Application

[derivativeofx]

Out-of-Character Information

Name: Snap
Are you over 15?: ye
Time Zone: +6 GMT?
Personal Journal: irregularpassion
Reliable Method of Contact: AIM or Plurk, both still TemporaryCancer
Other characters in the game: Char (rivalkidneypunch), Lyra (genderbentmario), Kieran (burninghart et. al)
Tegaki: Same as it ever was.
Anything Else?: bbbbbbb

In-Character Information

Name: Copy X
Game/Series: Megaman Zero
Teacher/Student/Other: Other!
Canon Point: Z3, after dying for the second time.
Age: ROUGHLY EIGHT OR SO… But, uh, he more or less functions on the level of a young adult. Robutts and ages, man. How doe.
Grade Level/Class Taught/Job: Truancy Officer (I HOPE THIS IS OKAY, ESSAY/KRIS.)
Dorm or Living Arrangement: Dorm I guess?

Personality:

So, the original X. He’s totally a nice guy, right? A strong-hearted soldier of justice, defender of the oppressed, a staunch believer in equality between humans and reploids. Naturally, a perfect copy of him would be exactly the same way, right?

HA HA HA NOPE.

Copy X is not what anyone in their right mind would call a nice boy. At all. Ever. At best, he’s a deluded, insecure child who refuses to accept that he could ever be wrong. At worst, he’s a murderous, unsympathetic tyrant with no regard for the value of life. He’s got a massively unwarranted sense of self-importance; as far as he’s concerned, yes, he does run the world, and yes, it does revolve around his whims. He, of course, is a big important hero; whatever he does is for the greater good, simply because he’s the one doing it. If a few lives have to be tossed into the incinerator in the process, well, tough. That’s just how the world works.

That blatant arrogance, of course, may be thanks to the circumstances he was born into; back home, everyone believes he’s the real X, a beloved near-legendary saviour who can do no wrong. He’s the most high-ranking person around: nobody dares tell him no, lest that vindictive, draconian temper decide that they’re clearly committing treason. With everyone around him acting like he’s hot shit and every idea being met with nothing but asspats… yeah, his ego’s gonna get pretty out of hand.

Whether he’s actually willfully evil or not might be up for debate, considering that. He genuinely buys into all the aforementioned asspatting: he believes he really is a hero, one who maintained a peaceful utopia through tumultuous times. Humanity supported what he did, so it must have been right. Those who opposed him didn’t have any points worth considering, because they were obviously the bad guys! Yeah, it’s an extremely childish moral viewpoint to take, but man, what else do you expect from someone who’s only been around for like eight years?

Not, of course, that this is an invitation to treat him like a child or feel sorry for him. Yes, he is childish and sheltered, but it’s not as though he’s some helpless misunderstood victim of circumstance. Copy X isn’t an idiot. He has a very efficient, calculating mind; if he’d been less naïve about the world, he might have made an excellent ruler. He’s been playing a role his entire life: lying and manipulation aren’t unfamiliar things for him. He’s willing to adopt whatever role seems most advantageous for him; if you see him as some tragic soul who can be saved, you can bet he’ll use that. Copy X isn’t the least bit sympathetic toward anyone else; if he doesn’t care the least bit about mass-murdering innocent machines, then trust me, he’s not gonna feel too guilty about using or misleading anybody.

I mean, uh… no, he’s… definitely totally just misunderstood. Definitely. I mean, look at this poor boy. He was created with impossible expectations piled up onto his shoulders: from day one of his birth, he had to pretend to be some flawless, venerated hero that he’d never even met, while running what remained of the world in the midst of a vicious energy crisis. The girl who created him, once she grew disappointed in his performance, defected and started a resistance movement to take him down. (And, uh, eventually had him assassinated. He’s kind sore about that.) The kindly old doctor who nursed his broken remains back to life? Used him and killed him off too. He’s never been allowed to be himself (whoever that is), every parental figure he dared to trust had him killed off, and yet all he ever wanted was to be a hero! Isn’t that just the saddest thing you’ve ever heard? So tragic. Poor baby. Poor, faultless, blameless baby. Better just do what he wants, because he’s clearly suffered enough, hasn’t he??

Not only is Copy X deceitful, spoiled, and ruthless, but he’s maybe not the most stable, well-rounded guy. His sense of identity is… uh, a little weird. He’s clingy and demanding, constantly needing people to reassure him and build his ego up… but he’s also inherently mistrusting. Both parental figures in his life betrayed him and had him killed off when he was no longer useful to them. This reinforced his belief that reploid life is utterly disposable, but it also taught him that he – the individual – was not a valuable person who could be loved. It was the role he played – X, the ruler – that mattered. He’s determined not to get burned three times; no matter how attention-hungry he might be, he refuses to believe the things he’s told. He’s thrown himself into his lifelong illusion maybe a little too much; he calls the real X his “original form,” which suggests that the lines between the two of them… might be kind of blurred in Copy’s mind. On the other hand, he also insists that building a peaceful utopia like he did was something only he could do, suggesting a need to establish his individuality and be recognized for his own actions. His sense of identity is probably best described as a chaotic, contradictory “have your cake and eat it too” jumble at best.

So, basically: you have a directionless, spoiled child playing make-believe in a situation he’s far too sheltered to really understand. Except said child is a war machine who looks at taking lives with the same attitude most would take about throwing out a broken TV remote. Yes. This definitely sounds like a great guy to know.


Backstory:

So once upon a time, there was this super fighting robot named X. A whole bunch of sentient robots were built based on his programming, ushering in the era of super-cool robots being all over the place. Except there was also this nasty virus out there that caused said robots to go Maverick – which is a shorthand way to say “flip the fuck out and MURDER EVERYTHING.” X (and also some asshole named Zero, but who cares about him?) spent forever fighting these Mavericks, until at long last, a vaccine to the virus was found by a whole bunch of researchers. Yaaay, the bad times are over!

Except… not so much. One of these researchers, some dunderfuck named Weil, felt it would be a good idea to use this vaccine to create some kinda emergency override – so if reploids got all murder-crazy again, direct control could be taken of them. Y’know. For peaceful purposes only. No way this could be misused!!

WHOOPS, IT GOT MISUSED. Weil used that mass-control to get himself an unwilling army and tried to seize the world with his awesome huge killbot, Omega. X and Zero, being protagonists and all, quickly put a stop to that. Omega was launched into space (instead of being dismantled and melted down for some reason???), Weil was put into a self-regenerating immortal mechanical body and exiled (instead of being sentenced to life imprisonment for the rest of his crusty super-old lifespan for some reason???), Zero sealed himself away (also for some reason???), and X… well, first he took this devastated wasteland and made it into Neo Arcadia, the last inhabitable city on the planet, then he also ended up sealed away (for macguffin-sealing plot-related reasons???).

Naturally, all this sealing and banishing left some voids to be filled. X had been a constant saviour for like a century or two by that point; if word got out that their beloved peacekeeping leader was suddenly kaput, then there’d be widespread panic, and this tenuous, fragile peace would smash all to bits. So this genius six-year-old girl (no, I’m not kidding) came up with the awesome idea of building a fake X to take over where the real one left off. Foolproof! This could not possibly go wrong at all.

And thus, Copy X was born. Unsurprisingly, he was hitting the ground running; Weil’s fuckery had wreaked a crazy amount of damage. The planet had already been pretty gross, having been rendered a big wasteland by an orbiting space colony crashing into earth long before the era of Neo Arcadia, but now there was also the added bonus of 60% of the world’s humans and 90% of their reploids being killed in a single short, extremely bloody war. Reploid-human relations were, unsurprisingly, exceptionally tense – though they’d been pretty dang tense for centuries, to be honest, given that “capable of snapping and killing everyone you love at any given moment” has been part of a reploid’s description basically from the moment they were invented. And just to put the icing on the cake, finite resources being finite was still very much a thing. Most of the world, reploids and regular machines alike, ran on energen crystals, but these were now in very short supply; there was a nasty energy crisis going on. No alternate energy source had been invented yet (apparently solar and wind power aren’t cool enough anymore???), but a solution was needed immediately. If nothing was done, then the paradise that had been the real X’s last gift to the world would crumble to pieces. Copy’s solution? Put humanity first.

It started off with just the criminals – reploids who had been found guilty of some crime or another in a fair trial. They were put to death. Deactivated reploids, after all, were no longer reploids who needed to be constantly consuming energen to survive. Have them “retired,” recycle their parts – very efficient, right? Except that wasn’t enough. So, bit by bit, reploid law got more and more draconic. Smaller and smaller offenses got labelled Maverick, and soon, reploids that were perfectly innocent had the government breaking their doors down and hauling them in for mass-retirement on trumped-up falsified charges. Keep up a steady death count, and wouldn’t you know it, energy consumption becomes manageable enough for the humans to keep living comfortably.

The little girl who had built Copy X (let’s call her Ciel, because that’s her name) was not exactly wild about mass-killings. Unable to condone this bullshit, she defected from Neo Arcadia, starting up a tiny Resistance with a few refugee reploids. Said Resistance did not exactly fare too well; Copy X was not especially merciful. The situation got dire enough that she resorted to desperate measures: she sought out and revived an ancient, sleeping legend: some asshole named Zero. Zero, being a protagonist, proceeded to wreck Neo Arcadia’s shit, ending with him assassinating Copy X himself.

That woulda been the end of ol’ Copy, but for a kindly old reploid researcher who found his broken remains and carefully built him back up to life. Or, uh. Kind of carefully. There were a few bugs, and his voice program kept stuttering and glitching, but that’s what happens when you half-ass rebuilding a bot. Oh well, not like he really needed to last that long, anyway.
This gentle old man who saved Copy X introduced himself as Weil. Yeah, that Weil. Sure, he and his big war machine Omega had caused some trouble a few years back, but gosh, he sure was sorry about what he’d done! And he’d been nice enough to save Copy X, too – gosh, a pal like that, Copy surely had to have his back, right? (Possible… programming alterations… might have helped him come to that conclusion, too. Reploid “upgrading” was something Weil proved to be very good at.) Copy X, entirely on his own with no outside suggestion whatsoever, no for realises, I swear, honest, decided that Weil should not only receive a complete pardon for his crimes, but should be placed in charge of all of Neo Arcadia’s armies as well.

While this was going on, Ciel had developed the Ciel System (gee, modest name), an alternative energy source that would solve the crisis that was responsible for all that reploid mass-murderin’. Copy X contacted the Resistance demanding they hand it over to Neo Arcadian control, but Ciel, seeing how Weil was EVEN MORE BATSHIT MURDEROUS THAN COPY, refused to allow her invention land in the hands of those who would use it to harm others. Well, the gloves were off. SHIT GOT REAL.

It culminated in a familiar scenario: Zero confronting Copy X, ready to kick some dollar store knockoff ass. Knockoff ass was kicked, and Copy X called out for his best buddies Weil and Omega to come help him. BUT THEN: the original X showed up (oh, by the way, he was some kind of glowy-data-robot-ghost this whole time, just fyi), telling Copy X that Weil had peaced out ages ago and was just using Copy as a tool, nothing more.

LIES AND SLANDER, right? No way Copy would allow himself to be manipulated! No way the man who had saved him didn’t actually care about him! Copy responded by trying to bust out his super shiny ultimate cool super saiyan armor, but it didn’t quite work out that way: Weil had planted a bomb into Copy that was wired to go off when said transformation was activated.

Unsurprisingly: Copy X blew the heck up, which meant that the role of Neo Arcadia’s monarch went to the current second-in-command: Dr. Weil. Gosh. How about that. Gosh.

AND THUS ENDED THE TALE OF COPY X: HIS LIFE SUCKED AND SO DID HE.

Or it would have been the end, but apparently someone out there believes in second second chances. Yeah, he’s been rebuilt yet again, this time in some small-time armpit of a school. Slush Academy or something. Sounds lame, but it’s not like he really has anywhere else do go, does he?

Anything Else?:
- Armors and attacks can be found here.
- Unlike for-realsies X, I’m headcanoning that he’s not perfectly identical to a human; you can see the lenses in his eyes if you get close enough, he has those auditory-receptor-headphone-looking-thingies where ears oughta be, and there are visible seams at his joints/where the fancy-pants compartments and USB slots are. His eyes are red instead of X’s green, and I’m headcanoning a slightly darker hair color too, so it should be easy to tell them apart.
-Also unlike for-realsies X, he sounds kinda artificial, too. His voice has this weird fake sort of ring to it. He actually sounds different than X does, too: this is canon. Again, it won’t be impossible to tell them apart.
-That being said, he is going to be pretending he’s totally the real X. Just. The future version. Time travel is a thing that happens here, right? Totally plausible. Totally.

In-Character 1st person sample:
[A text post this time, kiddies. It’s a lot easier when there’s no off-model eye colour or not-quite-right voice to deal with. That, and he can take his time with getting in character.]

You know, I was taking a look at the sort of laws that this city has in place, and what I found was pretty interesting. I guess it’s no surprise that a place this diverse would be big on equality, but still, Final Destination City is a pretty unique place. Human rights aren’t uniquely human here, for one thing. They extend to reploids, supernatural beings, ah… Pokemon, was it? All manner of creatures.

There aren’t any Maverick laws in place, either. In the eyes of the law around here, a reploid can harm a human, and it’ll be treated just the same as if it had been another reploid. I’d like to hope that it never comes to something like that, but still… here, all intelligent species are completely and utterly equal. It really is amazing to think that such different creatures can all live together so peacefully, isn’t it? I hope the rest of the world can take a leaf from this place’s book. That’s a future worth looking forward to, if you ask me.


In-Character 3rd person sample:

Attendance records. How utterly, completely, staggeringly dull. Copy X was no stranger to paperwork, by any means, but at least that had been something important. What did he care if some insufferable teenagers thought they were too good to attend class? Weren’t there some drones he could hand this tedious task off to? What could was this position if he was stuck doing grunt work like this?

Irritably, he pondered just shoving the pile of papers directly into the wastebasket. It wasn’t like anyone would really even notice, would they? If they had a problem with it, then they could just come down here and do this pointless time-wasting task themselves.

His hand paused, however, on the verge of sweeping the lot away. One name in particular had caught his eye. It went without saying that Copy X wasn’t exactly the kind of person who made a lot of friends, but every now and then someone cropped up who really managed to rub him the wrong way. This particular unfortunate soul, sadly, happened to be a student.

Casually, almost offhandedly, Copy X took a look around to see if anyone was watching. Of course they weren’t. Like he needed any supervision – a trained monkey could do this job, let alone a sophisticated machine like him. And, of course, no eyes on him meant nobody would notice if this attendance record here got just a few more unexcused absences on it. Gosh, what a terrible student, engaging in such delinquent behaviour. Someone had better sic that dead-eyed burnout Detention supervisor after this little class-cutter. Actions have consequences, after all, don’t they?

Copy X allowed himself a satisfied little smile. Maybe after this, he’d think about familiarizing himself with the students’ permanent records. If he was going to be stuck in such a miserable position, after all, he might as well make the most of it.