“I’m going too.”

ChiChi immediately turned to her with an icy glare and placed her hands on her hips in an intimidating pose. She stared down her nose at the future woman who sat on her couch, watching the news with watering eyes. She could understand how this would affect Mirai Bulma. From what she knew of the future world, it had been completely annihilated by the jinzouningen; it was just a world full of death and devastation. Seeing it happen all over again here must be awful for both Bulma and Trunks. She could even understand what had compelled the boy to run out and fight the jinzouningen, though she wasn’t about to let him hurt a mother and wife. But there were just some things that she wasn’t willing to understand, and Mirai Bulma going out to fight was one of them.

ChiChi frowned and spoke in a comforting, yet very firm tone: “Bulma, it’s a little too dangerous for you to be going out there alone to fight the jinzouningen.”

Next to Mirai Bulma on the couch, Tayhei suddenly brightened and raised her hand. “I’ll go with her!”

ChiChi turned the glare to the younger girl and crossed her arms tightly over her chest. She knew all too well just how determined Tayhei could be. She also knew that it was probably killing her not to be out amidst all of the action and excitement. However, she was just girl and ChiChi didn’t want her getting hurt, especially since she knew that the girl had no means of defending herself at all. If she honestly expected to go out and fight in a tight little dress and heels, she was insane. “You’re not going anywhere.”

“Maybe she should come.” Mirai Bulma suggested as she used the remote to turn the TV off. She turned to the young girl sitting beside her and gave her a friendly smile. “It would help to have the opinion of another scientist. I have to figure out a way to stop the jinzouningen from hurting anyone --- without killing them. And I can’t possibly do that without at least having a look at them and their power capabilities first.”

“NO!” ChiChi snapped at them. “No one is going anywhere. I don’t even trust you to get back to Capsule Corporation on your own without venturing into the city, so you’re just going to stay here. You can work on a plan if you want to, but you are going to do it in my living room, damn you. You don’t have to go out on the battlefield.”

Mirai Bulma sighed and stood up, gesturing for her to calm down. “ChiChi, just listen to reason---”

Angrily, ChiChi jabbed a finger at the woman’s chest and gave her a glare so fierce that it would have made Vejiita shiver and cry. “No, you listen. I just lost you once and I am not about to lose you again. Both of you just sit down on that couch and wait for all of the fighting to stop. I forbid you to go out there and place yourselves in so much danger. I’m going to make some tea, we’re going to discuss this rationally, and you’re going to stay here, damn it. Now sit down!”

With those final words, ChiChi stormed into the kitchen, her feet stomping on the soft carpet. She hated to be so mean to her guests, but there was really no other way to make them understand. People without fighting skills should stay out of the fighting, period. There was no reason for Mirai Bulma and Tayhei to go out there. She suspected that the real reason for going out there was merely to amuse themselves. Tayhei craved excitement like heroin, and if she knew this future Bulma half as well as she had known the one of her own timeline, she was biggest addict the world has ever known. Both of them would go flying out there, thinking they were about to have adventure and excitement, but they were just going to get hurt. Neither one of them had any fighting skills at all. She might be able to understand if Videl wanted to go and fight, but these two weren’t near the level that her daughter-in-law was. If they went out there, they were only going to end up getting hurt.

Or worse, ChiChi thought with a shiver as she began setting out cups and making tea for them. Killed.

“How long does it take to make tea?” Bulma quietly asked the young Tayhei as soon as ChiChi began clanking things around in the kitchen. She knew better than go against the woman and face her wrath, but that didn’t mean she had to listen to her when she had her back turned.

Tayhei turned towards her with a devilish smirk on her beautiful face. “Long enough to sneak out to the driveway and speed off in a Capsule Car.”

“Good. You’re driving.”

Wind ruffled Goten’s wild black hair as he flew, his best friend at his side. It was going to be a hot day; the sun was already so warm on his skin that it was uncomfortable and it wasn’t even noon yet. Not even the air that brushed against his cheeks as he flew was cool. It was thick, hot, and damp, like the steam that appeared in the bathroom after a shower. He raised an arm to swipe away a lock of hair that had been blown into his eye and turned to look over at Trunks. The purple haired warrior looked every bit as uncomfortable as he did, but he also had a wretched scowl on his face and his eyes were narrowed down into almost invisible slits. Goten knew his friend well, and he knew without a doubt what that look particular look on Trunks’s face meant. It meant that someone had insulted him somehow, someway. And Trunks did not take kindly to being insulted. Goten couldn’t be sure who it was that had offended him. His first assumption was Tayhei of course, but with the way that Trunks was glaring after Mirai Trunks, it had most likely been the future warrior.

Goten decided to test the waters. He raised his voice above the wind and yelled over at his angry friend. “How long has he been here?!”

“They came last night.” Trunks didn’t even turn his head, but his eyes narrowed even further. Goten took that as a sign that Mirai Trunks was indeed the culprit.

His friend was moody and arrogant sometimes, but at least he was easy to read. Trunks tended to display all of his emotions and his anger in an attention-grabbing showcase. If he was upset, he wanted people to know, and wanted people to know exactly why as well. There wasn’t much that Trunks kept to himself. When it came to attention and sympathy, the guy wanted all that he could get. He drank it all in and fed bits of it to his ever-growing ego, which certainly didn’t need any more attention than it already had. At the moment, Trunks had a pretty good mixture of pride and humility. But any more pride and he would tip the scales and start turning into Vejiita. Tayhei was right; it was good to knock Trunks’s ego down every once and awhile. It made the guy more angry than anything else in the world, but it was good for him.

“What’s he like?” Goten asked, as they flew over another forest. The tiny trees below them flew by in a blur of green, stretching out behind and becoming nearly invisible in a matter of seconds. They weren’t far from the city now, but Goten was a little afraid of what he would see when he got there. On the news it had looked terrible, but he knew that seeing it in real life would be much, much worse.

“What’s he like?” Trunks repeated bitterly. He shook his head. “Honestly? I don’t care. I think he hates me.”

“Why?”

“How should I know?” Trunks snapped. His eyes finally slid over to meet Goten’s; bright blue orbs filled with a confusing mix of anger and pride. “He’s probably just jealous.”

The last statement caught Goten off guard and he looked over at his friend, completely puzzled. “Jealous of what?”

“Well, I’m obviously the better looking one.”

Goten fought the impulse to burst out laughing. Leave it to Trunks to simply things like that. He suspected that Trunks really did think that the world revolved around his pretty purple head. If he ever needed proof of his friend’s incredible arrogance, it was right there in that statement. Of course Mirai Trunks wasn’t jealous of his younger counterpart. And if he actually was, it certainly wouldn’t be because of such a silly reason. He had been friends with Trunks for a long time now and had gotten used to comments like this, but every time his friend came up with something so ridiculous, Goten just had to smile. There really was no one on Earth like Trunks.

“Why is he so upset about the jinzouningen?” Goten asked him, still fighting off a smile. He needed to pull the conversation back into a more conventional subject before Trunks started elaborating on the ‘better looking’ idea. Below them now were the lengthy suburbs of the city, rows and rows of tiny, identical little houses and perfectly straight streets. He couldn't see anyone on the streets below him and guessed that they were probably all hunkered inside of their homes, watching the horror unfold on TV.

“Well, you know that they destroyed the future world. He is probably just afraid that it’s going to happen to this world too. I agree that what’s happening in the city right now with Juuhachi-gou is horrible, beyond horrible, but we can’t kill her. We just have to subdue her somehow, without endangering her life. Or Juunana-gou’s for that matter. It’s going to be strange.” Trunks shot Goten a sideways glance. “This isn’t going to be like any other battle that we’ve ever fought. We have to go into it knowing that we’re going to lose.”

Goten frowned deeply. “Let me guess, Mirai Trunks didn’t understand that.”

“He sees them as monsters, Goten. Nothing else. It makes me so mad that he wouldn’t even consider our opinions. He just took off without even attempting to listen to reason. He just thinks he is special because he’s this famous, angst-ridden warrior with a big, huge sword.” Trunks face took on a smug, important look. “If you ask me, he’s a bit irrational. He just runs off to fight without taking anything into consideration. Plus, this isn’t his world --- it’s ours. He doesn’t even have a right to be here, let alone fight our enemies.”

“I thought the jinzouningen weren’t our enemies.”

Frustrated, Trunks gave him a menacing glare. “That’s not the point, Goten!”

He smiled in return. “Then what is?”

“The point is, I don’t like him. He hasn’t even been here for more than a day and he’s already on Tayhei’s side; he treats me like I’m an annoying, impudent kid; he runs off to kill our friends without even asking us for permission; and he acts as though he’s in a fucking play. Everything has to be dramatic and everyone has to feel sorry for him. Plus, he doesn’t even attempt to fix his hair. I can tell he’s never even heard of hair care products.”

Goten shook his head and looked straight ahead as the city, filled with smoke and still on fire, loomed over the hills. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We’ll get there before he can harm Juuhachi-gou too badly, at least. I think the most we should allow him to do is knock her out. That would probably be the quickest way to get her to stop blowing things up. I don’t know what we’re going to do after that, though. If we can’t kill them, there really isn’t any way to stop them.”

In reply, Trunks merely let out something that sounded like half growl, half laugh. His eyes locked on the city ahead, he began to speed up. “I think we should worry about stopping Mirai Trunks first.”

The city stretched out before them in burning, desolate ruins. Most of the sky scrapers had already tumbled out of the sky and met the earth, crumbled into masses of charred concrete and glass. The buildings below had been crushed as well and were nearly invisible under the piles of wreckage. Fires had started during Juuhachi-gous’s barrage of attacks, and they were now raging across the remnants of the city in a hungry, glowing orange tidal waves. The people that remained alive in the streets were burned badly and trying to run as fast as they could, their sense of direction thrown off by the mass destruction that was lying before them. The dead lay in bloody, burnt heaps all over the once clean city streets. Safe in the Capsule Car, Mirai Bulma and Tayhei flew over the demolished city, their eyes wide.

“It’s horrible.” Tayhei breathed, looking down to see a young boy with his hand still tightly clutching his mother’s, his face twisted in terror. She felt sick to her stomach, sicker than she had felt in a long, long while. It was unbelievable to think that the quiet, smooth Juuhachi-gou had been able to cause this much damage, hurt this many people. Just knowing that she had once looked into the woman’s eyes with respect made her feel cold and numb all over. It was so much destruction, so much death and horror, that she couldn’t even begin to take it all in. She knew that she would have nightmares; something like this could haunt a person for a lifetime. She knew now why Mirai Trunks carried such a ghostly look in those sky blue eyes.

“It is horrible.” Mirai Bulma agreed softly, looking out the window with tears in her eyes. “It’s horrible and sick and wrong….But they do it anyway. This is what my entire world looks like. This is how it all started out: one ruined city, a million broken hearts, streets full of corpses and the burnt remnants of buildings. Pretty soon it spread to other cities, other countries, other people’s homes. The jinzouningen just swept across the world in one angry rage and obliterated everything in their path. This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen it all before. I know it far too well.”

Tayhei felt bad for the woman, felt horrible that anyone would have to live through something as terrible as this for the rest of their life. The weight of the situation and the intense fear of it must be absolutely mind-boggling to their visitors from the future. She couldn’t even begin to imagine what her companion might be feeling right now. The look in her eyes was positively heartbreaking. She had never seen such devastation or sadness in her own Bulma’s eyes. Her companion shifted in her seat, leaning back away from the window and closing her deep blue eyes for a moment, a sigh escaping through her lips.

“Are you scared?” She asked her slowly.

“A little.” Mirai Bulma admitted. “This is all so familiar that it’s eerie. In my world, the jinzouningen were really very frightening. Most people never even saw them, but they still shook in fear at the mere mention of the word. It’s hard to keep that old fear from coming back, especially considering the events going on before us.”

“Do you think that we will be able to stop them?”