5. Some Phantom Calling
Gohan
Something was different today
There was a nagging in the back of my mind, something that stood out; a ghostly edge in the air that beckoned, like a child persistently poking the back of my leg for attention. I scanned the cafeteria—no signs of anything amiss, nothing out of place or new.
The lunch hour flew by as quickly as it always did and my group parted in their typical corner to go to each other's classes. Mr. Haru's class was probably the most pleasant of my regimen. My passion lied with sciences and mathematics, but this period was more for relaxing and unhurried work.
When I crossed the threshold of the classroom, my steps halted when I beheld someone sitting at my normally empty table.
With the person's back to me, all I saw was a long, sleek curtain of black hair. From the build of the figure, it was obviously a girl. If I had been back in middle school, newly unleashed onto the world, I would have balked and ungracefully tripped over my own thoughts at the idea of having to share a table with a girl. I'd since outgrown that diffidence, but it didn't mean I wasn't still wary. In my experience, girls only ever reacted to me in one of two ways: unabashed flirting, or stilted conversation just for the sake of filling up dead air.
Taking a discreet breath, I pulled out my chair and sat myself down. As I did so, out of the corner of my eye, the girl kept her gaze locked straight ahead, almost refusing to acknowledge me. I eased my brows up, but couldn't bring myself to object to it, and readied for class.
Finally, whilst in the middle of arranging my supplies and books, something tugged my eyes toward her, and she was already looking at me.
She was… I couldn't find a word for it, to describe her. "Pretty" wasn't quite the right word. Her skin was nearly the same pale complexion as mine, the shape of her face refined but not so delicate that it made her appear doll-like; the angles of her black brows added a sharp, acute harshness that contrasted her overall softer features, with watchful chocolate brown eyes set beneath them—eyes that watched me with suspicious intent.
She was not the pampered, sultry sort of beauty so many girls strived for. She was both striking and yet plain—a…rugged sort of natural beauty, the way a rose was with its intact thorns.
And this girl did have thorns. I could practically feel them in her wary stare.
Regardless, I wouldn't forget my manners, nor did I want to be the catalyst for any further tension, so I merely paid her a modest smile in greeting. The intensity in her expression faltered a bit, as if she didn't expect the gesture; to my own surprise, she softened and returned the favor—just the slightest tug of her lips, a tentative tilt of her chin in recognition.
That was that, and we both refocused our attention to the class.
As the hour dragged on, this new girl kept her eyes on her textbook the entire class period, with her hair veiling her face. I mirrored her and retained my focus on my work, almost relieved.
No sooner did the bell sound was she out of her chair and on the move out of class. Her swift and hasty departure nearly stupefied me. For a moment, I wondered if there was something about me she found offensive or uncomfortable… But as to how that could be, I had no clue; I hadn't said a single word to her, hadn't even so much as glanced at her for longer than a breath…
Just as I was about to leave my seat, my eyes caught something on the ground: A worn, black pocket journal just large enough to match a pen's length, lay on the floor beneath the girl's chair. I thought I'd heard something tap on the ground when she left…
Retrieving it, I loped out of the room to catch up to her, spotting her black hair in the crowd.
I didn't know how else to get her attention. "Hey!"
That did the trick. Like a tetchy cat, her head snapped in my direction. Those relatively soft-edged eyes of hers widened a perceptive smidgen. I watched her as she watched me—as her eyes drank me in, analyzing me, just as she did when we first acknowledged each other in class. It was such a divergence from the looks I was used to getting from girls—a look of unadulterated observation, bold and unapologetic, like a predator sizing up a potential threat.
The mere weight of that stare almost had me wishing I had left the book with Mr. Haru to return to her, rather than be the focal point of her attention.
What I got in response was both a greeting and a question, as if perfect strangers strolling up to her was far from the norm in her daily routine. "Hi?"
Her voice was not what I had been expecting; one might mistake it for a boyish tone, but there was just enough softness to it that made it still undoubtedly feminine to my ears. Being face-on, I caught an anomaly in her curtain of black hair—one blood-red streak cascading down the right side of her face, dominating one of the longest locks of her hair. It added an extra touch of austerity.
A rose with thorns, indeed.
I swallowed, my breathing shallow for some reason. As if she was a deer on the verge of bounding away if I made the wrong move too quickly.
"I think you dropped this; it was on the floor by your chair." I offered the journal to her, which she took with reined-in alacrity. The moment her hand was close to mine, something thrummed deep in my blood, but it was so brief and trivial, I paid no heed to it.
The girl blinked and nodded with her thanks, her clear eyes warily searching mine. So she liked to read people… Unfortunately for her, she wouldn't be getting much from me. I had learned at an early age through painful lessons of trial and error to mask my thoughts well.
"You're new, aren't you?" I'd never seen her before—in the entirety of this school, or anywhere in town.
She gave a dip of the chin in confirmation. "Just moved here."
"To the city?"
Something seemed to wink out in her eyes as she elaborated, "To this continent." There was a heaviness to her tone that gave me a good clue that she wasn't exactly thrilled about it.
Well, if she and I were going to be sharing that desk for a while… "I'm Gohan." I held my hand out in a formal gesture, hoping I wasn't going to give the girl any wrong impression.
"Jae," she conceded, and I let the name echo in the chamber of my conscience.
When her hand timidly wrapped itself against mine, I felt a slight jump from her. Any normal person would only feel the extra firmness of my handshake and dismiss it as trivial; with her, it was as if she felt the electric flux of my life energy that coursed through my blood twenty-four-seven.
I wouldn't have thought anything of it, of that reaction, if I hadn't felt just the faintest spark of something else in her as well—like a mirror to my own energy. Something inside me roused at that ember, that imprint of energy, igniting something deep in my bones.
"Nice to meet you," she spoke more clearly, revealing a more crystal pitch in her tomboy's voice. With nothing else, she turned from me and trekked her way through the thickening crowd, expertly maneuvering and weaving to avoid slowing or stopping altogether.
It would turn out this wouldn't be the last I'd see of this girl for the day. While lazily jogging the rounds in the upper level of the gym while my other classmates trudged along tiredly, I caught a glimpse of what was happening in the lower level. I slowed to a stop by the railing when the black and red hair caught my eye, watching the new girl as she remained stationary in her position of the volleyball court. She appeared to be anxious; her arms were tight at her sides, her face twisted in a worried frown.
I felt a presence slow down and stop beside me at the railing. "What's up?" Iian glanced in the direction I was staring off to, humming once he found the source of my attention. "Are you actually staring at a girl?"
"Say what?" Elliot dropped by, stopping by the opposite side of me and leaning over the rail. "Did I hear you say our Gohan is checking out a girl?"
I rolled my eyes. "I'm not 'checking her out'."
"Who is she?"
"A new girl. She's in my Literature class."
"If I didn't know any better, I'd say she looks like she would rather be anywhere else but here," Iian observed, tilting his head as the girl—Jae—tried her best to avoid having to spike the ball. The first few times she did spike it, however, nothing went wrong; the ball went a bit higher than normal, but that simply proved she had a heck of a punch.
The next spike she delivered was rather careless; the ball was sent hurdling so high, it clipped one of the lights on the ceiling.
I swore in the privacy of my conscience when her eyes suddenly flashed toward us, immediately locking on me. Instinct told me to move along, to shun away from her line of sight, but I stood my ground, remaining at a slouch over the railing. She narrowed her eyes in bewildered scrutiny. It was as if we were challenging each other with our stares, daring the other to look away first.
A white little dot came careening through the air for her, and she snapped her attention for it just in time to fling her arm at the volleyball and send it flying into someone's head. The collision of thick leather hide with flesh-covered bone was impressive, and the ball ricocheted off the person's skull.
Iian, Elliot, and I each uttered groans that were half-laughter. I wouldn't deny, that looked—and sounded—painful. When the person turned around and revealed himself as none other than Taro Dowl, I took my reserved sympathy and tossed it out the window.
When it was obvious no more excitement was going to transpire, we moved along.
Even with my lulling playlist of classical music ongoing through my ears, even with the stack of papers littered before me, my mind refused to focus on any of it. No, my thoughts kept trailing back to the new girl—the imprint her energy left in my bones.
I still felt it, strumming within my blood. It was far more concentrated, but the feel of it was so identical to that flare I felt a couple weeks ago—the distant flare that was so brief and gone in the very next instant, I couldn't have been sure I didn't imagine it.
But I didn't react to nothing; my sixth sense didn't alert me to 'nothing'. I didn't break my focus in my studies for nothing. The hairs along my arms and on the nape of my neck didn't stand up on end—for nothing. My heart didn't leap in my ribcage in that split-second for nothing.
I felt something. It was far away, and faint, and so short-lived that even if I'd wanted to fly across the globe searching for the source, I wouldn't have been able to find it again.
As it'd turn out, I didn't need to go searching for it, because the source of that energy came to me instead.
The new girl—her energy had the same imprint as the spike I felt two weeks ago.
What did it mean?
It could mean a few different things.
Every living being had its own energy signature. With humans and most other mammals, the signatures were very faint, to the point it took considerable effort to register them. Some humans, like a majority of my father's friends, possessed robust, loud energy currents, thanks to years of training and honing their ki.
Somehow…I didn't think that was the case with this girl—Jae. Her ki signature was too strong, even at rest. During that bout of volleyball in gym, she'd appeared tensed, flustered; her energy climbed and plummeted—no control.
Human ki levels didn't go haywire like that, not that drastically.
No tail.
That was the first detail my mind searched for. Despite the fact that she wore loose clothes, there was no way she could have hidden the slender, flexible tail Saiyans were born with. Seeing her in a relatively form-fitting tank top and boys' shorts in gym class confirmed that.
It wasn't too farfetched to consider that perhaps, just like myself and the small cluster of Saiyans that called Earth home, this girl could have had her tail removed at some point—either at birth or later on through some other trauma.
Reasonably speaking, it's not to say she couldn't be some other form of alien; gods knew the universe was an enormous place, so how could I say I knew what aliens did or didn't look like—or what technology they had at their disposal for the sake of blending in?
Saiyans were the only ones I knew of in my experience that were the most humanoid. Save for our bizarre hairstyles of various degrees and the monkey-like tail that sprouted from the end of our spines, we could easily pass for human. I wouldn't have had such luck surviving in society if that wasn't the case.
I could just ask her, I suppose—find ways to discreetly work in the word "Saiyan" and see if she responded to it, without making myself look like a deranged moron. Of course, that banked on her knowing her heritage to begin with.
Sighing, I abandoned my pen and rubbed my eyes with the heel of my palms.
What if she was a Saiyan? Where had she been? Why hadn't I—or any of my group—sensed her before now?
So many hypothetical scenarios…
Groaning in frustration, I abandoned my earphones and books altogether, sneaking out my open window to head for the fenced pasture across the neighboring stream from my house, where Lightning contentedly grazed on rich spring grass to his heart's content. He halted in his feasting to nicker shrilly in greeting to me as I climbed over the wooden rails.
Patting him on the hindquarters, I gave him an affectionate hug around the barrel. Thanks to his faux unicorn blood, he was nearly twice the size of an average Arabian horse, my head barely clearing his withers; his midnight coat was glossier—almost metallic in hue when the light hit it just right. That horn that rested atop his poll, though, was graciously not tangible to the eyes of those the beast hadn't bonded with. It was a defensive mechanism, as old faerie-tales depicted, that unicorns practiced so as not to reveal their true selves to impure souls that could pose a danger to them.
It was perplexing to think how pure unicorns had wound up extinct, though, with such magical protection.
I lay on my back in the grass, staring up at the dimming afternoon sky. The blue was giving way to shades of pink, orange, and purple, golden clouds meandering along in an unhurried pace. Taking a deep breath into my lungs, I gulped up the pure mountain air, letting it cleanse my mind and body.
The sounds of Lightning's chewing brought a smile to my face. I loved listening to horses eat, loved the sweet scent of hay and grass coming off their breath.
Whiskers tickled my forehead, warm breath blowing on my face, and I opened my eyes as Lightning sniffed at my head, little strips of grass falling on me as he chewed.
"Thanks, bud." He blew a huff into my hair as if in answer, and resumed grazing on the grass around me.
So I laid there for a while, basking in the setting sun, content with Lightning's company, well until the world was cast into stars.
"Earth to Son Gohan."
The snapping of his fingers wasn't necessary, but Vince did it anyway just to irk me. Paying him heed with a playful glare, he grinned in response. "You seem unusually distracted today." He didn't elaborate, leaving it open for me to continue the conversation as he returned to the bio-model he studied on the table in front of him.
The faint humming of efficient mechanics filled the lab we sat in, picking apart and studying biological samples and testing bio-engineering scraps we'd put together. This was how I spent my Saturdays, in one of the many laboratories of Capsule Corporation, the home and workplace and playground of an old family friend. If I wasn't working alongside Vince in decoding biological components or deconstructing and rebuilding machinery, then I was shadowing Bulma in her work—from the depths of her protected labs to assisting her with more public work.
"Do I."
Vince hummed. "Could it have anything to do what that girl Ell and Iian caught you staring at in gym?"
Oh for gods' sake…
Of the two of them, I knew who would blurt out such a thing. I made a mental note to put Elliot through a few rounds of teeth-clanging sparring later.
"I wasn't staring at her."
"What were you doing, then?" Vince watched me out of the corner of his hazel eye, a taunting edge at the corner of his mouth. His five o' clock shadow that was peeking in gave him an especially roguish look—which Renea was always particularly fond of.
"I was objectively observing her."
"She must have been out-of-this-world for you to have spent more than a whole millisecond looking at her."
Out of this world? Possibly.
After a moment of debate, I caved in. "She's…peculiar."
Choking on a laugh, Vince directed his attention to me then, brows up. "Of course, if a girl was to catch your attention, she'd be 'peculiar', of all things."
"It's not like that," I debated, my voice even. "She didn't catch my attention that way."
"Then tell me how, pray tell, she caught your attention." Leaning back in his chair, he crossed an ankle over his knee.
"You want my honest to gods answer?"
"When do I ever ask for anything else?"
I struggled to form the words in my mouth. I didn't know how to explain it to him—to explain not just what I suspected of this girl, but what it meant—what it could mean—to me. Vince was as human as Renea or any of the others in our group, but they all fit in a different class than the friends I'd 'inherited' from my father. They knew I wasn't human; I couldn't hide that from any of them, nor did I want to; they hadn't cared that I was a half-breed alien, that I possessed a power that could end this entire planet without so much as breaking a sweat.
He would glean that this was something significant to me; he just wouldn't be able to understand how much, or why—not really.
I told him anyway.
I told him about the spark of energy I felt when Jae and I shook hands—how she seemed shocked by it, as if not even aware of what it had been; I told him how strong her ki signature felt—and how it was eerily similar to the prickle I'd detected two weeks ago.
Through all my tripping words, he listened, his expression thoughtful and absorbed, nodding only once I'd finished talking.
"I thought your Dad and Vegeta's cronies were the only ones that escaped Freeza?"
I shook my head, not to answer him, but to hopefully jostle some sense into my thought process. "That's just it, isn't it… She has to have a full-blooded parent—a parent we haven't sensed on this planet at all, not to mention I've never sensed her until she showed up over here. The absence of a tail doesn't help, either."
The possibility of her Saiyan parent having left the planet was a plausible one, especially since Saiyans were such a galactically nomadic people. The girl had to be close to my age, so her Saiyan parent—if she did indeed have one—would have had to escaped or been sent off of the Saiyan's native planet as an infant by the time it was destroyed by Freeza, as my father had been.
"Well, there is one way you can get the answer you're looking for and put this whole mystery to bed."
Looking at Vince in genuine curiosity, I raised a brow. "How?"
A playful spark returned to his hazel eyes, and he smirked. "Talk to her."
Clueless, I shrugged. "I have talked to her."
"No, you introduced yourself to her. I mean, actually talk to her; you know, find out her hobbies, her favorite color, what she likes and dislikes—whatever, and then you can ask her questions about her genetic makeup, and then bam! No more mystery to bruise that brilliant noggin of yours." He said this so mockingly blasé, as if it was so simple.
I didn't want to go out of my way to get to know this girl, to jump through all the hoops and make up little white lies, maintain that façade that had grown more permanent than my true self… Even if I wanted to talk to her, I didn't know how I would approach her or where I would begin; she was such a prickly and stiff yet intense person that it was difficult to stand being the center of her attention for longer than a full minute.
I uttered a reluctant, yet unsure grunt.
"Aw, come on. You're obviously curious. I mean, she could have the blood of your extinct race in her veins! That's got to ignite something primal in you on some level."
I didn't want to admit just how much it would affect me—how it'd affected me already.
So I said nothing else, quietly returning to my work until I had to take a break to relieve myself. In passing the kitchen, I decided to grab a snack, and crossing the threshold to the room, my steps faltered for a moment upon seeing Vegeta rummaging around. He didn't notice me—or if he did, he paid no heed to me; he was too preoccupied with making himself a meal.
Just finished a round of his training, no doubt, judging by his naked and scarred torso that still had a drying sheen of sweat, made noticeable by the synthetic lights above.
I debated returning later so as not to step on the toes of the prince of my extinct race, but if anything, this could be an opportunity to gain some answers.
Vegeta didn't deign to acknowledge me until I'd reached the fridge, skimming for a drink. He cast me a side glance, and snuffed in dismissal. His usual way of greeting anyone he didn't think too highly of—and I was near the top of that list, only just below my father.
While he certainly maintained his snobbish, high-and-mighty arrogance he'd had since day one, it felt eons ago that I considered him my enemy. Yet he wasn't quite an ally, either. He was stuck somewhere in between the two.
Come to think of it, I wasn't entirely sure why the prince, who'd spent the first few decades of his life being a destroyer and tyrant, stayed here on Earth, fighting alongside those who'd once been on his killing list. There was always a common enemy involved, yes, but still…
I'd like to think he stayed because of Bulma and their son, Trunks, despite the fact I'd never seen him bear any sort of affection or even fondness toward either of them.
Especially with my father gone, I didn't know what kept Vegeta here, without my father to be that constant reminder of his goal to get stronger, the plateau he's always coveted to reach.
Perhaps I'd never find out, which was fine. Vegeta had his pride, his secrets; he could keep them.
There was no way to start a cordial, normal conversation with him; so I only requested, in an even voice that had an underlying tinge of cynicism, "Do you have a spare minute to enlighten me on something about Saiyan heritage?"
Almost caught off-guard that I'd said anything to him, Vegeta's head snapped to me, eyes pinning me down with that ireful, bored scowl. It didn't take much for people to balk from him; while not the most towering of Saiyans—I was actually taller than him by a few inches now—there was something in the way he carried himself, those eyes always keen and itching for a fight, his up-standing black hair almost a crown in its own right, that gave him a commanding and intimidating presence, regardless.
I'd grown desensitized to his posturing and intimidation.
"What prompted such curiosity for the heritage you've long since turned your back on?"
Of course he'd put a jab in there; he could never speak without throwing some degrading remark in.
I rested my hips against the counter opposite of him, crossing my arms to my chest. His eyes tracked the movement of my body, picking apart my form with an unimpressed frown, as if seeing the evidence of my lack of "training" over the years.
I was as well-built as any jock or athlete, despite only being sixteen and surely having a great deal of filling in ahead of me, but it was still somehow less than how my body surely would have been if I'd trained all day, every day, to enrich myself like Vegeta did on a daily basis. I was leaner compared to his bulk and muscle, the mature warrior's body in its prime he'd honed all his life, whereas I only bothered with such things out of maintenance, or whenever the situation deemed it a dire necessity.
Impervious, I only matched his glare, not saying a word; I wasn't going to humor him with an answer until I received mine. When that had become apparent to him, he scoffed, a cruel edge forming on his mouth.
"You've got more backbone than you used to." Well, that was the closest to a compliment I'd ever received from him, and probably the only one I would ever get. He took a bite of a spiced chicken leg, not bothering to swallow first before prompting, "What 'enlightenment' would you like to hear?"
I got straight to the point. "Is it at all possible for there to be another surviving descendant of Saiyans—even just one?"
He paused in his chewing, incredulously eyeing me—with a quiet trace of hope lurking beneath that dark glare. I wondered, whenever he'd trekked out across the stars, how often he had looked for others of our kind; how often he wished others had survived.
"I've traveled across enough galaxies—and have seen not one trace of other surviving Saiyans in any of them—to say chances of even one having escaped Freeza's extermination are slim to none."
"Surely, there had to be other Saiyans deployed out on mission somewhere—every single member of the entire race couldn't have all been on the planet—"
"They were, because it was Reschnargh, the holiday we celebrated to pay homage to the Moon Gods that granted us our ability shapeshift to the Great Ape on the full moon; no Saiyan went out on mission, and no Saiyan would dare ignore the holiday. And any Saiyans that weren't on the planet, were on Freeza's ship, and either died that night all the same or were spared—only to be his lap dogs."
That's what he'd been, with the brutish Nappa, my conniving uncle Raditz, and his mate. All of whom had been put down years ago.
"Were Saiyan children still sent out?" The Saiyan race, not exactly the most nurturing of parents to their offspring, were not above the common practice of stuffing Saiyan children—most barely a year old—into space pods and then sending them off to some random planet, where they were left alone to fend for themselves and conquer the planet once they'd grown strong enough.
"No. Air space was always closed on Reschnargh—no incoming or outgoing flights allowed."
"What about any children or infants that had been sent out before that holiday—who weren't old enough to make the journey back to Planet Vegeta?"
A grim silence saturated the air, and a muscle in Vegeta's jaw feathered. "Whatever young children there may have been scattered across the galaxy that hadn't come home…Freeza hunted down and killed every single one of them."
The words—the fact—cut something in me. "How do you know?"
"Because I was there, boy. I lived on Freeza's ship from the time I was eight years old. And he had no qualms about slaughtering those Saiyan younglings in front of me, even when I was one myself; he made sure I was there to witness it in one form or another, made sure I saw each last ember of my race he snuffed out, just to remind me of his power, remind me that the proud race my father raised me to rule was nothing—that I was nothing, if only but a prince of an extinct people."
There was no waver, no anguish in his voice—only a quiet, resigned fury.
It took me a few breaths before I pushed, "If Freeza had overlooked my father's existence here on Earth…then what's to say he couldn't have missed one more Saiyan infant?"
He focused on me again, impatience pinching his features. "What are you on about, boy?" He never called me by my name; I was only ever "boy" or "brat"—though the latter had seemed to fade in occurrence over the years.
"There's a new classmate at my school, and her energy signal is…unnaturally high for a human."
He seemed to pick up what I was putting down. After a moment of letting the inclination sink in, a flicker of callous amusement crossed his face. "She?" He huffed another dismissing breath. "You're too tame to be vying for a Saiyan female, boy. I didn't think you'd find them much appealing, given you're even more of a soft-hearted fool than your father was."
For whatever infuriating, damning reason, I felt my cheeks and ears warm up. "I'm not…no, that's not what this is about—at all."
Vegeta's taunting snigger burned my ears. To my amazement, instead of dismissing me, he prompted, "Did she have a tail?"
"As far as I could tell, no; but it's not too farfetched to think it could have been removed when she was a child."
He hummed in accordance to my remark, but the sound was laced with old resentment—probably for his own tail he'd lost when Yajirobe cut it off with his sword in the flurry of battle.
"Have you approached her?"
Rather than explain my limited interactions with Jae, I only answered, "No."
When all I did was stand there, a bit confused myself as to what to do next, Vegeta glared at me again. "Well? What's your point, then?"
I tripped over my words for a moment before I finally said, "Never mind." I hadn't been all too sure what I aimed to accomplish in mentioning this all to Vegeta—if not to glean more of a probable answer to this nagging enigma in my head.
"Just…never mind."
