Hope Rides Alone

[Proto Man]

It wasn’t his fault he’d got distracted from his destination. You throw anyone into a mysterious new world full of lights and they’re bound to wander off course. When that same person is a preteen, it’s going to be virtually impossible to get from Point A to Point B on schedule.

So although he should have been at the library in a little under a half hour, Proto Man found himself about a mile off target after a few hours of wandering the various sidewalks and crosswalks of Coruscant. His experience in large cities like New York City, Chicago, and Detroit during his period of wandering had instilled in him a very real fear of cities. There wasn’t much of a place for a red-plated android in the nice parts of town, so he’d always had to survive where the attention of law enforcement and media seemed the thinnest. He’d seen people shot, stabbed, and killed before his own eyes. He’d had a friend or two get hurt trying to do a noble deed for another human being.

If it hadn’t been for the people he’d meet along the way, Proto Man was certain the entire experience would have soured him to all of humanity. Fortunately he had learned quickly enough that not every person was only looking out for themselves. The people he saw meandering the streets of Coruscant all seemed nice enough, and even more than that, they were the most amusing hodgepodge of humanoid species. Proto Man had only ever read of aliens in books or seen them in movies, but here in the Omniverse, science-fiction was reality. The other thing that he noticed was the presence of the military force led by Judge Dredd. It seemed like every sixth car was emblazoned with the imperial armed forces logo. Every now and again, he’d also spot one of the white troopers casually patrolling the pedestrian walkways, and once or twice, Proto Man was sure he’d spotted movement on a few of the rooftops.

His maps and the information he’d pulled from the Dataverse told him that he’d only seen a tiny fraction of Coruscant. From a few articles he’d skimmed while wandering, Proto Man knew that there were six additional levels to the city. It seemed like the second and third levels traded a lack of imperial soldiers for a lack of the absurd extravagance of the top tier.

Information on the tiers below the third were lacking—there were no official pages on them in Coruscant’s tourism bureau, although there were mentions of several industrial facilities on the fourth and fifth tiers. The use of a search engine revealed some additional facts, like the presence of a racing circuit on the middle tiers and data on some prominent organizations that would lease manpower. Despite the clever word choice and phrasing, Proto Man knew he was reading about mercenaries: Soldiers for hire that would shoot a person dead for money.

Scum. The bottom two tiers were impossible to decipher, although he found a few posts on a public message board about something called ‘Motorball.’ After he found Nanoha and went to the Jubilee, Proto Man figured a visit to the other tiers was mandatory. Nothing he learned up here would be worth its weight—there were too many soldiers and entirely too much propaganda.

As Proto Man rounded another corner, he bumped straight into someone a foot or so taller than him. Stumbling backwards, he looked up to see that he’d collided with a tall blonde—her face was soft despite the almost cold expression on her face. Although her hair seemed health and almost a bit glossy, it was pulled back into a tight ponytail that screamed ‘no nonsense.’

The red robot furrowed his brow behind his visor and tilted his head. “Do I know you?”