NOTE: brackets indicate another language being spoken

Seventeen wasn't really paying attention to what she and the frog child were saying as he was loading the syringe with the vial of antivenom. It was the Aracmyn type of antivenom he kept on him for work, which was a catch-all variant for most recluse and black widows.

Everything in the universe was a relative of each other. No matter how far apart they existed, all life shared the same basic makeup. Following this logic, even if the spider that had bitten this man was biologically mutated, the antivenom would still work. At least he hoped to whatever god may exist it would.

There was still the issue of what to do about the rotting flesh and infection of his circulatory system. The saline would hopefully flush out whatever was infecting his veins, but the site of the bite needed skin grafting of some sort, something Seventeen was neither experienced in nor had the tools for.

"When we're done here, we need to have one of the villagers take the truck and drive him to the city for surgery," he was in the middle of murmuring to himself, until he heard Kaki's exclamation.

Spinning around to see what was wrong, he almost dropped the antivenom vial, letting out a soft gasp before catching it with his above average reflexes.

"Kaki! What's wrong?"

"I can't believe I didn't see this from the beginning!" she continues, until her expression falls to shock and a gasp escapes her when she startles Seventeen and makes him nearly drop the antivenom. There's a pause on her side, where she gives him an apologetic wince.

"...This planet used to be occupied by Freeza's army. Before they were forced out, they built a factory not too far from here. A clothing factory." She takes her cloak by the corner to show him what she meant. "Remember? They make this out of arachnid silk."

Kaki then nods toward Pepsi, still watching curiously. "Pepsi just told me that it's been building 'nests of darkness'. It's building a web."

"Holy shit," he muttered. "Freeza's army really used creatures as dangerous as this just for silk?"

Suddenly a jingle blared from Seventeen's backpack. Carefully, he sat down the vial and syringe on the small wooden table next to the bed and reached into his backpack.

It was his cell phone that was ringing. But how was that even possible millions of miles away from Earth? He pulled the device out of the interior pocket, and glanced at the caller ID which read Capsule Corporation HQ.

He must have looked like he'd seen a ghost, because when he turned to Kaki and Pepsi ,they both stared at him with alarming anticipation.

"I - I'm sorry, I have to take this," Seventeen said, rushing out of the room and answering the call as fast as he could.

"Bulma?! How the hell are you able to reach me all the way out here?"

When the voice on the other end of the line spoke it wasn't Bulma's, but if he had been human he would have had a heart palpitation.

"Eighteen told me you left Earth..." Her voice, it was creamy and dulcet like it had had always been, but a bit raspy as if she had been crying. "Lapis...what's going on?"

"R-Rosemary?"

Kaki watches after Seventeen as he goes, before turning back to where he left the syringe. She walks around the man on the ground and takes it in her hand.

{ Pepsi, } she says, flicking the syringe with her finger to clear bubbles, { there's someone in your village who can drive, right? }

{ Yes! My mimi, } Pepsi tells her, perking up a bit.

{ Tell them to get ready for travel, then. This man will need proper medical attention after the antivenom is administered. }

{ Right! }

Pepsi does an enthusiastic salute and runs out, leaving Kaki with the man. She kneels to where he lays, putting a gloved hand on his arm to get his attention.

"I'm going to need you to turn onto your side," she tells him, "so I can properly give you this antivenom."

"For fuck's sake," mumbles the man, weakly rolling onto his right side, "just stick it in already."

She makes a face at the rather succinct way of putting it and inserts the needle into his left glute.

"I know you're still angry with me, and I know you told me never to contact you again, but Eighteen's worried about you...I'm worried about you."

Seventeen let the breath he had been holding for what seemed like an eternity out, as his chin fell to his chest.

"I don't have time for this Rosi-" he stops himself from almost using the pet name he used to call her. "I'm in the middle of something."

She groans. "You're always 'in the middle of something' Lapis! If it's not your job, it's your sister or something else!"

She lets out an exasperated breath, leaving the phone line crackling through the depths of space. "Please, Lapis, just tell me what's going on?"

"I killed a poacher executioner style and am now millions of light-years across the galaxy doing side quests with a woman who has a bounty on her head!" he shouts into the phone. "Now if you'll excuse me, Rosemary, I'm going to go save a man whose skin is slowly rotting from a giant fuck-off mutated alien spider's bite from dying an agonizing death!"

Angrily he shoved the phone back in his pocket and stormed into the room with Kaki and Pepsi.

"Oh good, you already shot him in the ass."

Pepsi had already come back with the news that their mimi was willing to drive the man back to the city, and jolted when Seventeen stomped back in. Kaki, having already pulled the syringe out from the man's buttock, looks to Seventeen with slightly raised eyebrows.

"That was... quite a surprise, your phone still working out here," she comments eventually, using one hand to help the man roll onto his back. She glances at Seventeen again when done, looking slightly concerned. "Is everything all right?"

"It's fine! Everything's fine!" Seventeen barks, hastily grabbing the saline pouch and butterfly needle off the table where he left them. Despite the angry outburst, he attempts to get the IV drip ready, Kaki watching him almost wearily as he did.

He's doing an okay job with the preparation and then there's sudden painful needling in his forehead.

/17. It's been a while./

"No. Not now," he says through gritted teeth.

/Oh, don't be shocked brother. It's not like you could keep me at bay for long. You don't have anyone to love and support you enough to fend me off like our dear sister./

Seventeen drops the IV supplies on the bed, scooting back.

"Kaki, can you do it?" he asks, barely able to get the words out.

"Um, sure," Kaki responds, taking the supplies from him.

She remembers watching doctors from the Medical Corps do this thousands of times - even had to do it a few times herself. She finds a vein in the man's arm and ties a tourniquet to get it to swell.

After disinfecting, she moves to insert the needle, watching carefully for blood. She sees a flashback and sighs in relief, knowing that meant the needle was in.

All the while Kaki continues, Pepsi's big red eyes are glued to Seventeen, watching in slight apprehension.

"Cell..." Seventeen growls, eyes cinched shut, and brows furrowed in pain.

/It's sad to see you like this 17. You've taken off with some random woman because of what? Morality? Heartbreak? Or is just because she makes you feel like you're more human than you really are?/

"Fuck. Off!"

It's hard to really be able to take in anything in the room right now besides him and Cell, but he does feel an almost vigorous tugging on his pant leg. Opening his eyes a bit, he sees the small frog child, Pepsi staring up at him.

{ Are you okay, sir? }

He shakes his head a bit, not being able to understand the child's language. "I - I'm sorry. I don't-"

/I'm talking to you 17!/

"Urrgghhhh!" Seventeen lets out a cry of pain when suddenly he feels Pepsi wrap their webbed hands and tiny arms around his calves. They're holding onto him so tightly as they begin to sing a little tune.

And just as quickly as he came, Cell is gone.

By the time she hears Seventeen cry out and the tune that Pepsi sang, Kaki had already attached the IV to the catheter.

She finally stands and quickly turns to see what was the matter, only to find Pepsi rather sweetly hugging Seventeen at his legs. Still, she goes over and hovers a gloved hand over his shoulder, a silver eye peering up at him in concern.

"Are you okay, Seventeen?"

He looks up at her, his eyes wide and mouth half open despite his jaw still being clenched. Kaki has a look of not sympathy, but deep and personal empathy in her expression. Something only someone who suffered the same as he did could wear.

His lips fall as he is able to regain his composure. "I'm...I'm okay."

Looking down at Pepsi, who had stopped humming their tune, but still hung off his leg, Seventeen smiled at them. He crouches down to be at eye level with Pepsi. "Thank you," Seventeen says genuinely.

The little amphibian looks up to Kaki expectantly for a translation.

"Can you ask them what song they were singing?" He looks back at Pepsi. "I would love to record it for later."

Kaki huffs a silent chuckle through her nose, before looking down to address Pepsi.

{ Seventeen says thank you for the song, } she tells them.

{ Oh! It is no problem. My mimi sings it to me whenever I get upset. }

"It's a lullaby," Kaki tells Seventeen, and then says to Pepsi, { He thinks you have a lovely voice. Would you let him record the song whenever it is we leave? }

{ He thinks I'm that good!? } If Pepsi's eyes grew any wider, they'd surely bulge right out. { I'd be honored! }

Kaki laughs a little at that. "And they'd love to share."

"That's real sweet of y'all," says a voice, which Kaki recognizes as the man they had been treating. "Now, I'm kinda... dyin' here. Would really love... to see a hospital now..."

"Ack." Kaki winces, before turning back to Seventeen. "Let's get the truck pulled up."

It's nightfall in the city where the streets do not sleep. In a particular technician's shop, a particular Tuffle named Loquat splays out a roll of blueprints over his workbench. He squints at them for a while. Then he adjusts the lamplight taking a long look at them again before sounding an impressed whistle to himself.

"Shit," he mumbles, scratching at his green beard, "I really hope he doesn't just give this kind of thing out to every engineer he meets..."

He jolts when he hears a loud crash, coming from the front of the shop, and rushes out to see what it was.

"Hey! What the - !?"

The bustling streets almost halt for the woman, parting like some kind of biblical allegory. She doesn't do clandestine in this body, it's too difficult. So she uses intimidation as a way to get the information she needs.

This is Rambutan, the bounty hunter with the most payouts from the PTO and the Galactic Patrol. Much like Ginyu of the Ginyu Force she can switch bodies with others. Her original body has long been taken by old age, so long she can't even remember what she looked like originally.

But she doesn't care about sentimental things like that when on the hunt. As part of her large network of information dealers, Rambutan found out that a high price target, the PTO deserter Kaki, has arrived on this backwater planet. She was spotted entering & exiting a technician's shop earlier today, so the bounty hunter has decided to pay this technician a visit.

Pulling the locked door off its hinges, Rambutan makes her presence known in the technician's shop.

"Heh, you're a scrawny one aren't ya? For a friend of Kaki's it's a bit disappointing."

Loquat grimaces darkly.

"Ugh! Why does everyone say shit like that to me?" he says, smoothly pulling a laser pistol from inside his work pants. "Warriors of her caliber aren't even that common!"

He aims the pistol at her and fires.

Rambutan can't even feel the laser gun's shot on her leather skin, but the small tuffle keeps shooting. She stomps forward as he does, the lasers bouncing off her and ricocheting around the shop. He's trying to keep her occupied, she can tell. He doesn't just care about his shop or keeping Kaki's whereabouts unknown. He's trying to fend the looming hunter off long enough to wear her down and make off on his own.

"Your tiny laser bullets are nothing to this body. You might as well give up little man." Getting close enough she tackles the Tuffle to the ground, the gun falling out of his hand and skidding across the shop's concrete floor. "Kaki was here earlier today wasn't she?"

He growls but keeps his jaw clenched tight. "Oh, I know you know who I'm talking about." She takes a switchblade out of her pocket and flips it open, running the blade along the man's cheek delicately. "The bearer of the storm surge?"

When he's forced to the ground, the back of his head bounces slightly off the floor, making everything look and feel as if it was spinning.

Loquat catches his breath as his jaw is gripped tight, where his gaze follows the blade pressed to his cheek. He knows better than to physically struggle at this point - in his experience with types like her, that would usually earn him a good cut in the face, or worse. With a glint in his amber eyes, his face twitches to a conniving grin.

"Yeah, sure," he pants, half-chuckling. "But she ain't here now. And even I don't know when or if she'll be back. You're gonna have to wait around just like me."

Rambutan frowns darkly.

"You're a bit too mouthy for my tastes," she says, knocking upside his head with a right hook, and he's out cold. "A shame, you're pretty cute..."

Rambutan stands up and kicks his body a bit. Yeah, he's still alive. He's probably smart, from the look of the shop's merchandise, but no one kept all their secrets locked up tight in their own home.

She goes through the beaded curtain into the back part of the shop, where there's still a lone lamp shining over the desk. Like it was framing a precious and expensive piece of art, she approaches it to see it might as well be.

It's blueprints for an android, from the specs of it which she doesn't really understand too much, it looks like this Android #17 is a cyborg, using a teenager's body as a base. Rambutan's eyes dart across the multiple pages of blueprints when the words "Immortal" cross her field of vision.

A plink goes off across the room, and the bounty hunter goes to check it out.

It's the technician's pager, a message from Pinkie Pie:

[ found one of your men. he will be fine. not sure about the other, but i wouldn't hold my breath. ]

[ one of the villagers is going to drive him into town since he is in need of surgery. ]

[ they're arachnids, by the way - from an abandoned armor factory not far from here. ]

[ seventeen and i are going to go find them and kill them before they spread out of control. ]

So this Android 17 is traveling with Kaki?

"I've been looking for a body to settle down in…" Rambutan says, a malicious smile spreading across her face, thinking about the two birds she's going to slaughter with one stone.

After they had sent the bitten man on his way back to the city, Pepsi had insisted on cleaning the floor of the building the man was housed in and brought a couple of hand-woven mats for her and Seventeen to sleep in.

Kaki stood inside, alone for once, staring at the screen of the pager Loquat lent her before she had left that morning. Eventually, she sighs in slight relief.

"Good, he got it."

It was a surprise that there was still a signal this far from the city, let alone one strong enough to actually send a message. Kaki puts the pager back in her pouch, before unbuckling the belt and tossing it to the floor beside her cloak, which was pinned by the brooch to the wall. She also removes her armor, finding it to be a bit too warm to keep wearing in the jungle humidity.

Finally, she sits on the mat for sleep but stays sitting up. She leans her elbow on her knee and rests her forehead in the palm of her head, suddenly feeling a wave of exhaustion and stress from the day's events take her over.

Seventeen leans back against the post of the bed the man had been laying in on his mat, propping up his arms behind his head. "It's been a long day… Well, a long few days for us. Did you sleep at all before we got here?"

Kaki presses her eyes shut, feeling them burn. She stays silent for a moment, her palm still at her forehead.

"Not really. But that's normal for me, anyway," she says, voice low.

Her eyes open, suddenly realizing how bad that sounded aloud. She sighs deeply and moves to take her shirt off, leaving her chest bare, setting it rumpled up beside her on the floor. She glances at Seventeen immediately after, trying not to feel awkward.

"...It's hot," she explains, looking away just as quickly. She scoffs at herself. "You'd think I'd be used to this climate, considering where I'm from..."

Letting out a laugh, Seventeen smiles at her, not even glancing at her chest. "Kaki, I've seen a woman with her shirt off before. I'm not gonna pop an oil leak like a horny teenager."

That being said, he has never seen her in anything but her PTO-inspired uniform. She was muscular, built like an athlete. Rosemary was a competitive swimmer in college, so he was used to that kind of physique on women. Unlike his ex though, Kaki was covered in scars, peppering her skin like stars in the sky.

"This is going to sound strange," he starts, "but your scars are really beautiful… I wish… I wish I could scar like you, or at all."

Kaki can't help to smirk a little awkwardly and mutters an apology. She sits back, keeping a hand on her poised knee, her expression drifting as her thoughts drifted similarly. But before they could drift too far, she's brought back when Seventeen speaks again.

Her brows raise slightly at his words as she meets his gaze for a moment before she looks away. A freehand instinctively goes to palm a distinct slash scar on her right forearm, the memory of how she got it flashing vividly in her mind despite the nonchalance.

"Um," she says, flattered but unsure of how to take the compliment. "Thanks."

Following her lead, he unties the scarf around his neck & puts it in his backpack for safekeeping. Then slips off the bandolier, and finally takes off the shirt the softness of which had a much more sinister edge to it than Seventeen had originally thought a few days ago.

"Okay, now we can both pretend not to be staring at each other's chests."

He looks down at his naked torso and frowns. "I wasn't lying about your scars. I - I can't scar. Something about the regeneration speed of the cybernetics I was injected with."

Kaki turns her head to fully look at him, her gaze traveling up and down with a look of sympathy before settling on his face.

"I'm sorry. I... cannot imagine what that is like," she says. She sighs, looking away again. "I just... I can't feel the same way about them. My scars. I do not think of them usually, but when I do... They're just reminders of a time I wasn't considered a person."

Her expression hardens a bit as she rolls her jaw. She wasn't used to being this candid.

"...For a lot of that time, I didn't feel like a person, either."

He's quiet for a moment. There was a lot of overlap in the little he knew about her experiences with his own. He had been trying to get at this when he gave her that monologue about sharing your pain in the truck, but there was a reason they were brought together like this. Birds of a feather or something like that.

"Autonomy is… It's fickle. One moment you have it and you don't even think about how good it is, and then the next it feels like you never did."

As he speaks he lowers his arms and repositions to be sitting cross-legged, letting his shoulders hunch over for a moment.

"I'm sorry you went through that, Kaki."

Kaki stays silent and eerily still. Her thoughts dwelled on the gruesome past and their cruel present, all stewing like a pot that had long begun to boil over. The anger in her eyes is smoldering and righteous, and her brows furrow together in determination.

"It doesn't matter anymore," she tells him. "What matters now is trying to circumvent the Planetary Trade Organization's goals, and stop them from bringing further harm to the galaxy."

The hand splayed over her knee clenches.

"...When I was a little girl and still living on Brench, I met an arachnid - in the wild. It was intelligent - terrifyingly so, I thought initially. But then it was... playing a game with me. And at the same time it was happening, I realized just how docile it was. They don't hunt people. They're not meant to. They've never been meant to.

"The arachnids, on my planet - they've been our companions for thousands of years. There's legends of them being our siblings, our - our creators. And then, when the Trade Organization took over and began industrializing - we were disconnected. Not only did they begin to exploit us, but they began to exploit the arachnids... I can't just sit by and let them wreak greed-driven havoc anymore. Not after all they've done and still do. That's why I went to your planet. I feared they had gotten there, too. And that's why…"

There's a sharp intake of breath, and she looks down, unable to speak coherently anymore. Tears of anger prick her eyes. Quickly, she scoots forward and lays down, turning away from Seventeen so he wouldn't have to see her upset.

"...That's why you have to let me do it. Once we get that arachnid on the loose, I need to be the one who burns that factory to the ground." She turns her head slightly as if to look at him from over her shoulder. "Promise me."

He sits silently for a second, his mouth opening and closing, trying to process everything she had just told him. These spiders, they weren't naturally like this? Well of course they weren't, most arachnids were docile unless provoked.

He looks at her as she lies facing away from him. Her body is almost curled up and crumpled, and she was breathing heavily, as though she was struggling to hold back tears.

"My friend, Sixteen… He once said that nature isn't something to be feared unless you have a reason to fear it. He's the reason I went into ecological protection," sighing he scoots closer and lies down on his back next to her. "So of course, Kaki. I promise."

He takes her silence as a 'thank you'. They lay next to each other for a couple of minutes, and eventually, she starts to snore. He watches her out of the corner of his eye, admiring her peaceful slumber, and continues to do so till morning.