Hello, ! While this isn't the first fanfic I've ever written, it is the first I've published- leave your honest opinions, I would love some tips from fellow authors!
So, regarding the story. Peacemaker is the first of a trilogy of stories I plan to do in an alternate Dragonball Z universe, where Goku/Kakarot was originally sent to Earth not alone, but with Kalani, a female Saiyan who is given the name Goha and raised with Goku as his sister. She'll change the entire DBZ universe drastically, but you'll have to wait to see how. Oh, and in keeping with the tradition of naming Saiyans after fruits and vegetables, the name Kalani is a play on Kai-Len, the Chinese name for a leafy vegetable used commonly in Cantonese cuisine.
Each one of the three stories will focus on a different romance. Peacemaker will center on Raditz and Kalani, the second story will center on one of my personal favorite pairings, Goku and Vegeta, and the third will center on a very curious pairing that I'm still on the ropes with regarding whether to go through with it or change it: Nappa and Launch (her bad form, that is). It was originally going to be just two stories, but I felt kind of bad pairing both of Nappa's partners but not him up, so I started thinking about doing a third, shorter one for him. Let me know what you think of the idea.
And just a quick setting review: Remember Vegeta and Nappa's first appearance in DBZ? They're on a forested planet, surrounded by large dead, insect like beings (eating them, to be precise). The planet is never named, never expanded upon, it's just there as a background. That, in my fanfic universe, is Udaryya, a massive planet which took even Vegeta and Nappa over a year to conquer, for reasons explained in the story below. If you have any further questions about the setting, the timeframe, or anything else, for that matter, feel free to ask me, I'm more than happy to answer.
Italics= Character's thoughts
Enjoy the fanfic!
Peacemaker
Chapter 1: Udaryya
Blood. Fire. Smoke. Death. Music to my ears. One after another, the warriors of the village fell in blasts of ki and pillars of suffocating smoke, their arrows and spears shattering on contact with my armor as their resistance became more and more futile and desperate; not that a tribe of filthy insects festering in the jungle would have ever stood a chance against a Saiyan in the first place. I swiftly lost count of how many craven villagers had fled into their huts rather than face my wrath, and spared myself the trouble of hunting them down by letting out a final, double handed ki blast. The wave of energy leveled what hadn't already been taken by fire, letting out a thundering roar which echoed through the jungle around me, and choking the air with dust and ash.
Chuckling softly to myself, I waved my hand, quickly dispersing the black cloud before taking off back towards my partners, Nappa and Prince Vegeta. Gliding above the thick, teal draped forest canopy, I caught sight of several thin columns of gray smoke winding skywards several miles to the west, and grunted. Great. More of these damn villages. It's going to take forever to comb this damned planet. There was nothing about this particular conquest which pleased me in the slightest, when I thought of it. When Frieza had assigned our team to conquer Udaryya, a planet which hadn't even advanced past the tribal level, I had thought that we got off easy. The mission had been simple: Exterminate the native, insectoid population to the last village, to allow Frieza's Planet Trade Organization to found a mining colony. Frieza had been uncannily specific in his instructions to clear "every last village", however, and now I knew why.
The fact that Udaryya had no cities and no central government, which I had thought would benefit us, backfired quickly. No central governments beyond tribes meant that if we razed a thousand villages, leaving none alive, the next thousand wouldn't know that we were even on the planet. The levels of isolation and lack of communication made it impossible to force the natives to surrender to Frieza's rule on any sort of large scale, not that they would be intelligent enough to negotiate anyway. And so the only option was to search the jungles and clear the villages one by one, a fact that wasn't helped by the planet's sheer size; Udaryya was almost three times as massive as Vegeta-sei, with most of its land covered in thick rainforests.
To further exacerbate the situation, the indigenous not only peppered the forest with their villages, but also, as Vegeta had discovered yesterday, kept almost as many as on the surface located in vast stretches of underground tunnels, which they constantly expanded. The whole fiasco infuriated me more with every passing day, and every day my rage at Frieza grew. He had stuck us with this planet as punishment for Nappa lashing out at him, or perhaps simply for being Saiyans, so he could sit back in his throne and mock us as we spent month after month scouring caves and razing forests, all to hunt down a few bugs. Whereas normal conquests of planets like Shikk took mere days, I knew, Nappa knew, even Vegeta knew that Udaryya would take a year or more, at best. I shuddered silently to myself as the two became visible in a clearing below. A year of this Hell…
Obviously, my frustration showed; as I landed, Vegeta, never missing a chance to insult my power level, called out with a smirk,
"What's wrong, Raditz? Was that last village too much for you?"
"We can let you guard the camp if you can't handle the fighting," Nappa continued with a wry grin, siding with his former charge like he always did.
"Nappa's right!" Vegeta cried in mock awe. "I mean, you probably need some training time to work on your power level; perhaps by the time we leave, you can have it above 2,000!"
"Shut up, the both of you," I growled, clenching my fists and doing everything in my power to prevent my ki from spiking with rage, as that traditionally signaled a challenge, and I learned long ago that sparring with Vegeta never ended well for me. Normally, I could contain the anger, but my partners didn't exactly make the task easy on occasions like this. "I was just thinking about how pointless this gods-damned mission on this gods-damned planet is! Vegeta, you know that Frieza is humiliating us on purpose with this mission! Where's your Saiyan pride? How can you stand for this, after everything he's done?!"
On this issue, I knew that for once, Nappa was on my side, as he brought up the subject of deserting or rebelling against Frieza as often as I did, even if Vegeta ignored us most of the time. Done with the insults for the moment, Vegeta sighed and sat on the trunk of a felled tree, his brow furrowing.
"You two don't understand what deserting Frieza would mean for us, for the rest of our race. Believe me, he would track us down and execute us, and it would be the perfect excuse for him to hunt any other remaining Saiyans into extinction as well. If we're going to overthrow him, and trust me, my comrades, the Saiyans will have their vengeance, we have to make him trust us first. We must work our way through his ranks and serve him loyally until he is too blinded by our ruse to suspect anything, and we cannot break when he torments us with missions like this one; that's exactly what he wants us to do. No, we will persevere though situations like this, and ascend his ranks until we can go no higher- then, we will gather the remaining Saiyans, and strike him down, avenging our people and my father once and for all!"
Spoken like a true leader, I thought to myself, nodding slowly along with Nappa, like a king.
"Other Saiyans…" Nappa murmured, frowning, "I thought that we were the only ones who made it?"
"Don't be foolish, Nappa," Vegeta replied, standing and gazing towards the skies. "I've been in communication with Turles since Shikk, trying to get him and his pirates to join forces with our group. My brother, Tarble, is in exile, though I don't know where, and he's too weak to be of use anyways." Vegeta paused momentarily, and then settled his gaze on me. "Raditz, it's been so long that they're almost certainly dead, but wasn't your brother, Kakarot, sent to conquer Earth with Kalani years ago?"
An alarm went off in my mind as the memories of my infant brother came rushing back to me at once; I had almost forgotten! Kakarot had been sent with Kalani to conquer the remote planet Earth hours before Vegeta-sei was destroyed, when I was but a child. The civilization there had barely begun to tap into ki, and so two Saiyan infants had seemed more than enough to subjugate it. Communication with the two, however, was completely lost, and though under normal circumstances a search party would have been sent, the simultaneous extinction of most of the Saiyan race, including King Vegeta and my father, Bardock, had prevented this from occurring.
"They might not be dead," I mused, running different possibilities through my mind, "Maybe they heard of the destruction of Vegeta-sei and decided to lay low… or perhaps the conquest of Earth proved more difficult than we thought? What if the fight is still ongoing?"
"If they're true Saiyan warriors, they would have subjugated Earth long ago. But even so, if you're right, the two of them might prove a valuable asset to our group. Two more Saiyans would mean that the planets we attack will fall almost twice as quickly; not to mention that faster conquests and more soldiers at his disposal would gain us favor with Frieza."
Vegeta pondered this for a moment, and then turned to me once more.
"Raditz, I want you to go to Earth, find Kalani and Kakarot, and wait there. From here it will take approximately a year in a pod to get to Earth; by then, we should be nearly done here on Udaryya, and after we finish and report back to Frieza, we'll join you there. If by some freak accident they failed and were killed, I expect that you can finish the job on your own… or then again, maybe we should be sending Nappa."
"I can handle it," I snapped, scowling as I plodded to my pod and set the coordinates for Earth. After linking my scouter to Vegeta and Nappa's and making forced farewells, it finally hit me that I wasn't going to have to spend the next year of my life living on the oversized rock called Udaryya, hunting down bugs in the forest like Vegeta and Nappa. For the first time in what seemed like forever, I threw my head back and laughed as my pod blasted upwards through the atmosphere, and hypersleep's cold fingers began to take me.
And hence Chapter 1 ends. What did you think? Please leave your honest thoughts and/or any unanswered questions in the comments, it would be greatly appreciated!
As for Chapter 2, in keeping with the pattern I explained, it will be written from Goha/Kalani's point of view, and should release by about this time next week, depending on school and what my workload is like.
Bye for now!
-Imperium42