LETTA ⭐ レッタ

Letta is Spina’s mother. In contrast to Rugul, Letta doesn’t have a beef with the elites or the royals specifically so much as she has a beef with everyone, at least until later in life. Unlike Rugul’s peaceful early childhood in a creche of amiable kids and fun and kindly caregivers, Letta’s upbringing was dicey from the start. The caregivers of her creche were a pair of rather hands-off retired soldiers who believed in survival of the strongest, and the other kids were rough and fiercely competitive. Letta was the youngest and weakest in the creche, and though she started with a fiery spirit, it got her into more trouble than out of it.

This only got worse as the Saiyan-Tuffle war began when Letta was only 7, and she and the others from her creche were assigned to a squad led by a nasty, spiteful hunter. As the runt, Letta would be made to do the scutwork and sent out first on scouting missions as more or less a meat shield. If she tried to fight back, she ended up just getting beaten. Eventually, one fateful scouting mission led to near-death, as she stepped on a mine which severely maimed both her legs, only surviving because of a reflexive ki-shield move she taught herself. She managed to escape back to camp but her squad had abandoned it and fled, leaving her to find rescue on her own.

On recovery, Letta demanded assignment to another squad, and was put on the team now headed by Rugul. Over time with them, Letta learned to trust others for the first time in her life. Her wariness of people never truly goes away, however, except for those in her squad or anyone else she manages to get comfortable with. Letta is very observant of people’s behaviors, patterns, and changes, especially for a Saiyan.

Narratively, Letta is to Rugul what Vegeta is to Spina, at least in the sense of being an isolated, untrusting person who is healed by earnest kindness. She has a lot of pent-up aggression, and tends to be blunt and cynical when she feels the need to speak, but mellows out later once she and Rugul establish themselves on New Plant. In the spin-off story where the younger canon Saiyan trio find New Plant and make a truce with the residents, Letta also takes on a bit of a teacher role, first by showing Raditz how to overcome the tail weakness, and later teaching Puka to fly.

GALLERY