About Time

by April CK

Part 10

Five hundred years ago there had been violent storms on Planet Namek. If the storms had ended a little sooner, a Namekian child would never have been sent into space. If the storms had lasted just a little longer then the child wouldn't have been sent into space alone.

What were the odds?

Instead of getting lost in space, instead of landing on some barren deserted world - the child had managed to land on Earth. And instead of being found by government scientists or any other sort of Earthling that would have wanted to put the Namek either into a zoo or under a microscope, the Namekian child had met Korin. The Namek had been taken in and raised by the gods of Earth. The child had become Kami.

What were the odds?

Thirty years ago, planet Vegeta had been reduced to space dust. If the disaster had happened any sooner then a certain Saiyan infant would have died in the explosion. If the disaster hadn't happened at all then perhaps the infant would have grown up knowing his blood relatives. But instead the infant had also made it to Earth. After all, it wasn't as if an infant could steer a space pod. There were so many things that could have gone wrong. Goku could have ended up anywhere. But he'd made it Earth.

What were the odds?

And not only had Goku made it to Earth intact, he'd been found and adopted - not by a tailor, not by a circus, not by village of lumberjacks - but by a legendary martial artist. And not just ANY legendary martial artist but by one of the few that owned a dragonball. So instead of becoming a third-class mass murderer or a forgotten orphan left alone in the wilderness, Goku had grown up to become a legendary hero that went around saving other peoples planets.

What were the odds?

The threads of coincidence kept spinning, weaving together in a tight double helix - the building block of some larger design. Uranai Baba concentrated. The past was a pattern. The future would continue that pattern. It was a living pattern and so the details were always a little different but the basic pattern was the same.

Uranai Baba had been alive for so long that she'd begun to take the pattern for granted. She'd always looked at the details more than the overall picture but now... If she could just get the mental image of the pattern, perhaps the details would fill themselves in and she'd discover what the future held. She could almost make it out.

Androids. Dead humans that were dug up and programmed - albeit accidentally - by other humans to destroy humankind in general. Androids that not only did what they were programmed to do but that were even stronger than they could have been designed to be. Androids that had spirit, attitude and personality. Robots that had somehow gotten the beginnings of humanity mixed in to their codes. Androids that, in the end, would almost certainly have to destroy themselves to complete their mission of total human extermination.

What were the odds?

A ten year old demi-saiyan. A boy named after a legendary human that he'd never met and actually related to more legends than he'd ever be aware of. The sheer unlikeliness of his birth, the precise combination of bloodlines... It was mind boggling. And while the kid hadn't been the strongest warrior or even the most experienced one, yesterday he had somehow survived what every other mortal defender of Earth had died against.

What were the odds?

Kamis Lookout. After thousands of years of enduring all sorts of disasters, the Lookout was gone. And the holy structure had finally lived up to its name - for as it had fallen from the sky the villagers below had screamed "look out!". The villagers had lived under Kamis residence for countless generations. Yet in its final moments, they hadn't even known that they'd been yelling the name of the place.

What were the odds?

The time machine! Oh everyone had theories about time machines but to actually build a working one! A real live working time machine - it must be a working one, it was causing the ripples in time. It hadn't even been built yet and it was already making a difference in the timeline. How amazing was that? How unlikely was that?

What were the odds?

Enemies and complete strangers becoming friends. Gods that could die. Mortals that could be reincarnated. Talking animals, flying humans and unlikely heros. Villians that were always stronger than ever but that somehow always managed to conceal their power until they wanted to be noticed. Senzu beans and gravity rooms and capsules in general. Invisible sentient schools of magic and dangerous underworld monsters posing as cuddly household pets.

Uranai Baba had been on Earth for eons, watching. Just watching. You could learn a lot just by watching. She'd managed to make a fortune off what she'd learned. People didn't always like the truth but they were willing to pay to hear it anyway and sometimes, they were willing to pay to not hear it too. Uranai Baba had never really valued money and had honestly never expected to become a multi-trillionaire. But that was just how the world worked. Nobody buying a single lottery ticket really expected to win. The odds were against winning. And yet, eventually, someone always won.

It had become Uranai Babas personal opinion that in any given situation, the most impossible things were the ones that were bound to happen.

So that was it then. That was the pattern. The impossible was always pending. Uranai Baba adopted a thoughtful pose, resting a wrinkled hand on her double chin and tapping an unseen foot. What is the single most unlikely event to occur? The one thing that nobody believes can happen...

Somewhere in the depths of Uranai Babas brain, a metaphysical penny was thrown off a nonexistant skyscraper. And it hung there, spinning in midair. Not falling, not getting twisted up in the dimensions - just hanging there. It was a mental signal. Predicting the future had always been a bit like waiting to see where and when the coin fell and how it landed. Thus if the coin didn't fall, there wasn't a future to predict.

Ah. Of course. Uranai Baba snapped her fingers. The Apocalypse.

She proceeded calmly down the hallway. Leaving behind the still-paralyzed Android 17 who was desperately trying to convince a very small black cat that androids were not chew toys.

She passed a fire extinguisher that hung from a fireproof brace on the wall and that was labeled, in neatly stenciled text, 'in case of fire'. She kept walking. A bit further down the darkened corridor were several more fire extinguishers. These were slightly larger and labeled 'in case of fire elemental'.

There were several other implements hanging along the walls. 'In case of barbarian invasion'. 'In case of plague of goldfish'. 'In case of bottomless pit'. 'In case of math test'. Because Lunar University HAD been a well-reputed magical facility. Staff and students alike - or at least, any who had valued their survival - had made it their duty to be prepared for everything from localized natural disasters to upset gods and unexplained multidimensional phenomena.

Finally - at the end of the corridor, in the back of a cluttered storage room, behind a bookcase and buried under a couple thousand years worth of dust - Uranai Baba located a small hole in the wall where the nail had been. She searched the floor for a bit, sneezing frequently and eventually located a tiny leather pouch. In faded handwriting that no one under the age of four hundred would have been able to read, the pouch was labeled 'in case of The Apocalypse'.

The Capsule Corp equivalent of a bright red Ferrai materialized. It was slick little aircar with a glossy paint job. The slanted body of the vehicle was streamlined, the chairs were heavily padded and the large engine appeared to be the source of more than half the aircars total weight. It was the kind of vehicle that seemed to beg for a speeding ticket even when it was parked. The type of aircar that wasn't even advertised to the general public because the pricetag was nine digits long. The sort of vehicle that could make ghosts contemplate wearing seatbelts and possibly helmets.

"Q-Leap?" Gohan nervously read the aircars personalized license plates.

"Quantum, hon." Mrs. Briefs informed him cheerfully from where she was fastening Trunks into his carseat. "The Q is for quantum."

Infant Trunks wore an expression that suggested he would be right at home with a large flashing sign that had 'HELP!' written on it in bold print.

Gohan peered at the speedometer of the vehicle and saw exactly what he'd been hoping not to see. The aircars maximum speed was three digits, very nearly four. "Er... Maybe I'll just fly." He tried to sound polite about it. "I'm sure I'd get there eventually. Wouldn't want to be any trouble."

Flying at speeds that required three digits to express was something that Gohan was comfortable with - as long as he was in control of his own flight. He'd have to push the boundries on Super Saiyan to reach those kinds of speeds but that seemed less risky than essentially handing the steering over to someone else. Gohan had just never liked being in vehicles.

Could be because you're not old enough to drive. Something thought.

Gohan heard this thought and that bothered him because he was fairly sure that it hadn't been one of his own thoughts. Yet currently, as far as Gohan knew, nobody else was present that could have been aware of what he was thinking. Gohan glanced around, visibly agitated. He didn't see anyone next to him. Nevertheless, he had the distinct feeling that something was there and that it was shaking its head.

The distraction cost him valuable opportunities to escape.

"Nonsense, hon. It's no trouble." Mrs. Briefs said sweetly with the tone that mothers everywhere use to make their kids do chores. "You've flown across the continent just to end up here. It's the least we can do to make sure you get home safe before the world ends."

"Err..." Gohan tried to think of an argument as he was ushered towards the aircar but Mrs. Briefs had a way with words that tended to leave people speechless.

There weren't any back seats. There was a passenger seat, a drivers seat and Trunks carseat was anchored down inbetween. Trunks now seemed resigned to his fate and shot the world in general a dirty look. Being only a year old he couldn't have known that between the unique driving skills of his grandmother and his mother, he was being prepared for the experience of piloting a time machine.

The human part of Gohans brain was telling him that he was going to die because seatbelts weren't worth much at three digit speeds while the Saiyan part of his brain was reminding him that it wasn't too late to blow up the car. And the most recent voice in his head was thinking: Uhm... Excuse me? The world is ending since when?

But Mrs. Briefs was buckled in on the drivers side now and the aircar engine came to life, growling like some sort of dangerous wild animal about to pounce and unleash its full power. "It'll be nice to see your mother again. Haven't visited her in a while." Mrs. Briefs remarked casually, turning on the headlights and stepping down on the gas pedal.

It was forty-two seconds later when her words first made an audible sound and by then the aircar was somewhere between West Capital City and Satan City, busily redefining the phrase 'off road adventure'.

Before there were humans, there were animals. Before there were modern animals, there were prehistoric animals. Before prehistoric animals - and just slightly after microscopic single-celled creatures - there had been mythical animals.

Mythical animals were generally ignored in the evolutionary chain of events but all prehistoric and modern animals, including most humanoids, were descended from them. Mythical animals were not what happened when lost tourists saw a new creature and decided to give it an interesting history. Mythical animals were not just something that people living at high altitudes had dreamed up. Granted there WERE a handful of mythical animals that had been the result of intoxicated or otherwise confused humanoid imaginations - but the vast majority of mythical animals had existed long before anything humanoid had.

It is important to understand the logic of mythical animals as ancestors. Evolution is not, as many people believe, a one way street where every step represents an improvement. Evolution goes both ways. Basically what happened was that hey, all the animals could talk. Most of them could fly or cast magical spells. Everything had an amazing talent. Everyone was important and shiny and new. There had actually been a highly sophisticated universal culture...that had been more boring than watching the stars fade.

Every day had been a celebration and eventually the party-goers had gotten sick of it. They had wanted to try something new. They had needed to have bad experiences to balance out the good ones. Thus a large portion of the mythical animals had gradually, with each successive generation, become less flashy and more functional by their own choice. They had given up the magic, the speech, the wings, the immortality. They had wanted to build character. They had wanted to earn and develop talents as needed instead of just having the whole works handed to them. They had wanted to become more substantial.

The mythical animals had been searching for something that, billions of years later, humanoids still didn't fully understand - although most modern animals did. Self-worth.

Gods had not always been humanoid because humanoids had not always existed. Gods had been animals and prehistoric animals and even mythical animals. Gods had only started to become more humanoid because humanoids were very strange creatures that seemed worth investigating. Why didn't the humanoids ever truly feel that their accomplishments were good enough? What was it about self-worth that seemed to conflict with humanoid survival instincts? Shouldn't someone just go down there and try to explain it all to them? Viola. Just like that, humanoid gods.

There were, in truth, countless categories and ranks of gods but only two main types that really mattered: gods that sentient beings believed in and gods that actually existed. A god was typically one or the other - very rarely both.

The believed-in category was, obviously, the easiest to find information on. Believed-in gods had intact temples. They appeared as characters in sacred stories and legends and artwork. The believed-in immortals looked very humanoid most the time and they did or said all sorts of contradictory things. Despite which, mortals worshipped them.

Most of the gods that actually existed didn't want that kind of attention because it didn't make much sense. Besides, it got in the way of their realms. Korin, for example, had never allowed any temple built to him to remain standing. Because Death was not something that could be limited to happening only in temples and fairytales and so forth. Temples were useless to Korin. Generally speaking, Death could not be caused or prevented by prayer.

Feng had always been much the same way - it simply hadn't been very realistic of mortals to try to put Love into a temple. In fact the effort had been almost as ridiculous as the mortals several failed attempts to make Love appear humanoid. Like Death, Love was not something that could be limited to any one species.

Indeed when it came to temples and other such attempts by mortals to control divine powers, most actual gods had found ways of escaping. But for a very long time, one of the younger ones hadn't.

Chaozu paced the astral plane. It wasn't even his temple, that was the truly annoying thing. He'd gotten trapped in the back of a temple that wasn't even his. His presence there had been pure accident, of course. He'd suffered from one of his more severe fainting episodes and when he'd regained consciousness, the temple had been there as if built around him and people had been making offerings to gods that he'd never even heard of before.

If the temple had been dedicated to him then he wouldn't have hesitated to forcefully relocate the intrusive structure. But it wasn't his and he couldn't just run around kicking over other gods temples. That was bad karma, especially with his realm.

His true physical body was still trapped at the temple. He'd had to leave it behind in order to escape. Mortals would pass it by and say things like "what an odd statue" - if they even noticed it at all.

Chaozu was reluctant to go near the place. He wasn't sure how he could get himself completely out of the temple without violating the terms of his own realm. Also, rather a lot of his brainpower was devoted to the vague hope that maybe reclaiming his physical form wouldn't be necessary. He honestly didn't want to fight anyone, much less another god. This had to be the sort of thing that someone else would take care of.

To most mortals it would have seemed ironic that the one god with all the weapons and all the armies was also the one that didn't enjoy fighting. But Chaozu would have been the first to point out that it was sheer coincidence that he had any influence on warriors. Sure he'd mastered a few martial arts but with his sort of lifespan, who wouldn't? Besides, he liked martial arts. The first thing taught in any decent martial arts class was how to avoid fighting.

War was not his realm. If War was anyones realm, it was Fengs because Love and War went together well - mortals didn't often kill each other over things that they didn't care about. Peace was also not his realm. Chaozu supported the concept of Peace but Peace was just a sub-realm of Korins since deceased mortals had a noticable tendacy to become peaceful.

Chaozu paced. It was an awkward pace because pacing was an activity better suited to humanoid forms and on the astral plane, the term 'humanoid' no longer applied to him.

He did actually owe Feng some vengeance. His empire twenty-two years ago - and most the ones before that - had been wiped out by Feng a little more than anything else. Directly or indirectly, Feng had almost always managed to create problems for Chaozus own realm. Even her absence had been a headache. Love was one of those mysterious catch-22 situations. Couldn't live with it, couldn't live without it and nobody fully understood it.

Chaozu hesitated to glare at the temple that he was pacing around. He was a minor god only in the sense that his realm was extremely subtle. It was something that most mortals overlooked. People didn't notice him in much the same way that they didn't notice exactly how many grains of sand it took to make a beach and that was fine. His realm was one of the few that did in fact have more power if mortals ignored it or took it for granted.

He really really didn't want to fight. He didn't care to risk the attention. But he had to do something.

On the one hand, Feng was hunting his friends. So he couldn't afford to wait around for someone else to save the day. On the other hand, it was night. No one could save the day when there wasn't one. That was the first thing to fix then. Chaozu turned away from the temple.

There were no two ways about it, Freezia was freezing. Hell had gone from boiling lavabeds to glittering permafrost. The battle had stopped and that seemed unfair because Freezia still had a lot of anger to vent. But most of the Saiyans were now icicles - or at least covered in them.

The Icejins were coping a little better with the sudden temperature change. Their native world, planet Ice, had been very accurately named. The cold had been so severe that it had motivated the Icejins to go from large primitive lizards who got their tongues stuck on glaciers to semi-humanoid lizards capable of interstellar travel in less than ten generations.

Historically, it may be of some interest to point out that the Icejins had never left their homeworld intending to become evil tyrants. They'd left their world simply because it was too cold. The whole evilness bit had been a result of the Icejins seeing so many other planets that had it easy - worlds where the natives had an abundance of luxuries like sunlight and water in liquid form. The Icejins had been rabid with envy and as a group, they had decided that they should be allowed to take anything they wanted in order to compensate for their own planets lack of practically everything. Thus had begun an intergalactic empire.

Even now with Freezia and his father, King Kold, both dead the vast Icejin empire remained intact and growing strong. It was being run by Freeias brother, Coola and also by his mother, Queen Galacia.

Freezia thought about his living relatives. He thought that where ever they were right now, they had large fireplaces in their private chambers. If only he was still alive then he'd have a fireplace too. During the past four years of being dead, he'd come to miss his room more than anything else he'd had while alive. There had been a giant fireplace in his room. Nice and warm and cozy. As an added bonus Freezia had often kept the blaze going by adding the corpses of creatures that he'd never liked. Occasionally he'd even tossed in a live idiot or two just to keep things entertaining.

He smiled at the memory. It was the kind of smile that usually made creatures want to grovel for mercy or run away very quickly. Those were the days.

It wasn't fair that those days were over. He'd had so much left to do - places to conquer and people to kill. How dare anyone take that away from him. How dare anyone tell him that he had been wrong! Planet Ice being so neglected was what had been wrong, the rest of the universe having life so good was what had been wrong.

Saiyans - ha. Speedbumps, nothing more. Super Saiyans - even they were relatively tolerable and insignificant now. What irked Freezia more than anything else was that a bunch of pitiful excuses for demons thought that they could shove him into a frozen hell for eternity. He absolutely depised being cold. It was heriditary, all Icejins did.

Icejins have never truly tapped their anger until they're freezing.

Uranai Baba peered into the tiny leather pouch labeled 'in case of The Apocalypse'. The contents appeared to have disentegrated from age. "That can't be good..."

HMMM.

She was standing nose-to-nose with Death.

"AHHH! Korin! Jeez! Give me a heart attack!" Uranai Baba froze for a moment and clutched at her heart region protectively while holding up her other hand. "Figure of speech!" She amended swiftly, "DON'T give me a heart attack! DON'T give me a heart attack!"

SORRY TO HAVE STARTLED YOU. I HAVEN'T FIGURED OUT HOW TO NOT SNEAK UP ON MORTALS.

"You and the rest of divinity." Baba muttered, regaining her composure. "Since you're here though - you wouldn't happen to know what was supposed to be in this pouch, would you?"

Korin twitched his whiskers and grinned. YOU CAN'T SMELL THAT?

The ancient witch took a cautious sniff of the tiny leather pouch. "Leather. Dust. Very old dust. Lots of dust." She leaned back, blinked, grimaced, leaned forward and sniffed the pouch again. There was something else there. She took a moment to place the smell. "... catnip..?" She glanced up. "You mean... This was MEANT to summon you?"

THE UNIVERSE IS ENDING. Korin shrugged. I AM SUPPOSED TO OFFER YOU THE CHANCE TO BEAT THE CROWD.

"Aha." Uranai Baba took a few steps back. "I think I'll pass, thanks anyway. Uhm. Aren't there any alternatives?"

If anyone knows how to avoid Death, she reasoned, it should be Death.

MY AREA OF EXPERTISE IS NOT LIVING. Korin said flatly. THEREFORE I AM UNABLE TO ADVISE YOU ON HOW TO CONTINUE LIVING.

"Oh wonderful. Very helpful that."

PERHAPS, Korin was positively beaming, YOU SHOULD SPEAK TO HIGHER AUTHORITIES.