Chapter Text
I had about half of a really interesting dream a while ago (which is a terrible basis for a story usually) in which a very old, very disabled X was looking for a missing human man in an apocalyptic, burnt-out city, and met a bunch of refugee reploids who lived there and had killed the missing man because he'd been caught abusing a child. Right as they'd discovered who X was and were accusing him of faking his disability, my alarm went off, and I was very annoyed.
So I told one of my friends about it after I was awake enough to make sense, and he was like, 'And then what happened?' And I was like, 'And then my alarm went off,' and now he was very annoyed too.
About a week passed and this thing was still living rent-free in my head, so I thought, Hmm! If I just write it out, maybe I'll get inspired and figure out what the second half of it was going to be, and then neither of us have to be any level of annoyed. Optimistic that this would be maybe an afternoon of effort, I opened the Notes app on my phone and started making paragraphs.
It's about three and a half months later, and I just wrapped up editing what ended up being a 162,128 word goddamn novel. So, that's how that went. I've never even had something turn out longer than 50,000 before. I mostly can't carry a story further than I can throw it. I've definitely never written more than 6,000 words in a day before this, and I did it multiple times without really noticing. I have no idea what happened, but I'm not going to complain about success.
The important thing is that I did in fact find out what happened next! And now you found out, too. Congratulations. (Unless you skipped to the end for some reason. I don't know why you would, but there's no law against it, and the world is full of kinds of people.)
Hopefully the sheer number of original characters wasn't off-putting. Writing about a post-canon time in a series whose defining feature is that every entry introduces a minimum of eight new guys who are guaranteed to explode to death makes it a little difficult to have that many canon characters onscreen. On top of that, I ended up with a ridiculously long list of themes I wanted to explore that really needed their own purpose-made narrative vehicles.
One of my main goals with this, since my dream was very explicit about X's exact malfunctions and I'm disabled in real life, was that I wanted to write a story with a heavily disabled main character who was still badass without having to become magically abled at any point. Disability is morally neutral. It's just a thing that happens to people. Nobody's going to make it out alive anyway. Might as well have some characters who are also disabled and increase the number of stories in the world with disabled characters. Honestly, it was kind of fun to write a main character with a mobility device, especially a character like X that you would not in a million years expect to need one.
The more I thought about representation, the more I just kept having character concepts occur to me and more or less write themselves, so if you feel like you spotted a particular kind of neurodivergence or mental illness or identity or what have you, you can safely assume that you did. Some of them have multiple reasonable readings, but that's fine too.
I played very fast and loose with how some reploid functions are portrayed. Their ability to repair themselves is never explained worth a damn. Whether or not they need to be plugged in or not is a massive shrug. Why they're full of red is…questionable. I decided to just scrap the entire mess and start over with my own thing. They bleed silver nanofluid and blue coolant now, which is objectively cooler and much stranger. I really wanted them to feel very different, very computer-y, and maybe even a little alien from a human standpoint, and not just like a bunch of guys in funny big boots. Hopefully I achieved that a little bit.
Anyway: no alpha readers, no beta readers, no outside editor, no sleep, we whole-ass everything single-handedly for no reason at all (have I learned nothing? From any of this? Nope! I really haven't. Thanks for asking though) and die like Mavericks here.
Also, I really want to come up with a sequel, because I feel like it wrapped up a little too neatly and recovery just isn't linear like that, which X could stand to learn. Besides, how long do you really think X can sit still knowing that the world is still unjust? Maybe five minutes? Fifteen if someone sits on him?
No guarantees, though. I think I've earned a break after banging this one out in not even four months. I'd like to illustrate it more before moving on, anyway. (ETA: And I have been! ...But I did also start writing on a sequel. At this moment, it's around 56k, because I guess I cannot be stopped. Illustrations are happening anyway, though.)
Huge thanks once again to Daemuth for AOYeet, which I used to convert this from Google Docs.
Appendix 1: Timeline and Canon Shenanigans (Canonigans?)
If you're having trouble placing when the hell any of this happens, that's valid, and there's an explanation. I decided to roll with X5 as the last canon entry, going from the 'good' ending in which Zero dies and X isn't stripped of his memories, with a dash of the 'bad' ending in that X did dream of building a utopia. In this canon, though, X's dreams of building a new world don't last, and the MMZ continuity also never happens. Dr. Cain did in fact explode in the first bombing of Abel City, which borrows from Maverick Hunter X/Day of Sigma.
X6-X8's Mavericks sort of happened, in that there's some offhanded mention of an unnamed Blizzard Wolfang and Wind Crowrang, but in this canon they weren't connected to any particular major events.
If you're the kind of person who's really into dates, or alternately you're like me and you're the kind of person who's really bad at dates, the entire timeline does exist, and can be found right here. It's detailed and color-coded and everything, because I don't know about you, but I love a good spreadsheet. Just check the tabs at the bottom.
The less-detailed version is as follows, though it's still pretty detailed.
- 2024 - X is sealed away.
- 2115 - X is unsealed.
- 2116 - Reploids are being mass-produced.
- 2118 - Zero is discovered. Mack is built, but not activated.
- 2119 - Mega Man X/MHX happens. Dr. Cain dies. The Maverick War begins.
- 2120 - Mega Man X2 happens.
- 2154 - Mega Man X3 happens.
- 2166 - Cain Labs, which continued on without Dr. Cain, develops Repliforce.
- 2168 - Reset Point is founded. Flip and Siobhan are built.
- 2171 - Mega Man X4 happens. Repliforce rebels, Sky Lagoon falls, and Flip has a bad time, multiple times.
- 2181 - Mega Man X5 happens. The Eurasia Colony Incident also happens. Zero dies too at the age of 63. Not a great year for many people.
- 2183 - Cirocco and Trigger are built and deployed on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
- 2185 - Sophia Microelectronics Research launches Project Convergence, aka Virgil. Cirocco and Trigger are declared Maverick.
- 2186 - The massive attack that creates the Abel City quarantine zone happens, killing Dr. Wendy Myers and Motive. Focus and Drive split. Valentina is built.
- 2190 - Mavericks target a brothel that employed three reploid sex workers, including Valentina. After killing a client and her pimp, Valentina is declared Maverick. Ricochet and Trebuchet are built as warehouse workers.
- 2191 - Hammer, originally named Smith, is built and employed by Alderman Materials and Construction.
- 2199 - Kathy is built.
- 2200 - Seren is built and almost immediately enlists with the Maverick Hunters. Valentina's serial murders catch up with her and she leaves for the quarantine zone.
- 2201 - The Maverick War is declared over, and the wall is built around the Abel City quarantine zone.
- 2202 - Seren's promotion is denied. X becomes disabled. Hammer kills four coworkers in self-defense and moves to the quarantine zone.
- 2203 - X retires at the age of 88. Kathy seriously loses her chill at a parent-teacher conference and flees to the quarantine zone, where she meets Hammer. Flip defends himself and Siobhan against three muggers with way more enthusiasm than necessary and they also flee to the quarantine zone, though they don't interact with Kathy or Hammer for several more years.
- 2204 - Seren is declared irregular and flees to the quarantine zone. A few months later, Ricochet and Trebuchet follow her. Glitch is built.
- 2207 - Glitch upgrades himself and engages in a little corporate espionage because he's bored, then gets declared Maverick. Seren, Ricochet, and Trebuchet join the Drifters.
- 2208 - Glitch steals and activates a C-15 Mettaur. Mack is finally activated, 90 years after the fact. Glitch and Mack move to the quarantine zone and very quickly meet Kathy and Hammer. Valentina joins up as well. Seren kills Tera and converts the Drifters into the unofficial Quarantine Zone Maverick Hunters.
- 2209 - Sophia Microelectronics Research closes. Focus and Drive visit the quarantine zone and just never leave, because they find Kathy and company living right where they were going anyway. Flip and Siobhan also move in at this point.
- 2210 - After years on the run, Cirocco and Trigger move into the Abel City quarantine zone.
- 2211 - X goes on an officially unofficial mission to find a missing human by the name of Charles Alderman, who disappeared in the quarantine zone.
So, in descending order, everyone's ages in the story are…
- X: 96 since activation, or 187 since construction
- Mack: 3 since activation, or 93 since construction
- Flip and Siobhan: 35
- Cirocco and Trigger: 28
- Focus and Drive: 26
- Valentina: 25
- Hammer: 20
- Ricochet and Trebuchet: 14
- Kathy: 12
- Seren: 11
- Glitch: 7
…Which is actually pretty ridiculous. Glitch is practically a baby. Who let a baby become the world's most notorious cybercriminal? (This also implies, between Mack, X, and his attempt to befriend Flip specifically, that Glitch has some kind of a thing for antique hardware, but let's not dwell on it too hard. He definitely isn't.)
Appendix 2: >I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast.
So, about that reploid dialect! It was heavily inspired by 68:Hazard:Cold by Janelle Shane, which is a really fun piece that you should read. Outside of that, it's entirely headcanon. I am a large enough nerd that I love a good conlang, or a bad one, and this definitely counts as a not very good one at least, but it's still entertaining so it's fine. It is mainly a subject/object/verb ordered language, not unlike Japanese. Subjects are often omitted in sentences, also not unlike Japanese, and parts of speech are employed fairly loosely in most cases.
Codes can come from any system, and come in four general flavors. 'I' codes are informational. 'E' codes indicate an error. 'W' codes indicate a warning, and 'A' codes are alerts, which is a stronger warning. (There are 'F' codes, indicating a fatal error, but these aren't used as vocabulary the same reason certain obfuscated codes aren't used: they cannot be broadcast at will. There are chunks of the dictionary like that.) The same single code can use any of those variants to mean separate things.
For example, >E.00186-CMB: Engage. is a noun, meaning 'a threat.' >W.00186-CMB: Engage. is a declaration of intent to attack; the speaker themselves is issuing the threat. >A.00186-CMB: Engage. is a direct order from the speaker, telling the listener to attack. >I.00186-CMB: Engage. is also a noun, but instead of meaning 'a threat,' it means 'a combat.'
Being computers at heart, reploids have a lot more conjunctions than humans use, employing the entire range of logic gates. Whereas a human might say "If they're both going, I'm not," a reploid speaking >I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. could phrase this the long and more polite way with a nice >I.00098-LOG: IF/THEN., or they could simply slap down a >I.00024-LOG: Boolean: NAND. between themselves and the offending duo and call it a day.
There are no hard and fast rules for most of this. The Watsonian reasoning is that it was developing piecemeal by a ton of reploids over the span of about 90 years, and isn't even considered a real acceptable language, so it's all over the place. The Doylist reasoning is that I was making shit up. Still, I did maintain a dictionary of all the codes used (and a handful that weren't, or were but editing changed things) and if you'd like to see what kind of hell that was, you can read that here too, which is the same link as before.
Bonus Appendix 3: Memes
Because I'm memelord trash and also an artist, I'm making it everyone's problem.
There will probably be more over time, because I think I'm funny.