::I'd like to start this fanfic off with a few notices: I did not play
most of the X games, nor did I have the booklets (and therefore the main
plot behind) the other first Megaman games (1-5), so PLEASE don't get on my
case about holes in the plot or details I messed up/ completely missed.
Also, since I don't want to get sued, I own none of these characters, as
they belong to Capcom. I'm just using them for my own entertainment.
Anyway, I was playing one of the Megaman games.. uh, 4, I believe, when I
got bored and my imagination went on overtime. Well, this is the result,
and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the concept.::
All he could see was a bright light, and in the light was a shape of an older man. The room was too bright.. He feebly held up his hand to the light to shield his eyes, but it barely made a difference. "Who are you..?" He croaked, his throat dry.
"You are my creation, my masterpiece!" The silhouetted man rambled randomly. "I created you, you are nothing less of perfect.. Mwa ha ha haa!" That was no ordinary laugh. It was the coined laugh of an evil badguy. "There is no way you can fail against.. HIM.. I created you to avenge me; he is my enemy and you are much more powerful than he will ever become. Now go! Find him and destroy him!!"
"The heck are you talking about?!" He mumbled to the random figure. The light was too bright.. He was starting to feel sick. What was going on??
Suddenly the bright light vanished, and images flashed and flew by; of people- no, reploids, dead. Dying. Blood was everywhere, covering the floor and walls. Did he do this..? He looked to his hands.. red and bloodstained.
Zero suddenly awoke to a start. After realizing that he was just back in his room, back near the M.H. HQ, he regained composure and his breath, concentrating on what his dream meant. It was very confusing, especially the way how the author didn't let the audience know who "he"(Zero) was until he woke up.
"Hey! Rosiel-sama!" Zero yelled to the computer screen. Rosiel, the author currently writing this, paused and sighed.
"Yes..?" Rosiel slinked away from the screen a bit, a little guilty and worried of what was going to happen next. Zero refused to let sympathy get in his way.
"Double-check your fics once in a while! That dream sequence was WAY too confusing!" Rosiel hung his head and whimpered.
"I was going for voice..." Zero sighed.
"Well, make sure your 'voice' can at least be followed by the audience." Rosiel looked around.
"We have one?"
"Well, apparently, if someone's acknowledging this. Now get back to work; we have to get the actual plot going now." Rosiel cocked his head to the side.
"Wait a minute, I'M the author, I'M supposed to say who does what when.." The blade of Zero's sabre made Rosiel change his mind. "Er, as I was saying, I should get back to writing this.."
Zero walked into the main room of the head quarters, it being just a door away. Iris suddenly ran up to him
"Zero-sama!" she pleaded, "My brother won't listen to me- you have to stop him from attacking the humans!"
"Err.." Zero brilliantly started, looking around nervously, "The Mavericks didn't even attack.. Wait a minute- didn't you die?" Iris' eyes widened, caught in another brilliant hole in the plot.
"Um.. Am I supposed to be dead..? I think I'll go and check the script.." With that, she left the room and a sigh of relief filled the room from all who were still in it.
"Anyway." Zero proclaimed. "Alright, people, let's get back to work.." He hesitated first on the thought of "what work?" Then another thought came to mind: Where was X? "Anyone seen X?" He asked.. uh.. his.. fellow coworkers..?
"No."
"Nope!"
"Wasn't he in the lunch room getting coffee?"
"Haven't seen him." With only one response giving him a vague idea, Zero left towards the lunch room. 'Why do robots even NEED lunch..?' he wondered. Once inside, his foot landed with a "SPLRT!"
" 'Splrt'..?" Zero asked himself, looking down into what he stepped into. The carpet was soaked with coffee and strawberry icecream. The countertops were littered with cheesecake crumbs. Non-dairy creamer powder was still in the air and on whatever was not yet claimed by an edible substance. With wide-eyes did the red reploid slowly leave the room. Still looking downwards, he saw coffee-footprints. They were too big to be his own or any of the coworkers'.. It had to have been X. 'He must have short circuited or something' he reassured himself. He followed the prints, leading him through the copy room to the storage room to the snow-cone machine room (?) and finally to workers' lounge where he was greeted by a bag full of flour in the face.
"HI ZERO!!" X's voice boomed happily. "Wanna join me for a dance? I'm gonna dance the Happy Tunafish Dance!" Zero waited for the flour to settle before he assesed the situation. X was dancing atop one of the tables wearing a bunch of grapes on his head and one of his feet in a bucked atained from who knows where. "C'mon, Zero, join me!"
"X...?" Zero started, not really able to focus due to shock, "What are you doing...?"
"The Happy Tunafish Dance!" X stated, as though it were the obvious.
"The.. 'Happy.. Tunafish Dance'." Zero repeated. "Why.. are you doing the 'Happy Tunafish Dance'..?" X's expression fell to a blank one of contemplation.
"Uh... I.. Oh yeah!" He beamed, proud of himself. "Today a penguin gave me a pink daisy!" Zero couldn't even begin to respond. X didn't notice and returned to his dancing of happy fishies.
"Well, it seems to me that his normal program must have broken down or something and so he went to his backup." The doctor reported. X was sitting patiently, but happily none the less, on the doctor's bench. Zero's look of concern had never left his face since he arrived here carrying X in a barrel two hours ago.
"So.. What do we do about it?" He asked. X was finally allowed to stand up and walk around a bit. The doctor scratched his head in thought.
"Well, you should have made a backup of his previous person, if you were afraid of this.. Either that or changed his original backup.. But, since we're here now, you could try and redo his whole life, program a new personality, or leave him as he is. That, or you could try and repair his other personality.. But I really don't know what caused it to crash in the first place." Zero said nothing as X's hand crept onto his shoulder.
"You still don't recognize me, Alexiel?" X asked, smile planted into his face, "That's escapism borne of guilt, my dear sister." He immediately leapt into a fit of handstands.
"Well, leaving him like this is out of the question." Zero sighed. "We can't make him redo all of his experiences up to this point, because we can't make the Mavericks attack again and Sigma suddenly re-betray us.. Re- betray..? Is that even a word..?" The doctor shrugged. "Either way, no one alive knows how to program X.." Zero glanced at his partner. At this point, he was gleefully stuck in a corner of the ceiling, having used some magnets. "I guess we'll have to look for a way to fix his program.."
"Look, Zero!" X exclaimed, holding a magazine to his face, "George Bush looks like a monkey!"
------------------------------------ Upon their return to the HQ, Zero immediately began his research in X programming. Unfortunately, X struggled too much and kept on trying to play Twister whenever Zero wanted to examine him, so he soon gave up. But one morning soon after this, opportunity knocked on his door. Having been woken up, Zero relunctantly answered.
"Yes..?" He wearily asked. Two reploids stood on the other side.
"Hello, Mr. Zero! The HQ looked us up after hearing about your problems with X. Allow me to introduce myself; I'm Opportunity and this is my partner, Annatar. We're the proud makers of Time Machines Inc. and wanted to know if you were interested in our help." Silence.
"Annatar..? Wasn't that Sauron's alias when he went to Gwaith-i-Mirdain and worked with the Eregion elves to forge the Rings of Power..?" Zero asked, half-awake. Opportunity and Annatar looked at one another.
"Er.." Opportunity continued, "Well, we were hoping that we could lend our help by letting you borrow a time machine of ours.. without cost, but that will be because we were hoping you could use our prototype-"
"PROTOMAN!!" X suddenly shouted from inside Zero's room. This lead X into fits of playing "pretend armies" against invisable Mavericks.
"Uh.. as I was saying, a prototype, so this way, you could test our newest product, and we could help you go to X's creator to fix him." Zero perked up.
"I-I beg your pardon?"
"Well, you see, we heard you were having trouble programming X back to his normal self, so Annatar and I thought, 'hey, why not go to his creator? He'd know what to do!' The only problem is, well, he's dead. So, we're willing to lend you our prototype time machine to find him."
"You're kidding!" Zero exclaimed, hope finally returning to his perspective. "I can't believe it! This is great! This is- Wait a minute!"
"What is it?"
"If you guys produce time machines, then how come I've never heard of them? And how come someone hasn't already gone back and changed the past; like destroying Sigma before he created that one virus?? Or killing that Hitler jerk? Or preventing 9/11 or George Bush getting presidency..?" Annatar looked nervously to Opportunity who seemed to remain calm.
"Well, the problem is that if time travel is possible, (which it is thanks to Time Machines Inc.,) it's already been done."
"Pardon?"
"If someone went and killed Hitler back in time, then he's already dead! Someone would have already been there and killed him, so whatever it is we have now already happened, and if someone changed it, they already did." Silence once again, save for the anomonopias that X was producing from his imaginary tanks. "Look, let's not talk about the space-time continuum. Would you like our help in this matter?" Zero took one more look at X (who, at this point, was speaking for each soldier in his "army" of fluffy pink penguins).
"The battle has just only begun! Blarg!! Ahoy, there, arr! Luke, at that speed, will we be able to pull out in time? Aiee! You got Rush Coil! May the Goddess of Time protect you.. Oh no! I will make you suffer large, alien! Oh my god, I killed Richard Nixon! Are ya ready kids? Ooooh who lives in a pineapple under the sea.." Zero returned his attention to the two outside of his door.
"Yes, I'd love your help."
------------------------------------ The single garage of Time Machines Inc. was a small one, but at least it was easy to clean up that way. In the center of the white room stood a large piece of machinery, many a part, pipe, and wire connecting it to itself.
"This dashboard will let you choose the time," Annatar explained, "the date, year, month, ect., and this watch will send you back to this time."
"Why do I need a watch to come back?" Zero asked.
"Well, in case of emergency. And besides, this time machine wasn't made in that time, so we're not sure if it would work there. So just press this button to return to this time."
"Alright.." Zero looked up to the hunk of metal that would hopefully send him back a few centuries. X quietly bounced in place. "How would I exist though..? I wasn't made in that time.. and nither was this watch." Annatar looked around nervously.
"Well.. uh, isn't X worth the risk?" Zero just pretended he never asked.
"Has this.. ever been tested before..?"
"We tried it on a monkey, I think." Opportunity answered.
"That wasn't a monkey, Opportunity, that was George Bush jr.!" Annatar corrected.
"Oh, well, either way, he didn't come back and it was no big loss." Zero hesitantly pressed in the wanted dates, that sentence in mind. "Well, thank you for using our prototype! Annatar and I have some paperwork to get to, so I'll leave you two to your work. Happy travelling!" The door shut with a metallic 'clang!"
"So what are we doing tomorrow night?" X asked. Zero didn't respond, wondering whether or not to continue this. "Well, I think that this plan will certainly bring enough cheese for Twoson to feed those oranges for weeks!" X continued. 'Yeah, let's do this' Zero concluded.
"X, wait for me here, ok?" said Zero. The blank smile on X's face was none too reassuring. Regardless, Zero shut his eyes and walked through the threshold that would supposedly send him centuries back..
..To open his eyes and find himself back in the time of the original Megaman.
All he could see was a bright light, and in the light was a shape of an older man. The room was too bright.. He feebly held up his hand to the light to shield his eyes, but it barely made a difference. "Who are you..?" He croaked, his throat dry.
"You are my creation, my masterpiece!" The silhouetted man rambled randomly. "I created you, you are nothing less of perfect.. Mwa ha ha haa!" That was no ordinary laugh. It was the coined laugh of an evil badguy. "There is no way you can fail against.. HIM.. I created you to avenge me; he is my enemy and you are much more powerful than he will ever become. Now go! Find him and destroy him!!"
"The heck are you talking about?!" He mumbled to the random figure. The light was too bright.. He was starting to feel sick. What was going on??
Suddenly the bright light vanished, and images flashed and flew by; of people- no, reploids, dead. Dying. Blood was everywhere, covering the floor and walls. Did he do this..? He looked to his hands.. red and bloodstained.
Zero suddenly awoke to a start. After realizing that he was just back in his room, back near the M.H. HQ, he regained composure and his breath, concentrating on what his dream meant. It was very confusing, especially the way how the author didn't let the audience know who "he"(Zero) was until he woke up.
"Hey! Rosiel-sama!" Zero yelled to the computer screen. Rosiel, the author currently writing this, paused and sighed.
"Yes..?" Rosiel slinked away from the screen a bit, a little guilty and worried of what was going to happen next. Zero refused to let sympathy get in his way.
"Double-check your fics once in a while! That dream sequence was WAY too confusing!" Rosiel hung his head and whimpered.
"I was going for voice..." Zero sighed.
"Well, make sure your 'voice' can at least be followed by the audience." Rosiel looked around.
"We have one?"
"Well, apparently, if someone's acknowledging this. Now get back to work; we have to get the actual plot going now." Rosiel cocked his head to the side.
"Wait a minute, I'M the author, I'M supposed to say who does what when.." The blade of Zero's sabre made Rosiel change his mind. "Er, as I was saying, I should get back to writing this.."
Zero walked into the main room of the head quarters, it being just a door away. Iris suddenly ran up to him
"Zero-sama!" she pleaded, "My brother won't listen to me- you have to stop him from attacking the humans!"
"Err.." Zero brilliantly started, looking around nervously, "The Mavericks didn't even attack.. Wait a minute- didn't you die?" Iris' eyes widened, caught in another brilliant hole in the plot.
"Um.. Am I supposed to be dead..? I think I'll go and check the script.." With that, she left the room and a sigh of relief filled the room from all who were still in it.
"Anyway." Zero proclaimed. "Alright, people, let's get back to work.." He hesitated first on the thought of "what work?" Then another thought came to mind: Where was X? "Anyone seen X?" He asked.. uh.. his.. fellow coworkers..?
"No."
"Nope!"
"Wasn't he in the lunch room getting coffee?"
"Haven't seen him." With only one response giving him a vague idea, Zero left towards the lunch room. 'Why do robots even NEED lunch..?' he wondered. Once inside, his foot landed with a "SPLRT!"
" 'Splrt'..?" Zero asked himself, looking down into what he stepped into. The carpet was soaked with coffee and strawberry icecream. The countertops were littered with cheesecake crumbs. Non-dairy creamer powder was still in the air and on whatever was not yet claimed by an edible substance. With wide-eyes did the red reploid slowly leave the room. Still looking downwards, he saw coffee-footprints. They were too big to be his own or any of the coworkers'.. It had to have been X. 'He must have short circuited or something' he reassured himself. He followed the prints, leading him through the copy room to the storage room to the snow-cone machine room (?) and finally to workers' lounge where he was greeted by a bag full of flour in the face.
"HI ZERO!!" X's voice boomed happily. "Wanna join me for a dance? I'm gonna dance the Happy Tunafish Dance!" Zero waited for the flour to settle before he assesed the situation. X was dancing atop one of the tables wearing a bunch of grapes on his head and one of his feet in a bucked atained from who knows where. "C'mon, Zero, join me!"
"X...?" Zero started, not really able to focus due to shock, "What are you doing...?"
"The Happy Tunafish Dance!" X stated, as though it were the obvious.
"The.. 'Happy.. Tunafish Dance'." Zero repeated. "Why.. are you doing the 'Happy Tunafish Dance'..?" X's expression fell to a blank one of contemplation.
"Uh... I.. Oh yeah!" He beamed, proud of himself. "Today a penguin gave me a pink daisy!" Zero couldn't even begin to respond. X didn't notice and returned to his dancing of happy fishies.
"Well, it seems to me that his normal program must have broken down or something and so he went to his backup." The doctor reported. X was sitting patiently, but happily none the less, on the doctor's bench. Zero's look of concern had never left his face since he arrived here carrying X in a barrel two hours ago.
"So.. What do we do about it?" He asked. X was finally allowed to stand up and walk around a bit. The doctor scratched his head in thought.
"Well, you should have made a backup of his previous person, if you were afraid of this.. Either that or changed his original backup.. But, since we're here now, you could try and redo his whole life, program a new personality, or leave him as he is. That, or you could try and repair his other personality.. But I really don't know what caused it to crash in the first place." Zero said nothing as X's hand crept onto his shoulder.
"You still don't recognize me, Alexiel?" X asked, smile planted into his face, "That's escapism borne of guilt, my dear sister." He immediately leapt into a fit of handstands.
"Well, leaving him like this is out of the question." Zero sighed. "We can't make him redo all of his experiences up to this point, because we can't make the Mavericks attack again and Sigma suddenly re-betray us.. Re- betray..? Is that even a word..?" The doctor shrugged. "Either way, no one alive knows how to program X.." Zero glanced at his partner. At this point, he was gleefully stuck in a corner of the ceiling, having used some magnets. "I guess we'll have to look for a way to fix his program.."
"Look, Zero!" X exclaimed, holding a magazine to his face, "George Bush looks like a monkey!"
------------------------------------ Upon their return to the HQ, Zero immediately began his research in X programming. Unfortunately, X struggled too much and kept on trying to play Twister whenever Zero wanted to examine him, so he soon gave up. But one morning soon after this, opportunity knocked on his door. Having been woken up, Zero relunctantly answered.
"Yes..?" He wearily asked. Two reploids stood on the other side.
"Hello, Mr. Zero! The HQ looked us up after hearing about your problems with X. Allow me to introduce myself; I'm Opportunity and this is my partner, Annatar. We're the proud makers of Time Machines Inc. and wanted to know if you were interested in our help." Silence.
"Annatar..? Wasn't that Sauron's alias when he went to Gwaith-i-Mirdain and worked with the Eregion elves to forge the Rings of Power..?" Zero asked, half-awake. Opportunity and Annatar looked at one another.
"Er.." Opportunity continued, "Well, we were hoping that we could lend our help by letting you borrow a time machine of ours.. without cost, but that will be because we were hoping you could use our prototype-"
"PROTOMAN!!" X suddenly shouted from inside Zero's room. This lead X into fits of playing "pretend armies" against invisable Mavericks.
"Uh.. as I was saying, a prototype, so this way, you could test our newest product, and we could help you go to X's creator to fix him." Zero perked up.
"I-I beg your pardon?"
"Well, you see, we heard you were having trouble programming X back to his normal self, so Annatar and I thought, 'hey, why not go to his creator? He'd know what to do!' The only problem is, well, he's dead. So, we're willing to lend you our prototype time machine to find him."
"You're kidding!" Zero exclaimed, hope finally returning to his perspective. "I can't believe it! This is great! This is- Wait a minute!"
"What is it?"
"If you guys produce time machines, then how come I've never heard of them? And how come someone hasn't already gone back and changed the past; like destroying Sigma before he created that one virus?? Or killing that Hitler jerk? Or preventing 9/11 or George Bush getting presidency..?" Annatar looked nervously to Opportunity who seemed to remain calm.
"Well, the problem is that if time travel is possible, (which it is thanks to Time Machines Inc.,) it's already been done."
"Pardon?"
"If someone went and killed Hitler back in time, then he's already dead! Someone would have already been there and killed him, so whatever it is we have now already happened, and if someone changed it, they already did." Silence once again, save for the anomonopias that X was producing from his imaginary tanks. "Look, let's not talk about the space-time continuum. Would you like our help in this matter?" Zero took one more look at X (who, at this point, was speaking for each soldier in his "army" of fluffy pink penguins).
"The battle has just only begun! Blarg!! Ahoy, there, arr! Luke, at that speed, will we be able to pull out in time? Aiee! You got Rush Coil! May the Goddess of Time protect you.. Oh no! I will make you suffer large, alien! Oh my god, I killed Richard Nixon! Are ya ready kids? Ooooh who lives in a pineapple under the sea.." Zero returned his attention to the two outside of his door.
"Yes, I'd love your help."
------------------------------------ The single garage of Time Machines Inc. was a small one, but at least it was easy to clean up that way. In the center of the white room stood a large piece of machinery, many a part, pipe, and wire connecting it to itself.
"This dashboard will let you choose the time," Annatar explained, "the date, year, month, ect., and this watch will send you back to this time."
"Why do I need a watch to come back?" Zero asked.
"Well, in case of emergency. And besides, this time machine wasn't made in that time, so we're not sure if it would work there. So just press this button to return to this time."
"Alright.." Zero looked up to the hunk of metal that would hopefully send him back a few centuries. X quietly bounced in place. "How would I exist though..? I wasn't made in that time.. and nither was this watch." Annatar looked around nervously.
"Well.. uh, isn't X worth the risk?" Zero just pretended he never asked.
"Has this.. ever been tested before..?"
"We tried it on a monkey, I think." Opportunity answered.
"That wasn't a monkey, Opportunity, that was George Bush jr.!" Annatar corrected.
"Oh, well, either way, he didn't come back and it was no big loss." Zero hesitantly pressed in the wanted dates, that sentence in mind. "Well, thank you for using our prototype! Annatar and I have some paperwork to get to, so I'll leave you two to your work. Happy travelling!" The door shut with a metallic 'clang!"
"So what are we doing tomorrow night?" X asked. Zero didn't respond, wondering whether or not to continue this. "Well, I think that this plan will certainly bring enough cheese for Twoson to feed those oranges for weeks!" X continued. 'Yeah, let's do this' Zero concluded.
"X, wait for me here, ok?" said Zero. The blank smile on X's face was none too reassuring. Regardless, Zero shut his eyes and walked through the threshold that would supposedly send him centuries back..
..To open his eyes and find himself back in the time of the original Megaman.