The lip of the cave had given way more and a mound of dirt had accumulated in the blue, tube-lit corridor. The captain sidestepped it and marched into the room where she had woken up three days ago, muttering a rancorous: "Over a decade under the fucking ground and this cunting place still smells like arse."
I had never met anyone who swore as much as vengeful Athena and it made my ears burn to hear her use three cuss-words in one sentence. Even Goten couldn't pull that off. My dad was apt to throw out the f-word if he was really mad, but with his stoicism that hardly happened to begin with. The only thing that was sure to get him cussing was the training chamber breaking down whenever he went over the top with his exercise like he had two weeks ago. He did avail himself of the sporadic arse or piss, like when I was doing a piss-poor job at my training or if I asked him for attention and he couldn't be arsed. And, of course, Earth was an ignorant muck-hole, Goku was the idiot, Chichi the loud loon and their children spawn. Mr. Satan was the moronic mayor of Shitburg, Dende a miserable green fart and the guardian of heaps of shit, Android 18 was all scrap no knickers, Krillin a diseased bell-end, Yajirobi a fat craven, Yamcha the weakling, the rest of the Z Warriors were a bunch of sad-arse fuck-nuts and the world's population on the whole minor recreants. Indeed, Earth wasn't my dad's home either and it struck me that he too probably viewed living here as a fate that could have been worse.
I looked at the captain who was clearing away the vines from the lockers with decisive care so that not a sliver of busted surface was misplaced from the dangerously sagging wall behind. They had more in common than getting stranded on this planet, she and my dad. The sharpness in their features, that gravity-defying thing to their unmanageable-looking hair, the dusk in their skin-tone that, even if my dad's was lighter than hers, corresponded better than my white skin compared to his. And then there was their bearing. That lethal air always accompanying them, the plain fatality in their being, the boasting assertiveness and no-nonsense attitude and just that larger-than-liveness their Saiyajin origin gave them. And if the captain was Athena, then my dad could really only be Zeus, no matter the points he was behind on Goku. My best friend's dad was more the male version of an Eleos, merciful and compassionate. My dad being Zeus, I could style myself Herakles, which I really dug, and then my mom was Alcmene, a human of such wisdom and beauty that she had drawn the God of Gods' attention.
My analogies were opening my eyes to my own 'otherness'. I was neither human nor Saiyajin, or I was both but not whole. A demi-God stuck between two worlds. One world was gone and the other wasn't built for beings with power like mine. I had to be mindful of my strength, always, in using things, hugging people, having it out with bullying classmates in scuffles, partaking in gym class. Showing who I really was would have ramifications. I would be ousted, become a freak on top of a nerd in school. I had never felt the duality of my mixed heritage more keenly than I did in that moment standing there while the captain rummaged around for a refit in the place where she had been kept prisoner. I felt such indignation and wrath on her behalf, such outrage for the injustice perpetrated on her people. Our people. Daunting and intimidating as her presence was, she was somehow also known to me, kindred, and I was pining for something I couldn't give words to, something that belonged to me in part. Maybe it was the place that she called home, maybe the people who my dad was a prince to or maybe it was simply a sense of belonging that I suddenly found I lacked.
I raised my camera and snapped a shot of the captain on her heels in front of the opened lockers, curious to see if I could capture that tremendous Saiyajin bearing, but the polaroid my camera spat out had captured something very different. The captain was in profile, from her left side, the side without the two scars, and her face was so pretty that I half believed I had photographed someone else. My eyes went from the polaroid to the real captain and back again and I saw that I hadn't just caught her on her good side. I had caught her with her guard down. There was a sadness to her expression that the real her wasn't showing. Under that frightful mask there was deep, tangible, devastating grief. That she could carry that in the way she did, with such resilience, made the godlike status I had given her in my mind only more profound. She was epic.
When the captain threw me an assessing, sideways look, I quickly slipped the compromising polaroid into the pocket of my gi-pants, knowing instinctively that if she ever saw it, she would hate how it showed so much of her. I turned to taking snaps of the equipment, starting with the five coffins, the illuminated interfaces on the top and then the column of rotating disks in the centre. She left me to it, apparently not interested anymore in what my camera was for and what it could do, and so while she dug around for whatever she needed inside the lockers, I was going through the room looking for things that would lure my mom to this place. Apart from the column with its coffins and the tubes of liquid light running through the corridor, there wasn't anything of interest, but I took a snap of the steel box filled with scouters the captain dragged out from under a pile of rubble all the same.
"Let me see." she finally said, rising from her squatting position and holding out her gloved hand for the polaroid I was blowing on to make the image settle faster.
I gave her the picture and she looked from that to the box at her feet, did the humph that could mean several things and declared the sound a favourable one by saying: "Nifty."
"Did they have technology like this where you are from?" I asked before I could think back on the sadness I had accidentally captured in the picture that suddenly started burning a hole in my pocket. I really hoped that she hadn't seen me slip it in there because I did not want to have to show it to her.
"Vegetasei's technological advancement came with its affiliation to the WTO." the captain answered in a very factual manner. There were seemingly no sentimentalities attached to the words and I wondered whether my camera would disagree. "And those cunters' interests lay in conquest and warfare. Inventing something like this would have been useless to them." she handed me back the polaroid. "I have seen similar stuff in other worlds. Why are you making these?"
"It is for my mother." I told her. "I want her to come out here with me so I am taking pictures to convince her it is worth her time."
"It isn't. This place honks like a sweaty crack and anything worth taking is under the ground."
"Well," I said, trying not to blush at the sweaty-crack remark. "Those coffins you were trapped in are beyond our technology and my mom is always looking to invent new things. I know she will be able to replicate it or make it into something better."
The captain laughed bitterly. "Mine was a trap." she looked back at the structure resuming: "It is a hibernation vessel. Used for hyper sleep on long journeys so that you don't come out on the other end with grey pubes and sagging tits should you fail to locate a travel portal and get lost in deep space."
Even my neck was flushing red now, but the captain didn't seem to notice how her swearing was turning my face into a tomato. "What about the ship's other occupants? Wouldn't they need to go into hibernation too?"
"Ships like these had that built in. The vessels were used to store us. You see, we never came quietly, as they say. We raised a stink whenever we could and the sadistic cunt got fed up with that so he stuffed us into our coffins to shut us up. By that time, there were only five of us left…" the captain glanced at the row of lockers. I counted ten and I did not need my camera to catch the second of anguish on her scowling face. "Five of my men already met their end when we got our hibernation. I guess the price was getting too steep for that sadistic cunt to pay. He needed us. We could conquer worlds in a fraction of the time it took his benders." and she added, soft and absent: "Even if we did draw it out. To make our freedom last."
"That is awful." I said, feeling that in the deepest of my core. "Just awful."
The captain switched it off as easily as flipping to the next tv-channel. "There could be more left of this ship." she said, hands on her hips and turning to the southernmost, crumbling wall as if she could see what used to lie beyond it. "It was big as fuck and we are in its deepest innards. Besides, it would be way too fortunate for this room to be the only one left standing. I am never that fucking lucky."
I left the horror of the previous topic behind with her. It was an enormity that I did not want to let my mind loose on. With mine, it could take me places I really didn't want to go. It was too heinous. Instead, I tried to visualise the layout of the space ship.
"I could try to excavate it." I mused. But where would I find the time for project like that. I had already decided to devote the remaining week of my summer holiday to training with the Saiyajins and I wanted to work ahead on my upcoming classes and also had a whole list of chores left my mom wanted me to do before school started again.
"Why would you undo your own handiwork?" the captain said to that. "Leave this scrapheap as it is, I say. Or better yet, obliterate it from history altogether."
"My dad says those are useless." I mentioned when she stooped to pick up a red-visored scouter from the heap inside the steel box at our feet.
She was toggling through the screen, mumbling a mildly interested: "Daad?"
I sniggered, thinking back on the dad conversation with my dad. I guessed she didn't like the term either. "My father." I said.
She peered at me with more interest. "Does he now?"
"Yeah. The power-readings are inaccurate. We all mask our base power and it can't register anything over nine-thousand points. Even the stronger humans surpass that."
Her next humph was a rejective one. "In points maybe, but I doubt they know how to use it."
She wasn't wrong. Humans were pushovers, even the strongest ones. Their speed lacked and their bodies couldn't withstand much. Seventeen and Eighteen were the exception to that rule, but they had been bionically enhanced by the mad scientist Giro so they didn't really count.
"A scouter is used for more than power assessment. I don't need this thing to size up my opponents. I can spot their worth at a glance." the captain was bragging and it made me smile. She was smirking too and leaned in closer with the scouter to show me the tiny interface. "It gives you the lay of the land, see?"
The scouter was mapping out our surroundings. It depicted the woods close by, the stream meandering through its heart and indicated the presence of animals wherever it picked up their ki. Standing this close to her, the smell of shampoo and soap was so penetrating, it made my nose itch. Somewhere under the pile of flowers was her scent, I knew that because it was the same as the scent lingering in the hibernation vessel she had been trapped in. It was a mysterious smell, soft and pleasant and warm. And reminding me of my dad. No, it was my dad I smelled. I actually looked over my shoulder expecting to find him standing in that blue-lit corridor like I had the first time I was down here, but there was no one. His scent, snowed under by the shampoo and soap, was coming from the captain. I glanced up at her and she made her scarred brow rise in question.
"You sparred with my dad." I understood and it explained why she had not joined the others for training.
Her grin was so sinister and so wide that all her teeth showed. She scratched the fresh scrape on her temple, then nudged me in the ribs with her elbow and held up the scouter to draw my attention back to the device. "Shelter, water, game." she listed off. "The first things you want to locate when entering unknown territory. Apart from hostile company, naturally."
"What range does it have?" I asked curiously.
"For detailed information on the surroundings, it can throw a scope as wide as thirty leagues and it can probe a whole planet for high battle powers."
I was getting eager. "What is this for?" I asked, pointing out a tiny symbol in the bottom left corner that kept flashing.
"The communication system. It is down." the captain pointed at the rest of the scouters inside the box. "These are all linked. If you switch one on, the system starts back up and you can transmit messages."
"Does it take other frequencies?"
"The system was closed. We were prisoners. That sadistic cunt didn't want us communicating outside our own squadron."
"Oh. Right." I said awkwardly, regretting that I had asked.
The captain pressed the scouter in my hand with a dismissive. "Here. Your daad is right. It is a useless piece of crap."
I chuckled. "It's dad and don't let him hear you say it. He hates it when I call him that."
"He should. It sounds ridiculous." she decreed. "Anyroad, keep the scouter if you want. That one was mine."
"Thanks, Captain." I said happily, pocketing the scouter for later inspection.
She dismissed my thanks with a rough snarl and ducked back down to rummage through the box of scouters, muttering under her breath: "If only these could pinpoint where that fucking device is."
"What are you looking for?" I asked. I was getting bolder and bolder in her company, but she didn't seem to mind my questions. She may have many things in common with my dad, this was not one of them.
The captain stood back up, gave the box a kick that landed it on the other side of the room and made the walls shudder, then touched the back of her head. "The controls for this thing in my head. It keyed me up like my arse was suspended over a fucking fire thinking it could be out in the open down here."
"Then we should excavate this site. To find the device." I said, making up my mind. I was going to find time for this project.
"Nah, I can't be arsed. If that thing is not in this room, then it is most likely underground and inaccessible. Should you go digging around, keep an eye out for it." she held her hands apart like she was indicating the width or length of something. "It looks like a dick, about this long."
"Captain…" I said, rubbing my burning cheek awkwardly but soldiering on and channelling some of my dad's unabashed straightforwardness: "You really shouldn't use all those bad words around me. I am not allowed to hear and it… it makes me uncomfortable."
"So don't hear." she said impatiently before resuming: "There are two tweakers on top and a row of big-arse shifters on the sides. That sadistic cunt had claws like fucking hams."
"You mean turners." I said, mimicking turning a dial. "And sliders?" I continued, pretending to slide a switcher up and down.
"I mean tweakers and shifters." she said, making the same hand gestures I had. Semantics again. She and my dad should start a club.
"It is the same thing." I said a little exasperated. I had the feeling that she was making fun of me and I didn't bear that well, and in regards to all the body parts she was hurling at me even less. "What colour is the device."
"The colour of a fat, golden stiff one." she returned with a rather wicked grin and she added: "You can't tell me that I did not try to spare your princely ears with that."
"You could just say what shape it is." I muttered sourly.
"I did. Twice." the captain barked a laugh and left my side to gather up the stack of battle gear she had taken from the lockers. She bundled it all up in a blue undershirt, tied the sleeves and swung it over her shoulder like a knapsack. My unsatisfied curiosity for this place must have been clear. As she passed me, she nudged me with her shoulder saying: "I can draw you a map of the ship."
The offer surprised me. "Would you?"
"Yeah." she gave me a second, harder nudge and left the room telling me: "If you hand over that picture of me you have inside your pocket."
"Shit." escaped me before I could stop myself.
"Ouch, Princeling, my ears!" the captain hollered. She barked another laugh and marched off into the corridor.
I dug up the polaroid from my pocket and looked down at that face that was so unblemished and pretty and sad. Carefully, I rubbed my thumb across the surface of the picture, then pressed my nail into the part where her eyes were, where the sadness hid, and erased it. Athena should not be made aware of her mortality, not when she worked so hard to keep it at bay. I wanted her to stay every bit as daunting and vengeful as she was. This wasn't uncommon for me. It was just like how I always took care to not touch my dad's untouchability. I was used to circumventing crushing grief.