Hey guys! This is chapter one, rewritten! I needed to fix a few things and play around with The Mega's/Protomen's stories and attempt to make something that worked together.

Enjoy!

The Message from Dr. Light

I whispered unheard words to him. This child of mine. This...being of my creation.

As I look at him, my hands wrapped in bloodstained bandages, I see flashes of the Reploids I'd built before. The sniper bot, thousands of mine workers...Blues. These were prototypes, things I had no cares about. These were beings built for a purpose--to serve mankind. That, as I believed, was what robots and Reploids were for. They had no emotions or reasons to be alive other than to serve.

I should have listened to Albert. Perhaps it is my own fault that he went mad, perhaps nothing this evil would ever have happened.

I learned my lesson as an old man. It took the loss of a son to teach me. Now I look up into the face of another Reploid, one that I will love with all my heart. I built him in my image--I built his hands, his face which was partially finished. To any other, the gaping eye and wires scattered everywhere would be something out of a horror film, but to me, this was my son, my creation. This was the boy that should have been mine and my Emily's. His eyes are forest green, like his mother's.

I will build him, program his personality, make him learn, know how to walk, how to feel and act. His personality will be that of a curious, adventurous, and kind young man, but with the extensive and incredibly complex program I will build into him, he will take his life's experiences and integrate them into his system--things people tell him, those that spend the most time with him, gender of certain people, conversations, tragedies, everything--and he will learn from them and let them mold his personality, just like any other human. I can teach him as if he were my own human son.

I feel empty and hollow as I speak aloud. Speaking to keep my sanity. I think the words were of my past, stories of my life and those whom I've loved. I sincerely hope this child will remain innocent. I hope he will burn with the passion that I used to. My mouth formed the words...

A message from Dr. Thomas Light.

Twenty-six years earlier...

As a man of twenty-nine years of age, I was hardened and aged more than a normal man of sixty. I had lived in a society of working people, people who had to kill themselves daily to live and get by.

My father worked in the mines, just like the rest of them. Our stock of coal was larger than anywhere else--but that was all that this city--if you could call it one--had. When I was just seven years old, I began working alongside my father. He always had rough hands, and he always worked hard. He would come home every night, coughing up black soot and dust. My mother would watch helplessly until she was also forced to work alongside him.

My father--Thomas, like me--would tell me stories as we worked. I'd bring the buckets of coal he'd gathered and cart them up an elevator to the ground above while he talked.

"Little Tom, there was once a man who had nothing. Then he worked hard, day and night, and earned himself money enough to travel away from his family and find his fortune. He found a spot of land, one that was dusty and dry--but he loved that land, and he claimed it for himself. Thirteen years later, this city was formed. Others found it and came to live here, and pretty soon, all this coal was discovered. So you see, son, with hard work, anybody can make something out of nothing."

He used to tell me other stories, each of them usually ending up with the hardworking man getting what he'd earned in the end. Father used to teach me that a good man would be humble, a good man would be kind and generous. He told me once, when I was ten years old and I was upset about the death of my friend's father, that real men showed their tears. That was the first time I let myself cry in front of him.

When I speak about my friend, I talk about Albert--my very best friend. He was always so vivacious, so ambitious. He always had some kind of crazy dream he'd be working towards--each dream different and more wild than the last. He had a habit of telling tall tales--lying, of course--but I would listen to each story intently and laugh until my sides hurt.

So when Father died, he was right there by my side, his brown eyes sober and lacking that spark for once. We stood there at the funeral, Mother there with us and hacking up that black dust like Father had until his throat would bleed, and I decided then--no more. Men would have to kill themselves no more.

I was nineteen at that time. I went home and gathered up every scrap of metal I could find. The only machines I knew how to control were the mine elevators, but I wanted to learn how to make a different tool, some machine that could ease the burden upon the people and make for a better life. I didn't sleep for five days, and when I came out of my father's old garage, I had a metal machine that moved. It had copper dangling in places and electric circuits that stuck out everywhere, but this machine could roll on smooth ground and pick up small items. From there...I didn't stop.

Pretty soon Albert caught on to what I'd been doing. He came over and began spending days and nights with me in that little garage. He was good with his hands, but he didn't seem to get the concepts of machinery as I did. He did, however, insist that the metal had some kind of warmth and life, that the machine would speak to him and tell him how it wanted to work. I think he knew then--the bots we built had ghost programs in their systems, and those were the things that made them feel, made them alive.

Together he and I created ingenious contraptions, things that helped men in the mines. Minor helps, at first, but soon Albert and I were to build such an advanced machine together...it was going to be phenomenal.

It was around the start of this eight-year project that I met Emily.

She was...beautiful. I met her one day in a crowd of mine workers as I explained one of my lesser machines to them and how it worked, how it would help them. She had lingered behind for some unknown and unremembered reason, but as I stepped down from the makeshift presentation stage made of slabs of wood, I saw her.

I turned around and she turned her eyes to me--entrancing green eyes, the color of shaded leaves--I instantly fell for her. I don't know how it happened, and I don't know if I knew what I was feeling at that age.

Present

I cut myself off and stop talking at this point. My chest hurts and my throat hurts too much to continue talking about her. I watch my half-finished son sleep. I cover his body and face with the black tarp, hiding him away, and one of Wily's many search bots scans through the window of this run-down apartment building. It leaves, and I get ready to try to sleep.

It felt as if tonight was going to be another sleepless night.