Chapter Text
The last droplets of an overnight autumn rain gently pattered against the half-collapsed roofs and the abandoned shells of vehicles that still lined the streets. Time could heal many kinds of wounds, but infrastructural wounds like this one tended to fester. The area, once the bustling downtown of Abel City, had for the second time in its unfortunate existence become a war zone during the final years of the Maverick Wars. The decade since had seen plenty of reconstruction, but none of it had happened here. The city simply grew away from its scar this time, barricading it away behind high walls, and the Abel City quarantine zone remained condemned, bombed beyond repair.
A tattered blue tarp, not unlike any number of others that dotted the crumbling district, laid underneath the eaves of what had been a convenience store, a remnant of some long-past attempt to itemize the damages before the entire area had simply been declared a lost cause. Or it did lie there, at least, until it shifted, and with some effort, it stood.
The figure underneath it straightened, leaning heavily on a cane, getting its bearings slowly. It wore plain enough clothing: a long-sleeved shirt, an armored motorcycle jacket that had been green and dark gray before the ubiquitous dust of the quarantine zone had happened to it, and tan pants that didn't fit quite right and had seen better days. The cane was a similarly shabby affair, simply a handle on a collapsible metal shaft, worn clean of whatever paint it had once had.
The figure could have passed for human, at first glance, and indeed he had done so plenty of times. It was more effort than he cared to exert unless he couldn't avoid it, now. At some point, he had found he didn't even need to hide his identity. Nobody, reploid or human, would look twice at him. Perhaps it shouldn't have worked, but when anyone thought of him, they thought of a man who hadn't existed for ten years, if he ever had at all. X, the first, the progenitor, savior of humanity and reploids alike—the legend had grown too big for its own good seemingly overnight after his first, bitter victory over Sigma, and only loomed larger over the long course of the Maverick Wars, leaving him awash in his own shadow by the end.
He had found over the intervening years, once he'd learned to move a little in that shadow, that this was not necessarily such a terrible state of affairs in certain ways. For one, it was much quieter. That was a plus in his book.
X, still draped with the tarp pulled over his head and shoulders like the hood of a particularly ratty and shapeless cloak, picked his way over the cracked sidewalk. His left hand gripped his cane, and the other extended awkwardly to his side. Where he could trail his fingers along a wall for balance, he did. He'd gotten lucky, honestly. His self-repair systems had held together with practically no intervention for so much longer than any of the first derivative systems he'd helped design based on his own. He felt he had no meaningful room to complain, compared to countless others.
He reached a former main intersection. The remains of a massive insect-like mechaniloid lay across it, deep in the crater that it left when it had been shot from the sky and half-buried under a chunk of building it had clipped as it fell. Even with the high walls around this part of the city, it had been picked clean of any parts that weren't welded down, leaving a metal skeleton too heavy to budge without a crane and little else. The impact had pancaked the street's surface into the storm drains, and the storm drains into the maintenance tunnels, tearing open dark passageways into God and certain city planners only knew where. Most of the sidewalk remained intact, though, so X skirted the crater.
The sidewalk shifted under his foot, and even before he had entirely realized that he was about to slide, X planted his cane hard into a crack in the ground and braced himself with it. The stray chunk of concrete that broke off beneath his foot toppled end over end into the crater, revealing very little beneath it for support. Wind and weather had eroded much of the underlying soil away and rusted through the rebar. X froze, analyzing his potential routes to safety. In the past he'd have simply taken a sliding leap over the entire issue, no problem. That sort of high-speed mobility relied on incredibly precise sensor input, though, and X's proprioceptive sensors were…'less than reliable' was putting it very politely.
X remained still, awaiting any further shift in the ground, and watched the usual procession of errors file past behind his eyes.
>E.04877-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Retrying.
>E.04877-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Retrying.
>E.04877-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Failing.
>W.04877-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters. Recalibration required.
>E.55005-SRV: Failure to process actuator position. Retrying.
>E.55005-SRV: Failure to process actuator position. Retrying.
>E.55005-SRV: Failure to process actuator position. Failing.
>W.55005-SRV: Actuator position could not be verified. Recalibration required.
>E.04874-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Retrying.
>E.04874-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Retrying.
>E.04874-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Failing.
>W.04874-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters. Recalibration required.
It was almost meditative at this point; at least, when it wasn't maddening, or worse, depressing. The full loop included between 1428 and 1452 various errors, three times each, with one additional warning per set of three. Most of them were spread across his sense of balance; a small but important handful pertained to his related kinesthetic senses; the remainder were divided between energy production and storage, memory processing, and damage warnings from sensors that by any analysis were not damaged. X could ignore the errors readily enough, but he had no way of dismissing the warnings, and the background noise they generated as a whole occupied more of each clock cycle than he liked to contemplate.
And they hurt. Even an intact damage sensor reporting damage felt exactly like a damaged one. It made discerning actual injury from systems wear or pure glitchiness very difficult. X had learned with time which unrepairable aches and pains were his new steady state, and simply had to assume that the warning messages they generated were nothing but noise to try and filter. It was not easy.
He logged a full three seconds of error messages, the actuator warnings becoming more insistent as one of his legs began to twitch unsteadily. The remaining sidewalk held, though, so X cautiously made his way back towards the building, counting on the foundation to have resisted erosion. It had, and soon enough he had crossed the street.
Like an old man. I think it's better, he decided, if I don't think too deeply about it.
He had long since stopped feeling sorry for himself, except in brief, bitter bursts. It wasn't going to fix him, and he had things to do that weren't grumble about having to live in the same state as plenty of other people did. Granted, he was lucky. In many places, a reploid with his level of malfunction might have been talked into being retired for scrap, or simply been made to keep on until their systems failed entirely. Retirement was not an option many enjoyed. The long cast shadow of his history protected him, and he knew it. If he was going to be bitter about anything, it was that he was even allowed to simply stop contributing where so many others weren't.
Once X had gained more stable footing on the far side of the crater, he found a vantage point atop an old scaffolding that held up to a few hard, experimental shakes, holding onto the structure with one hand and prodding each next step with his cane before taking it. At the top, he sat, his tarp cloak once again rendering him nothing more than a forgotten stack of building materials to the casual observer, and he waited.
Nobody took a stroll in any of the many condemned districts of the post-war world for the fun of it. X was here to find someone, one way or another. All the better if he could find someone to help him find this particular someone, though who he might meet out here and what they might be like was a question that weighed heavily on his mind. He was not as helpless as he looked, even without his old weaponry and accustomed armor, but he hoped that anyone he encountered wouldn't take him as a threat.
If he was lucky, X thought, he might even find someone with the means to recharge. He could run for a long time on a low battery if he took things carefully, and he could still recharge slowly in the sun, but the constant low power reminders were a hassle. He was sufficiently old that his reactor no longer did more than keep him level if he didn't move much. If he did have to resort to fighting, he would burn through his reserves quickly, he knew. It took a startling amount of computational and kinetic energy to function in combat with his limitations, which would leave him defenseless if he couldn't end it quickly.
X had already had so much more than his fill of fighting, anyway. If it came to it, he was no longer sure if his distaste for violence wasn't now even greater than his distaste for having the bolts beaten out of him. At least he could stand to look at himself in the mirror if he got thrashed a bit. He couldn't say the same for having to destroy yet another fellow reploid.
X recrossed his legs. To his relief, the midmorning sun had started to warm the chilly air. That would take the edge off of some of the complaints from his joints. As for the rest of the usual flood of errors…well, they gave him something to do while he watched, he supposed. After all, he was probably going to be here for a while.