Mirai Bulma had buried herself in the laboratory as soon as she managed to choke down enough coffee to function properly. She had refused to let the boys into the lab. There was no way that she was going to go through that kind of torture again today. Now that the jinzouningen were under control, she didn’t really need them anyway. She would be fine on her own as long as she just kept her guard up and watched what she was doing. The jinzouningen might be rendered completely helpless and immovable right now, but she had to remember that they were still monsters, and she still had to watch her back. When she had gone into the storage room earlier to check on them, she discovered that Juuhachi-gou was actually awake. That had been a big surprise to her, because she hadn’t expected the medication to wear off so quickly. She had to admit that when she opened up the doors and found Juuhachi-gou’s ice blue eyes glaring back at her, she had just about jumped out of her skin.

The female jinzouningen hadn’t said anything to her at all, just continued to stare at her with an unwavering, cool glare. Although Mirai Bulma knew that Juuhachi-gou was restrained and could not attack, it still sent a chill up her spine to see her like that. It was odd to stand next to someone who she knew had such incredible power and such incredible evil. She knew that if she weren’t restrained, Juuhachi-gou could easily have reached out and killed her within seconds. Anyone from the future world was well aware of the jinzouningen’s capabilities. She saw this as both a plus, and a bad thing. On the good side, it was helpful to know what the jinzouningen were capable of; it made her more aware of what was going on and more certain of what she needed to do to be able to restrain them. But on the bad side, it evoked a flame of fear that sometimes felt as though it would never end.

She had kept the examination tables in the storage room, even though part of her wanted to be able to keep an eye on the androids. It was just a little too scary to have Juuhachi-gou stare at her while she did her work. Besides, they were safe enough in the storage room, as long as the door was locked and she checked on them frequently. The main thing was that she just didn’t want to have to feel those ice blue eyes boring into her. She didn’t even want to think about what it was going to be like once Juunana-gou woke up as well. One pair of eyes was bad enough, but she wasn’t so sure that she could handle two of them. She might actually have to call someone back into the lab if that were the case. She didn’t think she could work under that kind of pressure.

Speaking of work….She gazed around her at the stacks of files and discs and medical journals. There was an awful lot of material to wade through. The idea of it wasn’t necessarily appealing, but there was no use in putting these things off anymore. She needed to start working on the jinzouningen before she ran out of time. Besides, she wasn’t the only one that this was affecting. She had to think about Kuririn and his family. It might have been easy for her to put off trying to solve the problem, but Kuririn and many others were counting on her. She at least owed it to them to get to work and “fix” the jinzouningen. If she could fix the jinzouningen.

That was the main problem: she didn’t understand how she was going to do this. It was like staring at a blank piece of paper or an open canvas: there was a tremendous amount of possibilities, but there were so many options and so many different angles that she didn’t even know where to begin. There were a thousand different methods that she could try and experiment with, a thousand different ways she could think of to solve this problem and turn the jinzouningen back into the human beings that they used to be. But unlike the blank piece of paper waiting to be written on, she wouldn’t get a second chance with this. The jinzouningen only had one body. That meant there could be no mistakes, no second drafts. Whatever she did in the lab had to be it. Whatever method of surgery or extraction she chose had to be the final decision. The best decision. If she was wrong, not only would the jinzouningen surely die, but she would be killing their family as well. Their last hopes would die on an examining table.

She leaned her head back against the headrest on her chair, closing her eyes tightly. The hangover certainly wasn’t helping matters. It was making it hard to think, hard to concentrate. It was difficult to make herself calculate numbers and formulas in her head when her ears were already ringing and her temples were already pounding. There was no room for anything else in her brain today. She should never have gotten drunk last night. Out of all of the stupid things that she had done since she had gotten here, getting intoxicated the day before heavy research and experimentation ranked number one. She should have just been an adult and faced the problem instead of drinking it away. Alcohol never solved anything --- it just managed to cover up what was there for a few blissful hours.

She wasn’t an idiot. She knew that those things weren’t actually going to disappear. In the morning, Vejiita would still be there, her son would still be there, and she would still be here, in this timeline where she just plain wasn’t welcome.

What was I thinking? Why did I come here? She asked herself bitterly, clamping a hand over her eyes. What made me think that anything in my life was going to change? Did I honestly think I was going to get rid of years and years of grief and pain by coming to this new world and having a fling with a Vejiita that wasn’t even mine? Was I honestly so foolish as to think that this was actually a solution to the problem? That everything could be fixed and well once I was with Vejiita again?

First of all, Vejiita didn’t even want her company. He had proven that well enough yesterday. He didn’t want anything to do with her. She wasn’t the Bulma that he knew, and he had basically told her that she would never be able to even compete. Looking at herself through his eyes, she saw nothing but a pathetic old woman who was trying to desperately grasp at the shreds of her former life. She certainly wasn’t the young, vibrant woman that he had just lost.

And more importantly, he had just lost his wife. It was too soon. If she turned it around and tried to place herself in his position, she knew that she would react the same way. If, months after her Vejiita’s death, another version of him came and attempted to start a romance, she would just plain be disgusted. What kind of a woman would she be if she dishonored her husband’s memory like that? It was true that Vejiita was a different kind of person than her, but she still felt that he had too much dignity to sleep with another woman, just months after his wife had died. He was an arrogant bastard, but he still had pride and class and taste. And, from what she managed to gather while she was here, he had actually really cared for his wife --- Not just in the way that he had cared for her, but actual love. If he hadn’t of loved her, really loved her, then he wouldn’t be nearly so upset over her death. If he hadn’t of really loved her, then there wouldn’t have been a second child, and he would have been gone a long time ago.

Shaking her head vehemently, she reached down and picked up her cup of coffee, gently taking in a sip. Why am I thinking about these things now? She scolded herself angrily. I should be thinking of ways to help the jinzouningen and turn them back into the normal human beings that they deserve to be. This is not the time to agonize over my love life.

Intent on concentrating, she snatched up one of Dr. Gero’s more intense files and spread the contents out on the desk.

It wasn’t easy to understand. Dr. Gero had been a brilliant scientist. His notes and records were complicated and vague at the same time --- revealing everything and yet revealing nothing. She imagined that when he sat down to experiment, he relied more on his own intelligence than any kind of research that he might have done. She had a feeling that most of his experimentations were done spontaneously, probably whenever an idea or theory popped into his head. It also seemed that he did not take the care to write these things down in detail, only explaining them lightly in his notes. Whatever the reason for this was, it made it incredibly hard to figure out what had actually been done. Although she had almost the complete plans for the jinzouningen now, the most important pieces of it were missing.

She could try to figure out those missing parts completely on her own, but she knew that it wasn’t going to work. Like Gero, she was a genius, but in a very different way. She was a technical genius; a person who could make a working gadget out of scrap metal and figure out any code in a computer. When it came to matters of human experimentation and biological science, she was probably no more educated than anyone else. It was true that she had an edge --- she was quick to learn and incredibly sharp, but that still didn’t match her up with the intelligence and talent that Dr. Gero had in that area. There was no way that she could simply place in the missing pieces of the puzzle that Dr. Gero had left. It was much more complicated than that. She did believe, however, that if she researched enough, she would find the solution. Those missing pieces had to be in the files somewhere, perhaps written along a side edge or scribbled on the back of something.

She also planned to do more than just research and look through his notes: she planned to get into Dr. Gero’s head. She had already found several documents that included information on him. Not only did she want to figure out what he did with the jinzouningen, but she wanted to find out why he had done what he did. That was a question that had been burning in her mind for a very long while now. How did a well-respected, incredibly ingenious and intelligent scientist manage to cross over the line of creativity and innovation and stumble into the realms of insanity? What was it that ended up pushing him over the edge? Had this scale of evil and destruction been his plan all along, or was he simply so consumed by the power that he found that he couldn’t help but follow through with it? That was the problem with most scientists: they were so caught up in proving that they were right, that they didn’t stop themselves to think about whether or not what they were doing was morally acceptable.

Perhaps Dr. Gero had fell into that trap as well. Maybe when he first begun his experimentations, he didn’t intend to create the monsters that he did. He wanted to get revenge on Son Gokuu and revenge on the world, but she doubted that he would want to do it at such a grand scale. On the other hand though, there was the possibility that Dr. Gero really had been insane --- and had been that way all along. Maybe instead of slowly realizing the dangerous evil that he was creating, he purposely set out to create it. That latter seemed more likely, when she remembered what she knew of Dr. Gero before the jinzouningen had ever even been heard of. She had never known him to be civil or remotely kind. He had always appeared to live in his own world, far away from any kind of reality. Maybe that dark insanity had been there all along; it just took the horror of the jinzouningen to push it out into the open.

Pushing back from her desk, she raised the coffee cup to her lips once more and took another drink. It was hard to imagine that kind of insanity, that kind of evil. For someone to actually draw up plans and premeditate such awful killing machines….It was almost unthinkable. And she didn’t even want to think about the torture that he had put the jinzouningen through while he was experimenting on them and perfecting them. She doubted that he spared them any kind of comfort at all. He had seen them as nothing but lab rats. But he had taken them, warped them, polished them, and perfected them. He had turned those lab rats into the most sophisticated killing machines that the world had yet to see at that time.

She cast another glance over at the storage room door, imagining the jinzouningen; imagining those unbelievably cold blue eyes.

Dr. Gero had created these perfect killing machines, had created them with the intent to destroy the world. He had molded them into cold, heartless, incredibly strong monsters and set them loose, knowing that the world did not stand a chance against them. He had made them to be invincible, had given them every means for the utmost destruction and devastation. It only made sense that that his programming would creep back into their systems after awhile. No matter how human Juuhachi-gou and Juunana-gou wished they could be, they weren’t. They had only been fooling themselves into thinking that they could live normal lives. It was only a romantic illusion to think that they could overcome the evil that had been implanted in them with the strength of their own human hearts. It simply wasn’t feasible.

Until every influence of Dr. Gero was removed from their bodies, they would never be whole again.

That would be her plan of action, then. She would have to surgically remove anything that the doctor had ever implanted in them. It would be hard --- it would be unbelievably hard, but it was the only way. She would never be able to truly be sure that every single particle of Dr. Gero’s experimentations was destroyed unless she was physically able to take it and crush it under her heel.

A knock at the door made her jump, and she whirled around to stare. Through the small windows in the lab, she could just barely make out the top of Kuririn’s face. She couldn’t help herself from smiling. First of all, she had hadn’t seen her little bald friend in many, many years. Even though she had her moments of frustration with him then, she had still missed him when he died. Kuririn was a good person. A little annoying and boring at times, but he still had a good heart.

She motioned for him to come into the lab with one hand, and absentmindedly tidied up her files with the other. It had felt amazingly good to talk to him that morning, to tell him about his wife and her condition. Eager to see him, and eager to explain what she had done with Juuhachi-gou and Juunana-gou, she hinted around that he should come to the lab and visit for awhile. After she had hung up with him, she was almost sure that he would not be coming, but he actually did.

“You haven’t changed a bit.” He told her pleasantly as he entered the laboratory.

Although she wanted to say the same, she simply couldn’t. Kuririn looked unbelievably different. The dark mop of hair on his head was almost comical, and yet at the same time, completely charming. It made her want to reach out and ruffle it, just as if he were a puppy or a child. The two of them exchanged the obvious small talk, taking a moment or two to get reacquainted with each other. She didn’t want to simply just jump right into the serious stuff. She needed to at least make him comfortable before she started telling him about his wife’s situation.

There was a young girl behind him, who looked so obviously like a cross between him and Juuhachi-gou that Bulma could only assume that it was their daughter. She was cute; cute in a way that was more adorable than beautiful, and it made Bulma smile to see the awkward way that she held her hands in front of her chest. She was wearing a jacket that was much too big on her, and her pale blond hair (the same exact shade as Juuhachi-gou’s) had been tied up in childish pigtails. She looked a little nervous to be here, and kept shooting glances around the laboratory. Bulma felt bad for her. She hadn’t been prepared for Marron to join them --- if she had known that the girl was coming, she would have taken a moment to prepare a gentler speech. She had planned just to tell Kuririn flat out what the situation was, but now that Marron was here, she would have to soften it a bit. If the girl just heard nothing but the gory details, she would feel awful.

It must be awful for them in general. From the very beginning, she had felt bad for this family; these two people had been so greatly affected by the jinzouningen. But now that she was with them and talking to them, it made her feel even more compassionate towards them. It gave her even more incentive to get the job done, and to get it done right. Now it seemed as though there were more important things riding on her success than just the obvious factor of saving the world. She was trying to save a family now as well.