Three months later...
Protoman woke and open his eyes. He briefly scanned the room. Two creatures were staring at him. They seemed... happy. Yes, that's what it was. He didn't know how he knew, but he knew.
"How do you feel?" One asked.
"I feel... fine." He answered. They smiled again at him.
"Do you know your name?" The other asked him.
"It's... Protoman." He said. He was begining to become aware of more things. He was a robot. These men, Dr. Light and Dr. Wily, built him. They owned him. All that He knew so far had been programmed into him.
"Good, good. Do you have full access to your memory files?" Wily asked.
"Yes. It's all coming to me," Protoman said. For some reason, He didn't trust Wily. He seemed insincere compared to the bubbly cheerfulness of Dr. Light.
Just then something occured to him. He wasn't happy, like the Doctors. He wasn't sad either. He was just empty, void of feeling. That made him wonder. What would feelings be like? What would it be like to be happy like the two men in front of him?
Wily suddenly broke his thoughts. "You know you can get up off the table already."
There it was again, the barely detectable insincerity. Protoman thought he sensed something else... hatred maybe. Or anger.
He jumped off the table in one swift motion and tested his limbs.
"Everything working properly?" Light asked. Yes, there was a definite difference between these two. I wonder if Light knows or not. He certainly doesn't act like he does, Protman thought.
"Yes. Everything is working," he replied.
Light cheered in delight. "Finally, you're completely working. It took over three years, but finally I've got a working humanoid robot."
Wily smiled, this time sincere. "I'm happy for you, Tom. It's a great accomplishment."
"It's our accomplishment, Al."
Wily shook his head, sadly Protoman thought. As if he was distant from the Doctor and him. It was like he was trying to say good-bye, or to appologize. It confused him, but he filed the information safely away in case it was important.
"It's your idea and your project, Tom. I'll have my own claim to fame eventually, but this is yours. All yours. I'm just your assistant." Wily smiled.
Light nodded. "If it's what you want..."
"It is."
A week later...
It's good to finally have some peace, I thought. For the past week I've been paraded to one place after another. Conventions, meetings, lectures... day after day I have to be shown off to other people. Finally, I have some rest while Wily and Light are busy planning what to do next.
Proto looked in the direction of the home lab of the apartment. He knew Wily and Light were in there fighting over him. They both had differing opinions about what to do with him. Light wanted to keep him around as a pet. Wily wanted to sell him, or at least rent him out. I certainly hope Light has noticed the increasingly less veiled hatred Wily had toward me, he thought.
He didn't think that they knew that he knew they were fighting over him. They probably didn't. They didn't pay much attention to what he did. However he had picked it up whenever they'd stop talking when he entered a room, or quickly change subject. He could tell there was distance between them, at least where he was concerned. They didn't act like it when he was around, but he could tell. I'm not an idiot after all, he thought.
I don't understand why I'm such a big thing, he thought. I guess being the only humanoid robot ever created is slightly interesting to humans. Then it hit him. He was the only one of his kind. He was alone, stuck between humans and robots. He wasn't one or the other, but a new type that never existed before.
Protoman's mind altered thought again. This time he thought about what he should do. His mind quickly decided to watch television, something new to him. He sat down on a couch and began to channel surf. After a while this was getting dull. He couldn't understand how humans enjoyed this so much. All it was was a bunch or sounds and pictures with no real meaning.
Suddenly he stopped on something different. It was a cartoon he realized. He watched it for a few moments, and was drawn into the story. Although it was childish, he could sense a deeper plot. When it ended it left him with an eagerness to learn more about it.
He turned to the computer on a desk nearby. It took him mere seconds to access the internet and start his quest for information. He poured through numerous sites, learning almost everything about the show. One character in particular fascinated him, Haruka. She was a tall, athletic girl who drove a fast car and was powerful, but distant. He liked her.
This sparked an idea in him. He wanted to watch the show in it's original form. However that was Japanese, and not shown here. He quickly came up with an answer. It took him a few minutes to hook up the tv in the room Wily and Light had given him so that it would recieve Japanese telvision signals.
After that was done he returned to the the internet and started learning Japanese from several sites. Minutes later, he was ready to watch more Sailor Moon.
One month later...
Wily and Light were busy again. They recently received a contract to build a set of six construction robots to oversee non-intellegent robots in tasks too dangerous or tedious for humans. The pair had been working day and night on them, and they were almost complete. Then, he would have brothers. He wouldn't be alone.
Ever since that one day he'd first seen Sailor Moon, a new world had opened to him. He started learning things that hadn't been programmed into him. Things he assumed the Doctors would think was irrelevant or unimportant. But they weren't. He learned about human emotion and life. He now had confidence that he could emulate a human, if it weren't for the armor he had been built in and couldn't remove. It was stuck there forever. It'd be kind of hard to pose as a human child if he was wearing a set of armor.
Protoman looked in the direction of the lab. There was something else Dr. Light was working on. He didn't think Wily knew about it though. Light was working on another set of humanoid robots. One was exactly like him, only with slightly different programming and different colors. The other, a pink female, was completely different. Proto liked the idea of nine brothers and a sister.
One thing however, had startled him when Light had first shown the pair to him and asked him to help. He was fascinated with his brother, Mega Man. More fascinated even than he had been with Sailor Moon. He was actually impatient to start working on him every day. For some reason, he felt immensely close to his little brother because he was working on him. He felt that there was a bond between them, even if he was the only one conscious.
Last night, when Light was gone, he had slipped extra memory information onto one of the chips, deep down in his brother's subconsious where it wouldn't be found. He just wanted to make sure that his brother would know who he was. He just had this sense that he wouldn't be around to meet his brother in person.