Haruka steels herself for a naked walk.

"... There's no helping it." Haruka sighed. She reached up to run her hand through her dark hair in frustration, but simply ended up whiffing her half of a mechanical arm alongside her head. "I'll bring an end to this foolishness. Somehow, someway, this is someone's nightmare. I don't need to be afraid of anything that can happen in a nightmare. Also... naked or not, I am an android who saved the human race from extinction. Once I explain that, I ought to be able to command a certain degree of respect." Based on how things had gone until now, Haruka wasn't sure even she believed that would be the case, but it didn't change the fact it should be that way...

Everything would be so much easier if Haruka was an emotionless robot, but right now she was saddled with her damned sophisticated simulated emotions. She was able to set her face into as neutral and mechanical of a frown as she could hope, but she couldn't regulate the tomato-red color that had risen into her face and ears. It was the best she could do, though... Taking a deep breath, she left the alley, turned the corner of the sidewalk, and made her way to the office door with her fists balled at her side and a quick but soldierly gait.

As Haruka entered the double door, she was immediately greeted by a security checkpoint. Frustrating, but not surprising. What was surprising was that beyond the checkpoint, she could clearly see a winding sea of cubicles and desks, fully staffed. She saw the elevator doors far beyond, which meant she'd have an office floor of eyes on her bare body as she made her way...

First things first. The security gate was staffed by a bored looking man in a military uniform. He registered some surprise at seeing her, but not the jaw-to-the-floor surprise she expected. "Ma'am, can I help you?"

"I am Ensign Haruka Goshin of the Human Survival Mechanized Squadron, serving aboard the Figurehead V." She didn't go any further, assuming that should carry the weight she needed to be let through.

The man didn't look impressed. "Badge?"

Haruka's frown broadened. "As you can see, I do not have it on me..."

The man looked her up and down, not showing any apparent reaction to her naked body. "I see... No badge, no entry, ma'am."

"You have to be kidding," Haruka told him crossly, raising her voice when she realized he wasn't. "You understand that when I claim to serve aboard the Figurehead V, I am referring to the Squadron's most powerful battleship, of which I am one of two surviving crew members? Am I not recognized as the sole android enlisted in the Squadron's forces? And would it make any difference if I stressed the urgency of my entry?"

"Huh... An android, huh?" The man scratched the back of his neck, then put his hand to his chin and squinted at her. "Wait, so that means you're squadron property, right?"

"That is incredibly offensive."

"So, you should have a bar code somewhere on your body I can scan and match to our database, right? If so, I can pass you in as equipment."

"... I am not equipment," Haruka stressed, with more anger burning in her eyes than fire in her face. "There will not be a bar code on my person. I was not produced by the Squadron's laboratories. I signed into your Squadron under special circumstances in the far reaches of space. I- Hey!" The android let out a yelp of protest as the man approached closer, then began scanning his unaffected gaze all over her body, beginning squarely at her perky chest and continuing by lifting her arms to closely inspect her armpits. "Y-you will not... There is not...! Cut it out!" The man had bent his knees and brought his face close to her lower body, running his hand across her stomach and the smoothness even lower as though he expected to find a code written in Braille. She tried to swipe at him with arms that weren't there as he grabbed one of her bare legs and lifted it to search across it, then the other. She tried yelling in his face as he stood again to shove her bangs upward and look at her forehead, wondering if she had suddenly gone mute. "I said stop this immediately!"

To her surprise, instead of stopping immediately, or even continuing his inspection on the other side, the man suddenly grabbed her around her slender waist and lifted her in a barrel carry along his side so that she was **** to crane her head around to see him. She saw with mortification that he was staring squarely at her naked ass.

"Aha! I knew I'd find it. It's right here at your tailbone. Heh, kinda looks like a tramp stamp."

"It kind of looks like a what?! Excuse me?! I do not have a tr- I mean, a bar code, or a production number!" Even though she was protesting that, she couldn't exactly prove it to herself. There was no way for her to see her lower back without a mirror; if she had her arms, she could detach her head to look for herself, but no such luck.

"Okay, Ms. 069247, I'll show it to you when we finish the scan," the man laughed, then placed Haruka face down on what was quite clearly a luggage conveyor next to the metal-detecting gate she'd expected to pass through.

Haruka turned her head to show the man her indignation, clenching her teeth. "I am not equipment!" she complained as her face disappeared through the curtain and into the screened scanning area. It continued to move her without pausing, giving her the interesting feeling of her bare front pressed against the rollers and belt below. Suddenly, she stopped. "For all that is... I am stuck. Of course. This belt is not designed to pass anything shaped like a human. What part is causing the malfunction."

The man let out a chuckle in response. "What part do you think? One sec."

Haruka waited as the rollers vainly attempted to continue to pass her through the scanner... Suddenly, she let out a yell as she felt hands digging into the synthetic flesh of her rear end. "What do you think you're doing?"

"I'm clearing the jam!" the man grunted with exertion. "Don't know why the Squadron built a weapon with such a fat ass, though. Almost got it..."

"My ass... i-is not that fat... it should not be possible for my entire upper body to clear the entrance... if... Ah...!" Haruka's complaints about the dream logic were cut off by the unfamiliar feeling a man's coarse hands kneading her behind to make it fit through an unyielding metal gate. She felt her body heat had risen considerably. "It is... sensitive, you idiot..."

"It's through," the man declared, walking back to the side of the screen and observing the scan. The clacks of buttons could be heard. "Aaand, there we go. We got a match on the scan. Serial 069247, Type 1 Fat-Assed Android."

Haruka couldn't bring herself to protest the indignancies to someone who so clearly didn't care any longer. She simply shut her eyes and silently begged for the process to end without any further incident. As if rewarding her for giving up, she finally reached the end of the conveyor. "Am I permitted to continue...?"

"Sure. I assume you're heading to an equipment locker somewhere, but do you need directions?"

Haruka didn't answer his insulting assumption, but shook her head at the need for directions. She knew where she was headed straight away.

"Good. Just one more thing..." The man headed back to the scanner as Haruka began to sit up, struggling to get to her feet steadily without hands and hoping to get away before he could inflict any further wounds to her pride. Casually, the man took a printout from the machine and clipped it to a lanyard, then put that lanyard around Haruka's neck. "That identification ought to let you get where you need to go."

The android was trying not to let anything shock her now, but she couldn't hide her reaction to having a letter-sized photo of her ass with a disturbingly angel-wing tipped barcode inked just over her tailbone, and the words TYPE 1 FAT ASSED ANDROID in thick, black marker in the white margin beneath it. "... Thank you," she muttered, all she could think of to say.

The man casually waved her off, and Haruka turned back to the rows of offices in a stupor. She started walking slowly with her head down through the aisles, not surprised to see every worker drop what they were doing and shout the title that had been pinned to her with a loud voice, nor surprised to see that all of them seemed to have the faces of the crewmates Rebecca had shown her in photographs aboard the Figurehead V. When one reached out to give her a hard slap on the ass as she passed, however...

"Enough is enough!" Haruka wasn't even speaking to herself now, but yelling her words as curses to whatever god was tormenting her. "If this is all a dream, it does not matter what I do!" Abandoning decorum, she picked up speed, first to a jog, then to a run. She felt her feet clopping against bare carpet and the photo that had been foisted on her swinging around to the back like a a short cape, no longer doing their already poor work of hiding her breasts. The hall seemed somehow impossibly long, but her running pace was now far beyond a regular human's. "Screw this! I am getting to the top and ending this nightmare as quickly as possible!!"