Chain 030: Mega Man

Chain 030: Mega Man
Location: The City
Age: 19
Identity: Drop-In (Human)
Drawbacks: [+600] The Sons of Fate
(Abilities: Savant; Regeneration; Hyperkinesis; Achron; Hey, Wait! You Swore!; Not Dark Enough; The Stars Shine Upon Me; Waveform Anatomy; Hybrid; AT Field Mastery; Pattern Ultraviolet; Secondary Field; Cybernetic Knowledge; Light of the Orokin; Paragon)

[100/1600]  Basic Robotics
[200/1600]  Civilian Mode
[400/1600]  Enhanced IC Chips
[600/1600]  Solar Powered
[1200/1600] Weapon Copy System
[Free]      OST
[Free]      E-Tank
[1600/1600] Beam Saber

(At last, I have the means at hand to properly design and build an army of robots and Pantheon to maintain Hyperion, all managed by the Magi triumvirate.)

A decade of guerrilla war against Dr. Albert Wily, the tyrant of the mega city, would drain almost anyone. Oh, I thought it would be simple enough - I knew enough about the games and the Protomen's rock opera that I had hoped I could swoop in and simply save the day. That, of course, is not how it went.

Most of what he had in terms of robots was simply an army of simple machines, but he had his robot masters, too. Each of them could coordinate anywhere from dozens to hundreds of robots. To fight one of them was to fight through an entire army to get to its commander, and engaging them wasn't like fighting Mavericks. They freely coordinated, and fighting smart was necessary.

At first, I worked alone. I initially tried to seek out Thomas Light, who seemed to ascended to the status of Emmanuel Goldstein, but I only got to speak to him for a very short time. You see, he was effectively on house arrest at Wily's behest. Wily had let him build one more "child", Roll, Who was without question a housekeeper. Also, under Wily's complete control; the polite fiction was maintained in front of Light, but as soon as we were out of his sight she tried to kill me. Had I not the ability to see it all coming, she might have succeeded, but... well. If you can pair Savant and Hyperkinesis with Achron, you can pull off the sort of tricks that would make anyone short of Contessa jealous.

I did what I could to gum up the works. In truth, most of what Mega Man fought were just the low level robots - he'd fought less than two dozen robot masters, which was admittedly quite the accomplishment but still nothing compared to what he had at his disposal now. People were smart enough to keep their heads down when things happened, but most of it stayed in the shadows.

Still, it's hard to hide the broken bodies of robot masters being hung on open display in a few of the remaining open spaces.

Things from that point got much, much more difficult, however. I tracked down Mega Man and was rebuffed, quite forcefully; I returned his favor with my own force, before throwing him my e-tank to repair himself as I regenerated my own damage. When he asked where the heroes were when he and his brother had fought for humans, I pointed out that they were already dead. Wily wasn't stupid - he'd been assassinating anyone who caused trouble. The ubiquitous robots all but blended into the background for most people, after all, and people don't often look up when there are quiet drones hovering overhead or zipping to and fro. A robot master who can listen to them can take the disparate snippets of conversation and put them together into something seamless. And that's without taking into account that Wily probably could have bugged damned near everything - after all, he'd singlehandedly advanced technology by a century.

But no matter what I said, Mega Man seemed to have no interest in everlasting peace, save for the peace of the grave. So be it.

I resumed my guerrilla campaign, and the difficulty ratcheted itself upward rapidly. As I later discovered, Wily had many irons in the fire, and didn't rely solely on his own genius - the Chronos Institute was only one of those, but he was able to travel thirty-seven years into the future to steal technology and bootstrap himself. He was not pleased with the future he saw, one in which he was very much dead and people were free, but the first sign that was the case was a seemingly unprompted tightening of his control over the society of the city.

I, on the other hand, had new machines come for me. Enker, Punk, Ballade. Each of them was as far beyond a robot master as a robot master was beyond the machines they controlled. He'd built them as a contingency in case Mega Man thought to raise arms against him again, and... well, that had abruptly become unnecessary. While dealing with them in a running battle through the city, others came at me in what was clearly a coordinated attack; they might have even stood a chance if I weren't wearing power armor from a century in the future, augmented by Orokin technological upgrades. And in addition to that... Mega Man and Proto Man seemed to reappear, fighting together against Wily's army at the behest of the Cossack, who backed them up with his own machines. Wily was seemingly killed, the Cossack installed as liberator.

Things were of course still as dark as ever - the truth of the matter is surely unsurprising. The Cossack was playing a role, his daughter held hostage by Wily. I changed my tactics once the Cossack took control, though - I had the means to infiltrate and seize records, to release them while people were watching the talking heads on their screens, every so often. Things like Dr. Wily's continued-

The timeline rearranged itself as I found myself interrupted in my task. A version of Mega Man - no, more like his shadow - along with a half dozen robot masters who were advanced far beyond the rest I'd fought. Now that I knew it was time travel, it was obvious, and I resolved to close that door as soon as I eradicated these machines.

... as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, Dr. Wily's continued existence and Cossack being his unwilling puppet, among other things ...

The Cossack tried to reassure the populace in a live broadcast, but I was not expecting to see a machine named Bass kill him on-air, call the people fools, and name himself, Break Man, and Quint as humanity's heroes - who would save them whether they asked for it or not.

(I was lucky enough to destroy the time machine, and I used cyber-elves to corrupt the backup data so that any replacements would fail to work in spectacular explosions. Sadly, Wily himself was too clever to test any unproven machines himself - I'd half-hoped that he might try to use it and be turned inside-out.)

Even a beaten-down population can get restless, especially when controls are tightened. I'd been counting on it, in fact; I had my own means for surveilling and picking out rabblerousers. Cyber-elves were so handy in that way, after all. And sure, showing up with a magic wand in hand and reading their mind was not something any of them expected, but despite it taking MUCH longer this way, it was a means to ensure the loyalty of anyone who I recruited. (Well, that, and... hey, they swore to never use such power for their own ends.)

I recruited, and did one of several things - they might get a highly refined package of cybernetics, a transfusion of Kuva, a visit to the Chronicle cave in the warehouse, a suit of power armor ... over time, the groundwork was laid. While I kept up my attacks on the city's infrastructure, I slowed them. I let myself get visibly wounded and played up supposed injuries. I intentionally took what looked to be a fatal wound, and limped away before stopping any more attacks.

After having disappeared for over a year while the resistance was built up, the day came. Eight years after my arrival. We struck as one.

I dealt with Bass, Quint, and Break Man personally - that is, Wily's solution to the Mega Man problem, along with the subverted Mega Man and rebuilt Proto Man - and I'd saved my trump card for that last showdown. My power armor's weaponry was compatible with a variable weapon system, after all, and what was the weapon copy system but its prototype? Lasers, missiles, fire, ice, they didn't expect them to come from me. Meanwhile in the streets below, hundreds upon hundreds of people rose up. Both with and without my gifts. Even Dr. Light rallied one final time - he'd built a new machine under Wily's nose that he'd called X. The old man died at Roll's hand, Roll died at X's, and X charged forward to attack as well - he was surprised to find the "Hero Trio" dealt with, but less so to find that Wily had a last trump card, Zero. And having lived through the future, I suddenly had an epiphany. This is how it all began. Two centuries of brutal warfare between mankind and machines, humans and reploids, that would eventually cause humanity to nearly be extinguished.

"This is stupid," I told them as they faced off, and drew my wand. Consumed by fiendfyre, the only thing left of the pair was Zero's saber.

(I regret nothing.)

In the aftermath, Wily was launched out of his burning tower, and it was debated whether it was suicide or if his own machines threw him to the wolves. The city was pandemonium as people smashed the machines and the robot masters, but things settled down soon enough as a loose government was put into place; some people reverse engineered the machines, but their role in society afterward was vastly limited. People returned to working, and while they had perhaps tougher lives than they did before, they still had technology to make it easier. It wasn't the perfect solution that Thomas Light envisioned. It wasn't the well-oiled machine of society that Albert Wily had put in place. But sometimes perfect isn't what you need - what you need is just a little better than it used to be.

And that was enough.