This is a work of fan fiction. It comes from a deeply personal and vulnerable place. If this is the sort of thing you would find frivolous or cringe, please do us both a favor and stop reading here.
If you are reading this, it means one of two things. Either you are one of a select few people I hold near and dear to my heart as a fellow writer from the Brave New World project, or you have stumbled across this writing on my website. This was started in early 2025 and completed at the end of July. This project encapsulates feelings and ideas from a very specific point in my life.
“Rockman: Brave New World” (BNW for short) was a collaborative writing project that I was involved with. It was a take on the world of Mega Man, meant to expand on the world and ground the tone. It was done in the form of text roleplay, written in verbose third-person paragraphs. The project started at the tail end of the Classic era, set in an interwar period. A massive, multiple-month-spanning alien invasion event marked a transition to the X era, albeit sans the century time skip. The project ended shortly before the events of the first Mega Man X game.
This work is an anthology of short stories set after the project’s ending. Most of the stories focus on the canonical and original characters I wrote content for (or characters I had planned out but never got to use), detailing where they would have ended up at different points throughout the unfolding timeline of the game series. It serves to grant me closure and approach some ideas I wish I could have executed. It does not necessarily tell an overarching story, though some characters will recur and experience progress and you will be able to track roughly where in the timeline a given story is set if you’re paying attention. Think of this as scraps of a larger story I wanted to be a part of telling.
IF YOU NOTICE THAT CERTAIN ASPECTS FEEL UNDERDEVELOPED OR UNDEREXPLORED, THAT IS ABSOLUTELY INTENTIONAL ON MY PART. I AM TRYING TO CAPTURE THE VIBE THAT THESE STORIES ARE SMALL SCENES CUT OUT FROM A MUCH LARGER BODY OF COLLECTIVE WORK THAT NEVER CAME TO BE.
There are significant deviations in the chronology and minutiae compared to the events of the games. These largely come from meta discussions had with other members of the project, both during its run, and after the fact; although I also invent some details whole cloth for the purpose of this writing.
For example, “Arcadia” was established in our setting as a major city in the Classic era. It existed as a central hub of the robotics industry. It is the precursor to “Neo Arcadia”, a city-state from the Mega Man Zero games that is the central seat of power for a global ruling body of the same name. In my interpretation of events, Neo Arcadia comes to exist earlier than is explicitly established by the games.
Additionally, effort has been put in, both in the original project, and in this work, to tie the setting to real-world entities to some degree. The United Nations is a major player, and an authority that familiar entities like the Maverick Hunters answer to. There is an aspect of alternative history to this, supposing a world where the UN was much more successful in becoming a central global government.
I can’t do much more to contextualize this anthology. This project is not a wiki or any source of comprehensive information on the original BNW setting. If you are curious about the world we spun, feel free to contact me to ask questions.
The remainder of this foreword is meant for the people I wrote with.
If you were in BNW and feel melancholic that this brings your stuff to no end or closure, I apologize- I could simply never replace your own talent and mind for the writing behind your characters. As it is, I am having to write a few things about a few characters that I did not control because it simply would not make any sense for me not to, given the stories I felt necessary for this project.
If you end up desiring to write your own coda, I would love to help you bounce ideas around, edit, proofread, or even just read whatever you come up with. BNW was never exactly a place, but a feeling, an act; and while the ‘official’ project is over, I would like to imagine that we all became better writers as a result of our participation, and the legacy of BNW will live on in everything we create into the future.
There’s going to be some easter eggs and internal references that I hope you catch. There’s going to be a lot of sentimentality and raw emotion that I hope comes across in all the right doses. I’ve had to reckon somewhat with a decay in my skill as a storyteller, and I hope this is a work you can love despite that.
Love,
Molly