Disclosure

[Beechlgz]

A Dragonball Z fanfic.




(attempt number 2 at posting... tried last night and failed due to database error)

Wow. It's been a long time since I made a DBZ fanfic (what, 10 or 11 years?) and long since I watched/read any original DBZ too. Inspiration seems to have a mind of its own. I tried posting it on fanfiction.net but after 4 chapters I still haven't got any reviews. I do know from the story stats that at least a few people are reading through to chapter 4, but nobody's commenting yet to say if they think it's good or bad, which is strange, because there's hardly any stories with 4 chapters and no reviews. I don't know if any of you guys here will remember much of DBZ or maybe even still watch it seeing as it's kind of old, but if you do don't expect any of the familiar cast any time soon. This is a fanfic that is going to have mostly original characters and the plot is very 'aletrantive universe', not really canon with the series. It's more like an original story that takes elements from the DBZ world. So, if you're cool with that, here's the prologue, hope you like.
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Disclosure


Prologue – We are not alone


Many have often wondered if there is life beyond this world. Some believe that Earth is the only safe haven for life in this universe, whereas others speculate that the universe is so vast and diverse that it would be sheer ignorance to say it isn't teeming with life. Some even affirm that we are being watched or even visited by intelligent beings right now as we speak.


What if I were to tell you that we really are not alone here on Earth; that we have been in the company of foreign beings for much longer than we think? That some have known about us and interacted with us intermittently for thousands upon thousands of years? That some of them even live amongst us, surviving off the same resources that we do, walking the same streets that we walk? You wouldn't think so to look around, and the chances of you encountering such a being are slim to none.


That's because you probably don't live in Hoodra. Let me tell you something about Hoodra... about one hundred years ago it was a very typical island continent that ranges between lush tropical in the North and warm temperate in the Southern Pacific Ocean. Its inhabitants were thought to have largely descended from the same very distant ancestors as the Polynesian people a bit further West, though this is still disputed. However their culture and gene pool was heavily diluted, not by the British, the French, the Americans or the Japanese, but by a separate race whose ancestors could not be traced back to any part of the human race, or any part of the globe. They were a cultural, geographical and genetic anomaly. They were split into two sub-races, the Quigui, and the saiyans.


Not long before the onset of World War I, the Quigui were actually the first to welcome American settlers onto the continent of Hoodra, offering their rich culture almost naively to their new inhabitants. They didn't seem to understand the concepts of caution, distrust or aggression, at least, not towards the Americans. Unfortunately this only made them too easy to conquer. Quigui still exist today, but in greatly reduced numbers. The young Quigui are ignorant of the culture of their parents and grandparents, and are ostracised by those descendants of the non-native Americans who now call themselves the Hoodrans.


The American Hoodrans, separate from the more liberal culture of their ancestors, outcast the Quigui mockingly, seeing them as unevolved beings that have failed to break away from their primitive roots (blatant, shameless racism if you ask me). I suppose having short, black and yellow striped tails don't help matters much at all. But the Quigui are not the real threat in the eyes of the American Hoodrans. In actual fact, the Quigui live in relative ease compared with their cousin inhabitants of Hoodra.


The Quigui warned the early American settlers (before these new settlers turned on them) of another people living on the land, who they called in their native tongue 'Bon-to-Har' which roughly translates to 'the Cat Devils', a war-like people who reached over twice the height and sometimes as much as four times the weight of the average Quigui, and who had long, cat-like tails. Their existence goes back nearly two hundred years in Quigui mythology, where they believe that the Bon-to-Har arrived from the stars on burning flying boats. One of their human ancestors mixed with the Bon-to-Har creating the Quigui race. The American Hoodrans didn't take these claims seriously at first, until they encountered the Bon-to-Har for themselves in a bloody battle. Needless to say, the Bon-to-Har were demonised and despised by the Hoodrans, and have been feared and loathed by them ever since.


The Bon-to-Har are, of course, the saiyans. Nobody knows the full story of how they came to be here where they came from, or even what they are. Some very risky research suggests that they believe themselves to be a race of very proud and aggressive space beings with a home planet outside this star system, but became stranded here on Earth after a freak accident of some kind. They seem determined to find their own way back home, even though they apparently started out with no working technology of their own aside from a few relics that have been studied and mass produced by the Hoodrans for their own purposes in warfare. The saiyans did wise up and get some of this technology back and learned to produce their own, not long before they re-gained their understanding of space travel - not a lot of people know this!


How do I know all this? Well, until recently I was probably just as ignorant to all this as you. Because until recently very few people in the world knew about Hoodra except for, of course, the inhabitants of Hoodra. The dinosaurs are extinct? That's not what they teach school children in Hoodra, because there are plenty of living, non-avian theropod dinosaurs in Hoodra. Hoodra really was hidden from the rest of the world. It was even omitted from world maps.


Then, along came the internet, which started to become established globally around the mid to late 1990s, except on the other hidden island continent Pacifis where it had been mainstream for over a hundred years. Yeah. I was confused too when I found out there was a second hidden continent besides Hoodra, as Hoodra was announced before Pacifis. But it was the advent of the internet that made it impossible to keep these places hidden any longer. It also became impossible to keep the saiyans and the Quigui hidden from the rest of the world too... because they had spread to all corners of the globe. They were sparsely spread, not even a significant fraction of a percent of any population outside Hoodra, but they were around.


This is why there needed to be a worldwide disclosure, and the disclosure was the start of how I found out everything.


I think I should probably start from the beginning...


I was a first-year medical student living on the outskirts of England's capital city, London, when the news reached us. My life was really just beginning. I was 19, full of life, ambition, hopes and dreams. I was studying something I was interested in, something I was good at and something I thought I could potentially use to end all sickness in the world. I was actually quite dedicated for my age and although I was attracted to women, I didn't let them distract me. I had lots of friends, and even though I didn't drink or do drugs and ate a strict, healthy balanced diet, it didn't mean I couldn't have some fun from time to time. So you can imagine I was really looking forward to my future. I was happy, confident and easy going and I loved it.


There was a lot of build-up towards the disclosure, I guess so it wouldn't come across as so much of a shock. You know, those websites that kept saying that the aliens were among us, depictions of flying saucers and bug-eyed, grey skinned space men. Claims that the world was ending I guess were to make us grateful of any less disastrous event that might occur in its place, though I think only few took the 2012 hype seriously. Then there were the stories of Atlantis, the lost continent, which, I don't know, might have existed. Or it might have actually been a parody of Pacifis or its smaller neighbour Hoodra.


The majority of us never really paid much attention to all these theories. So, it was still a huge shock when the hidden continents and their inhabitants were announced. Nobody had ever heard of a saiyan before, so there was some initial confusion over the words 'dangerous' and 'vermin'. Were they talking about some kind of animal? Then when they were mentioned as being a 'people' panic started to set in a bit. Many jumped to the conclusion "it's the aliens, and they're actually not friendly". I suppose the fixation on aliens in movies and TV shows over the past few decades drilled these thoughts into people's minds.


Finally they were explained properly. They were normally large – not massive, but significantly larger than a human in most cases (with some exceptions) – with the appearance of a human except for their long, slender tails covered in a brown fur. They were also described as having dense, thick hair on their heads that was nearly always black or a very dark brown, and irises that were never anything but pure black, and either white, tan or light brown skin and a generally heavy build with a low amount of body fat in proportion to muscle mass. You can imagine the paranoia that escalated over the unfortunate non-saiyan folks who just so happened to vaguely fit that description, minus the tail. And there were some humans that looked like that, including myself to some degree. Except I was skinny as a rake.


But there wasn't exactly a mass panic or society meltdown or anything, actually most people took it all at their stride, and life appeared to continue as normal for a while after the disclosure. But it was just the calm before the storm.


I was visiting my parents when the news reached us that the humans were actually at war with the saiyans. This was new. Sure they had been described as dangerous but this was the first time that we were told that they had the capacity for organisation or the technology to wage war with us. Then it just got weirder (and more frightening). Turns out that one – they had technology and not just any technology, but otherworldly technology and two – some of the stronger saiyans seemed to have trained themselves to tap into some in-built energy supply that made conventional weapons useless against them.


They had made their aim clear: to steal human resources and further their supply of technology, get off Earth for good and destroy us all in the process. My mum, myself and even my dad were shitting bricks. And so was probably every other human on Earth that had access to a news broadcast. Now this is just the icing on the cake, listen to this: we were informed that there were saiyans living amongst us, spying or biding their time for the right moment to strike. And it could have been anyone. Even your best mate that you'd known for years.


Seriously were they trying to make us paranoid? But then I had to think... this is information we needed to know. They wouldn't be telling us this for no reason.


I wasn't due to return to school for another week, so I took advantage of not needing to travel and stayed indoors most of the time. I mean it was illegal to own firearms in our country so it wasn't like I had anything particularly useful to defend myself with. There had already been reported attacks in London by saiyans (for what reason I'm not sure), some even captured or killed. Then I found out that there had been a saiyan living in my parent's neighbourhood for years, and something in me snapped.


I kind of fell into an illness. You know, like when you're so scared of something you freeze up and your stomach goes in knots, you get the runs and you can't hold anything down when you try to eat? It's a kind of shock. I wasn't alone, a lot of people were suffering from this paralysed state of fear, especially those of us who had lead a cushioned lifestyle up until now. But it was really out of character for me, I could normally take things at my stride. This, strangely, got too much for me. I became lethargic and one morning I didn't get up. I was so zoned out I can't even describe, just completely out of it, like when you have a burning fever. I couldn't tell where I was or who was around until some time the next day when I had fully rested.


I was still tired so I lay in bed for a moment to regain my bearings. At this moment if you had asked me if my life could have gotten any weirder, I would have naively told you no, it cannot get any weirder. Well, it just did.


I felt something crawl along my leg, causing me to jump out of bed in an instant. The blanket flew across the room into the corner. There was nothing on the now bare bed. Itchy sensations continued and I jumped into the air out of fright, hitting my head on the ceiling causing a loud thud. I hastily frisked my joggers for the invader... a squirrel or a rat? I grabbed the foreign object. Pain shot up my spine, my mind became overloaded with new sensations and I went into a kind of spasm and fell onto the floor, letting go of whatever it was.


"Nicholas!" My mum's muffled voice from behind the door could barely be heard over my pulse drumming in my ears. "What was that noise?!"


"I-I'm..." I was about to say I'm fine but that wasn't exactly the truth...


"Are you decent?"


"NO!" Any excuse. I had to know what was going on first before meeting my parents.


"Well, would you like me to bring you anything?"


"I'm fine, really!" I lied. I hoped my voice wasn't too shaky.


"Okay, you rest up now..."


I heard the footsteps move across the landing and down the stairs. The coast was clear. I sat forward and upright on the floor, holding my hands out in front of me to gauge my composure. My hands were shaking like I'd never seen them shake before. I gulped, trying to get the saliva flowing in my dry mouth. Filled with dread, I hesitated to find out what was wrong with me. Why I had been sick for over two days... was it this?


The sensations were mine. It wasn't something detached. It belonged to me. It had my nerve endings. My body heat. My blood and muscle twitches. I pulled out the thing that seemed to move around aimlessly, still lacking the neural connections in my brain to control it. I thought to myself, 'this can't be happening'. The brown fur-lined limb was just as I had seen it described. It was the obvious signature of a dangerous creature, as the recent hype would suggest. Why me though? How did it come to be attached to me? How was I going to hide it? If anyone found out, I'd be done for... I couldn't believe I was one of them though. No, this was some kind of mistake. Sure I fit the description but I was surely still human. It was obvious. I needed to have a clear mind about this but I couldn't help it. My breathing became erratic and my fingertips went numb and tingly. Signs of panic set in and I felt unable to control it, just as I was unable to control my racing heartbeat.


Walking into the bathroom I wobbled from side to side as my legs threatened to give way at any moment. Seeing the toilet so near by I heaved a little, but only air and salty saliva came up. My stomach was empty. Then I saw what I was looking for. My dad's shaving knife. An old wash cloth. I grabbed both items before locking the bathroom door behind me.