Age 775 - Three Years before the events of Arrival

There were a few things that Bulma knew would always be true about Son Gohan.

One, he slept very loudly. He snored throughout the entire night, tossing and turning the entire time. She'd had to reinforce the frame of his bed more than once to make sure that it didn't break again. In fact, maintenance on the guest room had become one of her relaxing habits, but the same was true for pretty much any room Gohan made good use of. The gravity chamber that had once belonged to her husband had become his new training room, whenever he had the time to use it, and the kitchen was always kept reasonably well stocked for whenever he had the time to visit.

The second thing that she'd noticed about him was that he always swung by at the most convenient times. He was eerily similar to his father in that regard, always swooping in at the right moment to save the day... or lighten the mood during an awkwardly silent dinner with her son.

Trunks, as he grew older, had come to understand the state of the world a lot better than she'd have liked. Every day, he holed himself up in the outer gardens and shadowboxed with himself, just like his father had. The only difference was that Vegeta had been doing it in three hundred times Earth's gravity and Trunks was doing it in literally the safest place possible.

Bulma was not particularly surprised when Gohan swung by after a long day and agreed to help her work on her blueprints for a possible time machine, in fact, she'd almost been banking on it. Because of his mother's influence, Gohan had grown up with an almost inhuman work ethic. Every time he found a new subject, he spent days delving into it and devouring it until he'd come to understand everything he could.

To some people, it was probably odd or unusual for someone like Gohan, the son of the world's greatest martial artist, to hole himself up in a library and get lost in a book... but Bulma understood exactly why he'd throw himself into things like that.

She'd done the same thing after Vegeta had been lost to the Androids. For a long time, she'd felt like she wouldn't be able to do anything ever again. First, she'd lost Goku... then more of her friends - and finally her husband. She had only survived because of her ability to work through a crisis.

Bulma perked up when she heard him come in, literally bumping his boot on the corner of the doorframe as he came through the doorway.

"Hm? Oh, hey Gohan!"

She waved her pen in his direction and grinned, signalling him to come closer to the long desk she was working at. Really, it was more like a workbench mixed in with a library table; papers were strewn about the surface of the wood without much care, left to linger while their owner worked on other pages. Gohan picked one of them up when he sat down opposite Bulma at the desk, silently enjoying the fact that she'd placed a chair for him before he'd even arrived.

"Hey Bulma, what's up? You said you had some ideas you wanted to work on?"

Bulma turned back to her work and nodded, passing some of her notes over the table to Gohan.

He'd come in expecting a few notes and scribbled down designs; what he got was an actual, legitimate set of blueprints for a supposedly functioning time machine. He blinked and put down the page of random notes that he'd been looking at, sifting through the blueprints with a childlike curiosity.

"These seem like a little more than ideas, Bulma," he muttered, as he examined the inner mechanisms behind what appeared to be the legs of the machine. The whole thing seemed to be egg-shaped, with legs built to support it, which was simple enough, he supposed. The rest of it was the complex part. He didn't understand most of the terms on the paper, much less how they were relevant to the time machine itself. "I don't know if I can help with this."

Bulma didn't waste time looking up from her notes.

"I wouldn't say that," she said.

"You've always been a pretty quick study, Gohan. I know you've been checking out some of the books from my library while I'm out."

Gohan felt his cheeks redden, embarrassed at the fact that he'd apparently been sloppy. He huffed and let his elbow rest on the table so that he could examine the page he was looking at a little bit better.

As if she could literally sense his embarrassment, Bulma spoke up before the silence could get too overwhelming.

"Trunks. He was up late one night and saw you sneaking out the window with a few books. You know, he actually came to me to find out what you were reading? I swear, if you started cleaning up around here he'd probably do it in a heartbeat..."

Gohan didn't laugh, but he did exhale a little faster than he should've. Bulma wasn't lying. He'd noticed Trunks starting to imitate him lately. From what he'd heard from Bulma, he'd even been watching security tapes of Gohan's time in the gravity chamber so that he could copy his form. That said, it didn't seem to be working out all that well for him. Like always, Trunks's strength was above average... but it wasn't really high enough to cause much of a stir. He was probably about as strong as Krillin had been during the battles on Namek.

"Yeah, that's not too surprising. I mean, I emulate my dad a lot," he said.

He was actually surprised that, for once, he hadn't come over in his training clothes... at least, not the ones he usually wore. His outfit consisted mainly of a black version of his father's stylized undershirt and some baggy pants, which were more for comfort than anything else. Of course, the undershirt wasn't weighted, because that probably would've been inconvenient, or at least, he figured as much.

"You are starting to look a lot like him. You're always wearing that orange and blue, and your hair's pretty much the spitting image of his," she agreed, nodding and looking back up at him for the first time since he'd arrived. "But that's not what we're here to talk about."

She put her pen down on the table and leaned back in her seat, stretching her arms out over her head and yawning loudly.

"I've been working on this for a while. It started out as a pet project, after Goku died... but lately, it's been seeming a lot more realistic. The whole premise is, you know, time machine. It'd let us fix things that went wrong, maybe even save your Dad... I mean, we did come up with a vaccine for the heart virus not too long after he passed."

Gohan blinked and looked down at the blueprints in his hand with a renewed interest. He hadn't really thought about doing something like that before - but then again, he'd never really been a scientist. He developed a reading habit because his mother had kept prodding him.

"Bulma, if we saved my dad... the Androids probably wouldn't exist right now," he said, trying to hide the anxiety behind his words. Still, he was impressed... and he couldn't hide that. It showed in the way he held her notes, reverently, like he was suddenly afraid to rip them.

"That's what I'm getting at!"

Bulma passed another page over to Gohan, who took it without thinking. He didn't have to look up at her to see the smile plastered across her face, but he did anyway. It was, he noted, a nice change of pace.

"Think about it, Gohan! We could do so much with this. We could save your dad, we could prevent all the problems that're killing us now just by hitting him with a vaccine before the virus hits. Wouldn't that be great?"

He could tell that she was excited. Still, he wasn't really sure how to react. In a lot of ways, her plan was awesome. There were a lot of things that they could put right with a time machine and some clever plans. With that in mind though, there were also a lot of things that could go wrong - or not change at all.

"Well, I mean... I don't know as much about this stuff as you do, Bulma, but something tells me that nothing's going to be that easy. Everything I've read tells me that time would try to preserve itself, at least, in one line," he explained.

"Time preservation, chronological protection conjecture... I know what you're talking about, but there's other things we could do too! Even if our timeline doesn't change, we could bring Goku back here! Then he could beat the Androids! I'm sure that the two of you would be enough to do it, right?"

Gohan wasn't so sure. He was pretty strong... but at his current strength, the Androids were still mopping the floor with him. He could fight maybe one of them on pretty even terms though, probably long enough for his Dad to beat one of them, assuming he could. He'd always said that if anyone could beat the cyborgs that it would've been Dad.

"Maybe. What about the idea of a multiverse though? What if this creates more universes where my dad just never comes home and everybody dies anyway?"

Gohan put down the sheet of paper - which had been a list of materials needed for the creation of the time machine itself - and grabbed another one on the table labeled "Suggested Reading." He could only imagine that it was a list of books Bulma wanted him to read before he started contributing to the project. Deep down, he sorta wished that she had some of her old researchers back. They would have been much more useful.

"That's unlikely, but I'll explain to you why before I say anything else," she said, tenting her fingers together as he skimmed the list with his eyes.

"Let's say we've got a box of oranges, right? We need the box of oranges to come to our timeline. So we use the time machine to go back in time and grab a box of oranges from another timeline. We take the oranges we grabbed and clone them so that we can grow oranges, and we send the oranges back to the timeline they came from. Do you know why that's the way it is?"

She took Gohan's blank stare as a no.

"It's because, like you said, timelines are going to try to preserve themselves. When we use the time machine, it's probably going to create another timeline - the timeline we'll be getting the oranges from - for us to travel to. Then, when one of us goes back, we'll be accessing that same timeline. The universe isn't going to create a bunch of new timelines just because we took some oranges. It's going to take us to the same timeline we went back to originally, because that's the simplest way for it to work."

Bulma paused, still grinning, and subtly reminded herself that Gohan's knowledge of physics was relatively rudimentary. She wanted to just make a joke that the universe was one big lazy office worker, sorting all things in the same cabinet - but somehow she felt like her brand of humor would be lost on him.

"Make sense?" she asked.

"Uhm, I guess so?"

Gohan didn't look convinced. Tempted, sure, but tempted wasn't sold. Still, Bulma could practically see the lights firing up behind his eyes, excited by the prospect of reuniting with his old friends. It was almost like the idea seemed too good to be true for him, or too convenient.

"But if I change the timeline, would I still be able to go back to it? I mean, let's say I put down another box of oranges. Does that effect anything?"

Bulma shook her head and let her hands rest on the top of the table.

"Not really. Obviously there'll be ripple effects along that timeline, but if we're using the multiverse theory, then we wouldn't be affected... assuming things work that way. Right now the only thing that's suggesting our timeline wouldn't change if we saved Goku from the heart virus would be the paradox protection behind it. If we saved him then we'd never go back in the first place," she explained.

Gohan, who seemed to be catching on, nodded solemnly. He understood a little, now. If they went back in time, there were two possibilities. Either the loops they'd created would resolve themselves, or they wouldn't be loops at all. If the universe were protecting itself from a paradox, it would do what he'd suggested earlier and create another timeline, meaning that he could pretty much do whatever he wanted without it having much of an effect. Naturally, that was a kind of double edged sword.

He opted not to think about it too hard.

"So what's this list of books you want me to look at? Is it just recommended reading on time travel? I know a bit about physics already," he said, sheepishly.

Bulma let him look back down to the list in his hands before she answered him, aware that he'd already read the title and was asking more to be sure than anything else. Gohan was a lot smarter than his father was, in the conventional sense. Goku wouldn't have gotten the analogy any way she tried to put it. He had always been a doer more than he'd been a thinker. In some ways, that was a trait she'd always admired. In other ways, it was literally the single most infuriating thing she'd ever had to deal with.

She still couldn't believe that he'd just agreed to marry Chi-Chi without giving it any forethought.

Then again, maybe that'd been a good thing. Gohan had turned out alright, demons from outer space and cyborg terror aside. He was a smart kid.

"Yeah, pretty much. It has a list of the more important titles you'll need to look at if you want to work with me on this. I know you don't really know much about any of this now, but I'm sure that you'll be caught up in a month or two."

Gohan laughed, once, and put the list down.

"That's thinking a little highly of me, isn't it? I'm not a genius, Bulma. I get that I'm pretty smart, but I don't think I could keep up with you on something like this. I don't even know if I'll be around long enough to use this thing," he said.

"Gohan, I can't think of anyone else that I'd trust to keep up with me on this. Even when you were younger, you probably could've been an entry level researcher here. You were like six years old and figuring out how rockets worked and cicadas mated in Spring, or something. I think that you could probably figure this out if you took some time to yourself and looked over the material."

Gohan struggled not to correct her on the cicada mating point - as the specific instance she was referencing had involved him describing to her in great detail how certain species of cicada had a tendency to molt in Springtime - but let out a heavy sigh nevertheless.

"Bulma, I dunno... Do you really think this'll work? I think that the machine itself is fine, but if we don't have any of the science behind it figured out... how're we going to make it function? What's it going to be powered by? What if time keeps going while I'm gone and the Androids find you?"

Bulma felt her fist clench over the table, letting her knuckles rap silently against the wood. She could tell that she'd reeled him in already. He was asking questions because he wanted to answer them, not because he was concerned that they couldn't be answered. She just had to put him in the boat and everything was going to be set in stone.

"Gohan, even if time kept trucking on while you were gone, I somehow doubt that the Androids would suddenly come for me and Trunks. I'm pretty sure that they know you live around us and they haven't exactly spent time tracking you down. They're demons looking for fun, not predators looking for food."

Her point was pretty solid.

Gohan puttered his lips and leaned back in his chair. His heart was racing at the thought of saving his father or going back and stopping the Androids before they could become a threat... or bringing him back and stopping them together. He could see his friends, tell them the things that he'd never gotten the chance to tell them.

He adjusted in his seat, suddenly, like he'd startled himself, as the thoughts continued to come all at once.

What if he could use the dragonballs from the past to change things in the future? What if he could figure out some way to get his friends back in his timeline? Could he really set things right that easily? Had the Androids not killed Piccolo, they could have gathered the dragonballs in a month, tops. He could move way faster than the speed of sound without even unsuppressing his power level.

"Bulma..." he breathed, still nervous.

"I think you've got yourself a new partner."

A/N: This here is a decent start to the exposition that'll be expounded upon in the less-actiony parts of the next chapter. I'll be releasing backstory chapters infrequently until the original, destroyed timeline is caught back up to the point where Gohan goes back in time. This should only take about three more chapters - of a slightly larger length than this one - or so.

One thing worth noting is that this version of Gohan, the one I'm portraying, is currently weaker than he should be. He's still not sold on his destiny, despite the fact that he's forced into his role as savior of the Earth, which is one that he'd originally always wanted to fulfill. It's another thing to note that, in this chapter, Gohan is only like fifteen years old. He's got a rudimentary knowledge of the things Bulma's asking for him and the knowledge that his ability to learn is way beyond that of other people his age. Time travel is both realistic and interesting for him.

In the chapters to come, we'll see how far that optimism gets him and how long it lasts. Challenges aren't just going to disappear; in fact, because of the fact that he's meddling with a timeline he shouldn't be in, things are going to get a little more complicated than they were in canon. Timeline protection theory is an understatement for the things that poor Gohan is going to have to deal with. Already, divergences have popped up - namely, Cold having a third form, which we'll see more of in the next chapter. What else might he encounter?

Power levels for this chapter are as follows:

Mirai Bulma - 4

Mirai Gohan (suppressed) - 20

Mirai Gohan (full power; age 15) - 3,000,000