This chapter contains, spoilers: Decap, surgery, scars, way too much talking and way too little fapable material. Reader discretion is advised.

Chapter 2: Pached Up

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“I don’t normally judge what two consenting adults get up to in the privacy of their own home, but this?” She said, resting her palm on the forehead of her potential patient. “I feel it’s my duty, as a formerly licensed physician, to inform you that this is not a healthy way to explore your sexualities.”

“I told you, it’s not like that!” The second possible patient said, stamping one foot indignantly as a blush lit up her cheeks. “It was an accident! We were scavenging, I was using a torch to cut through some support beams, and I accidentally stepped on some hot slag.” She said, propping herself up on a wall and pulling a comically oversized boot along with some bloody rags off of her left foot to reveal an extremely blistered, bloodied, and alarmingly dirty foot. “I fell over, Cabe ran over to help, and the torch I was using cut his head off!” She pointed to Cabe’s headless body lying naked on the operating table, the (technically not a) doctor eyeing it skeptically as she continued. “Then, because he’s a Londarr, he survived, but then his body went into a sexual berserker rage, had its way with me, and that’s how I got all these,” she turned around and pointed to the ten circles of blood soaked into her robes with one small hole in the center of each indicating where one of her friend’s talon’s had pierced her. “and why we’re all messy.” She said, turning back around and motioning to the crotch of her pants, which was significantly darker, damper, and muskier than the legs.

“Uh huh.” The doctor said, unconvinced. “And what’s your explanation for this?” She asked, flicking the tip of the Cabe’s penis with a cold metallic finger. Said penis had been shoved up his recently opened esophagus and was jutting out of his half open and fully grimacing mouth like head on a spike. “He tripped and fell on it?” She asked.

The eyes of the still living head narrowed and focused indignantly on the doctor, the ridge around his mouth that technically were his lips forming the letter “e”, which in this context probably meant he was trying to say “He!” in response to being referred to as an “it”. Feeling his cock twitch inside his throat in response to the involuntary movements of his truncated vocal cords, his painfully distended throat stretching further, Cabe decided that until he was un-shafted he would keep any further comments to himself.

“He bit me!” Cabe’s friend said, crossing her arms and giving her maimed coworker the stink eye. “I said I was sorry and he bit me anyway!”

“I see.” The doctor said, not sure whether this girl was the best actor ever or the most petty person ever to deliver that line with such sincerity. “And what about this?” She tapped the body’s charred neck stump with a gold painted fingernail, rapping against its spinal column causing the technically still living body to tense reflexively as its nerve endings were uncomfortably stimulated. “Unless you’ve got some ridiculously unsafe and counterproductive mods on your torch, or you intentionally held the torch against him for a quarter of a minute, you’d have slashed his throat and set him on fire, not decapitated him.” She looked over at the repulsorlift cart that the woman had brought her coworker in on. The doctor pointed at one of the tools lying among the assorted scraps. “Also, that’s a vibro-saw, not a torch. Vibro-saws don’t cut flesh nearly this cleanly, nor do they burn meat this much.” She ran her nails across the charred stump, black dust that had formerly been Cabe flaking off and drifting down to the operating table. “This is the sort of wound you’d expect to see from a lightsaber.” The female patient tensed like a child caught with its hand in the cookie jar, and the not-technically-a-doctor smiled. “So, did little Jedi Jedha find herself a lightsaber and get a bit too kinky with her Jedi role playing?” She asked, leaning over Cabe’s body toward the patient who was suddenly very fascinated with getting her friend’s pilfered boot back on her foot.

“It was an accident!” Jedha shouted. There was a pause, and she realized that she’d neglected to deny the other half of the allegations. Looking up, she saw the doctor’s smile deepen, and she knew the jig was up. “Yeah, I cut Cabe’s head off with a lightsaber. Accidentally! Everything else I said was true.”

“Including the part about not having 25,000 credits to pay for his surgery?” The doctor asked, leaning back against the wall.

“Pach…” Jed said, her eyes and voice implying a deep and emotional begging as she uttered the doctor’s name.

“I’m sorry, Jed, but as I’m sure you’re aware, a lady’s gotta eat. Even cyborg ladies.” Pach said, shrugging her organic right shoulder and her mechanical left one. “And don’t think I’ve forgotten all the freebies I’ve done for you and your friend over the years. Plugging up your stab wounds, sewing his thumb back on, not to mention all the bacta runoff you’ve bummed off me to heal your nicks and scrapes. All that and I’ve NEVER seen a single credit come out of your grubby little pocket, so don’t you dare ‘just this once’ me.” Pach said, a quiet mechanical click preceding and following her hypothetical quote, a quote which was spoken in an eerily perfect copy of Jed’s own voice.

“Paaaaach!” Jed repeated, lightly banging the back of her head against the wall like a toddler throwing a tantrum. “This is serious!”

“Yes, seriously expensive!” She agreed, stepping away from the operating table and sauntering her way towards Jed on legs that were suspiciously well toned for a woman who spent most of her time indoors, eating incredibly processed food of dubious nutritional value, and who lived on a literal dump of a planet. “Removing all this burned flesh, growing replacement cells, rewiring his entire nervous and circulatory system, sticking the parts back together, and a million other things far too technical to even bother getting into with a laywoman such as yourself. So, unless you find 25,000 credits tucked into your back pocket, or have some sort of illegal pre-clone wars Jedi artifact worth a lot of money to curio collectors and bounty hunters that you could trade for payment, you can see yourself out.”

“I… don’t have it on me. I hid it. On my way into town.” Jed said. She wasn’t sure why she’d lied, beyond the fact that Pach was looming over her at an uncomfortably close distance with an oddly cold smile. Pach wasn’t the sort of person who would kill Jed for money or rat her out to the Imperial police if she refused to comply. At least, Jed didn’t think she was. Before now.

“Oh, don’t worry, I can wait.” Pach said, stepping slightly to one side so that Jed could better see her decapitated friend slowly dying on the operating table as she dithered. “I’m not so sure about him, but I can wait.”

“I… I’m not entirely sure I want to trade it to you.” Jed said, deflating an inch with each syllable.

Cabe’s nearest eye snapped onto Jed and filled with a mixture of panic, anger, and disbelief. Forgetting or disregarding his prior commitment not to move, Cabe’s lips mouthed “EH! AH AA UYAAEE!”, the best approximation of “JED! I AM DYING!” that he could manage with a twitching half 2/3rds erect cock shoved backwards up his neck hole.

“Wow.” Pach said flatly, her mechanical hand rising to her perfectly symmetrical and perky chest. “That’s cold, letting your friend die so you can pocket the money for turning the lightsaber in.”

“That’s-!” Jed’s response fell apart. She wasn’t trading this lightsaber in for some measly bounty like Pach was suggesting. She was going to use it to achieve her Jedi destiny! This was her light in the darkness, the small spark that, in her hands, would burn down the empire and kindle the flames of a new Jedi order. That… well, it was for the greater good. Cabe should understand that. His sacrifice… his death… his death that she had kind of sort of been responsible for. The death of the man who took her in after her parents were killed and her sister disappeared… no. No, that wasn’t right. Jed was a Jedi. Jedi helped those in need, stood by their friends, and made amends to those they’d wronged. She’d have to think of something else.

“That’s that, then.” Pach said, overdramatically clapping her metal and biological hand together and wincing slightly as she did. “Don’t worry about finding a dignified spot to bury your old roommate, I’ll have one of my droids dump his remains somewhere after I extract all the useful organs.” She turned around and made another inhumanly uniform saunter over to Cabe’s body, the reptilian’s nearest eye frantically shifting its glare between the cold hearted witch and… that actually described both women for Cabe in that moment.

Pach snapped her robotic fingers, and a small swarm of medical droids beeped and whirred to life around the oddly cavernous room. The droids rose in unison and flew to her side, their cold metal limbs unfurling to reveal an unsettlingly wide assortment of knives, clamps, needles, scissors, and horrifying mystery tools that even Pach wasn’t entirely clear on the utility of.

“Wait!” Jed called out, extending her hand in an attempt to hold Pach in place with the Force. The doctor did indeed stop, Forcibly or otherwise, and turned to face Jed with a genuine smile that sent a chill down Jed’s back. She was really going to let Cabe die if Jed didn’t cooperate. “We can make a deal.”

“Can we, now?” Pach asked, her medical droids slowly rotating so that their little black lens camera’s with their tiny red dots in the middle bore down on her like the eyes of some fairytale monster. Pach hopped back a little and sat on the operating table, her uncomfortably short and certainly not-medically-advisable skirt drawing halfway up her thighs. Jed eyes darted uncomfortably between Pach’s eyes, Pach’s clearly visible Patch, and her own feet which pointed sheepishly at one another in their mismatched boots no matter how hard she tried to take on a confident stance. “Well, I’ve given you my terms. Bring me the lightsaber, I heal your friend. As for you… 500 credits and I’ll let you take a dunk in my bacta tank, buff out all those little cuts and burns of yours. Throw in a free blood transfusion for anything you’ve lost. I’m sure you have at least 500 credits.” She said, leaning back as she eyed Jed and Cabe’s partially functional repulsorlift cart and their thirdhand tools.


“Well, I have a counteroffer!” Jed said.

If Cabe had the lungs necessary to produce speech, as well as a throat and mouth unencumbered by a crusty twitching cock, there wouldn’t have been such a long silence after Jed spoke. It would have been filled with expletives, accusations, and demands aimed at both women haggling over his life even as his world was slowly overtaken by the icy shadows of an impatient death. To Jed, he would have called her a rude word for the mentally impaired, accused her of murder if she didn’t hand over the lightsaber, and demanded that she let go of her silly fantasy and do some real good by saving him. To Pach, he would have used an expletive meaning psychopath that didn’t exist in Galactic Common, accused her of extorting good people who had never done her wrong (even if they had TECHNICALLY never PAID her with money before), and demanded that she stop leaning back because she was now leaning against him, pressing his cheek into his shaft and rubbing the tip of his body’s cock against her soft white shirt which was exciting the organ painfully inside what was left of Cabe.

Alas, Cabe couldn’t provide any input, and instead a dozen seconds of awkward silence passed before Jed finally settled on what exactly her counteroffer was. “So, my offer. My offer is that I don’t have 25,000 credits on me right this very second, but I can get you that amount of money. If you heal me. If you heal me, and agree to keep Cabe’s head and body ALIVE in your clinic for thirty days, one month, I’ll raise the money to pay for both his surgery and my healing.”

“Do you know how much it would cost for me to keep this guy alive, in two pieces, in my clinic, for an entire month?” Pach asked, sounding more confused than rhetorical. “Not to mention all the equipment I’d have to take out of the rotation and devote entirely to him, losing customers along the way. I’d be operating at a loss here. No, no deal.”

Jed sighed. “Fine, if you give me… twenty days. I’ll-”

“Ten days.” Pach said, her voice taking on an ominous air of finality. “I’ll keep your friend alive for ten days, one whole week, starting tomorrow. At the end of those ten days, you’ll either hand me 25,000 credits, give me the lightsaber, or you’ll have the decency to never darken my doorstep again.”

Jed looked at Pach, looked at Cabe, looked at their cart of scraps and scrapping equipment, and Jed realized that she had been overlooking an obvious third option. She could save him, right here and right now, and she would. “How about this. I’ll pay you 5,500 credits TODAY to heal me, and to stabilize Cabe’s head permanently so that I can take him with me. Then, if you keep his body on life support here for the next ten days, I’ll come back with 20,000 credits and pay you to reattach his head and body.”

“And, if you don’t come back with the money, I pull the plug and his body dies? And he has to live out the rest of his days as a severed head in a living nightmare? If you could even call that living?” Pach asked, her and Cabe’s faces twisting in unison into a horrified scowl at the callousness of the wannabe Jedi. While Cabe’s face held this position, Pach’s quickly shifted into a wicked grin. “That’s awesome, I’m in! Assuming you actually have the 5,000 promised credits, that is.”

“Well, I have 1 a little over 1,000 on me.” She said, pulling a small compartment off of her belt and dumping a fist sized mound of electronic coins and magnetically charged plastic cards onto a nearby table.

“1,114.7 credits.” Pach said in a robotic monotone, her green eye flashing briefly. “What about the other 4,385.3?”

Jed motioned to the cart. “These tools are worth at least two th-”

“No.” Pach said, this time in a human monotone.

“One thousand five hundred credits.” Jed said, a little disheartened as Pach nodded in agreement. “That’s half. The metal scraps are worth around 300, and our cart is two thousand. That’s-”

“585 credits short.” Pach said, matter of factly. “Anything else?”

Jed frowned, looking at her feet. She really didn’t have much more she could give. While the air on Raxus Prime was TECHNICALLY breathable, any human who breathed it in raw for any extended period tended to live much shorter and more cancer ridden lives, so her oxygen mask, air tank, and filters were non-tradable. She had some food and water, though it wouldn’t even put a dent in the 85. Her blaster pistol and ammo… well, she had a lightsaber now. Jedi didn’t use guns, they were uncivilized or something. Though, uncivilized or not, they were definitely useful things to have. It definitely would’ve been useful to have access to her blaster pistol while Cabe’s body was riding her like a rented bantha. Then again, it WASN’T useful when that happened.

“No? Well then, I guess we’re back to plan A. Chop up the lizard and yank out its useful giblets” Pach said, dramatically turning on her heels.

“HERE!” Jed said, her temper flaring as she pulled the holster off her belt and threw it, with the blaster still inside, at the doctor.

One of the medical droids intercepted the weapon mid air, and presented it gently to its master. “Hmm… rare build, pretty good shape, and with the power cells included, it should fetch around six hundred. I’ll make sure to put any excess earnings towards your 20,000 credit debt.” She condescendingly reported, then snapped her fingers and jubilantly declared “Alright, then. One bacta bath and one crime against nature, coming right up!” On cue, the droids went to work, one small saucer shaped droid flying over to Jed to assist in prepping her for the bacta tank while the remainder hovered over the quite faint yet visibly furious Cabe as their master wondered how she wanted to do this.

Pach leaned down and studied the charred stump of the body’s neck up close, the smell of lukewarm cooked reptile and stale blood greeting her. Despite the clean cut, lightsaber wounds were counter-intuitively a nightmare to treat. The blade was about an inch in diameter and completely disintegrated any humanoid flesh it came in direct contact with. Not only that, the flesh was cooked for another inch around the cut, so that meat would have to be amputated as well, meaning that there was a three inch long section of Cabe’s neck that would have to be remade from scratch. Pach scanned the diameter and circumference of the blackened cross section of neck, her eye blinking as it measured its dimensions and placement of its veins, arteries, and nerve endings down to the nanometer. The destroyed/amputated section of neck could either be cloned, genetically engineered, and meticulously sutured back on, the significantly harder and more time consuming option, or it could be replaced by a cybernetic replacement, which would be cheaper in the short run but would be greatly disfiguring and would require constant maintenance in the long run. Both head and body would obviously need cybernetics to keep them alive while detached from each other, though whether or not the cybernetics should be kept post-reattachment or replaced with cloned material… well, that was a choice for future Pach. Present Pach saw that her patient’s eyes were starting to glaze over and his jaw was slackening as she pondered, so she needed to start the job before she lost it. Her mechanical eye flashed as she transmitted the appropriate data to her servants, and when she snapped the droids acted on that data.

Meanwhile, the droid prepping Jed for her dunk in the bacta tank grabbed and tugged at the young woman’s clothes in an attempt to speed up the disrobing process. It was counterproductive at best in this regard, the embarrassed Jed doing her best to swat away the overly touchy robot as she stumbled and hopped across the room toward the large tank of light blue liquid whirring to life as she approached. Jed peeled away her bloodied and mangled garments and left them in heaps trailing behind her, exposing fresh wounds and long forgotten scars to the droid chasing her down. The droid seemed to get distracted from its disrobing duties as Jed revealed her injuries, its lone glass eye cataloguing every cut and burn for Pach’s medical files.

There was an old and pronounced scar on the lower left of Jed’s chin, hidden by her oxygen mask until now, and a thin ‘v’ shaped scar beneath her left ear. On either side of her neck were a small series of faint crescent shaped marks, eight in total closely packed in bunches of four. Similarly, the top of each shoulder bore four freshly scabbed over but extremely bloody holes, complimented by two holes stabbed into her back above either shoulder blade. The droid noted that the patient was likely in extreme shock or unconscious when these holes were made, as the punctures were all extremely neat and showed no signs of tearing or struggle in the surrounding skin. Either that, or Jed had lost most sensation in her shoulders over the years, as beneath all the blood and loose bits of skin were a web of scars running down her shoulders, back, and upper arms, common injuries among scavengers who crawled through cramped shipwrecks and caves of rusted metal. The scars were less numerous and less pronounced on her upper-middle back and her slightly lopsided c-cup breasts, only a single thin scar running up the side of her smaller right breast and singe on her back where she must’ve gotten too close to a live wire. Her somewhat pudgy tummy, a product of very little heavy lifting and very many processed meals, had a small and relatively fresh scar three inches to the left of her belly button where a sharpened screwdriver had been used to convince her that she ought to surrender her coin purse. Jed dropped her belt and waddled towards the tank with her pants around her unevenly booted ankles, the droid taking note of the four long and alarmingly deep claw marks running from the small of her back down her left butt cheek. Dried maroon blood caked her cheek with sloppy lumps of deep red scab tissue running through the new ridges of her rear, making the left half of her butt look more akin to an overly scored and overly glazed hunk of meat more so than a partner to her right cheek. The fact that she could lean her rear on things in this state implied either that the talons had severed quite a few nerves, or that the pain in her groin and foot was extremely distracting. The latter was certainly plausible, as Jed’s womanhood was still puffy and raw from its encounter with the oversized Londarr cock. It wasn’t bleeding, externally, but blood had collected beneath the surface of the loose skin and formed several light purple bruises inside her outer labia and inner thighs.

As Jed disentangled her boots from her feet in preparation for ascending the ladder into the bacta tank, she turned to see how Cabe’s surgery was going. A droid with long spindly arms and padded clamps had latched onto Cabe’s head and unceremoniously yanked him off of his body’s cock with a soft ‘pop’, the lips of the severed head quivering as it reflexively tried to gasp in relief. The droid dropped the head of the now barely conscious Londarr into Pach’s hands, the woman staggering a little at the weight but maintaining her footing. Pach carried the head to a smaller table nearby and dropped it on its right side with a heavy thud, as a quarter of her droids tended to the body, a quarter followed Pach, and half flew away to fetch parts and equipment.

The droids over Cabe’s body began by sawing off a one and a half inch thick disk of unsalvageable cooked lizard, a fresh spray of blood pouring from the neck’s arteries as the cork of char and evolved blood constrictions were removed. The body’s legs kicked a little as the droids sliced between the vertebrae, its cock stiffening briefly as the vibrating saw stimulating what nerve endings hadn’t been burned out, but torpor returned to the body when the disk was pulled away and dropped in a bucket of medical waste. The amputation was completed just as their companions returned with the supplies.

Cabe flinched as his head’s neck stump was shortened, his eyes trying to focus on Pach’s but finding that with the further drop in blood pressure and the staleness of what blood remained it was impossible to focus on anything. The whole room was collapsing into a shapeless abyss, and apart from the hot flashes of pain flaring up from his spine as it was truncated, all was ice cold. Even as Pach precisely inserted a series of fine, short needles into the ends of his veins and arteries, her droids reaching past and securing each needle in place with medical glue in a process that surely had to feel like having a bunch of needles shoved into his throat, Cabe could muster up only enough life to twitch the corners of his lips in pain. Pach attached some sort of tube with a bristly end to base of Cabe’s spinal column, only five or six vertebrae by now, and while Cabe could tell that the bristles forcing their way up and between his frayed nerves was immensely painful, he had no more energy to react to that. He was going, going…

The fluorescent lights lining the ceiling of Pach’s operating room suddenly came into focus for Cabe, and had grown orders of magnitude more bright. For a moment, Cabe thought that he was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel that he’d heard so much about, right up until the doctor’s smug face loomed over him. She looked deepy into Cabe’s eyes, smiling one of her robotic minions rubbed some sort of thick, rubber cement feeling paste across the surface of Cabe’s open neck. “You still there?” Pach asked. Still voiceless, Cabe attempted to spit at her, though the last of his saliva had long since dried out and had left him with the worst case of cottonmouth he’d ever experienced. “Good!” She said, seeing the attempt. “I’ve got the life support unit up and running, so you should be getting a steady flow of oxygenated blood running. Well, synthetic blood. Not many Londarr donors around these parts. Don’t worry, it’s high quality stuff!” She pat Cabe on the cheek reassuringly, and while he wanted to reenact the stunt he’d pulled on Cabe, the doctor had either accidentally or strategically chosen to use her metal left hand to do the patting. Cabe wasn’t about to shed any more organic material by chipping a tooth, and so he metaphorically bit his tongue. “The sealant should be set by now.” She poked the end of his neck, surprisingly inflicting no pain on the Londarr and producing a light clicking noise as her nail rapped against the hardened resin the droid had coated the wound in. “Yup. That should prevent any leakages and provide a layer of cushioning for your head to rest on when I secure it into the module. Speaking of which,”

“AUGH!” Cabe screamed, a bolt of lighting running up his nub of a spine and rattling around in his head. When the pain subsided, Cabe realized that “I can talk!”

“Yup. The receptors I hooked your spine up to will not only track your vitals for the life support system I’m hooking you up to, it’ll allow you to directly control your temporary body’s legs and speaker system.” Cabe foolishly got his hopes up for one foolish second, his mouth curling into a smile as Pach reached beneath him and grabbed his life support system. Then, she brought the device into view.

Jed couldn’t hear a word of her friend’s tirade, and saying that she saw his blowup was something of a stretch. By this point, Jed had already shed every piece of her wardrobe save her goggles, put on the bacta tank’s built in oxygen mask, climbed the ladder (one footed), and lowered herself into the semi-liquid semi-transparent semi-blue semi-living bacta. While Jed had rubbed plenty of expired bacta runoff into her wounds, much to the unpaid Pach’s chagrin apparently, she had never actually been inside a tank of fresh bacta. Some people said it was the most serene experience ever, having millions of tiny symbiotic microbes crawl into your wounds, bond with your cells, and heal your body from the inside out. Some people also liked having strangers pee on them. The point being, some people were wrong.

Jed squirmed in the jelly-like substance, the jelly squirming in kind and forming a wriggling feedback loop that the naked young woman could not abide. Her breathing quickly devolved into short, shallow huffs as the jelly crawled its way across her skin and slithered into every orifice not protected by her sealed oxygen mask. She would hesitate to describe what the bacta did as ‘healing’. Bacta runoff healed, the mostly dead microbes only able to speed up the body’s natural processes and holding lightly torn flesh in position. The fresh Bacta, Jed would argue, was un-eating her. It bonded to her flesh, digested itself, and its waste product was more of Jed. She felt the five ridges of her butt wriggle against one another, the bacta seeping between the cracks and making the four superfluous ones shallower with each second until they were completely smoothed over. She felt the deepest point in each of her ten new holes rise until they were flush with the surface of her skin, then vanish. She felt the bits of rubber that had sank into her left sole jettison from her foot, and the blisters peel off and get carried away by the bacta as the sensations grew less and less distinguishable from her uninjured right foot. She felt the walls of her womanhood and the surface of her skin vibrate, her scars shrinking and her raw flesh regenerating its outermost layers of skin. She felt all of the wounds she’d collected today, and many of the scars that she had gathered throughout her life, vanish from existence, leaving behind a Jedha Kraz that was more alive than she had ever before been, yet the biggest sense of relief she got was when the droid tasked with observing her reached into the tank and tapped the top of her head with its metallic clamp, signaling that her bath was done.

“SPIDER!” Was the first word Jed heard as she cambered out of the thick goo that seemed to want nothing more than to pull her right back in, the bacta not really pouring out of her ears so much as it fell out. While only the one word was heard by Jed as she rolled over the lip of the tank and dropped seven feet to the cold hard floor, the inflection and cadence of the word implied that it was not said in solitude but instead was the end of a very long sentence.

Jed was fine, not that Pach or Cabe were checking, and the residual bacta clinging to her skin numbed the worst of the pain and prevented bruising. As Jed rose to her feet, rubbing her sore bottom and taking the unreasonably small towel offered to her by her droid nurse, she saw both the source of the word and the reason for it.

The stump of Cabe’s neck had been secured into a three inch tall cylindrical life support module slightly wider than his original neck, clamps and a rubberized hermetic seal firmly holding his head in place while an crude digital display and speaker on the front of the module displayed his vitals and synthesized a slightly tinny rendition of Cabe’s voice. Said life support module was, for lack of a better term, jury rigged onto a robot spider.

The chassis of the robot was a relatively flat disk shape, slightly wider than the life support unit that had been tastefully wired, clamped, and hot glued to it. Six articulated metal legs with sharply pointed tips sprouted from swiveling ball joints lining the circumference of the chassis, spaced equidistant from one another at the 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, & 11 o’clock positions. While technically the leg count would make this a robot insect as opposed to an arachnid, the distinct bend of the legs and the creepiness factor as they furiously wiggled beneath their new master gave every sentient in the room a very spider feel.

“This wasn’t even part of the deal, I’m giving you a freebie here!” Pach said, shrugging smugly. “So the way I see it, you either learn to love the robot-spider look for the next ten days, or you have your decapitator carry you around all week.”

Having mentioned her, Cabe’s eyes immediately shot past Pach and locked onto Jed. “YOU!” He roared, five of his legs wobbling to keep him balanced as the one at his 1 o’clock pointed accusingly at her.

“Don’t let her bug you, you look great!” Jed said, wincing both at her unintentional pun and her blatant lie. “This is only a temporary condition, we’ll get you back to normal in no time!”

“YOU can get me back to normal NOW! GIVE PACH THE LIGHTSABER AND GET ME OFF THIS RIDICULOUS THING OR SO HELP ME I WILL CLAW YOUR EYES OUT!” Cabe roared, scuttling towards Jed on wobbling legs.

His mistake, obviously, was getting within kicking distance of the person he was threatening before he had even figured out how to comfortably walk with his new body. Jed reached out her left foot, now completely free of even the most superficial burn, and placed the heel delicately on Cabe’s forehead before pushing softly, toppling him with no effort much to the amusement of Pach. Cabe nearly blew out his speaker swearing at Jed, his legs squirming uselessly beneath his chin and spinning him in circles. Jed took the opportunity to dress herself, the filth and dirt of her clothes mixing with the gooey residue of the bacta to create a horrible muck that encased her entire being. She’d need a good-old-fashioned water bath when she got home. When she was clothed and ready to go, she knelt down and place a hand on the side of his head. “I will help you up, but only if you promise to be calm. I’ve got everything under control, we’re going to make it through this.”

Cabe continued swearing, then stopped, then swore some more, then stopped, then with a heavy synthesized sigh said “I hate you.”

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“I still hate you.” Cabe told Jed, practicing his scuttling technique as he circled Jed’s bare ankles.

“I still forgive you.” Jed said, refusing to dismount her moral high horse as she scrubbed away the sins of the day. Jed had jumped in the shower the moment they’d gotten home, and had scrubbed with all her might, yet even after blowing through their next week’s water budget in what had to be a record setting shower session, she still felt filthy. She and Cabe weren’t typically the sort of people who were comfortable showering in one another’s presence, or force forbid together, but after the many incidents of the day that had exposed both of them to one another’s nakedness in some of the worst ways imaginable this felt significantly less awkward than any of the preceding events. Besides, it wasn’t like Cabe had anything to get excited about, or with, any more.

“So, do you have any sort of plan on how we’re going to get our hands on 20,000 credits in ten days? Because scrimping on utilities doesn’t seem to be part of that plan.” He said, dodging a soapy cascade as Jed lifted her breasts closer to the showerhead for a concentrated power wash before dropping them with a wet clap.

“We’ve made that much in a week before.” Jed said, observing the spot on her breast where a scar had once been. None existed now, and in fact none of her scars still existed except as slightly paler skin that even now was fading into the surrounding tones. It was like the years of hardship and hardscrabble living had been washed clean off her body, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Heroes were always pretty, sure, and scars weren’t pretty, fair enough, but her scars had stories behind them. They were reminders of what she’d toughed through and survived, and the longer she stared at her baby smooth and unblemished skin, the more those memories started to feel fake. It made her feel fake.

“Yes, WE have. You and me. With tools. And a cart. Once.” Cabe said, clicking his 1 o’clock leg against the shower’s grouting with each point. “You expect to repeat that feat alone, with no tools, no cart, and no leads on anything good?”

“You can still help!” Jed said, her hair whipping forward and slapping across her face like a wet blanket as she looked down at her wet blanket of a friend. “You,” she parted her hair like a pair of particularly heavy curtains, the bacta refusing to wash out no matter how much shampoo she attacked it with. “You can crawl into spaces no other scavenger could! Get loot no one else has access to! Think of all the electronics guff that’s been left in the nooks and crannies over the years by bigger scavengers!”

“And what, carry that guff back up to the surface?” He asked, clicking his 11 and 1 o’clock legs together to demonstrate their lack of thumbs. “Put it between my teeth?” He clicked said teeth together. “And if I get trapped spelunking somewhere, how are you going to get me out?”

“With the lightsaber, obviously!” Jed replied, stamping her bare foot impatiently at her friend’s overly negative response.

“Oh yeah, and cut off my jaw too while you’re at it.” Cabe said, expecting that answer. “Jed, please, I know you’re-” he stopped himself, realizing that saying she’s completely insane and needed immediate professional help to deal with her grandiose delusions and narcissistic personality disorder would probably not help him at this exact time. “I know that you’ve got this notion that it’s your destiny to be some great Jedi or something, but… I need you to think about the people you’re hurting chasing this fantasy. Look at what you’ve done.”

“I can fix you!” Jed shouted, louder and more defensively than she’d meant to.

“I know you can. You just need to do is give Pach the lightsaber.” Cabe said, putting on the best puppy-dog eyes that a scarred, decapitated lizard head attached to a mechanical spider could muster. It was surprisingly decent.

Jed stared at the friend at her feet, remembering how he once towered over her. He’d taken her in, protected her, had always been there when she needed him, and now she was going to risk his livelihood on a hopeless gamble. He was right, there was no way they’d raise the money in time, not without taking some pretty heavy loans from people you really didn’t want to owe money to. It was impossible. Maybe she really did have no choice but to give up her weapon and her dream. Maybe…

Sanity was tackled into the abyss of Jedha Kraz’s subconscious as she recognized the loophole she and Cabe had been overlooking this entire time. “Cabe, you’re right. We need to get Pach a lightsaber. What you’re wrong about, however, is that we need to give her MY lightsaber.”

Cabe raised the spot where a human’s eyebrow would be. “What, are you going to make one yourself? With the energy modulator you don’t have and the kyber crystals you can’t buy? Or are you telling expect to just randomly stumble upon two lightsabers in the same week after I took you years to find one?”

“No, I’m not going to randomly stumble across this one. We both know exactly where another lightsaber is.” She said, crossing her arms beneath her breasts smugly.

“What are talking ab-” his face went blank. Cabe’s life support didn’t allow him to lose color in his face, but his expression of stunned terror conveyed his feelings adequately. He knew where she was going with this. Where they were most likely going. He stared into the eyes of madness, and cursed the day he accepted this deranged lunatic into his life.