Fog from the Mirror
by Moonraker One
Author's note: Any who hate Dragonball, I'd suggest not reading this fanfic. I am a manga fan who happens to also enjoy American comics, so I had this idea bounce around in my head for quite a long time. It started from me thinking about all those Goku vs. Superman debates that exist and how idiotic they are, and sort of spiraled into something completely different. So here we go, many things will be different. There will be many elements of the Smallville version of the DC Universe combined with the Dragonverse.
CHAPTER ONE- It all started back when...
Just as it had been many times before, a peaceful wind brushed over the semi-idyllic podunk of Smallville, Kansas; however, its benevolent nature lent to a false sense of security that a ill-wind following after would shatter. None of such occurred to the loving couple of Jonathan and Martha Kent. A jingle of an entry bell sounded as they entered the flower shop currently staffed by Nell Potter. In a corner near a metal table painted white, a young girl in a princess costume waving a magic wand over a small cake caught the attention of Martha. The wife closed in for a better look as Jonathan gave their order for roses to the aunt of Lana Lang. "That is a beautiful tiara!" she complimented the girl. "Are you a princess?"
The girl beamed. "A fairy princess," she corrected. "Do you want to make a wish?" She looked over.
Martha leaned down. "Why, I'd love to, Lana!" She closed her eyes a moment as the girl gently depressed the star-shaped tip of the wand against her forehead, concentrating on her wish. God, please let me have a child. I know I can't have a child of my own, but please, let me have one, She thought. She opened her eyes. She'd been wanting the same thing ever since she found out she couldn't bear children on her own. It wouldn't hurt, she believed, to indulge herself in a little fantasy every now and then.
Having taken the roses, Jonathan reminded his wife that they had places to be and headed out the door. He started the truck as his wife got in the passenger door and set the roses down in between them. Slowly they headed out of the main part of town, not noticing the townspeople gathering around or the meteorites that they were gathering to see. More important issues would show themselves soon enough, and they had chores to concern themselves with. Nevertheless, the citizens all gathered to look up at the streaking balls of fire from the sky. Nell and Lana exited the store in time to witness something they would much later wish had never happened. Nell waved to the parents of the girl standing across the street, having just exited their car. The father looked up at a ball of flame. "What the...?" were his final words in this world.
An instant later, one of several meteorites smashed into the car, and the resulting firestorm that flared up vaporized both man and wife instantly. Nell responded at once to comfort Lana, while the rest of the immediate population descended into chaos, running in every which direction as a second meteorite demolished the water tower, another blasted several vehicles into the sky, and so forth. None of this caught the attention of the Kents, who by this point were outside the main town already. However, they did notice one specific ball of flame heading over their vehicle, followed by several others flying in many directions. One landed in a cornfield far to their right, creating a large shockwave and a mushroom cloud thirty feet high as it leveled several acres of crop. "What's happening, Jonathan?...!" Martha screeched, as an object blasted a trench several dozen feet long and at least five feet wide perpendicular to the road forty feet ahead of them. Jonathan immediately slammed on the brakes, bracing for impact as he realized the truck couldn't stop before entering the trench.
The vehicle disappeared into a huge cloud of dirt dust kicked up by the object. Both husband and wife were tossed against the interior of the truck, both briefly losing consciousness. A few vehicular sounds awoke them both, with Jonathan immediately making sure he felt all his limbs in place, and that none were broken. Satisfied with his being intact, he began fumbling for his seatbelt to free himself, and happened to look to his right, and that's when he saw it. "Martha," he uttered, his voice not allowing him anything louder than a whisper. He cleared his throat. "Martha!" He freed himself from the seatbelt and tumbled to the ground, crawling out of the cab. Gently, he undid his wife's belt and assisted her out of the wreckage.
"Oh my god, Jonathan! He's injured!" Martha ran up to the boy, carefully picking him up. His head looked painted a crimson red from blood oozing out of a nasty wound on his upper forehead, just below a relatively unruly mass of hair. On the sides of his head large clumps of hair pointing like spikes extended a few inches from the regular mass of black, and a large clump extended upwards with several smaller ones beside it. He seemed relatively unconscious, except for his small hand which grasped for air, occasionally grabbing Martha's arm. She'd never felt a squeeze quite so hard, and pulled away fast to avoid injury. "We'd better get him to a hospital." She noticed something. "Hey, there's a burn mark on his lower back! It looks like there was something here that was cut off!" She looked at Jonathan. "I think we'd best get moving."
"I know what you're thinking Martha," he reminded her, "and we can't keep him. But for now, let's get him to a hospital." He took one last look past his wife at the spherical pod with its door open. The seat inside stained with blood, telling him this wound hadn't occurred during the landing. He nimbly climbed out of the trench, helping his wife get out as well. They walked for at least twenty yards before they came across a truck with one of Jonathan's friends in it, dead at the wheel. After tending to the body of his friend, he backed up the truck and got out. "Martha, help me with this thing. We can't just leave it here." Setting the boy down in the cab, they headed over to the pod and rolled it to the back of the truck. "Good. It's lighter than it looks." They slowly lifted it into the back, setting bales of straw so it wouldn't roll away, and covering it with a tarp. It was then they headed off to the hospital in town, taking a back route. Martha gently comforted the boy, cradling him in her arms. Jonathan looked over at her, and swore he'd never seen someone look so happy as his wife at that moment. Maybe it won't be so bad after all, he thought. He hit the brakes as a man in a business suit frantically leaped into the road waving his arms. He jumped down after parking the truck. "Mister, what's wrong?"
The man seemed unable to form coherent phrases, but kept motioning to the cornfield. "He...He...I..."
Jonathan tried to force him. "Mister, what's wrong?" he demanded.
"My...son," the man uttered, finally making slight sense.
"Where is your son?" Jonathan didn't wait for a response. He grabbed the man's arm and led him into the corn, keeping an eye out for a child. He saw a huge circle of downed corn from one of the meteorites, and small clumps of reddish hair every so often. "Mister!" He saw a body curled up, barely conscious, below a pile of downed crop. The man came running, as he took his son into his arms.
"What...what happened to his hair?" he asked, as they ran back to the truck. Martha scooted over to the center as they got in and drove off at full speed towards town. He looked over at Martha, pushing down on a cloth, trying to stop the bleeding on a wound. He wondered how the child came to get such an injury, and how his hair looked so unusual. Still, he said nothing regarding it. His concerns were on the result as a whole. "What're you carrying back there? It's slowing us down." His son, with slight ash marks on his bald head, glanced over in his semi-conscious stupor at the boy with the head wound, clinging tightly to life as he breathed heavily. The boy would seem to get nervous, then reach out, and touch Martha, and would momentarily calm down.
They got to the hospital shortly thereafter, and began the process of waiting desperately for doctors to return to the waiting area with some news that was positive. Martha leaned against the window of the waiting room, her arms hanging by the sides of her chair. Jonathan kept trying to comfort her with his words. It was then that the businessman approached.
"I just got word that my son is doing fine. Thank you very much mister Kent. I appreciate this." He reached into his jacket pocket to get a business card. "If you ever need anything, just give me a call. I mean that, mister Kent." He handed the card over. The name on it was Lionel Luthor. He walked away to make some phone calls and deal with the issues at hand. Jonathan turned back to his wife. A few minutes later, the doctor approached. "Mister and Missus Kent?" The couple turned to the doctor. "I have news on the child you brought in."
Martha asked first. "Well, how is he doing?"
The doctor looked rather bewildered. "That's kind of difficult," he admitted. "Don't worry, physically, he's fine. We barely got a needle in him, because his skin is do darned tough, but I think we got the wound stitched up. The wound must have been from a nasty blow to the forehead. Yeah, his skin broke two needles; we had to get an extra strength kind in to sew the wound up with. He might be anemic for a few days because we can't give him a blood transfusion, but he should be fine."
"Wait," Jonathan retorted, "why can't you give him a blood transfusion."
The doctor raised his eyebrows. "That's one of the difficult parts. I checked his blood. It has the same hemoglobin we do, but his red blood cells are an unusual shape and he has a blood type not yet known to science. Anything I give him from stock might kill him, even O negative, the universal donor, because of the shape of his cells. Still, he didn't lose too much blood. He should be fine."
Martha inquired, "what's the other difficult part?"
"His mental state," the doctor revealed. "He doesn't know how old he is, but since he can speak coherently, I'd put him at least at four and a half. He doesn't remember who his parents are, or where they live, or even what they look like. He does, however, have one of the most vivid imaginations I think I've ever heard in my natural life." He laughed a moment. "He says his name is," he looked at his sheet to make sure he pronounced it correctly, "something like 'Kakarot,' and that he is an alien called a 'Saiyan' from a planet called 'Vegeta.' Naturally, he doesn't remember where he got this information from." He looked at the chart. "He will be fine, but since he doesn't have any identifying papers of any kind, and child services doesn't have missing child reports on anything that remotely looks like him, he'll have to go to the child services office in Metropolis tomorrow morning." He prepared to leave.
Martha chimed in with, "can we take him home?"
The doctor thought a moment. "I don't see child services having a problem with it, but before long we'll have to make sure he's got the proper birth certificate to do all the paperwork and what not." He smiled and walked away. "I'm sure we'll find out who he is sooner or later."
Martha and Jonathan exchanged looks. Jonathan looked at the card in his pocket, realizing it might get put to use far sooner than anticipated. The next morning, the child awoke and was discharged, and when the Kents took him home, Jonathan cashed in the favor, setting in motion a chain of events that would affect everything. Later on, the couple sat down with the child in their living room.
"So, Kakarot, that is your name?"
Kakarot nodded in response to Jonathan's question.
"Who sent you here?" Martha knelt down to ask.
The boy looked puzzled. "I don't know. I mean, I can't really remember." He looked around. "Do you have anything to eat?" He began eyeing a bowl of fruit on a table.
Jonathan had a more practical question. "You remember who you are and where your from, though. And you speak English well."
He got up and walked over to the bowl, took a banana from it, and bit it in half, peel and all. He then repeated the task with the other half, then devoured an orange in three bites. He looked over, remembering he was asked a question. "The computer taught me how to talk like this," he informed them. "And it also taught me who I am and where I'm from." He proceeded to devour every piece of fruit in the bowl, then moved into the kitchen and started eating potatoes uncooked from the plastic bag.
"You've got quite the appetite there," Martha noticed. "Let me fix you something." She headed into the kitchen.
"Who made the computer teach you?" Jonathan inquired.
"Dunno," he replied, muffled by the sound of chewing potatoes.
Martha began cooking a lunch. She looked down at the boy, who'd already eaten half of the potatoes. They'd give him the benefit of the doubt, for he probably hadn't eaten since he arrived on the planet. "You're pretty smart for a four year old."
He looked up. "I am?" He looked around. "Hey, what happened to the big round white thing with the talking computer?"
Jonathan looked up. "Hey, Martha? Why don't you take a break from that for a moment. Let's go see the pod out in the storm cellar." She set the stove on its lowest setting and headed out the door. It was a brief trek into the cellar, with Jonathan carrying the young Kakarot in his arms, handed him over to Martha, as he pulled the tarp off the object. The sphere opened wide as he pushed a button near the door. Kakarot looked at the instrument panel.
"Hey!" he cried. "It's the talking computer!"
At the sound of his voice, a hologram projected from the panel. It looked like a man, roughly five foot seven inches tall, wearing a greenish type of body armor and a device attached to his ear with an eyepiece. He had the exact same hairstyle as the boy. "If you're hearing this, Kakarot, it means you've landed," the man's image spoke. "I may be dead by this point, so this will probably be my last message to you. I am Bardock, your true father. You are a member of the Saiyan race, which a tyrant named Freeza killed so that he could not be threatened. He sent his men to hunt you down as you are the legendary Super Saiyan. They managed to injure you but I know you'll pull through." Tears filled the hologram's eyes. "To those who might have found Kakarot, please treat him with kindness and respect, as I never got a chance to hold you in my arms for very long. Being the legendary Super Saiyan, his destiny will lead him to be the greatest warrior ever to live, just as long as you guide him well. Remember my son, use your power to protect the innocent from harm. Goodbye, my son." He might not have understood it much then, but young Kakarot would hear the message many more times over his life.
Kakarot looked in awe as the hologram disappeared. He looked around, and noticed something out of the corner of his eye. "Hey, mister, what's that?"
Jonathan picked up the golden orb off the counter. "Oh this? I don't know what to make of it. I found it in the back fields some years ago, and never figured out what it was." It was perfectly spherical, about the size of a baseball, and it had four stars on the front of it. It too, would play a vital role in the events to come.
"Mister Kent!" a familiar voice came from above. Quickly, he covered the orb and put the sphere back where it was, and the Kents headed upstairs, out of the cellar. Lionel presented them with a form. "I've got the details together for a fake birth certificate, and I'll be working on the adoption after that. However, we're going to have to have a phony birth name to give to him in order to make this process work. Did you have one in mind?"
Jonathan looked over at Martha. "I don't have the faintest idea. Martha? Any ideas?"
Martha thought a few moments. Kakarot with no last name isn't the best idea, she mulled. Wait, I've got an idea! She looked at the spot on Kakarot's lower back where it looked like an appendage was lost. That looks like the remnants of a tail...why not! "Mister Luthor? I remember back in college I was studying eastern mythology as an elective, so, how about 'Son Goku'?" Jonathan looked at her funny.
"Like the story of the monkey king in Journey to the West," he noticed. "It certainly invokes images of power and glory. First name Goku, last name Son." He wrote it down. "Ok, that'll be his birth name. Any name changes from the birth?"
"I was thinking 'Clark Kent,' but that sounds so ordinary compared to what we've got here, so why not just leave it as the birth name?"
"Ok. I'll make sure it gets completed," Luthor replied, getting ready to leave. "Oh, and I'll be back to discuss some other issues when I'm done." He made his exit.
"Your new name is Goku," Jonathan told Kakarot. "Is that ok with you?"
"Sounds ok," he shot back. He looked up at Martha. "Are you still fixing something to eat?"
They both laughed. "Yeah, Goku, it'll be ready soon enough."
Martha thanked the heavens for her gift. The future would hold huge events that would shake the very foundations of reality, but for now, she could enjoy the young child.