“Before them was that which they had struggled so incredibly hard for: peace!”

    The woman’s face was vibrant with enthusiasm and joy; she always became obnoxiously excited when she related The Epic—whether it was completely true or not.  She was far more lively than normal this time because her audience finally included descendents of The Legendary Warriors whose titanic struggles against evil were told of in The Epic.  She uncontrollably smiled like an absurdly happy child, radiating energetic giddiness and anxiously awaiting the ecstasy that would momentarily consume the listeners and reaffirm for her the wisdom of her decision to become The Story Teller.

    These ears were the ones that she had yearned for since the beginning of her efforts.  She desired their attentions so intensely that she found her pleasure impervious to the horrible thoughts that kept cavorting through her mind.  The fact that their kind had razed nearly the whole of human civilization and had left the Earth a charred, barren ball spewing cries of agony into the cosmos wasn’t important at the moment.

    She thanked Kami—well, no, he was certainly dead…wasn’t he?  No, he wasn’t dead, miraculously, because then she couldn’t have them; he was either in their voracious clutches having the life thrashed out of him or he’d managed to stash himself away in some remote sanctuary—but at any rate, it was a blessing that none of The Monsters had managed to accompany the agony beyond the coffin of clouds to torment whatever was out there to be tormented.  If even one had done so, she would never have been afforded this wonderful opportunity to rectify the whole situation and restore the world.

    Yet it was a curse that they had never wandered away into the beyond.  They were just going to keep ripping the planet apart until it was no more, and, certainly, they would eventually add her to the heaps of rotting flesh that they so merrily danced about in their lunacy.

    But that spark of reality didn’t ignite a fire of ice on her nerves; they were too drenched in hot anticipation to heed the truth, they were too busy embracing the silence, they were too elated stalking the rapture.

    This thrill of reaching out to them and changing things was why she didn’t join the rest of the crumbled civilization, which once numbered over six billion—at last count there were about half a million men, women, and children left—in the charred corpse of Gohan City, which, despite the diligent efforts of its inhabitants, had failed to become anything more than a hideous Crater on the planet’s desolate, marred surface.  Her remarkable scientific intelligence had been repetitively summoned to The Crater, but she very strongly believed that her knowledge of The Epic—which was just as thorough as her understanding of all aspects of science, if not greater—could do the greater amount of good by filling The Monsters with some sense of identity and providing them with a wonderful example to follow, eventually—finally, eventually was now—bringing them to change their ways.  So far, she’d done little more than attract small—but very brave—congregations of youngsters from The Crater, and that was mostly because the ruins that were their parents had deemed The Epic the only healthy entertainment—the only entertainment—left for their offspring, something worth the trek through the chaotic territory of the perpetually bloodthirsty Monsters to her little hole in the ground, perhaps the only remaining trace of humanity left beyond The Crater.

    She would have preferred it if the latest generation of the dying didn’t come.  She admitted that The Epic could benefit them—and her by providing sanity-sustaining company—but she had not placed herself seventy miles beyond the tatters of hope for the perks; she did not want to further endanger the remaining humans if she somehow—although it wouldn’t require much exertion—managed to provoke the fury of The Monsters.  Of course, that would require them discovering her, which, until now, hadn’t happened.  That, and it was terribly depressing to see them.  But, she knew, she would feel just as if not more miserable sitting alone in her hole all the rancid time, knowing that the little darlings were wallowing in the crater with nothing to do but decay and rot and maybe, if the tedium was in a lull, be savagely murdered by the Monsters.  She therefore did not prohibit the visitations.

    The population of The Crater was dwindling.  Betterment sent no messenger, likely because it couldn’t get one through.  Each horrid day, several more people, devoid of any more fumes of hope to inhale to feign life, subscribed to the belief that they should quit torturing themselves by remaining undeceased and should quit torturing new lives by leading them, unable to protest, into the wound, still smoldering—The Story Teller was always amazed when she considered that The Crater was screaming in extreme pain from an attack that was launched, according to The Epic, over ninety years in the opaque past, though the seemingly eternal renewals of the destruction by The Monsters probably was contributing to the longevity of the writhing—and thus the rate of suicide was astronomical, presuming that there was an outer space to compare the numbers to, a place where the stars still twinkled beyond that eternal sunset carved in the sky.

    Did the stars ever twinkle, if there ever were stars?  She got that idea from The Epic.  She would have asked some of the older folks, the ones who had survived the first siege of Gohan City, but no one survived that.  No one would be at The Crater if The Monsters hadn’t been implored by the most talented of supplicants and designated it The Game Refuge.  Which it wasn’t; inhabitants would occasionally—usually on the eights of the hour—be plucked from The Crater to pacify The Monsters’ lust for others’ suffering, and the scar itself was bombarded with attacks and the Monsters’ garbage almost daily.  If anything the fires had grown larger, the stench more repugnant, and the shrieks more shrill since the Monsters had so condescended.

    The Monsters—The Plague, The Epidemic, The Doom, The Really Bad Armageddon—had been dominant for almost three full centuries, slowly toppling species after species, obliterating the system’s only inhabited planet, mauling justice and purging the terminally ill world of its soul.  At the thought of this, The Story Teller felt, once more, inclined to curl up into a ball and die, but she had a lust for originality and that manner of death was so common in The Crater that it was abhorrently dull.

    Her contemplations were fleeting.

    The air tensed; the two boys whom she was hoping would begin the invigorating round of frenzied cheering—they looked to be about ten years old, but it was hard to determine the age of those who dwelt in the pillars of debris and poached in their own preserve—glared at her with intense but veiled displeasure and held their places as boulders hold theirs.  The rest of the little children, a typical sized congregation of about fifteen—just enough to evade the danger and make it to The Story Teller, but not so many that their deaths would singly end their generation—averted their attempts to revel in the yarn because they could feel the granite entities in their midst holding invisible blades to each of their throats and could hear them whispering, they thought for sure, of gruesome manglings they’d be delighted to demonstrate.  The congregation gladly submitted to the implied demands of its passively active oppressors, assimilating the general countenances of the two, although with a putrid taste of horror just behind its pairs of irises rather than the acidic taste of damnation.

    Her anticipation choked on itself and fizzled away, leaving emptiness.  Leonard the Ox of No Particular Emotion briefly inspected the emptiness, but upon noticing reality, fled into the impenetrable innards of her mind as quickly as he could.

    The uncannily pervasive terror found the poor woman’s spine and snuggled it like a serpent, plunging her into a violent fit of cold shaking and subdued shrieks.  This was not at all normal, but she couldn’t really state that as a fact; she had never been visited by a Monster.  She carefully, slowly analyzed their faces in hopes of alleviating the uncomfortable situation, craving herself to be misinterpreting two innocent boys whom she simply was seeing in a poor light.

    The drenching gone, the fire was able to ignite: these were Monsters before her, not fuzzy little rabbits—which were extinct—or cute little dinosaurs—which were also extinct.  What had she been thinking?  There was absolutely no way she or anyone else could cleanse these horribly vile children, especially not with story time!  The Epic may have been powerful, but she was trying to do something akin to coaxing a black hole into stopping its path of galactic annihilation in favor of joining a symphony orchestra, and doing so with only a crudely colored drawing of the Greek letter epsilon!  She could have at least used gamma, but she was in too deep to fret about that now.

    She couldn’t decide how horrified to be.

    The two Monsters were sitting next to each other, relative to the other boys and girls, who, from the beginning, had felt that the Monsters were to be avoided and had thus dispersed in a ring along the skeletal walls of the bleak room.  It was partly a result of an innate fear instilled by centuries of unfathomable horror, partly a result of the dreadful warnings issued by their parents, and partly a result of the nauseating smell of brutal evil hanging about The Monsters.  Regardless of the cause, the Monsters were in the center of the room, directly under the only light—an old, grimy light bulb nestled in among the barren rafters of the ceiling—which made them and nothing else, unfortunately, prominent in The Story Teller’s field of vision.  The photons, probably due to the kind bargaining—or threatening—of the Monsters, clung to them fiercely, dimming the rest of the room to a faint abyss and illuminating their physical attributes as if they were infernos of organic cold.

    Like her nerves now were.

    The cowering congregation would have smelled foully of urine and sweat, but The Monsters’ stench ripped the other apart, spat upon it, and burnt itself into the congregation’s nostrils, upending its stomachs, thereby inundating its mouths with human soup.  But the brave children had too much pride to spill themselves; The Monsters had to see that the humans weren’t sprawled on the floor in death’s foyer yet.  And they couldn’t bring themselves to taunt death so.

    The Story Teller had seen many of The Atrocities herself—because she had been very daring and stealthy, managing to traverse about the surface without being ended or eaten and then ended or tortured and then eaten and then ended—but personal contact with them, especially of this type, was so foreign to her, and likely to them and most every other living thing left on Earth, that she could barely bring herself to await whatever storm they were brewing.  She was eager for this meeting to progress and either somehow validate her years of diligence or painlessly stop the pain.

    Maybe they would magically turn good.

    Maybe they wouldn’t make her death last until the ends of forever.

    The boy sitting to the other’s right seemed dreadfully improper in such a refined body.  Despite his placidly disturbing black eyes of obliteration, he seemed like the exception of them all: clean, neat—although his light skin didn’t seem that way due to a multitude of scars and other disfigurations—black hair spiking above his head in a large, groomed peak, a pointed hairline on an amicable—but ruthlessly hostile—brow, a discontented smirk mildly hinting of potent displeasure, all on a head too big for his muscular little body, which was wrapped in a dark blue, full-body, spandex outfit, flawlessly clean white boots and gloves, and, of course, a fuzzy brown tale about the waist that wriggled at the tip.  He sat perfectly erect, legs crossed, eyes transfixed—for whatever reason—upon her.

    His oddly cute comrade was sprawled back on his elbows, wiggling his bare feet around and tapping the floor—ominously, as if it was his means of passing the time between murders and other components of his routine—with strong little fingers that stuck out from his oversized blue undershirt, which was not big enough to hide his well-toned body but more than enough to make his baggy red pants and sleeveless shirt bulge with excess fabric tucked here and there.  His meandering tail fiddled with his clothes restlessly, though more often that strange appendage was knocking small bugs and dirt from his big, spiky, black hair, which seemed to have no care as to how it was growing.

    She should have accepted the invitations to the safety and paradise of The Crater.  This was not what she wanted.

    “That story really sucked,” the first boy commented.  His voice was very different than a normal boy’s: it was teeming with menace.  It was irrationally coarse and heavy, a bundle of rocks heaved at the ears.

    At the sound of this, The Story Teller, devastated and mortified, fainted, her arms flopping limply to her sides and her turquoise hair and fair skin bloodying as she slipped out of her humble wooden chair and came to violently rest the back of her head on the concrete floor, after it had plunged through the chair, toppling it’s tattered carcass onto her inanimate flesh.

    In a much lighter—but no kinder—way, the other boy, subtly smiling at the woman’s misfortune, commented to his neighbor, “Peace my tail!  What do you think, Vegatus?  Is something that stupid true?”

    “Of course not.  What a…way…to blow my birthday,” the first venomously hissed.  “That stupid woman.  If she wasn’t so—what is she, dead now?—I’d kill her.  I’d even…”

    The trembling of the children surrounding The Monsters promptly stopped as they collapsed from exhausted nerves, prompting Vegatus to hold his tongue and contort his face into some odd expression of both loathing and delight.  The collision between the bodies of the children and the ground echoed throughout the room, which was no more than a basement closet tucked well below one of the few buildings that still had debris that could be piled up.

    Both of The Monsters smiled.

    “Kakorus, how dare that old…stupid person…tell such a…stupid…story?  Huh?  Really!  Our ancestors could not have been such…weaklings…that they would grow old and then quit fighting!”

    “I guess so.”

    “Really, you…moron!  Think about it with that…that brain of yours.  She changed that story so we wouldn’t kill her.  If she had the good sense to tell the truth and not…lie, she would have been…still alive!”

    “Yeah, sure.  You’re right.”

    “Idiot!  I said think about it!  How could she be so…stupid…as to think that we wouldn’t want to hear of the daring feats that King Vegeta performed?  Huh?  That…stupid…woman…I’m glad she’s dead!  If she weren’t, I’d probably…”

    Vegatus’s rambling was cut short by a fiery twinge in his head, all through it.  He growled—a low and ferocious sound that perturbed all of the musty air—and muttered, “Ryukyu, don’t you dare.”

    Ryukyu, feeling obligated, dared.

    The ceiling moaned and creaked as the tremendous weight it supported dramatically dwindled until the battered old thing was only holding up the sky, which at once sent a reconnaissance team through the gaping cracks and holes in the crusty wood, polluting the damp darkness with foul light colored like vomit and noxious particles and clumps of sundry toxins.

    Kakorus, suppressing a hearty chuckle, hopped to his feet and ambled over to the door—a battered slab of cardboard, bent in the middle, flapping over the dreary doorway from a scanty shred of duct tape adhering—barely—to the frayed frame.

    “You bust ‘im up good for me; I need to get me somethin’ to eat before my stomach starts to eat me.”  Kakorus’s chuckle escaped as he brushed the door aside and contentedly traipsed into the lightless hallway in search of sustenance.

    “Sure…thing.”

    Vegatus turned his attentions to the dustfalls cascading from the rafters and the tremors causing them.  With a joyful sigh, he stood and flexed his muscles, ensuring to himself that, indeed, all of them were there and ready for a rousing brawl.  He clinched and unclenched his fists several times, took in a deep, lung-burning breath, and pondered what fabulous new strategy Ryukyu had concocted.

    Thick smoke began to drift down through the crevices in the ceiling and curled up under the boards, staining them black with soot and filling Vegatus’s nostrils with the wholesome smell of ignited, rotting wood.  He ran his slimy tongue over his lips and absolutely savored the aroma.

    “I wonder if that…idiot…actually set this place on fire.  That would be just about…typical…for him.”

    A strange sound suddenly commandeered the whole of the room, thrashing both air and structure with a torrential vibration.  Vegatus could feel his insides bumping into each other; it elated him, but not nearly as much as the searing golden light that exploded through the ceiling, almost burning his eyeballs right out of their sockets, or the intangible shockwave that thrust its way through his bones, ordering his hairs on end and beckoning his heart to beat faster.

    “Ah, energy attack.  Direct.  Wait…what’s…”

    He squinted his eyes and extended his thoughts out into his environment, poking and prodding around, deciphering energy to establish what was occurring above him.  Something else besides Ryukyu—and Vegatus was certain there wasn’t much else—was roaming about the area, itself prodding about with thoughts.  And it was intently cognizant of the impending tussle.

    The room imploded with an extremely loud, thunderous snapping of wood planks and their rapid incineration in a massive fireball.  Vegatus could feel flakes of skin and clothing—undoubtedly from the vermin strewn about whom he had killed without doing anything—pelting his body as a result of the energy’s gravitational reversal.  Ecstatic, he let out a giddy scream as thoughts of their smoldering carcasses frolicked in his mind and began to awaken dormant capabilities and tendencies within him.

    Shuddering from mental revelry, Vegatus pulled back his right fist—blood trickling from the calluses his fingers had agitated on his palms—and readied a strike that would vomit the attack right back up into Ryukyu’s face.

    The blast ceased to be.  The air paused in confusion, reassured itself several times that Ryukyu had stopped, and then sprinted into the vacuum as fast as its glee would carry it, giving birth to a tremendous explosion and a great pandemonium in the large sphere that had become extremely lacking in occupation.

    Vegatus looked up through the smoking wound that had been inflicted upon the ceiling—still hosting small flames—and saw Ryukyu wearing a very similar expression to his own: befuddlement.  The attacker’s hands were still pouring off steam from the blast’s heat and his whole body was still pumping energy out—Vegatus could feel it—but nothing was happening.

    Ryukyu was visibly confused and extremely irked.  He firmly set his powerful jaw and grunted as he exerted all his might into correcting the situation, but nothing transpired save for more confusion.  Ryukyu’s young but darkened skin and two long chunks of blazing golden hair—one normally sticking straight out to each side of his forehead, but now sagging with dirt and sweat, flopped behind his hears and taunting the other hairs on his head, all of which were short and coarse—erupted in scorching light as his envelope was pushed.  His tail frantically thrashed about behind him.

    The Story Teller propped herself up on her elbows, blinked quite hard to clear her vision, and—having temporarily forgotten her situation—wondered whatever happened to The Legendary Warriors.  If they were still around, things might be different, specifically, the human race might not be teetering on the verge of extinction and the tailed Monsters might be taken care of; they just needed some guidance and a solid maiming.

    “Hey, moron, I think you’ve got a problem!” Vegatus hollered to Ryukyu, who quit trying to make his energy blast work and scratched the back of his head, both with his hand and his tail, as well as brushed some of the aroused dust from his naked chest and black pants.

    Vegatus, upon noticing the newcomer and the skull-melting ocean of heart-crushing…something…stampeding out from him, mumbled, shakily and softly, “Yeah, a pretty…big…problem…”

    Lost in hazy thoughts and still detached from the peril about her, The Story Teller vocalized her fantasy: “If I had the last dragon ball, or if Son Goku was here…”

    A legend then peered through the hole at Vegatus—who was now quaking severely—fluidly looked over its shoulder at Ryukyu—who was now about to simply pluck his eyes out and scream—gave an unusually long glance to Kakorus—who had wondered out of the hall with a thick sandwich in his hands and an utterly hell-stricken look on his face—briefly looked in the direction of The Story Teller—who was immersed in her fantasy—noticed the grimy, squirming children about the walls, turned to none of those present in particular, and asked, very gently and amicably, almost paternalistically, with undiluted fury, outrage, even extreme abhorrence bordering on blatant hate, “What hell have you wrought upon my home?”