Reluctantly, Bulma handed over the Time Machine and, eagerly, Gohan took it. He gazed greedily down at the capsule in his hand for a moment, then pocketed it before Bulma could change her mind.

"Don't worry," he said, "if anyone asks, I'll say I stole it."

"That's not what I'm worried about." Bulma stepped forward and put her hands on his cheeks, studying his eyes with her large blue ones. Sometimes he forgot Bulma was old enough to be his mother. "I'm worried about why you're doing this."

For a moment he thought back to Videl, her face solemn and determined. Viciously he pushed the memory away and gently pulled Bulma's hands down from his face.

"I have to do this," he told her firmly. "If I don't, I'll regret it for the rest of my life."

"You do have more than your fair share of regrets." Bulma gave a sad smile. "But I think trying to fix them will only bring more."

She was probably right, Gohan thought as he flew towards Yunzabit Heights. But he didn't care.

When Videl heard the doorbell ring, she thought for an absurd moment that it was Gohan.

She sighed, putting down the laundry basket she was carrying, and chided herself. First of all, the man wouldn't bother ringing his own doorbell. Besides, he'd left hours earlier to 'visit Piccolo'—though she knew that had only been code for 'I'm angry at you and I need to blow off some steam.' He probably wouldn't be back until after nightfall, although they fought so seldom she wasn't actually sure. Maybe it was him and he was too beat up to open the door.

It wasn't him.

Goten stood on the porch, tear tracks cutting through the grime on his face, the knees of his pants soaked and muddy. Behind him were Tien and Chiaotzu, looking grim, and lying unconscious in Tien's arms was—

"Bulma!" Videl backed up quickly to let them inside, mind racing. She knew Tien mostly by reputation, and even though Bulma knew him better, she also saw him about as infrequently. Why was he carrying her? Why had he carried her here? "Goten, what happened?"

She ushered them into the nearest sitting room. Tien laid Bulma on the mostly decorative couch, and Videl threw a blanket over her. She looked at Goten, who was starting to shiver.

"I-I don't know!" he said, voice high with panic. His arms were wrapped around himself and he was staring at Bulma. "I found her like that at Capsule Corp. She was lying in the bushes. The whole building was on lockdown, I— I've never seen it like that before. All the metal shielding was down and the energy shield was too. I couldn't get inside. I didn't see anyone in the whole compound, even the employee parking lot was empty. It was like a ghost town, and she wouldn't wake up…"

Goten sucked in a shuddering breath and visibly tried to calm himself. Videl knelt beside Bulma and gently probed her head, looking for bruises or contusions and finding none. She looked up at Tien, who had parked himself at the edge of the room so they were all in his line of sight. He spoke before she could ask.

"We were at Capsule Corp. because Bulma left a message asking us to come. She didn't give any details, but it sounded urgent."

Videl frowned. "But why would she call you?"

"I don't know." Tien shook his head.

"Okay," Videl said, gearing herself up to be patient, "so why did you bring her here?"

All three of them looked at her, nonplussed.

"You said you found her lying unconscious at Capsule Corp. with no idea what happened?" Videl was very carefully not yelling. "Why didn't you call an ambulance?"

Interestingly, both Tien and Goten looked at Chiaotzu.

"She's not injured," he explained. Videl arched an eyebrow.

"And how do you know that?"

Chiaotzu's mouth puckered in concentration. "She's… sleeping. Or, not sleeping, but…" His hands waved in vague patterns around his head as he searched for words. Then he gave up and dropped his arms to his sides. "I just know."

Videl was this close to reading him the riot act, vis a vis head injuries, when she caught sight of Goten huddled at the foot of the couch looking frightened and miserable. She forced herself to smile instead.

"Well, what's done is done. Goten, is Trunks still at school?" Goten nodded. "Can you go get him? He should be here."

Goten unwrapped his arms from around himself.

"I'll be right back," he said, and ran from the room. A second later they heard the woosh of his takeoff outside, and Videl glared at Chiaotzu.

"You'd better be dead certain she's not hurt. Moving someone with a head injury is extremely dangerous!"

"I know! It's not that. She's all..." Chiaotzu spun his hands around each other. "Twisted up inside. Hiding, not injured. Something bad happened, but it wasn't head trauma. I can tell."

Videl stared at him incredulously, then looked at Tien.

"Chiaotzu can read minds even better than I can," he told her. "What he says is the truth."

"O-kay," she said slowly. She did know mind reading was something that came with high level ki use, though she preferred not to think about the implications of that too hard. "So why isn't she waking up?"

Chiaotzu frowned. He walked over to Bulma and put a hand on her head. "I don't know. Her memories of the whole day are a blank. It's like she's been asleep since last night, but she definitely called us this morning. Goten said she called Goku too."

"Did she call Gohan?" Tien asked her, and Videl started to shake her head. She caught herself and shrugged, annoyed that she'd forgotten they were fighting.

"I wouldn't know. He's been gone for hours."

Tien arched an eyebrow. "Gone?"

"Training with Piccolo," she amended calmly. She caught sight of Chiaotzu closing his eyes in concentration and turned to him. "Can you wake her up?"

Chiaotzu opened his eyes and looked at Tien. They seemed to be having a silent conversation, and as the silence wore on, Videl realized they were probably literally conversing in their heads. Whatever the nature of their discussion, Chiaotzu seemed to come off worse, tearing his eyes away from Tien with an annoyed sigh.

"Fine," he said, sounding defeated. He closed his eyes again.

"What?" Videl glanced between them, bewildered. "What?"

"He's going to try to wake her up," Tien explained.

"Was he… not going to do that?" Videl demanded. Chiaotzu opened his eyes briefly.

"It's… complicated," he said. "I might not be able to."

"You will," Tien said confidently. Chiaotzu gave him one last glare and closed his eyes again.

And then… nothing. For several minutes Chiaotzu stood stock still, hand on Bulma's forehead, face serene with concentration. Tien stood almost as still, watching his friend with his arms folded across his chest. Eventually Videl sat down on the armchair next to the couch.

"How long is this going to take?" she asked. Tien glanced briefly at her.

"It's impossible to say," he said.

Videl held back a sigh. More minutes passed. She tried not to fidget.

"Why is Goten not back yet?" Tien asked.

"Trunks' school is pretty far from here," Videl said, grateful for a break in the silence. "He's been going to a new prep school since March. About time, I say. It'd be one thing if he was going to apprentice to Bulma and be an inventor, but he's clearly not interested. He needs to mix with society more if he's going to run the company someday."

"Is he?" Tien seemed interested in spite of himself. Videl shrugged.

"That's my guess. When I ask Goten about it he doesn't know, but I don't know if that's because Trunks doesn't know himself, or if he's not telling Goten."

Tien raised his eyebrows. "I thought there wasn't anything they didn't tell each other."

"They used to." Videl looked down at her hands, linking her fingers together. "They've got so much in common that sometimes I think they forget they come from different worlds. That used to not matter, but lately…"

"What do you mean, different worlds?"

Videl held back another sigh. She'd known none of Gohan's side would understand, but laying it out felt cruel.

"Trunks is a rich city kid who's going to inherit a multi-billion dollar company. Goten is the second son of a country farmer. Under normal circumstances they never would have even met. That was bound to catch up to them sooner or later."

Tien frowned at her. "I think you're being too pessimistic," he said. "What their parents do for a living doesn't matter. Their bond is too strong to let something like that come between them." He glanced at Chiaotzu as he said this, a subtle softness entering his eyes.

Videl chose to refrain from commenting. Tien could be right. He should be right. If anyone could beat the odds stacked against them, it was Goten and Trunks. But Videl knew firsthand the way wealth and fame could poison relationships. Even the friends that hadn't turned bitter or fawning had found themselves repulsed by what her father's rise to fame was doing to Videl herself. She had eventually found friends who didn't mind, or even understood, her newfound prickliness, her defensive arrogance, but not one of her old friendships had survived the transition.

"They'll be alright," Tien reiterated, and Videl gave him an insincere smile.

Chiaotzu stood in front of the faintly glowing energy shield of a locked down Capsule Corp., hesitating. The way Bulma was steadfastly refusing to interact with reality unnerved him. Some people were like that: any bump on the road of life and they retreated into themselves like a snail into a shell. But Bulma, he knew, was the complete opposite. Bulma came at life with fists swinging. If she was retreating into herself now something truly awful must have happened.

But he hadn't come here to speculate. He'd come here to bring her back out. Chiaotzu lifted his hand and pushed it slowly through the shield, which parted for him like water.

Instantly he was inside, without having gone through the mundane business of opening doors or passing through doorways. All across the atrium was a bustle of activity: robots and ghostly humans carrying printouts and machine parts and cups of coffee. Several copies of Bulma stood around a chalkboard and debated something in loud and esoteric language. None of them paid any attention to Chiaotzu.

He wandered around for some minutes being totally ignored by everyone, gawking at the sheer amount of movement. Everywhere he looked something was being built, or designed, or imagined. It was controlled chaos, and it left Chiaotzu dizzy.

Finally he found a passageway that led off the main entrance deeper into the building. At first it went straight back, but soon it turned, then turned again, then forked. Chiaotzu didn't think too hard about it, just picked a random direction, and soon that passage forked and again he chose randomly. As he walked, the featureless walls began to grow narrower, the ceiling lower, until the hallway was too small for even him to squeeze through.

He backtracked to the last fork and went the other direction, but before long that passage also shrank into nothing. Again he went back, and again, always with the same result.

Frustrated, he went back to the entrance and thought about what to do.

"It's just the Fibonacci sequence," a pregnant version of Bulma told him. "It's not that hard if you know what you're doing."

Bulla had been born almost a year before, so Chiaotzu knew this was not the real Bulma. The real Bulma was probably at the center of the maze, but he didn't even know what the Fibonacci sequence was, much less how to use it to navigate.

"Wait, I remember now," Bulma said, laughing. "You're the one who couldn't even do basic addition. You'll never get in there like that."

Chiaotzu scowled.

"I don't need math to fight."

"Oh, come on, it's easy. You just start at one and add the previous two numbers together. Even you can do the first few steps. Try it."

With nothing else to do, Chiaotzu did, Bulma helping him along.

"Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, then…?"

Chiaotzu sweated. They'd moved beyond his fingers now. Eight plus thirteen was impossible without taking off his shoes and socks, and he didn't want to embarrass himself in front of someone so smart.

"Oh, alright, since you tried." Bulma handed him a slip of paper with a picture of a strawberry on it. "There. But for heaven's sake, take some remedial classes, will you?"

Chiaotzu made quick time with the map, barely managing to squeeze his way through to the center. Once he was through, the entire building opened up like a flower and he was standing on top of a giant strawberry. Bulma— the real Bulma, Chiaotzu was sure— was curled protectively around the stem.

Without looking at what she was protecting (she deserved what little privacy he could give her), Chiaotzu shook Bulma gently by the shoulder, calling her name. She swatted at him.

"Bulma," he said again. "You need to wake up."

"Go 'way," she mumbled, turning over to face him. Squinting, she caught sight of him and startled. "What the— Chiaotzu? What are you doing here?"

She got to her feet and looked around, her mouth dropping open as she took in the sight. Chiaotzu took her hand.

"You're dreaming," he told her. "And you need to wake up."

Bulma stared at him for a moment, and then something dawned in her eyes and the landscape began to melt away. Chiaotzu smiled, relieved.

On the couch in Videl's house, Chiaotzu's eyes opened the same moment Bulma's did.

A/N: My two inspirations for this were MasakoX's Build-A-Baddie series, and the story also titled Mindscape by SatuD2 over on Ao3. I took both those premises and ran. I ran so far away.

Just a note: this takes place pretty soon after the Tournament of Power because that's when I started writing it. It probably contradicts things in the Broly movie and the manga by now, so's you know.