Versus 4: Temporal Distortion

--Plan It Caravan--

"What kinda news you got for me?" Pan asked as she and Bra drove on down the road.

Bra smiled. She fully intended to tell Pan what it was she wanted to tell her, but making her wait seemed so much more fitting. She kept her eyes on the road as she drove Pan toward her home.

"Oh, come on, Bra. You can't do this to me," Pan whined. "This isn't payback for walking in on you and Goten, is it? I mean, you two shouldn't have even been in the living room. If you wanted to do something freaky, you should have gone to the bedroom."

Bra blushed and hit Pan's shoulder.

Pan laughed. "Well, it's true!"

"Be quiet," Bra told her. "I'll tell you what I wanted to talk to you about, but you can't let this kind of information leak out. This is very important and very private."

"You can count on me. Have I ever told something you didn't want me to tell?" Pan asked.

Bra just looked at her.

"Well, that doesn't count because I didn't know that you didn't want me to tell that," Pan said.

Pan was referring to when she told her entire family that Bra and Goten were kissing at school. It had gotten Goten into a world of trouble with her father, which resulted in a city-wide man-hunt. And that's when Bra had come to the decision to fight her father.

"Pan, you're my best friend. The only friend I've got--" Bra began.

"What about Marron?" Pan asked. "We're both your friends."

"Yeah, but I don't see her as often as I see you," Bra continued. "Anyway, I wanted to tell you this because I believe you'd give me your honest opinion." She sighed and looked at the water that had collected on the street.

"You know I will. I rarely bite my tongue, even if it means saving my own life," Pan told her.

Bra nodded. She respected that quality in Pan... Most of the time. Sometimes, it got them all into more trouble than anything. "Here we go, then. Since Goten and I talk about marriage sometimes..., I was thinking that maybe I could beat him to the punch and ask him to marry me. Officially. Ring and everything."

Pan looked surprised. "Bra, you're 16. You're still in high school."

Bra frowned. "I don't mean that we should get married right away. I'm just saying that we could get engaged and wait a while before we get married." She stared at the road, waiting for Pan to speak.

When there was no response, Bra wasn't sure what to think. Maybe she'd really gone overboard this time. Maybe she was jumping the gun. But was it so wrong to want to show the man you love how much you loved him? Was it wrong for her to want to dedicate herself fully to this man and ask him to do the same?

They'd known each other all their lives. Goten and Bra. To say that it was too soon in their relationship would have been the same as saying that it was simply never meant to be.

"Are you serious?" Pan asked.

Bra looked at Pan out of the corner of her eye. She was sure that she didn't look like she was joking around about this. It was way too important to be a joke.

The quarter Saiyan smiled. "It'll knock his socks off! This is great! I'm so excited!" She reached over and started honking the horn. "I--CAN'T--BELIEVE--YOU'RE--ACTUALLY--GONNA--DO--THAT!" she shouted, a honk for each word.

Bra rolled her eyes and went back to watching the road. Pan was a wild child alright. "Stop that."

Pan moved back to her side of the car and looked around at the cars that were honking back at them. "What's gotten into them?" she asked like she hadn't provoked the other drivers. "So, when are we gonna go pick out a ring? I know you've got plenty of money in your bank account to get a good one," Pan stated.

Bra now had no doubt that Pan thought this was a good idea. She smiled. "I think Goten said that he and Trunks are getting their brain waves checked tomorrow, so we could sneak around behind their backs then." She pulled into Pan's driveway, and then looked at her again with a smile. "Speaking of Trunks. What's going on with you two? I saw the way he was watching you today."

Pan blushed a little. "What are you talking about?"

"You were getting undressed right in front of him," Bra reminded her. "You're wearing his favorite dress shirt."

"Oh, right," Pan said. "Trunks and I joke around with each other a lot." She got out of the car and looked back in. "Hey, when you blow Goten's mind, I wanna be there to see it. We should set something up so you can do something romantic for your proposal. We'll talk about it at school tomorrow, okay?"

Bra nodded.

Pan closed the door and waved good-bye to her.

As Bra was pulling out of the yard, she realized that Pan had gotten away with changing the subject of her relationship with Trunks. And it was so slick the way she avoided her question altogether. Maybe Bra should train on some of those kinds of techniques.

When Bra got home, she saw neither hide nor hair of her mother or her father. Chances were that if her father had talked to her mother, they'd gotten into an argument. They always had something to argue about. After something like that, it was highly likely that neither of them would be in the mood to talk. So, she decided not to bother her mother about the results of Gohan and Pan's tests.

--the next afternoon--

School had been stressful. Bra had a lot of work to do. It all started when she and Pan schemed up a way for Bra to propose to Goten:

"The last thing you wanna do is put it in his food. That would be stupid. He would eat it. Besides, I've seen it done on a million TV shows that way," Pan told Bra.

Bra rolled her eyes. It was their usual meeting time. It was a long time before the bell would ring and they sat in the seats of their first class of the day. "I know that. Tell me something I don't know."

"Well, you wanna make it romantic," Pan said. "And you wanna make it original. But everything in the world has already been done for a proposal."

"Maybe I should just keep it simple," Bra suggested.

"That's no fun. Come on. You serenaded the guy. Girls don't serenade guys. That was creative and romantic. You can't let the romance die before you even get married," Pan argued.

"Fine, Pan. But if you'll remember, the serenade was your idea," Bra told her.

Pan smiled. "You're right. I'm really romantic." She looked at Bra. "Well, you did come up with the proposal thing. That's romantic too. You just have to do something fun with it."

Bra thought for a while. This would be a little harder than she thought. She was good at several things, but coming up with an original proposal idea was something she never thought she would have to do. Sure, she had plenty of time to think about it last night, but she really couldn't come up with anything. Why couldn't this be a math problem or a programming prob--?

"Hey, Goten loves video games," Bra said seemingly out of nowhere.

Pan looked confused. "And?"

"I could write a little computer game with him and me in it, propose on that and then see what his answer would be," Bra explained. "Then I could show him the ring in real life."

"That's a great idea! Really cute. But doesn't it take a while to write a whole video game?" Pan asked.

Bra frowned. "Yeah, it does. I'd have to test and debug and debug and test and everything. It would be a simple little game, but it would still take a while to get it together."

"You could always wait to propose. I think that game thing is a fantastic idea. It would be a shame to lose an idea like that just because you don't have enough time to do it today," Pan said.

"I don't know. I think I could do it today," Bra stated. She thought for a while. "If I work out some code while I'm here at school, I could type it up and run it when I get home. It would be a really small, really simple game, but I think it would have the same effect."

Pan laughed giddily. "You're the technological genius. If you think you can do it, then go for it. I think that before he lays into the game we should all go out and do something. Mini golf or bowling or something. It could be you, Goten, me, Marron, Uubu and Trunks. Then we could all go back to Trunks and Goten's apartment for your game." She shrugged. "Not only would it be good for your proposal, but it would be a good excuse for Marron to see Uubu again."

That had set the whole thing in motion. Bra was handwriting code for her game all day long. Through every class, she scribbled down notes on what her program would consist of and added comments about what certain blocks of code did in case she got lost. Everything was in order by the time her last class rolled around, so she got on one of the computers and typed the code. All she had to do was paste it to her game editor and make sure it worked.

She met up with Pan again after school, holding the papers in her hand.

Pan looked at the papers and raised her eyebrows. "What's that?"

Bra should have reminded Pan of how she'd talked about Goku's inability to remember things, but she decided not to bring that up. "This is the program for my video game," Bra told her.

Pan frowned. "All that? There's, like, 10 sheets of paper there."

"I made it a little more complex than I intended," Bra said. "But at least I won't have to type it up when I get home."

"I can't believe you did something like that in, like...," Pan looked at her watch, "...5 hours. And then you typed it all? You really are some kind of genius."

Bra smirked. "I'm not just blowing smoke when I say stuff like that." She laughed confidently. "Come on. Let's go get that ring."

Saying that just gave Bra a major case of butterflies.

--End Plan It Caravan--

--That's the end of this episode. Okay, so this was a Bra and Pan episode. So that's not what we all came here to see. Well, there's more fun on the way. Just keep your eyes peeled and let me know what you think.

--There was something I didn't comment on that I meant to comment on a while back. Someone asked if I got the title of one of the earlier chapters from the movie, The Crow because there was a certain quote in it. The answer is no. Loved the movie (the first one, that is), but I haven't seen it in a while. Great soundtrack too. So what about the quote? The quote, "...rapping at my chamber door", I admit was taken from Edgar Allan Poe's poem, "The Raven". I like Poe's stuff. But the title of that part, which I think was "Rain Song", could have come from a number of places. I got it from a song on Led Zeppelin's album Houses of the Holy called "Rain Song". At least I think it was. And the title the person asked about was one of the rain chapters. I'll just go through them. The chapter called "A Little Rain Must Fall", I got from a quote in a Queen song. I think the name of the song is actually, "Rain Must Fall", from the album, The Miracle. Love Queen. The chapter called "One Rainy Wish" is the title of a Jimi Hendrix song from Axis: Bold as Love, I believe. But don't get me started talking about where titles of stuff comes from. I could go on all day.

--After all of that babble I think I'll call it a day.

--I appreciate past reviews. I appreciate the fact that you read this chapter. If you skipped that long and chatty comment above, that's alright. It was only targeted for one person, really. But if you did read it and you're not that one person, then you show much more interest than most. So I thank you for that too. And I'll see you good people on the next journey into the world of Versus 4: Temporal Distortion.