2:11 IMPRISONMENT
Days and nights, they seemed to glide by unnoticed. The place where the young boy was condemned to was one of eternal darkness. No natural light could enter here, his prison located deep under the earth. Vegeta had no idea how deep, but it seemed to him that he was entombed closer to the dominion of the Gods of death then his previous prison, the hellish royal kitchens, had ever been. Although life under his master's cruel hands had been tough, he could endure it. Here, where the memory of sunlight was distant and fading and where he was chained like a dog and left to rot amidst the green-eyed rats, frighteningly large spiders and pale colored roaches, life seemed to be mere a shadow of what it should be. It was hardly any worth to preserve.
Vegeta curled himself up into a fetal position. The hay with which he had covered his body was wet, and heavy with the scent of mold. He was shivering continuously. His breathing wheezed and gurgled. His eyes were shimmering rapidly, lost in a feverish dream. He moved his arms and kicked with his legs, trying to escape the nightmare that had captured him. Anxious mumbling followed by a muffled scream.
The boy woke with a bitter taste of copper in his mouth and the noise of his own hampering respiration. He coughed, and lurched forward to spit out dark tainted phlegm. Sweat ran down his widow's peak and drenched his clothes, although he was suffering from the dreadful cold that crept in his wet shirt and remained there.
"Can't you stop coughing all the time!! You're disrupting me in my meditation!" a raspy voice barked from the other side of the prison. Chains rattled in the dark. A tall figure appeared, dressed in the faded, decaying remains of a soldier's uniform. Then the face of a fishlike creature became visible in the sparse light that shimmered through the iron bars of the small peephole in the prisondoor.
"What's wrong with you! Ever since they have tossed you little runt in here I haven't enjoyed one good night of sleep."
Vegeta crawled away from this alien creature, knowing all to well what the man was capable of if he came to close to permit his restrains to grab a hold on him. He instinctively wrapped his tail around his waist. Moving this sensitive organ still caused him sharp pangs of pain, the fragile bones being once fractured on multiple places.
The fishman snickered. He came a couple of steps closer till the tension in his chains restrained his mobility.
"How's your tail, runt."
Vegeta didn't answer, but kept moving away from him till he had his back against the wall on the other side of the small chamber. This part of the cell was particularly damp, with the end of a rusty pipe protruding through the crumbly wall, leaking smelly, brown tainted water. The old pipe was probably a digression from the city's sewer. The dungeons were built during the reign of the ruthless Vegeta kings. Since those who were opposed to their bloody regime were quickly sentenced to death or life imprisonment in those days, the dungeons had been elaborated many times to accommodate new prisoners. They didn't really consider the city's planning when they were expanding it, rather added branches to the dungeon here and there randomly, where it seemed suitable at that time. The wing where Vegeta's cell was located, was erected right in the middle of an existing and ancient sewer system, and traces of old piping were scattered all over the place, like the decaying roots of a dead tree.
"Well, don't be shy just because I yanked on that useless thing a couple of times. If you have the nerves to disturb me, you better keep me company." The prisoner sneered. He scratched the purple, scaly skin on his arms against the stones fervently. Fragments of silver were left in the wall, sticking to an amber colored fluid.
"Damn fleas! Argghhh! This rash is driving me insane!!!" He seized the itching limb and dug his black-rimmed nails into the flesh, hoping the pain would reduce the infuriating irritation.
"You can't come anymore near me now fishface. I know that, so you can't scare me." the boy replied. His voice trembled a little, but he made sure that it was unnoticed. He had learned to pretend to be stronger then he really was. He had to, if he wanted to survive in here.
"Stupid monkey! Among the vermin down here you are the biggest nuisance!" bellowed the alien, and crouched down at the spot where his chains had confined him. His hand reached out to his back, where he clawed his nails over his with welts covered skin till it burst and shed his amber tinted blood. "You! You are a parasite! A pest! An insignificant bedbug! GOD!! I hate little runts like you!!! Your kind always makes me itch!!"
"I thought it was your bad hygiene that causes that." Vegeta said boldly. He had trouble to keep up his pretence. His mind was feverish. The dampness of this prison and the cold had weakened his health considerable. His head felt so heavy, almost too much to carry on his bony shoulders. However, he felt too sick to lie down, though he knew that he was now safe from his fellow inmate's clutch. He simply couldn't breath when he was lying down. His airways would be obstructed instantaneously by a flow of tenacious slime and he had almost suffocated during his sleep the last few times he tried. Exhausted, weak, and haunted by anxious nightmares, Vegeta figured that it was only a matter of time before he would become as crazy as the alien prisoner with whom he shared his cell.
"Stupid, stupid monkey! Stupid!" the fishman yelled continuously, while he kept on scratching himself as if he was obsessed. If the man had any hair, he would have torn it off like a traumatized parrot, picking itself featherless in angst. "Stupid!! Stupid! Stupid!!" The man started rocking back and forth, back and forth. He kept yelling and shouting and screaming. Words, whole sentences without meaning, gibberish in an alien language that the boy could not understand. Then, when he finally spoke in a tongue that was the Saiyan's, the sense of the tirade was still difficult to grasp, for it reflected the troubled man's disordered and chaotic mind.
"YOU STUPID, STUPID MONKEY!! If my master was here, he would have never allowed to lock you up together with me. Me! A loyal servant to the emperor! I would have had my OWN cell. One without a stinking monkeyboy that makes me itch! Master Frieza would have disposed a little runt like you immediately. He hates monkeys. Hates them! He should, because they are all absolute filthy! My master would crush an annoying insect like you with one single hand!"
"Well, he isn't here. Is he?" Vegeta said with difficulty breathing.
"Why you little." The deranged fishman spat. "How dare you to speak about master Frieza so disrespectfully! As a matter of fact, how dare you to speak out his name at all! My master doesn't' like his name to be spoken by you, worthless monkeys. You are our enemies." His foamed lips trembled out of an inexplicable rage.
"Who is this Frieza anyway?" The boy paused, surrendering himself to a vicious coughing fit. As he almost suffocated in the brutality of the convulsion, his fellow inmate watched him cautiously, while he licked the white suds off his burst lips. He looked like a scavenger, stalking his dying prey.
"You sound rather weak, monkeyboy." The fishman remarked almost casually, as if inquiring a close friend for his health. "Don't you need to lie down a bit, instead of asking me about my master?"
Vegeta gasped in prescious air. His ribcage moved in shocking motions.
"Don't mind me. I'm fine." He said, although quite feeling the opposite. "Tell me about that powerful master of yours, why does he hates us so?" The boy wasn't really interested in the man's mad rambling, but he did not like the attention he gave to his weakened condition. He rather had him talking about something else, something that could divert his incoherent mind from the concepts of hunger and him being present.
"Master Frieza hates you monkeys because you're a weak and useless race! You don't deserve to rule the galaxy! The vastness of space should belong to the Cold Empire! Your powers are nothing compared to that of the superior Icejins!"
"Is that so?" Vegeta could hear the howling of the other prisoners outside his cell. They were getting restless, which could only imply one thing in this obscured world that had no other indication of time except for the regular visits of the keeper. When the keeper came down the dungeons, he brought food.
"I don't think the Icejins are so powerful at all if they got their buts kicked by king Bardock." The boy said.
"You insolent fool!! Roared the man, and he clawed his neck fervently. "You stupid, stupid, stupid monkey! How dare you! How dare you to say that!!"
Vegeta moved closer to the prison door located on the other site of the cell near his cellmate's reach. He had not eaten in days. If he wanted to have a chance on a proper meal, if he wanted to survive and not to perish in here with his corpse devoured by a hungry, scavenging madman, he better prepare himself for some action. He stalked towards the entrance like a wary deer. His eyes didn't stray from the dangerous man squatting in the middle of the room one single second.
"Then tell me, why are they beaten then, these Icejins and this superior master of yours? Why didn't they win the battle?" asked Vegeta in a very obvious effort to distract his attention.
"They didn't win because that no-good son of a bitch king of yours chickened out and begged the other enslaved races to join their treacherous revolt! If it wasn't for that, you Saiyans had all perished centuries ago and your race would have been nothing but a faded memory! A mere fart in the face of history, that's what you lowly monkeys would have been! HA!"
Vegeta tilted a sweaty brow in response to this remark, but he continued crawling closer. His sensitive ears could pick up the sound of heavy footsteps and the rattling of chains and locks. Also, the sounds of inmates screaming nervously came ever nearer. It might be his delusional imagination, but he could almost smell the horrible, mushy porridge that they had given him the first few days that he was actually able to get a hand on his share of a meal.
"So, you mean that, although we have won the war and freed many others from those nasty Icejins, it wasn't fair at all, because we asked for help?"
"Precisely! Exactly! That's the truth! Soldiers of the Cold Empire never need help! We can chop up our own enemies. We fry our own rivals, and we certainly can fight our own battles. Calling for help is a habit of the weak and the cowards!!"
"Your master must be furious to have lost everything because of that." Vegeta said, his head twirling and hardly able to pay attention to this peculiar conversation. Still, he tried to make a sense out of his replies, although he doubt if the man cared at all. "I can imagine that I would be pissed if someone wins from me in an unfair way. There is already so much that's unfair in this world. And nobody gives a damn about it."
What am I saying? He thought.
"I mean, it's unfair right? That you guys lost because our king was too much of a coward to battle the Icejins on his own powers."
The fishguy eyed at him for a short moment, but then continued his frenzied speech relentlessly. Indeed, he didn't seem to care if he as talking to someone who was actually listening or that he was talking to a blind wall.
"Of course it's unfair! You monkeys cheated! You didn't play the game according to its rules. No tactics are allowed, what so ever! When warriors fight, they fight honorably, without using their brains, ever!! Thinking is a cowardly habit of the weak!" He barked with such determination and conviction that he scratched his arm till rips of flesh were torn off.
"I think you're right." The boy positioned himself as close to the door as his chains permitted him. His body was tensed like that of a winded spring. A shadow appeared in front of the small porthole, obscuring the scare light that entered. The sounds of a lock being removed.
"But don't think that your kings will remain unpunished for this humiliation, this treachery! My master, the dark prince and son of the almighty King Cold, will take his revenge. He was already planning something, before I got arrested and thrown in here to rot. He was planning something big, something wonderful and of tremendous significance. Something that will bring your arrogant, foolish king to his knees and end his feeble linage once and for all!!"
"Absolutely." Whatever you say, mushbrain, the boy thought to himself. The door cracked open, and a hand holding two cracked bowls appeared in a thin stripe of light cast upon the stones. With one, well-aimed pitch, one bowl was flung into his direction. It soared over the lumpy, cobbled floor in a wobbly line. Vegeta launched his frail body forward, his arms stretched and his hands desperate to receive. Just as the reward of his efforts was no more then a finger's length away from him, a foot, wrapped in the remains of what had once been a sturdy army boot, stopped it's course. The bowl bounced back and spun around, till it finally halted in a crack between two cobbles.
The alien seized the bowl and held it up for Vegeta to see. He sniffed it and looked at it with discontent. Then he gave the boy a wicked grin.
"Why are you still trying, monkeyboy. You know that you are not fast enough. Not anymore."
The door was closed again, and the heavy footsteps of the keeper departed till it died down completely. There was an unusual silence, as the inmates stopped their continuous howling to devour their scanty meals. The only sound that could be heard, came from the boy's soft panting for air.
"Why are you doing this to me! You have your own share. You don't need mine!"
He stared at the villain, his eyes full of hatred, his hands trying to find support on the dirt covered floor. The twisting and coiling of his stomach had never felt this bad.
"You think that I'm actually interested in this MUCK?" The fishman yelled and tossed it away. The bowl exploded against the door in a rain of shards and porridge.
"I've been eating this shit for as long as I have been condemned to this vermin infested hellhole!! I can't stand it!! It's as if they think that they can feed a lion with wheat, or a wolf with grass!! It's fucking preposterous!! I AM A WARRIOR, AND WARRIORS NEED MEAT, DRENCED IN BLOOD AND GORE!! WE EAT OUR CATTLE. WE FEED ON WILD BEASTS. WE FEAST ON OUR BUTCHERED ENEMIES. BUT WE NEVER, NEVER, NEVER FEED OURSELVES WITH PORRIDGE!!"
"I think I've got your point." The boy stammered. His face was pale. The deranged and threatening sprawling of this sick mind got his heart trembling with fear. He gazed at the smudge that the brew had left on the steel door, and a sickening sense of hunger engulfed his body. It felt as if someone had grabbed a hold on his stomach and was wrenching it in his hands. He collapsed, bending double on the stone floor, his body twisting, his hands shielding his painful abdomen, trying to protect it from an unseen torturer.
The fiendish warrior approached the boy, scuffling closer to him till the rattling of chains ceased and permitted no more movement. When Vegeta looked up warily, panting of agony and burning with fever, he stared back at two deranged, bloodshot eyes. They glow with the mad craving of a wild, starving beast.
"Tell me boy." The fishman inquired casually. "How's that fever of yours going. Are you sure you don't need to lie down?"
~*~*~*~*~*~
Later, when the sounds in the hallway had ceased, and the fishman was curled up in his corner of the cell, lying fast asleep, Vegeta finally found enough strength and courage to edge towards a shard that lay within his range. He took the sharp slice, and hid it under his sleeves, tucking it safely under the metal cuff at the side of the back of his hand. He crawled back to his corner, dreading another night without sleep but finding it eventually as he curled up to a ball, keeping the shard close to his heart. His raspy breathing had cleared up somewhat, and it seemed that object in his hand provided him with a little sense of protection, and had calmed him down.
Next time, when the keeper comes down to their cell and the madman strikes again, he will be prepared to fight back.
NEXT CHAPTER: TWIST OF FATE
I'm sorry guys, but I had to split this chapter in two, because it was getting way too long (again). But I think I got the right pacing now. I tried to change my style of writing a bit, making it less tedious to read and more "getting right to it", because I have still so much to tell. So chapter 7 (Twist of Fate) will be the final chapter that closes Book 1 of House of Vegeta, and Book 2 will be about Vegeta's adolescence. I will update the whole division of Book 1 ("Kitchenboy") within this week. Book 2 ("Slave", yep sounds like evil Pan is going to torture Veggie for another while, at least till Book 3 that is, then our Veggie is becoming really pissed!) will appear next year. Meanwhile, thanks for your support and see you (hopefully) back at the 31st of Dec 2001 for the last chapter and the big finale of Book I of House of Vegeta !!!
Cheers, Pan
Days and nights, they seemed to glide by unnoticed. The place where the young boy was condemned to was one of eternal darkness. No natural light could enter here, his prison located deep under the earth. Vegeta had no idea how deep, but it seemed to him that he was entombed closer to the dominion of the Gods of death then his previous prison, the hellish royal kitchens, had ever been. Although life under his master's cruel hands had been tough, he could endure it. Here, where the memory of sunlight was distant and fading and where he was chained like a dog and left to rot amidst the green-eyed rats, frighteningly large spiders and pale colored roaches, life seemed to be mere a shadow of what it should be. It was hardly any worth to preserve.
Vegeta curled himself up into a fetal position. The hay with which he had covered his body was wet, and heavy with the scent of mold. He was shivering continuously. His breathing wheezed and gurgled. His eyes were shimmering rapidly, lost in a feverish dream. He moved his arms and kicked with his legs, trying to escape the nightmare that had captured him. Anxious mumbling followed by a muffled scream.
The boy woke with a bitter taste of copper in his mouth and the noise of his own hampering respiration. He coughed, and lurched forward to spit out dark tainted phlegm. Sweat ran down his widow's peak and drenched his clothes, although he was suffering from the dreadful cold that crept in his wet shirt and remained there.
"Can't you stop coughing all the time!! You're disrupting me in my meditation!" a raspy voice barked from the other side of the prison. Chains rattled in the dark. A tall figure appeared, dressed in the faded, decaying remains of a soldier's uniform. Then the face of a fishlike creature became visible in the sparse light that shimmered through the iron bars of the small peephole in the prisondoor.
"What's wrong with you! Ever since they have tossed you little runt in here I haven't enjoyed one good night of sleep."
Vegeta crawled away from this alien creature, knowing all to well what the man was capable of if he came to close to permit his restrains to grab a hold on him. He instinctively wrapped his tail around his waist. Moving this sensitive organ still caused him sharp pangs of pain, the fragile bones being once fractured on multiple places.
The fishman snickered. He came a couple of steps closer till the tension in his chains restrained his mobility.
"How's your tail, runt."
Vegeta didn't answer, but kept moving away from him till he had his back against the wall on the other side of the small chamber. This part of the cell was particularly damp, with the end of a rusty pipe protruding through the crumbly wall, leaking smelly, brown tainted water. The old pipe was probably a digression from the city's sewer. The dungeons were built during the reign of the ruthless Vegeta kings. Since those who were opposed to their bloody regime were quickly sentenced to death or life imprisonment in those days, the dungeons had been elaborated many times to accommodate new prisoners. They didn't really consider the city's planning when they were expanding it, rather added branches to the dungeon here and there randomly, where it seemed suitable at that time. The wing where Vegeta's cell was located, was erected right in the middle of an existing and ancient sewer system, and traces of old piping were scattered all over the place, like the decaying roots of a dead tree.
"Well, don't be shy just because I yanked on that useless thing a couple of times. If you have the nerves to disturb me, you better keep me company." The prisoner sneered. He scratched the purple, scaly skin on his arms against the stones fervently. Fragments of silver were left in the wall, sticking to an amber colored fluid.
"Damn fleas! Argghhh! This rash is driving me insane!!!" He seized the itching limb and dug his black-rimmed nails into the flesh, hoping the pain would reduce the infuriating irritation.
"You can't come anymore near me now fishface. I know that, so you can't scare me." the boy replied. His voice trembled a little, but he made sure that it was unnoticed. He had learned to pretend to be stronger then he really was. He had to, if he wanted to survive in here.
"Stupid monkey! Among the vermin down here you are the biggest nuisance!" bellowed the alien, and crouched down at the spot where his chains had confined him. His hand reached out to his back, where he clawed his nails over his with welts covered skin till it burst and shed his amber tinted blood. "You! You are a parasite! A pest! An insignificant bedbug! GOD!! I hate little runts like you!!! Your kind always makes me itch!!"
"I thought it was your bad hygiene that causes that." Vegeta said boldly. He had trouble to keep up his pretence. His mind was feverish. The dampness of this prison and the cold had weakened his health considerable. His head felt so heavy, almost too much to carry on his bony shoulders. However, he felt too sick to lie down, though he knew that he was now safe from his fellow inmate's clutch. He simply couldn't breath when he was lying down. His airways would be obstructed instantaneously by a flow of tenacious slime and he had almost suffocated during his sleep the last few times he tried. Exhausted, weak, and haunted by anxious nightmares, Vegeta figured that it was only a matter of time before he would become as crazy as the alien prisoner with whom he shared his cell.
"Stupid, stupid monkey! Stupid!" the fishman yelled continuously, while he kept on scratching himself as if he was obsessed. If the man had any hair, he would have torn it off like a traumatized parrot, picking itself featherless in angst. "Stupid!! Stupid! Stupid!!" The man started rocking back and forth, back and forth. He kept yelling and shouting and screaming. Words, whole sentences without meaning, gibberish in an alien language that the boy could not understand. Then, when he finally spoke in a tongue that was the Saiyan's, the sense of the tirade was still difficult to grasp, for it reflected the troubled man's disordered and chaotic mind.
"YOU STUPID, STUPID MONKEY!! If my master was here, he would have never allowed to lock you up together with me. Me! A loyal servant to the emperor! I would have had my OWN cell. One without a stinking monkeyboy that makes me itch! Master Frieza would have disposed a little runt like you immediately. He hates monkeys. Hates them! He should, because they are all absolute filthy! My master would crush an annoying insect like you with one single hand!"
"Well, he isn't here. Is he?" Vegeta said with difficulty breathing.
"Why you little." The deranged fishman spat. "How dare you to speak about master Frieza so disrespectfully! As a matter of fact, how dare you to speak out his name at all! My master doesn't' like his name to be spoken by you, worthless monkeys. You are our enemies." His foamed lips trembled out of an inexplicable rage.
"Who is this Frieza anyway?" The boy paused, surrendering himself to a vicious coughing fit. As he almost suffocated in the brutality of the convulsion, his fellow inmate watched him cautiously, while he licked the white suds off his burst lips. He looked like a scavenger, stalking his dying prey.
"You sound rather weak, monkeyboy." The fishman remarked almost casually, as if inquiring a close friend for his health. "Don't you need to lie down a bit, instead of asking me about my master?"
Vegeta gasped in prescious air. His ribcage moved in shocking motions.
"Don't mind me. I'm fine." He said, although quite feeling the opposite. "Tell me about that powerful master of yours, why does he hates us so?" The boy wasn't really interested in the man's mad rambling, but he did not like the attention he gave to his weakened condition. He rather had him talking about something else, something that could divert his incoherent mind from the concepts of hunger and him being present.
"Master Frieza hates you monkeys because you're a weak and useless race! You don't deserve to rule the galaxy! The vastness of space should belong to the Cold Empire! Your powers are nothing compared to that of the superior Icejins!"
"Is that so?" Vegeta could hear the howling of the other prisoners outside his cell. They were getting restless, which could only imply one thing in this obscured world that had no other indication of time except for the regular visits of the keeper. When the keeper came down the dungeons, he brought food.
"I don't think the Icejins are so powerful at all if they got their buts kicked by king Bardock." The boy said.
"You insolent fool!! Roared the man, and he clawed his neck fervently. "You stupid, stupid, stupid monkey! How dare you! How dare you to say that!!"
Vegeta moved closer to the prison door located on the other site of the cell near his cellmate's reach. He had not eaten in days. If he wanted to have a chance on a proper meal, if he wanted to survive and not to perish in here with his corpse devoured by a hungry, scavenging madman, he better prepare himself for some action. He stalked towards the entrance like a wary deer. His eyes didn't stray from the dangerous man squatting in the middle of the room one single second.
"Then tell me, why are they beaten then, these Icejins and this superior master of yours? Why didn't they win the battle?" asked Vegeta in a very obvious effort to distract his attention.
"They didn't win because that no-good son of a bitch king of yours chickened out and begged the other enslaved races to join their treacherous revolt! If it wasn't for that, you Saiyans had all perished centuries ago and your race would have been nothing but a faded memory! A mere fart in the face of history, that's what you lowly monkeys would have been! HA!"
Vegeta tilted a sweaty brow in response to this remark, but he continued crawling closer. His sensitive ears could pick up the sound of heavy footsteps and the rattling of chains and locks. Also, the sounds of inmates screaming nervously came ever nearer. It might be his delusional imagination, but he could almost smell the horrible, mushy porridge that they had given him the first few days that he was actually able to get a hand on his share of a meal.
"So, you mean that, although we have won the war and freed many others from those nasty Icejins, it wasn't fair at all, because we asked for help?"
"Precisely! Exactly! That's the truth! Soldiers of the Cold Empire never need help! We can chop up our own enemies. We fry our own rivals, and we certainly can fight our own battles. Calling for help is a habit of the weak and the cowards!!"
"Your master must be furious to have lost everything because of that." Vegeta said, his head twirling and hardly able to pay attention to this peculiar conversation. Still, he tried to make a sense out of his replies, although he doubt if the man cared at all. "I can imagine that I would be pissed if someone wins from me in an unfair way. There is already so much that's unfair in this world. And nobody gives a damn about it."
What am I saying? He thought.
"I mean, it's unfair right? That you guys lost because our king was too much of a coward to battle the Icejins on his own powers."
The fishguy eyed at him for a short moment, but then continued his frenzied speech relentlessly. Indeed, he didn't seem to care if he as talking to someone who was actually listening or that he was talking to a blind wall.
"Of course it's unfair! You monkeys cheated! You didn't play the game according to its rules. No tactics are allowed, what so ever! When warriors fight, they fight honorably, without using their brains, ever!! Thinking is a cowardly habit of the weak!" He barked with such determination and conviction that he scratched his arm till rips of flesh were torn off.
"I think you're right." The boy positioned himself as close to the door as his chains permitted him. His body was tensed like that of a winded spring. A shadow appeared in front of the small porthole, obscuring the scare light that entered. The sounds of a lock being removed.
"But don't think that your kings will remain unpunished for this humiliation, this treachery! My master, the dark prince and son of the almighty King Cold, will take his revenge. He was already planning something, before I got arrested and thrown in here to rot. He was planning something big, something wonderful and of tremendous significance. Something that will bring your arrogant, foolish king to his knees and end his feeble linage once and for all!!"
"Absolutely." Whatever you say, mushbrain, the boy thought to himself. The door cracked open, and a hand holding two cracked bowls appeared in a thin stripe of light cast upon the stones. With one, well-aimed pitch, one bowl was flung into his direction. It soared over the lumpy, cobbled floor in a wobbly line. Vegeta launched his frail body forward, his arms stretched and his hands desperate to receive. Just as the reward of his efforts was no more then a finger's length away from him, a foot, wrapped in the remains of what had once been a sturdy army boot, stopped it's course. The bowl bounced back and spun around, till it finally halted in a crack between two cobbles.
The alien seized the bowl and held it up for Vegeta to see. He sniffed it and looked at it with discontent. Then he gave the boy a wicked grin.
"Why are you still trying, monkeyboy. You know that you are not fast enough. Not anymore."
The door was closed again, and the heavy footsteps of the keeper departed till it died down completely. There was an unusual silence, as the inmates stopped their continuous howling to devour their scanty meals. The only sound that could be heard, came from the boy's soft panting for air.
"Why are you doing this to me! You have your own share. You don't need mine!"
He stared at the villain, his eyes full of hatred, his hands trying to find support on the dirt covered floor. The twisting and coiling of his stomach had never felt this bad.
"You think that I'm actually interested in this MUCK?" The fishman yelled and tossed it away. The bowl exploded against the door in a rain of shards and porridge.
"I've been eating this shit for as long as I have been condemned to this vermin infested hellhole!! I can't stand it!! It's as if they think that they can feed a lion with wheat, or a wolf with grass!! It's fucking preposterous!! I AM A WARRIOR, AND WARRIORS NEED MEAT, DRENCED IN BLOOD AND GORE!! WE EAT OUR CATTLE. WE FEED ON WILD BEASTS. WE FEAST ON OUR BUTCHERED ENEMIES. BUT WE NEVER, NEVER, NEVER FEED OURSELVES WITH PORRIDGE!!"
"I think I've got your point." The boy stammered. His face was pale. The deranged and threatening sprawling of this sick mind got his heart trembling with fear. He gazed at the smudge that the brew had left on the steel door, and a sickening sense of hunger engulfed his body. It felt as if someone had grabbed a hold on his stomach and was wrenching it in his hands. He collapsed, bending double on the stone floor, his body twisting, his hands shielding his painful abdomen, trying to protect it from an unseen torturer.
The fiendish warrior approached the boy, scuffling closer to him till the rattling of chains ceased and permitted no more movement. When Vegeta looked up warily, panting of agony and burning with fever, he stared back at two deranged, bloodshot eyes. They glow with the mad craving of a wild, starving beast.
"Tell me boy." The fishman inquired casually. "How's that fever of yours going. Are you sure you don't need to lie down?"
~*~*~*~*~*~
Later, when the sounds in the hallway had ceased, and the fishman was curled up in his corner of the cell, lying fast asleep, Vegeta finally found enough strength and courage to edge towards a shard that lay within his range. He took the sharp slice, and hid it under his sleeves, tucking it safely under the metal cuff at the side of the back of his hand. He crawled back to his corner, dreading another night without sleep but finding it eventually as he curled up to a ball, keeping the shard close to his heart. His raspy breathing had cleared up somewhat, and it seemed that object in his hand provided him with a little sense of protection, and had calmed him down.
Next time, when the keeper comes down to their cell and the madman strikes again, he will be prepared to fight back.
NEXT CHAPTER: TWIST OF FATE
I'm sorry guys, but I had to split this chapter in two, because it was getting way too long (again). But I think I got the right pacing now. I tried to change my style of writing a bit, making it less tedious to read and more "getting right to it", because I have still so much to tell. So chapter 7 (Twist of Fate) will be the final chapter that closes Book 1 of House of Vegeta, and Book 2 will be about Vegeta's adolescence. I will update the whole division of Book 1 ("Kitchenboy") within this week. Book 2 ("Slave", yep sounds like evil Pan is going to torture Veggie for another while, at least till Book 3 that is, then our Veggie is becoming really pissed!) will appear next year. Meanwhile, thanks for your support and see you (hopefully) back at the 31st of Dec 2001 for the last chapter and the big finale of Book I of House of Vegeta !!!
Cheers, Pan
