Author's Note: :watches as Sonic fans scream and run for their lives: Ehe... Yes, NT Warrior story thingy. Sorry to those of you who don't like the dub. I honestly don't mind dubs, so I like watching it. Thus, all the names are their dub names. Anyhoo, This sort of starts from what seems like the middle. It was kind of a random hit of inspiration, I guess. You can sort of... make up the beginning based on stuff that's mentioned about it a little further in, maybe. It does get better if you keep reading. I like corny friendship stuff, also! There aren't really chapters to this, soI'm gonna split it into chunks, sorta. So this is chunk one :D
Please be kind with reviews. They are very muchly appreciated. Take care :)
PART 1
The net warrior kept a sturdy arm around him to keep him from toppling over. "Don't get too angry, Lan. I don't want you to unintentionally dilute your thinking." He smiled lightly. "Sometimes panic and anger can be the biggest downfall in battle."
The boy felt a rush of a different kind of anger flood through him. Pulling his weight back to his own two feet, he gave MegaMan something of a solid shove. MegaMan lost his balance slightly out of surprise.
"A... are you okay?"
"You don't get it, do you?" Lan clenched a shaking fist and felt the vibration work up his whole body. The rest of him shook as heavily as his hand. "You don't understand why I'm upset! I don't think you can!"
MegaMan blinked in surprise. "Of couse I understand why! After something like that, you've got a right to be. I wouldn't doubt that I'd feel the same way."
"How much could you understand about it?" the brown-haired boy shot. "You're... you're a computer program! You can't understand the way I think!"
Something about the expression MegaMan gave him looked wounded. "I... Lan..." He looked somewhat lost for words. He shrugged helplessly, his green eyes still struck with hurt. He nodded weakly. There was no use arguing and angering Lan even more. He was already upset as it was, and he worried it would impair Lan's judgement in battle or thwart what remained of his patience. "Fine." Tilting his head downward a little, the peak of his helmet hid his eyes from his net-op's view. "I guess I can't understand, then. I'm sorry."
"Exactly! If you've got a brighter plan, you can go do it without me!" Lan shouted.
MegaMan too clenched a fist, but not in the same manner. He turned in the opposite direction. "If that's what you want. Raika said a netnavi is never supposed to disobey his net-op. You can fill in the plans. I'll just follow them like you say." He started walking back in the direction of the Meeting Room.
"Yeah, you do that!"
There wasn't a response. There was no more sound, except for that of MegaMan's boots against the floor. He was really going? He really didn't intend to give Lan ideas? He was just going to follow Lan's plan, he said. What..? Lan felt his shoulders relax. W- why did he just yell at his best friend? MegaMan understood him better than anyone, and yet he'd said that he couldn't understand him at all? His heart sunk. Fatigue and frustration truly were getting the better of him. He just wanted to go home; go back to his room, and sleep. All night... all day, if he had to, just so he wouldn't feel this irritable. Now he could only imagine what MegaMan was feeling.
Even if he was a program, he had a personality file intergrated into himself. He was special. He could think independantly. He could feel anger, or fear, or happiness. ...He could feel fatigue, and frustration and pain... And he was probably just as tired. Despite all that, he never yelled at Lan, or told him his ideas were stupid, even when some of them really were. Despite everything that MegaMan dealt with and everything he tried to do, Lan had just blown up at him?
"MegaMan, wait..!"
Lan threw himself unto a run and chased after his friend, stopping in front of him to bar the way. "Don't go, okay? I know you can feel. You can just as much as I can. I... I shouldn't have said that to you."
The figure said nothing.
"Oh... MegaMan, I'm sorry!" Lan hit his fist lightly on the navi's chest, trying to fight himself from crying in frustration. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" He lowered his head, trembling slightly. He felt like screaming, getting mad, anything but this. Anything but making himself look small and frustrated, which was really how he felt. Tears welled up in his eyes, stinging as he fought fruitlessly to hold them back any longer. "...I'm sorry..!" he choked, falling into the blue-clad net warrior's arms, shaking.
It felt strange to be against him like this. He truly was by no means like any living being. The closest thing to a heartbeat that could be felt beneath Lan's cheek was the pulse of data moving through the digital figure. He felt MegaMan's arm press around his shoulders.
"It's alright, Lan."
There it was again. His completely undying patience. He didn't sound angry, or shaken, or flustered. He felt none of the uselessly negative things Lan felt right now, and if he did, he was famously good at hiding it. Lan was unsure if it made him feel more solid and comforting, or much less easy to relate to all of a sudden. It didn't matter. They were both tired, and they were both unsure of where they had to end up in the long run. How much longer could Lan go on without sleep before collapsing? How much more time was there before MegaMan had a prgram overload and had to shut down to repair? How much time did they have before they both gave out altogether?
However long it was, they'd indefinately last longer if they stuck together. They were a team.
Lan squeezed his eyes closed, and a tear gushed down his face. With his arm still around his net-op's shoulders, MegaMan smiled very softly. "Everything is going to be okay, Lan. We can do this, right?"
Trying to quell the negative emotion that was being charged off of his fatigue, Lan nodded. "We can do this." He took a step back from MegaMan and placed a hand on his shoulder. "..Because we are a team!" He rubbed gingerly at his eyes and managed a smile. "No more fighting, alright?"
"Alright." MegaMan smiled in return. "Although, I think we can keep the corny friendship talks in this time. They do seem to help."
"Yeah, I agree." Lan paused, and his cheeks reddened slightly. "Just please don't tell anybody about the way I cried on you, okay?"
The netnavi laughed. "You got a deal."
It was alot of wandering. It seemed like hours worth of it; just aimlessly wandering up and down the halls of the building, listening to the silence that pressed in all around them like a thick smog. Up the stairways, down the halls, through the rooms... then they'd simply loop around until they were back where they'd began and they'd find a new course to wander along. Lan's feet started to hurt from all the walking. He wondered several times if MegaMan experienced the same thing, but it seemed silly to ask, so he didn't.
The lack of viruses was probably what seemed the most peculiar. The walls and floor were funny looking in the dimensional area, almost rainbow-hued in appearance. Lan sighed in a both bored and tired manner. How long would it be before he could get out of here and sleep again? His eyes had begun to blur his vision and now he was starting to feel groggy. MegaMan yawned too, covering his mouth with the back of his blue gloved hand. "Sorry," he apologized meekly, as though he'd just done something wrong.
"How long has it been?" Lan asked somewhat impatiently.
MegaMan pulled up a translucent green pixel screen in front of himself in under a second and tapped on it once. "4:37:52am," he responded. "Why?"
His net-op groaned. "It's only been like... ten minutes since I last asked you. I coulda sworn we've been walking longer than that..!"
Clunk.
Lan lifted his head. "What was that?" He and his friend both froze, although the sound of breathing might stop them from hearing anything else. It was a distinctive noise; like someone chipping away at something, then managing to tear off a sizable portion before letting it drop to the floor. It didn't sound like something heavy, though; almost like plastic. Plastic? There was alot of plastic in this building..! There were computers, firstly, and other machines that had plastic shells or outer coverings. "Which way is it coming from?" Lan asked, his voice so quiet it nearly suprised him. MegaMan pointed forward down the hall. "Somewhere down there," he calculated. "I think we should try going down the left corridor first."
"You got it!"
The two rushed down the hallway and took the left route. An empty hallway greeted them. Not even the sound was there anymore. Where had it gone? In under a minute, it started again. The sound reminded Lan of mining, and mining reminded him of picks, which in turn, reminded him of mett viruses. "Maybe there are some metts around here somewhere," he guessed. "They might make a sound kinda like that."
"Yeah, but Lan, mett viruses don't actually ever manage to break things off. They just sort of stab at it. It seems to do its job, anyway." The blue figure walked ahead of Lan, scouting out the hallway. "Come on! Down here!"
Lan raced after him, his footsteps pounding down on the empty hallway. "I think the control room is down here. They store the main computer database in there. But who else would have access to something like that? Can we even get in?"
MegaMan looked over his shoulder at him as they ran. "I think we can. All the systems are running a glitch. I can probably input some kind of fake code. It might even take that. It's sure worth a try." He stopped in front of the door. It was heavy and laden with electronic locks. There had likely been a recent and severe security upgrade since the last time the darkloids had attemped to gain access to the data stored in the database. It seemed like kind of a waste now; the dimensional area, among other things, had made it run amok, and MegaMan had extreme ease of effort in getting it open.
AGH0264781020410000176937
110732659713294790068MRA1
The navi's gloved hands flew over the keys, pressing them so fast that Lan probably never would have guessed which ones he was pressing, if not for the way they were being displayed on a little LCD screen after he chose them. Lan frowned, trying to see some sort of a pattern. He couldn't see anything, though. Just a jumble of numbers with afew letters thrown in. "I don't get it."
MegaMan frowned and retried. "There isn't any logic to what I'm pressing, to be honest. I'm just choosing 25 characters-- 22 digits and 3 randomly generated letters. The verification is so bad on this thing that as long as I keep trying, we'll eventually get in. The system is too easy to hack when it's weak." He tried three more codes, and a beep sounded.
"VERIFIED. WELCOME, DR. SANRIO."
Lan quirked an eyebrow. "Huh. That was weird. At least it worked, though."
His best friend stared in disbelief at the opening doors. "It looks like there's a seperate code for each of the scientists, or something like that. They should change that! The more access codes there are, the easier it is to hack into it. I can't believe they would think of something like that."
"If dad were here, I'm sure he'd have done something about it."
"Heh, I'm sure he would, Lan. But we need to get moving. C'mon!" Without further hesitation, MeganMan ran into the room. The central system stood in the center of it. Colored lights blinked from various places on it, and it hummed quietly in the silence. Apparently, it was on. The net navi paused, glancing around the room with just his eyes. His body remained stiff as a board. "I could have sworn it was---"
"Ah, MegaMan. Good of you to join me. I see you brought your 'better half', too."
MegaMan looked frantically around the room, confused at his inability to see who was speaking to him. "Who are you? Better yet, where are you?"
The voice laughed. It was a strange soft laugh, though, like the way an adult would laugh at the naive and silly mistake of a young child. "Is that really what's important right now? Or wouldn't you rather get out of here first?"
"I... T- that's besides the point! Are you the one leading this operation?"
"Do you really want to know?"
"Well, yeah..!"
The voice purred almost intellectually, if that were possible. "MegaMan... All you want is to get out of here! You want to get to the bottom of all this so that you can go home. You're worried about your net-op, and you think that his parents are probably concerned by now. Isn't that right?"
"Stop stalling, you creepy guy who's probably lodged in the ceiling!" Lan's unintelligent rebuttal resulted in MegaMan giving him something of a flat stare. Ignoring that, Lan clentched a fist, and looked viciously around the room. "You're not going to scare us, okay?"
"Lan Hikari... I intended to do nothing of the sort! I just wanted to warn you to stay out of the way of the darkloids. We've taken what we needed, and so we shall be going now. Stay out of our way, and we won't have to eliminate you or MegaMan. It sounds like a fair bargain to me."
"But if you'retaking data that could threaten the whole city, it's not much of a fair deal at all!" Lan cried. "We don't want the darkloids to take over the net!"
A sigh. "I haven't time to argue with you, I'm afraid. I must be going. For your own sakes, however, please stay out of my affairs in the future. You'd be most appreciative of the warning if you knew just what is at stake if you do not heed it."
"Hey! What do you mean by that?"
No response.
"Hello?" He stopped. "What..?" Lan looked confused. He shot MegaMan a questioning glance, and the navi responded by shaking his head. His body visably relaxed.
"He's gone, Lan," he said simply.
Outside, the dimensional area was fading away. The translucent dome covering the perimeter of SciLab quickly fell away, and whatever traces of the net had been brought into the real world via it began to dissapear, too. Much like when jacking out of the network, MegaMan was extracted back into the PET, and the blue machine let out a small sound to indicate that the navi had returned. Lan blinked in surprise, not having expected his friend to dissapear from in front of him.
"MegaMan?"
"The dimensional area went away," MegaMan explained as his net-op pulled the PET from the pouch attached to his side. He gave Lan a puzzled expression through the screen. "I wonder who's behind all this?"
"Beats me..." Lan realised now that his eyelids felt heavy, as did most of his body. He hadn't noticed it as much before. Maybe the feeling that something interesting was about to happen had prevented him from feeling tired previously. His knees buckled, and he sunk onto them on the linoleum, letting his head fall to his chest.
"Lan? Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine, MegaMan. Don't worry. Just kinda tired, that's all." He slowly stood up, trudging back down the hallway. "I sure am glad for elevators," he said quietly as he headed for one. Without anything in the building to be on the look-out for, he wouldn't need to take the stairs. Hooray.
Taking the elevator down to the first floor, Lan groaned as a thought occured to him. "I gotta walk all the way home! Awww, man..!" He picked up his backpack from where he'd left it on the front desk and heaved it over his shoulder as though it weighed a thousand pounds before walking to the front door. He took the snap-on wheels for his sneakers from out of his backpack and attatched them to his shoes before gliding easily out the door, PET still in hand. The sun had thrown hazy warm colors into the sky by that point. The morning light was coming quickly.
"I'm not sure what we're supposed to do about a threat we couldn't even see," MegaMan admitted, silently considering the ways by which the villain could have been communicating without becoming visable. "He just shut everything down on us like we weren't even a threat."
"We'll think about it after I complete the human ritual called 'sleep'," Lan replied with a yawn. "I'll put the PET into sleep mode for the night, and you can run a bug check on yourself in the morning." The wheels of his inline skates rolled almost rythmically against the pavement. It wouldn't be long now...
Lan Hikari collapsed face first onto his bed without a second thought to it. He let his backpack slide off his shoulder and onto the floor next to him with a mighty thud. The PET landed on the bed next to him, but he didn't even have time to do anything with it. He was asleep the instant he hit his bed. MegaMan smiled vaguely. "Sleep well, Lan. You do deserve it." He, too, retired for the night, and the PET screen went dark.
It didn't feel like a very long time. In fact, it didn't even feel like an hour. Lan groggily lifted his head and rubbed at his eyes. Morning sunshine poured through the glass door near the head of his bed, but he hardly noticed it. He looked around very drowsily for his PET. "MegaMan..?" he half mumbled in query. From the floor, MegaMan's green eyes followed him through the screen of the handheld terminal. "Down here." He watched as Lan reached over the side of the bed and blindly fumbled until he managed to hook the peculiar handle on the side of the PET with his index finger. He pulled his arm back onto the bed, and brought the PET up in front of his face, rubbing at his eyes again.
"Glad to see you're awake," MegaMan said.
Lan yawned. "What time is it?"
"17:37:12PM," the navi answered. "You've been asleep all day."
The boy jolted with surprise. "Five thirty?" He sat up, only then realising that he had neglected to take the wheels off of his sneakers. He'd forgotten to take his sneakers off at all. He untied them and pulled them off. The house seemed quiet. Lan wandered out into the livingroom. He could see into the kitchen from where he stood. His mother was sitting at the table by herself, drinking a cup of what was probably coffee. The TV was on in the livingroom, so Lan suspected she was listening to the news from where she was. He wondered why he couldn't hear the TV through his bedroom door.
"Mom?"
Lan's mother glanced in his direction. "Lan! You're up! How are you feeling?"
"Feeling?" Lan repeated. "Fine..! I overslept, though. Spending all night in a dimensional area really wears you out."
"I can imagine..!" She took a sip of her drink before looking at the boy again. Her eyes fell upon the PET in his hand. "And good morning to you, too, MegaMan."
MegaMan smiled. "Good morning, Mom. Don't worry about Lan. I'll make sure he catches up on all of the homework he ends up missing because of NetSaver missions."
Lan groaned. "Not homework..! We just got stuck in a dimensional area for thirteen hours and you're talking about helping me catch up at school? C'mon, MegaMan. Cut me some slack!"
"I cut you enough slack already," MegaMan said a little too honestly."I'm not even supposed to be helping you with your math..!"
His net-op pouted, and Mrs. Hikari laughed. "Take it easy, you two. Are you hungry, Lan? I saved you some dinner just in case. It's in the oven so it wouldn't get cold, okay?"
"Sounds good!" Lan dropped his PET on the tabletop and immediatly rushed to seize his food. "Ooh! Fried chicken! Awesome!" He grabbed some cutlery and sat down at his respective place at the table. No sooner had he picked up his fork when he was interupted by a shrill ringing sound.
"Lan, it's your phone," said MegaMan.
"I know that!" Lan grumbled frustratedly, fumbling across the table for his PET. He held it up in front of his face. "Hello?"
Famous' face blinked onto the screen. "NetSaver Lan! Report to SciLab immediatly. The computer systems all shut down suddenly about ten minutes ago, and they can't get anything running. There are concerns that there will be a city-wide net loss if this keeps up, due to the same problem. If no-one can get online for a period of several days because of problems that need fixing, it will cause even bigger problems. Can you get over there?"
Lan looked as though he couldn't be any more discouraged. "Can I at least finish my dinner..?"
"Take it with you, perhaps. Anyhow, the point is, you need to get over there soon. Famous, over and out." The image of his face blinked out in the same manner it had appeared in.
"What's going on, Lan?" Mrs. Hikari queried.
"We've got another netsaver mission," MegaMan responded. "It looks like those darkloids are dead set on getting whatever it is that they're after. Come on, Lan!"
"Goodness... This is awfully sudden. Make sure you eat something before you go, alright?"
"That I can do, mom," Lan replied, swiftly trying to wolf down as much as he could, expecting that if he didn't hurry, Famous would call again, barking at him to get moving. In five minutes, he'd finished everything in front of him. Jamming the PET into the pouch at his side, he dashed into his room to retrieve his backpack and rushed out the front door. Mrs. Hikari sighed. No one home again...
The phone rang, and she went to answer it. "Hello?" A familiar face popped up. His hair was slightly untidy, but that seemed to be the standard for him when he was at work. "Oh! Yuuichiro! It's good to hear from you!"
Her husband smiled and pushed up his glasses. "Yes! It seems like there's an endless load of net problems over here. How are things over there?"
"Fine, dear. Lan just dashed out the door again though, I'm afraid."
"Ah, he's taking after me, I suppose." Mr. Hikari laughed. "Has he been doing what I instructed?"
"What was that, dear?"
"I told him that after every time he enters a dimensional area and allows MegaMan to materialize in it, he needs to go home and run a bug check. After every ten times or so, he has to go over to SciLab and upload the navi program onto my computer to do an analysis. I want to ensure there are no adverse or harmful effects on MegaMan from jacking into a half-net world."
"I'm sure he's been doing it. He always remembers to do his computer-related work. I wish I could say the same about his chores..."
"Haha! Boys will be boys, Haruka. He'll learn if we keep after him. I just wanted to tell you that I'll probably be home the day after tommorrow if nothing else goes wrong over here. Send Lan my love."
"I will. Take care of yourself, Yuuichiro. I love you."
"I love you, too. See you soon. Bye."
Lan's sneakers thudded rapidly against the sidewalk as he ran, and he clumsily threw his backpack over one shoulder. It bounced against his back as he continued, beginning to pant from the run. "Stupid Mr. Famous and my stupid netsaver missions during dinner," he grumbled. "I didn't even have time to put on my rollerblades."
MegaMan chuckled. "...But you had time to finish eating? That's strange," he said teasingly.
"Hey, be quiet." Lan tried to ignore him. How could MegaMan sound lighthearted at a time like this? How much sleep were they going to end up losing? There was no way to know how long they'd be there. What if there were dimensional area generators? Judging by their recent encouters with them, they'd probably be there awhile. "Why do you sound so perky anyway?"
The netnavi ignored his net-op's moodiness. "We won't be there long, Lan. Don't worry. You're just a little grumpy because you just got up and you had to rush through your dinner."
"I'm not grumpy," Lan responded irritably as he ran. "I'm just not up to net-saving right now."
Lan didn't have much to worry about. Reaching the front doors of SciLab, he was greeted with an unexpected encounter. Someone else was already unlocking the frontdoors of the building and heading in to deal with his job. Someone with a red vest. Lan's eyes went wide. "Oh, what?" He raced in after the figure, who was walking calmly towards the stairs that lead up to the room where the main computer system was located.
"CHAUD!"
The boy calmly glanced back over his shoulder. "Oh. Hello Lan. I don't have time to talk right now. I need to go stop whatever is faulting up the computers." His hands were in his pockets, and he seemed collected and vaguely dutiful at the same time. He headed up the stairs, completely disregarding Lan. The brown-haired boy almost shook with frustration.
"Arrrrrgh! That stupid Chaud! He thinks he's so much better than I am!" Frowning, he pulled out his PET. "Come on, MegaMan. Let's go show him that we're not useless!" He ran up the stairs Chaud had taken.
Unfortunately, Chaud seemed to have gotten 'crafty' in the thirty-five seconds since Lan had last laid eyes on him, and he didn't seem to be anywhere in sight. Lan ran frustratedly down the hall, discovering that either the high-security door was still open from the previous day, or Chaud had opened it himself. He peeked into the room. No Chaud? Argh! Where could he have possibly gotten to? "Stupid Chaud," Lan mumbled again. Next to him, a door slid open. He jumped. Chaud smirked vaguely at the response, his face immediatly going cold again afterward. "Excuse me, Lan," he said briefly, walking past him into the room.
"Rrrrrrr..." Lan's hand clutching the PET quivered. MegaMan laughed. "You're just jealous because he acts so much more collected than you do," he said playfully. Lan didn't hesitate to ignore him. He stormed after Chaud, who had already jacked Protoman into the system.
"I was sent here for a netsaver mission. I didn't hear anything about you coming along. What're you doing here?" Lan tried to keep a straight face. He was honestly a little annoyed that Chaud had been sent over like this. Did Famous think he couldn't handle it by himself because of how he'd gotten stuck in a dimensional area twice now? It wasn't his fault, anyway..!
Chaud only partially turned, his red PET in his hand. His other hand was in his pocket. There were probably battle chips in there, just in case. "I was sent here because you didn't come when you were supposed to."
"Didn't come?" Lan halted himself from sounding crazy. "Errr, well I'm here now!"
"They sent you almost twenty minutes ago. It shouldn't have taken that long." Chaud's straight face made Lan want to twitch in aggitation. What was so good about Chaud and Protoman? He and MegaMan were just as good netsavers, if not better. Besides, Lan could win a hundred straight battles in the net arcade. Could Chaud do that? Lan doubted it. As much as he disliked having to rush dinner, or lose sleep, he was a little dissapointed about this event.
"You can go home. I have this under control."
Lan wanted to argue, and from his slightly tilted position in Lan's hand, MegaMan could see that. "You heard him," he said, trying not to sound like he was siding with Chaud, and hoping that he could prevent his net-op from trying to argue with him. "Let's go home, okay?" Much to his relief, Lan didn't object.
"...Okay."
The boy turned around somewhat disheartenedly and trudged out of the room. Chaud hardly noticed him leave. Protoman was busy checking out the system, but finding absolutely no flaw, virus or any other kind of hinderance that could be preventing the system from running properly. However, he would not show defeat. They hadn't been here long enough for him to do that. They were netsavers. Failure was not an option right now. He would just have to keep looking. "I don't see anything," Protoman reported sternly, "but I think the best thing to do would be to unlock another level of security and check further in."
"Security breach permitted." Chaud loaded up a high-level unlocker program. "You can access the next level if you like."
Protoman gave a single nod in response, and headed off into a more heavily protected section of the system. Everything was desolate. No navis, no viruses, no darkloids, no--- Wait, what was..?
