Chapter 1: The Lighter Side Of Life
"When it comes to wars, some people suppose we should consider ourselves lucky. In the last two centuries, the 'good guys' never bit the big one. Wars are terrible, yes. But at the end of it all, the people got to go home and return to their lives for the most part..." -Dr. James Cain, Reploids And Their Place In Society
"Let's see here... two bills and a junk for the Lees..." The postman muttered as he stuffed the mail into the box in front of the house, then walked further down the road. The next house wasn't for a ways ahead, so he had plenty of time to sort out what they would be getting today. "All right... one bill, three junk, a comic for Blues..." He raised an eyebrow at the graphic nature of the cover, but didn't comment further. "A newsletter for the Doc, a... summons for jury duty for Roll?" He laughed. "SOMEBODY's sure got the wrong number... and a letter from a 'Colonel Dex,' also for the doc. Pretty good haul, all things considered." Humming a little tune to himself, he made his way to the front of a lone house a good ways out from the city. As he approached the mailbox, a startled oath came from behind a bush.
"No! Mr. Kazansky, don't-!" Too late; the postman had already opened the mailbox, and received a blast of snow from it, straight in the face. Sputtering, he wiped it off and glared at the source of the late warning; a black-haired boy who looked to be about thirteen or fourteen, wearing a thick red coat and grey snow pants, along with a pair of oversized sunglasses.
"Cute trick, Blues. Let me guess; some kind of snow war?" The boy sheepishly looked down.
"Yeah, pretty much... it wasn't meant to hit you, though. Sorry, Mr. Kazansky." Although the boy looked perfectly human, Kazansky knew that Blues was in fact a robot, the first of the "Advanced Robot Masters" to be built, and while he didn't actually possess complete free will, he was damn close enough that most people, including Kazansky, couldn't tell the difference. Although he couldn't see them, he knew that Blues' younger but equally advanced robotic siblings, Rock and Roll, were undoubtably hiding around somewhere.
"Well, here's the mail. Don't let it get soaked, okay? I doubt Dr. Light would be amused." Blues nodded and whistled a short melody.
"Don't worry. Here, gimme-YOW!" A heavy snowball approximately the size of a bowling ball exploded against the back of his head, courtesy of a boy who looked for all the world like a slightly younger version of Blues, dressed in blue. Laughing, Rock ran behind a hill.
"Oh, so that's how you wanna play, huh?" Blues growled angrily. Stuffing the mail into its box, he gave chase, scooping snowballs as he ran. Kazansky shook his head as he watched a third form make its appearance. Roll, their sister, climbed to the top of the hill and began creating an abnormally large ball of snow. Although he couldn't see what was going on behind the hill, Kazansky could tell by the noise that the brothers were too busy dealing with each other to notice Roll. With an evil grin, she kicked the huge snowball down the hill towards them. Kazansky shook his head as he heard the oaths and crashes caused by this latest attack.
"I'd better get out of here before these kids kill somebody... namely, me!" Turning, he walked down the road away from the Light residence. Back at the snow fight, the three siblings had moved in close together for a brutal firefight. Dodging, weaving and counterattacking each other, the Light children moved underneath a large, spreading snow-laden tree.
"Too bad your trap was tripped, big bro!" Rock laughed. Blues frowned and nailed him with an iceball.
"Ain't going to stop me from winning this, brother mine!"
"Big words from two boys who just got NAILED less than a minute ago!" Roll taunted. "And you two are supposed to be the fighters in the family! Why don't you just make it easy and-ARGH!" Suddenly, without warning, the tree above them released its frigid cargo. Huge sheets of snow fell upon all three of the Lights, burying them completely underneath its mass. For a short time, there was silent peace and serenity in the yard. Then, it was spoiled by Rock bursting out of the new snowdrift like a leaping whale, making sounds akin to one as well.
"Urgh... good thing we don't need to breathe." The robot muttered. A moment later, Roll came out next to him.
"I'll assume that wasn't your trap?" She asked. Rock shook his head. "Didn't think so. Stupid Blues... he's going to be in for it when he gets up here." They both looked at the place their brother had been when the snow fell, but nothing came up. Several moments passed, and Rock frowned.
"He's not coming up... do you think something happened to him?"
"I don't know..." Roll bit her lip. "That shouldn't have hurt him in any way... he's tough..."
"Oh, wait. There he is." Rock walked down from the pile, followed by his sister, and pointed at the tunnel through it. Unlike them, Blues had dug his way out through the side, and was now cheekily on his back, making a snow angel. He smiled and whistled as they stood over him.
"Hey, you two. Nice one. That was undoubtably the best move in the game. In fact, I think it was so good, I'm willing to concede the whole thing to whichever one of you was behind it." The two younger Light siblings blinked and looked at each other. Roll was first to speak.
"That... wasn't yours?"
"Nope!" Blues shrugged.
"Well, it wasn't ours..." Rock muttered. "Then, who...?" As one, they turned to look up at the tree. Perched on a branch was a small, brown robot resembling a suitcase with a face and feet. They all stared. "EDDIE?!" Eddie beeped. After a moment of stunned silence, Blues began howling with laughter.
"HAHAHA! Well, well, looks like we have a surprise participant! I hereby declare Eddie the winner of this game!"
"This isn't a laughing matter, bro." Roll frowned. Eddie was the oldest member of the Light family aside from Dr. Light himself, created for him and Dr. Wily back in the days of the Second Rainbow as a robotic case for their papers. "Eddie's nice enough, but he's still just a robot. Oh, I'll admit he's probably more advanced than most normal robots, but still, he's far below even the average Robot Master. And his programming contains absolutely NOTHING about snow wars. He shouldn't even be able to understand the concept of what we're doing, let alone spontaneously decide to take part in it. Something is wrong here... wrong and wierd."
"Aaah, it's okay." Rock shrugged. "Let's go in and ask dad; he'll probably be able to figure it out. It was about time to go in, anyways; I'm going to suffer hypothermia if I stay out here much longer."
"We're robots, doofus." Roll reminded him as Eddie hopped down and the four of them started to walk back to the house. "We can't GET hypothermia."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." Blues yawned. "Doesn't mean we can't feel temperatures. You take things too seriously sometimes, Roll."
"SOMEBODY has to." She snapped back. The two Light brothers looked at each other, smiled and shrugged, feeling too happy to bother getting into an argument with their sister.
Life was good for the Lights.
"Hmm... they should be arriving here soon." Dr. Thomas Light mused, looking at his watch. Ten to noon. Yawning, the robotocist leaned back in the chair he was sitting in at his favroite restaurant. The somewhat portly robotocist's hair and beard were both completely white, leaving only his eyebrows their natural dark brown, even though he was only in his early sixties. A legacy of stress from the Third World War, he would tell anybody who asked. Right now, he was waiting on a few friends; two from far, far out of town and one considerably closer.
"Hey, Tom! Tom Light!" A voice called him from the entrance of the restaurant. Dr. Light looked over to see a black-haired man with a neat mustache waving cheerily at him. He was shortly followed in by an older man with hair and beard as white as Dr. Light's, wearing a pair of sunglasses. The first was Dr. Trent Corbun, former head of the now-defunct Sennet Robotics, and the second was "Mr. X," aka Olivier Xanthos, a billionaire. Both were friends of Dr. Light, and in fact he had been expecting them; they had arrived in Japan only recently. The two men crossed and sat down at his table, shaking his hand.
"It is good to see you again, Tom." Mr. X smiled. "How have you been these past three years?"
"Good as possible, all things considered. The kids have been taking it easy... no more... Robot Rebellions. Well. You know." He fell silent for a moment. "Hmm... I wonder where Darwin is..."
"He's over there." Dr. Corbun looked over at the door, where a portly, balding man nodded perfunctorily to the doorman and walked over to the table. Darwin Vinkus was Japan's representative on the council of the United Nations, and while not exactly Dr. Light's-or anybody else's-favorite person, he saw the doctor and his family regularly due to their fame.
"Tom... Trent... X." He shook each of their hands. "Looks like we're all here." The four men around the table were the remnants of the "Gamma Team," the heads of the project to create the ultimate robotic peacekeeper three years ago. Dr. Light and Dr. Wily had been the true geniuses behind Gamma, but Vinkus, Corbun and X, along with the politician Donald Richolds and the psychologist Dr. Cedric Froid, had served various important roles in the completion of the project, from supplying funding and labor to managing PR and making sure it fit the UN's orders. Wily, Richolds and Froid, however, had all died in the chaotic disaster at the end of the Third Robot Rebellion, and Gamma was also destroyed by Mega Man, hopefully never to be rebuilt.
"Vinky, old buddy! How you been doing?" Dr. Corbun laughed. "Still on the UN? Keeping all those other maniacs from blowing each other up?"
"The council's doing just fine, Trent, thank you for asking." Vinkus growled. The british robotocist just smiled; needling Vinkus was one of his favorite pastimes whenever they met.
"Gentlemen, please. This is supposed to be a friendly reunion." Mr. X reminded them. "Trent, what have you been doing lately?"
"Cleanup duty, mostly." Dr. Corbun admitted. "The Third Robot Rebellion did more than bankrupt Sennet; it really made a huge tangle out of what was left, with a capital SNAFU. Employee records were an absolute disaster, and as the president at the time of its bankruptcy, I have to sort it all out. Not particularly fun; not at all. I'm almost done, though; once I am, US Robotics was making some motions that looked like they wanted to hire me for a nice position. The only account still left to unravel besides my own is Sergei Cossack's."
"Cossack?" Vinkus frowned. "Wait... I thought he resigned long before that Rebellion?"
"Oh, he did, he did." Dr. Corbun assured him. "He resigned in protest because we made warbots... he was a genius, but he just couldn't see certain things. Had a hard time understanding the real world sometimes. Anyways, just because he resigned earlier doesn't mean his accounts with us weren't majorly bleeped up when the Rebellion hit. Admittedly, it's not all that much; by all reason, it SHOULD have been one of the easiest for me to take care of."
"Should have?" Dr. Light frowned. Dr. Corbun rolled his eyes.
"Yeah. Should have. Instead, though, Murphy's Law hit me right between the eyes. I haven't been able to get a hold of Cossack at all; ever since he quit, he's been completely quiet to the public eye, and he hasn't returned any of my calls. Quite frankly, it's irritating as hell."
"Excuse me." Mr. X politely spoke up. "Who is this Dr. Cossack? I seem to be the only one here who does not know of him."
"Dr. Sergei Cossack..." Vinkus thought for a moment. "Well, he's a Russian robotocist of great skill, there's no doubt about that. Something must run in the family, I suppose; his father, Yuri Cossack, was in the Second Rainbow. He was a medical doctor... worked to create cures for all those nasty little diseases that sprung up from biological warfare. BW wasn't as showy as nuclear weapons, but it killed almost as many people; Yuri was instrumental in putting a stop to that. When Sergei grew up, he rose quickly in the robotics field... he was the leading robotocist of Sennet Robotics for what... five years, Trent?"
"Approximately." Dr. Corbun nodded.
"Anyways, shortly before the First Robot Rebellion, Dr. Cossack resigned." Vinkus continued. "It was in protest over Sennet's construction of warbots, like Trent said earlier. He became a recluse; refurbished an old hereditary family castle that was built in the fifteenth century and disappeared-just shut out the world and forgot everything. Lived the hermit life. Ever since then, the only contact he's had with the outside world has been large quantities of components shipped to the castle. That would tend to suggest that he's been working on some secret superadvanced project all this time, but so far, nothing's shown of it."
"It's a shame, really." Dr. Light sighed. "Even when Sergei was young, he had a great deal of potential... Yuri was no robotocist, not by a long shot, but he knew that his son could become even greater than himself... he was always so proud. I wish he had lived longer... perhaps if he had, Sergei would have shown all his potential instead of hiding it away like this."
"He's a grown man now, Tom." Dr. Corbun reminded him. "Dr. Cossack may be a lot younger than you, but he still has to make his own decisions on how to live his life. You probably haven't even seen him for over a decade. I think he even has his own daughter now or something."
"Point, point." Dr. Light conceded. "I've got my hands full keeping my three kids in line anyways. The other day, Blues put a jalapeno in my coffee. I felt like I would have to drink bleach or something in order to get the taste out. Absolutely disgusting, let me assure you."
"Jalapeno coffee...?" Vinkus made a disgusted face. "Your robots have a decidedly questionable sense of humor, Tom. That sounds almost as bad as Trent's 'idea' about wasabi on a scone three years ago; the idea of THAT horrid concoction still gives me nightmares." He shuddered.
"After being raised by Tom here and old Al Wily, who can blame 'em?" Dr. Corbun cracked. "Still, they've got nothing on Sennet's old Spinstrike models. Hyperactivity is not a good trait in a Robot Master with a glitched personality, especially at an Energen crystal mine."
"I'll bet..." Mr. X looked at his menu. "I think I'll be getting thie fish and chips... are we all ready to order now?"
"Hey, dad!" Roll yelled. "Where are you? We need to talk with you about Eddie!" She looked in the living room, kitchen, and dining room; no Dr. Light. "Where is he?" She glared at Blues, who was leaning against the wall with an amused look on his face. "Well? Aren't you going to help look?"
"Why? He's not here." Blues shrugged. "He went out... Dr. Corbun and Mr. X are in town, and he's going to meet them and Vinkus for lunch."
"NOW he tells me this." Roll rolled her eyes heavenward. "Why, oh why was I graced with such an irritating older brother?"
"Your sparkling personality?" Rock suggested. "Corbun and X are good guys... hopefully we'll get to say hi while they're in town. Vinkus, though..."
"What about Vinkus?" Roll asked. Rock frowned.
"I don't know... nothing that obvious. It's just... the way he looks at us, acts around us... something about it creeps me out."
"I know what you mean, actually." His sister shuddered. "It's like... like he doesn't care a bit about our lives, as if they have no relevance or value whatsoever... it's freaky, is what it is."
"Think about it." Blues' smile had vanished. "Vinkus was part of the anti-robotics half of the Second Rainbow... the half that opposed our very existence, along with the rest of the Robot Masters. They feared that robotics would advance too much... that we would supplant them, replace humanity."
"That's bullshit." Roll snorted. "The three of us are at the top of the order, as smart as they come. And even we don't have complete full will, even discounting the Laws of Robotics."
"Don't be so sure." Rock said very quietly. "Remember Doc Man?" All three of them flinched as they recalled the insane, mass-murdering lunatic who had started the Third Robot Rebellion and slaughtered hundreds for the sole purpose of personal revenge on Rock and Dr. Wily. "He was an Advanced Robot Master like us... but he had no restrictions, no limitations. And it cost him his sanity... remember how many people he killed? He would have done that again and again if I hadn't killed him instead."
"But... he wasn't working right." Roll protested. "Right from the start, Doc Man was built by an insane man. And after you beat him in the First Rebellion and Wily abandoned him, his brain snapped. He was a fluke... a glitch. That wasn't supposed to happen... it wasn't right..."
"So?" Blues muttered. "So he went insane because of events that happened in his life. If something like that happened to you, or to Rock, or me, can you be one-hundred-percent sure that we wouldn't go off the deep end too? There's still a lot about our mental workings that dad doesn't fully understand, even though he created us. And if he doesn't know, then who does?"
"There's still the three laws." Roll stubbornly countered. "We know that Wily installed much different versions into his robots, and in his insanity, they were probably loosened on Doc Man. No matter what else happens, I can't see us breaking the first law... I just can't."
"You're wrong about the laws, Roll." Rock whispered. "All of us have broken the Third Law... and I know I've broken the Second Law more than once. Against the first Wilymachine, when I overrode the safeties on my arm cannons and fired both at once... and against Gamma, when I forced all my weapons energy into the Top Spin in one last suicide strike. Both times, I nearly died."
"Well, Roll does have one point. That still leaves the First Law." Blues looked at his brother. "Doesn't it?" Rock was silent. "...Doesn't it, Rock?"
"I..." He struggled. "Blues, I don't know if you'll understand this, but... Rock is bound by the First Law of Robotics... a robot must not harm a human being, or through inaction, allow harm to come to one. He cannot violate that, it's bound to Rock's core programming, like you two. Rock must obey the First Law... but..."
"But what?" Roll whispered. Rock took a deep breath and looked at her.
"But I don't know if Mega Man does." Roll reeled as if she had been slapped. Rock continued without pausing, as if afraid that he wouldn't be able to keep going if he stopped for even an instant. "More and more, as the Rebellions continued, I felt my mindset dividing... changing. Like I was two different people on and off the battlefield. It wasn't a problem, really... that is, until the end of the Third Robot Rebellion."
"That night... now I remember..." Roll nodded. Blues raised an eyebrow.
"Forgive the returnee to the family... what night?"
"Yeah, you weren't there..." Roll realized. "It was the night you and Rock assaulted Skull Fortress III... but before that. That terrible time when we realized that Wily had been faking after all... that even though he wasn't behind the Rebellion, he was still the madman who had started the other two, and that he had Gamma... it hit Rock the hardest." Rock nodded in silent agreement, face chalk-white, as she continued. "He was the most skeptical, you see... he never really believed Wily until Doc Man revealed himself. And when he arrived back from his battle with Doc Man to find... THAT... he... well, he lost it, to put it mildly..."
"Mega Man lost it." Rock corrected her. "Not Rock... it was like nothing mattered anymore... for those few minutes between when they told me what had happened, and when I teleported off to attack... it was like I wasn't even slightly myself. All that I knew... was that Wily had to be stopped. And Blues... I DIDN'T CARE HOW." He looked at his brother. "I didn't care, Blues! If I had gone up against Wily with that same mindset.... I might have... have..." He lowered his head again. "I should be dead now. For what I considered... I should have gone into mind freeze. But I didn't."
"That's because you didn't actually DO it." Blues informed his brother. "Look, Rock. The three of us are very complicated works, I'll give you that. We may be as close to humans as robots can get. But what you gotta realize is there are downsides to that as well. A lot of what we experience... what we remember... isn't actually real. You may THINK you would have violated the First Law... but thinking something and actually doing it are two seperate things. You're really the most spiritually advanced of us all... in a highly-charged state of emotion, it seems you can think about violating the First Law without raising alarms. But don't think you could actually do it. Even when Gamma had gone critical, you pulled Wily out of the cockpit to try and save him. Even though that failed... you still did everything you could to preserve a human life... your worst enemy's life. You're up against the boundary... but that boundary remains as solid as ever. You're not a threat to humanity, little brother... and I'm confident that you will never have to worry about that."
"Yeah... I guess so." Rock smiled weakly. "Geez, Blues... where did you get all that? You sounded like a psychologist."
"Eh, I talked with Doc Froid a few times in my youth." Blues shrugged. "He taught me a few things about the human psyche, and it seems it applies here as well." He smiled reassuringly. "Something else he taught me is that it's not good to dwell on these gloomy discussions. Let's get our minds off of this... how do some video games sounds to you two? Maybe a racer?"
"Sounds good." Roll grinned evilly. "Of course, you both know I'll kick your butts, right?"
"Excuse me?" Rock laughed. "You? I don't THINK so. I'm going to win this so easily, you won't believe it!" Blues blew a raspberry.
"Neither of you has a chance against the old man. I've got experience on my side, so get ready to eat dirt!" Happily arguing, the three Light children walked into the living room to play. Eddie watched them for a second, forgotten for the moment. He blinked once or twice, then walked upstairs to pursue his own devices.
In northern Russia, it was snowing; thick, deep snow that would have made a seldom-traveled road in the wilderness completely inaccessible years ago. Now, though, mack trucks came with attachable plows for this kind of situation. One such truck was currently making its way across one of those roads.
"Hey, Johnny." The man in the shotgun seat turned to the driver. "You reckon we're almost there?"
"Looks like it, Mitch." Johnny grunted. "About time, too... why does the doc have to live so freakin' far out here, huh?"
"This is your first time makin' a delivery to Cossack, huh?" Mitch smiled. "I'll tell you why; the doc lives in a freakin' castle. Ancestral or somethin' like that. I dunno why he does it myself, but hey, you know the drill with these eccentrics. Just stay quiet, make the delivery and collect the pay."
"Yeah, I suppose you're right." Johnny nodded. "A castle, huh? Boy, that'll be somethin' to see, I'll bet. He lives there all by himself?" Mitch nodded.
"Pretty much. He's got his 'bots, of course, but no Robot Masters as far as anybody knows. Still, they pretty much run the show; they handled all the shipments I've taken there. I've never actually seen doc Cossack himself." Johnny shuddered slightly.
"Man... hope this is a quick transfer, then. Don't tell anybody, but those things really kinda give me the creeps."
"Robots?" Mitch raised an eyebrow. His friend nodded.
"Yeah... I dunno what it is, really. Just somethin' about 'em... how they're as smart, or smarter than us... but they don't got minds of their own, they're just doin' what they're programmed to. And how powerful some of them are... I just don't like it."
"Well, like you said, they don't got minds of their own." Mitch reminded him. "So what's the big problem?"
"You stupid or somethin', Mitch?" The driver stared at him. "The Robot Rebellions, man! That crazy ol' Doctor Wily! Robot Masters on the rampage! Ring any bells?"
"Oh yeah yeah, right right."
"Robot Masters in particular creep me out..." Johnny continued talking as he drove on. "I mean, they look almost human... but you know they're not. I saw some of the things that happened in those Rebellions... all those robots killin', slaughterin', all without even a bit of hesitation or guilt... nothin' even remotely human in their eyes. Just doin' what the programmin'... the programmin' altered by Wily... tells 'em to do. Even the 'good' ones... just lookin' at 'em, at any of 'em, in the eyes... you can see they would do the same thing if their programmin' was changed too. Somethin'... somethin' just ain't right about the whole thing." Mitch frowned.
"Well, they ain't all like that. What about that one guy... Mega Man, was it? Yeah, him! He was a pretty good guy, wasn't he?"
"Mega Man..." Johnny mumbled. "I really dunno, Mitch. Mega Man and his two. 'siblings'... Roll and Blues... aren't they smarter than other Robot Masters? Almost humanlike or somethin'?"
"That's what I've heard." Mitch agreed. Johnny's scowl deepened as the truck came near Cossack's Citadel.
"Now, look Mitch. Maybe they can make a copy of a human's mind pretty well; that I can accept. But makin' a human soul just like that... no, I don't think so. What if one of THOSE three just 'decided for itself' that it should attack humanity or something?"
"Naw, Johnny. Mega Man wouldn't do that." Mitch argued. "He went out to fight those Rebellions... riskin' his own life. Nobody told him to do it... he decided to do it by himself. Somebody who'd decide to do that... not once, but three times... no, he wouldn't do that."
"I hope you're right, Mitch... I really do hope you're right." Johnny pulled the truck to a slow crawl. "I think we're there now... yeah, there's the sign. Freakin' snow... I can't see much else." And then, as if the complaint had been a signal, the cold weather halted its fall, clearing the sky for the trucker to get a clear look at the home of the man named Dr. Sergei Cossack. "Whoa..."
"Hey, I told you it was a freakin' castle." Mitch told him smugly. Johnny just shook his head.
"I know... but still... whoa." Ahead of the truck, a gigantic building loomed like some carved mountain. Spiraling towers were visible over the thick square outer wall, connected by twisted bridges. At first glance, everything was made out of ancient, time-weathered stone; however, closer examination found a piece of metal armor here, a hidden laser there, evidence that beneath the surface, Cossack's castle was packed with technology.
"Front gate's straight ahead." Mitch directed his friend. Johnny nodded and drove the truck up to the castle, where a massive stone gate barred the way. "Just a sec." Mitch got out of the truck and pressed a doorbell almost humorously small compared to the gate, then returned to his seat. Several moments passed; then, with a creak, the gate slowly opened itself.
"So, we just drive in?" Johnny asked nervously. Mitch nodded.
"Yeah. Robots'll meet us a little way in."
"Whatever..." The trucker drove on in, only jumping slightly when the door closed behind him. The courtyard was completely covered; as he drove forward, a robot materialized out of the dark so suddenly it was like it had teleported. "Whoa!" The robot blinked.
"Are you carrying the load of supplies from Moscow?" Although it was humanoid in basic form, its monotone voice showed it was no Robot Master, emulating human mannerisms. The robot looked to be built after an egyptian mummy; for some strange reason, its face was permanently fixed in an idiotic grin. Johnny nodded, pulling out his ID card.
"Yeah... we got the whole shipment here."
"Excellent." The robot didn't blink. "Bring the truck this way." Turning away, the robot led them to a wall of the main fortress. A thick yellow pole rose out of the snow, extending up into the dark. The mummy-bot indicated that they should stop with the back of the truck facing the pole, then pressed a button in the wall.
"What's that?" Johnny asked his friend. Mitch frowned.
"I think it's a lift..." He was right; the pole began moving downward, and a wide yellow platform appeared, attached at the top. It wasn't until it reached their level that the two truckers realized it was already occupied.
"Error! Error! Kabatonki unit 2 should not be occupying this platform!" The mummy-bot beeped in confusion. On the lift was a massive purple hippopotamus robot. It was very heavily armored, and when it yawned, a pair of what looked like missile launchers were visible in the mouth. Johnny and Mitch watched, wide-eyed, as the lift went back up, not saying anything until it was gone.
"What was that...?"
"I dunno..." The mummybot turned to them, calm and collected once more.
"We're sorry... there will be a short delay while the lift his cleared. We apologize for the wasted time."
"No, it's okay." Mitch told him. "We're fine." Several minutes later, the lift came back down, empty. The two truckers opened up the back of their vehicle and unfolded the ramp, then pushed the boxes of supplies down it and onto the lift. The mummybot checked each one as it was unloaded. When they were done, Mitch and Johnny returned to the cab and waited for the mummybot to finish.
"Excellent. Everything seems to be here." The robot signed the form that confirmed the delivery. "Please exit the way you came in." It took the lift up with the supplies, and the truckers quickly followed its request.
"Johnny... did you see that thing back there?" Mitch asked nervously. Johnny grunted.
"I saw it."
"I ain't no robotocist, but that thing was armored like a tank!" Mitch continued. "And those things in its mouth looked an awful lot like missile launchers to me! Johnny, that thing was a warbot... but I ain't seen one like that ever before!"
"Mitch, I'm gonna give you some advice." The older man muttered darkly. "Don't mess with trouble like that if you can avoid it. I don't know what's going on in that castle, and I don't WANT to know. It's bad news, whatever Cossack's been holed up there doing, and the less we're involved, the better." He fixed the other trucker with a steely glare. "Now, listen Mitch. Back there, we just had ourselves a nice, easy delivery. We delivered the materials, and that's it. We never saw no warbot, you hear me?" Mitch gulped.
"Y... Yeah, Johnny. We just keep our mouths shut and our eyes on our own business." Johnny gave him a tight grin.
"Exactly." The two men drove off, both thinking about what they had seen back in the castle, and both hoping that whatever dark designs Dr. Cossack was up to in his castle, that they would never see any part of it again for the rest of their lives. Behind them, the castle's giant, stone gates slowly closed again, premitting no more contact with the outside world... for now.
