Prologue

ASIMOV'S FIRST LAW: A robot must not harm, or through inaction cause harm to come, to a human being.

ASIMOV'S SECOND LAW: A robot must obey a human being, unless doing so conflicts with the first law.

ASIMOV'S THIRD LAW: A robot must act to preserve its own existence, unless doing so conflicts with the first and/or second law.

WILY'S FIRST LAW: A robot must not harm, or through inaction cause harm to come, to its master, Dr. Albert Wily.
WILY'S SECOND LAW: A robot must obey its master, Dr. Albert Wily.

Hello, everybody. My name is Rock Light, although I'm probably more commonly known as Mega Man. If you don't recognize that name either, then I envy you; it means you know nothing of the Robot Rebellions, and in that matter, ignorance is indeed bliss. But it's also too high a price to pay a lot of the time. Which is why I'm here to provide a brief rundown of recent history prior to this chapter of our story. I'd rather not, but my siblings Blues and Roll have both taken their turns, as has my friend Dr. Cossack. Auto's still too young, so that leaves me and dad. So I'm up. I'll try to make this as concise and clear as possible.

I suppose it all really started in 2040. The end of the world as humanity knew it, and close to being absolutely literal. War is stupid enough in any way, shape or form, but when the world's superpowers all start throwing nuclear weapons at each other like upset toddlers with their toys, it transcends that. And, in true human fashion, even when they realized what they were doing and pulled back at the last second, they still needed somebody else to save their asses. That's where the Second Rainbow was created. I understand that it was named for something biblical, but I don't really know of such things. Regardless, its purpose was clear-to save the world. Putting aside all cultural and racial adversaries, it was simple in concept; geniuses from all over the world, pooling their gifts in a desperate attempt to heal the planet before it died. And it worked. The world lived on, and humans as well. Of course, all things come to an end, and after safety was accomplished the group dissolved. And this is where our story begins, with the two men who changed the concept of "intelligent life" forever. Dr. Thomas Light, and Dr. Albert Wily. The fathers of the Robot Masters.

Their personal histories aren't really important, and more importantly, they're private. What does need to be said is that they were both good men, the best of humanity, and it's quite possible that without them even the Second Rainbow may have failed; they were the whizkids of the whizkids, the shining stars of hope. Though vastly different in personality, they were united by their love of robotics, and their desire to help the world that their species had wronged so much. When you put those two together with their talent, it's understandable that they managed to do what nobody else had dreamed of before. A Robot Master, as they named their creation, was a robot that could walk, talk, and act like a human being. For business purposes, it could command other robots and organize them efficiently. For a more artistic standpoint, it could add to its behavior protocols at a rate more advanced than any robot beforehand; it could almost think for itself. And they did it. Dr. Light and Dr. Wily built a Robot Master. His name was Blues.

Paranoiacs, bigots and religious zealots would believe that the building of a Robot Master cursed the world from the start, but it was in actuality two years after that. Light, Wily and Blues were working on another nearly miraculous invention; a matter teleporter. And in the tradition of science fiction stories everywhere, things went horribly wrong. Light was lucky enough to be clear of the device when it went haywire, but Blues was caught up in it and lost, vanished from their sight and all human contact; we would later find out that he had been dropped in the middle of the African Congo with his navigational systems haywire. But far worse than that, both on a personal and a global level, was Dr. Wily's fate. Though he was not teleported, the beam nevertheless affected him; it scrambled his brains, to put it loosely, since I'm not a student of psychology either. At first, he appeared to still be sane, but on that day, the hero of the world he had been died, replaced by a horror beyond any humankind had seen for centuries.

Distraught by Blues' loss, the doctors nevertheless went on to create more Robot Masters. Eight of them. Of those eight, six were meant for the global market, mass-produced by the hundred. Industrial robots, meant for work, their bodies stronger than their minds. The other two, like Blues, were individual, unique models. Twins. Roll Light, whose appearance was female and who developed a personality to match; the only Robot Master to date to do so. And Rock Light. Myself. For the first months of our lives, we were happy and peaceful with Dr. Light, who we regarded as a father, and Dr. Wily, who was more reserved but nevertheless fond to us as "Uncle Al." Until he revealed what he had become, and was lost to us forever.

The world had thought itself safe, now that global peace had been declared, and the United Nations kept things calm. The world was wrong. Armies of robots, cold and merciless, descended upon six valuable resources for the still-crippled planet and killed every human they saw, conquering them entirely. They were led by the six mass-produced Robot Masters, corrupted and reprogrammed to serve their new master. From a seventh location, his "Skull Fortress", with his own unique Robot Master at his side, Dr. Wily demanded that the world submit to his rule. He claimed that his control was necessary in order to safeguard humans from the dangers of robotics at the same time that he used said robots to commit atrocity after atrocity. And the world couldn't fight back. Against the robot armies, humans simply could not fight back. Only another robot could. And so I made the decision that would change my life almost as much as the accident had changed Wily's. I told dad to upgrade me, to make me a fighter. Blue armor covering my body, a plasma buster on my arm, I became Mega Man. And I stopped the Rebellion. I defeated the six armies, and the Robot Masters commanding them. I infiltrated the Skull Fortress, defeated Wily's hologram-using assistant, Doc Man. And I stopped Wily. With him in jail, his armies dismantled, the world was safe again.

It would be nice if things ended there, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, that curse I mentioned had a lot more in it than that. This was proven adequately when Wily escaped, a year later. This time, he created eight Robot Masters of his own design, and stole enough lesser robots to make eight more armies. He even built another Skull Fortress. And all of it was for naught, as I came back too, and put him right back in the slammer. But me and him weren't the only ones who could affect the world. Doc Man, who I had defeated in the First Rebellion, had escaped alive after being disowned by his own "father" for his loss. Like me, Roll, and Blues, he was of a different level than other Robot Masters, his programming almost nearing human thought levels. But after that defeat, he couldn't stand to live with Wily's programming in his head. So, after repairing his body, he worked on his own mechanical mind. A self-lobotomy. His survival at all was a dark miracle, even if his mental state was reduced to a half-functional, whirling mania. But even like that, he could still act; with his holograms, he managed to fake his father's psychological recovery, and Wily ran with it when he got the chance. He even fooled us, so I can't blame the government for being taken in as well, much as I'd like to.

So Wily was back, and as far as we could tell sane. And unknown to us all, Doc Man was out there. What did he want? Revenge, pure and simple. On me and on Wily. And I came first. By that point of time, other companies had begin mass-producing their own Robot Master models. Echoing in his creator's footsteps, Doc Man reprogrammed eight of them, and launched a bloodbath of his own; a Third Robot Rebellion, which Wily had no connection to. He was occupied on something else; collaborating with dad to build a gigantic machine that would keep the world safe from any future threat, so that I wouldn't have to keep playing the hero. Nice thought, but foolish in retrospect. They named it Gamma, and built it while I went out again to track down who was responsible for the madness. And to complicate things further, this was when I ran into a fourth party by the name of Break Man, who seemed bent on stopping the Rebellion for his own purposes-nice, except he also wanted to bust me up. But he was rational, and I met him over and over again through the course of the Rebellion, gradually becoming friends with him. By the time I found and finished Doc Man, he was firmly on my side. And with Doc Man dead at last, I thought my personal hell was over.

Think again, past Rock. Doc Man faked Wily's recovery. And thus, when Gamma neared completion, Wily ran off with it, gloating that not even I could stop it. With Break Man's help, I got into the third Skull Fortress, and proved that wrong. The bad news? Wily was crushed in the fortress' collapse. Dead. Gone. But at least the world was safe. And as for Break Man? Turned out he was my older brother Blues, who had finally found his way back only to be tricked by Wily into messing with me. With that all gone, the three of us and dad were a family reunited, and finally at peace. At least for three years. That was a welcome reprieve, but not an end. When those three years had passed, a new threat arose; Dr. Sergei Cossack, a robotocist from Russia who claimed hatred for dad due to being constantly outperformed in the robotics field. Like Wily in the Second, he used his own eight Robot Master designs to launch a Rebellion. There was one silver lining; despite his anger, he was totally sane, and thus used hostages instead of deaths to force my hand. But I had to stop it all the same. And I did.

Does this seem fishy to you? It did to Blues, too. So while I took the spotlight, he investigated, and he pulled in a whopper. Wily had faked his death, and from his fourth Skull Fortress, was forcing Cossack to take the fall for the Rebellion with his own hostage. Cossack's daughter, Kalinka. Blues then did the most gutsy thing I've ever seen in anybody, human or robot; he put his own ass into an ordeal more punishing than any even I've ever done, busting Kalinka out and then keeping her alive through a two-week hike through Russia in the winter. Somehow, Proto Man (as he now called himself when a Rebellion was on) managed to keep them both alive, and arrived back at Cossack's just in time to break up my fight with the puppet doctor. Needless to say, I descended upon Skull Fortress IV with enough wrath to split it in half. But this time, Wily escaped. He was back, and I couldn't catch him. I could only watch, and wait.

More years passed. The Cossacks became friends of ours; in particular, the Doctor became our dad's new partner, and Kalinka had developed quite an attachment to Blues that me and Roll loved to tease him about. Speaking of Blues, he was back to wandering, this time of his own volition; he'd check in with our family and the Cossacks a couple times a year, but mostly he went where the wind took him. But what he seemed to take from that left us all reeling. At one point, he had the misfortune to undergo repeated instances of human-to-robot violence caused by bigotry in rapid succession, and vanished off the radar for a while to cope. Understandable. But starting a Fifth Rebellion, with eight hijacked commercial Robot Masters and a mysterious sidekick, in order to raise robots over humans? Not even close. And kidnapping my dad and Wily? Even worse. But it was good this time; again, even my family was buying into it by the end. It came right down to the wire, with me fighting Proto Man, before the truth came out. He had me on the ropes when a second Proto Man appeared. From there, it was easy; that "mystery sidekick", a stooge named Dark Man, was the real driving force. He had faked his "Proto Man" all along with holograms until the real deal revealed the truth to me. And guess who built Dark Man? You got it, Wily.

Hold on a second. Holograms? Yeah, holograms. And a Robot Master who commanded other Robot Masters. Maybe a coincidence. But it wasn't. For this Rebellion, Wily had repaired the creation that had come closest to beating me before, and reactivated him with memory blockers to stop that troublesome hatred. But I destroyed those memory blockers. And with his memory and sanity both present, Doc Man managed to pull the biggest surprise of all, and called off his revenge against me. The details of that last conversation with him will stay with me forever, but before he committed suicide to absolutely destroy himself with no hope of ever being reactivated again, he said one thing in particular. He said that to stop the Rebellions, I would have to kill Dr. Wily. Or he would never stop. And true to that, Wily escaped again.

With all that having happened, I think the circumstances leading up to the Sixth are understandable. You remember Gamma? Well, to be honest, dad and Wily weren't alone in building him. Five other human males, one of which was Doc Man in disguise, also contributed from various fields. Dr. Trent Corbun, a robotocist whose company was the one targeted by Doc Man for his armies. Darwin Vinkus and Donald Richolds, a pair of politicians; Vinkus was actually ex-Second Rainbow, and Japan's representative on the United Nations. The psychologist who had "cured" Wily, Cedric Froid. And the billionaire Olivier Xanthos, who preferred to by known as Mr. X. Richolds and Froid were both dead by the end of the Third, but the other three remained close friends with dad-and by extension, us-for years to come. It was Mr. X who had the idea of laying a trap for Wily. A Robot Master fighting tournament. The eight finalists would be too tempting for Wily to resist, or so Mr. X claimed. And he was right. But not in the way we hoped. Wily killed X, assumed his identity, and launched the Sixth under that falsehood. And even when I found out, this time it was too late to save his scapegoat. But at least I got him. At long last, Wily was returned to jail. The Rebellions were finally over. And with dad building a fourth "child" Robot Master to add to our family, it looked like bright times were ahead.

But sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel goes out.