recopy | HEADCANON SHIT

just little notes and doodads to stick in here so I don't forget/have to go through layers of my own info posts just to dig it out DON'T LOOK AT ME

Yuichiro Hikari never expected Hub's soul to actually show up in the Navi Megaman. Programming his experimental project Navi in the DNA image of his dead son was probably an entirely snap decision brought on after a long night of feeling generally powerless on top of grieving; it's entirely likely that he took up the project again the day after Hub died, tired and frustrated and feeling as if he had nothing at all to lose. The much more likely result would have been a simple virtual clone of his son--unhealthy or not, Yuichiro was probably willing to accept this outcome. Hub confirming his own identity and memories upon being activated, however, was completely out of left field.

So out of left field that it's reasonable to assume Dr. Hikari still doesn't know how he did it! Somehow managing to virtually upload and revive the souls of the deceased isn't exactly peanuts, after all--the wave this would have produced in the scientific and religious communities should have been huge...but it looks like Dr. Hikari's never released the results of his Navi Project to the general public. Still, Dr. Hikari isn't a selfish man, either, definitely not one to keep an immense scientific breakthrough all to himself for his own personal benefit; the simple fact of the matter is that he probably could not replicate the phenomena again. Whatever he did to Megaman's code the first time, a means to copy it hasn't yet been found. It's probably also because of this that Megaman as a program cannot be backed-up by normal means--most attempts carry over the shell, but not the soul. To date, Tadashi Hikari's posthumous personality data is the only entity that has successfully compiled a single-use backup of Megaman that actually works after deletion.

Megaman is twelve years old at the end of Battle Network 5. Technically he's still physically ten, however; Navis do not age, and need a complete frame image overwrite to change appearance, which is a hassle that most Operators don't tend to bother with often. Dr. Hikari designed him to look around ten because he intended to give Lan a NetNavi on his tenth birthday, and it's generally fitting for a custom Navi to be the same aesthetic age as their Operator, especially children. Before being gifted to Lan, however, Megaman spent his first nine years as a virtual assistant to Dr. Hikari and his peers in SciLab.

Thanks to this formative nine-year stint in SciLab, Megaman will probably always have a robust appreciation for science, and the people involved in the process. He's already knowledgeable both in most standard scientific procedures and in a lot of odds and ends of science trivia he's picked up over the course of his stay. He'll probably always be pretty comfortable in lab environments, and will generally be the first to try pinning down a scientific explanation for a strange event. (Chances are he's never really going to wrap his head around pure magic as a concept--as far as he's concerned, it's some kind of higher form of physics. "Sufficiently advanced tech in the medieval eye looks like magic anyway" etc etc)

I figure Lan and Megaman's first meeting probably went exactly how it did in the anime--with Lan expecting a much larger and cooler Navi after all that hype about his father's mad programming skills, and being initially super disappointed in the rather wimpy-looking Navi he ended up actually getting. Rudeness to be had all around! It was a rocky relationship to start, between Lan's rash and lazy habits clashing with Megaman's careful and productive inclinations, but eventually they'd start learning to lean into each other's strengths.

Thanks in part to the kind of eidetic memory possessed by programs normally, Megaman still somewhat remembers being human, as short-lived as that actually was. Actual events are vague and indistinct, but he can recall sensations that ought to be foreign to a normal Navi--like being hungry, or crying. Though he never makes a huge point of it, Megaman does hold these little details close to heart, and tries to use them to better understand and help Lan despite the dimensional barrier between them.

He lives on the Internet! The chances are high that Megaman is already fairly familiar with the myriad of child-unfriendly things present out there; if anything, he probably actively works to shield and restrict Lan from accessing inappropriate sites or seeing inappropriate ads etc on a daily browsing basis. Megaman probably also has active parental controls in place on his own person too; that is to say, he might know plenty of swear words, but he is physically incapable of actually saying them...or talking about inappropriate things in general. These parental controls probably lift automatically when Lan's 16 or 17. In the meantime, any attempt at swearing on Megs' part would probably sound like a censor word-swapper gone out of hand--gosh darn it to heck and fudge it all, really :V

Re: timelines! WHAT ARE THOSE...these games don't keep very good track of them....however! It's confirmed that Lan (and Megaman's) birthday is on June 10. Lan is eleven in the first three games of the BN series; however, at the end of BN3 he turns twelve and is ready to enter sixth grade. In the next two games, however, Lan doesn't have to worry about attending classes. SO, assuming each game probably takes up about a month's chunk of time on the whole, the events of BN4 probably went down a few weeks after BN3--towards the end of June/start of July--and BN5's events occur a month after BN4's, in August--meaning that the end of BN5 is prooobably towards the end of August.