Accurate Nomenclature
A/N: In the Icicle vids, Ifalna notably both uses the name for the Calamity that Gast was already using at Shinra as though it's the usual Cetra one, and does not say her ancestors killed her. Only sealed her away.
Which suggested to me that the process was a lot more involved than just getting rid of the body, and that they labeled it.
*nonchalantly posts random fic like she didn't evaporate for a month since the last one* Life's been crazy, and currently consists largely of hauling everything in existence out of the basement and cleaning the mud off it, and then shoveling the mud that remains into buckets. For anyone waiting on my longfic, am very sorry, will be back!
This was not actually Gast's dig. Archeology was not his specialty, after all. He had a general grasp of the discipline but had conducted his deeper studies primarily in the harder sciences, particularly the biological. His lifelong interest in Ancient culture had never raised him above hobbyist, amateur expert on the subject but no real authority.
But this dig was sponsored by Shinra Company, and he was head of the Department of Natural Sciences, which gave him the authority to peer over whatever shoulders he liked when he chose, and demand regular updates. Many of the workers here, even the most experienced excavationists, had no particular sensitivity to where treasure hunting left off and science began, and it was necessary to keep a sharp eye on them lest they make off with precious artifacts.
Not that there was very much by way of temptation just now. This stage of the excavation was uncovering no small articles that could be covertly slipped into pockets, not since the materia embedded at the corners had been pried loose—just smooth obsidian surface engraved at the cardinal points with mysterious inscriptions, and inset with a serene silver death mask.
The same face had been carved into the basalt outer housing of the tomb, almost entirely worn away by the elements, and cast onto the mythril box inside of that.
A little further north, inside the ice fields, the atmosphere might have been cold and dry enough for the wooden intermediate layer to survive. At this latitude it had not, but it was generally agreed the face had appeared there, too. The loss of whatever text had been placed on the cedar casket was a blow, but the surviving layers were a treasure trove. Bets on how many steadily smaller tombs they were going to have to cut their way carefully through were flying fast around the dig site. Gast supposed that sort of thing was harmless as long as the bets didn't concern anything that could be falsified, to the detriment of scientific integrity, in the interests of winning them, so he pretended not to notice. It wasn't actually his dig.
An acquaintance at Junon University had talked about an imaging system based on sending shockwaves through the ground to pick up solid objects, and if he ever got the sensors actually developed it would be incredibly useful for digs like this—it was hard, after all, to X-ray a small, half-buried building. For now, they would have to wait and see.
It would have helped if they understood more of the Ancient writing system, but the few sites that had preserved any text came from all across the Planet and, scholars agreed, centuries apart from one another; not being able to rely on any perceived similarity reflecting actual linguistic continuity made the translation process slow in the extreme.
This amazing discovery was only two thousand years old, though—the most recent Ancient site ever unearthed, the inner inscriptions beautifully preserved, and last Gast had heard the linguists on the Project had been fairly sure they had found a familial resemblance to at least one language that had gone extinct within the frame of historical time, and was not actually lost to scholars. This had accelerated their work immensely, though at least one major error had been made due to a false cognate.
Being able to watch history unveiled millimeter by millimeter was more than worth enduring the chill winds of the Northern Continent. Gast thought he could quite get to like it here, really. "What have you learned since my last visit?" he asked, finally looking away from the dig site itself to pay attention to his supposed guide.
"It's hard to say anything with certainty just now," the dig coordinator temporized, clipboard clutched in both hands. The main impression Gast had of her so far was a tendency to gush. "But this is one of the most complete Ancient sites we've ever found, and by far the most elaborate tomb. We're learning something every day!"
Gast knew all of that. Larger burial sites had been found in the south, but none so intricate, and none that had not been despoiled by grave robbers long before scientists came along. "Have you determined the identity of the occupant yet?"
That was what everyone wanted to know, all the casually interested archeology fans and Rupert Shinra who was underwriting the excavation. Who had they found? A king, had been the initial assumption—who else did you find buried so elaborately?
But the first legible inscriptions to be partially deciphered had seemed to refer to the occupant in consistently feminine terms, which had provoked an immediate new flurry of interest. A queen, perhaps? A High Priestess of the forgotten Ancient religion? Archeology departments across the Planet were hoping for the latter; there was likely to be more cultural information available in a priestess' tomb.
If Gast was honest, he was anxious to know himself. "Last I heard the name was something like Sefirot?" He quite liked the name, thought it suited the serene death-mask.
But the coordinator was shaking her head. "No, the southern university got back to us. Sefiroth is the shorthand for the ten names of the Ancients' star god, the reason it appeared on every wall of the mythril layer was to invoke the watchfulness of the stars to guard the site."
"So we still don't have a name?"
She tucked some hair behind one ear. "Oh, no, we do. I mean…we still don't have a comprehensive grasp of the Ancient syllabary, even with the work Doctor Valentine has done on the Western Continental sites, but this part," she continued, pointing to a clump of three characters graven into the obsidian, difficult to make out even with the strong diagonal light being cast upon it by dig lamps, "is definitely the name, and the consensus is that it reads Je-no-va."
"Jenova," Gast echoed. "Do we have any idea what it means?" Not that it necessarily meant anything, but what Ancient writings had been deciphered suggested a tendency toward descriptive names, or possibly toward referring to people in writing almost exclusively by their titles.
The coordinator shrugged. "Something like Originator, or the Source. It's related to the Old Northern Genos, which gives us the modern word genesis."
"Mother of All, perhaps," Gast mused.
"That's definitely a possible interpretation, especially if she was a religious figure. We'll have to keep our minds open." That was possibly the most diplomatic way anyone had ever called him a romantic idiot, but Gast frowned at the woman anyway until she looked down at her clipboard, abashed.
"This tomb dates from near the end of the collapse of Ancient civilization," she said in a more subdued voice. "As you know, some of the Site C fragments suggest that one of the effects of the great plague was sterility in its survivors. It's possible she represented some sort of hope of rebirth for her people, possibly by literally having a large number of children."
"Whatever it was she did," put in Doctor Niles, rather snide, "it wasn't enough."
Gast and the coordinator—he should really learn her name, she was obviously an actual scholar in the field, not just a low-level administrator—both frowned at Niles, on his knees several feet away taking a careful rubbing of some of the large-cut characters near the base of one black wall. "It's unfair to blame the extinction of a race on one of its heroes," Gast told him rather stiffly. Niles was always unpleasant, but being in a position of authority over him meant it would be bad form to lose his temper over it. "Worse, you're kneeling at her grave; it is rude."
Niles laughed but didn't make any retort, just returned to his work.
Gast shook his head. Niles wasn't really a Shinra employee, just on loan from his university for this project, and seemed to take entirely too much satisfaction in not owing the company hierarchy much respect. If this kept up Gast might need to write to his Department head about the need to maintain harmonious relations between their institutions.
But for now he was standing before an awe-inspiringly intricate work of Ancient artifice, watching the inexorable progress of research, bringing them closer to the secrets of the Ancients, the path to the brightest of possible futures. He thought the silver mask seemed to be smiling the faintest, most secretive smile as it gazed off into nothingness, exposed to air and a view for the first time in two thousand years.
The Ancients had lived contemporaneously with humans, mingled with them toward the end, and it was always possible the body they found inside would be merely human. Some people argued the Ancients had been human all along, and all their fabled powers only myth and lost technology. But Gast didn't believe it.
"The cause of science requires that we disturb your rest, Great Lady," he told the High Priestess, or Witch-Queen, or whatever she turned out to have been.
"But perhaps…" Gast fingered the slip of a coded telegram in his pocket. This was getting ahead of himself, he knew, when the inner tomb still lay sealed, but budget allocations were best sorted out before one needed the money, and Rupert had come through. If there was preserved biological material enshrined in the site, Shinra would fund an attempt at reproducing its genetic traits. Some part of the Ancients would walk the Planet again.
Gast returned the gentle smile of the silver mask. If Jenova's ghost was watching, he hoped she understood. "Perhaps in the pursuit of our mission…we can help you fulfill yours as well."
A/N: *slow clap* yeah gast very well done good job with that