Hardman's Bar

By Hadrian Howell (Hardman)

Chapter 47

“At the end of the show, people change.”

It was something Gag had said to me once. I’d been cleaning the bar, and he’d been sitting at one of the tables, watching me, and he’d just broken out into this speech.

“At the end of the show, people change,” he’d said. “It really doesn’t matter how or why they change, or even if the change is for better or for worse, but what IS important is that the change happened, and is irreversible. You can’t become who you were before the story began, and you’re forever replaced by the person you’ve become as a result of the story. It’s really up to personal opinion to decide whether you’ve become a better person or not, but the change is unavoidable. We’re the product of our experiences, and each moment shapes us in some way, changing us forever.”

“What are you talking about,” I had asked.

“I was just thinking about how much you’ve changed since you built me,” he said, giving me a critical look. “Sure, you’ve always been a bartender, and you’ve been Hardman for almost two years now, but every time you go off and fight the good fight, you come back as someone else. It doesn’t really matter if you had a good day or a bad day, but you always come back different.”

“Deep,” I had said, looking him over. “HOW drunk was I when I built you again?”

Gag had simply shrugged and taken a drink of his water. “No idea,” he’d told me, “but it doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is the here and now, and our actions right now are determined by the experiences we’ve had from before. We’re never the same people twice.”

And then I woke up.

Ever woken up with heart burn? It’s a rather unpleasant feeling. It’s like your throats on fire, or bathed in acid, which it is, in fact. It’s probably one of the worst ways to wake up aside from a hangover or (and I have no experience with this next one) pregnancy morning sickness.

I, however, happened to do one better, and was shocked awake by a full bodied burning sensation. Apparently, my orbit around Earth had been somewhat degrading while I was out of commission, and I was now rather more on fire than I would have liked, hurtling toward Earth’s surface. I had become a four ton meteorite.

It was pointless to flail my arms or anything, because what could I do? I was falling backwards, so my back armor was melting and peeling away, layer by layer, as the friction of re-entry was causing my body to become enveloped in white hot flames. I briefly wondered if I was going to die, but then remembered I had several layers of heat resistant armor between layers of tougher titanium. The falling, in this case, would be fun compared to the landing.

I wondered what I was falling on to. Had we been directly above Monsteropolis? Maybe we’d been above some foreign country. Maybe, when I hit at terminal velocity and totally nuked a city in some third world nation, I could be responsible for world war eight or something. How long had I been in space, anyway?

Pretty much every robot has an internal clock to gauge such passages of time by, and it turned out that our battle with Junocron had ended no less than four hours ago. But that didn’t make any sense. Hadn’t I been drifting AWAY from earth?

Then, on the edge of perception, I recognized a sinking, cold feeling in my gut that was being overridden by the overall burn of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. Something magnetic was pulling me back to earth!

My bets were on a crimson robot with a magnet pasted to his forehead. I don’t know how he was doing it, but he was actually reeling me in like some sort of interstellar fish.

Oddly enough, I didn’t really feel the pain, either from the burning OR from the magnetism. Parts of my brain had shut down in self defense, really. I was going to feel all of this much later, and I’d be sore as hell for weeks to come, but if Magnetman managed to slow my descent as I got closer to the surface, I wouldn’t reduce 4 miles around me to rubble when I hit.

I broke through a cloud layer and tumbled through the sky, catching sight of a passenger plane off in the distance. I wonder if anybody on that plane would notice a fourteen foot tank spinning through the air. The fire around me went from a bright white to a dull red as I started to actually slow down, partially from the concentrated magnetism, and also partially from the increased air pressure. I could see the thicker cloud layer, the one everyone else could see from the ground, fast approaching.

Funnily enough, as I careened down toward the earth’s surface and a year’s worth of burning armor smell, I thought about the rest of the team. How had THEY made it out of space without having to go through this? That was a question I’d have to get the answer to.

I sailed through the thicker clouds, the moisture there evaporating into thing steam around me, cooling my out layer down, but not enough to extinguish the flames. Armor all over my body had peeled away, leaving me looking something like a stripped down space capsule. I broke through the clouds and into a light rain, my gaze falling on Monsteropolis below me as I spun wildly through the sky.

I felt two sharp jerks at my shoulders, and I slowed down a LOT. I looked to my left, and there was Gyroman, of the Ascendant Androids, holding on to my arm and putting all his effort into slowing my descent. On my other side was a grim-faced Cloudman, putting forth eqaual effort and showing just as much strain.

We slowed to a comfortable descent speed, and I croaked out a few words that might have been “Thank you.” My voice didn’t want to work because all it could remember right now was being on fire.

The two flying robot Masters set me down on the concrete, and I was instantly showered in a cold mist as Iceman unleashed a fire hose on me. The force of the water barely shifted me, but I collapsed anyway, my knees giving out with a groaning crack. I lay there on the concrete for a while, staring at the sky, barely aware of the shouts and cheers going up around me.

Magnetman was the first to appear in my field of vision. “Good to have you back, Hard.”

I squinted up at him. “How…” my voice cracked.

“We hacked into the teleportation network and zapped down here right before Junocron exploded,” Snakeman explained, leaning over me. “It was actually Needlegal’s idea.”

“”You look like hell, man,” Geminiman said, grabbing on of my arms and hoisting me into a sitting position. I took the rest of the team in, and they looked almost as badly injured as I was.

“You guys don’t look to hot yerself,” I managed.

“Why didn’t you teleport with us, Hardy?” Sparkchan asked me, putting a hand on my shattered shoulder to steady me.

“Didn’t hear you guys…” I said through cracked and broken vocal chords.

“Must have been Unicron’s Spark,” Shadowman nodded. “That, or Magnetman’s power screwed with your comm. link.”

“By the way, Gauntlet,” Snakeman asked, “when are we getting new ones?”

“Whenever we have the money,” the ninja leader said sullenly.

“We used our comm. links to do the hacking,” Tpman explained to me. “We kind burned them out.”

“Better burnt out than burned up,” Magnetman grinned. “Right, Hardy?”

“Har, har,” I croaked. “What’s that noise?”

Only now did I notice the crowd standing around us. Humans were cheering all around us, throwing up their hands in celebration. There were more than a few other members from other Megaman Teams standing around as well. Iceman gave me a thumbs up as my gaze passed over him, as did Gyroman and Cloudman.

“Well, that went well,” Snakeman said, waving at the crowd.

“Speak fer yerself,” I grumbled.

“It did go well,” Needlegal said, nudging me. “We saved the world, you know? AND-“

“Here she goes,” Magnetman rolled his eyes.

“- we learned something too,” she finished, ignoring him.

“Okay, I’m stumped,” Geminiman said. “What did we learn?”

“We actually learned two things!” she said happily. “The first one is that you should never be suspicious of someone unless you know their side of the story too, and the second is that we can overcome anything if we work as a team!”

“Oh,” I said, “joy.”

“Didn’t we already KNOW the whole ‘work as a team’ thing?” Geminiman asked.

“Yeah, but we HAVE been splitting up a lot lately. This was a nice change of pace,” Shadowman shrugged.

“YOU’RE always the one going off on his own!” Topman shouted.

“I stand by my statement,” the leader of the Mechs smiled.

“What now?” Snakeman asked.

“I could use a drink,” I suggested.

“Sounds like a plan. Do we go to Terri’s?” Needlegal asked. I gave her a glare that would have cracked a mirror, and she smile. “Just joking, Hardman. Let’s go.”

“Well,” Topman said, turning to the crowd in general behind us, “until Hardman starts serving non-alcoholic beer, we are… the Mechanical Maniacs!” And the crowd went wild.