From Lavender to Spider Lilies [OPEN]

Thread PL: 8,000
Items: Healthy Bean | Energy Drink | Sparkling Water

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The past week had been interesting for Yogu. He'd gone from wanted ex-convict to a double-wanted ex-convict anti-registration... guy. It was a mouthful, and he hated just about every minute of his existence now. First, he tried hiding out on Papaya Island, but that ended badly. As it turns out, you shouldn't go running around a small and highly populated area when every cop can pull up your name, face, and record at any time. So instead of playing cops and robbers he decided it would be much better to hide in this little slice of lifeless land, far from where any sane person would spend their day-to-day. With any luck, he could sit around and train until all this accords nonsense blew over. He still wasn't sure what side he was on in that whole conflict, but the world wasn't giving him much of a choice. So it seemed much smarter to just let everyone else fight it out and decide. All he knew was that there were no heroes or winners in that argument.

Currently, Yogu was wandering aimlessly through the wastes, trying to find a good spot to hunker down for the night. If he didn't move every day coyotes would come and that wouldn't be pretty. He found that out the hard way. Aside from wildlife trouble, he had been getting better at life outside the city. Thanks to his time out on Mount Paozu with a certain talking purple dinosaur (who was NOT Barney), he'd learned to hunt and start fires, so now it was just a matter of finding a comfortable spot that wouldn't let him freeze to death if he couldn't find wood that night. He'd made it to a much flatter and open part of the deadlands and off on the hazy horizon he saw a great big something. He wasn't sure what, but it stuck out from the rest of the landscape, and there was nothing like it in the miles and miles of land he'd trekked.

He spent a good while marching over there to get a better look, "Finally, somethin' exciting! Maybe it's some little scrap hut, beds and everything!" It had been so long since he had eaten anything other than game! He wasn't above breaking and entering if they had some grocery store food to eat. Fully convincing himself that this would be some oasis of refrigerated foods and soft beds, Yogu start sprinting across the desert to get there, exerting way more energy than he actually had.

While he was on his jog, something in the sky caught his eye. The silhouette of a person! Just gliding through the air like a plane! He comes to a slow stop, staring up in shock. He knew people could do that stuff, it just wasn't any less jarring seeing it in person! Something compelled him to hit the deck, so he did, diving into the sand and suppressing his energy just in case.

It didn't look like they spotted him, their attention focused way more on whatever it was out there that was so shiny. When they touched down and disappeared from sight Yogu crawled back to his feet and started up his march again. He wouldn't be deterred by flying people! Not if there was a semi-comfortable place for him to stay the night!

By the time Yogu got over there, the size of this chunk of scrap metal became way more apparent. It looked like it could be used as a makeshift shelter, it would just take a little spiffing up! He made note of the strange purple symbol, but didn't offer up more than a shrug as a comment. Sure enough, whoever that was he saw in the sky was inside whatever this weird structure was, and way stronger than him. He was willing to gamble on their friendliness, Yogu was a little desperate to interact with a person after being out there alone for so long. So when Kanna stepped outside, it'd be hard not to spot Yogu sitting crisscrossed on the ground an awkward distance away. He'd raise a hand in greeting, "Heyo! Don't blow me up or nothin', I'm just looking for a place to stay the night! You mind if I crash here?" If only he knew what a poor choice of words that was.

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Wahahaha

Total WC: 724

"Shipwreck?" This thing sure didn't look like a boat. Turns out that whoever this lady was, she didn't own the place. Just looking around for things to steal. That probably meant that any food or goodies in the place were picked clean. Looking at the state of the structure, he had to assume that people had taken whatever wasn't nailed down to the odd-shaped ship. It was also hard to believe that this person, who he assumed to just be some desert bandit or the like, found gold in there. But seeing was believing, and he had seen that golden glint in the burlap sack she was carrying. He fell for this prank hook, line, and sinker.

Yogu hops to his feet and, trying to ignore the weird funk coming off of her, moves past the other thief and stops at the entrance, "Yeah, sure lady, I'll totally let ya know." He had no intentions of actually sharing whatever he found. It was rough out there in the wasteland! He deserved a little treat for himself. He steps inside, and the unmistakable waft of rotting corpse hits his nose, causing his pointed ears to twitch. Well, it would be unmistakable if he'd ever been around a dead body before, "The hell is that?" He shouts back out the door, "You really gotta take a bath or something! You leave a stink cloud wherever ya go lady!" Some people just didn't know what hygiene was! Like he was one to talk though, he hadn't had a shower in weeks being out in the wastes. Looking around in the dark, he realizes that she meant a spaceship and not a ship ship. "Yeah, that makes a lot more sense." Giving up on scrounging through the dark he draws out some ki into his hand to use as a light and for a moment he just looks around, unable to understand just what he was looking at. A few seconds later and it clicks, especially when he realized his foot was on someone.


A half-second later and Yogu was out the door and back in the desert. There was no holding back what was coming. He hunches over behind a rock and starts to hurl. "Aw, man, I almost tripped over one of 'em!" Yeah, that was something that'd be burned in his head for the rest of his life. "That's gonna be a lot of sleepless nights..." His mind was racing, and he really didn't know how to process what he saw. Shock had completely overtaken him. He stumbles farther away from the entrance, trying and failing to get the stench out of his nose as he gagged. He started piecing together the story here from what little the girl had told him. Crashed ship, no survivors, big mess. "Where the hell did you find gold in there?!" He can't stop himself from dropping to his hands and knees and retching some more. "You're really sick, to go screwin' with me like that ya know!"

If he hadn't lost his childhood innocence after everything that had gone down the past year, it was gone now. He wouldn't be going back in there, robbing an abandoned building was one thing, but grave robbing was a whole other beast. After all of that, Yogu knew how to feel about it now. Unbridled rage seemed to be what won out, "So what, you just go around picking people's stuff off their bodies?! Not even gonna give 'em a burial?! The hell's wrong with you?!" He thought to get up and throw a punch her way, but decided on waiting to hear what she said. For all he knew, she caused that ship to crash to loot it! Even if she deserved a Kamehameha to the face for that trick, he needed to remain calm and in control of himself. He told himself that he was just sticking to what Kore had been teaching him, but the truth was that this grave robbing crazy lady scared the shit out of him. Who knew what twisted thing she'd do next!

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Total WC: 1,413

This lady was a real piece of work! She just didn't seem to care about all of the dead people just a couple of feet away from him. He knew there were bad people out there, but could someone really be that cold? "That doesn't mean... You can't just-" What was the point? Yelling at her wasn't going to change her whole lifestyle around. She would keep robbing corpses all she wanted, and he couldn't do a thing about it. He sighs, clearly defeated and overwhelmed by everything that had happened in the past minute. "Ya know what, screw this!" Getting back on his feet and throwing his hands up in the air in surprise at the sheer lack of care this lady had, Yogu tries to find the resolve to go back in there to bury them. They all deserved that much after being desecrated like that. He didn't need a fight right now. Not while those people in there needed someone to take care of them. Especially now that he knew there really was an afterlife thanks to Kore, he felt that he should do his part to help them move on. They didn't deserve to lay there and rot in such a sad place.

He started walking back over, pinching his nose to block out the stench. Yogu felt pretty good about how he was controlling himself. It was close, but no fight had been started. Then something about what the girl said next really set Yogu off. Was it the way she chastised him for not immediately recognizing the smell of a dead body? Was it her calling him city boy earlier? Or maybe it was the realization of how easy he'd had it, not knowing what the smell of a rotting corpse was. Of never having to see someone die. Of never having to kill.

Whatever it was (probably that last one), Yogu whips back around and without thinking fires a Kamehameha right at her! No words, no charge up, it was just as sudden for him as it was for her. "SHUT UP!" The attack ended as quickly as it started, more of a warning shot to cut it out than anything. "Alright miss tough guy that sniffs corpses! What would you have done if you found a survivor in there, huh?!" He was red in the face now, absolutely furious. "Someone that needed help. Would you have just looted their friends and left them to die too?! Just cause people die?! What kinda crap is that?!" For a moment Yogu felt that he might've overstepped. He should be trying to stop things from boiling over into a fight, especially when he was the sole aggressor! Then he remembered that this lady tricked him into stumbling on a bunch of rotted, brutalized corpses and he had to stop himself again from rushing forward and throwing haymakers like he so desperately wanted to. The kid was basically begging for her to try something now.

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In a rage Yogu shoots a Medium Attack || Kamehameha at Kanna to process some of that good ol trauma he just got! 4,000 damage is coming her way. This tech has the homing variant.
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PL: 6/6 -> 2/6
MP: 0/6 -> 2/6
Damage: 0%
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Total WC: 1,912

Yogu had enough screaming, and the dust was settling after his attack. "So? Got anythin' to say for yourself?!" It didn't seem like it. Mostly because they couldn't speak on account of the lack of head. Wait WHAT?! "O-Oh..." That was all that Yogu could manage at the moment. He looks down at his hands for a moment, noting that he'd never seen them shake so bad. It felt weird, how calm he was. This wasn't the reaction he expected out of himself. His mind didn't race. There were no thoughts. His body moved on its' own, stumbling over to the body. "That can't..." But it was. The girl was laying there headless. He drops to his knees, "I barely even charged it..." This just made no sense. He had felt that girl's energy, and this should've been like a bug bite! But that energy was gone, the only thing showing the girl was here was this... Which looked worse than some of the guys he saw in there.

Now that he was close enough and what just happened started to feel real, now his mind begins to go wild. First a building in central city, then a prison where he beat up a bunch of innocent people to get out. And now, he'd killed. It just kept escalating. "When will it stop?" was the question he kept repeating in his head.

For the second time in his life, that inhuman gravelly voice in his head spoke. The same one he heard on Papaya Island, accompanied by those eyes he saw staring back at him whenever Yogu so much as blinked.

Yogu felt breathing down his neck, and that unmistakable anxious tingling sensation all down his back that you get when somehow you know someone’s sneaking up behind you. He rises back to his feet and slowly turns around to face this thing that had been tormenting him all week! But he finds nothing. Kanna sees and hears none of this monster, only Yogu's reactions, other than perhaps the faintest whisper in the wind.

“This… It’s all a load of shit! Just some desert mirage!” He turns back around to look at the graverobber’s corpse, hoping that just like the creature he swore had been creeping up behind him, it would disappear. But there it was. “I’ve finally lost it… Oh Kais, I’m so sorry…” His voice wavers and cracks from the emotional and mental strain that was now completely overwhelming him. He should’ve gone straight to Kore and begged for help after that night on Papaya.

There were so many warning signs that he just ignored and he didn’t even know why he did it. “Just so I could pretend I was fine…” And now an innocent life was taken. Sure, they might’ve disagreed and Yogu thought she was a little harsh, but murder was way worse! Now Yogu started imagining the life she led, how harsh and unforgiving it must’ve been for her to resort to scrounging dead bodies to survive.

He sits back down, knees to his chest, rocking back and forth as he lamented his life’s choices. Yogu became the thing he feared he would most. “I never wanted this! I-I just wanted to help people!” He screams at the sky. But he knew not a single shinjin up there heard what he said, and even if they did they wouldn’t have cared. He couldn't blame them, only himself for this nightmare. He was a damned soul.

Or at least he would be if this whole thing wasn’t a big joke (if you could even call it that, at this point, it had crossed the line into full-on torture) at his expense. Hey, someone getting a kick out of this was better than someone being killed though! Other than the people on that ship who were still very dead. Yogu moves to start burying the fake Kanna, digging into the sand and dirt with his bare hands.

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Total WC: 2,590

Yogu didn't get too far into digging out the grave with his hands. For one, the lack of a shovel was definitely causing complications. Secondly, he completely broke down into a sobbing crying mess like two minutes in. "Oh Kais..." He still couldn't get the stench of rot out of his nose, and his pointed ears wouldn't stop twitching in reaction to the smell.

His life as he knew it was over. For the second time in his life. He couldn't even begin to imagine how Kore would react. Then again how well did the shinjin know him? They were basically strangers. Yogu was a stranger to everyone, but now he was a dangerous menace. All he could think of himself in that moment was a power-drunk monster. So many people he'd met recently had put so much faith in him to figure this out. To change and improve. But there was no going back from something like this. He'd only gotten worse the more guidance that was given to him. Like he was intentionally doing the opposite of whatever advice he'd been given. His mind goes blank, unable to try to process what was going on in front of him. "Just keep digging." The smell really was unforgettable, now that he knew it. Yogu wasn't sure if he could ever clean it off of himself.

As if his life hadn't gone from a crappy road trip movie to a terrifying nightmare horror movie enough, the girl he thinks he had just killed appears again, a few feet away from the body. He looks to the body then back at her, at first dazed and confused, thinking it was a desert mirage like that voice. But this vision of the girl wouldn't shake. Almost as if it was real. That couldn't be the case though, right? Ghosts couldn't be real! And if they were, then the thing that Yogu was most scared of was standing right in front of him. Nothing filled him with more existential dread than ghosts. zombies and other various undead had never given him the willies, but nothing terrified him more than ghosts. The look in this ghost mirage's eyes was so real. He couldn't believe it was a trick from his scattered mind anymore. Unable to answer the ghost's question, he screams at it. "N-No, you're not real! None of this is real!" Careful with your words there, Yogu, you're starting to sound nuts. The murder wasn't helping his case.

It's face began to melt off while approaching the kid, and that's when he had about enough. Yogu starts randomly firing ki blasts at it, in some vain attempt to make it go away. The blasts passed right through the specter, because it wasn't real, but how was he supposed to know that?! It was ghosts! They were unpredictable. The ki blasts whizz past an out-of-sight Kanna's head. He looks back to the corpse, only to find it rapidly decaying and falling apart until it was just as bad as the bodies in the ship. Yogu's jaw falls to the floor and he goes to scream, but it gets caught in his throat. The visceral horror before him was just too much for the boy, and he finally cracked. Not in some massive explosion of power or something like that, he curled up into a ball of the ground, tucking his head between his knees and his chest and shaking uncontrollably. "Take me anywhere- anywhere but here, please...!" He begged to no one in particular. Yogu couldn't take the torture. He truly wanted the ghost to kill him, or something of the sort. He didn't know. Whatever it would take for him to wake up from this nightmare. "I'm sorry grandpa... I'm so sorry..." He said between wailing sobs. Then he sensed another energy approaching and his heart sank. Was it someone coming this way to check out the abandoned ship? What would he do if they came upon him, and this body. The questions they'd ask. For a split second he considered having to kill again, and it made him sick to his stomach again.

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Total WC: 3,281