Airports in Heaven

At the sound of a young voice calling for his attention, Nashi’s eye twitched and a single eye opened.

It was a kid! Well, perhaps not kid. Maybe a teenager? Or, failing that, a pre-teen. Or maybe it was an elderly person with an especially convincing disguise— frankly, with how inevitably multicultural and varied the people of the Otherworld were, Nashi didn’t want to make assumptions.

New here? He supposed that made sense. Having just arrived in Heaven was a perfectly reasonable justification for being in Heaven’s Airport. But, still, why would a kid die? Who’d kill a kid? Nashi looked down, considering his situation and recent happenings. Oh. Right.

”No, no, stay!” Nashi looked young, sure, but his sounding young was an entirely different matter! But what Tarch couldn’t have known was that Nashi was far younger than either would indicate. ”I was starting to get bored anyway!” That tended to happen when Nashi tried to meditate: he wanted to play with something, or look at something, or chase his own tails. It seemed to increase his wisdom he’d need to meditate more— but, to meditate more, he’d need the wisdom meditation brings. Or maybe that wasn’t how it worked. Nashi unlocking the throat chakra did not come after a lengthy meditation session but from only a nice, especially serene bit of meditation followed by a self-realisation. Not especially replicatable, to be frank: to engineer such circumstances, he’d need to know what self-realisations he’d need to make, and if he knew the self-realisations he’d have probably made them, too… now he was just confusing himself. ”Well, er, this is Heaven’s Airport! It’s an absolutely terrible place. Not fit for a cat, not in the slightest. Everyone’s bustling against each other, angry and sleep-deprived, and picking up the stuff from the lower compartment whatever takes ages.” And sometimes personal possessions got misplaced. That is to say, dropped into HFIL. ”I’m only here to try to ignore it, filter it out or whatever, and meditate on the inner me, the me me, in the me. Or something like that?”

Nashi considered where all the other places where. What else was there to see in Heaven? ”There’s a lot of flowers here, basically everywhere. Very pleasant, all the time. Ya prolly saw some from the plane window, if you got the window seat!” It as also always daytime, despite Heaven being a globe with only one sun. Nashi decided not to look into that. ”I think the general idea is to frolic around a bunch and be content with whatnot until you gradually reincarnate into something cool, like a leopard or a tiger or a lion or—“ Nashi commenced to name every big cat he could think of. And then all the small cats, as well. ”Personally, it’s a good opportunity to meditate on the meaning of life and enjoy nice exotic alien cuisines before I’m back alive again!” And he was sure he was going to return to life eventually, and not by means of reincarnation. Whether it was by the Dragon Balls or other means™, Nashi was sure that he, an Immortal Cat, would not die for long. ”And train too, I guess.”

Nashi felt kinda bad: all his attempts at answering Tarch’s questions were either irrelevant, about himself or irrelevant and about himself. ”There’s a few shinjin and ogres around that are cool. They can help you train, if you happen to like that sort of thing.” But a kid probably wasn’t interested in that, at the best of times at least not immediately. ”But for now I can shout you an ice-cream, if you’d like. I’d say it’s expensive because the parlour’s at an airport, but it doesn’t actually cost anything, so…”

This dude was pretty cool. He liked meditation and training and, most importantly of all, ice cream: he must have been pretty strong, to have your body be able to afford to eat ice cream while still maintaining the strength to train.
… unless Tarch’s training wasn’t physical at all but, like, in a video game. Which was pretty neato too.

A rough death? Nashi’s mind went to images of being thrown in a shredder, being slowly lowered into a vat of poisonous, hot acid with poison-proof, heat-resistant and acid-resistant ravenous sharks in it and being flattened by a giant with a spiked rolling pin. Each of his own deaths were far from his mind… until he brought it up, of course, mostly due to Tarch’s asking. ”Yeah, my first death was pretty bad too. Got eaten by some disgusting cockroach poorly stretched out to human proportions, a walking health and safety standards violation. This was back when the Goons took over Satan City, ya see. On Earth also.” ‘First death’, huh? Pretty suspicious wording. ”And then was the other time, not too long ago, when, er…” He had a hard time remembering this bit. Remembering the details got a tad difficult when you imploded yourself using the energy required to keep the body running and the memories stored, y’know. ”Some dumb nerds came for my Dragon Ball, named, er… Vocational and Crease? Yeah.” Or was it Avocado and Crass? ”And despite how poorly they were fighting I was still losing, and they had the cumulative humour of a grey brick, and I think Quince was there, and…” He remembered there was an explosion, and he was pretty sure it was him. A big boom. On that day, perhaps, it was Nashi who was the boomer. ”… Anyway, I asploded myself to deprive them of the pleasure. Sudoku, that was sort of thing.” Seppuku, he meant.

Nashi would wordlessly start moving to the nearest ice cream parlour. With any luck, Tarch would follow.

wait
”Looks like something similar happened to you, huh? Were, they, like, Namek’s Dragon Balls? I don’t know of any other sets besides that and Earth’s.” Nashi had not considered the possibility that they were in the same Dragon Ball hunt without having met each other. Nashi also failed to think on what Tarch (or his sister) might have wanted to wish for.

But, more importantly, they made it to the ice cream parlour. The guy running the stall was a fat ogre who only took the job because he got to eat any amount of ice cream and was allowed to haul around an infinite amount of ice cream wherever he decided to be for work. Post-scarcity, and all that. Paradise. ”Anyway, which flavour of blue ice cream would you like? There’s blueberry, blueberry crunch, blue bubblegum, blueberry bubblegum, blueberry bubblegum crunch and blue.” There were a whoooollee bunch of other ice creams, Nashi only named the blue ones.

A cockroach sounded like this guy’s brother’s dad? Must have been pretty dirty. Or maybe it was because he kept on surviving, despite hardship. Or maybe it was because he could survive a thermonuclear detonation? ”Dunno who that is.” ‘Chromo’… Nashi thought back to a tour of a Hetap-flavoured Instant Noodles factory he’d went to in life, but he wasn’t sure why. ”But at least he made up for it.” Nashi reserved his judgement until later. He didn’t know anything about this ‘Chromo’ and wasn’t prepared to think of him as a hero or a villain or anything Nashi didn’t already think of him, back when he didn’t know the name.

Earth ones? ”… I’m kinda getting confused here...” This guy had a brother and a sister? Two siblings, was that even possible? And now there was another sister! Absolutely ridiculous. ”I might need a diagram.” All of this weird family drama stuff was happening in the same Dragon Ball Hunt that Nashi was in, and he somehow didn’t know about any of it? Well, OK, fair enough, Nashi had only ever seen a few of the Dragon Balls, but still. ”But… at least the Namek ones did the thing?” They did do the thing, right? Nashi was starting to confuse the Hunts. ”6.02214076x10^23 and Mess were in that one, right?” 6.02214076x10^23 being the Avogadro number.

”Ya don’t know what blue tastes like? It tastes blue, dude. Duh.” What else was it going to taste like? Magenta? ”Just like how blueberry tastes like blue and berry. So, that, without the berry.” Nashi spoke up and looked to the voluminous ogre. ”I’d like some blueberry bubblegum crunch, please! Two scoops.” The rotund worker got to scoopin’.

”Heh?” I’m pretty sure I told this guy my name. Nashi did not. I’m, like, 90% sure I did. No. ”O-Oh, I mustn’t have…” Darn. His name was usually one of the first things he said. ”I’m Nashi, Senbyō of Earth! What was your name?” Tarch had already said. Nashi remembered the name but forgot learning it, and it didn’t quite connect in his mind that he must have learnt it from somewhere.
cos he’s a genius

”Cress?” Nashi seemed to consider this briefly. To Tarch, it might have looked like he was searching through the deepest recesses of his mind, his memory, to unlock some grand true memory in its full revealed state. But, no, what Nashi was actually doing was trying to figure out what Tarch meant. He was still thinking about ice cream and names, you see. And in thinking about ice cream, his mind was on food. And in thinking of food, and ‘Cress’, he thought of garden cress, the plant. And in thinking of cress in relation to what he’d been thinking of originally, he thought of cress-flavoured ice cream.
And that thought unsettled him deeply.
May as well be a salad ice cream at that point.

But then Tarch implied that this ‘Cress’ was a person and it all came crashing down. Like tetrominoes falling and fitting perfectly in place, except they didn’t immediately disappear as a result. ”Oh, yeah, ‘Cress', that was it! He was really stinky, and smelly, and wasn’t very nice at all, and probably had very poor table manners.” Forevermore would that be recorded as the most scalding of all roasts. Nashi couldn’t remember many of the specifics, or the generals, or all that much of any of it, but he did remember the thought that they were all a bit rude, their murdering had remarkably little class about it and their quips were far weaker than what one would expect from villains such as they.

Ah, Tarch is a saiyan, ey? Perhaps this might have been a bigger discovery, had Nashi been a bit more sure what a Saiyan was. When he was half as old as he was then (which, believe me, wasn’t all that long ago) Nashi believed that saiyans were just another race of earthling: basically humans, but always with a certain hair or eye colour and monkey-like tails. Nashi’s idea of what a Saiyan was got confused when Hale, seeing Nashi’s coloured hair, great power and tail(s), claimed he was a Super Saiyan. Since then, Nashi was never especially sure, but his running theory was that being Saiyan (/Super Saiyan) was a trait, attained either by doing whatever chakra stuff Nashi did or by being born as a member of a space-faring particular race. In short, Nashi’s idea of what being Saiyan meant was far, far more interesting than what it actually meant.

Nashi shrugged his shoulders. If Nashi had paid attention to those books in the Lookout when he pretended to read them, perhaps he’d have thought of one of the times Earth didn’t have its Dragon Balls. ”I dunno about you, but death wasn’t so bad, not the first time. It’s been pretty cool the second time, around too, but I reserve judgement proper until I’m back from it. If I hadn’t died, I don’t know if I would have balanced that first chakra and achieved tranquility of voice.” Despite Nashi’s rambling, his speech was clear and purposeful in intent. It wasn’t so much as saying whatever came into his head as saying whatever his soul put in it. ”Like, it made me look older and everything. My spiritual maturity informs my physical maturity, y’see, and I’m actually three years old.” ok maybe that wasn’t very useful information. So, maybe, like…

”I suppose the Dragon Balls can let real heroes exist in any state above decline in a world where they don’t always win. Because the villains want to kill the heroes, and the heroes, if they’re actually heroes, only want the villains to improve themselves as people, and move away from villainy.” And, no, not by killing them. ”There’s a misbalance to the system. But with Dragon Balls? Well, the heroes can wish back heroes who died, and what can villains do? Wish for immortality? A hero wasn’t going to kill them anyway. Wish for power? A drop in the ocean.” Nashi paused for a moment. ”I dunno. I guess I sorta came up with that ad lib. But I like them.” It was a naïve thing to think, of course it was, but it was the flavour of naïvety that good thrived in, and the sort of naïvety that his chakra of the voice could convey with something of Nashi’s intent inherent to it. For while they were only words, in them was the thought, the idea itself, that the words themselves were modelled to fit.

Nashi heard Tarch mention Chime, but didn’t quite the connection that this might have been significant. Before that could really connect, Nashi was already onto trying to remember Alphabetical. And yet, despite Nashi’s best efforts at remembering, he could couldn’t remember what Botanico looked like. He flung his whatsit and the doodah short forth into the water as he waited for a dablingo— that was supposed to be a fishing metaphor, but Nashi didn’t know the terminology— but all he was catching was the phantom pain of an arm that was not only broken, not only missing, but broken and missing. His other arm came up to comfort it.

”He looked like the Platonic form, the form in itself, of which all dimwits are emanations. Like the illegitimate lovechild of month-old lasagna, an uncomfortably soggy muesli bar made of cous-cous and kidney stones and an oblong-shaped table of the exact texture of goats, with various goat eyes, horns, ears, mouths and hooves, all still acting as if on a live goat, assorted around it as if put there by someone with a stamp desperately trying to exhaust their ink supply. So, yeah, something like that.” Nashi spoke this matter-of-factly, without any hint of anger or resentment. He scratched his chin. With the ice-cream now in his hands, he licked it like a cat is wont to do from a bowl of milk. ”Though, he had one metal arm? Probably a prose-apoplectic.” Prosthetic.

Huh? ‘Mr. Vocado’ sounded oddly familiar. The ‘Mr.’ bit was in cartoons, shows, toys, business cards and cartoons, all over the place, preceding all sorts of names. He heard it all the time in real life, too, so it was super familiar! That ‘Vocado’ bit was sorta familiar, too, but Nashi was having trouble putting the present to its immediate context and couldn’t put one and one together.

Nashi very conveniently looked into his ice-cream and took a few generous licks, unawares that Tarch was having his trauma-induced personal pseudo-eureka. Had it gone on for a bit longer Nashi still wouldn’t have seen it, for he winced for far too long a second due to the ice-cream’s frigid powers wreaking havoc upon his brain— ya know, brain freeze. This marked another entry in the number of times Nashi reallllly would have benefitted from being able to sense energy but, alas, it was foreign to him, like an anime from 60 years before he was born or forgetting that there’s a ‘u’ in ‘colour’.

Tarch started laughing out of nowhere. Nashi gave it a good look, but was left confused when he saw no one ticking the boy. What’s so funny? Maybe it was the name, ‘Vocado’. How could that be funny? Well, for a start, it was just ‘Avocado’ without the ‘A’. And it was at the start of the word, too, so it was a capital letter: the biggest sort of letter! One could almost say, then, that it had a big A-hole. Hah! I guess that is pretty funny.

”I’m an adult too, you know, I can say big words! You can say ‘shifty’ around me.” That very definitely was not what Tarch was about to say.

Oh, right, training! That thing he should have been a lot more of! ”Oh, well, I guess…” Nashi tried to think of a good place to train. He thought of all the places he’d trained before, but it was difficult to think of any of them as distinct locations. They were all, well, Heaven: a nice sky, a good day, a continual biome of pretty flowers stretching on for what a tourist group might have thought was forever. There were distinctive locations, sure: there was a mushroom forest where all the trees were gummies, but when Nashi tried to train there he only ended up solving the problem of his rumbling stomach by adding to the problem of deforestation. He also tried going to a gym in Ogretown but the nice lady at the front tried getting him to sign up for newsletters and more newsletters and Nashi ended up deciding it wasn’t worth the fuss. So, without any better options…

”Simple! Just close your eyes and spin around real quick until you have no idea which way you’re facing, and then stop at random! Then just fly in that direction at full speed for a few minutes, or maybe more, I dunno how quick you are, and land and then you’re there! And I’ll be there, too. ‘Cos I’d have followed ya.”

!!!

Nashi was being challenged! That, in itself, wasn't especially unexpected. Nashi was challenged all the time, whether it be by riddles, people murdering him or himself giving himself a way to prove himself. But this was a challenge to his pride! This Tarch had been crowned as the 'Speed King'!!!!!!1!!!!exclamation mark!!! Didn't he know that Nashi was the fastest guy around? The fastest in the universe, even! Who decided that Tarch was the 'Speed King' and not Nashi? Who voted for this Speed King? "Oh yeah? Well I'm the Speed Emperor!" No one had crowned him as such: in it, he was self-proclaimed. But the thing about being self-proclaimed was that you could always trust the guy who gave the title really meant it. "No, er, uh, the Speed... God! Yes!" haha get rekt, can't outdo that

Nashi clapped at Tarch's spinning, but only because the flames it made were blue. When he was done and pointed, Nashi looked over... it was a perfectly boring spot with absolutely nothing going on. Perfect! It didn't matter much, just about every other spot had the same value in novelty.

Nashi was about to start racing himself, but stopped himself when he realised Tarch was still reeling from dizziness. Nashi had entirely forgotten that was a thing, presumably because he'd gotten so use to the sensation from many a time spent chasing his own tail when he was only a few months old. Nashi was expecting a no-frills race to their destination, however far that was, but instead he only followed, feeling guilty over his lack of foresight. He was half-tempted to dizzy himself up to try to have a race but, by the time the idea came to him, they were just about already there.

"The bad news is, I don't think this is where you pointed initially. The good news is, it doesn't matter!" Nashi's left foot, then right, touched down on the serenely wind-shifted grass. "So, uh, do you want to spar? 'Cos I don't know how strong you are. If you want to just train normally, that's fine, but if you want to spar I'd be open to an arm-wrestling competition!" Over a kilometre to the left was a tree either of the two could chop down by operating chopsticks poorly enough: its stump could be used as a platform for arm-wrestling. If not that, the ground would work well too. Nashi was down for either, if Tarch was too!