So, I thought 'I should write something' and found myself typing something in the vague universe of the sequel to Definition I'd like to write someday, but preferably when I'm doing a little better.
This is a noncanon 'what-if': when this happens in the actual story, Zero will be trapped in cyberspace and X & WilyAI in the real world, the opposite of what happens in the 'verse of this scene. Thank goodness.
Also, Princess Bride quote.
She stood there in reploid form, waiting. It took focus to remember how she used to look and project it. Keeping up the appearance took up a certain percentage of her attention and put her at a disadvantage, the way all distractions did, but as a miniature cyber-elf, it would be hard for someone to see that her arms were folded, or that she had a disapproving look on her face, if they even cared enough to look that closely.
The X she'd met when she joined the Maverick Hunters would have. Absolutely. Even when he was on a mission, he would have found a smile for her, and listened to what she had to say, trusting that it was something important. Trusting her not to waste his time, when people were in danger.
He never would have seen her as a waste of time.
Now, well now. Now she was standing in his way.
The X she knew back then would have tried to convince her to move. Even during the Eurasia incident, he hadn't wanted to fight the people standing between him and the components they needed, and not only because it was a waste of time.
He approached in his cyber-elf form, and when he finally noticed her… no, he would have noticed she was here when he arrived in this particular space, if not before. When he finally acknowledged that she was here, it wasn't by taking reploid form. Not even the manifestation where he floated in midair, surrounded by rings of energy. When the X she'd known hadn't wanted to remind people he had the power to obliterate them. Hadn't wanted them to think that he was above them, looking down. Now, his manifestation screamed power and distance, not just warning people to keep away but making it a fact that if they tried to come too close, if they tried to touch him, it would hurt.
Those rings weren't even lowered for Zero, who darted between them, or appeared already inside of them, arms around X. He had to stay close then, because moving too far away from X meant he could hit a ring, but that meant that Zero, too, wasn't reaching out to them. They couldn't come close enough to him to pat him on the back or extend a hand either.
She didn't like that, and it wasn't healthy, but Alia wasn't going to say that to X. Not when she was already doing something more than suicidal enough, she thought as that orb of light expanded, and kept expanding.
I'm going to die, she thought when the edge of it came within a meter of her, or at least what seemed like a meter. It wouldn't be the first time X had killed her.
It wasn't that she wasn't grateful. Any hunter would take death over the virus, and he'd gotten her in time that the information she'd sent out and tampered with, well, only one unit was wiped out. A few others were savaged, but it would have been so much worse. She remembered thinking of just how bad it would be and glorying in it.
If she didn't move, she was going to die. X had killed her before.
She didn't move. It wasn't that she was too terrified to move, or that it wouldn't have done any good to run. If X wanted her dead, he would have just killed her, and he wasn't the kind of person to give someone hope of escape and then shoot them in the back. Not even now. That would have required caring about his targets, about the people who were in his way.
Giving her a chance to run was all she could expect from those rock-hard green eyes… She wasn't burning.
Engulfed in white, and not burning.
It had gotten past her.
She whirled to see the sarcophagus intact, for the moment, before realizing what she'd thought.
No, he had gotten past her, why was she thinking of X, even this manifestation of light, as an it, as some terrifying thing? Even if, she knew, that was exactly the effect he'd intended, to remind her that it was pointless to try to fight him. That she shouldn't even try, she shouldn't make him have to kill her.
The elaborate maze constructed around the sarcophagus was gone, overwritten by empty white that began to dim, began to split apart into crystals, no, prisms, beams of light and the hum of power all around her. The representation of X's systems. The mind that the virus couldn't infiltrate, couldn't influence.
Her eyes widened, despite her effort to not show intimidation, no matter what she felt and he might be able to sense. There wasn't really any point in trying to hide the obvious? She would have to be a fool not to see the implications here. He'd overwritten the cyberspace fortress they'd created to block access to the sarcophagus?
X hadn't changed his manifestation to intimidate her. That wasn't an acknowledgement of her presence. He'd ignored her and carried out his plan without dealing with her first. She hadn't even qualified as an obstacle.
Now, he manifested, hovering not just over the plane where she stood, but over the lid of the sarcophagus, rings appearing around him, the manifestation of his willingness to cut anyone who came close to him burning, cutting its way through the lid of the sarcophagus.
She watched him, and he knew she was and didn't react. Of course she watched him, she was his spotter, once upon a time.
Of course she called out to him. That was her job. "What are you doing? We don't know what's going on, but he's…" No, right now, X wouldn't care what happened to humans or reploids. "Your enemy!" No, that wasn't the right approach either. "What will he try to do to Zero?!"
The ancient turned his head, but didn't look at her. "Someone," he said, with a terrible calm. "Has cut this space off from…" The real world, but that wasn't important. "Has separated me from Zero. And here we have the person who first discovered how to connect these two spaces."
"He's not going to help you," Alia said, because that was absurd.
"Yes," said X. "He will. You're a good person, Alia, and a sane one." So she didn't know what she was talking about, when it came to Dr. Wily. She got the message: X was implying that he did, because he wasn't either. Not anymore. "I don't need him to help me. Oh, he very well might, because I'm my father's son, but all I need is for him to be himself. He's the tool I need to accomplish this mission." And hadn't she guided him through doing terrible things, for that very reason? Killing reploids to get the parts to destroy Eurasia and all its inhabitants?
"You want to pretend that you don't have a conscience. That you don't care that he's going to find some way to make people suffer."
"I…"
"Don't remind me that you cut your suffering circuit. You created that circuit in the first place." He didn't need it, not really, if only he'd just think about what he was doing!
X frowned, unamused that she'd cut him off when he was bothering to kill time explaining himself to her. Dr. Ciel's protections seemed to still be holding, but how long until X was done? "Based on the fundamental architecture of my understanding of the laws of interaction, yes. While I was in the capsule. While I was somewhere sane. Then, I spent far more years than that century in a very, very different world." War. "We're at war, Alia."
Yes, that was the majority theory among the former Maverick Hunters, but jumping to conclusions was never a good thing: they needed to consider alternate possibilities, and if she could get him thinking about them? "We've been cut off from the real world…"
"No, Alia. This is an attack. What do you think is happening, back on Earth? What do you think is happening to all the reploids and cyber-elves that are dying, right now, with no cyberspace to go to? This isn't a natural phenomenon. Someone did this on purpose, and it's not a one-time event, but a steady state, meaning it's being generated. Someone knows that they're putting anyone who dies right now at risk of final death, and they're not stopping." It had been hours: even if they hadn't known that something was blocking off cyberspace before, anyone with the resources and knowledge to do this kind of thing had to know by now, had to be observing the result of their experiment. Had to consider it a success, not a horrific failure with far too high a cost.
"Right now, there is someone who lets innocents die and doesn't care, that possesses enough power to cut Earth off from cyberspace. What do you think they are doing with that power?" he asked her. "Zero will fight this person. Because Zero is like that." Without X.
Zero? Zero was in the other world? Alia knew that already, Sigma had told them when this started, they'd checked on X, Zero, Dr. Wily, X Arc and the Mother Elf, all the beings who might have had enough power to pull this off.
She should have realized this before. Zero was based in cyberspace. That was why destroying his physical body hadn't killed him. Had changing himself in Axl's body changed that? Was Zero entirely in the real world? Could he, could he really die this time? Really?
It didn't seem possible, especially seeing X like this. They had the infinite potential system. They'd started out far stronger than reploids and they were only getting stronger.
"Zero's mind is on the other side, but his body is still here. Dr. Wily's mind is on this side, but the device that generates his prison is not," X told her. "Now do you understand why I want him released under controlled circumstances?"
"You could have…"
"What you know, he might possibly find out from you," X said grimly. "Dr. Wily is on this side. Zero is on this side. Zero's will to defy his creator is not. Now do you understand that this is war?!" That this was an emergency?
"You still need to tell us these things!" He needed a spotter, he needed someone, and Zero wasn't here.
"No," he said. "I don't need to tell anyone anything. You're not my spotter anymore, Alia, and Signas isn't my commanding officer. Even Zero doesn't have seniority anymore. You died, and I was elected ruler of the world, for my sins. I was never meant to give anyone power over me. Ever. You remember after the fall of Eurasia, Alia. You remember that the real order was to recall both of us. You remember that terror. You're terrified now, because you're a very smart child. Very brave, and it's already gotten you killed once. I would rather not have to kill you again. Don't make me kill you again. I dislike people attempting to control my actions. I dislike people trying to get in my way. I restrained myself. I restrained myself until I couldn't, not anymore. Zero… Zero still has the power to make me want to restrain myself. Until we're reunited, I'm not safe, Alia. You need to tell the others that. A war has started. I hate war. All of you need to stay out of my way."
Otherwise, he might obliterate them along with the war.
She knew how deadly he was. She was his spotter, she'd watched him kill hundreds of reploid mavericks, knowing that they were people to him, most of them innocent victims of a disease. If someone could slay people, not 'the enemy' but innocent people, then… She admired X, not just as a hero and a scientist (he was one of the creators of reploidkind in his own right, not just as a template for them) but as a person. She'd known that he was dangerous long before he was reduced to this. "We can't stay out of this," she told him, restraining the urge to form a buster cannon.
"Of course you won't," he said, and at least he acknowledged them that much. "I could do this by myself, but it would take too long." Be too much trouble. "And I'd kill too many people."
"Why are you doing this to us?" she demanded. "I know what you think of Colonel. How he forced the Maverick Hunters to consider Repliforce Maverick." Because of his own stupid pride. X was saying things that made them duty-bound to get him under control. "You've admitted that you're insane! That makes you an Irregular!" At best!
"It's not that I'm trying to get you killed," he told her. "It's that I can't… try to convince people anymore. I can't lie to you, I can't try to play along. It never helped. And you are my friend, so I feel I owe you the truth, instead of silence. Instead of ignoring you, like you don't even matter."
"If you're still capable of caring about my feelings," Alia said, and spread her hands.
"You're not my enemy yet. You tried to stand in my way," but she hadn't actually gotten in his way. "You seem a decent fellow. I'd hate to kill you."
"You seem a decent fellow. I'd hate to die." Shouldn't it be Zero, saying that? "You're an irregular at best, and you're freeing Dr. Wily. You know that you're not rational!"
"So… it's the duty of the Hunters to get me under control?" He tilted his head. "I'm outside your chain of command, which is good, because I can't get myself under control. Zero never resigned from the Hunters."
"So you're… turning yourself in." To Zero. So the rest of them were in the clear.
"As soon as I can," he murmured, looking down at the lid of the sarcophagus. "Be quiet, Alia. If you say a word, make a gesture, if one byte of information is transferred from you to him that he can use…"
"I'm not going to help the creator of the Maverick Virus." There, right back to feeling insulted.
"Oh, trust me," X said, smiling in a way that didn't seem right to Alia, that seemed outright wrong, even if she chalked it up to X not being right himself instead of recognizing the threat display. Trust him? Because she was neither a fool nor insane that would have been the last thing she did, if she was Dr. Wily. "I'm not helping either."
Silence then, except for the sound of X burning through the sarcophagus as Alia watched him. Then, a click. "Master X," X said, sounding almost disgusted that Ciel's security yielded to him, a moment before a man tumbled out.
Alia was almost taken aback. He looked very little like the short, bent-up old man of the stories and the images that had survived the cataclysm, at least until she keyed up facial recognition software. She was intellectually aware that aging damaged humans, but a human getting damaged that severely, losing that much bone, and still remaining alive? Were things really that different in lost, legendary 20XX?
Unless he'd programmed his AI to look better than the reality, he was a megalomaniac, she reminded herself as he stood and dusted off the coat completely unnecessarily, shaking his head. "Why do they think that putting someone already mad in solitary confinement will help?" he wondered aloud, pretending to ignore them even though it was clearly for the benefit of the audience. "And I'm not even human anymore: not having to deal with idiots or my embarrassing kids is called a vacation." He looked up at X. "So, you're after my time travel technology, are you?"
"After you bragged about how your time imprisoned hasn't softened you up or caused you to reflect on the fact your crimes were crimes for a reason?" X wondered. "Someone's sealed off the real world from cyberspace."
Dr. Wily raised an eyebrow. "I may build that time machine after all. If they completely succeeded, they destroyed the Earth. If they effectively succeeded, then the question is how large the radius is. Without time travel, the best option would be to cause something to come into existence traveling at .999c and have it drop us off at a safe distance from the planet. If all they did was block off the means of access inferior minds could almost understand and think they were safe if they shielded them, then later, losers."
He vanished before they could react, leaving behind a voice clip to say, "By the time you make it back, the world will already be mine!" and some maniacal laughter.
"And now I have something to work with," X said happily.
"Try to do what he did over and over until your infinite potential system works it out?" Alia asked.
"Oh, no, he'll have anticipated that," X told her, closing his eyes. The rings snapped into position, one by one, as the crystals and patterns around them reoriented, (deliberately?) disordered thoughts replaced by smooth focus on the job at hand. "He's right, that it would take too long to brute-force it that way with only one of me, and I'm sure he threw in as many red herrings as possible."
Even if Alia had identified the key words in that statement, there still wouldn't have been anything she could do to stop it.
"So what are you planning to do?" she asked, when it was already over.
Hope nobody notices how many people are missing seventeen minutes from their timers and realizes it's because of me instead of because someone's messing with cyberspace: that would have been the honest answer, but the answer he gave her was his disappearance.
Wily gloats and postures, declares war, programs Lightbots and Forte to kill and unleashes the virus, but he doesn't follow through, he doesn't win, because while he's willing to condemn theoretical people to death, he does things like have the explosive removed from Roll's car in "Burning Wheel" because he doesn't have the will to win if actual people he knows have to die in the process. Which means he keeps screwing around and getting people killed in the process of losing. Again, and again.
X does have the will to go all the way. He hates it, but if he has to, he will kill people he knows, people he loves, in order to win. Inafune's Zero series concept was X becoming ruler of the world and imposing a final solution: what Wily repeatedly failed to do, because X has the will and Wily doesn't.
Fortunately, X has compassion, and in the actual games he realized how dangerous he was when he lost that compassion and got the heck away from temptation. Here, someone evil has attacked the world and innocent people are dying, meaning someone just hit X's berserk button/lit his fuse and trapped his safety mechanism in another dimension. He's not trying to get back to Zero because he's furious that they were separated again, he wants to get back to Zero because he doesn't trust himself anymore and Zero's the only one that he can count on to stop him, just like how he asked Zero to kill him if he ever went maverick at the end of X4.
An incredibly powerful reality warper (cyber-elf) with almost two centuries worth of PTSD, and enough knowledge of politics and military strategy to use that power to do maximum damage. The former Maverick Hunters are very, very right to be worried. X used to be Zero's Morality Pet/the person he checked with to make sure he was doing the right thing. I like the idea that he's learned well enough that X can rely on him to do the same now: in Inafune's concept, Zero fighting X in Zero series would have been granting X's request, that Zero stop him if he ever need to be stopped.
As for what X just did, right now the majority of Zero's power is trapped in cyberspace, and it's established in the fic that X can access Zero's power (eg, to kick/ban Wily). And Zero isn't there to say 'wait, no.' So, a distributed computing approach to something that would have taken forever with a single reploid following a single line of attack. In addition to reploids and cyber-elves under sixty, former mavericks were also vulnerable since the system remembered their minds and how to infiltrate them. What's really worrying, though, is that as an apology and to remove the temptation to do it again and make it much harder for anyone to do it in future, X left the infinite potential system installed.
So, yes, good thing for the world this is noncanon. It's not a matter of 'if one city blows up, one species is extinct and another has maybe fifty-fifty odds' anymore, but they still can't absorb all that many WMD-level attacks, and look at Dynamo. With the IPS, it only takes a few bad apples willing to commit mass murder for kicks or money. I suppose it says something, that the attempt to make things right will do more damage than the selfish action... Although even the selfish action was done to save lives.
Chronic Hero Syndrome for you.