Arrival (1)

(Author Note: Okay, before you read I just wanna say something real quick. This fanfic has been an idea of mind ever since I read a story called 'Perspective Is Ki' by Elbowsnapper and said story is a massive inspiration for this story. So there will be similarities. The MC's won't really be anything like one another and neither will the plot after the first few chapters but I'd thought it better to say this than to act like my idea is completely original lol. Anyway, hope you enjoy the story!)

The first thing I felt when my eyes fluttered open was the vibrations all around me. Then the hum of machinery. The softness of whatever I was sitting on. The smell and taste of stale, recycled air.

How I wasn't in my goddamn bed.

I couldn't see anything - nearly sending me into a panic attack thinking I'd gone blind - but that soon changed as pale, red light began filling the extremely cramped...thing, I'd found myself in. Padded white walls, shaped in a spherical way. I was in a ball. The window I was very quickly realizing was in front of me was pitch black but that seemed to be an aesthetic choice as it became transparent.

I really wish it'd stayed opaque.

Why? Because looking back at me from the other side of the window was a planet I was very, very familiar with as one of it's inhabitants.

The panic attack avoided when I realized I wasn't blind was back in full force. Deep breaths turned to shallow ones. Ragged, rough. Too quick to really gain any oxygen from them. My head spun, my ears rang and the edges of my sight went black. All of it only made the panic worse.

I was in space.

A strange thought, seeing as I was in my bed - from my perspective - moments before. But it was hard to refute the somewhat distant blue, green and brown ball of mud and water in my sight line and the fact I *wasn't* on it. I *was*, however, in a ball-spaceship-thing hurtling through fucking SPACE toward Earth.

At the thoughts spiraling through and around my head, the panic only got worse.

Was I abducted by aliens? Did they experiment on me? Was this all a goddamn acid trip--was I spiked at the pub last night?

It was when I looked down to check over my person that I realized there was more to be panicking about than just being in space.

My body was *different*. Still mine but glaringly different. So different I stopped breathing altogether, panic surging to new heights as I absentmindedly prodded and poked at muscles that hadn't been on my frame until I woke up here, in space, hurtling toward Earth.

The somewhat pudgy in the stomach and flabby limbs were gone. Replaced by broad shoulders, defined pecs and eight-pack abs. Biceps that'd put Arnold's to shame. Forearms like bunched up metal cables within a sheath of skin. Legs that were very much the same - muscled like I'd spent every day since I was born in the gym. "What the fuck did those aliens fucking do?" I cursed in whisper, unable to help myself as I continued prodding. Expecting it all to be a dream and to feel my sofa-trained chubby body but only feeling a robust and sinewy body instead.

My lungs burned and I realized I still indeed needed to breath. I was more delighted with that simple fact than I wanted to admit.

Panic still flooded my system, my ears buzzing with the sound of blood rushing passed them. But something...*inside* me, kept me calm. Told me to shut up, man up and act like...something. Like I was betraying who I was by panicking the way I am.

Clamping my eyes shut, I fell back on breathing exercises I'd learnt in therapy years ago. Slow, methodical and controlled breaths. Count to four while breathing in through your nose. Hold the breath for another four seconds. Slowly release it. Repeat. Again and again until you don't feel the pressure.

I did this for the next few minutes, my circumstances be damned, before I opened my eyes. Still rattled but considerably calmer. If you could even call feeling nauseous and like your head is spinning, calm.

But it was the best I could do.

As coach always said, 'You don't have to stay calm, just stay focused'.

I could do that. Focused.

The first thought that sprung to mind was how fucked this whole situation really was. I don't know how and I don't know who did it, but someone, someones or something had taken me and changed me. Not done with just that, they'd taken me into space and put me in a spaceship before firing me at Earth. Nothing I could do, think or say could change that. Unless this is a bad trip. God I hope it is. But if it isn't, there's not much I can do to change the situation. Only how I react to it.

My calm breathing continued as I worked through the night before. I got off work, went for a drink down the local boozer and wandered home half-delirious, got a kebab - or a pizza, either way I folded something up and ate it - and then got home. Got into bed. Sleep.

Admittedly, the memories were blurry. But blurry in the way all memories made when you're drunk are. I could see the general gist of the night.

Not once did I see a flying saucer swoop down next to my bedroom window and beamed me up into it. Don't remember partaking in anything other than pints of beer either. So I was asleep when it happened and not high. And I wasn't even that drunk, so I would've woken up if I'd actually been moved. Call it the blessing and the curse of being a light sleeper. But I hadn't woken up while whatever had happened, happened. I slept like a baby until I woke up here, now and heading to a noticeably closer Earth.

I couldn't even allow myself to feel joyful of that fact either.

As incompetent as the world's governments can feel sometimes, they wouldn't not notice a literal UFO falling from space. I'd get taken in, questioned and then sent to some sort of black site to be cut open after they search up my name and realize how much I'd changed.

Hell, I was somehow noticing that I hadn't just gotten really muscular but that I'd gotten bigger overall. Taller, wider--I'd definitely shot up into the six foot region.

There was no way on God's green Earth that I wasn't gonna be treated like some sort of guinea pig--

I squashed that line of thinking, filing it away in the basement of my mind. Focused. Don't have to be calm, just focused. Focus, Ethan. Focus on the situation, not the outcome. I looked around at the cramped spaceship...cockpit, I guess? Whatever this was called aside, I looked around and saw a bunch of buttons. Reds and greens. Blocky text that seemed oddly familiar with a number slowly counting down.

"Pretty obvious that's the distance to Earth..." I muttered before looking to the buttons and suddenly feeling daunted by them, "There's so goddamn many of them," I continued harshly.

This ship was chugging along pretty alright. Probably on auto pilot or whatever it's equivalent is. But what about landing? More specifically, did *I* have to land this thing? Hence me looking at the buttons and realizing pretty quickly none of them were labelled.

I could just start slapping them haphazardly but then there'd be as much chance as me landing safely on Earth as the door separating me from the empty vacuum of space opening suddenly or messing up the obviously planned flight to Earth and sending me right into the bloody Sun.

So...there was little I could do except sit here and wonder about what the fuck was happening. The past minutes had shown just how useless that'd had gone as well.

Which meant I just sat there. Looking at Earth.

Panic was still there but more than anything, it was resignation. Maybe even despair. Would I die? Would I actually be shipped off to Area 51? Would I even get to Earth? Would I just stop and orbit the planet before slowly starving to death--No, I'd die from dehydration before then. Fuck. A lethargic laugh ripped itself from my throat as I leaned back into the annoyingly comfortable chair. I'd never experienced being so clueless and helpless. Even having sex for the first time had been less confusing and I was raised in a pretty hardcore religious foster home, so I was pretty clueless about that sorta stuff.

Another laugh tumbled out of me and then another, until I was chortling at how messed up this entire thing was. But deep within me, after that helplessness, burst forth frustration and annoyance and then towering rage, burning fury and mind-numbing frenzy. I thrashed and pounded at the thick glass window, uncaring of the possibility I'd somehow break it and become incredibly intimate with the vacuum outside it.

I just didn't care.

Why me? Why Ethan Blaine? *Why*?

The same question spun round and round in my head, making me dizzy with wrath as a scream burst up through my mouth from somewhere deep within my gut and chest.

It was only after a few minutes of this and when I was panting from the howling, that I realized there was something different about my body. There was the skin-tight black bodysuit, the obvious increase in size and musculature but that wasn't I was noticing. It was the near invisible layer of literal energy floating above my body, covering me like flames and acting as such as they waved back and forth.

"What the..." the curse died in my mouth as I realized there was more different with me than I'd first thought. The energy wasn't just on my skin. It was under it. Under my muscles. In my bones. Flooding my organs. Running alongside the signals traveling along my nervous system.

You know how in cultivation novels where the protagonist can just feel inside his body? Sometimes even see it? Called some crap like 'Inner Eye' or 'Mind's Eye' or whatever--I'd always thought it was stupid. I mean, how could you ever look inside your own body? Your eyes are on the outside, after all.

But here I was, right now, feeling the inside of my body and some anomalous energy I'd never had before buzzing around in my body like it'd always been there. Like my body was it's rightful home.

I leaned forward to lean on my knees when I felt it. A sensation on my lower back.

Something fuzzy, long and decently thick. Then I realized I could feel whatever *it* was touching, whatever *it* was. My heartbeat spiked at the feeling, my mouth opening and closing like a fish in a aquarium. Had the aliens...had they attached something to me? A parasite? Was that the cause for the changes? Whatever it was, it responded to my mind and it moved. Slowly I reached around myself, hand crawling through the air like it was molasses and then I touched the thing.

My heart skipped a beat and damn near stopped beating altogether as I gripped the tail tight. Pain assaulted me almost immediately and my body locked up before I started spasming in the seat, mouth opened in a silent scream.

Thankfully it didn't last long and I finally pried my fingers free from what I was figuring out was actually a tail.

Everything started to make even less sense than it already was as with a mental thought the tail circled around my front and let me actually look at it. Brown-ish fur, maybe three feet long and very prehensile. It twitched and moved as I thought it...like an arm. It also looked damn familiar. Plus that energy.

"No," I said harshly, "No, no, no, uh-huh," I shook my head as I willed the tail to return to behind me, "Fuck that. I'm not one of them. Can't be. Nope. I refuse," I sat back and crossed my arms, ignoring the fact I was now hyper sensitive of my apparent tail.

The aliens wouldn't fuck with me that badly, right? They wouldn't kidnap me and turn me into one of *them*, right?

Realizing the shape of the spaceship I was in, I paused before scoffing, "Sick joke," I whispered, ever so sure of myself, "It's gotta be."

Despite my words, part of me had already accepted what had happened. Didn't understand it or how it was possible, but knew it'd happened. That part was like a whisper at the back of my mind. Constantly talking about the evidence. How once was a coincidence, twice was weird and thrice is a sure thing that something is definitely up.

Usually that logic was used when you hear a weird noise in your house. Not when you suddenly wake up in a spaceship heading for Earth and find out you have a monkey tail. But it still applies.

The specific shape of the spaceship. The mysterious energy in my body and my ability to sense it. The goddamn tail poking out my lower back. Now that I thought about it, I did feel stronger. Tougher. Full of stamina and vigor. I'd tried to think it was because of the muscle mass and the size increase but the monkey tail crushed any delusion I'd tried to convince myself with. My denial and stubborn attitude collapsed as the pieces came together in my mind.

"But..." I whispered hoarsely, looking down at my hands, "I...Why...Why am I a bloody Saiyan?!"

. . .

It must've been an hour since I'd finally put the pieces together and figured out I was now an alien. Made by other aliens, presumably. A Saiyan, to be specific.

It...would explain things. The fact I didn't devolve into a crying mess and instead got angry. The fact I'd even stayed as calm as I had, had been because of what I now guessed were Saiyan instincts forcing me to not act like the normal person I was.

"This whole situation is so messed up," I chuckled listlessly, leaning back and looking up. My eyes flickered down and I looked down along my nose at Earth. A lot closer than an hour prior. Close enough that I'd already passed the Moon. Close enough that I had no doubt I'd be making re-entry soon enough. Panic tried to crawl up my throat and make me scream but I'd simply worn myself out already. I didn't have a scream left in me. I'd either land in the ocean and survive or I'd die.

I was resigned to whatever fate had in store for me. A no doubt Saiyan part of me screamed to do something but it soon shut up when I turned to it for answers on *what* exactly I could do.

So I just sat there and watched Earth get closer. It sucked, sure. But what could I do?

If I started smashing the buttons with abandon, I'd really hit home on the stereotype of being a monkey. Well, I mean, without the enhanced strength, bulletproof skin, enhanced senses and access to a mystery energy called Ki, Saiyans and humans are pretty similar. Both descended from apes, so I guess even if I didn't have a tail I still kinda was a monkey. Semantics, really.

As the thoughts meandered across the forefront of my mind, the ship shook and put an end to all of them as my heart jumped into my throat. The view of Earth was quickly obscured as the air was set alight by how fast the ship was moving. The shaking got worse for a few seconds before settling despite still going through re-entry--some sort of stabilizer, if I had to guess. It wasn't rocket science to figure it out...well, I guess is actually. Huh.

I tried to keep myself distracted with my thoughts but soon enough, the red and orange of super-hot air cleared and was replaced by dark blue nearing on black. By the time I realized I was looking at the sea, I only had a second to brace myself as I flinched back into the seat and covered my face.

...Yet I didn't feel anything at all. Maybe a little shake but that was only because I was expecting movement.

Opening my eyes and lowering my arms, I saw I was just floating on the surface of the ocean.

Before I could even decide whether or not I wanted to start testing buttons to open the thing, the hatch to the ship hissed before slowly opening with a mechanical sound. I looked at the opening and felt the fresh but cold air hitting my face and took in a deep breath. After an hour of stale air from inside the pod-like ship, it was heavenly.

Curiously, the bobbing from the ocean below didn't make me feel sick. I was usually useless on the sea, feeling sick throughout most trips I'd taken across the channel to France. But right now, I felt fine. Better than fine, actually. I felt refreshed and overjoyed to be alive.

My future aside, at least I hadn't died in a horrific crash.

"Take the good stuff when you can, Ethan," I muttered to myself before wondering what I was supposed to do now. I was somewhere in the Atlantic - knew that purely because I'd seen that I'd land in the ocean between the UK/Europe and North America. Closer to America, if I had to guess. But still nowhere near close enough to swim my way there - even with my no doubt enhanced physicality.

Oddly enough, as soon as I had that thought, I heard something cutting through the waves. Leaning out of the pod, I carefully balanced myself on the edge as I poked my head out to look around. I saw a ship, waaaay off in the distance, "I can see that far now? Jesus Christ," I said in surprise.

The ship must've been about a kilometer away from me and yet I could see it with perfect clarity, even making out the person driving the thing and the people looking in my direction with binoculars.

They were pointing at me and shouting something even my newly keen ears couldn't make out but I could guess what they were saying. Probably think I'm an alien...not that they're wrong if I am in fact a Saiyan.

Annoyance surged within me again but I kept myself under control. Last thing I needed was to lose my shit. If I were normal, it'd be fine. But as a Saiyan, a member of a superpowered warrior race, shit could get real ugly if I just up and said 'Fuck it'. I didn't wanna hurt anyone just doing their job but neither did I want to be turned into a guinea pig.

Or a lab monkey.

I allowed myself to chuckle at the dark and frankly poorly timed joke. Gotta find humor where you can, that's what my coach said. Too many times, really. Usually when he laughed at me when I was getting the crap beaten out of me during sparring.

Melancholy suddenly hit me. I'd never see him again. I didn't do MMA anymore but I'd kept in touch with the old codger. I wouldn't see any of my mates anymore. Or my family. What about my sister? She was pregnant with my nephew, for God's sake. I collapsed back into the pod, thoughts that had been repressed by the panic of being in space and then re-entry flooding my mind.

"Just my luck," I simply said, voice cracking with emotion. Slamming my fist into the white cushioning, a dull but loud bang rang out and the ship rocked to the side before settling back. Emotions running high, with an intensity I'd never experienced before, I was forced to close my eyes and re-do my breathing techniques.

When I next opened my eyes, the ship had gotten much closer to me. I hadn't looked at it earlier but the side of the ship had 'U.S. COAST GUARD' emblazoned on the side. Even if I hadn't seen that, I'd know I was dealing with the yanks when one of them spoke into a megaphone.

"Remain where you are! Any movements we see as hostile will be met with the appropriate force in response!" the man's voice held a definite American accent. Almost New Yorker-like. Other than that, his voice was hard and I could infer that even without a megaphone his voice would've been overly loud. With a megaphone? My sensitive ears felt a little overwhelmed and I winced in response.

"Sure thing!" I shouted back with as much forced good cheer as I could. I know Saiyans are durable but I didn't wanna find out whether or not I could deal with a sizable ship's worth of armed men and women shooting at me.

A hint of excitement sparked in my chest at the thought of such a challenge but like the rest of my Saiyan instincts, I kept a tight rein on it.

With a sense of malaise, I watched a dozen or so people pointing assault rifles at me. Six on the right of the man with the megaphone and the other six on his left. The man himself seemed surprised with my cheer, as obviously forced as it was, and my agreement but he soon got over it as he spoke again, "What are your intentions on Earth?"

I withheld the scoff that wanted to come out my mouth at the implication and answered, "I live here, mate. In England, obviously," I said though my accent properly already told him that. Pausing, I thought for a few seconds before continuing, "I know how this all looks--and I'm pretty sure I was abducted and experimented on by aliens. As crazy as that sounds," I whispered the last part to myself. Still couldn't believe I'd been possibly probed.

The man whispered something like 'not again' under his breath and I raised an eyebrow at that. Not again? Did this happen a lot? Bloody hell. Those crackpot conspiracy theorists were right. Well, I'll be damned.

"Wait there and I repeat, do not move!" he replied and handed the megaphone off before pulling out a phone and beginning to speak as he went back into the ship itself. Oddly enough, I couldn't hear anything inside the ship.

A few minutes passed and the man came back out, took the megaphone back and lifted it to his mouth once more, "Would you be willing to come with us so we can verify if what you're saying is true? We've gotten in contact with the British authorities and they've sent a representative. You will be treated as a foreign party for now but with the due respect of a person in your circumstances." I could tell he wanted to add 'supposed circumstances' but he was forcing himself to be civil.

If he's making the effort, I should do the same. The second anyone mentions cuffs, a bag over my head or anything of the sort, I'm gonna take my chances in the ocean.

The fact, however, was that I didn't really have much of a choice.

Either I went with them or I stayed here, and if I was a Saiyan...I was gonna get real hungry real soon. Being stranded at sea wouldn't be fun then. Wasn't fun now either.

"Uh, yeah, that's good with me--can I move now then? I've got to if I want to swim over to your ship," I answered and hoped my reluctance wasn't too obvious. The man gave me a gesture to come over, so I did. Hopping out of the ship and into the ocean, I was greeted by cold water that wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting. Putting the internal questions on hold for now, I swam toward the ship. As you'd expect, it was way easier than any swimming I'd done as a human.

The currents and the waves felt like nothing as I broke through them with ease. Strong arms and legs made the not insignificant distance between myself and the ship a rather quick trip. When I arrived, a ladder was placed down for me and I pulled myself up with one strong pull and basically threw myself up onto the deck.

Some of the armed men and women twitched at the casual display of athleticism, causing me to reprimand myself mentally. Shouldn't be showing off or testing stuff now. Wait until later, man.

I saw a few of them look at my lower back and the monkey tail, making me feel a little self-conscious but I wouldn't show that. Instead, I just curled it around my waist like they did in the show...should've done that earlier.

At that point, I realized just how much bigger I was now. Having an actual reference like the railings next to the people nearest to me, I saw that I was a head and shoulders above some of them. Must've been a solid two meters tall. Damn. A big upgrade on 5'10". A cough to the side brought my attention to the obvious leader of this crew who'd spoke into the megaphone.

He was a tall man, only a few inches below me. But he wasn't nearly as brawny. Lean, hard-faced and sinewy from a life in the military. No doubt he was a dangerous man, if you weren't a Saiyan.

"An experiment, huh?" he gestured to the tail, a ghost of a smirk tugging at lips that looked entirely unused to smiling or doing anything other than frowning or opening to shout something.

I gave a nervous laugh at that, knowing how it looked. I had the same questions as him; why put a tail on me? Why even turn me into a Saiyan? But I was already coming to understand I'd most likely never know why, so I stopped the questions before they could derail me any further. In response to the man's comment, I shrugged and gave a 'what can you do?' expression.