| abstract
| - The concept of this story, and, indeed, the concept of this entire one-shot collection was first conceived of on August 15, 2015. That was when I came up with the final 8 stories for The Heels of the Unknown. Now, that's not entirely true (I replaced the concept for story #5 (which eventually became Starfall) twice more, but I'll get more into that on Starfall's anthology page; I also replaced a story about Roshi and Oolong with a story about Super Handel, which became Crushing Blue). The Heels of the Unknown was created as a fourth serious one-shot collection, following in the footsteps and legacies of The Brady Patrick Collection, The Black and White Collection, and Things Were Better Then. I settled on 8 stories rather early on in the conceptualization of this collection, for I did not want to reuse any number of stories I had previous used for a one-shot collection. There were various special things about this collection that were settled on rather early in the creation process: the fact that half of the stories are serious, while the other half are comedic stories; the fact that each story would be tied to Japanese aesthetics, particularly Japanese tea ceremony aesthetics; and the idea that there would be 8 stories, an auspicious number in Chinese culture. Other ideas, such as the binaries of spring/summer/autumn/winter, the story theme songs, and the idea of having 4 canon character stories and 4 fanon character stories were things I came up with later. Below, I will list a brief timeline of The Heels of the Unknown, as recorded by me since August 15, 2015:
* August 15, 2015 - came up with final list of 8 stories; 4 comedy stories, 4 drama stories
* November 14, 2015 - did work on stories 1, 3, 7, 8 (KV note: all four of these stories are ones that remained to publication - A Shadow on the Wind, Down the Well-Worn Road, Black Dawn, and The Great Sushi-Eating Contest)
* December 15, 2015 - came up with three names for the story collection, though none are perfect (As We Wind On Down The Road; The Long and Winding Road; The Road Goes Ever On)
* December 22, 2015 - came up with idea to have a Sertung story instead of Majin story (KV note: the Majin story was the original idea for story #5, which eventually became Starfall)
* December 24, 2015 - came up with idea to have zen pictures + poetry + song reference for songs
* December 28-29, 2015 - all except story #6 given songs and story #2 was mostly plotted out during this time; decided to change story #5 from one about true Majin to one about Sertung and Verlate and Champa
* January 4, 2016 - came up with stuff related to the Supreme Kais in Sertung's story as I read over some pages (most notably Kaishin Orion's page) on the wiki, as was my duty as a judge for the 2015 DBF awards
* January 10-11, 2016 - looked up many pictures for top of page pictures of all one-shots
* January 11-12, 2016 - came up with two new story ideas, getting rid of the Sertung story and Roshi/Oolong story, replacing them with a Bojack story idea and a story idea about Super Handel (KV note: these changes were the last story changes for The Heels of the Unknown; from this point on, all of the story ideas were kept and written out on the wiki)
* January 13, 2016 - came up with all story theme songs and pictures, as well as did some research on the flowers for each and template construction; the Pikkon template was created
* January 14, 2016 - had TUN help me come up with a name for the story (Fin); however, I did not ultimately use that name for this one-shot collection
* January 15, 2016 - thought up another name for the story collection - The Ravaged Minds - but did not settle upon that; later, while listening to the closing theme of Cowboy Bebop (Blue), I came up with the name "In the End" and used that for this story collection's name at the time
* January 18, 2016 - came up with a final name for the one-shot collection (The Heels of the Unknown) and finalized five chapter titles - stories 2, 3, 4 were not given final names at this point.
* January 19, 2016 - came up with names for stories 2, 3, 4; found pictures for every character; posted story collection page on the wiki.
* March 31, 2016 - did significant work on story 1, and wrote two quotes for it; wanted to write the story this day but it was too late and I had school the next day, so I couldn't, which sucked.
* April 9-10, wrote most of Pikkon story (some was written on March 31) So the above timeline covers everything up to the completion of A Shadow on the Wind. As can be seen, it took a while for me to settle on many things related to this one-shot collection. Naming it was a great struggle, as was coming up with the binaries, the themes of the collection, and all of the story ideas. Those took time. But I did have everything settled roughly 3 months before I wrote this story. Below, I will list all of the story ideas I had for The Heels of the Unknown, including the four abandoned story ideas. I don't remember exactly when I started working on this story collection, or when I came up with it, but I'd like to think that it was soon after I completed Things Were Better Then and I knew that I still had several one-shot ideas I wanted to write out and I realized that I had been doing one-shot collections every year for the past three years. So all of those factors influenced me to create a new one-shot collection, and at first, probably in July 2015, I had more nebulous ideas, which you will see below. I don't believe I ever modified any of these story ideas; all of them were written in July or August of 2015:
* 1. Pikkon - Pikkon tracks escaped Babidi and Kid Buu (from IR), whilst also dealing with his own feelings about his death and past life. He finds them on a ruined, rainy world and easily defeats them; he almost just leaves to return to the realm of the living, but at the last moment decides to return to the realm of the dead, noting that his time is over.
* 2. Cui - Cui gets into an argument with Guldo about some candybars that leads to a dance-off and other crazy shenanigans between the two and other Ginyu Force members and members of Frieza's empire.
* 3. Elijah - Elijah looks for Makare's blade, noting what happened to the other 5 legendary tamahagane katanas that existed as well. He finds the blade in a bandit hideout being wielded by a bandit chief. Colonel Violet is present during this. Elijah meets several people with black eyes who spook him.
* 4. Korin - origin story, featuring Garlic, Makyans, Beezelbub, and others.
* 5. Bojack - A story about Bojack as he genocides through space just before being confronted by the four lesser Kais, who of course imprison him in a star, but that occurs off-screen.
* 6. Super Handel - A story about Super Handel, his drug addictions, hookers, murder, poker, and of course his pet cat. Set in a cyberpunk world - must have lots of focus on the city, the rain, the technology and the disparity between machine and man.
* 7. Cyleria - This story details Cyleria's last days alive as she and her squad clear a planet, get marooned on it, and are met by Zarbon. A fight ensues, where Zarbon and his lackeys kill all of the Saiyans, despite Cyleria's plea for mercy since she's pregnant.
* 8. Ledas - This would be the sushi eating competition between Ledas and Tarble, expanded a little bit to show some information about Ledas' life since TF. Discarded story ideas: (KV note: the number in front of each name is where that story would been placed in the above collection; as can be seen, only stories 4, 5, and 6 had multiple story ideas vying for those spots)
* 4. Roshi & Oolong - the pair tries to alleviate their boredom by finding some hotties, but instead they just find some huge fat tall women. (story concept abandoned on January 11-12, 2016)
* 5. Sertung - Sertung drifts through life, dying a slow death as the universe is thriving around him, watching the Daman empire crumble and the Kais rise; he is alone with Verlate's mind prison and eventually runs into Vados and Champa, and he gives them Verlate's mind prison before succumbing to his disease. During his meeting with Vados, a Supreme Kai appears and attacks Vados with a spirit bomb but is killed. (story concept abandoned on January 11-12, 2016)
* 5. True Majin - Story about True Majins and why they almost went extinct. Perhaps this one will deal with a True Majin who survived to present times to meet the Priests of Amoon and Majin Nikto. (story concept abandoned on December 28-29, 2015)
* 6. The Benefactor - A comedy story about TB escaping from the ice world, dealing with space truckers and the like. (story concept abandoned on August 15, 2015) From what can be seen above, there was a bit of chaos in the summer and autumn binaries. Indeed, there was quite a bit of uncertainty with those stories up until late January 2016. As opposed to those two seasons, spring and winter were set almost from the beginning. The concepts of those four stories remained unchanged throughout the almost year-long process of conceptualizing and writing out this entire collection. And of those, A Shadow on the Wind benefited the most, for it was the first story to be written, and thus, it was the story I spent the most time on, conceptually. I probably spent more than twice as long coming up with the plot, themes, characterization, and all the other aspects of this one-shot compared to the others in this collection, simply because I had from mid January to mid April 2016 to work on this story. For every other one-shot in this collection, I had less than a month to work on them. That is simply because as soon as I had written A Shadow on the Wind, that compelled me to put a timeline on completing the one-shot collection. I decided that each seasonal binary (spring, summer, autumn, winter) should be completed quickly, so as you can see if you check each one-shot's history, each comedic story for each season was completed only a few days after that season's dramatic story. In the case of spring, I'm a Candy Man was completed about three days after this story. As with all "first" stories in my one-shot collections, A Shadow on the Wind is a bit odd. It doesn't feel totally like the other seven stories because it was written with no concept of what a completed The Heels of the Unknown story would look like. I think this is also seen with Sixth (the first story written for The Brady Patrick Collection), Bluestreaker (the first story written for The Black and White Collection), and Glory (the first story written for Thing Were Better Then). This story's themes are a bit less subtle than what is seen in the rest of the collection, and the prose in general, in my opinion, is a bit less like the other one-shots in this collection. However, this story is much like the others in many other ways. For example, I resolve a cliffhanger from Dragon Ball Z: In Requiem in this story (one that Destructivedisk thought I didn't need to, but I disagreed with him, obviously). This connection with another story of mine, with the greater KidVegeta Universe, is something I first attempted to a much smaller scale in Bonetown Blues in my previous one-shot collection. Here now, this one-shot (and indeed, most of the stories in The Heels of the Unknown) has a binary function in that it serves as both an epilogue to In Requiem whilst also maintaining the themes, aesthetics, and characterization I was going for in this collection. In many ways, The Heels of the Unknown is me trying to resolve many aspects of my universe that have been left unresolved. Of course, not everything that I leave unresolved is something I want to later resolve (having some mysteries and ambiguities is good for a dynamic universe), but in this case, this was something I wanted to resolve. Since Babidi and Buu are both canon characters, I didn't want to leave their fates up in the air, for fear of later canon contradictions (in case Super ever brought them up again, for instance). That was the main inspiration for this story. Indeed, I had had this story idea since before the creation of Things Were Better Then, my 2015 one-shot collection. The idea that Pikkon would go out and re-capture Babidi and Buu is something that has been in my head for so many years, it's essentially been a canon fact to me (for my universe)... so I decided to write it out. So in terms of how I wrote this story, I wrote two quotes for it on March 31, 2016, at around 2 am. These two quotes were the first bits of prose I ever wrote for The Heels of the Unknown. They are: "He closed his eyes and felt the pulse of the universe. One pulse, not two, he thought. Babidi, and no Buu." and "It was the oldest, most real thing in the universe: champion against foe. Which was he?" Those two quotes may have been modified in the final version of this story, but those were the first things I wrote for this story. I often approach stories from an aesthetic or thematic viewpoint, and I think those two quotes illustrate what I was attempting to do with this story in a visceral way. I was unable to write more than that at the time, though, since I had school in the morning. I continued the story on April 9, 2016, starting at 11:21 pm, and I continued writing until 4:24 am of April 10. Then, exhausted, I collapsed into bed. When I woke up, I re-read the story and edited it from 5:32 pm to 6:46 pm. I posted the story on this wiki at 7:09 pm of the same day, and the rest is history. I do remember this story took the longest to publish because not only did I need to format the italicized text, but I had to create the template (I was able to do the template much quicker for the other stories when I had this story's template as a reference point). Other than that, there's not much to say about the writing process. It was rather hard and grueling, and I remember writing all of it, but there was a tremendous sense of accomplishment when I finally finished this idea that had been swimming around in my head for at least two years. Anyways, one last thing I want to mention before we get to the specific story commentary is that every story in The Heels of the Unknown was given a theme song before I began writing this collection. I created a playlist of the songs on January 19, 2016 that can be seen here. As any astute reader will notice, only one out of the eight songs ended up being used for these one-shots. Yes, that is true. I'm not sure why that happened, but the songs I intended for the one-shots were mostly discarded as I wrote the one-shots. As I wrote the stories, I thought different songs would work better for most of them, including this one. Below, the original list of theme songs is listed: (KV Note: all of the songs, except for the third one, were discarded by the time each story was published)
* 1. Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin) LIVE xxx
* 2. Rocket Man (Elton John) xxx
* 3. Along the Road (Radical Face) LIVE
* 4. Hey Bulldog (The Beatles) xxx
* 5. Hrafntinna (Sigur Rós) LIVE xxx
* 6. Get Home (Bastille) xxx
* 7. Silent Spring (Radiohead) LIVE xxx
* 8. Choke (Bowling For Soup) xxx The actual list of songs I used is below:
* 1. Saturn (Sleeping at Last)
* 2. La Bamba (Playing for Change) LIVE
* 3. Along the Road (Radical Face) LIVE
* 4. Revolution (The Beatles)
* 5. Kveikur (Sigur Rós) LIVE
* 6. Deutschland (Die Prizen)
* 7. Bodysnatchers (Radiohead) LIVE
* 8. Weight of Living, Pt. 1 (Bastille) As can be seen, four of the songs are live, while four are studio recordings. This is another one of the binaries in this collection, and one of the coolest ones, in my opinion. For A Shadow on the Wind, the use of Saturn by Sleeping At Last focuses on the themes of existence, loneliness, life/death, and has a really cool space-theme to it all. I thought all of those aspects of the song greatly aided this story thematically and tonally. Anyways, that's all I think I needed to say in this opening monologue, so onto the endnotes! I haven't read this story since its publication, so this should be fun.
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