Disclaimer: The only one I'll give for this fic - I do not claim to own anything written in this, and I do not seek to gain profit off of it.

AN: So I thought..."Here's a thought! What about a Naruto/Dragonball crossover? That's like, never been done before!"

But anyway, I'm taking this from the beginning of Dragonball vs the end of Naruto for multiple reasons. The ages of Sakura and the rest of the Z fighters synch up here, their relative power levels are much closer (Sakura will actually surpass their abilities for a while, in fact), and by setting it where I have, it will provide an opening for her to fit into the story. There simply isn't room to do much organically with the cast once aliens start popping up in the story.

And really, in Dragonball it wouldn't have been a surprise at all if the girl they found fell out of thin air onto them instead of sneezing her way into catching their attention. I have no promises on the pacing: I'm not in any huge hurry to rush into Z, but I'm not going to strictly force her to walk through the stages of canon. The fic is a study as much as anything else, into what would happen should Sakura have ended up in Goku's party instead of Lunch. The story will naturally go AU, but how far it will go will depend on Sakura's involvement, and is yet to be seen.

The Next Dimension Over

Chapter one

It couldn't be said that things moved too quickly for her to react, short of the very last moment. Under normal circumstances, she would have been able to react in time just fine. Ninjas were trained to react to critical situations in a moment.

They were trained to do very little at all with the amount of chakra exhaustion she suffered. She certainly wasn't trained to deal with Obito-now-Kaguya's bizarre method of transportation or their twisting portals while handling her excessive chakra depletion. She didn't even truly slip and fall: it was a momentary lurch.

Under the circumstances, a momentary lurch was all that was necessary to dislodge her from the slight grip Sasuke still had on her arm. For a terrible moment, she thought she'd fall back into the dimension between worlds and be trapped there perhaps forever. That moment passed, and she found it was worse than that: rather than crashing to the ground, she found herself falling.

And falling.

Blue sky and silver-gold clouds spiraled by her as her body limply fell toward distant grassland below. Her mind clouded with exhaustion and weakness from the charge of chakra Obito had needed moments before, and it made it difficult to force herself to think. How could she break her fall and land without killing herself? Katsuyu was in another dimension and most likely trapped within the infinite tsukuyomi. Around her, emptiness extended in every direction, with nothing for her to reach out and grasp onto.

She felt too tired to laugh, but otherwise, she might have. If she died from the fall, then she couldn't even wait around helplessly for a rescue while Naruto, Sasuke, and Kakashi saved the world. What a waste of all of her effort and training.

Something collided with her midsection with enough force to knock the wind out of her and make her vision blurry with tears, and an unfamiliar voice echoed through the air. "Power pole extend!"

(*)

Frankly, he didn't much like her. She'd yet to speak a word, since she'd been unconscious the entire time that he'd known her, but he had almost plummeted to his death because his thick headed ride left him to drop through the cloud in favor of catching her (sure, Goku went and got him too before he hit the ground, but no one enjoyed the sensation of falling to their death! He had a very strict rule about not dying before he actually got himself a girlfriend.). She was also just in the way, being sprawled across the cloud unconscious. Granted...if she didn't float on the freaky cloud thing for whatever reason (he refused to accept the idea that having perfectly normal, human thoughts meant he couldn't fly on a dumb cloud) it probably would have been much more difficult to get back home without falling to his death again.

But he still didn't like her. She was covered in blood and dirt and sweat, and he really didn't want to be near whatever it was that gave her that burn on her arm...which might actually be following her for all they knew. Why else would a girl be randomly falling through the sky (unless she went and rolled off of some other cloud in her sleep. Could they do that with just any cloud...?)

Unfortunately, Goku refused to drop her off anywhere since she was injured (or kick her back off the cloud, though he didn't see a problem with that, objectively, since she might have wanted to be falling in the first place), and they definitely didn't have room for four on the dinky little cloud. She wasn't exactly the kind of girl their esteemed master probably wanted, being so wanting up front and so haggard and...blood covered in her current state...

But he had a pretty strong guess from the attitude of the boy in front of him and the old man on the island that put up with her as an offering. And that meant training. After his recent brush with death by cloud, he didn't really feel up to trying to find anything better than 'passable' if he didn't have to.

"Hey, do you think we should get her into bed?"

He blinked, jolted out of his thoughts by the sudden question. Oh. They'd made it back. "Uh...wait, right away?"

"Well, yeah. She looks like she needs to heal up, or do you think we should make sure she's what Grandpa Roshi wants first?"

Oh. That kind of thing.

As Goku jumped from the cloud, he dropped like a rock onto a rock in the sand. Ouch. "...No, we might as well get her inside." Just in case the master got any ideas about telling them to throw her back in.

"Alright!" He hefted the girl in his arms in an awkward looking way that couldn't be comfortable for either of them. "I'll get her up into the bedroom, you go find old grandpa!"

(*)

She knew it would be a strain on her system, but she still hadn't expected it to take so much out of her so quickly. Maybe it was because she'd been running low to begin with, maybe it was the strain of adapting her chakra to fit Obito, or the extra juice she'd had to use to heal up Sasuke and Obito after their ordeals. Maybe the jutsu she supported was so foreign her body couldn't handle it.

Whatever the reason was, she didn't stay conscious long. She felt an impact from the wrong direction, heard an echoing shout, and then darkness consumed her. As her consciousness threaded back, so did her reasoning. The Power Pole was a tool used only by the third hokage's personal summon. She'd heard that from the Fifth when she was training. There was no way that he could have appeared in a parallel dimension without someone summoning him (if he was even free of the genjutsu), and that meant...it had to be the Third's work. Did that mean that the Edo Tensei soldiers were unaffected by the worldwide genjutsu after all?

If...she were in the same dimension as the Edo Tensei soldiers...then that meant that she had fallen into the original dimension when she'd slipped through the cracks. And if she wasn't in a dream world (which she couldn't be, if she remembered not being in it, right?) then...the genjutsu had to have been broken. More than that...she wasn't lying on the hard ground. It was...something soft?

A bed. She'd been moved to a bed. So...that meant...had she...slept through the rest of the fight?

Even if the jutsu was broken by Kaguya leaving the dimension or being defeated...had Naruto, Sasuke, and Kakashi returned? How long had she been asleep? How hurt were they? How was everyone else?

Just what had she missed?

She jolted upward in a sudden panic, shaking off her remaining lethargy with fearful suddenness. A frail looking figure tumbled out of her vision with an unhappy shout...but she barely registered the sound or the movement at all. "Sasuke! Naruto...!" Slowly, she began to register her surroundings, as heaving breaths slowed down. "I...?"

The small room wasn't even slightly familiar. Two small children stood a short distance away from her, eyes wide with surprise and curiosity. Quickly, she turned to look out the window to gather her bearings... "Sea...?"

"Are you...uh..." A scratchy voice spoke from where the children were, and she turned back toward them. "Are you okay, lady?"

"Where'd you come from, anyway?" The boy with hair spoke, scratching the back of his head and screwing his face up into a confused expression. "Did you faint and fall off of a cloud or something?"

...They didn't know where she'd come from? But-

She shook her head quickly, and looked down at herself: still the same tattered, dirty uniform. Her arm had been bandaged, but it hurt too much to have had medical jutsu applied. The man looking dazed on the floor was definitely not the honorable Third.

Then...

"Where...am I?"

"Oh, I know that one!" The dark haired one spoke up quickly, grinning. "You're in Kame house! It's where the old turtle hermit lives."

"...And us, now." The bald young one squinted over at the other with something like suspicion. "Don't forget that."

"Huh?" He blinked, and then shook his head. "Well, yeah! Now it's all of us, right? She's the kind of one you wanted, right, Grandpa?"

Wanted?

The old man, who had been righting himself then, dusted himself off and gave a frantic shushing gesture toward the two kids, and then turned to look at her, dark glasses glinting in the sunlight that streamed through the window next to her. "What...eh...he meant is...you need a place to heal up and stay, don't you? At least until we can figure out how you ended up falling through the sky!" He laughed, and nodded to himself. "Unless you have somewhere else you'd rather be?"

She set her jaw. She didn't have the time to be dealing with...whatever it was that these three were actually planning. What she needed were answers. Could this be another dimension of Kaguya's? A place inhabited by people? What kind of people were living in a dimension that Kaguya apparently created? Prisoners? Or...something worse?

They didn't look dangerous, but when it came to tricks from someone as powerful and unimaginable as Kaguya, she couldn't let her guard down. Her fist clenched at her side. "How...how are you connected to Kaguya?"

The three were silent for a moment or two longer than she wanted to wait, before the old man spoke. "...Kaguya? Just what is that? Is that where you just came from?"

She scanned the room, but the others didn't seem to show any sign of knowing what she meant, either. Just...

How?

No. No. That wasn't important, and she wouldn't allow herself to be distracted. If this wasn't home, then it meant she was still in the grip of Kaguya's dimensions...and the battle might not have been decided. She glanced out the window again, but although it was daylight, that...didn't help at all in determining how much time passed.

"How long has it been since you...found me?"

"Oh...well...let's see..." The old man hemmed and hawed for a moment before the bald one spoke up.

"It's been about an hour."

"An hour?!" She ignored whatever outburst the old man gave toward the child, and immediately shoved herself out of bed, running for the door and...wherever. She'd figure that out once she got outside and found the place she fell through. "I have to get back!"

"Wait!"