The Royal Bastards of Galagan (Chapter 1)

After catching up to my siblings on the ground, I got this reminder of how different I was from my siblings, Poppy and Lemon, and really most of our kind. I was a foot taller than them, something I could forget when we hovered above the sky. Even my more muscular form didn’t have that much bigger of a shadow in the air.

But from the ground, it was easy to feel like a freak. I’m thankful that Poppy and Lemon never looked at me that way, it was nice to be little more than their big sister.

That didn’t mean they could just stare at me though!
“What are you waiting for?!” I yelled at them. “Go!”

Lemon’s long green highlights nearly hit Poppy in the face as he ran ahead. I had to shove Poppy forward before I turned around. 

I held my hand forward, charging cakra into my palm. With one ball of light, I blasted the sewer’s roofing, trapping me with the nauseating smell of sewage.

The rock crumbled as the troopers and the hovercars stumbled to a stop. I turned back and flew to catch up to Poppy and Lemon. 

“What’s that going to do?!” Poppy asked me.

“They won’t blast into the sewer, they’ll risk blowing up the city’s pipeline,” Lemon told her, smirking to himself at my thinking.

“If they’re smart,” I grunted.

“It’s your plan, and you’re not even confident in it!” Lemon laughed to himself.

“I’m so glad you have something to laugh about as we’re on the run,” I told him.

“Firstly, I’m laughing because I feel like I’m gonna explode. Secondly, technically, we’re on the fly.”

“Technically, we’re the three most wanted people on Galagan.”

As the three of us took a sharp turn down another tunnel, slowing down to make sure we don’t break the sound barrier, Poppy made a snide little comment to herself. “That’s what happens when you kill the royal heir and his mother.”

I was so sure as we flew through the city’s sewer system that we had gotten ahead and away from the authorities who were after us. To think I really thought we could get away with it. Who would have thought they really liked the miserable old prince over his royal enforcers?

Lemon saw the light ahead of us first, but I couldn’t see it behind that mop on his head. “There’s our way out of the slag!” he said as he sped up.

“Lemon, wait!” I called. I don’t know why I bothered. He nearly broke the sound barrier just to get away from the smell that was seeping into his vest.

Poppy and I tried to speed up after him, but once you get a headstart as a cakra user, you generally keep it. Lemon wasn’t weak. 

When he stopped as soon as he got outside, I knew it couldn’t be good. The blast that hit him a millisecond later only confirmed that I was right, as usual.

“Aaaah!” I couldn’t help but yell as I powered up ahead of Poppy, I was on the ground standing in front of Lemon before she was even out of the sewer… and before my eyes could adjust to the light of dusk.

Si-sup!

I heard the sound of Poppy’s cakra trail ending as she landed. My eyes adjusted at about the same time.

We were surrounded, by troopers and highwaymen with beam rifles all trained on us. They shined a searchlight on us, and I raised my arm to shield my eyes. I swear, it was so bright it could have made my dark brown skin look white. 

I felt one of my siblings grab my thick waist cape. I tried to put my arm out to press whichever one it was back, but they just pushed it aside. It knew it was Lemon when the green color of his cakra lit up around his hands.

Poppy was quick to take my other side, with her blue cakra forming a cloak around her, the same form as Lemon’s. I had wanted to avoid killing anyone — which was a first for me — since it’s usually considered best practices to not murder too many of the people you want to rule… but they were going to try and shoot us. 

I charged my cakra and let my white cakra cloak light up their eyes.

“Oh, no need for that,” said an old sybarite, a waste of fucking space, the Khan’s stand-in for a jester if the jester wasn’t funny, “their royal highnesses know that fighting isn’t in their best interest.”

“Kybi,” I growled.

The old lecher smiled behind those white-rimmed glasses. He looked down on us from his place in front of the searchlight. He must have been how they found us, he was always good at sensing our powers and sniffing us out. It was the one thing the old Khan would have him do when Kybi wasn’t stroking his crusty point of a beard.

Lemon flexed his power, letting his cakra pulse and give off little lightning bolts around him. A better warning than most words, but I’m sure he thought his words helped. “Letting ourselves be captured isn’t in our best interest either.”

“You’d need more than these pitiful pigs to take one of us, let alone three!” Poppy jumped on. 

I didn’t know if either my brother or sister knew that they weren’t helping or if they were buying me time, but it sounded stupid. 

Kybi knew full damn well that this force wouldn’t take us. He must have had a plan.

His eyes were on me, and so was his smile, because he knew that I knew that we were far away from having the upper hand.

“Quite right,” agreed the old lecher, his hands now clearly behind his back as the searchlight moved from behind him, but still on us. “The royal bastards are the greatest weapons to walk Galagan, it’s been that way for generations. I’ve seen you three conquer planets in the name of your father in a day, I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say an army would be needed to restrain you, let alone defeat you.”

“He’s kissing our ass, that’s bad, I don’t like it,” Poppy started muttering.

“Let him know, why don’t you,” I growled back.

“Even among royal bastards, you three might be some of the strongest a crowned Khan has ever produced, oh, the things your brother,” the prince, “could have done with you three at his side.

“I imagine you realized the same thing when you killed him.”

Yeah, we killed our older brother, the royal prince, the heir to the throne of Galagan… and his cunt of a mother too. 

She was the real challenge.

“Now that my asshole has been thoroughly licked,” I called up to him, searching the troopers and the hovercars for some kind of superweapon as I did so, “do you have a point?”

Kybi licked his lips. “Of course, I do. We want you gone, but we can’t defeat you, so what’s the next best thing?”

Pfft.

Ke-yooooonnnn.

“The searchlight,” I muttered as the white light on us turned red. 

What a rookie mistake.

In a split second, I had leaped up towards it, sending a blast from my hand to blow the mystery weapon out of the sky, but it had already hit me. My cakra blast bent in on itself several times before I was hit by what felt like an asteroid against my chest. 

I flew back as the world faded to white around me, a spiral void pulsing and removing me from space itself. 

I turned over to see Lemon and Poppy get hit by it too. They were unbending constants, the only things I could see. 

I tried to fuel my cakra through my body, as my masters had taught me to do. To use controlled emotion, that which gives life meaning and made sentience worth having. 

It didn’t do shit.

I tried to fly to Lemon and Poppy as their screams were drowned out by the pulsing void. I grabbed them in each arm, crushing them to me, holding on tight.

Who could say how long that lasted? It could have been years, hours, seconds, an instant, but it felt like an eternity.

And being hit by Kybi’s weapon felt like being hit by an asteroid if the pressure stayed on my chest for longer than usual. It wasn’t like I could punch nothing into a billion smaller pieces of nothing. 

That pressure wasn’t was relieved from my chest until we were dumped out of whatever that beam was. That may make our escape sound like a pleasant experience, but it was worse than being hit by the beam itself. My body snapped back the other way like it was a rubber band. 

I still managed to hold Poppy and Lemon close as we fell a story onto the ground. We must have gained momentum from what was some kind of teleportation ray because we hit the ground hard. 

Bump!

They both bounced out of my hands and hit the ground half as hard as I did.

They were both groggy and moaning, but I flipped over to get to my feet as fast as possible. We didn’t know where we were, when we were, and if this place was full of hostiles, potentially beings strong enough to jump us.

I looked around as lights seem to turn on in the buildings around us. There were more than a few skyscrapers with this strange round architectural style and glass-like building materials. It wasn’t like the suffocating blocks of Galagan, and they weren’t filled with people like Galagans, but… you know they felt weird.

Their own form of flying vehicles were strange thin floating spheres, though based on their gravity lowering technology, I could tell this was a species nearly as advanced as Galagan’s, scientifically speaking. 

As they stepped out of their vehicles and their gravity elevator-whatevers, it was clear to me this was no planet we had ever been before. The native species were distinctive, impossible to forget, and it wasn’t because of their bulbous heads, their gray skin, their three fingers, or even the extra set of arms that some of them had. 

It was that they were all three feet tall.

This planet was made to torture me.