Chapter 2: Introducing Akira

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"PAN!!! If you don't get out of bed right now you're going to be late for school again!" Videl yelled to her daughter through the closed door.

"I've got plenty of time if I fly," a groggy voice replied.

"You are not flying to school! You know what happened to your father when he was your age. Now get out of bed, your breakfast is getting cold!"

A few minutes later, a sleepy and very grouchy Pan was sitting at the table muttering under her breath as she began loading her plate with pancakes. She was joined shortly by her father, and the two of them proceeded to devour enough food to feed a small army.

'Yuck,' thought Videl as she watched the two demi-Saiyans plow through their breakfast, 'I've been watching them do that for almost seventeen years and I still get grossed out by it every time. But at least they have better manners than Goten, Vegeta, and Trunks.'

After breakfast, Gohan drove the still grumbling Pan to school. For a while, he tried to make light conversation with her, but after a few distinctly Vegeta-like replies, he gave up and the two rode in an uncomfortable silence. After several minutes, he tried a different approach.

"You know, it's been a while since you and I did any serious training..." he began, noticing that the word 'training' immediately got his daughter's attention. "Maybe after school we could borrow one of Bulma's gravity room capsules and start again," he smiled as her face softened a little, "unless of course you aren't interested..." he had her and he knew it.

"That would be awesome!" Pan exclaimed, excitement in her eyes. She might be the daughter of a scholar, but she was the granddaughter of the strongest fighter the universe had ever known. "I haven't gotten to do any real training since grandp... uh, I mean, not in a while." Pan turned her head and stared out the window as her she felt her eyes begin to moisten.

"Its okay, I miss him too. But, hey, I don't think he would want us to be sad about it, actually, I think that training would be a great way to remind us of him." Gohan said, forcing a smile. It had been three years since Goku had vanished and despite all of the efforts of King Kai and Kabitoshin, he had not been found in the land of the living or of the dead. He simply was gone, apparently forever this time.

They sat quietly each immersed in his or her own thoughts until they finally arrived at Orange Star High School. Then, after a quick peck on the cheek for her dad, Pan was running to her first class.

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"Hmmm, cutting it a bit close today aren't we Pan?"

"Sorry Mr. Hikaru, I guess I over slept a little," Pan said as she hurried to her seat next to her best friend, Zori.

The two had met when they were in middle school and had just latched on to each other. A lot of people thought that they made an odd pair because they seemed to be complete opposites. Pan was the quiet tomboy, never bothering with makeup, jewelry, boys, or any other thing that was deemed "girly." Zori on the other hand was the essence of girliness. She was blond and beautiful, constantly fretting about her appearance and brushing her hair, usually while talking about boys; she seemed most at home in a shopping mall, surrounded by adoring admirers. But despite all their differences, the two girls got along perfectly. Zori brought out a more feminine side of Pan and Pan, in turn, helped to tone down Zori's somewhat overwhelming flirtatiousness.

"Hey Pan, did you hear?" Zori whispered as soon as Pan sat down. "There's some new guy in school today! No one really knows much about him, but I hear he's really cute," Zori whispered as Pan sat down. Pan rolled her eyes and opened her notebook.

'Fresh meat for Zori,' she thought, rummaging through her backpack for a pencil, 'I wonder if she'll even go a week before dumping him.' Though she hated to admit it, Pan was intensely jealous of Zori in this department; after all, she was almost seventeen and had never even been kissed by a boy, let alone dated one. 'Well, I guess it's hard to land a guy when you have huge arms, big thighs, and no chest,' she thought with a small sigh.

The early teen years hadn't been particularly kind to Pan, who had spent many a morning examining her self in the mirror deciding that she was an over-muscled, ugly freak of nature. Consequently, she was completely oblivious to the fact that nearly every guy in her school stared at her as she walked by.

Had she not earned a reputation for being hostile to any sort of romantic advances, she would probably have been asked out on a fairly regular basis. Unfortunately, after a regrettable incident in which she, thinking she was being teased, had laid out the school's star running back for hitting on her the second day of her freshman year. Zori, who was also considered beautiful by Orange Star's male population and hadn't physically hurt anyone who'd asked her out, always had her pick of the guys.

"Alright, settle down class," Mr. Hikaru said from the front of the room. "Now, before we start, let me introduce our newest student, Akira."

All eyes where on the front of the class as the new student walked in. He was wearing cargo pants and a baggy polo shirt with the Orange Star High School emblem on it. He appeared to be about average height, but seemed taller because of his spiky, black hair, which looked like it hadn't been touched by a comb in quite a while. The young man looked up at the class, smiling cheerfully; his dark eyes had an innocent quality to them, giving his face an almost child-like appearance. Pan didn't realize she was staring at him until his eyes met hers; she gasped quietly and looked down at the floor.

"Wow," Zori whispered, "he's even cuter than I'd hoped!" She smiled happily and then added, "I usually don't go for the ones with goofy hair, but he makes it look good." Then, noticing that the current object of her infatuation was trying to find a place to sit, she raised her voice and pointed to the empty seat next to Pan, "There's a seat over here Akira."

The young man quickly sat down and the lesson began. Mr. Hikaru was almost as well known for his poor hearing as he was for his boring lectures, so shortly after he began most of the class was either asleep or whispering back and forth to each other.

"So Akira, do you live around here?" Zori asked after introducing herself and Pan.

"No, I live on the outskirts of town," he replied.

"Have you lived there long?" the blond girl pressed.

Akira smiled, "Almost as long as I can remember."

"Where did you go to school before you came here then?"

The young man's smile seemed to falter almost imperceptibly, he hesitated for just a second before saying, "I guess you could say I was home schooled, but I thought that it would be nice to come here for my senior year."

Seeing that Akira was looking a little uncomfortable with the current line of questions, so Zori decided to change the subject, "What classes are you taking?"

"Um, I'm not really sure, they just kind of handed me my schedule and told me which room to go to first," Akira said as he pulled a piece of paper out of his notebook and handed it to her. After just a moment of examination, Zori happily noted that she and Pan had a lot of classes with him.

The blond girl kept the conversation with Akira going as Pan listened in silence. She had rarely met anyone her age that she found attractive, but Akira was undeniably good looking. 'Oh well,' she thought, 'he'll probably be going out with Zori by the end of the week, not that he'd notice a tomboy like me anyway.'

Thirty minutes later, Mr. Hikaru wrapped things up just as the bell rang, so they packed their things and headed to the gym for PE.

To say that PE was Pan's least favorite class would be a gross understatement. She hated the class with the burning white-hot passion of a thousand suns. Her loathing of the class stemmed from three main things. First, she hated that her gym clothes seemed to make her already large muscles stand out even more, though Zori told her daily that she looked great, Pan was positive that her friend was just being polite. Her second reason was that Mr. Rager was a friend of her grandfather Hurcule and felt the need to point this out no less than twice a class. And last, but certainly not least, Pan hated that she had to spend the entire class doing her best not to kill anyone.

"Okay guys, today we are going to start martial arts, we'll be on this subject for the next three weeks. Now, I know that some of you have grown up around this stuff your entire lives," here he paused and looked pointedly at Pan, who was silently praying for death. "For the rest of you this will be a pretty interesting subject and could come in handy should you ever need to protect yourselves. I'll be pairing you off and then we will work through some of the basics, if we have time at the end, maybe we'll do a little sparring."

'Wow, basic martial arts! This out to be about as much fun as getting teeth pulled,' Pan thought.

"Hey, check out Akira, he doesn't look nearly so skinny now that he's out of those baggy clothes. He's actually pretty buff." Zori said as Mr. Rarer began separating the class into pairs.

"Um... okay, whatever."

"Oh come on! You can't tell me you don't think he's cute."

"I guess I never really looked." Pan lied.

Zori was about to make a comment when she realized that Mr. Rager was looking to pair Akira up with someone. She started to raise her hand to volunteer when Mr. Rager said, "Pan, why don't you partner up with Akira?"

Pan walked over to Akira and said a quiet prayer to Kame that she wouldn't send this poor boy home from his first day of school on a stretcher.

"You look nervous," Akira whispered, "have you ever done this before?"

The Saiyan sighed, "Only everyday of my life."

"Then why so glum?" the young man asked.

"I'm just worried I might hurt you."

"Oh, well in that case, I guess I won't want to hold back too much." Akira said, putting a behind his head and laughing softly.

Pan wasn't sure if he was joking or not, but she found herself a little annoyed at his somewhat arrogant statement. 'Perhaps,' she thought with an evil looking grin, 'it wouldn't be so bad if he went home a little early.' She spent most of the next twenty-five minutes tuning out the teacher and watching Akira out of the corner of her eye. He seemed to be doing his best to absorb all that was being talked about. During the time that Mr. Rager was having them practice the moves he'd shown them, Pan couldn't help but notice that Akira's form was terrible.

'If I had to guess, I'd say he's probably never thrown a punch in his entire life,' she thought.

With ten minutes left in the class, the teacher decided that they probably knew enough to do some light sparring.

Pan went extra slow while Akira fumbled through the basics, but after a while he seemed to gain some confidence and started to step things up a little; lunging at her when he thought she might not expect it. Pan easily side-stepped the telegraphed move and swung her body down low to sweep his legs out from under him, however, all she hit was air, Akira was no longer in front of her. She had just started to turn and look for him when she felt a light tap as his fist softly hit her cheek. Glancing to her left she found Akira, looking very proud of him self.

"Come on now Pan, I know you're better than this," he said with a smile.

Pan stepped back and they began again, this time the Saiyan went on the offensive first. With lightening fast speed she shot her fist right at his gut, but to her great surprise Akira blocked the blow with ease. Now se was starting to get mad, she backed away and then went at him as hard as she dared to go against a human her age, with several kicks and punches. Akira blocked or dodged everything she threw at him, grinning like a fool the whole time.

Just as Pan was about to go all out and wipe the floor with his smug face, Mr. Rager blew his whistle signaling the end of the lesson and the students headed to their locker rooms to change.

"So, is he any good?" Zori asked as she ran to catch up with Pan.

"Who?" Pan teased.

"You know who! Come on now, how did he match p with the granddaughter of the greatest fighter in the world?"

"Eh, I guess he's not too shabby..." 'In other words he's easily the best fighter in the school besides me. And easy on the eyes too...' her eyes widened slightly as the thought passed through her brain, 'Oh no, I'm starting to sound like Zori!'

"Did you guys get to talk much? Did he ask about me?" Zori asked excitedly.

"No," Pan said, and then, noticing the sudden look of disappointment on Zori's face, she added, "but I'm sure it was just because he was concentrating on the class."

"Yeah, that must have been it... Oh-uh, hey, I have to get to math, but I was wondering if it would be okay if I asked Akira to sit with us at lunch."

"Whatever."

"Cool, see you then!" Zori said as she and Pan headed to their classes.

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A/N: The name Akira comes from Dragon Ball Next... or was the first name of the creator of Dragonball and Dragonball Z, whichever floats your boat. Hikaru is the last name of the Japanese voice actor for Pikkon and Rager is the last name of the American voice actor for Mr. Satan (Hurcule).