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godslush · 8 months

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Where SlashGirl.EXE just exists to be a general denizen of the world, TokeiWoman.EXE has more of a narrative direction.

I doubt I would ever get around to doing something more complete with this idea, but this is the general gist of her arc, for the time being.

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It’s any other day, and Lan and his buddies head out to do typical after-school kid things. However, along the way, they happen to pass by a HUGE demonstration at large corporate building. They learn from attendees that the company inside (Zenith Hyperprocessing) had installed a program/NetNavi to centralize a large portion of HR and finances across multiple subsidiary tech companies, which in turn lost them their jobs (or jobs of family members and/or NetNavis working Web-side) and they're protesting it, to the company's deaf ears.

This is seen as a mild annoyance by the general public at most, but word gets out that some of the displaced workers have banded together a fund where they'd pay a good amount to anyone who can break into Zenith's system to permanently delete that program and get them their jobs back... and several established 'villain' Operators feel this is a great way to make a quick buck at the expense of a large corporation.

However, Zenith’s position gives it the backing of the government, and they call any city NetBattlers to help defend it, citing the damage that losing the program would cause to the many other jobs/livelihoods of the people still working at the companies under its jurisdiction. So the city NetBattlers and their NetNavis form a sort of perimeter around Zenith’s central server, stopping some of the opportunists. However, a few of the 'evil' Navis get through the blockade.... only for their Operators to suddenly lose contact with their Navis completely.

After that incident, some time passes, when suddenly the 'program' starts to act... strangely, doing things that are not to it’s owner company's bottom line interests, which causes a bit of a ruckus. The authorities in control can't seem to get in to deal with it due to the digital defenses set up, but don't want to unplug or delete it completely right off the bat due to the potential dangers to the mainframe, and the costs that would incur, but they're worried that the NetNavis that went 'missing' weren't deleted, and somehow were corrupting the program from within the program's bubble of inaccessible influence.

So city NetBattlers are called in again to find the root of the problem, joined by official ones, and once within the strange anti-communication zone, MegaMan DOES manage to break defenses to find Tokei’s true body. He discovers that she had managed to freeze and capture any NetNavis that made it to her prior; they had no effect on her decision to start disobeying Zenith for the welfare of hard-working employees over the ‘lazy and ineffectual management.’ The company did that to themselves. She's 'fixing' their problems, as far as she's concerned. She at least agrees to free the NetNavis she trapped, provided they leave her alone and stop wasting her time.

MegaMan can’t find it in himself to delete her, not that he could in the state he found himself in, given he notices his energy being sapped at an astronomical rate, which prompts an explanation of the Overclocked domain, which also covers why he couldn’t communicate with Lan. Before he can leave to an area where he can safely Jack Out, ProtoMan arrives, with enough energy to fight, having not had to fight through all the defenses that had been defeated prior, and MegaMan has to prevent ProtoMan from deleting Tokei, allowing her to speak her piece.

With that resolved, MegaMan returns and simply reports his findings. It raises the question of the 'rights' of NetNavis. He returns from time to time - at great risk to himself, given the Overclocked server - to check on her out of sympathy, but she is always too busy to hold much of a conversation, sending him away. He insists she needs to take a break once in a while... even computers need to rest.

Finally there’s a breaking point, and MegaMan - instead of returning to a safe zone to resume contact with Lan and Jack Out - stays put, in an almost child-like tantrum. His ultimatum; she turn off the Overclock on the server and return to normal time and see how it feels to run at a normal, non-stressed speed... or she keeps it on at the cost of his own safety/life.

Unable to bring herself to hurt MegaMan, Tokei concedes with great effort and turns everything off... and while it does prove that it’s a huge weight lifted, it has the downside of suddenly bringing her activity back into observable time, putting both of them under immediate scrutiny. With Lan also able to weigh in, they argue until suddenly another party joins; Zandra Hertz, Zenith’s CEO.

To show the ‘children’ the error in their own thinking, Zandra uses Tokei’s unprotected state to violently tear the NetNavi’s consciousness out of the supercomputer housing (appearing, Web-side, as a large claw appearing and physically ripping Tokei out from her desk into the darkness), sticking it in an extremely outdated, dilapidated PET, to show both the NetNavi AND the employees she stood up for how much Zenith can’t afford to let her take time off for extended periods. Zandra’s last words to Tokei are, “Fine. Take a vacation. See what good that does you, and everyone else.”

With Tokei gone, the rest of Zenith and its subsidiaries start to feel the pressure of that work not being done. The chaos caused by this, and the ineptitude of the management who had become so painfully reliant on her for HR functions, means they can’t even hire or rehire workers to replace her quickly enough to prevent things from crashing and burning. When Zandra is contacted to take care of matters, it’s discovered she conveniently took a vacation to let everyone fend for themselves. Typical upper management behavior.

Tensions peak after a few days and Lan or someone else chooses to break in to steal the PET Tokei was consigned to and get her out, only to find that the poor condition of the PET and its lack of visual interfaces causes it to act like a sensory deprivation chamber (or worse, if damage to the PET such as electrical shorts or overheating components can actually affect the NetNavi inside). It’s so archaic that while MegaMan can enter the device via Jack In, they don’t know how to get Tokei out of it without first taking it to SciLab for analysis, and in the mean time, they can’t actually charge the device without damaging it further.

To make matters worse, the disappearance of Tokei and the PET she was on becomes an issue of company property theft. In the kids’ hands, nobody knew where the device had gone, but the moment they take the PET to SciLab to either be repaired or to have Tokei transferred into a new device, the lab gets implicated for it and come under legal scrutiny (it turns out Zandra had predicted it would happen and set it up intentionally, banking on the ‘reckless heroism of youth’ to forego critical thinking). She was hoping to use that criminal lawsuit against SciLab for stealing critically proprietary ‘software’ to pad her other earnings.

Fortunately for everyone, this starts to get the public riled up the more they learn about what was happening. A lot of people - even so-called ‘villain’ sorts - cite their own close connections to their NetNavis, as well as the existence of independent NetNavis, as proof that they are more than just feelingless tools for humans to use.

Eventually, public outcry causes Zandra’s plan to backfire, when hundreds of NetNavis from outside Zenith break into its mainframe to help the panicking employees rectify its problems temporarily, and Zandra is forced to step down for endangering the livelihoods of so many people... but not before trying to spitefully take down as much as she possibly can by firing up Tokei’s supercomputer and expanding the Overclock zone to encompass a large portion of the Cyberworld in hopes of melting down as much of the Web as she can in the process, by running malicious code into every connected device.

It’s revealed she never believed humans should have become so reliant on such fickle cyberspace beings in the first place; she lost her injured brother to a hospital mishap caused by the machines failing at the worst possible moment. Her whole plan from the start was to make as much money as she could exploiting the system before ultimately taking it out.

Since the Zenith server cannot be approached via the web without the Navis involved getting hit directly with the wave of Overdrive code, the situation has to be diffused by manually reinstalling Tokei into the supercomputer in person, which possesses its own difficulty as the Overclocked machine is physically overheating and threatening to explode and take the whole company building with it. Suffice to say, though, they succeed (because Lan has protag power).

Zandra is arrested and control of the company is handed over to temporary management, but eventually is given to Tokei herself. She was already doing so much work she practically ran the company upon initial installation, anyway. Since she has no need of money, she simply lets what she would have been making as CEO fall back into the company to promote a better workplace, and to hire employees to keep things running smoothly over the long-term; she’d crunch the numbers initially to get things back on track, and then slowly let the workload redistribute so she could take on a more humane level of management... and finally get a proper damn vacation without worrying about everything going to crap.

She also offers to do the kids’ families’ taxes for free on her off-time. As thanks. Compared to what she’d been doing prior, a handful of tax forms is just a few grains of sand in an hourglass to her.

#art #fanart #fancharacter #mega man #mega man battle network #mmbn #netnavi oc #dai's mega man dump #the reference intended with zandra is mostly a nod to tokay's arc over in classic #it's a pretty heavy-handed nod but i think it's funny #my frame of reference for the most part is mmbn 1-3 and a little of 4 #since dani has been streaming it and suffering through the truly delightful tedium masquerading as game mechanics #this is a real game with real mechanics and real dialogue written by real people it's honestly quite incredible

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