Why am I updating this already? Because its starting to feel as if I'm in a race with Archaon. He updates as I do, or so it seams.
I apologize now to Rose Kitsune.EXE because she might not like me for what I'm going to do. I'll explain why I did what I did at the end of the chapter.
Thanks to anybody who liked the fight. They are my hardest things to write.
Ok first off, why he didn't keep the mop head. If he kept the mop head he wouldn't have had a staff weapon, it would have been classified as a spear or a halberd. And if anyone out there is a midlevel buff like me (or just like fighting with weapons like me) they know that that is a different fighting stile that is often much too slow to be used effectively in close quarters. Spears and halberds are used for group battles or keeping an enemy out of arms reach. And with Zero's exceptional speed a spear or halberd is not the weapon to fight him with.
Nobody could guess? Rock had one true melee weapon in the game, if only used defensively. Protoman's shield.
Enough talk get reading.
A blaster from the past C7)
Rock was heading down the hallways while still in his paint-covered armor. He didn't doubt that if this hadn't been a sparing match he would be waking up on a worktable while the scientists here picked over his severed body parts.
He turned down another hallway, noting that the base seamed to be little more than halls. He checked his map again and turned into a large shower room around the bend from the gym. He walked in and turned on the water hot, letting it wash the paint from him and his armor. As he turned off the water he heard sobbing around the dividing wall from the females showers.
He walked calmly around the bend, ready to run if he saw anything compromising. He stuck his head around the corner and saw something he had expected but not so soon of viscously. The fox reploid had been striped down to her underclothes and every hair on her head and body had been ripped or shaved free.
Rock took one look at her crying in a pile of her own fur and turned and walked away. Rogue robots, dark alien powers, strange lunatics he could deal with, a crying woman was something to avoid in his experience.
He pulled up a COM link to the medical ward and told the on duty nurse who answered where to find the fox reploid. Then he activated his wide range scanner and looked for the signal he knew would be nearby. Seeing a pink dot following along behind a red one and took off down the hall at a trot, passing the medical reploids as they went to get the injured reploid.
He jumped over or dogged around and between paint covered reploids and humans in the halls as he neared the gym again. He couldn't hear the paint cannons firing anymore and assumed the paint wars where already over. The two dots on his screen where moving away and the pink dot was slowly getting closer to the red.
Rock found a single trail of purple amongst the many blue footsteps covering the floor. He picked up his pace, his feet slamming against the ground as the walls flew past. She was stalking him and Rock wagered that this wasn't the first woman to get hurt when between her and Zero.
He spun around the corner and leapt upward as Zero spun around to see who was coming. Rock wrapped his hands around Roll's ankles and pulled her down from the ceiling, tossing her against a wall and positioning himself between her and Zero. "What exactly did you plan to do to him? Where you going to pull out his hair too? How many times have you attacked someone after they have been near him? Any reason? Or are you just obsessed to the verge of madness?"
Rock heard the hum of power as Zero's saber flared to life behind him. "That's that maverick I killed a few months back."
Rock didn't take his eyes of Roll as she climbed back to her feet, rubbing the scuff in her armor where she had hit the wall. Her eyes darted past Rock to Zero and then back to her brother. "I always gave them warnings first. Little things a first, Rs burnt into their doors or messages sent to them on private COMs telling them not to go near him. I had given Kitt several warnings."
"What the hell is going on here? Rock how do you know this reploid?" Zero stepped forward and to the side so he could watch them both easily.
"Zero, meet my sister Roll. She is a robot, not a Reploid and has been awake the whole time I was asleep. It turns out she has had a rather obsessive crush on you since you decapitated her." Rock watched a blush spread over Rolls face, she had more than a few upgrades so as to be easily mistaken as a human or reploid and blushing was a simple one.
"Are you kidding? There is more than one of you running around. How many of you are there?" Zero watched them both with a look of someone hunted by a lost memory or thought. He directed his next words at her, despite not looking away from either. "What have you been doing all this time?"
Roll was blushing more than before as Zero actually addressed her, Rock answered the questions first. "There where more than a few but I don't think many is still active. She has been gathering information for me while I slept." Rock waved his hand at Zero's saber, not noticing Zero's trembling fist. "You shouldn't need that unless you turn her down for a date."
The hunted look disappeared instantly as Zero realized what else Rock had said about Roll. "I got a hundred year old stalker that had beaten up every girl who gets near me?" his saber sputtered out as he started laughing. Roll blushed until she was brighter than her armor and stuttered something before disappearing in a flash of light.
Rock waited until his laughter had subsided before stepping close to him. "I don't think you want to upset her, or me." Zero's head came up and his laughter vanished as he glared at Rock.
His hand tightened on the hilt of his saber, "what does that mean?"
Rock let his hands fold away and channeled power to collect in the barrels. "She is a little unstable after being killed a few times, it happens to some robots. You make her mad and she wont hesitate to hurt you in the best way she can think of. And know this, I am her brother and will protect her if she cant do it herself."
Zero raised the hilt of his saber and drew it out before him so its end pointed at Rock's neck. "I should be scared of either of you? If I recall, you took the first hit in our spar and the most direct hits. What could she do?"
Rock stepped forward and placed his buster against Zero's chest and let the lens of the saber touch his neck. "She is almost as good as me but she fights dirty and has more equipment." He pressed the barrel harder, feeling it rub against the dent he made in Zero's armor earlier. "And we tend to come back after we die without nearly as much trouble as reploids."
They stood there glaring at each other until X came running down the hall in his armor. "What the heck are you doing! The fights over, if you want to pummel each other some more go back and get the training gear again." somebody must have seen them and told X what they where doing.
Rock kept his glare strong while he withdrew his busters and let the energy disperse. "Just a discussion about my sister." He looked over at X after a moment, "I would guess she is your sister too."
"Whaaa?" both Zero and X hadn't expected that. X recovered fast enough, "you, I mean we have a sister? Is this past tense?"
Rock enjoyed causing a little confusion at times but even he was confused as to why he and Zero where just about to fight. He smiled as he pushed the jumble of emotions aside and let logic take over. "Present tense. You meet her a while back, after Zero cut off her head and she went critical in the halls outside of his office. You had a very nice conversation that ended with her running away."
X's face was blank for a long while as he tried to comprehend what was happening. "Your saying that she, and you can come back after going critical? And retain your memories and personalities?"
"It isn't so odd. After all I was dead for a while and came back good as new." Zero leaned back against the wall and acted as if having died was nothing.
"That was different. You never went critical and power was kept in your parts so that your neural network didn't destabilize." Rock revaluated his opinion of X, he hadn't thought X cared much for research but if he knew how to prevent a neural network destabilization he might have a chance.
"Roll and I use rather simple memory cores for our memories and personalities. They are automatically transferred before a critical meltdown or as needed. Bodies are easy to replicate although waking up in a new one isn't always nice." Both of them where watching him like he had sprouted horns and a tail while speaking with a forked tongue.
"How many times have you been killed exactly?" Rock studied X's face and doubted he should say anything, so he didn't. He turned and started up the hallway, leaving them staring at his back until he turned the corner.
He walked quickly and headed towards nowhere in particular, he simple didn't want to have to deal with X and Zero. He found himself walking down between white halls with many doors with small windows and a strange smell in the air. His wandering had brought him back to the med-ward.
He caught the sound of crying and followed it to a door where a curtain was drawn over the window. He knocked on the door lightly and the sobbing stopped and was replaced by a flurry of muffled motion. "Go away."
Rock knew this was a bad idea but he griped the doorknob and went in slowly. The room was dark but his eyes could easily see her curled up on the bed and wrapped in blankets. He saw a flash of hazel eyes filled with tears, "I said get out!"
Rock shut the door behind him and walked over to the bed and sat calmly beside the trembling ball of blankets. He sat there for a long while in silence, not entirely sure why he was here. The trembling grew worse and the sobs returned, growing louder and making the blankest shake more than before.
"I'm sorry." Rock didn't delude himself into thinking he could have stopped this but he started the chain of events that made this happen.
The blankets shifted around and he could see the eyes watching him. "Why would you be sorry? I was the one, I was…" the eyes disappeared under the blankets and the crying started yet again.
"Shaved." The blankets where tossed away as the fox reploid sat up with a bolt.
Before when she had hit on him she had had lovely red-brown hair that came down around her neck and stood up slightly where her long ears stood out from her head. A very fine layer of fuzzy fur had also covered her face and body while her tail had had long fur with surprising body. Now her skin was and irritated where Roll had shaved her and her scalp glistened with where her hair had been ripped out and was starting to heal.
She was wearing a hospital gown the covered her body but she blushed after a moment and pulled the blankets around her, hiding everything except her blushing face. "How did you know? Are the rumors already spreading about this?" she raised a hand up to her face and scrubbed at the tears running from her eyes.
Rock shook his head, "I don't think so but I called the medics for you."
Rock found himself against the far wall with his damage control systems screaming about structural damage. He looked up and saw the fox reploid standing on the bed and trembling with rage. "You called them! If you hadn't I could have snuck off until my fur grew out."
Rock looked at her fist, seeing metal bone sticking out around destroyed synthetic tissue and motor systems. He reached up and felt the huge dent mashed into his armor and his body beneath, his fingers came away with a smear of her sliver/ red blood. She had hit him with every ounce of her strength; if she were in armor he would be wakening up on a worktable back in the lab.
Rock used the wall to pull himself back up, feeling worse than when Gutsman had hit him, this reploid had more than a little power. "I meant no harm. I was trying to make amends for the one who harmed you."
Rock pulled himself up again and looked back across the room where he had been standing. She had moved faster than even Zero had, she had grabbed him and tossed him across the room, cracks spread out from where he had hit the wall. "You know who did this?" Rock was suddenly held up in the air as her hands wrapped around his neck and tried crushing his air from him.
Rock opened his mouth to speak and felt his vocal synthesizer crack in her grip. He reached up and griped her wrists, her blood running down from her ruined hand made his hands slip. "Tell me where that pink bitch is!" she slammed him against the wall causing more cracks.
Rock managed to get a hold of her hands and force red them away from his neck, still held up against the wall with her pushing him. She growled at him and pressed harder, her bald face becoming a snarl. Rock felt the wall behind him begin to break as she forced him back, her strength wasn't much but her anger was driving her past her limits.
With a lurch and an audible nap the wall gave way and they both went tumbling through. Rock tossed her away but she had barely touched down when she came back with a devastating uppercut. Rock heard shattering metal as his head lurched back at an odd angle and he fell limp to the floor.
She snarled and leapt on him and began to pummel his body while he just lay there. She had effectively crippled him until his repair system repaired his neck and its severed data paths. Unfortunately she had lost control of her emotions and was now snarling and growling as she beat on his slowly cracking and warping armor.
There was a shout and a light in the room turned on while nurse reploids in white and pink armor came and pulled her away from him. He saw the glint of a needle and she slumped in their grasp almost instantly. They took her out the door as another nurse came over to him and pointed a medical scanner at him.
After a few moments she shook it and tossed it aside and placed her hand on Rock's twisted neck, feeling for a pulse he never had. After a moment she shook her head a pulled a sheet off the bed and tossed it over him. Apparently she hadn't heard about his incident earlier or she didn't recognize the battered armor and messed up face as Rock.
Rock was very annoyed at this incident; he lay there for nearly an hour. Then reploids came and got him and carried him off to some room full of refrigerated drawers. The lower temperature was slowing his repair systems down to less than thirty percent of its max.
Finally after nearly seven hours in the drawer he regained control over his body and a received a new damage report. The fox, he still wasn't sure of her name, had nearly finished him off. He sent his ruined armor away, only trusting his damaged transfer system to do that. And made his damaged body to move, kicking off the door over the drawer he crawled out.
The room was dark but that didn't stop his eyes from seeing the morgue around him. He walked out of the morgue as rapidly as his body would let him, not wanting to think about how many robots he had sent to the scrap pile.
He opened a COM and sent a text message, his voice still offline, to X. 'X. I'm near morgue and could use help.'
The reply came after a long wait, 'why? What happened? It is the middle of the night, can it wait?'
Rock felt his leg buckle under him and slumped down to the floor. 'No I cant, bring a mechanic. Fast.'
There was no reply and Rock considered calling Zero, he would just return home but his personal transfer device had taken a bit of damage and might not work properly. He checked his belt for a recovery chip and found only dead cells there, they had a limited lifetime and had probably expired soon after he got in the pod.
He heard boots thumping down the hall towards him and lifted his head and saw X and Zero running towards him along with the old human that had watched Rock test busters. They where in civilian clothes and dressed for bed, Zero in a tank top and boxers while X wore blue and whit pajamas and the old man was dressed as if he had been working.
Zero had his saber in hand and kept on going, looking for who had done this. X slid to a stop while that man took a moment to catch his breath. "What happened?"
"I got the shit beat out of me." His voice was cracked and full of static until it healed fully. Rock didn't see a toolkit in the man's hands witch meant he would have to go to wherever the man wanted to go to be fixed. "I said something stupid to an upset woman and got beaten through a wall." The old man kneeled beside Rock and lifted his shirt, whistling at the dent that was nearly five inches around and two deep.
"That had to hurt a little. What did she hit you with?" the man took a knife from somewhere under his lab coat and started to peel off the torn skin over Rocks chest.
"Her fist, and she would have killed me if I hadn't been wearing my armor. Her fist is going to need more than a little work too." Rock winced as the man took out a screwdriver, again from under his coat, and pried open the warped chest panel.
The man dove into Rock's chest with both hands, while X tried not to look. Zero came back and didn't flinch at the sight of Rocks twisted innards. "Where is she? And who is she? Was it your sister?"
Rock winced as the man pulled out a wire and wondered if the man knew what he was doing. "She was in the hospital ward, that fox reploid. I don't know where she is now; I have been in a drawer in the morgue for a few hours. Do you know what the hell your doing?" the last was directed at the man as he pulled out a broken chunk of metal framing and tossed it aside without a glance.
The man looked at Rocks face for a moment before going back to work without answering. "Don't worry about Doc here. He hasn't met anything he can't fix and I don't think you will be the first. He fixed my armor a few times and I don't trust anybody to do that." Rock tried glaring at X but Doc did something and pain flared in Rock's mind.
"Fox? Wait a minute you where that unknown reploid killed by Kitt today? Damn it! She woke up and ran off thinking she was going to be arrested or even retired. Great, another member of my squad gone." Zero turned and stormed off down the hall mustering under his breath. He stopped and looked back, "I'm going off to hunt her down before she dose something stupid. X, keep him out of trouble."
X watched Zero disappear and then glared at Rock. "I have enough trouble keeping Zero out of trouble without dealing with you. But if I have you here for a while I might as well get some answers."
"Not here. I need to get him down to my workshop before I can do anything else. You can question him there. Give me a hand moving him." Doc tossed aside another chunk of framing metal and griped Rock under an arm while X did the same on the other side.
Strain was visible on the man's face and even X looked surprised at Rock's weight. The trip down into the underground levels was silent except for the man muttering about his back.
Once they had dropped Rock on a work cluttered table X made himself scarce while the man took out a large dangerous looking drill. Rock closed his eyes and waited while pain and stats reports rolled into him. At several points the repots said he was near to shutting down.
With a clang Doc shut Rock's chest panel, "I can't do much more, I just don't understand most of your parts." Rock swung his feet off the table and stood, stretching slowly and checking that his stats report where correct.
"It will do until I can fix it myself." Actually Doc had done rather well, he had gone from critical structural damage and varying internal damage to being near seventy three percent functional.
X looked back in the door and saw Rock pulling on his shirt. "Good now I can talk to you about reports I have been getting about you." Rock tried activating his transfer but got an error that it wasn't responding.
"Looking for this?" Doc held up a small round disk with many lights and trailing wires. "I thought you might try leaving before Mister X could talk to you so I took out your transfer device. An interesting model too, looks better than X's even." Rock went to snatch it but X got it first and tucked it away in a pocket of his pajamas.
Doc gathered up several peaces that he had taken out of Rock and left the two alone in his workroom. X closed the door behind Doc and turned to Rock, "first off I need to know where Akako is?"
Rock sat down on the table again, wondering if he could wrestle his trans device away from X. as he recalled his damage and the fact that X could call his armor while Rock couldn't at the moment he decided it would be best to work with him for now. "She is back at my headquarters. She decided to jump into my transfer beam and was taken there with me. Until I'm sure she won't revile my secrets she will stay there. Don't worry about her though, she is very happy rediscovering things this age has forgotten and would probably fight to stay there."
X found a chair under a pile of greasy parts and sat down, jumping up again as oil stained his pajamas. He sighed and leaned against the wall and appeared to be thinking over what Rock had said or maybe his next question. "Light said about you matching my potential but I haven't seen it so far. You where beaten down with sheer force by a reploid without her armor. If it wasn't for your skill Zero would have beaten you bluer than your armor."
Rock picked up a steel ruler that had been melted somehow; he taped his leg with it in a measured pattern of beats. "I can but not in the same way. While your raw energy is incalculable its effect on the world isn't. You could, when near your projected max power before the computer freezes in mid calculation, summon a blast that could shred the every fabric of space. However I couldn't match that, only another reploid made on your exact sciatic could, I can however be upgraded and modified to match and exceed your current power levels by using reevaluated scans of your physical growth and evolution."
X's mouth was wide open and he seemed to be having trouble breathing. He regained enough composure after a while to focus on Rock again. "But if I could be that powerful isn't my very existence a threat to the world? What if my schematic gets out or a new scanner is built that can read all my systems?"
Rock shook his head and waved the questions away, although X's reaction said a lot about what he stood for. "That is why I'm here. You where made to be copied, all be it not in so much verity as I have seen. The only copy of your schematic is safe and well protected from anything I know of. And while a new scanner could be made it would never be able to read you in your entirety unless they knew what they where scanning for already."
Rock flicked the ruler up and let it stick into the tile-ceiling overhead. "I am here to make sure that if you are dangerous you never make it near your full potential. Hopefully it wont take too long to determine that, I would like to have a vacation from saving the world where I wasn't asleep."
X was clearly in shock as he slid down the wall and sat on the floor, after a long while Rock considered taking his trans device while he was trying to recover. X shook himself and climbed back to his feet and began pacing back and forth. "What about Roll? She doesn't seem entirely sane from what she did, not to mention you said she was a little off. And exactly how many other robots can I expect to turn up?"
Rock shook his head, " I don't know. There where more than a few that had gone bad or had been reprogrammed. And there are a few that helped me in the past but I don't know what happened to them or if they are still alive. And there are robots that neither Light nor Wily built, not many, but I know least one are still alive."
X was staring at him like he had grown leathery wings to go with his horns and tail from before. "That many? What is this one that is still alive and where is he?"
Rock stood up and checked his stasis reports; he was healing fast enough considering the rudimentary errors the Doc's repairs. "I'm not sure where he is but as near as I could tell he is immortal and invincible. His name was Duo and if he ever comes back to earth I don't think he could be stopped from destroying it if he chouse." He stretched his arms over his head and held out his hand, "I need my Trans device."
"Later." X patted his pocket where the device was. "What do you mean comes back to earth?" Rock sighed and sat down again and prepared to tell how he meet Duo. Chances are it would lead to other topics about everything Rock had done but he would keep back what was needing kept silent.
There chapter7 done. It was off for several reasons but I don't think it will be fixed anytime soon.
Rose Kitsune.EXE, again I'm sorry if shaving Kitt upset you. I had already had that part wrote before I got your review or read your bio. I made it up with her totally trashing Rock though. I'm afraid I'm not done picking on Kitt yet; it is going to be hard on her for a while. And I'm apologizing because you are very obsessed with kitsunes apparently.
Not sure what is going in the next chapter, plenty of ideas just not sure what ones to use first.
Kitt got lucky beating Rock. That first punch was rather disabling to his capabilities and had caught him off guard. From there it was all down hill for him.
I'm surprised nobody has commented on Rock's sudden shifts in mood or personality. This story gets everything pointed out before I'm ready to tell why but that hasn't. I'm going to tell you here because I don't feel like working it into the story. Rock's emotional processor is at odds with his logical processor and often they want to do diffract things. So sometimes he acts himself and others he acts as his logic says he should. Actually by my thinking that short growling match with Zero in the hall after Roll was logic telling Rock how he should be acting. As you can imagine it isn't a perfect system and has many flaws, and could be why Light worked on the Neural net in X (I have no idea what a reploid's brain is like so I call it a neural net. I am not a treky.)
That is a lot of talking; I will keep it down in the next chapter.
Later