Chapter Text
Story Idea 15
Inspired by my de-aged-Robert idea and my Fae-Robert idea, as well as the song, “Changeling Child” by Heather Dale.
Despite trying for many years, with many different surrogates, Robbie fails to get a son. Hell, at this point he’d be willing to settle for a girl if it meant having someone to pass the mantle of Mecha Man onto.
A doctor’s appointment, and then two more after he tried to deny to diagnosis, reveal that he is infertile (possibly due to being Mecha Man). He will never have a biological child of his own.
Adoption is also impossible. He’s a single man who works long hours in a dangerous profession where he could die at any time, no agency would approve him for any child, let alone a baby he could raise into being Mecha Man.
So, Robbie turns to the mystical.
He finds a powerful Fae and bargains with them for a son, trading away gold, highly sentimental heirlooms and even some of his own lifespan (which he doubts he’d reach the natural end of anyway). Knowing that Fae can be tricksters who will stick to the letter and not the spirit of a bargain, Robbie tries to be careful with his wording. He wishes for a son that will grow, will be strong and healthy, and become a better Mecha Man than Robbie is.
He walks away from the encounter with the son he wanted.
At first, Robert looks and acts like a completely normal kid, just with a severe allergy to iron and a bit of a mischievous and feral streak that Robbie does his best to train him out of.
But once Robert is around 11, he stops aging at all. At first it goes unnoticed, everyone treating it like he’s a late-bloomer, but it eventually becomes undeniable.
Robbie hadn’t been careful enough with his wording when striking his deal. He thought he’d gotten around the “I will give you a child and a child is all they will be” trick that the Fae occasionally pulled by asking Robert to grow and be healthy, but they took advantage of him not specifying that he wanted his son to grow into an adult to stop his aging just before he would start transitioning out of childhood.
There is no way to fix Robert’s aging. As far as magic and science are concerned, Robert’s age is natural, since he was created that way. And attempting to age Robert up with magic carries too high of a risk of Robert getting turned into an old man.
However, because Robbie asked for Robert to be a better Mecha Man than him, his brain continues to develop beyond his physical age. And because of Fae magics, Robert gets to have the proportional strength of his current age. So, Robbie decides that he can still work with it and still have Robert inherit the Mecha Man mantle.
Robbie constructs a suit for Robert to hide his child-body from the public, changing the costume to a full-face mask and bulking it out in places. There’s no hiding his height, but at least with the costume changes and a voice changer, the public can be made to think that he’s a grown man with a genetic condition. He also draws up blueprints for how Robert will need to change the Mech’s cockpit to suit his height once he takes up the mantle.
As Robert’s Robertson, the truth of his condition is known, just so people don’t think he’s an unaccompanied minor and he can do things like get a job. He carries multiple IDs and forms proving his chronological age and that he’s not actually a child despite looking like one.
Other ideas include:
- Over the years, Robert has worked at deepening his voice without the use of a voice changer. So, when initially dispatching the Z-Team, they think he’s just a young-sounding man until the meeting.
- Learning about Robert’s condition makes things very awkward for most of the Z-Team, especially Invisigal after all the sexual comments she had been making. Logically, they know that he has the brain of an adult, but it still feels wrong to make such comments around someone who looks like a child.
- Punch Up gets along well with Robert, the two of them bonding over being screwed over by deals made. Though, Robert wasn’t the one who made the deal.
- Punch Up also has a level of respect for Mecha Man, seeing him as a fellow short hero.
- Punch Up gets in the way of Flambae trying to attack Mecha Man at the bar due to this respect.
- Flambae still ends up losing a tooth to Robert. He dares Robert to hit him, believing him to be as weak as a child, only for Robert to punch him in the face with the proportional strength of a grown man and knock out a tooth.
- Elliot/Shroud constantly infantilises Robert, treating him like he’s still a child and disregarding all attempts at telling him that Robert has the brain of an adult.
He views Robert being Mecha Man and living an adult life as a failing of those around him. - When he’s captured, Shroud has Robert kept in an iron cage, which burns him every time he touches the bars. Shroud pulls the “it’s for your own good” card on Robert.
- Relationships are complicated and non-existent to Robert. Any adult comfortable with dating him belongs in prison, and even thinking of dating children who match his physical age makes him feel like the creep.
He desires a purely romantic relationship, as his lack of puberty leaves him asexual as a default. - Many times, Robert has used his appearance to catch predators and infiltrate child trafficking rings.
- There is a support group for other people like Robert, such as vampires who were bitten as children, that Robert is either already a part of, or that he’s encouraged to join.
- Robert still has some childish tendencies that he tries his hardest to squash down, like wanting to own toys. He’s also a picky eater.
He also tends to act more childishly when he’s really tired. - One of the powers that Robert has as a Changeling is to make people want to take care of him. This initially interfered with his job whenever he was outside the mech, before he learned how to turn it off.
- Robert does get to enjoy some advantages of being an eternal child after meeting the Z-Team, as they take him to places where he gets in for cheap/free. Though, it also proves additional disadvantages when he (along with Punch Up) don’t meet height requirements.
- Robert’s met at least one villain who realised that Mecha Man was physically a child and tried to adopt him.
Story Idea 16
Code Lyoko AU.
Alongside the Astral Pulse, Robbie and Elliot were working on a supercomputer that could house an entire digital world and several minds. As well as scanners that would completely transform a person into data and transfer them into the digital world.
To Robbie, Lyoko was to be a place to safely train his son, a place to control the Mecha Man armour without needing to be inside it, opening up more possibilities for hero work, and a way to be Mecha Man without himself or his son dying.
To Elliot, Lyoko was to be a place that he controlled completely and way to achieve immortality.
The existence of the supercomputer and Lyoko is kept secret from the other Brave Brigade members.
The supercomputer, requiring a huge amount of energy to function, was made to be powered by the Astral Pulse. However, Elliot and Robbie failed at creating a second Astral Pulse, leading to conflicts over it, with Robbie refusing to permanently give it up since it would severely cripple Mecha Man’s ability to fight.
So, Elliot was forced to use proto-pulses that would burn out in only a few hours, alternate power sources, and the brief windows of time he got to use the actual Astral Pulse when Robbie wasn’t being Mecha Man to work on the supercomputer and Lyoko.
After their final disagreement over Elliot’s placement on the team and who the Astral Pulse belongs to, Elliot shoots Robbie when no one else is there. Panicking, he grabs the Astral Pulse, then goes to Robert and convinces him to come with, saying that his father needs him for something.
Elliot takes Robert to the Supercomputer and plugs the Astral Pulse into it, which makes Robert suspicious as to why Elliot has it. When Elliot orders Robert into one of the scanners, the teen gets even more suspicious and refuses, forcing Elliot to get violent with him, knocking Robert down long enough for the scanner doors to close on him. The scanners have never been tested on humans before, so Robert will be the first, but Elliot is confident that nothing will go wrong. So, Robert is digitised and sent to Lyoko.
Elliot then either follows after, or is caught and sent to jail before he can digitise himself, leaving Robert trapped in Lyoko with no one else knowing where he is.
The story can then go a couple of different ways.
…
Option 1
Elliot successfully digitises himself to Lyoko before the Brave Brigade find Robbie’s body and learn that he did it.
So, he continues working on Lyoko and his schemes from within, the Astral Pulse powering everything. Meanwhile, Robert is left to mostly just run around Lyoko, mad at Elliot for keeping him trapped.
Lyoko is programmed with a life point system where losing full life points means de-virtualisation. To prevent Robert escaping through killing his virtual avatar, Elliot hacks his code to remove this.
With Mecha Man dead and his son and killer nowhere to be found, the Brave Brigade disbands, leaving their former base abandoned. But before they leave, they switch everything off, including the supercomputer. So, both Elliot and Robert are essentially stuck in stasis for the next fifteen years.
Years later, an aged-down teenage Z-Team comes across the old Brave Brigade base and claims it for themselves. They find the supercomputer and turn it on, meeting Robert through the screen. He explains about his situation and warns of Elliot, who is now going by Shroud.
Elliot’s own code was corrupted by the shutdown because he was in the middle of doing something, while Robert was spared from further damage due to being safely holed up in a tower. This has trapped Shroud in a specific area of Lyoko, with no digital avatar and unable to de-virtualise. But he’s still able to access the real world through possessing towers on Lyoko, allowing him to possess things and animals in the real world using the power of the Astral Pulse.
Not wanting anyone to know about the supercomputer or risk Robert’s new friends shutting down the supercomputer again, Elliot starts attacking them.
Unknown to Elliot, Robbie had already created a user profile in the supercomputer for Robert when the scanners were deemed safe, and this profile had admin privileges. So, Robert is able to purge Shroud’s control of the towers when accessing them, and fully access Lyoko’s code when using the access point in the central sector.
As he can’t manifest himself in Lyoko anymore, Shroud creates creatures to attack Robert’s friends when they join him in Lyoko to guide him to the infected tower.
So, Robert and his friends start having to regularly fend off Shroud’s attempts to kill them while stopping his schemes in both the read and virtual world. They could stop him by just turning off the supercomputer, but they’ve come to care about Robert enough to try and get him out first.
Other ideas include:
- Not all of the Z-Team are present straight away, starting with just a few of them and then building the group as more people discover the secret or are actively brought in.
Start with Malevola and Sonar, then Flambae and Prism, then Invisigal, then Golem, then Punch Up and Coupé - The age gaps between everyone remain mostly the same. Invisigal and Prism are young teens, Robert, Malevola and Sonar are mid-teens, Flambae is an upperclassman, and Coupé and Punch Up are young adults. Golem’s ae doesn’t matter as he doesn’t go to the school
Waterboy is a junior, and Blonde Blazer, Penomaman and Royd are upperclassman. - Flambae finds out because he wanted to claim the abandoned Brave Brigade base for himself, but failed to actually chase Sonar and Malevola out, then got caught up in one of Shroud’s attacks.
- Flambae brags about the base, though not the supercomputer, to Prism, who then decides to use the place for a music video, and then also gets caught up in an attack
- Golem just shows up at the base one day, looking for a place to stay, and no one sees any point in chasing him away
- After catching the team acting suspiciously, Invisigal follows the group and spies on them to learn their secrets.
- Punch Up and Coupare adults who live nearby who also get caught up in a Shroud attack and learn the truth, resolving to help the group.
- The team frequently go to Royd for computer problems, not telling him the source, until they’re finally forced to come clean about what they have him working on.
- Instead of working at SDN, Chase has retired to be a teacher at the school all the characters go to.
…
Option 2
Elliot is caught before he can digitise himself to Lyoko. And in the struggle, the scanners are damaged, preventing Robert from being de-virtualised.
Elliot refuses to tell anyone what he has done with Robert and the Astral Pulse, wanting to keep the supercomputer secret, so Robert remains trapped and abandoned on Lyoko.
The supercomputer is not turned off when the Brave Brigade disbands.
Robert spends years alone on Lyoko, experimenting with what he can do. He eventually finds a way to modify Lyoko’s code, allowing him to further develop the world in order to fend off boredom and loneliness.
After that, he finds out how to interact with the outside world using Lyoko’s towers. By this point, the Brave Brigade is gone, some strangers are in his house, he can’t find Chase, and he is believed to be dead.
Rather than announce his continued existence within a computer to people, he finds the Mecha Man armour and takes control of it, taking up the heroic mantle as his dad intended.
This leads to many theories as to who the new Mecha Man is, including that it’s the ghost of the previous Mecha Man haunting the suit.
With the Astral Pulse powering the supercomputer, Robert can only be Mecha Man for so many hours in a day before he has to bring the suit back to base to recharge. While waiting for the suit to recharge, Robert usually messes around with Lyoko and figuring what else he can do using the supercomputer.
He eventually figures out how to create spectres of himself in the real world, allowing him to do more as Mecha Man as well as work on the supercomputer from the outside. Though, these spectres can only exist so far from the supercomputer or a relay, which Robert then puts in the Mecha Man armour and all throughout the city.
When Shroud escapes prison, Robert initially continues to keep his situation secret, keeping anyone who tries to come near the base at bay with Mecha Man and his spectres. But holding off the Red Ring is becoming harder and harder.
Shroud sends Robert a message, promising to fix the damage done to the scanners and free him from Lyoko if he just lets him in. Robert does not trust that this will happen, plus he wants to catch Shroud for killing his dad and trapping him in Lyoko in the first place.
Robert is eventually forced to admit that he needs help when the Red Ring begins to break through his defences, calling the SDN for help.
As the old Brave Brigade base is considered an important site despite its abandoned state, as well as it being Red Ring, heroes quickly show up to beat back the villains.
Once the Red Ring is gone, Robert introduces himself.
On hearing that a guy named Robert is stuck inside a supercomputer inside the old Brave Brigade base, Chase immediately heads over. He wasn’t in on the secret, but he did overhear Robbie and Elliot talking about it enough to put things together. He happily reunites with Robert.
Chase promises to get Robert out of the computer, even if he has to pay someone to fix the scanners himself. Blonde Blazer steps in and promises that he won’t need to and that she is already planning on getting Robert out.
In exchange for this, as well as repairing the Mecha Man suit, which was heavily damaged in the Red Ring attack, Robert agrees to work for the SDN.
Other ideas include:
- While stuck in the supercomputer, Robert doesn’t age. So, he’s still a teenager.
- The Z-Team can either be their canon ages, or also be teenagers and juvenile offenders.
If teens, the Pheonix Program would be for rehabilitating juvenile delinquent through community service like low-grade hero work. They would all live in a group home together with strict curfews and still have school. - There is some debate about what to do with the supercomputer. Lyoko and the process of virtualisation have great potential, like the training aid that Robbie intended to use it as. But there are also plenty of ways for it to be misused.
There would be no shortage of people willing to kill to get their hands on it to become immortal through virtualisation. As well as the other capabilities of the computer. - While Robert is the owner of the supercomputer and Astral Pulse by right, there will be plenty of people who will try to use the fact he’s been missing and considered dead for fifteen years, and his current digitised state, to legally get passed that.
- The idea of Chase entering Lyoko once the scanners are fixed to prevent him dying prematurely comes up.
- Invisigal isn’t yet part of the Z-Team here, still working for Shroud during the attack on the base
- Invisigal was charged with shutting down the supercomputer so that Robert couldn’t defend the base anymore. She hesitated long enough for the heroes to arrive, and decided to join the Pheonix Program out of fear of Shroud punishing her for failing.
- After the scanners are repaired, they need to run some tests before attempting to bring Robert back.
When moving onto human-testing, one of the Z-Team is used.