Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ The Arrangement ❯ Decisions, Decisions... ( Chapter 3 )

At home at last after what had been a long day, Bulma changed into her comfortable clothes: old jeans with the knees ripped from seam to seam and a T-shirt with a neck so worn that it slipped off of one shoulder. She thought the outfit had a kind of classy, relaxed punk look. She wandered downstairs and checked the mail, hoping that her mother hadn't been through it yet. Today was her mother's Gardening Club meeting, so there was a good chance... and, yup, she was in luck. It wasn't sorted, so her mother couldn't have seen it yet. She'd kept her fingers crossed for this. The clinics she'd checked online had told her to expect the brochures in two to three days. Humming happily to herself, she grabbed a bottle of wine and a glass from the kitchen and settled in the dining room with her new reading material.

She spread her collection on the table and spent awhile perusing them and sipping wine. Most of the clinics looked nice and reputable. She'd have them checked, of course. Being the heir of a major company could make life difficult sometimes. The last thing she needed was news of her decision being made public. It'd be obvious eventually anyway, and she didn't plan on trying to hide it, but she preferred to deal with it in the normal course of events. Having it plastered across every tabloid and newspaper was not her idea of a good way to begin a pregnancy.

Bulma paused in her reading. Security and privacy were definitely going to be an issue. Even assuming that the clinics would respect her privacy, there was always the problem of the paparazzi. The robots and guards around the compound did a good job of keeping them out, and they'd pretty much stopped even trying since Vegeta had fried a few of them. Fortunately, he hadn't considered them worth more than a warning shot so Capsule Corps had been able to pass the incidents off as accidents involving new laser armed security bots. They'd paid for the reporters' medical expenses, of course, but that was still preferable to funding funeral costs. But CC security was only effective in the compound; once she was out in the city she was fair game. She could take guards with her, of course, but they couldn't protect her from cameras. Maybe she could get Piccolo to go with her and have him use his unique powers to destroy any cameras in range... Bulma shook her head and resolutely put the wine away. If she could think things like that, obviously she'd had a little too much.

She sighed as she sat back down and rifled through the remaining brochures. The security issue was bothering her, and honestly, she just didn't see anyone in the donor pages that really interested her. She scowled at a picture of a man smiling arrogantly at the camera. "Obviously a ladies' man," she grumbled. "Yeesh. The clinics must take steps to ensure the quality of the donors, but what about inheritable personality traits?" There was no way to meet the donor before she had the procedure done. Also, she had to admit that she wanted the father of her child to be special in some way. Some of the donors claimed to be geniuses but so was she, thank you very much. She wanted something to compliment her already wonderful genes, not match them. Having seen all the danger and insanity in the world, she wouldn't mind if he were a good fighter. She wanted her child to be able to take care of itself, and while training could take care of that it would also be worthless without an adequate physique.

"What's this?" Bulma paused in her restless sifting through the brochures. "A PANDA?" she exclaimed. "What kind of place is this?" Spurred on by morbid curiosity, she opened it. In big, black letters, it said, 'Help save endangered species!' "Oh. Heh," she laughed at herself. "I must have picked it up accidentally." She giggled lightly, then stared thoughtfully out the window, still smiling. She wasn't paying attention to what she was looking at, she was just thinking through everything she'd been reading, but a unusually loud explosion rocked the gravity chamber sitting on the lawn and snapped her out of her reverie. She stared at it tensely, waiting for Vegeta to come storming out, demanding that she fix the now probably broken gravity generator. "Thank God," she muttered, when nothing else happened. "I don't need to go in there again." Trying to fix the thing was difficult enough normally, but it was practically impossible with an impatient and ever-grumpy Vegeta hovering over her.

Vegeta. Now there was a thought...

"Whoa. I must've had more wine than I thought," Bulma muttered. Once she'd thought of it, though, it was hard to ignore. He was certainly strong. He was arrogant beyond belief and had psychopathic tendencies, but Goku and Gohan were proof that Saiya-jins weren't indelibly stained. Raised in a human environment, the child would be normal. Well, normal emotionally, anyway. In addition to that, Vegeta didn't strike her as the family type-- he wouldn't insist on pushing himself into her life and trying to force her into some kind of Donna Reed role. Lastly-- and here was a really odd thought-- as royalty he probably completely understood the whole 'liaison of convenience to get a satisfactory heir' thing. "I can't believe I'm thinking this. Well, no, I can believe it. He is physically attractive and I must admit that behind that arrogance of his he is rather intriguing. I just can't believe I'm being so rational about it."

Gathering up her brochures, Bulma resolved to think hard about the whole affair for a few days. There was no way she was going to make this kind of decision in one night. As she headed upstairs to her room, she noticed that the pamphlet on the top of her stack was the one from the endangered species society. Glancing out the window at the gravity room, she couldn't help laughing. Now there was another idea. She could see it now. 'Save the Saiya-jin! Only two members of this once proud species now survive but tragically both are male. Cross breeding with humans is the only way to save them. The younger male has been successfully paired with a human female already! Please help us save these rare and awesome beings! The remaining male is the prince of these people. He stands 5'2", is extremely well built and hardy. He is quite intelligent when his ego doesn't get in the way..." Giggling helplessly, Bulma reached her room and tossed the real brochures on the desk then left to rent a movie or something. She needed a break.