Some often told him he was one of the luckiest men alive. He had seen it all, they said. He had lived to tell the tale, they said. When no one else should have possibly made it through all that he had, he did. He must have been blessed by the goddess of luck, they said.
The problem was that he had never made it through anything. He was a coward, through and through, and suffered like one. If the goddess of luck had done anything to him, then most certainly she had placed a curse on him.
It had started when he was young. He hadn't realized the truth of the world just yet. He had thought he could make a difference in the world. Young, full of hopes and dreams. He was a simple policeman at the time, it was his second week on the job. He had yet to have a chance to help anyone, and he was getting antsy.
Then along came King Piccolo. When others ran in fear, he ran right for the danger. If he could save one life, he thought...
Was there more? Maybe. Maybe not. He never did finish that thought. He died, like so many others. Like an insect, insignificant before King Piccolo. That had been the end of him.
Yet sometime later he found himself alive, when he knew by all accounts he should be dead. He was positive he had been dead. Why was he alive?
There was no explanation. Many had mysteriously come back to life, despite how the deaths had even been captured on film. No one understood, certainly not he.
This lack of knowing haunted him constantly. Was any of this real? Was he in some kind of limbo? Was his whole world going to end at any moment? Had it ended already and he had simply gone mad?
From that moment on, he never trusted anything again. If he couldn't trust something as fundamental as life and death, what could he trust?
He did take one positive thing from the experience, at least.
He just wasn't cut out for police work.
Frankly, he wasn't cut out for anything in his state of mind.
For a while, he was a daredevil. Whether this wasn't real or he just couldn't die, he didn't care. Maybe he had just lost the ability to. Again and again he put his life in ridiculous dangers, but he always came back from it. That was how people started deciding he was lucky.
He went off the grid for a while. Some say he took to the streets, others say he was locked up in a mental institution under a false name.
It was years before anyone heard his name again.
Then, just like that, he was back.
He had recovered. He didn't talk about how, but he had. He convinced himself that it had all been a dream. He had never died. How crazy was that? Something else must have happened, but he was still here, wasn't he? People just didn't come back to life!
Though by now he had been diagnosed with PTSD, he could at least live his life again like a normal person. He even got married. His friends always remarked about his luck, despite how antsy and fearful he had become over the years.
He wanted to get away from it all. So he and his beautiful wife settled down somewhere nice.
Ginger Town.
The last time he ever saw his wife was when he saw her getting sucked up into that monster's tail. He followed shortly after. Once again, he had died.
And, once again, he returned to life. Just like that. He had felt his body being slowly sucked away by another, and then just like that, he was back again.
Did anyone care? Oh, heavens no. The world was happy. A monster had been defeated, a hero had been born, and the day was saved. Everyone was returning to their homes, or so it seemed, and resuming their lives once more.
All except for him.
He couldn't go back, of course. He was sure he had died this time. There was no way around it. He was sure his wife, who had been pregnant, had died. Part of him wanted to go back, but he couldn't. The mere thought of it just... It just broke him.
He couldn't face that life. It must have been some kind of illusion. This whole world must be some kind of trick. Everything from the moment he saw King Piccolo that day, it had to be.
Perhaps he was lying in a building somewhere, drugged and trapped in some madman's experiment. This whole world, the life he had lived up until now, none of it was real. That made sense.
It made much more sense than the dead just coming back to life, that was for sure.
Wherever he went, he suspected everyone if everything. Was that woman dead? Was that child real? Was that man in the window out to get him?
It was only his reflection, yet it terrified him all the same. For every time he saw it, he was haunted by images of that face melting away as the monster known as Cell swallowed him whole.
One day, the man realized he had reached his breaking point. He watched someone get run over, and when the scores of people were calling for help, all he could wonder was how many days it would be before the person got up again. That's how the world worked, didn't it?
The people in the crowd didn't seem to share his opinion. Not one bit.
It didn't matter though. He had already decided what he was doing today.
He climbed to the highest building in Satan City, smiling more than he had in years. He had drawn attention to himself, he realized, but it just confused him. People were making such a fuss, he truly didn't understand why. Why not try joining him instead of being so upset?
After all, he'd be alive again before the sun set.