"Do you really have to go?" Vegeta asked, as Bulma was packing enough clothes for a three days trip. He loathed to have Bulma kept away from him. He had thought about accompanying her but she insisted that it would be strictly scientific and that she would be back soon.
"And Trunks needs you." Bulma added as Vegeta was once again trying to have her stay. "He is getting a little bit old to stay with his grand-parents, he will get bored if we live him alone here. Also Gohan is home from college for the week. I will not ask Chichi to have another Saiyan at the table."
Vegeta eventually agreed it would be better for him to stay with his son, it was after all not the first time the woman had to leave on a business trip.
Two days before Bulma had received a phone call coming from a remote military base in the south. They had found a wide metallic piece in the desert that was likely to be a part of an aircraft. They were however not able to determine its origin and had asked for Capsule Corp's expertise. Bulma had immediately decided to go herself, curious to know the story behind this unidentified object.
Despite Vegeta's protests she left the house for the airport a couple of hours later as planned. Trunks quickly showed excitement over spending time with his dad and started making plans for the day. At 14 years old he began to understand how different his family was and knew he had a very unique father. Vegeta promptly told him to calm down before he had to cancel their training together. He had agreed to take Trunks to the mountains where he sometimes went to train by himself when he needed solitude. The conditions were rough; the altitude made the oxygen rare and the freezing temperature was tough for a Saiyan to put up with. Bulma obviously forbade Trunks to go there, claiming he was too young for such an intense sparring session. Vegeta obviously thought it was nonsense as his son already trained daily under two hundred times the Earth gravity. They both had planned to leave after lunch and come back for diner, not willing to skip one of Bunny's meals and have to cook their own food. Vegeta liked to be served as the Prince he was, and Trunks had inherited his mother's ability to burn down the kitchen by making a salad.
Comfortably seated in a private cabin, Bulma looked at the pictures she had received from the base. The piece they had found was strangely curved, surely a part of the fuselage of the aircraft. It reminded her of something but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. It might be from one of the many Capsule Corp's models she had personally designed.
It was already dark when Vegeta decided to head home. Trunks silently flew a few feet behind him, secretly relieved to end the session. He had lost his enthusiasm shortly after the beginning of their training, when he had realized he was far more affected by the cold than he thought he would. His scratched knuckles were aching and he could not feel the tip of his fingers. Also his father, fired to have a decent opponent in a complex fighting arena, had seemed to forget from times to times that he was hitting his own son and that it was not a fight to the death. Trunks had taken a few bad punches and his shirt hid some nasty bruises. He tried to keep up with his father on the way home but breathed painfully in the freshness of the night.
They arrived home late after Mr. and Mrs. Briefs had gone to bed despite their initial plan. Trunks flew directly through his room window, eager to take a hot shower and bandage his wounds. Vegeta was less tired from the spar and went straight to the fridge, hoping to find a meal to heat up. However, as he crossed the front door, he smelled an unfamiliar scent. It was on the handle and the side of the door. Focusing his attention, he deduced that someone had entered the house when he was absent. He quickly reached for his in-laws' kis and was relieved when he felt their weak signals in their bedroom. He couldn't feel anybody else in the house, beside Trunks and himself. He shrugged, surely the old woman had changed her perfume. His hungry stomach decided it was a decent explanation.
Trunks hurried to sit at the kitchen table when the comforting odor of hot food rose in the house. Vegeta had never known how to cook anything but was mysteriously able to perfectly microwave just about every kind of meal, never ending up with a cold-centered bowl of rice or a still-half-frozen slice of pie. Both Saiyans ate quietly until they had emptied the dishes. Trunks was already dreaming about the softness of his pillow when Vegeta talked to him with a low voice:
"How do you feel?"
Trunks raised his head from his plate. It really was an unexpected question coming from his father. It was not like him to show concern.
"I'm fine." the teenager answered, knowing that complaining would only annoy him.
"Boy, don't play that game with me." Vegeta said simply.
Trunks knew he had to tell the truth, but had not planned on telling so much. His exhaustion got over him as he admitted: "I feel like all my bones are broken. I think two of my ribs are shattered. I need to sleep for a week." After a pause he added: "Maybe I overestimated myself on this one."
He then waited with apprehension for a mocking line about his weakness. To his deep incomprehension it never came.
"Well," Vegeta began seriously, "even Gohan would not feel fine after what we did today. Don't be ashamed of your limits. Knowing them will only make your training more efficient."
Trunks didn't know what to say. It was the closest his father would ever come to a compliment. Yet before he could express his relief, Vegeta left the table. "Tomorrow we will rest. Now go to sleep." he ordered as he crossed the door.
A couple of hours later Vegeta found himself lying on the couch, caught in a deep reflection about his day. While he didn't really need a day off his training, he did not want to break the gravity room while the woman was away, and training outside would mean no ki blast or strong punches to keep the garden in its current state. He watched TV for a while after Trunk fell asleep. He didn't like to sleep alone in his bed. He had become used to having the woman beside him and felt uncomfortable lying by himself in the cold sheets. He seriously considered sleeping on the couch. He was dozing off when he sensed a new energy in the house. He got to his feet with an unnatural speed and quickly arrived in front of his bedroom where his could feel a ki. He hesitated for a couple of seconds. It was a low energy, about like a human. But just as he wondered how someone with human strength could be in his bedroom without using the stairs, he smelled it again. The odor he had noticed at the front door. It was a feminine smell, strong and somehow wild. It could have been a trick from Bulma but he would never mistake her ki among others. He carefully opened the door and entered the room without turning on the light. In the dark, he could see a feminine figure sitting on his bed. She looked quite like Chichi, a fit body and long black hair. She wore baggy jeans, boots and a leather jacket over a white T-shirt. She looked about twenty. Vegeta could see she was nervous.
"You had better have a good explanation for your presence." he said threateningly.
There was a time when Vegeta would have killed the intruder without any question, but Bulma surely wouldn't like to have blood on her sheets. As far as he was concerned, the girl on the bed might even be one of the woman's friends and then he wouldn't hear the end of it if he murdered her. Her voice soon rose in the dark:
"You are just as they described you. I need to talk to you, Vegeta."
Vegeta was stunned. He didn't know any other human female beside his own wife and Kakarott's nightmare of a spouse and daughter in law. He believed the monk and the toaster had a female child that was about Trunks' age but it clearly wasn't her here.
"What do you want?" he spat.
"I heard you are a powerful man. I came to offer you even more."
Vegeta shook his head in annoyance. She was one of the crazy women who read tabloids and wanted to take Bulma's place in his bed. Rumor had it the Capsule Corps heiress was living with a very attractive Eastern Prince who loved to workout shirtless in his backyard.
"There is nothing for you here, go away." Vegeta growled.
"I'm afraid I won't. I travelled too far to give up now and I have nowhere else to go. Listen to me, you could have everything you've ever dreamt of."
"I already have what I want. Leave before I blast your head off your shoulders."
Vegeta was genuinely surprised she was still there. Most humans were scared by his mere presence, let alone when he threatened to kill them.
"Really?" she stood up and took several steps toward him. As her smell became stronger he realized it was strangely familiar to him. It triggered his memory, as if he had already met her before, or her family. "Do you really have a throne to claim and a nation to rule? Have you actually given up on being the Prince of all Saiyans?"
She was not even done with her sentence that Vegeta had grabbed her by the throat and pinned her to the wall.
"Who are you?" he roared angrily. "SPEAK!"
She struggled to talk but Vegeta was blinded with rage and did not loosen the pressure on her neck. He could not stand that someone he had never heard of knew so much about him. He started feeling anxious and thought he should have killed her on the spot, for his simple peace of mind. He was quickly brought back from his thoughts when the girl's small hand caught the wrist that held her against the wall and she brutally freed herself. Vegeta could feel it now, she had had to show her true strength to save herself. She was much more powerful than a human. Without thinking he fell into a fighting stance. He couldn't let someone so unpredictable in the same house as his sleeping son. But she didn't move when he landed the first blow in her guts, she didn't try to dodge when he gave a strong kick that made her fall heavily on the floor. He felt mocked. She was strong enough to at least block the attacks, he knew it. He extended his arm in front of him toward the girl as white ball of ki formed in his palm. Under the new light he saw she had lost her confidence. Her dark eyes were wide open in fear as she also took in his appearance. She painfully rolled on her side to face him.
"What do you want, alien?" he growled.
She knew he would fire without hesitation. She stopped thinking and did the only thing that came to her mind. Very slowly she moved to briefly support her weight on her hands and feet instead of sitting on her bottom. Vegeta saw her inner thigh move as if her muscle had twitched under the jeans fabric. But it was not her muscle. As she sat upright Vegeta's eyes got caught by something moving behind her back. He aimed at it with his ki light. And he almost fell down from the sight of it and what it implied.
"Children." the alien murmured, "I want children." There, in the light of the ki, she shyly waved behind her a long, brown, furry monkey tail. A mark of the Saiyans.