Day 1 Evening

[Proto Man]

Before Jupiter

For some reason, it felt as if the progression of time here was different from the rest of the Omniverse. Every step the robot took seemed to tax his systems a little more than the last one—had his power supply been compromised?

Something was wrong with the world.

After some time, he started to feel a great discomfort in his stomach. In time, the sensation was like someone reaching through his skin and twisting up his insides. That ache accompanied him and never seemed to abate. With his system management app offline, he couldn’t pinpoint the source of the malady. As the pain continued, he even began to experience pangs of vertigo. How would he be able to function if his gyroscopic stabilizers failed on him?

As the shores of the island started to recede into the horizon behind him, Proto Man found the open fields giving way to forests and hills. Somewhere in the distance, he spotted a collection of mountains jutting up toward the horizon. Where was he heading? North? South? Without the needle in the upper left of his internal display, he was left playing a guessing game. During his days wandering the central United States, he’d picked up a few tricks, but those were related to tracking stars and constellations.

When was the last time he’d even seen a star? The Ashen Steppes and Pale Moors were almost permantely overcast, and he’d never had a chance in the Tangled Green to try and worm his way up through the canopy to try and see if the blackness above twinkled at night with the light of far-away balls of hydrogen and helium gasses.

Would he ever see a star again?

Since his arrival in the Omniverse, Proto Man had never really stopped to ponder mortality. He knew that primes returned to life upon their demise, and he knew that was the case from watching Dante’s Abyss. Even so, he had never wanted to test that theory on himself.

Now that he was in this new verse, he felt a greater weakness than he’d ever known, dating back even before the Omniverse. Only those last, painful weeks before his collapse outside of Monsteropolis had tested his resolve more than a few hours on this strange island. If his systems could be compromised, there was reason for him to believe this could very well be the end. Who’s to say his power supply wouldn’t fail him in this environment?

Is this how humans feel all their lives?

The thought caused him a great deal of unease… and not the vague sensation he felt when he stared at a horde of charging darkspawn. The knots in his tummy twisted, and for a brief moment, he actually felt a warm acidity in the back of his throat. Try as he could to deny the fact, he knew that something was wrong with his body on what had to be a molecular level. Something or someone—this ‘Warlock,’ perhaps?—had tampered with him in such a way to make him more vulnerable than he’d ever been.

The machine had sweat and bled before, but those had been environmental responses. His organic layer sweat when directly exposed to extreme temperatures, and that same synthetic tissue bled to simulate a degree of humanity.

What Proto Man felt as he wandered further into the interior of the island was anything but synthetic.

He felt… human.

After Jupiter

Spatters of red stained the machine’s palm. In the wake of the confrontation, he’d removed the material around his hand to expose the organic layer underneath. Designed to emulate human beings, he had organic hands underneath the spandex-like suit. The stark contrast his pale skin against the slowly drying scarlet splotches unnerved him just as much as the man who had rushed him with the knife.

Normally, he would wash the fluid off and carry on with his life. Time and the natural accumulation of omnilium would have mended the surface wounds. Now that he was starting to understand the gravity of the warlock’s magic, the sight of his blood elicited vastly different emotions.

How much of this can I lose?

Would he bleed to death?

The wound already felt stick when he touched it—was that good? Or was it indicative of some worse symptom taking root?

What if he had blood poisoning? Had that man’s weapon been rusty? Didn’t that cause a disease too?

If he was in the Omniverse, his operating system would have plucked the answers from the Dataverse in a few nanoseconds. Deprived of that vital connection to the world at large, he could only make uneducated guesses. He tried to recall memories of his life before the Omniverse, when he’d made due on the streets of big cities or by wandering the countryside. Those memories were blurred beyond recognition, much like any computer data stored on a faulty hard drive.

His hands were gooey. The blood had grown dark and sticky, much like the wound itself.

Natural. Has to be natural. The boy assured himself as he dropped down and tried to wipe his hands clean on the grass beneath his boots. While he couldn’t remove most of it, he cleared away enough that his hands didn’t stick anymore when he made a tight fist.

Despite the injury and the loss of blood, he didn’t feel a great deal of pain from the shoulder. That made him believe that, with any luck, the magic of the warlock hadn’t completely nullified what made him ‘the Proto Man.’