Dedicated To Keiji Inafune – Without You, There Would Be No Story

Disclaimer: Rockman/Megaman and Rockman/Megaman X © Capcom, and are used without permission.

Author's Note: 2013. The year Megaman's legacy stood still, and Rockman's legacy was one of cancellations and broken promises. Since then, Keiji Inafune made three attempts to recapture that golden feeling within the fanbase, managing to find success only with Azure Striker Gunvolt, and ending up personally stigmatized and ostracised, with his indie development studio bought out from under him.

Five years later, however, Mega Man returned. Updated designs for the characters, a brand new level of support for the franchise and a possibility that the solution to what happened to some of the characters may well come with time. I will say that Mega Man 11 is a nice gesture… But I'd have loved it five years ago.

For now, this story will only make cursory references to Mega Man 11, like some aspects of Roll's design, in that I do like her new hoodie, but will not consider it the definitive end to Mega Man's story until Capcom do.

MEGAMAN: CAUGHT OUT OF THE LOOP

Black Box Recording: SWN-001

Designation: BASS

Secondary Designation: FORTE

Date: XX/XX/20XX

For all it matters, The Age Of Quint is over, Megaman Shadow has been and gone. I didn't meddle, I knew what was going to happen, It's odd to see something that was already pretty much history repeat from the other end of the equation. But, what am I doing? Sitting pretty, waiting for my power supply to run out, while noticing that it hasn't even flickered. Goddammit, Herr Doktor, Mein Fuhrer… All I have to do is wait for my replacement to power up, that damn girly boy robot you made as the last Wily Number before you croaked. You did too well in designing me, Super Wily Number 001, since I'm not going anywhere any time soon.

Hey, I just thought… You were going on about how you'd eventually win against Dr. Light? Congratulations, you old bastard, you won by Technical Knock Out. Megaman Is Dead, I'm not. Winner By Default, And Definitive Champion: Me. I beat him by outliving him by… Wait, Someone's here. Message Ends.

– ENTRY ENDS –

Once the area would have been lethal to go into in just a hooded dress, but right now, with the conveyor belts rusted in place, the mechanisms that allowed the blocks to disappear broken down, the spikes were either bent, blunted or both and the automated robot deployment systems effectively had nothing to deploy, the robot manufacturing plant having destroyed itself in a mutiny caused by a door rusting shut at a key choke point. All of those meant that Roll could just about, albeit still with some care, pick her way through Skull Castle.

She sighed. She'd had her current body for what seemed like forever, not helped by the fact her chronometer had stopped working years ago. She couldn't exactly repair the parts of her body that were damaged, since the fabrication system had been badly damaged back at the lab, with the cultures that grew the artificial skin layer of her body exposed to bacteria and rendered useless, and her father couldn't remake them, since her father was dead and buried, and even if he wasn't, the genetic sequencer had been in the repair bay.

She had a Buster with her, the self-proclaimed Roll Buster, or her energy broom, which was magnetically attached to her back, but they were useless, except, in the case of the latter, to help damaged door servos to kick in. If this didn't bear fruit, admittedly, she'd just sit down and get some much-needed sleep. Even if she knew that she'd not wake up. She checked what was effectively her energy meter, a bandoleer of E-Tanks that were siphoning their power directly into her systems, her normal power system having been used a few years back as an impromptu grenade.

If she didn't find what she was looking for, she'd have to go back to Right Labs, and add her personality matrix to the stack of them that was the only remains of her brothers and most of the rest of the robots that had populated the laboratory in it's active days. It was the fact her functions had lent themselves well to being a nurse that meant she was left online as Dr. Right lapsed into the early stages of dementia, and that she'd needed the companionship which was why Tango lasted. She was surprised to find him half-asleep, sat with his wolf, which growled at her as she entered the room, Bass looking at her curiously.

"You're still online? I thought you'd gone offline after something exploded rather spectacularly during an 'incident'..." He declared.

"I had a plasma battery, Emphasis on had... It made quite a potent bomb..." Roll offered, undoing the front of her skirt to show him the gaping wound where a crude shunt had been placed, the battery compartment outright having been torn out, and Bass winced perceptibly. He knew what the batteries used on some of them were, and why he never saw what happened when a Robot Master did get irrecoverably damaged. There was a room far below him for that purpose. It was intentionally lined with heavy duty shock absorbers. All anyone knew was when Wily replaced the wall panels.

"So, What really happened?" Bass asked, surprisingly curious about her, "From what I could tell from here, I thought you were making a last stand against Quint, and buying the past Megaman some time..."

"I couldn't self-terminate… The plan was for me to sacrifice myself, give my father time to upload his consciousness into some data network he'd set up to give advice to the next generation of robotics, so we don't copy his mistakes..." Roll began, shaking her head, "I'm rambling, but I tore out my battery, set it to blow, fitted a crudely made shunt in it's place before I shut down, and threw it out of the window before it lost structural viability and… You know most of the rest. The explosion got everyone's attention, and allowed me to disappear,"

"Great, Dr. Light managed to make my replacement a rival… Yet another reason to lament my existence..." Bass grumbled, "Way to steal my thunder… Bet you 10 zenny that they end up allies because Dr. Wily isn't around,"

"Didn't mean to… He fell into dementia over the following years, and I used my limited power supply to nurse him… It was why I faked my death," Roll sighed, slumping against the wall as another E-Tank flickered and died, "He claimed that Dr. Wily would return, use his time of weakness against him, but I knew better. Dr. Wily wasn't coming back… After he died, I invented the bandoleer, siphoned all the power the lab could spare, set the alarm, locked up and came here, and now we're in the present."

"Well, For me, I'm in a massive robot factory. I just call up one of the robots that I know has the right configuration of parts to repair me, take it apart, and I'm back to fighting shape. You were in a small laboratory that didsn't do mass fabrication of robots every few months due to the whims of the already half-senile man in charge," Bass sighed, "Admittedly, whatever Bassnium is, the power levels on it are 'None of your goddamn business'… And no, that's not directed at you, it's what the Doc put down. I kinda believe him as well,"

"So, What's your angle? I'm your enemy, but..." Roll began, for Bass to lean forward, smirking.

"You never told me why you came here on a crude power shunt with little chance of survival..." He stated, "My angle, though… Remember that big incident with Wily's King series?"

"You basically took offence at him making some big over-blown successor to you, and proved that you're the better robot..." Roll replied, "What about it?"

"You know that bet I just made? I have it on good authority that I'd win. Hell, when I first came along, I was young, believed the senile old fart..." Bass stated, "When King happened, I actually blew the guy off afterwards, got pretty damn pissed at him, said some things I shouldn't have, but felt I had the right to… The only reason I even went back to working for him as he completely lost it was when it was like daytime in the middle of the night… The only reason I had to betray him had just killed herself,"

Roll blinked, as she realised that Bass, way back in the past, had pretty much been ready to call it quits, purely, more than likely, since he met her, and found a reason other than defeating her brother to survive.

"Well, I'll admit, you are the only robot who is worth living for… Rock and Blues… They're my brothers, and that would just be awkward..." Roll offered, "I'd be sure of what I feel about that if I had the subroutines to know what the feeling is..."

"Cheapskate parents..." Bass quipped, "Your father only fitted a duty-of-care package to you since he was going off the deep end,"

"The scary thing is that you're probably actually right. He patched it into my existing diagnostics package. I only have operator protocols since he didn't want to do the job himself..." Roll sighed, watching as he pulled out a box of literally untouched E-Tanks from a rack of them, visibly all full and still in their safety packaging, "How the hell do you have enough power there for a small army?"

"I never actually use the damn things, I've got dozens of them…" He offered, "You don't think they just happen to drop from a robot's dead fingers out of nowhere? Dr. Wily might not admit it, but him and your father hold the patent on them, but Wily managed to stiff him on the fabrication process. It's why he actually has a room specifically for containing a plasma explosion, it's just off from the factory,"

"So, what do I do now?" Roll asked, for Bass to raise his arm.

"Well, A good start would be to go into a sleep cycle there..." Bass offered, Roll sliding under the offered arm and going offline.

"Probably was redlining her battery when it overloaded. Wasn't strictly designed for powering a Buster..." Bass mused, before calling, "Reggae!"

The bird flew over, Bass taking out his secondary power supply. It was a redundancy that he felt was even more redundant considering. Neither of them would die out this side of the half-life of the universe at this rate.

"Get the repair bay on her, replace her battery compartment to fit this in it's place, then give her a full maintenance run," He ordered, "I'm seeing damaged synth-skin, her clothes need cleaning desperately, and I'm sure there's a ton of stuff she's not telling me..."

When Roll woke back up, her battery meter was missing, and the holes and damage in her synth-skin, especially the gaping hole where her power supply was, had been repaired. Her clothes had even been washed and patched up.

"You got a full maintenance check-up courtesy of Cobra Robotics..." Bass offered.

"Cobra Robotics?" Roll asked, confused, for him to tap his helmet.

"Been studying the plans for what both our parents created, X and Zero… Briefly contemplated good robot names beginning with Y to troll them..." Bass stated, Roll chuckling as moved over, sliding into the same spot as she'd taken when she'd been sleeping. Over the following weeks, and several long-delayed upgrades, her hooded dress turning into a hooded jacket paired with some leggings, she continued to do so, as they planned something other than a way to troll their respective parents.

The final product of months of brainstorming, flirting, more brainstorming, relationship upgrades, even more brainstorming and a whirlwind romance, now stood before Bass. The robots in front of him was far in advance of what X and Zero had been designed to be, and made the Reploid program look like a flawed prototype. Treble, upgraded in similar ways, was stored in a different part of the facility, along with one of Roll's pet projects. He looked at the blinking light of his battery meter, smirking, all the Bassinium now in the robots in front of him.

He had a few last things to do, then his mind would leave this creaky old relic, the fabrication systems dismantling and recycling it like they had Roll's old body a few days ago.

"Cobra Robotics… If the good… and bad… doctors had known it was specifically set up for me and Roll's retirement, they'd have a fit..." He sighed, wanting to run his hands through Roll's hair one more time. As her emotional processes came on, she became so much more real for him, and much more the girl he loved, as she grew up to a young woman of 19. When X or Zero was activated, a program would cycle them up. Until then, automated systems would clean up the rough edges of their programming, similarly to why X and Zero themselves were offline still.

When they woke up, only a few things would give away that they weren't completely human. They wouldn't wear armour, they wouldn't carry highly visible and obvious weapons, and he knew for a fact X and Zero didn't use culture-grown skin, the process so expensive it was only done four times before now.

"It's only forever… Not long at all… Lost and Lonely… ...Not any more..." Bass sang, terribly off-key, before he went into his last sleep cycle. A short time later, the room was effectively empty, except the sleeping forms of the future of Cobra Robotics… and the last survivors of the Wily Wars. The only thing in the room other than them was a single plate.

Here lies Bass And Roll Wily nee Light, SWN-001 and DRN-002, who ended the last actions of the Wily Wars with a union of the Wily and Light families, ending decades of hostilities…

"Old Man, I bet you the remaining finances for Wily Robotics that, when Zero's turned on, he turns to the side of good. Yes, If your last robot turns good, Me and Roll get a lovely nest egg..."