Post by Krillin on Oct 8, 2010 2:09:07 GMT -5
Krillin tried to chase after the office demon, but he had no luck. The door had inexplicably vanished. Just wonderful. What was he supposed to do now? The answer came, and it was not one that he liked: wait the seventy or eighty years. He hated his life.
No, scratch that – he hated his afterlife.
Not that his true life had exactly been a picnic, especially considering the way that it ended. With a shudder, Krillin recalled the last few moments. They were still as fresh in his mind as anything. Krillin knew there was not going to be a way around it, he was going to die. He knew the moment he had walked into the room with the 2 demons, he had just hoped he was going to be able t put up a better fight than he did. He felt pitiful, like a weakling, Krillin knew he wasn’t a weakling, he just felt like he was.
"Hey there, son, snap out of it."
Krillin jumped at the voice, and at the hand on his shoulder. He turned to face the one who had shaken him out of his memory. It was one of the ones with a body, though he had not needed his eyes to deduce that fact – after all, the guy had touched him with a hand.
The figure was old, looked to maybe be in his eighties, and was not a great deal taller than Krillin himself. That immediately put him at ease. It was such a calming influence to be around people close to his own height rather than the usual person who towered over him. Maybe that was one of the reasons that he liked kids so much.
But something about this man looked familiar. The small, stocky body, the bushy white eyebrows, moustache and beard . . . the round, kindly face . . .
"Allow me to introduce myself," the old man said. "My name is Son Gohan."
Well, that certainly got Krillin's attention. And now he realized where he had seen this old man before. It had been many years ago, when he had still been a child. When he had met Baba for the first time, and the old Son Gohan had been one of her fighters. Almost funny that they would both end up in a place like this . . . but Krillin paused for a moment.
Actually, there wasn't really anything funny about this at all.
"Son Gohan," Krillin repeated, for lack of anything intelligent to say at the moment. What could a person say in a situation like this?
"Well yes," said Gohan – Gohan Senior, Krillin said in his mind, to distance the name from the child he knew. "That is all right, isn't it?"
"Oh, of course," Krillin laughed nervously, rubbing the back of his head with one hand. "Nothing wrong with it at all."
This seemed to appease Gohan Senior, whose quizzical look faded back into a cheery smile. "Glad that's settled, then. You must be new here. Come on and have a sit. An old man needs some company every once in a while."
Still fascinated yet somewhat disturbed to be in the company of his good friend's adoptive – and dead – grandfather, Krillin accepted. He followed Gohan Senior around several wildly flying wisps to – strangely – a pair of quite comfortable looking blue easy chairs. At least the higher ups provided a little perk to being in a place like this.
The chair was every bit as comfortable as it looked, and he took a moment to sink into the cushiony fabric. In this thing, he could almost forget that he was in fact dead. Of course, a quick glance at his surroundings killed that notion almost instantly. It was hard to forget such a thing while surrounded by yellow clouds and what he assumed were bodiless souls. Not to mention the halo floating over his head.
"Hm."
Krillin looked up, and found Gohan Senior staring at him quizzically from his own chair. The upper half of the old man's face wrinkled so deeply that it was a chore just to see his eyes. Still, it managed to be unnerving somehow. "What?"
"Haven't we met before?" Gohan Senior asked. "I keep thinking that you look somehow familiar."
"W-well . . ." Krillin stammered, not quite sure how he should respond. Though he did not know what harm it could do to tell the truth. A little company with some familiarity could only be a good thing, after all. "Yeah, actually we ha –"
But Gohan Senior snapped his fingers before Krillin could finish the reply. "At the fortune-teller's place, right? You were one of the boys with my grandson."
"Yep, that was me." Krillin's tone was bright when he answered, but his mood sobered at the old man's next words.
"I knew it! Memory was just a little foggy for the moment. So how was he doing when you saw him last?"
It was a good question, and one that he cursed the man for. How was Goku doing? Krillin wasn't even sure that he was still alive…He didn't want to say that, though.
After all, what was there to tell? Somehow, saying something like: "Well I just got obliterated by some big bad demon dudes, and I haven’t seen your grandson in years so not much I can say about him" did not seem like an adequate answer for the old man. From what Krillin remembered, Son Gohan was a good old man, and had loved Goku as if the Saiyan had been his own. The idea of telling him that his grandson was possibly dead . . .
"Well, how is he?" Gohan Senior pressed.
"Uh, well . . ." Krillin stalled for time. Perhaps he should find a way to just duck out of this conversation. "Well, he was, doing okay, I guess. Look, I've gotta go. See ya later."
With that, and before Gohan Senior could reply, Krillin jumped out of his chair, and flew some distance away – he could still see the various other people and souls, but he hoped that this would be far enough to avoid the old man for a while.
But he was bound to catch up to him sometime. If Krillin was going to be here for seventy or eighty years, then there would be plenty of time to track him down and ask him again. Of course, there was always the chance that old Son Gohan would not be here much longer anyway. He had to have been here for at least . . .
Hey, come to think of it, what was the old man doing here, anyway? Surely problem cases were not that common, especially with people from a particular planet . . . Never mind. If he had thought of this earlier, he could have asked about it, but the questioning had thrown him off guard and he'd just needed to escape.
Maybe he could use it the next time Gohan Senior caught up with him – deflect a question with another question. If he could just do that for a while, maybe old Son Gohan would not have to find out about his grandson's probable fate.
- -
Time passed in the odd place called the Relegation Room, but Krillin did not know how to measure it. There was no sun or moon to watch, the sky did not lighten or darken, and there was no common routine that he could see which would signify the passage of a day.
At least he had managed to avoid Gohan Senior for the time being. In addition to that, he had passed his time talking to one of the many white wisps that were indeed bodiless souls. They didn't have much interesting to say, merely commenting on how bright and wonderful the weather was – which made absolutely no sense as there did not seem to be weather, per se, in Otherworld – but it was easier to deal with than the questions that old Son Gohan would be asking him.
He never realized how much he missed his ability to sense ki, though he was never very good at it it always provided him with at least some sense of comfort that was of course until it was rendered invalid by being in a place with a bunch of dead people. While he was alive, it had been tougher, though not nearly impossible to sneak up on him. Odds were reversed when nobody had any ki. Thus it was that he did not notice that the very person he had been running from was now right behind him.
"Hello again, son."
Krillin jumped and turned. Well, round one of running was over. Now came the new tactic – the question to a question.
"I've been trying to track you down for a couple of weeks, but I seem to be just missing you," Gohan Senior said, not sounding particularly disturbed by this for whatever reason. "Was there something that you hadn't wanted to tell me back there?"
"Uh, well, it's just . . ." Krillin was momentarily derailed form his strategy, but regained his composure. "Say, just how did you end up here?"
The question seemed to give Gohan Senior pause, and he looked at Krillin funnily before reaching up to scratch his head, a puzzled look coming across his face. "Come to think of it, I'm not quite sure. I don't think it was ever explained to me." He stopped scratching his head, and his eyes turned piercing and intelligent once again. "Now my question, please."
Rats. Krillin was about to take off again when the man caught his shoulder. It would have been an easy hold to break, given Krillin's high physical strength in comparison to Gohan Senior's, but somehow it just did not seem right. Maybe he should just give the old man his answer. This was only the first repetition of the question, and already Krillin's conscience was on him for not answering in the first place. Krillin sighed, relenting. He might as well get this over with. "To tell you the truth, sir, I don't know how he is. I haven’t seen Goku in a few years now, for all I know he may be dead . . ."
"I see." That was all that Gohan Senior could seem to say at the moment. But then he perked up a bit. "Then again, Goku was always good at getting himself out of sticky situations. An amazingly persistent boy he was . . ." He paused again, looking puzzled. "Right?"
That was strange . . . "Well, yeah." Though confused by the statement, Krillin was also a little bolstered by it. Maybe he didn't have enough faith in Goku. Maybe his old friend could still be alive somewhere and Krillin just hadn’t noticed him. Maybe Goku actually was fine right now.
Surprisingly, Gohan Senior turned and walked off, muttering something quietly to himself. Krillin could not hear it very well, but he thought that he could make out, "I'm sure he was a persistent young thing. There must have been several examples of this, if I could just remember . . ."
Krillin blinked. This place just got weirder and weirder.
- -
Things were getting past weird, now. They were starting to get scary. With nothing else to do, Krillin had just been reluctantly socializing with his fellow cast-offs. But the same thing came up constantly and it was troubling.
Every time he talked to someone one day, they had completely forgotten anything that the had related a mere few days before. While this in itself was not quite altogether frightening, it was the fact that they never remembered him at all. Or anything, for that matter. Not a single one of them. They all greeted him anew as if the had never seen him before in the afterlife.
Currently, he was trying to find out the reason for this, from yet another of the white wisps. It was not a lot of help.
"Forgetting things, hm?" the wisp said, in its strangely squeaky voice. "Can't say that I have forgotten anything, or if I did I don't remember. How do you know if you forgot to remember if you were supposed to forget –"
Krillin massaged his forehead, wondering if the wisp was giving itself as much of a headache as it was giving him. The conversation was going absolutely nowhere. Finally fed up, Krillin merely got up and left, the wisp still prattling on about how he was supposed to remember if he had forgotten anything. Krillin should have learned better than to talk to the wisps anyway. They hardly ever made any sense.
So he wandered off alone again, silently wondering if he was the only sane person in this place. Considering that even he had thought that he was crazy while alive, did not exactly strike him as a very good sign.
It was never a good sign when he was the sanest person in the room.
"You look depressed there."
It was an unfamiliar voice, and Krillin looked up to face it. Above him stood a strange bluish green creature with no apparent ears or nose. Heh. At least the latter was something that they had in common. Did he have anything to lose by talking to this thing? Probably not.
"Nah, just confused," he replied. "I just can't seem to figure this place out."
The new figure sat down beside him. "You like figuring things out too, huh? One of my favourite things to do. At least I think it is."
Krillin sighed in exasperation. "See? That's what I'm confused about. What is it with this place and chronic bad memories?"
The new figure nodded. "Hmm. That's a good question. Wonder if I ever wondered something like that."
Once again, a conversation that was going nowhere. Big surprise. Krillin wished that this guy would just prattle on his own now, so that he could quietly sneak off somewhere. But the figure surprised him.
"Do you forget things, too?"
Krillin blinked. "No. No, I don't."
"Gee that's weird. Are you new? The new ones always seem to remember stuff better." The figure paused. "At least I think."
Being new . . . A though sprang in Krillin's head, and he wasn't sure that he liked it.
What if it was this place? For all he knew, the others could have been here for a very long time; Gohan Senior must have been here for at least a couple of decades. And Krillin himself was the only one, it seemed, that was not suffering from a faulty memory . . .
A chill swept through his bones – or it would have if he still had bones. He could be in here for quite some time himself. If his hunch were true, he would begin to forget things as well. His whole life, eventually. It may not have been the happiest of lives, but he didn't exactly want to forget it, either.
"Okay, that's it," Krillin said. "I've gotta get outta here."
Word Count: 2528
No, scratch that – he hated his afterlife.
Not that his true life had exactly been a picnic, especially considering the way that it ended. With a shudder, Krillin recalled the last few moments. They were still as fresh in his mind as anything. Krillin knew there was not going to be a way around it, he was going to die. He knew the moment he had walked into the room with the 2 demons, he had just hoped he was going to be able t put up a better fight than he did. He felt pitiful, like a weakling, Krillin knew he wasn’t a weakling, he just felt like he was.
"Hey there, son, snap out of it."
Krillin jumped at the voice, and at the hand on his shoulder. He turned to face the one who had shaken him out of his memory. It was one of the ones with a body, though he had not needed his eyes to deduce that fact – after all, the guy had touched him with a hand.
The figure was old, looked to maybe be in his eighties, and was not a great deal taller than Krillin himself. That immediately put him at ease. It was such a calming influence to be around people close to his own height rather than the usual person who towered over him. Maybe that was one of the reasons that he liked kids so much.
But something about this man looked familiar. The small, stocky body, the bushy white eyebrows, moustache and beard . . . the round, kindly face . . .
"Allow me to introduce myself," the old man said. "My name is Son Gohan."
Well, that certainly got Krillin's attention. And now he realized where he had seen this old man before. It had been many years ago, when he had still been a child. When he had met Baba for the first time, and the old Son Gohan had been one of her fighters. Almost funny that they would both end up in a place like this . . . but Krillin paused for a moment.
Actually, there wasn't really anything funny about this at all.
"Son Gohan," Krillin repeated, for lack of anything intelligent to say at the moment. What could a person say in a situation like this?
"Well yes," said Gohan – Gohan Senior, Krillin said in his mind, to distance the name from the child he knew. "That is all right, isn't it?"
"Oh, of course," Krillin laughed nervously, rubbing the back of his head with one hand. "Nothing wrong with it at all."
This seemed to appease Gohan Senior, whose quizzical look faded back into a cheery smile. "Glad that's settled, then. You must be new here. Come on and have a sit. An old man needs some company every once in a while."
Still fascinated yet somewhat disturbed to be in the company of his good friend's adoptive – and dead – grandfather, Krillin accepted. He followed Gohan Senior around several wildly flying wisps to – strangely – a pair of quite comfortable looking blue easy chairs. At least the higher ups provided a little perk to being in a place like this.
The chair was every bit as comfortable as it looked, and he took a moment to sink into the cushiony fabric. In this thing, he could almost forget that he was in fact dead. Of course, a quick glance at his surroundings killed that notion almost instantly. It was hard to forget such a thing while surrounded by yellow clouds and what he assumed were bodiless souls. Not to mention the halo floating over his head.
"Hm."
Krillin looked up, and found Gohan Senior staring at him quizzically from his own chair. The upper half of the old man's face wrinkled so deeply that it was a chore just to see his eyes. Still, it managed to be unnerving somehow. "What?"
"Haven't we met before?" Gohan Senior asked. "I keep thinking that you look somehow familiar."
"W-well . . ." Krillin stammered, not quite sure how he should respond. Though he did not know what harm it could do to tell the truth. A little company with some familiarity could only be a good thing, after all. "Yeah, actually we ha –"
But Gohan Senior snapped his fingers before Krillin could finish the reply. "At the fortune-teller's place, right? You were one of the boys with my grandson."
"Yep, that was me." Krillin's tone was bright when he answered, but his mood sobered at the old man's next words.
"I knew it! Memory was just a little foggy for the moment. So how was he doing when you saw him last?"
It was a good question, and one that he cursed the man for. How was Goku doing? Krillin wasn't even sure that he was still alive…He didn't want to say that, though.
After all, what was there to tell? Somehow, saying something like: "Well I just got obliterated by some big bad demon dudes, and I haven’t seen your grandson in years so not much I can say about him" did not seem like an adequate answer for the old man. From what Krillin remembered, Son Gohan was a good old man, and had loved Goku as if the Saiyan had been his own. The idea of telling him that his grandson was possibly dead . . .
"Well, how is he?" Gohan Senior pressed.
"Uh, well . . ." Krillin stalled for time. Perhaps he should find a way to just duck out of this conversation. "Well, he was, doing okay, I guess. Look, I've gotta go. See ya later."
With that, and before Gohan Senior could reply, Krillin jumped out of his chair, and flew some distance away – he could still see the various other people and souls, but he hoped that this would be far enough to avoid the old man for a while.
But he was bound to catch up to him sometime. If Krillin was going to be here for seventy or eighty years, then there would be plenty of time to track him down and ask him again. Of course, there was always the chance that old Son Gohan would not be here much longer anyway. He had to have been here for at least . . .
Hey, come to think of it, what was the old man doing here, anyway? Surely problem cases were not that common, especially with people from a particular planet . . . Never mind. If he had thought of this earlier, he could have asked about it, but the questioning had thrown him off guard and he'd just needed to escape.
Maybe he could use it the next time Gohan Senior caught up with him – deflect a question with another question. If he could just do that for a while, maybe old Son Gohan would not have to find out about his grandson's probable fate.
- -
Time passed in the odd place called the Relegation Room, but Krillin did not know how to measure it. There was no sun or moon to watch, the sky did not lighten or darken, and there was no common routine that he could see which would signify the passage of a day.
At least he had managed to avoid Gohan Senior for the time being. In addition to that, he had passed his time talking to one of the many white wisps that were indeed bodiless souls. They didn't have much interesting to say, merely commenting on how bright and wonderful the weather was – which made absolutely no sense as there did not seem to be weather, per se, in Otherworld – but it was easier to deal with than the questions that old Son Gohan would be asking him.
He never realized how much he missed his ability to sense ki, though he was never very good at it it always provided him with at least some sense of comfort that was of course until it was rendered invalid by being in a place with a bunch of dead people. While he was alive, it had been tougher, though not nearly impossible to sneak up on him. Odds were reversed when nobody had any ki. Thus it was that he did not notice that the very person he had been running from was now right behind him.
"Hello again, son."
Krillin jumped and turned. Well, round one of running was over. Now came the new tactic – the question to a question.
"I've been trying to track you down for a couple of weeks, but I seem to be just missing you," Gohan Senior said, not sounding particularly disturbed by this for whatever reason. "Was there something that you hadn't wanted to tell me back there?"
"Uh, well, it's just . . ." Krillin was momentarily derailed form his strategy, but regained his composure. "Say, just how did you end up here?"
The question seemed to give Gohan Senior pause, and he looked at Krillin funnily before reaching up to scratch his head, a puzzled look coming across his face. "Come to think of it, I'm not quite sure. I don't think it was ever explained to me." He stopped scratching his head, and his eyes turned piercing and intelligent once again. "Now my question, please."
Rats. Krillin was about to take off again when the man caught his shoulder. It would have been an easy hold to break, given Krillin's high physical strength in comparison to Gohan Senior's, but somehow it just did not seem right. Maybe he should just give the old man his answer. This was only the first repetition of the question, and already Krillin's conscience was on him for not answering in the first place. Krillin sighed, relenting. He might as well get this over with. "To tell you the truth, sir, I don't know how he is. I haven’t seen Goku in a few years now, for all I know he may be dead . . ."
"I see." That was all that Gohan Senior could seem to say at the moment. But then he perked up a bit. "Then again, Goku was always good at getting himself out of sticky situations. An amazingly persistent boy he was . . ." He paused again, looking puzzled. "Right?"
That was strange . . . "Well, yeah." Though confused by the statement, Krillin was also a little bolstered by it. Maybe he didn't have enough faith in Goku. Maybe his old friend could still be alive somewhere and Krillin just hadn’t noticed him. Maybe Goku actually was fine right now.
Surprisingly, Gohan Senior turned and walked off, muttering something quietly to himself. Krillin could not hear it very well, but he thought that he could make out, "I'm sure he was a persistent young thing. There must have been several examples of this, if I could just remember . . ."
Krillin blinked. This place just got weirder and weirder.
- -
Things were getting past weird, now. They were starting to get scary. With nothing else to do, Krillin had just been reluctantly socializing with his fellow cast-offs. But the same thing came up constantly and it was troubling.
Every time he talked to someone one day, they had completely forgotten anything that the had related a mere few days before. While this in itself was not quite altogether frightening, it was the fact that they never remembered him at all. Or anything, for that matter. Not a single one of them. They all greeted him anew as if the had never seen him before in the afterlife.
Currently, he was trying to find out the reason for this, from yet another of the white wisps. It was not a lot of help.
"Forgetting things, hm?" the wisp said, in its strangely squeaky voice. "Can't say that I have forgotten anything, or if I did I don't remember. How do you know if you forgot to remember if you were supposed to forget –"
Krillin massaged his forehead, wondering if the wisp was giving itself as much of a headache as it was giving him. The conversation was going absolutely nowhere. Finally fed up, Krillin merely got up and left, the wisp still prattling on about how he was supposed to remember if he had forgotten anything. Krillin should have learned better than to talk to the wisps anyway. They hardly ever made any sense.
So he wandered off alone again, silently wondering if he was the only sane person in this place. Considering that even he had thought that he was crazy while alive, did not exactly strike him as a very good sign.
It was never a good sign when he was the sanest person in the room.
"You look depressed there."
It was an unfamiliar voice, and Krillin looked up to face it. Above him stood a strange bluish green creature with no apparent ears or nose. Heh. At least the latter was something that they had in common. Did he have anything to lose by talking to this thing? Probably not.
"Nah, just confused," he replied. "I just can't seem to figure this place out."
The new figure sat down beside him. "You like figuring things out too, huh? One of my favourite things to do. At least I think it is."
Krillin sighed in exasperation. "See? That's what I'm confused about. What is it with this place and chronic bad memories?"
The new figure nodded. "Hmm. That's a good question. Wonder if I ever wondered something like that."
Once again, a conversation that was going nowhere. Big surprise. Krillin wished that this guy would just prattle on his own now, so that he could quietly sneak off somewhere. But the figure surprised him.
"Do you forget things, too?"
Krillin blinked. "No. No, I don't."
"Gee that's weird. Are you new? The new ones always seem to remember stuff better." The figure paused. "At least I think."
Being new . . . A though sprang in Krillin's head, and he wasn't sure that he liked it.
What if it was this place? For all he knew, the others could have been here for a very long time; Gohan Senior must have been here for at least a couple of decades. And Krillin himself was the only one, it seemed, that was not suffering from a faulty memory . . .
A chill swept through his bones – or it would have if he still had bones. He could be in here for quite some time himself. If his hunch were true, he would begin to forget things as well. His whole life, eventually. It may not have been the happiest of lives, but he didn't exactly want to forget it, either.
"Okay, that's it," Krillin said. "I've gotta get outta here."
Word Count: 2528