Vegeta stood with his arms crossed as the ship's exit ramp extended down into the ground. Not wanting to waste the energy flying down, Vegeta instead walked down the ramp as if he owned the world he was about to set foot on. Which, going off of the survival-of-the-fittest mentality he learned as a member of the Frieza Force, he pretty much did already, in everything but name. True, everyone on the planet's surface had hidden their power levels from any means of detection which he was capable of, and no planetary survey data on the planet had ever been recorded, but he knew that they had no means of stopping a being of his power. This was readily ascertained by the fact that all five members of the Ginyu Force had been alive and well enough to divert to Namek at Frieza's order. Obviously the mission wasn't all that difficult for them if they could afford to drop it halfway through.
Confident in his safety, Vegeta made no effort to hide his own power level, knowing that the locals likely possessed the ability to sense energy. If they could, Vegeta reasoned, then they would know that resisting him was futile. And, just as Vegeta thought this, a group of them stepped forward, proving him right. The small blue-skinned aliens were difficult for Vegeta to distinguish between, looking incredibly similar if not identical in terms of skin tone, facial structure, and clothing choice. The only indicator which showed a clear difference was the Yardrat's voices. One of the Yardrat gathered before Vegeta, who appeared to be dressed in red garbs which were slightly different from that which the others wore, had a deeper voice than the others around them.
"Greetings!" Synara said politely. "Welcome to our planet, stranger! We hope that you will enjoy your visit!" As she spoke, several Yardrat around them moved to attend to Vegeta in various ways: placing a rug over the dirt Vegeta would have walked on, shining his boots, and offering him plates of food and beverages with colors which Vegeta had never known food or beverages to have, at least ones that weren't tainted in some manner. Vegeta couldn't help but chuckle to himself at the Yardrats' ridiculously servile behavior, regarding them all with amusement.
"Ah, the Ginyu Force must have scared you all worse than I thought," he said cockily before deciding to get down to brass tacks. "In any event, we all know your heart isn't really in all of this, so why don't I just cut to the chase?"
None of the Yardrat seemed fazed by Vegeta's attitude. "What do you mean?" the first one who spoke asked, keeping up appearances so well that, for a second, Vegeta wondered whether or not they were all actually acting. Nevertheless, he continued.
"I have heard tell of incredibly powerful ki techniques which your people have developed and perfected over the years. If this is true, I require the services of your most skilled ki user in order to learn these techniques for my own purposes. If the techniques you have for me are not to my satisfaction, I will kill every person on this planet. Is that understood?"
Some of the Yardrat faltered ever-so-slightly, but for the most part, they maintained their composure. The leader of the group simply smiled, turning around in the direction of their village.
"Of course," she said. "We will take you to our elder. He is the wisest and most skilled among us in the manipulation of ki. If anyone can give you the knowledge you seek in a timely manner, it is him."
Vegeta grinned, already imagining what he'd do assuming that the rumors were true. A technique that allows the user to teleport anywhere across the universe? This alone would give him a major advantage against anyone who dared to oppose him. "Especially Kakarot," he thought with disgust. He had no idea for sure whether he was alive or dead after his confrontation with Frieza, but at this point, Vegeta wasn't willing to count him out just yet. "Particularly with..."
He paused, trying to think back to that horrible spell of disorientation he suffered from as he tried to leave Namek. He was bleeding from his chest wound, only barely managing to make it to an Attack Ball, and yet he could have sworn he sensed two powers of a magnitude he never thought possible. He couldn't think of any likely source for them other than Goku and Frieza, and yet, try as he might, when he tried to quantify them, he couldn't come up with anything beyond just...big. It was possible, of course, that his newfound power was greater than both of the powers he had observed. This would obviously make it remarkably easy to kill both Goku and Frieza when the moment came. "In fact..." Vegeta thought to himself, "This latest power increase...may just have been enough to push me beyond...and into the realm of legend!" Clearly, he would need to verify this hypothesis as soon as possible. "And what better way to do that than to teleport right to that low-class fool and kill him where he stands?" Vegeta thought with a sadistic smirk, the Yardrat around him watching and sensing him carefully in order to keep tabs on him. Before long, they had arrived at the outskirts of the village, where Vegeta was happy to observe many of the Yardrat hiding from him in fear. He always enjoyed people that knew their place. At the same time, however, one of them, who looked similar to the others save for small hair-like extensions, stood before him with a wide smile.
"Greetings, traveler. I am Pybara, the elder of this particular village," he said, showing no signs of deception which Vegeta could perceive. As such, Vegeta decided to press on.
"Well, elder, your people seem to believe that you are the most qualified to teach me the techniques you have developed in this world."
Pybara nodded. "I am inclined to respond with modesty, but they are essentially correct. The Yardrat race has perfected the use of ki in ways known to no other mortal species throughout the universe. As an elder of the Yardrat, I am the most skilled user of these techniques."
"And just what kind of techniques are these?" Vegeta asked impatiently. "I have heard that you have the capacity to teleport from one place to another in an instant through the use of ki."
Pybara nodded sagely. "This is true, but there are other techniques which my people have developed, using many of the same principles."
"Such as?" Eagerness had crept into Vegeta's tone, lured by the promise of gaining abilities which no one in the universe could possibly combat. Pybara smiled in response to Vegeta's question.
"Imagine, if you will, being able to generate an army of duplicates, each one sharing your combat strength, limited only by the powers of the mind. Or being able to alter one's size, to grow as large as one wished, with all of the benefits and none of the drawbacks that growing to such sizes would naturally entail." Pybara held out his hands, as if to welcome Vegeta to a new world of possibilities. "All this, and more, can be mastered by you, with enough time, patience, and dedication."
Vegeta grinned widely. "Excellent. If such powers truly are possible, I wish to make them my own without any delay. To that end, you will begin training me, effective immediately...or else." The demand, which caused the Yardrat assembled around him to burn with righteous indignation, seemed to produce no discernible effect on them, especially the elder, who continued smiling.
"Of course," he said amicably, before looking directly into Vegeta's eyes in a way that left him unsettled for the first time since he landed. "I'm sure that we will both learn a lot from each other."
Before Vegeta could discern exactly what Pybara meant, he felt someone bump into him, and Vegeta had just enough time to turn around in a flash. However, all he found was...Pybara, who had a hand placed firmly on Vegeta's chest. This was all he was able to see before the scenery around him vanished, and he disappeared into a formless void, plucked from the planet's surface like a stone taken swiftly from the ground by an unseen hand.
After what couldn't have been more than a second of travel, Vegeta opened his eyes and found himself standing upon a very different world. Raging overhead was the biggest storm Vegeta had ever laid eyes on in all of his years traveling throughout the galaxy, a storm which he quickly surmised would pose quite a challenge for any ship to pass through unscathed. Not that there were any ships on this planet to begin with, let alone much in the way of life save for what appeared to be massive fungi which strongly resembled a typical rock formation. Nevertheless, although experiencing what he could only assume was the Yardrat's teleportation technique first hand had left him disoriented for a moment, his senses were still sharp enough to pick up the distinctive noise which he had heard just before finding himself standing on this barren world. He could readily guess what the Yardrat elder's plan was, and Vegeta was hardly about to let some old alien from some backwater planet succeed in stranding him here. Not after everything he'd accomplished. Not after everything he had left to do before he would finally be satisfied. Without a second's hesitation, Vegeta moved faster than Pybara could see, slicing off his right hand and disrupting his attempt to escape less than a second before it would have succeeded.
With a cry of agony, Pybara fell to the ground, using a quick blast of ki to cauterize the wound just before Vegeta landed next to him and grabbed him by the throat, lifting the Yardrat elder off of the ground until he was at eye level with the Saiyan prince.
"Did you really think I would allow you to strand me on this forsaken planet?" Vegeta asked, in a tone that would have left almost anyone who knew of him by reputation quaking in mortal terror. Unfortunately for Vegeta, Pybara was not such a person, nor would he have been likely to give Vegeta the response he had wanted even if he had known about him prior to his arrival. Despite slowly being choked to what the elder could only assume was his death, Pybara still managed to let out a small chuckle in response to the situation he had found himself in, only furthering Vegeta's ire.
"No...heh...I suppose I did not. Still...it was worth a try," Pybara responded between gasps for breath, causing Vegeta to look at him with murderous intent as he laid out his demands.
"Bring me back to your planet and give me what I asked you for, and I might let the rest of your kind live. If, however, you dare to refuse the Prince of All Saiyans, I am going to-!"
"What?" Pybara countered frankly, seemingly unimpressed with Vegeta's threats even after experiencing the consequences of defiance just a moment prior. "You...cannot kill me. Not if you...hope to escape. And if you...plan to torture me...I will not yield." At this, Vegeta sneered.
"We'll see about that."
As minutes turned to hours and then to days that Vegeta remained on the inhospitable planet he had been transported to, Pybara proved frustratingly resistant to every method of torture which Vegeta could devise in order to get the Yardrat elder to cooperate. Being left in the position of having to hurt someone just enough to where they would both survive and be more likely to bend to his will was not a completely foreign situation for the Saiyan prince, but it was certainly not a position he enjoyed finding himself in. Nevertheless, as much as he would have liked to dismember the Yardrat elder as payback for trapping him and almost leaving him to die, Vegeta knew full well that he had no other choice but to keep the old fool alive until he could get what he needed.
With his past experiences as a part of the Frieza Force in mind, Vegeta had a wide range of options to choose from when it came to forcing Pybara's compliance. He began with the simplest method available to him: beating the elder within an inch of his life and hoping that the fear of death would compel him to assist Vegeta in escaping. Unfortunately, as Vegeta would eventually come to realize, Pybara had gone into this scheme he had enacted fully prepared to die in the act of saving his people from yet another alien threat to their civilization. Therefore, as soon as Vegeta figured out that simply beating him into submission would not be effective, he switched to an extreme adaptation of his usual fallback method: depriving Pybara of food, water, and sleep for the majority of their time together on the planet. Of course, this was not to say that Vegeta stopped beating Pybara into submission once he began the new torture regimen; after all, one of the many things Vegeta came to loathe about the planet he was trapped on was its lack of many living creatures on which he could risk taking out his considerable aggression upon. And yet, even with the added discomfort on top of the constant beatings, Pybara still refused to use Instant Transmission to transport Vegeta off the planet or to teach Vegeta the technique as he had originally promised. As infuriating as Pybara's resistance was, Vegeta nonetheless had to admit to himself that a part of him could begrudgingly respect the old man's sheer tenacity in the face of a foe more ruthless and powerful than almost anyone else in the entire universe.
Making matters even worse for Vegeta, knowing he had no means of preventing Pybara from escaping while he was asleep or otherwise distracted, Vegeta kept his eye on the Yardrat elder at all times. Each day that Vegeta sacrificed his own much-needed rest in order to ensure that Pybara could not escape or enjoy any rest himself slowly took its toll on the proud Saiyan warrior, and no matter how stubbornly Vegeta tried to keep himself awake by any means necessary, both parties knew it was only a matter of time before one or the other would finally need to get some rest. In retrospect, Vegeta should have expected that the man who had already somehow endured days of torture at his hands would have the willpower necessary to fight against fatigue slightly better than Vegeta. And so, Vegeta awoke one morning to find Pybara looking much healthier and tenderly bandaged in the areas which the prince had made certain to wound more deeply than the rest of the Yardrat elder's tiny body. As far as Vegeta was concerned, the strangest thing about the sight he was greeted with that morning was not the fact that Pybara had managed to escape; it was the fact that he had decided to return at all, for a reason which Vegeta was desperate to ascertain.
"You," he barked as soon as he had processed the implications behind the elder's presence.
"Yes?" Pybara replied simply, surprisingly cordial to the man who had cut off his arm and done nothing but torture him for days on end. By this point, Vegeta had well and truly had enough of Pybara's lack of deference. Being spoken to as if he were a subordinate was humiliating on its own, but being spoken to as if he were an equal was an entirely new level of demeaning.
"You obviously escaped while I was unconscious. Why have you returned?" Vegeta asked, his irritation plainly visible on his face.
"I am certain I do not know what you are talking about, Vegeta," Pybara replied smoothly, his dismissive response serving only to enrage Vegeta further as he cracked a nearby rock into pieces with a single slam of his right hand.
"Do not play coy with me, old man!" Vegeta snapped back, having lost what little patience he had had to begin with. "It's obvious that you left this place and returned to your planet to recover with the help of your people, unless you expect me to believe you had been carrying that many bandages around this entire time without my noticing. Now, what I can't figure out is what possible reason you had to come back once you had finally managed to escape, and if you don't want to end up in the condition I last saw you in yet again, you're going to tell me what that reason is!"
For a moment, Pybara said nothing, and it took everything Vegeta had not to punt the Yardrat elder into the closest mountain for his insolence. However, when Pybara finally did speak, his words ended up catching Vegeta off-guard, for multiple reasons.
"To be quite honest...I was not planning on it originally," Pybara admitted. "You are right; once I finally had the opportunity to return to my people, I took it immediately, as I am certain most would in my situation. My people were glad to see that I had survived and quickly set about treating the injuries you inflicted upon me as best they could. They all believed that I was fortunate to have survived at all, as did I. They were quite content to leave your visit to our planet as little more than an unpleasant moment in our long, storied history. And yet..."
After a moment of silence, Vegeta audibly sighed in annoyance before prompting Pybara to continue his explanation. "And yet...?"
"And yet, I found myself having second thoughts about simply leaving you here."
"Why?" Vegeta asked bluntly. "It was your plan, was it not?"
"Yes, but...well, I am reluctant to admit this, but ever since we first arrived on this planet, I have been...reading your thoughts. At first, I was simply intent on discovering what you had planned for me so that I could better prepare myself, but as I looked deeper into your mind, I felt a growing sense of...curiosity, you could say, regarding just who the man I had sought to contain here was."
Vegeta scowled. If he had a credit for every time some old alien had decided he could simply barge into Vegeta's mind and plumb the depths of his thoughts and memories to ascertain his plans and try to construct some ridiculous theory regarding who he is as a person, he would have two credits. Which is not a lot, but it is rather odd, in retrospect, that it happened twice.
"Is that right?" Vegeta asked, the disdain he felt for the Yardrat elder plainly evident in his tone. "Any particular reason you were so hesitant to mention this, beyond the obvious fact that I would most certainly have been less willing to hold back if you had blurted it out before you left?"
At this question, Pybara noticeably shrunk into himself, evidently ashamed by this particular course of action which he had taken only partly out of necessity. "In my culture," he eventually answered, "it is considered morally reprehensible to read the thoughts of another without their consent, even under circumstances such as what you placed me under not that long ago."
"More morally reprehensible than kidnapping a man and leaving him to die alone on a deserted alien planet with no means of escape?" Vegeta asked sardonically, causing the Yardrat elder to raise both of his eyebrows in astonishment before eventually regaining his composure.
"...A fair point," he conceded, causing Vegeta to scoff at the old alien with contempt.
"And what world-shattering insights did you manage to gain from your unethical foray into my private thoughts, oh wise elder? Did they include, perhaps, a compelling reason for why I should not immediately resume tossing you around this planet like a ragdoll and leaving you on the brink of death for daring to invade my mind?"
Pybara did not respond for quite some time, a fact which left Vegeta with even less patience than he had at the beginning of their conversation. He was about to kick Pybara into the nearest mountain as punishment for his crime when the Yardrat elder finally settled on what to say in response to the prince's inquiry, a response which was the last thing Vegeta had ever expected to hear from anyone he had ever met in his entire life.
"I learned that you have the potential to be a good person," Pybara replied simply.
The first impulse Vegeta had in response to that particular statement was to simply stand there in stunned silence. The second impulse Vegeta had in response to that particular statement was to laugh out loud at its sheer absurdity, to which Pybara remained surprisingly unaffected as he simply waited for the Saiyan prince to get it all out of his system.
"I'm sorry, what?" Vegeta finally asked, incredulous. "You honestly believe that I would ever become some insufferable boy scout like Kakarot and the rest of his foolish friends?" Vegeta scoffed in amusement as he regarded the Yardrat elder. "Clearly my disciplinary methods have done more damage to your mental faculties than I had anticipated if you've come to such an outlandish conclusion after accessing the darkest depths of my psyche."
Pybara nodded thoughtfully in response to Vegeta's question, acknowledging the point. "It is true that you have done many terrible things, either in pursuit of your own selfish desires or simply because you did not care enough to be bothered by the immorality of your actions. Disrespecting your parents and the rest of your people simply because they were not as powerful as you. Subjugating a number of planets in Frieza's name. Being personally responsible for the deaths of millions. Seeking out the mystical 'Dragon Balls' in order to obtain immortality and take Frieza's place as a tyrannical emperor of the universe...not to mention all of the unspeakable things which you have done to me ever since I made your acquaintance. I have no doubt that, if you were to die today, you would not be greeted warmly in the Other World, to say the least."
Vegeta smirked at that, acting unusually smug for someone who had just been told, in the most polite manner possible, that they were absolutely, definitely going to Hell.
"And even so...I believe that that royal, Saiyan pride which drives you to commit these heinous acts could be turned in the opposite direction, towards the path of righteousness, provided you found the right motivation to do so." As Vegeta scoffed, Pybara continued with his speech undeterred. "To that end, I am prepared to offer you this: if you can prove to me that you are capable of the positive change which I believe you are capable of...I will teach you all that I know, as I had originally promised when you first came to my world."
"And if I refuse?" Vegeta asked pointedly, to which Pybara simply shrugged.
"Then we will no doubt continue the same song and dance as before until you either kill me by accident, or I escape...and elect not to return."
At this implied threat, Vegeta paused for a moment, weighing his options. He still didn't buy what Pybara was telling him for a moment, but at the same time...if he could find a way to trick the old alien into believing that he had made a change as he described, then he could find a way to escape. He had simply to make one slight alteration to the deal Pybara laid out for him.
"On one condition: no more meddling your way into my mind from now on. Got it?"
"Of course," Pybara replied simply, causing Vegeta to repress a sinister grin.
"Excellent. Now, as long as I play my cards right and sell it convincingly enough, the old fool won't be able to tell that I'm lying about my 'turn to goodness,' and the secrets I sought after will be mine!"
With that, the first day of Vegeta's "rehabilitation" began, and although Vegeta knew that he could not fake having redeemed himself within a short period of time, days and days passed without any sign of Pybara having accepted that Vegeta had changed for the better. Even without exercising his ability to plunge into the depths of Vegeta's thoughts, it soon became clear to Vegeta that Pybara was not quite as foolish as he had initially assumed, and that his decades of life experience gave him a keen sense of when he was being lied to. Still, while Vegeta was many things, a quitter certainly was not one of them, and with no other option to force the Yardrat elder's cooperation at this point, he had no choice but to continue the charade as best he could.
When he wasn't busy gathering the planet's miserable excuse for food sources, making himself a shelter by carving a hole into one of the massive fungi which dotted the planet's surface, and begrudgingly training in solitude as best he could, he found himself spending a rather inordinate amount of time making conversation with Pybara. He didn't exactly like chatting with the old alien, of course, but with no one else on the planet to talk to, he was unfortunately Vegeta's only option if he wanted to keep his mind from succumbing to the effects of prolonged isolation. And, to Vegeta's surprise, Pybara turned out to be a rather tolerable conversationalist, all things considered, never taking any given conversational topic far enough to the point where it would drive Vegeta to an unyielding rage and opting to mind his own business with quiet meditation whenever Vegeta made it clear that he would rather be left alone. What's more, Pybara proved to be a rather sympathetic listener; the first time that their conversations turned to the subject of Planet Vegeta's destruction, Pybara had offered nothing but support and kind words to Vegeta in spite of everything the Saiyan prince had done to him. Vegeta had scoffed and dismissed the old man's kindness that night, but a small part of him, a part which he had never even known existed within himself, appreciated the old man's sympathy.
The more that he and Pybara talked about their lives and the many hardships that they had experienced over the years, the more Vegeta found himself thinking back on his life even when not in Pybara's company. He thought of his father, the proud Saiyan king whom he had looked down upon as a boy, having already come close to surpassing him in power when he was but a child. Their roles would likely be reversed now if he learned of Vegeta's current circumstances, left with no other option than to play the fool in the hopes that he could trick Pybara into teaching him the techniques he needed to leave this forsaken planet. He thought of his mother, whom he had looked down upon as a weakling and refused any and all affection which she tried to provide for him. He hadn't spent much time thinking about her at all in the intervening years after Planet Vegeta was destroyed, only for Roshi's brief foray into his thoughts to bring it all rushing back to him. He thought of Tarble, the weakling younger brother whom he had never had the chance to properly get to know and had spent years barely remembering the fact that he even existed. He wondered what became of him after all these years, and found himself hoping that he was at the very least still alive. This wasn't to say that Vegeta was quite at the point where he truly regretted any of what he had done to his family or anyone else he had encountered over the course of his life. However, he would be lying if he said that he was not left wondering whether Pybara, fool though he still thought the old alien was, really was onto something regarding Vegeta's nature, only to conclude that it was impossible.
At least, that's what he kept telling himself.
Weeks turned into months turned into a year, then another year, then another, and still Vegeta was left marooned on the inhospitable planet which Pybara told him had never been given a name, not even a pending designation in the planetary database of the Frieza Force. As Vegeta began to resign himself to his fate on the miserable rock, he could certainly see why the planet had never attracted their attention; only a fool would willingly choose to settle upon such a barren land. And so it seemed that Pybara was, for willingly choosing to remain on the planet for so long, and Vegeta too, for willingly continuing to indulge the old fool in his attempt to save the Saiyan prince's soul. Loathe as he was to admit it, the Yardrat elder had grown on the Saiyan prince after years spent with no one else but him for company, and it seemed to Vegeta that the feeling was mutual, even in spite of all the horrible things that Vegeta had done to him. One could go so far as to call them friends.
However, this didn't mean that Vegeta didn't have a plan to betray him.
As he had long ago come to conclude beyond a shadow of a doubt, there was no way that Vegeta would be able to trick Pybara into believing that he had truly become a better person than he had been when they met. He had tried it before, at times where he was certain that enough months spent in deep conversation and soul searching had gone by for the elder to buy into the ruse that Vegeta attempted to sell him. Each and every time Vegeta had convinced himself that he was on the precipice of finally learning the techniques that he wanted to learn and escaping the wretched planet he found himself on, and each and every time Pybara saw through his insincerity and refused him. The Yardrat elder explained to him what he was missing after the last attempt two months ago had failed, although at the time Vegeta had been less than willing to hear it.
"Vegeta, it's clear by now that you understand that what you did was wrong, but this alone is not enough. Someone understanding the immorality of their actions does not necessarily prevent them from committing those actions regardless; all it does is make them feel guilty about it after the fact. To truly prove that you are capable of changing for the better, you must demonstrate not only your guilt regarding your past actions, but also your resolve to not engage in those actions again. As far as I can tell, you have not done this...but I still believe that you can make the leap, no matter how much you may believe it to be impossible."
These words did little to improve Vegeta's mood at the time, as he simply flew off in a huff and blew up some massive fungi to calm himself down. However, when he returned to Pybara's side, he did begin to notice a change: perhaps as a means of encouraging him, or perhaps merely because they had run out of things to talk about, Pybara finally elected to teach Vegeta one of his many ki techniques. Although Vegeta was initially disappointed to learn that the only technique Pybara was willing to teach him was the use of telepathy, in time Vegeta eventually realized that, with enough time and carefully crafted conversations with Pybara, he could figure out how to perform the same telepathic trickery that both Master Roshi and Pybara had used on him. Should he succeed in mastering such a technique, he could pull all of the knowledge that he sought directly from Pybara's mind...and leave the old fool with no more leverage over him.
There were times that Vegeta would come to wish that he had agonized over the decision to betray his Yardrat friend, that he had experienced a crisis of conscience unlike anything he had ever faced before or would ever face again. The reality was that the decision was made almost instantly, with barely more than a single thought given to Pybara after all of the time they had spent together. This fact is one that would continue to haunt Vegeta for the rest of his life.
After two months of training and preparation, Vegeta knew that it would soon be time to put his plan into action. Pybara was beginning to grow suspicious of how their conversations tended towards revealing more and more details about the nature of telepathy, and Vegeta was well aware of how perceptive the Yardrat elder could be. Were he to discover what Vegeta was planning, he would no doubt refuse to speak to him any further and return to his people if he was once again given the opportunity, leaving Vegeta stranded on the planet until he died alone. He would not allow himself to go out in such a fashion, especially not after devoting all of this time towards trying to escape. Thus, as Pybara went to sleep one night and Vegeta did his best to ignore the faint whispers of his conscience in the back of his mind, the Saiyan prince at last made his move.
The effect was immediate: Vegeta used everything he had learned about telepathy in the past two months to pierce through Pybara's sleeping mind like a syringe, forcing his way into the Yardrat elder's deepest thoughts and draining them from his brain in a single massive flood of information and memories. It was a surreal experience to have an entire life that wasn't his own flashing before his eyes, but it was over far too quickly for him to truly grasp the enormity of what he had just done and truly understand why the use of telepathy in this way was such a taboo to the people of Yardrat. It was no surprise that, having never done this before and having extracted so much information all at once, Vegeta would both find himself completely overwhelmed and find Pybara having woken up suddenly from the shock. As the information he had gathered began to crystalize in his mind, Vegeta looked across to Pybara, who had managed to get up to his feet and looked back at the Saiyan prince. The two stared at each other silently for a mere fraction of a second that nonetheless felt like an eternity, and Vegeta was left to make another decision that would change his life forever.
In reflecting back on this particular incident, Vegeta would once again come to wish that he had spent longer thinking over what he had done. Unlike the plan itself, there was no possible line of reasoning he could have used to justify its necessity. The primary justification in his mind, and indeed the primary justification of almost everything that he had done up until that point, was nothing more than directionless anger and stubborn Saiyan pride finally being given an outlet to pay the Yardrat elder back in full for all that he had done to Vegeta over the years he was trapped on that planet. Before he traveled to Yardrat, this alone would have been enough to sign Pybara's death warrant in Vegeta's mind, and it was a testament to the fact that Vegeta truly had been changed by the years he spent on the inhospitable planet that this was not the case now. Instead, it was another justification which prevented Vegeta from staying his hand: the fact that he could not bear to hear a single word of recrimination from what may well have become his only friend in the universe. It was this reason, more than any other, that determined what Vegeta was going to do:
He fired a ki blast directly through Pybara's brain.
It was yet another testament to how much Vegeta had changed that he opted for such a quick and painless death, rather than the long and excruciating torment that he had envisioned for Pybara even mere months earlier. Nevertheless, in an instant it was done, and Pybara was left without even a fraction of a second to process his death before his lifeless body fell to the ground. Vegeta got up from where he had been kneeling a few feet in front of the Yardrat elder and stepped away from the corpse hurriedly, panting in shock and a simmering feeling of regret in a way that he had never done after killing someone before. Not wishing to think too hard about what he had just done, he screwed his eyes shut in a futile attempt to block out the event from his mind, and focused instead on applying what he had now learned in order to both get off of the planet and find Goku, hoping that ascertaining the location of his hated rival would get his mind something else to focus on. However, as he kept two fingers pressed against his forehead and felt around the entire universe for Goku's ki, he began to notice something rather odd:
Many ki signatures were missing.
He had somehow suspected that, if Goku had indeed survived his battle with Frieza on Namek, it would be because Goku had triumphed over the tyrant, but it was still surprising to find no sign of Frieza's ki anywhere in the universe. The signatures of the Ginyu Force which he had briefly sensed on Namek were also nowhere to be found, and without any ki signatures he recognized on any of the planets he knew to be under Frieza's control, it would seem that his empire had all but dissolved in the wake of Frieza's apparent death. Turning his attention to Earth, he could feel only one ki signature of any notable magnitude, one which felt familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time, and which was leagues beyond any power he could manage. He tried searching for all of the others he recognized one by one: Goku, Goku's brat, the Namekian warrior, the short bald one, the one with the scar and only one arm. At each and every juncture, he found his efforts at locating them thwarted, and from what he had recently learned, even hiding their power levels would still leave a faint enough signature for him to track. The only conclusion that the Saiyan prince could reach is that they were simply not there, and the only explanation for how this could be the case when they had one or potentially even two sets of Dragon Balls at their disposal to bring back their dead was as unavoidable as it was soul-crushing:
"He's...dead," Vegeta muttered in disbelief. "They're all dead...and gone."
Left grappling with this new revelation, Vegeta finally dared to look back at Pybara's corpse, staring right into the clean hole shot through his forehead and the wide-eyed look of disbelief permanently frozen onto his face. That he had done it to begin with would have been bad enough, but to have done it and be left with nothing to show for it...that was what gave the guilt that had been festering in his heart enough power to begin breaking down the floodgates of his psyche. Images flashed through his mind of everything he had done up until that point: challenging his father, scorning his mother, laying world after world to waste, brushing aside the deaths of his only comrades like they were nothing, and terrorizing both Earth and Namek all in pursuit of a dream that was now meaningless to him. He saw brief glimpses of everything he had done to Pybara since he arrived on that planet, but also thought of what Pybara had done to him, what they might have been able to do together if Vegeta hadn't betrayed him. One day traveling back to Yardrat or even living out the rest of his days on this accursed rock wouldn't have been so bad if he had had his elderly companion by his side, but that better future was lost now. Lost...because of him.
As Vegeta's ki continued to rise beyond his control, all of the better futures that he could have possibly imagined in that moment, futures where he'd been kind to his parents or kind to his comrades, where he hadn't become a merciless planet-killer and had never even heard of any "Dragon Balls" to pursue with uncompromising determination, extinguished themselves before his eyes. Because at the end of the day, when all pretenses were shed, there was one simple fact about Vegeta that had prevented those better futures from coming to pass. A fact which filled Vegeta with an inexhaustible well of rage and sadness, a violent tide of raw emotion that threatened to shatter the barriers which were barely holding back an explosion unlike any he had ever experienced:
He was a monster. A monster he hated.
As his hair suddenly flared up into a bright yellow and his eyes shifted into a turquoise hue, the earth around Vegeta crumbled away as his unfettered ki was let loose in a brilliant yellow wave. For the first time in the Saiyan prince's life, tears came to his eyes as he let out a scream that could be heard for miles before slamming into the ground with all of his newfound power. When the barren earth proved to not be a suitable outlet for his anger after several more hits, Vegeta was seized by a sudden, desperate need to fight something and unleash everything he had upon it. His thoughts quickly turned to the familiar, yet unfamiliar ki signature that he had detected on Earth earlier, and without more than a second's reflection on whether or not this was a good idea, Vegeta hastily put two fingers to his forehead and sought it out again before vanishing into nothingness...leaving Pybara's broken body behind.
Hoo boy, this one was a doozy.
We've got a handful of questions answered, with how Future Vegeta came to learn those techniques and how he got started onto the path of the redemption we see in the present day, and to be honest, I'm curious how y'all feel about it. In writing this chapter, I found myself hitting a bit of a roadblock around the part where Vegeta's imprisonment on the deserted planet shifted from focusing on beating the information he needed out of Pybara to trying to get it through faking a redemption instead. I'd originally conceived of this imprisonment lasting for the majority of the time interval between the present day and the year Future Vegeta traveled back in time, but decided instead to shift it backwards so that he'll run into Future Cell shortly after he woke up and chose violence. I think it was a good decision as far as making it easier for me to finish this chapter ahead of schedule, but I worry that that came at the cost of making Future Vegeta's shift towards becoming a better person feel rushed. Let me make it clear: Future Vegeta's still got some work to do, as the final part will hopefully illustrate sufficiently; this was just the moment in which Future Vegeta was finally confronted with his own monstrosity and actually recoiled from it. As for how Future Cell woke up so fast when it took him decades to emerge in canon, that question will be swiftly answered next time. Until then, though, I'm hoping y'all enjoyed this second part of the trilogy.
Anywho, time for review responses!
Anonymously96 says:
"First of all, glad to see you back. Hoping that this gets regular updates now, lol
Second, why are the earth warriors being so dumb when he's literally saying I'll explain it all in a small while, just let it be so that Gero can't track me and prepare for contingencies? Anyway, hoping to get to the next arc soon, and that Goku does not do the same shit he did in canon, pushing Gohan to Cell, and giving a Senzu bean to boot, when he damn well could've used that Senzu and would have had a good chance at actually killing Cell. That was the main instance of bad parenting from Goku I saw in canon.
Update soon"
Yeah, don't worry, he won't be doing that, for a number of reasons. xD
As for the first bit, that one might be on me: my intention there was that Future Vegeta is basically suggesting that he doesn't have any time to explain anything to them and that they need to just take him at his word if they want to succeed, which I think at least merits a bit of scrutiny. Again, though, might not have communicated that well enough, and honestly, the prologue scene is mostly there to set up the narrative framing device of this whole mini-arc anyway, lol.
And, back in Chapter 3, WrathofAjax says:
"I'm really enjoying this so far. I like the idea of Roshi stepping up to help his pupils in their time of need (part of why i loved his inclusion in the ToP in Super especially the manga version) since it show his true character as more than just a lech. Because lets face it, if he was really as perverted as he acted, there isn't really any girl that could stop him from acting on his desires. So i like there being more than common sense and a few scattered references to show that he has a better character than his bored antics."
Yeah, in retrospect, I do find it kinda funny that my largest fic is specifically centered around the greater inclusion of a character that I honestly don't like a lot of the time because of said perverted and lecherous antics. I agree with others that the Tournament of Power really showcased his potential as a character, and I hopefully have done an adequate job of shying away from the gross "comedic pervert" archetype that he traditionally falls into in other portrayals within this fic.
Anywho, as always, thank you all for reading, stay safe, wear a mask and get vaccinated if possible, have yourselves a fantastic night, and take care. See y'all for part two!