For want of a Ribbon: The 25th World Tournament
By Bob-Dude17
Prologue: Fall of Commander Red, Rise of Commander Black
There are many possibilities in this world, both theoretical and actual. So long as there have been butterflies being killed or left alone, there have been possibilities, and more importantly, changes.
In most universes a Saiyan by the adoptive name of Son Goku went on to become a powerful fighter and force for good, saving the world from members of his own race, tyrannical space lizards, killer androids, biological chimeras, and a long dormant slayer of the gods themselves.
And in this universe where our story is set, one of many throughout the multiverse, Goku went forth to take care of the Red Ribbon Army once and for all. But unlike in a certain other universe, something much different happened on May 12th in the year 750. Though, the full ripple effects of that day's events, however, were not felt until a good many years later...
DBZ
May 12th, Age 750 had not been a good day, the former Staff Officer Black thought as he looked about the rising smoke from the ruins that had just that morning been the Red Ribbon Army Headquarters. Not a good day at all.
First, there had been that monkey tailed boy who had came storming in and had wrecked the place up a good bit before the soldiers had overwhelmed him through a relentless onslaught of rocket launchers, sniper rifles, and hand guns. It had taken just about every bullet the Red Ribbon Army had at their disposal, but it was worth it when the boy finally went down in unconsciousness in the end, mumbling something about being hungry.
Either way, with the boy subdued and awaiting execution for causing as much trouble as he had for the Red Ribbon Army, Black thought that might have been the end of their problems. That with that boy's head soon to be lopped off, that the Red Ribbon Army might then be on its way to properly conquering the world as was Commander Red's dream.
Ha! Turns out the damn brat had friends, friends who had just ever so conveniently been on their way to help that wretched monkey boy out.
One was the famed 'Wolf Bandit' Yamcha, who smacked down solder after solder with some savage fist based attack. Another was the infamous criminal Lunch, who mowed down solders as she wielded dual machine guns, the grin of a demon spread wide across her face.
One of them was even the legendary martial artist Master Roshi no less! No detail needed to be gone into how HE dealt with the soldiers. Needless to say, there was nothing the men could have done against that combined force of freaks, and Black couldn't blame those that made a run for it while the getting was still good.
Then, as if to top it all off, Ex-Commander Red had revealed in a moment of frustration his true motivation for the formation of the Red Ribbon Army, for wasting all the manpower and money and years spent hunting for the Dragon Balls in the first place.
To make himself taller.
That had been the proverbial straw for Black, as the reality of the Red Ribbon Army's whole existence hit him, all of the money wasted and loss of life, having been done just because his boss wanted a change in height? When he had someone like Gero who could have just MADE him as tall as he wanted to be?
It was such a comically stupid motivation that Black did the only rational thing a man in his position could be expected to do given the absurdity of the situation. He shot his former commander in the head at point blank range.
Having done the dirty deed and, truth be told, feeling as if a weight had been lifted off his shoulders, Black had then left the dragon balls out in the open and taken the elevator up to the top floor. Then he waited in a corner until the one known as Son Goku and his friends found them, took the two damned orbs, and left the compound to go celebrating their hard earned victory.
An act of a coward? Maybe. Black thought his action more of that of the act of a sane man in what was now clearly an insane world.
Now the ever sane, ever-rational Ex-Staff Officer Black was the only one left. Left in what just that morning had been the headquarters of the most powerful army in the whole world. As Black stared out at the compound below him, the low orange warmth light of the late twilight sun warming his baldhead as he thought long and hard about what he would do with his future.
He still had his capsulized mecha suit in his breast pocket, so that was something if nothing else. But that still didn't leave him much of anything to work with in truth.
Fuel for the damn thing was a big issue for starters, to say nothing of repairs to keep it running. It was like being stuck in the wild with a rocket launcher when what you really needed was a bow and some arrows. Sure, it was better than nothing, but given his current situation it was overkill. Like using a tank or monster truck to go out driving on the highway.
But what he had was what he had, even if it wasn't all that much. Black then changed thoughts to just what in the hell he was going to do with himself now; he could always worry about his capsule battle suit later. He could he try going straight, get away from everything illegal when he made his way back to the nearest city.
Settle down and become the yes man for some big company like Capsule Corp, or if he got truly desperate, Pod Corp. (though the mere thought of working for that bargain bin knock off of a corporation made Black physically shiver). Suddenly Black frowned at the thought of himself in old age, still working for someone like Red in personality if not appearance.
"No." A dry, cracked whisper escaped his thick lips at that moment as he curled his large hands into fists and tightened them. "Never again." He had had enough of taking orders from someone else to last a life time.
Maybe it was seeing the entire Red Ribbon Army crumble around him, maybe it was the fact that he had just resigned in a way most salary men WISHED they could do to their bosses, but something about wanting to conquer the world still wouldn't leave Black alone.
It was odd when he thought about it, until he had met Commander Red all those years ago, he had never given world domination a serious thought before. But now the bug of the idea had wormed its way into his brain and it wouldn't leave him alone. Just then Black remembered a quote he had read about a woman who had once climbed Mount Frappee.
Why had she done it, when the mountain was infamous for turning into a deadly blizzard in the presence of those of the female gender? Because it's there, the woman climber had replied.
Why take over the world? Because it's there. Because I can, and because I damn well want to. It wasn't the deepest or most original motivations, true, but there was just something about the simplicity of it all that Black found appealing.
King Black the First, now THAT had a ring to it. Black smiled at the thought of him with a crown on his head. So, he now knew what he was going to do. Question was, who was going to help him do it? Black's frown only deepened as he mentally checked off all of the personnel of the army.
Commander Violet had only been in it for the money (as her heist of most of Red Ribbon's stored wealth had showed), Tao hadn't come back and was most likely dead, same as General Blue and all the rest of the generals no doubt (though he had never heard word from Silver or White, Black didn't want to get his hopes up), and with the grunt men that were either dead or fled he had no backbone of an army to work with or command.
Granted there was still Gero, though Kami knew what his current location was. But the idea of working with a scientist as clearly unstable as him made Black's stomach churn at just the mere thought. The simple truth of the matter was that Black just flat out DISLIKED and distrusted the doctor, whose loyalty to Red Ribbon bordered on the fanatically insane.
Black, by the simple fact that he had not hesitated in shooting the late Red when the truth of the Army's origins had been brought to light, was far more reasonable and grounded in reality thank you very much. Besides, there was no telling how someone as unhinged as Gero would react to the truth, either about Black shooting Red, or the fact that the Red Ribbon's whole reason for being was just to make a short man taller.
It would no doubt be a kindness (to himself if nothing else, and given what had happened today Black needed every bit of kindness he could get) if Black made the mad fool of a scientist think that all of Red Ribbon had been destroyed today when the old goat finally got word of its destruction from his base in the northern mountains. As for issues of money…
There were a few scraps of wealth that that traitorous purple haired woman hadn't managed to run off with, and while it wasn't much of a nest egg to start the funding necessary for something like a new Red Ribbon Army, Black supposed it was better than absolutely nothing.
After all, if that fool Red had managed to build up something as impressive as Red Ribbon, what was there to stop Black from doing the same?
As for spare men, when one added in the late Commander Red's stupid tendency for killing his men for a very broad and just outright petty definition of 'failure', Black decided that his army would focus less on manpower and more on the gathering of intelligence. Lack of Intel on this Goku boy, that was what had done Red and his army in at the end, that and constant underestimation and overestimation on the now late Red's part. Black's army would be different. Better. He'd make sure of it.
"Regardless of Gero or my funding issues, I will rebuild. Not here though, the compound is a wreck and even if I was able to repair and restaff it, I'd just be inviting bad luck, and that's the last thing I need right now." Black said softly to himself as he stood up and looked back down at the ruined headquarters below him.
He knew it was foolish, talking to himself with not a soul around to hear him but the echoing of his own voice. At the same time, he was desperate to break the haunting silence by this point, as the sun set into the sky, bathing his now sullen sitting frame (one could only stand and stare for so long) in its orange glow. Besides, there was only so much thinking to himself that he could do before he went mad from lack of another voice. So his voice would have to do for now.
"Yes, I WILL rebuild an army of my own to conquer the world. It will take a while, a long while. But I WILL do it, by Kami, and I swear to you Son Goku and friends:; you will pay for what you did here today."
All of this, after all, was the fault of that damned monkey boy and his friends when you got right down to it. He could have been the ruler of the earth by now if not for that damn lot barging in like they had.
Black balled his hands tightly as he turned away from the window, and thus, the ruined compound that for years had been home to the strongest army in the world.
"The whole lot of you will rue the day that you messed with Commander Black's Black Ribbon Army, I promise you that right now. Son Goku and friends, you WILL pay for what you have done here today."
So, as one famed playwright once put it, the scene (of sorts) has been set. This is the nail, or in this case ribbon if you will, where my story and the Dragon ball canon split. Sure, I could have gone for obvious ones like Radizu surviving, Piccolo staying evil, Freeza and Cell becoming good guys, ect but all of that's been done by people FAR more talented and skilled than my lone self. So I went with the unorthodox idea and thus this little rough gem was born.
Now another thing I should note (this is where that sort of from before comes into play) is that there's no Majin Buu or evil wizards or Goku coming back to life in this fic. Not that I hate the Buu arc mind you, I just don't want to rehash canon for the sake of rehashing canon.
2. As my beta reader Ness Frost would attest to, I am human and horrible at self editing, so many thanks go to both him and my good friend Doctor Black for helping me in getting this tale down on digital paper.
3. This story will be updating on a weekly weekly bases on every Friday (though the Thanksgiving holiday may prove difficult, so I might release a chapter earlier before then) as the story is completed and finished (to say nothing of edited, thanks again Ness Frost!), so this is 'in process', in the sense that just have to upload all the chapters.
4. Any and all author notes will be at the END/bottom of chapters/computer scenes as I feel it allows the reader to jump into the chapter easier than read through a bunch of blah by the writer, that and author notes in the middle of the story are just distracting and unprofessional. (and yet American Vigor...)
5. I'll be using a blend of anime filler, the manga, and some video game stuff like the Legacy of Goku ll or Buu's fury, and the DS game Attack of the Sayians as my canon, partly just because I can and mostly because I thinks it adds to the world building. The same will be for attack names (which wont be bolded or anything like that as I find that distracting in DBZ fics myself). Most attacks will be in english, like Yamcha's Wolf Fang Fist attack if for no other reason then it rolls of my tongue better than the Japanese name does, but I'll be using the Japanese name for attacks such as the Special Beam Cannon or the rock paper scissors technique.
As for the character's themselves, I'm mostly aiming for trying to capture their Funianmation dub selves for the most part, as for better or worse it's Sean Schemmel's Goku that is the character to me, not (with all due respect) Mrs. Masako Nozawa. This is partly because I grew up, like many did in America, with the Funi english dub (with all its dubbing warts and blemishes), and partly because as an English speaking American, I generally prefer my animes in my own language, thank you very much.
7. While I've tried to do the character's justice and give them their due as best I can without playing favorites, I have made certain canon characters slightly more mature and/or willing to admit their personal flaws and the like (Goku, for example, because he was rescued by his friends from the Red Ribbon Army, came to appreciate them just a little more then he did in canon and because of so went out of his way to share techniques like the Kaio Ken).
DBZ
8. Lastly, I'll be answering comments/reviews but only if the comments have some depth to them. So please, none of the atypical 'UPDATE SOOOOOOON PLEASE' or 'This is really interesting...please update soon!'* garbage.