Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Origin ❯ Origin ( One-Shot )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Author's note:
This is my idea of the origin of the Saiya-jin people. I know we don't have much evidence one way or the other, but I still think it's very odd that two completely different sentient species could develop on one planet. So... What if they Saiya-jin hadn't exactly developed? How DID they begin? Here's my answer. (Note: The Vegeta in this story is not any Vegeta that WE know. He's just the first of the dynasty.)

"This one looks ready." A soft, cultured voice echoed slightly in the large laboratory. "What is your opinion?"

"I am not so certain, Terles." The other scientist came over and frowned at the tank. "Is there really nothing we can do about the tail?"

"As I've said before," Terles responded with a bit of impatience, "I see no reason why we should. It is harmless, and it makes an excellent form of identification."

Tarpa frowned. "If you're certain," he said. "But I don't like it. Obviously the genetic integration was not as complete as we thought. There could be dangerous side effects."

"Like what?" Terles scoffed. "There is nothing dangerous about a tail. In the meantime, we are endangering our project if we leave him in the tank for too long."

"As you say." Tarpa tapped a few buttons on the computer pad, beginning the sequence that would decant the infant. "We should be able to handle any side effects, anyway."

Infant #001, named Ruuta, matured quickly. He, like the others from his batch, had been designed to mature quickly for two reasons. The first was so that the scientists could see results as soon as possible, and the second was that they felt it wouldn't be convenient if the new race had a prolonged a period of helplessness as infants. However, Ruuta proved to be a disappointment. He was as powerful as they'd hoped, but he just didn't have the mental capacity that they felt they'd designed him for. He wasn't actually stupid, but he would never make a good guard. He was too simple, he didn't have enough cunning. Terles and Tarpa felt that they could make the best of it, and simply use him as a laborer, except for his dependance on food. It was only natural that he need more food than usual to grow his body and fuel his strength, but as the years passed it became obvious that there was more to it than that. When he became hungry, he completely lost his strength and his concentration, and he became hungry so often as to make him almost useless.

Unfortunately for the scientists, all three infants from their initial batch had the same problem. Tarpa determined to work with them to find some way to make them useful, and Terles went back to the drawing board.

Ruuta and the others were three years old when the next batch was born. They seemed extremely wary of the new arrivals. Terles called it basic sibling rivalry and ignored it as he began the tests on the new ones. Tarpa, however, noticed uneasily the predatory gleam in their eyes whenever they saw one of the infants.

"Terles," he said one day, as he watched the children cluster around the window of the nursery. "I think we've given them too much aggression. Look at how they watch the infants. You'd think they were planning an attack."

"Nonsense," Terles breezed easily, waving off Tarpa's concerns as he studied the latest test results. "They're just evaluating the infants as threats. Since they've had no chance to interact, they have no data to help them make their decision. As soon as the infants are ready to join them, we'll integrate their classes and the problem will go away."

Batch number two was proving to be much more satisfactory when, three years later, the classes were integrated. None of the batch had the dependance on food that characterized the first batch. Broc, the first to be born of that batch (ID #004), was displaying a satisfactory intelligence, and though the others were somewhat younger, they weren't far behind him. Tarpa and Terles congratulated themselves, had the classes integrated, and prepared to fine tune the next, and hopefully final, trial batch.

Integration, however, was a disaster.

At least, it was to Terles and Tarpa. The children thought it was complete success.

That night, after the classes and Terles' tests were finished with and the children were supposed to be in bed, a series of screams and crashes brought the scientists and caretakers running to the children's room. The scene they found horrified them beyond description. One of the caretakers simply passed out.

The room had been destroyed. The walls were covered in blood. Two of the first batch of children, Tomo and Poto, lay lifeless and ignored amidst the wreckage. Ruuta, battered and bleeding, was clutching the tail of one of the second batch, Skosh, as the other two second batch children, Broc and Zuchi, looked on cooly. Skosh, who should have been able to throw Ruuta off easily, was on the floor screeching horribly.

Tarpa sagged against the door frame, clutching at his heart. "In the name of-- EVERYTHING," he gasped, "What has happened here?"

Broc turned his cold gaze to Tarpa. "They," he said, indicating the dead children with a scornful tilt of his head, "were weak."

Next to him, Zuchi smiled chillingly. "But this one," she said, nodding at Ruuta with a kind of condescending respect, "isn't as bad. He used a new move." Ruuta, rather than being angry or insulted by her tone, was pleased, and smiled proudly.

"Dear goddess," Terles whispered. "What have we done?"

The months following the integration were nerve wracking for Tarpa and Terles. They were terrified that there would be a repeat incident, but the children had established their pecking order and saw no reason to change it. They were even eerily well behaved, though their play did get a little rough. Fortunately, since they had been designed to be powerful, their rooms and equipment had been designed to withstand them. While the children were "peacefully" taking their lessons, Tarpa and Terles tried frantically to figure out just what had gone wrong and fix it.

Unfortunately, batch number three was already in the tanks and there was no way to affect their genetic structure. They had tried, but the babies were too developed, any new cells were simply out bred and absorbed by the already existing ones. The only change that they managed to make stick was the reduction of the sensitivity of the tails, and that only worked because the tails had just begun to develop. In the end, all they could do was decant the new batch and hope for the best. They had, after all, engineered these "Saiya-jin" (as they were calling them), to be intelligent as well as powerful. That meant that it was only a matter of giving them the proper education. They could be taught to channel their aggressiveness more productively.

Initially, the new batch was a success. The tails were indeed much less sensitive, and thus were no longer a dangerous weakness. The new infants did not grow to the same size as their predecessors, but they proved to be much more powerful, and initial tests indicated that they'd be even more intelligent. This time, however, they waited five years before integrating the classes, hoping that time and their teaching had mellowed the older children and that there wouldn't be another incident.

However, they hadn't learned an important lesson from the first incident. It wasn't the older children they should have been worrying about.

Cela, Aspa and Vegeta glared coldly at the bigger kids and the bigger kids glared back. Ruuta was now eleven, but he deferred to Zuchi and Broc, who were eight. Since his humiliating defeat by Ruuta, Skosh was the outcast of the group, belonging to neither side.

"So, how strong are you?" Aspa sneered at them. To anyone else, the scene would have looked completely ridiculous-- a five year old taunting four much older and bigger children. To the children, however, the whole thing was in dead earnest. Preferably with emphasis on the "dead" part.

"Strong enough for you, runt," Skosh sneered back. Broc glared at him for speaking out of turn, but Skosh hoped to prove his worth by defeating the challengers, so he chose to ignore him. "What, are you travel-sized for convenience? I could take on all of you!"

"Really?" Cela asked, raising an eyebrow. "Prove it."

"Bring it on!" Skosh roared and charged.

What happened next happened fast. So quickly as to make it seem ridiculously easy, Aspa knocked Skosh to Cela, who knocked him to Vegeta, who backhanded him into the wall. Skosh impacted the wall with a heavy, hollow sound, and slid lifelessly down to the floor.

Vegeta turned to look at his handiwork. "Well, that was stupid," he said, and turned back to the big kids.

The atmosphere was now even tenser than before. Theoretically they were now even, three on three, but the casual ease which with Aspa, Cela and Vegeta had dispatched Skosh, was impressive. Broc, however, kept up a good front. "Is that the best you can do?" he asked lazily. "Three of you against one of him? You're a waste of resources. We can take care of you and still get a good night's sleep."

"Well then, be sure you say your prayers," Aspa grinned cockily. "We wouldn't want you to have bad dreams-- in hell!" Simultaneously the two groups rushed each other and the standoff turned into an outright brawl. The younger children were stronger and faster, but the older children were more experienced and larger. Once again the room was trashed and covered in blood by the time the adults arrived.

"Skosh and Aspa," Tarpa said numbly as they surveyed the wreckage.

"Skosh was stupid. Aspa was weak," Vegeta pronounced. "They don't matter. I'm tired now. I'm going to bed." He smiled mockingly at the scientists. Then, to the adult's astonishment, the children simply and calmly bedded down, using the torn bedding to make nests wherever they could.

Terles and Tarpa were extremely edgy after the last incident. They stopped work on new batches and tried desperately to fix the ones they had. However, it was very hard to influence the children. They had no respect for anyone who could not match them. Classes were just short of riots, and the scientists were amazed that the children hadn't killed anyone else yet. They attributed that fact to the control Vegeta had of the group. He at least seemed inclined to learn. Cela did too, but she didn't exert the influence that Vegeta did. It was Vegeta who kept order and who prevented them from simply killing each other in one gloriously hideous last battle. Not that he cared what violence they did, he just kept it short of killing. It was Terles' idea to influence the children through Vegeta.

"It works like this," he said to Tarpa. "If we keep him happy, he keeps the others in line. Haven't you noticed that when he's bored with the material he lets them wreck havoc but when he is interested he won't let them be a disruption? We can use him."

"I don't know. They're too dangerous. We didn't plan for this Terles. Maybe we should..."

"Maybe we should what? Cancel the project? Then what? We have five insanely powerful and violent children on our hands, children that we engineered from a zoo's worth of species! Do you think we can just have them quietly adopted?"

"Well, no, but we could..."

"Dispose of them?" Terles cut in brutally. "Need I remind you that we are a peaceful people? We don't kill! That's why we engineered these Saiya-jin! We need guards against the other brutal races in the galaxy who would be only too happy to attack us for our technology. Don't you watch the news? Tsufuru-jin tech is one of the biggest items on the market, legal and otherwise."

"We wanted guards, yes!" Tarpa shouted back. "We didn't want homocidal maniacs!"

"But we need some of those aggresive traits to make them effective! They're young, that's all. With training, Tarpa, with training, we can control them. We just use Vegeta to help us train them. It'll be all right, you'll see."

"I don't know."

"Training. You'll see."

Broc pushed himself back in his chair, propped his feet on the desk, and stared idly out the window. It was free study time, when they were supposed to be doing their homework. He might do it later, but he didn't feel like it just then. "Twenty years," he muttered.

"What's that?" Ruuta asked, coming over to lounge around with him.

"We've been here for twenty years."

Ruuta smirked "YOU have," he said. "I've been here for twenty three years."

"Amazing, isn't it? You'd think we would have blasted our way out of here by now. Look at it," he pointed out the window. "There's a whole world out there, just waiting for us to conqure it, but we sit here molding."

"You wouldn't be molding if you payed attention in class." Vegeta wandered over and casually kicked Broc's chair out from under him.

"Why the hell should I?" Broc snarled at him as he lunged for his throat.

Vegeta caught Broc's arms and flipped him across the room. "Because you moron, they are educating us for free. We can learn anything we want, all we need to do is ask."

"Who cares!" Broc stood up and threw a chair at Vegeta. "We should destroy this place and go out on our own. Then we can make our own rules!"

"Yeah!" Ruuta cheered. "That would be GREAT!"

Vegeta batted the chair away and stood there with the classic "I'm surrounded by morons" look on his face. "Shut up," he snapped. "Obviously you need someone to think for you! Do you think that food just magically appears whenever you're hungry?"

Ruuta frowned worriedly. "You mean it doesn't?"

"No it doesn't, you over sized idiot. Someone has to produce it. We get food here for free!"

"But we could just take it from them whenever we wanted!" Broc cut in, nursing a twisted arm and glaring sourly at Vegeta. "They're weak!"

"Then what? When we've destroyed them all, who will make the food? You sure don't strike me as farmers," Vegeta snorted, crossing his arms. "Besides, they're weak, not defenseless. They've got technology. We need to learn more before we take them on."

Broc eyed Vegeta suspiciously. "'Take them on'?" he asked probingly. He'd never trusted the younger Saiya-jin but he was outclassed in just about every respect and had no real choice but to follow him. He'd been very leery of Vegeta's determination to study and his seeming trust of the scientists.

Vegeta only smiled.

Two more years passed. Terles and Tarpa had been holding meetings regularly for the last fourteen years, discussing in detail the progress of their students. Terles was pleased, he felt that they were shaping up nicely and that with only a few more years of training they would be ready for active guard status. Tarpa was more cautious. He admitted that they did seem to be growing up well, but he couldn't shake the suspicion that they were only biding their time. Tarpa and Terles were in another meeting, going over the same things for the trillionth time, when suddenly the alarms began blaring. They ran from the offices to the lab and found the complex in ruins. "What happened?" Terles demanded, grabbing the nearest lab assistant.

"The Saiya-jin... they've escaped," the assistant gasped.

Stricken, Terles moaned, hiding his face in his hands.

"I warned you," Tarpa said.

Terles wailed. "What do we do now? The experiment is a failure."

"The only thing we HAVE to do they've done for us," Tarpa said calmly. "They've destroyed the lab and the evidence. We write it off as a tragic failure and try to pretend it never happened."

"But we can't leave those monsters loose!"

"We'll be all right. There are only five of them, and our technology is enough to deal with them."

"Need I remind you that two of them are females, of breeding age?!"

Tarpa shrugged. "Unlike you," he said pointedly, "I didn't trust that training would keep them under control. I made plans. They'll only have a female birth rate of one in four. They'll breed themselves out in a few generations, if they don't kill each other fighting over mating privileges first."

The Saiya-jin regrouped out in the wilderness, as far away from the Tsufuru-jin cities as they could get. "Well, what now?" Zuchi asked as she leaned against a boulder.

"Battle!" Broc roared gleefully. "We are free at last! We will slaughter the weaklings and this world and their technology will be ours!"

"YEAH!" Zuchi and Ruuta cheered, their eyes bright with bloodlust.

"Sit down before you hurt yourselves," Vegeta snapped.

"Why should we listen to you?" Broc challenged. "You little pipsqueak, you're the youngest here and just about the smallest! Give me one good reason not to kill you right now." He grinned, cracking his knuckles ostentatiously.

Vegeta snorted and disappeared. He reappeared behind Broc and delivered a crushing blow to the kidneys that sent the larger Saiya-jin sprawling into the dirt. "Because I can kill you first, moron. I thought we'd been through this." He glared at the others but they were content to leave matters as they were, at least for now. "That's better," he growled. "Our first order of business is survival. In case you haven't noticed, there are five of us and millions of Tsufuru-jin, plus their technology. We could do a lot of damage, but eventually we'd be outnumbered and outgunned. So we find somewhere to live, somewhere that can support us, and begin building our numbers and our strength. We raid occasionaly, but only enough to be a nuisance."

"Excuse me," Cela said, stepping forward with a scowling Zuchi behind her. "What's this about 'building our numbers'? If you think we'll sit home quietly and be your birthing tanks, you're deluding yourself."

"Welcome to the group," Vegeta drawled sarcastically. "So glad to hear you join in for once."

She ignored him. "We won't be birthing tanks," she repeated.

"And how are you going to stop us?" he sneered.

"We'll kill you," she responded. "Or, failing that, kill ourselves. We won't be held back from the fighting." Both women glared at the men angrily. "We're Saiya-jin too, in case you haven't noticed."

"Whatever," Vegeta grumbled.

"And another thing," Zuchi said. "There are more men than women in this group. How are we going to decide who gets who?" Cela stepped in before Vegeta could respond.

"We don't. Pairing would be genetic suicide. We'd breed ourselves out. So, what we do is every woman chooses a man to father her child. If it's a boy, then when he is old enough his father takes him to train and she chooses another mate. If it's a girl, then she stays with her mother and again the woman chooses another mate when the time is right."

"Have you been planning this, woman?" Vegeta growled. He was extremely irritated that his thunder had been stolen.

"Of course," Cela grinned. "Someone has to think for you louts." This earned her a universal glare from the men.

"ANYway, if we could get back on track," Vegeta said. "Does everyone understand? We gain strength and numbers, then we take this world and their tech for our own!"

"YEAH!" everyone else cheered. "Long live the Saiya-jin!"