"Hey, you pull that Bechixian six-cutter out and put it back where it belongs!" Bulma pointed at a confused alien grunt in a sleeveless shirt that did little to restrain his gelatinous body structure. The face of the slumping muscle-head looked like that of a blobfish while the rest of his slurpy body didn't look that much better either.
"Uh… I don't know what you're talking about, Earthling woman…" the flustered behemoth stuffed his hand halfway into his slimy head in an attempt to snuggle his consciousness into oblivion before Bulma stood up and reached over the table to yank on a card that was stuck to the slimy secretions of the alien's skin under his forearm.
"I knew I had a pair…" Bulma nodded and reached out for the Ultimate Dragon Ball that laid on the table as a part of her bet with the Wormhole Slice gang.
"What are you doing, Earthling?" a humanoid, feminine alien of a fiendish appearance and bat-like wings grabbed hold of Bulma's hand halfway. "You've lost the game. Now hand us your ship and beg that we let you and that runt son of yours leave this station alive. We could just as easily keep you around as free hands to tend to our ship."
"How dumb do you think I am?" Bulma yanked her hand out from the alien's hold after letting go of the Ultimate Dragon Ball so that the fiendish alien let go of it and placed her hands over her hips. "I've seen more than enough of this simple game to know how it's played. The first player to count up to twenty arms wins, right? Well, I've got a pair of Bechixian six-cutters, both of which have six arms each, which count up to twelve. My opponent here has Fortexlon that has six tentacles branching out from their body and a Babarian with two arms–since I was the last one to play a card, I've counted up to twenty arms."
"Tentacles don't count!" a pink, armless alien that looked like someone had roughly sculpted him from stone rumbled. "We would have normally kept playing but since you've got to be so uptight about it, I think we'll just treat it as you giving up and take your ship, anyway!"
"You guys… When King Vegeta hears about this!" Bulma stomped her foot in wrath, grinding her teeth.
"Huh? King Vegeta, the King of Saiyans? That guy's a has-been. No one's seen him showing his face off-planet for an entire year. He's chickened out from keeping justice in his domain so we do whatever we want!" the gelatinous powerhouse of the Wormhole Slice gang slammed his fists on the table, breaking it in half and sticking all the cards onto the slimy surface of his body. As the alien absorbed the cards into his body, they sizzled and dissolved, with the Ultimate Dragon Ball being the only hard subject that didn't disintegrate in moments.
"You dumbass, you're digesting all our Vegebucks!" the fiendish alien woman scolded her oafish compatriot.
"Oh… Sorry, I guess we'll actually have to take this woman and her punk son with us to work off this debt in Vegebucks. Just her ship won't do anymore…" the gelatinous alien proclaimed as a toddler-sized boy walked into the room holding the shell of a Maihaku fruit with a straw sticking out from it.
"Are we done yet, mom?" little Trunks wondered. "I wanna train with my dad already!"
"Train with his dad? Look at this little runt. I've never heard Earthlings being so feisty at such an age," the limbless, sculpted alien spat out sweet-tasting and almond-smelling dust in the air as he voiced his observation. "Judging from his speech, he only must have learned to talk a few months ago, and he's already itching to go for it."
"That's good, we have plenty of work for him to do on our ship!" the fiendish alien woman beamed rows of razor-sharp teeth at little Trunks, playfully strutting up to him and leaning down. She stretched out a long tongue from her mouth to lick the boy's cheek. Her lawn green slobber bubbled at the tip of the tongue of the female alien.
A shrill scream filled the space station bar when little Trunks grabbed hold of the woman's tongue and squeezed it to where it became deprived of blood flow to the point of the outer half of it popping like a zit with a surge of thick, blaze-colored sludge spilling out.
"You're a stranger, lady, I won't let you touch me in a way I don't like!" Trunks pouted, pressing his knuckles by his waist as he lectured an alien hundreds of times older than him with a waggle of his finger, mirroring the body posture of his mother when she lectured him the few precious times she used to pay attention to him.
"That's okay, Trunks, these guys are being awfully rude and saying bad things about your father, you can beat them to a pulp," Bulma rested in her chair and sighed, gesturing for the bartender to slip a Maihaku shell with a cocktail of her own while little Trunks took care of business.
When she thought about it, it felt profoundly wrong leaving her three-year-old to pummel a bunch of organized alien criminals that came into possession of the Ultimate Dragon Ball. And yet, he was so efficient at it. It felt almost nostalgic to the time that Bulma left to collect the Dragon Balls alongside Son Goku all those years ago. Of course, the stakes had been much lighter back then. All they had to do was travel around the world and all they had to lose was a lifetime supply of strawberries. That was all that Bulma wanted initially.
All this mess, over all the strawberries she could eat. That was fine. It was a good mess. It was her mess.
The winged alien woman flew past Bulma, barely giving the woman the time to lean aside and nod in gratitude to the bartender as he served her the drink. Little Trunks began pummeling the gelatinous alien with little success initially. It was only when the young half-Saiyan spread his arms out and produced two Ki spheres in each hand and connected them into a single energy wave before blasting a hole in the entire station that the gelatinous blob slurped out through the hole and into the vacuum of space.
"S-Sorry, mom!" Trunks freaked out and went pale, after realizing the destruction he had caused. Bulma sighed and picked up her drink, bracing to protect against the howling draw into the cold, dead oblivion outside before the emergency hatch closed shut.
"That's okay, it's time to leave, Trunks," Bulma grabbed the Ultimate Dragon Ball and the hand of her sniffling superpowered toddler as she rushed to the doorway of the bar.
A handful of burly and wrathful aliens stepped in their way. Some of them swung about casual wreckage, pipes, and massive boards that they sought to inflict damage upon those they saw responsible for ruining their drinks and downtime in before bigger jobs.
"Come on, guys, you saw what the half-Saiyan kid can do… You don't want any of this…" Bulma tried to reason with the mob that was getting increasingly angrier and treading closer and closer to choosing immediate, rightful violence. She may have been exaggerating the fighting condition of her son, however, as when Bulma looked down at little Trunks, she only saw a sniveling little boy who seemed a lot more frightened and distraught about causing damage when his mother had earlier instructed to keep a low profile than ready to fight for his life.
"I'm sorry… Mom…" he didn't stop sniveling. "You'll still… Fly me to dad… Right?"
"Now, of all times, he acts like an actual toddler…" Bulma groaned, rolling her eyes as she slowly moved back and into the center of the stage that was about to host a bloody bash and might have proven fatal to the object of the mob's obsession unless some immediate solutions could have been found.
"Piss off, lowlifes!" a loud ground made Bulma's frown turn upside down when a scorching energy wave pierced a burly alien mutt from the backside and left him flopping on his face in agony with a jarring hole in its chest. "The Earthling woman and the Saiyan prince are ours!"
A pair of rough-looking ruffians wearing standard Frieza Army battle armor in the Saiyan soldier variant style entered the bar. A trail of smoke still lingered from the extended hand of the balding Saiyan, suggesting that he was the one that dispatched of the rowdy brute just a blink earlier. The pair strut into the bar as if they owned it and the other rowdy rioters hissed and fumbled away from the troublemakers as if they were sunlight, scolding and scorching their skin.
"You two, come with us," a long-haired Saiyan, taller than his deadly and silent compatriot, and donning a triple scratch scar on his forehead, extended his hand to lead Bulma out of trouble. Ever the opportunist, Bulma was not about to refuse to have her life saved by the people ruled over by the father of her child.
"About damn time!" Bulma pressed her knuckles to her sides. "I was wondering how much deeper into the Saiyan territory I'd have to fly into to get some attention!"
"Do we kill her?" the balding Saiyan turned to his ally, pointing his open palm at Bulma. The genius inventor leaned back in terror of the sudden turn, but the long-haired Saiyan shook his head.
"No, she might still be useful. If he thinks that the Earth woman is useless, the Emperor can kill her himself. Killing defenseless women feels more his type of thing to do," the scarred Saiyan shook his head.
"The Emperor? That Vegeta… I thought just being the king was good enough for him. I guess he really took over Frieza's entire operation and rule the universe…" Bulma muttered to herself.
"Say, mom, what did that rude man mean about killing defenseless women being dad's thing to do? Is dad a bad man?" Trunks pointed at the back of the long-haired Saiyan as the pair guided Bulma's way back to the garage section of the space station.
"Well… That's a tough thing to answer…" Bulma chuckled with heat flushing at her cheeks. "Honestly, he's not a model guy, and I'd rather you didn't take after him, but… I don't think Vegeta's that wicked…"
Then again, she hadn't seen him in years, so who knows what sort of trouble that lover of hers might have gotten himself into and what kind of man he might have left as. For well over three years, the man has had absolute power in his grasp and absolute power corrupted according to its nature. Still, Bulma shook her head, refusing to believe that Vegeta could have been anything like Frieza before him. He could be a crude dirtbag at times, but Vegeta had a strict code of honor to him. Bulma believed that firmly. It was one of the few things she'd bet her life on.
"W-What did you do to our ship?" Bulma grabbed hold of her head and shrieked out after seeing their spacecraft hovering inside of a stasis field, suspended by a much smaller Saiyan vessel behind it.
"That's impressive engineering. Tsufurian and Frieza Army blueprint, right?" the long-haired Saiyan crossed his arms and gave Bulma a mocking glare as the woman collapsed on her knees, realizing that they weren't being escorted to Planet Vegeta but being taken hostage.
"Just the stuff that eyesore needs…" the balding Saiyan snickered to himself with a low-pitch snort. "I guess, in the end, you'll be useful to our king in more ways than one, Earth woman."
"What's going on?" Bulma grabbed her head and shook it in disbelief. "Vegeta, what are you doing?"
"M-Mom…?" Trunks leaned down to his mother. "What's happening? Do you want me to pummel these guys?"
"Pummel?" the long-haired Saiyan raised an eyebrow. "The brat's got a mouth on him. More of a mouth than I had at his age, even if I itched to throw down just like the halfling runt in his years."
"Say, we came here for him, but maybe we don't really need him? The ship's gonna serve as enough of a Tribute and how much easier can a little halfling runt like this make his Tribute for the king? He might be more trouble than he's worth…" the balding shorty Saiyan suggested.
"Heh, I like where your head's at. True, if the kid's taken more from his mother than his father, he might put the Emperor in a bad mood. Let's put him to a test here and now and see if he's worth easing the king's Tribute," the scarred Saiyan nodded and threw a stiff kick in little Trunks' direction.
"What the…?" the Saiyan that saw his leg trapped in little Trunks' adamant grip grunted while his comrade staggered back as his scouter turned on by itself and began counting up rapidly.
"800… 1700… 4300… 9200… 12000!" the chubby Saiyan mumbled to himself as he failed to believe that a Saiyan-Earthling hybrid as young as three-years-old could muster up such a power level when in a mood to wreck someone's day. "That's not right. That can't be right…"
Trunks let out a battle cry as he pulled the Saiyan to him like a rag doll and began spinning him around, forming a tiny and contained vortex as his shining aura colored the whirlwind mustard. Trunks released the long-haired Saiyan without warning, sending him crashing through the roof of the space station and leaving everyone around him. The engineers, the new arrivals, the balding Saiyan, and his mother alike stunned.
With a stern and sharp look, the three-year-old turned to the other Saiyan. Little Trunks' eyes had differed greatly from Vegeta's, his eyes had a lot more human features to them and could display a greater variety of emotions that ranged to far broader depths, and yet, at that moment, they were just as piercing and ruthless as his father's.
"I won't let you hurt my mother and steal our ship," little Trunks declared while the balding Saiyan shook in his attempt to take a fighting stance. The Saiyan charged at the halfling but Trunks weaved under his arm and thrust his fist deep into the Saiyan's gut, depriving him of all of his oxygen in one blow and sending his opponent staggering back and spitting up slobber and bile from his innards. The balding Saiyan collapsed on his knees and his face rear up and turned off.
After the dust settled and the spectators finally felt the full weight of the sudden bout on their shoulders, little Trunks kept on staring at his hands in confusion. A shuttle closed high-up to seal the hole that little Trunks had made by sending the long-haired Saiyan flying and a handful of impish wall-crawlers carrying tools and sheets of spare alloy used in the construction of this space station went up to fix the hole so they could open the emergency seal, eventually.
"Did I… Do good?" Trunks wondered, turning back to his mom who kneeled and embraced him, pressing the boy's head to her chest.
"You did good, Trunks," Bulma eased little Trunks' mind before he could break down crying again. "You're so strong, always watching over your mom. I'm proud of you. Now, let's look your father in the eye and ask what the heck he thinks he's doing here!"
"I'm… I'm scared…" Trunks looked up at his mother. "I'm not sure I want to train with my dad anymore. Can't that other me train me as he promised? Or Chayote-san?"
"Nonsense!" Bulma stood up and took her son's hand, gently guiding him to the Saiyan ship. She picked up a fallen tool from the alien imps hustling over their heads and slipped it under a bent sheet. With a bit of Trunks' help, she pulled it off and began checking on the wires she needed to cut and shorten to open the hatch. Most of it ran on electronics, but it was a more basic blueprint because the external hatch system was closer to the elements and therefore could misbehave easier.
"There we go…" Bulma said when the hatch finally opened up and she could slip in. It only took a few minutes for her to find the bridge. From there, it took her only a few more minutes to hack into the ship's systems and transfer control over to her own AI system. Once that was done, Bulma opened the ship up and let Trunks in. "Take whatever you like. I'll turn off that stasis field they have our ship in. This is junk. We're flying to Planet Vegeta on our own."
"Are you sure dad is going to listen to you? Those other men sounded pretty scary," Trunks wondered as he browsed the place for something cool, finding himself slim-fitting Saiyan armor and prancing around in it like a little penguin before he got used to the hefty boots and the boots got used to the shape of his body and shriveled up to fit him like a glove.
"Tsk… I can't believe you're making me do this, Vegeta…" Bulma sighed and shook her head as she typed up the number of the communications of one of her own ships. "Piccolo, can you hear me? Trunks and I are headed to Planet Vegeta. A crew of Saiyans attacked us and we're fine, but… I'm not really sure anymore what Vegeta's intentions are. Naturally, I'll give him a piece of my mind but… You know… Look, I'm not going to ask you for help, I'm just figuring that you're the only one that could handle Vegeta if he ever went ballistic on us again and I'd rather not die again."
"Again?" Trunks turned back to his mom with a curious tone of voice.
"We'll be fine, Piccolo's a big softie, he'll come to help us if we get in trouble," Bulma waved it off and dragged little Trunks off the Saiyan ship, guiding him back to their own vessel before it took off toward Planet Vegeta to get to the bottom of all those rumors and speculations. Only looking Vegeta in the eyes and smacking some sense into him, if need be, would solve this matter for Bulma. If the Artificial Humans were to kill them all, may as well give her lover a piece of her mind for losing his way.