The year was 20XX, one year before the robot known as Blues, Protoman, would be created.

Within a base that was hidden away in the mountains, an elderly man in a white robe worked tirelessly at improving some stolen blueprints. The elder man was Doctor Albert Wily, a once respected roboticist who had his own merits fall by the wayside by the work of that blast Doctor Thomas Light.

He believed that he could do anything Light could do far better. So he had stolen his prototype blueprints from his office with just a bit of subterfuge. While they were only conceptual at this point, he was more than confident, maybe even overly arrogant in his ability to turn these concepts into reality before Light.

The old man tapped away at a computer and moved around a mouse to select regions of the electronic blueprint, running simulations on it. The main thing that was holding the blueprints back was that Light had yet to find an energy source that could sufficiently power it safely.

He paused, finally finding a solution for the power issue that this robot had. If it ran on gas or just batteries, it would run out of the ability to move freely within hours.

However, if he were to condense a plasma energy source, akin to a small sun. A big ask, but not something new in this day and age. He could implement into its chest, no, the head. That way the artificial brain would be even faster.

Realizing this solution, he began modifying the blueprints even further. He was putting a superpowered energy source into this thing. He was going to weaponize it somehow. In that way he would also prove that his creation could be a soldier worth purchasing that would revolutionize the world and bring him fame.

—

It took several months even for the mad doctor, but he had finally finished the chassis. Initially he wanted to use the material Doctor Light had appeared to make for this project, but that would appear too suspicious even for him. So instead of using Ceratanium, he used strong but mundane materials.

The man wiped sweat from his brow. He was far too old for this sort of manual labor already, but a simple robot would never be able to be this delicate or precise. In his opinion anyway.

He confidently grabbed the artificial brain. Though it wasn’t really a brain however. The main power source was embedded into the back of what appeared to be a metallic skull. He plugged the cords within the body into the skull, starting with the eyes, then mouth. He spent at least an hour tirelessly working on interfacing the artificial nervous system on its own.

Once this was done, he closed the back of the head up, a long silver ponytail adorned this figure’s helmet, composed of steel fibers.

Unlike the original blueprints, he made it bigger, older looking. Roughly a teenager in height but still looking rather

The robot had blocky black armor adorned with skulls, including on the front. No one would ever say Wily didn’t have a thing for skulls just looking at the design.

Where two hands meant for cooking and cleaning once were, were instead vents directly leading to the power source. With some control, the robot would be able to fire out shots of concentrated plasma at a very high rate.

More vents hung beneath the feet of the robot, rather than ending in boots, the feet were instead tubes with thick sharp claws that could dig through any steel. These vents allowed it faster speed, even air movement in theory, and the claws would allow it even more mobility and extra fighting options.

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Finally, there was the face. Instead of a young boy or girl according to the original idea, there was an armored jaw and heavy helmet balanced out by the steel fiber ponytail. Yes, even the silver ponytail that Wily gave this robot was a weapon by design. It functions just as well as any whip, and being directly connected to the brain, it could be manipulated in theory like any other limb like some sort of tail.

All that remained was to turn the thing on.

Wily gave a laugh loudly into the empty robot factory he had built, all his materials devoted to this one project. With it finally complete he could show it off, get funding for more, and the best part was he beat Doctor Light to the punch! A fully sentient robot, within his grasp.

Wily pressed a button on the computer, beginning a remote start up sequence, watching the robot’s eyes flutter and begin to open to reveal burning red orbs.

-

Nova had made his choices, he was not by any means going into this just to pal around and become a footnote.

Over the years, fighting, politics, growing his following and finally becoming a universe spanning emperor. It was the Megaman series he kept coming back to.

It was a relic of his past, as strange as it sounded considering he was 60 when he finished that entire thing up. For him though who lived long past a century, it was a lot.

He felt himself waking up, but unable to move yet. He entertained himself by viewing the choices he had made. He had reasons for each of them.

He was assured by that being that his experience would have all he asked for.

The question anyone would immediately ask was, “why join Wily?”, and the simple answer is he wanted to leave behind a legacy that spanned the many years of the games both inside this world and out of it. Initially, he wanted to more or less hijack the entire premise of Zero or even Bass. Those first impressions were the reasons for his weapons, or ones he was going to get at some point. Who knows what he was beginning with now.

The main thing was the setting. He was surprised when he saw it. In truth the archival process for animation was beyond harder than the games, but he succeeded in doing it with time during his initial time as a content creator.

This setting wasn’t just simple ‘Megaman’ but instead specifically it was a version of the games from the OVA known as “Megaman: Upon a Star” meaning at some point characters from the game world would gain the ability to enter the real world. This was something he was keenly interested in for one reason.

Feeding his own ego.

That’s it, the main reason he made himself a weapon of Wily, gave himself so many weapons and absurdly interesting was simply to be interesting enough he hoped to be popular enough to influence the course of history.

Of course, it wouldn’t be for a long time until he could see his impact upon the history of Megaman, at least until Megaman 5.

That did not matter to him though. He would wait patiently as he always did, he could wait a century or so to die, he could wait however long it took to reach Megaman 5.

Having said that, as he finally felt light reach his eyes. He needed to make himself interesting, and he didn’t fancy being a simple weapon.

With a sudden movement, he raised his arm cannon before it even entered his vision, firing it at the first blurry object he could see. He knows he was close to hitting someone when he heard a gasp and yelp along with that object moving. He raised his other arm with a second weapon and continued shooting out hot balls of plasma that impacted the walls and computer.

When his vision finally fully cleared, only then did he let out a breath even if he didn’t need to. He felt a power brimming behind his eyes, his skull had a constant hum to it. He looked at his body. He looked like some kind of mixture of Bass and Zero, as he expected.

His red eyes turned towards the computer, stepping forward, his claws clinking against the ground before he saw a hand reach up and press a single button. His arms going limp, his body quickly shutting down.

Despite being shut down, he laughed out loud at the actions leaving him, he caught himself barely from stumbling and falling over. With his vision turning black he put all the energy he could into his feet, digging the clawed feet into the ground.

Even as he turned off, his feet stayed in their position and kept him standing up.

–

Doctor Wily could say he had not expected that, but he had, somewhat expected it.

The robot was designed purely for combat and war. He did not expect it to just fire however. It shouldn’t have done that without a direct order.

Perhaps avoiding implementing the three laws was a mistake, but no, he did not make mistakes. Merely minor setbacks!

That’s all this was, perhaps this, Beta, was a bet too unrefined. He’d perfect it further, put this one in storage. One day he would reactivate it and tell the world what he had done. At least he was content knowing he had beaten Light at accomplishing this thing first.

With that he sent it into the back of his robotic factory and got to work on designing more robots, using the blueprint as a basis for less intelligent but still deadly ones.

There, Beta, also codenamed as Punk, sat, gathering dust and left to wait in the dark for his next time to shine brightly.

He was already having a laugh in the darkness that came when he was shut off though unknown to the doctor, it entertained him to just try it. Of course he failed though and was shut down, but he’d proven he was a weapon.

He had a feeling Wily wouldn’t throw away a perfectly good weapon for no reason.