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| - This will be a slightly unconventional anthology page, as Nowhere to Go doesn't exist on this wiki. The text of it - all 21,206 words of it - are nowhere to be found. Only I have a copy of the story, and I have no plans of ever posting it on this site or anywhere else. That's not to say I won't summarize important events and discuss the creation/writing process of it here, though. But there will be no endnotes for this anthology page. Nowhere to Go has existed, in some form or another, since at least 2012. Sorry, but I don't remember exactly when I began it. Back then, it was called "Prelude to a Nightmare". I wrote three short chapters of it in prose back then. I did minor revisions to those three chapters from 2013-2016, although, to be honest, I rarely re-read or even thought about PTAN during that span. The summary of the story is posted below. In the original draft of Nowhere to Go, the story featured The Benefactor and Ledas concocting up a hair-brained scheme for him to impregnate a random woman. The reason for this plan was never something I came up with. I just needed a way for him to have a son for the sake of The Last Saiyan. The three chapters included Ledas arriving on the girl's front door as an abandoned child, trying to gain sympathy with the family so that he could move in with them and get closer to the girl. The girl's name was originally Aubrey. Suffice to say, that story was horrible. When I re-read it for the final time in the summer of 2016, I concluded that there was essentially nothing salvageable of the original story. I deleted it and started fresh. And by that, I mean, I changed almost every aspect of the story. Every character aside from Ledas was renamed. The Benefactor no longer appears in Nowhere to Go (I've since found a different thing to do with his character, and I don't expect he'll be around during the time of The Last Saiyan - not that he was ever meant to have a large role in that story). Aubrey briefly became a variety of other names, mostly Asian in flavor (for a while, her name was Aeko), and later, Hawaiian in flavor, but I eventually settled on Aela as being the prettiest name I could think of. By 2012, I had decided that Nir's mother's name would start with an "A". By late 2015, I had determined it must begin with "Ae". It took me until August of 2016 to come up with her actual name though. The story was written in drama format - the same format used to write Dragon Ball Z: The Forgotten. I was originally going to write it in prose (as I had written the first draft of the first three chapters), but scrapped that idea when I realized it was impractical and unnecessary. The text color is the same shade of pink as the deleted scenes in TF. I have listed the overall length of the story and of each of the seven chapters here and here. As of writing this commentary, Nowhere to Go is the fourth longest story of mine, which I think is rather funny. It tells me that I don't have many long stories if this quickly-written tale is suddenly the 4th longest out of 72 stories of mine on this wiki. But it won't hold that position. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Planet Trade Organization, The Last Saiyan, His Majesty's Pet, Chasing Oblivion, and Dragon Ball: Heart of the Dragon will all be much longer than Nowhere to Go once they are completed. I guess I should complete them. For additional perspective, Nowhere to Go is also longer than the entirety of the Prince Vegeta Saga and the Planet Earth Saga of TF, though it is at least 1000 words shorter than any of the other four sagas of TF. So I don't have that much I want to say about this story. The below summary is pretty self-explanatory. I do want to say that it was fun to write about build up to The Last Saiyan, though. This story really helped me solidify my idea of the timeline leading up to TLS, and I came up with more than a few cool ideas to later put in that story (such as Tess being Nir's aunt, and giving a better backstory to Tyren). With Tyren, his new story in the prologue is based on me reading Beowulf in an English class of mine during the fall semester of 2016. After reading that story, I came up with the entirety of the Dragons of the Dawn/Ledas/Tyren/Aekyarian plotline, and I'm quite proud of that. Another thing I should mention is that Nowhere to Go became mostly structured after I created the Ledas: A Saiyan's Story page. After I created that page, I re-focused on the story of mine that was at the time called "Prelude to a Nightmare" and placed it on the page under a new name ("Nowhere to Go" is a reference to a line from "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles). In the week and months after creating the page for Ledas: A Saiyan's Story, I began thinking about this story more and came up with a general outline. I wrote seven chapter outlines overall, which helped me write this story. Interesting to note is the fact that I didn't know how many chapters this story would be overall until I had finished the fifth chapter (at times, I thought it might be 8 chapters or 10 or 12 - it ended up being 7). And writing it in drama format made the writing go faster, too. Seeing Ledas' tales in full on the Ledas: A Saiyan's Story page, seeing what was left to be written, I came to the conclusion that Nowhere to Go could be completed relatively quickly. At first, I had not meant to start it this year, but after I realized I could finish it quickly, I decided to start it. I wrote the first chapter on August 14, 2016. I usually wrote one chapter a day - though rarely I wrote a partial chapter and then continued it on another day. I always gave myself at least 24 hours between finishing the first draft of a chapter before re-reading it to edit and finalize it. The last chapter was finalized on September 12, 2016. I wrote the chapters in two main bursts - the first four in mid-to-late August, and the final three in early-to-mid September. The writing went very quickly. The entire 21,206 word story was fully completed in less than a month, which is a great feat, I think. This story has immense value to me. I had a lot of fun developing Ledas' character in this period of his life, and there was lots of set up for The Last Saiyan, a story I've been wrestling with since 2012. I gained significant clarity on several major plot points of that story in the writing of Nowhere to Go. This is mostly true for stuff related to Tess and Tyren. As well, I finally came up with an idea for what to do with Ledas. In truth, before writing this story, I didn't really have an endgame for Ledas - I knew he'd be around in TLS in some capacity, but with the writing of this story, I came up with a precise role for him in TLS and I mapped out the rest of his life. That's a character who's existed since early 2010 - I finally came up with his fate in late 2016 (specifically, on August 31, 2016). So yeah, a lot of significant stuff happened in this story and Nowhere to Go also helped me come up with explanations and ideas for other aspects of the furthest stretches of my universe (I don't plan to write any stories beyond TLS, timeline-wise, as of this moment). For that alone, Nowhere to Go has been a wonderful surprise, born of an old, bad idea, and refined into something I am proud of. I will not be rating this story, however, since it's mostly a collection of deleted scenes.
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