Gohan answered the phone on the first ring.
“Hello, Son residence….oh, hi Bulma….Pan…no, I really don’t think—” Gohan dropped his head and held the phone away from his ear as Bulma’s voice cut him off and echoed through the receiver.
“What I don’t get is why we just don’t tell her to stand in her front yard and yell…it’d be the same thing, she doesn’t hear what we say, we can’t get a word in edgewise, and we still hear her loud and clear,” Pan mumbled around her breakfast.
ChiChi whapped her on the back of the head. Pan laughed.
“Bulma—what?…” Gohan sighed, his head still aimed defeatedly at the floor, the mouth piece of the phone in front of his face, the earpiece somewhere off to the side of his head. “Bulma, are you sure that’s the brightest…yes, you’re a genius, Bulma, no one could forget—you wouldn’t let the—…Bulma…yeah, I know that…but one, I’m a schol—…alright, yeah, but I don’t like the ide—…”
Pan laughed as she watched her father rake a hand through his hair, laughing quietly at Bulma’s enthusiasm.
“Alri—Bulma, listen to me, please…just let me say something, ok?…Thank you! Bulma, yeah, I know it’s tearing them bo—” He groaned, once again cut off by the infamous Bulma Briefs. “Alright, Bulma, but I don’t like the idea of doing that to my ki—”
He blinked, lifting his head and holding the receiver out in front of him, staring at it as if he had just been told it was Cell incarnate.
“Should it surprise me that she hung up without letting me explain myself?”
“No. That’s why I say she stand on her front lawn and yell. We’d hear her, at a bearable decibel level, and she’d hear just the same amount of response from us.”
Gohan shook his head. “I used to wonder how she fell in love with Vegeta…now I wonder how Vegeta can stand to sleep with her.”
He promptly earned a slap upside the head from his wife.
“No—Videl, what I mean is that she never shuts up! On Namek, with Krillin, and on the way there, she’d just keep talking and talking…and talking…even in her sleep! She just doesn’t shut up! I don’t mean sleep with her,” he cried, his face turning crimson. Videl, seeing as much, tried not to laugh. They have one daughter and try countless times for a second child, and the man still turns red at the mention of sex. “I mean actually sleep with her!”
ChiChi laughed. “What’d she want, anyways?”
“She wants Pan to meet her down at Capsule Corp in about an hour…I don’t understand why, she cut me off every time I tried to ask. But, yeah. And she wants me to stay as far away from the building as I can without leaving the country.”
Pan rubbed her head, her light mood broken.
“If that bastard—”
“Pan!” ChiChi cried, staring at her granddaughter. “Watch your language!”
Head still cradled in hand, elbow still resting on table, Pan muttered, “I have choicer words, if you’d like, Grandma.”
Grinding her teeth, ChiChi turned back to the sink.
“Pan,” Gohan said gently as she straightened up, setting her napkin on the table. “Bulma’s orchestrating this…not—”
“Yeah, well, let’s hope so. If I have to set one foot in the same room with that pompous prince, I don’t care if I leave the room in a body bag, I will do what I have to do to distance myself as far away from him as possible.”