As a short geography note, I'm assuming The Sleeping Forest used to extend out the other entrance to Forgotten City: on the expanse between the caves and Icicle Inn. For the purpose of this chapter, assume it was excavated away by Shinra.
Also, please note that the Bugenhagen chapter, chapter 2, has been altered to include a new scene at the beginning and fill out existing scenes.
Chapter 4: The Excavation of Catherine Drake
"People always think it's the big things that change everything, but they're wrong. There's always a splash that sends you home to change your petticoat first. On the way back, you get run over. You know what happened to me my first day at Shinra Manufacturing Works? I broke through a thin layer of ice outside the front door, slipped, and got water all over my dress. You know what I didn't do? Go home."
-Catherine Drake, last Head of Development under Shinra Manufacturing Works, first Head of Weapons Development under Shinra Inc.,
"Doctor Tuesti, your pupil is making a general mess of my laboratory again."
"I can't control what Faremis does." Kane smoothed his mustache over his lips. "I told him to work on a proposal. There's no reason for him to be in your laboratory."
"He said yours was too cluttered, and he needed to make a place for something big."
"Something big?"
Kane Tuesti, to Catherine Drake, appeared too fragile. The gods of Wutai had made him from rusted metal instead of the normal human stuff. Catherine avoided confrontation with him for his own protection.
That did not mean that it did not exasperate her when Kane Tuesti seemed indifferent to the mechanisms propelling his own research. His primary toy, Gast Faremis, considered himself a boy genius with a rock tumbler and an ant farm. The Shinra labs became his playground. Never mind that Jonathan Shinra had given Kane and his assistant full reign over the excavation site in the forest just below the mountains, or the plot and the shed on university grounds. Never mind that they only managed to accomplish simple translation work, let alone their main objective. For some reason, Gast Faremis needed a hidey hole in Catherine the Great's laboratory.
"Ask him yourself." Drake dropped a pile of work request forms on Tuesti's shanty of a desk—put together by golf club irons and panels from test tube crates—watching it shake. "If he won't write a proposal, at least have him file these with my secretary."
Kane crossed his arms. Everything the man did seemed to take twice as long as it would anyone else, so Drake had a moment to dig her heels into his dirty linoleum floor. As far as offices went, the Vice President's had little: a steel-framed photograph of his wife—the woman wore too little makeup and would look better with her hair down—his doctoral diploma hanging crooked on the wall, and a small coal stove in the corner for heat and preparing tea. It functioned more as a greenhouse with small lamps and troughs of vegetation. Tuesti seemed partial to legumes and roots. Drake could barely move around inside the space without feeling like a baked potato.
"I don't see why he doesn't have ample space at the University."
"Does Jonathan pay you a VP's salary to tell me things I've already considered?" Catherine licked her lips. "I need to prepare for the move to Nibelheim soon, but instead I'm dealing with Administrative issues in a department I neither have faith nor part in. I told The President over and over again that hiring a chivy would only leave—"
Tuesti cleared his throat. He seemed tolerant of racial jabs from anyone but Catherine Drake, which delighted her immensely. She could feel the fading rose color—staunched out during the baking process—coming back to her cheeks.
Then the door to Tuesti's office opened. Drake found this surprising, not least because she could not imagine a reason why anyone would have a desire to come into Kane's office. She became even more surprised when she turned around to spot several of the excavators from the Shinra dig site covered in sweat and dirt, mopping their foreheads. One still wore his hardhat and held fast to a Legendary Hammer, which he hung over his left shoulder. As if he were bored. The nerve.
"We need your authorization for the trolley, Doctor," the man with the hammer said.
Catherine narrowed her eyes. "What for?"
Another excavator cleared his throat. "We meant Doctor Tuesti."
Her lips pursed involuntarily.
Kane raised an eyebrow—in the same, excruciatingly slow way he did everything—and stood from his seat, keeping his arms crossed. "Her question is my question."
She certainly didn't need him validating her.
"Professor Gast wants to move the new specimen to the Drake Labs for your project, Doctor."
Catherine cleared her throat, feeling the returning rouge begin to dominate the remaining pores of her face. "If anyone is transporting anything to the Drake Labs, I would think—"
"Excuse me a moment, Doctor Drake." Kane side-stepped his desk and the Head of Weapons Development in one movement and wove past the excavators. The door to his office crashed behind him.
Catherine Drake, not to be brushed off so easily, clacked after Kane as quickly as her heels would allow. "Where do you think you're going? Excuse me, Doctor Drake! Excuse me, indeed. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't have a job."
As Kane Tuesti proceeded to the elevator, continuing to ignore Catherine Drake, the door opened, and Professor Gast spilled out, dirt over his white lab coat and grease in his mustache, precisely as he had been when Catherine had seen him hours earlier. He pushed his glasses up, over-large knuckles straining under the skin on his fingers.
"Doctor Tuesti, Doctor Drake." Whenever Gast greeted someone, he seemed genuinely happy to see them. This annoyed Catherine because she never felt happy to see anyone and could see the obvious value in possessing Gast's disposition over her own. "I was looking for both of you. You have to follow me. I assume you gave the excavators permission to use the trolley?"
"Faremis, what's going on?" Kane sounded hollow, as if he had just learned that his wife had died.
"It's brilliant, Doctor Tuesti," he said, "I think I found the answer to our problem of sustaining biological mechanics."
"What problem—"
The stumbling feet of the excavators approached behind them. Catherine turned to see a distressed expression distorting the face of the man in the hard hat.
"You didn't authorize the use of the trolley yet?" Catherine turned back to see that Gast's face had fallen.
Catherine cleared her throat. "Why are you moving it to the Drake Labs?"
Gast's facial expression cleared as if he had just been vindicated. Of course Kane Tuesti had faith in him. It was only Doctor Drake's reservations about her facilities. She rolled her eyes, not caring whether he caught it or not.
"It's just that no one else but Shinra can learn of this discovery. University eyes can't possibly be privy…"
"Yes, but what is it?" Catherine demanded, feeling a vice tug up between her breasts and around her throat. She suddenly had a very terrifying feeling—that someone else's work might become more important, that her supremacy over Shinra's research could be something so easily overthrown. Why hadn't the fuss died in Tuesti's office, where it belonged with the carrots and beans?
"I've found one," Gast said. "I've found an Ancient."
The subsequent ordeal had lifted Doctor Drake's spirits, at least. The Foreman—the one with the hammer—had made a show of using white tarps to hoist the specimen from a cart—the trolley was more of a dolly—to a steel work bench Catherine liked to use to leave all the parts of a new firearm out for her admiration a week before its unveiling. Dirt skittered off, rattling away on the floor. Frost began to melt, smearing the steel like lipstick kisses.
Chunks of granite, ice, and hard earth had been chipped away to reveal a block of the same in human form. More precise tools had whittled away to flesh dangling from a rock sleeve. A few long, blue, otherwise human-looking fingers poked through, nails still intact, though torn and blackened.
Gast held up a handful of curled, black ribbons, offering one to Catherine and the other to Kane. Adjusting her glasses, Catherine took one, held it in the light, and pursed her lips. The hard material had sharp edges and didn't bend its shape like Drake had thought it would. It seemed almost like—
"Fingernail," Gast said. "It grew while she was entombed. Which means—"
"Don't get ahead of yourself." Drake snorted. "Just because you found a creature with long fingernails sealed in a rock box, doesn't mean someone could have lived—how long?"
"Approximately 2000 years, according to the dating of the material in the surrounding area," Gast said. He used his kerchief to wipe his spectacles again. "If you look closely, you'll notice the downward bend. There's a large granite casing around her, but it left her with space. The shape suggests that the nails grew along the tomb."
Faremis turned to Doctor Tuesti. "If you'll look at these documents, Doctor Tuesti." Gast handed Kane a sheaf of paper he had had tucked under his arm.
"Just because she was alive for a while, and granted, it would have to be a long while, after they buried her, doesn't mean—"
"Doctor Drake,"—Kane whispered the kind of whisper that seemed louder than a scream—"please look at these."
Catherine Drake knew next to nothing about biology, aside from human ballistics. She liked guns, the way a canon shuddered and gunpowder spilled over a field. She liked swords, the way metal turned pliable, but still deadly, out of a forge. Yet even she could read. Yet even she knew what, "Heart rate: 32 bpm" meant.
Whatever it was, it was alive. And Catherine Drake? She might as well be dead.
When little Katie turned eight years old, her father taught her how to make explosives. He took a glass bottle and filled it with gunpowder. Then he threw it at Great Glacier, and a cloud of black cotton bloomed in its side.
Katie made one the next day, having picked the lock to the cupboard in her parents' bedroom, and threw it at the neighbor's cat.
"You never should have shown her something like that," her mother said, holding Tuesday's laundry and a suitcase. "It's not good for a child to see things so horrible."
Probably not. So Little Katie wouldn't be a child anymore.
That same cat vanished, leaving its feet, its tail, and its ears behind, surrounding a crater about the size of Katie's head. In exchange for having the privilege of making more things like that bottle—that bottle that could move everything else—Katie would gladly give up being anything at all.
When Catherine—as she had started calling herself—turned sixteen, she stole engineering texts from the library—her mother wouldn't let her have a library card or a father anymore—and started sitting in the lobby of Shinra Manufacturing Works every day for the hour between when she finished at the bakery and her mother returned home. The receptionist, twirling her fake pearl necklace, told her they could start her on clerical work.
"I want to make weapons," Catherine insisted.
Once, she happened to catch The President leaving early to pick up his son from school. Catherine leapt between him and the door and said, "I am about to start work for you."
"Funny," Jonathan Shinra said, "I've never seen you before." Then he stepped around her as if she were an awkwardly placed lobby fountain and slipped through the door.
The next day, early in the morning, before her shift at the bakery, Catherine threw an explosive much more destructive than the one her father had taught her to make at the front porch of Shinra Manufacturing Works. It left chunks of the front stoop and a wide Ilich-sized hole in the wood of the door. Jonathan Shinra, who had just arrived outside for the work day, could not say that he had never seen her before anymore.
Instead of handing her over to the authorities, Jonathan Shinra made a deal with her mother to keep her record clean.
He kept her in the building's basement.
Of course, it was furnished. Catherine had a plain bed with white sheets, at least three dresses, a round side table, a chair, and set of square dishes. There wasn't much heat, so she asked for more blankets and a coat, and they gave them to her. They also installed a furnace and supplied her with coal.
Anything to distract her from the guard stationed outside her door.
"You just have to impress me," President Shinra said. "You're not a prisoner.
Well, then what was she exactly?
After the Drake Weapons came from the basement of Shinra Manufacturing Works, the story President Shinra's son sold to the press read, "Jonathan Shinra Gambles on Blue Collar and Gets Paid."
Catherine Drake wasn't sure she counted as blue collar—or much of anything. But what she made was a company man and a brand new world.
It certainly didn't look much like an Ancient.
If Catherine Drake had to compare it to anything, she'd compare it to Tuesti's wife: all blue, no shampoo.
She thought it was funny at any rate.
The foreman and his people had cracked open the granite box to reveal a blue-skinned woman. Sort of. A little. She had a tail. And arms that reminded Catherine of the hunkered over wraith-trees that grew at the base of Great Glacier. They were puce. Catherine thought puce only looked good on prostitutes, but she doubted the Ancient could make any money that way.
Kane Tuesti had allowed Gast Faremis to name it. He called it "Jenova." Catherine would have felt insulted, had she been even mildly religious.
It didn't move. Its heart rate increased to 36 bpm, but remained constant over the course of the next three days. Catherine thought they should get rid of it, but Tuesti and Faremis considered the Ancient a breakthrough in their attempts to create a biological engine. It would keep living, no matter what. If they could find out how to feed it, how to cut it up and use its pieces, they could harvest a field with a monster.
For her part, Catherine Drake did her best to avoid Jenova. She had to walk by the room Gast had chosen for it every day, and as she did, silt would rest on her eyelids and scratch the back of her skull. Jenova had brought The Sleeping Forest with her. Faremis said that they had had to dig into the outskirts of The Sleeping Forest to find Jenova. Had the Ancients paved the earth with the bodies of their dead? Did the trees grow from corpses, spreading tired revenge on humanity?
The silt scratching at the back of Catherine's skull persisted. She rested her hand on the front of Jenova's door.
"He'll replace you someday."
On Catherine's eighteenth birthday, Jonathan Shinra came down to her fancy box and told her that he had arranged for her to use the forge and attend the Iron Works College in Icicle Square, as long as she came straight back to the Works every day.
"I just want to make weapons," Catherine repeated, as if she had forgotten how to say anything else. She went anyway, of course.
By twenty, however, fickle Catherine had concocted a plan to break her promise. She threatened the guard with the musket she had managed to piece together, hoping she'd melted down enough iron bearing from scrap she pilfered from the forge and chiseled enough gun powder from the coal they gave her.
A couple shots after she opened the door to her room, and the guard backed down. Then she walked from the building like any other ungroomed researcher who had not seen his wife or a bath in a week.
It came, she suspected, from the conflict of insisting over and over again that one is nothing and beating together weapons that could not possibly come from nothing. The "I" in "I want to make weapons."
Then, instead of running home to a mother, Catherine would rather lose the conflict and disappear. She went to the forest to the south, which all Icicle children learned to avoid when their friends vanished and never returned. No search party would follow after them.
By the time Catherine reached the Sleeping Forest, she had lost half her iron bearings to the ribcages of stray bandersnatches following the trail left by her unwashed scent, and the other half had squeezed through the finger-sized hole in her pocket. Her thighs and fingers burned black with powder. Catherine dropped the musket at the tree line, having failed it, and listened to the forest.
Nothing. She threw herself in.
Inside the forest, her skull squeezed, and her internal temperature dropped. Hunger drifted up through her feet, but she recognized it as other. In places, the earth had a heartbeat. Snow faded, all became green and gold, but Catherine still felt cold.
Bark from the trees flattened her corneas and tore out her insides until she fell, fell, and the dirt bit her cheeks like meat it hadn't tasted in decades.
"Your weapons shrivels before my flesh."
Catherine wanted to argue, but she'd left her gun outside the forest—as if she had stood on her own throat.
She didn't remember much from after she lost consciousness.
Just a hand on her wrist. A voice.
"Don't come here; we put it here. Next time you come, I'll leave you to rot."
"I am the new face of Shinra."
Doctor Drake ripped the door open and saw Jenova again for the first time since the unveiling. Though her heart rate remained at 36bpm, the flesh had gotten stronger. It reminded Catherine of the bark of Sleeping Forest trees. Strong—so that the room palpitated along with it.
God, to be a potato in Kane's office.
Jenova's arms seemed to have grown, stretching down to the floor. Veins—red vines, Shinra vines—congealed in wild ribbons just below the skin.
Penknives, needles, and syringes littered the table top. Tuesti and Gast used them to collect samples. Fear kept them from glory when it should spur them to act.
Catherine grabbed a knife and, without hesitation, cut along the red veins of Jenova's left arm. The skin split, beads kissed the cuts, leaking to the floor. A splash colored Catherine's cheeks when she sliced an artery. Fresh blood, too fresh for someone who came from the roots of Sleeping Forest trees, too fresh for someone who could live without oxygen. She closed her eyes and pressed deeper, dragging the knife along the arm, up to Jenova's throat.
Then she opened her eyes.
The knife stuck out from the neck of a pale, naked blond. Catherine recognized her in the vague way that she had recognized herself after two years without mirrors: the same sense of recognition and not recognition. A replica of Catherine Drake, blue in death. Blood flooded from a line from her wrist to her throat.
Catherine closed her eyes again. Prone to madness, that's what Jonathan had said. Well, it was a wonder, the way she had lived her young adult life. She just had to avoid running scared. People saw things all the time. Strange things. Erda Tinning running naked through the Sleeping Forest things.
When Catherine opened her eyes again, the Catherine she had seen on the table had transformed back into Jenova, and the scalpel knife which had stuck form her neck lay, harmless, on the table beside her. The long line of damage had vanished, and blood continued to flow under Jenova's skin like sludge without an exit point.
"Your weapons shrivels before my flesh."
Catherine grabbed the scalpel and threw it. The knife clattered against the hard clay of the basement, glinting in low light as it fell.
Fine, Catherine thought, just fine. Then she pressed her face close to Jenova's so that her nose touched the cold nose of the near corpse. She swore she saw eyelashes flutter as she wrapped her fingers around Jenova's biceps, but she ignored them and willed her heart rate to slow.
36 bpm.
"I don't know what you are, bitch, but this is my company, and I won't let some Snow Pollensalta, Faremis, or that damn chivy and his basil plants take it from me."
The clang of her heels rang on her way out.
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