Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Gypsy ❯ Past And Present ( Chapter 2 )

[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
Hey guys! Well, I expected a little more reviews... I hope to get some more this chapter, but if not, oh well. I mean, I simply can't get better if I dont know what to fix. Please enjoy this chapter, and hehe, just trust me in it. I messed with the original happenings in the anime, but oh well. Just trust me. I am the twisted god of my fanfics! XD

--Kuree


----
She crouched behind a remaining chunk of an Acanthian base, listening to the moaning around her. Some were shrill and painful, and others were a soft, pitiful whimpering, the sobs of a child or dying elder. Her troops lay on the field before her, butchered, but twistedly alive...

She listened, trying to block out any emotion. There was nothing she could do for them. They were victims of the Raiders. Most knew them as the very demons that crawled out of hell. Hadein Raiders. (hay-dee-in)

The raiders themselves were souless beings, remnants of a race that had died thousands of years ago. Their flesh hung from their mutated bodies, putrid and rotting, yet they still were alive, still growing. They feasted on the flesh and souls of whatever race they happened to come across. Flesh mutated their bodies into a stronger being, and souls kept them alive.

Once, she had seen the look of pure perverted pleasure on the face of a Raider as it sucked the newborn soul out of an infant Acanthian...a thousand bitter images played over and over in her mind, all of what destruction the demons had brought.

They marked their victims, if they chose to inhabit them, with a cross-mark between their eyebrows. They lived in the body of the victim as long as they pleased, and as a whole, the Raiders didnt have one single identifying feature except for the tatoo. Their race was an eclectic mix of thousands of different races, all bodies. The way they killed their victims was brutal, living inside their bodies for millenias, slowly slowly consuming tissue. It was known that a person of a race that only had a lifespan of perhaps a hundred years lived up to a thousand when inhabited by a Raider. Slowly dying...but never totally dead. If one was taken, there was no hope of survival.

This was where Pan was trapped, in the long War of Acanthia. A War that the whole universe knew about, and feared. No one would come within lightyears of this planet's sector for fear of the Raiders. Her ship was in a coma liked state. It did it's best to defend against the soul-sucking powers of the Raiders. They clung to the Gypsy day and night like moths to a light, stealing bits of its ancient soul. She had come here to speak with a trader 2 years ago, not knowing of the plague that brewed on the planet's surface. Now she was stuck here.

They felt her day and night, lapped at her Ki. She was always like a lighthouse and they tracked her incessantly, because of the bond she shared with her soul ship, The Gypsy.

"Amara ke sene!....Jo'ma...senere!" The strangled cry rose to Pan above the moaning. She sat up straight. It was a prayer for death, a prayer begging for death.

She crawled in the direction of the voice, avoiding pools of blood and severed limbs, not looking at the strings of intenstines and bashed heads. The cry was coming from an Acanthian female. She had no mark...she was alive. She wasn't one of them.

Pan gathered her up in her arms and placed her palm on her forehead. She was bleeding from her stomach...her womb...Pan grimaced, and pushed the bile back. Some Raider had ripped the child from her stomach and left her for dead. The raiders had a taste for infant flesh and the pure souls of babies.

The woman mumbled...called her an angel of 'Senenra'...she thought Pan was an angel from Hell, coming to take her. "Shhh..." Pan whispered softly to the woman who was delusional and in shock. Pan slowly sent ki through her body, resealing her flesh, rebuilding tissue. The woman's eyes folded shut, listening to the silent lullaby Pan sent her in her mind. Pan rarely used her mind to speak anymore...it made her vulnerable here. She lifted the woman easily and carried her back to her temporary hiding spot and listened to the sounds of death.


What was worse than then the last cries of the fated Acanthians, was the silence. There was no sound after a raid, only the crackling of smothering ashes. The smoke made no sound as it drifted upward, and the cold, dead eyes of the people didn't need to. The silence nearly made her ears bleed.

She looked out onto the field of bodies and her hope died.

She was going to die out here.

------------------

Pan awoke with a start, trembling. She felt her ship murmur around her, as if sharing the pain of rememberance. The gypsy felt remorseful to her...almost guilty. Pan frowned. She never dreamed, and if she did, it had a very important purpose. Her ship sent her dreams to communicate with her at times.

She couldnt help but frown deeper with a spark of anger towards her ship. It knew she hated to think about the past. It knew she hated to think about the day she had saved that woman...the day she had saved Anathea. She hissed with annoyance at her ship and slung herself out of the chair. She was about to go take a shower to calm down, but she happened to glance at the ship window...

there were no stars.

Not one.

Just a red sky.

Pan's eyes widened and she dropped her hands to her side. How in the hell---how had she landed?? *Where* had she landed?? Then, in a moment she realized what had happened. Auto-pilot.

"You stupid ship! You cow! What have you done now??" She shrieked to The Gypsy, waving her arms around. The Gypsy answered with a puff of hautiness that seemed to say "Figure it out, smartass." It pulled up a picture on the viewscreen:

The image was of a chunk of a planet...maybe one-eighth of what it had originally been. However, the chunk was about the size of a small planet. This had been an extremely massive planet when it was whole.

Stats flashed up beside the image, the air was stable, and the planet was still in its original orbit. Apparently it was able to retain oxygen and an orbit due to its immensity. The computer picked up a large amont of metal in a certain area, and it indicated that there was probably some sort of structure on its surface. She reasoned it was probably a ruin now.

Pan squinted at this information for a few seconds, sleep making her drowsy. Then, she slowly peiced it together.
She was on what survived of Vegetasei.

"Holy shit, Gypsy..." She stumbled, then composed herself a little. She ran to the control desk and read some theories that the Gypsy had pulled up about how this peice of Vegetasei had survived, shouted a few commands to Gypsy, and then opened the hatch. The air was, after all, breathable.

With a puff of air the doors slowly opened, and warm air rushed in. Pan sucked in her breath at the sudden temperature change. It was thick air, almost tropical. She covered her mouth in shock and looked around.

The land was covered in vegetation, and she appeared to have landed in the middle of a town square...a city. She was reminded of the Taj Mahal in India. The buildings were beautiful, built in white stone. In her mind, the Gypsy told her she was in the middle of the chunk of Vegetasei, and that the air only rose so far from the surface. The Gypsy went on to tell her that the old Palace was probably the structure it had detected earlier.

Pan stepped off her ship lightly, and inhaled the air. It was spicy with the smell trees and flowers that grew. She knew that at the edges of this planet the buildings were charred and destroyed, but where she was now was like a moment frozen in time. Altough plants and vines had grown up around the buildings, she saw that many of them were damn well preserved due to the techonology they were built with. Keypads had the houses locked airtight, and as she went up to what looked like a house and peered though a window, she saw armor and bowls and plates and a couch...still intact. As if the owner had merely left for a stroll...

Shop signs still displayed their wares, and she could read a few of them. Mostly armor places, bars, places to buy slaves, clothing, food...it was wild. It was eerie, Pan thought, to be walking in such a dead but somehow alive city. She walked down the streets of the royal city with an open mouth. No one had came and tried to claim this as their own...it was like a ghost town.

She walked until she came to one of the largest buildings she had ever seen in her entire life. It was beautiful, even as it crumbled, time touching it slowly. She kneeled at the steps and almost wept. It felt like she was walking among the Gods, almost like this was a temple. Statues of Saiyajin surrounded it, arms poised, eternally protecting the Palace. Their stone eyes stared at her with the dignity of the people that had used to live here.

Gently, she headed up the steps, in awe of what was around her.

The halls of the Palace were open to the outside...she could see tapestries, crumbling from their hooks, but their old colors were still there, just faded. She went inside and gasped. More statues lined a massive throne room...and she realized that these were the likenesses of the kings of Vegetasei. She kneeled near one and read the name that was almost gone from the stone. 'King Vegeta, the 18th in the royal family of Vegeta, 756 to 872' She read and puzzled over it. She went back 18 statues and and saw that this King was the last of his house. HIs family had been the royal family of Vegirrn.

"Oh my god..." She whispered, looking back over the lines of statues and the way she had come in. They wrapped around the whole palace...thosands of them. This was the history of Vegetasei, told in stone, over centuries and centuries and centuries.

She ran up until the last statue and saw that his was Kind Vegeta the 23rd...She shrank back from the statue. It looked so much like Vegeta. "It's his father..." She thought to herself. All the carvings were of the Kings in their prime...She looked at the date beneath it. It had a starting date, but then only a dash, and no ending date to his reign. "God...!" She whispered again. He had been killed by Frieza, and none of his people had been left to finish his statue.

She sank to the marble floor and put her fist to her heart in tribute to the fallen Saiyajin.

"Creeaaaaaaaak." The noise instantly brought Pan back to the present. She spun on her heels in the direction of the noise, and fell into a fighting stance. She saw a fleeting shadow out of the corner of her eye. Pan realized was not as alone as she thought in the deaded palace of Vegetasei.

"Show yourself!" She hissed in Saiyago, the words flowing out of her mouth easily. Her anger was ignited. "Show yourself, you flea who dares to walk upon the holy resting place of my people!" She growled deep in her throat, intensely angered that the trash of the universe had invaded her ancestor's homeland, the most sacred part of it.

A deep, booming chuckle bounced of the high walls and columns of the throne room. It was an almost evil laugh, one that chilled her to the core, one that was so haunting she could have sworn she had heard it before.

"Show yourself!" She screamed, even moreso angered. She bared her teeth, and the hair on her tail stood on end. The defined muscles in her arms, back and stomach shown, tensed for whatever lurked in the shadows.

A body, moved slowly out of the dark, acompanied by a purring male voice.

"He'sen manna gaurrd, Saiayjin che." It said, and Pan froze. "Ouji sa, pre ten kanen."
'You know not of what you speak, impostor.' she translated from his smooth, dripping Saiyajin voice.

'To your king....
show respect.'

Pan choked. She knew that voice. The man stepped out of the shadows and Pan's steps wavered. She sank to the floor.

"Vegeta?"