MEGA11 - FINISHED AT LAST		[*VERY* ALPHA]
A MegaMan/Bubble Gum Crisis/Battle Angel fusion
by Christopher Willmore (willmore@mail.idt.net)

	Sylia Light's hands trembled as she ran the final checks.
	She KNEW everything would work, of course.  Ten other tries and many years
of work and study had assured that THIS would be a successful activation.
	Nonetheless, this was her LIFE, her GOAL.  There was much more at stake than
reputation or wealth; no one was paying her for this. She was doing this on her own, for her
father.
	<And for Mackie...>
	She remembered that day perfectly, every detail fresh in her mind from constant,
detailed evocation.
	She'd gone off with friends to buy clothes for the new school year.
	Her brother, of course, had been bored, so Dr. Light had taken him to the lab, to
help him as he finished the prototype for the new MegaMan project.
	Both of them always enjoyed that; seeing their father pound away at keys as robot
attendants whirred around, busily shifting parts, welding, testing...
	She should have been there.
	Maybe THEN she would have been able to...
	Of course she couldn't have. She was only a girl, then.
	Besides, how was she to know?
	As it was, it took a while for what had happened to sink in.
	She was trying on a blouse in a dressing room when the store's intercom had
blared,
	"Sylia Light, report to the main desk, at ONCE."
	She hadn't stolen or broken anything, so she'd gone.
	An AD Police officer met her at the counter, and refused to answer any of her
questions.
	He just shoved her into a car, and took her to the site.
	The lab was in ruins.
	A hole had been blasted through the front entrance, through which the scattered
remnants of what had been the high-tech lab could be spied.  Chunks of concrete,
wire and steel were strewn about, while pieces of computer terminals sizzled and crackled,
emitting a foul yellow smoke.
	As did the bodies on the ground.
	"Do you recognise this?"
	Icily, dispassionately, one of the officers shoved a see-through zip-lock bag in
front of her face.
	She took it, and peered inside.
	It was the face of Dr. Light. Or, rather, the top right quarter of it.
	"Father!" she'd cried, hugging the half-baked flesh to her chest.  To this day, her
idle hands felt the fractured piece of skull against them, which is probably why she tried
to always keep them busy.
	"We're sorry, Miss, but we needed a next-of-kin ID, and this was the only identifiable
remnant..."
	"And.. And Mackie?"
	Her brother had been severely injured, but alive, and had been sent off to a hospital.
	The official story was that the MegaMan prototype had gone out of control on
activation.  An assistant had phoned AD HQ right before being killed, himself, and a full
squadron had finally been able to annihilate the out-of-control robot, though not before
it'd killed all those involved in the project and put the labs beyond repair.
	That was only the official story.
	She'd learned better, later.
	Wylon had hired her father, but it didn't own the lab.  Being private property, ownership
had been transferred to HER, Light's heir.
	Refusing any offers to sell out, under the excuse of emotional attachment and
psychological duress, she'd publicly locked up the place, refusing entrance to anybody.
	Anybody but herself and her robots, of course.
	The next few years after the event had been spent in studying, visiting her comatose
brother, or research, but all of these were always linked in her mind with her primary objective;
finding out what had REALLY happened that day, and taking her revenge.
	Eventually, it'd become clear that the MegaMan project had NOT been at fault.
Her 'droids had found a blaster among the rubble, cut off from the arm of a boomer.
	A Wylon boomer.
	Other clues had also surfaced, though none really as important as this one.
This piece of physical evidence, with no reason to reason to be there except for that which
she suspected and feared, clinched it.  The recovered videotapes and computer recreations
from the physical evidence only added to her ire, and made it impossible to deny that
her father had been killed by Wylon, for knowing too much.
	And she knew too little.
	This revelation had set her course for life, impressing upon her a need to discover
what that company was up to. She acted cautiously, of course. Wiley and his subordinates
controlled global production of electronics (they were the makers of  sixty-eight percent of
the world's cars, for one thing), and swung quite a heavy stick.
	First off, she had trained herself. Sylia excelled in her studies, taking no time for
social activities, eventually gaining general recognition as the best cyber-doctor in MegaTokyo
 - Quite the reputation in a town which called itself the 'Iron City'.
	With her added skills and knowledge, she had assiduously analysed all the project 
data her father had accumulated, and thankfully stored as hard copy in an underground
guarded vault.
	Because, of course, Wylon had lost all THEIR backups in an unexplained database
crash the day after Dr. Light's murder.
	Using his information, she rebuilt Mega1 and went on to create Mega2 through 10,
on her own.  These almost-sentient robots formed her only REAL friends, except for a select
few of her university colleagues, and Mackie.
	Sylia visited him almost every day, talking to him, bringing him fresh flowers
and clothes...
	She'd even designed a system that would feed information directly into his 
subconscious, and allow it to react, bypassing the physical blocks that the coma had placed
on his conscious self.  With the news, personal information, and monologues of her own that
he was being fed, Mackie had a chance for a somewhat normal level of mental development. 
If he ever woke, his sister had reasoned, he should not find himself a child in a man's body.
	He never did.
	There came the day when the machines were no longer enough; when the corruption
of his tissues caused by that boomer's shots were too much for his fragile body to handle...
	She'd asked that the corpse be treated for recycling, saying she needed the money.
	She DID, in a way.
	The Light fortune had proven to small to cover all her research (and investigation!)
costs... <Blasted AD Police gets harder to bribe every year....> Add to that that her sense
of pity made her do most of her cyberdoctoring for free, and it was no  wonder that she'd
had to start her own designer clothing company.
	Regardless, that wasn't WHY she'd scrap-ironed Mackie.
	Not quite.
	Since she'd requested it, her brother's body was taken apart after clinical death,
but before total cessation of brain function. Each organ or limb had been carefully placed
in a separate, life-sustaining container, including, most importantly, a separate one for
the system of eyes, brain and spinal cord.
	THOSE would fetch a nice price, the doctors assured her, cince they hadn't
been damaged at all, except for the coma, and that could be easily fixed after death.
	She'd nodded. After all, that's what she'd hoped for.
	The other pieces WERE sold, the extra income used to buy (quite ironically)
some of Wylon's military-quality materials.
	The remaining tank had been carefully placed in her own private lab; a secret one
beneath the mansion, and was constantly monitored by Mega2 (her first success) and
Mega7 (the largest of her creations).
	She'd known then what she had to do, but she refused to finalise it until she was
sure she could do no better.
	Sylia began to hire out the MegaMen as Hunter-Warriors, carefully investing the 
bounties they reaped, and always stipulating a salvage clause in her contracts. That allowed
her to take the weapons from the defeated robots and boomers and use the data gained
from their analysis to help improve her own armament design.
	All the time, of course, she'd never lost sight of her goal, and never refused a job
where Wylon was involved.
	At last, about a year ago, she'd deemed herself ready.
	Sylia had put together all her skill into making the ultimate megaframe (a cyborg
hull this time) and had implemented every trick she knew to make it small, light and
dangerous.
	Hidden weapons abounded. The joints were more flexible than a huuman's, and
the overall appearance was as close to 'homo sapiens' as current technology would allow.
	She could even vouch for the maneuverability. Unwilling to risk an untested model,
she'd built a 'suit' model of Mega11 that could be worn by a normal human, and tested it
out. It worked beautifully, giving her boomer-class strength and speed, plus flight and
destructive capabilities well past the army's own infantry exo-skeletons.
	If any MegaMan could wipe out Wylon, this one could.
	All it needed was a mind.
	Mackie's mind.
	The process of feeding it information had continued in the lab, to the point 
where there was now little difference between the Light computer core's silicon AI and
her brother's own organic subconscious.  The interface was perfect, the knowledge base in
place... All she had to do was plug it in, and she had. That had been the last step.
	The PENULTIMATE step had been an afterthought, a touch of poetic justice.
	She'd modified the hull's left hand to allow for plug-in replacements, and
had then done some quick doctoring of the blaster that had killed her father.
	The blaster that the ORIGINAL MegaMan prototype had shot off the Wylon boomer
in an attempt to save its creator, unwittingly providing the company with a scapegoat, and 
dooming ITSELF to destruction by the AD Police.
	The PS-20 would could now be fitted to his arm, interchangeable at will with one of
her advanced hand prosthetics.
	It was only fitting that this cyborg, made to combat Wylon (and to give her brother
a second chance at life!) should fight Wiley with one of his own secret weapons.
	Mega11 was equipped with better ones, but this one was...
	Sylia shook her head. Best to stop daydreaming.
	No more procrastination. She'd done all she could, and it would have to be enough.
	<Now.>
	Dr. Light flipped the switch.
	A click, and lights flickered around the frame.
	Teh synthetic skin vibrated as the carbon-fiber muscles twitched and contracted,
while the figure's fists clenched and relaxed in the standard first-boot test routine.
	The cyborg opened its eyes.
	"Mackie?" Sylia asked it. "Welcome home."

TO BE CONTINUED...

-Christopher Willmore
 May 26th, 1996