Wily smiled happily as he carried Vinyl to the lab with him the next day. Well, carried was a bit of a stretch. He'd tried holding her in his arms, but she'd squirmed and wriggled until he'd released her, at which point she'd promptly climbed up him onto his head. Since that was apparently her favorite perch when moving, he decided to let her ride. He greeted those who looked at him with a smile and a wave, and Vinyl mirrored his actions. He found the dropped jaws as they realized the unicorn on his head wasn't a fashion statement much more entertaining than the laughter he'd gotten before.
He'd left the sonic disruptor in his apartment, in the secret arsenal that opened when he pushed the toilet handle up instead of down. He didn't want to reveal to Dr. Light - or the ones who had commissioned their project - to realize just how advanced Vinyl was...yet. Beyond that, the possibilities of sonic technology - if he could figure out how she did it - were mind boggling.
Of course, the moment Vinyl had seen the arsenal, she'd tried to get at all the weapons to test them out. He'd woken up 17 times last night to take a weapon away from her and put it back. Finally, he'd locked the bathroom door...only to be awoken by the sound of his shower head being obliterated by a plasma blast and the discovery that Vinyl had learned how to use that aura she generated to pick locks. He made a mental note to study that and figure out how that energy worked.
At the lab, Dr. Light looked up at him. "Didn't leave her at the apartment?" he asked curiously.
Wily managed to look aghast. "Really, Tom? Leave an infant unattended for an entire day? What a terrible parent you'd be!" As Vinyl hopped down from his head, he watched her with a smirk. "Figured she might want to see more of our work."
Dr. Light raised an eyebrow. "Couldn't get her off your head, eh Al?"
Wily chuckled and rolled his eyes. "At any rate, I'm going to go take a closer look at the Robot Masters' code. Check for bugs and the like."
"Try to keep an eye on her," Light groaned. "I'm still worn out from repairing Rock and Roll yesterday."
Nodding, Wily headed to the computer room, plugging the 6 Robot Masters into the central computer to examine the code. While he did check for bugs, his primary interest was in checking how the override program he'd given them to install was progressing.
While he worked, Vinyl raced around the lab, chasing the various shiny and noisy toys he'd scattered around for her specifically to keep her distracted during this part of his work. He did notice that she seemed to spend a lot of time at the toy turntable...which he didn't remember putting there. Noticing Protoman in the corner pretending not to be watching Vinyl play, Wily couldn't help but smirk. Protoman was the only robot in the lab specifically designed for combat, though his refusal to take orders was both baffling and made him useless to the people who'd commissioned him. As he seemed to vanish if anyone other than Wily, Light, or now Vinyl looked at him, the two Doctors had told everyone that he'd run off shortly after completion. Thankfully, they had bought that story. Protoman was so good at hiding that even Rock and Roll didn't know of his existence.
Protoman had always been a loner, deciding his own path. He also didn't trust anyone, not letting either Light or Wily repair him or look at his code. He was also the only robot who could probably stand against Wily's plans with the Robot Masters. But if Vinyl was wrapping him around her hoof, and she wanted to help... He couldn't stop himself from chuckling at how things were falling into place for him.
In response to his chuckle, Vinyl turned towards him with a huge smile. She leapt up onto the computer, turning around on the keyboard as she clicked random keys with her hooves as she turned to face him, looking adoringly up at him. Hearing the clicking of the keys, though, she glanced down at the keyboard. Moving her hooves, she saw the keys depress with a click-clack and gasped happily. She then proceeded to dance on the keyboard, a rapid clickety-clack filling the room as seemingly random lines of code appeared on the screen.
"Vinyl!" Wily snapped. "Don't do that!" He quickly pulled her off the keyboard.
Vinyl, for her part, giggled happily, snuggling into his embrace.
Shaking his head, Wily tried to examine the lines of code she'd wound up typing in.
"@[=g3,8d]\&fbb=-q]/hk%fg"...
Wily struggled to make sense of what had been typed in, but it was absolute nonsense as far as he could tell. "No way I can let this be in the Robot Masters. It'd fry their circuitry." Reaching out, he pressed 'Delete' to start erasing the nonsense code.
As soon as 'Delete' was pressed, however, the screen started flashing error messages. As best as Wily could tell from it all, it looked like the computer was trying to connect to the internet, but there wasn't an existing net connection, a security precaution given the nature of their work. After a time of the screen flashing randomly, everything returned to normal.
"That...was strange," Wily murmured.
"No kidding," Protoman replied. "What the heck happened?"
"Let me see..." Wily went over all the code in the system, but didn't find any anomalies. However, he did find something unusual in the Robot Masters' coding. New 'if/then' protocols were present in their personality subroutines, but the qualifiers for activation - and the results - were deeply encoded in the same nonsense code Vinyl had typed up...and Wily couldn't delete them. At first he thought of telling Light to get his help fixing this...until he noticed the way the new lines of code connected to each Robot Master's 'Master Power' was reminiscent of Protoman's combat code. The new code also connected back to the new program he'd added...which meant bringing Light in would reveal the nature of that program. It wasn't time for that yet.
"...I think we can pretend this didn't happen," Wily muttered, more to himself than to Protoman. Not that Protoman was listening at this point. Vinyl had found a whistle and was playing a tune he seemed to find fascinating.