Chapter Text
A storm was fast approaching.
Bulma Briefs made her final visit to her home at Capsule Corp a few hours before the hurricane’s arrival. This was cutting it close, even for Vegeta’s liking, but given everything the scientist had lived through, Bulma’s survival instincts had failed to activate at far worse.
Clear of the storm’s trajectory, the couple’s island-based second home had become the scene of their unplanned vacation, as well as temporary storage for all their possessions until West City was safe again. In spite of all this, Bulma had managed to forget about a number of her side projects, which she was now racing to rescue in her hovercraft.
It hadn’t been easy to get off the island. Bulla, now a toddler of eighteen months and as rowdy as any Saiyan child, was in the middle of a clingy phase that was proving to be a chore for both her parents. She was so adept at just knowing when one of them was leaving, that Vegeta suggested she might already be sensing ki. This time, they had been lucky that Trunks had found something to distract his sister, putting her in a much easier mood than usual.
It was possible, Bulma thought, that the sudden departure from Capsule Corp was reminding Bulla of what had happened during Moro’s rampage. Perhaps she was even afraid that her father would go away again. The two parents had never discussed this possibility with each other, but Bulma could tell that Vegeta thought about it too. She was sure of it every evening when he left the gravity chamber and sat down next to Bulla, who had made a habit of waiting for him outside. The child would curl up on his knee, and he would put his hand on her side. They would sit there, silently, until Bulla was fast asleep. Vegeta hadn’t spent a single night away from the family since Moro.
Of course, the warrior had his own excuse for this behaviour. Three months after the demise of the planet-eater, New Namek endured yet another attack from soldiers of the Frieza Force, who, after using the dragon balls, killed all the namekians who saw them up close or heard their wishes. By the time anyone could get through to Vegeta, the assailants were long gone and Frieza himself was too far away to detect.
That was the last they knew of the despot’s activities.
In Vegeta’s mind, this most recent attack on Namek, together with the incident with Broly the year before, pointed towards a change of strategy for the emperor that would almost certainly culminate in another attack on earth. With Goku practically living on Beerus’s world now, only Vegeta could be trusted to guard humanity from this imminent danger, a fact he kept reminding the other Z-fighters every day.
However, there had been other changes in Vegeta that were harder for him to justify. For one, the topic of his life on earth had come up far more often than usual, as he went out of his way to stress his lack of regret for moving there. Sometimes at night he said things to Bulma she never dreamed of hearing him say, about how devoted he was to her and their children, and how nothing in the universe could ever convince him to turn back.
--0—0—0--
Speaking with reception, Bulma discovered that the miracle of miracles had occurred. Her parents had actually heeded her advice to escape the hurricane, taking their arc-load of pets to somewhere rural.
With most of the Capsule Corp employees also out of town, or at very least sheltered at home, the building was the emptiest Bulma had ever seen it. Capsule Corp was so large and crowded, that even after 4 decades living there, parts of it still didn’t feel homely to her. In the absence of the usual bustle, the blue-carpeted halls of the corporal part of the building were downright eerie. Bulma wondered if this feeling stemmed from the lighting. The sparse, cold sunlight peering through the clouds was abnormally dim for the time of day.
Perhaps it was also the lack of cars in the usually gridlocked metro. Such sounds had become white noise for the scientist, present every damn second she lived and worked. Now Bulma’s senses were more attuned to other sounds, and every unseen footstep from the few people still in the building felt like an intrusion.
Bulma’s unease faded at once in the familiarity of the lab. Bathed in white light, the irregularities brought on by the impending storm were invisible here. But more importantly, this was Bulma’s domain.
Mental stimulation had always been her coping mechanism against danger. In the year that the Z Warriors had trained to prepare for the arrival of Vegeta, Bulma was down a rabbit hole of experimentation in trying to understand Saiyan scouter technology. It had come to nothing of value in the end, a fact the charred remains of the scouter still stashed somewhere in that very room would prove.
Nonetheless, the challenge of decoding an alien writing script without reference had given Bulma a personal mission, overshadowing her fear and helplessness for what was to come. She was not unlike Goku in that sense, who stared down his enemies of far greater strength with a grin of irrational excitement. True to form, Bulma’s heartache for the damage due to come to her home was overshadowed by the opportunity to incorporate even more advanced technologies into the new design, rebuilding it far better than it was before.
Bulma’s lab was her domain.
The sturdy bag Bulma had brought was navy blue, with the signature capsule logo painted in white. It wasn’t hard to find everything she was looking for, most of it still sprawled out on the table from the last time she’d tinkered with it. Wasn’t it Einstein himself after all, who died with his desk in imperceptible chaos?
She began loading her projects into the bag. After this, she’d do a quick check of the living rooms for anything else left behind accidently, and then she’d be on her way home. She would enjoy belittling Vegeta for his unfounded worry, which he would promptly deny ever having expressed. The conversation, playing out already in Bulma’s mind, was an amusing typicality for the couple. With the packing just about done, her phone began to ring with her husband’s number.
Pfff, what could that man want now?
She crossed to the very back of the room to get the phone, carrying the unzipped bag over her shoulder.
Without time to register the footsteps dashing towards her, a sharp force struck Bulma Briefs in the back of her head.
As she collapsed to the floor, the contents of her bag crashed to the ground in all directions.
The last moments of Bulma’s waking memory consisted of her attacker stepping over her. Unseen hands pulled the bag off of her shoulder, and the ringing of the phone timed out.
--0—0—0—
There was no exact moment in which Bulma’s awareness returned to her. The first indicator was the humming: a deep, continuous, electronic droning which was stronger in the left ear. Following this came the discomfort: a sickly nausea in the neck and surrounding area, coupled with a pain that felt like her head was being pushed against the ground.
It was some seconds after this that Bulma regained her conscious thought. Initially, the focus was on her breathing, and the momentous effort it seemed to require. Bulma felt as though she had just run a marathon, even though as far as she knew, she had been asleep for potentially hours. That was the first assumption Bulma could make as she took in her surroundings through blurred vision. This was because the lighting alone, dim and warm, suggested that she had been out long enough to have been moved to a vastly different location.
Why can’t I move?
Her vision clearing, Bulma observed that the ceiling was filthy. It was a patchwork of dark metal which clearly hadn’t been cleaned in months, and patches of something disgusting completed the awful aesthetic. Even looking from left to right was tiring enough to send shockwaves from her eyes to her skull.
Gods, what did they drug me with?
Still, she was able to gather that the room she was in was small, perhaps eight square feet, and absolutely squalid. The walls were painted burgundy red, but it had peeled enough for the metal underneath to be visible in large patches. The metal was tarnished by shiny scratches, as though the previous inhabitant had been some wild animal.
What caught Bulma’s attention most of all was the fourth wall, or rather, the lack of it. In its place stretched some sort of screen of energy, which she recognised instantly as the technology used to keep the inmates of the Galactic Prison in their cells. This particular screen was a little different, almost opaque rather than translucent, and the colour was a deep blood orange. Nonetheless the technology was undoubtedly the same.
The scientist was very sure of this fact, because following the recapture of runaway inmates after their leader’s defeat, Bulma was invited to study the technology used in the prison for the mutual benefit of the prison and herself. She’d been able to identify a number of flaws in the shielding technology and rectify them. Of course, nothing she could do would make it immune from a wish on the dragon balls, but the guards were nonetheless grateful for her work. On her end, she’d reverse engineered the technology for her own use, putting it amongst her planned improvements for Capsule Corp’s security following the storm. And now, stuck alone in what was increasingly apparent to be a prison cell, Bulma had received another, unforeseen benefit to the opportunity.
This… place… was not the Galactic Prison, meaning that although it may have used the same technology, it would not have received the upgrades introduced by Bulma’s charitable genius. In other words, the flaws that had been corrected in the prison may still exist here.
Then again, all this depended on Bulma being able to move. If her suspicions about being drugged were correct, then hopefully the effects would wane over time. However, Bulma wondered why the drug’s effects were purely physical, and why her captors hadn’t simply kept her unconscious for longer if they wished to restrain her that way. The paralysis wasn’t total; her heart and lungs were still functioning after all. That gave her hope that her other muscles could also be persuaded to move.
She focused her effort on her fingertips first, and sure enough she was able to get them to twitch. The floor must have been just as filthy as the rest of the room, as Bulma could feel the grime collecting under her nails as she clawed weakly at it. Next, she experimented with bending her elbows a little, moving horizontally as to avoid contending against gravity. With some effort, this proved successful, and soon Bulma could glide her arms across the floor. It was probably a good thing she couldn’t look to see what the undersides of her sleeves looked like right then.
Now came the real challenge: hoisting her arm up onto her chest and over to her shoulder. She felt like a fridge magnet, and her first few efforts failed to lift her arms even an inch off the floor.
This is pointless. It would be easiest just to wait for Vegeta.
On that thought, Bulma realised it was strange Vegeta and Goku hadn’t found her yet. Her initial theory about having been unconscious for quite some time was rendered a gross understatement at the discovery of advanced galactic technology guarding the cell. In all likelihood, Bulma was not on earth any more, but most likely on some sort of spaceship, meaning enough time had almost certainly passed for Vegeta to start searching for her ki. Did that mean that she was already so far from the earth that Vegeta could not locate her energy? Worse, was the earth in trouble?
Bulma tried again to regain control of her movement. Eventually, she was able to wrench her hand onto her chest to feel the empty breast-pockets of her jacket.
Damn. Did they find the capsule as well?
Wincing at the pain in her shoulder, Bulma moved her hand to the other and felt the touch of a bandage at the top of her arm. This was a better sign. Prying through the folds of her bandages, a task made exceedingly difficult by the exhausted twitching of her arm, Bulma’s fingers grasped a metal object.
They didn’t find it. Thank fuck.
The capsule Bulma had hidden was a new model. Not round like the conventional design, but a thin cuboid shape, like a memory stick but flatter and more flexible. It had been designed with the specific purpose of being easy to conceal on her body. Vegeta had advised her to carry tools with her at all times, in the event Frieza managed to have her captured behind his back. The bandage idea was also Vegeta’s, something he had learned in the Frieza Force. It was genius in its simplicity, and it had done the trick.
Bulma let the capsule drop to the ground, materialising a white box just small enough to carry underarm. She struggled for a good minute to pry the lid from the box and reach inside. Thankfully, the water bottle she so desperately wanted to get her hands on was placed right at the top of the box, allowing her to practically roll it onto the floor. Having found the strength to shift onto her side, she positioned the bottle at her neck, unscrewed it with her teeth and allowed gravity do the rest for her. The water immediately washed away a good amount of the nausea. The coolness counteracted the sweat she’d worked up from getting out the capsule, so she didn’t care that most of it just puddled around her. She had another bottle in the chest. Within a minute, Bulma felt a little strength come back to her, if only from the confidence gained by her achievement so far.
The next challenge she set herself was to sit up. Bulma rolled onto her back again and tried to prop herself up on her arms. It was no easy feat, but she managed to get half upright, enough to see fully into the contents of the capsule box. There, tucked at the back was the real prize: a pen-like device she had built while studying the energy shields of the Galactic Prison. It was a means of shutting the shields down.
Bulma was pleased with herself, to say the least. Sure, some credit had to be owed to Vegeta for convincing her to make the capsule and yes, she would tolerate his ‘ I told you so’ as reward. But this energy pen was her invention. Busting out of there would be her achievement. She looked over to the energy screen in triumph.
Bulma fell flat on her back again as fear seized her. There, on the other side of the orange screen, was the silhouette of another person. And it... no, not an it, a she... she was looking at Bulma.