A Pleasant Chat

If there was one word Taori could use to describe Lottus now that he had finally met the man, it would probably be... 'Extra.' Taori had met plenty of wrathful Saiyans in his day, but Lottus carried himself in a way that seemed a step about just wrathful. He seemed like he just hated everything around him. He recognized Taori quite quickly, and, after a brief display of force that sent all the undergrowth around them flying away and flattening down into a convenient circle around them, he made a few idle threats about all the brutal ways in which he was going to kill Taori. Taori, though, stared blankly at Lottus for a moment, then let out a snort.

"Alright, pal, whatever you say," he replied, crossing his arms. "You know, I can set flowers on fire and beat up folks who are a fraction of my power level, too. If you're trying to intimidate me, it won't work. Try anything and I'll just instantly vanish myself outta here." From what Amara had described of Lottus' power, it was something incredible, but not so incredible that Taori wouldn't be able to at least survive long enough to activate his lamp and get himself out of there before Lottus could kill him.

Would probably hurt like hell to get punched by him, though, so if he could somehow avoid that, it'd be preferable.

"I can tell you're not a fan of mine," he continued, "Though I'm not here to win you over, or anything like that. Instead..." Taori reached behind him into a small sack he'd brought with him - thankfully, any small objects he had on him were also transported with him into Hell. Though, if they weren't, then he'd probably have popped in fully nude, which would have made this meeting... Awkward. From it, he pulled out a bottle of a store brand of beer, and then tossed it over towards Lottus. "Dunno what your brand is, so I just grabbed mine," he explained as he pulled out a second bottle and popped the cap off.

"I'm more here to get a sense of... What you're all about, I guess," Taori explained. "I don't think we ever met while you were alive. So... What'd the Tuffles do to piss you off so badly you somehow triggered an ancient legend? Pretty sure the war was over by the time you went and attacked them."

Well... Good! Taori wasn't sure if Lottus would take his drink and chat offer, or just immediately start blasting at him. If he'd chosen the latter, then this trip really wouldn't have been worth all the hassle. Taori took a sip of his own drink, and while the flavor was more of a muted one compared to some of the stronger alcohol that was out there, Taori preferred it, personally. Lottus took a moment to mull over Taori's questions before giving them proper responses, and they were certainly some kinds of responses. The king's brows furrowed slightly at hearing them, though he let Lottus finish before he gave any reply of his own to them.

"Put off an inevitable second conflict, huh?" Taori replied. He took another swig of his drink, swallowed, and then crossed his arms, one hand still gripped around the neck of the bottle as he replied. "Listen, Lottus. As long as there exist at least two people in the universe at the same time, there'll always be an inevitable future conflict. That's sort of how things work, if you hadn't noticed." Taori didn't want to get too aggressive in his manner towards Lottus, for obvious reasons, but he'd never been one to easily hold back what he had on his mind in full.

"But what I do have to consider is how worth it it is to keep pressing something. Do you really think choosing to strike down their leader and occupy their capital city by force was going to lead to less conflict in the future?" Taori scoffed, and then shook his head before continuing again. "Plenty of them had already escaped by the time our forces arrived. What, do you think they'd have all just shit their pants and ran away forever because I blew up some pink chick? The last hundred years or so of fighting suggest otherwise."

There was a brief silence as Taori pondered what to say next, all the while studying Lottus' face to gauge his reaction. "You know, I think you're just hiding behind that as an excuse. I think what you're really thinking is that you wished we'd dealt the 'final blow' so that the fighting could continue. I think you're one of those types who, when you're not fighting, you just can't find any purpose to your actions." Maybe that was a bit too cutting. Though, as usual, Taori couldn't keep what he was thinking to himself all too well. 

Taori had been bouncing between expecting Lottus to just laugh him off and say he had no idea what he was talking about, or immediately power up and start attacking him. Most Saiyans could be lobbed into those two categories when someone was standing up to them. To his surprise, though, after Lottus thought about things for a few moments, his response was mostly tame and measured. A far cry from the vicious monster Taori had seen in the footage Amara had showed him, for sure.

As Lottus went along, Taori frowned. Perhaps he'd had Lottus wrong, at least partially. He'd have to verify it once he got back to the living realm, of course, but if Lottus had truly warned the Tuffle civilians ahead of time to evacuate... Well, that hardly made him a monster with a pure desire to destroy the innocent. And, apparently, he'd been betrayed by someone named Cato. Taori supposed Cato must have had something more of a moral conscience about attacking even an evacuated city, but he could empathize with Lottus.

"I did something similar myself," he replied, "The Tuffle civilians were warned we'd be advancing on them and hide time to evacuate while their defenders remained. Of course, they never spared us that same mercy whenever they struck us." Any Tuffle attack on Sadala or another Saiyan settlement hadn't come with any warning. Was Taori still bitter about that? ...No, not really. But he didn't forget about it, either.

"I'm sure you think of me as some pompous asshole who lives a life of luxury," he continued after Lottus had finished. "But I've only been in this position for about a year or so, now. I doubt you'd have heard of me either, before that. I was a low-class warrior too, back in the day. Had a crush on this elite's daughter, but I was too weak for him to even consider letting me offer her my hand. So, off to the trenches I went to prove myself." 

Taori took another sip of his drink, which was a bit less than half full now, and then paused and looked at the label on the bottle after he finished, a look of grim reminiscence on his face as he put himself back in the mindset of those days on the front lines. "You don't need to tell me about the horrors of Destron. I saw it firsthand, for years. Lot of friends I went into battle with never made it out. They choked to death on their own melting flesh and boiling blood. Some of them right in front of me. Some of 'em are probably around here somewhere, but I can't, uh..."

There were a few moments of silence, during which Taori simply stared quietly at his bottle, until he finally glanced back up at Lottus. "You lose someone? In the war, I mean," he asked. "I can't imagine you acted purely because you figured it was the pragmatic thing to do."

"Yeah?" Taori replied as Lottus revealed they had actually gone into battle together a handful of times, back in the day. He couldn't say he really remembered Lottus specifically, but he had no reason to believe the man was lying. "My wife's battle power is also two thousand. Mine was around three thousand when I left the frontlines. Bit above average for someone of our rank, I suppose." Nowadays, a battle power of three thousand was worth nothing. Though Taori was hoping perhaps they could start finding some common ground now that they had discovered their shared experiences in the war, Lottus wasn't done speaking. 

Taori listened quietly, his expression one of stone as Lottus recounted everything he had lost, gained, and then lost again throughout the war against the Tuffles. With the way Lottus spoke of Rapini, he clearly had feelings for her that went deeper than the sort one had for just their fellow soldiers. And she'd been ripped away from him by Destron. Though it was selfish of him to think so, Taori was glad Alpinia's father had kept her away from the frontlines by pulling some strings of nobility. She could very well have shared the same fate as Rapini if she had been sent to fight alongside the rest of the Saiyans.

And if Lottus losing Rapini had turned him into this, what might that have meant if Taori had lost Alpinia?

Not that Lottus' struggles ended there, anyway. It seemed as though every time the dead Saiyan had found allies to place his trust in, they had either died or turned their backs on him eventually, until finally, he, too, had died. So, it was quite obvious to Taori why Lottus was, in the simplest of terms, angry at just about everything and everyone. "Hmm," Taori quietly thought to himself once Lottus had finished with his outburst, allowing the echo of Lottus' voice against the rest of the woods to fade completely before speaking himself.

"Have you looked? For Rapini, I mean," Taori asked. "Whether she ended up here or upstairs, she's bound to be around somewhere. I don't know a whole lot about the afterlife, but I do know it takes longer than a few decades for souls to disappear from it." From the little he'd gleaned from Ward and Amara, souls could live on for quite some time after they had died. Eventually, though, they'd be recycled into new life... If what he'd heard was true. "Maybe talking to her will give you some kind of closure. Unless you think she wouldn't want to talk to the 'monster Super Saiyan,' in which case... Get your head out of your ass and go talk to her."

Taori then idly wondered if Yangcong of all people was around here, somewhere. He seriously considered asking Lottus to, if he was going to continue to beat down on the denizens of Hell, seek the man out and give him a pounding worth remembering, but decided against it. For the moment. Dead friends and foes aside, though...

"When I get back to the living world," Taori explained, "I'm going to be hosting a summit. I'll call on the Tuffle Chancellor - Cheri still, I'm pretty sure - and demand of her that all Destron and research relating to it must be destroyed if she wants diplomatic relations between our peoples to remain peaceful in the long term. Because you're right - eventually, someone's going to open that box again if we don't get rid of the box entirely."

Taori snorted slightly when Lottus commented on how much he hated it when annoying people - presumably like Taori - made good points, and that Taori had at least earned a smidge of his respect. Taori wasn't sure what good the respect of someone reviled across the Kingdom would do for him, but he supposed he'd take it.

Lottus may have been more cynical about the state of the world than most, but that didn't mean he was wholly ignorant of it as well. He explained that Destron had found its way off of Plant as well, into various black markets and seedy underbellies of the galaxy. However, that information only made one thing clear as day to Taori: Even if Lottus' attack had succeeded in an objective sense, there was no way even he could have truly removed Destron from the galaxy at this point. The moment it had hit other planets, it was too late to stop. It didn't really matter how many planets Lottus wanted to raze to the ground.

At piecing this together, Taori just very lightly smirked while Lottus listed off his messages for everyone he wanted Taori to deliver. He'd started having some doubts as to whether or not Lottus had truly deserved to die for what he did... But if that was his endgame, then it seemed it really was for the best. 

"Right, Vocado is a loser, Amara will see you soon, Cato is forgiven, and Nasu is a prick," Taori stated with a nod of his head along each beat. "And I should get our people off that planet." He wasn't so sure about that last one, admittedly. He'd heard Amara express similar sentiments of her own, but was Plant truly so hopeless of a cause? Taori felt he was going to need a lot more convincing on that front to think so himself. He was kind of surprised to be hearing that from Lottus of all people, really. Amara wasn't quite so devoted to the Saiyans herself, her blood split between them and the Tuffles, but Lottus was a full-blooded Saiyan warrior who had fought in the war on the front lines. 

"I'm not so sure we need to leave just yet, though," Taori added after a beat. "As many mistakes as our former Kings and Queens made in landing on Plant and starting this war in the first place, at this point, it's our home. Might not be perfect, but I hardly think it's beyond saving. I like to think all the Saiyans who fought and died in the war at least died for something. And I don't think either completely exterminating the Tuffles or abandoning the planet is that something. Maybe we still have to figure that part out."

Surely there had to have been some reason for all of the strife in the end, other than an uneasy stalemate on a damaged planet. They just needed to figure out what that was. Aside from that, though, something had crossed Taori's mind as Lottus insisted this wasn't the end of him. "Anyway... Did you know that Amara was able to escape her own death at Yangcong's hands and return to the living world?" Taori studied Lottus' facial expression to gauge his response as he continued, "Just thinking... If you can figure that out, maybe you can drag that Rapini along with you. I'd love to meet her."

"Eh... I'm sentimental," Taori half-joked as Lottus brought up the dire state of the planet. He supposed if they were going to try to make Plant work, some environmental reclamation projects were probably in order. His original tenure as King had been so heavily focused on the war effort and reparations directly afterwards, he hadn't had the time to think much about that sort of thing. "And I don't give up on things very easily. I know the Tuffle Chancellor has been looking into Destron cleaning technology. It's their planet too, for the time being, so they have every incentive to help clean it back up." Saiyan technology wasn't nearly as advanced as Tuffle, so reaching across the planet for help... Well, it might be a good place to start, at the very least.

And as for that feast Lottus was suggesting... "Sure, why not?" Taori replied. "Long as you can promise to be on your best behavior, and all. That means no leveling any cities." Did he really expect Lottus to find a way to break out of Hell the same way Amara had broken out of Heaven? Not exactly. But he couldn't discount the chance entirely. And while they were getting along well enough and just talking now, Taori couldn't count on Lottus being as civil if they met again on the surface. Right now, aside from calling on Nasu, the Kingdom didn't have a whole lot it could do if a Super Saiyan turned its wrath against it.

Speaking of which, Lottus finally asked Taori for the real reason why he'd come all this way, which prompted a smirk from the King. "Heh, you think I wouldn't come all this way just to chat?" He paused for a moment, folding his arms. "Well, you're right. I think you know the real reason I'm here too, anyway."

There was another brief pause until Taori figured he may as well just say it. "I want to see it for myself," he stated. "The Super Saiyan. I know I could just flag down Nasu and ask him, but yours is... Different. It was the first. I've heard Amara describe your aura is suffocating in its power. And you know what they say - seeing is believing." Taori took a small step back, and gestured as if he were giving Lottus the floor. "Also, you seem like the kind of guy who'd be dying to show it off to anyone he got the chance to, anyway. Unless you can't, down here."