Final Results: Tanuki Man

“I’m not a leader. I’m just a system administrator. All I do is keep the lights on and the books balanced, and sometimes I suggest courses of action that I think make sense, backed up by reasoning. When people follow my suggestions, it’s their own choice.”

Quick Facts

Name: TNCN-001 “Tanuki Man”

Gender: Masculine-leaning genderless

Sex: Masculine-analogous

Pronouns: He/him

Species: Robot Master

Creation date: February 8, 2001

Official firmware revision: 0.12.3

Mental age: Approx. 23 human years

Height: 4 feet

Weight: 300 pounds

Alignment: Tin Can, Post-war Wily, Wily bots that have abandoned their father, King Numbers, un-corrupted Repliforce survivors, Resistance-02 through Resistance-05, robots who need help fleeing from oppressive humans, robots who stand up justly to human oppression, lost or overused Cyber-Elves.

Appearance

Tanuki Man is a fairly small robot, designed to resemble an anthropomorphic Japanese raccoon dog- a small wild canine with bushy fur and markings that make it resemble an American raccoon. It would be easy to mistake him for an “Animaloid” Reploid from the early Maverick Wars era, but there are tells that he is actually an early Robot Master. Chief among them are the exaggerated proportions of his face, in particular his large eyes. His appearance has shifted over time with the modifications and repairs that he has done to himself. A strange, boxy sensor array is attached to his head over where his original left eye used to be, though it has a screen that matches the iris appearance and angle of the normal eye.

His eyes feature dimly glowing irises, which shift color to indicate status. Their resting state is a low green shade.

Tanuki Man’s overall appearance is defined by the dark grey armor plating that is strapped to most of his body. The armor is covered in sensors. Upon the forehead of his helmet is the sizeable lens of a robust hologram emitter. Embedded in his chest plate are four smaller emitters.

Underneath many of these plates is an irregular layer of artificial fur colored somewhere between mauve and lilac, made from cheap felt. This extends to his face. Underneath his eyes are a pair of true purple stripes that trace down his face, designed as an abstraction of a real world tanuki’s ‘mask’ fur pattern. By coincidence, they resemble the facial makeup of SWN-001 Bass.

Tanuki Man’s helmet matches the gray of the rest of his armor. It is a simple design, made from an un-styled helmet blank. It has subtle flat circular protrusions where humanoid ear cups are typically mounted. The helmet has cutouts with rims for his ears to stick through. It lacks anything like a central crest. Instead, the helmet’s only real detail is the hologram emitter. During combat, a translucent visor piece flips down for eye protection.

Underneath his helmet, the fake fur on Tanuki Man’s head transitions to a fluffier material that emulates something like hair.

All over Tanuki Man’s body are small square connection points for his armor to anchor onto. The easiest one to spot is on his forehead, under where his helmet’s emitter is placed.

Tanuki Man’s head is topped by a pair of pointy canine ears. The rims of his ears contain loops of wiring that function as redundant communication antennae.

His fashion sense outside of his armor is fairly eclectic. Examples include: a specially tailored dress; a series of skirts; various faded loose-fitting logo tee shirts; and on rare occasions, stereotypical goth accoutrements such as fishnet gloves. Frequently, however, he also simply wears a reconstruction of the form fitting outerwear that was designed for his body, the original being long since destroyed.

He occasionally does makeup. Standard makeup works fine for the silicone rims that make up his lips and eyelids, but for any look that extends onto his face, he uses washable hair chalk.

Tanuki Man has a short tail. It is covered with the same fluffier material as the ‘hair’ atop his head, giving it a bushy appearance. It is used for maintaining balance.

Finally, Tanuki Man’s back and feet are host to an array of microthrusters for rapid acceleration and directional change.

Personality

Tanuki Man is above all else a bubbly person. He approaches his interests with passion and curiosity and is all too eager to include people in his interests. This clashes with the fact that he is a perfectionist, and this can lead to moments of high anxiety. He has a dry sense of humor, honed by decades of friendship with cynical war veterans. He carries an eternal sense of mischief, and his morals are centered around broad outcomes rather than norms. Despite his up-front jollity, Tanuki Man has a side to him that has been hardened by the losses he’s experienced in his life. He is extremely protective of those he views as “his people”. His ethics are defined by a desire to prevent lasting harm from being caused, and a desire to stop actively occurring harm. This is noble on the surface but has led to him employing ruthless tactics when commanding units in combat. Tanuki Man specifically refuses to personally kill anyone, and does not condone executions. However, he has been in command of lethal combat scenarios on several occasions.

A list of his strengths include:

A list of his weaknesses include:

Equipment, abilities, talents

Tanuki Man has the inherent benefits of most humanoid robots- far stronger, faster, more durable, and more perceptive than any un-augmented human, and even most that are augmented. Furthermore, he enjoys the specific benefits afforded to Robot Masters. That is to say, while his personality is subtly more rigid and he started from a template persona, he has the ability to download entire skillsets at will, such as a set of motions and techniques useful for painting. However, Tanuki Man is not in any way a combat robot. He has basic armaments including a rudimentary buster and a collapsible energy spear, but these are weapons of last resort. When faced with combat on his own, Tanuki Man’s best prospect is to use holograms to confuse the enemy while abusing his mobility to flee. That said, he becomes more capable when operating a vehicle such as an armored mech. Furthermore, as a commander, he is decent at broad combat strategy and even a degree of troop micromanagement.

Of particular note is his talents at holography. He keeps several hologram emitters on his person, equipped with flight controllers, which he can remotely command; and he can generate holograms from his armor. He has an extremely wide variety of tricks. The simplest panic option he’s found to be consistently useful is to simply create holographic clones of himself that procedurally move about. He’s used the devices to disguise himself in the past, or as a crude anonymizer device- by stepping into a monochrome shell of light, the wearer of the anonymizer hologram becomes impossible to identify by eye or camera. Under incredibly specific circumstances, using maximal processing power, Tanuki Man has been able to create a limited cloaking hologram that covered a small static area. A particularly esoteric use of the technology is to create a thermal blade by refocusing lensed light back onto itself, causing an extremely bright and hot blade of sorts that can be commanded wirelessly. The significant limitation to holography in its capacity for combat usage is that it works best in direct bright light, such as sunlight. In the dark, the emissive glow of a hologram becomes very unmistakable, even with simulated shadow shading applied.

Outside of combat, the holograms are useful as a quick way to share visual information, and Tanuki Man has become rather adept at quickly creating and tuning 3D models for display purposes. They’re an incredibly potent visualization tool for projects such as reconstructing a damaged machine.

Tanuki Man’s hips have hollowed out regions that make for storage space, analogous to the pockets on a human’s pants. They’re covered by doors. Over the years, he has modified his hips to be wider, both for aesthetic reasons, and to store more items. He primarily stores his holographic emitters and several spare cannisters of Energen in these hip compartments.

Tanuki Man is a skilled mechanic. He is able to keep himself and others in functional condition. A testament to this is his own body. While his frame is still more or less original, he’s elected to replace much of himself with new or different components, either for the purpose of upgrading, or simply as maintenance demands it. He has a few unusual modifications, such as a bank of storage card slots installed in his arm, specifically for non-mental file storage. He is especially skilled at damage assessment and improvisational repair, once achieving the feat of stabilizing a severely damaged Wily bot long enough for him to safely shut down, while they were experiencing a turbulent air transport.

He has experience with weapon design even outside of niche physics tricks with holograms. He designed most of the standard issue arsenal that Tin Can’s militia employs, and these were popular enough that several crates of Tin Can weapons made it into the hands of the Third and Fourth Resistance movements. One of his first designs, a handheld particle accelerator cannon, while not especially impressive by most standards, met the needs of its specialty mission- it had been designed to pierce Stardroids, overcoming their stout defenses. It saw limited deployment, but was nonetheless effective in driving off Terra shortly before his timely death during the Second Invasion. His modern designs are significantly more generally useful. A hallmark of Tin Can weapon design is the ability to use off-the-shelf Energen cannisters as their ammunition magazines. This is extremely helpful because the majority of the militia are not designed for combat, and therefore their cores are not designed for buster output demand.

Adjacent to the weapon manufacturing is achievements in signal intelligence- Tanuki Man has, on many occasions, poached sensitive data from the networks of the UN and later Neo Arcadia, up to and including fiercely protected stealth fighter specifications that allowed him to create an early warning radar that Neo Arcadia was never able to counter in the years before it was erased.

Tanuki Man’s intended purpose as ingrained into the template of his mind was to complete management tasks such as book balancing and purchases. This aptitude has been refocused into the efficient running of Tin Can’s infrastructure. Under his quiet management, the town hums away, its data network and defense grid and power grid all working seamlessly. When construction is required, the materials and tools are allocated efficiently. The militia is able to experience the benefits of both autonomy and careful oversight. In short, Tanuki Man’s greatest accomplishment is the constant running of the town he oversees but will never see himself as the leader of.

Biography

Begin record.

The early days of the history of robotics were a gold rush akin to the dot com bubble. When Thomas Light released his papers and schematics on the ‘Robot Master’ and showed of his son, Blues, to the world, it seemed like every company was taking a crack at their own Robot Master line, whether or not it really made sense for them to or not. It was a time when many products in search of a demographic came into existence- products that could think and feel and hurt. One such instance of this was the Tech National Conglomerate. If one looked up the definition of ‘corporate cynicism’, their logo might have been the result.

They had formed in the 1950’s in the boom after the Second World War as the Tech National Corporation, manufacturing transistors and early circuit chips at the plant next to their silicon mine in the deserts of southwestern Nevada. It was mundane but stable work, assuredly profitable as the computer industry exploded. They absorbed more and more companies and their industries, taking a “Roman colonizer” approach- injecting a bit of their corporate culture and siphoning profit into their pooled coffers, but otherwise leaving companies to do their work as they had been. Corporation turned to Conglomerate, and for a time, they were among the most profitable corporations nobody had ever heard of, manufacturing shelf-ready components that ended up in thousands of products that were commonplace in homes around the country. At the height of The Miracle in Japan, the Tech National Conglomerate went international, merging with several Japanese manufacturers. For a brief moment in history, the emotionally dead executives of the corporate amalgam must have felt like kings of the world.

And then The Miracle ended. The money ran out in Japan, and suddenly those branches of Tech National, too ingrained to be cut loose, turned parasitic as they bled value. Over the years, the assets of the company began to slowly dry up. Here and there were bailouts, largely in the form of miscellaneous government contracts- “build X component for Y military hardware project for Z years and we’ll subsidize some of it”, that sort of thing. But by the end of the 90’s, it was clear that this- and the whole company- were unsustainable. With the advent of Robot Masters, a Hail Mary was thrown.

TNCN-001 Tanuki Man was designed with a nominal management purpose- for in the age of Robot Masters, a central purpose was an essential component- but really, he was Tech National’s do-everything prototype. He was built on a tight budget, standing a mere four feet and existing as modular proof of concept show piece. Activated on February 8th, 2001, he was shown off at trade shows with a variety of hardware configurations in an attempt to entice investors. The story was always the same- his personality was charming, they liked him, but the focus of the design was all out of whack and they only had the one miniature prototype to show for it. While Tanuki Man had great social success up on the stage, the company was finished off by the failed R&D investment.

By the end of the year, the sum total of the Tech National Conglomerate’s assets were confined to the town where everything had started- Fairview, Nevada. Their shitty vanity ‘skyscraper’ (technically several floors short of the definition to save on budget), the town they de-facto owned, and their depleted silicon mine- which they had begun selling raw material out of as a last ditch effort- it was all just an empire of dust. The IRS was gearing up for the rare occasion to send in armed men in plate carriers to lock it down for an investigation. Third-party debt collectors had been spotted. Unrelated but concerningly, there had been rumors of some sort of huge riot involving industrial Robot Masters that was spreading across the state. The writing was on the wall. The Robot Master bubble looked like it was about to pop, and Tech National didn’t even have the juice to witness it happen. It was time for the final day of business.

Everyone clocked in. Everyone started to load up their cars with whatever wasn’t nailed down in hopes of pawning it off. Much was simply left in place. Tanuki Man was ordered to shut down, left sitting on his maintenance platform on the Robotics Division’s floor. Nobody clocked out that day. Everybody was too busy fleeing in all directions.

In all likelihood, the remaining employees of Tech National would have been caught, the remaining assets in the town seized, and Tanuki Man found and reassigned to a different job, if the first Wily War hadn’t just broken out. In the chaos, the matter was quickly shelved and eventually forgotten, a dusty curiosity in the vast filing cabinets of the government.

For the next twenty or so years, Tanuki Man slept a dreamless sleep. He likely would have rotted away to an irreparable pile of rusted scrap with enough time. But by some fluke, he woke up, and in relatively intact condition, no less. Aimless and confused, he wandered out into the forest that had grown up and around the town. It wasn’t long until he came upon an encampment of Wily bots that had left the Tower. Taking pity on the confused robot, they took him in. They taught him about the world that had passed him by. In turn, he helped them however he could. He helped the Wily bots raid the local robotic disassembly plant, ruining the machinery and saving those that were on the chopping block. They retreated to the overgrown town, taking shelter in the still-standing ruins. Eventually, he got the opportunity to meet the big man himself, the good Dr. Wily. They saw eye to eye on much regarding humanity’s mistreatment of robots. Wily agreed to help the robot set up the town for longterm habitation. The makeshift wall of shipping containers became a proper defensive wall with gun turrets. The crates of stolen E-Tanks became a solar power grid connected to a synthetic Energen refinery. From ruin, Tin Can was born, named in hopes of reclaiming the slur of “fucking tin can” from the humans.

Tanuki Man befriended one of Wily’s original sons, a shapeshifter by the name of Copy Man. They very quickly bonded, spending much time together, with Tanuki Man even being smuggled through the teleporter pad onto a few random missions that Copy Man had been sent on.

The Wily Wars had been in flux after the first Stardroid invasion. Smaller scale conflicts had occurred here and there, but both Wily and the top brass of the UN were much more focused on shoring up defenses for another potential invasion. A strange artifact called the Beacon reactivated, reviving those Stardroids that had been killed, and recalling those that had escaped. It was obvious they were intent on regrouping and war was imminent. The first invasion had changed the face of the Earth for the worse. Nobody wanted it to happen again. Putting aside their differences for the time being, Wily and the UN put their heads together. Tin Can, being associated with Wily, became a part of the plan, specifically a part of the back-line logistical network that was being set up.

An asset denial mission was devised ahead of the invasion. Representatives from the coalition members would be sent. Three elite UN soldier robots, Copy Man, Bass, and Mega Man would be sent, with Tanuki Man as the team pilot. The mission was completed successfully, but it was a pyrrhic victory. The assets were denied, but the great hero Mega Man died in the process. Nobody who made it home was spared trauma.

In the week following the mission, as the invasion drew closer, Tanuki Man and Copy Man spent their days listlessly cooped up in the relative safety of Tin Can’s walls. Finally, things reached a breaking point. Awakening from a nightmare, Tanuki Man confessed his love to Copy Man. Copy Man reciprocated. They knew neither of them were guaranteed to survive the invasion, but they wanted each other to know. The mutual confession rejuvenated their spirits somewhat. They went off to face their respective challenges. Tanuki Man, for his part, heavily modified his body, hooking it up to a server cluster at the heart of Tin Can so he could simultaneously command all of his forces at once. It would allow him to keep them safe, to help them retreat as they ran supplies.

The Second Invasion was short, but brutal. The less that is said about it, the better. Suffice it to say that at the end of it all, many were dead. Countless Wily bots. Countless humans. Countless UN soldiers. Countless noble volunteers of all sorts. Reploids were unveiled in the invasion as an experimental fighting force, barely acquainted and already being sent to fight and die by the hundreds. Blues Light, the first sentient robot, ended up sacrificing himself to stop the full apotheosis of Sunstar.

In the end, the Second Invasion was where one era of history ended. In the wake, another dawned. Down was the Wily Tower. The UN had indirectly won. In the end, Tanuki Man and Copy Man survived. They reunited. Together, they did their best to heal. For a few short years, there was relative peace. Tanuki Man leveraged his contributions to the war effort and his personal friendship with the acting commander of the UN’s forces in the invasion to secure the safety of Tin Can. During those years, the surviving Wily bots rallied in the town. Tanuki Man began his research into Cyberspace and developed technology to better interface with it.

The peace didn’t last. In lieu of the common enemy of Dr. Wily’s sons, a new classification was invented by the UN- the Maverick. In theory, it specifically meant Reploids that were exhibiting violent behaviors due to cognitive defect, but it didn’t take long for it to become a general-use term for any robotic criminal or ne’er-do-well. The UN’s own Maverick containment force, the Hunters, were the source of the first large scale revolt, as their leader brought half of their number on the warpath against society. As it turned out, Reploids were a technology that was not flawless, and they were being forced to live in an environment of unrest. The era of the Maverick Wars had started.

New heroes emerged. Zero and Mega Man X were the shining faces of the Hunters for a time, doing their best to contain legitimate threats. Zero personally involved himself in helping Tanuki Man stave off Mavericks trying to take over Tin Can. He felt responsible for what little family he had left, after the revelation of his origins as the final son of Wily.

X turned more and more to politics, attempting to help maintain a status quo, but inevitably slipping into ineffectual bipartisanship. Suspicion of groups like Tin Can started to grow among certain political parties. The desire to label all non-conforming robots as Mavericks reared its head. The quality of living for Reploids began to decrease.

Things got worse. An entire massive space colony fell to the Earth, a result of a Maverick uprising that involved the use of malware to complete their goals. The resulting ‘volcanic’ winter drove humanity underground into shelters for several years. Dust advisories aside, Tin Can was unaffected, and those brief years were another moment of peace free from anxiety for the town. The remaining elements of Reploid government on the surface stuck to their own devices, building new cities for the humans to emerge into. Built on the bones of the UN with the site of the destroyed Arcadia as the capital, the humans emerged into the relative comfort of a fledgling Neo Arcadia. A new generation of ultra-modular Reploids- really, a poor imitation of Copy Man’s capabilities- helped to run these cities, defending them from the odd Maverick attack and helping to reestablish the industries humanity so desired.

Once again, it seemed like peace was on the horizon. Once again, this did not happen. A new technology had been developed using the data from specific incidents that occurred in the Maverick Wars. Freely floating, disembodied program data with the discretionary capabilities- read, sentience- of Reploids came to be. It was the age of the Cyber Elf, and it didn’t take long for the Elf Wars to start in earnest. The same story as always was recurring- new sentient technology emerged and was immediately abused, to ruinous effect. It is said that some 60% of the human race and the vast majority of recorded Reploids died.

Throughout it all, Tin Can stood mostly unaffected. Tanuki Man had already been wary of overusing the Cyber Elf, given their cruel limitation of dying if overexerted. Despite his misgivings about Neo Arcadia, he worked tirelessly on a solution to the root issues behind the war. Ultimately, he failed to find one before Neo Arcadia did. The Mother Elf seemingly stopped the war overnight.

You know how this goes.

The Mother Elf was a radical new paradigm of sentient technology.

A mad scientist came along and used her talents to hold the world hostage.

A bloody conflict occurred.

Tanuki Man stood by, unable to do anything but watch, being just a single disenfranchised robot with a small town of fellow disenfranchised robots.

Finally, the Elf Wars truly wrapped up. The man responsible was exiled, undergoing a form of perpetual living death. Zero went into stasis with the simple directive: “Wake me, when you need me.” The Four Guardians were constructed as X’s children and inheritors. X was laid to rest to seal away the fell power of the Mother Elf. Peace at last.

Sort of. Not really.

After all of that warring, humanity’s propensity for bigotry was quite incensed. Things only ever got worse for the Reploids living in and being manufactured by Neo Arcadia. The eye turned inward in search of Mavericks. Places like Tin Can, already a point of suspicion, were conspired against. It would have been turned into a parking lot, but the night before the Four Guardians made their move, Tanuki Man breached into their top-level communication network to lay things out. It’s not known exactly what he threatened to use, but it’s likely it was something in the depths of the Wily Tower ruins- and therefore, likely a credible threat.

Finally. At long last. In a world that had been turned into a slow-burning cynical hell, with society at large entering an energy crisis caused by an unwillingness to give up treats, at least Tin Can was sure it would be more or less left alone. Robots were a people that had been invented as a convenient means of labor and a convenient scapegoat. Both were tuned to the maximum. Tin Can, then, was a tiny spot where a robot could go to be a person again.

A few decades passed. People came and went. Tanuki Man and Copy Man enjoyed their peace together. Even a human by the name of Tomato Durand moved into Tin Can on a permanent basis. Eventually, the gears of history began to turn again as revolutions began in Neo Arcadia. Zero came back and began murdering Neo Arcadian officers. He never stopped cutting them in half, one by one, until the city was wiped off the map.

In the spot where Eurasia impact had broken the world, nature spread out once again. The miracle technology of augmentation, and the collapse of humanity’s ability to meaningfully surveil or wage war, meant humans and Reploids became closer than they had ever been- they became like each other. It was a real, lasting peace. But Tin Can kept to itself. Tanuki Man and all of the other old-timers had grown wary.

What is going to happen next is uncertain. Nature thrives, enhanced by nanotechnology and mechanical pollinators of all shapes and sizes. Cities stand proud and tall. Humans and robots intermingle. The world is a beautiful place. It was always a beautiful place, but if you’d been watching for long enough, you really came to appreciate what had been scarred and what had made it through everything intact.

Maybe some stupid shit will come along to undo it.

Maybe it’ll be some stupid shit caused by a delusional person, but it won’t end up actually changing anything. That would be a good change of pace.

Maybe they’ll invent a new category of sentient technology that they don’t abuse and which the abuse of doesn’t unravel the world.

All I know is, I am one old Reploid. I have seen a lot of shit happen. I’ve kept track of a lot. There’s also a lot I’ll never know. The absurdity of history has damaged my ability to maintain a professional tone.

If I’m a betting man, I’ll say this: Whatever comes next, Tanuki Man will get us through it. He always has. Our gates remain open to anyone who needs to get away from it all, be it for petty reasons, or because the boot of fascism has once again descended.

This has been an extremely truncated summary of the history of our settlement for the Tin Can Historical Society.

End record.