A/N: I started writing this almost immediately after Abnormal, and I got pretty far before I got stuck and abandoned it. Every so often through the years I would come across it and re-read it, and I wanted to finish it but had no idea how. Then Super happened, and while I do love it in its own way, I assumed it was a death sentence for this story. They take place at almost the exact same time, maybe a year after the Universe Survival Arc, so obviously it conflicts and it was never going to be canon compliant. I was a little sad, but there didn't seem to be anything to be done. Then in October I got a review from gizmo-gal on Abnormal asking if I was going to do the sequel. Just knowing there was one person out there still waiting for the rest of the story motivated me to work on it again. I had just gotten to the part where Goku recruits Seventeen for the tournament, and he was so different from my version I realized I could just call this an outright AU. Gizmo-gal has kindly lent her efforts as beta and I am proud to present to you, after a delay of something like six years, the long time coming sequel to Abnormal.

Marron tilted her head this way and that, seeing how she looked from different angles in the floor length mirror in front of her. Her bangs fell neatly across her forehead and her pigtails trailed down her back, held in place by red hair ties. She was satisfied with her hair, but though the cargo pants, t-shirt and boots she wore were suitable for adventuring, they weren't very fetching. She puckered her lips in annoyance before giving herself a bright smile and turning away from the mirror to bound downstairs, determined to be cheerful for her parents.

"You look ready to wrestle a T-rex," her father said, picking her up by the waist and swinging her around. She laughed in spite of herself, but she slapped lightly at her father's arms, desperate to make him put her down before she lost all semblance of dignity. He did, and her eyes went to her mother before she could stop herself. Eighteen was standing next to the couch, arms folded over her stomach, looking placid, though Marron knew her well enough to know she was agitated.

"Do you have all the capsules Bulma gave you?" she asked. Marron sighed.

"Yes, mom."

"You can call us any time and we'll come get you."

"I know, mom."

"Make sure you eat enough. My brother doesn't always remember that sort of thing."

"Mom, I'll be fine!" Marron exclaimed, her exasperation tending toward anger. "I'm not going to the moon!"

Her mother narrowed her eyes ever so slightly and turned her head away. There had been a growing tension between the two of them lately, Marron's normally easy-going temper turning sour at the slightest provocation. Krillin, who was baffled and helpless in the face of his two favorite women in the world not getting along, took his daughter's shoulders in his hands. They were now the same height, a somewhat recent development, so he had to fight the instinct to kneel down to look her in the eye.

"Your mom is just worried about you. We both are. We know you'll be fine with your Uncle Seventeen but we just can't help ourselves. You're our precious little girl, Marron."

Marron squirmed in discomfort. Ever since the incident with Vegeta, her parents, especially her mother, had been overprotective to a degree she found stifling and humiliating. The way they fussed over her felt like she was back in diapers, about to crawl over to something dangerous. She was almost eleven years old, but the way her mother treated her lately made her feel about one and a half. Aside from being lots of fun, the road trip her uncle had planned was going to be a welcome respite from such overbearing treatment. He never made her feel like a baby.

After a long, sullen silence from his daughter, Krillin slowly lowered his arms, frowning but unable to guess at what to say. All three of them were relieved to finally hear a knock on the front door.

"Uncle!" Marron cried, bounding over to the door. She opened it to reveal Seventeen, his overcoat slung over one shoulder and the kerchief he normally wore around his neck stuffed into his pants pocket. He grinned at his niece.

"Phew," he said, stepping inside. "It's too hot this far south."

"No it isn't," Marron contradicted, skipping beside him, "You're just used to it being cold up in the mountains."

She stopped in her tracks, looking back and forth between her mother and her uncle, who were sharing some sort of look.

"Take care of her," Eighteen said, voice colder than the mountains Seventeen lived in. He met her gaze steadily.

"Of course," was all he said. He glanced down at Marron.

"You ready, lightning bug? Got your capsules?"

"Yup!" she answered cheerily, unaware of her mother muttering, "She doesn't sass him when he asks."

"Remember, you have a month before we come looking for you, okay?" Krillin said, giving his wife a comforting squeeze on the elbow as he moved toward Marron. "One more hug for the road, firefly?"

Marron was not so exasperated with her father that she would refuse a hug, though she pulled out of it as quickly as she could. She glanced at her mother, secretly hoping she wouldn't also insist on a hug. Sure enough she merely gave her daughter a nod.

"Be careful," she said, and Marron nodded back.

"I will."

She looked out the still open door, and for the first time, despite having gone out that door countless times in her life, she was suddenly aware that beyond its threshold lay the entire world. It appeared to stretch out before her endlessly, the horizon another threshold to cross, leading to yet another horizon that was itself a threshold, and another and another. She could spend her whole life finding new horizons and never find her way back to this one.

All this crossed her mind in a moment, and after a small shiver went down her arms, she stood a little taller and strode out the door like it was nothing.

"Come on, uncle!" she called, "Let's go!"

Almost a minute into the boat ride away from the island Marron realized Seventeen was going at a granny pace. Although she had never been in a boat with him before, she was sure he would have taken the chance to rev the engine and speed away as fast as the boat could go. As it was, he wasn't even making much of a wake. She glanced up at him quizzically.

"Why are you going so slow?" she asked. He looked down at her, then flicked his eyes back to shore briefly and winked. Marion grinned as she realized he was putting on a show for her parents. This was exactly why Seventeen was her favorite uncle. She refrained from fidgeting as long as they were within sight, but the second Kame House dipped behind the horizon, her uncle opened up the throttle and she let out a whoop of joy that he answered with one of his own.

According to the dragon radar, the closest dragon ball was on an island a few hundred miles from the house, and they made it to shore by late afternoon. When they found the ball it was stuck in a small crevice between two rocks. All Marron had to do was reach down and pluck it out of the ground like a strange fruit. Seventeen let her brag about the fact that her hands were small enough to fit and his weren't with an indulgent smile on his face.

"I mean, what would you have done if I weren't here?" she asked teasingly, and then immediately sobered as she realized that an awkward rock formation would hardly have inconvenienced her super-powered uncle.

"No, you did good," he said, after the silence began to stretch, but he could instantly tell he had only made things worse. They walked on in an awkward silence, but by the time they reached the rocky shore Seventeen had had an idea.

"Hey, remember I promised you I'd teach you to shoot?" he asked, slinging down the bag that held their capsules and pulling out a case. Marron's face lit up, somberness immediately forgotten. He gave her an answering grin and popped his rifle, snatching it out of the air with a practiced ease that never failed to impress his niece.

They went through the basics of gun safety ("always assume it's loaded, never point it at anything unless you intend to shoot it, keep your finger off the trigger until you're ready to fire,") and then went through an overview of how the gun worked, how to load it, proper technique; and only when Marron could repeat everything back to him did he let her hold it.

"Okay, aim for that rock over there," he told her, crouching behind her to help her sight. She relaxed, taking her time to aim the way he'd told her, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger. Even through the ear protection Seventeen had belatedly remembered, the noise was almost deafening. Ears ringing, heart pounding, breath unsteady, she slowly lowered the gun.

"Wow," Seventeen breathed, straightening up and staring at the rock that now had a large chip in it. "That was pretty good for a first try, bug."

He looked down to see Marron grinning ear to ear, her shoulders shaking with excitement. She lifted her head to meet his gaze, eyes shining.

"That was awesome!" she cried. Seventeen couldn't help returning her grin, pleased that she hadn't been scared, and more pleased that he had been successful in distracting her. He let her shoot to her heart's content until the sun went down, and then they made camp a little ways inland. "Making camp," in this case, meant popping a capsule house on a level spot of ground. Dinner was sandwiches because neither of them felt like cooking, and they ate outside looking up at the stars, both feeling the quiet camaraderie they had developed over the weeks she'd stayed at his cabin.

As she was drying her hair after her bath, Seventeen having already taken his, Marron heard him exclaim in the main room,

"Bulma is officially crazy."

She opened the door, still toweling off her hair.

"What?"

Seventeen gestured expansively to a cabinet she hadn't noticed before, the doors now flung open. It housed a large screen TV and more movies than Marron had ever seen in her life. Her uncle shook his head in disbelief.

"Who packs a TV and movies when they go camping?"

Marron draped the towel over her shoulders and walked over to the movie cabinet. It housed a wide selection, everything from little kid movies to action flicks to romantic comedies. She saw a title she recognized and pulled it out. The cover showed a mustachioed man in a trench coat holding a pistol while a blond woman draped herself luxuriously over him. Seventeen raised an eyebrow at the choice. Marron shrugged.

"It's Oolong's favorite, but mom and dad won't let him watch it when I'm in the house, so I don't know what it's about."

"Want to watch it?" Seventeen offered. Marron looked up at him with huge, eager eyes. He grinned. "I won't tell if you won't."

It turned out to be disappointingly boring. It was in black and white, there were a lot of kissing scenes, and everyone spoke in an old, strange dialect. The lack of excitement on screen, however, was more than made up for by the thrill of being allowed to watch something forbidden. Seventeen didn't even seem to mind when she started talking part way through, and he didn't make fun of her for looking away from the kissing parts or the scene where the bad guy's head exploded. When the movie ended and they finally went to bed, it was several hours past her bedtime.

Lying in bed, thinking over her day, Marron felt more grown up than she ever had in her life, and it wasn't until she was halfway to falling asleep that she began to dwell uneasily on what exactly they were doing out here. True, they were on a quest to obtain the dragon balls, just like in the old stories her dad used to tell her, but unlike in those stories, they were intentionally handicapping themselves to make it take longer. If there were really some point to summoning the dragon her uncle could fly around the world and have them gathered in half an hour. They weren't out here for any grand purpose, like trying to bring someone back to life or fix the damage done by an enemy: they were out here because her uncle had wanted to take her on a road trip, and she suddenly felt very foolish for feeling grown up at all. She wasn't necessary to any of this. She was just along for the fun of it.

She sighed deeply, turned over, and took a long time to get to sleep, none of which was lost on her uncle, lying awake in the bed across the room.

By the next morning she had recovered her spirits. The next dragon ball was on another, slightly bigger island and Seventeen let her drive the boat most of the way there. It was lodged in a tree, and when she suggested he could merely fly up and grab it, he looked at her oddly.

"We're doing this the old fashioned way, bug," he reminded her, almost sternly. "That tree has way too many small branches for me to climb it, big as I am. It's got to be you."

There was still that sense of being humored, but it was easily squelched in the face of both his impeccable logic and the fact that she knew better than to suppose Seventeen would do something like coddle her to make her feel better. And climbing the tree turned out to be a lot of fun. She got debris in her hair and sap on her hands and tore her shirt in two places and when she reached the ground Seventeen did no more than pick one or two of the larger twigs out of her hair and suggest she scrub her hands with sand.

Once the dragon ball was procured, Seventeen let her shoot the gun again, and this time she managed to hit a squirrel. She stood over it, not sure how to feel.

"What do we do now?" she asked.

"What are you talking about?' Seventeen countered. "I taught you how to skin and dress things back at the cabin, remember?"

Marron hesitated, squirming a little. She looked back up at her uncle, one eyebrow raised in an expression of incredulous disgust.

"Yeah, but… a squirrel?"

"They're not bad eating," Seventeen said, but Marron made a face and shook her head.

"Can't we just… leave it?" she suggested, but even as she said it, she knew it wasn't proper. Her uncle looked at her with a strange expression on his face, like he was trying to decide something. Eventually he said,

"If you don't want to eat it, then at least take the tail."

"Okay," Marron said, bending down to do the work. She resolved not to kill any more animals unless she wanted to eat them. The idea of leaving it, as though just killing it had been the point, was too... sad, somehow. She tried to think of something she might want to do with a squirrel tail. "What if I put it on a keychain and gave it to my mom?" she said, looking up at her uncle with a grin. He threw back his head and laughed.

"She would kill me!" he howled gleefully, as though that were the best part. Marron laughed too, as much at the idea of doing something so against her mother's sensibilities as at her uncle's joke. She finished harvesting the tail and wondered idly if she could just live with Seventeen from now on. She supposed she would miss her father a little too much to really want to do it, but getting to go on a month-long road trip with him was turning out to be even better than she had dared hope.