Anyway, I've always liked the story behind MMZ, and all the attempts I've seen at novellizing (is that even a word?
) it have been mostly bland C&Ping of the game script. That's no fun. So here's my attempt. Comments? Crits? 'Holy crap Ryoga stop writing this shit'? 
Mega Man Zero:
The Price of Heroism
by
Ryoga
Chapter 1
Ciel walked down the street, a light shiver passing through her body.
It had nothing to do with the cold.
She had just seen something horrible, something that she had long feared to be true, but prayed wasn't. The city of Neo-Arcadia had long passed a series of increasingly bigoted laws against their synthetic residents, the Reploids, but she had always hoped it would stop at mere discrimination.
Then she saw the recycling center. At it's heart, a Reploid wasn't a real person; they're robots, albeit ones with the capability to think, feel, and make their own decisions. That didn't make the screaming any less frightening to her as she watched them being manhandled into a blast furnace one by one. She feared that the howls of those whose bodies were already beginning to melt would haunt her 'til the day she died.
Obviously, this would not stand. So she found herself making a last, desperate stab at freedom; while she had long used some of her connections as a scientist to smuggle Reploids outside the city, this was going to be one of her biggest rescues ever. As she rounded the corner into the small parking garage where Marco was waiting, it occurred to her that the nearly two dozen Reploids she planned to take with her were entrusting their lives to her.
She just prayed that she wouldn't fail them.
The plan had seemed so simple at first. While Neo-Arcadia was impressively self-sufficient for a city of it's size, farming and other essential functions took place well outside the city limits. A few falsified requests for equipment later, and Ciel was confident that she could fit all the refugees into crates and drive right through the checkpoints ringing the city. Huddling in crates for a few hours didn't seem too comfortable, but compared to the possibility of being shot or 'recycled', most of the Reploids readily agreed to the plan.
The first, inner, checkpoint went well. Ciel had studied the layout of the city's security systems over the last month: the city was protected by two rings of security checkpoints, with a heavy military presence keeping an 'eye' on anything that passed through. When she was younger, Ciel had assumed it was to keep enemies out. Now she wondered how many Reploids had been shot dead trying to make a run for it.
Unfortunately, it was the outer checkpoint where things went south. Ciel knew something was wrong as soon as she saw X-Droids waiting at the gate. While they were only drones, and not capable of independent thought like a Reploid, the man-sized humanoids with the single cyclopean eye were still quite intimidating. She shuddered; they bore an uncanny resemblance to 'that man', the ruler of Neo-Arcadia. Milan, the Reploid driver of the truck, peered over at her in the passenger's seat, but said nothing. A man in uniform approached the truck, sneered as he noticed Milan's mechanical parts, then drawled, "License please." Milan complied, trying his best to hide his nervousness; while he was a humanoid-type Reploid, and had thus escaped persecution for the most part, he knew that if there was the slightest slip-up he could die here. Possibly along with Ciel and the others hidden in the back. The guard looked at the license for a moment, then waved the X-Droids over. They opened the back of the truck and began to search. Ciel tried to fight down the urge to panic.
