Chapter 3

A battle was taking place over and beyond the entire Multiverse.

A dark force was spreading it´s influence over universes and timelines... and finally over all of creation. A force that could not be erased and not be contained anymore.

And this dark for had found itself a new host, in a celestical demonic being calling himself Demigra.

So the battle was reaching across timelines and universes and even into the void between the universes.

New timelines were spreading out under the sinister influence and in a few cases ended up collapsing into themselves.

Until at the height of the battle, the dark force merged itself with Lord Zeno - the King of all existence - himself and with the Super Dragon Balls.

And as a result all of reality had temporally ended up being erased from existence.

Until, with the help of some chosen fighters, Zeno managed to overcome the dark influence and restored the Multiverse.

With the exception of a few timelines that had become so twisted that Lord Zeno decided it would be better not to bring them back.

xxxxxxx

Future Timeline - now

"Trunks?" Marron said.

She saw him hesitating.

She glared at Kiviya with pure rage.

Marron activated her Android mode, the same one she had never asked for and that she was horrified by.

And she powered up a blast on her own.

"Marron - do you really have to do this?" Bulma asked.

"She had turned you, Trunks, Vegeta, your parents, Gohan and countless others into mind-controlled slaves," Marron said furious. "My entire family died because of her."

"But wasn´t she... just a tool for this Beby character?" Bulma questioned. "She can not longer control anyone, right?"

"We don´t know that for sure," Trunks replied instead of Marron. "And even if not, she is still powerful enough to kill us in our sleep and destroy the entire planet afterwards."

"My father, my mother, my uncle and many others were killed because of Beby and her," Marron exclaimed angrily. "Because of her mind-control Bulma experimented on me and planted a Infinite Energy Reactor into me that Beby had ripped out of my uncle."

"Your mother refused to be controlled, just like your uncle," Kiviya called out. "Your mother said she would rather die. Seventeen said the same to father before he had Gohan and Piccolo shoot him in the back. So we have given them what they wanted. We have done them a favor," she said.

Trunks and Bulma starred at her. She actually believed hat she just said, they could tell. They started to realize just how messed up this girl truly was. What in the world had this Beby done to make her like this?

"Y-you are insane. You did not need to enslave people in the first place!" Marron shouted at her.

"Of course I did," Kiviya replied. "This is the only reason why I as created and why I exist. If I did not fullfill my purpose, father would destroy me."

Even Marron hesitated for a moment now. But only for a moment.

"Do you think that changes anything?" she growled. "Beby has left us alone for a year and you still continued."

"You are right, it doesn´t change anything," Kiviya responded with her own words. "No matter how close or apart we are, I belong to him."

"But now you are in a completely different timeline," Bulma said. "You should be free now, right?"

Even Kiviya looked somewhat distraught now.

"T-there must be a version of him in this world too," she said weakly.

Of course, Trunks thought. He had not even thought about that yet.

But if Beby existed in his timeline as well... and the chance was great, then she might be the best chance to get information on him. That was something else they should consider.

Marron had similar thought, as much as she hated to admit it.

"But the Beby of this world has no idea that you even exist, right?" Bulma stated.

All she could see right now, was a twisted, broken and manipulated child, that had been used by someone else her entire life. But on the other side, was this any different from how it begann with the Androids?

"I think, if she promises not to harm anyone and to tell us what she knows about Beby, we should try to give her a chance."

"I hate to admit it, but I have to agree that Bulma has a point," Marron said. "Kiviya knows more about Beby than anyone else I know of."

"She is still dangerous," Trunks pointed out.

"So was your father a long time ago," Bulma replied quietly.

Yes - Trunks knew the story of Vegeta. How Goku had spared him, even if no other would have agreed to his decision.

How the same happened with Piccolo before.

"But things were different back then," Trunks said. "Back then Goku was still around and Gohan and the others. And back then you still had the Dragon Balls. You could still bring people back if things went wrong," he stated.

"Then you could still affort to take some risks. But now it is only me... Me and her perhaps," he said, looking at Marron.

"But it is too early to say that I trust her yet."

Of course not, Marron thought. He didn´t really knew her. Not in this world. And technically she was the daughter of one of his greatest enemies.

The truth was, Trunks was afraid. He was afraid to make a mistake. Afraid that everything he and his mother had achieved so hard would be lost and even more people would die because he had made a wrong decision.

...

Then suddenly Trunks and the others heard a voice inside their heads, a voice he knew all too well.

"Trunks, Bulma - do you hear me?" it asked them.

"Goku?" Trunks said, not quite believing it.

"Yes," the voice answered. "Sort of at least. For the moment, could you not kill one of the two girls who had appeared in your world?"

"Are you speaking to us from the Afterlife? With the help of Master Kaio. Like you talked to me from Namek back then?" Bulma asked.

"Well - not exatly," Goku answered. "You see, I am not really the Goku you knew. I am actually the Goku Trunks has met in the past. Well, one of him at least. You see, there are several timelines."

"Kakarot don´t make it more complicated than it needs to be," another voice spoke, they all froze as they recognized it - Vegeta.

"To make it short, the past you have visited has split into a few more timelines later. As it turned out, you are not the only ones capable of time-travel. Not to mention that our Bulma had reinvented the time-machine years later."

"Vegeta," Bulma said quietly.

"It is good to talk with you Bulma, you too Son," Vegeta said to Trunks. "Well - technically I talked with you two just a short time ago," he stated. "Not exactly this you. You know what I mean."

"It is good to hear from you Father," Trunks said. "So the world where our two visitors came from is one of this other timelines."

"More or less," Goku responded, "that timeline was created by Beby as part of a pact he had with this incredible powerful being named Demigra," he told them.

"You see - Demigra and his followers were trying to take over the Multiverse and he had recruited Beby to help him. In return Demigra had offered him his own universe to control and gave him the time-travel technology."

This hit a mark in both of their visitors. They both remembered that Beby had claimed that he would fight in some kind of great battle when he had left. But he never specified.

Marron had to deal with the thought that her entire world was just the result of a deal Beby had made.

While Kiviya remembered that her `father´ had not told her about any of this when he had left her behind. Had she really been just a tool to him?

"We and many other fighters tried to stop Demigra," Goku continued. "But he used a very powerful set of Dragon Balls to merge himself with Zen-chan. That means Lord Zeno - the God who rules over all worlds and universes."

"Demigra was stopped," Vegeta told them. "With some help from us, Zeno is fully back in control of himself... and Beby is dead," he added with some obvious tone of satisfaction. It was very likely that Vegeta had been the one who killed Beby, they all realized.

Dead. This got to Marron and Kiviya both... for different reasons.

"But, there is something else..." Vegeta continued. But then he stuck. It seems whatever he wanted to tell them left even Vegeta lost for words.

"And you say you are saying you are actually talking to us telepathically from another timeline?" Bulma asked. "How could that even be possible? I mean, are you somehow talking through a wormhole or something?"

"Let us say we have someone with us who can do that," Vegeta told them.

"Hello to you too," a somehow child-like voice now spoke to them, someone they did not know. "I am Zeno - King of All. Like Goku and Vegeta told them, with their and some of their friend´s help, I am back to myself... mostly at least."

What? it went through all their heads. They were still wrapping their minds around the fact that there was actually a God of Everything. And now he was talking to them. And he was with Vegeta and Goku and they seemed to be on pretty good terms with him.

What in the world had happened in the past timeline?

"But as Demigra and me merged, I lost control and accidentally all existence has temporally been erased, except for my palace, Demigra´s closest followers and the group of Warriors I had recruited to fight them."

What?!... it shouted through their minds. They all could barely believe what they had just heard.

"When it was over, I restored the universes and different timelines. But in a few cases, this worlds had just become terrible, twisted and should not exist. The one where your two visitors came from was one of them."

The minds of both Marron and Kiviya froze. Their universe did not longer exist. It was gone.

"What?" Marron called out.

Kiviya did not even say anything. She just looked downwards silently.

"But now we found an anomaly," Zeno continued. "It seems that this two were transferred into your timeline and interrupted a short time before their were erased. But this also split your own timeline to split off from another one, where they didn´t appear and Trunks and Bulma just continued their lives."

Trunks and Bulma both noticed how this god seemed to switch between mostly sounding like a small child and then suddenyly like an adult and explaining complex matters.

"Normally I would just erase this two interloppers. But since Goku and Vegeta had asked me to, I am willing to let them be...

... But I could still change my mind if they cause any trouble in your world," he added with an obviously fake innocent voice,

which caused especially Kiviya to flinch.

"You are right," Goku told them, "Beby exists in your timeline too. So you could need any help you can get. Aside from that we just don´t like people getting erased," he added. "It could however still be many years before he gets active, so you should have time."

"I understand," Trunks replied.

"Good luck son," Vegeta said. "Bulma - goodbye. You will see the other me in the Afterlife some day."

"One last thing," Zeno mentioned. "I would ask you not to use the time-machine anymore. Time-travelling for Mortals is against the laws of the gods because it can destabilize reality. Not to mention that so many timelines are annoying.

For Goku´s and the other´s sake, I will allow you one more trip through time, one more. But only if you absolutely have to. If you go against that I will have to erase you too."

"Okay okay - we promise we will only use it if we have absolutely no other choice," Bulma said nervously.

"Then goodbye," Zeno said.

A moment later they were all trying to come to terms with what they hd just heard.

Kiviya just sank down to the ground, completely broken.

Marron could barely keep herself from doing the same thing.

xxxxxxx

The next day

Marron was walking through the still mostly destroyed town.

She needed some time for herself after all what happened. All of this crazy things. What Goku and Vegeta and this Lord Zeno had told them... it was just too overwhelming, too bizarre. Her world, her entire universe, gone.

No, not entirely, she told herself. There was at least one other world out there that was identical to hers until Beby and Kiviya had started to corrupt their timeline. A Marron who was probably still living happily with her family.

Only that this Marron was not her, not anymore.

She still had doubts about letting Kiviya live, epecially after all she had done. But they had given good arguments for it. Still, that didn´t mean she had to accept it easily or had to like it.

Part of her, she admitted, was actually hoping that she would betray them. So that she or Trunks had an excuse to kill her.

At the same time, Marron´s mind just started to fully realize, after this last year of terror, of constantly hiding, constant fear and loosing people close to her... she was now free. She could once again walk around without fear.

Of course she could have also been flying.

But Marron knew that there as a chance that people might mistake her for Android 18 or some other superhuman threat. Her appearance alone could cause a panic. And the last thing Marron wanted was to add more to what this people had already gone through.

The people were used to Trunks and Gohan earlier, because they had seen them fighting the Androids and saving people for years, because they knew them. But she, a young girl who was looking remarkable similar to the Androids, was another matter.

There was also another reason why she was walking slowly throught the streets instead of flying to an unpopulated area to spend some time by herself.

She wanted to see the state the town was in (to see with her own eyes what the Androids had done).

After three years the rebuilding had still barely begun. At the first look this sounded very long.

But given that the entire world had been in shambles and government, civil services or even construction companies had barely existed anymore, it was a wonder that they had even come this far in this time.

And this was West City - one of the Capital Cities of this world. Marron hated to think how the rest of the world would look like.

xxx

But the worst was when she came to the large Memorial Monument, consisting of a line of large stone walls that had been errected in a park a few kilometers from Capsule Corp. Each of them over two meters high and twelve meters long.

All what was engraphed on them, on both sides, were names. The names of the victims of the Androids. Thousands of them, on each of these walls.

And there were twenty of these things standing in two lines in the park. And these were only for West City alone. How many had it been on the entire world? she asked herself.

Marron already knew the answer, billions. Between two thirds and three quarters of the entire human race, as she had red on the small plate before the large monument.

Seventeen and Eighteen had done this, she knew. But this Androids were not her mother and uncle, she told herself.

But she also realized that they never truly knew for sure where the difference was between them and this Androids. What had caused her mother and her brother to turn out so different from them?

Had it just been a difference in the process how Gero had modified them. Was it simply a mistake when he had tried to programm their minds. Or maybe as far as it came to Gero her family was the `mistake´, since he had failed to turn them into monsters.

In this moment she suddenly felt a pain in her chest, right where she knew they had implanted Seventeen´s reactor into her.

She remembered the possessed Bulma talking to her when she awoke after the procedure.

`Number 22´, she had called her. Just another Android.

Marron was feeling dizy. A irrational fear overcame her.

Had she maybe done something else to her? Something she had not even realized yet?

She then suddenly felt the urge to run or better fly away as fast as she could, not matter how everyone reacted. It was a sharp contrast to how numb she felt a short time before.

"So you are here," she heard Trunks talking to her.

xxx

Trunks had just arrived following Marrons ki. A moment ago he felt it suddenly rising up.

As he arrived he saw that she was having what seemed to be a panic attack. She was breathing heavily and looking distraught."

He should not be too surprised after all what happened to her.

"Calm down," he told her. "I know exactly how you feel. The same happened to me... more than once," he admitted.

"They - they turned me into an Android," Marron stammered. "They might not been able to control me directly. But what if they placed some kind of orders into my mind? How could you trust me if I can not even trust myself?"

He wrapped his arms around her shoulders to calm her down.

"Trunks - what?" she said.

"You are not helping anyone by letting your fears control you," he reminded her. "If you want to, we can have my mother take a look at you to find out what exactly they have done to you."

Marron froze at the idea of lying in Bulma´s lab once again. But this Bulma was the real one and not controlled by Beby, she reminded herself.

She nodded.

"Maybe it is for the best," she admitted.

She noticed something.

"By the way, where is Kiviya?" Marron asked.

"Still at Capsule Corp," he replied.

"So you have left your mother alone with her?" she said aghast.

"Well - I told her that I will keep my senses on her ki and that I will kill her if she makes as much as an suspicious move," he told her. "Then I left them alone for one minute before I bursted into the room again to how her what could happen. So I don´t think she will try anything."

Marron was looking at him for a moment, then she burst out into laughter.

"Beside that, she seems pretty broken up after what we have been told by this Zeno character anyway," me stated.

"She is not the only one," Marron admitted.

"Let us go back," he said to her.

xxxxxxx

A short time later Marron was lying (once again) in Bulma´s lab. She was suppressing the fear that was coming up inside her. This was neccessary. She needed to know if Bulma´s possessed counterpart had done something to her she was not aware of.

To all their luck, she found nothing.

Bulma had however recovered something else, the cure against Beby´s eggs, from Marron´s blood.

"Great, it when I have isolated the serum, it should be no great problem to reproduce it in large numbers," Bulma said.

"That means we at least don´t have to fear Beby´s mind control," Trunks stated.

"Yes," she replied. "But that still leaves Beby himself. Him and whatever allied he might have."

"Right," Trunks said sternly.

Like they said, it could still be years or decades till Beby would get active in this reality. But Trunks swore they would be ready when the time came.

For now however they had other things to deal with.

During the entire exchange Kiviya had just been standing in some distance and watched silently. She had barely said anything ever since Goku, Vegeta and Lord Zeno´s revelation.

Trunks and Bulma were not sure if this was a good sign or not.

Author´s Note - Population:

Some fanfic authors, when they name the population size of the Dragon Ball Earth, just take over numbers from our world and name the population number of five to seven billion.

I have to say I think this is complete nonsense. This planet might be named Earth, but it is at the same time very different from the one we know.

First of West City, Central City and Satan City are considered major cities by their standards. By what I have seen however, by our standards they would barely considered more than middle sized towns.

Massive population centers like New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Bombay or Peking with tens of millions of people in the towns and surrounding areas don´t seem to exist in this world.

I personally would put the population at two, maybe three billion people.

xxc

Powerlevels:

Future Timeline:

Future Trunks: 18.000.000 - SSJ: 900.000.000 - ASSJ: 1,35 Billion

Marron: (Human:) 140.000 - (Android mode:) 290.000.000

Bra/Kiviya: 6.000.000