The Master Builder

By Ape32

Disclaimer: I own nothing, Sega owns all, cept for a few things that should be obvious. Also this is a crap fic I wrote for the heck of it, so don’t expect anything. A little note on the continuity; this is an altered version of the Archie Sonic Comics continuity, one where Robotnik Prime returned instead of Eggman, just so you know.

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Robotropolis.

The Land of Darkness.

The Machine Hell.

Whatever the nickname, the dread city was always a terror to behold; a dark and horrific testament to the perversion of science and the rape of nature on a scale that was once thought only possible in science fiction. Yet there it stood, like a cancer on the body of the world, the malignant source of the poison coursing through the planet. It was here in the city of lost souls that countless atrocities had been committed; abominable actions that would make even the most jaded individual shudder at the sheer cruelty displayed.

Only tonight something was different; tonight, a life was being saved rather then destroyed, in the labyrinthine depths of the looming Robotropolis Central Command building.

Two hands worked diligently on the delicate mechanical internals, one a hand of the flesh and the other a hand of metal, both of them large and unwieldy looking. It was a testament to their owner’s skill that he could so carefully and so precisely work with the tools to fix the damaged machinery before him in spite of the meaty paws he called his hands.

Robotnik had always prided himself on this, the surgical skill with which he could create and take apart machinery despite of his clumsy looking hands. Just one of the small hurdles he’d overcome for most of his life, and right now he was putting his hands to good use repairing the mechanoid before him; Mecha, known to most as “M”.

Robotnik’s artificial eyes narrowed as he worked with such care he may as well have been a doctor working with a patient; and in Robotnik’s mind, that’s precisely what he was. The android woman lay upon the repair table, her normal outfit gone in lieu of her undergarments; nothing skimpy, simply a black leotard. Her normally perfect outer appearance was marred damage sustained in battle against a certain hedgehog and his freedom fighting allies. Normally even thinking about that blue rodent would have cause Robotnik’s eyes to blaze blood red with rage, but right now there was far to much at stake for him to focus on that little blue waste of oxygen.

While Robotnik himself worked on the most vital of the repairs, around him were a variety of mechanical limbs with tools mounted on them descending from the ceilings to work on the minor damages Mecha had sustained, under the watchful eye and operation of her “brother” A.D.A.M. Though the automated repairs were skillful at their duty, Robotnik trusted only himself on this most precious of creations; his daughter.

Anyone who would have witnessed this scene would have dismissed Robotnik’s focus as being simply his doing his best to salvage a valuable weapon. True, Mecha was a powerful weapon, an excellent tool against the Freedom Fighters, but there was more to it then that. Much more…

No one realized it, but the time it had taken to develop Mecha was much longer then anyone could have guessed. It was figured by most that the tyrant had built the gynoid in short time, as a replacement second in command when Snively defected. This was not the case; in truth, Robotnik had begun her construction years ago, seven years to be precise. It was a secret project, something so secret not even Snively could have found out.

Into Mecha went the absolute bleeding edge of technology, inch by inch and foot by foot her form painstakingly constructed and meticulously designed to the peak of perfection. Things had paused for a while during his… absence, after the Ultimate Annihilator debacle, but upon his return he’d set right back to work on finishing his masterpiece, his magnum opus; his daughter.

She was perhaps the most singularly human machine on all of Mobius, in all the history of the planet, as close to organic nature as a machine could get without tumbling into the realm of techno-organic tech. That was why he so lovingly sculpted her form, much like Pygmalion sculpting Galatea, his vision of perfection. And it was no accident that she looked the way she did; a brown haired, blue eyed young woman in her twenties. Her beauty, modeled after someone from long ago, and her age… the age that his daughter WOULD have been if not for the cruelty of Mother Nature.

Memories began to play in Robotnik’s mind, to a time before he was Robotnik, before he was “The Eggman”; back when he was simply Julian Kintobor of the House of Ivo, the youngest son of the Kintobor clan.

He could remember his childhood. He’d always been brilliant for his age, but where other parents would see a source of pride, his saw something to fear and feel ashamed of. He was too much like his grandfather Gerald Robotnik for their tastes, too much like the infamous “mad doctor” of the family, whose antics had gotten his granddaughter Maria killed and resulted in his committal to an insane asylum.

The tragedy had prompted Gerald’s eldest son to change the family name back to “Kintobor” while they would spend their future time trying to regain the prestige of their noble name in Overland. But with Julian showing signs of his grandfather’s intellect… they wanted to take no chances, and so they ignored and shunned him in the hopes he would eventually crave their affection enough to play dumb, while in the meantime they showered praise and affection on the golden boy of the family, Julian’s older brother Colin.

From childhood on this continued, and it served to plant the seeds of darkness within his soul. That was until college, when he met… her.

Laura.

Beautiful, sweet Laura.

She shared his physics class, a beautiful woman whose appearance belied her own keen intellect and gentle soul. Her interactions with Julian Kintobor, the dark tempered but brilliant student who none of the others wanted anything to do with, brought out a side of him that even he never knew he had. She saw something in him, something neglected, something that needed to be nurtured. And Julian himself had a way of making her laugh and of making her problems vanish.

Was it any wonder that they fell in love?

They married shortly after graduation. The happiness of that day was burned into the mind of Julian; the day things would change for him, where he at last had hope for the future.

A future with Laura.

A year later, the happy couple would be expecting their first born child. All was right in Julian’s universe. Until…that day came.

The day that would be branded into Julian’s memory until his dying day, the date he would hate forever.

June 9, 3213.

The day life as he knew it ended.

He could recall getting the call from his office in the ministry of science; Laura was going into labor, their daughter to be was about to be born! He sped from the ministry building, driving hurriedly to get to the hospital, eager to see his wife and child. Instead he was greeted by a doctor, who told him to wait; there were some complications, but nothing to worry about.

That didn’t stop Julian from pacing out in the hallway as the minutes slipped by, seeming like an eternity to the anxious man. When the doctor finally exited the delivery room, Julian’s heart nearly stopped. And then he saw the man’s expression; the expression all men wear when they have bad news to tell.

He spoke of the complications; they’d been more severe then anticipated. Julian felt the dread in his gut swell, daring to ask what this meant exactly. The doctor had a pained expression on his aged face as he spoke the words that would shatter Julian’s universe; she was dead. The childbirth had killed her.

Julian could recall how he just stared ahead, mouth agape in silent horror. He quietly denied it, before he felt the sting of tears worked their way into the ducts of his eyes. However, in spite of this tragedy, he at least had the clarity of thought to realize something was wrong; he couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear the cries of his newborn daughter. He quietly asked about the child, how was the child? The doctor’s expression grew more pained; he explained what had happened in detail, but one word stuck out in Julian’s mind, superimposing itself over all the other words the doctor spoke.

Stillborn.

His child… the child his beloved had died to birth, was stillborn.

His universe shattered in that singular instant, and nothing was the same. He remembered leaving the hospital numbly, simply driving home wordlessly, his expression unreadable. He remembered entering his home, going to a room that had been lovingly made over the course of nine months; a nursery, meant for the latest member of the Kintobor family. He stared at the crib… what should have been his daughter’s crib. He just stared, and stared, and stared…

The funeral went by like a blur to him; he recalled naming the stillborn girl “Maria”, after the cousin he’d lost so long ago. He and Laura had agreed to it. Despite everything, after that day, he did not cry. He could not cry; he could not find it in him to cry. Life was over, his hope was dead and gone forever.

That was the beginning of the downward spiral that would catapult Julian Kintobor into a path of darkness. He neglected his health and shut himself off from the world, burying himself in work, all the while growing more and more disgusted with the imperfections of the world and the capriciousness of nature. Nature was cruel, unpredictable, uncaring; science could make it better, he realized, science could make all the problems nature concocted go away. He began to make plans… plans for a future, a future of machine perfection and control. He even began to mentally refer to himself as Robotnik, in honor of his dead grandfather. He used his ever increasing position within Overland’s science ministry to procure materials and test subjects for experiments that most would have found… questionable at best.

Then came the Great War, and the realization of his destiny.

The destiny of Doctor Ivo Robotnik.

The destiny of The Eggman.

The destiny of Mobius itself.

But for now, all that would have to wait. Right now, he had to focus on repairing his daughter. On June 9^th of the year 3236, merely a few weeks after his so-called “Return from the Dead”, Ivo Robotnik had completed work on his magnum opus, on the twenty third anniversaries of his wife and daughter’s deaths. The result was one Mecha “M” Robotnik, built to look like the daughter that COULD have been.

Sweat was on his brow now as he delicately finished up with the repairs… and with a relieved smile, he was done. He swiftly closed her up and moved back as the hum of a power source coming online rang like music to his robotic ears. “Repairs are completed, father. Mecha is now returning to optimum efficiency,” A.D.A.M. mellow voice announced from speakers everywhere in the darkened chamber.

“I’m aware of that, my son,” Robotnik responded patiently. A.D.A.M. was a loyal son, but he had a habit of stating the obvious. He privately wondered if that had anything to do with the AI’s very accidental creation from a computer virus… ah well, that would be a mystery to explore some other day. Right now, there were more important things to worry about. He leaned over to gaze down upon M’s face, gently speaking. “Mecha… Daughter, can you hear me?”

Her eyelids quivered before opening, greeting Robotnik with blue eyes that matched what his were once like, so many years ago. “I…can, father. I can hear you.” She said softly, groaning as she sat up. Robotnik breathed a sigh in relief and stood back to give the gynoid some much needed room.

“How are you feeling, M?” Robotnik asked in concern as she wobblingly stood up, placing a hand to her head.

“I feel unsteady, father, but I’m fast recovering… the hedgehog did a number on me,” Mecha murmured as she steadied and straightened out. “I’m sorry, father…” she sighed, looking ashamed as she stood before the mountainous form of her maker. Robotnik raised a brow as he moved to the side, returning with a long coat slung over his arm like a waiter’s cloth.

“Sorry? For what?” Robotnik asked in genuine confusion as he covered her form with the coat before backing off to let her finish putting it on. When she was done, she stared at him sorrowfully, as if she’d done something horribly wrong.

“The hedgehog… sir, I allowed that little beast to get the best of me. You deserve better from me.”

Robotnik snarled at the memory of Sonic, causing his mustache to bristle fiercely and his daughter to flinch slightly. However, he forced himself into a calmer state; this was something he would have never afforded Snively, his own nephew. Sighing, an effort that cause his metal shoulder guards to rise and fall slightly, he looked his daughter in the eyes, the glowing reds of his eyes reflecting off of her own blue orbs. “Daughter, you did your best against the vermin. In this instance it was simply dumb luck that enabled him to triumph, nothing more, nothing less,” he placed his mechanical arm around her shoulder and began to lead her out of the medical bay, “There is no need for self-recriminations in this instance.”

“If you say so, father… still, I think I could do better,” she sighed as she walked alongside her maker.

“There is always room for improvement, Mecha. Never forget that. But in this case, don’t worry,” Robotnik said paternally, something no one on Mobius would have figured him able to sound. “Now, return to your chambers. It’s been a long day, and you could do with recharge, I think.”

“Yes, I could do with that… aw damn it,” she snapped her fingers suddenly, her brow furrowing in annoyance. “That little freak wrecked my glasses…”

Robotnik couldn’t help but allow himself a chuckle. “Oh I’m sure you’ll figure out some way to make the rodent pay.” Eventually Robotnik separated himself from his surrogate daughter. “Well, you rest up. I’ve still work to do.”

“I understand. Good night father,” Mecha bowed her head respectively before heading off to her room.

“Good night, Mecha,” Robotnik responded quietly as the tyrant turned around and headed for his command center. Today had been a harrowing day for the rotund dictator; he’d nearly lost her back there. He had already been denied one daughter in life, and he was not eager to lose another, least of all to the hedgehog. He honestly didn’t know what he would do if she were taken from him… his face softened up some, his mustache drooping a little as the sad thought played out through his mind. No, best not to think about… there were other things that needed to be done.

The soft expression on his face soon hardened into the more focused, dangerous look he always got when there was work to be done. “ADAM!” he bellowed out as he reached his command room, sitting himself upon his command chair and bringing up several screens showing the various parts of Mobius under his observation.

“Yes, father?” Once more, the AI’s voice was omnipresent.

“Bring up the fleet construction rates, as well as Metal Sonic’s latest mission log from Cat Country if available.”

“Certainly, father. Fleet Construction is at optimum efficiency, and by the end of this week we should have…”

Even as his digital “son” enlightened him about the current state of his empire, Robotnik’s mind playing over a mantra he’d adopted regarding his daughter, an extension of his own core beliefs. At least I can save her mind if her body is destroyed. In the end, science will always grant me that second chance. Science is forever.

His mind repeated it once more, just to be safe.

Science is forever.