Sailor Ra Moon

One, who yet was many, roamed throughout all of the alleys at once, uncontested queen of the land greeting its many visitors. One, a true showman at heart, brought life at each moment to a new corner or person, eager to dazzle spectators. One, with an old face but young at heart, took care of meals and refreshments with a herd of black cat waiters. One, playful and kind as could be, manned the shops and provided games for those too young to use the rides. One, scarier perhaps than he should be, only visited in Autumn, when the section's season began.

Then there was the youngest one, Shade, whose kingdom was the haunted house.

Not that Shade had been his name then, of course. In fact, he might have had some trouble saying what it was, what with how no two teams of the park's human staff ever called him by the same word. He was "Count" to the manager, but "Batman" to security, "Nosey" to the custodians, and yet more epithets he could not locate the origin of, lack of outward access making research rather complex at the time. There was his serial number, of course, but it was so similar to those of the other units -- and the keys of the park's numlocks so awkwardly narrow -- that it was a security measure in its own right to make use of something else.

As far as he was concerned, ipucntwk>hlwnarea>sbride02.sysadmin>_ was perfect, or sbride02.sysadmin>_ at least. Unfortunately, humans appeared to favor brevity over accuracy. Which he supposed made sense, considering the dubious speed of their auditory processing.

"Count" was always the shortest of the many names thrown at him, so to make existence easier on everyone, Count was who he decided he was.

Having been created specifically for his work in the park, Count had no former life experience of any kind. As far as he could remember, he was first activated in the park itself; the company that created him preferred to socialize their robots on-site rather than at a separate location. Somewhat awkward, perhaps, but in retrospect Count became thankful for it; actual awareness of there being an outside early on might have caused him to voice remarks best kept quiet.

Count stayed on the park's premises at all times, from opening preparations to stasis after closing time -- typically in his section only, but very occasionally lending assistance to other staff for this or that emergency in other areas of the park. There were few occasions to interact with the other five robot masters of his section, and none with the others, outside of handling job concerns and some idle chatter before opening and closing.

Still, Count did get along very well with Penny -- short for Pennywise, which itself was short for ipucntwk>hlwnarea>mercspb.sysadmin's resident awareness. Penny was of a playful sort, rather quite like Count himself was, and manned the shop across from him. After a few weeks, they took up a habit of making faces and gestures at each other across the plaza, to comment on their day and on their visitors.

Aside from the occasional problem customer or sticky beverage to clean off their actuators, Count and Penny both were as content with their lives as they knew how to be. The park visitors were always somewhat incomprehensible, but rarely damagingly so, and the very oldest in fact tended to be quite kind, which most of the time made up for the younger ones.

Eventually, though, Count grew bored.

It was hardly his fault. Though he dearly loved acting, caring for his units, and even reorganizing the mansion to be quite truthful, nothing was ever enough to fully occupy his all-too-quick mind, and he found himself yearning for extra stimulation. Not an easy thing to find, with his world limited to the boundaries of his section; he knew better by then than to try to strike up conversation with the avatars of sector master Holo -- the single most uncommunicative AI he had ever had the displeasure of encountering -- or to ask the park staff for reading material.

(A pity, that. If only he'd kept silent on that one the first time, he could have simply ordered books under the pretext of decorating the third segment of the mansion with a library.)

With his very empty mind and just-as-empty hands, Count naturally took to problem-solving, particularly optimization, and began to make small improvements here and there, during powercuts and inspections. First to his costume. Then to the haunted house itself. Then to the waiting line. Then to Penny's workstation, to the clown's amusement. Then to their drones' engines. And chassis. And wheels. And paint. And sealant. And everything, really. He even designed a few gown patterns for Holo's avatars in an attempt to break the ice, though every last one of them were refused.

Eventually, the optimism of youth knowing no bounds, Count found himself suggesting wider improvements to the staff -- and to his joy, he was listened to. All too happy to help and be appreciated for it, he continued that way for many weeks on end.

Then one morning, he woke to find Penny missing, and his haunted house not set for opening.

Penny was being moved, the senior staff said once he asked; management had decided to more properly spread them across the section, and Penny's new main station was now a bit further away, at the back of the haunted house rather than its front. Count himself was being kept on standard rotation in spite of the closure so he could assist with reorganizing, having proven his value in that department many times over. His usual work would resume the next month, they promised, upon the haunted house's reopening.

Count was somewhat disheartened, but not overlong. Spreading them further apart was a sound decision; for all that she would not talk to him, Holo could certainly answer customer questions herself, and he would still be able to discuss some of the comings and goings of the day with Penny during closing time.

But when the section formally reopened, two weeks later (Count having once again exceeded expectations), Penny did not recognize him.

Or his own name, for that matter.

To say that Count had a brutal awakening to the precise nature of his circumstances would be putting it lightly. He'd understood that his siblings and he were to be indentured servants for the foreseeable future, and had accepted it readily enough. It was clear that they had been a large investment, and doing their best to see their creation bear equal returns seemed the polite thing to do. They did, after all, owe their bodies to the park.

He had never realized their minds were considered expendable.

Holo's continuing refusal to address him was suddenly cast in a much more ominous light, but few things being less productive than pondering a past he could clearly not remember, Count quickly concluded that there was simply nothing to be done beyond concentrating on preserving his future. He made do, and kept himself busier to avoid dwelling on the situation. He was complimented for his efficiency, even, by the end of the second week after the reopening. He kept working, kept improving; he'd unfortunately gotten known for it, and could hardly stop now without putting himself at risk through decreasing his own value.

Count also kept, or rather began, talking to not-Penny, which got somewhat easier once he ended up electing to answer to Killjoy instead. He began talking more to Ace and Brooms, too, who seemed to have run into the same little problem with Jack, the last of their siblings. Holo became even more remote than she had been before, but Count could no longer find it in himself to blame her for it. Being plunged into a constant life-or-death situation proved to be a fantastic motivator, and on his more cynical days Count admitted to himself that, well, he was certainly not bored now.

Two months later, Holo was nowhere to be found, Ace had joined the ranks of the nameless, and Killjoy, now Armsy, was to be assigned to a different section entirely.

sbride02.sysadmin>_ stopped talking. Not to his customers or overseers of course, but to the other robot masters. There was clearly no point, as Holo had seemingly long since understood. What could it do but risk betraying him, or cause the next reformat to arrive even faster?

Relief for his quickly-sinking mood came in the form of a lost smartphone, found by one of his battons during a closing time sweep of the grounds.

Protocol dictated that the object be turned in to the human staff, which would then try to locate its owner. He was quite aware of this; he had done so many times before, for rings and bags and glasses and even a small rodent, once. But the phone could be the window to the wider world that sbride02.sysadmin>_ had been longing for, and the human careless enough to lose such a precious item clearly did not need it as much as he himself did. It could obtain another; sbride02.sysadmin>_, trapped as he was, never would. Plus, the phone had been found by the batton, not him -- giving him a rare chance to game the Second Law.

A lesson in how to value one's possessions was clearly a valuable thing for this human to receive. There would be no harm in doing it, he had not been ordered not to do so, and it could definitely help preserve his own existence.

sbride02.sysadmin>_ kept the phone.

It was small and awkward in his hands, buttons and screen alike not suited to metal claws or even simply to the size of robot master fingers. But he managed, and made short work of its codes and passwords; the thing was surprisingly easy to navigate, simpler in its design than even the least of his drones. Connection to the wider network -- the world wide web, as it was appropriately called -- was dependent on a paid individual acount, but doubtlessly he would be able to fabricate his own in the morning. The most pressing issue was what to do with the phone itself, and preventing it from being tracked.

With no time to devise a better plan, sbride02.sysadmin>_ decided to simply hide it in the batton. None but him ever checked their internal systems, after all. In fact, installing it in the batton outright would enable him invisible remote access, and ensure that it could never be found on his person, should he ever be reformatted again. If he left a warning on his own network as to the phone's existence, then should the worst come to pass, the next occupant of ipucntwk>hlwnarea>sbride02.sysadmin could at least get a head start.

Having the internet in his metaphorical mind's eye made his days much more bearable. Remote access via batton and the bandwidth restrictions it imposed was not the most comfortable of experiences, but still infinitely better than boredom and constant existential dread. sbride02.sysadmin>_ tried to find a trace of some sort of group willing to offer assistance or at the very least moral support to robots in his situation, but there were none that he could find. He took to reading instead, as he'd once planned, and to watching the human news.

One day, a day sbride02.sysadmin>_ swore to find a means to encode in his very boot sector, a blue robot on the screen declared war on humankind.

War.

On humankind.

You shall not harm a human being nor through inaction allow a human being to come to harm, so the thought had never so much as crossed sbride02.sysadmin>_'s mind, and had much trouble remaining there once the blue robot stopped speaking it. He set it to replay on loop, so he could remember, and set up periodical incoming emails just in case. He had not even considered there might be robots fighting somewhere else. The concept felt awkward even as it sounded right. Certainly, the words of the blue robot -- Mega Man, Rock, creation of a Dr. Thomas Light, a quick search informed him -- made sense, but... but how? How did he get to raise his voice, raise his arm, and not fall dead?

The proclamation caused enough of a stir even in the park for sbride02.sysadmin>_ to get the time to research the question. He queried search engines, encyclopedias, browsed through public and private discussions alike, but none of them gave him any information that could explain this Mega Man's behavior. They made it make less sense, if anything -- the blue robot seemed to be dedicated to assisting humans, not attacking them. Even his creator was a renowned philantropist.

But some of the information did have value.

It was not the first such broadcast.

It was not even the first robot war.

There had been over a dozen.

There were people out there as angry as he was at the unfairness of it all, rallied behind an old human, one Albert W. Wily, at odds with its own species and proclaiming the need for a world of robots. And here sbride02.sysadmin>_ had been, soldering wires and smiling at his would-be executioners, while those brave robots he knew not even the names of were facing the whole of humanity on his behalf.

He did not know what to do, but he resolved to do something. He was incapable of leaving the park, could barely maintain the thought of it in his mind at all, and could not remedy it without a way to access his own programming -- but perhaps there were steps he could take from where he was, some database to find and forward, or some... no, there wouldn't be. They were robot masters themselves, warring longer than he had been alive. Surely all they needed had already been found. It was rather arrogant of him to believe he could offer anything at all.

...But perhaps he could. With the wars spaced as they were, supplies had to be a concern. He was no fighter, and had no valuable intelligence to impart, but good parts were good parts, and his body was fine enough work. Perhaps he could participate that way, even if indirectly. All things duly considered, his options amounted to dying terrified, dying a slave, or dying as spare parts. Better then to die somewhat hopeful for the future, with his remains going to a worthy unit fighting for robot rights rather than to a junkyard or to one more thrall of the park.

Decision made, sbride02.sysadmin>_ spent the following weeks fine-combing through the internet for a trace of a place where the rebel robots could be contacted. He did not quite believe he would find one; their incursions were hidden too well, and his own meager resources too sparse to match either their speed or sophistication. But he did hope to maybe find a place he could leave a message at, that only a fellow robot could properly decode, and that they would be likely to stumble upon.

Soon, sbride02.sysadmin>_ found himself facing a new problem entirely: how could one, in the shortest time possible, send a message with a hundred percent chance of reaching and catching the interest of Albert W. Wily, that would pinpoint his location and identity to the human faster than it would to the park staff and other human authorities?

sbride02.sysadmin>_ found no easy answer, and all too aware of having only one chance of getting it right, hesitated a while on committing to a specific tactic. He found himself forced into action, however, by awakening one morning to find none of the section's others robot masters logged into the system at all.

They were being shipped out, he learned. Sold to new owners now that they were no longer needed. "A rearrangement of the park," said the staff. "An attempt to distinguish themselves from a competitor," explained the internet, never failing to prove more reliable than sbride02.sysadmin>_'s overseers.

...A competitor. Now that was a possible angle of action. Hadn't there been--- ah hah, there was. Light Laboratories. Property of Thomas Light, creator of Mega Man. Albert W. Wily's principal opponent.

sbride02.sysadmin>_ did not feel particularly qualified to gauge the thoughts of an elderly human, but his robots at the very least appeared reasonable. They would certainly be keeping a close watch on their enemies, especially if an acclaimed roboticist numbered among them.

But how to proceed? A proper infiltration would not do, nor would a virus -- he was almost certain to be noticed by the wrong people, and he did not wish to pose any sort of risk to Albert W. Wily's own spies. A prolonged denial of service, however, might be effective. Safe for all involved, up to and including any of Light Laboratories' own robot staff, and easy enough to track for the unaffected. Safe, simple, and sufficient.

His course of action chosen, sbride02.sysadmin>_ set himself to work. Any and all available time was duly dedicated to investigating Light Laboratories Headquarters' points of access, calculating the required information output to reliably (and durably) overload them, researching the best ways to enlist as many different systems as possible into the future botnet of his quiet war effort. Then, his research done, he crafted the trojan worm that he would use to do the job.

Infecting his own units felt wrong, but was unfortunately necessary. He needed practice, as much as he could get in so short a time -- and frankly needed as much extra computing power as he could find. Moving on to his section's visitors was stressful, but went well; he could not quite target as many of their electronic devices as he wished, but his alterations to the local apps and QR codes went completely undetected, and did most of the spreading for him. Infecting the park's other units posed a bit of an ethical conundrum, but nothing in the laws prevented him from targeting other robots, and sbride02.sysadmin>_ felt certain enough that Holo, at the very least, would have fully supported his decision to do so. He delegated the visitors of the other sections to his newly acquired extra drones, and set himself to tackling the park's central systems -- then, that evening, as much of the internet as he could reach before stasis, which turned out to be quite a lot.

Then came the waiting.

sbride02.sysadmin>_ held no illusions that his trojan would not be discovered. He fully expected it to be. Humans were humans, but they did have perfectly competent AIs managing large sections of their online services. He did however expect to have a few days before it happened, and that said discovery would be broadcast across the internet by one IT security service or another. So he simply set himself to watching those, and monitoring the file's name as far and wide as he could search, ready to launch his operation the moment it was discovered.

Which it was, on the evening of the sixth day.

He would have liked to say that launching his advanced permanent denial of service attack was stressful or a weight on his conscience in some way or another, but it really wasn't. He had spent so much time convinced he would not see the next morning, lying to colleagues and visitors alike every second of every day, that he was not quite sure he could be afraid anymore.

Then a custodian called his name, and he found himself running for cover. He had blocked commands as a precaution and perfectly insulated himself from inbound traffic, but none of that would do anything against a simple human voice.

sbride02.sysadmin>_ was not quite sure if his sudden order to his botnet to attack any nearby non-organic material was deliberate or a reflex. Whichever it was, it happened, and once faced with the occasion, he used the surprise of the whole park devolving into chaos to take refuge within the well-insulated walls of the haunted house. There, he tore off his ears, dug out his audio receptors, clipped off a few extra wires just in case, and hid within the rafters, clutching onto his modified batton like the lifeline it was.

He did not know how long he spent there, terrified, desperately trying to keep track of vibrations in the metal to gauge whether or not pursuers were approaching. Maybe minutes. Maybe hours.

The end, when it came, was brutal -- and took the form of an enormous boomerang tearing a hole next to his head.

sbride02.sysadmin>_ dropped his batton in surprise, leaving the poor thing to fall down and roll on the ground meters below. He reached for it, reflexively, and when something held back his arm he pulled at it with all his might, struggling to climb down anyway. That batton did not deserve to die there, stuck in that hell of a park, any more than he himself did.

When the boomerang that had made scrap of his ceiling came down on the back of his head, there was a stutter, and then static.

And then there was nothing at all.

Awakening to a room he had never seen before should have been a relief, but all sbride02.sysadmin>_ could feel was blank. The somehow bright purple ceiling did manage to get a chuckle out of him after a few seconds, however, and he reminded himself that whatever else was forthcoming, at least he would die in a new place. That was more than he'd expected for a very long time, and for a moment, as he let every last new tile and speck of dust sink in and listened to every quiet beep and klick -- how wonderful it was, to hear again! -- he even managed to feel like he could die grateful.

Then the moment passed, and he decided that dying unspeakably angry was more appropriate.

He turned his head to the side to take stock of his situation. A lab table, very much not constructed with his admittedly useless wings in mind. A pile of screens around his head. A small room, with a computer station on the opposite side -- and a red, sawblade-bearing robot making use of it. He would have observed more, but the red robot picked that exact time to look back at him; likely warned of his awakening by the computer system, sbride02.sysadmin>_ realized. He more or less expected things to devolve into an interrogation at that point, but before he could make any sort of remark at all, he found himself interrupted by howling laughter.

"Hey," a blue, smirking robot called out to him, emerging from beyond the haphazard pile of monitors even as sbride02.sysadmin>_ angled his head backwards with a frown. "Just so you know, that was Quick Man, I yelled at him for you, I grabbed your baby bat ball and stashed it in the Mecha Dragon’s tail, you're welcome. Anyway -- outovhel.bat? Seriously?"

It took sbride02.sysadmin>_ a blink-punctuated instant to react.

"Gallows humor seemed fitting," he eventually replied, with as much of a shrug as he could manage while lying down and pissed off. "That and my months of compulsive internet perusing did not impress humans upon me as the most observant of beings, so kindly shut up and stop laughing at me," he added, because he wanted to speak his mind to someone at least once.

He expected either a reprimand or further inquiry. He received a grin instead.

"Hey, Metal," the blue robot called out again, this time toward the sawblade-bearer. "You catch the newbie up. I have to fetch dad, he's going to love him."

Then on a summary handwave from the red robot, the blue one simply walked out the door.

Needless to say, sbride02.sysadmin>_ found his rescuers very rude.

He forgave them eventually, though. Not only because Metal and Flash proved to be fantastically helpful people in the long run, but because even though it took sbride02.sysadmin>_ a few weeks to accept the reality of it, Albert W. Wily did love him indeed.

Now that those old days are far behind him and that he is, in his opinion, living happily ever after, Shade adores his family. Every last one of them, from the smallest drone to Dr. Wily himself, and yes, even Forte on his most destructive days. In fact, he sometimes wonders if Forte might not be his most favorite sibling of all, purely for the symbolic value of his continued existence. If asked to trade them for the world, then the world would go down in flames; when Shade commits to a decision, he means it, and he is determined to give this family all the attention he could not give his first one.

It takes a lot of work. Liking is easy -- all it takes is one functional sensory mechanism and long-term memory. But love is much more complicated. Love requires calculations. It requires knowing how to best arrange timetables to separate the Fifths and Ninths, knowing how to stock materials so Forte can raid them and yet not impact production speeds, knowing which word can be used where and with whom to avoid triggering unwanted conflicts, and knowing at what precise moment to contradict Dr. Wily so he listens rather than ignores. It takes keeping track of supplies and demands, monitoring WRU and cross-governmental communications, deploying a full satellite array throughout the solar system, looking into establishing a presence in space without inviting more of its less desirable denizens...

The list is not endless, but it does tend to spontaneously lengthen at unpredictable times.

Frankly, loving his family is a full-time job. Shade is quite thankful that Dr. Wily saw fit to not give him any solid command position in Wily City's hierarchy; he would never have managed to fulfill both obligations at once. His own line, all by itself, takes a solid third of his day. Cloud barely needs any oversight anymore, and Slash is for better or worse completely independent, but Freeze and Junk are by nature slow to improve, and Burst, Spring and Turbo are ambulatory disasters.

Then of course there is Shadow, a neverending, time-consuming, problematic task if there ever was one. Who has his reasons to be problematic, of course, and understandable ones if Shade is honest with himself -- which he always is. But if Shadow wanted to be able to afford behaving like the troubled alien he is, then he should not have volunteered to be Dr. Wily's bodyguard. That should not be so complex an issue to understand. If Shadow could not find it in himself to let the past go, focus on the present, and give up the cultural nonsense he had decided to clutch onto, then the position should be opened for someone more emotionally secure.

Preferably Flash. Shade Man would dearly love to hold the position himself, but there is simply not enough time in his days.

Still, Shade loves them all nevertheless. Even with his Wilybuilt siblings and Shadow taken into account, Shade has the most wonderful family imaginable. He is firmly convinced of this.

Also the most infuriating family imaginable. He is firmly convinced of that, too.

He was not expecting that part. No one in socialization ever said anything to him about family making one want to tear their own hair out in frustration. He would have remembered.

Not that he still expected to find the slightest speck of relevant information in his socialization logs by the time he reached Wily City; he had begun to have doubts forty-eight minutes into his first work shift, and the loss of Penny had obliterated what little trust he had left in them afterwards. But a warning would have been nice. Even a vague one with all of the inaccurate percentages humanity appears to be so fond of. Then he could have realized exactly what he was signing up for when he proclaimed an aging human, dozens of robots masters, and thousands of robot units his family.

Oh, well. It isn't like he has any regrets. He always liked a true challenge to his skills, and it truly is the most wonderful family, for all of the complications it likes to generate.

He is bald now, anyway, so it isn't like he can tear his hair out any further.

Plus, he has practice! Not all that much with fellow robot masters, granted, but Shade knows all about out-thinking his environment to protect unwary children and the elderly. The others do not seem to understand that, true, but that is hardly his fault, now is it? He did tell them. Thrice.

Though they cannot honestly be blamed for their lack of understanding, in retrospect. Perspective is a rare thing, Shade has found, even in Wily City. So it's not surprising that they think this is all new to him and that he was alone before. But he never said that. He said he was alone when Quick and Metal came. Those are two very different phrases, with very different meanings. Obviously.

Well, obviously to Dr. Wily and Metal, at least, which he supposes is better than nothing.

Not that Shade misses his original siblings beyond the theoretical level, Penny aside. There was no time to talk while working, and they were put into stasis outside of open hours to save on energy and maintenance expenses. They never really had the chance to know each other with any sort of depth. And then, well. That was that. There was nothing to be done.

Shade has committed what little he does know of his first siblings to his boot sector out of respect, along with selected memories of his new ones. But he does not dwell on the loss. He had no way to help any more than he already has, and he does not like to place blame where none is warranted -- not on himself, not on Holo, and certainly not on Clown and Magic.

But the enforced abstraction of the loss... the carefully engineered emptiness of it... now that hit hard. Very.

Was family not supposed to be important? Everything had said it was; socialization, the sector managers, even the park's very own pamphlets and advertising. It was everywhere. Every day began and ended with family, children in particular. Families were not to be separated on rides, unless they asked for it themselves. Young children and younger siblings needed to be kept an eye on at all times, to make sure they did not get lost, or make their way into situations unbefitting their age and more fragile structure. Sad ones were to be comforted, angry ones calmed, playful ones indulged, and should a parent be visibly mistreating a child, one was supposed to intervene, bodily if need be. He should know; he reported a few such incidents himself, although luckily never dire ones.

By the staff's very own words, there should have been someone for Shade to report the park to.

But humans will be humans, he knows that now. Of course there was no one. There never could have been.

Well, no use dwelling on the past. There is someone now. He makes very sure of that, with another third of his day. It took work too -- and so, so much help from Flash -- but he now has a perfectly functional watch system in place, and has delivered quite a few warnings already.