In theory, I am well aware that the fic has too much talking. However, I like the talking, and seeing characters interact, and fun worldbuilding and such, so I'm going to keep doing fanservice-for-me, or rather author appeal.
If it helps, there will be a final boss.
The rider took off her helmet, revealing blonde hair about half as long as Zero's. Still wearing a heavy coat, she dismounted from the snowmobile.
"Kalinka Cossack?" Zero asked, glad he wasn't wearing armor.
She nodded, not coming any closer, which seemed eminently sensible to him. He and Axl had stopped sparring when the snowmobile crossed the border of their property, because Axl was using rapid-fire energy bullets with a decent range and it would only take one. The shots were low-powered, because 20XX weapons generally were by 21XX standards and X didn't want them to kill too much of their tree cover, but humans were squishy. Also, X borrowed Auto's lab to put these together since even with his dislike of people getting shot the veteran didn't want Axl unarmed, and his first priority had been building something that was unlikely to blow up in Axl's hands even though X was working with unfamiliar parts. He'd also built a pair each for himself and Zero, so Zero could demonstrate for Axl and the two of them had weapons that were built in this century and weren't obviously Lighttech.
Axl didn't have any default, built-in weapons: he was supposed to copy enemies, or other Wilybots presumably, and use theirs, but that just went to show, Zero thought, that Wily had no idea how combat training worked. Axl needed to get something down, for self-defense, and then he could work on expanding his range of weapons. What kind of idiot expected a newbuilt to instantly master fighting not just with a variety of weapons with different specs that changed how Axl would have to use them if he wanted to win, but with a variety of body types? That completely changed what Axl would have to do to avoid getting hit? Sure, Axl might have pre-programmed dodge routines, but if he didn't understand the mechanics of it, how and why certain things worked for his body, then how was he supposed to adapt them for entirely different bodies? Not just height and weight, but center of balance, different articulation, dash boots or no dash boots…
No, Axl's copy chip meant that until he learned how to learn, he was useless against anyone who saw him coming. No wonder he had such an uphill battle trying to get Red Alert to allow him out on field missions: the Repliforce veteran was old enough to think outside the box, otherwise he wouldn't have disobeyed General's orders and left Repliforce before the end, and he must have recognized that Axl needed more training than the standard newbuilt.
Of course Axl would have whined and complained about that, when his friends were out there and he was training instead of helping them, but since no one was getting hurt at the moment, this Axl took to training much more happily than their Axl. This Axl was duly impressed by Zero's tricks and wanted to learn them, while their Axl, although he admired Zero, had a tendency to go "Yeah, that's great, but why am I not in the field when my friends are getting shot at?!" Fortunately, Zero had cured him of saying anything like "The only real training is field testing," in front of impressionable newbuilts before it got any of them killed. Axl was immune: they weren't.
If they were back in 21XX, Zero could probably build a functional pair of energy pistols, come to think of it. He'd trained with every weapon he could get his hands on, so he would know their capabilities and limitations if an enemy tried to use them against him. Disassembly for cleaning and field repairs were part of weapons training, so he knew the general part types and how you hooked different varieties of them up in different combinations to produce different specs. Knowing that meant testing out a captured enemy weapon gave him a lot of tactically valuable information.
X was the one with formal training as an engineer, though. In addition, the Elite Seventeenth was a heavy artillery unit, since X would rather the mavericks didn't get anywhere close to the reploids he was looking after. Especially since once a war started, he wouldn't be there to look after them. That meant X spent a lot of time training his newbuilts in the use and field repair of various things that hopefully made other people go boom. The Shinobi unit, on the other hand... Zero's recruits were either promoted into it after surviving a certain amount of time without death or infection in another unit, or purpose-built and trained before coming into the Hunters. If they didn't already know how to take proper care of their weapons, they weren't going to qualify for his training. It had been decades since he'd handled someone's training from scratch instead of having them come in thinking they knew what they were doing and having to be cured of their bad habits.
Even though both of them were unarmored, they were still armed Wilybots. Not an insignificant threat.
A background tactical process was calculating the speed and acceleration of that snowmobile, how fast she could probably get back on it and comparing it to what the presence of all this snow was doing to his top speed. Even Axl could easily shoot her, but she was staying out of easy grabbing range. When he corrected for the differences between an android's structure and a robot master's, she wasn't just out of easy grabbing range. Huh. Fairly impressive. He liked people who were good at not being killed.
Not good enough, and obviously she knew that, given the bit of tightness around her eyes. They could kill her easily, but capturing her, to use her against her family: that would take a little work, for someone who wasn't him.
"I'm here to speak to X, if he's free," she said, and Zero nodded.
"If you want to drive up to the house, you'll find him there," he told her, instead of offering to escort her. She would have to slow down so he could keep up with her without pushing it, and she'd probably feel safer talking to a potential Maverick – a Wilybot – with X there. It was only sensible.
"My GPS doesn't have the house's location on the property," she said, which made sense, given the place's defenses. A lot of people had privacy tech up these days, according to Roll when Zero asked if it would attract attention. It wasn't visible from where they stood, either: there were several little valleys, otherwise Zero wouldn't have wanted to risk practicing outside, even if Axl needed to learn to deal with terrain. "Would you mind showing me where it is?" she asked, and smiled, trying to have it reach her eyes.
…That seemed like a deliberate effort not to be mistrustful, to ignore her survival instincts, but then he thought about it, and compared her to Dr. Light.
Dr. Light didn't even seem worried when he was in the same room with Forte, forget Zero, although Forte was in Roll's custody at the time. He'd been kidnapped before too, but Kalinka was the one who had been around robot masters since she was a child. Why was she more wary than the old man?
Zero nodded. "Axl, go on ahead and tell X that Kalinka's here."
"Is that necessary?" she wondered, when the newbuilt ran off.
"We're not robot masters," he reminded her. "There isn't a network on the property. X and I have secure comms, but secure by 21XX standards isn't secure against Dr. Wily." The real reason was that in theory, one was less of a threat than two. They were numerically even now, and hopefully that would help her calm down her tactical. Her rational mind would know that even without Axl, Zero was still just as deadly, but it wasn't the problem.
"Or someone with a robot master of their own." Some robot master's owner, when X and Zero were hiding from the authorities. "Nothing's secure against Dr. Wily."
"I assume you wouldn't have come unless it was safe for us?" he asked her.
"I have a fondness for fast vehicles," she told him, getting back on the snowmobile and starting the engine. "I spend a lot of time riding various things, when I'm not helping my family." No one would care if she spent a few days driving around a national park, even if anyone was watching her movements.
"The engine doesn't sound the same as it did before," he remarked.
She nodded. "It's not traditional, but this is quieter."
Zero understood that: there were a lot of reploids who liked the noises their vehicles made. "Follow me, then. Or you could follow Axl's tracks." It would be awhile before Zero tried to teach him to move with stealth in the snow, even though Axl liked that kind of thing. Zero knew the limits of Axl's stealth capabilities when facing off against 21XX tech, but he needed to get a robot master involved in Axl's training, see what their capabilities did to the equation. Of course Axl's current abilities wouldn't be ineffective: Dr. Wily built him to go up against robot masters, at least in this timeline, but Axl had worked out quite a few new tricks in his time with the Shinobi Unit and Zero had no idea which ones would still be effective in 20XX. He wasn't going to teach his student something that would get him shot.
That meant the first priority was making sure that Axl could take care of himself if the enemy located him.
It didn't occur to Zero to ask himself 'what enemy?' There had always been conflict, someone had been Zero's enemy ever since his original activation. His experiences meant he saw war as the default state of the universe, and it would be odd if no one was trying to kill him or X in the same way it would be odd if water decided to flow uphill. The peace X sought to create was, if not quite a fairy tale to Zero, something entirely theoretical. A nice idea: not impossible, but if it was real, you wouldn't call it a dream.
Kalinka kept glancing at him, which he noted but didn't really think was odd until she apologized. "You remind me of someone," she said. "I wonder Dr. Wily built you in memory of him."
"Oh?" he asked her.
"Roll sent me images of you in armor. Red, grey and your hair, that yellow…" She shook her head. "Normally I have better manners than to stare at people. I could say 'my brothers are robot masters,' but that sounds too much like 'my best friend is a robot master' for comfort, even though Roll is my best friend."
She was talking about racism, Zero realized. "I'm a Wilybot." And odds were he'd killed more than the rest of them put together, although saying that wouldn't help her. "You've been kidnapped and held hostage by Wilybots twice, so if you're nervous around me, I'll attribute it to that." To purely reasonable caution and correctly functioning tactical systems.
She stared at him for a moment. "Did I say something wrong?" he asked her.
"No," she shook her head. "I'm glad that you didn't count Skull Man as a Wilybot, even though that man insisted on working on him." There seemed to be more to it than that, but Zero wasn't going to press her on it. Skull Man was a Cossackbot: had he kidnapped Kalinka? There wasn't anything like that in the Mega Man stories Zero knew about.
He kept trudging through the snow and trees for a bit, staying at least a meter from the snowmobile even though the track wasn't all that wide, since the trunks it meandered around were limiting factors. Nature. He'd prefer to leave it, but X had taken him for a walk last night, far enough away from the house that there was no mechanical noise, and it was so quiet. With all the snow around, it would have been impossible for anyone to sneak up on them: it was a clear night too, so cloud cover wasn't a problem.
When X sighed, and said, "Isn't it peaceful," looking up at the stars, though, Zero ended up with the impression that X expected him to agree, but for reasons other than the tactical ones, given that X sighed again after Zero hit the high points, and this time it was with familiar, fond irritation (Zero being Zero, meaning all of his partner's systems were operating normally even if what was normal for Zero wasn't normal by anyone else's standards) instead of relaxation.
It wasn't that he minded quiet, unless it was the 'something's missing' variety that gave away an ambush, so he was glad that Kalinka didn't talk to him again until they arrived at the house.
X offered her something to drink after she hung up her helmet and coat and got the snow off her boots. "Roll said that you wanted to talk to me?" she asked him.
"Is there anything you can tell me about Duo?" he asked, showing her a seat and then sitting down himself. Without armor, he looked younger than she did, although there was something similar about their eyes.
"My father is the one that worked on him… but that's why you're asking me." Kalinka took a breath. "I shouldn't have installed the crystals into the others. It seemed mad, but so mad that I assumed he wouldn't have suggested something like that without a good reason. I recognized them from images of the one the team brought back before Wily stole it – my father built those robots, the ones that explored the asteroid. He does, we do, quite a lot of humanoid support unit-level robots for various applications, like Ring Man's Robot Police units."
X nodded. "Not fully sapient, but capable of some initiative. More initiative than one would assume, when they found themselves dealing with alien defense units and had to prioritize what to bring back."
She gave him a thin smile. "The Mother Computer project… Dr. Light isn't the only one who hasn't been able to retain ownership of his work, after refusing to license to the wrong people." The military-industrial complex had wanted robot masters, up until Dr. Wily made it very clear that trying to use robot masters or any kind of drone would be handing him a free army. The industrial side of it still wanted them, could still get away with making use of them up until it was bad enough to cross the line, and they still hoped that they could cross that line without Dr. Wily's robot masters finding out about it.
Zero wondered what she would think of X putting his original plans and the rest of his technology that they could figure out in the public domain, but it did set the precedent that the parts of a reploid's body weren't anyone's intellectual property, and so the reploid was no one's property but their own. Imagine if people were able to twist copyright law into some ownership of reploids containing parts they designed…
"I'd really like to talk to you and your father about the Robot Rights Movement from your perspective," When Dr. Cossack wrote a book that was still a major historical text when X woke up, "But if Dr. Cossack built the team that first encountered this kind of technology, then I understand why you didn't see the need to ask for details in the middle of an emergency."
"The crystals shouldn't have shorted them out like that. I barely had time to build a token interface, so I decided to build one that would break down if the crystal tried to shunt too much power into their bodies, and where the damage was located… They weren't interfacing with their power systems," she told X. "My brothers have surge protectors. There should not have been power surges in their processors."
"I believe you," X said. "In my era, there was practically an epidemic of things ending up in people's processors that really shouldn't have been able to get in there."
No, there was a literal epidemic of it, but Zero wasn't going to derail the conversation just because X had made a kind of a joke, trying to reassure Kalinka that he believed her.
"I believe it's the same principle," X told her. "And since my power generation is derived from those crystals, I'm a little concerned."
Meaning he wanted to know what she knew about Duo. "The crystals came from the White Giant's arm. I think it made my father lie so people wouldn't know that the crystals that made my brothers crazy came from it. It crashed into our transport, and my father had the body of one of the robots we sell teleported in. He attached the White Giant's arm to it, and set my voice as an authorized user."
"Authorized user?"
"That kind of robot usually goes to construction sites that don't need a robot master, just a unit to do the heavy lifting," she told him. "They're speech capable, but only a few phrases, like warning someone to get out of the way. The unit obeyed me, but… Its priorities were wrong. We set our robots to protect people, even other low-level robots, not just humans, and it wouldn't have protected Mega Man and the others if I hadn't ordered it to stop attacking and block that stardroid's attack instead. That was when I was certain, but…"
"You know enough about how these units act that you already knew something changed its personality."
The engineer nodded. "A completely different fundamental decision-making architecture. My father's greatest fear is robots being used for war. People using them as instruments of murder so they can pretend their own hands are clean, so they can do horrible things and quiet their consciences. Pretend that it's the robots that are evil, use that as an excuse to force children to murder children. A robot that prioritized destruction over saving people's lives… He could not have programmed such a thing. Not after what happened to Skull Man."
X hesitated, but since it was upsetting her, "May I…?"
"Ask?" She looked down at the coffee table, at her still-gloved hands. There was no bare skin except her face: a good habit, for someone that worked with robotics. Zero remembered when it was safe for there to be human doctors, or robotics engineers, in Hunter medical, even though X and Dr. Cain made an effort to have the reploid trainees get as much practice as possible.
Especially in a cold climate like this: bare human skin could stick to metal, couldn't it?
"He was completed after I was kidnapped. Dr. Wily ordered my father to build him like that, a robot child forced to fight for a human child. Fight another child robot, at that. After the war, Skull Man didn't have the Three Laws, my father didn't want to install them and rebuild his body as well. He didn't know what to do, and Skull Man looked like a Wilybot, and I… He… We failed him, as a family. Then we couldn't save Copy-Rock, either. The crystals drove my brothers berserk, they turned their weapons on…" The angry shake of her head moved her hair as well, reminded Zero of his own. "None of this, none of it, is anything my father would have done. Not to my brothers, especially not to a unit he'd just turned on." She scowled. "But I'm certain that Duo wasn't a new unit. That was the White Giant, just pretending to obey my orders."
"Why?" Zero asked her.
"I don't know, any more than I know why it made my father tell that lie, claim that he kept Dr. Wily's data. As though we want anything to do with Wily's programming, after what he did to turn my brothers into combat units." A moment of hesitation. "I think it wanted to see what I would do with that power." That just made her even angrier. As though she would let people be killed right in front of her! "But I'm not certain of it, not the way I'm certain that Duo wasn't our work." Not a Cossackbot. "I don't know what he is, I don't know how they think. Just like a robot master might not do something for the same reason a human would, even though in some things we're very alike."
"I'm beginning to think I did something very stupid," Zero sent to X. At this short range, it wouldn't be intercepted.
A simple "?" was the reply, while X said to Kalinka, "I'm still discovering the differences between robot masters and androids myself. I think a lot of it is that they network so easily, that they're rarely alone but can always reach out to the people around them to help and be helped. It's not that they're different just because they're different, but how they interact with the world and each other is different. People are shaped by their experiences, change how they approach the world based on what works and what doesn't, so two people who experience very different things are doing to develop in different ways."
"I'd assumed that I was responsible for the Cataclysm because I'm a force of destruction, and what else was there that would possibly destroy your family and mine?" Another Wilybot? Why would a Wilybot kill their own family? Zero wasn't a proper Wilybot: when he woke up, he was a rabid beast. "I know more about finding out who's responsible for a maverick attack than that. Ignorance of the situation is not evidence." Not knowing of anything else that could do it didn't mean the one thing he did know of was the answer, it didn't prove a damn thing.
"Rubble," X sent. "Rubble, a second asteroid belt, in every timeline except the one where you were completed with your current design. It makes you wonder, doesn't it?"
Since that was a rhetorical question, Zero saw no reason to tell X he agreed, not when the idea of him being any kind of savior was just wrong. Recognizing his silence as grudging agreement, or at least the temporary inability to make a good argument that X was wrong, X continued, "There's the time machine. We could move forward to do recon, but there's still a lot of information out there that we can gather without the risk of bringing something back with us."
That, Zero definitely agreed with. Especially since X was immune and Zero wasn't. He was not letting X go and face who-knew-what without him, but he'd been flooded with the virus before. He was not going to kill X and then come back and kill X's family.
Kalinka coughed politely. Zero was a little surprised she spotted it: the two of them had a lot of practice keeping private conversations private. Perhaps there was some tell that the reploids and humans of 21XX didn't recognize that someone who grew up with seven robot masters, who networked constantly instead of using coms occasionally, would recognize. He made a note of that, although he'd already noted not to even try to have a private com conversation around Roll.
"We were reviewing what the people of 21XX think about certain aspects of this era," X said. "It's looking like the general assumptions are wrong."
"The 'general assumptions' about robot masters always are," in her experience. "What you said about networking: it's very true. A robot master should not be alone, any more than a human should be. That's why my father wrote his book, about treating robot masters as family. At the time, I was a little, well, seven younger siblings?" If they were valued the same as her even though they weren't human, did that mean she was less than human to him, that she wasn't special to her only parent? "Robot masters… they look after their robots. Helping others is an 'Of course' to them, even if those others are objectively inferior. More so if they're weaker and less intelligent, since it means they need the help more. So… if humans don't see the robot masters they own as worth helping, worth caring about, that means that something must be very wrong with the robot master… or with that human. And if all the humans they know see them as things, then that's their sample of what humanity is like."
So a robot master in a bad situation? Of course they would start to think that all humans were like that, if every single solitary human they encountered was. That was what the evidence would show them. "Dr. Wily is a very cruel man," she continued, "but the position of robot masters would be much worse if it weren't for his pettiness. The abusive can't keep their robot masters, and the laws governing the treatment of robot masters we do have are almost all because of him or Mega Man." And Mega Man wouldn't be a hero if he didn't need to stop .
"I read your father's book years ago," soon after he was released from the capsule, "but…"
"Are you done yet?" Axl yelled from upstairs.
"Should I get him outside again?" Zero asked X.
"It's up to you," X told him.
Zero shrugged: X would tell him any important information he missed later, and Kalinka might speak more freely without a Wilybot standing right there. She probably thought he cared about his family, and wouldn't want to say anything too bad about them in front of him, even if it was true.
They needed to know the bad things she had to say about Zero's creator. Both Rock and Dr. Light considered Dr. Wily a very dangerous person, but Rock was like X, and Dr. Light was an old friend of his. They were both the kind of people who gave the benefit of the doubt, even though they'd acknowledged long ago that Dr. Wily wasn't going to reform and they needed to treat him as a clear and present danger. His children, though, weren't necessarily enemies, no matter who built them.
Then there was the fact that Zero was X's friend, and that meant Rock and Dr. Light didn't want Zero to kill himself. Of course they were going to slant what they said with that in mind: Zero knew how X was about people dying, and they were where he'd gotten it from, apparently. So, anything about Dr. Wily's possible intentions for Zero, the implications of Zero's abilities that might leap out at 20XX's AI specialists, unlike X who had spent his entire life working with reploid-based technology? They needed a scientist who hated Dr. Wily like a normal person on the one hand, but could be trusted not to reveal X's existence and get Dr. Light's family in trouble on the other. Sure, that was also a bias, but two biased for and one against was better than only having the two biased for.
Kalinka might not have made it into the history books other than as Dr. Cossack's daughter, but given her age, she might just have died before she got a chance to stand out. Trying to compete with Drs. Light and Wily? Dr. Cossack was only remembered because of the Fourth War and his book. Even if she wasn't a genius, they still needed her. They needed someone with the familiarity with 20XX technology and concepts that X lacked.
Roll would have been ideal, since her opinion of Dr. Wily was that everyone would be saved a lot of trouble if someone hit him over the head and repeated as necessary to keep him unconscious, but Roll wasn't immune.
"Dr. Light and Rock are studying Zero," X said once Zero had gone upstairs. He wouldn't be coming down this way: there was another staircase in what probably used to be servants' quarters.
She nodded. "Roll is keeping me informed."
"Ah, you said that you and Roll were friends?"
"We competed in the-Well, she competed in Battle and Chase, we built the car she drove together. Bright Man and I were going to be her pit crew, but then Dr. Wily attacked the race, and the two of us had allowed my father to get the impression that Dr. Light gave Roll permission to complete," Kalinka said, not even bothering to pretend that was in any way accidental. "Ring Man found out and locked down our transport before we reached Hawaii, and Bright Man wouldn't help me get control back." And a human, even a roboticist, trying to regain control over a computer-controlled vehicle after it was taken by a robot master?
"Well, once the race turned into a battle…"
"It was always going to turn into a battle, that was why Roll wanted to compete, and she didn't have armor. If Dr. Light upgraded her into a warbot, then…" Long story and nasty legal situation, that was X's guess when Kalinka shook her head, lips tight and eyes dark. He could see that Kalinka hadn't appreciated Ring Man keeping her away when Roll might end up needing urgent medical attention. "That fake Mega Man shot her and nearly killed her in the last war before the race. Battle and Chase was only a few months after the tournament, just in time for Dr. Wily to be ready for another war: the WRO is tasteless like that. We couldn't just build Roll external armor, she would have to be completely rebuilt to be a warbot. Rock was built to be able to survive lab explosions: they've had to redesign a few things and put in replacements more frequently than expected because of the wear, but his body can handle the weight of the armor provided he doesn't overstress anything. Roll has much better articulation and dexterity than he does, that's why she can do labwork just as well as Rock without the Variable Tool System."
X was nodding. "Too many potential failure points, if she's suddenly carrying a hundred additional kilograms. They'd have to rip out and redo her entire endoskeletal structure, and she'd lose so much performance it wouldn't be worth it." Waving at himself, he said, "I can have this kind of articulation and carry armor because the nanites compensate for wear, but it sounds like she's built like Zero, without the nanites. This was a problem for reploids, too: that's why so many of the members of the Shinobi unit were custom units, different engineers trying to figure out how to min-max the problem of close-range specialists."
Her eyes lit up. "Because nanites require a pseudo-circulatory system, and that adds another set of design constraints."
Oh, of course she and Roll had already discussed this as an option, X realized. Roll wouldn't even have needed to tell Kalinka about him. "She already has a lot of functions and subsystems: without building her into a larger frame," X didn't have any ideas. "Alia made a lot of advances, but I'm not sure how many of them are applicable to robot masters."
Oh? She motioned for him to go on.
"Over time, a lot of people have experimented a lot with reploid design. Signas, the son of a friend of mine, is structurally closest to a robot master, although of course he has nanites. His articulation is, well, I wouldn't recommend borrowing any of that design for Roll. He wouldn't have put up with those limitations if we didn't need him. Alia was taller than Roll: she started out with a non-combat structure but with the circulatory system in place of Roll's master system. In our time, networking was limited since we were trying to stop the spread of the virus." Just because it didn't need to spread that way didn't mean it couldn't. "I don't have plans for robot masters in my databanks, so I don't really know much yet about how they're put together, but is a taller body an option?" Since that would alleviate the space constraints.
Kalinka shook her head. "How aware are you of the Light family's position?"
"Not as aware as I'd like to be."
"Mega Man was not even offered the position of head of the robot police. Not that Ring Man was asked: he was transferred by the municipal police force my father wanted him to join to the WRO's new, international organization. The official reason is that Ring Man is not a warbot: he was built to capture, not injure. The unofficial reason is that no one is very happy with the fact that conventional forces are at a massive disadvantage against robot masters: the more technology they use, the more helpless they are, meaning that militaries that didn't have the money to modernize potentially have a massive advantage against the forces of the developed world, if they could force robot masters without the first law to work for them.
"They ordered Dr. Light to build Gamma, a robot able to fight robots, and even let Dr. Wily out for that purpose, because they wanted such a thing. They wanted it very, very much, to the point the power crystals were secondary. Otherwise, they would have launched another mission to retrieve them. The WRO sponsored that gladiatorial game because they want more warbots: Dr. Wily made it very clear that he will tolerate no warbots other than his own and Mega Man. The creation of his friend from his university days. Dr. Light has been imprisoned by the government three times now, because they suspected him of things that were Dr. Wily's doing. In the eyes of some, the fact they were Dr. Wily's doing doesn't necessarily mean that Dr. Light is innocent, either. If Roll became a warbot? Even the ability to defend herself: many will look at that and assume she, that Dr. Light, wants those capabilities for the sake of offense. Rebuilding her, making her look obviously different for the sake of being combat-capable?"
"Would put her family in danger." The same way X's very existence did, in a world where they tried to kill robots because it might be possible for them to say no. "What about yours?"
"We have some more trust because we've suffered at the hands of Dr. Wily. None of Dr. Light's creations are dead." Not like her brother, and wasn't that suspicious? "They would rather a unit like Ring Man was under the control of someone who wasn't a robot rights activist, but at the moment, they have no alternatives. Dr. Wily's arrogance sees to that: he hates competition, people seeing someone else as a genius and ignoring him."
"If Dr. Light owns the only unit that can protect them from Dr. Wily, some would see that as a source of power. So they want an alternative, like Repliforce." At least no one could claim that the Mavericks were leaving the Maverick Hunters alone, that they had some secret treaty or were even working together. "In my time, there were mercenary units that people could hire if they were afraid that the Hunters might not be able to assist them." Might not have the resources in the face of widespread attacks, might not get there in time. "They tended not to survive very long, with a handful of exceptions." Axl's stepfather was very old for a reploid when the virus finally got him. "No one except your father has managed to build a," no, not a warbot, that was important to the Cossacks, "robot capable of subduing other robots that is personally loyal to him and refuses to join Dr. Wily?" Or at least Ring Man had rejoined Dr. Cossack once freed by Mega Man?
"The eight finalists from the tournament were traumatized by Copy Mega Man. They might not want to join Dr. Wily, but they don't want to fight, either. Even the ones that were obviously purpose-built warbots were covered as civilian units, because warbots are illegal. They were returned to their supposedly-civilian work in order to keep the cover of those projects intact. Since they know their builders put them in that danger, and now see them as failures, why should they fight for them? They did fight during the stardroid incident, but that was to protect co-workers, friends they had made, and the kind of people who want warbots see that as merely the First Law in action, and thus useless for their purposes. Forte… the implications of Forte worry them. How do they get a warbot without the First Law to kill only enemy humans? Forte ruins Dr. Wily's plans far more often than he does anything helpful."
Convincing people that building robot masters to try to force them to kill was a bad idea sounded very helpful to X. His goals weren't Dr. Wily's, but if Dr. Wily was trying to discourage others from building warbots to compete with his own designs… "How do you get anyone with free will to want to help you?" X asked, and for him it was an entirely rhetorical question. Help them. Be worth helping.
"Speaking of uncontrollable people…" She looked around.
Who was she looking for? She knew that Zero and Axl had gone back outside: Ah, they had another houseguest. "Lumine has a Wilybot e-mail account, and Shade Man sent him a link to a video game called Minecraft. He wants Lumine to build him a space elevator, since he heard on the grapevine that the Lumine of our time built one." Lumine had taken that as a personal challenge, not wanting to be outdone by another of himself, and was up in his room taking online crash courses in engineering, materials science and something called the Kerbal Space Program.
X wasn't going to complain: this was a much better hobby than world domination.
"Shade Man is the one who figured out how to get Ring Man and the others into orbit to fight the stardroids and Ra Moon," Kalinka said. "Star Man still manages their satellites, but since Shade Man took over their aerospace program, I'm sure they're doing more spying with them."
"Zero met him: he got the impression that Shade Man was more concerned about the stardroids than anything else, and wasn't likely to… No?" X asked when Kalinka started shaking her head.
"No," she said bluntly. "He and Shadow are Dr. Wily's enforcers. Oh, most people believe that the Second Numbers are his enforcers, but they only rescue robot masters, they have nothing to do with the wars. They helped when Wily Island was attacked by the White Giant, but they have their own bases, somewhere, and build their own robots. They have organized themselves, they're not under Wily's command. Most of the Third Numbers went to live on their own for awhile after I was kidnapped and my family was forced to fight, although that wasn't because they objected to my kidnapping but because Dr. Wily wasn't providing them with upkeep and wanted them to support themselves. They moved back to Wily Island once it was built. Shadow remained with Dr. Wily the entire time: he kidnapped me and supervised Copy-Rock. The Fifth Numbers were built to be self-sufficient from the beginning: they too will not be overly inconvenienced by his death. Except for the fact that I'm sure people will want them brought under control once they no longer have Dr. Wily's protection. The Seventh Numbers, of which Shade Man is one, are some of the rescued robot masters: they volunteered to help Dr. Wily during his plans for Battle and Chase. One of them hated Mega Man so much, because he fought for the humans, that when he thought he was about to die he tried to kill Roll and Ice Man."
X's eyebrows rose at that: that was very different from what he was learning about 20XX's normal. It was more like what he was used to, sadly.
"Shade Man told Rock that there was a bomb under Roll's car, and that if he didn't win Battle and Chase it would be set off. It's a rare robot master that doesn't mind having innocents in danger: even Shadow Man helped Roll, when she and Ice Man were attacked by the Gilliam Knights – attack non-sentient robots that Wily deployed in a populated area, not under a robot master's control," she explained. "The Third Numbers kept me prisoner, but I think that when they scared me, they thought it was funny because it was ridiculous of me to be scared, and if I thought so poorly of robot masters then I deserved to suffer a little for it." Since she was the daughter of a roboticist, and they thought Dr. Wily's understanding of robots was normal, or how humans should be at any rate. So she should have known better. "I was in danger because of Dr. Wily, not because of what they might have done to me on their own initiative. Shade Man hasn't been involved in any violence since then, but a lot of politicians have been having their files leak and other such things. They're claiming that Dr. Wily fabricated them, of course, even though he says he doesn't know or care what they're talking about, but Ring Man is certain that Shade Man is behind it, and Shadow is helping him infiltrate and get the physical files."
X tried not to look too visibly happy or intrigued. Yes, theft and kidnapping were wrong, but murder was worse, he could really use a cut of the intel they were getting and he'd worked with Wilybots almost his entire life. He'd have to ask Lumine for Shade Man's e-mail.
I will eternally be amused that X ends up ruling the world, probably due to a combination of popular demand and 'if you want something done right…' And then of course the only way to resign was to go AWOL, because apparently, as someone with more than 150 years of leadership experience by the time he left, he was too good at it for his own good and no one would let him retire.
His feelings about politics are rather like his feelings about combat: he hates both of them, but he hates the idea of standing by and letting people be murdered even more.
What's interesting is that everyone here from the Classic timeline (except Kalinka, whose personal experience is that things have always been dark) is thinking that things are getting darker and darker, but from X's perspective, everything is so nice and sunny and genocide is a possibility instead of an ongoing reality!
Also, there are forests with trees that don't have mechanical life support built into them, and his family's alive…
I'd make a joke about 'this is so much Lighter and Softer he needs sunglasses' but then everyone would want him to take them off, he looks like Blues and it is scaring them.