towerofanimus | I try to live on science alone

Entry tags:

I try to live on science alone

Characters: Hojo and you
Setting: In his room and between the dormitories and the laboratory.
Format: Prose or action, whichever you prefer.
Summary: Hojo's arrival and subsequent explorations.
Warnings: Hojo being Hojo; also, blood and needles.

Room 2-08:

Strange, very strange. It's not that he isn't surprised by this change of scenery, but he must think this through with logic, not emotion.

His world has been destroyed? An interesting little pair of letters. Well, well, he can only hope he was responsible. That would be ideal, wouldn't it? Considering the timing, it's not so unthinkable… But then, it is an incredible claim, and he'd need proof to believe it. Scientists don't believe claims without evidence, though he's always willing to consider a theory that has merit. Yes, he'll consider it. He touches his fingers to the collar at his neck, a curious expression on his face. He's almost--amused.

After a long pause, Hojo rises and stretches, studying the room and, before long, opening his trunk. How thoughtful! A ShinRa armband, and his clothing. First, he studies the Materia in the armband with a faint smile. Now, that is useful. Ah, and there's his gun. He dresses and arms himself quickly. No sense in waiting. Once that's done, he's happy to find some of his samples at the bottom of the trunk, nice and neatly stowed away.

He drums the fingers of one hand upon the back of the other, looking down at his arm thoughtfully. "Hm, and I wonder, are you still in there? Or have you left me?" He asks--maybe himself, or maybe he believes he's actually talking to someone else. He chuckles, his lips twisting into a smile. "First things first, I should find out, shouldn't I? It would be rude of me to ignore you. Must check my results."

Later, throughout the Tower, anywhere between the Dormitories and Floor 27:

He hums to himself as he walks, not any particular tune, just a tuneless collection of notes sprinkled here and there. With his lab coat covering his gun and his Materia, he's not visibly armed unless one looks very closely. At first glance, he certainly doesn't look fit for combat. The truth is, fit or not, nothing could stop him from exploring. He has investigations to conduct!

It's a shame he failed, he thinks to himself--yes, even he failed in the end, but he knows why. Like any good researcher, he was able to pinpoint the exact moment and nature of his error, once he realized that there was a flaw in the research. Cloud. Yes, Cloud, the one he'd deemed to be a failure, who was in fact his greatest success, the perfect Sephiroth clone. If only he'd seen it sooner! The last thing he remembers before arriving here is Cloud. And dying… Not that dying matters. Not to him. Not anymore.

And, on Floor 27:

Excellent! Just what he's been looking for. A laboratory to work in. Much of the equipment is odd to him, but some is far more familiar. So much to explore, but for the moment, he only has one goal. He doesn't need much. Just a microscope to analyze a sample of his blood. Yes, that's what he's most interested in now. He's brought a syringe and needle with him, and he draws his own blood without blinking, still smiling and humming the same tuneless non-song to himself.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Oh indeed not." Hojo wouldn't disagree with that statement. He'd known some incredibly humorless people, but it didn't matter to him a great deal, whether people laughed, or whether they didn't. He laughed. He did so now.

"Ha ha ha, money..." He waved a hand, derisive. "Money matters to me only as it can further my research. It does bring with it certain benefits, but that's a secondary concern. Once I almost left ShinRa..." He trailed off, remembering that incident suddenly, but Cloud was a more interesting topic at the moment, so he didn't pursue that line of thought longer than a moment.

"I had a great variety of subjects in my labs. If I wanted something, it would be brought to me. But I see you know very little about my work. I would have thought you would want to know more." He looked Cloud over again, searchingly. "After all, the subject involves you so intimately." He shook his head. "I said I thought you might have the makings of a scientist, but perhaps you lack the necessary curiosity."

"Do you really think any experiment wants to know more about why they were used?"

He should just go. This was getting too strange and uncomfortable, especially with Hojo talking about how he thought cloud would make a scientist. Maybe at one time, it would have been interesting to learn more about the Planet and the everything on it. He still found interest in what others could take for granted. But...

But he wouldn't admit it to Hojo. The scientist was just too much. He made Cloud's skin crawl, and the laugh had him biting down hard on the inside of his cheek. He had nightmares filled with that laughter and the green and voices. Sometimes he wondered if he was still dreaming during those flashes, that the rest of this was nothing more than fantasies locking him away from the labs.

"Curiosity? Is that what you call it? I'd thought that a scientist would know better than infect themselves with a disease."

"You don't wish to understand yourself? What you've become? That is something I can never understand. Who wouldn't want to know everything, if they could?" He shook his head. So few people shared his vision, but by now, he was no longer surprised in the least by others' limited minds.

"Knowledge is power. A trite phrase, perhaps, but there is truth in it! Through knowledge alone, I've wielded so much power. More even than you know, my incurious success."

Then, he held up one hand and drummed on the back of it with the other, an almost unconscious gesture, perhaps a new habit. "A disease, Jenova? Oh no... You've understood so little, in the end. About me, about everything. A true scientist stops at nothing. He will even cause his own death, if necessary. For the research."

"I would rather be ignorant, thanks."

He knew he was screwed up in some ways, he knew that his system was even more strange thanks to everything that had been done, but Cloud didn't want to know how much change had been done. The stigma is gone, and he felt no different than he did before, but if he knew, he might just break again.

"Yeah? So knowing that all the JENOVA cells want to do is absorb all life on the Planet and then use the husk to move it across the universe to another life-bearing planet to eat is just stupidity on my part?"

"With a more complete knowledge, you might better know how to care for yourself and avoid certain side effects, but as you wish." If he wished to remain stubbornly ignorant, that was fine, for now.

"The behavior you describe is not that of a disease." He sighed. If only clones of Sephiroth had been given Sephiroth's intellect; it would make them much easier to converse with. "It is not your knowledge, but your perspective that I'd call 'stupid', as you aptly put it. Jenova rewrites DNA like a virus, yes, but it's a completely different form of life. The cells absorb and transform all the Planet's energy, creating a new life form. Much as you kill and eat animals' flesh and thus convert their energy into new cells of your own. It's a predator that utilizes a virus-like mechanism, converting its prey without the need of a digestive system, much more direct and efficient. An almost perfect apex predator." It was certainly a fascinating life form. There was still so much to learn about it.

"However, I was able to create a fundamental change in Jenova's own DNA! Creating an entirely new organism."

"Certain side effects?" Cloud frowned, thinking over the past couple of years and then gave a shake of his head. "The stigma or something worse?"

The stigma had been bad, seeing children affected by it was worse then knowing that his own body had been rotting. Vincent's words about how it was his body's reaction to the J-cells in his system had not been the best moment of his life, though it had made sense to him once he thought about it.

"Sorry I didn't have time to study science while stuck in a MAKO tube." Flat, dry, with a slight tilt to his head. "Some predator. Is the whole mother complex part of the redesign? Everyone of the clones I run into keep on asking for her."

"Stigma..." He actually wasn't familiar with that phenomenon, but he gave no sign, considering it silently. "I could tell you things, but then again, I have no real reason to do so. I have a great many theories. The cells are clever, aggressive. The part seeks to form the whole. They find a way. And I wonder..." He trailed off, talking more to himself than to Cloud for a moment before regaining focus with a frown.

"If you haven't studied, then don't make assumptions where I can hear them." His tone sharpened slightly as he said this, then softened again.

"Ah, the mother!" He shook his head. Sentiment. It didn't weigh him down. "It hardly matters. 'Mother complex.' Unsurprising you'd make some illogical human comparison, confusing the symptom with its cause. All quite pithy and pat, allowing you to feel knowledgeable, while being entirely wrong." He sighed, sounding genuinely put-upon for a moment.

He still had scars from his stigma, hidden under the long black sleeve as was Aerith's hair ribbon. His body was slowly filling them in, but after having it for months before Kadaj made his move, there was a lot of damage. It was strange though, that something Cloud didn't even think about had happened just like how the Planet used the Lifestream to block the main bulk of Meteor.

"Just gotta wonder," he said with a shrug. "The three S-clones I ran into after Meteor Fall kept on asking for mother and called me brother."

Maybe there was something more human about the Remnants that saw things in such a simple form. It would explain the reason why they spoke of them like that. Of course Cloud had his own theories concerning them, especially when Kadaj became Sephiroth. Sephiroth had also called the JENOVA his 'mother'. And that was probably because of whatever he had found in the Mansion's labs along with Hojo's notes and files.

"It's an echo, I'm sure," said Hojo, dismissive of the thought that it meant anything more, anything scientifically relevant. It was a fragment or a lingering impression of humanity. "A way of expressing in human language terms and concepts that humans do not know, so how would they have words for them?" He paused, struck by Cloud's latest statement.

"S-Clones?" Now, that's very odd. "What do you mean by S-Clones? What S-Clones were these?"

"Huh, I guess that makes sense."

He shrugged, looking away in order to make sure nothing was showing up. One of the floors he had been on had crawling shadows that liked grabbing on ankles and jerking them. It wasn't something Cloud enjoyed.

"A couple guys that looked like Sephiroth with numbered tattoos. I had thought they all went to the Northern Crater but I guess I was wrong."

Details, details. That wasn't correct but like him and Sephiroth, the Remnants wore heavy black gloves so he wouldn't have known even if they did had the tattoos.

"Of course." It would make sense, because he had said it, and he understood his creations. His fusion of the finest human genes, J-cells, and Mako energy. "Human linguistics were learned by one of the fused subjects."

He made a low, thoughtful noise. "Odd," he said. "What did they do?" He had kept track of his clones, and he had been fairly certain the human clones (save one) had had their energy absorbed by Sephiroth, proving his Reunion theory. They had all gone to Sephiroth, except the one who stood before him now. Hadn't they? Yet there may have been clones, aware enough of themselves to speak of mother and brother? He wasn't sure what to make of this account. It didn't make sense. He didn't have enough evidence to form a theory. It piqued his interest. Perhaps he could learn more...

"Meteorfall, stigma, clones," he listed the things Cloud had mentioned that had apparently occurred or manifested themselves after his death. As he often did, he was speaking more to himself. Yet then, he suddenly frowned and shook his head. "No, none of those are the results I'm waiting for." He had set other experiments in motion before his death. Nothing Cloud had mentioned sounded like it had been caused by one of those.

"Attacked people, looked for mother, tried to blow up the city in their search, and then dissolved when they got damaged too much."

Simple and to the point. No, he wasn't going to go into the whole mess from start to finish. He didn't want Hojo to know all the details, in fact he really shouldn't have opened his mouth, but Cloud had always had a fatal flaw of curiosity. He tried to keep it in check, but that didn't always work.

"Sorry to disappoint." Maybe he can get away now. He was talking to Hojo far too long as it was.

"As a matter of fact..." He laughed again. The other results he was waiting for were important, but the fact that they hadn't evidenced themselves yet could have been positive or negative. And now that he had appeared here, there were new factors to consider.

"I think I might be pleased! More so than I was previously. You needn't fear you'll disappoint me. You are one of my successes, I know that, now."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I try to live on science alone

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject