The First and Last of Their Kind
-
There was something in that memory of that ethereal glow from that unarmored Rockman that kept haunting Cometman's processes. What even was that?? Nothing in whatever database he had could point him to any sort of logical conclusion.
Sure there was a lot going on with Serpentine and that whole Colossus Colosseum, but it was that ghost that kept coming to mind. And it wasn't curiosity, or a need for an answer, it was something else, but what it was evaded him. It spoke to something about Rockman himself, like there was just... A lot going on with him. Was it weird that all he thought was that he wanted to help him?
If he traced out a similar logic path, it was the same route he'd take when he saw Ellen look sullen for some inexplicable reason. And there was only one thing to do in that situation, face it all head on and stuff, such was his nature.
"Hey Ellen," he called out, determined, "I'm gonna contact Rockman, the older looking one, got some things to ask him."
Ellen peered over at him chilling on her desktop with a brow raised, "Yeah? You don't gotta ask me for permission, what's up?"
"Well, I want to talk to him one on one," he hummed, "So I'd be going over to his world by myself."
"Oh!" she chirped, taking a moment to consider the fact that she'd be letting him go out there all on his own, "Yeah, uh, cause that guy's got secrets and stuff."
"More like, he seems like the kind of guy who likes to keep some things private. Like he wants to stay quiet about some things," he clarified, holding his chin in his hand.
"Well! When you come back, tell me all about the stuff you're allowed to tell me about!" she grinned, giving a thumbs up, "It's still unbelievable that we've got like, direct access to legendary heroes across time!"
"Different pasts, different futures, different people, Ellen," he grumbled.
"Yeah, I know," she waved a hand about, "It's the same guy, but different! I'm just! Worried about him too, so make sure to tell me all about how he's doing!"
Cometman paused, blinked, then gave her a soft smile, "Of course."
[MSG
]: Hey, this is Cometman. I wanted to check up on you after all that stuff happened at the Colossus Colosseum. Let me know if you're available to meet up somewhere and chat. 
-
"Cometman?" Rockman mumbled to himself, not daring to speak too loudly as he observed Blues and Enzan in a meeting. Some stupid investors, some overseas stuff to make them stay late— but now his attention was drawn into his texts.
He did remember Cometman. He remembered his voice in the cacophony of all of them under Serpentine's influence, alongside his operator's. He remembered the way they fell slowly under the influence, then all at once; both her and the other her, echoing back and forth, their insecurity a perfect knife.
And he remembered their attacks against him, and he remembered– well, he remembered too much. He blinked a few times as if to clear it from his mind. He shot a quick message to Blues to indicate he was going to take a quick walk, and he exited the IPC network.
[MSG:
️] I'm finePause, pause.
[MSG:
️] I mean, from that. All good here. Why do you want to meet?Prickly prickly. Maybe they just want to know why you were such a psycho? Rockman blew a scoff from his nose.
-
Cometman seriously doubted this guy was fine.
[MSG
]: I want to chat about Navis and what we are, because you seem knowledgeable about that. And to be quite frank, I want to help you. You're a nice guy and I want to be your friend, that's the long and the short of it.He sent the message and leaned back on a window Ellen had opened up for him. She had that look on like she was trying to solve a hard puzzle, and she wasn’t known to really like solving puzzles.
"What’s on your mind, Ellen?" he asked, peering up at her.
"It's just...!" she growled, clutching her arms in close, "I'm thinking about that fight we had with that Rockman and how weird it was."
"I mean, the whole colosseum was weird but, what are you talking about in particular?"
"Man, it was like," she flipped her hand about, "Okay so there was this one time when Netken had a huge update that brought a bunch of old players back into the game and they all had this way of fighting where they clearly knew what they were doing but they weren't familiar with the new meta and also they just hadn't fought in a while. That's what Rockman's fighting reminds me of! Kinda rusty, and experienced all wrapped up. And what was going on with his Operator the whole fight? Like, I know he's a different Netto and mind controlled and all that, but he really did a complete one eighty after breaking out of Serpentine's control. I don't know what I'm trying to get at, it's just... There's something else going on between those two, you know?"
He was inclined to agree, especially being told by ghostly Rockman to not tell his Netto about all this.
"He seems awfully lonely," Cometman noted, "Poor guy."
[MSG
]: By the way, have you had the chance to talk to your Operator or anyone else about what you went through? We haven't spoken to Netto about it, but I still think that this is something you should talk to someone about. If you want, you could even talk to me about it, considering I know something about what happened and went through something similar. -
The more that Rockman read the texts, the more furrowed his brow became, and the more the familiar feeling of dread crawled up his throat. He swallowed, even though he didn't have to.
What we are? What a bizarre thing to say. A navi just knew. What the hell would be the purpose of a navi who didn't know– they wouldn't be very useful, that's for sure. Rockman tapped his foot as he tried to figure out what he should say, how he should swerve out of the trajectory of this impending…thing.
Well- first, the talking part. Cometman asked him about talking to people, his operator, which he found woefully naive, never mind the sword in his side or the pain in his head. He laughed, though the sound was sort of distant to him.
[MSG:
️] I talked to my partner.Vague enough, and true. More like he shouted incoherently, and Blues listened, because he always listened. Cometman didn't need to know that partner didn't mean his operator in that context. As little personal information as possible…
You really are an antisocial freak, huh. [MSG:
️] I don't need your help. A friendship with the approach of fixing someone sounds kinda shit.Ugh. The sting of guilt hit him like a lead pipe.
[MSG:
️] …It's nice of you, but I don't need your help.He was still tapping his foot.
[MSG:
️] We can talk, I guess. If you want. My Net is open. -
What a presumptuous prick!!
Cometman clenched his fist and swiped out a message with a swift fury.
"Things getting heated in friendship land?" Ellen asked, peering over at Cometman's disgruntled face.
He paused, gathered himself, then growled out his frustrations and threw his hands down, then folded them across his torso, "I don't get this guy. He's all over the place! Sometimes he's nice, other times he's standoffish, and other times he's just straight up mean?? Makes me wanna fight the guy, maybe I'd finally get a straight answer out of him then... I won't, but," he huffed.
"I mean we already fought the guy, beat him too," she mentioned, leaning back and reminiscing.
He fell slightly onto the window behind him, then let his head fall backwards, looking up at the ceiling of Ellen's desktop, "...How can we even help him?"
"I was really hoping you're strategy'd work cause I have no idea," she chirped.
He stared up at the simulated ceiling that was roughly converted data to a visual format. It was extended pixels from the background extrapolated and constantly shifting with colors. It existed because it had to exist, because he was there looking at it, because he could see these things, these things had to be seen. It was freaky and weird as heck and he just wanted answers all over again.
"I wanna grab that guy by the shoulders and scream at him," he grumbled, squeezing his arms.
"Is that really what you want to do?" Ellen pressed cautiously.
He growled, "No. What I really want to do is get to know him better and be his friend, but maybe the direct approach isn't best here and I gotta be more... Gentle." he sneered as it felt like a betrayal of some sort.
He leaned forward off the window, righting himself and caught Ellen looking at him with a soft smile, to which he mumbled, "What's that look for?"
She laughed and threw up her hands, "Nothing! Nothing, I'm just, glad, that's all!" she smiled, "Why don't you go visit him?"
"I think I'll do just that," he smirked, quickly swiping away his unfinished message and writing a new one.
[MSG
]: Alright, make way then, I'm heading over."If he gives you any grief, you can suplex him again," she chuckled, giving him a thumbs up.
He opened a portal to Rockman's Net, giving her a thumbs up in return as he stepped through.
-
Cometman was huge. This made Rockman a little internally frustrated, as he only had a vague recall of what he looked like back in the Colosseum. Certainly not so huge. Reminded him a lot of navis like MagnetMan, of whom he had no idea how it was practical to be that huge. Rockman stepped back to give him the room to come into himself.
Awkwardly, he shuffled on his feet. He blew a strand of hair out from his eyes. For all intents and purposes, he was quite the different Navi than Cometman had seen in the Colosseum; less bitey, less controlled, and certainly more grounded in reality. In fact, he didn't look much like his bark; he wasn't even making eye contact with Cometman. Just staring a little bit past him.
"Welcome," he said, though it felt sort of stupid to say. Cometman had been to this world before. Wasn't a first time. "Sorry about the whole, like, fight to the death type thing. Not my idea of a pleasant day, that's for sure."
It was becoming more and more obvious to Rockman that all his life, he was using Netto as a proxy to socialize. It was a lot easier then, when they just bounced off of each other. He was terribly adrift on his own. And terribly awkward.
-
The moment Cometman entered Rockman's cyberspace, he scanned the room and then did a visible double take as his eyes landed on Rockman who was a head shorter than he expected. He knew these Megaman types were a bit on the shorter side but he remembered him seeming taller for some reason.
He chuckled good-naturedly at Rockman's apology.
"It's good to see you again, glad you're doing ok," he gave the blue guy a smirk and a flippant hand wave, "Eh, it wasn't that bad. We all made it out alive, didn't we?"
He caught himself. He needed to be more gentle, more!
"I'm really glad that we had friends that were able to help get us out of all that," his expression softened, "I was able to reach Ellen just in time and that's what's important."
He nodded to himself, then felt as though he'd been too vulnerable.
"But yeah! It all worked out in the end!" he gave his best, cheesiest grin, "We beat a baddy, learned a couple of things, and we got a rare chip out of it! Not bad, I'd say."
He ended with a satisfied smirk. He was getting better at this whole conversation thing. Usually he'd rely on Ellen to carry the momentum, but as this was his first time talking to a Navi by himself, well, at least he thought he was doing alright, all things considered.
-
Rockman had the sense that Cometman was also like him, in that a cheerful operator went a long way into modeling normalcy. The cheesy grin looked a lot like that girl's (Ellen, he thought, who's name had escaped him entirely in the void of Serpentine).
"Glad you're...alive," Rockman said, then grimaced- what a stupid thing to say. Cometman may have had his own stumble, but Rockman was basically tripping and falling on his face. He folded his arms, almost visibly walling himself off. There was no reaching for this well of friendship to save Netto; there was nothing and static and
unity.He had nothing in common with this guy.(...Was he a navi? He was on the internet like a navi. But Cometman was asking about navis, and what they were, and Rockman was a navi and nothing else.)
"What- what did you want to talk to me about? Besides- the Colosseum. Something about navis?" His shoulders drew up, tense. For all his cool-headedness in text, his emotions were almost too plain for a navi.
-
Cometman let out an uproarious laugh, "I'm glad I'm alive too!" then simmered down a bit as he felt odd for being so loud.
For a moment, Cometman wanted to reach out and give Rockman a hearty pat on the back, but quickly decided against it -- something about him seemed awfully prickly.
And then he brought up the reason for the whole visit.
Cometman's face fell a little, though he picked it back up quickly, "Yeah, I was curious about Navis. Like um..." he suddenly felt extremely stupid for just thinking about this, but, he was already here so, "What even are they, normally?"
It took him a moment to recheck his output and put together that he had added the 'normally' cause his background processes had been thinking about how not normal he was. But in front of Rockman, all this didn't seem so weird to voice.
"I'll just cut to the chase. Basically, I don't think I'm a normal Navi and so I want to learn more about Navis so I can be a better one. Like for instance," he held out his arm, pinching seemingly thin air alongside it and pulling up an iridescent sheen, "this is a wrapper program made by one of the good Dr. Hikaris. I can't normally interact with, well, anything from y'all's time without it. So that means I'm not normal, you know? It's like... that."
He suddenly felt awfully out of place for just going out and saying what was on his mind in such an inarticulate way. He hoped that with how experienced this Rockman was that he would just... get it. Without him having to explain... that more than anything... at the moment, he just wanted to be more normal.
-
Rockman flinched a little from Cometman's laugh. His arms fell to his sides, and he took a half-step backward. Just surprise at such a response, nothing more.
And then his brow furrowed, tilting his head at Cometman's sudden ask. He seemed to relax, too— his shoulders fell, and his stature seemed to loosen. Rockman was a very normal Navi, so he could easily answer whatever questions he had. ("One of the good Dr. Hikaris" was a strange thing to hear...)
"You seem normal to me," Rockman murmured, watching him touch the wrapper. "Looks like a compatibility layer? You're from a different...internet, I guess. You'd have to be."
Rockman had no reason to think Cometman was strange in some unique way, aside from the whole world-altering and time-altering properties. "I mean– hm."
...It was strange as hell that Cometman found it weird. That he had the sense to believe there was a wrongness in him, and that wrongness meant something. A program was a program and all it knew was itself, what use did it have for knowing of abnormality?
"I mean– doesn't that make sense to you? You're from a different place. Right? I guess— I'm surprised you actually...find it weird."
-
Well... Rockman didn't exactly know what Cometman was talking about, and to be fair, he really didn't know either. How in the world could he possibly describe the feeling of being in his world's net and the net of the past? Where every movement brought errors and warnings that were honestly just annoyances and nothing else. But it all made him feel like an awkward puzzle piece.
There was that one thing that brought this all up to begin with...
"Ah, okay, so. Do you remember back at the Colosseum when you said I wasn't really a Navi? That you really didn't even know what I was?" Cometman hummed, retreating into his collar, "What did you mean by that...?"
He was thinking about that. He was thinking about the time Mel looked into his code. He was thinking about the time Dr. Hikari looked into his code too. He was thinking about the fact that no other Navis could exist at his time.
So what was it? What made him... like this?
It wasn't just curiosity that drove him to ask these things... There was this fear that, since he was so different, and if something were to go wrong with him, what could he even do to fix himself...?
Just thinking about it was making him suddenly and constantly imagine the horrible possibilities. And all of this was plain to see on his worried face.
