My first memory… was of darkness. Well, partially. As soon as I was born, I was placed into an incubator for just over three years, just like every other Saiyan baby.
In my incubator, I was taken fairly good care of. That made sense. Low-class or not, I was the son of King Vegeta, after all.
The point of the incubators was to shove information into our heads, bypassing the need for formal education at all. How much of that information stuck relied on the individual, but apparently, I had a pretty good brain, because I could read, write, and do math at a fairly high level from the moment that I was taken out of my incubator.
Unfortunately, that was all I had going for me.
For Saiyans, one's place in society was determined specifically by their power level at birth. Nothing else mattered in the least. It was a terribly useless system, but these people believed in it with all of their hearts.
Any Saiyan born with a power level below 100 was considered low-class. Saiyans born with power levels between 100 and 249 were mid-class, and anyone born stronger than that was an Elite-class Saiyan. For example, Goku's brother, Raditz, was born a year before me, with a power level of 251, barely squeaking into Elite Class.
Meanwhile, I was the other way around. As the younger brother of the great Prince Vegeta, the baby born with the record-breaking power level of over 950, my father had great expectations when I was born.
Unfortunately for me, my power level at birth was literally less than one-tenth of my elder brother's. 85. Low-class. A disappointment.
But, to be honest, that was more than enough for me.
Still, it would've been nice for my father's first words to me to come from a place of pride, rather than, "Tarble. You will be personally tested by me on your fifth birthday. That gives you one year to prove to me that you are not the weakling that I believe you are, or you will be permanently exiled. You are not allowed to leave the castle under any circumstances. Get out of my sight."
But, to be honest, I was fine with where I was.
After all, the only one who could possibly get strong enough to take Frieza on before he destroyed the planet in around four years is Broly, and I had exactly zero desire for strength with that kind of drawback. As such, it didn't really matter how strong I got, my father, and the planet as a whole, was doomed.
Most Saiyans were low-class. Even though my power level at birth was only 85, I wasn't technically weak by any measure, at least for my age. Almost perfectly average, in fact.
That meant that, if I really worked at it over the next year and a half or so, my father wouldn't be pulling any strings if he allowed me to stay on Planet Vegeta and be treated like a normal soldier.
Unlike my brother, I wouldn't be allowed long breaks between assignments, and I wouldn't get any real benefits, but I could, theoretically, lead a perfectly average life as the younger brother of the future king of all Saiyans.
Unfortunately for me, life, for a Saiyan prince, wasn't that simple.
Saiyans weren't known for their loving care and attention. Immediately after I was released from my incubator, I was relegated to a small wing of the castle and put through a brutal training regiment that seemed to only highlight a Saiyan's strengths.
Strengths that my brother had in spades. I did not have those strengths.
Speaking of Vegeta, he was five when I was released from my incubator. I saw him a few times, on my way to training. While he clearly looked down his nose at me, like the snot-nosed five year old he was, he never actively belittled me for being weak, unlike my caretakers, maids, and trainers. Simply ignored me. Maybe a little scoff as we passed in the hallway, but nothing beyond, even though he had every right. Here I was, going on four with a power level of 155, while he was almost six with a power level of 2500. From a Saiyan common sense perspective, me even being allowed to train in the same area as him was an almost unheard of show of favoritism on my father's end.
While it wasn't exactly love and affection, I definitely preferred being treated like a non-entity to being treated like garbage.
The reason that I was treated so poorly by my caretakers was a simple one, though. My father valued family. More specifically, he valued his family's strength. From his perspective, it was his duty to have children who were the strongest Saiyans alive. Vegeta was doted on, because he fit that image to a tee. A prodigy, when it came to combat.
Me, on the other hand? I may have been intelligent, but that wasn't a good thing in combat. It meant that I thought too much, hesitated too much. Add on the fact that I was also skinny, weak, hated the sloppy way that they taught combat by putting me in a room with a Saibaman with orders to stop just short of killing me, and was prone to asking questions that normal Saiyans didn't care about, because they had nothing to do with combat, and you had the exact opposite type of son, compared to what my father wanted.