Hope Rides Alone

[Proto Man]

The preteen android let out a sigh as he placed the panel back over his exposed foot and waited for it to seal back into place with a dull thunk. Once that was done he practiced twisting and bending the ankle to ensure that the appendage was functioning at its optimum efficiency. In the scramble from Wily’s collapsing fortress, he’d got caught on some rubble and twisted several of the pistons out of place.

With that done, Proto Man fell back onto the bed’s naked mattress and looked up at the ceiling. An icon in the corner of his HUD told him that the display was nearly done patching to the newest available software, whatever the hell that meant. As he relaxed, the robot listened to the strange melody that the flying cars made as they traversed their strange, invisible streets. Despite the fact that Monsteropolis had been one of the most advanced cities on the planet, it had nothing that compared to the menagerie of real life science-fiction that was Corusant’s sea of impossibly tall and often strikingly beautiful structures. If this was to be his life for the foreseeable future, Proto Man was certain he could adapt quite easily to his new surroundings.

Patch Finished. Omniverse-update complete. A reboot is required for this update, would you like to do that now?

“Yes.” The android muttered as he drew breath into his inorganic ‘lungs.’ The last time he’d been forced to reboot his system, he’d lost a good week of his life and woke up to find himself buried in a landfill somewhere outside Chicago. At least this time he was somewhere that he wouldn’t been mistaken as a busted-up toy. As the icons on his screen vanished one-by-one, Proto Man flashed a grin toward the spinning ceiling fan overhead. “Maybe I’ll wake up in ano-- …

...”