Gehn
Member
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2022
- Messages
- 38
The screens above the commercial district were four stories tall.
They float between towers, upon on projected light arrays, and cycled through advertisements or news briefs or entertainment feeds that changed every few minutes. The content shifted through a dozen languages at once with text crawls running beneath in more. He didn’t know how he could hear the individual audio tracks as they all played over each other, but he could. The Interstellar Market ran on commerce and commerce ran on attention, and the broadcasters had learned exactly how to hold it.
When they could.
Beings of a dozen species moved through the street below without looking up. They had long since stopped noticing.
Gehn stared and could not stop.
He stood at the edge of the walkway with the crowd moving around him. His arms hung limp at his sides. The arm with the mounted cannon was behind him, the barrel angled down – an old habit for public spaces back on Vegeta. The integrated scouter behind his eye catalogued the foot traffic on both sides without being asked and he ignored it.
On the screens: Earth.
The footage was shaky and clearly pulled from survivor comm devices and security systems stitched together by whoever edited this particular broadcast. It kept cutting angles, struggling for coherence. It didn't matter. The subject was too large to lose.
The Oozaru filled half the screen in most images. Gehn had seen enough Saiyans transform both in his own life on Vegeta and in Napyarn's files. Those files had covered it in clinical detail: transformation biology, the process of Blutz Wave absorption, the structural changes in bone and tissue. Almost as though, and it twisted Gehn’s gut to think about, he learned it all for him. The Saiyan he picked out of the wreckage.
An unexpected bounty, Gehn recalled the lines written about him in Napyarn’s notes.
Reading about it, and even seeing it himself, was different from watching one move through a city. The thing on the screen was enormous, dark-furred, its red eyes catching the light in a way that cameras weren't built to process correctly. Buildings that Gehn knew were multi-story structures came up to its chest. The ground shook with each step and every footfall sent a ripple through the handheld frame.
He'd heard it.
The comm channel had crackled with it, the deep percussion of those steps traveling through the ground and into the buildings and into the air and through a scouter held against a Human woman's ear, and through a quantum-entanglement line to a scouter integrated directly into the skull of a Saiyan standing on a moon several star systems away.
"Tabelle. Listen to me—"
"I hear it." Her voice had been completely level, remembered vividly. The machine in his skull noted her tone as well.
"Then you understand why you need to get out of the city right now. Get to the spaceport, to the ship I had prepared for you. You know the escape routes, you've studied every starmap and all of—"
"I'm not leaving."
He hadn't argued. He'd known from the first day she pressed the button on that old scouter that she was the kind of person who didn't hear "there's a door" and then go think about whether to walk through it.
The footage cut to a different angle. The Oozaru turning. The scale of it took a moment to process from ground level — the camera had been held by someone crouched behind a vehicle, maybe sixty meters away, and the angle caught the thing in profile against the city skyline. Even Gehn's eye struggled with it, re-calibrating scale relative to the known dimensions of the buildings in frame.
Then she appeared on screen.
She came from above, which meant she'd been flying, which meant she was already depleted and still in the air. The footage was too low-resolution to see her clearly at that distance but Gehn's eye enhanced it anyway — his brain registered the chestnut braid, the olive jacket, the posture he'd come to know from six months of calls where she'd described her training and he'd found excuses to listen longer than strictly necessary. She was smaller than a thumbnail against the Oozaru's frame.
She was charging straight at it.
You'll have to get very comfortable with that, he'd told her, about the dangers. You'll become a target even if you target no one yourself.
She'd said yes without taking a breath.
The beam came from the creature's mouth. Dark red — so dark it looked almost identical to Gehn's own Ki but not the brighter red-pink of Failure's, but something deeper. It was wide. It was fast. It caught her before she closed half the distance, and the footage whitened out around the point of impact, the camera struggling with the light, and for two full seconds there was nothing on screen but brightness and the distant sound of the explosion’s shockwave rolling through the city like something geological.
The brightness faded. The camera found the Oozaru again.
The street where she had been was a trench, a crater in the city when the head of the blast hit.
Gehn stared at it, unbreathing. He made himself look at it long enough to be sure he understood what he was seeing and where she had been relative to the impact zone . His integrated scouter began to tell him what that meant mathematically, began to make inferences of his Power Level from what he knew about to Tabelle, began to draw on his own energy to extend its reach across the stares and scan for itself
No, don’t— terminate, abort operat– just fucking stop! His thoughts fought back and, with a delay, it obeyed.
The screen floating in the air suddenly cut.
An interview now, shot in what looked like a medical facility somewhere in Quartz City. A man with bandaged arms, older, sitting in a chair that he gripped too carefully.
The text crawl beneath him read EYEWITNESS: QUARTZ CITY EVACUATION.
Behind him, other figures moved through what had once been a school gymnasium and now held the particular organized chaos of emergency relief.
"She came through telling everyone to move," the man said. "Going door to door. On foot first and then flying, and I mean flying, just — up off the ground and through the windows when she needed to. She knew the district. She knew which routes were clear. She kept saying the same thing: go north, go north, the bridge is still open."
The reporter's voice asked if he knew who she was.
"No. I don't know her name. I wish I did."
The screen cycled. Another survivor, a woman this time, younger, with a child on her lap. "She came back for us," the woman said. "We'd gotten turned around and she came back. She didn't have to."
The reporter again: Did she tell you her name?
"She didn't say. She just said go."
Gehn stood in the street and the crowd moved around him and the screens cycled through more survivors, more fragments of the same story, each one ending with the same question that met the same answer.
None of them knew her name.
He looked back at the footage when it resumed, the clip they kept returning to — the small figure in the olive jacket leaving the frame in a streak, the beam, the whiteness. They played it three times in sequence while the correspondent narrated over it in a language Gehn didn't speak, and the text crawl translated it as UNIDENTIFIED HERO: WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN.
His jaw was tight. He noticed that it popped, and then realized how hard he was gritting his teeth.
He'd told her to train every hour she could and to study the charts and to be ready, and she'd worn out the navigation catalogs he'd sent and come back with questions he hadn't anticipated. That made him, for reasons he didn't examine carefully, genuinely glad. He'd told her she would become a target. He hadn't warned her that the target might not be her specifically.
He should have.
Whereabouts unknown meant they hadn't confirmed anything yet. It was the most accurate statement the broadcast could manage, but he knew what it meant. Gehn knew what he saw.
Some Saiyan warrior had finally come for Earth, some backwater world that the Saiyans of Vegeta never previously cared for. Tabelle had not been ready. By the looks of it, Gehn would have died. He saw in the clips that even in the madness and rage of Oozaru, the Saiyan fought exceptionally well.
That madness only seemed to make him that much more destructive, that much more dangerous. Not the hindrance it usually proved.
Light from screens above shined down on Gehn and all the others around him cycled again. An advertisement now, something loud and bright in Changeling script, while all others ignored the now-old news of the one-man Saiyan invasion of Earth. Gehn never looked away, didn't even blink his one still-organic eye. Then, the footage returned.
The small figure. The olive jacket. The braid.
The beam.
Whereabouts unknown.
Deep in his chest, rage welled up and burned. The kind where the fury tried to talk one’s rationality into letting it loose. What harm would it be, to punch a hole through a couple buildings? To rip the street in half? To tear electrical equipment, light posts, clean out of the ground like metal trees by their copper or fiber-optic roots?
He turned and walked back in the direction of the facility.
Blood dripped from where his nails dug into his palms from his clenched-shut fist.
Whereabouts unknown.
His scouter-eye warned him of someone approaching. His bleeding hand twitched, on the verge of ripping it out.
Whereabouts unknown.
They float between towers, upon on projected light arrays, and cycled through advertisements or news briefs or entertainment feeds that changed every few minutes. The content shifted through a dozen languages at once with text crawls running beneath in more. He didn’t know how he could hear the individual audio tracks as they all played over each other, but he could. The Interstellar Market ran on commerce and commerce ran on attention, and the broadcasters had learned exactly how to hold it.
When they could.
Beings of a dozen species moved through the street below without looking up. They had long since stopped noticing.
Gehn stared and could not stop.
He stood at the edge of the walkway with the crowd moving around him. His arms hung limp at his sides. The arm with the mounted cannon was behind him, the barrel angled down – an old habit for public spaces back on Vegeta. The integrated scouter behind his eye catalogued the foot traffic on both sides without being asked and he ignored it.
On the screens: Earth.
The footage was shaky and clearly pulled from survivor comm devices and security systems stitched together by whoever edited this particular broadcast. It kept cutting angles, struggling for coherence. It didn't matter. The subject was too large to lose.
The Oozaru filled half the screen in most images. Gehn had seen enough Saiyans transform both in his own life on Vegeta and in Napyarn's files. Those files had covered it in clinical detail: transformation biology, the process of Blutz Wave absorption, the structural changes in bone and tissue. Almost as though, and it twisted Gehn’s gut to think about, he learned it all for him. The Saiyan he picked out of the wreckage.
An unexpected bounty, Gehn recalled the lines written about him in Napyarn’s notes.
Reading about it, and even seeing it himself, was different from watching one move through a city. The thing on the screen was enormous, dark-furred, its red eyes catching the light in a way that cameras weren't built to process correctly. Buildings that Gehn knew were multi-story structures came up to its chest. The ground shook with each step and every footfall sent a ripple through the handheld frame.
He'd heard it.
The comm channel had crackled with it, the deep percussion of those steps traveling through the ground and into the buildings and into the air and through a scouter held against a Human woman's ear, and through a quantum-entanglement line to a scouter integrated directly into the skull of a Saiyan standing on a moon several star systems away.
"Tabelle. Listen to me—"
"I hear it." Her voice had been completely level, remembered vividly. The machine in his skull noted her tone as well.
"Then you understand why you need to get out of the city right now. Get to the spaceport, to the ship I had prepared for you. You know the escape routes, you've studied every starmap and all of—"
"I'm not leaving."
He hadn't argued. He'd known from the first day she pressed the button on that old scouter that she was the kind of person who didn't hear "there's a door" and then go think about whether to walk through it.
The footage cut to a different angle. The Oozaru turning. The scale of it took a moment to process from ground level — the camera had been held by someone crouched behind a vehicle, maybe sixty meters away, and the angle caught the thing in profile against the city skyline. Even Gehn's eye struggled with it, re-calibrating scale relative to the known dimensions of the buildings in frame.
Then she appeared on screen.
She came from above, which meant she'd been flying, which meant she was already depleted and still in the air. The footage was too low-resolution to see her clearly at that distance but Gehn's eye enhanced it anyway — his brain registered the chestnut braid, the olive jacket, the posture he'd come to know from six months of calls where she'd described her training and he'd found excuses to listen longer than strictly necessary. She was smaller than a thumbnail against the Oozaru's frame.
She was charging straight at it.
You'll have to get very comfortable with that, he'd told her, about the dangers. You'll become a target even if you target no one yourself.
She'd said yes without taking a breath.
The beam came from the creature's mouth. Dark red — so dark it looked almost identical to Gehn's own Ki but not the brighter red-pink of Failure's, but something deeper. It was wide. It was fast. It caught her before she closed half the distance, and the footage whitened out around the point of impact, the camera struggling with the light, and for two full seconds there was nothing on screen but brightness and the distant sound of the explosion’s shockwave rolling through the city like something geological.
The brightness faded. The camera found the Oozaru again.
The street where she had been was a trench, a crater in the city when the head of the blast hit.
Gehn stared at it, unbreathing. He made himself look at it long enough to be sure he understood what he was seeing and where she had been relative to the impact zone . His integrated scouter began to tell him what that meant mathematically, began to make inferences of his Power Level from what he knew about to Tabelle, began to draw on his own energy to extend its reach across the stares and scan for itself
No, don’t— terminate, abort operat– just fucking stop! His thoughts fought back and, with a delay, it obeyed.
The screen floating in the air suddenly cut.
An interview now, shot in what looked like a medical facility somewhere in Quartz City. A man with bandaged arms, older, sitting in a chair that he gripped too carefully.
The text crawl beneath him read EYEWITNESS: QUARTZ CITY EVACUATION.
Behind him, other figures moved through what had once been a school gymnasium and now held the particular organized chaos of emergency relief.
"She came through telling everyone to move," the man said. "Going door to door. On foot first and then flying, and I mean flying, just — up off the ground and through the windows when she needed to. She knew the district. She knew which routes were clear. She kept saying the same thing: go north, go north, the bridge is still open."
The reporter's voice asked if he knew who she was.
"No. I don't know her name. I wish I did."
The screen cycled. Another survivor, a woman this time, younger, with a child on her lap. "She came back for us," the woman said. "We'd gotten turned around and she came back. She didn't have to."
The reporter again: Did she tell you her name?
"She didn't say. She just said go."
Gehn stood in the street and the crowd moved around him and the screens cycled through more survivors, more fragments of the same story, each one ending with the same question that met the same answer.
None of them knew her name.
He looked back at the footage when it resumed, the clip they kept returning to — the small figure in the olive jacket leaving the frame in a streak, the beam, the whiteness. They played it three times in sequence while the correspondent narrated over it in a language Gehn didn't speak, and the text crawl translated it as UNIDENTIFIED HERO: WHEREABOUTS UNKNOWN.
His jaw was tight. He noticed that it popped, and then realized how hard he was gritting his teeth.
He'd told her to train every hour she could and to study the charts and to be ready, and she'd worn out the navigation catalogs he'd sent and come back with questions he hadn't anticipated. That made him, for reasons he didn't examine carefully, genuinely glad. He'd told her she would become a target. He hadn't warned her that the target might not be her specifically.
He should have.
Whereabouts unknown meant they hadn't confirmed anything yet. It was the most accurate statement the broadcast could manage, but he knew what it meant. Gehn knew what he saw.
Some Saiyan warrior had finally come for Earth, some backwater world that the Saiyans of Vegeta never previously cared for. Tabelle had not been ready. By the looks of it, Gehn would have died. He saw in the clips that even in the madness and rage of Oozaru, the Saiyan fought exceptionally well.
That madness only seemed to make him that much more destructive, that much more dangerous. Not the hindrance it usually proved.
Light from screens above shined down on Gehn and all the others around him cycled again. An advertisement now, something loud and bright in Changeling script, while all others ignored the now-old news of the one-man Saiyan invasion of Earth. Gehn never looked away, didn't even blink his one still-organic eye. Then, the footage returned.
The small figure. The olive jacket. The braid.
The beam.
Whereabouts unknown.
Deep in his chest, rage welled up and burned. The kind where the fury tried to talk one’s rationality into letting it loose. What harm would it be, to punch a hole through a couple buildings? To rip the street in half? To tear electrical equipment, light posts, clean out of the ground like metal trees by their copper or fiber-optic roots?
He turned and walked back in the direction of the facility.
Blood dripped from where his nails dug into his palms from his clenched-shut fist.
Whereabouts unknown.
His scouter-eye warned him of someone approaching. His bleeding hand twitched, on the verge of ripping it out.
Whereabouts unknown.
