Count Down From Ten

Have Some Patience

Chapter Four

(Bulma's POV)

Two months and seventeen long aggravating days, that's how long it's been since my previous interaction with Vegeta. I was on my last nerve with the prince as I stewed in my own frustrations while smoking my last cigarette for the night. The last few months had been filled with tedious amounts of work. Even though the matter had nothing to do with the prince I had grown so used to blowing off steam by yelling at the callous man.

He had become an easy outlet for my frustrations and with the aliens' absence I had few alternatives. Thankfully my mother had been very unselfish with her recent crop. I would find myself jumping at the opportunity to join my parents in my mothers' garden. In previous years I had never indulged as much. I had too many adrenaline rushing activities to keep me occupied.

Nowadays I'm in my lab racking my brain for any sort of inspiration for exciting types of projects. In my opinion it was all the prince's fault. Today was especially grinding. I had spent most of my time down in the laboratory with my father, the day had been taken up with an exhausting amount of paper-work. When we signed our last couple of contracts my father had excused himself, it was after all my parents anniversary so they would be dining out this evening. I had been looking forward to an after work smoke session with my father but I didn't want to put him behind schedule in any way. Instead, I was left to my only other outlet; which just so happened to be glaring daggers into the gravity chamber for the rest of my day.

The first week of Vegeta's absence had been expected, I was using that time to renovate the gravity room back to what it was before the unfortunate explosion. Like any other task that required my full attention I had confined myself to the lab. My music blaring at an obnoxious volume as my body functioned on caffeine and adrenaline; I was fully engrossed with the schematics for upgrades.

I was mentally patting myself on the back for all my previous hard work in keeping up with gravity upgrades. Luckily the algorithms I had invented in December still had backup files on my computer. Now if my computer were to randomly explode then Vegeta would be shit out of luck because it would take both my father and I at least two weeks to start over from scratch but luckily that is not the case.

Ever a man of his word apparently, Vegeta happened to tell me that he would not pester me, for once. I was half expecting him to come by every so often while I added all the upgrades to the gravity room. On any other occasion he would pop into the gravity chamber to yell at me to hurry up but he never showed his face; as far as I knew he was in his bedroom meditating or some crap. When I went to tell him the upgrades were finished a day earlier than I had planned for I couldn't find him anywhere.

His room appeared to have never been lived in; it was so clean, but the armor folded on the dresser and tattered military boots on the floor told another story. With the room devoid of its occupant I decided to examine the armor. I noticed the huge hole on the abdomen and the small hole singed in the left breast plate. This armor wouldn't hold up well in another fight. Naturally, my curiosity got the best of me. I was a scientist after all, I looked over the boots they appeared easy enough to replicate. As I analyzed the tattered materials of the spandex from the battle suit I couldn't help but think that this was something quite worth my time.

Mending his armor had been a nice change of pace from all the gravity room upgrades and it kept my mind off the princes' whereabouts. It was a task that had taken a while; I had to figure out the material, there was nothing like it here on Earth. After a full three weeks of experimenting, I had developed the new synthetic fabric; another two weeks of quality control testing and I was confident in my design. As anticipated, not only was I able to fix the armor and duplicate it, but I was also able to upgrade the fabric.