"That's the monster?" Videl stopped the purposeful rush toward the rampaging goliath formed out of Destron Gas. "What even is that?"
"Don't know, don't care!" young Trunks took a fighting stance and went onward swinging. In a single dash, he closed the distance between him and Destron Garlick Jr. The young Saiyan swung his foot over the head, accumulating strength in it before crashing it down to meet Garlick's raised arm. Immediately switching it up, Trunks exploded in a flurry of left leg kicks, thrusting all around the chest and stomach of his oversized opponent.
"Eagle Kick!" Videl came soaring over Trunks' head. Garlick Jr. caught her foot and swung her around, but Videl quickly recovered by driving her free leg into the side of Garlick's neck. This made the giant flinch and stagger away from the pair. Down on the ground level, people were shuffling around and fleeing for their life. The police cars had been parked all around the place, but given how high up the battle was taking place, they stayed content, just standing by and waiting for a chance to be useful.
"Just stay out of my way! This guy's really strong, he's my chance of becoming a Super Saiyan!" Trunks chastised Videl for her assistance, making the teen throw her arms in irritation. Before he could hear her response, Trunks took off toward Garlick Jr. The eyes of the Destron Gas monster flashed red as red lines quickly sketched over Trunks' head and a massive building appeared out of thin blue. Crashing down like the meteor, the building ended up trapping Trunks underneath it while Garlick Jr. wound his fist back and smashed into it, blowing the airborne building to smithereens and marveling at the debris.
"That's… Magic Materialization, just like Kami Upa… Who is this guy?" Videl observed the uncanny abilities of their opponent. Whatever the Destron Gas created out of the permeating ephemeral feelings lingering in the region was a powerful combatant, but it was also capable of magical abilities too. This made Videl wonder if perhaps Chayote or Gohan and his family had ever run into this monster before.
"Are you okay?" Videl looked down to Trunks, who soared upward surrounded by a lively aura and had a face twisted in anger. He had a few minor scratches and dirt patches on his clothes but, other than that, he was tougher than having a skyscraper flung and blown up in his face.
"Just got caught off guard, shut up!" Trunks lashed out. "That's it, now this guy's gonna pay!"
"Calm down, let's fight him together. He's not just an ordinary powerhouse, he's got magical abilities too. Who knows what other tricks he might have?" Videl sighed in frustration. It wasn't at all surprising how stubborn young Trunks was. He was Vegeta's son after all and, based on the few impressions Videl had of the man, he was a tad hard to work with too. Then there was the issue of Trunks not even being fully five years old yet…
"Just stay back and go help the people or something… This guy's mine. Once I become a Super Saiyan, none of his magical tricks will work on me!" Trunks growled and rushed at his opponent with a fist wound up behind his back. Garlick Jr's eyes flashed again, creating an airborne blizzard of magically augmented glass shards rushing straight for young Trunks, but the speedy brat vanished and appeared much lower, directly by Garlick's abdomen, and smashed his elbow into the monster's gut.
This made the Destron Gas monster stagger back, frothing from the mouth and looking pitiful in its painful misery. Trunks vanished and appeared over Garlick's head, slamming both his arms down in a double ax handle, then moving on to a flurry of jabs and hooks to pummel his opponent about and wear down their durability and stamina some more before the young Saiyan could execute a finishing blow on the Destron Gas monster.
After a handful of strikes, the young Saiyan slipped in a stronger hook or two, smacking Garlick Jr.'s jaw, his gut, his chin, and every sensitive weak spot that Trunks found an opening on. A crystal-clear aura surrounded young Trunks as he exploded with a wrathful rush of strikes, just decimating the monster with thunderous cracks before yelling out when the burn on his stamina became too much to ignore. A booming explosive energy wave threw Garlick Jr. flying aside. The Destron Gas monster reeled by clutching his injuries.
"This monster is strong, but not outside our battle powers to overcome," Videl realized. Even if neither she nor Trunks could sense this titan's Ki, this exchange of blows revealed he was nowhere near the Androids' battle power and couldn't just dominate them and bully them about. Holding this monster here until Turbo finished his gizmo of disposing of Destron Gas felt possible.
Garlick Jr.'s eyes turned red once more, this time the glow appeared more malicious as if he was tapping into a darker type of sorcery compared to the divine magical materialization skill he showcased earlier. This was no magic that Videl had ever seen Kami Upa perform. Lightning began surging up Garlick Jr.'s body. The monster put his arms forward, creating a bright ring of magical light that shot off rings of energy toward the confused young Saiyan. Trunks gasped as the energy surrounded him with a jolt, the shock was painful enough for the young Saiyan to wince.
"No way!" Videl cried out in disbelief when a magical barrier formed around young Trunks and compressed on sight. However, instead of crushing or constricting the young Saiyan, it shrunk him down to a thumb's size too. The titan lifted his hand, drawing the magical barrier with a thumb-sized Saiyan boy into his grip. Videl rushed at him to stop the evil that was on his mind, but Garlick's eyes flashed, creating two mountains from each of Videl's sides and smashing them both together.
With young Trunks' magical barrier in his grip, Garlick Jr. crushed it in his right hand and then flung the injured young man aside as the magic Garlick Jr. put him through dissipated and the battered young man began falling down into the Penguin Village. Videl yelled out, expelling rays of light from her as her aura alone devastated the two mountains, crushing her together, and rushed out to scoop Trunks from thin air in her arms. Problem was that with him in her grip, she wouldn't be able to fight Garlick Jr. efficiently…
"I wouldn't mind if you snapped out of it," Videl looked down at Trunks.
Garlick Jr. raised his arms. From his open palms, a barrage of yellow-colored Ki blasts began shooting toward Videl. The teen embraced the child in her hands and covered him up with her body, turning her back to the incoming energy barrage and bracing for impact. She grunted from the shock of the initial impact, but then closed her eyes and focused on persevering through it. Because of the extended nature of Garlick Jr.'s attack, he wasn't able to put too much of his battle power into each blast so while the continuous energy barrage was painful, it couldn't deal much lasting damage or finish Videl off for good like the monster would've undoubtedly wanted it.
The Destron Gas monster grumbled and crossed his arms up. His already remarkable bulk was inflating even further as pulsing veins bulged out over his muscles and his forehead and Garlick's eyes spread wide from the severe strain his body was going through. Feeling numbness in her back where Garlick Jr's barrage had left a smoldering hole in her clothes and some hurtful burns over the back of her shoulder, Videl straightened out. Trunks mumbled something in her arms, realizing that the young Saiyan was returning to consciousness, she slowly let him hover on his own strength.
It didn't seem like Garlick Jr.'s shrinking magic trick broke anything, or at least nothing Trunks couldn't fight without.
A golden gleam outline surrounded Garlick Jr., the Destron Gas in the skies began whirling as if being sucked into something massive. Videl looked up as the flushing of the Destron Gas shroud revealed a sky that was blaze colored and raking to the eyes to look at. It was as if the entire region of the planet had become literal hellfire. Videl looked down, realizing that chunks of Penguin Village and entire buildings were crumbling or rising whole and hurling toward the sky. In a snap, an overwhelming pull began attracting Videl and Trunks too, forcing the two to burst with all of their energy just to resist the deadly attraction.
"Wh-What's going on!?" Trunks muttered.
"D-Don't… Know. It's sucking us up… Like a black hole… Or something…" Videl tensed her entire body to resist the incredible pull. "Is this the monster's ace technique?"
"Damn it…" Trunks clenched his fists as sweat began pouring down his body and dripping off of his shaking little dukes. Upon separating from the boy's body, it all went down the drain into the hole that the Destron Gas, the crushed debris, and everything that the Dead Zone's attraction could yank in disappeared into. "If only I was a… Super Saiyan… This'd all be nothing for me…!"
"This isn't the time for that, Trunks!" Videl turned to her partner, holding her hair from getting in her face and distracting her from holding the energy defenses that prevented her from succumbing to the incredible pull into the Dead Zone that would soon collapse and spiral out of control, slurping in Penguin Village, the entire continent, the entire world and however much else of the solar system Garlick Jr. wanted to make disappear. With each passing second, the Dead Zone's draw became exponentially more powerful and the scale of its destruction escalated out of control too. "Don't you remember what your father told you? You don't become a Super Saiyan because you need it very much. You become a Super Saiyan by being a person deserving that transformation!"
Trunks dropped his jaw and looked away. Before he could fully contemplate these words in his head, a violet flash stunned both martial artists. A little girl with long purple hair and glasses in a flashy, oversized suit and bowtie slammed her head into Garlick Jr.'s gut, sending the rampaging Destron Gas goliath flying toward the dark abyssal opening of the Dead Zone. Almost instantly, upon consuming Destron Garlick Jr., the Dead Zone portal closed, as if devouring itself.
"What the…?" Videl blinked a few times in awe, staring at the shrimp with glasses and purple hair who just dispatched of Destron Garlick Jr. with a single headbutt, completely oblivious to the Dead Zone's attraction.
Just about everything about this peculiar girl looked odd. Her appearance made her look like a clown whose make-up still wasn't applied. Then there was the issue of two little angels dressed in red with creamy yellow bibs. The pair of mascots had curly green hair and antennae sticking out of their heads and looked extremely happy to be here. Pumping their hands as if hyping up their own ecstatic glee.
"N'cha! Who are you?" the girl turned around and pointed at Videl and Trunks. When she smacked Garlick Jr., her expression was bland, whereas when she turned to Trunks and Videl, she was just confused. Almost as if she couldn't yet say if she needed to smack these two out of her village like that monster or if they were here to help.
"We were trying to hold that monster off until Turbo finished his machine of clearing out the Destron Gas," Videl explained. "My name is Videl, and this is Trunks."
"I don't know you," the purple-haired girl pointed out the obvious. "That's weird, I'm the mayor, I know everybody. Maybe my husband will know you?"
"Y-Your husband?" Trunks freaked out. "She looks like she's barely older than me!"
"Hmmm… I wonder where Obotchaman is…" the purple-haired girl pondered to herself.
"Umm… Obotchaman?" Videl said. The name rang a bell for her. "You wouldn't by any chance be…"
"Oh, my name's Arale. I'm the mayor, n'cha!" Arale waved her hand in greeting. It was only then that Trunks noticed the fact that Arale was wearing a backpack that had some sort of plane engine, like a rocket attached to it.
"Wait, you can't fly!?" Trunks gasped. "You completely swamped that Destron Gas monster, yet you can't even fly!?"
"I know. My current body is so lame. I keep asking Doraemon to rebuild it and give me a bigger chest and an adult body, but he keeps saying he'll "do it later". All I've got to become a big and busty gal is this here…" Arale pulled the sleeve of her suit to reveal a watch on her right arm. "But it drains the batteries really quick so the best I can is pose in front of the mirror in the morning…"
"Doraemon?" Trunks scratched his head.
"The Professor," Arale replied.
"Oh, she probably means Senbei-san…" Videl pointed out.
"Who are these two weirdos?" Trunks pointed to the pair of green-haired angels floating by Arale's side at all times. Unlike the eternally childish Android, these two little angels appeared to be capable of flight despite not even moving their tiny wings.
"Gatchans," Arale replied as if it explained anything.
"We… Don't know what that means," Videl felt implored to clarify this to the mayor of Penguin City, who, somehow, was the weirdest person they'd met that day despite the competition being incredibly tough.
"Gatchans came from an egg from the past. We played a game where we traveled to dinosaur times using Doraemon's Time Slipper and picked the egg Gatchans hatched from. At first, there was one Gatchan, then Gatchans were two…" Arale explained as if that made it any clearer.
Videl and Trunks looked up, while the Dead Zone portal had taken a meaty chunk of Destron Gas out of the shroud covering the sky, the shroud began accumulating once again at an alarming rate. What Turbo implied appeared to be true–the Destron Gas situation was getting worse and it might have consumed the entire Earth and sent it spiraling into the chaos of all imagination and any semblance of thought and feeling coming to life all at once. Spites and curses of even long-dead coming back to haunt the planet and those they've left behind.
"Hmm…" Arale lulled out, observing the rapidly deteriorating situation. As if reacting to her relative indifference, the Destron Gas began swirling in a singular vortex in front of the martial artists, Gatchans, and the Android until it left a titanic humanoid shape that began solidifying at once. In a blink, Destron Garlick Jr. reformed again out of Destron Gas.
"This guy again!?" Videl exclaimed.
"Just doesn't learn his lesson, does he?" Trunks took an aggressive fighting stance before wincing in pain at his ribs. The crush in Garlick Jr.'s arms still had some sore aftereffects on the Saiyan.
"N'cha. You're wrecking Penguin Village," Arale pointed at Destron Garlick Jr. with a blank expression. In a blink, she appeared right before the monster and slapped him up. "Stop it!"
Videl and Trunks bawled out in shock when Garlick Jr. soared up into the sky and blasted through the Destron Gas shroud, disappearing somewhere into deep space. Arale kicked her sports boots and shot off in pursuit of the Destron Gas monster. Gatchans burst into a peal of laughter and raced off after Arale.
"Did she just knock him out into space?" Videl scratched her cheek.
"W-Wait, look up… Somehow I can almost see what's going on!" Trunks pointed up while squinting.
"Wait, that doesn't make any sense…" Videl replied before looking down at the engaged crowd below that was cowering underneath the wreckage of the Penguin Village from the crumbled buildings and debris having rained down and left the whole place in ruin. The people were looking up into space with hands put to their foreheads as if they were looking at a plane soaring over their heads. A few of them were using ordinary binoculars as if they could see far off into space with them. "This must be because of the cartoonish nature of this dimension."
Videl and Trunks swooped down to the ground level and borrowed a pair of binoculars to look up. What they saw in space made their jaws drop in disbelief. Arale kept on slapping Garlick Jr. through planets that were bouncing off like marbles, all the way until she smacked Garlick crashing into some sort of black spot. It was as if no light at all came off of that planet, the only notable feature besides the complete absence of light on it was the noticeable shroud of Destron Gas on it.
"Wait… Is that… Gatchans?" Trunks wondered with a breaking voice. While Arale stomped Destron Garlick Jr's head into the surface of the dark planet and began spanking him all the way around it with flat spanks to the monster's rear, the Gatchans began eating up the planet.
"They're eating the planet!?" Videl exclaimed in doubt of what her own eyes were showing her.
"Indeed…" Turbo's voice made both Trunks and Videl turn away. "Gatchans eat metal. This would mean that… The Dark Planet from which the Destron Gas originates from is artificial, that is to say–cybernetic."
"A cybernetic star? Just like the Capsule Corps Star…" Trunks realized.
"Though this makes me worried. I appear to have been a bit too late with my device…" Turbo pointed to a blue vacuum cleaner with googly eyes and an elephant-like snout. "While we can still clean up the residual Destron Gas and the Gatchans will consume the Dark Planet whole, I'm afraid that won't solve our problem. In fact, this might as well spell out the end of the world."
"Huh? How come?" Trunks wondered.
"W-Wait… What's going on!?" Videl screamed out.
Pulling up the binoculars and gazing upon the Dark Planet, Trunks cried out in absolute horror as well. Something was going horrendously wrong there, as it began feeling as if the entire planet was disappearing from existence. Everything was being wiped clean and becoming reduced to a flat, vertical surface that had the texture and color of drawing paper. Destron Garlick Jr. dissipated into a black shroud that vanished as if erased from the paper's surface. Arale became just a flat drawing on paper, though her expression looked… Sad.
"This is… The last… N'cha…" she said in a somber voice before the lines comprising her vanished too. The corruption spreading throughout the system of the Dark Planet began expanding at an alarming rate, reducing planets, stars, and nebulae to becoming flat, white paper while all lines drawn on it vanished at once. The universe wasn't just being destroyed, it was turning to manga pages that then became blank slates as all traces of ink vanished from the page.
"The universe is done for," Turbo sighed. "I knew I shouldn't have fiddled so long to get the eyes just googly enough."
"Wait, you mean you had this Destron Gas vacuum machine all figured out, but you didn't hurry because the eyes weren't googly enough!?" Videl flipped out, grabbing her head. "You moron! I'm not getting erased because of you goofing around! I've got too much to do: become a martial arts champion, get married and have children!"
"Yes, I'm sure Shonen Jump readers wouldn't want the Dr. Slump universe vanishing either. Imagine all the crossovers that would become impossible, besides, if the author of your hokey fanfiction managed to mess up Dr. Slump for everybody, it'd put them into all sorts of legal trouble…" Turbo nodded to himself. "Though I'm afraid, the Gatchans have consumed the Destron Gas. Gatchans are angels, children of the God of Dr. Slump. Their power surpasses even that of my own. By eating Destron Gas, they became what they eat–a forge for pure imagination. Sadly, Gatchans have little in terms of mind and imagination, so all the pages they produce become blank. The only solution is to prevent Gatchans from eating up the Dark Planet and the Destron Gas at all."
"And how are we supposed to do that? These white spots are spreading throughout the entire universe!" Trunks pointed at the sky that was filling up with white blotches all over. At this rate, they may have had seconds to fix this calamity before it consumed everything.
"This may be worse than I feared. Because Dr. Slump is a Jump title, this mess might leak into other titles too. Shonen Jump sales would plummet and people would sue them for selling blank paper… I'd imagine that the author of this awful story would get sued for everything they own. Shonen Jump lawyers are no joke," Turbo sighed. "Man, I really wanted to find out how One Piece ends…"
"The Time Slipper…" Tori-Bot pointed out. "Use the Time Slipper."
"That's right!" Videl yelled out in excitement. "That's the machine in Senbei-san's basement, right? We can go back in time and fix all this."
"There's no time to look for that old thing," Turbo shook his head. He turned to the wreckage of Penguin City and used his telekinesis to call forth a storm of scrap from all the destroyed vehicles and coffee machines, even the totaled Senbei Norimaki inventions, and gathered all of them in one place. "I've assembled a Time Machine for Toriyama-san to use before. This one is even more advanced than the last one. Unlike my father's Time Slipper and my Time Machine Mark-1, you can mess with time a lot more effectively with no effects on the timeline. We're lucky that the author of this hokey fanfiction really doesn't like Dragon Ball Heroes, so we should be safe from any Time Patrol crossovers if you two use this."
"Please, you two. I know I've neglected giving you two much to do in my main series but… Save Dr. Slump, and save Shonen Jump!" Tori-Bot shook his disappointed mechanical head as if suffering from a tremendous cyber-migraine from the extreme mess this crossover arc turned into.
"Right!" young Trunks nodded and jumped into the Time Machine Mark-2 with Videl following shortly thereafter. "All of this feels almost natural… Somehow…"
The red and black spherical time machine modeled after the ordinary hovercars, one of the millions racing across the monorails and busy speedways of West City, elevated into the sky just as the white spots began expanding and swallowing up everything in their path, consuming nearly the entire Dr. Slump universe. In an electric shockwave, spewing lightning storms in all directions, Turbo's Time Machine Mark-2 blinked Trunks and Videl back in time so that they could prevent the Zero Imagination Wave from ruining Shonen manga forever.
