Saiyan Arlic

A R L I C
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Saiyan Exile ◆ Zenkai ◆ Saiyan Tail ◆ Age 19 ◆ Good​

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▌ APPEARANCE

Arlic is built lean the way a knife is lean, not unfinished, but stripped of everything unnecessary. He stands shorter than a Commoner soldier expects, with narrow shoulders, light limbs, and the compact, spring-loaded frame of someone who wins by going where your eyes aren't rather than meeting you where they are. There's no armor-filling mass to him. What's there is wire and reflex. When he moves, he moves completely.

His skin is a medium tone, unremarkable at a glance, with a few old nicks across his knuckles and the back of his left forearm. Light enough to miss unless the light catches them. Deep enough to suggest they weren't from sparring.

His hair is jet black, wild, and architecturally impractical. It shoots upward from his forehead in a dense cluster of spikes going in several directions that don't fully agree on which one, taller than they are wide, chaotic at the tips in a way that suggests the hair has opinions and acts on them.

His face is young and open. The bones are sharp and angular beneath the surface, but the expression overtop of them is loose and quick. He grins wide, shows teeth, and the grin lives in his eyes as much as his mouth. Those eyes are black the way Saiyan eyes are black: no visible iris, no separation between pupil and color, just depth. White sclera around the edge. The intensity reads clearly anyway.

His tail is gone. Where it attached at the base of his spine there is scar tissue, the kind that doesn't come from a clean cut. He doesn't talk about it. He doesn't reach for where it used to be anymore, which took longer than he expected.

His Ki is pale gold, warm in low light rather than bright. Most Saiyans run blue. His doesn't.

He wears Saiyan battle armor in an orange-gold scheme: large, sharp-pointed shoulder pauldrons that flare outward past the line of his frame and make him look wider than he is, a black undersuit beneath a segmented gold chest and midsection plate, and white gloves with the cuffs loose. His boots are white and gold at the toe, clean enough to be deliberate. He wears the armor like it cost him something and he intends to get the use out of it.

His voice lands somewhere between easy and direct, the kind that doesn't work hard to fill a room but tends to end up filling it anyway. He uses fewer words than you expect going in and more silence than most people are comfortable with after. When he finally says the thing you were waiting for, it tends to land on something precise.

▌ BACKGROUND

At fifteen, Arlic was below average by Saiyan standards, assigned to low-priority work on minor worlds where nothing was supposed to go wrong. His unit's commanding officer was a Noble named Chard, a second son from a house that hadn't produced anyone remarkable in two generations. Low power level, moderate rank, the kind of posting that matched a man's ceiling. The two of them had more in common than either would have said out loud.

What Chard did with the authority of that assignment is where the comparison ends.

The assignment was a tribute arrangement with a Human-like population on a world with no meaningful defenses. When a village fell short, which Chard ensured happened regularly by moving the number, he had the adults who couldn't pay executed in the square. He took what he wanted from the local women. When a settlement elder stood in front of him and said, without much hope, that there was nothing left to take, Chard killed the man's children while the man watched. Not collateral, not the side effect of overwhelming force. Deliberately, to make a point about what happened when people talked back.

Most of the unit looked at something else. Arlic waited until the unit had dispersed for the night, found Chard alone, and killed him. It wasn't clean. It took longer than it should have and he took damage he shouldn't have, but Chard was dead and Arlic was still standing when the rest of the unit found him.

He fought them too, because there was nothing else to do. He lost quickly, in the way someone loses when they've already spent everything they had. They brought him back to Vegeta with his hands bound.

Chard's family reviewed the matter. They hadn't been close to their son and weren't grieving him. What they cared about was that a Commoner had killed a Noble, and that going unanswered meant something they weren't willing to accept. They didn't ask for his execution. Execution in combat carries a kind of dignity they didn't want to give him. They asked for exile instead, and for the removal of the tail first, done in the way that ensured it wouldn't grow back, wouldn't be repaired, wouldn't be restored by any medical facility in the galaxy. He was sixteen by the time the sentence was carried out. He stood through it the way you stand through something you've already decided you're going to survive. Then they put him in a pod and pointed it somewhere that wasn't Vegeta.

Four years. The universe outside Vegeta is larger than they tell Commoner children, and less impressed by Saiyan heritage when that heritage comes without a power level to back it up. He found work where he could, on planets that didn't know what the scar at his spine meant. He got into fights that weren't his business. Some he won. The losses were educational in the way that losing badly always is.

He's left marks in a few places. A settlement where an enforcer stopped shaking down workers, abruptly, after a short conversation that left both of them needing a few days to recover. A port town where he happened to be in the right place on the last day. Small things. Not a legacy. Just a pattern that's been building long enough that he's started to recognize it as intentional.

He's nineteen now. He doesn't think about what Chard's family took from him in terms he could articulate as loss. He thinks about the elder in that square, and the children, and the way most of the unit looked at something else. He's decided the universe has enough of that already.