Sat, 09 Aug 2008 08:31:24 GMT

Player Name: Kex
Email Address: hexisea@gmail.com
AIM Screen Name: scientifLc

Character Name:
Series: Final Fantasy VII(OGC only)
Age: 34
Affiliation: Other[industrial scientist]

Physical Description: Hojo is not an immediately imposing figure. He's rather tall, at roughly 6'3", but abysmally thin and with a lankiness that he never seemed to leave behind in adolescence. He has a long face and spidery hands, and his hair is an oily black and often hangs in his face. His features are angular and harsh, and a pair of round, wire-rimmed glasses perch in front of his calculating black eyes, though they give him a rather owlish look considering the stringiness of the rest of him. While he can dress well if the situation calls for it, he normally prefers more simplistic clothing that's easy to replace should it get suddenly splashed with dangerous chemicals.

Personality: A psychologist would probably have a field day with him. While Hojo could only very rarely be called friendly, he does tend to be easygoing and laid-back -- at least with people he either wants something from or doesn't consider beneath him. The rest of the time he's high-flown and egotistical, with a habit of routinely insulting or talking over whatever unlucky individual happens to be nearby(this habit has gotten him severely injured on more than one occasion). He's not afraid to get his hands dirty, either; everything is more or less an ethical grey area to him, and that's when he gives any thought to morality at all. For the most part, though, he doesn't really have an idea of what right and wrong mean and has a very hard time understanding why other people seem so caught up in it, although he does have enough sense about him to recognize which of his various avenues of research would get him in a lot of trouble.

Of course, that doesn't stop him, but it does mean that he tends to keep a lot to himself, and most of his work is conducted secretly. Consequently, there are a lot of rumors circulating about him; that he kidnaps people or uses death-row convicts for his research, that he invented the grue to generate a steady stream of corpses that no one would miss(even though they've been around much too long for this to be at all true), or that he's secretly putting experimental medication into the water to conduct large-scale tests in lieu of expensive clinical trials. Of course there's no evidence to prove any of these, but people don't often let the truth get in the way of a good story. To be fair, he does find the grue to be extremely interesting and has put a lot of time and money into learning more about them, but as far as anyone knows he hasn't been able to create one.

Abilities/Strengths/Weaponry: While Hojo can't specifically break the laws of nature, he's very good at stretching them to their limits. He's quite intelligent, despite what many would choose to believe, and what he lacks in talent he makes up in tenacity. He has a thorough knowledge of the human body and quite a bit of practice modifying it as far as is possible without causing death; a good number of his designs can be found on the black market, either as cheap imitations made by other people or having been modified almost beyond recognition(sometimes this improves on the original design, but oftentimes it doesn't). While not physically strong, he's a good shot with a pistol and won't hesitate to use it if he feels he needs to(of course, this requires him to actually have it with him, which most of the time he doesn't).

Weaknesses: As stated before, when it comes to physical strength Hojo has very little to call on. If he's attacked or restrained there's very little he can do about it, especially if he's unarmed. He's got an impressive ego on him and this doesn't tend to make him any friends; he's much more likely to alienate someone than make an ally out of them, and it's only belatedly that he realizes that getting on that person's good side may not have been such a bad idea.

History: Hojo had a fairly privileged upbringing. He was at the top of his class throughout most of his childhood and teenage years, despite some sociopathic behavior; by the time he was seven he was no longer allowed to have pets, after his parents began finding pieces of them around the house. They began pushing him towards medicine and the sciences in an effort to channel his interests into something useful, rather than simply drowning the neighborhood cats so he could study them, and he took to both very nicely.

After finishing his postgraduate education he was hired onto the R&D department of a struggling pharmaceutical company, where he made himself very much at home and began to bring the company out of the financial pit it was in; mostly this was accomplished through flexibly moral research and a steady stream of scholastic papers, strengthening his credibility. He quickly came to sit at the head of the department and remains there now, with the company becoming a major presence in the industry despite occasional rumors of pollution, questionable ethics, and unforeseen problems with its medication -- such things are rather commonplace in the industry, after all.

Fairly quickly Hojo became bored with simply developing medications, though he was decently talented with it. Physical augmentation was a massively important industry at the moment and though the company he signed on with didn't specialize in that sort of thing, he began to expand his research to include body modification and, after a few more months, the grue. No one really knew what they were, or how they came to be, and as such any scientist that was able to shed some light on the issue without said issue fleeing because of it would end up quite well-known and credible.

Because of the obvious limitations of studying grue in places that they did not frequent, Hojo had a small laboratory built in the Akihabara district to make it easier. Very quickly, however, he learned that having any sort of help from labhands or fellow researchers would be damn near impossible; within the first week three of his labhands committed suicide and two simply disappeared, and by week two no one would agree to return with him. Not that it was much easier for Hojo to stay efficient; it was impossible to get anything done during the day, and at night he had to keep the lights dim so he would actually have specimens to study. He did do better working alone, as fewer people attracted fewer grue, but he still ended up trying to give the project up several times, convinced that completion would be impossible and continuing to try would end up killing him.

Eventually he built up a routine of working in the Akihabara lab once every three nights, using the time between to recuperate, fairly interpret the data he was able to take, and put together a plan for what to do next time. Having a simple checklist helped; with a list he could get away with actually thinking as little as possible, and with no thinking came no thoughts of ending the project, destroying his equipment, or killing people and/or himself. It worked well enough in theory but there were still nights that got so difficult that he would inject himself with a powerful sedative and turn the lights on bright so he could sleep through to morning rather than risk his research. It was obvious that the work was slowly driving him crazy; even at home there were nights that he refused to sleep for the nightmares that started becoming a normal fixture. He started talking to himself, and he lost most of his patience for anything that didn't go exactly as it was supposed to. He developed a sort of notoriety in the district for being the crazy scientist subjecting himself to the grue on purpose.

It was in the third month that Hojo managed to confine one of the grue to one location. He isolated it, putting up walls and moving equipment around so that he could keep the area dark and study the thing without having to run back and forth across the lab. What he found was rather strange. His instruments could tell when the grue was present; when he turned the lights on it seemed to disappear, as usual, but with the lights off it never moved from its one spot. Hojo started hooking himself up to his equipment and walking into the grue on purpose, recording various changes in his bioelectric field during inhabitation and release, and what changes became static during posession. He shortened his recovery time down to two days and eventually just to every other day; it was no easier on his sanity, but the promise of progress was a very effective lure.

Slowly, though, Hojo started noticing his being inhabited longer than usual. The grue recognized him, and while originally it was hostile and silent it slowly became a bit more benign and familiar, able to hang on to Hojo's mind for a time outside of the area it was confined to when alone. Why this was he couldn't quite say, though the data he was pulling together made it seem as though she -- it manifested itself as female for some reason -- was starting to conform to his bioelectric signature, like clay being molded to line the inside of a bowl. Having her inhabiting him kept the rest of the grue at bay as well, since a person could only be posessed by one at a time, and with familiarity came cooperation of a sort. She only began answering his questions after that familiarity was established, after she stopped resenting him for trapping her, and her answers quickly became very valuable to his research.

Hojo never intended the inhabitation to become permanent. He didn't put much stock in how she was learning to spend more time in his mind regardless of how close to her area of confinement she was, not until she started accompanying him back out of the district. At first her posession was weak, lasting the normal two days before she snapped back into Akihabara, but one day she just... never left. He waited for it, started spending time as far from the district as he could, but nothing really worked; when questioned about it she simply said she couldn't leave and left it at that. Hojo panicked a bit at first, but eventually(and after a couple of weeks trying to figure out how to force her to leave) he simply gave up and came to terms with it, considering Jenova -- as she had eventually introduced herself -- a permanent fixture and moving on. He abandoned his lab in Akihabara after removing all of his data and most of the advanced machinery, transferring his research on the grue to his main laboratory.

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