Kakkhan: Giendonese Saiyan Warrior
Disclaimer: I don't own Dragonball/Z/GT, but I do own Janden, the Laniins, the other races not including Human, the planet Giendon, a few techniques, and a handful of other things that are my creation alone.
A/n: Chapter edited for glaring format errors and annoying author's notes. Urgh. (Shudders)
Notes: Frieza, Cell, Majin Buu will be mentioned in this trilogy. Garlic Junior is skipped. Androids Eighteen and Seventeen appear, but the rest of the Androids do not. Also, Piccolo is not the evil side of Kami, so when Piccolo dies, Kami won't die. There is no Saiyaman in this story. The way you pronounce "Laniin" is "Lah-neehn". Replace the double i's with two e's, like a Japanese pronounciation.
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Chapter One: The Taking
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The gold-skinned Humanoid stole through the darkness of the country. He kept to the shadows, avoiding the patches of moonlight scattered across the ground. He looked around, his night vision telling him nothing that concerned him for the moment. After a while, he crept out of his chosen sanctuary and skulked across the abandoned setting, toward his destination, a tiny house in the middle of nowhere.
Gohan tossed restlessly to and fro on his newly acquired full bed. His parents had just gotten it yesterday, and he was still not comfortable with it. Two-year old Gohan opened his eyes and his mouth to call for his mother, but it was covered with a gold-skinned hand, alien and yet disturbingly Human. A square/oval face followed, with red pupiled and gold irised eyes, no nose, and a thin cleft for a mouth in the nose's place. It was handsome, in an alienic way. The little chibi Gohan's eyes opened wide with fright but didn't, couldn't make a sound. He could, and did, struggle to yank the hand off his mouth, but since he hadn't had his fight training yet, he failed.
The thin cleft opened to reveal tiny teeth arranged in rows. Where on a normal Human canines would have been, fangs grew, unnatural looking against the size of the teeth around them. The teeth drew out of sight, and the alien spoke in pleasantly accented Japanese, "Do not worry Boy. I do not wish to harm you, so do not try to defend yourself against me."
Gohan stopped struggling, and the alien took his hand slowly away from the chibi's mouth. Satisfied the Human boy wouldn't scream, the gold-skinned alien settled down on his backward-kneed legs beside the low-leveled bed.
Looking at the still scared boy, calmer than before but still wary, the alien sighed. "Well, Boy, if to do anything to stop your distrust of me, I might as well introduce myself. My name is Janden, and I have come for you. I have been sent to collect the boy Saiyan Son Gohan and take him back to my planet for training. I can take you there voluntarily, or I can take you by force. I sincerely hope I do not have to do the latter, but if I have to, I will." Janden looked down at the boy. His eyes had indeed lost its wariness in place of trust, but there was also a kind of anxiety. Janden understood the anxiety, as he didn't want to leave his parents, and also understood the remedy for this.
Reaching out, Janden plunked two out of the thirteen fingers on his hand on the boy's forehead. Reassuring the boy that this would not harm him, a greenish light flowed from his fingers to the demi-Saiyan. Gohan relaxed, his anxiety not to leave his parents forgotten. He clasped Janden's hand and stuck a thumb from his other hand into his mouth. Janden smiled at him, the eyes crinkling slightly at the corner, just a corner of his mouth tilting up. Janden straightened his oddly structured knees and led the trusting chibi out of the house. The boy had been braver than he ever would have been at that age, and would need more bravery to see him through the long Warphole journey to Giendon, Janden's planet.
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Goku woke up at dawn, as usual, with a yawn. He blinked sleepily as he sat up in bed, and stretched mightily. Chichi was already up, pattering around the kitchen as she prepared breakfast for her men folk. It was some time before Goku noticed that his son's ki was not in his room or anywhere nears the Son home. He frowned. What is going on? he wondered. He heaved himself off the bed and went into his two-year-old son's room. Gohan wasn't sleeping in the bed, and it hadn't been made, which Goku found odd, because usually when Gohan woke up, he always made his bed before he went down to breakfast. Goku frowned again. He closed his eyes, searching for his son's ki, but he couldn't find it. Hmm. I wonder why I can't sense Gohan's ki? Hey, why am I worrying? He'll probably show up for breakfast, and then my worries would have been for nothing! But still...
But his thoughts were forgotten as the tantalizing aroma of Chichi's food wafted in the air. "Oh wow, breakfast is ready! It smells really good! I better get down there before I starve of hunger! Mmm..." Goku followed his nose out the bedroom and down the hallway to the kitchen, thinking with his stomach as usual.
Chichi looked up as he arrived. She noticed that Gohan hadn't arrived yet, and she wondered, 'Why? Has Gohan overslept?' Chichi couldn't sense ki like her husband and eventually her son, so she didn't know that her son's energy signature was missing. She asked her husband, "WHY HASN'T GOHAN ARRIVED YET?"
Goku winced.
"I don't know, Chichi. His energy signal isn't anywhere, and he isn't in his bed." Goku realized the mistake he made as his wife screamed, "WHAT! WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE ISN'T IN HIS BED!"
"Well, Chichi, that's exactly what I mean! I mean, if he's gone out, he hasn't returned, but I can't sense his energy signal on Earth anywhere, so I doubt that Gohan's even on the planet!" Goku grasped just what he was saying just after he said it, and a foreboding feeling cascaded over him. His wife's eyes grew wide, and instead of blowing up like she normally did, she became a little subdued. She sat in Gohan's chair, removing the toddler chair out from under her as she sat.
"What? Gohan is gone? What if he's been.kidnapped?" she asked her husband. Goku paused in stuffing himself, which he did in all circumstances if he wasn't fighting, and looked at Chichi. "Kidnapped. That's a horrible idea! He's only been gone for less than an hour! What if he comes back before the end of the day?"
"I know he's been gone for less than a day, but I somehow have the feeling that we're not going to see him for a long time." Goku looked down at his food, his appetite (amazingly) diminished. "Yeah, I have the same feeling too."
The married couple sat in silence, until Chichi got up and said, "Well, even if we aren't going to see Gohan for a long time, we still have to do things like washing the dishes! If you are finished, then come help me!" Goku's eyes widened, and he returned to eating the food at the rapid pace of a full-blooded Saiyan.
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Janden strode forward, awkwardly moving his legs to match the pace of the young chibi tottering at his side. Gohan had nearly fallen asleep on the long Warphole journey to Giendon, 1.9034 X 10 to the 21st power kilometers away. They were in a spaceship, with aliens everywhere. Janden explained that while Giendon had its own population of the aliens Laniins, they brought children from other races from other planets here to train and to change the future of the home planet that the childs were brought from. Janden explained proudly that he himself was a Laniin, and that Gohan had been his first bringing to Giendon, if not his first teaching. Apparently it was a great honor to bring an "other race" to Giendon.
Also what the Laniins did to the kids they brought to their planet was, one, they stuffed the memories of the children to the back of their brains. Those memories were only to resurface in dire need, or when the "memory cleanee" was dying. Two, the Laniins made the children pick new names for themselves. Even though they renamed the kids, the kids knew their real name, but preferred to go by their chosen name. Three, they educated the children about their home planet, and when the trainee reached sufficient training, he/she/it was sent back to their planet of origin to battle any enemies that threatened the existence of that planet. Janden didn't tell Gohan about the first two things, but he went to extensive details on the last one. Gohan became kind of frightened about the training, but he kept it well hidden.
At last the Laniin stopped at a door. Gohan was happy to stop. Janden tilted his head at the chibi, and stomped one of his large three taloned feet on the platform they had stepped on. The platform, with a rumble, started to move downward, kind of like an open elevator. Gohan clung to Janden's many fingered hand in fear. He buried his face in the armor suit that Janden, and all Laniins, wore with variations in the color to separate each Laniin from one another. Janden's colors were silver and a light violet, which somehow went well with his skin. After a while, when the platform did nothing but go down with a mind of its own, Gohan peeked around Janden. He gaped at all the Laniins go to work here and there, ignoring the odd pair of Laniin and Human on their way to Kami knew where. The chibi was so busy looking around that he didn't notice when the platform stopped rumbling in preparation to stop at the designated place. So it was a surprise to him when the platform suddenly bumped onto the floor. Looking up, Gohan saw it was a long way up to the top, and looked questioningly at Janden.
Janden didn't catch the look, for he was climbing off the platform. He beckoned for Gohan to do the same. "Come Boy, we have a schedule to keep. I must take you to meet the Board of the Headmasters within an Giendon hour of my bringing you in, and Giendon hours are indeed very short, half an Earth hour." The chibi demi-Saiyan hurried to keep with Janden, his stubby legs working to keep up. Janden noticed Gohan's plight and swept him up in his arms. Gohan smiled at Janden and faced forward where he could see interesting things. Janden whipped up his pace to what can be called a run, but was more like a hop-skipping pace. They whistled through the five-walled hallway to a door at the dead end of the hallway.
The Laniin slowed his pace as he approached, sliding to a stop in front of it. He stomped again, putting Gohan on the ground, and the door slid open from the left to the right side. They stepped inside. Janden bowed jerkily, motioning for Gohan to do the same. Gohan copied his Laniin companion perfectly, right down to the amount of air between his head and the ground. Janden raised his eyebrows a fraction, impressed. Whispers in a strange language came from the shadows ahead of them, obviously commenting on the politeness and the quick learning of this Human Boy standing before them.
Then, the shadows lightened to show a board of seven different races. Laniin, Gorthan, Qwithi, Raelin, Wyrnth, Iogoroth, and Human the races were. After a while, the shadows returned to the five races besides Laniin and Human.
Representatives, I suppose, Gohan thought, before the Laniin in the middle caught his attention. This one was gold-skinned, like Janden and like the Laniins Gohan had seen on his way down, but this one was blue- pupiled with the standard gold irises. A crown was embedded in the area above the tilted ears, and the armor spandex was an immaculate white that was stark and yet gentle at the same time. Its voice, when it spoke, was melodious and somehow female.
She welcomed the Human Boy to Giendon, and asked Gohan in excellent Japanese if he understood why he had been brought to Giendon. Gohan shook his head. The inhumanely beautiful Human at the far-left end of the board frowned, but didn't say anything. He stared at Gohan with his startling green eyes. He had wavy black hair, no sideburns and a goatee. He wore a white spandex over a green gi with swallow-tailed sleeves. His nose was hawk-bent, and his mouth was a firm line in his face. His forehead soared high over his eyes, and chiseled eyebrows marched across the otherwise unblemished forehead. All in all, he looked quite magnificent.
The female Laniin turned to the Human, "Yuin, do you have anything to say? From your thoughts, it sounds like you wish to comment on the boy's ignorance." Yuin, still frowning, shook his head no.
"The perhaps you would want to guide the young one to understanding why he has been brought here?" Again Yuin shook his head no, but he did venture a comment on the last subject.
"I cannot guide him, for the young one must come to the conclusion on his own. I cannot make him understand at his age now, even with his complimentary education wrought unto him by his mother so far. He has just been taken from his parents, and if he isn't feeling anything now, he will later, if he is left alone before the cleaning. You know that as well as any Laniin, if not more, Nirvana."
Nirvana nodded her crowned head. "Yes, I did know. But I had forgotten about that, for we have not had a Human visitor for a while." She turned to Janden. "Yuin will not guide the boy, I have forgotten the ways of Human nature, and my colleagues know nothing about Humans. You will have to be this boy's teacher until the time he finishes his training in martial arts, his education about his home planet and his heritage, where the Saiyans came from, and passes the basic Laniin education. Do you accept this responsibility? The martial arts training include the Human Martial Arts and the Saiyan Ki Arts. Should you want help in the martial arts training and education, you may indeed talk to any of us about that, and my colleagues and I shall do our best."
Janden repeated his jerky bow from before and mumbled a phrase that Gohan heard, but didn't understand. Nirvana, however, seemed satisfied, for the knit in between her eyes slowly ironed itself out. With a wave of her hand, the large door behind them opened, and they were seen out by the steady golden gaze of Nirvana and the frowning green gaze of the Human Yuin.
Janden stomped at another door down the hall from the Board of the Headmasters room. The door opened just as quickly and as silently as the previous one. Janden led chibi Gohan through the door, into another hallway with a dead end. The odd pair of Janden and Gohan stood stock-still, and suddenly, they were at the end of the hallway, and going around a corner. Around the corner came, and Gohan stared at the vast chamber they walked into. It was like a scientist's lab, but it was one that would have sent Bulma's lab to shame. Beautifully crafted walls rose up around the machinery, with runes and unknown letters from unknown languages frolicking around the walls in a merry kind of jig, strange to outsiders, but holding a special meaning to those to could interpret its meanings. There were even some characters from the Human Japanese language amongst them.
The machinery itself was frightening in its grandness. There were gadgets for shrinking a person, for reenlarging that same person, and for keeping an eye on the target while it was in shrunken mode. Other gadgets were for searching the stars, traveling the stars, or for blowing up/restoring stars and galaxies. And there were gadgets whose functions could not for the life of Earth be guessed at. What was really remarkable about all these pieces, they showed just how violent these Laniins could be, but also showed just how peaceful this advanced technologically race really was.
Janden towed Gohan over to one of the unknown function machines. The machine had a seat under a huge telescopic cylinder. Another alien had just vacated the seat, and which had a strange look on his/her? face as he/she followed another Laniin away. Gohan watched the alien stagger away from the machine, and looked fearfully at Janden. Janden looked at him, and sighed deeply.
"Do not worry, Boy, it is not harmful. What it does is make you kind of...I don't know, blank-minded for a while. You, and others who go under it, will remain this way until you go to sleep. While you are sleeping, your brain will adjust, and any information you acquire after the cleaning and before the First Sleep will be stored in the place where the previous memories used to be. I will have to be careful during this period."
Janden looked quickly at the boy, to find that Gohan had a look of understanding on his face. He supposed he had that Earthling mother of his new student's to thank for that.
Gohan asked, "By blank-minded, you mean that you'll be erasing my memories?" Janden's mouth tilted up ruefully. "Well, kind of. What is actually being done is that your previous memories before you and I met, they will be put in the back of your head, in one of the places where a Human/Saiyan has no control over. They will only resurface when they are needed, or when they wish to be remembered. One thing that will not be "stuffed" into the back of your head is your real name. However, you will chose a new name for yourself to be known by for the rest of your lifetime, except in the most dire of situations."
"By the most dire of situations, how do you mean?" Gohan asked his future sensei. But Janden looked away to the cleaning machine.
"Come, Boy, it is time for your cleaning. It will not take long."
Gohan followed his sensei to the seat. Chibi Go-chan slid into the seat. Looking behind himself, he stared in awe as the seat shifted itself to fit him. Finally, the seat became the most comfortable thing for a Human of Gohan's size and age. The machine above him whirred as it adapted its settings to Gohan's brain. Janden commanded the two-year-old Gohan to look straight into the lens that towered above just above it. The machine whirred softly again as the lens came closer and closer to the forehead. At last it touched the as-yet-unmarked forehead, and stuck there. Gohan's eyes glazed over as his memories were messed with, and Janden asked his student,
"What do you see?"
A surprisingly deep baritone voice rolled out of the chibi's mouth. It was the voice of this young warrior when he matured, and it said, "I feel like I am floating in cold darkness and in colder light. The cold light is going away, and the warmer darkness is staying. Darkness asks if it can embrace me, but there is another light coming. A deeper, warmer light. It is coming through the dark, and it is beckoning for me to follow it. But the darkness is insisting I stay, and I do not wish to resist."
The chibi continued to talk, describing the struggle between the light and the dark. Janden knew what it was. It was the struggle between the Saiyan side and the Human side in the boy's blood. The darkness was the Saiyan side, and the warm light was the Human side. It sounded as if though the chibi would go with the Saiyan darkness. Janden hoped he would. A Saiyan was better equipped in battle, and would not have as much difficulty as a Human in reaching and controlling his Ki. Although a Human wouldn't be as difficult to live with as a Saiyan, they would be very limited in learning, with the exceptions of that nine-year-old in college and that Human author who graduated from college at age twenty, the "genius" category. Janden didn't have any doubts that Gohan was in "the genius category" but he just felt better with a Saiyan.
Listening back in on Gohan's conversation, it seemed like Gohan felt better with his Human side, but was going with the Saiyan.
"The darkness, although it is cold, it feels to me instinctively much better than the warm light. The light, as if sensing my doubt, is shrinking. Now it is nothing more than a mere nanoparticle, and the darkness asks if it can envelop me. I open my mouth, but no sound comes out. That does not stop the darkness. It sweeps over me, and I suddenly feel invincible, ready to take on anything that threatens my existence."
Janden grimaced, thinking, Just like a Saiyan. Looking on at the chibi, Janden was startled for some reason at the change that was starting to take place. The chibi now looked maturer, more like a fighter as the cleaning went on and the nature and the blood of the former demi-Saiyan warrior changed from half Human/half Saiyan to a full-blooded Saiyan. Without warning, the machine stopped whirring and moved away from the fully transformed Saiyan chibi. The cleaning was complete.
The chibi opened his eyes, which at some point had closed entirely against their will, and looked glassily at Janden. Janden, even after watching all of his students go through this, was still a little bothered by how glassy their eyes looked after a cleaning. But he was even more shocked by the strong expression of a Saiyan in those eyes behind the glossiness. They were entirely black, with no shine in some distant corner like Goku's eyes do, and they held a far away yearning not for the chibi's parents, but for...a fight, or to learn. Janden recovered, suppressing his surprise, as he asked his student what he should be known by.
The chibi's voice was back to normal, only with a slightly deeper note of maturity added to it. "My real name is Gohan, but I shall be known as...Kakkhan." Kakkhan looked in the direction of his sensei for his approval, and heard it in Janden's voice as he answered. "Very well, Kakkhan, welcome back to Giendon." Kakkhan smiled slightly as he had seen Janden do when they first met, when he was still Gohan. He knew he had made Janden smile just as slightly when he spoke again, it was in his voice. "Come, Kakkhan, let's show you around. You must learn to navigate the corridors of the spaceship Tiara before you go to sleep, or else you will be lost in the morning. Hang on to me, and I will guide you safely. Now, about the planet Giendon, its gravity is five hundred times that of Earth, which is why I Warpholed straight to the ship and not on the planet. The ship has no gravity."
"Warphole is what you did when you transferred me from Earth to here, right? Could you teach me how to do that?"
Thus began one Saiyan child's journey onto a path that had not been documented for him by Fate. But what Kakkhan didn't realize was that he and Janden were starting this journey by conversing in fluent Laniin.
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Edited 06.29.07