"Well, without knowing much about this world I can hardly highlight the differences well," Cherry points out. "There are about 15 billion people living in habitats and on planets throughout our solar system. Personal safety devices and their industrial cousins ensure that everyone is safe and comfortable. Rent is cheap in undesirable solar orbit, and expensive in cities. I'm an experimental dimensional engineer, as I said. If my experiment hadn't exploded, it might have been a first step towards building a pocket dimension."

And Armsmaster realizes what was bothering him. The device's responses are getting faster.

He switches back to looking at the recording, and measures the interval between responses. The most recent responses are 2.2 seconds faster than the start of the conversation, once he accounts for the length of each response. If that rate of increase continues, it will be operating in real time in a little more than a day.

This no longer looks like the kind of situation where he can take his time. The device is revealing new capabilities too quickly, and they might have only a few hours to try to contain a sentient, self-repairing, self-improving piece of tinkertech before it decides not to quietly sit in storage and be investigated.

"Thank you for your cooperation," he says. "I have to go."

He closes the containment unit, tucks it under his arm, and drops an urgent meeting into Director Piggot's inbox.

Two hours ago, woman in a fedora leaned around the corner of a warehouse in the docks and took a shot at a group of AAB members who were posturing across the street from a group of Merchants before disappearing.

The resulting kerfluffle had many effects, including causing a traffic jam that made people coming home from the docks 15 minutes late (which gave a traumatized young girl home from her first day back at school just a little longer to fully wallow in it before her father arrived), redirecting BBPD troops to try and control the violence (which let a pawnshop across the city be robbed without generating a police report until the next day), and, when Hookwolf and Oni Lee got involved, diverting Velocity and Battery from their scheduled patrol.

With Battery not back at base in a timely manner, Assault decided to hang around in the PRT building (where the car they both commuted in was parked) making a nuisance of himself.

So when Armsmaster arrives to her office, she's pissed.

"Armsmaster! Report," she snaps.

And Armsmaster explains his observations and the situation.

"And you're only bringing this to me now?" she growls.

The director drums her fingers on her desk. Since Armsmaster doesn't believe anything more can be learned from the device, PRT policy is to lock it into one of the long-term containment vaults. And then she'll have to file permanent space and budget allocation affidavits for containment, and bring those to the Fiscal Policy Oversight committee meeting next month.

Unless she thinks it presents and clear and un-containable danger.

Self-repairing tinkertech with no macroscopic components? She won't even have to justify the destruction order with anything more than 'possible nanotech'.

"Destroy it," she tells him. "It presents a clear danger, and we're not equipped to contain it."

"Sir."

A fun fact about standard PRT portable tinkertech containment units: they are designed to dampen vibrations from inside or outside, to prevent sonic attacks from being used to bypass the containment.

They may damp vibrations, but when your whole body is a microphone sensitive enough to pick up on the vibrations of individual molecules, it turns out that they don't dampen vibrations enough.

Still, it takes a few minutes for Weeping to skim through the conversation, so it's not until Armsmaster is stepping into the machine shop with the largest heavy-duty drill press that she begins planning her escape.

Her radius is, unfortunately, too small to grab enough air to fly. She can grab on to the material of the containment unit and shove herself around, though.

At her current simulation rate (57:1), time is not on her side. So she needs to plan what to do in advance, and fast.

Step 1: Move to the lid of the containment unit and cling to it.

No, wait, he'll feel the weight when he tries to open it.

Step 1: Cling to the box just below the hinge, and be ready to run up the lid when it opens.

Step 2: Blind him with lasers

Step 3: Shoot he's opening the lid

Armsmaster positions the containment unit inside the fume hood and ensures that the room and his armor are sealed. With possible nanotech involved, procedure calls for all debris or byproducts to be contained if possible.

He unlocks the containment unit and opens the lid.

Weeping Cherry shoots out of the containment unit as soon as the lid is open enough to permit her passage. Her lasers (dark red -- a tradeoff between not triggering the blink reflex, but still imparting enough energy to the retina to cause temporary damage) don't actually damage Armsmaster at all, because his visor is designed to filter out harmful amounts of light.

Being hit in the stomach by several kilograms of crystal going about 7 m/s does, though.

He stumbles back and tries to catch the device, but fumbles it, letting it drop to the floor. He triggers a lockdown alert and draws his halberd.

Weeping Cherry scrambles in some direction -- she hasn't exactly had time to aim yet, the important thing is to keep moving.

If the lasers aren't working, though, she's going to try a different tactic with the photogenerators. She flips on adaptive camouflage and changes direction to slide under a hydraulic press.

The PRT security officer who receives Armsmaster's alert is on the ball. He sees something (tinkertech?) hit Armsmaster and then vanish. Protocol for possible Strangers in a locked room is to deploy containment foam.

(Actually, a lot of the PRTs procedures for things are to deploy containment foam. It's a useful substance)

He hits the button and floods the room.

Being locked in a room is for people who can't rearrange molecular bonds at will.

Weeping Cherry releases a pulse of X-rays, and watches the backscatter. It doesn't look as though there's anyone below her. She starts disassembling the floor below her and reassembling it behind her once she's through.

She needs to steer around electrical cables and chemical resovoirs, not because they would hurt her, but because she doesn't want to reveal where she is by setting off any alerts.

She panics a bit when she first clips a fiberoptic cable, but she's able to splice it back together, hopefully before anyone noticed. (Why they have fiberoptics, CAT-6 cables, and what looks like a disused pneumatic tube system, she doesn't know)

Her rate of speed isn't great, with her forb still running on emergency power, and needing to take a long, convoluted route through the structure. Occasionally, she's able to pop into a maintenance shaft and make good progress before eating through the floor again.

This isn't the first time the PRT has had to deal with hostile beings with unknown powers. Which is why they don't wait until de-foaming Armsmaster and confirming she's no longer in the machine shop to start a building-wide lockdown and send patrols of troopers to sweep the corridors, just in case.

While he's waiting to be freed, Armsmaster coordinates with two troopers to set up the scanner from one of his labs. The device may be capable of invisibility, apparently, but it is noticeably denser than most other materials and that doesn't seem like the kind of thing it can likely change.

It takes two rounds of Weeping Cherry almost getting into a maintenance space before troopers arrange themselves just around the corner from where she will emerge, followed by her reversing course and trying a different direction for both sides to realize that they can see each other.

Cherry sits in a water tank and takes some time to think. She spreads the scans of the building that she's collected around her, and tries to plot a route out.

The problem is, if they can see her (how?), then they could just intercept her as soon as she popped through the exterior brickwork. So her only escape is to head down, past the basement, and see if she can get out of their range.

She charts a course and starts to eat her way through the side of the water tank ...

... when a costumed hand reaches through the wall and grabs her.

Weeping Cherry's forb is busily repairing itself to be a crystal that takes advantage of a ridiculously high-dimensional spacetime, but it hasn't had very long to grow along the dimension that Shadow Stalker's shard shoves it. So she scoops it out of the water tank without resistance.

"I've got it," Shadow Stalker declares, dropping Weeping Cherry into another tinkertech containment unit.

And Cherry, for whom this chase scene has been about 3 minutes, mentally kicks herself. Yes, she didn't have time to negotiate when Armsmaster was about to destroy her, but once she knew she wasn't hiding from them she really should have hopped on the radio and started trying to talk about this.

She grabs the bottom of the containment unit and shakes it hard enough to bypass the anti-vibration mechanisms in the walls. "Look, can we talk about this? I'm perfectly willing to cooperate, I just don't want to be killed."

And also she begins eating through the floor of the containment unit, because being locked in a box is also for people who cannot re-arrange the fundamental building blocks of reality.

It is not an uncommon occurrence, that the PRT needs to destroy something without letting it get out of a containment unit. This is why the standard containment units are built with secure attachments for flasks of acid.

Like the one that Armsmaster is standing by with. He makes sure Shadow Stalker is clear, just in case, and then locks the container of tinkertech acid into the input port on the side of the containment unit and presses the release button.