1.5 Aura and Socialisation

Back to Pan and Bunny. I've now redrawn the image without the internal map of genki, focussing only on the aura. As sentient lifeforms, both Pan and Bunny have aura. We know genki is used by the body to regulate its systems. Why then does the body produce extra genki that is left to escape?

[Figure 1]

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This isn't a case of "just because". Evolution is a fickle beast. For a trait to become widespread it needs to be either advantageous to a lifeform, or at least of neutral cost so the trait is idly passed down to offspring. Genki production takes energy (a cost in terms of energy ultimately gained from food). So, wasted genki is wasted food. The leaking genki, then, must serve a purpose.

The genki in the body can fall into a number of categories based on the intent - the (lack of) purpose the genki is carrying. For now let's discuss two major groupings, active and passive. Active genki, genki carrying an intent to perform a very specific role, encompasses all the genki used in checking homeostatic equilibrium. If a message is being actively carried it cannot be changed and repurposed, only ignored or physically blocked depending on the intent. These are messages like, "measure temperature", "body temperature too low, take action", "pay attention to the threat straight ahead".

The second type is passive intent, and is crucial for aura. These are blank or partially blank slates of genki waiting to be assigned an active role. They are caught and used by cells to send messages in response to those homeostatic checks to allow the body to make decisions. The centre then needs to release a fraction of genki that has no assigned role and therefore no destination. The passive genki meanders around the body, and as genki is typically not stopped by solid objects, the genki leaves. This leaking is the aura.

The body can stop this passive aura leaving without converting it to active ki, effectively bouncing it back from the skin surface. Some passive genki can further be activated to shore up this bouncing of genki in what we call a guard. Creating a wall in this manner to isolate ki prevents a hostile person from manipulating your passive genki. This is not a high-level technique, in fact guarding is an automatic response triggered by emotion and perceived threat. We even refer to "putting your guard up" and "feeling defensive" in common parlance. Whilst ki-use has fallen out of public consciousness, the effects of ki itself have not been, the feeling passed down in emotive language like above.

This guarding is happening in the first picture of Pan and Bunny. Bunny is not comfortable in this situation. Rabbits do not like being held above the ground and so there's no surprise he would be reeling away from a stranger like Pan. His passive genki is not leaving his body, bounced back from the guard building up at and around his skin and rejecting Pan's. For advanced ki-users this guard can be built up to higher energy densities to reject more than genki; stopping bullets, fire, explosions… you name it. This rejection is an automatic response, but keeping a guard up when not feeling defensive is an advanced skill. At the highest level the ability can be modified and manipulated to learn "super strength."

Without an aura to directly detect, the only ki-sense of a defensive person is the impact their genki makes on the ki field. Even at a standard level, this lack of aura can give off a sense of coldness and distance. My own handshake I've been told can come across robotic when I'm nervous - surprisingly often in academic circles. I suppose that's better than weak and clammy, but still not ideal. Due to my own natural ki-strength forming an easily detectable guard, the difference between defensive and calm handshakes is readily apparent.

Touching a strong guard is an unyielding, metallic sensation. This touch usually causes your own genki to respond in defensive kind, the clashing of guards causing a fuzzed spark sensation like metal, (or if there's a severe dislike between the guard owners, foil on tooth). It feels cold because of that fuzzing but that sensation is subjective, there's no measurable change in temperature. For me, the person with the stronger guard, I feel a dulled sensation of touch, like wearing woollen gloves.

These guards are not rigid barriers. They flow with the body (and when augmented with greater power extend beyond the body a short distance) and with a strong enough grip - or punch - the barrier can be warped. In addition two people with the same energy density of barrier will not cancel out each other's guard (that is another skill entirely), but there are ways to get around a guard without dropping it.

Still, even with meandering passive genki, why would it be needed beyond the body and why so much? Why not keep just enough contained at all times? The answer is socialisation. Passive genki awaits instruction, and whilst it is most easily manipulated by the original owner of the genki (the programmed intent a product of that individual's mind or body) passive genki can still easily be manipulated by others. This is akin to reading and writing in someone else's handwriting in their journal; the more alien the mind the harder the handwriting is to read and mimic, but thankfully most lifeforms' handwriting is legible.

This ability to set the intent of someone else's passive genki is the reason we feel comfortable dropping our wariness in places we're with friends (friend with a reputation for pranks aside). Sleeping in the open we would keep one eye on the world around us, never feeling fully rested come morning. With a friend around to share the watch we can fall asleep as though we were safe in our own bed. What's the difference? On the surface yes, we trust the person we're with to look out for us and to wake us should we be in danger. There is a second element to this however, and it involves that leaking passive genki.

When we are comfortable with each other, our genki recognises a friend and happily mingles. Genki will propagate and mix at any rate, but it's the difference in mixing between oil and water, and water and alcohol. What would have been fuzzy bubbles of genki will completely mix when people are comfortable with each other. The second picture of Pan and Bunny reflects this (a guess on my behalf, the rabbit was put back on terra firma rather quickly). Bunny's aura in particular can be seen leaking into Pan's, and likewise hers to his. This mixing is good news out in the wilderness with one watcher and the family group asleep. The genki still purposefully leaks from the sleepers, ready and awaiting instruction. The same with the watcher - they may be on guard themselves, but the aura of the sleeping group reaches them, surrounds them and effectively binds the watcher to the group.

When danger appears - not enough for the watcher to call out but enough to cause concern - the watcher's genki will increase its own defence. However the message is not restricted to just the watcher's genki. The signal to be on guard ripples back to the sleepers through that passive genki binding. The signal is not enough to rouse most people at first, though the body will begin to ready. When that first call goes out from the watcher, when danger is real, genki's warning registers in the brain fastest of all the senses, usually before the eardrums have even vibrated. This extra split-second of warning can mean the difference between life and death.

And so it is that aura play a role in administering an undercurrent of social interaction between us all. This is evolutionarily advantageous to have, even at an energy cost.

Consciously sensing aura outright is a skill but there is one circumstance where aura become obvious. We all have a bubble around us that we dislike people stepping into. This bubble is different sizes for different people; we are more comfortable standing closer to partners, friends and family than strangers. In cities and in some cultures it's customary to stand closer together when talking. This can cause social problems where one person is continually and subconsciously putting distance between themselves and another, with the other closing the gap, confusing both parties - one feeling someone is over familiar, the other feeling dismissed.

This complex layering of social distance is indeed governed by aura. There comes a point where a forced mixing of passive genki becomes uncomfortable, we sense too much of the other person for how friendly we are with them, specifically their ki particle pressure being too high. Note: this isn't the same as their power level, just the number of particles leaving the centre at any one moment (otherwise no one would want to stand near me in the slightest). It is possible to change tolerances over time however, and city dwellers often have a higher tolerance to ki particle pressure than those from lower density population centres. (There is one village on a small island east of Papaya Island that has a ki tolerance similar to a large city, for reasons I shall explain in section 1.8.)

As a ki-user, seeing these bubbles assert themselves and those links of genki people subconsciously make is a beautiful dance to watch. It's a more obvious signal than body language, from the wisps of ki joining and breaking as partners move through a room seemingly ignoring each other but keeping in close auratic contact, to watching an aura impinge on another in hope of reciprocation and fading back in disappointment. Mind reading is easy when observing aura.

That's not to say ki-users are more in tune with their emotions. It's true on average they'll be more empathetic as they can more readily see another's emotion through the movement of aura, but when it comes to themselves and their nearest and dearest they can be wonderfully clueless. And indiscrete. I'm primarily thinking of Vegeta, husband of my father's oldest friend Bulma, of Capsule Corporation fame.

An extremely closed man, trained to be from childhood due to his royal status, the suffering he endured over his youth only encouraged his emotional wall. His life didn't begin to settle until he met Bulma and began a family. I was only young at the time they first met, but by then I had learnt how the ki dynamics between friends, families and partners worked. I was always people-watching with the then relatively new sense I'd acquired, and so I turned my attention to studying their burgeoning attraction. Bulma bounced from an amicably ended relationship with a now still good friend (martial artist and West City Taitans' player Yamcha), finding herself drawn to someone who, quite frankly, was a deadly adversary until then. Anyone who knows my Auntie Bulma will not be surprised at Vegeta's past; Yamcha himself was a bad-boy back in the day (though not to the same extent I hasten to add). Over the coming months, Bulma's attraction ramped up. She spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about Vegeta to my mother Chichi, though I couldn't quite understand why seeing as her guard was completely down around him and her aura even sought him out in the room. Mom just said "women are complicated" and left it at that, which really didn't help my studies.

I'd visit a lot over the next couple of years and Vegeta was always around "training". One day I caught Vegeta himself, still as gruff as ever, with a subtle change in his aura's movement. His aura was far more receptive, and Bulma's more assured. Nothing had changed on the outside from what I could tell at any rate, but the interplay of their aura had definitely shifted. The connection was still nothing like my parents', their aura effectively a unit even when Mom was angry at Dad, but there was definitely something between the two. I asked Mom again and whilst she told me it was rude to get involved in other people's business, she looked fit to burst with gossip.

Doing the math, this must have been around the time Trunks was conceived. I know that although Vegeta's attitude improved somewhat, especially a year or so after Trunks was born, many more years passed before he outwardly caught up with his aura and recognised he cared about his family. Even still, his aura never moved in the same way as Dad's. My Dad's was carefree and encompassing everyone, Vegeta's instead was alert and ready at all times, actively protective around those he cared about the most more than sharing passively. There were rare times though he was at peace and softened completely with his children, these times becoming more and more frequent (and less jarring to witness) as he aged and mellowed.

[ Figure 2 ]

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Bra and Pan playing as kids, with Vegeta looking on. The girls' ki is mixed, friendly and extremely trusting. Vegeta claimed he was unconsciously protecting Bra, although I suspect he was participating in some light-hearted cheating.

Sensing aura isn't limited to those who can actively use ki. It is an internal sense that is brought to conscious attention at times, usually as a gut feeling about a situation. Watching children, who are still subconsciously learning the connection between social cues and aura, can be fascinating. Children can play fight, instinctively aware of the (lack of) seriousness of the situation. Sometimes though the fight, with all the correct social cues like smiling and laugher and lack of force, is still misread and one person is antagonised enough to fight seriously, leading to the end of the game. At times this is easily explainable as a misreading of visible social cues (as I've said before, not every behaviour or feeling can or should be attributed to genki). Other times however there is a mismatch in the reading of the intent of another person's genki. The body believes it senses actively hostile ki rather than passive, causing a reaction when there is no cause for alarm. This same kind of misreading can occur at all ages, when one is anxious or paranoid everything can feel hostile.

This misreading can happen when there's no strong source of genki, either. The sensation of somebody close by can be triggered when no one is present. Very rarely will this sensation be triggered by a randomly passing, stable, over-dense region of genki - a rare one-off event that will not reoccur in the same place. Most times we feel a nearby presence over and over again it is likely to be caused by the environment. Anything from gloomy lighting, odd, faint smells, settling beams in a house (recently popped capsule houses are notorious), echoing sounds and even the wind hitting the outside of the building can set off a feeling of being haunted. When particular events align they can trigger the same set of physical sensations that are activated when sensing particular genki, encouraging the final sense, the ki-sense, to presume it should be responding and return sensation as such. This is the same experience as watching a video clip with the sound off and "hearing" the sound effects where you expect them to be. Your mind is very capable of filling in the blanks and causing you be believe someone, the same person over and over again, is nearby. Sometimes we believe it is someone we know. This could be because the sensations match our own impression of their ki signature. More often than not the mind is purely trying to make sense of nonsense and latching onto the most "obvious" person; someone we've lost and have been dreaming about or the haunting we "know" goes on in the building. If the sensation is persistent and weather or time-of-day dependent, phantom ki-sense is the most likely cause. As you grow accustomed to sensing ki the ability to discriminate correctly grows.

(A note: A haunting could of course be a spirit cursed to ceaselessly wander the mortal realm by a demon. If you believe this to be the case please get in contact as Mr. Piccolo and I thought we'd found and lifted the curse on them all.)

One final example of auratic effect and consequence encompassing an on-going theme for the kids, and what I guess could happen with the next generation of ki-users. When you can use ki from a young age oftentimes the rules governing what is and isn't possible aren't clear. Ki use becomes more a mother-tongue than a rigorously learnt language, where sometimes the simplest of grammar rules lay hidden. This has merits. Not knowing the limits allows for poetry-like play and the breaking of received wisdom; some of the best techniques have come from the kids not knowing something should be near-enough impossible. But not understanding the underlying components of a mother tongue and how to extrapolate your knowledge in a structured fashion can leave gaps. Those gaps are filled with what makes "sense" to the user, and that can lead to ridiculous misunderstandings.

February Age 794, Paozu Place café in Satan City after close, with Goten (26), Trunks and Marron, joined by Capsule Corp engineer and Trunks' partner Mai (28).

Gohan: I'm going to ask you a question, and it can be construed as a little… personal.

Trunks: Ominous…

Gohan: It's a question Goten asked me a long time ago, and I rebuffed it at the time because of that.

Marron: He asks a lot of those kinds of questions, you'll have to be specific?

Goten: Hey I-… okay yeah.

Gohan: You asked me when Videl and I started dating and again when we got married.

Goten: OH! - Really? You want that in the book?

Gohan: It's a useful illustration of aura.

Goten: Please don't illustrate that.

Mai: What's the question?

Goten: I asked how you're supposed to …kiss someone as a ki-user.

Marron: Kissing or… "kissing"?

Goten: Let's say growing up in the country taught me the mechanics, just not the logistics. Can't you write the section yourself? You did have Pan.

Gohan: I will. Only, I'm curious, because you did eventually stop asking.

Marron: Why would you think that was a problem?

Trunks: When you're flicking marbles into orbit by age five it does eventually occur to you that you could do that to a person accidentally. Especially as every time we've ever smashed something we were frustrated or… over-excited.

Goten: We wondered why that didn't happen with other people.

Trunks: Specifically why our Mom's were still on-planet. Fathers being who they are and all.

Goten: Gohan was the only person we felt we could ask and you let us down, bro.

Gohan: Sorry.

Goten: Too late…

Marron: You idiots.

Mai: What did you do then?

Goten: Forgot for a while, but the situation got desperate when you turned up, Mai, and Trunks spent most of his time panicking. "I want to kiss her. What if I get to kiss her? I don't want her to DIE."

Trunks: We don't need to go into that.

Mai: Oh we very much do.

Goten: S'okay bud I'm not. The plan was genius, just suppress your power level.

Marron: I swear to God there's not a gnat's common sense between you both.

Trunks: Didn't claim there was.

Marron: That's the worst thing you can do. The snapback you guys must have…

Mai: Sounds sensible to me, so what's wrong with it?

Trunks: To maintain ki suppression you need to cut off emotion, right?

Mai: Oh… so practically impossible - did I dodge a bullet?

Goten: Grannypants, you did indeed dodge a bullet by breaking our young prince charming's heart until-

Trunks: The bullet was taken by a lovely, very insistent girl we met on a South Island beach one summer who took a shine to Goten-

Goten: She half-cornered me -

Trunks: If I remember correctly she thought it was really important she had a summer romance -

Goten: We were fourteen by the way -

Trunks: And your first kiss was so bad -

Goten: Not my fault! I was suppressing, couldn't feel a thing -

Trunks: She made you do it again and again until it matched what she wanted?

Marron: You lucky ass.

Goten: I stopped trying to reel it in in the end, thinking if she got hurt she'd at least leave me alone. Nothing happened, I calmed down, ki-sharing kicked in, then I worked out why people wanted to make out.

Marron: You lucky, lucky ass.

Goten: Not really. She got the 'romance' she wanted, told me "that was ok I guess" then left me standing there like a real melon just as I was starting to enjoy myself.

Mai: And so, you've been trying to make up for that one-star review ever since?

Goten: See, you joke…

The main crux of Goten's question was one I've heard many times before from extremely bold strangers. The Great Saiyaman is a public figure, mostly appearing to stop crime, save lives - and wave at those rare events he was strong-armed into attending by his father-in-law. As part of being the Great Saiyaman I've had to scoop up, carry and otherwise manhandle strangers - criminal and victim alike. Both are under great stress and experience a massive surprise when being effortlessly picked up and flown places, and the oddest nonsense will tumble out their mouths. Usually people telling me my "name", informing me over and over again that we're flying, asking if they're dreaming, and sometimes those in trouble apologising profusely for being a bother. Those were fun flights. Though there are a few people who, with all mental clarity, take the flight as a chance to manhandle me back. These passengers were far more difficult to be patient with. I have been propositioned extremely bluntly on a ridiculous number of occasions, their remarks making it painfully obvious they believe the prospect of spending time with me to be both a dangerous and - exhilarating - experience. Papayaman receives the same level of comments, if not more as he conscientiously spends time in the public sphere at charity events. Even his silent helper Shadows, dressed in uniforms so black you can't determine their shape to even work out who you might be propositioning, get the same questions. One of the team - if it isn't obvious by now - is of course my daughter, and whilst she is a grown woman and more than capable of handling herself, I still find the stories she brings to dinner vexing.

So, herein lies the terribly boring solution to the mystery and please, please, I beg of you, stop asking us.

As Goten alluded to and we have already discussed, when people are friendly their ki exchanges as a form of social bonding. If the ki is accepted as familiar enough, the guard response (and permutations that go beyond that like increased strength) extends through and beyond the individual, effectively causing the group to be a unit. Touch between people parts these guards completely so they aren't felt, the same way my guard parts when I put my hands together. This occurs when those involved are relaxed, or at least experiencing positive intent towards each other. The more wrapped up with each other people are, the tighter bond and the lower the strength differential becomes. Unless someone actively intends to block this automatic social bonding - which would either be a withdrawal of participation or would require a competence with ki - spending time with a ki-user is no more dangerous than a non-ki-user. Although, given that genki carries emotional and sensational information, one could argue that these social interactions have the capacity to be more intense between ki-users.

Marron quite rightly points out that suppressing your ki output to match the person you're with, whilst sounding sensible, is not a great idea. Briefly, as this will be covered in a later exercise, suppressing genki output takes concentration and a calm mind to prevent the emotional fluctuations that drive it. Matching the energy level of a non-ki-user is often not a stable state for those with a high power level, so it is an extremely difficult task, with particular situations making emotional stability near-impossible. Should concentration slip, what Marron referred to as "snapback" will occur. This is the genki output rapidly returning to its stable base state. Going from a lower strength to a higher one in this fashion could be dangerous to those nearby, as the flare of aura immediately rejects anything in the vicinity to "clean" the body and aura of any foreign genki and run its checks. The concentration slip could be a fraction of a second, but by then the other person could have experienced a nasty "shock" or even be pushed away. This snapback isn't all bad as it can be modified and amplified in battle as a surprise way to break holds. I wouldn't recommend trying it with people you like, however.

You'll notice we've been discussing the movement of aura and the interplay with intent but not exactly how to perceive and influence them. This forms the basis of chapter two. Until then however I believe it is prudent to understand how perception works in general, and how this changes when sensing ki.