(no subject)
Dr. Wily's last creation was intended to be a carrier of the virus, rather than infected with it itself. The virus was to be installed after his creation was activated because it needed a live system to contain it. However, something went wrong with his plans.
Wily's last creation, Zero, was never activated. He remained in stasis in a secret underground bunker, along with a storage capsule containing the pure form of the virus.
Until the lab was discovered by a group of archaeologists. However, before they could secure their discovery, one of the archaeologists' local 'guides' conspired with a group of reploid blackmarket thieves to raid the excavation for valuables. The thieves killed the small team of archaeologists, intending to seal their bodies up inside the excavation and cause a collapse after they left to destroy the evidence. However, one managed to send a distress call regarding a maverick attack.
Not realizing there were authorities on the way, the thieves broke into the lab and started stripping it of anything of value. Accessing the computers, they discovered there was a viral weapon sealed in the storage capsule and being interested in profit, they took it. Upon discovering a reploid sealed away, they broke the seal to take it with them. However, they hadn't expected him to activate on his own once the stasis was released.
And they certainly hadn't expected him to have a violently feral and incredibly lethal combat subroutine activate in reaction to finding himself in a threatening situation. Almost all of them were killed. Only the few that fled immediately managed to escape - taking the virus, and other things that had already been carried out of the lab, with them.
By the time the Maverick Hunter unit arrived, the survivors had fled the red demon reploid and Zero was left, still in threat-assessing combat mode, inside the dig site, surrounded by the mangled corpses of the reploid thieves and the reploid archaeologists. The assumption was that the blood-covered reploid still standing in one piece was the maverick they'd come to stop.
The Hunters engaged the maverick and found themselves badly outclassed. They called for backup and the Commander Sigma himself came out to deal with the maverick personally. Sigma lost an arm in the ensuing fight, but Zero took a blow to the head and was knocked off-line.
Sigma had Zero brought back for repairs and analysis but kept shut down in stasis.
It wasn't until a good while later that Professor Cain was able to convince the government that Zero did not have anything more wrong with him that could cause maverick behavior. He was allowed to reactivate Zero under controlled conditions for observation and study to determine why he might have gone maverick in the first place.
When Zero was reactivated, he was no longer in combat mode and had no real concrete memory of the incident. He was just a newly activated reploid, although one who had more akin to X's original design than to the current generations of less sophisticated and much easier to analyze reploids.
This intrigued Cain's assistant, X himself, who wanted to know more about this strange reploid who was and wasn't like him. Despite the government's misgivings for his safety, X began helping to take care of Zero and teach him. They became quite close.
However, in the meantime, maverick activity was on the rise and seemed to be spreading more and more among reploids. Sometime after the thieves escaped with the virus, it was released and began spreading - first among the criminal elements of reploid society, and then later in localized outbreaks among the reploid populations. The first infections were accidental, but later ones were intentional as samples of the virus were sold or used as reploid-based bio-weapons.
With this upswing in maverick activity, and the discovery that Zero still possessed remarkable power and combat reflexes, Sigma agitated to get Zero transferred into the Hunters so that he could use his power to protect humans and other reploids. Although Cain lobbied to have Zero kept out considering his youth and value to reploid research, he was overridden when it was discovered that a reploid virus was being used as a terrorist weapon to turn reploids maverick. In the frightened atmosphere following that discovery, the government gave the Hunters as many able-bodies and as much funding as they could to stop the threat and calm the populace by showing that 'yes they were being protected from the terrorists.'
Custody of Zero was transferred to the Hunters and X was terribly afraid he'd be killed or worse - infected by this new virus. Zero quickly rose through the ranks of the Hunters, showing incredible skill and power.
However, the numbers of mavericks increased and the attacks worsened, and X felt more and more powerless to help stop it as Cain's lab assistant. He terribly wanted to help Zero and Sigma to protect people and stop the mavericks - and save them if possible. But he didn't feel he could do that sequestered safely inside a lab complex. He knew he had the power to protect others - and that's what his predecessor Mega Man had done, and what his father Dr. Light would have wanted him to do. So he joined the Hunters.
However, despite being very powerful and well armored, he lacked the desire and resolve to fight to kill. He hesitated, even when his own life was in danger. Because of this, despite lots of training, and even being put into the 17th elite unit under Sigma's direct command and training (to ensure his safety), as well as alongside Zero, he never rose above an average B-rank.
Samples of strains of the virus were isolated from captured viral mavericks and were studied to attempt to find a cure. Scientists all around the world searched for a cure. One of the leading scientific minds in the search was Dr. Doppler, a reploid scientist.
However, as death tolls mounted and the virus proved to be so highly infectious and mutagenic that all attempts at a true cure failed, he became increasingly convinced that a cure wouldn’t be found soon enough and it wasn’t just a vaccine that was needed. The infected needed to be wiped out to stop the spread. To that end, he resolved to create a predator that would prey upon the virus and infected.
Using experimental research and technology he engineered a parasitic bio-tech symbiote that he called the Limited. In a way, it was a hive organism. He created a queen, Mother Limited, to spawn more symbiotes. Each drone symbiote was subsentient, more akin to animal intelligence and instinct than a full AI. However, they were capable of learning - which was part of his plan.
Each drone symbiote would locate and take a host. The symbiotes were capable of highly sophisticated matter-energy conversion on a molecular level. The symbiote would merge with the host and would use this ability to boost their power and strength far beyond anything they were normally capable of achieving. The symbiotes could drain energy from other sources to use to boost their host’s power exponentially or to create and manipulate matter. They could also convert matter directly to energy to boost their host’s abilities or to manipulate the matter of their host’s body. This provides an unprecedented healing factor which allows the host to instantly heal any wound and even regenerate limbs. The symbiote is even capable of breaking the host’s body down to a semi-liquid state if necessary.
In exchange for these abilities, the host would provide energy to sustain the symbiote as well as data on the host’s combat abilities. The symbiote would gather this data and use it to learn, and eventually the data would be transferred back to the Mother Limited so that it can use it to create symbiotes with more knowledge of how to fight and kill their prey.
Because of the ability to manipulate the host’s body and to drain energy from other sources to use itself, the host became effectively immune to the maverick virus. Because the virus proved to be part energy, if infected, the symbiote could drain the energy from the virus, weakening it and breaking it down, and then reform the matter of the host’s body to expel the remnants of the virus and regenerate.
However, this only works if the host is not already heavily infected. If the symbiote takes an infected host, the host usually doesn’t last long. Because the symbiote is programmed to drain the virus and break it down to use as energy for itself, if the host is heavily infected the symbiote will eventually drain the energy from it’s own host and break down the host’s body for conversion to energy. The more the host uses the symbiote’s abilities to boost their power and strength, the faster their body will be broken down until they die.
Part of the symbiote’s programming is to protect the host. If the host is threatened or dying and unable to survive on it’s own, the symbiote will take control of the host body and use any and all means to keep the host alive and to kill it’s prey (the infected mavericks). However, if the host dies anyway, the symbiote will attempt to merge with and possess the next available host - generally the victor of the combat.
With each new host, the symbiote drone learns and grows stronger and more intelligent, yet retains it’s predatory nature. It grows more and more intelligent and sentient as it learns more. Because it learns from it’s hosts, it can pick up various behaviors - which can result in some vicious or bloodthirsty tendencies if it’s had virally maverick hosts.
In order to ensure the Limited did not depend on the survival of only one Mother Limited, each drone is capable of, eventually becoming another queen Limited and spawning more symbiotes - once it grows enough and gathers enough energy, intelligence, and data.
During a Hunter mission, X was separated from the rest of the team and was attacked by an unusually powerful maverick. X was badly damaged in the fight, and was barely able to hold his own against the maverick. However, in the middle of the fight, when X was cornered, the maverick collapsed on top of X and died. While X struggled to get the much larger and heavier dead maverick off of him, a Limited drone oozed out of the maverick and flung itself onto him. X blacked out as it seeped into him on contact, merging with him and taking control.
By the time X came to, he was in the medical ward back at Hunter Base. He’d been found unconscious not far from the dead maverick, the wounds he’d gotten in the fight had been healed by the time Zero found him. Zero had taken X back to base for treatment and nothing had been found wrong with him, except that his energy was low and he’d collapsed from exhaustion.
Since then, X has been having blackouts and nightmares. Usually he would black out on a mission in the middle of a fight, though sometimes he’d black out when not fighting for his life. When he blacked out, no one else was around - except the mavericks. And by the time he came to, the mavericks were dead… messily, he had blood and fluids all over him, and sometimes he wasn’t even in the area anymore - he just woke up bloody with no corpses around, and only later heard about a bunch of mavericks having been found massacred.
He’s having nightmares about the killings he can’t remember doing and gets sick after nightmares and blackouts. He’s terrified he’s going maverick. And he’s afraid of being found as maverick, because infected mavericks are summarily executed when found. He’s terrified that if the Hunters find out, he’ll be killed. And part of his rationalization for keeping it a secret is because he’s not sure if he’s right, and because so far as he knows, he’s only killed mavericks; never anyone else. But he’s still afraid that one day he will, so he’s been avoiding people when he can.