Mega Man X: Warmachine
Prologue
The silence inside of the dome-shaped room was shattered by the echoing click of a light switch being flipped. Overhead lights hummed to life, illuminating the subterranean chamber. The room was crammed with expensive terminals, lab equipment, workbenches, tool racks and white boards. Every single flat surface was covered in research material, books, blueprints and the occasional datapad. The centerpiece was a steel pylon that reached up to the high, curved ceiling from the center of the room. Attached to it were four pods, each of which was hooked up to its own set of monitors and powered through heavy cables plugged into the pylon's internal generator. The soft, continuous hum produced by the machinery was enough to evoke the sense that no small amount of energy was flowing through the entire system. The pods were working overtime to keep the silhouettes inside of them alive, while a last minute analysis of their individual systems was being performed. The contents weren't human though, as the corresponding viewscreens displayed the schematics of four nearly identical Reploids. While less prominent with the lights flicked on, the room was still tinted a light blue from the wealth of monitors and the energy coursing through the cables strewn across the floor; some of which had transparent sections for maintenance.
The silence was further broken by the hasty tapping of metal, booted feet across the tiled floor of the R&D lab. A Reploid had darted into the room in a state of panic, his mechanical hands constantly clenching and releasing nervously. "So this is what it's come to?" the Reploid spoke to himself aloud, as if it would keep him focused on the task at hand. He made his way to the main terminal, his fingers darting across the virtual keyboard as he logged on with his personal security credentials. "They're taking everything from me..." for an instant, he looked over to the pods behind him. "From us," the scientist's frame shuddered as if he was about to be overcome by his growing desire to just run. But, after he composed himself, he proceeded.
"The bastards," the humanoid robot was a scientist, a profession made obvious by his dirty, worn lab coat. Messy, synthetic hair and scorch marks across his body only reinforced an appearance of panic and fear, given that much of that damage could only have come from actual shots being taken at him with energy weapons.
'I won't let them, I -can't- let them!' his thoughts were not anymore coherent than his words or actions, as he accessed the wrong terminal functions numerous times in his distraction. He cursed loudly in an attempt to vent some frustration and restore his concentration. He shot a glance back at the pods again, as if reminding himself what was at stake. His blood-red eyes would fall upon the label of the nearest container: V-002. Meaningless to anyone but he.
"They wanted war machines. That's all they ever wanted!" his frantic exclamations were quickly followed by more tapping of fingers to keys. 'And I just went along with it. For far too long,' his eyes were now fully trained on the text scrolling across the largest screen of the terminal. "Maverick Hunters. You cannot trust any of them. Remember that! They broke in, gun's blazing," suddenly, a crackle of electricity burst from the Reploid's shoulder, causing him to reach for an apparent, more grievous injury hidden beneath the folds of a scorched coat. 'This is nothing. They've already shot her,' the scientist moved from thoughts to words at random now, making him unintelligible to any who were not in on what went on inside his head.
"Up there. Right in front of me. Buster. Square between the eyes. There was no life left in her even before she hit the ground," his voice took on a mournful tone, but his focus was no longer shattered and was instead replaced by resolve.
The faintest hint of a smile crept up on his face as he had finally gathered everything he needed. Everything he wanted to preserve. After entering one more command, all of that information was fed from the terminal and server into the pods. The scientist looked over his shoulder again, this time at the only empty pod among the four. Labeled V-004, it hadn't been occupied in weeks. "They never wanted to know what went wrong. They were never going to let me try and fix it. So I failed you. Just as I fear I've failed the rest of you," he knew the Reploids in the pods had no idea what he was saying.
They couldn't hear him.
An explosion ripped through the silence in the room. The trembling ended in darkness as the power cut out abruptly. Fortunately, redundancies had been built in, which instantly kicked in to keep vital hardware running. The emergency lights were as red as the scientist's eyes, which narrowed at the sound of a low pitch alarm and the banging on the blast door into the lab. While the information he was risking his life for was being transferred, the scientist had also been overriding all manner of safety protocols, ignoring any warning his computer was displaying. Just when the pounding at the door became unbearable, a hatch opened up to his right, revealing a compact power source. The blue light inside of the fist-sized module was pulsating at an alarming frequency, one that would have made it clear even to a layman that something was not right about it.
It was overloading. Rapidly.
The injured Reploid stumbled away from the terminal and towards the makeshift bomb, all the while reaching into his coat to draw a buster pistol he'd managed to snatch from an injured Hunter. 'Please. Survive,' the power source immediately began to sear his palm hand the instant he grabbed it, forcing his body to simulate pain as a means of getting him to drop what would surely melt his entire hand. At the same time, the four pods began to be lowered beneath the ground, thick blast shielding slowly sliding shut overhead. The Reploid only had a brief moment longer to look down at the V-003 unit's pod before it, and the others, vanished from sight completely.
The blast doors bent inward, warped enough by an explosive charge to allow assailants to slip through the crack between the two, reinforced halves. Three Maverick Hunters rushed in, two of which instantly took down the small, defensive turrets that descended from the ceiling in the hopes of defending the lab's owner.
"Take him down!" the officer of the small unit exclaimed while pointing to the other side of the room, breaking all manner of Hunter rules by instantly resorting to lethal force.
The scientist could not even utter a single word or take a single shot before the highly trained Hunters opened fire. He was mortally wounded by a buster shot to his chest. His entire breastplate had been blown off, with a considerable amount of his internal circuitry and hardware molten and sparking as a result. He was no combatant, he had no armor to speak of. This was an execution. The scientist fell back, hitting the ground hard, but with the overheating power cell still clutched in his hand.
The hunters slowly approached, their weapons still raised until one of them noticed the humming device so obviously out of control. "Take cover!" the youngest of the three cried out.
'Goodbye…' was the last word the Reploid scientist thought, as the damage to his body was such that he couldn't even speak anymore. The device reached critical levels barely a split second later, and exploded. The blast took out the entire lab, but it was the breach in the pylon that truly caused devastation. Once the generator blew, it took the entire facility with it in a column of flame, smoke and debris, leaving nothing but rubble and a hole in the ground in its wake.
"Sir! I think there's something here you should see," a Maverick Hunter was hunched over a partially buried pod that seemed to barely be sustaining the power needed to keep its control panel active.
In response, a large Reploid approached the other, placing his hands in his sides once he was close enough to be able to inspect the finding.
"It looks like a pod, sir. Shall I have salvage dig it up and take it in as evidence?" the Hunter's query was met with a few moments of silence.
The tall commander was clad in green and black armor. The bald Reploid's eyes narrowed and a large, white hand reached for his chin. "No. Take it to HQ's maintenance bay. I want engineering and doctor Cain to take a look at this. I doubt we'll find anything else that might shed light on what happened here," Sigma's reply was brief and precise, as was customary of the commander. He turned away from the site and proceeded to make his way over to the police line the local authorities had set up, which circled the entire blast radius. The explosion had almost taken an entire city block with it, so it was no wonder that press had already arrived in droves to try and catch any glimpse of what may have transpired that morning.
"Yes, commander," the Hunter turned his eyes back to the pod and reached out for the acrylic glass cover. After wiping away some more dust and little bits of debris, a helmet was revealed inside.
A purple helmet, with a T-shaped visor and one letter on its forehead: V.