[Exemplary] Family of Steel - Carved from the Blighted Oak

[Proto Man]

His brothers were slipping through his fingers. Over the last few months, he’d gradually lost contact with half of his siblings, and try as he could, Quick Man didn’t trust anyone to oversee the operations in Coruscant in his absence. The only solace he had was that the Empire had stopped searching for the Gen 2s after reports started filtering in that they had been separately spotted in various verses.

The last report from Heat Man had been nearly a month ago. Unlike many of his brothers, the shorter Robot Master was never one to miss a chance to send a transmission rambling around volcanism or seismology or some other bit of geological nonsense. On top of Heat Man’s silence, the prime had failed to return as well.

Fortunately, only one of those facts caused Quick Man any grief, and it wasn’t that he didn’t have that sociopath watching his ever move. Even so, the absences were disheartening on a personal and a professional level, as they were behind on all of their timetables.

“Where are you all?” Quick Man muttered as he pushed his chair over to another terminal and stared at the small icon. It was the last conversation and transmission from Wood Man, and the timestamp listed a date that was now two months in the past. With a frown, the red-and-black machine clicked the icon to replay the footage.

There was a burst of static, and then the frantic visage of Wood Man filled the screen. He started to talk without following any of the usual protocols. “The trees here...they’re all wrong,” Wood Man whispered as he glanced to his flanks before looking back at the hologram of his brother.

“What do you mean ‘wrong’? I thought you were instructed not to research anything passed the mission parameters, Wood Man? Your coordinates are all wrong. What are you doing?” Quick Man’s disembodied voice asked. The present-day Quick Man frowned and felt some shame at how angry he had sounded at the time. The wood-based machine paid his brother’s tone no heed. Wood Man was too busy running his hands through hair that didn’t exist. There was clearly something wrong with the android, but at the time, Quick Man had been too irritated with the situation in general to care.

“Don’t get me wrong… I-I found dozens of amazing ecosystems here. A-a-as I mentioned, the night elves and the ninjas exist in perfect harmony with the environment.”

“Yes, I recall the images and video you sent us about their giant tree.”

“I was tracking some elves the previous week, and I followed a scouting party into a part of the Green I hadn’t visited yet. Everything was… wrong. Black and moldy soil that seemed to fester and ooze. The trees that weren’t dead were twisted and coated in this living filth. All black, gray, and red… It was like a disease or a fungus that was growing unchecked. But the host plants weren’t dying. It was more like they had been transformed from a cellular level into something else entirely.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s the fauna as well!” Wood Man shouted before pausing to scrape at himself. “They’re also infected by the same disease, and it has turned them into these hulking, half-alive monsters. Those elves that I trailed? They were ambushed by a pack of these mutant, black-skinned creatures with pointed ears and dressed in the remains of elven armor.”

“So it’s some kind of infectious, cross-species disease?”

“That warps and mutates the afflicted!” Wood Man rasped, his eyes erratically glancing around the still-empty clearing. “I hid in the bushes and watched one of the elves writhe and scream as her life slowly left her. I watched the pestilence spread across her corpse and turn her lithe, beautiful form into a twisted mockery of its original design…and then she--it--stood back up.”

“You need to leave that area and return home, Wood Man. There are too many variables with which to contend. Just pack up and return to the factory.” Present-day Quick Man was frowning, much as he had when he’d last spoke with his brother. The frown he wore now was directed more at himself for his lack of empathy.

“I can’t!” Wood Man screamed, causing Quick Man to wince.

“Why?”

“Because my curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to examine one of the dead elves up close, and it got up and assaulted me. I managed to knock it down and escape, but it’s attacks cut deep…”

“You believe that it somehow infected you? You are a machine.”

“I know!” Wood Man screamed as he twisted his body to reveal a nasty scar on his right leg, beneath the knee. While his ‘skin’ had been crudely sutured, twitching black veins fissured out from the initial injury.

“Have you internal systems been compromised?”

“No.”

“Have you tried to physically remove the infection?”

“I tried. It just regrew...I feel like it is just biding its time until it can adapt enough to infect my coding!”

“There is nothing like that in the world, Wood Man!”

“We’re not in the real world anymore, Quick Man! Or did you forget the part where we all died?”

“Calm down. I will dispatch some of Sniper Joes to come retrieve you.”

“Send no one! It’s too dangerous!” With that, Wood Man smashed the projector, killing the transmission and leaving Quick Man with a sea of white noise.

Leaning forward, Quick Man closed the video file. He had managed to send about two dozen Sniper Joes to the Tangled Green, but their communications back to him had ceased a few weeks ago. If the boomerang-themed robot had learned anything over the last year, it was the fact that the Omniverse was far more dangerous than anyone could imagine.

For the first time in a long time, Quick Man felt the closest thing to loneliness that a robot could feel.