Another Iris piece, but oh so very different. Takes place late in X4, after second battle with Colonel.

Whirlwind

The space station was not pretty, was not comforting. The seemingly endless halls were made of blank metal with small air vents every twenty feet. Not even the doors broke up the monotony. Embedded in walls were weapons and traps, including hologram projectors covering pits in the floor. Hidden cameras were there too, keeping an eye on the reploid walking with quick steps. But she was a member of Repliforce, so nothing triggered on her.

She stood out in this place; the bright reds and blues of her dress were jarring against the dull metal surfaces, and the earthy brown of her hair did not fit the artificial construct. Iris didn't really like this place, but she had to be here. If things went well, there would be time to soften the looks of things, make it more comfortable. Things were already going terribly, though, and her mind was far from thoughts of redecorating.

According to her map, she was in the right place. Everything looked exactly the same to her and nothing about this door said it was anything special. Iris requested the door to open; it took twenty seconds for it to decide that the request was valid and to open itself. Then she went into her brother's office.

Back on Earth, Colonel's office had been something of a wreck. He organized things to some odd system that only he understood, but if he got called off to do something more active (and thus, to his liking), he would leave whatever he was working on right where it was until he remembered to finish it. There were usually ten different projects like this that he was 'working on' at a time. And there had been some odd statuette of an otter in a pirate costume that was always sitting in a different spot when Iris visited her brother. While there were other knick-knack gifts scattered about the office, that otter was his favorite.

This office was bland and neat, so unlike Colonel. Everything was in its proper place and there were no half-finished projects lying around. There had never been a project to procrastinate on here at the space station. On the shelves, there were books and bins that had never been opened, never been used. There were no dusty spots and no stains. This place had never been used, and it never would be used. Colonel was dead.

Iris grimaced, disliking this room as much as the rest of this place. No, maybe hating it more because her brother was supposed to be here, but he wasn't. If he were here, he'd be rearranging things and setting up his pirate otter somewhere. And there would be boisterous music playing too. The room was quiet and sterile.

Why had he been killed? As she felt warm tears on her cheeks, she knew that she could say why. He had stayed behind to make sure no one interfered with the transport shuttle taking off. But someone did: X and Zero of the Maverick Hunters, sent in by the government to permanently shut down Repliforce. They had done that because Repliforce had been battling government forces in retaliation for being branded rogue, branded Mavericks when no one in Repliforce was infected with any viruses.

And they had been branded that because Sky Lagoon had fallen while Repliforce members had been patrolling it, when they hadn't been responsible for that accident. The reason they had been there had been because they were trying to regain official accreditation after an inspection committee labeled them dangerous and ineffective. And that had been because Repliforce had been doing exactly what it had been made to do, be an army ready to fight a large-scale war. Definitely not the ineffective part, but the dangerous part had been exaggerated.

Although she could trace the trail of this disaster back, she didn't want to accept that as a reason to explain this mess. Iris wanted to believe that their leader General had been truly inspired by good ideals. They had been made to protect world peace by eliminating those who threatened it. When humans began to be afraid of them, began to disarm them, General had simply changed that to protecting peace for a nation of reploids. They would even go to the moon to get away from humans if need be. That was the reason this station had been acquired.

To be in a peaceful harmonious community where reploids could be free to be what they wished to be… Iris believed in that dream. But why had that dream become this nightmare of war and death and suffering? Why did they have to fight so violently for their community of peace?

Unless it was inevitable that reploids built for war would wage war, no matter what they tried to do in avoiding that fate.

No! She didn't want to believe that. Frustrated, she grabbed a folder at random and threw it at the other wall. The red folder clattered open and would have scattered papers if there had been any inside. Red.

Zero had been the one to kill Colonel. She knew this because she had watched the battle on the shuttle as they had been leaving Earth behind. Ideally, they would have teleported him to the shuttle just before they hit the atmosphere and the range limit. But then X and Zero had come, and Zero had killed Colonel.

Why did it have to be him? Iris could have dealt with it if X had killed him. Well not really, but she could have at least had the illusion of being able to draw Zero over to Repliforce's side. She had dated him a few times and liked to see that he was getting less awkward about it, even warming up some. And she wanted him to join their community of peace, so they could be together and not worry about any more wars or battles. For that reason, she had convinced Colonel and Zero to stop fighting earlier in this mad conflict. She had tried to talk Zero into stopping the Hunters from stopping Repliforce's move to the moon. If X had killed Colonel, she could have believed in the dream, hard enough to make it come true. It could have happened, even if a snide part of her mind said that the plan was just a delusion.

But no! Colonel and Zero had to ignore her request when she wasn't around to enforce it! Iris hated both of them for doing that. They were supposed to work for peace, not war. Couldn't they try to improve and try to not fight over every single little issue? And she hated General too, for starting a war in the name of a peaceful dream. Why did he say he wanted utopia and then tell everyone to ready their weapons? Had she failed to show them that fighting wasn't everything?

She failed…

No, they had failed to listen to her. They had failed to listen to reason and hope. When she believed in the power of love, they only spoke of it while believing in the power of anger and hate. She tried to be pure and everything else was corrupt. The world had the scars of war because if those scars healed and faded, new ones would appear more terrible than the last. So what was the point of even hoping that things could change? The only change was death and one of her closest friends, her dear brother, was now dead because he could not change from what he had been programmed to do. Reploids were supposed to be able to change, but they weren't. And there wasn't anything Iris could do about any of it.

Gritting her teeth, her tears seemed as ineffective as any of the rest of her. Giving a short scream of rage, she ripped another folder off the too tidy shelf and threw it at the too clean desk. It hit a plastic organizer tray and knocked it onto the floor, making a snap as it broke. She wasn't supposed to be violent, but that was somehow satisfying. Tearing down the order of this misfortunately empty office worked for a while, but eventually there were no more folders to rip out and no more bins to slam into the floor.

The office was now a total mess, like some whirlwind had blasted through it. But it didn't change the fact that her brother Colonel was dead, and her boyfriend Zero was the killer, and her leader General was ultimately the one to destroy the dream he had promised. Iris dropped down to the floor, weeping harder and shaking. What could she do now? Everything was ruined. There were no hopes to be had, no dreams with which to delude herself with. Nothing but the stark and sterile truth.

At some point, there came the message that X and Zero had managed to board the station. Iris considered killing herself for a minute. She certainly wasn't going to let them take her now. And she wished that magic were real somehow and there was a way to go back and fix the things that went wrong. Just wish it all away and make the dream of idealism become reality. But that certainly wasn't going to happen either.

Then she noticed that one of the bins had not actually been empty. Down in the mess she had made, there was a chip lying intact. She picked it up and soon realized what it was. It was one she had helped to design, a transformation chip which was to grant Colonel a stronger form should he need it someday. When he'd gotten it, he hadn't been too impressed with it. He said that his skill with a sword was all he needed to win. If he had swallowed his pride and used it, would he have won against Zero? What would Iris be thinking of then?

What if she used it to get revenge for her brother?

That was madness, utter madness. The system wasn't fully compatible with hers. Sure, she could transform with it and possibly even fight in that form. But it ran on more power than her body could provide. She could use a backup generator unit to get that power. However, the transformation did not account for such a thing and the generator would be poorly protected. Or the unit could blast more power into her systems than she could handle, leading to fatal programming errors that would glitch her badly enough to become unrecoverable. The chances of her using this chip and a generator to fight someone like Zero without getting killed were slim. Maybe even none.

If she just killed herself here, Zero might be saddened by that fact, but only a bit guilty. If she killed herself by using this chip in a fatal battle against him, Zero would be punished for going against her wishes and ruining the dream of Repliforce. They would all be punished for destroying the ideals of peace and love.

Iris whimpered, not liking this plan one bit. She wasn't supposed to be like this. She was supposed to be the peaceful and loving one. she was supposed to teach others to be the same way.

But peace and love weren't working.

War and hatred were working.

It was her time to join the corruption.

Various sources say she got the transformation chip from Colonel after he died. But if he had it, why didn't he use it? And how did Iris get it when he was delaying the Maverick Hunters from stopping the others from moving to the space station? Also, if the chip wasn't compatible with her systems, how could Iris even use it? That's what I was trying to explain here. That, and contrast the earlier fluff piece with something angsty. That fluff-angst contrast makes Iris an interesting character to me.

And yes, I had considered writing a fic for X4. But it would be a lot of battles and I don't like writing battles. I put my attention to novelizing another MMX game instead.