A Place in Time

Chapter Three: Imminent Innuendo

By: SSJ Pan-chan

"Who are they?"

"You got me…"

"One minute I leave the lab empty and the next minute three toddlers and a time machine show up. I'm really confused."

"That's obvious, onna. We all are."

"Don't give me sarcasm, Vegeta!"

"Feh."

"Well, I guess we'll just have to wait for them to wake up…"

"Yep…Hey, speak of the devil…"

The rest of the family turned towards the blue-haired girl sitting on the bed where they had laid down the three mysterious children and were able to see one pair of cerulean eyes flutter open groggily. A small hand went up to hold the raven-haired girl's head in pain and she groaned sitting up. As she moved, she seemed to stir the other two, boys, they were, and they were soon mimicking their female companion's motions.

"Where are we?" the little girl said, looking around, confused. "What happened to the bad guy?"

Bra was about to respond to her question when she was stopped by one of the boy's voices; the boy with the haircut that looked really strangely familiar to Goku's and Goten's, when he was younger at least.

"I dunno, Musu-chan," he said, moving over so that he was in front of both her and his twin. "Maybe we got him?"

"No way," the other boy said, making a look of hope that had been on his sister's face disappear. "If Mama and Papa couldn't beat it in all those times they tried then we definitely didn't beat it…"

"But we might—"

Finally getting sick of all this nonsensical blabbering, Vegeta exploded. "What in the good world are you brats talking about!?" he yelled. Bulma looked at him in a scolding fashion.

"Vegeta, be nice! You'll scare them!"

"What?" one of the boys on the bed asked. "Um…Ma'am, I didn't do anything wrong, did I?"

"I'm sorry, I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to my husband, Vegeta."

"I'm not your husband," the little boy said, becoming more and more confused by this odd blue-haired woman who couldn't seem to discern between her husband and himself.

"I didn't say you were, honey," Bulma said in a sweet yet perplexed voice. "I said I was talking to Vegeta."

"But I'm Vegeta!" he exclaimed, trying to make the crazy woman find sense. She was about to say something, but her mouth closed immediately and she blinked a few times.

"Say what?" the older Vegeta snapped, more angry than fazed apparently. "You can't have that name! Vegeta is the royal name of the Saiya-jin prince! No low-class human brat, or even a Saiya-jin brat is allowed to share that name with me!"

"Hey! Don't be so full of yourself!" the little girl said, coming to her brother's defense. "Our Daddy is the Saiya-jin prince and he gave Vegeta that name! I don't know who you are, but you're not the Prince, you imposter!"

She had by now stood up on the bed and come face-to-face with a boiling-rage-faced Vegeta, trying to stare him down. She didn't know who this man thought he was, but whoever he was, he had no right stealing her Daddy's rightful title!

"Wait a second…" Bulma said, holding out an arm to stop Vegeta from practically lunging at the girl known as 'Musu-chan'. She had something itching in her mind. "How do you kids know about Saiya-jins? And how can your father be the Prince of them. I'm sorry to tell you, but he's not lying. My husband really was the prince of Vegeta-sei."

'Musu-chan' turned to Bulma, liking talking to her much more than to the cocky flame-haired man who she claimed to be her husband. Her tone was much gentler and patient. "We are Saiya-jins, silly! But I'm not lying either; our daddy is the prince and our mommy is the princess. Actually, they're the king and queen, I guess. Daddy says that Grandpa died a long time ago and Grandma always told him to be proud of being a prince because Grandpa would have wanted him to be, just like he was."

"Uh…where exactly do you guys come from; some alternate universe or something?" Trunks finally spoke up. He straightened himself up, lifting himself away from the wall he had been leaning against. 'Musu-chan' looked up to him and her eyes widened, not having noticed him in the room before for his lack of input into the conversation. He looked at her oddly. "What?" he asked to her gawking.

"Daddy!" she screamed in her high-pitched soprano voice and ran over and hugged onto the unsuspecting Trunks.

"Uh, e-excuse me? I'm sorry, I think you've got me mistaken, kid. I don't even have a girlfriend, much less a kid," he said slowly, pushing her gently away. She looked slightly hurt. Why was her father denying paternity to her?

Bra looked between her older brother and the girl incredulously. "I'm so confused…" she muttered. "I need some facts here." She got up and put 'Musu-chan' back on the bed, taking control and looking oh-so-much like her mother as she did so.

"First off, what are your names?"

"Gohan."

"Vegeta."

"Musume."

"Alright, now we're beginning to get somewhere," she said with a satisfied smile. "I presume that you're all siblings." This warranted a simultaneous nod from all three.

"Well, if two of them are named Vegeta and Gohan, and the other one says that you're their father, Trunks…I'm sorry to say, but maybe they are related to you somehow—"

"Yes! He is our Daddy, I'm sure of it!" Gohan exclaimed, pointing at Trunks who looked something between horrified and shocked beyond all reason. "Our Daddy's name is Trunks. Trunks Briefs! And our Mama, her name is Pan Briefs! But she's not he—"

"What!?" The whole family exclaimed this in unison, three of them about to die of this major bomb being dropped on them and the other one, Vegeta, whose voice stood out over all the rest quite clearly, with white-hot anger bubbling up inside him. "You can't be serious!" only he went on to say. This time, Bulma was so well struck that she didn't stop him, but rather was stiff and seemingly glued to her spot. "Kakkarot's third-class grand-brat can not be the mother of my grand-brats; his stupid spawn can not be the next in line to take over my family's throne! It's an outrage!

"Brat!" he turned to Trunks, who seemed to be snapped out of his trance by his father's fearsome anger being suddenly directed at him. "I demand you tell me what you were thinking when you married that low class child!"

Musume, Gohan, and Vegeta winced and recoiled at the scary prince's voice. Trunks wore an expression identical to the children's as he also recoiled, his father's wrath obviously not his favorite thing. Vegeta backed him into a corner and lifted him up by the collar of his shirt, slamming his son's body against the wall hard. "Answer me, boy!" he yelled.

"Vegeta!" Bulma finally yelled, horrified. "Stop it! Don't you dare hurt my baby!"

Trunks didn't even have time to blush at the name his mother had used for him as he was sent into a hurried string of words to explain himself to his father…even though he himself didn't really know what was going on. "I-I swear, I'm n-not married to Pan! I don't k-know w-who these kids are, but I-I've never seen t-them before!"

"Daddy, stop!" Bra called, running up to her father and touching his arm. Immediately, the small man stopped, and Trunks was eternally grateful to his sister. Sometimes he wished he could learn how she got him wrapped around her finger like she did.

"Daddy, don't be angry with him," she continued once Vegeta was completely off of her elder brother. "Mom said the kids came in a time machine, so they're not technically Trunks' kids…" She trailed off slightly, wondering if she was making any sense. Thankfully, Bulma picked up and broke out into a grin.

"…They're Mirai Trunks' kids…" she said with a squeal. "I'm going to be a grandma in the future!"

"Shut up, onna," Vegeta ordered, getting him a glare from the euphoric genius of the room. "That still doesn't stop the fact that they're also Kakkarot's great-grand brats." Bra spoke up again then to put in her two cents.

"Does blood really matter all that much? I mean, if Trunks and Pan-chan got married and had kids…that would make a bunch of three-quarter Saiya-jins. That's better blood that either Trunks or I have by ourselves…And I know that you don't want to see the race die, so shouldn't that be more important—having children endowed both with strength and thick Saiya-jin blood—than sucking up your pride and allowing our families to mix? I mean…well, I always knew that it would happen sooner or later…" The girl hid a blush right then that only her brother caught onto and he knew immediately that Bra was not just thinking about he and Pan…the idea of which still didn't sit well on him.

Vegeta seemed to be contemplating. Trunks would not keep the issue going for now if his father would agree. First off, these children probably didn't need to hear him denying that he didn't love their future mother or him claiming mistaken paternity for them. Second, it might just make his father switch over his decision, and he really didn't want to have any more meetings with the wall tonight.

The whole family let out a great sigh of relief when the prince finally scoffed, a prelude to his exit from the room. He had too much pride to ever outright admit that someone else was right for once, so just getting that scoff out of him meant that he agreed without him saying it. Bulma smiled and turned to the children who sat obediently on the bed, the shock of everything finally getting to them, it seemed. Her eyes sparkled in happiness, seeing these kids in a new light. She wanted to take them out and buy them all sorts of candy and cute clothes and spoil them and…

"Excuse me, ma'am, are you alright?" Gohan asked her , perplexed by his 'grandmother's' odd gleam.

Bra grinned. "She's just fine. I think she's just a little excited at the thought of having grandkids to take care of."

Musume inched closer to Bulma and put on her sweetest smile. "I don't mind you spoiling me…" she said in a sugary voice. "Can we go shopping, gramma?"

Bulma squealed and brought the girl into her arms. "Oh, you're just so precious! Of course we can go shopping! First thing tomorrow! Ooh, I'll dress you up in all sorts of pretty things and buy you whatever you want!" In the midst of the prospect of bring treated like a princess, Musume at least had temporarily forgotten any withdrawal from her parents. Vegeta and Gohan merely rolled their eyes at her. They didn't need any of those things that their sister adored so much; all they needed was some new training gear and they would be content.

"Mom, I'm sorry to ruin your cloud of happiness, but isn't trying to devise a way to get in touch with their parents more important than pampering them right now?" Trunks asked. Bra smacked him in the shoulder.

"Be quiet! I want to go shopping too!"

"I just took you shopping today! Isn't that enough for at least a few days!?" he asked, exasperated. "Besides…well, you're Panny's best friend…shouldn't you tell her what's going on?"

"Me tell her? Oh, no, Niichan. These are your future kids, not mine. It's your responsibility to tell her."

"What!? No! I can't do that! That'd be too uncomfortable!"

"Well I'm sorry to say, but you'd better get used to that discomfort, because I have a feeling that it's not the worst thing that's going to come out of this."

The lavender-haired career man sighed and put his head in his hands. "You alright, Trunks?" Bra finally asked after a few long moments of silence.

"I'm going to bed," he said shortly, sounding infinitely like his father, and he left the room without another word.

Bulma and Bra looked at the door as it closed behind him, both worried about him and both realizing how difficult that this would be on the youngest man of the family. The tension was only broken by Vegeta letting out a large yawn. "It's midnight…Can we go to sleep now?" he asked Bulma.

"Of course…I'll fix up the guest rooms for you kids and you can all get a good rest…Bra, help me?"

The teenager nodded, and motioned for Musume to follow her while her mother took Gohan and Vegeta by the hands and led them off…


"I don't understand it; that old machine was in complete disrepair from what I could tell…"

"It was supposed to have been at least," Trunks picked up, putting an arm over Pan's shoulder. Their ordeal over the last twenty-four hours had taken a lot of energy out of both of the parents. First, Pan had to convince her spouse to help her to continue to look for their missing children. He had been difficult and very emotional the rest of the day, but somehow she had been able to keep up her optimism and patience through it all. He had almost become too much to bear for her—after all, she had been battling to keep her own emotions down as well—and more than once she had almost lost her temper at him. Every time, she had to tell herself that she understood his pain and that her getting frustrated would only make things worse.

Finally, they had about given up. They had searched everywhere in the compound, and still there was no sign of the youths. Trunks' stormy mood had worsened enormously, her optimism was thoroughly tainted with discouragement and even Kaeida had sensed something wrong, tears springing to her eyes nonstop throughout the last hour or so. Knowing that they couldn't search forever, they resigned back to the lab…to find nothing there.

Pan hadn't yet decided if that was a good kind of nothing or a bad kind of nothing; all she knew was that the old time machine was gone. Completely and utterly disappeared.

She was caught somewhere between relief that she had found what had happened to her children and panic that she technically didn't know what had happened to her children. They didn't know how to operate the machine, so they could be in absolutely any timeline…ever. That was a lot of timelines. The thought was positively dizzying and she felt herself leaning onto Trunks' shoulder.

"I suppose the engines were still intact, even after so long. That's probably the only thing, though," he said. He shifted his weight to better support her.

"No," Pan said slowly. A tiny light bulb was going off in her head slowly in this realization. "No, it wasn't!" she exclaimed, jumping back from him. "That's right! The radio is still working!"

"Are you serious?" he said, looking just as excited now as his mate. "Yes, I remember you telling me that, now that I think of it…Do you know what this means!?"

He grabbed her by the shoulders, his euphoria taking hold of him. If she weren't a demi-Saiya-jin, she probably wouldn't have been able to stand the strength of his grip, which was tighter now because he was being more careless. Ignoring it, she stopped him, holding up a finger to his lips and slipping out of his grasp.

"Not so fast. Now we've got to take into account a number of things that could go wrong," she told him. She walked over to the panel and began typing madly, her fingers flying over the keys at a blinding speed. "First of all, that thing is ancient. I've got no doubt that your mother's machines still have the ability to contact it, but it might not have the ability to receive the transmission."

"I don't think that will be much of a problem. Even if video doesn't work, audio should work fine," Trunks told her. Her walked over and leaned over her, even though he knew she hated it when people hovered over her work. He had to sate his appetite for knowledge of what was going on and he couldn't help that.

"That brings me to my second point. Depending upon how far back they've gone, it'll be harder and harder to reach them clearly. If I'm calculating this right, with time and quality deterioration of the device, they have to have traveled back less time them you did," she said, almost to herself. She resisted the urge to swat him away from her work. He was just concerned and that she understood better than anyone could imagine, so she allowed him to continue his annoying hovering. "The furthest they could have traveled without losing radio contact is…" she typed in the numbers and the product came up on the screen, "about 25 years back into the old timeline."

He counted some stuff up in his head. "That's about right. That would be a year or so after I left if my 'present' self is around 26."

"He'd be turning 26 soon, if that's what you mean. Your birthday is coming up."

"Same difference. Anyway, let's cut the chat. I know that there's not a good chance that we'll be able to get a hold of them, but we've got to try anyway."

"That's just what I was doing. If you had been paying attention, you would have noticed that I already set the frequencies," she said, slightly irritated. "What's the point of me allowing you to sit on my shoulder and annoy the hell out of me if you don't actually learn anything from it?"

He smiled. "Sorry," he said sheepishly. She turned back around in her chair and began to push a few buttons and flipped up a couple of switches, and his anticipation grew with each click. 'Will it work, after all this time?' he thought, his hope suppressed by fear. 'Mother, will your machine reach my children?'

"Well…here goes nothing…" All they could do now was tune into the frequency and wait.


Ding-Dong

"Oh, Pan. Uh, come in," Bulma greeted and directed the teenager into her house. The woman hoped that she hadn't caught the tone of uncertainty in her voice, and thankfully she hadn't. She had to remind herself that the girl smiling at her now knew nothing of the events of the night before and that she shouldn't make her suspicious that anything was going on.

"Good morning, Bulma-san," Pan bowed respectfully. "Is Bra around? She promised to help me plan my party today."

Looking at her now, it felt so weird to think that this girl was the future mother of her grandchildren. Suddenly, she felt much differently being around Pan than she had before. Before, she was Gohan's daughter, and her daughter's best friend. Nothing much more. Now…she seemed infinitely closer.

"Yes, Bra's upstairs taking a shower. Would you like something to eat while you wait?"

Pan nodded vigorously, as with any other Saiya-jin, never able to pass up the prospect of food. Bulma smiled, trying as hard as she might to act as normally as possible. "Thanks. Mama wasn't up when I left, so I didn't have any breakfast."

"Well, I'll get you taken care of, dear," the blue-haired woman told her. "Vegeta and Trunks are already in there."

She motioned for the youth to proceed into the dining room while she went into the kitchen. When she got there, Bulma leaned against the counter. 'Trunks is going to hate me for having her go in there,' she thought. 'I know this is difficult for him, but he has to learn to accept things the way they are…and sooner or later he's going to have to tell her what's going on. She has a right to know. So he better get used to it, because I have a feeling things are only going to get worse before they get bett—"

"Hurry up with the food already, onna! You humans are excruciatingly slow when you wish to be!"

Bulma groaned, her mate's voice shaking her from her pensive state, and she gathered up the plates of food and went into the dining room with them. Purposefully, she brushed by Vegeta, knocking the fork from his hand.

"What was that for!?" he demanded, glaring. "Pick up the utensil you have caused me to fumble!"

"It was for being so horribly impatient, and I'm your wife, not your slave, so you're going to have to pick it up yourself, your Highness!" she retorted, and turned away to set down her son's plate…to only turned back around, puzzled.

"Vegeta, where did Trunks go?" she asked.

"He was acting all weird," came a female voice from the other side of the table. She looked to see Pan with her arms crossed. "He saw me and got all worked up, said he had something he had forgotten to do, and ran away. Whatever, though. I get first dibs on his breakfast."

Vegeta scoffed at the teenage Saiya-jin's obliviousness as to the situation. Bulma sighed. "My son is such a coward," she muttered to herself, and set down Pan's plate of food.

"Now, there's more of where that came from in the kitchen," she told them both. "When Bra comes down, she can make herself a plate. Right now I've got to go downstairs and work on the tim—something." Thankful that Pan was too into her food to have caught her near-slip, she decided that it would be best to be silent and just walk out of the room without attracting any attention.

As she left, she could hear Vegeta mutter something that sounded suspiciously like, "Feh, earthling women…" before he continued with his food.


Musume groaned as she observed her brothers' antics. 'We shouldn't be in here,' she thought nervously. 'Gramma is gonna catch us in her lab and we're gonna be in trouble. And it's all because of my stupid brothers…why do I let them drag me into these things?'

Meanwhile, to her great distress, Gohan and Vegeta were fiddling around with the many robots and other gadgets that Bulma had devised over the years. Her lab had been a major point of interest since they had arrived, as Pan had not allowed them to fool around din the other one while she was working. To their surprise, many of the things they had seen before were still there, but they were all previous models of what they had seen in the future. Nonetheless, it didn't take the most recent technological advancement to entertain the mischievous toddlers.

"Sugoi! Look at this, guys!" Gohan exclaimed. In his hands was an oddly familiar device to the children. It was small, round, and had a green screen with graph lines on it in black; the dragon radar. Recognizing it immediately, Vegeta rushed over to see and even Musume's worries were suppressed by her interest in his finding.

"Hey," Vegeta said, "That's the dragonball detecting device thing that Mom and Dad keep at the house, isn't it?"

"I didn't realize this thing was that old," Musume said. "It must be…" she began to count off years on her small fingers, but soon lost track and gave up. "..um, how far back did we come, exactly?"

"I don't know," Gohan replied with a shrug, setting the radar down on the table. "I didn't think to ask with everything that's going on."

Vegeta blinked a couple of times. "Yeah…to make it even worse, the timelines are different, so we may be further into the future than we would have been in this timeline, at least that's what I heard Daddy say…So that means…well, I don't know what it means. I do know that my head hurts, though."

"We should ask later," Musume said, brushing the topic off the floor as quickly as she could. Puzzled by her strangely rushed speech, the boys looked at her oddly.

"You alright, Musu?" Gohan inquired.

"Ssh!" she hushed them with a finger to her lips. "I think there's someone in here with us!"

In an instant, the two boys were on their guard, reaching out their senses to find the ki she was talking about. However, it wasn't an energy signature that they detected, rather, it was a sound.

"Uh, I don't think it's a someone," Vegeta said, his muscles relaxing slightly. Curious, the three began looking around the lab for the source of the sound. It was staticy and soft, like a television that was losing reception. With their sensitive hearing, they could also pick up something else mixed in with it—it was distinctly a woman's voice, trying to break through the storm of noise.

"Guys, it's coming from the time machine, I think!" Gohan exclaimed, proud at having found the mystery location. The three gathered quickly and they cautiously began to pile themselves into the one-seater. Though their sizes were small, it was still difficult to fit and the room was a lot more limited than they had ever remembered it being the first time.

"Move over, Sis! Your foot is jabbing my leg!"

"It's not my fault that you decided that you had to climb in with us!"

"I could say the same to you! This should be a no-girls-allowed zone. You're too whiny!"

"Me, whiny!? I'm not the one crying about my leg, am I, Vege—"

"Shush already!" Gohan told them, clearly annoyed with the sibling bickering. "I'm starting to hear the voice better!"

Sure enough, the female voice was beginning to come through, chopped up words every other second coming from the small many-holed box on the console. For a second, too, the voice almost sounded a bit like…

"Mama!" Musume shouted out, being the first to recognize their mother's voice through the radio. All of them, wide-eyed, gaped at the box from which Pan was speaking. In just a few seconds more, they could hear her perfectly, save for the occasional interference or two, and grins broke out onto all of their faces.

"Oh, Kami, I'm so glad to hear your voice, Musume!" Pan's voice said with no effort to hide the relief.

Suddenly, Vegeta lurched himself forward and grabbed at the box with his two small hands and with tiny tears in his eyes, looking infinitely like a young Goten. "Mama! Where are you!? The box monster ate you! Gohan," he turned to his brother and tearfully wailed, "I think…I think maybe, I think the time machine ate Mama! Do something!"

He grabbed Gohan by the shoulders, who only rolled his eyes and removed his twin from him. "And maybe you're a moron," he said. "Calm down already, Vege-chan. It's just a radio transmission, stupid. She's talking to us from our time."

With a look of understanding, Vegeta calmed down a little bit, but was soon just as shaken as before when another voice resonated throughout the small lab. All three of them spun around at once to look at the doorway, their little hearts racing.

"What are you kids doing in here?"

It was Bulma, looking like she was caught between whether to be angry or confused. Oh, the woes of being a grandparents… "I thought that I told you three—"

"Gramma, quick, come here!" Gohan cut her off, thankful for her to be there more so than worried about getting in trouble. He jumped from the machine and took her by the hand to rush her to where their mother's voice was coming. "Gramma, it's Mama and Daddy; they're contacting us!"

Bulma blinked, now really perplexed. "What are you going on about?" she asked, until she was cut short once again, this time by an obvious sound of movement from the speaker. A few short seconds later, she heard a voice that she thought she had heard the last of nearly twenty-six years ago…

"Hey, Mom."


A/N: Hey, Pan-chan here! Sorry about the delay in the release in this chapter. However, I had a ton of geigh shtuff to do during winter break, like, well…I would like to say that I worked on my flute chair tryout piece, but I didn't (heh ;)…well, like, opening presents! You know you did it too! So, shush! It's a good excuse! As always, review and tell me what you think. I'm open to suggestions and questions; everything but flames.

Reviewer Responses:

Fan-Fic-Addiction: I've never read that story, but I'll be sure to check it out after I'm done with mine. If it's alike it already, I don't want to make it any more so, so I'll try to keep my own ideas in my mind for now. ; But thanks for telling me. And don't worry, Trunks and Pan will get their turn!

Sidel Sisters: Thanks! Keep reviewing!

Allie: I'm happy you like it and I'm happy to have a new reviewer. I didn't update as soon as I would have liked, but hey…no complaining out of any of you! P

HellenI'm glad to have you left wanting more! That's what I hope for. -

PennyPThank you, Penny! I'll try to update sooner next time!

ss-dragon-ladyThanks; please keep reviewing for me. I really appreciate it when people review!

HaleinI'm glad you think so! I've been waiting to do a storyline like this for a long time, so I'm glad that it's being well-received!

Miki23: Hee, you really guessed well, didn't you? I suppose it wasn't all that difficult, but I love it when people guess at what's going to happen. It's fun both when they get it right and when they don't.