hacker_twins | [Backdated, see below]

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(Continued from here after Release 88 made the first post unusable)

The only thing that grates on Techno worse than when people notice how obviously he resembles Forte, is when it dawns on them he resembles both Forte and Mega. He isn't really sure how to feel about the person responsible being dead, as now he'll never get to have that nice loud 'what the hell were you thinking' talk he'd sometimes fantasized about.

But for now the Twins skirt around that topic and onto one of pets, as they follow Zero towards X's room.

"I still think we should get a puppy."

"We live in a treehouse, Middy. Canines can't climb."

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"Recipes?" Zero says, as if he can't quite believe it, and swears. "Well, we know that won't happen. I've been banned from trying to cook anything since I was a few months old. I set fire to the last Skull Castle's kitchen..." He checks the box carefully while saying this, then shakes his head. "That's the last one."

The recipes are for new items, but he isn't going to correct Zero. It's funnier this way. "No one's around to tell you no in the game's world."

"Alright, then as long as he isn't sent to jail at the end, you should get to kill him in that one. I wonder if playing the other three is necessary to understand what's going on in the last one."

"How would I know?" Zero says, checking the box. "More than one player in here. One of us could start with the first and one could start with the fourth..."

The Twins are still just keeping quiet, coding a VR setting.

And X has fallen asleep on the couch. Not being alone seems to be helping a bit with that.

"I call dibs on the first," Forte says as he grabs the first one and digs around for a system to play it on. He's gotten slightly excitable over the games, especially the odd content of these.

"I want to see how deep this rabbit hole goes. And it looks like the forth has escort missions so screw that."

System in hand, he scoots to a corner of the room out of a habit to avoid people bothering him while he plays. It's not long before he's through the intro and on to the first mission. That's when things get familiar.

"Got some good news and some bad..."

Zero had just reached a boss selection screen when Forte says that, so waits to pick a level and asks, "What's the bad news?"

"That thing we just did with the crusher and Harpuia's bird. Doing that now, and it's only the first mission. So if things line up, that's four games worth of stuff before Weil's defeated."

Edited 2011-12-26 12:55 (UTC)

Zero just swears at that, "If Weil's timing is like Wily's," meaning roughly a 'game' per year, "I don't know if X will survive that long. What's the good news?"

"Well, we have four game's worth of info of possible future events to get ahead of anything Weil plans. Maybe we can use it to speed things up and get to the point of his defeat quicker."

"A real life videogame speedrun," says Zero, and nods. "Getting even one step ahead of that bastard would be better than being ten steps behind all the time."

"I have some news too, but almost all of it's bad. This starts with humans fleeing Arcadia because Weil's having anyone who disagrees with him killed. And it says that was triggered after someone killed Arcadia's 'leader'. We know the leader's Weil, but... you know who he just set up as a figurehead. So at some point he's going to pull the same trick again and killing that Copy is going to play into his plans. The fleeing humans don't want anything to do with 'bots, because they blame us for the whole mess. Again."

"Second, the humans are trying to flee to a place that doesn't exist. The game says it was made by the Eurasia colony crash. It didn't crash for us, it ended up on the moon. Lumine took it back over not long after the Giga City mess."

"The only good news is I guess I can tell Quick he can tell Plum that Neige probably isn't dead yet. She's with the ones fleeing in this game."

"A speedrun with a lot of effort put on damage control," he winces. Protecting people was such a pain in the ass. "If even the humans are getting killed off, he must get some serious power over them. Enough that he's not worried about his image to the public anymore."

"What if a replacement place was set up?"

"It's like he doesn't care about that any more. He doesn't need Copy X to hide behind, so lets him get offed so the humans will blame us for spoiling their 'utopia'." Zero pauses and swears. "That's why that crazy Harpuia blamed me for Weil. Maybe in his universe he didn't know Weil was there the whole time. Or, hell, maybe he wasn't."

"Don't think Earth's ecosystem's as trashed as this game acts like it is, but it couldn't hurt. Part of that might be the time difference. There are supposed to be a couple of hundred year gaps that have disappeared on us, I think."

"All he knew was that your actions started a domino effect."

"I guessed something like that was at play when game you gets woken up and travels through a lab from prehistory. Prehistory... how does that even.." He shakes his head. He shouldn't take the game's plot too seriously, or at least not the parts that don't line up with what's going on.

"It's something to offer them," he shrugs. "Leaving Weil with an empty kingdom would be nice. Just not as nice as killing him."

Zero snerks. "Now I'm picturing a lab with a Flintstones theme... If I'm a 'old relic' already, what does that make the rest of you?"

"There's a few more familiar faces. An alt of my daughter. And an alt of Ciel, but the one I know isn't even five yet, so definitely some of the time distortion at work."

He'll nod agreement to the rest. "If we can do something to get them to trust us. Though... if we can get X's kids back, maybe they can do that. And I don't care what the game says happens to Weil in the end, he's dead. I wouldn't trust leaving him alive."

"Older than time itself? I don't know, it's certainly making me feel really old." He mashes a button frustratingly. "I shouldn't be old enough to feel old." He already gets enough of that with the newer reploids who don't know who he is.

"Definitely. Wily was bad enough getting second and third chances. Weil can't be given that opportunity."

"This... isn't good," Zero mutters. "There's something in here about a plan called 'Ragnarok'. Basically, Weil finding a way to wipe out any place humans could survive outside of Arcadia to force them to stay."

"The first level I picked involves taking out some particle beam cannon being used to destroy stuff. The game's got some stupid bits. Even if the boss was part of the thing's power systems, I don't think that would shut it down for good."

The only words for that level of crazy is a few choice curses. At this rate, there isn't going to be anything left to fight over.

"No, but it's not a good game if you're breaking stuff that doesn't fight back. If it comes to it, we'll just blow the whole thing up."

"Oh, there are drones, and the boss was still a reploid. Some kind of turtle design, but it looks like each 'level' is going to be some kind of doomsday device that looks like Weil got it out of a stack of designs Wily rejected. This one's a floating fortress that drops acid rain..," there's a pause and he starts to snicker, "with a prissy pegasus boss named after a French pastry." Because that's what comes to Zero's mind when he sees the word 'éclair'. Food.

He shakes his head. "The bosses in this are giving that nutty alt-Harpy a run for loony bin material, too. Half of what they babble makes no sense, and the rest is just restating the obvious."

"Well I'm just getting rescue missions and information gathering that ends in everything getting destroyed. And something about energy for the resistance's base, but we don't need that."

"You think it could be the force energy driving them all crazy?"

Zero shakes his head slightly. "We've actually got an energy surplus, thanks to how Gate's space shield works. And it could be... Something has, and it's either that or Weil did something to them. Or both." He blinks and mutters a swearword. "Things look different in game sprites, but I've seen Pegasolta Eclair. We both have. He was one of the ones with Harpuia earlier.

"Hmm. I don't think this level can exist. It's supposed to be a research lab, more than a century old, used to make Cyber Elves. We don't have those, and certainly no over-a-hundred year old labs full of failed experiments kept in cryo for no reason... did they even have cryo that worked as far back as 1996? It's just not possible."

"At least the boss seems saner than the others, though he still doesn't say anything that useful. Just says the stuff so far is only the beginning, and to make a list of excuses for not being able to save the one human-habitable place left on Earth."

"What's with the elves anyway? I've collecting the things and feeding them, but then you can use them as a one time power up. And they're just gone after that. Lowers your score too..."

"I have no idea. I've been trying to ignore them, except when I have to help name the stupid things. I think I've seen something that looked like one in Alouette's stuffed toys, but it didn't fly around and give upgrades."

"Next level here is apparently 'death by plantborg'." The sheer crazy is getting amusing, in a twisted way.

"Let us know when you get to Weil," says Techno, quietly.

Middy nods. "We've roughed out a simulation, but we can add information from the game to make it better."

"Are we still hooking X up to this?" Techno asks. Because X seems to be actually getting some sleep now.

"That sounds like a bad B movie."

"There's no way they could attack us here or Mars, so the base invasion level can be ignored. Know anyone named Colbor?"

"It looks like one, too."

"They could attack an entrenched front line area, but we're usually expecting that. Here's out of the question because of the way the Nexus is. Mars... would be difficult, and they'd be stupid to try it."

Zero frowns at that, thinking. "The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I don't think I know them. There are a few thousand Reploids just on Mars now, so I don't know everyone."

Zero shakes his head slightly in response to Techno. "Let him sleep. The problem's a little different than I thought." He'll pause his game to get up and go to the bedroom, returning with a blanket to tuck around X.

Middy, meanwhile, is running a quick search through a list of colonists. "There's a Colbor listed in the Mars Colony data," he says.

Forte's frowning at his screen by the time Zero returns.

"Rescued him from Harpuia," is all he says, and from the way he's pressing the buttons, that's who he's fighting right now. He doesn't think some random colonist will need rescue like is happening in the game, but Harpuia showing up at all is worth mentioning.

Zero just nods, frowning slightly as he resumes his game. They knew Harpuia and the others would be in here somewhere, after all. "I haven't seen them yet in this one, but the next part's a direct attack on the human settlement. And getting a lot of no thanks for saving the squishies from burning to a crisp, since they don't want any 'bots there." At least they had Lightbots to take care of that kind of stuff.

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