Iris the Ibex

Iris is a Nubian ibex who has great healing proficiency, but is fairly weak otherwise, despite her recent acquisition of portal-creation powers. Lacking self-confidence or direction for the bulk of her life, Iris recently has gained more motivation, propelling her into new and crazy adventures.
== Looks ==
Iris is a female Nubian ibex with white fur and differently colored eyes; her right eye is bright yellow, while her left eye is a deep blue. Iris's hair is surprisingly like her older sister, Niki's, being short, white, and wavy; however, Iris's is slightly longer than Niki's, cut just before her collarbone to avoid tucking into her armor. She has a small and slight build, being three inches shorter than Niki and easily twice as narrow.
Iris usually wears dark gray chain mail covering her entire body, with the exception of her head. The chain mail is worn out of habit, as she grew up in a time of war and needed to have some form of protection on her at all times, especially due to her narrow build and resultant fragility. The lack of a helmet is due to the fact that anything covering any of her sensory parts (eyes, nose, mouth, ears) severely impairs the corresponding sense and makes her extremely uncomfortable, so she avoids wearing a helmet of any type.
== Personality ==
Iris, like her sister, Niki, is kind and serious. Iris used to be very prone to extreme anxiety as well, especially after an incident at the age of 10; from that time to when Iris was 13, Iris would often become very nervous when in dangerous situations, often needing an external source of comfort to avoid becoming completely debilitated in dangerous situations. However, at the age of 13, Iris underwent an experience that made her more motivated and self-confident.
=== ===
During the events of Depths of Dimensions, Iris briefly acquired a second personality due to mental instability caused by her attempts to use new superpowers. This personality was fairly confident, criticized anyone (including Iris) for being too long-winded, was far less trusting of strangers who exhibited alarming behavior than Iris was, and had developed a crush on Keira, something that Iris considered extremely inappropriate for a 13-year-old like herself. T
After the events of Depths of Dimensions, this split personality is now gone, but small amounts of the drive and distrust have filtered into Iris's new, single personality, making her less prone to manipulation and better able to be a dependable and helpful person on her own. Iris became more focused, possessing a newfound drive to help others despite personal risks, with this drive only rarely overshadowed by personal insecurities.
== Strengths and Powers ==
Iris is able to heal most injuries. By default, healing may take a while, but she can choose to heal targets quickly at the cost of temporarily exhausting herself. Healing causes her right eye to glow brightly, in perfect coordination with the beams of yellow energy arcing from her right hand to the target. Quick heals (mentioned above) cause glowing yellow cracks to appear on her right arm in addition to the other effects, representing the stress that she puts herself through to heal targets at such a high speed. These cracks disappear when she stops healing the target. Iris has had and used these healing skills since she was a small child, and thus has great proficiency with them.
Another power of Iris's—one weaker and more recent in origin—is the power to create portals, allowing her to teleport objects from one place to another by forming portals around the objects in question and at the destination; for example, Iris once created a rock ladder by creating portals around small rocks and creating their portal counterparts right next to a wall. Iris doesn't have terribly good control over these portals, but with her newfound tutelage under Rinnahssiah-3, her skills have been improving and are now reasonably reliable, if weak. Also, just as her right eye glows yellow when she heals and yellow cracks appear in her right arm when she uses extra power, Iris's left eye glows blue when she creates portals and blue cracks would likewise appear in her left arm should she use a more powerful portal ability.
Finally, when Iris is unusually determined to do something beyond what her normal power levels would allow, she can tap into her Empowered Form. This lets her accomplish unusual feats at the cost of draining her; the more she does in this form, the more trouble she'll have when she snaps out of it, ranging anywhere from collapsing to passing out to staying unconscious for hours, possibly even days if she were to try something severe enough. It should be noted that Iris's Empowered Form is fairly similar to her quick heals, in that it does something powerful that then takes a long time to recover, with the main difference being that her quick heals are incredibly fast and have short (if inconvenient) recoveries, while her Empowered Form lasts a lot longer and has incredibly time-consuming recoveries.
== Weaknesses ==
Iris is physically weak, somewhat uncoordinated, and has no combat training. Being born into a war, her adoptive parents and other members of her faction tried to teach her how to fight, but she was unable to lift most of the weapons that they tried to teach her how to use, and of the few that she could use, her poor coordination kept her from being at all useful with them, causing her faction to give up trying to teach her how to fight.
In addition to Iris's lack of combat training, her lack of coordination applies to her leg movements as well as her hand movements, making it impossible for her to run without tripping and hurting herself. Also, she is easily injured, due to her delicate frame (although she can heal herself from such injuries, making this only a minor weakness). Her newfound portal powers help her somewhat with coordination, as she can use portals to help shift bits of ground under her feet to brace herself, but this power is still far from perfection.
Besides her physical weaknesses, Iris's healing powers require her to be able to both see the target with her right eye and have a clear path between her right hand and the target. If her right eye is obscured or there is an object between her right hand and the target, her healing powers will not work properly. Note that this limitation does not apply to healing herself.
== History ==
=== Early Childhood ===
On November 5, 260 SY, Iris was adopted by the Cantins, and Cobalt Village went to war with Anthracite Village. The two events were linked; Iris was adopted by the Cantins because her parents—prominent members of efforts against Anthracite Village in a time of rising tension between the two villages—were assassinated on the 4th by a mercenary hired by a few Anthracite Villagers. This pushed the villages past the breaking point, with the two villages almost instantaneously becoming engaged in all-out war, a war that would span most of Iris's childhood.
For the next nine years, as the war raged on, Iris and her older-by-3-years sister Niki (the Cantins' biological daughter) trained in combat once they were old enough, using this as experience so that they would be capable of defending their village should the war still be relevant when they were fully grown. Although Iris couldn't fight well due to her lack of strength and poor coordination, it was quickly discovered that she had great healing proficiency (a rarity in the village), so she was deployed to heal injured Cobalt Villagers when no one older and more experienced was available.
By the time the war ended, the Cantins had been hit by another tragedy; in a battle, Niki—who shouldn't have even been near the front lines—was attacked and injured beyond Iris's capacity to fix. Though Niki did eventually wind up receiving prosthetic replacements for her injured parts (obtained from the more technologically-advanced Platinum City), this was a severe blow to Iris's self-confidence, as she realized that she couldn't always keep her family safe, no matter how hard she tried.
When the war was over, Iris tried to find work healing those who became injured in peacetime, as she couldn't remember having done anything else remotely as useful in her life. Weak, scared, and unfulfilled, Iris was extremely unprepared when her life changed drastically for a short, but important period of time.
=== ===
At 13, Iris was teleported to another dimension, quickly landing in a maze populated only by complete strangers. Finding solace in an initially-scary but secretly kinder teammate named Keira, this "solace" turned into something stranger when Iris, on observation of a portal opening, discovered an unexpected ability: the power to create portals. The initial shock of discovering this ability briefly scrambled Iris's mind, leading her to develop a split personality that interrupted her at important times, made her feel even less secure, and—most shocking to Iris—had a crush on Keira, something that Iris knew she wasn't ready for.
Extremely confused and dealing with several new installments in her life, Iris finally reached a positive point in her life when another person in the maze, Chase, was pinned down by a large obstacle in a battle. This triggered Iris's protective instincts, making her realize that her new powers could, in fact, help save Chase. Personalities fusing back into one, Iris managed to fully take hold of herself, push her new portal powers to their limits, and use them to remove the obstacle from Chase, thus saving him before passing out from the strain.
=== New Aspirations (non-canon) ===
Iris woke up back home, having been brought there for reasons that she didn't know. Still glad to be back, and with her new experiences both bolstering her faith in herself and her future, Iris started on a more focused quest to find a use for herself, now fully believing that she could, indeed, be a great asset to the world and ready to embark on a new chapter of her life.
This new chapter came faster than Iris had expected. Not too long after Iris's return to her home, an experienced young woman by the name of Rinnahssiah-3 came to the village looking to fix her own self-esteem and atone for the atrocities done to an alternate version of the village by Rinnahssiah-0, Rinnahssiah-3's progenitor and semi-alternate-self. Rinnahssiah-3's skillset and ambitions clicked nicely with Iris's aspirations and desire to learn more of her own powers, and Rinnahssiah-3 soon became Iris's teacher in how to make use of her powers and skills.
== Statistics ==
=== Current ===
After acquiring new portal powers, Iris's statistics look like this:
*Health: 0 – Iris is incredibly fragile and is therefore easily injured, despite constantly wearing chainmail.
*Damage: 1 – Using her portal powers, Iris could potentially do a small amount of damage. However, she hasn't trained much in this, preferring to use her powers for utility rather than outright damage.
*Speed: 1 – Iris is fairly slow and unbalanced. She can walk briskly, but she can't actually run at all. Iris has tried using her portal powers to boost her speed, but this has yet to increase her actual movement speed.
*Reflexes: 3 – Iris's reflexes are about average.
*Intelligence: 5 – Iris is able to quickly come up with fairly good plans, even in unfamiliar circumstances.
*Regen: 6 – Iris's self-heal ability allows her to recover from damage very quickly.
=== Empowered Form ===
In Iris's Empowered Form, her statistics look like this:
*Health: 0 – Iris's Empowered Form scarcely improves her physical defense.
*Damage: 3 – Iris can do an average amount of damage via teleportation in her Empowered Form, should she choose to use it for such.
*Speed: 3 – Iris can teleport herself around at a speed matching that of the average person by pushing her physical and magical limits.
*Reflexes: 3 – Iris's reflexes are still average in her Empowered Form.
*Intelligence: 6 – Iris's perception and mental power are pushed to the maximum in her Empowered Form, letting her see things and come up with plans that she usually couldn't.
*Regen: 6 – Iris's self-heal ability is just as strong as always in her Empowered Form.
=== Pre-DoD ===
Before acquiring new powers, Iris's statistics looked like this:
*Health: 0 – Iris was incredibly fragile and was therefore easily injured, despite constantly wearing chainmail.
*Damage: 0 – Iris couldn't fight at all.
*Speed: 1 – Iris was fairly slow and unbalanced. She could walk briskly, but she couldn't actually run at all.
*Reflexes: 3 – Iris's reflexes were about average.
*Intelligence: 5 – Iris was able to quickly come up with reasonably good plans, even when dealing with things that she'd never experienced before.
*Regen: 6 – Iris's self-heal ability allowed her to recover from damage very quickly.
== Quotes ==
== Fun Facts ==
*Iris's arm-crack effects came from a dream that I had. In this dream, I had a fan over my kitchen range, and if I held my arm up to it, bluish-purple glowing cracks would appear along my arm, which would disappear if I moved my arm away. Ever since I woke up from this dream, I have been trying to incorporate this visual effect into a fictional character, ultimately giving this to Iris. (Of course, Iris's arm-cracks are yellow, not bluish-purple, and they appear when performing quick heals, not when holding her arm up to a ceiling fan, because that would be ridiculous and useless in most contexts. Still, this is where that came from.)
*When designing Iris, the idea to have her have heterochromia actually came from her name. Her name came to me out of the blue, and I thought, "If her name is Iris, there has to be something interesting about her irises." Hence the heterochromia.
*It took seven months between when some of Iris's post-DoD information was established in her last turn in and when it was finally added to the article. What ultimately inspired the content additions was nothing other than TV Tropes, specifically the Iron Woobie and Heal the Cutie tropes. Whether or not these tropes apply to Iris—to be honest, I don't know if they do or not—they got me to finally write up all this, so kudos to TV Tropes for all this.
Category:Wikikinetic's Characters
Category:Heterochromia
Category:Lawful Good
Category:Healers
Category:Mobian Teenagers
Category:Heroes
Category:Females
Category:Biromantics