The Destructivedisk Anthology/Special (Legacies Episode)

Special was the first story I wrote for the Legacies collection. At the time of writing it, I had the idea for Tien: Origins, but I wasn't certain that I wanted to write it; I thought it might have been too risky. As such, I decided to write a shortened version and gauge the community's reaction to the story. It worked cleanly into the Legacies mythos and was pretty fun to write. It's one of my shorter stories, mostly because it was intentionally supposed to be short.

The story was written on January 28th, 2011. Like A Sprint to the Top, it was written in one segment and was written pretty quickly. I put a lot of forethought into the story, and it ended up serving as a rough guide for how I would write Tien: Origins. It was also the first story I wrote that focused on Tien.

Special
Third eyes are not entirely unheard of on the Planet Bekk; merely rare. Somewhere around one in a thousand infants would be born with a third eye, all of whom would either be very quickly exceuted or sent into the endless void of space. Regardless, they were viewed as defective and useless, and were never to be seen again. Unless, perchance, they survived the execution or their space pod was just as defective as they, but that is another story for another time.

Our precious Tien was one of the few born with a third eye. For his race, he was born with an extraordinarily low power level, with it being but 40 (note: these power levels are for comparative purposes only. The Bekk did not have access to Saiyan power-detecting devices, but instead sensed power with their instinctual ki sensing). The majority of his race was born with a power level somewhere around 100, which made him a bit of a runt among the infants, which was only worsened by his third eye.

The Bekk adults were far stronger than even the most elite of Saiyan Soldiers, with power levels peaking near 30,000. Much of this drastic increase in power occurred during adolescence, if the warrior was provided with proper training routines and challenging workouts. With all these factors put into play, they could grow into formidable warriors later in life, those that would be cherished by their lords and placed into the elite. Like the antagonist of this story, Kortar.

Kortar was perhaps the strongest of all of the Bekks. His power level was precisely 29,687, which did allow him to edge out the rest of his race and be placed as the head general of their tribalistic army, a highly revered squadron of Cooler’s extensive forces. He had even so much as seen the great Cooler several times, with the universal tyrant regarding him by first name on two separate occasions.

But that’s neither here nor there. It was on this consequential day that Kortar and his army found themselves on their first genuine mission from Cooler; destroying an entire solar system. Naturally, this has led to a tumultuous reaction from the general populous of the Bekk world, as those that were not elites found themselves to be generally peaceful people. Violence was not a game to them, but instead something which should be resorted to when necessary and certainly not done to please a superior. The elites disagreed to the upmost degree.

Kortar felt the annoying buzz of his communicator go off while he ascended from his ship into the blackness of space, before swiftly grabbing it out of his pocket. He held it up to his ear, before spitting out, in a low pitched rumble, “What do you want?”

Soldier number 57 stuttered incomprehensibly for a moment due to the intimidating affect Kortar had on his underlings, and then followed up this terrible linguistic display with, “It’s-it’s the citizens, sir. They’re pro-protesting the space station, and are standing in a mob, not letting us depart,” the young soldier rushed out of his mouth, before taking in a large gulp and silently awaiting a reply.

“Soldier, I’ve made it explicitly clear that if any of them low-lifes try to interfere with us that you blast through ‘em. We need all the manpower we can get if we wanna get through all nine of these planets. I don’t care who they are, but get ‘em out of our way,” stated Kortar, before placing his phone back into his pod and flying off to the planets. The Bekks needed not air and had unusually high resistance to extreme temperatures. These two attributes lead to unprotected space travel being available to all who could fly, which was more or less all those of the Bekk race. He saw a multitude of ships coming up behind him through his peripheral, which caused him to start charging a ki ball.

Hundreds of Bekks began filing out of their spaceships, all of whom with ki blasts powerfully charged and ready to start flinging. Cooler wanted the planets to be destroyed so that he would have a nice place to plant his kingdom, as the area was in the center of most of his regions. He could kill them all, which they all knew full well. This was not to stop them from doing what they did best; destroying things.

A young baby Tien was still sitting in his crib, with his mother peering into it and simultaneously crying, while his father arrogantly sat off to the side, scoffing at how unlucky he was to be born with a strength-deficient child. These judgments, were, of course, totally incorrect, as their son, Tien, would later grow to be the strongest of his race, significantly surpassing even Kortar. However, with their short-sightedness, they saw none of this, but instead simply saw a weakling of a child with a third eye.

"I can’t-I can’t just kill him!” the mother wept, slowly wiping a tear off of her cheek. “I carried this baby for 2 full years, 2 miserable years! And now I’m expected to just give him up? I’m not going to do it! I just won’t.”

“What, you think the law is going to listen to that sob-story? ‘Cause they won’t do anything. They hate those with abnormalities like our little boy over there, and won’t accept him into our society,” the father responded with the best sangfroid he could muster, before the wife erupted in another monologue.

“I can’t send him out to space on the off chance he’ll come across a planet, either. He won’t have any food or water, and he’ll probably just float around in space for a while. What am I going to do? What?”

“The boy has no use in living. He’ll do more dead than alive, I assure you. C’mon, let’s go down to the committee to figure out some type of verdict of what to do with him,” said the father with strange calmness, as though he had experienced the situation a thousand times over. He grabbed the crib with a firm grasp and headed out the door, straight down to the way of the committee.

The forever-open committee just happened to be in the immediate proximity of the space pod center, a coincidence which would play quite in the favor of our hero, Tien. As the three arrived, the father, the mother, and Tien, Soldier Number 57 and his crew were blasting their way through the crowd of people. This fantastic light show was quite noticeable to all passer-bys.

Tien’s mother, perhaps in a hormone-induced delirium or perhaps in a thought fueled by anger, had a sudden epiphany. Their son, Tien, shouldn’t be raised in this environment, under the bizarre circumstance that he was allowed to do so to begin with. She had always been able to ignore this tribal behavior by reassuring herself that they only killed those who were imperfect, but such a thing was not the case. Those with powers abused them and those without them were the abused, the mistreated, the repressed. Regardless of where Tien ended up, he would not be in a good place. The only way to achieve such a thing would be for Tien to be sent to a different place entirely.

As Tien’s father turned for the committee, his mother continued walking forth, straight to the space dock. There would be a remaining shuttle or two, just enough for Tien. Tien’s father, upon noticing where she was going, walked forward to catch up with her. He caught her by her shoulder, and turned her to face him, to which she merely said, “We are, the whole of us, evil,” before continuing forward.

They continued into the dock, and, lo and behold, there was a single space shuttle left. Tien’s mother grabbed his crib from his father’s arm, and securely removed Tien from it. She gently placed him down in the pod, and, in a whisper, said to him, “You shall protect wherever it is that you go. You will be the hero of that world. Just do it, for me, okay?” She closed the lid on the spherical pod, and Tien’s father stated that it was heading towards a planet called Earth, a planet with low power levels where even Tien could flourish.

Of course, Tien lacked the sentience necessary to understand his mother’s inspiring speech. He would go on to be a disciple of one of the most evil men on Earth, Master Shen, and almost end up an assassin. He would commit heinous crimes and perfidious acts, and yet, perhaps by chance, he would one day end up a great man, the one who fought for others and abandoned all of his ancestor’s tribal ways. He would genuinely become a hero.

The glimmering fireworks of exploding planets shone brightly behind Tien, perhaps lighting his way toward the planet he would one day call home.

Endnotes
Special is an all right story. The characters and the dialogue are thoroughly weak throughout the story, but the plot is all right and it's generally well written. This was definitely the better of my two contributions to Legacies. Kortar's inclusion felt pointless and the story on the whole did not feel cohesive. The story was largely rushed and, had I expanded on it more, it would have been a much better story. However, it was only a prototype, so I guess I can forgive myself on that account. It was however, without a doubt, a good decision for me to change the story quite a bit before writing Tien: Origins. As a standalone prototype, though, it's not a bad story at all. I would give it a C-.
 * 1) The story's title has undergone much debate since it was published. In fact, it's just a reference to the fact that Tien has a third eye and is therefore 'special'.
 * 2) The condescending tone displayed toward those with three eyes also appears in Tien: Origins. In this story, though, it's a birth defect.
 * 3) This is one of the very few times that I've directly used pwoer levels in a story. In my recent stories, I've done away with power levels completely. They're boring, for the most part.
 * 4) Kortar's character was one of the most cleanly-translated parts of the story. He was changed very little in between Special and Tien: Origins.
 * 5) 'sangfroid' was yet another vocabulary word from seventh grade.
 * 6) The protest that Tien and his parents come to would be an anti-war protest against Kortar destroying a galaxy. This was not very well delivered in the story, so the whole thing felt kind of random.
 * 7) This was probably my first story to contain any serious thematic elements. The whole point was that Tien would be sent away from the world under circumstances similar to Goku's, but would develop completely differently from Goku once he got there. There's also a bit of an anti-war theme present in the story, with Tien's mother referring to her race as 'evil'.