The Light Legacy
Partially inspired by the Act II of the Protomen series, but also from a intimate knowledge of the series as far as we see in the games, from repetitive gameplay. I stopped when I reached Megaman 7 though. I felt the story had gotten far enough. [I've played for a few minuites on X though… Was pretty awesome. Also, .exe wasn't too bad, if a bit bizarre if you weren't expecting it to be set in an alternate universe.].
Now, most of this story is from the perspective of David Light, Thomas Light's son.
Technically, Rock is the closest thing to Thomas's son, but… I felt that our favourite Santa clone needed a REAL boy to call his own. How this interplays with the Megaman mythos we'll explore later… Especially since this is the first fiction where I know where I'm going with it. Also, writing from David's perspective effectively means I'm writing from my own perspective… Something you'll notice in my fics is that I prefer the first person… Sure, it sucks if you want to hint at something in someone else's thoughts, but it's good for getting a feel of the character… It is highly possible this is since I play too many games, and hence, the first person perspective of thinking is pretty much how you behave. Think about it… You rarely get to control other characters or see their thoughts, and when you do, it seems a little artificial. Sticking to just one character and interacting with others is the natural way… After all, how many times have you swapped bodies with someone? [note: David Light is my possession, at least his first name is, although, I guess I've named him after my uncle, who died of cancer when I was really little, young enough to just remember him being bald and looking really worried about something the doctor said... Pretty much everything else is either the possession of the Protomen and Capcom. … Oh, and Emily Light IS David's mother, just in case you thought Thomas went around sleeping with other women after she died…]
It is difficult to explain the rise of Wily to those that weren't there within living memory of when it happened.
That's because his war on everyone was unlike any other.
One man, and his army that was capable of reproducing itself in mere days, rather than the human biological months, against the entire planet.
Of course, he didn't have an army so big, to start with.
He had one robot, to start with.
But, hey, we're getting ahead of ourselves here…
…
Hmm. Where to begin. I suppose I had better put in my Father's story here. The one he told me, the one that he said each night before I went to sleep, just so I didn't forget about the ones that fell as Lord Wily rose… And as the world everyone knew crumbled.
I was not there in the days before… But my father, Dr Thomas Light, was.
Our tale begins before the utility robot known as Rock Light became the amazing Mega Man.
Our tale is before the doomed fight of Protoman against Wily.
Our tale begins a longer time ago, before my father's hairs were grayed, before his face had hardened with the constant losses he endured.
And it all begins… When his own father, my grandfather, died, due to an accident in the mines.
Tom, as he thought of himself back then… He felt rage at the world that had done this to him.
Why did he have to die? Was that his purpose in life? To live, work his fingers to the bone, and then… Just die, not even getting to see his own offspring grow up? Where is the justice in that? Tom thought, feeling his hatred grow at everything.
However, despite his rage at his father's death, Tom quickly found himself an orphan.
His mother died of natural causes a few years after her husband's death.
Tom's sister died not too much of a period away from that, and the records show that she was trampled by a horse. Father never did elaborate on how she died, and it was very mysterious how she had no gravestone, like the other members of the family.
However, it is said that in one of their confrontations, Wily did mention Tom's sister's name to him, which led to tears, but we're getting ahead of ourselves again.
Tom quickly found that he needed to survive, and get out of the orphanage that he had been placed in by the State.
And then… He read a comic book.
A comic book about Iron Man, a man with a suit of armour made of metal and circuitry, used to fight crime.
Tom linked the idea of Iron Men in his mind with his father's death, and a spark grew in his mind.
A spark, which grew into a flame, which grew into an inferno of burning determination.
He trained, physically and mentally. Tom began to start collecting certificate after certificate of grades, most of which being close to, if not at 100%.
He was quickly recognised as a genius, however, despite how hard the media tried to find out more about him, they could never find out much about his past, the reasons why he was an orphan.
Tom refused to let them see his permanent files, and quoted legal mumbo-jumbo after mumbo-jumbo to persuade them that he knew his rights, and knew that they could not legally snoop around in his background without permission from the State.
In fact, there is a small article on the internet somewhere, that's still accessible today, which shows a former lawyer's analysis of my Father's words, and it shows that every case study he mentioned, every law and policy… They were all correct and legal.
Tom quickly found himself engrossed in the realms of electronics, and engineering.
Computer technology, in particular, fascinated him.
He was quickly criticised though…. Even then, the programming languages he was using to create his primitive version of what we know call Metools had an almost human quality to them.
He soon found himself at university, studying for a PhD in Robotics.
Little is known about Father's time at university, but it is said that it was there that he met both my mother and Wily.
It is said by those who have been close to Wily for any amount of time during the war that he kept a small picture of her from that period.
Many have deduced that he and she were indeed an item back then, and some of Wily's hate for my family started when Emily Hooper realised that she was no longer attracted to him, and was deeply infatuated with Thomas Light.
However, bizarrely, the two men did work together.
They created the first functioning artificial intelligence, due to Father's skill with software, and Wily encased it in a practically indestructible shell, a more advanced version of the designs that Father made when he was younger.
This robot was the first to join Wily's troops, although father did not know it.
Eventually, they both gained their doctorates, and decided to form a business, creating robots that would prevent the death of highly dangerous and high labour jobs.
And so, the world quickly found itself changing.
The Doctors moved to an area in the country, and bought a large amount of land, using their money from all the mining and bomb disposal robots they had created. They created Monsteropolis [the name came from the huge amount of semi-monstrous robots they made, when the few people that went there went there. The Doctors hated the name… Well… Dad did… Apparently, Wily used to giggle when he heard it…. He sounds crazier with every story you hear, doesn't he?].
It was at this point that the two Doctors began to split.
Now, many disagree about what happened next.
Those in the Resistance believed that it was Wily who invented the Buster Blaster outside of my Father's attention, a device which can channel in energy from the surrounding area, and releasing it in a single burst.
He attatched it onto one of his Metools, and soon saw the military potential of the robots.
My father told me the same story, except that he knew about the Buster all along, and was naive enough to believe it could be used for non-military purposes.
He was already on the phone when my Father told him that there was no way in hell that he was going to be the father of the death these weapons would cause.
Wily promptly knocked out Father with a sucker punch to the face [some say he had knuckle dusters, I say who cares, the story's still the same…], and finished his call.
Soon enough, Father was imprisoned at home, surrounded by a horde of his own robots, programmed to destroy him if he left his house.
Meanwhile, Wily had plans.
He went to the Research and Development Wing of the Monsteropolis Capital building.
There, my mother, Emily, was working on some designs…
In fact, you know what, I have a machine here, and I have the security tape here, I'll let you hear the story as it happened… If I told you it, I'd be swearing.
[footsteps on carpet]
"What are you doing here, Albert? It better not be to badger me about Tom. What you did was WRONG! I'm only here because I know you won't let me leave here… I'm not such a fool that I don't know when I'm beaten… for now."
"Oh, Emily… Foolish, naïve Emily. Light will be NOTHING when I'm done with this company. The world will be our oyster. I will be the Lord and Ruler of this new world that I create. And you… You could easily be my Queen… All you have to do is forget about your fiancé. Forget about Thomas Light. And take your rightful self by my side."
"You know I will never join you. And you know why? Because you may have locked Tom up in a cage, you may be polluting the air, casting an eternal darkness on the world with your factories and your machines… But there always will be those that oppose you. ALWAYS. So if you want me to be with you… You can forget it. My place is with Tom. You know I love him."
"You are a fool, Em-Em."
"Don't you DARE CALL ME THAT! You haven't let it go, have you? I fell in love with Tom, you fell in love with Claire, she dumped you after one week, and then you felt jealous…"
"JEALOUS? I AM BEYOND THAT! I WILL BE THE GOD OF THE NEW WORLD!"
"… Wily… You're nothing. The darkness inside you is just that, nothing. Whereas Tom… Well… The clue's in his name. Light."
"If I am the darkness, then his light will be extinguished… as you will be if you mouth off one more time."
"Wily… No matter what happens…. There will always be Light."
"No… He will fall… As all you weak humans will."
"Wily… Have you looked at yourself? Sure, you have a robotic eye-thing, which I KNOW has a semi X-ray vision which you're using right now, it glows slightly blue when it does that! … But you're still human."
"He will be nothing!!!!"
"He will be everything!"
[various machines in the room start, denoted by the sound of their motors whirring. It is presumed that Emily Light pressed a button, or somehow else activated them all. The next line is coming from her, then repeated by all the robot vocaliser speakers.]
"THERE WILL BE LIGHT"
"THERE WILL BE LIGHT!"
"THERE WLL BE LIGHT!"
"THERE WILL BE LIGHT!"
"THERE WILL BE- oof!"
[sound of something cracking]
"Bass, finish her off… Oh, and make it so it looks like Light did it."
"Bass… Remember… To… Tell… T-"
[sound of a energy weapon being charged and disfired]
"Urgh, BASS! Did you have to splatter me with blood too? Ah well. Now, I want you to erase all memory of me before today. You had a logical reason to destroy Emily, which you will now create a false memory of to replace the removed one, okay? I don't want any cops that understand how to check your memory, as few as they are, to see this. Oh, and run. I want them to have to try to hunt you down."
[sound of a robot breaking down a wall]
"STUPID MACHINE! You should've taken the FREAKING DOOR!"
[a small pause was here… But it has been removed so that some of this tape can be used for the Resistance to store data during the War… Any long gap in old tapes like this was utilised.]
"Hmm… Robot Masters, eh? Sounds nifty. I'll take that… and that… and… ooh, a music box with a biometric lock… I wonder if… Nah, there's no way she could have known her death was coming…. Ah well."
[sound of rustling of paper, then the tape ends.]
Yeah. So he killed my mother, and took the plans for the Robot Masters.
…
Hmm. I didn't mention my being born, did I?
I'm so used to hearing this story from my Dad, and since he didn't really mention my birth much… Well… I was delivered by Wily.
Dad was off on a business trip, not really knowing how far gone my mother was, so it just left Wily and her behind, so she gave birth with Wily doing his best to help. There was a prototype medical robot, but it was still experimental, and my father said that there was "no way in hell your mother was going to let a robot near her feminine bits!".
Unfortunately, some of the Resistance originally thought I was Wily's child, but I look too much like Father did when he was in university for anyone to question it.
Wily…. Took me in.
It was weird, looking back on it…
One moment, my mother suddenly disappeared from existence, but I was so young I was just confused by it. I think I wasn't even able to talk yet.
Wily… Tried to raise me to become his successor. That much I know.
Soon I found that my Uncle Wily had sentenced my Daddy to death.
However, the early form of the Resistance saved him, and tried to help him prepare a counter-attack.
Remember that I was still young, and was still under the belief that adults could do no wrong.
My mother was killed by Wily. My father was exiled, and was said to be a hermit, killing those he met on the outside of Monsteropolis, a city which gradually grew, and took over a lot of the continent.
New York was allegedly one of the quickest places to fall, but, to be fair, Wily did create air-platforms all the way to Britain, where he obliterated the Light ancestral homeland, in Wales.
Bangor… Was razed to the ground.
I stood by Wily's side, and didn't question him.
He trained me to be a lot like him… But I think that was because he saw my mother in me. Everyone does say I have similar hair to her.
Eventually, I started to look like my Father more and more. Wily started to beat me then, starting with just his hand across my head, for no apparent reason other than residue fury from my father, and then he moved on to tools, like the belt.
He even sliced very thinly on my arm, enough to make me bleed, but not enough to remove anything.
He kept me away from the public view then, keeping me in the robot storage area.
Amusingly, it was there I started to resist him.
The robots in that particular storage area were designated as the Masters.
They had been designed by Father originally, as I could tell from their code when I connected them to my watch, a gift from someone given to me secretly at the time [I know who it was now, but more on that later].
He left a message in their blue prints, which I was given a clue for.
If Wily=Evil,
Then Davidthedarkness
Thus, if
And there was more to be gained from each machine. Wily didn't noticed it, since by the time he 'built' the Masters, he was just letting his robots do all the work, with him occasionally creating new shells and techniques for their identical minds to use.
The most original thing Wily made was Puff the Dragon, who actually was one of the most gentle robots I have ever met. In the future, when Rock killed Puff, I cried for a long time. That's because Puff was one of the few robots that Wily designed purely on his own steam, and despite what everyone says about the old dictator, he was a really nice guy when it came to his robots. Sure, with humans, like myself, he was capable of mutilation and murder, but with robots… He was very kind and gentle, even if he had transferred the creation process to his Metool army.
Most of the robots were rather unlike their master. Most were kind and gentle to me, and Bass, the robot I one day found out was the one that killed my mother, washed and healed my wounds whenever I was wounded badly by Wily, who was increasingly less human each year.
I think I was 17 when it happened. The explosion in the control tower in the tallest part of the city. I heard it over the secret radio bands I was not meant to be able to access, but I knew all the passcodes by this point.
I remember my first thought, even now, years after the war.
Father!
I knew it was him, since Wily himself did say that only he knew how all the robots were controlled.
The man who had entered the building was a man who, according to his file on Uncle Wily's computer, was a man scheduled for termination. A man named Joe.
I watched his face on the video feed as he died, and I saw something that I had never seen before in this cold, dark, desolate, lifeless place.
Hope.
Hope that Wily would crumble and die.
Hope that the Light can be brought back.