As the only other biological figure in the room answered, Xen remained hunched over the android, the small laser finishing its first task and moving smoothly to the second infraction. He movements were smooth and conservative, eyes intent on the task in front of him and brows tilted in a mild concentration that belied the intensity in his eyes. He looked for all the world like a human surgeon elbow deep in his own mother’s open heart; though, to be fair, a human heart didn’t have as many working parts as a robot core.<br/><br/>For all of his distracted appearance, his ears and peripheral vision remained fixed on his guest. Joy? No, Jo-ey; she had put emphasis on the long ‘e’, and with a sideways glance Xen decided she didn’t really have the demeanor or face for a ‘Joy’ anyway. Her accusatory tone prompted a quirked brow and yet another sideways glance, this one longer, but she continued before he could respond. The moment the words ‘bad shit’ left her mouth, the fence paused his technical work and turned to her with a searching expression, not angry but with the beginnings of offense behind the curiosity.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">“What, you think I sold you out?”</span></span>He smirked, somehow without smiling whatsoever,<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">“You think I called the heat, then sent a very expensive errand bot to save you? So that you could, what, be caught in a place that could land me in hot plasma too, instead of out on the street without any implications of my involvement?”</span></span>Honestly; he had appreciated her suspicion before, but there was a limit.<br/><br/>He huffed and turned back to the machinery in the chair, exerting a bit of extra effort to not roll his eyes.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">“It’s as important as you want it to be, honestly. It <span style="font-style: italic">is</span> your choice, after all; you can turn me down, walk out, and… then I guess it wouldn’t be important at all.”</span></span>His tone was considerably less snarky, though it wasn’t as professional or even polite as before.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">“I’ll hit the major points quick, since you seem to be in a hurry to get back to your Enforcer friends.”</span></span><br/><br/>He rapped one knuckle twice on Gil’s metallic chest and the android promptly sat upright. Xen turned his back to the girl and picked up the tray on the dial, taking it to an empty spot, though he didn’t stop his lazy words.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">“Several months of your time, with less than no guarantee of your safety,”</span></span><br/><br/>He stopped, seeming to inspect something on one of the shelves but really it was just for dramatic effect,<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">“several deaths on your conscious, if you’re lucky,”</span></span><br/><br/>The fence plopped the little metallic object on the tray and kept walking,<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">“quite a bit of information you probably never wanted to know,”</span></span><br/><br/>He set the tray with a sharp clatter on a solid bit of shelf, with several more like it,<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">“an arm and a leg – literally,”</span></span><br/><br/>Finally, Xen turned to face her, his dark golden eyes sharpening to a razor edge as they met her own.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold"> “and approximately four trillion credits.”</span></span><br/><br/>--------------<br/><br/>Her mismatched eyes flickered to the detective as he introduced himself, the same way they might have flickered toward a malfunctioning beetle bot that was making an inordinate amount of noise. She sighed almost before he had even completed his proposal, dodging around a few casual passers-by as the two of them entered a more inhabited part of the Dome. If nothing else, the cadet had a set of balls that she wouldn’t have suspected based on the rest of his half-trained physique; the last person who had asked her to do their work for them still had a piece of cheekbone floating around in their nasal cavity somewhere. Still, that person had been a fellow bounty hunter; physical violence was just another accepted method of communication in that group. She probably shouldn’t sock a certified agent of the Enforcement, even if he was just some wet-behind-the-ears whelp… still, it might teach him a lesson about keeping his brass balls to himself when the gumption was unwelcome.<br/><br/><span style="color: #BF80FF"><span style="font-weight: bold">“Listen, Dave,”</span></span>she said, voice low but clear and eyes still scanning the crowd (she had been forced to slow her pace considerably to avoid collisions with the rabble)<span style="color: #BF80FF"><span style="font-weight: bold">“if you know my name, you know I work alone, so why don’t you – cover.”</span></span>The last word had no particularly different inflection from the rest of her sentence, but it was accompanied by a steel-strong grip of the detective’s upper arm and a strong yank toward her as she pressed her back against the inside wall just behind the entrance to a food station. The only angled cover was the ridge of the entrance, but she slouched deeply and folded her arms, making her body seem smaller and less noticeable. Celi may have pulled the detective behind the cover and close to the wall, but he was still in front of her; her eyes stared past him, glued on a single point that moved with the heavy traffic of the pathway.<br/><br/>The smallish individual moved languidly, clearly in no hurry, his easy nature explained by the towering figures of the guard bots that flanked him. His extra set of eyes (smaller, positioned just retro to the more expected pair), virtual hairlessness and wide, dark mouth marked the figure for alien; Celi knew his file stated him for ‘half human’ so that he could have full Earth citizenship, but she’d be tied up and sold into marriage to a miner before she believed that drivel. Telthir Mos’drin was 100 percent Nulterran, and 150 percent a persistent pain in her ass. He was a key player in one of Earth’s most lucrative drug rings, using his heritage to smuggle in almost all of the redstalk salts currently in circulation. Celi pushed thoughts of the willing victims for the substance out of her mind, running her artificial eye hot to inspect her target- unfortunately, the crowdedness of the area made the heat signatures blur and tangle.<br/><br/>“Fancy meeting you here,<span style="font-style: italic">seirren</span>.”<br/><br/>The bounty hunter shut her eyes, face unreadable. The term itself wasn’t what caused the wave of frustration (though it was fairly unflattering, if she remembered correctly), so much as the language; it was Nultish. She should have known that Mos’drin would have his people covering him from every angle, particularly if he was going to walk so openly through streets laden with cyborgs. She straightened to her full height as she inhaled and turned to face the speaker, another Nulterran (she suspected a female, but genders were often hard to distinguish with this particular alien race), dressed in black with a confident smirk plastered on her frog-like mouth. She must have back-up, either present or closely on the way. The clear red of Celi’s eye relayed that she was all biological, but wearing shocker gloves, fully-charged.<br/><br/>It figured, really. Almost no action for weeks, and now a deluge she might well not come out of unscathed. Still… this scum hardly deserved the satisfaction of knowing that.<br/><br/><span style="color: #BF80FF"><span style="font-weight: bold">“You come down on me here, they won’t be able to overlook it. Won’t matter who you pay.”</span></span>Which was true enough; it may not have been crowded in the food station itself, but it wasn’t a large area and the hustle and bustle of the market still sounded from yards away. The bounty hunter’s artificial fingertips twitched, ears alert for approach from behind her.