"There you go, my treasured neighbor," Cell placed a bountiful basket containing a massive head of cabbage, plenty of carrots, apples, spinach, leeks, an entire pumpkin, two radishes, two cucumbers, and a handful of tomatoes as round and juicy as an ox's heart before its newly met friend.
A miserable-looking, old, and starving lion with a balding patch at the top of his head and teeth so rotten he couldn't have possibly used them for eating anything wept in equal parts of despair and utter confusion. Feeling content with the good work he's been doing, Cell took off into the sky only to be followed by a blank stare of a one-of-a-kind snail with a human skull instead of a shell while the gloomy elder lion stared at the basket of fruits and vegetables, feeling pathetic enough to try biting into some of that stuff just to get to eat anything.
Cell flew off to the edge of Monster Island and scanned the uneasy ocean surface with an ocular inspection. It noted seals catching the goldfish carps that looked and acted exactly like ordinary carps, except they had vivid orange goldfish-like scales and the survival instincts of a dodo bird. Just as Cell was about to intercept and scare the seals away so that they didn't continue hunting a much rarer prey than they were, Cell noted a vocal rumble to the rocky shore it just hovered off of.
A gigantic, black-colored whale looped over the surface, peeking with its head, flipping over its front, and then diving to the farthest depths available so close to the rocky shores that may have only been around twenty-to-forty meters deep, the colossal black whale slammed its tail into the ocean's surface and caused a bone fide ripple of tidal waves crashing against the mountainous section of the shores that even shook off a few pointy rocks and caused them to plunge into the ocean off the mountainside.
All of this commotion scared off the seals. With the black whale turning around and dashing straight for the deeper section of the ocean, which measured to kilometers in terms of depth, Cell noticed a bright orange metallic peek. With a bad feeling in its gut, the Bio-Android slowly flew all the way to the location where it just saw something metallic peeking from the ocean. Cell stared down, trying to peer into the depths to make out what that massive object was just before it emerged and nearly struck it with its nose—a large and armed orange submarine.
The surfacing watercraft shot with its nose into the air before flopping onto the water's surface, prompting Cell to dive to the side just in case the nose would end up bumping into Cell. While Cell felt good about its odds of suffering no damage after being hit head-on by a submarine, it didn't feel nearly as good about the odds of the submarine handling such a collision while emerging. Wasting no time, the lid at the top of the submarine shot off, revealing a bulky woman with a Monster Island Ranger uniform.
"Pirita-san?" Cell muttered. "You're handling this submarine all by yourself?"
"What can I say, I like brisk walks and excellent exercise. Besides, some of these leviathans require some heavy machinery to handle them, and it's not like we've got a handful of people here. Lapis is strong, but I hate to rely on him strong-arming the animals into submission every time. I'm the superior here so I should be useful sometimes too," Pirita laughed while wiping hot, pouring sweat off her forehead.
Cell could sense that this woman wasn't a martial artist, but her natural strength, speed, and ability to handle complex watercraft and military heavy tech machinery must have been second to none. She seemed to have things handled here if first impressions were to be believed.
"So, what's your deal here? Not thinking about running away already, are you?" Pirita smiled while using the excuse of small talk to get some fresh rocky shore breeze to cool her off after the grueling task of handling a submarine all by herself broke a torrential sweat.
"No. I'm just trying to do my part and be a good neighbor. Help the animals and beasts. I was going to scare these seals away from eating the goldfish carps, but it seems that leviathan whale did the trick for me," Cell replied, turning to where the colossal whale had dived off to only to see serene ripples on the surface and the dance of reflecting sun rays caressing its eyes.
"I guess that makes two of us. I was going to detonate a missile nearby. The shockwave usually knocks those guys loopy without hurting them and they swim away. Some local species of whales eat these guys, so we need them, but it would be cool if they stopped eating all of our rarest fish species. I guess it can't be helped when they've got such lousy survival instincts..." Pirita placed her hands on her hips. "The leviathan whales commonly smack their tails into the water surface, causing violent underwater quakes that knock the seals out. Then, they eat them up in troves like plankton. When the shock of a missile knocks them out, the seals think the leviathan whale is back for them, so they skedaddle as quickly as they can."
"A whale so massive it eats seals like plankton? That sounds dangerous..." Cell noted.
"A submarine is too small for them to notice. Besides, this place is a bit too shallow for them, so there's no way one could be all the way out here. It's a good thing the seals don't quite get that or else I'd need some other measures to keep them off our golden carps," Pirita laughed out. "If you're being a dear and helping around, why don't you lead those merfolk back inland? They're lake water folks, but they sometimes wander off too far and end up swimming in salt water. It can make them sick, you know."
"Merfolk?" Cell muttered, turning to a remote corner of rocky shores where a species of large fish standing on two, muscular humanoid legs and armed with two body-builder humanoid arms was swimming around with broad, humanoid strokes and gasping frantically as they became gassed and splashed around, as if they were drowning. The merfolk had brilliant teal scales and light, creamy green, and fishy underbelly that transitioned into their sticky and wet-skinned limbs. "Sure thing, I'd love to help."
"Thanks! You're a real lifesaver! I've still got some underwater errands to run. Lapis was worried that some poachers might be slipping through our posts and making it onto the island. If I see them lurking underwater, I'll blow them to kingdom come!" Pirita bent her arm and tapped her beefy biceps while winking at Cell as a gesture to make it feel safe and protected on this island. "The merfolk live in a lake by the riverfront. Just follow the concods, they migrate between rivers and seas all the time so they'll show you the way."
Following Pirita's directions, Cell observed a handful of bizarre fish with hardened, almost metallic-looking wings and fins that made them look like stabilizing plane extensions buzzing in mid-air and swarming together to fly from the seashore inland. They seemed to achieve flight through some sort of cartilage propeller around their backsides that was propelling them onward while their hardened fins let them maneuver mid-air and maintain impressive speeds that could have measured up to those of old-time airplanes.
"Will do, thanks for the directions!" Cell saluted the Monster Island ranger and plunged straight at the merfolk like a bird of prey. Content with her brief time-out and small talk, Pirita slipped down into her submarine and submerged again.
"Yo, stay away, bro! I'll pound ya!" the merfolk shook their fists into the sky and began shouting at Cell. Instead of engaging with the dim-witted species of fish-people, Cell swooped up just as it was about to collide with their group, creating a strong draft that knocked them all off the rocks they were showing their impressive musculature off on. After taking a few salty gulps of seawater, they desperately clawed and clung to the rocks sticking out of the seashore while Cell's right eye blinked with a sparkling pink pixel of energy.
"Yo, yo... What's going on, bro!?" the merfolk began yelling as their fishy eyes stayed round and wide open and their fishy lips just couldn't stop champing and smacking while gasping for air. Cell's display of psychokinetic abilities that Cell inherited from Frieza's mutated cells elevated the dim-witted merfolk into the air and carried them off with Cell as it followed the airplane fish deeper inland where it could once again place the merfolk down and leave them to whatever it was they were doing.
"Bummer move, bro! The babes won't be able to see us from all the way down the river, bro!" one of the merfolk yelled out at Cell, but the Bio-Android paid them little mind. After the merfolk were back by their lake, where they belonged, Cell flew back to the rocky shore to see the sun setting. Cell had little chance to see anything like it back in Dr. Puri's lab and it rarely got the chance to see the sunset when it was hiding out and stalking its targets way back.
Despite how rare these opportunities were, Cell very much enjoyed the serenity and beauty of a sunset and, from what it had heard from the city folks that Cell had drained of every joule of energy their bodies produced, the sunset out in nature was the best there was. With teary eyes, as Cell was waiting for the sun to set, dangling its three-fingered feet off the edge, Cell recalled the promise that a young man made to his beloved shortly before Cell drained them withered and dry–to show her the sunset at the beach. It might have been a stupid sentiment, since the woman's dried, husky remains stayed in the forest where Cell left them, but Cell wanted to believe that some part of the people he's drained could see and enjoy this sunset too.
Maybe... Even if Cell hardly deserved it, maybe they too could experience the peace and tranquility of life in this reserve instead of things being as cut and dry as the belief that Cell had completely extinguished their lives the moment it drained their bodies of all trace of energy necessary for their cells to maintain their form and function?
Cell saw the leviathan whale spouting off an alarming amount of water into the sky, to an extent where it breached into the lower atmosphere and began pouring down all over Monster Island from a relatively clear and still sky. It must have been so lonely to be confined to the depths of the ocean all by oneself. Even a colossal and terrifying creature like that, able to sink entire continents underwater by just flipping over on its backside and causing vicious tsunamis, deserved to see the light of day and find kinship.
The Bio-Android's memories turned back to when it stalked Piccolo and Chayote and the rest of the crew while they fended off Lord Slug in South City. That was when it got its hands on Namekian cells. However, that was also when it saw Piccolo perform a curious technique. One that it then saw both Piccolo and Kami Upa perform a few more times before the God's Temple had protection against Artificial Humans and manmade creatures entering it in place.
"Magic Materialization!" Cell exclaimed, extending its hand while holding its right wrist with its left hand. An electric jasmine-colored beam fired off from Cell's hand, erupting on the ground and sparkling with brilliant colors before producing orange and blue sneakers the size of a hotel each out of thin air. Cell wasn't sure if its body still contained the memories necessary to perform the technique from when Cell saw Piccolo and Kami Upa use it, or if it merely came packaged with the Namekian cells, but Cell hoped these sneakers would help the leviathan whale walk across the Monster Island and meet its inhabitants. That they would liberate it from the loneliness in the abyssal depths and let it see the sunset like Cell was seeing it now, surrounded by treasured neighbors and friends.
*****
"You know that this isn't where you belong, don't you?" Cell crossed its arms while looking straight into the eyes of a merfolk doing pull-ups to a thick tree branch with slugs that resembled a cross between a squid and a slug stuffed into a horned, cone-like shell, curiously observing the merfolk doing pull-ups with its beefy, amphibian arms while its bulky legs dangled underneath it.
"Bro, I can out-pull you every day of the week, bro!" the clueless merfolk declared before being snagged off the tree with a quick lunge of Cell's tail. The tail wrapped around the beefy merfolk, leaving it bound and helplessly thrashing around while Cell flew off to the lakeside it now knew all too well.
"Yeah, Cell, kick his ass! Next time he shows up in my forest, I'm frying that guy!" a teal-colored penguin-like bird with three-pronged antennae that could produce electrical jolts and send as well as receive radio waves with fairy-like transparent membrane wings fully capable of keeping it in the air despite its overweight build, as long as they buzzed hard enough.
Cell put the merfolk back by the lakeside. Cell knew better than to warn it to not run off again and do something stupid. Not only did these guys listen to absolutely nothing anyone or anything told them, but warning them against something would have only been understood as a challenge to absolutely do that thing they were being warned against. Seeing a handful of mammoths drinking from the lake, Cell followed them deeper into the woods by the mountainside where it was cooler and the mammoths liked to hang out.
"Weirdo!" a squeaky voice came from behind Cell, freaking it out. Upon turning around, Cell saw a blank-faced, bipedal amphibian with winged ears and curly growth out on the front that might have had a function but it just looked like a frontal curl of hair based on how it hung right on the forehead of the blank-faced creature. It held its hands bundled out in front of its crotch, a bit like a meerkat, and had a long and curvy, chameleon-like tail.
Cell sighed. It had met this creature a few days before. The Bio-Android was familiar with its limited intelligence and its ability to spout out insults it couldn't fully comprehend the meaning of. A bit like a toddler embarrassing their parents by pointing fingers at less fortunate people or just about anything or anyone looking unusual to them. Just like that toddler, the amphibian didn't really feel any spite toward the creatures it insulted and most of them didn't even understand its insults to begin with. That didn't mean that it didn't freak Cell out every time it squeaked from the bottom of its lungs from right behind it.
"I'm not weird," Cell replied just to entertain itself. It scooped up a rhinoceros-sized dung beetle with a locust's head and lifted it over its head. "See? This guy looks a lot more like me than it does like you. If anything, you're the odd one out here."
The mint-green amphibian scratched its head, completely no-selling Cell's response before becoming bored and walking off. The amphibian walked up to the mammoths that were just scratching their sides at the jagged mountainside and pointed at its rear end from the back. "Hairy!" it yelled out, prompting the mammoth to jump up and turn around, expecting to be attacked. It must have also met this amphibian, for it returned to its grooming and time-off sessions after calming its racing heart immediately after while the amphibian got bored and walked off to find more creatures to point fingers at and insult.
"Hey, bro, you wanna race, bro!?" Cell's neck tucked in after it heard that bubbly-sounding voice again. Although Cell already knew what it would see after turning around, it turned around regardless only to see an incredibly slim merfolk harassing a turtle-hare that couldn't run away because of how heavy its protective shell was. Cell was a bit surprised that the lean merfolk got a drop on the turtle-hare despite the hare ears being much more sensitive than those of a normal hare because a turtle-hare couldn't quite get away as fast as its ordinary hare brethren. Even the spider-monkeys were surprised by the sudden emergence of the hassling merfolk as they hurried away on their webs and hid in the thick leafage.
Spider-monkeys were known speedsters in this island's ecosystem, so it was far from being too ridiculous to conclude that they might have been next when the merfolk finally either beats the turtle-hare in a race or the turtle-hare hides in its shell and refuses to come out long enough for the merfolk to grow bored.
Suddenly, the turtle-hare, the merfolk, the mammoths, and all the other ordinary and unique animals and monsters alike jumped up on their feet and started fleeing for their lives. Cell turned its horned head, full of curiosity as to where the noisy rumbling came from. Everything went white before an armed tank shell detonated in the air, sinking the peaceful mountainside forest scenery in a blaze that uprooted the trees and burnt down the leafage and the spider-monkey webs alike, prompting the spider-monkeys to flee on foot alongside the other animals.
Rumbling and tumbling, over from the other side of the mountains, a fully metallic tank, decorated with numbers and a scary, doodled monster face out on the front emerged, aiming its massive barrel straight at the animals that were fleeing for their lives. A deafening blast alerted Cell that the tank fired another shell, this one aimed directly at the fleeing monsters to make way for its loud and destructive rolling across the woods.
Cell moved in an instant, racing up to the shell and catching it. It blew up in Cell's hand and surrounded the insectoid Bio-Android in smoke. The top of the tank's hatch opened up, revealing the chubby head of an overweight man, dressed in a rough military-style getup with a bushy almond-colored mustache and a head shaved the sides with a lone curl sticking high into the air from the center of the top of its head, like a crescent moon. The man's cheeks were colored in perpetual blush, likely because of the smell of alcohol that the man was putting out.
"That's right, that's what you get! We're gonna hunt ourselves a sea dragon if it's the last thing we do! Anyone or anything, any weird bug thing that's gonna stand in our way is either gonna get blowed up or flattened under our wheels!" the poacher proclaimed before the smoke from the blast cleared out and Cell was revealed to be fully unscathed. Terrified, the man slipped back into his tank, somewhat struggling to stuff his pudgy belly back inside, but doing so after a few hearty tries. He shut the hatch back down and aimed at Cell again, ready to put his tank to the test against the Bio-Android, all for the sake of the sea dragon whose horn powder cost billions of Zeni in the black market.
Cell's instincts were right, poachers really had made it onto the island. It was superb timing too. Cell's cells were just about beginning to make a fuss about being energized again and Lapis' policy about poachers was to kill them on sight, anyway. Cell would spare even ordinary gigantic insects from the grisly fate of drying and withering away after having all energy sucked dry from one's body. A fate reserved entirely to these poachers invading the Monster Island in force.
Cell could hear more rumbling and explosions in the distance. This wasn't just a scouting incursion, this was a full-on military force invasion. No. 17's efforts in fending off lone poacher ships and planes from finding this place only resulted in them pooling their efforts with some serious firepower. Even if the poachers stood no chance in as much as scratching Cell or Lapis, they didn't know that and they weren't at all worried about blowing up or burning down the natural habitats of these exceptional creatures as long as they got their hands on those sea dragon's horns.
This was what it meant to be fighting on the side of life that was other than your own. Even effortless breeze battles were threatening, for you weren't fighting solely for your own survival anymore. You were fighting for the sake of those you treasured and sought to protect, those that were fragile enough to die just by staying on the sidelines long enough.