The cyborg paced silently through the public area that led to the entrance of Eden, her graceful steps punctuated by the deep drum beat of her escorts' heavy feet. She had her protective face mask on for effect, but oddly enough nobody was paying the mechanized trio any attention. It was weird, as if it was completely natural to see three soldiers, armored from head to toe and armed to the teeth, prancing through the street. A man she passed too closely looked up to see what the noise was about, gave a barely noticeable nod and went about his business.

Realization hit her a moment later, making her slow down a bit and throw her guards off their pace. With her mask, she looked like them. And being in the front, [i]she looked like their boss[/i].

A small eerie chuckle did make one of the bystanders give the three a worried look. One day, all of this will be hers. Oh yes.

The admiral's final instructions to the prison crew before he left rolled through her mind as she made her way through the automated doors of the climate-stabilized greenhouse - Not their content but rather their [i]taste[/i]. Locke sounded indifferent, suspiciously apathetic, but she could tell it was in fact the other way around. He was not one of those men who were always ready to roll their responsibilities off their backs and onto the next in line. He held the weight of the entire ship on his shoulders, and to the practiced eye his effort was actually visible. It calmed her slightly. Even though her reassignment to engineering was probably nothing more than a chiding powerplay.

The air inside the greenhouse was different. Humidity and nitrogen levels were shifted from the ship's atmospheric solution, in addition to various organic substances floating around, in and out of the visitors' respiratory system. The cyborg shaked her head - she was letting the computer in her head smell the air instead of it going through her natural, albeit weakened, senses.

The Delegation From Planet Mechanozoid stopped on one of the garden's many pathways, beside a patch of grass with a tree in the middle. But when Chizuru leaned into her next step towards the green patch, she found herself incapable of proceeding. This was the last bit of grass in the universe. Would she trample it with her boots, due to paranoia? She suddenly felt like a heavy armored bull in a china shop where the china is made out of soap bubbles.

A barely noticeable hiss made the guard droids look down at Chizuru's body. Black rods slowly extended outwards all over her armor, and with a final click the chest piece divided in the middle. She stepped out of the exosuit that was her second home, and extended a lithe leg towards the grass. The suit remained in an upwards position, confusing the droids slightly as there were now two targets they had to follow. It was sort of funny, since it was an actual function the suit had, she thought, and put her weight onto her free foot.

It was a mistake. Cradled in the safety of hardened space-level titanium alloy for such an extended period of time, the foot's sudden cold and prickly sensation was amplified to unbearable levels, causing her to lose balance and lean forward. She threw her hand outwards to break the fall, which only worsened the effect, and found herself flat on her back a moment later. The far too bright illusion of sky overhead, the wet and sharp touch of grass that spread over the area of her appendages that still had the ability to sense touch, and the sudden lightness of her body threw Chizuru into a sort of dreamy vertigo. And for a long moment, she had lost sense of direction and gravity, her thoughts vanishing from her mind without a trace. There was only the sky, the grass, and a small girl as a wall between them, expecting to be crushed from both directions. She took a deep breath, as if to drink up the sky, her lungs resisting for some reason as if the air was made of rock. A strange warm wetness crawled over her face, breaking the illusion. She sat up, coughing, and rubbed her eyes.

Stupid hay fever.