Better Judgment:
The Dr. Wily Story

By Hadrian (Hardman) Howell

Chapter 7

199X

“You should dress warmer,” Tom said. “It's snowing out there.”

“In Russia, we do not call this snow. We call this 'Summer'.”

“Mikhail, the snow is three feet deep out there.”

“Yes.”

Isaac and I exchanged glances. “Do you think he understands the conversion to the metric system?” Isaac asked.

“Y'know,” I admitted, “this is one of those rare times when I'm just not sure.”

“I know how deep it is out there, and I'm telling you we have post cards from our beaches that have more snow in the frame than the campus has right now. I am fine in this T-shirt. Trust me.”

“Belabored Russian cliches aside, CAN WE GO NOW?” Noele demanded.

“Agreed,” Isaac put in. “And I'm not just saying that because the heat in the building is broken, although it is a very large contributing point.”

“This is a building full of engineering students and no one can fix the damn heater?” Noele growled, reiterating a point she'd made some ten times by now.

“YES, the irony has well and truly sunk into our frostbitten brains,” I snapped. “but if Spring Break over here is ACTUALLY ready to go, then let's get freakin' MOVING.”

“Spring Break?” Isaac's mustache twitched. “You think that nick name will stick?”

“Like a tongue to a frozen pole,” Tom grinned.

“What is-”

“No time,” I cut Mikhail off , “let's go.”

“We're quite an irritable bunch when we're uncomfortable and late, aren't we?” Tom said serenely.

“Tom.”

“Yes, Albert?”

“Shut up.”

“See what I mean?”

We finally managed to mill out into the open air of the MEU's winter-bound grounds. The reason we were all so annoyed was A) Mikhail being... well, Mikhail, really, B) the heat in our dorm building being as dead as Marie Curie (not a tasteful comparison, but I was cranky), and C) there was a massive lecture/presentation being given in the MEU's Main Auditorium by Walter K. Weisel, the head of the Robotic Industries Association (RIA) and also a remarkably brilliant engineer in his own right. The lecture was going to be centered around the ideas of combining advanced technology with economics and business. While a lot of faces were going to be there simply to try and meet the man and tell him their names in a futile attempt to be someone he remembered, Tom and I were quite interested in what he had to say pertaining to making a business out of robotics.

Given that Isaac, Mikhail, and Noele were all in the Robotics Engineering courses, I was under the impression that attending this particular event was something they were going to be graded on. I was going if only exclusively because of my prospective work with Tom, and hoping to hear some good advice on making a business out of our shared visions.

And what visions they were. Tom and I were making some real headway on a variety of designs, some of which we were eager to put into a prototyping stage. There was the Flea series, which I've mentioned before, and the Metool series, which were an exciting, modular model that was capable of fulfilling many less savory roles in tight spaces in construction sites, and also the Big Eye compactor, a roaming, massive machine used to help compress garbage heaps and junkyards and help such places conserve space and be more efficient. While we had nothing truly substantial yet, we had dozens of pages of sketches and thousands of lines of code along with whole books of notes and concepts we now kept safely locked in a number of lock boxes which we were keeping in a low-cost storage facility in Monsteropolis proper some two blocks from the MEU campus.

As we walked, we talked, mostly to try and keep warm, but I was also thinking. Tom and I had taken a lot of precautions to make sure no one could look at or steal our various ideas, but Gibbs still had me on edge. My interactions with him were more normal now, but every encounter I had with him outside of the class room was uncomfortable and stress-inducing.

The remainder of our conversation some months ago had been a psychological minefield. I had said a little too much and gotten very little in return. I still knew next to nothing about Alfred Gibbs, and he knew almost everything about me he could have possibly needed. I was certain that Gibbs didn't answer directly to any sort of official military body, at least not one I knew of, but I hadn't ruled out some sort of government work yet. He was an enigma wrapped in that maddening, friendly grin and hiding behind those shining, knowing eyes.

Suspicious? Most certainly. Evil?

… I wasn't entirely sure.

My worries melted away as we entered the Main Auditorium, along with the hints of frost that were beginning to form on my receding hairline. I'd never been so happy to be warm before.

“Good lord,” Mikhail hissed, “does it have to be so hot in here?”

“Shut up, Mikhail,” Noele returned, elbowing him in the ribs.

“I'll find a place for our coats, guys,” Tom volunteered. “Go find us some good seats.”

Isaac, Noele and I unloaded our winter gear on Tom and made our way into the auditorium proper with Mikhail in tow. The place was already a marginal level of packed, and finding five seats together proved to be quite a challenge. We eventually found a set of chairs near the railing of the first balcony (the auditorium had two) and set ourselves up.

“Hey, Isaac,” I whispered, “I know your not really studying the whole robotics thing. Why are you here?”

“I could ask you the same question,” he smirked.

“I have nothing better to do with my time,” I shrugged. It wasn't a total lie.

“That's sad. You should find a girl or something. Take the tension out of your system.”

“Is that your answer to everything? Find a girl?”

“It's not a BAD answer. Depending on the girl.”

“What girl?” Tom asked in a low voice, sitting down next to me.

“Isaac is trying to advise me to hook up with women who may or may not be good, non-crazy people.”

“What, again?”

“I know, right?”

“I never said non-crazy,” Isaac retorted. “ALL women are crazy, but sometimes you get lucky.”

“What was that?” I heard Noele hiss from the other side of Isaac.

“Nothing!” Isaac hastily threw over his shoulder.

I decided to help him. “So what ARE you doing here again?”

“Ah,” Isaac sighed. “I've been looking into business options for high-tech prosthetic limbs that I can explore after my military contract is done.”

“You actually have a contract?”

“Signed and everything, although I'm not really supposed to talk about it.”

“When do you start working for them?” Tom asked.

Isaac grinned. “Oh, Tom, I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.”

“You're a contractor, man, not a spy,” I told him.

“A man can dream,” Isaac smiled.

The lights in the auditorium began to dim, and the stage lit up. Walter K Weisel walked onto the stage to thunderous applause. I had a fresh, blank notebook for the occasion, and a pen ready, and I glanced over at Tom, who was leaning forward in his chair (no small feat, considering his dietary habits had left him with quite the belly), looking intently at the stage the way he always did in class when he was prepared to listen to absolutely everything.

A small part of me knew this would be a turning point in our lives. After today, something, hopefully something good, would happen. I had no idea what it might have been, but I was looking forward to it.

20XX

I was NOT looking forward to this. Sure, it had to be done, and quickly, but that didn't mean I was going to enjoy it. This would probably be the least pleasant conversation I had today, and it wasn't even dinner time yet.

“You understand the plan?” I asked Shadow Man.

“Yes sir.”

“We're not going in, guns blazing. You're there to protect me from the inevitable response, get in, get what I need, and get the hell out of dodge.”

“Yes sir.”

“The less attention we draw to ourselves, the better. Two teams. Hard Man, Needle Man, Gemini, Man, and Spark Man, you're with me, and we head straight for him. Keep him talking and distracted, but we're not going to do anything beyond that. Shadow Man, Magnet Man, Top Man and Snake Man, you're going to break in and steal what we need, because he won't give it to us anyway, no matter how convincing I am.”

“Do we have intel on where he keeps the-” Snake Man began.

“Of course not,” I snapped. “I had to break into the Russian KGB network to find his damn house. I didn't have enough time to locate his stupid computers.”

“So's this a smash an' grab?” Hard Man asked.

“Actually, this sounds more like a Kansas City Shuffle,” Top Man replied. “Y'know, they look left, you go right?”

“Or like one of the Ocean's movies!” Spark Man put in excitedly.

“... Ya lost me,” Hard Man said after a while.

“Irrelevant,” Shadow Man snapped to the others. “We follow Dr. Wily's orders, and stay in communication. We'll need to be able to react to any developments about two seconds before they happen if we're going to pull this off within acceptable limits.”

“What are 'acceptable limits?'” Needle Man asked.

“None of us die, Dr. Wily gets what he wants, and we get home without Mega Man showing up.”

“Oh man, that would frickin' SUCK,” Gemini Man said. “What about his own Robot Masters?”

“Yes, we will probably encounter them,” Shadow Man said. “That's why Team A is on bodyguard duty.”

This was a calculated move. Bringing the DRWN series II Robot Masters with me on this trip would hopefully mean that any damage they sustained in their duties as bodyguards would be relatively easy to repair. They also had no specific problems with the man I was going to visit, unlike the IIIs, and those were the two most complete groups I had in the bunker at the time. I was rapidly recalling all of my far-flung Robot Masters, with the exception of those tasked to work for the Book, but time was a substantially important and waning factor.

Some people wonder why I use entire series instead of just mixing and matching the most successful designs. I actually HAVE tried that before with mixed results, but most often petty disputes between the different series result in some terrible lapses in security and/or total annihilation by Mega Man. Individual series worked very well together, because they were designed that way.

And I needed a solid team, especially one that could operate well on two fronts, and that made the series II Robot Masters the ones for the job.

Mikhail was hardly likely to just hand over the Master Templates for the DRCN series, after all, and I was going to need them. He was much less likely to listen to me at all, given that I had once kidnapped his daughter. In my own defense, I had treated her quite well, and had her convinced for a while that I was 'Uncle Wily'. Seriously, while Cossack's robots had been fighting Mega Man and losing spectacularly, she was watching 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' and eating candy. Hell, if anything, THAT would have been the most psychologically scarring part of her time in my care.

Shadow Man was a good leader, I had to admit. I'm not sure where that particular portion of his personality had come from, because I wasn't one to program things like 'responsibility' or 'initiative' into my minions, but I was thankful for it in this situation. He was doling out specific advice and duties to each of his brothers in turn, always acutely aware that the most difficult part of this job was actually his. Once Top Man and Snake Man found Cossack's files, Shadow Man would be the one to break in and retrieve the Master Templates for me. Magnet Man was assigned to Team B almost purely to add some much needed combat muscle to a fragile group that could encounter Pharaoh Man, Drill Man or Dive Man at any point in the next thirty minutes.

I was less worried about Team A and myself, because I was sitting quite comfortably inside my Combat Pod. I was up to the MK 6 version of the damn thing, now, and I was trying to perfect it. This one possessed the cloaking systems the previous versions had, but was armed with a pair of multi-directional Plasma Cannons that I had borrowed from... wow, I couldn't even remember how many of my larger combat units I had installed with one of these. Like it ever freaking helped against Mega Man. While Mega Man often made short work of them, I expected this one to fare better against Cossack's crew of mechanical misfits.

I adjusted my coat and ear muffs and keyed up the teleportation platform. While the FDA may not have approved instantaneous travel for the human race yet, and teleportation was still only used to move cargo and robots, I had found in some personal experiments that teleportation left you nauseated and probably falling down with some extreme vertigo, but after a minute or so the feeling would pass as your biology caught up with you. It also had the benefit of scrubbing your body free of poisons and disease, but you always needed to eat afterwords.

I silently said goodbye to the sandwich in my belly as I keyed the platform to activate. A small Metool team had built the receiving platform a good distance away from Mikhail's location and had finished construction a mere four minutes ago. I mentally checked myself, catching myself hoping that this would work and not send me to some distant planet like... well, that just didn't bear thinking about.

“Okay, Dr. Cossack,” I grumbled under my breath, taking hold of the Combat Pod MK6's controls, “Knock knock.”

And my world became enveloped in white.