Chapter Text
CAST
Dr. Thomas Light - A loner. A thinker. A has-been.
Protoman - Firstborn, hero, martyr. Or so the story goes.
The Chorus - A city of vacant buildings, iron and steel all gone to rust. These are the people left behind.
Megaman - Light’s youngest son. Doomed from the start.
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SCENE 1.1
A spotlight thrums to life, its beam illuminating a bare-bones stage. Very little is visible outside the borders of the light: it’s just a shining yellow circle on a dark, blank floor.
From somewhere in the wings, a pre-recorded voice begins to play.
NARRATOR: Where to start—that’s the question, isn’t it. How do you begin a story with no beginning?
Could be said it opens with a man martyred at war; red helmet shining as he falls. Could be a kid on a motorcycle, making a break for the city limits.
Could be a miner, hands black with coal dust, working himself into an early grave. Could be anything at all. In a circle, any spot can be an opening, a midpoint, an ending.
NARRATOR: So take a seat. Let’s start here.
SCENE 1.2
The rest of the stage lights come on.
The set they reveal is sparse: a cold-looking metal table near the front of the stage; on the back wall, a crooked wooden door leading elsewhere.
Standing on the stage are two figures. One is bearded, exhausted-looking, at least a decade past middle-aged. He stands stooped next to the table, his hands pressed against the metal. His sleeves are rolled up to the elbows and stained with machine oil.
The other figure lies on the table, partially covered by an old, discolored sheet. His eyes are closed. He’s still and silent.
NARRATOR: By the time you’re born, there’s nothing of the city left to save.
NARRATOR: It doesn’t happen with any fanfare—your birth, that is. No slow burn to consciousness; no half-remembered childhood. Just a switch flipped, a circuit connected, a split-second jump from nothing to something. Your lungs fill with air for the first time
Through your new-to-you optics, even the dim glow of Light’s apartment is blinding.
The man on the table—Megaman—opens his eyes, draws in a single, gasping breath.
NARRATOR: You’re a bunch of bootleg tech, a web of wires wound into the shape of a man.
A siren screams; twenty floors down, the city writhes. The world you’ve awoken into is barely a coda. The end’s already happened.
Tenderly, Light smooths a lock of hair behind Megaman’s ear, places a comforting hand on his shoulder.
LIGHT: Raise your arm—slowly, slowly, very good. Let’s get you calibrated.
SCENE 1.3
The room again, set up the same as before: an examination berth, a doorway. The young man—Megaman—sits on the berth, legs hanging over the sides. He’s awake, alert, but just as before, remains unnaturally still.
Again, from somewhere offstage, the prerecorded voice begins to play.
NARRATOR: Somehow, you know about your brother.
NARRATOR: Light never talks about him. He doesn’t need to. Protoman is inescapable, unavoidable; he fills the corners and doorways of rooms in the empty hours. The apartment isn't big enough for three.
NARRATOR: This is how you live: you, your father, your brother’s ghost between you. Yellowed schematics stacked in piles. An old motorcycle helmet in the corner of a cupboard, gone gray with dust. A guitar your father never plays.
NARRATOR: You’re not sure what your brother looked like; you’ve never seen his face. There aren’t any photos. Wiley’s the only one allowed to keep cameras anymore.
You don’t ask about him, where he went, how exactly he died. You’re not the questioning kind.
NARRATOR: Eventually, you’ll learn it’s because you were built not to be.
Megaman stands, sliding off the table. He paces in a small, slow circle around a section of the stage; inside the tight confines of the apartment’s living room. He’s done this before, he does this often. What else is there to do?
NARRATOR: For as long as you live in the apartment, it doesn’t change, because your father won’t let it.
NARRATOR: Sometimes, you listen to Light’s stories.
NARRATOR: In the dim green glow of the monitors, he runs your diagnostics, green code scrolling, and tells you about the world outside. About how he scoured scrap heaps for years, painstakingly scavenging parts to build you with, one piece at a time.
Sometimes Light abandons the apartment, stumbling back hours later with his arms full of tech or water or food. Sometimes he stares out the dirty window at the skyline, watches the distant flames climbing as massive forms stride through the rubble.
Megaman continues to pace.
NARRATOR: Once, late at night, you think you hear a voice from the bedroom.
Quietly, you peek past the door frame. Light sits on his bed, cradling a piece of machinery. It’s a large cannon, meant to be mounted on an arm, plugged into an electrical port in the wearer’s limb. It’s wicked-looking and ugly; even in the dark, it thrums with heat.
It’s your brother’s weapon.
Light strokes the weapon like the head of a child, cradles it against his chest like a living thing. He says something low, under his breath. It sound an awful lot like “god help me.”
You stay there, stock-still; the moment passes. The gun goes back into the piles of apartment clutter, unacknowledged.
NARRATOR: Two months, six; a year, two. It’s all the same. It seems easy to stay put: don’t question, keep quiet. It’s easy, because it’s what your father wants.
This is where a train horn would sound, if there were any trains left; this is where a young man would spin a soliloquy, if you were one. This is where you’d make a choice, if you had one.
This is where the façade breaks.
SCENE 1.4
NARRATOR: One night, when Light leaves, the lock jams. For the first time, the door stays open.
The spotlights dim until the stage is barely visible. No action, no figures on the stage. Nothing moves. The only sounds in the stillness are the narrator’s voice, and the crackle of the recording.
NARRATOR: You sneak out behind him, quick as anything; sprint down the twenty flights of stairs, ride the spiral down and down and down into the cool depths of the ground floor. By the time you burst outside, you’re already second-guessing.
NARRATOR: City like a jigsaw, city like a scrap heap. City like an incinerator, a pit, a meat grinder.
Polluted air rolls across your face, thickens like motor oil in your mouth. Paper blows across the courtyard, scraps and trash kicked up by the wind, and you begin to walk.
A group of figures walk out from the wings, striding out to the rim of the stage.This is the chorus. This is the City. Twelve people, completely indistinctive, all utterly unremarkable. The specifics have never mattered.
They don’t say anything. Not yet, anyway.
NARRATOR: Sometimes, you see a person out of the corner of your eye, but they’re gone before you can speak. Probably for the best. You've never talked to anyone who wasn’t your father. You wouldn’t know what to say.
NARRATOR: You won’t ever read the word “labyrinth”, or hear the story of Theseus and what he found there, what things lurk in the corners of the structures wrought by men, but know this: that’s all the city is. A maze with something monstrous at its heart.
Well after everything ends, you’ll still remember rows of shattered windows stretching to the roiling clouds; buildings reaching up and up.
Remember: you’re not the only one caught here, not the only kid stuck fast in the grip of a dead house. Look around you. Can’t you see the lights?
The members of the chorus turn to each other. They begin to converse behind their hands, whispering. For a second, Megaman meets their eyes, then looks away again. He’s seeing them for the first time.
NARRATOR: When one of Wiley’s sentinels appears silently behind you, you don’t even notice.
Tangle of metal, dead man walking. It’s not a monster, just an automaton. It’s just doing what it was told.
NARRATOR: Alerts flare, red stripes across your field of vision. You’ve never seen them before, but you still somehow know what the bright strings of code mean:
##615-05092005 – CANNON NOT DETECTED. WEAPON NOT FOUND. ##
Formulas scroll by, faster than anyone but you could read, all the metrics of murder.
You’ve never held your brother’s gun. If you had it, you know exactly what you’d do, how to aim it, how you’d fire, the impact juddering down your arm. Wielding it wouldn’t even be a conscious thought.
Bad luck. The instinct’s there, the equipment’s not.
So, instead, you run, messages multiplying until all you can see is a sea of red letters, red strings of text, a wide dead span of red. ERROR. ERROR. The alleys all look the same; all around you, the maze tightens its grip, hemming you in. The drone follows close behind.
NARRATOR: Dead end. Your back presses against the bricks, and if any part of you is really human, it’s here now, forcing you to curl up on yourself, shielding your head like the kid you never were. Maybe it’s nature. Maybe it’s nurture; some intentional quirk of your schematics, some intentional gift of your father’s hands. Just another way he’s shaped you.
The light illuminating the stage begins to flicker.
NARRATOR: A metallic crunch. The smell of burning plastic. Wiley’s sentinel falls useless to the ground. Light-headed, loose-limbed, you fall too.
NARRATOR: Light leans over you, a looming silhouette against the flickering sky. Another error message, and your optics go offline.
In the distance, the sound of rapid footsteps. Whispering to one another, the chorus watches the apartment door.
The sound of footfalls comes closer and closer, until, suddenly, they stop.
Light throws the door open and steps back into the stage. In his arms is Megaman, eyes closed, limp and silent.
SCENE 1.5
The lights come back up. Just as they were at the beginning of the play, Megaman lies on the steel table, eyes closed. Light carefully checks him over; lifting Megaman’s arms one at a time, testing the range of Megaman’s joints, the bend of each of Megaman’s fingers.
Megaman’s face pinches. Resting on his chest, gripped tight in Megaman’s hands is an old motorcycle helmet, dented and green.
LIGHT: Easy does it. I’ve got you.
Take it from me, there’s nothing worth going out into that mess for. Hasn’t been for decades.
Megaman’s hands tighten on the helmet, knuckles turning white.
LIGHT: Better for you to stay at home, where it’s safe. Inside in the quiet with the door shut tight.
Lie down as long as you need. You know there’ll always be room for you here.
NARRATOR: Your father has been old your entire life. But now he looks ancient, like the monitors lining the walls of your little apartment, like all the dirty, scavenged tech gathering dust in the corners of the room. Mismatched. Obsolete.
MEGAMAN: [quietly] What happened to my brother?
Light freezes. His hands drop to rest on his knees. He can’t seem to look at his son.
The stage light falls on a spot at the edge of the stage – ostensibly some cluttered corner of the apartment. In its beam is Protoman’s cannon, shining wickedly in its glow.
LIGHT: You don’t know what’s out there. You don’t know what this city wants from you.
When Protoman died, no one else cared–even after he laid his life down for all of them, I was the only one at his grave. I had to dig it myself; had to place his body there, had to—
LIGHT: I was the only one who mourned.
MEGAMAN: I don’t think you did.
NARRATOR: Your father still won’t look at you. As he sits there: slumped, surrounded by broken monitors and trash, you see him for what he is: a man drowning in the riptide of his own past. An echo. Just another ghost.
Better pack it up, keep moving. There’s nothing for you here.
Megaman turns away from Light, still carrying the helmet.
He picks up his brother’s gun.
LIGHT: Listen to me!
Light falters.
LIGHT: [desperately] Please listen to me. Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go–
Megaman walks to the apartment door; for the second time in his short life, he wrenches it open.
NARRATOR: An old guitar, a burning city.
NARRATOR: You only have two choices. It’s an on-off switch. A binary option: pick the zero or pick the one. Stay or leave.
Megaman walks through the door, slamming it shut behind him. He doesn’t look back.
NARRATOR: You go.
SCENE 1.6
The stage lights dim to a deep indigo, mimicking the polluted night Megaman has escaped into; a grim, half-lit moment, an early morning, hushed before the dawn.
As the lights are shifting, a set change happens. The door is covered; the table is wheeled away. These changes are permanent, because Megaman will never return to his father’s house.
A tall object of some kind is moved out onto the center of the stage. It’s not yet clear what it is.
Megaman walks across the stage, barely more than a shadow. He’s still holding the helmet—now poorly rattlecanned a dark blue— and the cannon, they’re tucked tight to his chest. It’s an incongruous gesture. Childish, even.
The chorus parts as he walks, letting him pass. Their eyes follow him.
Dim ambient light trickles in, slowly, just enough that we can see the prop standing tall on center stage. It’s a single pillar, covered in spray paint, worn with the years, barely visible, but still legible. Hope Rides Alone.
NARRATOR: You kneel at your brother’s grave. You pay your respects. You make a vow.
Slowly, with great care, Megaman puts on the helmet. He slides the blaster onto his arm; watches it with awe as the display on its side blinks to life.
NARRATOR: Poor, stupid kid. No wonder what comes next.