On character creation (in the game I'm playing.)
Lately, I've been finding myself (re)playing Dragonball Xenoverse. In its most basic form, the plot is simple: create a character, and play through the history of the Z-series, which has been fundamentally altered by time-travelling villains so that the bad guys win. Unsurprisingly I made myself a human rather than any of the alien races or the ever popular Saiyans, and themed him after myself. Small, brown-haired, bespectacled, name and all. About the only thing I couldn't edit is how positively ripped he looks, but that's just anime for you. Now, the thing that started the idea from this entry, is that I replayed the introductory cutscenes again.When the Dragonballs are used to call the protagonist, Shenron explicitly uses the term 'summoned' when you are brought into the setting. Specifically, the character of Future Trunks wishes for a capable ally who can help him defend the timestream, and it's implied you have a great learning potential given the technique copying you do in the game. Now this begs the question, what was your character doing and where did he come from before the game?
Nominally this doesn't matter, but as a hobby writer with a hundred and one ideas in my head, I sat down to think about it. There has to be some reason he's capable of flying, fighting, and using ki attacks when he's been summoned, which means he was already trained in the ways of combat. Given how the nature of time travel is a finicky thing, I figure he has to come from some sort of abandoned timeline or alternate universe where things didn't work out. With that little thought out of the way I promptly considered just what it could be, given how alternate timelines can vary based on any number of little things. So this is how I figure the Protagonist's original timeline panned out, just to get the idea out of my head and muse on it. If you don't want to read the long version, the short version is: basically humanity gets off its collective arsehole and fights back, pulls a Humans Are Special a few times, and is ultimately almost wiped out. And as for the long version:
- Dragonball happened, but not in the way it happened in the anime series. It was regular humans that did the exploration and journeying, the fighting with demons and androids and armies, the training under Master Roshi. Climaxing of course with the battle against King Piccolo before we moved into the era of Z. Rather than sit back and relax, and expecting further trouble, humanity doesn't sit on its laurels and keeps training.
- We enter the era of Z. Rather than just Raditz showing up, he shows up with his brother Goku, who is a villain in this timeline and is as simpleminded and bloodthirsty as his ally. Without all the base experience and level grinding he did in the Dragonball series, he's not half as competent as his mainstream counterpart, but both Saiyans are still a terrifying force. Protagonist exists here, roughly filling the Gohan role of the young trainee, though more a teenager than a child, who demonstrates his technique copying here for the first time. Humanity wins over these two but not without some losses, though less than one might have expected given the aid of Piccolo as in the main timeline.
- Cue Nappa and Vegeta a few years later, who can bust cities easily and the latter of whom once threatened to blow up the planet. Through means unknown - and a loss of a lot of life from their rampages - they manage to weaken Nappa (to the point Vegeta murders him as in the main timeline) and imprison Vegeta, and reverse engineer the technology of his space pod. This in turn leads them to the idea that Frieza exists, since someone had to make this tech and Vegeta is no genius. So they send the pod out with a team (including the Protagonist who is now of age and Piccolo) on a return protocol, which leads them to Namek and the worst nightmare of their lives.
d) Most of the team is slain fighting Frieza, the Ginyu Force, and his minions (who are the only ones to actually suffer any losses on the villain side). Piccolo and the Protagonist escape in the pod and return to Earth, informing the planet of the terror beyond the stars. Though Frieza and company eventually follow the pod back to Earth, they are taken wholly by surprise when instead of simpering in fear humanity bites back and actually wins. Through a mixture of numbers and sheer overkill, the warriors of Earth - and by that we mean the whole Earth - manage to kill off the Ginyu Force and mortally wound Frieza, who escapes.
e) King Cold, Cyborg Frieza, and the Trade Planetary Organisation show up some time later, and bombard the ever-loving SHIT out of the planet with no regard for fair play or combat. Loss of life is immense while the biosphere remains intact, because there's no need to TOTALLY ruin a planet if you can scour it of life. Frieza personally hunts down the team of creatures that did the most damage to him (thus brutally murdering Piccolo who never had his chance to fuse with Kami), and the Earth becomes almost post-apocalyptic with his soldiers hunting the landscape for human life. Sure, Frieza could kill them all himself, but for all his egotism his men need a workout to. The Protagonist is last seen defending his non-combatant friends against scouting ships, an array of minions, and a Frieza Clansmanl who is going to murder them all deader than dead and they all know it. And then he is summoned, and taken away from this place to join the Time Patrol.
So, rather than being a blank slate, I give my character some form of history that probably has holes in it given my spotty remembrance of DBZ mythology. Having actually beaten the game and considered it some more, I wonder if he misses it, if he wants to go back given his extreme alteration in power level at this point. He would probably be told that it's not possible, that the timeline is a branch-off of the main one that's dead and abandoned and as they've learned throughout the game, altering the timeline can result in terrible distortions. That and he actually belongs as a member of the Time Patrol now. But it would be admitted that he would need closure, and it's been known that unstable areas of time and space often open up (the Parallel Quests /side-missions of the game), so Future Trunks and the Supreme Kai of Time put themselves to work. Eventually they would find an unstable zone that would resemble what he came from. His friends (or his memories of them) about to be brutally murdered by ships, minions, and the Clansman, that he can journey to once, and once only - these things fall apart after their 'goal' has been met after all. So our Protagonist, fresh off fighting Gods, is teleported back into a facsimile of his own timeline.
And he wrecks house. Grossly overpowered by series standards at this point, he'd be able to single-handedly take out the ships, the minions, and the Clansman with the vast array of attacks and abilities he's learned as a Time Patroller. He would go on to run himself ragged killing all the minions on the planet and then blow all his energy reserves on Frieza and King Cold. Having fought, bested, and sparred with things far more powerful than they, his level ability is impossible for them to match and he brooks no quarter. Once he's done with them and the Earth is saved however, he has to be pulled out. It is of course an unstable space region, but the last thing he gets to see is the image of his former friends thanking him in amazement for saving their lives. He gets closure for the timeline that no longer is, and is no longer racked by the hidden frustrations of not being able to save his friends.
And rather than just being an (in)accurate representation of me like I do in many a videogame, he now has a history, albeit one rather coloured by the series he's a part of. Unless a game provides any sort of backstory for my character, I take great delight in making it up myself.