Post by Sitka on Jun 23, 2019 22:21:31 GMT -5
yarruLast Wednesday at 10:38 PM
Bulma’s head tilted slightly, a habit she hadn’t lost even through hell of expressing her interest, curiosity, or cynicism. Often it was a mix of the three, like now, but she didn’t hide it from him. Her face still stayed impassive, refusing to show too much, but she was listening just as carefully.
He stepped towards her and her gaze slid down to the space between them, immediately gauging it as if he might be a threat. She was always careful about distance before she died, memorizing the length of any weapon she picked up as well as her opponent’s range in a few quick tests. She knew Tarble’s well after that one fight. Her memory for the small details was always strangely on point while other things faded away quite easily. She watched him cross it, her gaze shifting back up to his face, and the once sad smile remained but it reflected a different emotion in her eyes now, only that too was difficult to put a finger on.
”No,” she said gently, a hint of her former self sliding out with her almost motherly nature, and yet her next words were far too chilling even as her gentleness remained softly breaking the news. ”I’m saying that I could slice you open in your sleep and parade your head on a stick without losing any.”
It seemed they had switched places. Tarble had found his humanity whereas Bulma had lost hers in the traditional sense. She didn’t quite see it that way, but it was a universal opinion for what she had become. Violence, murder, death, torture...they were all tools of the trade and she owed her murderer that much honesty. Death had humbled both of them, but the effects of such revelations were extremely different.
299
PulseLast Friday at 3:18 AM
Tarble stared at her in that moment, hanging on her every word. It was a threat-- no, hell, it wasn't even really a threat. It was just a statement of fact. The woman that sat in front of him now was not the Bulma from the past. It was not the soft human that cared for her fellow man on Earth and Capsule Corporation. All that was left in the wake of her murder was a hollow soul, one that treated murder as a trivial thing. And in the wake of that unfortunate revelation, he realized.. she was a lot like how he used to be.
Why did he hate that?
"I think I'm beginning to understand why you tried to kill me." A statement she likely might not have expected him to speak, but he spoke it nonetheless. "I could picture myself saying those very same words in our fight. As a threat, or even just to say it." His shoulders rolled a bit, showing that the intimidation and chilling intent from her words had done little to freeze up his body. He wasn't scared of her. No, he would likely be more scared of the idea of facing her, but now he was loosened up.
He wanted this to be done and he wouldn't stop until it was. "I treated people as pawns, humans as expendable beasts. I wouldn't kill without reason-- yet my reasons were so trivial I might as well have been a mindless murderer." Despite those words, he was smiling softly at Bulma. "And yet I was able to see through it all, to come back and regain my humanity. So I know damn well there's something in there. A spark, a light. There is someone in you that wants to break through." His lids fell half way.
"A someone that wants to love people again."
311
yarruLast Friday at 12:48 PM
Bulma watched him, biting her tongue as she was tempted to agree. The Tarble of the past would have said it just to say it, and then somehow ‘out of his control’ it would come true. She knew where he was coming from, and she agreed they had switched places in a general sense, but it was only a general sense. They were still two very different people and he was misunderstanding her by wanting to see himself, wanting to know the way out of it. She hadn’t said those words to intimidate him or make him feel small. She hadn’t said them to get a reaction or to prove her superiority in being able to do something so guilt free. She wasn’t saying it to say it, she was attempting an open discord, giving him room for his opinions and listening quite intently just in case he might be right. It was something he could not have done in the past.
It was unfortunate that he was wrong, and she wondered briefly if he had simply flipped the coin and stayed the same at his heart. Would explaining her side of the story mean anything if he already had the preconceived notion that something was wrong with her? Would it really matter who she was now if he didn’t like it? And if not, had he really changed at all?
”What happened when you died?” she asked then, deciding not to immediately rebuke him. ”What did you see?”
She was a protege of Lucifer now and she knew hell well. Some parts of it fed strictly on grief, making you relive your regrets for eternity. Other parts, like where Trunks had gone, didn’t care he didn’t know how to regret and simply ripped him apart over and over again until the evilness was torn completely away. Then there was her hell. They hadn’t known where to put her. Yamma hadn’t signed the paperwork so they dug deep into her brain and pulled out whatever would hurt her the most, and when that stopped hurting moved on to physical torture, until they hit a wall where they didn’t know what to do with her at all.
What had Tarble seen? Did he even go to hell? It was possible he wouldn’t, not because his actions didn’t earn him a place there but because he was in fact guilt free. If it really was a catalyst for his change of heart he might have ended up wandering through the midlands aimlessly until he was revived, stuck between two lives. He might have gone to heaven, favored by his god ki. Anything was possible in death, and she knew that well.
What she didn’t know was whether his afterlife had affected him or if he had simply realized in his helplessness under her daughter’s hand that he had made a wrong turn. Maybe dying was all he needed to think he didn’t want to die again, at least not like that, but her own afterlife made her curious, and maybe whatever he said would make it easier to explain what had happened to her.
522/821
PulseLast Friday at 4:52 PM
She asked what happened when he died and what he saw. It felt like a somewhat odd topic change, yet related all the same. He didn't mind it, even if it was something he hadn't really discussed with anyone.. even his closest loved ones. Tarble let out a gentle sigh. "When I died at the hands of Bulla, I became numb. A lost soul in the tempest of Other World." Tarble moved beside Bulma, taking a seat on the side of one of the tombstones closest to her. He leaned his back against the stone as he kept gazing at her.
"For the first few months, I didn't have a physical body, yet I had retained all my memories. Yamma had sent me to Heaven-- to this day, I believe it was a mix up in paperwork. Something about 'divine power' had gotten me there. But God Ki shouldn't override sins." It was a firm belief. With all the lives he had taken, Tarble believed himself to be a denizen of Hell. Perhaps being in Heaven without a body was the greatest Hell to him. "When I was stressed in my life, I'd train to try and burn it off. To ignore the feelings creeping up in my mind and harden myself. So without that coping mechanism, I began to slow down and think about everything I had done. Some actions were regretful. Others, I had meant with everything in my being." Long winded, sure, but he wanted to give Bulma his honest answer.
"Then after a while, I had suddenly gotten my body back. Yamma seemed to understand my Saiyan will to fight, so I was sent to the Fighting Grid to an eternity of training. At first, I was happy to begin my training. I got drunk on it. But a few months of that went by and I realized I wasn't getting anywhere. I was still thinking. I was still sorting through every action I had done, and I realized I had regretted my life." He looked down at his hands for a moment, only to return to her sapphire gaze that analyzed him. "I realized I didn't want to die the way I did. A murderer, only known for destroying Earth cities and being a cruel Warlord over a warrior race that no one even remotely liked."
That was the paradigm shift of his very being.
"And so I broke free from my Other World prison. My determination to return and live a life I believed worth living was rewarded with the sight of my wife, my best friend and my firstborn son's deaths right in front of my eyes. I'll spare you the details, but.. it was bloody." Yet his eyes didn't waver. He had long understood their deaths. Stopped blaming himself for them. No longer would he blame himself for the actions of others. "I sought a better life. One free of guilt, free of pain. I wanted to unify people, to be the one they look to in the dark.. and ultimately, I wanted to right the wrongs I made in life." He chuckled to himself softly.
"You've been asking all the questions. Let me ask you one, Bulma. What happened to you in Hell to make you shift in such a way? The reactions from your son and Vegeta, they show me you changed radically. I want to know why."
568 / 879
yarruLast Friday at 6:06 PM
Bulma let him sit, lifting one of her knees up and leaning over it to see him better as he spoke. Somewhere along the way her broken left arm had vanished completely. She didn’t need it as she was now, and the wounds were slowly disappearing as well. She wasn’t a ghost anymore after all.
He explained and her motherlike expression returned as she listened to him openly and without judgement. There were no nasty thoughts behind it like that was what he deserved or that he deserved worse. She was attentive to him, and patient, listening to his story as if it were the most important thing in the world to her just then. It was almost easy to forget she had just said she’d kill him without any mark on her conscience. Her expression was kind.
It didn’t soften or empathize however when he explained how his family had died in front of him. It didn’t offer him any more comfort than the knowledge that she heard him and understood him. Even as he explained his goals she didn’t glare at them with skepticism or childish naiveté. She hadn’t told him not to trust others or to love them. She had advised him not to trust her specifically.
He turned the subject on her and she sat up, her expression becoming thoughtful as she became more comfortable showing her emotions, even if they still weren’t very lively.
”Imagine if your wife appeared before you, all the joy you’d have to see her again, and then to have her tell you the worst thing she could ever say, the thing you never wanted her to feel, as an absolute truth your very soul told you to believe,” she offered, looking ahead of her at the graveyard, still thoughtful as she tried to think of the best way to explain it. It showed nothing that she was troubled to remember her experiences.
”I saw the absolute worst in myself and in all the people I loved, so many times over that I sometimes forget what actually happened and what didn’t,” she explained. Tarble’s hell had been his own thoughts. He was forced to live with himself for the first time, and he didn’t like what was there. For Bulma it was similar, only she was forced to see only her bad thoughts, the worst case scenarios, what she feared more than anything else. Again, and again, and again...
She looked back to him but for the second time her face seemed to betray sense. Her expression had been almost warm when she said she could kill him, and this time she smiled. For the first time she seemed quite pleased despite describing what would be anyone’s hell.
”I still love them,” she said calm and true, before looking forward again, still smiling and gently swaying her feet against the stone. ”I love people. Everything about them, good and bad, more than I did before, but I realized something...” she said, reading the names on the stones and remembering each of them and the lives she knew about.
”It doesn’t matter if people hate me. It doesn’t matter if I’m the one to hurt them. People are evolving constantly,” she continued before looking back to him again. You are evolving.” It wasn’t meant as a compliment, though in its sincerity it could be taken as one. She believed him that he had changed and was changing, and that type of belief was touching, but the words before it still remained.
”And I want to see it,” she explained in the end. ”Whatever it takes.” Her words were delivered lightly and yet there was something chilling to them again, as the level of how far she’d go remained unseen, though she offered him one in the end: ”Even if it means slicing you up.”
642/1463
Tarble (Champion 3, Combat Rune, VR Octagon): 879
Bulma (Human, Combat Rune, VR Octagon): 1,463
Bulma’s head tilted slightly, a habit she hadn’t lost even through hell of expressing her interest, curiosity, or cynicism. Often it was a mix of the three, like now, but she didn’t hide it from him. Her face still stayed impassive, refusing to show too much, but she was listening just as carefully.
He stepped towards her and her gaze slid down to the space between them, immediately gauging it as if he might be a threat. She was always careful about distance before she died, memorizing the length of any weapon she picked up as well as her opponent’s range in a few quick tests. She knew Tarble’s well after that one fight. Her memory for the small details was always strangely on point while other things faded away quite easily. She watched him cross it, her gaze shifting back up to his face, and the once sad smile remained but it reflected a different emotion in her eyes now, only that too was difficult to put a finger on.
”No,” she said gently, a hint of her former self sliding out with her almost motherly nature, and yet her next words were far too chilling even as her gentleness remained softly breaking the news. ”I’m saying that I could slice you open in your sleep and parade your head on a stick without losing any.”
It seemed they had switched places. Tarble had found his humanity whereas Bulma had lost hers in the traditional sense. She didn’t quite see it that way, but it was a universal opinion for what she had become. Violence, murder, death, torture...they were all tools of the trade and she owed her murderer that much honesty. Death had humbled both of them, but the effects of such revelations were extremely different.
299
PulseLast Friday at 3:18 AM
Tarble stared at her in that moment, hanging on her every word. It was a threat-- no, hell, it wasn't even really a threat. It was just a statement of fact. The woman that sat in front of him now was not the Bulma from the past. It was not the soft human that cared for her fellow man on Earth and Capsule Corporation. All that was left in the wake of her murder was a hollow soul, one that treated murder as a trivial thing. And in the wake of that unfortunate revelation, he realized.. she was a lot like how he used to be.
Why did he hate that?
"I think I'm beginning to understand why you tried to kill me." A statement she likely might not have expected him to speak, but he spoke it nonetheless. "I could picture myself saying those very same words in our fight. As a threat, or even just to say it." His shoulders rolled a bit, showing that the intimidation and chilling intent from her words had done little to freeze up his body. He wasn't scared of her. No, he would likely be more scared of the idea of facing her, but now he was loosened up.
He wanted this to be done and he wouldn't stop until it was. "I treated people as pawns, humans as expendable beasts. I wouldn't kill without reason-- yet my reasons were so trivial I might as well have been a mindless murderer." Despite those words, he was smiling softly at Bulma. "And yet I was able to see through it all, to come back and regain my humanity. So I know damn well there's something in there. A spark, a light. There is someone in you that wants to break through." His lids fell half way.
"A someone that wants to love people again."
311
yarruLast Friday at 12:48 PM
Bulma watched him, biting her tongue as she was tempted to agree. The Tarble of the past would have said it just to say it, and then somehow ‘out of his control’ it would come true. She knew where he was coming from, and she agreed they had switched places in a general sense, but it was only a general sense. They were still two very different people and he was misunderstanding her by wanting to see himself, wanting to know the way out of it. She hadn’t said those words to intimidate him or make him feel small. She hadn’t said them to get a reaction or to prove her superiority in being able to do something so guilt free. She wasn’t saying it to say it, she was attempting an open discord, giving him room for his opinions and listening quite intently just in case he might be right. It was something he could not have done in the past.
It was unfortunate that he was wrong, and she wondered briefly if he had simply flipped the coin and stayed the same at his heart. Would explaining her side of the story mean anything if he already had the preconceived notion that something was wrong with her? Would it really matter who she was now if he didn’t like it? And if not, had he really changed at all?
”What happened when you died?” she asked then, deciding not to immediately rebuke him. ”What did you see?”
She was a protege of Lucifer now and she knew hell well. Some parts of it fed strictly on grief, making you relive your regrets for eternity. Other parts, like where Trunks had gone, didn’t care he didn’t know how to regret and simply ripped him apart over and over again until the evilness was torn completely away. Then there was her hell. They hadn’t known where to put her. Yamma hadn’t signed the paperwork so they dug deep into her brain and pulled out whatever would hurt her the most, and when that stopped hurting moved on to physical torture, until they hit a wall where they didn’t know what to do with her at all.
What had Tarble seen? Did he even go to hell? It was possible he wouldn’t, not because his actions didn’t earn him a place there but because he was in fact guilt free. If it really was a catalyst for his change of heart he might have ended up wandering through the midlands aimlessly until he was revived, stuck between two lives. He might have gone to heaven, favored by his god ki. Anything was possible in death, and she knew that well.
What she didn’t know was whether his afterlife had affected him or if he had simply realized in his helplessness under her daughter’s hand that he had made a wrong turn. Maybe dying was all he needed to think he didn’t want to die again, at least not like that, but her own afterlife made her curious, and maybe whatever he said would make it easier to explain what had happened to her.
522/821
PulseLast Friday at 4:52 PM
She asked what happened when he died and what he saw. It felt like a somewhat odd topic change, yet related all the same. He didn't mind it, even if it was something he hadn't really discussed with anyone.. even his closest loved ones. Tarble let out a gentle sigh. "When I died at the hands of Bulla, I became numb. A lost soul in the tempest of Other World." Tarble moved beside Bulma, taking a seat on the side of one of the tombstones closest to her. He leaned his back against the stone as he kept gazing at her.
"For the first few months, I didn't have a physical body, yet I had retained all my memories. Yamma had sent me to Heaven-- to this day, I believe it was a mix up in paperwork. Something about 'divine power' had gotten me there. But God Ki shouldn't override sins." It was a firm belief. With all the lives he had taken, Tarble believed himself to be a denizen of Hell. Perhaps being in Heaven without a body was the greatest Hell to him. "When I was stressed in my life, I'd train to try and burn it off. To ignore the feelings creeping up in my mind and harden myself. So without that coping mechanism, I began to slow down and think about everything I had done. Some actions were regretful. Others, I had meant with everything in my being." Long winded, sure, but he wanted to give Bulma his honest answer.
"Then after a while, I had suddenly gotten my body back. Yamma seemed to understand my Saiyan will to fight, so I was sent to the Fighting Grid to an eternity of training. At first, I was happy to begin my training. I got drunk on it. But a few months of that went by and I realized I wasn't getting anywhere. I was still thinking. I was still sorting through every action I had done, and I realized I had regretted my life." He looked down at his hands for a moment, only to return to her sapphire gaze that analyzed him. "I realized I didn't want to die the way I did. A murderer, only known for destroying Earth cities and being a cruel Warlord over a warrior race that no one even remotely liked."
That was the paradigm shift of his very being.
"And so I broke free from my Other World prison. My determination to return and live a life I believed worth living was rewarded with the sight of my wife, my best friend and my firstborn son's deaths right in front of my eyes. I'll spare you the details, but.. it was bloody." Yet his eyes didn't waver. He had long understood their deaths. Stopped blaming himself for them. No longer would he blame himself for the actions of others. "I sought a better life. One free of guilt, free of pain. I wanted to unify people, to be the one they look to in the dark.. and ultimately, I wanted to right the wrongs I made in life." He chuckled to himself softly.
"You've been asking all the questions. Let me ask you one, Bulma. What happened to you in Hell to make you shift in such a way? The reactions from your son and Vegeta, they show me you changed radically. I want to know why."
568 / 879
yarruLast Friday at 6:06 PM
Bulma let him sit, lifting one of her knees up and leaning over it to see him better as he spoke. Somewhere along the way her broken left arm had vanished completely. She didn’t need it as she was now, and the wounds were slowly disappearing as well. She wasn’t a ghost anymore after all.
He explained and her motherlike expression returned as she listened to him openly and without judgement. There were no nasty thoughts behind it like that was what he deserved or that he deserved worse. She was attentive to him, and patient, listening to his story as if it were the most important thing in the world to her just then. It was almost easy to forget she had just said she’d kill him without any mark on her conscience. Her expression was kind.
It didn’t soften or empathize however when he explained how his family had died in front of him. It didn’t offer him any more comfort than the knowledge that she heard him and understood him. Even as he explained his goals she didn’t glare at them with skepticism or childish naiveté. She hadn’t told him not to trust others or to love them. She had advised him not to trust her specifically.
He turned the subject on her and she sat up, her expression becoming thoughtful as she became more comfortable showing her emotions, even if they still weren’t very lively.
”Imagine if your wife appeared before you, all the joy you’d have to see her again, and then to have her tell you the worst thing she could ever say, the thing you never wanted her to feel, as an absolute truth your very soul told you to believe,” she offered, looking ahead of her at the graveyard, still thoughtful as she tried to think of the best way to explain it. It showed nothing that she was troubled to remember her experiences.
”I saw the absolute worst in myself and in all the people I loved, so many times over that I sometimes forget what actually happened and what didn’t,” she explained. Tarble’s hell had been his own thoughts. He was forced to live with himself for the first time, and he didn’t like what was there. For Bulma it was similar, only she was forced to see only her bad thoughts, the worst case scenarios, what she feared more than anything else. Again, and again, and again...
She looked back to him but for the second time her face seemed to betray sense. Her expression had been almost warm when she said she could kill him, and this time she smiled. For the first time she seemed quite pleased despite describing what would be anyone’s hell.
”I still love them,” she said calm and true, before looking forward again, still smiling and gently swaying her feet against the stone. ”I love people. Everything about them, good and bad, more than I did before, but I realized something...” she said, reading the names on the stones and remembering each of them and the lives she knew about.
”It doesn’t matter if people hate me. It doesn’t matter if I’m the one to hurt them. People are evolving constantly,” she continued before looking back to him again. You are evolving.” It wasn’t meant as a compliment, though in its sincerity it could be taken as one. She believed him that he had changed and was changing, and that type of belief was touching, but the words before it still remained.
”And I want to see it,” she explained in the end. ”Whatever it takes.” Her words were delivered lightly and yet there was something chilling to them again, as the level of how far she’d go remained unseen, though she offered him one in the end: ”Even if it means slicing you up.”
642/1463
Tarble (Champion 3, Combat Rune, VR Octagon): 879
Bulma (Human, Combat Rune, VR Octagon): 1,463
