01-09-2011, 08:38 PM
“Look, it isn’t that we think you’re weak or anything,” Boomstick prefaced, leaning back to look at Juno, who was sulking in the back seat of their hover car, “We just… have our doubts about your abilities, since you’re, you know, kind of scrawny.”
The half-Saiyan grunted, rolling his eyes.
He didn’t particularly like Boomstick and Rex. Sure, they were funny, and he could joke around with them, and get along with them fine, under normal circumstances; but in wartime, they got presumptuous and overconfident — well, Juno would show them what was what, that was certain.
Who were they, anyway, to question him? Boomstick carried a shotgun, and in Juno’s very humble opinion, anyone who relied on a weapon so much that they were named after it couldn’t have been all that powerful in the first place. That wasn’t to say weapons were bad — Juno himself kept an XRS-9 Ki pistol inside his pea-coat, for special circumstances — but the hybrid didn’t think they should be relied on; not by self-proclaimed ‘warriors,’ at least. If Boomstick couldn’t hold his own in a one-on-one, no-guns-allowed fight, then he had no reason to doubt the seer’s abilities.
Rex, the short, purple alien, hadn’t been quite as vocal about his predictions regarding Juno’s shortcomings as his friend had, but he certainly had done little other than contribute to the argument. Ironically, though, he had seemed inclined to agree with Boomstick’s notion that Juno was, in fact, ‘scrawny’ — confirmed by an approving nod of the head from the squatty extraterrestrial. The semi-Saiyan didn’t see how he had any room to talk; bulkier he may have been, but smaller, too.
All of this had started back in the hangar bay, when they’d reached the hover-cars. Juno, in his usually overconfident manner, had seen himself as, for lack of a better term, the ‘commander’ of their particular battery; Boomstick and Rex had quickly pushed that idea away from the realm of thought, relegating him to the backseat and telling him to watch behind them, just in case, and to let them know if anything dangerous came up. Juno sat in silence for several minutes, pondering the meaning behind that statement, before he came to a suitable hypothesis and confronted the two alien warriors about it.
“Why do I have to tell you guys if something dangerous comes up?” he’d asked, correct in his suspicions that they were questioning his abilities, “I’m pretty sure I could handle it myself, you know.”
Boomstick’s comment about his ‘scrawny’ physical form came subsequently, and for another good span of minutes, Juno sat silently, fuming interiorly on the subject. He wasn’t weak — the record on the doctor’s sheet had showed his power level at well over 3000, which he was quite certain neither of these two brutes could compete with — and they most definitely were not going to make him feel like he was.
After a few minutes of scowling, the hybrid remembered what he’d been told to do, and was hesitant to do it because the order had come from the two mouthy aliens. Nevertheless, he figured it was better to be safe and sorry, and turned to look for disturbances, expecting to find it clear again, much like every other time.
This time, though, something was there — a human, at first glance, on a hover-bike, slowly catching up to them. Juno’s brow furrowed — under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have thought anything of a human nipping at their tail, but something told him to look at the pamphlet they’d been given.
Sure enough, the alien on the front of the brochure looked identical to the yellow-garbed man on the motorcycle. Upon seeing Juno glance down at the picture, the alien yanked a pistol from a hip holster. That was enough for the hybrid to realize that this guy wasn’t your friendly neighborhood Spider-man, coming to save the day, but rather, something much more hostile than that.
“Boomstick, Rex, evasive maneuvers!” Juno yelled, but the alien was quick on the draw; it fired a shot toward the hovercraft, and the semi-Saiyan seer ducked beneath the ki bolt. Rex, in the driver’s seat, slammed the steering wheel to the left, and the flying car tipped, forcing the passengers to hold on tightly.
“I got this, small fry,” Boomstick said, standing up and taking aim with his shotgun, “Don’t strain your tiny muscles.”
The black-haired boy scowled, glancing over his shoulder at the alien. He turned and listened to the sounds of Boomstick’s shotgun prepping his shot. That alien didn’t have a chance in hell; so Juno decided to make Boomstick fight someone his own size, maybe teach him a lesson or two.
Juno held up a hand, making sure it was out of view of his two compadres, and shut his eyes, attempting to reach out to the alien with his Telepathy. The alien’s mind wasn’t too hard to breach — he was obviously just a grunt — and once inside, Juno bit his lip, and pushed a good chunk of his energy into using his Possession abilities. Previously, the hybrid hadn’t been able to use Possession without touching the target, but during his idle hours on Earth, he’d been practicing, mostly on powerless humans, in an attempt to give himself the upper hand in fights.
Luckily for the puppeteer, this alien’s mind was weak — it didn’t take long for the hybrid to wrap his fingers around its mind. As Boomstick held the shotgun up, and prepared to fire, Juno planned out his next move, and at the sound of Boomstick’s shot, the alien suddenly jerked to the right, out of the firing line, escaping safely, and unharmed.
“What the hell?!” Boomstick shouted over the whirring of the hover-car. The alien continued to fly out of reach of the red alien’s shot, which elicited a string of vulgarties from him. Juno, on the other hand, was beaming — this was his chance to prove to Boomstick and Rex that he wasn’t ‘scrawny’ at all.
The semi-Saiyan released the alien from his Possession, and then proceeded to leap off of the hover-car and onto the blue grass of Namek’s surface. Above and behind him, he could hear the confused shots of Boomstick and Rex, but he ignored them, and broke into a sprint, gradually getting closer to the yellow-garbed enemy. After a few seconds of running, he kicked off the ground — it was easier to fly with a running start — and engulfed his body in purple ki, charging, airborne, toward his prey.
WHAM!
The lanky, ‘scrawny’ form of Juno crashed headfirst into the abdomen of the yellow-suited alien, and, in a marvelous display of contact physics, the latter tumbled, much like a rag doll, off of his hover bike and down onto the teal grass which blanketed the surface of the picturesque planet. Juno caught himself in mid-air, and then slowly floated down to the ground, landing softly on his two feet.
For just a moment, Juno felt intimidating. Standing above the defeated foe, the humanoid alien, triumphant. Something in him said, ‘good job, Juno’ and patted him on the back, because he felt a remarkable sense of accomplishment. However, only one thing made him feel truly victorious right now — the idea that he had usurped the opinion of Boomstick and Rex that he perhaps wasn’t up to the job. Yeah, it had taken some tinkering, but hey, that’s what abilities are for, right? And at that thought of that victory — a small victory, but a victory nonetheless — he allowed a smirk to invade his face, and paint his countenance with confidence.
Suck on that, he thought, glancing over his shoulder to see Boomstick and Rex approaching. The bulky, red alien cocked his shotgun and then barreled past Juno, aiming it at the alien’s head and preparing to fire.
“Whoa, hold up —” Juno shouted, but Boomstick didn’t seem to have any intention of stopping. The hybrid closed his eyes and Pushed the idea of not shooting the alien into Boomstick’s head, and suddenly, the gun dropped from the red alien’s hands, clinking as it hit the grassy surface of Namek. “You can’t just go around shooting them like that. He might have some valuable information.”
“…what the hell did you do?” Boomstick asked, reaching up and clutching his head. Juno ignored him, and knelt next to the alien.
“I don’t think you understand our purpose, Juno,” Rex said, brushing past Boomstick and placing a hand on the hybrid’s shoulder. Juno shrugged, knocking Rex’s hand away, and checked the pulse of the yellow-suited extraterrestrial. He was still very much alive, and breathing.
“You did something, you scrawny little son-of-a-bitch!” Boomstick roared, reaching down and yanking Juno up by the collar of his pea-coat. Juno lifted up his knee and slammed it into the red-skinned reptilian’s gut, and he let go; the half-Saiyan landed firmly on his feet, a scowl crossing his face now. “What the hell?! What the hell is going on here, Juno?”
“I told you,” the black-haired hybrid muttered, “I don’t have a big mouth. I don’t have big guns. But I’ve got abilities that you two could never dream of having, alright? Like… mind control. And Foresight. And all that jazz.”
“You… mind control? Like, Possession?” Rex asked, stepping back. Juno nodded. “That’s a rare one, that is. I… uh… well, uh, I suppose that will be… valuable, in the long run.”
Juno ignored the purple alien’s rambling, and knelt down next to the enemy. Taking a deep breath, he decided that now was the time to tap into some long-unused powers, and placed his hand on the unconscious alien’s forehead. He accessed his Telepathy, and began searching through the mind of the enemy, attempting to figure out what exactly was going on. He couldn’t help but feel like they were going into this war blind, what with the shoddy pamphlet being their only source of information, and he hoped that maybe this alien’s mind might be an access point for more, useful information, that they could maybe take back. That wasn’t their main priority — they were militarized medics, that’s it — but he figured it wouldn’t hurt.
Unfortunately, the majority of the alien’s mind was blocked off by some sort of telepathic shield; it wasn’t of this specific alien’s creation, it was a uniform mind block, created by a hive master, of sorts. Of course, none of this was certain, but it was the closest Juno had to a conjecture, to an explanation, right now.
He did see one thing, though, lurking in a dark, unprotected corner of the alien’s brain — it was strange, he didn’t think it was something that would be left unchecked, but this alien (who he had hypothesized was some sort of reconnaissance officer, or scout, based on basic information he’d gotten) seemed to leave it out in the open, freely, for anyone who could find their way in to see. Nevertheless, it was important info, so Juno leapt out of the mind of the beast and quickly started to power walk towards the hover car.
“What the hell?” Boomstick said, repeating that phrase of confusion yet again, “Where do you think you’re going? Should I kill this bastard?”
“Shoot him if you want, but do it fast,” Juno called back, “We’ve got to move.”
The half-Saiyan grunted, rolling his eyes.
He didn’t particularly like Boomstick and Rex. Sure, they were funny, and he could joke around with them, and get along with them fine, under normal circumstances; but in wartime, they got presumptuous and overconfident — well, Juno would show them what was what, that was certain.
Who were they, anyway, to question him? Boomstick carried a shotgun, and in Juno’s very humble opinion, anyone who relied on a weapon so much that they were named after it couldn’t have been all that powerful in the first place. That wasn’t to say weapons were bad — Juno himself kept an XRS-9 Ki pistol inside his pea-coat, for special circumstances — but the hybrid didn’t think they should be relied on; not by self-proclaimed ‘warriors,’ at least. If Boomstick couldn’t hold his own in a one-on-one, no-guns-allowed fight, then he had no reason to doubt the seer’s abilities.
Rex, the short, purple alien, hadn’t been quite as vocal about his predictions regarding Juno’s shortcomings as his friend had, but he certainly had done little other than contribute to the argument. Ironically, though, he had seemed inclined to agree with Boomstick’s notion that Juno was, in fact, ‘scrawny’ — confirmed by an approving nod of the head from the squatty extraterrestrial. The semi-Saiyan didn’t see how he had any room to talk; bulkier he may have been, but smaller, too.
All of this had started back in the hangar bay, when they’d reached the hover-cars. Juno, in his usually overconfident manner, had seen himself as, for lack of a better term, the ‘commander’ of their particular battery; Boomstick and Rex had quickly pushed that idea away from the realm of thought, relegating him to the backseat and telling him to watch behind them, just in case, and to let them know if anything dangerous came up. Juno sat in silence for several minutes, pondering the meaning behind that statement, before he came to a suitable hypothesis and confronted the two alien warriors about it.
“Why do I have to tell you guys if something dangerous comes up?” he’d asked, correct in his suspicions that they were questioning his abilities, “I’m pretty sure I could handle it myself, you know.”
Boomstick’s comment about his ‘scrawny’ physical form came subsequently, and for another good span of minutes, Juno sat silently, fuming interiorly on the subject. He wasn’t weak — the record on the doctor’s sheet had showed his power level at well over 3000, which he was quite certain neither of these two brutes could compete with — and they most definitely were not going to make him feel like he was.
After a few minutes of scowling, the hybrid remembered what he’d been told to do, and was hesitant to do it because the order had come from the two mouthy aliens. Nevertheless, he figured it was better to be safe and sorry, and turned to look for disturbances, expecting to find it clear again, much like every other time.
This time, though, something was there — a human, at first glance, on a hover-bike, slowly catching up to them. Juno’s brow furrowed — under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have thought anything of a human nipping at their tail, but something told him to look at the pamphlet they’d been given.
Sure enough, the alien on the front of the brochure looked identical to the yellow-garbed man on the motorcycle. Upon seeing Juno glance down at the picture, the alien yanked a pistol from a hip holster. That was enough for the hybrid to realize that this guy wasn’t your friendly neighborhood Spider-man, coming to save the day, but rather, something much more hostile than that.
“Boomstick, Rex, evasive maneuvers!” Juno yelled, but the alien was quick on the draw; it fired a shot toward the hovercraft, and the semi-Saiyan seer ducked beneath the ki bolt. Rex, in the driver’s seat, slammed the steering wheel to the left, and the flying car tipped, forcing the passengers to hold on tightly.
“I got this, small fry,” Boomstick said, standing up and taking aim with his shotgun, “Don’t strain your tiny muscles.”
The black-haired boy scowled, glancing over his shoulder at the alien. He turned and listened to the sounds of Boomstick’s shotgun prepping his shot. That alien didn’t have a chance in hell; so Juno decided to make Boomstick fight someone his own size, maybe teach him a lesson or two.
Juno held up a hand, making sure it was out of view of his two compadres, and shut his eyes, attempting to reach out to the alien with his Telepathy. The alien’s mind wasn’t too hard to breach — he was obviously just a grunt — and once inside, Juno bit his lip, and pushed a good chunk of his energy into using his Possession abilities. Previously, the hybrid hadn’t been able to use Possession without touching the target, but during his idle hours on Earth, he’d been practicing, mostly on powerless humans, in an attempt to give himself the upper hand in fights.
Luckily for the puppeteer, this alien’s mind was weak — it didn’t take long for the hybrid to wrap his fingers around its mind. As Boomstick held the shotgun up, and prepared to fire, Juno planned out his next move, and at the sound of Boomstick’s shot, the alien suddenly jerked to the right, out of the firing line, escaping safely, and unharmed.
“What the hell?!” Boomstick shouted over the whirring of the hover-car. The alien continued to fly out of reach of the red alien’s shot, which elicited a string of vulgarties from him. Juno, on the other hand, was beaming — this was his chance to prove to Boomstick and Rex that he wasn’t ‘scrawny’ at all.
The semi-Saiyan released the alien from his Possession, and then proceeded to leap off of the hover-car and onto the blue grass of Namek’s surface. Above and behind him, he could hear the confused shots of Boomstick and Rex, but he ignored them, and broke into a sprint, gradually getting closer to the yellow-garbed enemy. After a few seconds of running, he kicked off the ground — it was easier to fly with a running start — and engulfed his body in purple ki, charging, airborne, toward his prey.
WHAM!
The lanky, ‘scrawny’ form of Juno crashed headfirst into the abdomen of the yellow-suited alien, and, in a marvelous display of contact physics, the latter tumbled, much like a rag doll, off of his hover bike and down onto the teal grass which blanketed the surface of the picturesque planet. Juno caught himself in mid-air, and then slowly floated down to the ground, landing softly on his two feet.
For just a moment, Juno felt intimidating. Standing above the defeated foe, the humanoid alien, triumphant. Something in him said, ‘good job, Juno’ and patted him on the back, because he felt a remarkable sense of accomplishment. However, only one thing made him feel truly victorious right now — the idea that he had usurped the opinion of Boomstick and Rex that he perhaps wasn’t up to the job. Yeah, it had taken some tinkering, but hey, that’s what abilities are for, right? And at that thought of that victory — a small victory, but a victory nonetheless — he allowed a smirk to invade his face, and paint his countenance with confidence.
Suck on that, he thought, glancing over his shoulder to see Boomstick and Rex approaching. The bulky, red alien cocked his shotgun and then barreled past Juno, aiming it at the alien’s head and preparing to fire.
“Whoa, hold up —” Juno shouted, but Boomstick didn’t seem to have any intention of stopping. The hybrid closed his eyes and Pushed the idea of not shooting the alien into Boomstick’s head, and suddenly, the gun dropped from the red alien’s hands, clinking as it hit the grassy surface of Namek. “You can’t just go around shooting them like that. He might have some valuable information.”
“…what the hell did you do?” Boomstick asked, reaching up and clutching his head. Juno ignored him, and knelt next to the alien.
“I don’t think you understand our purpose, Juno,” Rex said, brushing past Boomstick and placing a hand on the hybrid’s shoulder. Juno shrugged, knocking Rex’s hand away, and checked the pulse of the yellow-suited extraterrestrial. He was still very much alive, and breathing.
“You did something, you scrawny little son-of-a-bitch!” Boomstick roared, reaching down and yanking Juno up by the collar of his pea-coat. Juno lifted up his knee and slammed it into the red-skinned reptilian’s gut, and he let go; the half-Saiyan landed firmly on his feet, a scowl crossing his face now. “What the hell?! What the hell is going on here, Juno?”
“I told you,” the black-haired hybrid muttered, “I don’t have a big mouth. I don’t have big guns. But I’ve got abilities that you two could never dream of having, alright? Like… mind control. And Foresight. And all that jazz.”
“You… mind control? Like, Possession?” Rex asked, stepping back. Juno nodded. “That’s a rare one, that is. I… uh… well, uh, I suppose that will be… valuable, in the long run.”
Juno ignored the purple alien’s rambling, and knelt down next to the enemy. Taking a deep breath, he decided that now was the time to tap into some long-unused powers, and placed his hand on the unconscious alien’s forehead. He accessed his Telepathy, and began searching through the mind of the enemy, attempting to figure out what exactly was going on. He couldn’t help but feel like they were going into this war blind, what with the shoddy pamphlet being their only source of information, and he hoped that maybe this alien’s mind might be an access point for more, useful information, that they could maybe take back. That wasn’t their main priority — they were militarized medics, that’s it — but he figured it wouldn’t hurt.
Unfortunately, the majority of the alien’s mind was blocked off by some sort of telepathic shield; it wasn’t of this specific alien’s creation, it was a uniform mind block, created by a hive master, of sorts. Of course, none of this was certain, but it was the closest Juno had to a conjecture, to an explanation, right now.
He did see one thing, though, lurking in a dark, unprotected corner of the alien’s brain — it was strange, he didn’t think it was something that would be left unchecked, but this alien (who he had hypothesized was some sort of reconnaissance officer, or scout, based on basic information he’d gotten) seemed to leave it out in the open, freely, for anyone who could find their way in to see. Nevertheless, it was important info, so Juno leapt out of the mind of the beast and quickly started to power walk towards the hover car.
“What the hell?” Boomstick said, repeating that phrase of confusion yet again, “Where do you think you’re going? Should I kill this bastard?”
“Shoot him if you want, but do it fast,” Juno called back, “We’ve got to move.”