Empatheias App

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⌈ PLAYER SECTION ⌉
Player: Leriel
Contact: AngelLeriel
Age: 27
Current Characters: N/A


⌈ CHARACTER SECTION ⌉
Character: Megaman.EXE
Age: 13
Canon: Mega Man Battle Network (games)
Canon Point: End of MMBN6, just before the boys tell their friends about Megaman being Hub

Background: Hoo boy, there's six games to get through and the wiki doesn't summarize the series as a whole well...or at all, really. I apologize in advance for the herd of teal deer you are about to witness.

Setting info
In the alternate universe Earth of Battle Network, the Internet and computers have advanced and been integrated into everyday life to a spectacular degree. Scientists have even managed to create true Artificial General Intelligences, human intellect-level AIs that are fully self-aware and sapient...and also necessary to keep day-to-day life running smoothly. Called Internet Navigators, netnavi or navi for short, they come pre-installed in every PET (Personal Terminal, a handheld device that functions as a laptop, tablet, and smartphone all in one). The majority of netnavis are basic off-the-shelf models, but many are custom programmed to work best with one particular operator.

Pre-game backstory
Megaman.EXE is one of these custom navis, programmed by premier Net researcher Dr. Yuuichirou Hikari as part of a government project, attempting to use human DNA to generate navis even more human-like than the standard method. At first glance Megaman looks like a rousing success, but there's a tragic complication: he was programmed with the DNA of Dr. Hikari's recently deceased son, Hub, and somehow he's ended up with Hub's soul as well. Megaman's not just a humanlike AI - he technically is a human, accidentally brought back from the dead.

There's not much info about how this was discovered, or how Megaman reacted to learning this, but he and his parents are all fully aware of it in the first game. There's even less known about what his early life was like; odds are he spent at least some of it somewhere safe in his father's lab. Eventually he was given to his twin brother Lan, presumably as a gift sometime when they were five or six, given that the games make it clear they've been together for years and Lan never indicates there was anything odd about how he received Megaman. Megaman is perfectly happy being his brother's navi, and Lan is completely unaware that Megaman is his twin brother - or even that he has a twin brother at all. (Though given the whole accidental revival thing, it's hard to fault everyone for finding the subject awkward to bring up)

MMBN1
All in all, Megaman's life is (not counting the whole coming back from the dead thing) about as normal as can be expected for the son and grandson of world-famous scientists. This same status is also exactly what causes his and Lan's life to spiral rapidly out of control for a couple years, however - their very first run-in with a cyberterrorist group stems entirely from a plot to steal an important program Yuuichirou hid in the family home network. It results in a very harsh pivot away from a normal life, with Megaman needing to race against time to save Lan and their mother from being burned alive in a house fire.

The organization in question is called World Three, WWW for short, and is run by none other than Dr. Wily. (Sorry, Lord Wily, he took a long detour through Ego Trip on his way to villainy in this 'verse) WWW has been mostly just infesting everywhere with increasingly large amounts of increasingly powerful viruses; their end goal, however, is to steal several important programs containing information on programmatic elemental typing, which Wily intends to use to create a supervirus with no weaknesses whatsoever that he can use to take over military killsats. The brothers initially keep ending up in incidental encounters with WWW - one agent attempts to brainwash Lan's school, another disables the new local subway right when they planned to use it - but very rapidly start going out of their way to fight against them. This includes breaking into secure government facilities. Twice.

Eventually they manage to locate the route to WWW's main base (which is...a subway line hidden under Lan's school. This is not the weirdest thing that will happen in this series) and eventually convince their dad to help them use it to take the fight to Wily. By "convince" I mostly mean "make it painfully obvious that they're gonna do it anyway, and are less likely to die if they have Yuuichirou backing them up." Naturally, this means Megaman gets himself almost killed.

Yuuichirou is able to save him, of course, but doing so requires using an old batch file from back when Megaman was programmed. This file contains the original, unedited version of Hub's digitized DNA, and using it will patch Megaman's edited copy back to its natural state. Since this would mean that the boys - being identical twins - would have functionally identical DNA, it would trigger a permanent version of a state called "synchro" and leave them mentally connected. This could potentially kill Lan if they start synching up too much, so Yuuichirou explains who Hub was and that he and Megaman are the same person, then leaves the choice to use the patch up to Lan. Lan goes for it, and the bros have a very, very awkward reunion before they finally squash Wily's superbug.

Things are still awkward between them as they wind down from the aftermath. When Lan finally makes it clear he's not sure how he's supposed to treat Megaman, or even what to call him, Megaman puts things straight: he's still Megaman, always has been and always will be. He doesn't want Lan to treat him any differently now than he did before he knew. He's always been happy with the way things were, after all, and they never loved each other any less for it.

MMBN2
Life goes on, and eventually summer break arrives. Adventure! Relaxation! ...actually, massive amounts of homework and reports to do because Lan tanked his report card again. It genuinely almost makes them miss out on the chance to get Megaman registered as a "City Netbattler", a kind of honorary law enforcement position for navis in the wake of all the cyberterrorism; it's a good thing they made it in time, because there's a new netmafia in town and they're not pulling their punches. The boys' first chance to flex their newly legalized muscles comes when a member of the netmafia, Gospel, hacks one of their friend's houses to hold her for ransom, and from there things escalate quickly, first to a bombing attempt at a dam and then to finding themselves smack dab in the middle of an attempted takeover of Japan itself via the central government supercomputer.

Their help during the attempted takeover earns them not only a commendation for their skills (and Megaman's shiny new upgrades) but an invitation to an international network security conference being held by the Officials - an extranational, international "Internet Police" force - to address the threat of Gospel. One small problem: the conference is taking place in Europe, and guess who's never left Japan before? These two. The entire journey there is just a massive chain of problems and errors, from Megaman almost getting confiscated by airport security to Lan getting robbed twice, with the second time actually being Megaman's fault (mostly).

It all results in an argument at the hotel that ends in Lan ditching Megaman in the room; and after someone breaks into the room, hacks Megaman, and steals Lan's passport, the blue navi just ends up wallowing in guilt and shame until Lan finally comes back. The brothers reconcile - consisting mostly of Megaman blaming himself for everything while Lan alternates between apologizing for his own screwups and trying to make Megaman stop apologizing - and Lan repairs Megaman's damages so they can go out and get Lan's things back. Soon enough, everything is right as rain.

Just in time for the conference to get attacked by a Gospel mole. And then for the plane the boys take back home to get hijacked and nearly crash. And then for the world's environmental control systems get hacked and leave the boys racing to get things under control before huge swaths of humanity are outright killed by earthquakes and tsunamis. Because the Hikari brothers are not allowed to have nice things.

At first it seems like Gospel's gone for good, but viruses with their signature are still increasing in number and severity all over the internet. Things get so bad the Officials can't even spare enough manpower to investigate potential hideout locations, and when they put out the call for City Netbattlers to help the brothers answer...and immediately locate the base because having a well-respected government-employed scientist for a dad means you get access to all the good tech.

There's just one problem - the base was located only because it is emitting electromagnetic radiation like the world's largest microwave, at levels dangerous to human health. Lan gets his hands on a protective suit and they charge the base; unfortunately, the electromagnetic radiation is even worse than sensors indicated, and Lan slowly begins to be visibly effected by his exposure, much to Megaman's rapidly growing distress. When they finally confront Sean, Gospel's leader, things get so bad that Megaman kind of...snaps. The Mulitbug Organism Sean accidentally created hijacks the hideout servers and spikes the radiation so rapidly both humans start screaming in pain and eventually lose conciousness, prompting Megaman to basically throw himself at the entity in rage. "Nobody hurts my Lan like this and gets away with it!"

No amount of anger will let him win without Lan's help, though. Fortunately for the both of them. synchro kicks in, and after a very touching, very confusing "reunion" within the depths of their own minds Megaman manually adjusts his own settings to make their synchro even stronger. It's enough to give them the edge, and Megaman deletes the Gospel Multibug, shuts down the servers emitting the radiation, and saves his baby brother. ...and also the world, but honestly that was more of a pleasant side effect of the brother-rescue. They limp their way home with Sean in tow, and slowly life returns to normal. Just in time for school to start back up for the fall, and for the brothers to realize that in their hurry to save the world, they kind of forgot to do Lan's homework.

MMBN3
Once again things start heading back to a sort of normalcy, and once again that normalcy gets shattered by cyberterrorists. At first it seems like this time the brothers are tripping over villainous plots purely by accident, but even if they had somehow managed to not be in just the right place at the right time, they would've been dragged into things anyway. Wily's back again with his WWW, and a big netbattle tournament the brothers were practically invited to turns out to have been part of his plan to delete Megaman (and his not-so-friendly rival Protoman) live on international television as part of his announcing his return! It doesn't go even remotely like Wily planned, though, and the boys hope they won't have to worry as much now that they're not the only ones who believe WWW's back in action.

That said, the tournament does result in a couple unexpected side effects. One, the brothers are now pretty darn famous for their performance and are now known around the world as being the ones who stopped WWW the first time around, and two, they have fans now. They meet one, a boy named Mamoru, while checking in on a friend who was hospitalized after an accident; they end up befriending him, and Megaman becomes extremely protective of him after he tells them he suffers from a heart defect called HBD and basically has to live at the hospital. Why? Because Megaman knows far too well what having HBD is like - it's what killed him as Hub, and he very, very clearly remembers it.

Both of the brothers end up becoming a sort of encouragement squad for Mamoru, doing everything they can to show they're there for him and supporting him when his health takes a turn for the worse. When he gets rushed into surgery they immediately head for the hospital to be there when he wakes up - only for the hospital to end up the target of the next terrorist attack. Megaman throws himself at the navi responsible, doing everything he can to keep the hospital running; and when he discovered that the hacking has sent Mamoru's life support offline, he turns himself into the digital equivalent of a living jumper cable to get it running again, and almost gets himself killed in the process. Because he remembers, and he will not, under any circumstances, sit back and let another kid suffer the way he did.

Saving Mamoru - and the entire rest of the hospital, naturally - gets the boys even more fame. Fame that goes right to Lan's head, and makes it far too easy for an old WWW agent (the one who set their house on fire in the first game, even!) to get his claws into the boys. They both end up getting manipulated into helping him with his plan, and when their Good Samaritanship ends with their father's lab bursting into flames...well. They don't take it very well. Megaman even chases the agent's new navi into the belly of the criminal Undernet just to try and stop the blaze, and nearly gets himself killed by a mysterious, murderous Undernavi as a result.

The fire does get stopped, but their father ends up so badly injured he has to be hospitalized; Megaman suddenly finds himself having to stumble his way through helping Lan deal with guilt and depression. A surprise visit from Protoman's operator gives him the perfect opportunity to help Lan make amends, though, and after a visit to their dad for a pep talk Megaman finds himself heading back into the Undernet on an undercover mission: contact the most powerful navi in the Undernet and obtain the only program that can stop "Alpha", the target of Wily's evil plot. He succeeds (after having to essentially join the criminal underbelly just to earn the right to meet with S...at least he didn't have to commit any crimes?) only to find out that the counterprogram will only work for a very particular navis - if he tries to take it and he doesn't meed the requirements, his systems will freeze up. Permanently.

He meets the requirements handily, but he can't help faking a system freeze first. He never explains why he fakes it, but he's also got a very, very weird sense of humor, so who can even say. Unfortunately, Wily steals Alpha the very moment Megaman gains the counterprogram - and the mysterious Undernavi from before stops Megaman from getting Alpha back by just. Stealing the counterprogram. This is why you don't joke around while obtaining the only thing between your world and the plans of an evil villain, kids! Always assume your world-saving has a time limit.

With that, the entire internet starts turning against human and navi-kind. Alpha, it turns out, is a prototype of the navi-usable internet, but became so glitched and buggy that it started eating everything on it and essentially became a giant network-spanning virus. Wily, naturally, hooks it right back up, because he's a right bastard like that. And in order to ensure that nobody can mess with Alpha, he uses another piece of stolen too-dangerous-for-public-use technology: Pulse Transmission, a system that sends human brainwaves directly into a computer network, and which has a very nasty side effect of potential coma or death if a human's digital presence gets deleted.

Naturally, Lan plugs his brain right into that sucker while Megaman vehemently protests the idea.

At first, Pulse Transmission proves to be a blessing. With it, the brothers can reach Full Synchro for the first time, which causes Megaman to become essentially unstoppable as a fighter. Neither the mysterious Undernavi (Bass, who reacts to his defeat by vowing to eat Megaman alive to steal his power for himself) nor Alpha itself can stand in their way. After deleting Alpha's core, they find something odd - embedded in Alpha's code is a VR sim of a very, very old laboratory, and living inside it is a brainscan of their grandfather. He warns the boys to leave the system quickly, as Alpha is so big that it will take a very long time for it to completely "die" even with the core deleted, but while escaping the network a still-active chunk of Alpha grabs them and starts trying to "digest" them both. Megaman reacts to this the only way he knows how: he forcibly breaks synchro and, against Lan's will, triggers his suicide protocols to blow a big enough hole in Alpha for Lan to escape.

Lan is essentially flung back out of the network by the force of Megaman's core overloading...and somehow, Megaman doesn't die either. Though it's never explained for certain, it's heavily implied that the brainscan of their grandfather managed to preserve Megaman's core data by embedding it into the lab VR, and uninstalled himself so Megaman could fit. Unfortunately, it takes over four months before anyone even realizes Megaman's still alive, and while he gets patched up and given back to Lan as quickly as possible, it's still four months of his - and his brother's - life that he'll never get back.

MMBN4
So now Megaman is back, Lan's in his last year of elementary school, and everything has once again returned to normal. At which point two very unrelated things happen: one, a mysterious group called the Nebula Syndicate has cropped up, only instead of trying to destroy and/or conquer the internet and/or world, they're distributing what are essentially cyberdrugs, filled with malicious data that slowly infects and reprograms the navis that use them while also (apparently) tainting their souls; and two, a really weird comet shows up, which turns out to be an alien probe or satellite on a collision course with Earth.

To fix the comet problem, a consortium of scientists (including good old dad and a new net researcher, Dr. Regal) develop a special transmitter to let a navi connect to the 'comet' and alter its course, then hold a series of global tournaments to find the strongest navi-operator duo to send in. The boys win handily, and Dr. Hikari is...less than pleased that his sons are about to risk their lives again. Unfortunately nobody has much choice - it turns out Dr Regal has been the leader of Nebula the entire time, and he hijacks the transmitter to send his own navi to the 'comet' so he can use it to infect the entire internet with the cyberdrug program. The boys follow along and stop him, only to then find themselves facing a giant alien AI named Duo, who is actively trying to ram Earth because he's determined that humanity being capable of acts of evil means they need to be purged. Eventually the brothers manage to convince him that good and evil aren't blanket states, and that humans and navis are capable of great good to counterbalance their great evils, and the comet is diverted.

MMBN5
Time goes by, and one day the boys get a surprise call from their father. He's discovered something very interesting in their grandfather's old notes, and he'd like to show it to them and their friends. However, their impromptu field trip to the labs is interrupted by Regal and his Nebula goons - they gas the lab, steal whatever it was Yuuichirou found, and then kidnap Yuuichirou and all of Megaman's navi friends for good measure. The only reason they don't take the brothers as well is because Lan lost consciousness in a place where the goons couldn't find him, and Megaman can only lay there and listen while his father and friends are taken away by a very, very cruel man. So when their mother forbids them from trying to help rescue their friends, well, Megaman's perfectly willing to take his reckless baby brother's side and just go do it anyway.

They end up getting recruited into a secret Anti-Nebula task force (being publicly known for stopping cyberterrorists multiple times, and also an alien comet, and also being maybe-sorta rivalfriends with an Official opens a lot of doors) and become the leaders of the attack force, recruiting other navis and operators with skills and connections they need while fighting against Nebula navis left and right. On one offensive foray, though, everyone gets a little too caught up in their string of victories and drop their guard, and as a result Megaman gets kidnapped by Nebula. Regal has him forcibly reprogrammed, which is shown to be incredibly painful, and turns him into a vicious, sadistic, sociopathic murderchild. And because that alone isn't nearly enough trauma, Megaman himself is still actually sane and self-aware by sheer virtue of Nebula not being able to reprogram his soul, and he manages to break through and gain control of his body back a few times. Mostly to beg for death. He does eventually manage to override the reprogramming long enough to get rescued and fixed but....yeah. The odds that he came out of this with some serious mental scarring are pretty high.

While all of this is going on (barring the interruption of "kidnapped and forcefully reprogrammed")  the boys are doing their own investigation into what their dad found. They eventually discover something called the 'Hikari Report', which contains notes on one of their grandfather's last, unfinished, collaborations with Wily, the 'SoulNet.' Exactly what SoulNet is beyond "a way to link human and AI souls into a network" and how it works is never really explained, but one thing is made clear - if it's a network, it can be hacked. And that's exactly what Regal plans to do: complete SoulNet and then "infect" it with Nebula Grey, a giant digital being that is essentially a sentient mass of anger and hate and violence.

Regal fires up SoulNet and hooks Nebula Grey up to it, which starts slowly driving everyone to mindless violence...everyone except the Hikari brothers. Lan, in the course of their investigations, received an old "good luck charm" of their grandfather's that blocks the SoulNet signal, and thanks to their synchro Lan's mind acts as an anchor for Megaman's. Megaman immediately sets out to punch the living embodiment of all of the malicious thoughts and feelings of all humanity and AI-kind in the face while Lan works to shut SoulNet down for good. This time, once the day has been saved, Regal actually ends up getting captured. However, he's somehow lost all memory of the past ten years of his life, which seems to have been enough to bring him back to before he twisted off and decided to become a bad guy. The only explanation anyone can come up with is some kind of backlash via SoulNet, but Regal was still very much a cruel and violent man when they turned it off...

MMBN6
The internet (and the world) have been saved yet again, but this time things don't quite settle back into normal. Yuuichirou's been brought onto an important project in another city, and since he barely sees his family as it is he's not about to leave them behind for what might be months; the boys are moving away. Their new city is...odd, but they manage just fine, and even manage to impress Lan's new classmates. Plus, this place has Copybots - robotic peripherals for navis that let them interact with the real world directly. Any place that lets the bros have brohugs can't be that bad!

And then cyberterrorists set the school on fire.

Once again the boys are chasing criminals through the internet and all over the city. Only this time, they don't have a clue what their new city is really like, and the local internet has its own brand of local weirdness. The biggest one is a legend about "Cybeasts", massive Multibug Organisms sealed up deep in the local net. Naturally, the cyberterrorists (lead by two of the boys' allies from the Anti-Nebula task force, Beryl and his navi Colonel) want to let them out. So does a local cult of power-crazed navis who worship the Cybeasts like gods. The boys plan to do everything they can to keep this from happening.

Except it happens pretty much immediately, and Megaman panics and, um. Downloads one of the Cybeasts into his core. This has exactly the kind of pleasant outcomes you'd expect, with bonus "and now you're a werevirus, good job breaking it hero." Things pretty much slowly spiral downhill from there.

The brothers continue to fight against whatever additional plans the various villain groups in the city have running, while trying to keep the Cybeast Megaman downloaded out of their hands and under Megaman's control. (The control thing doesn't always work out so well). While they manage to make a few new friends in the meantime, including a girl named Iris who has the uncanny ability to always be around when things go south, the moment they get a free, calm moment they book it back to their old hometown to see everyone. It's not the happy break they planned on, though, and after an unpleasant series of threats and kidnappings the cyberterrorists manage to steal Megaman and run. And just like the last time he was kidnapped, the bad guys are perfectly happy to corrupt Megaman until he's exactly how they want him - in this case, an angry violent werevirus running around attacking humans with a Copybot. It's a genuine miracle Lan and his friends were able to wear the Cybeast out soon enough for Megaman to regain control.

Things finally come to a head when the head villain finally springs their trap on the boys using a local science convention. And who's been manipulating everyone from cyberterrorists to cultists to the freaking city mayor this whole time? Wily! You just can't keep that guy down. He sets off a massive revelation chain, spilling everything from his plan to install both Cybeasts into giant combat-capable Copybots so they'll destroy the whole world fighting each other to the fact that Iris is actually an unsettlingly human-looking navi in a Copybot and technically Colonel's sister. The boys manage a last minute Hail Mary, convincing Beryl and Colonel to turn against Wily and save Iris, and the twins join forces with Colonel and Beryl to deliver a tag-team siblings smackdown on the Cybeasts.

While they do finally manage to delete the "undeleteable" Cybeasts, it comes at the cost of Colonel and Iris' lives - they sacrifice themselves in a final suicide blow so Megaman doesn't have to, and like him they can't be restored from backup. The boys finally manage to bring Wily to justice, mainly by giving him a verbal smackdown so harsh he agrees to turn himself in and try to find a way to use his skills to preserve his old friend's dream instead of trying to destroy it. And with  that, life finally, truly returns to normal for the Hikari brothers.

Which isn't to say they're not due a last surprise. When Lan finishes the 6th grade, he and Megaman find themselves with a rather large gift - Iris' Copybot, sent to them by Beryl as a final thank you. With it, Megaman suddenly finds his world opening up in a way he never imagined possible.

All he has to do is open the door.

Personality: Megaman's personality can be summed up in three words: he's a kid. A kid who's rather mature for his age, to be sure, but a kid nonetheless. He's friendly and fairly outgoing, and loves hanging out with his friends. He's also loyal to a fault, sticking up for those he cares about whenever they're being put down and risking his life to protect them without a second thought. If he sees someone feeling down, especially a friend, he'll do his best to cheer them up and help them out. This means not only offering comfort and encouragement but also willingly going out of his way to help fix their problem or get something he knows will put a smile on their face. Megaman is not someone who makes idle promises - if he tells you that everything will turn out all right, you can bet he's already planning a way to go out and make things all right.

He's the kind of person who tries to see the best in everyone. While it's not terribly hard to get on Megaman's bad side (threatening lives, and especially his family, is a good way to do it), it's not all that difficult to get back on his good side, either; you have to really screw up to end up on on the blacklist permanently. This does make him rather easy to manipulate at times - the incident where Hinoken tricked Lan and Megaman into helping him attack SciLab is a prime example.

That being said, he's not one to wallow in guilt whenever he gets manipulated or makes a mistake. He'll feel absolutely awful while it's happening and throughout whatever attempts at fixing things he can carry out, but once everything is over he steps back and sets the incident aside. He doesn't forget it, not by a long shot, but he's not going to worry about something that's in the past. After all, it's not like beating himself up and indulging in what-ifs will do anything to change what happened. Better to accept that he screwed up, learn from his mistakes, and make amends by moving forward and doing whatever he can to deal with the aftermath or help out elsewhere.

Megaman's personality really shines through the most in the context of his relationship with his operator, Lan Hikari. While the two of them have plenty of similarities, they're best defined by their differences - Megaman is more polite and generally more well-behaved than Lan, and has no problem with chastising his operator for being rude or nagging him to do his homework or get out of bed. He prefers thinking things through when Lan would rather jump in and wing it, and is usually the voice of reason and the one to advocate caution. As a result it's not uncommon for them to argue, though they're close enough to reconcile fairly easily and can usually understand where the other is coming from. For the most part, Megaman plays the part of the dutiful older brother, doing what he can to keep Lan safe and in line; rather appropriate, considering Megaman's true nature as the digitally resurrected Hub Hikari, Lan's older twin.

This isn't all sweetness and light, unfortunately. Coming back from the dead, and knowing that he died and came back, has made Megaman more than a little codependent. There are many times where he talks and acts like he genuinely has no idea how to have a life that isn't defined by Lan and his status as Lan's brother and navi, and he gets extremely overprotective of Lan at times. He also gets deeply hypocritical about the lengths Lan is allowed to go to to protect him compared to what he's allowed to do to protect Lan; in the third game he even promises Lan that he'll stay by his side "forever and ever", only to turn around a few minutes later and chide Lan for trying to hold him to that promise while Megaman is trying to commit suicide to save Lan's life.

It must be said that, while Megaman is normally the Thinker to Lan's Doer, this is pretty much a relative comparison. Megaman's pretty reckless himself, and there are times where he'll gladly rush in headfirst without a plan when even Lan is nervous or uncertain. Usually this is whenever there are people in danger and he's capable of doing something to help them: debug an airplane's control computer mid-flight, use himself as a power source to jump-start emergency medical equipment, fight his way through the seedy criminal-laden underbelly of the Internet multiple times, download a violent and unkillable supervirus into himself to stop it, the list goes on. In fact, it sometimes seems like the only time he's willing to be reckless is when doing so puts himself in the most danger in comparison to, and for the sake of, others.

Which is not to say that he does it only in dangerous situations. His desire to see those around him happy and his insistence on following through with his promises means he can end up in some pretty crazy situations. This tends to happen when he promises to help with something and ends up over his head; however, things like "promising to obtain a rare Battle Chip that requires trawling around a hard to reach computer hunting for a rare virus and praying he gets lucky enough to score the data from its deleted remains as a gift for someone" have been known to happen.

In spite of this (or perhaps because of it) Megaman is not one to give up easily. The harder a task is to complete or a promise is to fulfill, the harder he works at getting it done right.

Megaman.EXE is rather unique among the Mega Men in that he is quite possibly the only one who is not combat-avoidant. Part of this is probably due to the fact that combating computer viruses is a main function of all netnavis, though he does rather clearly enjoy friendly sparring and netbattling. He doesn't immediately default to fighting hacker navis, but he has absolutely no problem with attacking if they won't settle things peacefully.

He's also not one to hesitate in deleting an enemy netnavi unless he can think of a good reason to let them live. This is probably due to the fact that most netnavis can be restored from backup data afterwards, so he's not really killing them. Again, it's not his default reaction in combat, but it doesn't really bother him if and when he does do it. His friends and navis who don't seem to be willingly participating in whatever is happening are pretty much the only real exceptions; he'd have to be forced to delete them and doing so would hit him pretty hard, even with backup data to revive them.

Abilities: As an AI, Megaman is normally incredibly limited when it comes to being able to interact with the real world. However, at his canon point he and Lan have just been given a very special gift - a robotic peripheral known as a Copybot. Copybots are robotic shells designed to be controlled by netnavis, and use hardlight holograms to make themselves look like the navi controlling them, thereby allowing them to interact with the real world directly for a limited amount of time. Very limited, as Copybots don't have the best batteries; Megaman's in particular is a custom model and implied to have a much longer battery life than normal, but that just means he can operate his for a few hours instead of a few minutes. He'll need to get his hands on a recharger at some point.

Megaman also has some pretty impressive fighting abilities, being a combat-spec designed for antivirus work (and casual netbattling). Under normal circumstances this will just manifest as him being insanely good at hand-to-hand combat and about as strong as an average adult human, as Copybots have safeties installed in them to keep malicious navis from attacking humans. These safeties can be removed, however, in which case he'll well exceed human strength and gain access to his infamous plasma cannon, the Megabuster.

(If allowed, removing the safeties would also give him access to battlechips, which are reusable weapons and abilities installed on memory chips or SD cards. He can't use them directly, though - he needs Lan to pop the battlechips into their PET and transmit the data remotely.)

Most of Megaman's abilities stem from being an Internet Navigator: he is, like all navis, designed to transmit himself between computer systems via networks, interact with and run or alter programs, and even operate computer-controlled machinery. Obviously most of this is going to be utterly useless in Verens and elsewhere without any actual working computers or computer networks, though theoretically he could interface to a limited degree with any robotic Otherworlders via the Copybot's network connection, assuming they have any kind of networking or comms capability themselves (and proper permissions, of course). The Copybot also has an IR port in the chest so he can transmit between it and anything that uses infrared data transmission, so if his PET's around he can pop back and fort between the two when they're synced, though that will likely be all it'll be good for.

He's also a walking talking digital personal assistant, which means if he can memorize your schedule, annoy you out of bed in the morning, and nag you into doing your chores/homework/errands/etc, he probably will. He quite literally has a computer for a brain, and thus has near-perfect memory and can process things very, very quickly; in addition to making him a professional nag, these make him surprisingly good at tactics and detective work. It can also make him come across as much smarter than he actually is - he doesn't forget what he learns, but that doesn't mean he fully understands it all. Megaman's intelligent for a preteen, but he is still (mentally AND chronologically) a preteen with a preteen education.

In addition to all of that, Megaman has something no other navi has - a permanent state of mental bonding with his operator called "synchro." Synchro is essentially "twin empathy" taken to an extreme, allowing Megaman and Lan to 'communicate' their thoughts and desires and emotions to each other through sheer force of will. While other navis and operators can achieve this through extreme practice or risky experimental tech, Megaman and Lan are always passively in a state of synchro, and the more in-tune their thoughts and feelings are the deeper the synchronization gets. At high enough levels, Megaman's injuries actually backlash onto Lan, and it's entirely possible for synchro to actually kill Lan if Megaman is injured severely enough. It's also possible for them to slip so far in that they cease being separate individuals (which is shown putting potentially fatal strain on Lan's body and brain in some versions of the series).

Synchro is a special case out of all of his abilities, since it can cause quite a stir in Empatheias: the boys synch via emotional state as well as thought, and this can result in some messy emotional positive feedback loops during arguments or other moments where they're bouncing a strong emotion back and forth. This basically turns them into emotional bombs - to use the argument example, once they both start getting angry enough at each other for synchro to kick in, it becomes hard for them to stop being angry. Synchro will just keep transmitting their anger back and forth between them, and since it's essentially adding one brother's anger to the other's each time, the longer they're angry at each other the worse their anger gets. If things get bad enough, they can even lose track of whose emotions are whose.

Alignment: Elios. Megaman's choices and actions are almost always defined in some way by love: for humanity, for his fellow navis, for his friends, for his family, and most especially for Lan. He's just as capable of being motivated by hate - Dark Megaman is living proof of this, as in many ways he is essentially what happens when Megaman is stripped of his ability to feel love and empathy - though even then love still plays a strong part; for example, he goes from being scared of the Gospel Supernavi to wanting to murder them the moment they cause Lan to start feeling pain. As such, he's likely to run strong on the positive side of the scale, though when he goes negative he goes negative hard.

Other: Given the massive amount of overlap with Lan, I've been working closely w Daimon (Lan's player) to make sure we're on the same page regarding things like their pre-canon history, how to handle the background section, and how synchro works.


⌈ SAMPLE SECTION ⌉
Sample: Remember that the sample needs to show both 1) core character portrayal and 2) some use of emotions, either as an environmental effect or discussing why a character is not feeling anything at all if they are more apathetic or less emotional than most. We highly encourage using the Test Drive, and you can use prompts from the Test Drives, Intro Logs, and the Task board if you need them. Refer to the main application page for links and more suggestions.

General Samples: One (log from Mask or Menace) and Two (PSL thread starring Copybot Shenanigans)!


Emotion Sample:

[It feels like everything is happening too fast - one moment his life was as normal as could possibly be, the next he's violating everything he'd ever understood about how his life must go. He's inside their house, actually inside it and not just looking at the rooms from a camera feed. The front door is right there. Outside is right there. His friends, Lan's friends, Lan are all right there, on the other side of that door, and he can feel his grip trembling on the doorknob (he can feel the doorknob).

He's glitching. He has to be glitching. He's going to try to open the door and suddenly his integration processing will finish and he'll pop out of standby, and his family will fuss and fret until his core scans come back clean. It's the only possible explanation, because there's no way he's actually about to do this, no way he's really going to open the very real door of his very real house and walk into the very real outdoors to tell his very real friends about his biggest secret while holding his brother's very real hand.]

Okay! You can come out now!

[...he can do this. He can. Count to three, turn the knob, push




He drifts up through the flood of warnings and errors in a daze. What happened? Did the Copybot malfunction? What kind of errors...no connections? GPS, internet, nothing...]

Lan?

[The silence is terrifying.

His head snaps up (not now, Lan, this isn't funny!) and he freezes.This isn't home. This isn't anywhere he knows. He's...he's been taken. Stolen. Kidnapped. He's been taken again and dumped and Lan is gone, his brother is gone, where is brother where did they take them--

Fear blooms in his core, encases it like a lump of ice. His thoughts spin in circles as though lost in the freezing fog spilling out from him with every movement. One step, two, and then he's running, trailing frost wherever he touches, barrelling forward with no idea of where he's going and no plan beyond his panic-driven need to find Lan right now.]

LAN...!

Questions: