The Life of a 27th Century Teenager - Summer Camp, a dragon ball z fanfic

L27CT – Summer Camp

Based on the roleplay, Dragonball Z – A Lionel Production

by Ninmast

Author's Note: A Day in the Life of a 27th Century Teenager was originally a one-off short story describing a single day in the life of a typical teenager, six hundred years after Saiyans, Namekians and other alien races came to Earth and came to call it home. Notable differences include that the Saiyans heeded Bardock's warning and most of the population managed to escape the destruction of their planet. This meant that Kakarot was not sent to Earth as a child and instead grew up with his family. The threats before the Saiyan Saga that Goku dealt with were instead handled by humans, and it was they that stood against the coming of the Saiyan threat, ultimately allying with the Saiyan migrant fleet to defeat Frieza and the threats that followed. Namekians, as well, and the original Vieteri race all had representatives in the heroes of that era. They brought peace to a forever-changed planet that had a new place in a much bigger universe, and a new realization of the power it was capable of.

Six centuries later, humanity is very different from what it was. For six hundred years, they have shared the planet with species once considered aliens. Saiyans and Namekians grow up alongside humans, together calling the planet home. They are not the only races on Earth, nor is it the only planet they call home, but they are the three most populous, and except for the Namekians and New Namek, there is no where else in the galaxy where they number so greatly. Under a new Kami that has, for more than two centuries, taken a much more open and involved role in the world than the Kamis before her, Earth has blossomed into an intergalactic cultural melting pot. Even the average power level of its citizens is higher than at any point in its history, rivaling or even surpassing that of Plant during its height of Saiyan power and influence.

And yet humanity, in so many ways, is so much that it always has been, and that is the heart of the world of A Day in the Life. Though Summer Camp covers more than the single day of the original story, this premise remains. The fantastic setting only frames the familiar personalities, the well-known turmoils, and the utterly mundane lives that make humans so exceptionally wonderful.

For those interested in this short story's word count, please start with the beginning of the story on the following page and exclude this forward.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy The Life of a 27th Century Teenager – Summer Camp.

Since time immemorial, the being known only as Kami has protected the people of Planet Earth from threats they cannot hope to resist on their own. And for as long as there have been the brave and the strong among its people, the bravest and the strongest have served Kami and trained to be …

The Guardians of Earth!

Under Kami's legendary training, these mere mortals transcend their own boundaries and reach heights lesser beings can only dream of! And yet the traits that make these warriors into heroes are not unique to them. Long have the vast majority who long to protect planet and family been resigned to more pedestrian methods, and the only reason being that everyone simply can't be the best.

But not anymore!

Now anyone can benefit from the wise Kami's legendary training! You, too, can increase your power level as much as a hundred times in just one month at Kami's Guardians of Earth Summer Training Camp! Reserve your spot now! Space is limited! Don't miss your chance for this amazing training opportunity!

Results not typical. One hundred times estimate based on lowest estimated power level of 50. The training regimen of Kami's Guardians of Earth Summer Training Camp is not recommended for those with power levels below 2,500. Kami's Guardians of Earth Summer Training Camp is not responsible for injuries incurred during training, including concussions, lacerations, osseal breakage, dismemberment or death. Not recommended for women who are pregnant or nursing, those sensitive to caffeine, those with heart or digestive conditions, those with seizures or other mental handicaps. Kami's Guardians of Earth Summer Training Camp makes no guarantee, stated or implied, that those who complete the training regimen of Kami's Guardians of Earth Summer Training Camp will be sufficiently powerful to qualify for selection in Kami's Guardians of Earth and does not promote or encourage aggression toward others in any belief to the contrary. Kami's Guardians of Earth Summer Training Camp is not affiliated with the World Martial Arts Tournament Organization or any other enterprise or entity pictured or mentioned in this commercial unless otherwise stated.

The television switched off while the indecipherable small print was still blitzing across the screen, and Hiro gently tossed the remote onto the coffee table in front of the sofa. Behind him, Miyou pushed his tall, lean body up from where he had been leaning on the back of the furniture.

"So that's it, then?" Hiro's best friend intoned with his usual lazy skepticism as he ran a hand through his black, slicked-back hair, its six-inch lengths stiff enough to never fully lay down. "That's what we're spending our summer doing? Sounds like a glorified boot camp to me." He didn't even look at his friend to tell he was receiving a glare. "Don't give me that look," he omnisciently countered. "You can shout training all you want, Hiro, but we all know you're only in it for Kami."

"Oh, Kami-chan!" a young preteen girl gasped mockingly as she entered the room carrying a tray of drinks, her hair the same, though much longer, messy dirty blonde as the boy she was mocking. "Oh, Hiro-kun! Kami-chan, won't you train me? But Hiro-kun, you're already so strong!" Mei, Hiro's younger sister, nimbly ducked the hurled couch pillow her brother chucked at her without spilling a drop.

"Hopeless romantic delusions aside," Miyou put in with a grin before vaulting the couch to land on the middle cushion to the left of his friend and scooping up a glass of the pseudo-fruity beverage, "anyone who thinks you can see any big jump in strength just from a summer camp has gotta be pretty gullible, man. I mean, they might be able to improve your stance and teach you some moves, but it's not going to get someone like you strong enough to even deal with Maiz."

The mention of Hiro's lifelong struggle with a low power level and his ever-persistent school bully in one go drew a look from him as if he were second-guessing Miyou's position of Best Friend. "Well, then," he replied sarcastically, "I guess that means that I'll be getting my money back, doesn't it?"

But as usual, Miyou just shrugged it off. "Hey, don't bite at me, buttercup. I'm just speaking truth."

Cutting through the flared tempers like a ray of sunshine piercing the clouds, one last visitor picked that moment to throw the door open. "I'm here!" Proute proclaimed, practically bounding into the room as she announced her presence with her signature lack of knocking she'd had ever since she and Hiro were little kids when she'd come pounding down the door to drag the boy off for the day. The half-saiyan's auburn tail, the same color as her shoulder-length hair that would likely reach past her shoulder blades were it ever to lay straight, wiggled animatedly behind her as if she were proud of herself for finding her way across the street like she hadn't been doing it all of her life with the exact same energetic expression on her face as she came to a stop before them, certain parts of the endowed girl taking a little more time to stop than the rest of her catching Miyou's eye.

Hiro, however, was just as oblivious to that as he was every day, bursting into a much purer smile than his friend's lecherous grin at the girl's energy. "Proute!" he greeted. "That boundless energy of yours never fails to brighten up a room!"

Proute's grin at that compliment was shocked off of her face by Miyou's follow-up. "There's something else about her bounding into a room that always brightens my day," he leered openly, oblivious to the humiliated expression on the girl's face and the glares from the room's other two occupants he was receiving.

At least until Hiro reminded him of his manners by grabbing the back of his best friend's skull by the hair and slamming it face-first into the coffee table hard enough to make the glasses jump into the air. One neatly hopped right into Proute's hands, whose shocked expression at the sudden violence was replaced with a pleased look at the prompt service, and the rest Mei was left to catch in flight.

"Agh! My face!"

"What is wrong with you?!" Hiro demanded of the young man rubbing his hand across his schnoz like he was worried he'd find it misplaced. "Do you have no filter at all?!"

"Aw, come on, man!" Miyou pleaded, motioning toward the half-saiyan girl who was already drinking from the iced kool-aid. "They're right there! How can you seriously go fifteen years living across the street from that and not notice?!"

"Isn't it obvious?" Mei put in, ever ready to take a snipe shot at her older brother. "It's because he's spent fifteen years across the street from her. Like that frog put in water that's slowly brought to a boil." She took a stern sip through her own straw before scowling over the cup's surface. "Besides, you're making way too big a deal out of it. They're not all they're cracked up to be, y'know. Seriously, if she weren't half-saiyan, those things would be back-breaking."

Miyou reached over and patted the girl gently on the head, almost seeming like he was about to impart some great wisdom on his junior. Until, typically, he opened his mouth. "Don't worry, Mei-Mei. I'm sure you'll grow a fine set yourself one day, you just gotta give it time!"

This time, the shock was enough that Hiro and Proute jumped back and there was no one to catch the couple drinks still left as Miyou's face was introduced to the table again. "You filthy pervert!" the girl shouted. "No, seriously! What is wrong with you?!"

Day 1

In an age of humanity where individual flight was commonplace, many often reflected how odd it was that motor vehicles remained so prevalent. The fact of the matter, however, was simply that when only one person out of a group of fifty knew where they were going, it was more efficient to load them all up into a single space where they couldn't lag behind or get separated. The Capsule Corporation manufactured air bus touched down in a gravel parking lot, kicking up dirt and rocks before settling in. The lot of them stood from their seats, grabbed their bags and began to offload even as a second bus landed behind theirs.

Proute looked back toward the second bus as the trio made their way off. "... Only two buses?" she inquired. "Not very many people for a summer camp."

"It's only their first year, right?" Hiro guessed as he shouldered his bag. "They're probably not a big enough name yet, or maybe it's like a trial run."

But that only triggered a scoff from Miyou. "Or too many people managed to find a readable copy of all their legalese."

As they talked, the bus driver proceeded ahead of them and raised a megaphone to give them directions. "Alright, everyone line up at the gate, each bus in a line! Instructors at the gate will take your name and power level and give you further directions! Come on, now, move along!"

Hiro groaned as they took their place in the newly filled line, Miyou ahead of him and Proute behind him. "Aww, why do they have to take our levels? And in public, too?"

The half-saiyan put a hand on his shoulder from behind. "Don't be like that, Hiro!" she encouraged him. "You've been working on yours, haven't you? I'm sure there's going to be plenty of people here you'll place higher than."

Ahead of him, Miyou's hair bounced from the force of his scoff. "Now you're just sugar-coating, Proute. I think we know the odds of that happening."

Proute scowled ahead of him as if her glare alone might silence him, then amended her consolation to Hiro. "They're professionals," she tried. "I'm sure they'll handle things like that in a mature and discreet manner."

At the head of the line, as if on cue, a booming laughter belted out above the din of the lines. "Twenty-four-fifty!? How did you get clearance for this camp? You fudge your numbers, butterball? Or did ya take an extra powdered donut that morning to give you a little extra push?"

Sure enough, as their necks craned with the rest of the campers to see the source of the ruckus, they could plainly see a large-framed Saiyan male in combat armor with a scouter over his left eye and a datapad in his hand, and at his mercy was a rotund young man who looked like he was going to fall apart on the spot.

"Oh, let him in, Rutaba," a woman heading the other line told him as she fiddled with her own pad, marking names and jotting down numbers from her own scouter. From the gemstone in her forehead and the fanciful cut and style of her own armor, she was easily identifiable as a Vieteri. Though she looked much gentler and her tone was infinitely softer than that of the massive bear of a man next to her, her words proved her no less harsh. "Someone has to be the bottom bar. Might as well make it a low one, right? Makes the numbers look better."

"Ha!" the Saiyan scoffed back. "Fine, fine! But when he's a fat, greasy stain on my field, you can write his parents, Verglas!"

Miyou said nothing, merely staring right ahead. Hiro, meanwhile, was pale as a sheet. With a bead of sweat forming on her brow, Proute tried one more time to encourage him. "Well, like I said, you've been working out, so … y'know … just … give it your all and don't worry about what they think, okay?"

Surely, after that outburst, Hiro wasn't the only nervous one in line, but there wasn't much he or anyone else could do but creep ever closer to the front of their lines. The lump in his throat had almost grown too big to swallow when, with just a few people ahead of Miyou, the line ground to a halt again.

"What the Hell?" It was the Vieteri this time, and the campers' attention went to her standing before a purple-haired girl and desperately fiddling with her ear piece. "Hey, Rutaba, lemme see your scouter for a moment. Mine's wigging out on me."

The Saiyan clipped his off and tossed it to her. "What's the problem?"

"Dunno. But the readings went crazy on me. 140,000 at one point."

Rutaba ignored his fellow instructor working on a hard reset of the machine to look the girl up and down, and guffawed. "Hehe, yeah, a human with that kind of power level? Yeah, no way I'd buy that, either. Especially not one so scrawny!"

Scrawny? Hiro didn't think that really fit. She was lean and her midriff showed a toned but not chiseled stomach, but scrawny hardly seemed accurate. Really, her build wasn't that different from Proute's. But then, who was he to judge? Surely a Saiyan trainer knew scrawny when he saw it? Or maybe it was more of him playing the drill sergeant, mocking the campers to break them down.

Verglas finally finished with the system and got it back up and running to take another peering at the girl, and a satisfied smile came to her face as she tossed the other that she was using for diagnostics back to her partner. "Yeah, that's much more like it. 14,000. Still very impressive for a human. We look forward to having you here, Stella."

It looked like the girl thanked the instructor and more instructions were probably given, but the line was moving again and the details were lost in the shuffle. It seemed like only moments before Miyou answered the monotonous call for a name and the scouter was trained on him.

"You don't seem too invested in showing off your power, boy," the Saiyan noted after a moment as Miyou only passively stood there.

"Why should I?" came his noncommittal reply. "Everyone knows that only serves a purpose if you're not going at full steam already."

Rutaba scoffed as if he'd been waiting for a smartmouth like this. "And you're already going full steam, are you?"

"As full as you're gonna get. I'm only here for the summer camp. The girls out jogging every morning in their gym shorts, the girls splashing each other in the swimming pool, sharing hot cocoa with girls around a campfire under the stars ..." Seemingly on impulse, he motioned toward the other instructor. "Maybe if I were in her line, I'd feel more like showing off, but you're really not my type."

A moment crossed his mind when Hiro couldn't help but admire his friend for his steadfast dedication to his goals, such that they were, even in the face of what must have been three hundred pounds of Saiyan in his face.

Apparently, Rutaba was having similar qualms finding fault with the boy's guts, and finally settled on an angry-looking smirk that reminded Hiro of Maiz as he went ahead and tapped his scouter for a final reading. "Fine, have it your way, Mister Tough Guy. Six thousand. Head on in to the courtyard for your kit and dorm assignment and enjoy the opening assembly, because tomorrow, your smartass is mine. Next!"

And suddenly, Hiro was face to face with the Saiyan instructor and, like Miyou, wished he'd been in the other line, but for other reasons. After vetting his name, Rutaba poked something on the touch screen and turned to face him. "Any time you're ready, kid."

"Right!" It was time to show everything that he had. He knew he wasn't going to place as high as Miyou, but if he was going to slack off, then Hiro had to show that wasn't going to be him. He planted his feet and focused with all that he had as the scouter's numbers rolled up.

And stopped. "Hehe," Rutaba chuckled. "Three thousand aaaaaand ..." The machine gave a beep of finality. "Five."

The response stunned Hiro more than he had anticipated. "Wh-what? No, no, that can't be right! I-I've gone down?! But I was at thirty-ten at the end of the school year ..."

"Sounds like this is the perfect way to spend summer for a wimp like you then!"

It still didn't really register, though, and he gave a weak protest of, "But I've been working out ..."

"Not my problem, Nancy! Next!"

Miyou took him by the arm and pulled him on out of the way with a, "Come on, buddy, Proute told you not to sweat it, didn't she?"

Rutaba, however, was already focused on the next in line. "Ah! Finally! A break in the long line of losers! Come on up here, honey, and give Ol' Rutaba your name."

Oblivious to the racist and possibly sexist behavior the Saiyan exhibited, the girl hopped right up to the front of the line with a brilliant smile at the compliment. "Proute!"

"A solid name for a proper Saiyan, kiddo! You straight-lined?" A Saiyan of straight lineage was one who could trace their line to one of the survivors of Planet Plant.

"Fifth Brigade," she replied proudly. "My grandfather," the several times removed went without saying after six centuries, "landed on Earth alongside the king's own men!"

"No kidding?" Rutaba tapped his scouter as the reading started. "Give us a pose!" The girl flexed her arms like she was a bodybuilder, nothing but silliness on both of their parts, but when the numbers stopped and the device dinged, the instructor let out a pleased whistle. "Twelve thousand! You do your grandfather proud!"

"Thank you!" she chirped as she headed on after the other two.

"Okay, seriously," Hiro opened as soon as they were clear of the gate. "Am I the only one who noticed how nice he suddenly was to Proute?"

"Everybody's nice to Proute," Miyou readily countered. "Just like everyone's nice to kittens, babies and little bunnies." He turned back to the girl as they kept walking. "Still, 12K, nice, Proute."

As she beamed at the praise, Hiro raised an eyebrow, still sour over his own drop, minor to the point of being worth writing off to a bad day. "How is Proute four times my level?"

But the girl only grinned like the monkey she was and flexed her bicep. "I've been working out!"

"Ha!" Miyou laughed as the words were thrown back to him. "Maybe you should join her for whatever training she's doing, Hiro!"

"Are you kidding?" the boy replied. "The last time I tried training with her, she threw me into a cliff! And then got me to buy her ice cream for it!"

The complaint fell on semi-deaf ears, however, as instead of remorse, Proute seemed to be happily recalling it. "Mmm, cherries jubilee …"

The throng of campers, perhaps nearly two hundred strong, still fit easily into the massive athletics field that doubled as the camp's courtyard. Nevertheless, it felt cramped and crammed to bursting as everyone shoved their way as close as they could to the stage and the podium thereon. It felt less like an impending opening ceremony and more like fans clamoring for the opening of a concert. All of the campers had received a set of weighted clothing they would be required to wear starting tomorrow morning, instructions on where the dorms they would be using could be found (as it turned out, there would only be two open for this first year, separated by gender) and a simple map of the grounds. Now, they were all waiting eagerly for the rumored appearance of Kami, herself, to make the opening speech.

"Huh, it always surprises me just how popular Kami is," Miyou commented as he twisted his neck about to observe the crowd. "Who'd think some shut-away little goddess wannabe would be such a pop culture idol?"

"She's supposed to be the most powerful fighter on Earth," Proute countered with the obvious. "Not to mention the most coveted trainer on this and probably half a dozen other worlds. Considering everyone here came because they expect some of that training, can you really be surprised? And even though she's supposed to be a couple hundred years old, she looks young and cute, so you get people like Hiro who are total crushing fanboys for her."

Miyou gave his signature scoff and ran a hand through his hair. "Sounds like that last one is the real answer for this mob. They don't know what they're doing. You wouldn't see me chasing some big name, no matter how cute she is. The bigger the star, the more that's expected of you, or you're just a boy toy, and I'm not gonna be any girl's arm candy."

Hiro, apparently deaf to what they were saying right next to him in his diligence to seek out the first signs of Kami, suddenly waved his hands to shush them. "Quiet down, guys! Here she comes!"

A young woman in unadorned white robes with a hood pulled over her head that obscured her upper face from view, but not her purple locks, which apparently seemed to be cut into a simple pixie or bowl judging from its evenly cut tips, walked with calm regality onto the stage, trailed by the two instructors from the gate, and made her way to the microphone. The throng of campers seemed to practically be electric with anticipation.

Well, almost. Like an itch at the edge of her mind, Proute could swear she felt a mental cold pocket of negative enthusiasm. Was that even a thing? She let her gaze travel past the adorkably enraptured Hiro and the bland Miyou who looked like he was trying to guess Kami's cup size through her heavy ceremonial robes of office and allowed it to gravitate to the violet girl from the gate. Though she was certainly as packed in by the crowds as anyone else, the sheer expression of utter neutrality on her face and in her body language produced an illusionary space around her that kept the eager crowds back. And yet she seemed completely absorbed in taking in every detail of Earth's guardian. Maybe she was critical of someone so close in appearance to their age, or perhaps, like Hiro and so many others here, she hoped to scale that ladder for herself and was arrogant enough to find the figure at the podium somehow disappointing.

Something shifted in the girl's posture ever so slightly, a change it suddenly occurred to the half-saiyan that she only noticed because she was studying her with the same intensity. When the girl turned her face in Proute's direction, she suddenly had the silly notion that she must have actually felt her gaze and quickly spun her own back onto the stage, hoping she hadn't been as obvious about it as she felt.

"Thank you so much for coming, everyone!" Kami opened, and Miyou doubly was reminded of a pop star with the way she did it as if they were all friends that had shown up for a party. The so-called "Fighting Idol" Aru Aru always did the same thing. And just like then, the crowd ate it up, erupting into an instant roar that she made a show of humbly blushing over before waving down. Maybe a lot of guys really did like warrior amazons that turned around and pretended to be normal girls outside the ring. He would've figured it'd be more of a Saiyan thing. Maybe they just made it mainstream.

"It does my heart good to see such an enthusiastic turn-out for our first year here," Kami continued. "I've personally certified your trainers for this summer, Specialist Rutaba of the Saiyan Space Security Force and Lieutenant Verglas of the Vieteri Exploration Team have taken the next month from their decorated careers to assist me by tending to your training in my stead. As much as I would love to work with each of you personally, I simply have too much to do for that to be possible. I assure you, however, that I have absolute confidence in their abilities, and you will still see me from time to time throughout the month as I confer with them and monitor your progress to ensure you get everything out of it you can. Please give them your all, and especially your full support over the coming weeks. Thank you."

The crowd erupted again as Kami waved to them and moved to leave the stage, a team of private security having to physically prevent the campers from following as Verglas moved to the podium to take her place, where she would proceed with a summary of the activities, schedules and rules with far less fanfare once the campers settled down again.

Day 5

Hiro looked up from his breakfast tray he had been nervously stirring with a fork as Proute, Stella and several other of the girls came into the mess tent from their morning run. The instructors ran them separately to ease the rush on the kitchen, with Rutaba taking the boys at dawn and Verglas following with the girls an hour later. But it wasn't the running schedules that had his mind occupied, and many of the others seemed to quiet at the same time.

It was more than enough for them to notice. Proute gazed around the massive tent and its alloy picnic tables as they got into line for the food kept hot by portable cooking torches."Okay, that's not foreboding at all," she observed tentatively."What do you think that's all about?"

"Well, it's not over our running suits we've been coming in wearing for four days now," Stella noted dismissively."Otherwise, I think they're setting a new record for obliviousness."

Proute moved toward where Hiro and Miyou were sitting and Stella, being her bunkmate, followed, as had become their standard seating arrangement, sitting across the table from the boys.

"For what it's worth," Miyou opened as he leaned toward the lilac girl - his proclaimed favorite color, Hiro recollected, "those suits really do look good."

"They're unisex, Miyou," Proute put in."The same as yours."

But the determined Casanova only waved her off without looking away from her roommate."The similarities of the clothing only highlight the differences of what's inside. They make me want to reveal them."

Stella didn't say anything for a moment, but finally forked a big, fat chunk of sausage from her plate and held it up before his face."Do you really want to see how far I can shove this up your nose?" she asked with a perfect conversational tone that made the threat sound all the more serious.

And it made Miyou sit back again."Teach a man to say something nice," he objected as if his feelings had been hurt. But it didn't last long. Soon, he was not-so-subtly elbowing Hiro, who had been trying to let the crash and burn attempt at flirtation distract from the initial awkwardness when the girls entered."Well?" he asked."You gonna ask or what?"

Hiro suddenly found his egg had grown dry in his mouth, swelling to thrice its size in the process. He forced himself to swallow it and felt for a moment he'd choke on it. He started facing Proute, who patiently waited, but went for a drink on his juice before trying again, this time turning toward the other girl, missing the saiyan's disappointed expression in his own nervousness."Stella ..." he delicately started.

The girl arched an eyebrow at being the one to be addressed, apparently having believed that her sausage would have earned her a few bites of breakfast undisturbed, but calmly set her fork down and turned her attention to him. After a moment of silence from him, she prodded him along with a, "Yes, Hiro?"

"Well, the guys were talking around Lights Out last night ..."He sputtered out again as Stella patiently kept waiting, though with an air of growing amusement, as if anticipating a great approaching punchline, not entirely hiding the ghost of a smirk with her glass as she took a drink."I mean, just about stuff. And, y'know, we're guys, so eventually, girls came up ..."The clumsy attempt at humor made him even more uncomfortable as it failed to do anything to change even the light in her purple eyes. There was nothing to do but barrel right on in at this point. It wasn't like he was that far from the bottom of the humiliation barrel at this point, anyway."I wanted to ask ...I mean, we were wondering, all of us ..."The circle he jerkily mimed with his hand that wasn't strangling his fork now didn't seem nearly as inclusive as it was meant to convey."What do you all do in your dorm before bed at night?"

The way Stella kept watching him, as if she were still waiting on him to finish speaking, gave him the rather uncomfortable impression that perhaps she had stopped listening and had tuned him out, not yet registering that he had stopped speaking. Or maybe she was giving him time to consider withdrawing the question before she reached for something more intrusive than her fork. Either way, she finally seemed to give up on whatever she was waiting for."Dunno," she simply and suddenly answered as she sat back up straight."What do boys do?"

The simple turnaround threw Hiro's already seizing mind into a total dead stop.".. What," was the best response he could give while his brain attempted a reboot.

"What do boys do?" she repeated while taking her knife and buttering a piece of toast."If I had to guess, it sounds like you talk about stuff you're mutually interested in, wonder at the great mysteries of the universe like whether or not the other locker room is any different from yours, share your tales of wisdom to prove which of you knows best, and then turn in, puzzling about the truth of the most outlandish claims among them, considering their implications even as you try to shake them out of your head."Stella turned back toward him as she finished preparing the food and returned the knife to her plate with an impact that seemed far louder than it really was."Why?What did you think we were doing?" she finished before taking a bite out of the dry bread.

Meanwhile, something about the whole thing seemed to gnaw at Proute, as if stirring something half remembered. When she finally grabbed hold of it, she plopped her spoon down, swallowed her mouth of Fruit Loops and turned right for Hiro's best friend."Miyou, were you telling that yarn about pillow fights again?"

For his part, Miyou promptly seemed to gag on his own eggs, even giving himself a quick hammer to the chest to clear it."Why, Proute!" he rushed to insist."Sweet, lovely, bountiful Proute! I absolutely have no idea what you're talking about!And the accusation that I would deliberately spread such a wanton lie!Why, I'd never!"

The girls' expressions certainly didn't get any more believing as he rambled, but Hiro's grew more heated. Even Stella, new to the group as she was, didn't so much as flinch when Hiro grabbed his neck and introduced his nose to the sausage on the plate. And the butter, the eggs and the cereal.

"Are you kidding me?!" The dirty blonde demanded."You sold us a line?!And you had just enough of us questioning it that you even got me to ask about it!Really, where is your shame, man?!"

As the boys continued, Proute noticed a long piece of paper go up on the cork board by the entrance."Oh, look, Stella!It looks like they've got the performance evaluations from yesterday done!Wanna go see?"

"Nah," the lilac girl replied as she forked some egg, I have a pretty good idea of how I did already, but you go knock yourself out."

"Come on, girlies! Move your asses!"

It wasn't actually the girls Rutaba was yelling at. All of the boys were in the field, running at full speed down the length to slam into a dummy the instructor was supporting before clearing out of the way for the next one.

"Move it! Move it! Move it! Hoooooold up!" The sudden change in commands came right after Hiro had charged and was preparing to circle back to the end of the line like everyone before him. "What the Hell was that, Nancy?" the Saiyan demanded, using the nickname he'd given the youth on Day One, the only thing he ever called him.

Hiro turned back to him while suppressing a groan as he stood straight and shouted as instructed. "A charge, Instructor!"

"You call that a charge?! I know you're wearing weights, Nancy, but my grandmother would've done it harder! Of course, she's not a scrawny human with a power level of thirty-ought-five! What're ya gonna do?"

Hiro knew that wasn't a hypothetical question despite how it was delivered. "Keep trying, Instructor!"

Still the Saiyan seemed displeased, his default state. "Then what are you standing there for, waiting on your dress fitting? Get back in line before I decide you're slowing us down and send you to do laps with Tubby!"

Tubby. The nickname for the rotund boy with the only level lower than his. And they weren't just laps. They were extra weighted clothing, thick enough that the summer heat was elevated to a sauna. Rutaba had said he'd sweat the pounds off of Tubby if he had to, and Hiro believed he meant it. He most definitely did not want to do laps with Tubby. "Yes, Instructor!" he shouted and headed to the back of the line.

At the front, Miyou charged across the field and slammed into the dummy hard enough that the breath caught in the Saiyan's chest, as if he hadn't been expecting it. But Rutaba only let out a laugh. "What was that, Smartmouth? I didn't quite catch it! I thought you told me when you got here I wasn't your type! Or did my yelling at your girlfriend get under your skin? Come on, keep it moving, people! We ain't got all day!"

On another section of the camp grounds, within the campus gymnasium, Verglas wasn't being any easier on her girls. "Faster, ladies, faster!" she shouted at them as they each blitzed a punching bag, attempting to get as many blows in on it in turn before the Vieteri blew a whistle and they would switch out. "A man with the same training as you is going to be stronger than you are ten times out of ten!" Another whistle. "You have exactly two things on him! Speed and brains!" And whistle. "If you're going to put him in his place, you've gotta strike hard, strike fast and strike smart!" Whistle. "You make every blow count and you overwhelm him!" Tweet. Then suddenly, she gave a long, hard blow, just after Stella finished. "Get back here!" she demanded. "Did you think I wouldn't see that? You think this is Rutaba's class? Nobody's slacking off on my watch! Do it again!"

The lilac girl moved back to the bag and wordlessly repeated the exercise. There was a steady pace to the blows and whatever lag Verglas had detected the first time was absent, as the woman nodded approvingly. "That's a performance for a five-digit power level. You should be more like your bunkmate and be giving it your all! How in the Nexus a human got so strong and still be such a slacker, it makes no sense to me!" And with that, she blew the whistle again, dismissing Stella to head back where Proute was waiting at the end of the line.

"Were you really slacking," Proute asked as if it were hard to believe, "or was she just trying to make a spectacle of you?"

"I lost my rhythm," the human claimed. "She probably noticed me pulling to find it again."

The half-saiyan nodded, but looked back toward the front. "I don't really look for a rhythm," she shared. "I just try to make as many solid hits as I can before she whistles." Proute fell silent for a moment before changing the topic. "What do you think of this place's training?"

Stella, too, silently considered her words before sharing her thoughts. "I think we've got it better than the boys," she offered neutrally. "Rutaba's training seems to consist of little more than hitting really hard." She crossed her arms as she went a little deeper. "Honestly, I get that it's just the first week, but so far, the training seems a bit too mundane to be legendary. I figure I should hold my verdict until we know how it'll pick up in the coming week."

"Yeah," Proute agreed. "The wilderness camp out is the end of next week. That'll be interesting, not many people here have probably had to handle a night without a roof."

Day 12

Hiro pushed a large branch out of his way as he tried to keep track of the girl ahead of him. "You set a grueling pace, Stella," he complained, "but are you sure we're going the right direction? It's getting darker by the minute and we still haven't seen anything of the camp."

"And we're not going to," the lilac girl replied, sparing a glance back. "We got separated from the others when you went running off with that oversized raptor on your tail. The camp is about ..." She came to a stop and took a moment to get her bearings. "... Thirty miles that way, and we've got about ten minutes of light left, less under all this foliage. We're not making that before we run out, and we'd be even worse off trying to get there in the dark. If we're going to catch up with Proute and Miyou, we'll have to cut across and make for the next one. With any luck, we'll cross paths with them sometime before noon tomorrow."

"Then what are we supposed to do for tonight?" The rather stupid question had already left Hiro's mouth before how obvious the answer was registered, and he was left to feel stupid for doing so.

"It is a wilderness survival assignment," Stella answered, of course. "And lucky you, you get to do it one better than the rest of them, a whole night with only any rations and water you've got left and what shelter you can scrounge up."

"Yeah, yeah," Hiro waved her off. "It was a stupid question, I just had the bad fortune to notice that after it left my mouth."

"Fortune has nothing to do with it," Stella threw back after giving a short laugh at the excuse. "How does the old saying go? Something about wrongly thinking of the wise man who holds his tongue until he's sure of what he wants to say as being a fool."

The boy finally twisted his face into a scowl at her backside. "Tell me something," he started to say. "Do you just scorn everyone around you, or is it part of a bigger plan to be the world's biggest ball-busting bi-" The air for the finishing syllable caught in his chest as his foot came down on the rocky soil ... and didn't stop.

The rumbling of the cliff side seemed to precede him as he felt gravity take effect and pull him after the rocks already plummeting down into the darkness.

And just as suddenly as it started, he stopped, and the rocks gleefully left him behind and splashed into unseen waters far below. It took him several long moments to wonder why that was before the sensation of strain on his limb drew his gaze up instead of down.

Stella was laying belly down on the ground above, her hand clamped like a painful vice around his forearm. Her arms were too occupied with him to stop her flashlight from rolling over the side in his place. It drew his gaze down again and he watched its beam shrink into oblivion before he could force himself to swallow.

"You coming back up or what?" Stella asked from above him.

"Yeah, yeah," he said for the second time in as many minutes, though this time with a very different tone, and he turned his body toward the cliff as she hefted him back onto solid ground.

He found his back to a boulder and leaned back against it while waiting for his breath to return to him. Only after a few moments of that did something occur to him and he let his head flop sideways to look at the purple girl before flatly stating, "I can fly."

Stella looked back at him as if she wondered if he had left half his brain to fall down the cliff to be stating the obvious like that, but finally just nodded strongly. "Yes," she agreed, then gave a little laugh. "Yes, you can."

"Then why didn't that occur to me before now?"

"Because you were too busy falling." When he turned back to glare at her, she held her arms up defensively. "What? It's the truth! It's a defense mechanism. Big, bad, scary stuff happens, and the brain throws out all higher thought to focus on every conceivable way out of danger as fast as possible. It's the same reason everything seems to slow down. You're not a bird, flight isn't even in the top ten of your first responses to that. So you were too busy falling for it to occur to you." She motioned to the darkness below them. "It's probably for the best, really. Tumbling through darkness, surrounded by debris, you may not have known which way was up as well as you thought and burst off in the wrong direction. Drowning people tend to do the same thing, back to that focusing thing again."

Hiro didn't say anything for a moment as he just let that sink in. Then, "Aren't you going to berate me for falling in the first place? Lecture me that it wouldn't have happened if I'd been paying attention to hiking instead of getting distracted by my temper?"

"Oh, I dunno," she replied as she planted her picked her walking stick up and propped it against the ground in front of her. "It sounds like you've got it pretty figured out, so why beat a dead horse? You do owe me a new flashlight, though."

Conversation drifted off about that as they sat there in the expanding night. Every once in a while, one would bring something up. Hiro talked a bit about his sister back home who was too young to attend, Stella pointed out the night sky away from the city, but it was pretty obvious they'd found their camp for the night.

It was while staring into the fire they had made from downed brush they had cleared a safe distance from the cliff that a much deeper issue rose up from him. Normally, he couldn't have brought something like this up to her. Maybe Miyou or Proute, but the boundary of an acquaintance of a friend seemed so much thinner out there, with nothing for thirty miles but them and their thoughts.

"It occurs to me," he opened with a scratch of his nose, "that I haven't really done much surviving out here.". His friends would have rushed to disagree or scoffed in agreement, depending on which were present, but Stella just let the branch she had been using for a poker rest as she gave him her attention again without interrupting. "You're doing all the navigating, you gave all the instructions for the fire." He motioned back into the darkness beyond the fire's light. "I'd probably be at the bottom of a cliff right now of it weren't for you." Still she didn't interrupt. "But I'm a city boy, it's to be expected. In fact, that's the problem. It occurs to me that they didn't actually teach us anything about navigation or anything.". Hiro hunched forward at that, hands pursed as he chased his thoughts. "And on the tail of that, I realize that I don't feel as if I've learned much of anything. We've been here for nearly two whole weeks, and all we've done is punch bags and run around shouting our heads off."

The silence fell over the campfire for a long moment as Stella apparently mulled his words before speaking. "Do you think it's left you stronger than when you first got here?"

It wasn't an assumption or an agreement. She didn't disagree or try to argue the point. He almost felt like she had changed the topic entirely as he wrangled together an answer. "Well, maybe," he admitted. "I mean, it's only been two weeks." He did his best to ignore her smirk at the reversal and doubled down. "But it's still half our time here! If they were really going to teach us something, I think they would have started by now."

"Is that what you came expecting," the girl inquired. "to be taught the special secret combat arts to guarantee you an advantage against your enemies?"

"No!" was his emphatic but knee-jerk reaction. A moment later, he reconsidered it and amended, "I'm not really expecting miracles, of course, but this is supposed to be a test of Kami's legendary training, but so far, it's felt more like a lazy football camp."

This time, Stella was silent for a bit longer. It was probably pretty obvious that no small amount of his disappointment seemed to be tied to Kami, and he knew it was unfair of him to expect her to defend the Guardian of Earth on the spot like that, but now that it had been opened to the night air, he found he pained for an answer more than he had realized. And yet, when she did answer, it was with another question. "You know basic martial arts, right?"

Again, he found himself rolling his shoulders in a sloppy shrug as he fished for the relevancy of what she was asking. "I guess," Hiro replied half-heartedly. "Just the same thing everyone else learns in a public school P.E. curriculum."

"Is there a reason you don't use it?" Finally, when he stared across the flames at her without comprehension, he got an actual explanation out of her. "You learned throws, right? Blocks, grapples, bars, all that stuff?" She didn't actually wait for him to nod in confirmation. "Did they ever teach you how to rack someone?"

Now he was halfway sure she was screwing with him. "I'm sorry, come again?" Hiro shook his head to clear the slush building up in it. "Why would they teach something like that? That's practically instinctive."

"So is throwing a punch," Stella countered, "and that's the first thing you have to learn if you want to avoid hitting like a wimp or breaking your wrist."

Hiro considered that for another moment. "Are you saying you don't think I know how to kick another guy in the sack?"

"I'm saying you don't know when to kick him in the sack. Or jab him in the eyes. Or rip his ears off."

He found himself reflexively leaning back away from his fellow camper as if to distance himself from unstable explosives. "Okay, that's just violent."

For the first time, he saw her actually roll her eyes at him. "Yes, Hiro, fighting is violent. Half the problem is that you see it as this honorable duel where both sides pull no punches except the ones that aren't very nice. There's nothing dirty or cowardly about doing everything in your power to protect yourself when you are in danger. Self-defense isn't a sport where you dance around inside a taped line and only swing for the chest. The whole reason grabs and holds and trips exist is because when a life is on the line, yours or somebody else's, the only thing that matters is rendering your attacker unable to inflict harm as quickly as possible and by any means necessary."

He still found the idea repulsive. "That sort of thing just doesn't happen, though."

"Doesn't it?"

And like that, Maiz' face sprang unbidden to his mind. Hiro forced it back down and instead focused on the violet face across the campfire. "Say you've got a point," he conceded. "That outlook doesn't actually get you any closer to actually being able to do it. Anyone you'd need to pull that sort of stuff on is just going to smash you in the face as you come at them anyway."

"And so you come here, fork over your cash under Kami's good name, and hope to learn some unique form of training or special technique that will help you to even the playing field," Stella summed up unnecessarily. Her confirmation was Hiro's sullen silence. So she seemed to give it a bit more thought and leaned forward again. "Well, what if I taught you one of mine?"

Miyou and Proute stumbled back into the facility grounds breathless from their rush. It felt like they'd been running non-stop since that stampede had separated them from Hiro. Stella had been fast enough to tail him, but they'd been cut off, and by the time they got past that, they'd been out of sight. Miyou had to practically drag Proute on to the next camp site trying to convince her that they had no means to find him, but reminding her that Stella was with him and she'd make sure he didn't come to harm.

Once they reached the camp, they'd informed the secondary instructors, who advised that, given the potential urgency of the situation, they head back to the summer camp and recruit Rutaba and Verglas, who were taking the weekend with the kids away to have some time off for a change, to the search, as their scouters would be able to locate Hiro and Stella quickly. But they were deliberately distant from civilization, and that included the training compound. Even taking to the air immediately to shave as much time as they could, darkness had fallen by the time they got there, and they made a straight shot for the staff dormitory.

However, the sound of three voices laughing caused Miyou to stop short as they were passing Administration, and he grabbed Proute by the arm to get her to hold up. She started to protest, but he held a hand up to shush her. Three. That wasn't the right number. Only Rutaba and Verglas were supposed to be here, and yet he was sure he had heard three distinct laughters. Silently, he waved for Proute to follow him as he crept over to the building's windows in a half-crouch.

The light inside clearly showed all three, comfortable and unguarded in the belief that they were completely alone for miles. Cans of a cheap brand of Saiyan beer were split between them, the kind of stuff that's less hops than nail polish, designed to get you drunk on the cheap rather than court the palate. Verglas had her long legs thrown up on a desk and Rutaba was fiddling with his own scouter. The third figure was a violet-pink Vieteri with the build of perhaps a lanky young teen, her hair cut into an angled bob.

"Who's Pinky?" Proute whispered as she peered through the pane beside him.

"Kami," Miyou answered without a moment's hesitation or explanation.

Which, of course, drew a look from Proute. "That is not Kami."

"Of course it's not," he replied. "It's the fake Kami from the opening ceremony. I knew something was off, she was completely the wrong size."

At that, the half-saiyan's mind went back to that moment at the ceremony when she thought he was trying to x-ray Kami's bust with his eyes. She hadn't thought any more about it at the time, just Miyou's usual perviness. Was he really saying he had identified the impostor just by that? She was torn between the impulse to be impressed and to hit him, but he shushed her again when she tried to pry confirmation out of him, his attention focused on the conversation inside.

"-best idea you ever had, Rutaba," Verglas was saying.

The large Saiyan gave half a chuckle. "Yeah, hard to believe people would pay us to run 'em around in circles just because we put the Kami's name on it. And the bitch is so distant in her perch above the world, she couldn't care less, apparently. Easy money."

"It wouldn't have been nearly as easy without our own Kami to really sell it," Verglas countered before turning to the third figure. "You really nailed it, Sis. Those nerds were so busy eating it up they didn't even bother questioning our credentials."

Kami scoffed and gave an arrogant grin as she leaned back. "No sweat," she assured her. "What are big sisters for if they aren't there to come through when they're needed? Besides, it was fun. Like being a pop idol. I felt like I should've promised to sing 'em a song from my heart or some rubbish. I can't wait to do it again."

"Absolutely!" Rutaba agreed heartily. "Even split three ways, this is way more credits than we'd make in a month on posts. Imagine how much more we'll make next year when we're a bigger name!"

At that, though, Verglas' mirth faded a bit to reflect a more thoughtful countenance. "I dunno, Rutaba. I've been thinking, and I'm not so sure that's a good idea. A bigger name means more suckers, sure, but it also means, well, a bigger name. How big can we really let it get without drawing the attention of the real Guardians?"

He looked up from the innards of the scouter as he snapped the cover back on. "What are you saying, you want out? Just up and quit after this kind of haul?!"

"Hell no," she snorted with derision. "But maybe we should consider relocating. Not too far. Maybe give it a run on Mars-"

It was at that moment the scouter finished booting up with its power restored, and immediately let out a pipipi as its screen lit up with figures. "Hmm?" The large Saiyan gave a sound of suspicion and alarm as his gaze went to the window a moment after the two sets of eyes peering in had dropped down.

The mirth of the room was gone, the two Vieteri tensing. The fake Kami reached for her robes and pulled them around her as Verglas half-stood. "What is it, Rutaba?"

"Someone's outside ..."

Outside, Proute and Miyou could hear the shifting of the floorboards underfoot, and Miyou knew they couldn't stay there. It was too late for stealth. There was only one thing to do. "Proute," he told her with stern darkness, "run."

Her face was white as a sheet and she barely registered what he'd said. "What?"

The steps were creeping closer to the door.

"Run," he repeated, and he heard the telltale sounds of a door knob being carefully turned. "Run!" he raised his voice, jumping up as he grabbed her by the collar and threw her forward, his own feet moving to propel him. "Run now!"

The two of them were scrambling for movement even as the door slammed open behind them with the force of a cannon, Rutaba's stark outline filling the doorway. "Hey, Verglas!" he shouted. "We got nosy campers!"

She joined him in the doorway, seeming small next to him as they watched the two flee. "How much do you think they heard?"

"Enough that they're running," he pointed out.

"Right," she sighed. "Looks like a couple campers didn't make it back from the camp-out ..."

The Saiyan grinned hungrily at the implication as the two took off after them.

Ahead of the two youths, the iron gates to the compound loomed like the pearly gates with some inexplicable promise of freedom that seemed to take far too long to reach even as their feet pounded beneath them with all they had. Proute could feel the poor start holding her back, her breaths not matching her strides, the tumbling start setting her behind Miyou, who had always been faster than he seemed. It was like a nightmare, with the wall seeming ever further away to her panicked mind despite how she pursued it. And then, like the horrifying conclusion, a sensation that wasn't quite pain flooded through her body, taking her strength with her. Her legs failed, her body faltered, every muscle in her body went slack and she went face first into the dirt, unable to even bring her arms up to stop her fall. Desperately, weakly, she stretched one arm toward the fleeing form ahead of her. "Miyou!"

Miyou was sure she was right at his back and hadn't slowed down to check as he surged for the gate until he heard her cry out. He glanced back and then promptly slammed on the brakes as he wheeled about at the sight of her laying in the dirt at Verglas' feet, her tail firmly in the grinning Vieteri's hands. "Proute!" he shouted back, but froze before he could even consider action, his eyes going wide and unfocused before rolling back into his head and gravity took over to drag him to the ground as well, Rutaba behind him with his hand still poised from the knock-out blow he had delivered while the boy was distracted.

Proute's arm dropped back into the dirt as if what remaining strength had left it, still extended toward him. "Miyou ..." she almost seemed to sob, literally powerless to do anything.

Above her, Verglas laughed at her pathetic form. "Well, what do you know? It really is true. Grab their tail, and a big, bad, scary Saiyan goes down like a little bitch. Everybody's heard it, but this is my first time actually seeing it."

Rutaba scoffed and self-consciously wrapped his own tail about his waist at that as he hefted the boy over one shoulder. "Don't get any ideas, Verglas. You try that on a real warrior, and we'd pop your skull like a melon."

"Oh, don't be so defensive," she smiled. "I wouldn't dream of it. We're business partners, after all."

Day 14

Hiro and Stella had, indeed, intercepted the other campers the next morning, who were delighted to see they were okay, and informed them that Proute and Miyou had made it to them, as well, but had headed back to the compound to get help to look for them. Relieved that his friends were safe, Hiro had gone about the rest of the trip with good humor until toward the evening of the thirteenth, when they were due to be heading back to the compound in the morning and the two still hadn't returned. Still, the sub-instructors assured him that they must have just not bothered coming back, since they were already there and would have arrived just to head back again.

Except when the campers returned to the compound and reported in to their instructors, both were surprised at the question, unaware that any campers had made their way back early. Proute and Miyou had never reached the compound. A search party with the leader equipped with a scouter was sent out, but by dinner the next day, they still hadn't turned anything up on the missing students.

Hiro had given up finding anything appetizing about his supper and left the mess hall early, his head down and his hands stuffed in his pocket and his shoulders feeling heavier than his weighted clothing could be attributed to.

"Hiro!" He looked up to see Stella approaching and waving him down. "How are you holding up?" she asked as she got close.

"How do you think?" he retorted. "My best friends are missing, lost out there somewhere, nobody can find them, I'm powerless to do anything for them, and it's my fault to begin with! And all I can do is mope and worry." Stella didn't say anything to that, but he felt her hand come down on his shoulder in a sign of support. "You know what the worst part is?" he asked after a moment.

"Hmm?" she responded encouragingly.

"Call me crazy and insist it's just me coping with it, but the further out they go to look for them, the more I want to shout at them," he confessed. "Like I get this feeling like it's all wrong. Closer, I want to say. Closer, closer, closer! They're closer! Look closer!" But Hiro just shook his head dejectedly. "Even though I know they've already scoured the surrounding area with a fine-toothed comb."

Stella patted his shoulder with the hand resting on it. "You're close to them," she assured him. "You've got a bond. You shouldn't be afraid to listen to those kinds of instincts. If there's one thing all the aliens in the galaxy have never been able to puzzle out about us humans, it's that sixth sense that always seems to give us information we shouldn't be able to have." Suddenly, a thought occurred to her and she brought her hand down harder on his shoulder than was reassuring. "In fact, how about we do an experiment?"

He could feel himself getting that unstable explosives vibe from her again and raised a suspicious eyebrow. "What kind of experiment?"

"Close your eyes." When he hesitated, she repeated the command. "Close them." Once he had, she moved behind him and placed both hands on his shoulders, giving each a gentle squeeze to help him relax. "Now relax. For a moment, put everything out of your mind. Take a deep breath. Now let it out." She gave his shoulders another squeeze. "I want you to think only of when the search party talks of looking for your friends. Far away, they say. Further every day. Further and further, stretching out into infinity. Hold onto how you're feeling. Don't analyze it, don't puzzle over it. Just hold it close. Now step."

He hadn't tracked how many steps he'd taken or how long they'd been conducting their little experiment, but his eyes snapped open as he heard Rutaba's voice.

"A Saiyan!" he was protesting. "Bound by rope! It's revolting!"

Inside of the most distant of the unused dorm barracks, Verglas motioned for the Saiyan to restrain his voice as she finished putting the final touches on bindings wrapping the halfling's tail, strapped to bed posts off to either side. The girl slumped down dejectedly, powerless to resist. "You keep it to yourself, you baboon!" she bit back. "Unless you want the whole camp to hear you. It's either that or we go back to taking turns holding the thing like a leash. Sooner or later, someone's going to stop into the office and notice one of us isn't there managing the search like we've been saying we are."

"Or we could just kill them already," he countered, crossing his arms. "Everyone already thinks they're lost, and they know too much, we might as well dump 'em and be done with it."

"No," she refused immediately, almost like scolding a dog. "My sister is back now and she'll be able to change their minds on that. They'll be found wandering aimlessly in the woods and this story will have a happy ending that won't hang like a cloud over this whole thing. Dead kids draw suspicious investigators like flies."

Without warning, the door to the barracks blasted inward, shredding to splinters as a boy's voice shouted, "Knock knock!" Their gazes snapped to the doorway, where Hiro stood with fist extended, Stella standing nearby with confidently crossed arms. Quite the entrance. At least, until Hiro tensed and shook his hand out.

"Ow, ow, ow," he protested before glancing to the girl. "That was a horrible idea! Why did I let you talk me into that?" But the girl just gave him a bewildered look and shrugged.

Verglas snarled in an expression that did her normally lovely face no favors. "Rutaba!"

The Saiyan jumped in line with the doorway as light pooled in his mouth, and with a roar, the blast erupted out in a throat cannon that threw up an incredible explosion as the youths jumped back and clear. A moment later, he gave chase.

The Vieteri was left in the room with the two captives, scowling at the ruined portal. "This is getting out of hand," she observed.

"I dunno," Miyou's boisterous voice put in from where he was power-cuffed to a chair. "Seems like it's going splendidly to me."

For two days, Verglas had done her best to ignore the boy. While Rutaba regularly gave retaliation, she saw the constant taunts for what they were, an attempt to exert control over the situation. But now, with all her own control quickly slipping through her fingers, she gave answer. "Your friends can't beat Rutaba, and soon, they'll be joining you. We'll tell the other campers that a fight broke out and he had to lay down the discipline. That arrogant human girl and your grief-stricken friend … No one will question it." She felt better just thinking it through out loud.

But the black-haired boy just grinned. "That's great, but that's not what I was talking about. You see, for the first time in two days, you're stuck here alone with us with your Saiyan dog too busy to come running if you called."

That shattered her calm she had built and she wheeled on him in a rage. "And just what do you think a boy in power cuffs and a powerless monkey girl are going to do?"

He shrugged too easily. "Well, I figured I'd start by getting out of the cuffs." Her face froze as she heard the all too telltale sound of metal impacting the floor. He had jumped before she could get her wits about her and respond, her heeled kick coming down only on the empty chair. "And then I figured I'd do this!" he shouted as he held his hand out, energy pooling there an instant before blasting forth.

It flew right past her. She had moved more on instinct than conscious response, but it pulled her out of the firing lane and the blast crashed behind her. She grinned. "You missed, boy."

But Miyou's own expression was as confident as ever. "Did you ever notice how every time someone says that, they turn out to be wrong?"

Behind her, she heard the boards shift as the half-saiyan girl stood, and she caught out of the corner of her eye some of the still-smoldering rope shreds hitting the floor.

Rutaba swung wide, only to hit another cloud of dirt instead of one of the little brats. The boy's blows were annoyances at best, but every time he'd reach to deal with him, the girl would kick him in the back of the knee or ki blast him in the bread basket. He was really starting to get pissed. Behind him, the roof to the dorm where they'd been holding Smartmouth and the Saiyan girl exploded, and he jerked around to see Verglas come flying out of it with them on her tail. He knew he wasn't the brightest bulb in the galactic box, but even he could tell this was all going rotten. What he couldn't figure out was how four little brats with less power between the four of them than either he or Verglas were giving them so much trouble! If the king could see him getting the runaround like this from a couple of scrawny humans, his military career would be over.

He whipped around and threw an energy ball fastball style at the incoming boy and grinned as he connected, sending him flying backwards, but the next instant, his scouter bleeped just in time for him to hit the dirt, a retaliatory blast from the girl in the shape of a spinning saw giving him a closer shave than he had any desire for. He watched as his hair from his newly formed flat top drifted down into his hands and wheeled on the girl. "What's wrong with you?!" he cried out. "Don't you know Saiyan hair doesn't just up and grow back?!"

But she just hovered in the air where she had thrown it, flatly frowning down at him. "If I hadn't missed, your hair would have been fine."

He seethed even as his scouter informed him that the boy had managed to roll out from under the blast and had hovered back as well, worse for wear, but ready to resume serving as the distraction for his more powerful ally. Bastard freaks, these brats were.

Verglas brought both of her arms across her front to absorb another haymaker from the half-monkey and cringed as the blow rattled through her bones. She was faster than the girl, more powerful, but as a Vieteri, she was not the physical match of even this halfbreed. The sheer brute force of the Saiyan race was more than a match for her in such a straight fight. She needed a way to even the odds, if only just long enough to change the fight to her own terms. She took a moment to take in her surroundings and her gaze went to Rutaba, still scuffling longer than she had expected with the other two. Yes, that was it. It was time to regroup and deal with these four as a unified front. When Proute took another swing at her, she whipped around and took the girl by the arm, hip tossing her with her own momentum and sending her sailing through the air. Opening achieved, she shot for her own Saiyan dance partner.

Only for that black haired boy to suddenly shoot up in front of her and spin a kick across her face. Another bizarre oddity, that one. That he had been restraining his power at the check-in was beyond question, but that he could be so fast … Of course, where she had been heading was painfully obvious. She should have checked his location first instead of thinking the Saiyan bitch was her only concern. Speaking of which, here she came again.

No, enough of this! The translucent crystal in her forehead released a flood of light as she threw her arms wide, a field of energy enveloping her while simultaneously knocking the other two back.

"You children want a fight?" she asked with renewed confidence as the light faded to reveal her combat armor replaced with a black skirt, heeled thigh-highs, three-quarter gloves, and a black sleeveless top with ice blue shoulders. She flicked a lock of hair out of her face where they could see a silver tiara embracing the gemstone as if it were mounted in it. "You'll have it."

With a shout, Proute charged again, but this time, Verglas simply stood there and let the girl's fist connect with her cheek, depressing the flesh and pushing her head to the side a bit, but accomplishing nothing else. A flick of her wrist released a burst of energy that sent the girl flying into the ground amid a cloud of debris. "You brats don't get it, do you? A Vieteri's magic produces a defensive barrier while they're transformed. You can't just batter me around like you were."

She stretched out her other hand toward the other fight now, energy pooling there. "RUTABA!" she shouted down at him. "GET UP HERE ALREADY!"

The three of them looked up as the energy reached critical mass, and reflexively, she saw the lilac one reach out and grab the other two as the weakling boy raised an arm in front of his face. The next moment, the location was engulfed in light that reflected sinisterly in her overly pleased grin. When it faded, however, it changed to surprise. She let out a laugh then. "Ha! I'd heard Saiyans didn't handle magic well, but I never imagined it'd be that effective!"

Proute pulled herself out of the rubble to stare at the scene in disbelief. There was nothing left. Just a crater. The concept of such power didn't even register to her. Hiro had come to rescue her. Hiro had been standing there. Hiro wasn't there anymore.

It felt like her heart slowed. Like it was going to stop right there. The blood pounding in her chest was so loud it filled her ears, her vision. Her chest was going to burst. It was going to explode.

She wheeled on the witch in the sky, unable to contain it any longer as her heart burst forth with a heart-wrenching outcry as a terrific blue beam with yellow tints, rocketing into the sky on a collision course with the Vieteri.

Verglas threw her arms before her again as she struggled against the beam, but felt her ears pop as her personal field shattered under its force and she went spinning backwards, only barely catching herself. Her transformed attire was shredded in several places. That shouldn't have even been possible. She seethed as she lowered her arms, arms that burned with the scorch marks of the attack. "You monkey-tailed bitch!" she shouted back. "I don't know where you were holding all that power, but now I'm going to kill you!" She drew her arms back, but jerked to a stop as black energy lashed around them and the rest of her body. "Wh-what? What is this? Magic? But how?"

She traced the strands back to the other boy's outstretched hands. But what she saw was impossible. His attire was completely different. It looked almost like a Japanese school uniform, but insanely over-stylized, with frills and silks streaming off of it. The net result was almost more of a fanciful, form-flattering officer's uniform than that of a mere high schooler. And there was an obsidian stone on his forehead embraced by a white gold headband. "I'm sorry," he taunted, "I don't remember anybody saying you were the only one here with magic."

Futilely, she raged against her bonds. "That's impossible! You're not a Vieteri! Five minutes ago, your forehead was completely bare!"

"You're absolutely right, of course," he agreed. "I'm only a quarter Vieteri. My mother's stone barely peeked through the skin. Mine is so small, it doesn't show at all unless I transform." He suddenly gave a jerk back on the binds, causing them all to tighten. "Do you have any idea how long it's been since I've had to do that?!" As she cried out from the crushing bonds, he called, "Now, Proute!"

And the next instant, there was an angry Saiyan maiden's fist embedded impossibly far into her stomach. She bent over with the force despite the binds, unable to draw breath as her sight thinned. Oh, by the Nexus, the pain.

A swirling cloud of dust stirred up and quickly dispersed as the air mass was displaced by three forms appearing in the middle of the courtyard. Rutaba and Hiro both looked around in confusion at their sudden relocation, but Stella recovered quickly, and was the first to take a defensive stance and put distance between herself and the Saiyan. The large man growled in annoyance as Hiro followed and planted his feet as if he were going to charge, but suddenly, Stella seemed distracted. Her gaze darted off to one side where she'd spotted a figure in a heavy, white robe quickly making for the gates. Seems they had a runner.

She suddenly looked back to Hiro with a grin. "Hey, Hiro, something's come up, I've gotta take care of it really quick. You've got this, right?" But without waiting for a response, even as he gasped out a protest, she took to the air and shot after the fleeing figure.

The robed girl only had a moment registering a shadow passing over her before the lilac girl touched down in front of her, forcing her to skid to a stop. "You sure look like you're trying to go somewhere fast, Kami." Her tone made it plain the name was used with full knowledge of its falsehood.

"It's not what it looks like!" the girl protested, taking a defensive step back. "I'm … I'm just a professional impersonator! I had nothing to do with … with whatever's going on here!"

"Uh-huh," Stella agreed. "And I'll bet that briefcase you've got stuffed under your robes is just your due payment for services rendered."

The girl's face twisted into a scowl and her step back turned into a more combat-prepared stance even as Stella just smirked at her.

As the girl flew off, Rutaba and Hiro briefly shared the same surprised expression, but soon the Saiyan's face shifted into a bloodthirsty grin even as Hiro's faded into dread. "Well, well, Nancy," he taunted. "Looks like I've got you all to myself … Time to play."

The impact of the giant's fist hit him before he barely had time to register the movement, and he was flying backward before he realized he'd been hit. Compared to the blow, the impact he made slamming back first into the building behind him barely registered. It was more in system shock than anything that he found himself still conscious. His entire world was the throbbing agony in his chest. He looked up as Rutaba took his time stalking toward him.

This was the power of a real Saiyan warrior. The might that leveled planets. A half-amused thought occurred to him. How willingly he would swap this encounter out for one more with Maiz. His longstanding bully had nothing on this guy.

The gorilla's hand reached down and ripped him from the rubble. "C'mon, Nancy, on your feet!" Rutaba commanded as he threw the boy against the wall. "I've got one last lessen for ya! I call it, Why you don't mess with a Saiyan Warrior!" The boy was starting to slide back down again, and Rutaba grabbed him by the collar, holding him back on his feet. "Pay attention, because it's the most important lesson you'll ever have!"

Again, Hiro went sailing through the air, thrown like a mere rag doll, or a chew toy for a rabid dog. When he hit, the pain from the blow to the chest was finally subsiding. Since that, Rutaba had been deliberately toying with him rather than causing any real further injury.

"I said on your feet, Nancy!"

Hiro let out a cough of a laugh, then promptly winced as his chest reminded him it wasn't that over it just yet, and commanded his muscles to move. Remarkably, it wasn't that hard when he actually started moving. It seemed for the most part, his body was still fully functional. The shift moved the weighted clothing, something he found he hadn't been giving much thought over the last two weeks. Maybe he'd been getting used to it after all. It was that thicker training attire, it occurred to him, that had probably absorbed most of the blow from Rutaba's opening punch.

As he finally found his feet, he couldn't resist sarcastically playing along, taking a moment to square his shoulders, albeit sloppily, and reply, "Yes, Instructor."

Rutaba was clearly amused, grinning and even giving a laugh. "There ya go, boy. Like a proper man. Even a scrawny wimp should face his fate face-forward." He held his hands behind his back, tail whipping to and fro like a preying cat. "First half of the lesson: The futility of resistance! It occurs to me that it's only fair that you get some shot off, or what kind of teacher would I be? So I'll give you one freebie, give it your best, and then we'll move on to the second half of the lesson." He brought one hand around and clenched it into a fist with such force that the air cracked like a walnut. "Irresistible force."

Hiro braced himself reflexively at that threat, even though the Saiyan claimed it wouldn't come until after his own attempt. But what else could he do? Stella seemed to be good enough to do some damage, but him? What did he have that could possibly budge the mountain of muscle and superdense bones in front of him? What was she thinking, just up and leaving like that, as if she thought this was supposed to be some simple street fight for him or something? What did she expect from him?

His eyes widened as it suddenly hit him. The lecture she'd given him that night on the cliff, and the training that had followed. That technique. It was simple enough that he had learned it in that single night, and she had claimed that even he could win a fight with it. He had felt offended by that at the time, but now, he thought he saw what she meant.

Meanwhile, his expression had stirred more amusement in the Saiyan. "Uh-oh," Rutaba mocked sarcastically. "Looks like Nancy's had a light bulb! What'cha got for me, Nancy?"

The thought, and the irony, brought a smile to Hiro's face as he planted his right foot back, that hand clenched as he began to focus. "Exactly what I came here for," he answered, his voice finding solidity in his focus. "I wanted something that could bring me what I needed to even the playing field, something to help a weakling like me close the power gap that's hovered over me all of my life." Energy pooled into his hand, and he grasped it as if to crush it into a ball within his fist. "And I found this! Instructor, this will remove the gap between us!"

Among all of the known humanoid races, Stella's voice, the memory of her lecture, came to his mind, sight is the only naturally acute sense. Any of the others can be trained to be acute enough to replace it, but it's the only one that we all have from birth. We rely on it, taking it for granted, to the point that, without it, the strongest warrior in the galaxy is powerless to defend himself. If you want to close the gap, the most direct way to do that is to blind your opponent.

But Rutaba only laughed, giving his silent scouter a passing glance. "Remove the gap?" he repeated, the idea preposterous. "Between a Saiyan warrior and your pathetic little thirty-oh-five? I must've rattled something loose when I hit you. I hate to break it to you, Nancy, but I've got a big, fat zero coming off of your revolutionary technique. There's no power in it! At all!"

But Hiro's grin only widened. "There's not supposed to be!" He clenched his fist tighter and drew back to throw. "Solar ..." And he pitched it forward, for the ground right in front of the Saiyan. "FLASH!"

The deceptively small orb sailed through the air and crashed into the ground in a silent but exceedingly brilliant flash of light right in Rutaba's face. His hands reflexively shot up in front of him, but by the time the impulse struck to do so, the damage had already been done. Though the "blast" had seemed to remain for a remarkable amount of time before fading, it had actually been over in an instant.

The massive man ground at his eyes with his knuckles in futility. "You rat bastard!" he raged. "My eyes! I can't see a thing! What the Hell did you do to me?! You'd better be running away, because when I can see you again, I'm gonna- UGH!"

Hiro hadn't remained still longer than it was necessary to confirm the technique had the desired effect. After the eyes, there are a number of locations that, regardless of species, are never protected. No muscle pads them, no bone shelters them. If your opponent is a male, the easiest and most direct of these to target is the groin. While both genders have about the same number of nerve endings there, only males have something that can be forcibly compressed with an impact. With Rutaba stunned, the human put all of his force into a ki-charged kick right into his cup. The Saiyan's eyes bulged out of their sockets as he keeled over, his blind expression stretched as if he would be sick.

While an easy target, however, it's not a particularly long-lasting debilitation. Its use is in setting up for further blows. A tall opponent will bend down with the impact, putting the throat within easy reach. Even as the Saiyan came down, Hiro was following with a piercing thrust to Rutaba's apple. The man's breath was immediately arrested as he gagged for air, his hands flying from his crotch to wrap around his neck.

This is a double-edged sword. It's one of the longest-lasting debilitating strikes, and the strength of a suffocating enemy will quickly drain, but they'll reflexively protect it once you do so. You need to get them to take hold of something else. With Rutaba's face still down before him, Hiro gripped his ears tightly in either hand and yanked down as hard as he could, bringing the Saiyan's chin down into his knee. The ricochet made a wet tearing sound and the large man's ears were dangling off of his head as he reared back and screamed in agony, his hands futilely flying to the sides of his skull and only making it worse. They almost immediately flinched away again.

After all of this, we've only made your opponent progressively miserable. In all likelihood, he's probably still standing. But his defenses are all down, and he's vulnerable to a final blow. The great myth of melee combat is that it takes a sufficient force to throw a knock-out blow, as if it were accomplished through a concussion. The truth is that force has absolutely nothing to do with it. They aren't rendered unconscious from the force of the blow, but by the torque it puts on the neck. No matter how strong or tough they are, you provide that sudden stress to the spinal cord, and it shuts right down to protect itself. This was the one he'd had to work the hardest to get right. With Rutaba flailing and blind, Hiro took a step back, readied himself, and whipped around, sending a turning round kick across the Saiyan's face with the practiced angle. Rutaba's head turned sharply as his eyes rolled back and he hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.

Hiro stood there for an untold number of moments, maybe a few, maybe a lot. Only his ragged breath from the adrenaline and pain interrupted the sight he couldn't quite believe was before him.

"Congratulations." It took him a moment to register that it hadn't been another segment of the lecture sounding in his head, but the real deal. Stella was returning, a petite girl slung over her shoulder with a similar hair color, but a notably different style, with no long tail in back, the bob short all around, and dressed in a tube top and short shorts, and a briefcase was hanging from her free hand. "You've bested a Saiyan warrior in single combat," she complimented. "That's not a feat many can lay claim to. You did well."

"Thanks," he breathed, unable to shake the impression she must have been hanging back specifically to watch. But he motioned toward her own cargo. "Who's she?"

"Their fake Kami," she replied as she laid the girl out next to the comparatively massive Saiyan, then hefted the briefcase. "She was trying to make off with their stock of cash."

He took a good, solid look at the girl. She was definitely the one on stage that first day, but now, up close? "She doesn't look anything like Kami."

But Stella only shrugged that off. "People see what they expect to see. When everything else is covered in robes, vague similarities can go a long way." But then she scoffed. "I also find it hilarious how many people think they know what Kami looks like. Same reason."

Hiro was about to ask something on that, but before he could, a loud cry of his name split the air and the next instant, something hit him with the force of a cannonball, nearly taking him off of his feet. It took him a moment to register what was attached to him, a sobbing, half-blubbering Proute. "Hiro! I thought you were dead! She attacked and you were there and then you weren't and there was just this big hole in the ground and you weren't there anymore and I thought-"

She seemed to be looping on that train of thought, but after a moment, he wrapped an arm around her and returned the embrace tenderly. But not so much because he was put off by the sentiment. Rather, the girl's grip almost felt like it was doing more damage than the fight had. "Proute," he gently intercepted his babbling, crouching down to better face her since she was latched around his torso. "Proute, it's okay, I'm okay. All in one piece. At least so long as you don't squeeze me in two."

"And you two beat the bruiser," Miyou's voice added to the mix as he approached, again in his training clothes and with the unconscious Verglas in a fireman's carry. "I was worried I'd have to come over and do all the work. As it stands, I've already gone way over my 'put forth actual effort' quota for the day." As he added her, bound in the power cuffs, to the other two, though, he addressed that. "I'd like to know what, exactly, happened back there, though."

Hiro got a confused look on his face as he reached up and scratched his chin. "I'm not really sure, actually. I think Stella teleported us."

"Teleport, huh?" The black-haired youth stood back up and put his gaze on the girl in question. "That's pretty high end stuff."

All she could really do was shrug, though. "It's a family thing. I've seen them use it so long, it was just kinda knee-jerk in the moment. I doubt I could do it again on the spot."

"Still, pretty timely save there," he replied. "Gave us a start, though. Proute thought she'd lost her favorite pet human."

At the mention of her name, Proute looked up, only to see the other campers out of the mess tent looking dumbfoundedly on. "Um, guys, we've got an audience."

"And authorities, too, if those are sirens I hear," Stella agreed. "Someone must've called them while we were tearing the place apart."

Hiro looked around in worry. Were they in trouble? "Should … should we do something?"

"Yeah," Miyou put in flatly as he started wandering away. "Let them do their jobs. I'm pretty sure camp's over. Once they've got these three jokers secured and gotten statements, I say we go start packing. I haven't seen a pool all summer, and the lack of string bikinis has been disheartening."

Proute looked back to scowl at him, though it was more puzzling than rejectful. "What's worse, that he can say that with such a straight face, or that we're too used to it to care?"

"Let him have his daydreams," Stella waved the concern off. "He's earned at least that today, hasn't he?"

That seemed to make Hiro think on something. "What about you, Stella? What are you going to do?"

"Me?" she asked, her expression clearly surprised at the question. But she rolled her shoulders. "Same as the rest of you. I'll head back home to my family, go back to training, get some sun time in for the tan lines these training clothes are giving me. Same old, same old."

Hiro let out a short laugh at that, leaning on Proute as much as she was on him. The stab of pain that made in his chest seemed halfway to a distant memory already. "Yeah. Here's to same old, same old."

"I'll drink to that." The slacker had returned, and Miyou held out dew-sweated bottles of protein water for each, his own already open and raised in toast.

Proute laughed, too, accepting the bottle and passing them on. "Here, here!"

"Here!" they all agreed, knocking the bottles together in the air above their victories.

Epilogue

The sidewalk underneath his feet was both foreign and familiar in the wake of summer. Hiro's backpack had a fresh set of notebooks and pencils, and the events that had transpired since last he headed this way seemed half a dream, a dream that kept him half above the clouds as he went. He barely noticed the training weights he was wearing under his clothes, only aware of them as a shifting created by his movements.

"Still wearing those camp weights, huh?" Miyou asked as he came out of an alley ahead that led from his own roads to meet up with him on the way to school. His own bag was little more than a rucksack with a drawstring and slung over his shoulder.

But Hiro gave a laugh as he eyed his friend's ever so slightly bulkier attire. "Like I can't plainly see you're wearing them, too."

The black-haired youth just shrugged it off. "You know me, I'm fundamentally lazy. You give me a way I can take credit for exercising without actually doing anything, I'm gonna take it."

"Me too!" Proute practically bounced out onto the sidewalk, all grins with her white leather backpack with a white tiger embroidered patch on the cover and dangling cat paws hanging from the bottoms of the straps.

"Proute!" Hiro beamed.

"You're late," Miyou blandly observed.

"Sorry, sorry!" she hurriedly apologized, but held out a bakery bag. "They had a line! And Hiro actually left on time today! I totally thought I had another half hour!"

"He must've been eager to see me."

The trio turned their attention ahead to a young man their age, arms crossed and hair standing straight up on end, with a lean, mean build to his body and a monkey tail lazily twisting in the air behind him.

Proute stuck her lip out with a soured expression on her face. "This morning was going so good, too."

Miyou took a step forward. "C'mon, Maiz, we're not in the mood. How about you scram before I deal with you, myself?"

But he stopped short as Hiro raised a hand out in front of him. "It's cool, Miyou," he assured him calmly as he shrugged his pack off and set it down on the concrete. "I've got this."

Maiz chuckled as he watched his favorite victim approach him. "That's right, Miyou. Hiro and I have a tradition, don't we? Every summer, he watches his self-help vids and comes back thinking he's changed his whole lot in life, and I smack him back to reality before he can hurt himself. Isn't that right, Hiro?"

"For too long, Maiz," Hiro agreed, but was still smiling. In his head, he was running the list. Eyes. Groin. Throat. Ears. Torque. Maiz was no Rutaba. He could probably leave out all of the middle stuff. He clenched his right hand, already preparing to focus the energy into it. "But I think you're about to find yourself out of a job."

"Oh, really?" the other boy sneered openly. "What's got you so pumped up and sure of that this time?"

Hiro's grin widened. "Because I've already taken down someone bigger than you'll ever be!" The energy began pouring visibly into his hand, and he kicked off, charging right for the boy he'd for so long seen as a nemesis, but now seemed like so little more than a speed bump. "SOLAR FLASH!"

Fin