Chapter 4: Explosive Discoveries
This was originally going to be a part of chapter 3, before I realized it was going to be too long.
I do not own Mega Man, nor Touhou Project. Mega Man is rightfully owned by Capcom. Touhou Project is rightfully owned by Team Shanghai Alice.
As Crash Man and Slash Man entered the corridor, it seemed to be a T intersection. To the right was a longer corridor that seemed to have more rooms on the sides. Straight ahead, the corridor led to a large room on the other side of the ship, which looked identical to the main deck that Chiyuri was fought in. To their left was a large metallic sliding door, right in the middle of the T intersection. Crash Man took a good look at it all, seeing the metallic door to their left, and smaller ones lining the hallway to the right.
"The rooms all seemed fortified. Guess I gotta blow down the doors, starting with the largest one."
Crash Man fired a Crash Bomb at the large door to the left, and when it exploded, it revealed another door behind it. Each door he blew up would expose another behind it.
"Looks like there's several layers of security..." Slash Man pointed out.
Once they had gotten through all the doors, they found a long room with what appeared to be a futuristic nuclear reactor at the end. The entire room was filled with blue protective lasers, preventing them from continuing.
"This seems to be the power core of the ship!" Crash Man called out. "Wily's fortresses would probably benefit from it if he could reverse engineer this strange power core."
"We can't even get over there with all these lasers in the way!" Slash Man noticed. "Though I think they would make a killer defense system if Wily could copy their design."
"We'll have to disable them somehow." Crash Man stated. "For now, we have no business in here."
They started down the long hallway. They blew up the first door on their right, which wasn't nearly as secured as the the last door. When they got inside, it seemed to be some sort of living quarters. They saw a bed and a desk with a futuristic gaming PC, which seemed to be running a simplistic 2D RPG with a poker-faced protagonist. They gazed around and saw various anime or anime-styled merchandise and posters. They saw all manner of green-blooded space alien girls, voluptuous goddesses, robot maids, flying girls wielding giant futuristic missile launchers while dodging bullet hell patterns, and even drink can gijinkas.
Crash Man broke the silence. "I think this is the blond girl's room..."
Slash Man leaned near him. "...What a weeb. Maybe this is why she wears that stupid sailor uniform."
They then blew up the door across from it, and it seemed to be another bedroom. They once again saw a bed and a desk. The bed was much tidier in this room. This time the desk had a simpler laptop on top. The laptop was opened up to work documents which seemed to contain endless research, and all around it on the desk were various papers with manic notes scribbled down. They looked around and saw all sorts of other note papers pinned to walls, sometimes with lines of red yarn connecting them, with diagrams of symbols such as hexagrams, Stars of David, even crosses, even combinations of them, among other occult runes or mythical/religious symbols. Among the notes were what seemed to be descriptions or observations of what these symbols meant, or how they... behaved? There were also written down results of numerous experiments with repeated trials... There were even strange incantations written down. Among all the chaos of what seemed like someone losing their mind deep in research, there was also blueprints on the wall for a staff-like object that would be capable of some kind of energy projection, along with more notes written into the blueprints about concepts of magical concentration, as well as more incantations. Nearby were blueprints of what seemed to be a futuristic ray gun, identical to the one the blond girl was wielding. These blueprints, unlike the other example, had no information on supernatural elements, just information about the mechanics and energy consumption of the gun, with more information detailing condensed, positively-charged photons, and unique manipulation of such. There was an awestruck moment of silence for what the two Robot Masters stumbled into.
Crash Man broke the silence. "I don't think this is the blond girl's room."
"This must be another crew member's room... maybe they were some kind of scientist?" Slash Man added on.
Crash Man tried to understand his surroundings... "Whoever it was, they must've been researching some sort of supernatural occult power, but also researching science and technology...?"
"Technology beyond our understanding. The staff and the gun seem to be buster tech way ahead of our time. There's no way modern Robot Masters would have the power core or the circuits to create so many energy bullets, and manipulate them in such ways..." Slash Man continued to add on.
Crash Man had an idea. "If Wily could get a grasp on some of this, and make the technology his own... There'd be nothing Mega Man can do to stop him. We'll report all these findings after we're done scouting out the ship."
They continued to blow up doors down the hallway, not finding much of interest at first. They found a bathroom, and then a kitchen, with what appeared to be limited food rations. The ship had all the essentials to serve as a temporary dwelling for interstellar, or perhaps interdimensional, travel. After the living essentials, they found various storage rooms and closets, not containing much of relevance to them, such as cleaning supplies or extra long-term food rations. They did, however, find a room that seemed to be some sort of docking station for a humanoid robot.
Slash Man's mind wandered... "Do you think Robot Masters exist in the world they came from?"
"Probably, if it's a more advanced world than ours. I think from the cleaning devices such as brooms and vacuums against the walls, and the washing machine and dryer, that this must've been a cleaning robot docked in here." Crash Man answered.
Slash Man observed more. "This table seems to have extra maid uniforms, and the docking station has nuclear warning symbols near it." He chuckled slightly. "A nuclear-powered maid robot!"
Slash Man then wondered, "Hmm... where is she then? We haven't encountered a maid Robot Master anywhere else on the ship."
"Heh, doesn't matter. Kinda reminds me of Mega Man's sister, a pathetic housekeeping robot with a silly broom. Except she's solar-powered." Crash Man noted.
Slash Man wondered about something else. "Well, we've seen earlier from those blueprints that these people have the technology to fire all those energy projectiles. What if the maid Robot Master is designed with the same ability?"
Crash Man reconsidered what he said. "Maybe she's not as "pathetic" as I thought... A maid that can fire a bunch of bullets? And they're a robot, no less? That's kind of frightening."
"I have deadly claws to slash with. You have the ability to blow up entire buildings. There's nothing we of all robots should be afraid of." Slash Man reassured.
Crash Man was still concerned. "But if the maid really is more powerful than we think... Let's hope she's nowhere else on the ship and we don't have to deal with her."
They continued down the hallway. They found another room that seemed to serve as some sort of experimentation room or testing facility for magic-related practices. They saw various counter tops with more research notes scattered around, not unlike the ones in the bedroom. Among them they saw magical objects or artifacts, such as glowing orbs with stars on them, or other symbols. Sometimes said objects had technological devices connected to them, drawing some sort of energy or analytic information. On one section of the walls, they saw what seemed to be severed fairy wings pinned up, encased in some sort of hardened, preservative coating. There were also jars with smaller fairy wings that were submerged in a liquid preservative.
Crash Man was somewhat disgusted. "Jeez, it's like they rammed their ship through some magic fantasy land, and researched the heck out of it..."
"Well, that's more fuel for Wily's research." Slash Man reassured. "Let's keep going."
In the room across from this, they saw what was some sort of testing chamber behind a glass pane. Outside the chamber were more counter tops, with stacks of blank paper. It all seemed to go unused and deserted, unlike all the other rooms.
"Huh, you think this is where they were going to keep some sort of magic creature as a test specimen?" Crash Man wondered.
"The room is relatively untouched. They might've decided against it at the last minute." Slash Man guessed.
"Well, it felt so weird saying "magic creature as a test specimen". Like, this is too much to take in so quickly. I mean, first we learn of humans coming from another universe, then we see blueprints of futuristic weapons that make no sense, and then we have evidence that magic may exist where they came from? I still can't explain everything we saw in the room across from here."
"I can't quite wrap my processor around it either." Slash Man admitted. "But we have a job to do. Maybe we'll get some answers once Dr. Wily takes a look at all this, and if he can get some info out of these crew members."
They entered the room at the end of the hallway. There, they saw large white missiles with strange smiling faces on the tips, lined up against sections of the wall that seemed to be hatches that could open up to the outer wall of the ship, acting as a missile silo.
"Wow, it's some sort of missile room. Maybe we can take some of these for Wily to use."
"What's with the weird face paint job on them?" Slash Man wondered.
"Don't ask me."
Upon approaching one, they get a closer look at the metal braces holding it as a silo for the hatch.
"Guess I gotta blow up the braces." Crash Man claimed.
"No! While I'd love to see some carnage and destruction, you'd blow up the delicate missile in the process and probably ourselves as well." Slash Man protested.
"I've got explosion-proof armor, you only need to worry about yourself." Crash Man objected. "Though preserving the missiles is sort of why we're in here, so you do have a point there..."
"Just let me handle it..." Slash Man ordered.
He carefully plucked each of the metal braces off the launching mechanism surrounding the missile using his Slash Claw. When it was loosened, Slash Man was unable to lift the missile.
"Grr... can ya give me a hand here?!" He complained.
"I don't have any hands, idiot!" Crash Man held up his arms with stored drill-bombs on the ends.
Slash Man was relieved as he let go of the smiling bomb, and it rolled back into place in the bracing.
Slash Man spoke into his communicator. "Wily, we have lots of scouting information to go over, and technology to raid from the ship. But for now we need heavy lifters for one of the weapons. Send Hard Man and Stone Man on board."
Crash Man was relieved. "Looks like we're done scouting this floor of the ship, and there was no crazy maid robot to worry about. Now all we need to do is go back to the entrance and give Hard Man and Stone Man directions to the missiles- SLASH, LOOK OUT!"
He turned around to see that a part of the missile that was scratched by his razor-sharp claws had rested on a weakened part of the braces, causing it to bend, and the missile slipped out of its silo and rolled across the floor. They were too late before it hit the base of another missile silo.
"Oh shi-"
Every missile in the room exploded instantly, engulfing the two Robot Masters.
From an outside point of view, a massive explosion several stories tall erupted out of the back of the Probability Space Hypervessel, almost like a thruster. The ICBMs the foolish robots were messing with are designed to level entire cities, and several went off simultaneously. Despite this, the vessel is an ingenious and durable craft, barely affected by the explosion, apart from losing only less than half of its body. The half containing the core, the staircase and the cockpit was still intact. The vessel was pushed forward slightly, further into the Wily fortress. The vessel's hull roughly contained the blast, protecting the fortress.