"Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'" But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

Book of Genesis

June 16, 1980 - Monday

Hi. I'm starting this journal because Dr. Ortega told me it would help me sort through my feelings now that I have moved to Nibelheim, and I can't meet with her anymore. They said they could send somebody here to work with me, since there is not a psychiatrist on-site at the facility, but I didn't want to be a huge bother, and I didn't want anybody to find out they had to hire or transfer somebody just for me, so I told her I would be all right. I'm not sure if she believed me, and she wants me to keep a journal since she knows I will not be able to talk to anybody about what happened, so I can hopefully get all my bad feelings out here and recognize any dangerous thought patterns before they go too far.

I am glad she had this idea because right now, I think I am going to lose my mind. Today I took the train in from Junon and arrived at the saddest little shack of a train station I have ever seen. They told me somebody would be sent to pick me up and escort me to the site, and sure enough someone was waiting for me on the platform.

The minute I saw him, my gut already knew what was going on because I knew Grim's son was a Turk, and here was this man with black hair and wine-colored eyes just like Grim, and my stomach was already dropping through my feet before he told me his name was Vincent Valentine.

Journal, I'm worried somebody is fucking with me.

I could hardly even look at him after he told me his name, but I kept forcing myself to try to act normal because I was afraid that he would somehow put the pieces together if I acted too suspicious, even though I know that's insane. Of course he wouldn't. But I was afraid he would so much that the whole time he was driving me and acting all chatty-friendly, I was tempted to just blurt out: "I know all about you, Vincent Valentine. Your father is Grimoire Valentine, a brilliant scientist who had a tenured position at one of the best universities in the world but left and followed you to Shinra because he wanted a chance to talk to you again. He used to say, 'My Vincent is a good boy,' and he was deeply sorry for whatever happened between the two of you, but he will never get the chance to make it right because he died six months ago, and I know all about it because it was all my fault."

But I didn't do that of course. I just sat there all quiet and tried to smile here and there, and now he probably thinks I am a huge stuck-up bitch who fancies myself too good to make small talk with someone like him.

By the time we got here, I felt like my lungs were going to burst, and I was going to start crying all over him. He asked to escort me to my room, and I couldn't even talk, so I just let him lead me up here and give me the keys, and then he said, "I will be here in the morning to show you to the laboratory facility, and if you need any help any time, you can always give me a call, I am just down the hall," and then he gave me his cell phone number on a piece of paper, and I just barely said, "Thank you," and then I let myself into the room and basically closed the door in his face before starting to cry a little and then a lot with my fist practically shoved into my mouth in case he was still close enough to hear me.

I haven't even unpacked yet, I just grabbed this journal that I bought from the bookshop in Junon before I left, and started writing because my heart is running now like it has no brakes, and I don't know how I am going to do this.

June 17, 1980 - Tuesday

How do you avoid somebody whose job is to follow you everywhere?

I had to skip breakfast this morning because of Vincent. He knocked on my door right as I was coming out of the shower and asked if he could pick me up coffee or something. I don't want to ask anything of him, and I told him not to worry about me, figuring there would be coffee in the lab because there is always coffee in the lab. I could have gone for something to eat, but there was no way I was going to let Vincent get anything for me, and I was terrified that if I tried to go out to grab something, he would insist on coming with me. I knew he was already going to walk me down to the lab, since that is part of his damn job, and I liked the idea of restricting my interactions with him to a five minute walk and another five minute walk back later, so I figured lunch was out of the question for me now as well.

When I was ready to go, I opened the door and managed to say good morning to him, maybe even sounding like a normal person instead of a grade-A basket case buckling under the weight of being face-to-face with a kind man whose father I more or less killed. He kept trying to make small talk with me all the way there, so maybe he doesn't think I'm a huge bitch after all, although I think I would prefer if he did think that, since all his little attempts at friendliness just make me sick to my stomach.

I wish I could talk to someone at HR about getting someone else assigned, but I am afraid that if I ask, they will want to know why, and they might suspect that he was not doing his job well or that he was somehow inappropriate with me, and I can't tell them the truth either because that file has been sealed since the investigation concluded, and I am not supposed to talk about what happened with anybody except the people who already know about it. I definitely can't jeopardize Vincent's career on top of everything else. If I did, I would truly be beyond the scummiest of scum, and I don't think I would be able to live with myself after that, so for now, I am going to have to find a way to live with him.

Thankfully, Vincent's duties end when I get to the lab and don't begin again until I leave, which I told him would not be until this evening so I would not have to see him again until then. When we got there, he handed me off to a tech named Ilona who is blonde and hit me with an onslaught of friendliness even worse than Vincent's, although it is more bearable to accept from somebody who doesn't have any loved ones dead by your hand. Mostly, I found her boring as she chit-chatted our way down the halls, showing me where everything was - the different facilities, my office, other people's offices, breakroom (blessedly stocked with coffee and SNACKS) - until we ran into Dr. Hojo.

He was walking down the hall the opposite direction from us, reading some kind of report and eating a donut with the same hand that held his coffee cup and not looking where he was going at all until he bumped into me before I could get out of the way and spilled coffee on my blouse and fresh lab coat.

If he had been just some normal guy, I am sure I would have gotten angry and wanted to slap those papers right out of his hands and the coffee cup right after them, but just as I was about to get very steamed, I noticed his name badge and realized that the man who had just ruined my outfit ten minutes into my first day on the job was the same man whose discoveries about controlling mako-induced mutations in mice had won the Allen Prize in 1975 for outstanding achievement by a graduate student.

Ilona yelped, "Ohmigosh!" and said she would go grab a towel from the breakroom, while I locked eyes with the man in front of me. He didn't apologize, which was kind of odd. He just brushed the droplets of spilled coffee off the surface of his papers before eying the fresh stain all down my front, and declaring, "I can show you how to wash that out so it will be like new." Something told me he had a lot of experience washing out coffee stains.

I took this as the cue to blurt out my introduction and gush like an idiot about how much I admired his career. Fuck. Miraculously, he didn't seem put-off by it. He smiled a little bit and said he looked forward to working with me. Not an overwhelming response - I guess he hasn't heard of any of my work, for better or for worse - but it seems he is at least willing to give me the opportunity to prove myself.

That was when Ilona came back with a wet towel and started patting me down with it, which was extremely irritating because she could have just given it to me to wipe myself down, and I hate it when people just touch me without even asking first, until Dr. Hojo snapped at her, "You are rubbing it into the fibers, girl. You are making it worse!" and she jumped back, chastened. I felt a bit bad for her but I have to admit I was grateful to him.

There was not a whole lot to do on my first day because Dr. Faremis is presently in Midgar. Apparently, he divides his time between here and there, so he is only in two weeks on and two weeks off. I am supposed to wait for him to give me the full run-down of the project, which I am dying to find out about, so this is very frustrating. Lucky for me, Dr. Hojo does not seem to be a stickler for rules or chain of command, so he took the time to give me some insight into what it is I will be working on here.

The first thing he asked me was if I knew what Jenova was. I told him, no, other than that I am here to work on Project Jenova. He seemed very satisfied to be able to be the one to enlighten me when he said, "Jenova is an Ancient." Of course, I was confused at first, so I asked him to clarify - is an Ancient, as in a living one? He kind of smirked at my bemusement and said, "Yes and no." Jenova was excavated six months ago and placed in cold storage in a facility in Nibelheim. Not here, at the manor, where the lab is, but in a special separate top-security silo of sorts. When they first found her, Dr. Faremis's team had taken her for a fossil, desiccated and encased in crystal. It took months of painstaking work to remove her entire form intact, but afterward, it did not take long for them to notice that what they had believed to be a dead specimen was anything but. Within days of being extracted from her tomb, Jenova's body began showing signs of vitality.

Her skin had been dried up and papery like a mummy's, but it began to grow more supple even as they stored her in a dehumidified autopsy chamber. They found that she had neither blood nor a heart and in fact resembled a clonal colony, like a man-o-war, a massive population of specialized single-cell organisms working together to function as a macroorganism. Each cell seemed to have a mind of its own, and with renewed access to air and light, the surviving cells had begun reproducing again, the offspring specializing to perform what duties were needed, replacing the dead flesh with living. Remarkable.

Dr. Hojo even showed me images that he had taken of the cells under an electron microscope. I was speechless; they looked completely alien. Each cell has two nuclei, which you would normally only find in cancer cells, and it renders them unable to undergo mitosis. However, the binucleation in Jenova cells does not seem to impede division whatsoever and for all we know, it may even aid in the process. They also appear to contain double-stranded RNA, but not DNA. I have never seen anything like this in my life.

Dr. Hojo said that when Dr. Faremis comes back, he may even take me to see the specimen.

When Vincent walked me home, his presence was almost tolerable because all I could think about was what I just saw.