Why yes, that's a bunny robot with two large pink ears that just fell down and cracked the pavement. Same old, same old.
"I had the chance of having a life companion, but fate has taken her from me. Now she has one life and I another, but I will always watch over her."
— Raines W. Xenox, Creation
Next Era, which can be found at the Next Era Network website, was a fan project based on Mega Man X. It started with merely creating a few Original Characters for fun, but got out of hand quick and ended up with its own webpage with all the stories, a comic and art gallery.
It had a crew of three artists, four and a half writers, a bunch of Swedes and one guy from Thailand. All in all, this was five people.
The final completed story, which ironically takes place long before all other stories involved in the project, was published in 2015. It has been considered inactive since.
Has a (currently non-functional) wiki.
For tropes that apply to the specific stories and characters themselves, please refer to the internal Tropes page.
The project provides examples of:
- Adaptation Distillation, bordering on Ultimate Universe
- All There in the Manual: Lots of information was revealed only on the wiki. Some information was even revealed only on the tropes page of the wiki.
- Alternate Continuity: The entire thing.
- Art Evolution: It was never bad, but got better along the way. Compare, for instance, this page to this. Or just look at this◊.
- Big Bad: Averted. While Sigma was some kind of ever-present threat, he only headed attacks twice in the history of the canon, so most evil plots that happened were, in fact, not his doing.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: All story titles consist of a single word.
- Omake: "Interview with an Indecisive Doodler", as well as all the fillers. Here. Not to mention the Next Era version of 12 days of Christmas that ran in December 2008.
- Original Character: 30+ and counting.
- Our Vampires Are Different
- Retcon: A few stories got wiped out from continuity entirely. Most of them were actually stories set in a possible future, but introducing new characters and plot points in the "present" made it essentially impossible for them to happen.
- Rule of Cool: The universe is fueled by it.
- Shout-Out: Since the entire crew working on the project were geeks, this happens a lot. Two of the stories were essentially written to be nothing but shout outs to the classic Mega Man series.
