App!
PLAYER INFORMATION-
Name/Nickname: Jim/Carnifex
AIM: Celapaleis
E-mail: Pray.for.the.mantis@googlemail.com
LJ: Carnifex Atrox
CHARACTER INFORMATION-
Canon Character and Series: Professor Hojo // Final Fantasy VII Compilation
In-Game Name: Professor Joseph Hojo or ‘Doctor Hojo’, as he would be known.
Age: 53
Gender: Male
Position & Ship: Amestris, Doctor.
Appearance: Hojo is a man of average height and a slender build. Although he is in his early fifties, he looks somewhat younger. This age discrepancy is due mostly to his extensive work and self-experimentation with Mana. His hair, raven-black in colour, is almost always scraped back into ponytail and is showing no signs of turning grey or thin just yet. That said, his face is lightly lined with the evidence of one too many frowns and scowls. His eyes, narrow and dark brown in hue, glare out from behind round, wire-framed spectacles and his short eyelashes and sharp eyebrows give him an almost perpetually severe expression.
He tends to dress conservatively and, true to his profession (be that as a medical doctor or a professor of the sciences) he almost always wears a laboratory coat if he is going to be anywhere near a surgery or research lab. The rest of his clothes tend to be plain, but are nonetheless functional. When not at work, he will dress like any other ‘gentleman’ of Reial. That is, in the typical Victorian-style three-piece-suit combination.
His posture, which is sometimes slightly slouched, betrays the look of a man who has spent most of his life bent over papers on desks, microscopes or difference engines. He has a tendency to almost shuffle when he walks when deep in thought, almost always holding his hands behind his back if they are not otherwise in use. Generally though, when he is not otherwise distracted by his thoughts, he is as upright as everybody else.
Personality: To the casual observer, Hojo is simply a middle-aged doctor who’s pattern of speech and typcally aloof manner make him seem impersonal and professional. Of course, this is the side that is generally only seen by patients in an infirmary or brief acquaintances at whatever function he may have to attend.
Beneath that, he is really quite vile. Monomaniacal for all things that are classed as empirical sciences, he places research and experimentation on a pedestal standing high above everything else. He is rather like a living example or dictionary definition of the term ‘Mad Scientist’ and tends to view the subjects of his experiments as mere ‘specimens’, regardless of the fact that they are generally sentient and usually human. He doesn’t afford such specimens any emotional investment and, if he loses one in the midst of one of his experiments, he sees it as a great loss not because a person has died, but because he has lost a valuable test subject and must then seek to obtain another.
He has a habit of belittling those who don’t match his own genius-like level of intellect and scientific prowess and will even seek to put down those who are, as if he doesn’t deem anybody but himself worthy of the title of ‘scientist’. He has no time for those who pour energy into the physical arts and generally deems them as inferior to intellectuals, who he in turn sees as inferior to himself. Hojo will order people around in such a way that makes it look very much like he is not used to not having his 'requests' followed. He is, as you may have noticed, a man of boundless arrogance and when it comes to science and the things he has achieved, he is conceited to a fault. He also places the value of his brilliant mind above his physical wellbeing.
All of that said, he does have something of a sense of humour, albeit a sick one. He has a habit of laughing (or nearly giggling) to himself at something that he finds funny, but all of these things tend to be in-jokes limited only to himself and are almost always at the expense of somebody else.
Abilities/Weapons: Most of Hojo’s abilities are mental. Analytical, desperately intelligent to the point of genius and regarding three of the four sciences as his ‘specialities’ (he is fairly good a physics, but doesn’t delve too deeply into it given the lack of means to test the majority of theories), he is a force to be reckoned with on an intellectual level as opposed to a physical one. He has a little bit of capacity for battle strategy due to his research into the behaviour of monsters and the people he pitted against them, but unless he is gaining valuable data from the effort, he doesn’t tend to bother planning things of that nature.
He learned, in his youth, to fire a handgun with fair accuracy and tends to be armed when going out and about. This is a precautionary measure to deal with what could happen should he run into anybody who wants him dead. Given his past, he has made quite a few enemies.
He also has an ability to heal himself due to self experimentation during his forays into researching the nature of his ‘Mako’ discovery. While he has never had much reason to use this passive power, it is sufficiently developed enough for him to regenerate even as much as a whole limb if needs be, but he has not yet tested it in full. How quick it would happen is something of a mystery.
How well can your character hack?: Up to and including the ‘hard’ level, given that he is extremely knowledgeable in the technological as well as Chemical and Biological sciences.
Weaknesses: His lack of physical fighting prowess is a major weakness. As an intellectual, he never bothered to hone any of his physical skills and, as such, is almost useless in a fight. As said before, he does value his physical form significantly less than his mind.
Often his arrogance will get him into awkward positions, especially with the more vicious of his experimental subjects. This is due to his abject disregard for them or their feelings and his burning desire to test out every theory to ensure that it is bullet proof. That said, as mentioned above, he is more than happy to take injury in the name of his work as long as his brain is left unscathed.
Furthermore, he will actually place himself in danger for the sake of his research. If a particularly interesting specimen comes up, he will make it his mission to investigate it regardless of the damage it may cause.
Another weakness, though a less serious one, is his short-sightedness and need for glasses. Without them, he can't see more than half a meter in front of his nose, so they are pretty much a requirement.
Lastly, his mouth can get him into trouble. He has no qualms about insulting people or snapping at them and this can and does rub some people up the wrong way.
History: It all started in Melior when a kind auntie bought young Joseph Hojo a small chemistry set on his seventh birthday. It was this present that sowed the seed of scientific obsession and changed him from a normal, active child into the scholarly man he would become.
After receiving that gift, he thought about little else but science. He went on to excel at the subject in school and aced every test regardless of difficulty, frequency or branch of the sciences. Of course, he did equally well in language classes and mathematics, but they were viewed by him as assets to his main passion rather than obsessions in and of themselves. His test results remained high throughout school and it was enough to earn him a tidy scholarship into a university, where his chosen subjects will come as no surprise: Biology, Chemistry and Magitech.
Due to reasons such as income (and an unfortunate refusal of entry at Draklor, which he viewed as beneath him from then on), he became a medical doctor, but kept his interest in Chemistry and Magitech keen and eventually, around his main job, he started dabbling into mana. He considered Mana Crystals an interesting substance and they had always intrigued him, but it wasn’t until then that he’d had the self-generated funds and space to really get his claws into the subject of it, it’s power and it’s origin.
Eventually, and after extensive study, he happened upon a method of refining and purifying it into a usable substance which, he theorised, would be possible to inject into living beings and enhance them and their abilities in much the same way that raw mana causes unforeseen side-effects when people are exposed to it for an extended period. The initial tests were performed on himself and manifested in the form of healing of an increased speed. It was interesting, to say the least-- a positive breakthrough, in fact! It was then that he packed in his normal job and headed to join the Shinra laboratories in Bellcius and showcased this new discovery --which he had called ‘Mako’-- to them as a way of creating a supersoldier of unprecedented power.
It was there that his research really descended into depravity; human experiments became par for the course and he forged a life-long rivalry with other scientists in the laboratories there, the main one of which being Professor Gast. Their contention over the charge of the experiments often devolved into vicious intellectual arguments, but for the most part, they kept this seething sense of mutual dislike out of the work place and away from the public eye.
It was also there that Hojo met Lucrecia Crescent-- the woman who would become the mother of this child.
Of course, when it comes to the reproductive process of two people of questionable sanity, nothing ever goes as normal. Hojo and Lucrecia decided to use their child as a test subject and injected the foetus with the Mako solution in utero, to see if the concentration of mana in a developing child would a yield positive outcome. Other, similar experiments were done by another of the scientists, a Doctor Hollander, but his approach was less direct and, arguably, far less successful. They are not important, however, because Hojo’s own method became a success.
They had a son Hojo withheld the boy from his mother in a cold display of scientific greed and possessiveness over the ‘sample’ and refused to allow her to see him. Well, he didn’t want her interfering with his development and making him soft when he was already signed up to a military program. Despairing, Lucrecia left soon after his birth.
Given that the Project-S experiment was a resounding success (as opposed to other branches of the same research, which yielded much less positive results) he decided to implement the procedure on already living soldiers with high levels of physical and mental fitness. Only those who were deemed fit enough to withstand the potential physical and mental trauma of the cocktail were selected for use in this program.
Back on the subject of his son, Hojo, unsurprisingly, wanted nothing to do with rearing the child as a parent. Instead, he allowed the boy to be raised by tutors and, to his mild surprise but characteristic lack of interest in the mundane, Professor Gast.
He entered him into a prestigious military program at an extremely young age and examined him regularly to ensure that he was developing to a soldier standard. He didn’t seem to care or notice at all that his workmate and rival was taking charge of him in terms of being an acting parent-- it was something he wanted nothing to do with. This went on until Professor Gast ‘mysteriously’ disappeared. In truth he, in his attachment to the boy he acted as the father of, became opposed to Hojo’s heartless approach to human experimentation. Unfortunately for him, upon demanding that he stop the research, found himself struck down by a fatal bullet courtesy of an unexpected handgun pulled from a lab coat.
Appointed head of the ShinRa science department in the wake of Gast's untimely demise, Hojo continued with the Mako experiments.
Eventually the boy grew old enough to move away with from the laboratories and it was there that his involvement with the boy stopped abruptly. He didn’t mind - he was positive by that point that his experiment had been a complete success.
After he left, he turned his attention to other things. He injected the substance into monsters as well as people in order to strengthen them for military purposes and he also dove heavily into the magitech area of study. He attempted to make mechanical weapons that were both powered by Mako and were able to use it’s power to use magic, depending on the situation. He devoted a large amount of time to studying Demihumans and their differences from the norm. He also studied Difference Engines rather deeply, being intrigued by them from the start. Hacking into the protected notes of other scientists was part of this study, of course, and he became rather skilled at it. His most depraved experiments, however, were the ones that turned normal people into monsters with an over-saturation of mako. The majority of them died due to the effects, but some survived and remain locked up inside pods in an undisclosed location.
Over the years, he has made a number of enemies, both in the scientific fields and not. It was partially due to that and partially due to the fact that ShinRa sold off the laboratories that he worked in that he decided to take to the air, to avoid the repercussions of his work, be they the human experiments, the monster experiments, or the hacking.
Got a problem with how I play this grumpy old fart? Leave me a comment or send me a note! All comments are screened, anon-enabled and IP logging is off.
Name/Nickname: Jim/Carnifex
AIM: Celapaleis
E-mail: Pray.for.the.mantis@googlemail.com
LJ: Carnifex Atrox
CHARACTER INFORMATION-
Canon Character and Series: Professor Hojo // Final Fantasy VII Compilation
In-Game Name: Professor Joseph Hojo or ‘Doctor Hojo’, as he would be known.
Age: 53
Gender: Male
Position & Ship: Amestris, Doctor.
Appearance: Hojo is a man of average height and a slender build. Although he is in his early fifties, he looks somewhat younger. This age discrepancy is due mostly to his extensive work and self-experimentation with Mana. His hair, raven-black in colour, is almost always scraped back into ponytail and is showing no signs of turning grey or thin just yet. That said, his face is lightly lined with the evidence of one too many frowns and scowls. His eyes, narrow and dark brown in hue, glare out from behind round, wire-framed spectacles and his short eyelashes and sharp eyebrows give him an almost perpetually severe expression.
He tends to dress conservatively and, true to his profession (be that as a medical doctor or a professor of the sciences) he almost always wears a laboratory coat if he is going to be anywhere near a surgery or research lab. The rest of his clothes tend to be plain, but are nonetheless functional. When not at work, he will dress like any other ‘gentleman’ of Reial. That is, in the typical Victorian-style three-piece-suit combination.
His posture, which is sometimes slightly slouched, betrays the look of a man who has spent most of his life bent over papers on desks, microscopes or difference engines. He has a tendency to almost shuffle when he walks when deep in thought, almost always holding his hands behind his back if they are not otherwise in use. Generally though, when he is not otherwise distracted by his thoughts, he is as upright as everybody else.
Personality: To the casual observer, Hojo is simply a middle-aged doctor who’s pattern of speech and typcally aloof manner make him seem impersonal and professional. Of course, this is the side that is generally only seen by patients in an infirmary or brief acquaintances at whatever function he may have to attend.
Beneath that, he is really quite vile. Monomaniacal for all things that are classed as empirical sciences, he places research and experimentation on a pedestal standing high above everything else. He is rather like a living example or dictionary definition of the term ‘Mad Scientist’ and tends to view the subjects of his experiments as mere ‘specimens’, regardless of the fact that they are generally sentient and usually human. He doesn’t afford such specimens any emotional investment and, if he loses one in the midst of one of his experiments, he sees it as a great loss not because a person has died, but because he has lost a valuable test subject and must then seek to obtain another.
He has a habit of belittling those who don’t match his own genius-like level of intellect and scientific prowess and will even seek to put down those who are, as if he doesn’t deem anybody but himself worthy of the title of ‘scientist’. He has no time for those who pour energy into the physical arts and generally deems them as inferior to intellectuals, who he in turn sees as inferior to himself. Hojo will order people around in such a way that makes it look very much like he is not used to not having his 'requests' followed. He is, as you may have noticed, a man of boundless arrogance and when it comes to science and the things he has achieved, he is conceited to a fault. He also places the value of his brilliant mind above his physical wellbeing.
All of that said, he does have something of a sense of humour, albeit a sick one. He has a habit of laughing (or nearly giggling) to himself at something that he finds funny, but all of these things tend to be in-jokes limited only to himself and are almost always at the expense of somebody else.
Abilities/Weapons: Most of Hojo’s abilities are mental. Analytical, desperately intelligent to the point of genius and regarding three of the four sciences as his ‘specialities’ (he is fairly good a physics, but doesn’t delve too deeply into it given the lack of means to test the majority of theories), he is a force to be reckoned with on an intellectual level as opposed to a physical one. He has a little bit of capacity for battle strategy due to his research into the behaviour of monsters and the people he pitted against them, but unless he is gaining valuable data from the effort, he doesn’t tend to bother planning things of that nature.
He learned, in his youth, to fire a handgun with fair accuracy and tends to be armed when going out and about. This is a precautionary measure to deal with what could happen should he run into anybody who wants him dead. Given his past, he has made quite a few enemies.
He also has an ability to heal himself due to self experimentation during his forays into researching the nature of his ‘Mako’ discovery. While he has never had much reason to use this passive power, it is sufficiently developed enough for him to regenerate even as much as a whole limb if needs be, but he has not yet tested it in full. How quick it would happen is something of a mystery.
How well can your character hack?: Up to and including the ‘hard’ level, given that he is extremely knowledgeable in the technological as well as Chemical and Biological sciences.
Weaknesses: His lack of physical fighting prowess is a major weakness. As an intellectual, he never bothered to hone any of his physical skills and, as such, is almost useless in a fight. As said before, he does value his physical form significantly less than his mind.
Often his arrogance will get him into awkward positions, especially with the more vicious of his experimental subjects. This is due to his abject disregard for them or their feelings and his burning desire to test out every theory to ensure that it is bullet proof. That said, as mentioned above, he is more than happy to take injury in the name of his work as long as his brain is left unscathed.
Furthermore, he will actually place himself in danger for the sake of his research. If a particularly interesting specimen comes up, he will make it his mission to investigate it regardless of the damage it may cause.
Another weakness, though a less serious one, is his short-sightedness and need for glasses. Without them, he can't see more than half a meter in front of his nose, so they are pretty much a requirement.
Lastly, his mouth can get him into trouble. He has no qualms about insulting people or snapping at them and this can and does rub some people up the wrong way.
History: It all started in Melior when a kind auntie bought young Joseph Hojo a small chemistry set on his seventh birthday. It was this present that sowed the seed of scientific obsession and changed him from a normal, active child into the scholarly man he would become.
After receiving that gift, he thought about little else but science. He went on to excel at the subject in school and aced every test regardless of difficulty, frequency or branch of the sciences. Of course, he did equally well in language classes and mathematics, but they were viewed by him as assets to his main passion rather than obsessions in and of themselves. His test results remained high throughout school and it was enough to earn him a tidy scholarship into a university, where his chosen subjects will come as no surprise: Biology, Chemistry and Magitech.
Due to reasons such as income (and an unfortunate refusal of entry at Draklor, which he viewed as beneath him from then on), he became a medical doctor, but kept his interest in Chemistry and Magitech keen and eventually, around his main job, he started dabbling into mana. He considered Mana Crystals an interesting substance and they had always intrigued him, but it wasn’t until then that he’d had the self-generated funds and space to really get his claws into the subject of it, it’s power and it’s origin.
Eventually, and after extensive study, he happened upon a method of refining and purifying it into a usable substance which, he theorised, would be possible to inject into living beings and enhance them and their abilities in much the same way that raw mana causes unforeseen side-effects when people are exposed to it for an extended period. The initial tests were performed on himself and manifested in the form of healing of an increased speed. It was interesting, to say the least-- a positive breakthrough, in fact! It was then that he packed in his normal job and headed to join the Shinra laboratories in Bellcius and showcased this new discovery --which he had called ‘Mako’-- to them as a way of creating a supersoldier of unprecedented power.
It was there that his research really descended into depravity; human experiments became par for the course and he forged a life-long rivalry with other scientists in the laboratories there, the main one of which being Professor Gast. Their contention over the charge of the experiments often devolved into vicious intellectual arguments, but for the most part, they kept this seething sense of mutual dislike out of the work place and away from the public eye.
It was also there that Hojo met Lucrecia Crescent-- the woman who would become the mother of this child.
Of course, when it comes to the reproductive process of two people of questionable sanity, nothing ever goes as normal. Hojo and Lucrecia decided to use their child as a test subject and injected the foetus with the Mako solution in utero, to see if the concentration of mana in a developing child would a yield positive outcome. Other, similar experiments were done by another of the scientists, a Doctor Hollander, but his approach was less direct and, arguably, far less successful. They are not important, however, because Hojo’s own method became a success.
They had a son Hojo withheld the boy from his mother in a cold display of scientific greed and possessiveness over the ‘sample’ and refused to allow her to see him. Well, he didn’t want her interfering with his development and making him soft when he was already signed up to a military program. Despairing, Lucrecia left soon after his birth.
Given that the Project-S experiment was a resounding success (as opposed to other branches of the same research, which yielded much less positive results) he decided to implement the procedure on already living soldiers with high levels of physical and mental fitness. Only those who were deemed fit enough to withstand the potential physical and mental trauma of the cocktail were selected for use in this program.
Back on the subject of his son, Hojo, unsurprisingly, wanted nothing to do with rearing the child as a parent. Instead, he allowed the boy to be raised by tutors and, to his mild surprise but characteristic lack of interest in the mundane, Professor Gast.
He entered him into a prestigious military program at an extremely young age and examined him regularly to ensure that he was developing to a soldier standard. He didn’t seem to care or notice at all that his workmate and rival was taking charge of him in terms of being an acting parent-- it was something he wanted nothing to do with. This went on until Professor Gast ‘mysteriously’ disappeared. In truth he, in his attachment to the boy he acted as the father of, became opposed to Hojo’s heartless approach to human experimentation. Unfortunately for him, upon demanding that he stop the research, found himself struck down by a fatal bullet courtesy of an unexpected handgun pulled from a lab coat.
Appointed head of the ShinRa science department in the wake of Gast's untimely demise, Hojo continued with the Mako experiments.
Eventually the boy grew old enough to move away with from the laboratories and it was there that his involvement with the boy stopped abruptly. He didn’t mind - he was positive by that point that his experiment had been a complete success.
After he left, he turned his attention to other things. He injected the substance into monsters as well as people in order to strengthen them for military purposes and he also dove heavily into the magitech area of study. He attempted to make mechanical weapons that were both powered by Mako and were able to use it’s power to use magic, depending on the situation. He devoted a large amount of time to studying Demihumans and their differences from the norm. He also studied Difference Engines rather deeply, being intrigued by them from the start. Hacking into the protected notes of other scientists was part of this study, of course, and he became rather skilled at it. His most depraved experiments, however, were the ones that turned normal people into monsters with an over-saturation of mako. The majority of them died due to the effects, but some survived and remain locked up inside pods in an undisclosed location.
Over the years, he has made a number of enemies, both in the scientific fields and not. It was partially due to that and partially due to the fact that ShinRa sold off the laboratories that he worked in that he decided to take to the air, to avoid the repercussions of his work, be they the human experiments, the monster experiments, or the hacking.
Got a problem with how I play this grumpy old fart? Leave me a comment or send me a note! All comments are screened, anon-enabled and IP logging is off.