AN: It's not likely to come up any time soon, so fun fact time- Sakura is 17 in the Fourth war, set on October 9th. When she arrived on Kame island, it was September. The tournament was eight months later, and so June in her relative timeline and May by Dragonball's calendar. As her birthday is in March, she is now 18, slightly older than Bulma and Yamcha.

This isn't relevant to anything other than that this is also chapter eighteen.

The Next Dimension Over

Chapter Eighteen

Sakura doubled over backward to dodge Goku's sudden lunge. He spun through the air, and then rolled across the ground a moment, before he sprung to his feet and rounded on her again with an expression of pure determination.

The compact figure bounced off of the ground a moment later, and outstretched fingers almost grazed across the shiny metal object held daintily between her fingers. The moment he passed her by, she spun around and kicked him square in the back, sending him sliding across the lawn in what looked to be a fairly painful way.

Honestly, he couldn't tell if the training they were doing was actually useful in some way, or if it was entirely designed to make the person trying to grab the bell look like an idiot through clever use of counter attacks and a style based around dodging.

Just to play it safe, Yamcha generally refused to join in on Sakura and Goku's apparently favorite time waster.

Training. Their favorite method of training.

If he could say one thing for it as far as training went, Goku did end up pretty bruised by the end of their games, and at least since he'd been watching it seemed like Goku was getting closer to actually getting it. But then again, he might have been as close to catching it as a pig was to catching a carrot on a stick.

He'd get such an earful if Oolong had heard him use a metaphor like that.

Goku shouted, and swung his magical red pole through the air toward her. She flipped sideways over it as it swept at her hips, and then struck out an arm to block the flying kick he'd immediately followed it with. If nothing else, the woman had good reflexes. Apparently she refused to enter the tournament despite the rest of Kame house insisting she did, due to the whole...different world thing...

It made him wonder how she would have fared against the woman who'd been in the tournament instead, though. Apparently she'd been defeated in the final round...but he'd fought her. She was strong, and she'd been holding back for a reason he'd never really figured out. That she lost just summoned up many more questions than if she'd just gone and won it.

Maybe he was being just a little bit prideful.

Maybe, but he didn't really think so.

As another kick knocked Goku out of the air, Bulma walked out of the building, hair tied up in a bun, eyes gleaming as they often did when she had some idea she thought was particularly good.

"Hey, you two! Can you stop messing up my lawn? I let you stay here free of charge, and the two of you keep rewarding me by ruining my grass!" She propped her hands on her hips while the two turned their attention toward her. "...Anyway, that's not the point. Sakura, can you come here for a minute? I think I've got something, but I need to take some readings off of you first."

(*)

Bulma sighed and shook her head. "I don't know what's causing the interference."

She'd been getting a handle on computers in her time there, but the science behind Bulma's research was way beyond what she could pick up in a month of listening and reading about it. She actually found it pretty impressive Goku spent an entire month in the building without getting restless. She found it slightly more impressive she made it an entire month being prodded and poked as much as she was.

The teal-haired woman shook her head. "I need more information. I'm only guessing most of the time right now."

Goku perked up. "Nimbus and I could go and search each place for her way home!"

She spoke before Bulma could. "There's too many to do that."

"Besides..." Bulma shook her head. "Without the right equipment, you wouldn't even be able to see it, let alone do anything with it. I won't be able to make something to interact with it until I can get some readings out of the place she came from. Or...places, if there's more than one opening."

She frowned over at the other woman. "Are you saying there's nothing you can do?"

"It's only been a month! You're asking me to do something that hasn't ever even been considered before, let alone attempted!" She huffed and glared. "Frankly, something like this...you'll be lucky if I can do this in a few years. Maybe a decade. It would take a lifetime if I were anyone else."

"Decade..." A heavy weight settled over her chest and shoulders as the woman's words sank in.

Ten years...

A part of her wondered if her friends would even remember her after ten years. After ten years, Naruto would probably be Hokage. Sasuke...would...

might...

She placed a hand to her head, and turned away from the screen that displayed hundreds of colorful dots. It might not take ten years. It might not even take a year. Maybe. But, then again...it could. Even her best chance of finding her way home the quickest (that she'd found so far) would take years.

Maybe she needed to leave and find other ways.

She shook her head, and walked away from the pair, back toward the room she'd been given.

Maybe she needed to focus on finding a way to create her own jutsu to escape.

Maybe...

"What if we used the dragonballs and wished her home?" Goku spoke in a thoughtful voice.

Dragonballs?

Wish?

She turned in place, and looked back at the two of them. Goku looked thoughtful, and Bulma...looked...stunned?

The woman blinked, and then shook her head again, expression flickering to irritation. "I-I guess that would work. It wouldn't help me with my research, though..."

She spoke over Bulma. "What are you talking about? What would work?"

"Dragonballs." Goku held up his hands in a small sphere shape. "They're little orange balls with glowing red stars. There's seven of them, and when you gather them together, you can summon a giant dragon and get any wish."

"...What?"

(*)

"You want to collect the dragonballs?" He blinked, and looked between Sakura and Goku. "I...guess that would work, now that I think about it..."

"It's not a permanent solution..." Bulma seemed to still be sulking a little bit about it. She had been kind of excited about the research opportunities involved in finding a way to open doors into other dimensions.

It was probably best he not mention she could just use the dragonballs to create something like that, too.

He sighed, and shook his head. Honestly, he really didn't want to have to offer, given how much trouble last time was, but... "Are you two gonna need any help?"

Goku shook his head. It was a little tough to say if Goku looked more excited about being given something to do that wasn't bothering him all day about training, or if Sakura looked more excited at being the one to get the wish. If he had to make a wager, though, he'd suspect Goku was.

"It's okay. The two of us should be able to handle it!"

Sakura frowned and looked over Goku's shoulder at the radar. "And you know how to use this...?"

"Yeah! It's easy, I'll show you how to use it, too!"

The radar was probably the only easy part of that kind of a search, really. "...I guess this means this will be the last we see of you then, Sakura."

The pink haired girl glanced up from the radar in Goku's hands, and then offered a small smile. "I guess it is. Thank you for your hospitality."

"You never know..." Bulma propped her hand on her hip. "Now that I know there's a dimension out there with people in it like you, I'm not gonna stop until I can find a way to get there. Eventually, maybe you'll have to show me around your place."

The two girls shared a laugh, and he shook off the eerie feeling he got every time they did that. He crossed his arms. "Are you sure you two don't want to wait until Oolong and Pu'ar get back? They might want to go with..." Well...probably not, but...

Goku shook his head. "We should go soon, or other people might start collecting them first."

He...seriously doubted that. Unless Emperor Pilaf had the guts to go and try to collect them again so soon after his...crushing defeat. But the answer didn't surprise him anyway. Goku had been antsy most of the month, and Sakura had been impatient to leave since he'd met her.

"Nimbus!" Goku shouted through cupped hands. "Let's go on an adventure!"

(*)

Goku's golden cloud had considerably less room on it than the airplane or the cars she'd ridden in recently, but she felt more comfortable on it than those. Floating summons flying through the air, those were something she was already very familiar with. Non-living contraptions doing it for her were...not. It was difficult to track the speed they were traveling, but it had to be at least as fast as Sasuke's snake had moved.

Truly, traveling summons were the best way to cross distances. Moments like these she wished her master had given her a contract with a giant hare instead. Fortunately, they were never moments where Lady Katsuyu was present to become offended.

She looked over his shoulder as they flew across the sky. "What range is that?"

"Huh?" He glanced up at her as the cloud zoomed over low-lying hills.

"How far can it see?"

"Well..." He tapped the top button a few times, and the image on it changed, the yellow dots increasing in number each time, until all seven were visible. "It shows all of them. But it's not very much use like this. It looks like they're all really close, but they're actually far away still."

"So then..." She pointed to the one they currently flew toward, up at the top of the green circle, "How far are we from this?"

He looked at it for a few moments, and then shrugged. "Mmm...dunno. We'll just have to keep flying until we get to it!"

She frowned, tracking the infinitesimal progress the glowing dot made toward the center as they moved, and then glanced up at the setting sun on the horizon. "I don't think we'll make it there by the end of the day."

"Normally I just fall asleep on Nimbus while I go places."

Considering his size, she...could see how he could manage that without falling off of the cloud. However...any attempt by herself to do that would almost certainly result in falling to her death in the night. Or, at the very least, being left behind while the boy slept for hours longer. As overdue as her return home might have been, she wasn't willing to risk being stranded or killed just to hurry it along a bit more.

"Bulma gave me a house to use." The idea seemed strange, but then Captain Yamato had done something very similar on the missions they'd went on with him. Erecting a house out of nothing was disconcerting, but at least it was something she understood on the surface. A surface understanding was at least better than being completely lost every time Bulma tried a 'new approach' to her experiments over the past month.

"Oh...well...I guess we could do that, too." Goku nodded. "It'll be slower, but Nimbus would be a little crowded if we both tried to sleep on it."

She sighed.

Considering how crowded it was with just the two of them sitting on it, she actually suspected either of them attempting to lay down on it in any fashion would result in both of them falling off of it.

And the cloud would probably leave them both behind, if they did.

AN: Other fun fact- This chapter was going to be set earlier in the month and probably be all training oriented, but I decided on keeping up pacing instead.

Also the first ten chapters was pretty much all training as it is.