Author's Note:

Okay, I know this chapter took me a really long time to finish, and I can't apologize enough. But here it is, despite writer's block and an absolutely cataclysmic computer crash. There are quite a few plot twists in store, no one will guess where this is going until you read it, I can assure you. Well, maybe a few of you might guess, but that's okay.

And thanks from the bottom of my cold, black heart to the readers who have stuck by me through my long periods of silence. You guys absolutely rule, and are really the reason I still write DBZ at all. Thanks!!

Chapter Two:

…take them…rip……tear…kill…

Uubu's mind shifted slightly, his totally peaceful meditative trance disrupted by a whispering, hissing voice. A few short years of experience and practice earlier, he would have been shocked totally out of his trance, the voice was so unnatural.

He listened hard, his awareness of self beginning to intrude on the trance. But the voice was not repeated. That is, if you could call it a voice. It hadn't sounded human at all.

His mind continued to drift in the black, but the peace that meditation brought him usually was now lost. That voice…. It hadn't been so much a voice as a command, a hissing spell that had stabbed through his meditative state like a hot knife through butter. Hearing words while in the trance was strange enough, but this….

Tear them apart…kill…you know you want to…

He actually gasped out loud this time, and he almost did lose the trance. That had been stronger, like words spoken directly in his ear. And even more peculiar was the wave of malice and hate that came with them. But the hate wasn't directed at him. Rather, it seemed to pass through him, become his own for an instant, and then fade away into nothing before he even really realized that it was there.

"What the hell is going on…." He whispered to himself, now almost fully back into the physical world. He could feel his arms and legs, and he was aware of breathing and the wind on his skin.

Now with his conscious will he began to wake himself up. Whatever this was, he didn't like it, and had never seen, felt, or heard anything like it before in his years of meditation. He would have to ask his sensei about it. If Goku didn't know, maybe Piccolo would….

KILL YOU ARE MINE AND I WILL HAVE YOU YOU WILL DO AS I SAY OBEY ME I AM YOUR MASTER

Stronger than the impulses of before, this was a scream, seeming to come from the center of his brain, like a sword going right through his head. Pain beyond imagining and a wave of absolute hate and lust for destruction and death overflowed his entire being, flooding his mind.

He was barely aware that he was screaming, and it was quite a while before the feeling finally subsided and he opened his eyes, looking into the worried faces of his sensei, and Vegeta.

Goku and Vegeta stopped the fight in mid-move when then shrieks of agony suddenly erupted from below them. For one second, Goku didn't realize the voice belonged to his only pupil, not until he looked down and actually saw the young man rolling around on the ground. He had never heard such screams issuing from his students mouth, roars of agony that should have been common in a medieval torture chamber, not this sunny day spent lightly sparring.

The two saiyajin shot each other a slightly frightened but mostly shocked glance and rapidly descended through the air, flying low and coming to a rest beside the writhing warrior on the ground.

Uubu was roaring as if he were suffering the worst pain that a person could feel, both arms clutched tightly to his head as if trying to protect it from something. His knees were drawn up to his chest, feet kicking back and forth aimlessly.

"Uubu!" Goku fell to his knees and grabbed his student by the shoulders. He gave him a good hard shake.

Uubu promptly sat up, eyes still shut tight, tears leaking out the sides, apparently totally unaware of what he was doing, and punched Goku square in the eye.

The saiyajin flew through the air and landed on his back in the dirt. By the time he hit the ground, Uubu had fallen back, his hands no longer clasped about his head. Punching Goku seemed to have brought some awareness to him, because now he was only lying on his back and moaning.

"Kakarott!" Vegeta sprinted over to him. "What the hell was that? Are you alright?"

Goku sat up, one hand pressed absently to his already swelling eye. "Yeah, I'm fine." He said indifferently. He got to his feet quickly and walked back over to his pupil, a perturbed looking saiyajin prince trailing behind him.

They stood over the groaning Uubu, looking down at him, neither with any idea of what was happening or what to do about it.

"I don't really know where to start." Mia, the girl all in rags, with hair white as snow, said in a low voice that Arda could barely hear over the low mutterings and whispered conversations of the other customers in the bar. She had dropped her legs to the floor again, and was taking the occasional bite of food. It was either because of her own decision or because of the strong telepathic impulses of calm and trust that Arda kept sending her way (normally he considered such powerful manipulation rude in the extreme, but any port in a storm), but she had apparently decided that she was in no immediate danger from the vampire across the table, though she had a deep underlying air of suspicion when she looked at Arda, as if he must be guilty of something and it was only a matter of time before she found out what. He thought that she probably wasn't even aware of it.

"Well," he said matter-of-factly, "the beginning is usually the best place to begin a story."

"That's just it, though." she said with a sigh that seemed to come from deep within her chest. "I'm not even sure where the beginning would be, not in something as crazy as this."

"Let's start simple then." Arda leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. "Where are you from? And how exactly did you get here?

She shot him another glance, then her eyes softened again. "We didn't have a name for our planet, really. We just called it home. It was on the outskirts."

"The edge of civilization." He smiled with only one side of him mouth. "You get some very interesting trade out there."

A small chuckle, totally devoid of any good nature or humor, escaped her throat. "You can say that again."

There was a moment of silence, and Arda sensed her hesitation was not because she didn't want to continue, but because she was thinking of exactly how. He sat in silence and waited for her to speak.

"I didn't know that our home was on the outskirts, or even that there were such things." She said finally, eyes glued to a spot on the table in front of her as if it held the secrets of the universe. "Not until recently, anyway. It was just home, and that was all we wanted or needed."

"We?"

"My parents. Our little colony. I didn't know we were a colony, because it wasn't an important part of our lives. A few generations ago, ten people set out from a planet in some huge empire," She said the words as if what empire or whose meant less than nothing to her. "They started their own colony on a desert planet that eventually became the place I grew up in." She paused for only a second. "There were maybe one hundred people there. Warriors, farmers, tradesmen, our own society, our own world. Nothing touched us, and we never looked past the sky of our planet again. They were the world to me. And more."

A single tear slid out of one eye, and that, more than anything else, made the vampire's eyes widen in amazement. Her face was as rigid and emotionless as a granite block, but that one tear said more than any expression could.

"Then it came. And killed them all."

When Uubu opened his eyes, he saw nothing but blue sky. No clouds. The air was slightly thinner than it should have been, and based on that fact, and the cold tile he felt under his back, he deduced before he was even really completely conscious that he was at the Lookout.

He sat up slowly, but even so, a huge wave of dizziness and nausea threatened to send him back down again. He shut his eyes momentarily and let it pass, then opened them again.

As he had expected, he was looking at the white, almost too perfect expanse of the residence of whoever happened to be serving as Kami at present. The current god of earth, Dende, stood there in the flesh, slightly to his right. The namek that had been a boy when he first took the job of Kami was now fully grown, and almost as tall as Goku. He was gazing at Uubu with a look of concern etched across his kind, still too innocent face, and Uubu wasn't sure why, though the idea tickled the back of his brain maddeningly.

Then, when he glanced to his left, saw his sensei, the man who came closer to being his father than anyone ever had, and also saw that Goku's eye had gone blue and purple and was beginning to swell. Just like that, the trance, the strange intrusion, and finally, that hateful and final assault on his brain that had cause his to lash out and hit his teacher in blind malice came back to his mind with a snap that was almost audible.

"Goku-sensei." He said, eyes wide, not sure what to say or how to react. What had just happened to him was so alien, so totally unknown, that for the moment he had no idea how to cope with it. So he just stared, and waited for someone to speak.

Although the person who did was out of Uubu's vision at the moment.

"Well, it's about time you woke up." Vegeta's voice echoed slightly off the tile floor and high marble buildings of the Lookout. Uubu tuned his head back in the direction of the voice, and saw the saiyajin prince leaning against a pillar, staring off into the flawless blue sky. Vegeta turned his head slightly to face Uubu.

"Normally, I would be the last person on the Kami-forsaken world to say anything about meaningless violence," The smile was not on his face, or even in his voice, but it seemed to be there, far below the surface, somehow. "But I really must know, since you're all just sitting there like statues. Exactly why did you punch Kakarott in the face?"

Uubu turned his head back to face forward. Why? How the hell did he even begin to explain this?

"More importantly," Goku's voice was compassionate and sounded a bit worried, "Why did you start screaming and throwing yourself around like you were being tortured? What happened?"

Uubu had faced Goku when he began to speak, and now he looked down at the tile between his feet again.

"I…" he took a deep breath and let it out. "I was meditating, just like always, sensei. But something was there. I felt an alien presence, something that just didn't belong." He told them what had happened, how the voice had fist told him to kill and maim, then demanded it, and finally, tried to make him and take control against his will.

"I don't think whatever is was… I don't think it was strong enough. Or maybe it was too far away. Or something." He sighed. "But…. It felt so strange. It was painful to even try to resist it, or ignore it."

Dende and Goku looked at each other for a brief second.

"Uubu," Dende said an instant later, "I know it's strange, but I think it might be best…" he paused, hesitant. "it might be best if you didn't try to meditate for a while. Just until we find out more about this."

Goku's pupil didn't reply. In truth, he didn't know what to say. Of course this was a dangerous situation, and an almost unknown one at that. But meditation was such a part of his daily training and life that he wasn't sure at all about giving it up totally, even for one day. He felt as Goku would feel if someone told him to give up fighting. But, if that was what it took….

"Okay." He said. "That sounds like the smartest thing to do. But…." He stood up, his legs still feeling like used chewing gum, but usable. "How in the world are we going to find out what it is that did that to me?"

It was Goku who answered. "I could talk to King Kai about it. If anyone would know, he probably would. In any case, he might have some advice on what we should do, and how we can go about finding who or whatever it is that did this."

Uubu nodded. He had learned enough from Goku to know that Kaio-sama, however many corny jokes he told, was also very wise, and also very, very old. He knew things, and had seen things in the vast universe that they had never known or dreamt of.

"Okay." Goku said. "No time like the present. Let's go."

Uubu shifted his position slightly and stood by his sensei's side.

"Hey, Vegeta, you wanna join us?" Goku asked.

"I suppose." The prince said, as he too walked over to stand beside Goku. "It will be more exciting than waiting here to see how it turns out."

Goku had become much more skilled with the instant transmission technique over the years. He didn't even need to touch a person anymore, usually. He let his aura manifest itself very slightly, and intertwined it in an action that was now almost reflex with Vegeta and Uubu's ki. Then, there was a flash and a rush of energy as all three warriors were transformed into a mass of light particles, and flew across not only light years of space, but into the plane of the dead as well.

When Goku opened his eyes a split second after he had closed them, he was staring into the startled face of King Kai.

"It killed them all?" Arda looked questioningly across the table the Mia, whose countenance now so resembled a block of wood. One tear had been shed, and apparently one tear was one more than she meant to shed. She wiped it away swiftly with the back of one hand, skin pale from long travel in space, away from the sun of any world.

"Yes." She said. "There was no rhyme or reason to it. One day a huge ball of light came out of the sky. No warning, nothing dramatic. We thought it was a ship, since we did get travelers from time to time. Usually they were peaceful, but sometimes they were, how did you put it? Interesting trade." The humorless laugh escaped again, like a bird leaping from a suddenly open cage before it can be caught.

"But it wasn't either." He said. He hadn't read her mind, but she wasn't guarding her thoughts either. He knew it was so.

"No." she said. "It wasn't even a ship. I'm not sure what it was." And now, the fear that had been gone without even leaving a shadow was back in her face, just behind the anger that was there as well. This time, she seemed to have forgotten about trying to hide it or push it away. "It was a thing, almost humanoid. In shape, anyway. It was all in white, and it had white hair. It's eyes were empty." Her voice trembled, and Arda could see the thing she spoke of in her mind's eye.

It was indeed in white, but flowing, pure robes, not like the girl's graying rags. It's hair was short and looked like it had been cut with a lawnmower, sticking out every which was. It's eyes had no pupils or irises, and they seemed too wide, much too big for the gaunt face, as did it's mouth, which was lined with small sharp teeth. He could see why she had feared him. The thing, with it's white skin and evil features, did look a bit like a vampire. But it wasn't. he knew that, even if she wasn't so sure.

And there was something else, something he could see if he dug into her mind. But she would come to it.

"The warriors set out to where they thought it landed." She said, "Just in case it was something hostile. We weren't a race of fighters, or anything, but our warriors were strong. Anyway, they went to see."

"Only it found them first." Her voice cracked very slightly and she stopped.

"One of them was my father." She said. "No one really expected any trouble, but that thing…. It killed them all. And they found our settlement soon enough."

Arda sensed that she was about to tell him what he had sensed further back in her mind, but right now he was more concerned that Mia would tell her tale. From the way it was pouring from her mouth, and her mind, he judged that she had probably never told anyone, since it happened.

"They?" he asked, puzzled. "Who were the others?"

She shook her head slightly. "There was only one other, and he was just a little bug looking squirt. Just stood around and laughed while the thing did all the damage."

Arda leaned back in his chair and pondered this information. He couldn't identify any one element of her story that hadn't happened in one form or another on all sorts of planets since the beginning of space travel, but something still felt genuinely wrong. Whether it came from her mind or his own intuition was questionable, but it was there all the same.

"My dad had been teaching me to fight for years." She said. "But I was still a few cycles away from coming of age and joining the warriors. When the scouts came back and said that all the warriors were dead…. I guess I went a little nuts. At first I tried to go find whatever killed them, but my mother wouldn't let me go. If I hadn't listened to her…." Mia paused, only for a moment. "If I had just gone to fight that thing, maybe I could have died a noble death like the rest of them."

"It didn't take them long to find us, like I said."

Her words stopped. But the images, moving pictures more potent than any movie, pure memory, those poured forth so that he couldn't help but see as she saw them.

The crazed being in white, screaming over and over, "Shine!!", or as it was in the common language, simply "Die" in a high, screaming roar that couldn't have been made by any normal being. It moved like a vampire almost, without seeming to need to use it's muscles at all, just gliding through the air faster than the eye could see. It ripped limbs from the bodies of women and children as they tried to flee, screaming. Old men died choking on their own blood through their crushed throats. Young men tried to attack the thing with crude weapons, and farm implements, only to have their own tools turned back on them to rip and dismember.

And finally only she, Mia, had been left. She had rushed out, throwing blows at it that were futile, trying to cut it with the sword that she had just attempted to sever Arda's head with. It slapped her aside easily, though the blow shattered her cheekbone and threw her over twenty feet through the air.

It had been ready to finish her, he could see, when a high, evil sounding voice floated from behind it. Just the voice itself sounded sneaky and mean, weak on it's own, but full of venom.

"No, don't kill her." It said, and from behind the monster floated a small being, barely three feet tall, wasted and withered. Arda wondered that it could move it looked so frail. It wore robes and an orange cape. A curious symbol was engraved on it's belt.

"Remember now, we must leave one alive wherever we go." The little creature said. "Someone to carry the tale and spread the word of our doings." As the words left his mouth, he held out his hand, and as if by magic, a small pod appeared, similar to the ones he saiyajin had used to conquer planets for Frieza.

Then he said something that chilled Arda's blood, and suddenly made the whole story much more alarming.

"Go, girl. Wherever you will, only tell those you meet about us. And say that we seek Son Goku!"

Then they vanished, leaving behind only the ruined planet, and the scraps of a place the girl had called home.

Arda was looking at the girl with a stare so penetrating that it shook her.

"You're sure?" he asked. "They said Son Goku?"

"Yes." She said. Her face was dark. "My ship finally broke down on a place called Frieza 912." She said. Arda nodded. A huge conglomeration of planets and people like the Cold empire couldn't be expected to totally disappear just because it's three highest monarchs were gone. Leaders would be replaced.

"I learned there that a saiyajin named Goku had defeated the tyrant Frieza years ago." She said. "But as to what happened to him after that, no one could tell me." She sighed. "Some guys tried to rob me, or rape me, or both. I don't know, they didn't get past grabbing me in an alley before I killed them. I took their money, got a taxi ship to take me to the next planet I could find, and here I am."

She looked steadily at him, as if expecting a response, but for a moment he just sat there, staring off into space. It didn't add up, even though he could tell with only minimal mind reading that she was telling him the total truth. If someone was searching for Goku, why wouldn't they just go to earth? It wasn't like it was a hard place to find, really, and anyone who had sensed Goku's ki before would recognize it. Besides, the kis of the warriors on earth could be felt galaxies away.

But those questions weren't really important right now. The mortal girl sitting across from him was. He could at least do te smallest thing for her. Yes, he could do that.

"I know Son Goku." He said shortly.

"What!!?" she leapt up from the table, spilling what remained of her food, the stainless steel plate rattling on the floor, chair overturning. "Are you serious!? You have to take me to him!"

Arda nodded. "I will, if that's what you want. Maybe he'll know what it is that attacked you and killed your race. But first things first."

"Huh?" she looked confused.

"Why don't you come with me to my ship, and get some clean clothes, get cleaned up a little. Then, I can take you to Goku."

She tossed this over in her mind. All mistrust of Arda seemed to have dissolved like so much vapor as she told her story, and now she only wondered whether he could really help her, or whether it would be more profitable to continue on her own.

"Okay." She said finally. "I'll go with you."

He smiled. "Good." He reached across the table, and placed a hand on her shoulder.

"This will fell a little weird." He said, and before she could protest, he put two fingers to his forehead, focussed on the biggest ki on the planet (which happened to be in his ship, and had come here with him), and they vanished.

Yet Another Author's Note: Okay…. If you don't know yet who or what the 'Thing in White' is, then go read my one shot fic "Shine". Or don't. It really doesn't make a difference one way or the other as far as this story goes.

Now, if you don't know who the little weird scrawny guy is with him, you haven't paid enough attention to your DBZ. However, if for some reason you still don't know, you'll find out in the next chapter, which will most likely be out in about a week and will (I promise!) have more action and less backstory.

Ta!

Rev.