<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Just a few... there we go,"</span></span>the almost-imperceptible murmuring dropped from his lips, a low thrum of vocal white noise in the background of his concentration. The smooth stylus burst into life, extending a pale blue laser only a few inches or so from its sharp tip and a small loop of the same force from the other end. Mar sighed in defeat and reached up and around her head with her distal arm, smoothing her hair away from the left side of her face and ear and holding it against the top of her skull. With the ease of long practice, the dealer found a seam in the pseudoflesh along the woman's hair line, behind her ear and rather close to her cervical vertebrae. He smoothly peeled it back a bit and inserted the point of the laser into the newly-revealed layer of bionics and silvery tech behind the bounty hunter's aural cavity, brow quirking in disapproval as he did so.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Pretty sure I showed you how to keep this clean, Cici."</span></span><br/><br/>Fortunately, he had already disconnected some of the delicate wiring and his words had fallen on, quite literally, a deaf ear. The laser danced in an intricate ballet on the smooth metallic surface of the plating and microchips, finding niches and nooks that many a practiced cyber-surgeon wouldn't even know to look for, let alone adjust. With a few more slices and gentle applications of heat to "suture", the minute little sensor dropped from the woman's inner workings and into Xen's waiting palm. At least this bit wasn't dirty or even very worn- it would have been strange it was, since he had been entirely honest when telling her she didn't even really need it. He nonchalantly plunked it into a small chrome box behind his counter, then deftly re-connected the aural wiring and re-sealed the cranial pseudoflesh. The entire procedure hadn't taken longer than five minutes.<br/><br/>Still, he caught the darkly muttered<span style="color: #BF80FF"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Finally,"</span></span>from Mar. Honestly, if the woman had been left to the government-sanctioned technical "experts" she would have to deal with far worse for far less gain. She had all the gratitude of a dead battery. With a quick squeeze the scalpel flickered back into an ordinary stylus.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">"You need to come back for a tune-up in about two months, Mar,"</span></span>he started conversationally, ignoring her ungrateful quip,<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">"if you'd like I can call you, but - "</span></span><br/><br/>The bounty hunter let her hair drop to cover the site of her recent surgery and met his lackadaisical gaze with her own dual-colored one, brow furrowed in deepening discontent.<span style="color: #BF80FF"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Don't."</span></span><br/><br/>Her abrasive attitude washed over him like water off of a duck's back and he offered a teasing smile.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Bye, Cecilia."</span></span>If possible, her retreating back seemed even more angry than when she had entered. Well, she had known the rules when she decided to play his game. The equipment was higher-quality than anything she would have been given officially, and, of course, the maintenance was nothing short of perfection when compared with the dundering idiots they had in the actual medical labs, but there was a certain amount of dirt to be smeared when one played on the wrong side of the transporter tracks. He smirked as the bounty hunter disappeared quickly from his shop, a dark, significantly less playful sort of smirk. He looked at her the way a chess player looks at the board right before they take an opponent's queen with a pawn.<br/><br/>Xen gave his head a little shake, the curtain of shaggy black bang fluffing about his forehead and eyes.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Miss? Where did you - Oh,"</span></span>he feigned a bit of ignorance and then easily cleared the counter in a leap, pivoting on his hand that pressed to the top surface. He approached languidly, but when he was only about a half-meter away, he caught sight of the small device in her hand. His pale amber optics widened with alarm but before a single syllable could break from his throat, her thumb collapsed the button.<br/><br/>He felt nothing. Even his glasses were deactivated, so there was nothing. Maybe there was a lack of natural hum, the sound of technology buzzing in the background, but as a fully-biological human there was nothing to truly deactivate in him.<br/><br/>Gil was not faring quite so well.<br/><br/>The android's eyes promptly flickered and he blinked in a human-like instinct to clear the disorientation, taking a step back in an attempt to distance himself from the offensive force. His shoulders hunched downward and one hand even came up to his forehead, cradling the spot just above his eye like a human suddenly beset by an intense migraine. Eyes wide, they still flickered and fuzzed with blinking lights and something like the static from an ancient television screen.<span style="color: #40BFBF"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Off-off-l-line-line. Off-line. O-off-li-line. O-off- "</span></span>His body was stock-still, somehow even more so than it had been before- the android had a flawless mimicry of ambient human movement, and this unnatural stillness put Xen's heart in his mouth.<br/><br/>He rushed to the android, just as the pink-haired girl shut the interference off. Gil remained frozen, but his eyes were no longer flickering with random lights; rather, they were blank, empty, dead. Ignoring the girl for the moment, the dealer stuck his face to the robot's, pulling its hand away from its face and grabbing its chin, yanking it back and forth for a moment to inspect the receptors on the tips of his ears. They didn't look fried. He sighed a quick bit of relief away, but the concern written on his face seemed incongruous for a man worried about the state of a computer.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Wake up, Gil. Systems check."</span></span><br/><br/>The android promptly straightened its body and tilted its head, eyes whirring back into activation instantly. As they focused in on Xen, a grin stretched his pseudoflesh face and he said,<span style="color: #40BFBF"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Good morning. Systems check in progress. Processing. Processing. Systems check complete. Seven thousand, four hundred and ninety-two anomalies found."</span></span><br/><br/>Xen breathed an audible sigh of deep relief, his shoulders slouching as the air leaked from his nose and his eyes closed. Good. The only problem seemed to be that his clock had reset, but that was easily fixed and hardly a priority. What<span style="font-style: italic">was</span>a priority, however, was the girl that had insisted he continue his morning with a minor panic attack. He wheeled on her, brow tilting downward and mouth set in a rather cold line as he reached to snatch the HexTech away from her. Xen knew he should have gone through this junk ages ago, or better yet, not even brought up the junk parts from the surgery room, but he had needed more content to make the place look like a real shop and it was hardly likely than anyone would find anything usable left. Clearly he had miscalculated.<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">"D'you always activate everything you - "</span></span>he paused, as though seeing the holding shelf for the first time, blinking in surprise,<span style="color: #FFBF00"><span style="font-weight: bold">"Did you organize all this?"</span></span><br/><br/>He fixed her with a stare, suspicion and curiosity written clearly on his face.