The Cockroach Omega Twins
Remains of the Weapon Beneath Eternity
Experience/Shield Type
Original Media: The Chaos Zone
(first appeared in 2024)
Story
The story of the Cockroach Omega Twins begins with a powerful machine from a mysterious land distanced from much of reality. Who built the machine, how many others the machine met, how many it felled or spared, all are unknown, but its purpose was clear: To be a powerful warrior, greater than any other. But such a grand goal wasn’t to be, and eventually a hero of justice challenged it and destroyed it.
The hero departed, and the machine lay there, nothing to repair it. Yet within the machine, two things survived. These mysterious entities would forge their shape in the broken image of the warrior machine, and in time, they became the Twins, the girl Omega C-A and the boy Omega C-B.
The twins, too, lingered in the mysterious realm for a long time, anticipating a fighter to challenge in the old machine’s stead…but instead, through a freak summoning accident, they would find themselves in the care of the human engineer Rika, in the main world of the Chaos Zone. Not wanting to rob them of agency but also not wanting them to run amok or forced to return to the empty realm they came from, Rika only gave the Twins very loose rules to follow, while trying to act as a caretaker of sorts to them.
With their elusive warrior origins, the Twins have virtually no experience with social interactions, and even their attempts to start or add to a conversation involve discussions of why those talking aren’t perfecting their power for battle, often surprising others when Rika tries bringing them along to socialize with friends of hers. The Twins don’t express much outward emotion or personality, either, though they approach certain topics slightly differently, with Omega C-B (nicknamed “Kabe” by Rika) having a slightly solemn tone to his voice, and Omega C-A (nicknamed “Kay”) being a bit more ambitious.
Voices
General Description
Child; voices are rather calm and emotionless, never yelling even in a fight; Omega C-B sounds slightly timid, while Omega C-A sounds slightly stern
Behind the Scenes
Conceptually, the Cockroach Omega Twins are a hybrid of four different ideas between four video games: The 1991 game Mega Man 4, the 2014 game Rockman 4 Minus ∞ (“minus infinity”), the 1992 game Final Fantasy V, and the 2014 game Final Fantasy XIV.
The basic idea begins with Mega Man 4 and Final Fantasy V: One of the bosses in Mega Man 4 is a pair of surface-crawling machines known as the Cockroach Twins. Final Fantasy V, meanwhile, has a secret boss named “Omega”, who is a powerful machine found in an otherworldly location called the “Interdimensional Rift”.
Being a modified version of Mega Man 4, Rockman 4 Minus ∞ puts a new spin on the idea of the Cockroach Twins, only having one of the machines be in the game, found in a secret location based on the Interdimensional Rift from Final Fantasy V. This version of the “Cockroach” robot shares the design and surface-crawling power of the Cockroach Twins, while inheriting the powerful attacks of Omega; fittingly, the hybrid is named “Cockroach Omega”.
Meanwhile, being part of the same series as Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy XIV puts a new spin on Omega, making them a fleshed-out character with a detailed backstory. This version of Omega is fought many times, trying to perfect their ability to fight by subjecting characters to dangerous battles, and eventually even creates two humanoid bodies – a masculine body dubbed “Omega-M” and a feminine body dubbed “Omega-F” – in an attempt to replicate the powers of the main characters.
With all this in mind, the idea of the Cockroach Omega Twins came from a scenario I imagined inspired by all of the prior information, where Cockroach Omega from Minus ∞ produced two humanoid robots in the style of Omega-M and Omega-F from Final Fantasy XIV, in the process taking the idea full-circle back to Mega Man 4 with the two robots being twins like the Cockroach Twins.
The idea of the Twins wasn’t originally written for The Chaos Zone, but rather for another roleplay on the Mega Man RPG Prototype website called Take the Crown, where one user would play the role of a “boss”, and the other users would have to fight the boss with their own characters, with the user who dealt the most damage to the boss getting to play the role of the next boss. The Twins were an idea I brainstormed for if I ever got to play the role of the boss, with the idea being that the characters would be transported to the secret location from Minus ∞ for the duration of the fight. I ultimately abandoned the idea as my interest in Take the Crown faded.
The “freak summoning accident” mentioned in the Story section is also a factor in why the Twins reside in Chaos Zone; the summoning in question was based on how characters can be summoned in the 2017 game Fire Emblem Heroes; in Chaos Zone, this summoning power is mainly wielded by a character played by the user “Prototedd”, but he allowed other users to summon characters of their own in a brief story moment; on my end of things, I decided to frame it as an accidental summoning by Rika; the fact that it was an accident, and that both twins were summoned at the same time, are what made it a “freak summoning accident”. I’ve been slowly working to write Rika living her life while watching over the Twins since.
As an additional bit of trivia, the Twins were just one option among three I ran in a poll on the Mega Man RPG Prototype, to help decide which character (or characters) Rika would accidentally summon; I was secretive about who any of the characters were until the time came to summon them, but the three options were:
- Charlotte Braun, a character from the long-running Peanuts comics, who was introduced November 1954, only to disappear after February 1955.
- Nruff, a boar-like creature who served as a boss in the 1995 video game Kirby’s Dream Land 2; she would be accompanied by her children, the Nellies.
- The Cockroach Omega Twins.
The Cockroach Omega Twins ended up winning the poll, and I think it was for the best; I was not committed to the idea of Charlotte Braun being a character in my writing, and Nruff being a wild animal would have contrasted with Rika’s engineering profession; the Twins’ mechanical origins gave them a fun dynamic with Rika, and I overall enjoy how this (admittedly complex) duo fits into my writing.
Images
Brash Buster 