a tiny spit of real blood out her mouth. The blonde android tried an uppercut, but the fist was caught midswing, and her entire body got launched against the far back wall.

"You're running out of options, android," Bulma explained. At her middle back, a small bulge appeared, from which a tube-like tail complete with a pointed stinger at the tip emerged from it. Juuhachigou almost screamed at the horror she was witnessing. Instinctively, she tried to run, even a few feet would help her evade the woman, but with her speed, Bulma kept appearing in front of her. Throwing a punch at Bulma, the android threw her off just long enough to bolt for the door. Out into the outside world, she felt free. She felt free to continue her reign of terror, she kept her eyes on the mostly-ruined Capsule Corp. building as she dashed on.

BUMP.

Turning her head around to see what she bumped into, Juuhachigou saw Bulma, and she saw the stinger on the tail open up wide like a vacuum cleaner hose. Then she saw darkness as her entire body got sucked up into the tail as though she were a piece of dirt.

CHAPTER THREE

The long tube of a tail pulled itself back into her middle back after the blonde-haired Juuhachigou passed through it. Underneath her skin, the nanites that made up the tail dissolved back to their normal task of regulating the body, only forming the tail when necessary. Inside an organ hastily assembled by Bulma's tiny nanites, the female android violently shook left and right, struggling uselessly against the nanocells that surrounded her. She screamed momentarily before the nanocells entered her body through her mouth, and began assuming control over her functions. On the outside of the android's body, she violently quivered in pain as the nanocells dissolved her flesh as part of the absorption process. She didn't feel much pain, as the entire process finished in less than twelve seconds. On the exterior of Bulma's body, a bright aura surrounded her entire frame the moment the blonde android came into her body, preventing her from seeing for a moment. Her display, however, documented the entire absorption process in steps as, through Dolmar's Formula, Cyran's Formula, and Gero's Formula, Juuhachigou became a permanent part of Bulma's system, adding power as well as a few new additions. When the light finally died down, the scientist noticed her power meter first off, and where it previously had been thirty-eight million or so, it jumped to almost seventy-three million! She could scarcely believe the increase in power. She was about to head back towards Capsule Corp. when a foot struck the back of her head, sending her sailing through a pile of rubble. Her nanites quickly repaired the tears in her clothing. Apparently, during the process of absorption, her systems were fully devoted to that procedure alone, preventing her radar from detecting a particularly powerful ki nearby. She looked up expecting it to be Juunanagou, but instead, what she saw caused her to be frozen speechless.

"T...T...TRUNKS!?"

"Don't try to fool me, Juuhachigou," he insisted. "Insulting my mother that way is pathetic."

Bulma blinked out of confusion. "Wh...What're you talking about?!"

"Don't play dumb with me," was his response. "That mask and voice changer."

Bulma looked down at a puddle of rainwater that hadn't evaporated yet. When the ripples on the water died down, she saw herself in the mirror-like surface. If her vision wasn't failing her, the absorption had given her the hair and clothing of the blonde android, but kept her facial features her own. Looking at Trunks, she wanted desperately to convince him that she wasn't the android, but on the other hand, perhaps she could get him to give her a little information on the androids. She wanted so eagerly to run over to him and take him up in her arms. But she kept the ruse up in order to find more out about the evil duo. "Oh don't worry," she said, changing her voice to the blonde android's. Keeping the lie going almost caused her to cry, but she pushed back her emotions. "I'm not planning on playing with you anymore." To that, Trunks seemed to get on edge.

"If you wanna kill me then do it, but don't mess around like you did when you knocked me out like you did. And I wanted to tell you the ship's complete."

Bulma's jaw almost dropped. "S...hip? Tell me about the ship!" She didn't know anything of what he was talking about, but him telling his arch-enemy that a ship was complete didn't strike her as normal. Trunks rolled his eyes.

"Are you having a brain cramp? Instead of you killing me, I build you a ship, you take me with you as you conquer the universe? It's done. It should take us to the nearest populated planet." After hearing her son speak, Bulma could scarcely believe what she was hearing. Had her son really lost all hope and sided with the bad guys?

"Of...Of course I remember! Don't think I don't!" She realized perhaps she was overdoing the anger, so she toned it down a bit. "So, remind me, when were we...going...to take you?"

He shook his head in exasperation. "You're really out of it, aren't you? Tomorrow, you were going to take me with you as you began your conquest of the universe." He desperately hoped that Juuhachigou-for he didn't know it was his mother-didn't discover his plan to kill both her and her brother. He'd planned it out so well: if he couldn't kill them with the weapons on board, the automatic pilot was pre-programmed to head into the sun, and his note he'd leave behind would tell his mother to make it to Namek somehow. Finally, he figured, all who died against the androids would have justice.

Bulma did her very best to keep her jaw from dropping, but hearing his words, she merely couldn't take it anymore. Changing her voice back to normal, she cried, "TRUNKS! Why have you sided with the androids!?" He took offense.

"Damn you, android, killing me I can handle. Acting like my mother is beyond evil!"

"Fly to the stars, Trunks."

Trunks's eyes widened the instant he heard those words. "What...did you say?"

"Fly to the stars..."

Trunks finished the poem she started. "...like a butterfly on a rocket-ship. Talk to the people from Mars..."

Smiling, Bulma began to recite in unison with him. "...with the light in your eyes you can't despise." It was poem Trunks had written when he was only seven years old. Both knew there was no way either of the androids could possibly know it. Bulma kept it within a sealed cabinet in her most treasured room.

"M...mom? I...I..." Unable to finish his sentence, he ran up and threw his arms around her. "I'm sorry mom. I just couldn't fight them anymore."

"There's no need to talk, Trunks, I'm sure you did it with intent to get back at them someday." He blinked; could she really see through his plan that well?

Back at Capsule Corp., the explanation took up much of three hours' time. Trunks found a way to explain all the details of his extensive plan to destroy the androids by onboard weapons, and if that failed, by flying the ship into the sun to fry everybody on board. Bulma found it just a little bit harder, but after many a wasted breath, she fully explained her project that she finished. She explained how she absorbed the female android, and how she'd fought the android. Trunks found it strange that his mother defeated one of the androids, but found himself grinning at the prospect of Bulma having seen terror in an otherwise invincible evil's face. Trunks never would have guessed that his mother would be the one to bring down either of the two seemingly unbeatable androids who'd terrorized the world for years without anyone capable of defeating them. As the two were wrapped up in conversation, they decided it would be best if they came up with a plan.

"What did you have in mind?" Trunks questioned. "I mean, with your level of power, we could easily storm the androids." Bulma had a grin on her face, which indicated that she was in the mood to have some fun.

"All these years, the androids kept prolonging the genocide just for the simple fun of it," she reminded her son, "and now it's time to put an end to it. I think if they're gonna have fun killing, we should play by their rules. I want to absorb Juunanagou, but I want to see the terror on his face while I do it."

Trunks knew exactly what she was talking about; he so desperately wanted to see the fright in the wicked machine's face too. On top of that, he wanted to see what would happen when she absorbed both of the androids. Juuhachigou already warranted quite a transformation, but what would her brother add to Bulma? "So, what should we do?" Before either of them could properly lay out a plan, Capsule Corp.'s front door burst wide open, and as fate would have it, the devil they were talking about defeating did his best to stand up straight, in the middle of the doorway. Neither could conceal the shock on their faces, for Juunanagou couldn't stand very long due to the fact that he'd been beaten up. Scratches covered his face, blood seeped from small cuts, and his clothes looked to be in tatters. He took two steps into the room and collapsed onto the floor.

When the two finally gathered enough courage to speak, neither knew exactly what to say. "What should we do, now?" Trunks asked. Instinctively, he knew what action was to be taken; this was the enemy, and could not be trusted. Taking her cue, Bulma extended the tube-like tail out of her back, and absorbed the dark-haired android. The very instant she did, her body once again became consumed by the bright aura as lightning bounced off of her, ricocheting off the walls and back to her again. Just the sheer magnitude of the energy emission threw Trunks off his feet and into the far back wall. He came back up about fifteen seconds later, and saw the aura beginning to die down. Once the light had completely dissipated, Bulma's look had drastically changed.

"M...mom? Are you ok?" Trunks knew she was fine, but would feel better if he asked anyway. His mother's hair was the primary concern: it was not in a ponytail like she usually kept it, and now it was twice as long. Above the shoulders her hair was a shade of light blue that was absent of all gray-in fact, she looked as though twenty years had been erased from her age. Below the shoulders it was blonde with dark streaks, representing the two androids. Her outfit was Juuhachigou's skirt and dark leg coverings from the waist down, and Juunanagou's two-layered shirt with scarf from waist up. Her height had increased from 5'8" to about 6'4", and she had Juuhachigou's high-heeled boots. All this was subordinate, however, to her level of artificial ki which increased to just a hair below a hundred and seven million. She examined her new body as the tube-like tail pulled itself back into her back, just like it did before.

TO BE CONTINUED IN BOOK TWO: No Denying Purpose