Night had fallen and Bulla was lying awake in a room that did not exist at her Capsule Corp of the future. It was a guest room on the other side of the building — the side that, in her time, had collapsed after an android attack — and it all felt very surreal.

After Tien and Yamcha left to investigate a strange drop in energy, she and the others (all except her father, of course) sat down to a nice meal and shared polite conversation. It was mind blowing that everything could be so normal during the moments that life was most assuredly not. It was interesting watching everyone interact with one another, seeing as how she never met most of them and that Gohan had been dead in her time for more than three years. They smiled at her, jovially passed her plates upon plates of food — much more food than she and her mother had in the future — and actively included her in their conversations. It was as if the outside world was not facing impending doom. It was a lovely reprieve.

When she went to bed that night, her father passed her in the hallway without giving her as much as a second glance. She noticed he retreated to a room that was not her mother's, and a knot formed in the pit of her stomach. Why did she care if they weren't together? They weren't together in her time, and it really wasn't any of her business. Part of her wanted them to be together, though, to be in the world where he loved this version of her mother like the future one said he did, and when Bulla realized this was not the case, she felt like she had been lied to.

Inhaling deeply, she shifted her thoughts elsewhere. She studied the ceiling as she wondered about this new creature. Another one of the fallouts of time travel — as one domino is moved from the path, her advantage of knowledge becomes more obsolete. This creature — whatever it was — was not in her time, or if it was, it had not reared its ugly head for some reason. Was this perhaps because Gero was dead?

His voice rang in her ears.

You look so much like Dr. Brief's girl. What was her name again?

Her eyes widened. Gero knew her grandfather.

She swung her legs over the side of her bed and put on some slippers Bulma had provided to her (along with some pajamas and the promise of an entire wardrobe if she so pleased). She hastily made her way downstairs to the kitchen, grabbing a glass of water before peering through the window at the laboratory compound just across the way. In the window there was a light, a shadow, too, drifting across the room.

As she ran her knuckles across the office door, she found it was ajar. Inside sat her grandfather hunched over a drawing table, a lit cigarette in his mouth, looking at various blueprints of what looked like a spaceship. Her grandfather had died in the attack on Capsule Corp. when she was young, but she remembered him fondly.

"Oh, hello!" He smiled. "If it isn't my granddaughter from the future."

"Kind of weird, right?" She chuckled. He beckoned her over with his hand and pointed down to the blueprints.

"I must say, you father is downright suicidal," he mused. "He wants me to build a spaceship that can reach 500 times gravity. I think he's a few cards short of a full deck."

"Honestly, I couldn't agree more," her fingers ran across the blueprints. "And I've only met him today."

"It must be strange for you," he pondered. "I can't imagine coming from a world where so many of these people don't exist, and yet you're seeing them face-to-face."

He paused for a moment, his eyes breaking from her and back down to his schematics before asking a question he knew might upset her.

"Am I alive, in your time?"

"No," she said quietly, her voice catching ever so slightly. "You're not."

There was a moment of awkward silence before Dr. Brief's closed the gap between them. Tenderly he wrapped his arm around her, and she responded by resting her head on his shoulder. When she was little, her grandfather had been a surrogate father to her, teaching her everything about anything. He taught her how to tie her shoes, he told her stories at night when she couldn't go to sleep — hell, he even showed her how to weld.

Though it had been years since he died, her heart ached for him. Wiping away a tear, she lifted her head and looked into his eyes with an eagerness that frightened him.

"Grandpa," she said, noticing how his face lit up as she said it. "Gero said something to me, something that confused me. He said that I looked like mom."

"Well, you have to admit there is a resemblance," he winked.

"No, that's not what I mean," she pressed. "You knew him, didn't you?"

Dr. Briefs crossed the room and went over to a pot of coffee that was humming — he had just made a fresh pot, Bulla observed, settling in for another night of inventing, no doubt. He poured himself a cup and took a sip before pensively glancing off at nothing in particular.

"I did, yes," he said, a tinge of sadness and disappointment in his voice.

"What was he like?"

"We were close friends, he and I, back in school," he sighed. "He was a brilliant man. He had this way of thinking of things — it was like he saw through problems instead of looking at them. I believe it was our final year of university to get our doctorates when he was approached by the Red Ribbon Army. In fact, I was too."

Bulla cocked her head. "You were?"

"Yes, yes," he let out a mournful breath. "But I had already developed my theories on capsule technology, and to be quite honest, I thought that would make me a hell of a lot more money than working for some loon like Red — not that money was the only thing important to me, you know. I even asked Gero if he wanted to join me as I started dreaming up Capsule Corp., but he turned me down."

As he grabbed for his cigarettes and lit another one, Bulla realized she hadn't seen him finish the first.

"It's hard when you see a friend — someone you come to care for — make a bad choice. But it wasn't my life, so I had difficulty trying to reason with him about it. And, to be honest, I had no idea what the RRA was going to become-I don't think anyone did. In fact, we kind of laughed about it. So, as his involvement with them grew, I stayed in touch. Sending the odd letter or card with pictures of my growing family. That is, until it started coming out what he was doing."

"What do you mean?" Bulla asked.

"There were rumors about what he was up to in our community, about all the human experiments, and it seemed extremely unethical and dangerous. When Bulma told me about how the RRA were attacking her and young Goku over the dragon balls, I was just flabbergasted and downright disgusted. He made his choice though, there was no coming back for him."

He took a long drag and looked over at his granddaughter, who stood in curiosity.

"I'm sorry you had to go through that," she empathized.

"Yes, well," he sighed. "What am I to do now?"

"Maybe there's a way you can help us," she said hopefully.

"Bulma already asked me about this after your first visit," his voice was thick with disappointment. "I don't know where he is and I have no idea where his lab might be. I guessed it was at the old RRA compound, but when Bulma went to search, she didn't find anything."

"Maybe she just wasn't looking for the right thing," Bulla's voice quickened. "Maybe we can look again — maybe there was a clue we missed and this time it can be different."

A smile formed on Dr. Brief's lips.

"You know, it's funny," he chuckled. "Even though you never met your father, you two do have the same aggressive determination, that's for sure."

Bulla blushed, casting her eyes down at the floor. Meeting her father had been a confusing experience, mostly because he was so horrendously rude and mean to everyone when they were nothing but cordial to him. What made it conflicting was the fact that she saw a lot of himself inside her, and it made her feel awkward knowing others saw it, too.

"Here," Dr. Briefs walked over to one of his many, many shelves of books and grabbed a huge atlas. He flipped around until he found the page he was looking for, and put it down on the table. With a red pen, he circled a large swath of land that sat to the west. "This is where the old RRA compound was. If you want to look for clues, I would start there."

He tore out the page and she gently took it from his hand. Dr. Briefs grabbed onto it, holding it in his before examining her face. His granddaughter was smart and cunning, brave and goodhearted. As he told Dr. Gero's story, his heart tugged in his chest. Often during these three years he wondered if it could've been him that turned evil. He was Gero's match in genius, wasn't he? He pursued his own creation and made billions doing it, too-which was exactly how Gero wound up with the RRA.

Dr. Brief's story could've been Gero's if the circumstances had been right. But now he realized the two men were not interchangeable: one's soul had twisted and turned into the darkness while the other's formed bonds and planted seeds of love. Looking at his granddaughter, he could see he made the right choice.

She rushed in and grabbed him, putting her arms around his neck and burrowing into his coat like a small child. Before she broke their embrace, she made sure to take in his scent-he smelled like he always did, of tobacco, and coffee, with a hint of a mahogany cologne.

Bulla was palming the map as she hurried back toward her room when she noticed another light was on in the lab just a short distance from Dr. Brief's office. She made her way down the hallway and peered into the room. It was her mother's part of the lab, and it was also where Goku's rejuvenation chamber was set up. Gohan had pulled up a seat and was absentmindedly flipping through the pages of a thick textbook.

"How's the book?" Bulla leaned against the doorframe. Gohan looked up in surprise.

"Oh, hey there," he said. "I didn't even feel you coming."

"That's no way to be prepared," she grinned. "What would they say, if they heard a Saiyan talk like that?"

This was the way they used to talk, back in the future. They used to joke around like this, and Gohan used to regale her of stories when he was training under Piccolo as a small child. He would do an imitation of his master — which, now that she had met him, seemed pretty spot-on — and then turn right around and be the same hard ass to her. But this Gohan obviously didn't know any of that, and seemed uncomfortable-or maybe just confused-at her attempts for light conversation.

"Sorry," she caught herself as she saw his face. "Back where I'm from, you were my master, and we used to talk like that."

His face lit up. "I was your master?"

"Yeah, you were," she smiled. His eyes floated to the map she had in her hand.

"Where are you going?" He motioned.

"Oh," she had nearly forgotten about her mission. "I'm going to do a little scouting. You can join me if you'd like."

Gohan looked at her with eager eyes, before casting his glance to his father's chamber. If he went with Bulla, he faced the wrath of his mother in the morning, but it also meant he could actually do something to help the Z Fighters cause instead of sit around and study his math.

"Can you give me five minutes to go change?" he asked timidly. She smiled.

"Do you think I'm going in this?" she motioned to her pajama pants which were baby pink and adorned with a cutesy white polka dot pattern. They both let out a little laugh and agreed to meet in the courtyard.

When they left, they purposefully dropped their ki to extremely low levels in hopes that Krillin or Vegeta wouldn't feel them moving away from Capsule Corp. Bulla was glad to have Gohan with her. Even if he wasn't the exact same Gohan she knew, his company was comforting and familiar. With him, she felt like she was with family. And, as she realized on the flight over, it was probably a good idea to have some backup in case things went awry.

As they approached, they agreed to descend and move on foot. The woods around the RRA compound were thick — a dense pine tree forest that spanned for miles and miles. They opted to land only about a half mile from the perimeter, but the woods were so heavy and the night was so dark that Bulla reconsidered her plan.

Once she had positioned them in the right direction, they made the short walk and found the clearing the compound sat on. It was absolutely sprawling. There were towers and turrets, elongated walls that cut through the clearing in several different directions, all a white stone that was shaded a mossy green from all the exposure. Several of the walls had crumbled, leaving eerie ruins that jutted up at all different heights and exposed the life of what used to be a thriving army.

Amidst the buildings were discarded army-issued jackets, rifles and random scraps of metals. If there was any place to build a secret hideout, Bulla thought to herself this would be the place to do it-there was a seemingly endless supply of junk that could be used to create something else. And with a man as clever as Gero, it wouldn't be difficult to do.

Just as they were about to emerge into the clearing, they saw a figure appear from one of the buildings on the side, a mere 100 yards from where they crouched. Gero emerged, accompanied by the androids. 18 has a melancholic look in her eye, her head cast downward as she sullenly followed behind. Immediately behind her was 17 looking like a caged animal who was calculating the perfect time to strike.

"So now that we're clear," Gero hissed, "can we please get on with this mission?"

"Yes, master," 17 seethed. This only made Gero laugh.

"I warned you, 17, that I have a monster capable of killing you and he is growing only more powerful as we speak. Disobey me again and I will ensure he kills you and your sister. But if you follow my orders…"

"We know," 18 replied, her voice a little shaky. "We can have our freedom."

"Exactly." Gero smiled. "It's almost dawn. I plan to go see the work of my new creation, and I suggest you go track down Goku as soon as you can. I'll give you one more day, twins, and if for some reason you're unable to fulfill my request, it will be over for you."

Neither android said anything to the other, and emotionlessly they flew off into the sky, leaving Gero alone. He pulled out a capsule from his pocket and jumped into his air car, zipping off in the other direction.

Bulla and Gohan sat stunned. This was where Gero was hiding all along. He must have built his lab hidden inside these buildings — possibly underneath them. Bulla slowly stood up and looked around the grounds to see if the coast was clear.

When she heard someone clear their throat behind her, she nearly crawled out of her skin.

"And just where do you two think you're going?"

There was no mistaking his voice. She chest tightened in panic and she debated whether running away would be the wise thing to do. Standing behind them was Vegeta, his arms crossed and a look of mischievous satisfaction on his face.