An increasing aircraft noise along with an alarm roar from the sky, and the crowd disperses away from the landing site, while a projector, bright enough to feel slightly warm, tracks Cherry.

With tumultuous wind, a visibly armed jet/helicopter hybrid descends from the skies.

These people are, presumably, the government. Weeping Cherry waves at them.

The jet-helicopter descends to the ground, tearing through one of the hanging bridges between the windows of the cliff-skyscrappers, and squishes a car underneath itself. (They are devoid of people; the car was standing empty and parked and everyone ran away from the alarm.)

Meanwhile, of course, the area is swept by the satellites; Arbites patrols and offices in the subsection are notified and mobilized; a couple snipers are getting into positions; some techpriests are trying to remotely get nearest camera footage and others are poring over it.

This isn't something like murder or government corruption, this is serious. Such accusations aren't made lightly, for it is said that if one accuses another of heresy to the Law, at least one is a heretic; such accusations are definitely not made lightly by groups of people.

A group of people in imposing-looking full-body armor holding imposing-looking guns at the ready briskly come out of the craft. About half of them quickly semi-surround Cherry in an "arc" slightly less than 180 degrees, the other half is halting random citizens in the now-dispersed crowd and establishing perimeter.

The ark forms a passage in the middle, splitting into two arcs slightly less than 90 degrees each, forming a thin corridor that, in the event of everyone firing at the suspect, would be safe. Through that passage and corridor, a man in slightly fancier armor stands forth, carrying a pair of ornate and weirdly technological handcuffs. He speaks in a practiced, drilled manner, amplified by a loudspeaker. There's no opportunity to interrupt him. 

"In the name of the Emperor and by the authority of the Adeptus Arbites, you are under arrest for suspicion of techno-heresy, suspicion of witchcraft, suspicion of being a Xeno*, as well as lack of registration and various other minor transgressions. Your device, suspected of being an object of techo-heresy, is to be confiscated for investigation, effective immediately. Now, without speaking or swift motions, put the device on the ground, then hold your hands out for the handcuffs."

* This word is essentially a harsh slur for aliens. The translation software have probably heard it a lot in child propaganda on the radio. This IS a world whose primary purpose is growing conscripts to fight in extermination wars against the Xenos.

She's pretty sure she caught ... most of that? And it's a problem because she can no more give up her fixity crystal than she could give up her brain, even if she wanted to.

On the other hand, there are people behind her who might get shot if the people with guns start shooting; she has no idea how good their aim is, and there are too many of them to be sure that she could catch all the bullets. At least not without causing a lot of damage to the closest people from shockwaves.

She has her fixity crystal settle on the sidewalk by her side, to show willing, but doesn't hold out her hands. She preps her fixity crystal to try and intercept any bullets, if violence breaks out.

"My machine — it is touching my brain. I cannot give it," she explains.

As soon as Cherry says the first words, the Arbites nearly shoot... but their chief halts them with a wave of his hand. It doesn't sound like an incantation, and she's being at least somewhat cooperative, which isn't what he would expect from a genuine serious heretic.

As for the content of her words, well, Imperium has plenty of precedent with brain modification. If innocent, this is evidence of status.

"Then we will keep it within it's working distance from your brain during the Mechanicus investigation. But the investigation must be conducted. Now, hands, or else it's resistance of arrest."

Well, she doubts that she will be terribly inconvenienced by the handcuffs, and this seems like maybe a step towards being able to figure out why everyone is so spooked by her.

She silently holds out her hands, and prepares to scan the handcuffs as they come in range. If they have anything in them that looks dangerous — like a singularity generator — or just sufficiently weird, she's prepared to render them inert.

They are weird! They contain a lot of tech (?) that, if activated, does weird things in the weird spatial dimension! And, of course, they have systems to prevent tampering, some of which are also tied up in that. 

Okay, well, she was exploded not fifteen minutes ago, so she's going to be at least a little bit cautious. On the other hand, she doesn't have a good understanding of how the extra dimension interacts with local physics, so she can't just emulate the potentially dangerous parts to fool the tamper sensors.

She crosses her metaphorical fingers, turns the bits that look like actuators into xenon, and loops the outputs of the bits that look like sensors until the cuffs stop interacting with the extra dimension. She also starts trying to crack the software running on the anti-tampering circuits, but even if she makes it higher priority than the language acquisition, that will take longer than it does for the important looking person to put the cuffs on her.

You know, that more or less should have worked, mechanically speaking.

But these handcuffs aren't just handcuffs. They are the bane of witches, a scarce rarity mass-produced in the chaos of the ancient Age of Strife and only available to a couple hundred thousands of various high-priority strike teams. They are almost relics. They are a symbol or technological dominance over witchery. They are the Law.

And, by the grace of the Emperor and the caprice of Warp, their failsafes work anyway.

If you have to roll to avoid hostile encounters enough, you are going to get a bad roll eventually.

Oh, ye dun did it now.

"Guilty", says the man, and gestures, and turns away.

The arcs launch a few volleys of lasgun rays at Cherry (and whoever happens to be behind her at the moment).

Those of them who carry boltpistols wait until the chief backs off a bit, then, if the lasguns didn't do the job, fire explosive bolts.

... shit.

She blurs into motion. The lasguns are too fast, and she can't catch all of the missed shots. The ones that do hit her aren't a problem — her fixity crystal is set to automatically counter rapid changes in temperature, so the energy of the lasers just vanishes in contravention of the laws of thermodynamics.

She can move fast enough to make sure the explosive bolts don't get past her, though, which should hopefully cut down on collateral damage. Those she transmutes into harmless atmosphere.

She hesitates for a bare moment ­— if she charges them, are they going to shoot each other? On the one hand, they should miss less if she's right there. On the other hand, friendly fire is, apparently, not something they worry too much about.

Instead, she shoves herself up, grabbing air and blasting it downwards. In the air, any missed lasers will at least not hit anything important.

"I not want people getting hurt!" she says. "We can talk!"

"Your sentence is death. None evade justice. There is nothing else to talk about."

Any faithful subject of the Emperor understands collateral damage to be the least important aspect of this situation. That this being brings attention to it is more evidence of corruption or alien nature of it's mind.

Listen not to the alien, look not upon the alien, speak not unto the alien!

- Imperial Thought of the Day

The fire, of course, never ceases.

Well, she is not getting less immune to lasers over time, so if they want to keep shooting at her, that's fine.

She tries to get some more height, to see if there's anywhere that she can get away from populated areas. They're going to notice she doesn't mind the lasers and bullets eventually, and when they do, she has the feeling that they're going to escalate.

What does this place look like from the air? Are there any other transports that seem to have an eye out for her? Or, alternatively, an air traffic control channel so that she can let people know where she's going?

The place is an ecumenopolis. There are some oceans to produce oxygen by phytoplankton and regulate climate, and a few of the rooftops have parks on them; other than that it's buildings all the way down and all the way across. A cathedral towers over most buildings. Spaceships and other craft are landing and lifting off in the distance; some of it is absolutely flying her way; the Arbites jet/helicopter scurries off with the witnesses after a couple minutes of futile shooting but not before offering Cherry some guided missiles as a parting gift. How does she feel about that?

There's no air control channel - at least no unencrypted radio channel for one.

Right, okay. She briefly contemplates going invisible, but she still doesn't know how their tech works, or how it was able to notice her tampering. It's entirely possible that being invisible will result in them being able to still track her, but less precisely.

She picks a vector relatively clear of aircraft, and heads for the ocean. She broadcasts a simple analog homing signal, so they don't lose track of her when she goes supersonic.

Also, they're clearly already spooked, so she starts removing the lead and other pollutants as she goes. She still won't make much of a dent on the planetary atmosphere in any reasonable amount of time, but it's the principle of the thing. When she gets to the ocean, she can figure out whether it makes more sense to talk or fake her death and try to collect more information.

"I don't understand why you want I die!" she broadcasts. "We can trade. I can make machines to you."

There are currently three main currents of causality unfolding from Cherry's actions.

The Adeptus Arbites are currently trying to make Cherry a problem of the military rather than theirs. They are equipped to fight criminals but not flying machines that absorb lasgun hits and homing missiles without a scratch.

Their investigation is of course turning up stone cold fuck you nothing, and the Judge who led the arresting squad and the commander of the operation are soon to get their obvious summary executions. They do say thay the fact that one couldn't have done anything to prevent failure doesn't absolve one of their failure; only the Emperor can.

The Imperial Guard is also not here to handle quite that situation, but they ARE the people who possess the firepower that they are going to try their darnedest to make overwhelming. They will begin their attempts by arming and repositioning Impera Dix's defense satellites - Cherry has left the populated area, so there's not much concern over collaterals of orbital bombardment.

The Imperial Guard isn't here to negotiate, it is here to destroy the enemy. But if the enemy refuses to be destroyed no matter how hard it is hit, that's frankly something that should be left to the government to figure out. So eventually, if nothing works, they're going to try pass the buck there.

Well, IF the enemy refuses destruction.

The Guard does have an ace up it's sleeve.

The second current of causality is as such:

In the Adeptus Arbites analytic center handling the ordeal, there is an unremarkable arbitrator who have, amid the chaos, sent a few words of notice to a trusted and esteemed government functionary, as per an agreement to report on anything that's wildly out of ordinary. The government functionary, when he notices the message, will, after some deliberation, then send a string of codewords to a man he only knows by a nickname. And that man will then call up and question some other people on the planet, think about the situation for a while, and then write up a string of perfectly random letters and have a private astropath in an underground bunker send that string to a different astropath.

And the receiving astropath, in a secret fortress on a moon that isn't known to the general public to be settled, will relay the random string of letters to a cheerful clerk.

Who will then descend into a massive vault of sealed envelopes, and find a specific one of them via an index, and pick one of them up, and leave the vault.

And then, the cheerful clerk will hand a message and an envelope to a very, very serious man.

And that man will, then, open the envelope and extract a different sheet of random letters from it, and combine the two strings of random letters into one string of not so random letters, and immediately burn the sheet.

And then, the man will spend some time in deep and serious thought.

For he is a very, very serious man indeed.

The third path of causality is not so straightforward.

Cherry, at the moment, may be soulless. But she has now put into motion the effects that touch upon a great many ensouled beings, that touch upon many more in turn.