On the one hand, that sounds like something that would work better on people who are made of atoms. On the other hand, these people are clearly not being nice, so she takes the opportunity to play dead.

She stops vibrating the containment unit, but keeps eating her way through the floor. Normally, her optical camouflage works by destroying incoming photons and creating identical outgoing photons on the other side of her forb. The people who design forb protocols are perfectionists, though, so it also includes some options to mimic an atmosphere for extra verisimilitude.

She sets her optical camouflage to pretend that the bottom of the containment unit is an unusually solid 'atmosphere' matching the external coloration of the unit. It won't be perfect, but it might stop people from noticing long enough for her to get free.

Protocols when dealing with potential strangers require him to use his scanning equipment to re-confirm the location of the stranger after capture. So he notices it when she drops through the bottom of the containment unit onto his Halberd's plasma blade.

What is wrong with these people! Her forb is rated against plasma up to several thousand Kelvin, so this isn't a problem, per se, but it does drive home that they're serious about trying to destroy her.

Normally she wouldn't do this, but it looks like everyone is wearing body armor, so at most they'll lose a few extremities. She disables the safeties on her forb's environmental controls and slaps the temperature control as close to zero as it will go.

She can't reduce things to absolute zero, because the motion her forb imparts is relative to its own reference frame, and that means that it will still be moving a tiny amount once you've averaged out all of the kinetic energy of all the particles in range. But it takes only a fraction of a second for everything within range to be reduced to nano-Kelvins above zero, and only a little longer for the atmosphere around her to pull in and start to liquefy.

She hits the floor, and it cracks. The concrete shrinks away from itself, sending spiderwebs out from her point of impact. Liquid oxygen and nitrogen drip into the crack and then rapidly sublimate, forcing it further open.

A sudden lack of heat slaps the various heroes and PRT troopers across the face, like an invisible bonfire suddenly going out.

Armsmaster has had a long day, and it looks like it's only going to get longer. He's faced worse than this, though, and he has plenty of time to pull his Halberd away before the sudden temperature change can do more than briefly put out the plasma on the blade.

"Surrender!" he says, on the off-chance that it works.

"Wow! No!" Cherry replies.

Going through the floors hasn't really been working, so she tries just grabbing the surface of the floor and shoving herself along it as hard as she can. She tries to aim between the troopers' legs, but they're still moving too fast, and she manages to break somebody's ankle instead. They'll have nasty frostburn, but she's past and ripping chunks of floor trying to make the corner before she can see them fall.

"The device is heading north on level three," a trooper radios in. "It appears to be generating extreme cold."

One of the others pulls their fallen comrade away from the foggy line of cracked flooring and starts splinting their ankle.

Armsmaster begins running after her, although his armor has no real chance of keeping pace. Still, she's going to have to slow down to go through any walls, and the PRT building has been on lockdown since she started trying to escape, so she's going to have to go through several to get out.

Hearing the trooper radio in gives her an idea. Since stealth has failed, it's not like it could give away her position, and they don't really seem in the mood to negotiate.

She quickly checks what the loudest radiowave she could generate without disrupting delicate electrical devices like pacemakers would be, and then starts broadcasting across the entire radio spectrum. If the hostile maybe-government is going to try to kill her, she's not going to let them do it quietly.

"My name is Weeping Cherry! I am a peaceful refugee from another world. My space-folding experiment exploded and I woke up here. I've been content to fix up my equipment and talk to the people who recovered me -- their vests say PRT -- but then they decided that I was too dangerous and started trying to kill me. I tried sneaking out of their building without escalating, but then they sprayed me with acid. I don't want to hurt anyone, but I'm not sure if I can hold out for much longer before I have to."

She puts that on loop on most frequencies, and dumps her fiction collection on the others as proof of her other-worldlyness.

Across the building, Director Piggot's pencil snaps.

And across the city, anyone with the radio on winces and turns down the volume. Grocery store PA systems and police radios aren't exempt. Anyone with a cellphone can watch their bars drop as the cell signal throughout downtown is drowned out by the strength of the announcement.

Okay. While she was setting that up, she also reached the end of this section of corridor. If she can break through this blast door and get into the elevator shaft, she can get up to the roof. She's been mostly going down, so maybe the change in strategy will confuse them for at least a moment.

She cranks the ambient temperature control to the other extreme and the liquid atmosphere clinging to her evaporates with a bang. Between the movement, the radio, the on-going repair work, and now the heat being dumped into her surroundings, she's running her forb at the limits of its power generation, but she can still dump enough heat to make the air around her start to glow.

The PRT has planned for how to handle crisis response without working radios. There are wired terminals built into the walls in strategic locations to let the troopers throughout the building coordinate with dispatch. The teams not near the terminals have runners and hand signals to convey orders.

So by the time the PRT forces on this floor of the building are nearly caught up to her, the teams on other floors have also converged on the elevator shaft.

It won't do them much good. Now that she's not bothering to carefully repair holes behind her to avoid structural damage, she can make it through into the elevator shaft faster than they were expecting.

She leaves behind a glowing jagged hole, perfectly shaped to her minimal cross section, and rockets up the elevator shaft. She melts through the roof access door ...

And is immediately stabbed by a lightning covered spear, shoving her back into the shaft.

Cherry clings to the spear automatically so that she doesn't fall back down the shaft. The lightning doesn't bother her, but the spear is weird. It's not entirely made of atoms, instead being partially comprised of interlocking wormholes.

Dauntless retracts his spear, sees Weeping Cherry clinging to the end of it, and extends it back into the elevator shaft.

"It doesn't seem to be affected by my Arclance," he calls to the trooper at the rooftop terminal.

"Dispatch says Armsmaster is on his way up. If you can keep it in the elevator shaft, he's got a sonic crystal disrupter that he thinks will work," the trooper replies.

Cherry gathers her wits, and uses the tip of the spear as a platform to launch herself to the other wall of the shaft. It took her a moment to realize that she doesn't need to leave via the door.

A moment later, she's through the far wall and launching herself off the side of the building.

Armsmaster, riding the top of the elevator, sees her leave and fires a shot with his sonic disruptor, making the building ring like a bell but doing no perceptible damage.

Miss Millitia, running out the front doors of the building and into the street below (where troopers stopped traffic and redirected it when the building went into lockdown), tries to hit her, but can't get a shot where the backdrop is clear.

And Weeping Cherry goes hurtling out into the air between buildings. It looks like she'll be able to grab onto the window of that building and maybe not break it and be able to scuttle up the outside.

She switches her radio broadcast to "I made it out! Thanks for being my witnesses," and then ends it. She turns optical camouflage back on, on the premise that maybe their scanner has a limited range which she can outpace, and drops her temperature to match the chilly January air through which she is sailing.

A moment later, Armsmaster steps out onto the roof and activates his density scanner. It catches something moving south for the briefest instant before she makes it out of range. He double checks that the building is clear, and radios his findings to the Console.

Weeping Cherry skips across the rooftops, throwing herself across the gap between buildings.

She takes a moment to just -- have nothing happening. That whole thing happened fast, relied on her reacting without time for rational thought, and now she's out.

When she has finished collecting herself, she is on an anonymous gravel rooftop on a four story residential building. She hops up on the ledge around the edge of the roof and takes in her surroundings. What she needs, is somewhere to hide.

She will feel a lot better about going toe-to-toe with people again when her forb has regenerated enough for her to operate at normal speed.

She briefly considers dropping into an anonymous alley and burying herself in the ground, but a more appealing prospect beckons her from the East. Because, while water won't perfectly mask the hyperdensity of a forb crystal (especially one growing into new spatial dimensions), it will do a lot to stop anyone from following her.

She resumes roof-hopping, and in short order she is sailing out over the clear, dark waters of the Bay. And then plop! She is safe under the waves.

She gathers the water she can reach and throws it behind her, propelling her further out into the bay. She lets herself sink to 10 meters or so below the waves, and then stays there.

For a while she drifts, and she heals, and she plans.

Eventually, sometime around midnight, she sends herself jetting out through the mouth of the bay and into the ocean. She makes her way a few tens of miles up the coast, and then surfaces near a small town notable only for having a lighthouse that made finding it easy.