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It started with Tien.
He and Chiatzou were training together in the upper slopes of the Qhini Mountains. Tien found that the higher altitude helped to increase the pay-off of his training and the clean air helped his mental clarity. They had found this place two years ago when they had been training for the arrival of the saiyans and had made it their customary stomping grounds.
Today had been just another day in the life of two martial artists. They trained, they ate and they trained some more, same as always. Tien had just gotten around to the third level of the Juun-do kata of the water striking house and knee deep in snow, when a strange sensation tingled away at the point where his neck and skull connected. Stopping in his tracks, he looked around, wary of a potential attack.
But as he continued to remain undisturbed, he reached out with his senses, looking for that which not even his third eye could perceive, but again he found nothing. Now alarmed, he stopped Chiaotzou's training to ask the psychic if he could detect anything out of the ordinary. After a brief wait, he was for the third time faced with a lack of answers.
Unable to shake the feeling of foreboding but equally unable to explain why, the three eyed fighter resumed his training with increased fever, determined not to let any potential threat overwhelm him. It wouldn't be like with Nappa and Vegeta all over again. This he vowed.
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The next to feel the disturbance was King Kai.
Negligent as usual, he had failed to pick up on the strange feelings emanating from space. They were echoes of negative ki energy; the death of thousands, if not millions and leaving an empty void in the grand field of life, thus the opposite feeling of that which sustained all life. It was the record of darkness that all kais feared, regardless of station or rank.
It seemed that whatever had happened occurred awhile back, judging by the dullness of the ache. Perhaps on the other side of the cosmos. Rearranging his antennae towards where the sensation emanated, the portly kai searched silently for several long seconds in silence, Bubbles and Gregory watching on. At last, He discovered what had happened.
Sinking to his knees in shock, he gaped widely at nothing, unwilling to comprehend the magnitude of the event. All those people…
"King Kai, what is it?" Gregory's high-pitched voice broke the tension, and with it, King Kai's paralysis. Tears began to run down his cheeks from under his sunglasses and sobs racked his frame. Not since the time of Bojack the Unbound had he been so overwhelmed by emotion. His two assistants rushed forward to support him should he feint.
But the overseer of the northern quadrant wasn't blacking out anytime soon: he needed to notify the other kais if they hadn't noticed and then contact the saiyans on Earth; it seemed like something in their league. Anything that would massacre most of the Southern galaxy needed to be stopped by the two super saiyans. He could only hope that they were strong enough.
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Now everybody felt it. The Z-Fighters, even the ones King Kai hadn't directly contacted could feel the overbearing evil that was sweeping in from the farthest reaches of space. It sent shivers down the spines of the bravest and the coldest alike.
Even Vegeta was concerned. His sadistic acts of the past had at least been committed with a clear goal in mind, something to surpass. But this was simply madness, an insane act for the sheer pleasure of destruction alone. Secretly, it reminded him of the enigmatic figure that he had seen in his father's hall as a boy, using the king as a footrest. He had later learned the identity of that purple feline, but that was beside the point.
"So," the Prince spoke up, leaning against the wall of the Briefs' living room and addressing the assembled Z-Fighters gathered with him, "do we continue training her or do we go and see just what has that sniveling Kai all bothered about?"
"Shouldn't you be falling head over heels to challenge a 'worthy opponent' or something?" Yamcha shot back, still sore over having the saiyan apparently take his place in Bulma's life.
"Knock it off Yamcha, we're all on the same side," Piccolo interjected before the retort on Vegeta's lips could be spoken. "I understand that tensions are high right now, but we still need to keep our cool and analyze this situation calmly."
"Agreed." Krillin stood up from where he had been sitting on the couch by Gohan and Goku. "This could be an even bigger threat than the androids. Think about it; that guy from the future told us that they laid waste to Earth, but just Earth. Whatever this thing is, it's already blown up a quarter of the galaxy! That sounds like bad news if ever there was any."
"So we go find it?" Goku asked, looking amongst his friends for confirmation.
"Hey wait! Yamcha, ever the voice of extreme caution, waved his hands in front of him to get their attention. "Do any of us even stand a chance against something so strong? I doubt either Goku or Vegeta could put down something that destroys entire planets like their nothing, let alone us normal guys."
It was Gohan that answered him, eyes stern with focus.
"If we don't try, then who? As far as we know, the people standing in this room are some of the strongest anywhere. It's our responsibility to protect those that can't stand up to the powerful threats like Frieza, or the androids. That's why we are the good guys, right? Or should we just give in when it gets tough? I know my answer, and I'm sure I know all of yours as well."
A moment of silence followed the small speech, all eyes on the youngest member. His determination was hardly surprising considering his lineage, but to see the fire in his eyes was startling compared to his usual innocence.
"Yeah alright," Yamcha relented, hanging his head in dismay. He wouldn't have just run away, but the fear of dying a second time was very real to him. He wasn't some super version of anything, just a man who loved martial arts. He was also the second weakest among them; even Gohan had surpassed while him on Namek. There just didn't seem much reason for him to go other than to get in the way.
"We'll need Bulma to make a few more ships for us then," Goku started, "or maybe just a really big one this time."
"Can't you or Vegeta use that Instant Transmission technique to just take us there?" Tien inquired.
"Neither of us can sense that far. And we wouldn't know if we'd be appearing in the middle of space or not if we did," Goku explained while the prince merely 'harumphed' in agreement.
"So: back to space?" Krillin grimaced, remembering the trip to Namek a year before.
"To space," Gohan agreed.
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Bulma had been surprisingly willing to build them a new ship. In all likeliness it was to try and impress a certain alien prince of a near extinct race, but no one said anything. Within a month, she and her father had managed to tackle the problem head on and improve everything about the last two Capsule ships and just make it generally a lot bigger.
Resplendent with an enormous supply of food, both hydrated and not, fresh clothes for everyone, a water recycler, an oxygen scrubbers good for a century before needing to be replaced, gravity manipulation device in the main chamber, various weights along the walls, cutting edge communication and detection technology, beds for all, a bathroom and even a cappuccino maker at the behest of Dr. Briefs, it was all in all a capable ship for housing two and a half saiyans, a namekian and three humans (Chiaoutzou decided to remain behind, citing that somebody had to).
At the dawn of the day after its completion, Capsule 3 was waiting on an old launch pad for its passengers as the techies scrambling around made final preparations. At the loading ramp, Gohan was hugging his tearful mother farewell. It had taken no less than a god talking to her directly for Chi-Chi to let Gohan go with the rest, but she was still obviously worried. It hadn't been so long ago that he had narrowly survived the destruction of a planet because of a wish from the Dragon Balls, and that kind of a close call would rattle any mother.
By the main house, Vegeta was silently observing the proceedings, casting a critical eye over the mammoth ship. He had admired the technology before, but that didn't mean he was willing to just throw his life in the hands of scientists, regardless the color of their hair. It was that thought that brought him right back around to the subject he had been trying hard to ignore. Despite his best attempts to submerge himself in his training, with or without Kakarot, Bulma just seemed to pop into his mind at the slightest provocation.
He tried to dismiss it as simple carnal lust, an animal instinct to breed with an attractive female. But that didn't cover it at all; she poked fun at him, she teased him, she talked to him freely without any sign of fear or loathing, she could get him to talk about his past life with enough needling and he absolutely enjoyed just being around her. Her scent intoxicated the senses and the few times their hands had touched during meals caused his nerves to tingle pleasantly.
"Zeni for your thoughts?"
Startled from his thoughts, Vegeta almost flinched when he saw that it had been the object of his attention that had…caught his attention.
"…what?"
"You were standing her and your face was all bunched up and I just thought that you needed to talk to somebody. Worried about the trip?"
"No, I just…" he petered out before he could even invent a reason. Her scent had hit him again, that blend of vanilla and fabric softener.
Suddenly, he was hyper aware of everything about this human woman that stood before him: the smudge of grease on her cheek, the way she held the back of her wrist to her waist, the well-used blue overalls that she wore, the strands of hair that escaped the sloppy braid she had pulled it into.
"Vegeta?" She probed, feeling warmth rushing to her face under the stare of the prince.
Snapping out of his trance, the saiyan pushed past her without a word and headed toward the ship. Before he made it too far, Bulma ran ahead of him and gave him a stern look.
"Now look mister; I try to be nice to you and accommodate your horrible manners and ignore all the insults and keep you fed and fix up the Gravity Chamber when it's broken and patch you up when you push it too far, but sometimes, just sometimes, it would be nice if you didn't always act like such a spaz and just have a decent conversation with me for a change!
"I may not be one of your saiyan women, the ones that could snap iron bars across their knees, but I am a woman and it would be very unwise for you to make me mad. You could just as soon find yourself on the street or crashing at Master Roshi's!" She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at said hermit who was wishing Krillin good luck. "I don't have to put up with you, but I do and that should tell you a whole lot about me! I am willing to tolerate weirdness aplenty, but not being ignored! So," she jabbed him in the chest with a finger, "zeni for your goddamn thoughts?"
He grabbed her shoulders and pushed his lips against hers in an act of complete openness. Taken by surprise, she could only stare into his onyx eyes for a few seconds before her brain kicked in. Pushing herself away fro him, Vegeta released his hold on her and let her take a few steps back, the hunger that dwelt within him satiated for the moment now that it had gotten a taste.
"That...that wasn't…" she couldn't quite complete a thought in her befuddlement. She couldn't tell if she was outraged or relieved, so she settled on annoyed. "You can't just throw yourself on a girl! You need to sweep her off of her feet first." Vegeta said nothing. He just looked at her with a strangely neutral expression.
"We're launching in one minute!" Dr. Briefs called to everyone around from the ramp oblivious to what had just transpired. The activity picked up to a fever pitch, as everything was triple checked and luggage was stored.
"You need to get going," Bulma urged, but the saiyan didn't move; he just continued to stare at her with the unsettlingly look of someone angry at everything but what they were looking at. Unsure, she pushed him slightly to make sure that he hadn't just spaced out, but he backed away from her touch. "What?"
"I don't ever lose control of myself like that, and I…that is to say, it would…"
Bulma watched him struggle for a second before catching his drift.
"I won't tell if you don't," she promised. Vegeta swallowed hard, nodded, and then took off at a sprint to enter the ship before it closed. Left standing their, the blunette bit her lip in thought as the countdown was completed and the spherical rocket was propelled upward and through the atmosphere. Just what had driven Vegeta to act like that?
But she already knew why. It was the same reason she allowing him to stay with her for so long, why she always waited by his sick bed until he was well enough to demand that she fix the gravity chamber. The same reason she would be waiting for him to return to her.
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The voyage was just as time consuming as they had anticipated, perhaps even worse. For the first few weeks, they had all trained vigorously using the equipment and gravity manipulator to great extent. But soon enough, that had become maddeningly tedious and most of them tried to find other activities to while away the long hours. Vegeta alone attempted to continue to train, but using the gravity machine caused everyone else to complain quite loudly and that drove him to the brink before he conceded and stopped using it. Without the extra strain, he saw no point in training and pursued other options.
Oddly, the prince took a liking to the handheld gaming device Krillin had brought. The challenge of a computerized opponent against his own wits and reflexes excited him and he ended up playing the games more than Krillin actually did. The former monk compensated by digging out his collection of his favorite soap opera and watching them constantly. Everyone else shunned the show at first, but eventually Gohan came to watch, and then his father, followed by Tien and Yamcha. It soon came to pass that watching the show became a scheduled event and everyone had placed wagers on which pairing of the main characters they thought would happen (with Piccolo being the only one to bet that it would be a sad ending and Vegeta insisting that two of the women had their own thing going on).
Goku, when not eating or rooting for Javier, attempted to master the cappuccino machine in the kitchen. The scalding hot coffee and application of cream was stumped him, but he persevered and kept making batch after batch with Krillin as his reluctant taste tester. The first several dozen were predictably barely consumable by humans, but at least they hadn't poisoned anyone yet. But, just as Goku was accustomed to doing, the plentiful experience rapidly began to improve his tests, if only by little bits at a time. Eventually though, he had memorized the entire procedure and could whip out a regular cup of cappuccino in scant seconds. With this victory, he set his eyes upon different recipes and went to work, a constantly buzzed Krillin watching as he went.
Yamcha, to everyone's surprise, had started to work on a book. When asked, he responded that every good baseball player eventually made a book that made them look a whole lot better than they actually were at some time or other. Appropriating one of the ships console for his typing purposes, he pecked away at the transcript day after day, fleshing out an interesting story. He couldn't accurately depict his early life since it involved being a bandit, fighting an invisible man, seven magical orbs and the second coming of King Piccolo, so he fudged his early life. Asking ideas from everybody, he eventually came up with him being distantly related to a now extinct line of royalty, he had an overbearing mother who had tried to pressure him into a life of Buddhism and that he found peace in meditating for long hours at a time.
Gohan, to nobody's surprise, read. Chi Chi must have raided half of the libraries around Mount Paozou to have packed so many books for her son, who didn't discount that possibility. They ranged from children's books to university textbooks for the monomolecular physical theorem. Dutifully, he dove into them and finished page after page at an extraordinary rate, though that coud probably have been expected. Surprisingly, Tien found himself engrossed in some of the books as well. Before he had been picked for the Crane School, he had used to enjoy reading at libraries before returning to the orphanage that he and Chioutzou had lived in for years. After the 22nd Budokai Tenkaichi, however, he just hadn't found much opportunity to find a thick chapter book and sit down with it for hours. Training had dominated his life since meeting Goku, but he guessed Vegeta had taken up that habit as well.
For a while, it seemed that Piccolo was the only one of them that had maintained his normal activities: meditating and being short with just about everyone. But one night, Goku had was going to the kitchen for another snack and perhaps some more cappuccino training when he noticed the namekian at the computer consoles, light from the monitor spilling over his form in the near dark of the 'night-cycle'. Taking a closer inspection, the saiyan had seen that half a dozen different videos had been pulled up on racecars. Indeed, fast automobiles had become a serious hobby of Piccolo's after their disastrous attempts to get their driving licenses a few months back. He followed racing circuits, street races and pro tours and kept statistics on some of the notable drivers.
And so it went on, their trek across the stars to reach the southern quadrant of the galaxy as had been laid out by kais of billions of years past. They even partly forgot their apprehension and fear of the coming battle should there be one…
But that changed on the forty seventh day when, all at the same time, the Z-Fighters felt the most terrible of presences blossom into existence not far from where they now were. It actually them made flinch and recoil from the shear force of the malevolence and insanity that perforated the ki energy like salt in the ocean.
But what really got their attention was the subtle distinguishing features of the ki, those that could allow them to determine identity if they already knew the person. This wasn't the case, but there were familiar elements that gave them a piece of insight into their future opponent.
"I don't believe it," Vegeta whispered, everyone still able to hear him, "it's a saiyan!"
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AN: There, a whole chapter and not a single punch is actually thrown. It's a lot more boring than other authors would have you believe, but that's probably just me.
As you could probably guess from the Glaring hints, the next foe that the Z-Fighters are going to face is my personal favorite: Broly, the Legendary Super Saiyan (not "Super Saiyan of Legend"; we'll get to that). But will he just be another push over like Cooler, or could he possibly be too much for our heroes to face? Idunno, but it'll still be an awesome fight nonetheless!
For those that are thinking that I made Vegeta change too quickly, or that the reason he transformed was wrong, then let us have a little heart-to-heart on the matter. For one thing, the dude would have been crying ten seconds later if he had been hit by the Death Beam, and that shows everyone that you aren't completely cold and ruthless, no matter how hard you try to hide it. He also isn't as cocky or arrogant as he was in canon because he survived Frieza's beating and then had a lot of time to dwell on it, not mention being there when Goku ascended as opposed to just seeing the results. This man's life until that moment had just been rendered moot, and he damn well knew it. So where else to go from the bottom but up?
And then it was his turn to go golden. Some of you have said that he would never ascend because Goku died like with Krillin, he still hated him too much. And that's almost true. See, he didn't transform because he felt any real sadness over Goku's 'death' so much as he realized that the best that his race had to offer had just been snuffed out. So it's still about the saiyans as a whole, but definitely on a more positive note than usual. Also, I twisted the "I don't care anymore" reason from canon into something that actually made sense… I hope.
If you have any more questions about the story, go right ahead and ask them. I'll do my best to answer them as clearly as I can, but no promises. I've also allowed Anonymous reviews, which I didn't even realize were, by default, off. I had to log into my account from my mom's iphone to realize that out. Go figure.
Laters!
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