[Today, he'd been assigned a rather simple B-rank mission; infiltrate an abandoned area, take down a Maverick, retrieve some info, the standard. He expected it to be simple, but the mission had not turned out that way. The Maverick had somehow rearranged the area into one huge maze involving lots of childish traps and challenge battles against a wide variety of Mechaniloids. Axl had embarrassingly fallen to a fair amount of those traps; enough to actually have him blow up at the Maverick when he finally found them, and then they had laughed at him!! And then, worst of all, the Maverick himself was a piece of cake; not nearly worth the effort of traversing that area.
Now he was at Hunter base, still steaming from the mission. He needed to rant at someone, and he knew just the person to bother.
Whatever Lumine is doing, it was time to set that aside because Axl enters his lab without much of a warning and proceeds to plunk himself right down in the chair next to the engineering Reploid.]
[Lumine exchanged a look with Palette and offered a faint apologetic smile over abandoning their project. It was designed to reinforce architectural structure to protect against Maverick attacks, and they'd been discussing the application to individual reploid armour. Fascinating stuff, really, but Axl had a way of... whining, putting it gently, and ruining any efforts at further progress. They'd revisit it once the field operative was done.
Lumine faces Axl with an air of his usual calm, the placid smile on his face reshaped by the absently fond exasperation at the complaint.]
How so?
[He gestures towards the doorway; they really should take it outside of the R&D lab.]
[He doesn't budge yet-- the chair he was in was comfortable, and he didn't feel like moving right now. Give him a moment, Lumine.]
That stupid Maverick made the entire place into a goddamn maze, and it was filled with traps like pitfalls and buckets dropping from above doors, and paintballs firing at you, and--! Augh!
[He's not going to mention how he fell for a good deal of them, despite being the Hunters' resident prankster. No, because he was the resident prankster. Because that would be huge blow to his prankster pride, not that it wasn't already suffering a severe blow due to this latest mission.]
And the Maverick wasn't even that much of a challenge! It was a total waste of time!!
[Lumine arches a naked brow while Axl goes on and on; he sees that injured pride. It's a tempting opening, but he refrains for the moment. Axl's too wound up to start picking on just yet without it blowing up, more likely than not. So instead, the engineer seats himself--midair, antigrav system keeping him aloft.]
Sounds more like a funhouse than somewhere for a Maverick to hole up.
[Someplace Axl should have enjoyed~]
Mission success isn't really what I'd call a waste of time, Axl.
[Folding his hands in his lap, Lumine tips his head towards a shoulder.]
Though don't imagine it was a particularly enviable experience.
It definitely wasn't a funhouse! It was more like an 'annoyinghouse' than anything else!
[There's a level of seriousness Axl expects from Mavericks and missions. Maybe if he'd been visiting off duty he would have enjoyed it, but...]
They totally could have sent someone else for this job! Why did it have to be me??
[Probably because he was the prankster. Which just makes it sting all the more to have fallen for so many of the tricks. Ugh. He's really glad his Navigator didn't have access to visuals during that mission, or she probably would have laughed at his state right after finishing off the Maverick. Covered from head to toe in all sorts of imaginable and questionable substances.
Thankfully, there had been a pool of water in one of the rooms of the maze and he had cleaned off there before reporting back to base.]
I'm saying no the next time a mission like this comes up.
You say that now, but you jump at nearly every mission.
[Which sometimes, Lumine'd noticed, earned Axl odd looks. Leaning forward, Lumine rests an elbow on his thigh, legs crossed, and props his chin on his palm. The opposite arm folds across his lap.]
Maybe you should have asked Palette to navigate for you; she's better at picking out structural information from feeds and research than most.
Missions are usually fun and exciting though! This one was just a total pain in the butt.
[He grumbles about it again; he's pretty sure he missed an area on him somewhere and there's still some weird substance left on him. Once he retreats to the comfort of his room he was going to thoroughly clean every inch of his armor.]
But she was busy with that project of hers. I didn't wanna bother her.
[And yet he bothers Lumine, who's working on the same thing.]
[Dammit Lumine, you always know where to hit to rub salt into the wound. He's tempted to wipe that annoying smile off the other's face but that would just make him even more amused. So he just folds his arms across his chest and pouts petulantly.]
Shut up. That Maverick's traps were terrible. They're nowhere near good enough to reach my caliber.
[Lies all lies he totally fell for them god how dare the Maverick beat him at his own game]
[Yeah, he knew. He knew, dammit. But after a few seconds of giving the other new gen a dirty look, he sighs and then grins. His anger and irritation always vanished after spending a few minutes bantering with Lumine. Something about the other's cool, rational logic and his subtle teasing calmed him.]
Maybe one day I can hope you'll become a more caring, loving friend.
[The vanishing negativity leaves Lumine with a small, satisfied look on his face. The differences between them act like a balancer, something to buffet against until whoever was railing discovered something level again.
Axl's "hope" is rewarded with a small fit of giggling, Lumine cocking his head to one side and peering up uncertainly at the older New Gen.]
I can't stop you from hoping, but I'd advise against it. You'll only be disappointed.
Of course. What a miserable fate I have been cursed with.
[Dry, sarcastic--and Axl undoubtedly knew better than to take the words at face-value. The arm around his shoulders made him bob minutely, system stabilisers (internal, unlike Axl's) adjusting for the weight instantaneously.]
[Perks of not being a field operative or his being one of the youngest Hunters on-base.
Doesn't much dampen the sarcasm, though. Which surfaces again with a resigned sigh.]
How ever will I survive?
[They have the strangest thesaurus in use.
Lumine peers back over his shoulder at Palette, the somewhat older reploid rolling her eyes and shooing them out of the lab ("If you're going to be like that, then at least let me work!"), and Lumine calls back to her as he's dragged away about resuming later.
Down the hall a ways, Lumine pushes a hand against Axl's face half-heartedly. Really, he doesn't need to be dragged the whole way to wherever or whatever it is Axl has in mind.]
[...okay. Axl wasn't exactly sure what was going on, because one moment, he'd been fighting Mavericks, traversing through some ruins to complete his mission. The next? He was in... a city. A not ruined city, and in fact it looked to be in much better state than most of the civilian inhabited cities he'd visited before. There were humans everywhere, and not a single Reploid to be seen. Was this a human only settlement? Except that didn't quite make sense, because even the most hateful human cities had a few mechaniloids here and there and he didn't see those around either.
The most puzzling evidence was the way they all stared at him like he was some sort of alien.
So he'd ducked into a nearby alley to get away from the attention and sort out his location. Pinging HQ got nothing. Well, that wasn't exactly true. He would've expected nothing, but he was getting a sense that the whole city was covered by a network, and he was getting ping backs from... something, and a whole bunch of data he couldn't interpret very well. It was a confusing mess, to be honest, and just left him feeling a little more than frustrated.
With a bit of a huff, he sent out one last query -- general location and information on the area -- and settled against the wall in preparation for the mass of confusing data he would inevitably receive in return.]
[Megaman would like to say that his first reaction to getting random mystery pings from nowhere had not been to shriek so loudly he'd gotten damage inquiries from concerned passers-by. He would be lying. It was hardly his fault; anybody would be startled by a disembodied voice suddenly talking to them, verbally or otherwise!
He'd calmed down eventually, at least, and tried to communicate with....whatever it was...but it really wasn't going all that well. A few other navis had "heard" it too, and had tried to talk with it, but they'd all pretty much given up after a while. Nobody could really understand what was being "said," after all, and whatever it was either couldn't "hear" or didn't understand them either. At least, he didn't think it could. Nothing had really felt like an attempt at a coherent reply.
...was this something like Zero? Had he tripped over some newly-sapient digital life's first "words"?
Megaman was almost ready to give up himself when another ping came in. This one he could understand, even if it. Still didn't quite make sense. A request for network location data and system info, he could understand, but the real world? Why would it want that? ...well, no time to think. He scoured as many network connections in the area as he could to "map" out the geolocations of their IP addresses, pulled up as much general info as he could find using them, and bundled it all up to ping back.
He kept a copy of it all for himself, too. Just in case.
"Lan, you need to call dad. I think I just found something weird."]
[As he expected, the returning data made little to no sense. First of all, he'd never heard of this DenTech City that whoever it was that sent him the data was telling him this city was named. On top of that, DenTech City contained so many locations that were... to put bluntly, frivolous and wastes of space, resources and electricity. It wasn't that they had any sort of energy shortage (that probably wouldn't happen for another century or so), but Earth was already doing poorly thanks to the Earth Crisis and the surface only recently became habitable for humans again. Maybe one entertainment space could be expected but there were so many others, and... there were also a ton more humans in the city than what would've made sense.
Frowning, he sent out a query to his aide -- a question about DenTech's prosperity, and the location of the Maverick Headquarters. He paused, and then added on a third query -- the identity of his helper.
Hopefully they'd understand it-- about thirty percent of the data sent back had been some sort of junk data, or something he couldn't understand, to be more accurate. He couldn't help but shake the feeling that he wasn't supposed to be here, wherever here was.]
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