The Megaman War:
Part 2 – Decisions, Destruction, Duty, and Destiny
By Hadrian (Hardman) Howell
Chapter 17: The Liar, the Bitch, and the War Room
Lightning tore through the streets of Tokyo, destroying cars, frying bodies, and shattering windows. Elecman made no sound as he recharged his Thunder Beam, ready to unleash another deadly stream of ion-directed lightning. The seemingly infinite number of police cars the city had at its disposal was growing annoying, as more and more of the lighted vehicles were trying to box him in. Their efforts were worthless.
“<Pathetic humans!>” Elecman screamed at the top of his lungs in perfect Japanese. “<Don’t you realize that this world has a new order now?>” With a wave of his hand, pure electrical force swept out and caused one of the police vans to explode, the shock and heat causing secondary explosions in the cars next to it. “<This world is no longer the world you knew! It has a new god! One that finds your presence distasteful…>”
With a cry of rage, Elecman unleashed all of the stored power in his electrical generators, the four large dynamos on his back whining their high pitched battle cry as twin streams of destruction shot forth, smashing aside everything in their path. There was nothing to save Tokyo from his unending, infinite wrath.
He was a god, powered by his own unquenchable thirst for destruction, and there was nothing a mere human could do to stop his divine wrath…
The President sat down in the Situation Room. “Trav, I have the Japanese Prime Minister on one line, shouting for help against some sort of living electrical generator, I have the royal family in Saudi Arabia on the other, screaming that I’m trying to kill them with some golden monster, and all of the disaster relief we have in the world is being directed to New Detroit. Care to make my day any better?”
Leonard Travitz visibly gulped. He and the President were alone this time, as all of the other subordinates were far too busy trying to do damage control on the various disasters that had hit the country and the world in the last 48 hours. Everything started going fantastically wrong about the same time a NASA attaché in the Pentagon started filing reports about several unauthorized uses of the Teleportation Web. Wily had declared war on the rest of the world without bothering to conquer the USA first. No doubt the mad scientist had something up his sleeve he figured would grantee his victory here, or he knew that trouble abroad would translate into trouble at home…
“Well, sir, it appears that our intelligence reports that Megaman had been critically injured were wrong, as he seems to be back on his feet and doing his job again.”
“I can’t imagine the New Detroit Police Department wants a vigilante doing their job. Then again, with the help he’s provided, they’re probably looking the other way.”
“Probably so, sir. There is some bad news, however…”
“Oh?” the President asked, leaning closer.
“I believe… certain evidence leads me to believe we have a mole in the White House, sir. Possibly in the Pentagon.”
The President leaned back and thought about this for a moment. “Is it you?”
“Good lord, no!”
“Well, it isn’t me. What makes you think there’s a mole?”
“Wily’s main shock troopers, or the ‘Masters’ as he calls them, exhibit many of the same qualities and abilities as another project that was being done under the Mountain before the takeover…”
“Prometheus, right?” The President said. He liked to keep up on current events.
“Exactly,” Leonard nodded. “However, since it is also likely that Megaman is a product of this project as well, one must assume Dr. Light did not aid in the creation of the Masters, or else there would be no such opposing force.”
“What if Megaman went rouge or something?”
“Unlikely, sir,” Leonard said, shaking his head. “From what we’ve been able to gather, most of the Masters have been brainwashed in some fashion or another to obey Wily at all costs.”
The President nodded slowly. “So where does the mole come into it?”
“All of the projects inside the Mountain were kept secret from everyone, even to those inside the Mountain itself. The soldiers that guarded the place didn’t even know what they were guarding. Dr. Wily could have only found out about Dr. Light’s project if someone else who knew about it told him.”
“Well,” the President said after a while, shifting uncomfortably, “that narrows down the field of suspects quite a bit, doesn’t it?”
Leonard Travitz nodded. It narrowed the list of suspects down to the people with clearance to the Situation Room. A very high-profile list of prospective criminals.
The President stood up quickly. “You have your work cut out for you, Lenny. Give me regular updates on your progress in the Residence at 2:00 am every day.”
“Er, will the first lady mind, sir?”
“She hasn’t been sleeping well lately, so the doctor prescribed some pretty hefty sleeping pills. There’s no way we’ll disturb her.”
Leonard Travitz stood up and saluted as the President left the room. “Thank you, sir.”
It was two days later. Things were surprisingly calm…
Megaman sighed as he stood atop a building, overlooking Maple Street. Construction crews below him were working on removing the damage that had been caused by the crashed Kobun. Any trace of his battle with fireman here was gone.
He stretched in the morning light. Roll would be pissed when she found out he was gone already, but he couldn’t really bring himself to care. Somewhere in this city was another of Wily’s Masters, the one that had taken his arm off…
He looked down at his replacement. His right forearm has much bulkier than before, with a gray ring of metal lining his wrist, where the hand ended and the arm blossomed out into its egg-like shape. With a half-conscious thought, his hand was pulled into the wrist, and within a short second, clicked into place inside the arm. An inch-long barrel slid out to replace his hand, and then the whole thing hummed.
Megaman hadn’t actually tested out this ‘Plasma Buster’ yet, even though Dr. Light assured him it would work flawlessly. The concept of throwing superheated air at his opponents wasn’t exactly a very imposing thought when it played out in Megaman’s head.
He shrugged, and his hand returned to its normal place with another thought. If it came down to it, it came down to it, but first, Megaman was going to find the other Master…
Theresa Frost sat calmly at the bus station. The Greyhound’s need to fuel had prompted the bus company to bring in another bus top finish the long trip to New Detroit. Other passengers that had been riding before Theresa, as well as several that got on afterwards, were milling around. She simply sat there, her backpack at her feet, leaning back and staring at the ceiling.
Nobody really approached her. It was true that, for all intents and purposes, she was stunningly gorgeous, but she just gave off this air of total indifference. She seemed about as kind and compassionate as a glacier. That kind of thing was hard to get past when you first saw her. Even her eyes were an icy blue, offsetting her long, dark brown hair that covered her shoulders and back. The blue denim jacket she was wearing did little to hide her knock-out figure, and her tight blue-jeans and hiking boots completed a picture of a rough-and-tumble, ready for anything woman.
Her cold gaze fell on the TV mounted to the corner of the bus station’s waiting room. The news was playing the same tired old footage of Dr. Wily’s hold on the Mountain, with occasional breaks to update the national coverage of Megaman and his increasing number of exploits. He’d been fairly active in the last few hours, stopping four different criminal acts in progress. It was like he was hunting for trouble.
A close up picture of Megaman stared back at Theresa from over the shoulder of the news anchor. She smiled to herself as her thoughts wandered around his face, picking out different things to like or dislike at will. He was cute, there was no denying that, but that helmet didn’t do much for his features. He probably had a nice head of hair under that.
Theresa Frost made a mental note to seriously study Megaman upon her arrival. The amount of fun they could have together was probably endless…
Roll poured Tron a cup of coffee. Her apartment last night had played host to the Bonnes as well as Rock, and the snoring from the boys had been raucous enough to keep the two girls awake most of the night. Taking her own steaming mug in tired hands, she sipped the black liquid, feeling the hot burn travel down her throat.
“So does he always disappear like that?” Tron asked, sipping her own coffee and deciding it needed some cream and sugar. She stirred in her preffered amount of additives as Roll shook her head.
“He’s become a lot more distant since he… well, ever since he started being Megaman. I mean, he still treats me like he used to, but he’s just so… driven. He’s really intent on fighting Wily.”
“Do you think he has a chance?” Tron asked half-heartedly.
“Not really,” Roll sighed, shaking her head. “I’m just afraid he’ll get himself hurt again, or maybe even killed…”
“He’ll be all right. He managed to get back to the truck despite his arm being sliced off, didn’t he?”
Roll bit her lower lip. “I don’t know about that. With the loss of the video uplink, we don’t know if he made his own way back or not. Whoever injured him might have carried him back on their own to serve as a warning…”
Tron shivered, sipping her doctored coffee again. “I don’t like the thought of any of those psychos knowing where we are.”
“Me neither.”
They paid attention to their respective drinks for a while, in contemplative silence. Roll was confused about herself more than she was Rock. While he had changed in his absence, anyone could argue that she had as well. It’s said that you never realize what you have until you lose it, and Roll knew now that she never wanted to lose Rock again…
Tron’s mind was another matter. A small part of her kept going back to a single thought. You love him! It screamed, in Tiesel’s mocking voice. It laughed at her in her sleep and made her clumsy and thoughtless. It hounded her every moment, waking or not. For some reason, this boy that played hero had simply taken her heart without asking, just like he’d taken her air ship…
But he couldn’t be just some kid. Not with what he’d asked the Bonnes to do for him. There was no way he was some thoughtless crepe who wrecked people’s stuff and didn’t say sorry. He’d have never asked them to build another air ship if that was the case…
Tron sighed in frustration the same time Roll sighed in depression, and the pair of them sipped their coffees again.
The sound of footsteps splashed their way through the dim light of the sewer, and the heavy breathing was the only sound that interrupted the angry shouts.
“Where did you RUN to, you coward?” Cutman growled from behind his mask. Protoman had been fighting the Butcher for almost 36 hours straight before he’d vanished in that odd flash of light. Cutman knew what teleportation looked like from the outside, and that hadn’t been it. Protoman must have escaped using some kind of flash explosive…
The orange Master swore loudly. The sludge down here had ruined his Yukata. He’d have to get it cleaned somehow before he went back to hunting Megaman. At least he still had his scissors, held out in front of him like a staff. Protoman had thrown them back to him before he vanished, and Cutman never got a chance to return the favor…
Growling in anger and frustration for having lost his prey, Cutman left the sewers through the closest manhole, and slipped into the nearest alley to remain unseen. If anyone saw him, they might try to alert Megaman, and the long battle with Protoman had left Cutman tired and drained. Not even he could do much to stand against Megaman at this point… It was best to rest before attempting to further his plans again.
In a Bazaar in a small village in Saudi Arabia, one man happened upon what he thought was the greatest find of his life. It was gold. A huge boulder of it, just SITTING there! He reached out and grabbed it, but his fingers hit something that felt like gelatin…
He screamed as he looked up and realized this was no the untold riches he thought it was, but rather a monster, born from hell itself! The Yellow Devil crushed him beneath one massive fist as it stepped out into the main stretch of the Bazaar. Gasps of amazement turned to screams of fear as the monster separated into 48 sections, each the size of a semi trucks wheel. Slowly, the pieces started to orbit the large, unblinking eyeball in the center, moving faster and faster in a tornado of solid gold, crushing the ramshackle wooden stalls of the market place as easily as the flesh and bones of the people around it.
Far enough behind the Yellow Devil to be safe was a coffin floating in the air that would’ve reminded anyone of ancient Egypt, if anyone had been alive…
Dr. Wily smiled to himself. Despite a few setbacks and the loss of contact with Icema’am, Shadowman, and unsurprisingly, Cutman, things were still going smoothly. Saudi Arabia had indeed blamed America for the attacks made by the Yellow Devil, who was even now en route back to the Fortress with Pharaohman. Japan was suffering the biggest recorded static shock in history, as the damage totals for Elecman had, by now, far surpassed anything Gutsman had accomplished. Everything was going fine.
Except there was this blue gnat in New Detroit that had beaten back all of his efforts so far. This called for some other plan.
“Kuvickman! Front und zentar!” he shouted.
The red speed freak was before him in seconds. “What can I do for you, boss man?”
“For starterz, do not call me zat. I need you to go und find me a ‘villing’ subjeckt to serve a greater purpose for me.”
Quickman nodded and vanished in a rush of air. He was back a few second later. “Sorry, didn’t quite catch that…”
“GO UND KIDNAP SOMEVUN SO I CAN MAKE MEIN NEXT MASTER!” the German shouted in anger. Quickman again disappeared and Dr. Wily returned to the schematic he’d been working on.
A shoulder mounted Vulcan would leave both hands free for more maneuverable weaponry. A grenade launcher hidden in the knee joint of the armor would allow for surprise attacks, and a gift to the design in the form of a huge suit of hulking Ride Armor he’d discovered in the lower levels of the Fortress would make his newest creation complete…
He scribbled the words ‘Megaman Killer 001’ in one corner and smiled, calling Reggae to help him start production of this new Master’s armor. He smiled to himself as he thought of ways to make that blue dweeb’s life miserable…
Hours later, the White House operator nearly hung up the phone on what she thought was a prank call. Her boss stopped her though, and the voice just kept going…
“You’ve got to help him! You’ve got to warn him! He’s made this new thing, this… Megaman Killer! He calls it Vava, or Vile… He plans on making more! Oh god, you’ve got to warn Megaman! You’ve got to tell him to avoid this thing! You’ve got to—“
She looked at her boss, who looked back at her, and nearly in unison they rushed to tell someone… ANYONE what they heard.
Protoman shook his head as he awoke on the pavement. “Great,” he said to himself, “What city am I in THIS time…?”
He stood up shakily and tried to get his bearings. His personal teleporter had been faulty for a while now, randomly sending him places if it was jarred too much or if he got too excited. Protoman was sure that somehow his time in that stolen M1 Abrams had something to do with… Maybe he’d hit it on something… Oh well. He didn’t have the necessary tools to fix it right now, so he was just going to have to be careful.
He exhaled a deep breath, and the world around him seemed to slow down. He’d discovered he could do amazing things after the System had been installed in his body. It was like someone had unlocked the 90% of his brain that Humanity never used. Time was optional for him now. He could ignore it if he just wanted to… His perception of the world had radically changed since becoming Protoman. He could speak any language after hearing a few words of it. He was already a master of classical Latin, as well as ancient and modern. He knew calculus, although he’d never studied, like the back of his hand. He saw most buildings the way an expert architect would: as a collection of lines and angles and degrees. He could measure distances without even really looking at them very hard. He could make a perfect mental map in his brain. He UNDERSTOOD the theory of relativity, and more importantly WHY it didn’t apply to him. He could tap into the collective subconscious whenever he slept, and even talk to people through it, much like he had with Megaman earlier. He was arguably the most intelligent being in the universe.
That’s why the Teleportation Web had so much trouble with him. It was like the system didn’t want to touch him. It would fling him in some random direction every time his personal teleporter decided to go someplace. He was an over clocked human being trying to use a system meant for the average Joe…
He made his way around the now locked up city. It was sad to see people frozen in place like this. Hurrying against the flow of time. Something he could just ignore. Protoman briefly wondered why this part of the brain was, by default, locked from the human consciousness. Maybe it was to keep them sane.
He shrugged and tried to find some clue as to where he’d ended up
