The Destructivedisk Anthology/Two

Moreso than any other story, I remember the origins of Two very well. It is one of my few stories that was almost directly inspired by a song. I was playing basketball by myself outside, as I oft do, when I was scrolling through my iPod and realized that there was a Ween album I had yet to listen to thoroughly. That album was Shinola, and it was a collection of various odds and ends that Ween had never released on an album before. One of the songs on that album was Gabrielle, and I loved it as soon as I had listened to it.

That song discusses a guy who either physically or verbally abuses his girlfriend and then tries to apologize for that. I had been struggling to come up with a story about Zarbon for quite some time, and this song struck me as appropriate for his character. It developed into a story almost instantly and I wrote it that night. I finished this story very late into the night, somewhere in the realm of 2-4 am, and fell asleep almost instantly afterward.

Before I settled on this story line, I had a number of ideas for stories about Zarbon, but I found them all really difficult to write. The most important one was a first-person perspective of Zarbon where he tried to defend his planet from Frieza but ultimately ended up joining Frieza at the expense of his people. A similar theme was carried over to this story with Zarbon sacrificing his people for himself. This plotline was foregone because I found it impossible and uninteresting to write after having written two or three paragraphs. Another storyline was an introspective story about Zarbon's disgust with his brutish form. Other storylines included Zarbon's relationship with Vegeta, Frieza, and Dodoria, but none of these really developed into anything more.

Two has a couple of themes throughout it. The biggest one is about the volatility of relationships and how a single action or two can irreversibly damage a relationship. It also deals with isolation and feeling excluded or alienated from the rest of your people. It's also a commentary on Zarbon's selfish, petty character, and how he sees himself as superior to everyone else.

Two
This story's theme is Gabrielle by Ween.

An orchestra of enchanted voices filled the restaurant, accompanied only by the quiet flickering of the candles. Beneath these candles lay red lacy table covers, the ends of these table covers elegantly falling near to the floor. Amidst this sea of loquacious people sat a single quiet couple, whose candle seemed to flicker a bit less vivaciously and whose table cover seemed to droop down and sag against the floor. On one end of the table there sat a man, a man with light blue skin and hair carefully tied into a fishtail braid; on the other end of the table was a woman, with skin of a similar hue and short, orange hair which perkily stood atop her scalp.

The couple quietly ate their food, with no playful foot rubbing between the two nor any flirtatious chit chat. The man went to his glass, taking a long sip of red nectar from the cup, gulping down every last drop as it slid reluctantly down the side of the glass. After a long moment of contemplation, he put the glass back down, turning his attention back to his food. After another strained moment, he spoke.

“I got a new job offer today.”

The woman looked up at him, eyes bright.

“For what? You're already the captain here.”

The man nodded back, looking back to his glass to see if he could swallow some more time. No such luck. He took a bite of the meal below him – it was some hideous gunk imported from the Planet Yardrat, considered a delicacy by some and despised by more. He stomached the food and wiped off his mouth, as he was always careful to keep his face clean. He turned his attention back to the woman, speaking again.

He sighed. “I don't know much... I'd be working with Lord Frieza-”

“Frieza? Really?” she replied, her voice breaking away from her normal monotone.

The man nodded.

“How much does it pay?”

“Gah – it doesn't matter. Look, we've gotta discuss this. Can we get out of here?” the man growled, realizing that a restaurant wasn't the place to have such an important conversation.

“Come on, tell me! What are you gonna do?”

“Shush woman, I'll tell you in a minute!” the man snapped, gesturing for attention from the restaurant.

“No, tell me now! I don't know anybody who's worked with Frieza!”

“It's some type of planet trading job – I don't have a fucking brief on it, okay? I can show you the job description when we get home.”

“Planet trading? Sounds important! Must be high profile. How big's the raise?”

“Is that all you can think about, the money? I'll tell you all about it later – can we just leave here for now?”

The woman hardly paid attention to him, as she was overwhelmed with fantasies of what her planet trading boyfriend could give her. The vacations, the houses, the fame – all the luxuries associated with such a prestigious job!

“When do you get to start? Are you going to get to meet Frieza and everything?”

“I said I'd tell you later!” the man yelled. The voices in the background ceased as he shouted, their heads turning to face him. He grimaced, shaking his head slightly, before standing up and grabbing his girlfriend by the shoulder. Without paying, he hurried himself and his woman out of the diner.

Taking her to the side of the building, he threw her against the wall, clearly frustrated.

“Zarbon, what the hell?” the woman shrieked, beginning to run away from him.

“Will you let me talk for a damned second?” Zarbon replied, as the woman stopped. “Alright, listen, okay?”

The woman nodded, half in fear and half in curiosity.

“Look, Frieza, he wants me to come work with him, but it's... it's not that easy.”

“Well, what, then?”

“He wants our planet. He wants to trade it.”

The woman looked at him for a moment, as she registered what he had said. At first, a small look of confusion was painted on her face – but then, after a moment, a look of pure astonishment spread across the woman's visage.

“You're not going to let him take it, are you? He'd kill us all!”

Zarbon snarled. “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do? I know better than to disobey Frieza.” His tone lightened. “But – I've got good news! You can come with me – you can live with me! On his ship!” Zarbon felt relieved to finally tell her this, now that he'd gotten the bad news out of the way. It would work out well, it would. He and his girlfriend could live the rest of their lives without trouble. He would save them both.

“Are you kidding, Zarbon? Is this some kind of joke?!”

“No, it's not! We can live together!”

His girlfriend stared at him with disgust. “You'd let your whole family die like that? Just to save yourself? All your friends, my whole family, everyone we know? You'd trade them for your own skin?”

Zarbon gritted his teeth. “Look, there's nothing I can do about that. You're coming to live with me and that's it.”

“No, I'm not! I'd rather die than do that!”

These two sentences unleashed a myriad of emotions from Zarbon, as he finally rose to a tipping point. He began to yell again, this time louder and with more force. “Do you understand what I've given to you? Your whole life? A house? Money? Every single thing you've wanted? And you won't fucking keep going with me now?” Zarbon took control of the woman as his face rounded out, the skin which held his face together stretching as far as it could go. His muscles grew dramatically in size, completely disproportionate to his body. His once beautiful face disintegrated into a repulsive amphibious grimace.

“You'd rather die than come with me? Is that it?”

With a single swift movement, he bludgeoned her against the wall, cracking her head open against the surface. The blood leaked down from her skull, forming into a puddle at the intersection between the cement wall and the ground. Zarbon, though, was not satisfied – he took the woman and threw her away, hurling her toward the open road to the right.

It took a moment, but Zarbon came back to his senses. He felt his face shape back up, his muscles contract, and his breathing slow down. He looked around at what happened, coming to the eventual realization that he had been the cause of it. He shed not a single tear, though, as he fled from the scene.

Zarbon came to a stop several miles away, a run which took him mere moments. He sat down, knowing what he had done. It was not his first transformation – he had hoped the one before would be the last, but now, it had come back, at such an inopportune time. The monster within, surging back up for another feast.

Zarbon wondered where to go to from there. He knew one thing, though – it wasn't to anywhere on the planet.

Endnotes

 * 1) I spent a lot of time revising the writing of this story. The first sentence, especially, I spent a lot of time on. I think that this story has some of my strongest writing overall, with pretty illustrative and colorful diction.
 * 2) Zarbon's design is pretty feminine, so I decided to give his girlfriend a fairly masculine appearance. That's why she has short, upright hair.
 * 3) The relationship between Zarbon and his girlfriend is shown to be one that has very little love or affection between it, meaning that it is likely a relationship borne out of wealth or status rather than personal feelings.
 * 4) By this point in 'That Magic Feeling', I had decided that the stories would be snapshots of character's lives rather than full pictures. A lot of information, therefore, was kept intentionally vague and ambiguous. A prime example of this is when Zarbon's girlfriend states that he is the 'captain' on the planet - it's impossible to contextualize what this means other than that it's a high-ranking position. That's because Zarbon's position on the planet is not the point of the story at all - I didn't want to draw focus away from the main point of the story, which is his relationship with his girlfriend. That being said, I definitely would have spent more time divulging on Zarbon's history if it were a standard one-shot, but That Magic Feeling was never intended as a collection of standard one-shots.
 * 5) The Planet Yardrat was included on a whim. This would imply that Frieza had conquered Yardrat or at least had strong relations with them, but this is mostly irrelevant to the story. It was just thrown in to expand the story's mythos a little.
 * 6) One interesting note is that Zarbon's girlfriend asks about his paycheck before his occupation. This would further imply that they were only together for the purpose of money and not for emotional reasons.
 * 7) Writing the dialogue for this story was very difficult. Zarbon is not a character I often think about, so I looked up some of his old clips and listened to his dialogue while writing it in. He's a difficult character to write, and I think that I definitely made him too masculine/gruff in my portrayal of him. He reads more like Vegeta than Zarbon.
 * 8) One thing that KidVegeta mentioned in his review of One was that the rest of the bar didn't react enough to what was going on between the rapist and the girl being raped. I tried to remedy that somewhat with his story, by having the rest of the restaurant stop talking when Zarbon shouted at his girl.
 * 9) That Zarbon doesn't pay implies that he is likely some type of high-ranking person in the planet that he lives in. It's like how police officers aren't really required to pay for their food at diners in really small towns because of their status.
 * 10) One interesting note about Zarbon's girlfriend is that she is portrayed as a very vain, money-obsessed character until Zarbon mentions that he's going to sell the planet. Even though she is greedy, she is still not willing to sell out everyone she knows for her own personal benefit, something that Zarbon is totally up for.
 * 11) "I know better than to disobey Frieza" is a line taken directly from the anime.
 * 12) Zarbon's murder of his girlfriend was never meant to be seen as premeditated or even intended. This story is said to take place long before Dragon Ball, and it's at least vaguely implied that Zarbon's transformation wasn't intentional. Really, one can infer that he transformed unintentionally and that this was before he mastered the transformation and that it was before he was able to control it. However, I could have done a much better job explaining this.
 * 13) I like the description of Zarbon killing his girlfriend. It was well written and I could imagine all of it in my head.
 * 14) This story has a lot of parallels with One. Namely, both stories feature an unexpected show of strength by the protagonist that kills someone else. The reader is meant to take from this that Zarbon sees himself as some sort of threat to the rest of the people around or at least as an outside to the rest of his group. Consequently, he leaves the area, because he sees himself as isolated and unable to interact with the rest of them as a member of the same race.
 * 15) I couldn't think of a way to include the word 'two' in the final paragraph, so I used it's homophone, 'to'. To make up for that, I used the word not just once, but three times.

I like Two a lot as a story. The writing style is ornate and the descriptions are, well, descriptive. Probably the biggest issue is the dialogue, which isn't bad in and of itself, but just seems out of character for Zarbon. Ultimately, this story was a foray into a realm of the Dragon Ball Universe that I rarely go into, as it is one of my few stories to feature an alien race expansively. As such, the world/society that Zarbon lives in is pretty underdeveloped, and I feel like the story is ultimately lacking in context and detail. In hindsight, I probably would have placed this story later in the collection to give me more time to develop and expand the story's context. However, I really enjoy the exploration of Zarbon's relationship with his girlfriend, which is an interesting look at just how jealous his character can be and how he interacts with others of his own. Overally, Two is far from a perfect story, but I enjoy some aspects of it while strongly disliking a few others. I would give it a B-.