For Honor or Glory

The Gambit

Chapter 28

After that week, Alex had expected life to calm down for her, but that was far from what happened. Although she never had to deal with professor Hojo directly, she found out that he did indeed want her help with the Soldier's boosters. The general's specifically. She wasn't sure why the schedule had been changed, but Sephiroth had to come in once a week on the day she was supposed to be assisting for a small booster.

At least most of them were not as bad as that first day she had found him. The upside to that was that they often spent a good portion of the day playing chess. They both became better players for it since, after her first defeat, Alex won at least a third of the time. It was her goal to even those out if nothing else.

Unfortunately, that one day a week was the least of her worries. Not that she didn't sometimes stress about the downtime, but she had so much else going on that she was about ready to pull her hair out.

The good news was that she had been able to identify two more genetic disorders in less than a month. That meant that she still had a month to go and almost enough material to publish her thesis. She was to the point that she was nearly ready to start splitting her time in the evening, which only made her nervous.

Before she decided to start looking into more personal DNA issues, she started watching who else was around in the evenings. Who might come close or be watching? She didn't want to take any chances that someone might accidentally walk in. Not that they had so far, but it was better to be safe. And that was only the first part. She still needed to figure out how to best go about identifying the Jenova portion in their DNA.

Her end-goal would be to find a way to isolate it. Or at least figure out how the alien could communicate on a cellular level and cut that off. There had to be some sort of structure. She couldn't discount a 'psychic' connection, not after her experience in the caves, but the idea still made her cringe. Maybe it was something else? A pheromone?

Those thoughts always frustrated her. She couldn't even begin to get answers until she got samples. She still had her own blood, but what part of her DNA was Jenova, and what was human? She couldn't compare it to Angeal's because they were twins. They shared too much genetic material. She couldn't even compare it to Genesis since her mother's cellular material had been injected into him when he was in the womb.

That thought made her a little ill when she considered the implication for their future, but that was a thought for another day. For now, she needed a better comparison. In the end, she realized that what she needed was a blood sample from Sephiroth. He had the highest concentration of Jenova, and he shared no other genetic material with any of the other three children that came from the Jenova project. She could compare each of theirs to his, and anything that matched would be Jenova. However, getting those samples without raising red flags might prove difficult.

She didn't think it would be a big deal to get them from Angeal and Genesis. She could just tell them both that she needed them for comparison for her thesis, and they would both be happy to help. Sephiroth, on the other hand, was another matter entirely. Plus, she had gotten to know him enough that she didn't want to steal it from him. It made her uncomfortable to even think about it. When she realized that she thought of him as a friend, it didn't take much to come to the conclusion that she would just ask him like she planned to ask the other two.

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It was two weeks until Alex's ninety days would be up, and she was almost ready to shoot the next person that asked her when she would be done. Not that she had a gun, but she was that frustrated. She was one more discovery away from having all she wanted to complete her thesis. She knew she could finish with what she had, but it would be shaky at best. With just one more, there would be no way anyone could deny her findings.