Dragon Ball Xenoverse -- Cosmic Castaway: The Heroes of Time Saga

PART I: CONTON CITY CASTAWAY

Chapter 1: Welcome, For The Rest Of Your Life, To The Time Patrol

A/N: And so, after not one, but TWO prologues, we finally begin this epic tale of time hopping and super-powered punching properly! And the author finally makes an author's note! And also something of an introduction as well. I hope you'll forgive me this slight indulgence of putting this here before the first chapter and not before the prologues but I felt that if I did that, I might lose some of you before the story even began. You see, this fic has been a long, LONG time in coming. Originally I called it Dragon Ball Z: Cosmic Castaways and started outlining it around about... probably 2002 or so. Yeah, it's been nearly twenty years since I originally came up with the basic idea for this fic. Back then DBZ was at the height of its popularity in the States and I came up with two ideas for fanfics concerning it. One was my now-never-to-be-finished continuation of DBZ called 'The Kakarot Saga,' and the other was an idea for a team-based fic. But because this was back during the height of Saiyan-mania, and also because I didn't really know much about the world of Dragon Ball at the time AND because we didn't have awesome games like Xenoverse 2, it didn't end up being very good. The 'team' I came up with for the original version of the story was pretty much just a group of saiyans. Not a whole lot of imagination or variety there, right? Well, like I said, we were all obsessed with super saiyans and I just didn't really fathom the idea of having characters that could be anything else. The other reason the original Cosmic Castaways wasn't that good (and partly where the name came from) was that it was essentially just a straight re-hash of the DBZ story, starting from just before Radditz's arrival on Earth and then going on through the subsequent sagas. I did try to change up a few things here and there, such as the saiyan team transforming into Oozaru to try and combat Frieza or having some of them accompany Mirai Trunks back to his timeline to fight the androids and also coming up with a much more elaborate introduction for Super Saiyan 3 but there wasn't too much more than that. I ended up getting to just the beginning of the Majin Buu saga before I finally gave up; a combination of Majin Buu being my least favorite saga and finally admitting to myself what I've been explaining here, that I was just reworking DBZ, not coming up with anything really all that original.

Now having said all that, you might be thinking, 'well aren't you doing the same thing since you said that this is going to be based on the Xenoverse games?' Well, yes and no. Because of the nature of the Xenoverse story and the conflict between the Time Breakers and Time Patrol, I'm not going to be rehashing things plot point by plot point directly. Also, In an effort to make this story worth reading and put my own twist on Xenoverse 2, our Conton City heroes aren't going to be fixing time anomalies that have to do with the main timeline DBZ story and some of DBS... they're going to be intervening in anomalies that have to do with the MOVIES. Yup, I'm going there. And I mean, why not? Turles and Lord Slug were already villains in Xenoverse 2 so I decided to change things up a bit. How is any of that going to interfere with the things at the Time Nest, you may ask? Well... you'll just have to read to find out.

So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, friends near and far, Dragon Ball fans and children in truth and in heart, I present to you: Dragon Ball Xenoverse - Cosmic Castaway: The Heroes of Time Saga! Have fun!

— — —

As she slept, memories intertwined with dreams.

"So if we use this machine of Bulma's, we can go back in time and prevent Goku's death at the hands of the androids?" asked Krillin.

"We can only hope..." Roma replied.

At first, it had all been so simple; go back in time, prevent Goku from dying, save the present. But things had only begun to spiral out of control from there.