This... is a very long chapter. In fact it's the longest chapter i have ever written, it is also the most complex in terms of subject matter. I tried shortening it, but i didn't like the result. What has been written here is what i want you all to see, however those of you who are young (I am talking younger than 16) should read carefully as many of the biological concepts written in this chapter require a greater understanding than grade school biology. I have written them as simply as i can, but i make no promises. For those of you who genuinly don't have a clue what i have written, you shouldn't find it too difficult tojust readpastthe medical jargon in order to have a reasonable understanding of what is being described. Anyway, Enjoy.

Experiment Kane

Yuna, Rikku, Paine and Tidus walked purposefully up Highbridge to the New Yevon headquarters. Very little in terms of appearance had changed over the last year, monks and nuns still dotted the long pathway and they each bow and give the sign of prayer to Yuna and her friends as they pass. The evening was almost upon them all; the sun’s magnificent orange glow bathed the entire city as it began to disappear beyond the horizon.

They reached the entrance of the New Yevon HQ, and without even needing to ask, the doors opened up and Nooj and Gippal stepped out. They surveyed the four newcomers and smiled.

“Excellent Rikku, a full house I see,” commented Nooj, “you have done well. Come, all of you, there is much to talk about. Though perhaps I should warn you that you are probably not going to like what we have to tell you,” he sounded grim when he said it, which did not reassure the others.

Motioning for everyone to follow, he and Gippal walked back into the building. They reached the elevator that lead up to the main balcony of the inner chamber; Yuna felt the air had a certain chill to it but she was not sure whether it was the actual temperature or the memory that this was where she was branded a traitor by Maester Mika three years ago. They each made use of the lift to get to the top. Eventually Rikku and Paine, who were the last two to use the lift were brought to the top and hopped off.

Nooj motioned for the door ahead of them, “This way please.”

They all followed him in and find themselves in a corridor; electrical lights, placed every meter or so, keeping their route lit up. They walked to the end of the long corridor and Nooj opened up the door in front of them. Stepping into the room, the friends saw they were in some sort of presentation room. Two people were already in the room, a woman, wearing a white knee length coat, and a man, who looks as though he has seen his fair share of battles. They each sat in chairs that were separated from the main seating.

The woman was quite tall, around five foot nine, her long dark blonde hair was tightly tied back in a bunch and she wore a pair of thin black rimmed glasses. She had thin carefully plucked eyebrows, which curved perfectly and evenly on her brows and her curvy eyelashes had also received some attention, a hint of black mascara extended their length by that all important millimetre. All in all she was a very pretty young lady and the others wondered what her role in this mystery was. The man cut a brusque appearance; he was definitely a military sort of individual. Despite the youth of the evening he looked as though he had been dragged out of bed against his wishes due to his unshaven appearance and slightly sleepy eyes. Unlike the woman, he had not gone to great lengths to preserve what could be considered quite a handsome exterior. His bristles did not hide his chiselled jaw and naturally they couldn’t hide his eyes, which, from the friend’s perspective, had a strange colour to them, but from the distance at which he sat from them, they couldn’t quite make out exactly what colour they were. He possessed broad muscular shoulders; definitely the sort of man who did some body building on the side of whatever he did for a living. His upper body structure was easy to make out thanks to the tight black t-shirt he wore. In fact the t-shirt was probably the only thing about him that looked reasonably well kept. His legs were not so easy to make out thanks to the baggy camouflage trousers he wore and heavy black boots. ‘Tall dark and handsome’ would have been a stereotypical analysis of his appearance, had it not been for his scruffiness and dark grey hair which had a strange gold tint to it. It was an oddly familiar colour to the friends but none of them were able to pin where they had seen it before. But he had made no effort to look good; he obviously had more important things on his mind like the situation at hand.

Nooj and Gippal walked towards the two people and they in turn stood up to greet them. As tall as the woman was she still looked short compared to the man who was easily over six feet. The two newcomers shook hands with the leaders of Spira, all saying their respective ‘hellos’, except for the man who merely nodded to them. Nooj looked back at the gang and motions towards the woman.

“Everyone this is Dr. Lienne, as soon as I have told you more about the problem we have she will give you some of the more important details,” the four friends nodded at the doctor who returns the gesture.

“It is a pleasure to finally meet you in person High Summoner Yuna. I sometimes wondered if we would ever meet in person,” her voice kind of reminded Yuna and the others of Lulu.

“Nice to meet you Doctor,” Yuna says, stepping forward to shake her hand. The doctor smiled as she takes her hand, “Oh please, there’s no need to use my title, call me Lienne” Yuna smiled back, “All right Lienne. And there’s no need for ‘high Summoner’ or ‘lady’ either, ‘Yuna’ will be just fine.”

The doctor nodded her approval and proceeded to shake hands with the others then sat back down in her chair. The man meanwhile had finished greeting the leaders of Spira and had moved onto the friends. He stepped towards them, allowing them all to take in a few more details of his facial features. That’s when they noticed the true colour of his eyes. He had dark crimson irises. Yuna opened her mouth to gasp but she made no sound. He held out his hand to Yuna who took it, his rough and tough skin was a complete contrast to Lienne whose skin was smooth and well kept.

“Like the doc said Yuna, it’s good to finally meet the woman who beat Sin where neither myself nor hundreds of my soldiers were able to do so three years ago,” he did not smile as he said that, and Yuna and the others look at him slightly puzzled, “Oh I was a part of the force of crusaders who stormed the beach to fight of all those little Sin spawns during operation Mi’ihen. I and some of those who survived only managed to do so by diving under the water, which shielded us from that weird wall of energy that Sin sent our way. Those who were unable to get under were vaporised, I lost many men and women that day, most of whom were friends.”

Yuna nodded solemnly, “I’m sorry for your loss,”

Realising he had not given his name the man snaps out of his memories, “Oh sorry, right, names. I’m Sion,”

Yuna gave a small smile, “Well it’s nice to meet you Sion.”

Sion glanced at the scantily clad Rikku and rose an eyebrow, he gives her the once over with his eyes and steps towards her, “I recognise you. You’re the one who stood at Yuna’s right side during her ‘destruction of Sin’ speech in the Luca stadium,” he folded his arms as he looks down on her. Rikku nodded, happy that her presence at the stadium had not gone completely unnoticed.

“I was with Yuna when she made that speech, I’m Rikku,”

“Nice to meet you Rikku,” he let go of her hand and his vision moves towards Tidus and a small smile forms on his face.

“So you are the slick young Auroch Blitzer I’ve seen in the sphere pool over the last year. Tidus isn’t it?” he held out his hand and Tidus shook it smiling, figuring that Sion was a fan.

“Yeah I’m Tidus, nice to meet you Sion, you’re not here for an autograph are you?” he joke at the man who smirked.

“No not really.”

He turned his attention to Paine, who hadn’t really stepped out of the doorway and into the light yet, her face in the shadow of the doorframe. Sion held out his hand, just out of reach of Paine, forcing her to step inside in order to take it. She stepped into the light of the room, took his hand and her face became clear to Sion, whose eye’s open very slightly, exposing the red irises even more, realising that they shared eye and hair colour. Paine too noticed Sion’s eyes and raised an eyebrow, but said nothing of it.

“The name’s Paine,” Sion turns his head like a dog that has seen something odd, and gives her a questioning look.

She looks back at him straight faced, “Something interesting about my name Sion?”

He straightened up his head and pursed his lips for a few seconds, “Maybe… I don’t know yet,” he released her hand and slowly turned away from her, keeping his eyes fixed on her until his turning prevented him from doing so. Yuna, Rikku and Tidus looked at Sion and then at Paine as if they were all saying, ‘what was all that about?’ Paine merely shrugged her shoulders. But in her mind she knew exactly what Sion was thinking. She had always thought her eyes were unique, and until now she had been right.

Nooj motioned for everyone to take a seat in the front row and they obey. Gippal stood in front of everyone, obviously the one to open up the explanation as to why they had all been called to Bevelle.

He put his fist to his lips and gave a cough to clear his throat, “Now you guys are no doubt wondering why we asked you to come all the way over here from Besaid. Well as you might have been able to figure out, we have a problem. A big problem, but more so than that is that fact that it is a very unconventional problem.”

The others looked at each other wondering what the heck it was that Gippal was saying, “See it’s like this okay? There was… or perhaps I should now say there is this man with whom Nooj and I were acquainted with once, his name was Kane. Now let me tell you a little bit about him. In his time Kane was brilliant, he was a true genius, a gifted member of the Al Bhed. There was virtually nothing this guy couldn’t do. He was a master mechanic, builder, excavator, fiend hunter, scientist, you name it he was good at it. However as you may be able to tell from the way I am speaking about him, Kane is, no, was dead. He was working with the machine faction right around the time that you guys defeated Shuyin and Vegnagun. An accident occurred in the Djose temple, shortly after I returned from giving that joint speech in Luca stadium to everyone. One of the newly constructed machines malfunctioned, we weren’t sure how and why, and to be honest we still aren’t,” this drew worried glances from the others as it was common knowledge that new ‘machines’ were being built, and applied for various purposes across Spira, if one of them malfunctioned why wouldn’t the others?

‘Don’t worry though we’re pretty certain it was a programming error for that particular machine, it was still only a prototype model at the time, and problems were expected to arise.”

He sighed heavily, “Unfortunately this one turned fatal, the machine had its own pair of hands that Kane had made the designs for himself. We were trying to see if we could build a humanoid machine that moved like us and was able to do the things that humans could do but with greater precision,” he paused for a moment, then continued, “however something in the machine must have gone completely awry because before Kane knew it he had gone from doing some maintenance work on the machine, to struggling to break the grip the machine had on his throat,” he shook his head in dismay, “we tried to get the machine’s hands off of Kane, but irony was not on his side, he had designed the hands too well. The machine strangled Kane, and had it had legs, it would have probably tried to jump at us and do the same to us. Needless to say we discontinued the project and destroyed the machine; however there is more to this story than just that. Over the years and by that I mean during the time of Yevon and Sin, the Al Bhed have been doing scientific research on all sorts of stuff, not just to do with machines either. Biological research was and still is one of the fields that we have been investigating,” he cleared his throat again, “now during the time of Yevon dominating Spira the Al Bhed had always known that a war with them was never too far away, I mean even you guys must have known that when you followed Yevon. As such we had been doing research into methods of creating a ‘Super soldier’. Now over the years we have been thinking about how the human body can be improved for the purposes of war, and the battle field. We had many ideas at our disposal, we didn’t however figure out how we were going to put our ideas into practice. That was until we met Kane,” the others looked at Gippal with baffled frowns.

“We realised,” he continued, “that Kane was the perfect person with which to test out some of our ideas, however we were not going to test them on a live human subject. We wanted to experiment on Kane once he was dead, it sounds bizarre I know, but trust me it had to be that way. Now we weren’t going to just murder him. We wanted to experiment with him but we weren’t that desperate. Besides we needed to make the proper preparations for when he did eventually die, whenever that might have been. That malfunctioning machine was our ticket to getting his body. We had to move fast to prevent his body from dying. His mind was gone, dead you see, but when a person dies the cells that make up their body do not die instantly they can live for a very short period of time after death. We had Kane posted in Djose temple for a reason: we had some specialised medical equipment there which was designed for use specifically on him, post mortem. When he was killed by that machine we seized our moment and put the device to its intended use,” he sighed, “the device was designed to attach to Kane’s dead body and continuously pump oxygenated blood into him, keeping his body alive, even though his mind was gone. We even had a former Summoner come and send him to make sure that his mind didn’t return. After that we had him shipped to a secret location near Zanarkand where our scientists could use his body and carry out all the modifications that we thought we could.”

Yuna and Rikku were looking at Gippal aghast at what he has just told them, “You authorised this experiment on a dead man’s body? What about his family, don’t you think they would object to it?” asked Yuna.

Gippal shook his head, “Kane had no family and his parents were lost to Sin, so there was no one to stop us. And just for the record I was not the only one who authorised this,” his eyes wandered to Nooj and everyone’s heads slowly turned towards the pair.

Nooj looked down at his metal leg, gets up and stands next to Gippal, “During the time that New Yevon and the Youth League were fighting each other Gippal informed me of the machine faction’s research, seeing as his group were partial to the youth league,” Gippal nodded, “Yeah I figured that the Youth League would be interested in getting their own ‘super soldiers’ and that they would pay very handsomely for them too. It was a money spinning idea you see.”

Nooj continued for him, “Then of course the conflict ended after Shuyin and Vegnagun were defeated and the three groups pretty much united. Seeing as there was no conflict there was almost no point in doing the research. However, we were all still curious as to what we could do with our technology and knowledge. So Gippal and I decided to allow the project to continue and wait for Kane’s ultimate demise. Sounds very cold I know, but at the time we were too interested in the research. When it happened we had his body sent to Zanarkand where there would be no prying eyes to watch what was going on. His body was experimented on by a team of doctors and from what we know, all the ‘upgrades’ we wanted done to his body were one hundred percent successful.”

“But?” interrupted Paine who looked at all three of them coldly.

Nooj huffed a little, “That easy to see was it? Yes there is a ‘but’ on this. However I think it better to show you what happened than to explain it in words. Inside the facility were security spheres that were recording everything that went on in the facility, including the recent incident. Excuse me.”

He walked over to a set of controls that lay at the back of the room and pressed a few buttons. The lights turned off and Gippal sat back down. A six foot wide white screen descended in front of the wall that everyone was facing and stopped after it had dropped about eight feet. Nooj clicked a few more buttons and some sort of projector came down out of the ceiling in the middle of the room and projected an image onto the white sheet.

Everyone saw a large man’s body lying on a steel table in a white room, nothing on the screen moved.

“Okay that man on the table there is Kane, now for nearly a year he had been lying on that table motionless and quite dead. However watch his head closely.” Nooj called out from behind them.

They watch as the head of the man jerked up for a few moments. They continued watching as he laid his head back down and remained perfectly still. A click sounded out and the door opened and in stepped the doctor and guards. They listened to the conversation about the man’s head not being in the position the doctor remembered it to be in. Yuna put her hand over her mouth, fearing what was probably going to happen in a moment or two. They watched the doctor approach the man and exam the head.

“His mouth is moist, that’s odd,” they heard the doctor say. Then the attention of the two guards jerked towards the foot of the man, “Whoa, whoa, whoa doc is that supposed to happen?” one of the doomed guards spoke out, though his voice sounded slightly electrical thanks to the sphere’s microphone. They all watched the scene unfold, rooted to their seats. They listened to the doctor’s denial that the body could have moved they watched as the doctor began to look back towards the man’s head and then freeze.

Then the man’s deep, menacing voice echoed out, “I may have found some holes in your theorem, Doctor,” everyone flinched as the man roared and his perfectly inanimate body violently jerked upwards. They watched and heard the metallic snapping of the restraints as his arms became free. He grabbed the doctor’s throat and broke his neck like a twig. Then He proceeded to rip off his leg restraints and stand on the floor. The guards all of a sudden jumped to life and aimed their guns at the man. The fierce spitting of their machine guns echoed through the room, accompanied by the sound of metal hitting metal. The man looked down at his body, back turned to the camera. The guards stopped shooting and everyone noticed their mouths open slightly in surprise. Faint metallic clinking noises could be heard as small objects dropped to the floor at the man’s feet. The man proceeded to kill the guards with terrible ferocity and dash like a rocket out of the room. The projection then switched to a new camera, this time in a foyer like area, guards littered the floor, save for one who was being held in the air by the shirt in the right hand of the man, who from what they could see, was staring at him for no reason. The man then rapidly grabbed the man by the throat and tore it out like the husk from an ear of corn and hurled the dying man across the room.

The monstrous man walked towards a large metal door which had a large circular handle. He took the key card he stole from the doctor and placed it inside an electronic slot, the door beeped and he turned the handle on the door and pulled it open. Through the doors the group was able to make out the night skies of Zanarkand and they heard the man laughing ominously, a laugh that chilled their blood, it was not the kind of laugh an ordinary man makes. The giant looked around himself then stared into the night sky. His titanic voice rang into the camera’s microphone

“I will be free!”

And with those words he ran off into the night.

The recording stopped and the lights turned on once more. The four friends looked shocked at what they had just seen. No one said or did anything except Nooj who turned the lights back on, turned the projector off, and walked to the front of the room.

“He… he came back to life,” stammered Rikku.

Nooj solemnly nodded his head, confirming that what they had just seen was not their imagination, “before you ask, we do not know how. What we do know is that, that man was not the Kane that we knew. Kane, prior to his death was a perfectly normal man and had no murderous tendencies at all. We can’t explain how he came back to life either. Nor can we explain exactly what he meant by ‘I will be free’.”

“Well maybe you’d like to explain how he managed to break those metal restraints over his hands and legs?” suggested Yuna standing up, she sounded very confrontational, “maybe you’d like to explain how he got shot so many times by those guards and still managed to stay standing?” she was raising her voice now, “maybe you’d like to explain why we heard metallic pinging noises when he was shot?” Nooj tried to raise his hands to signal for calm but Yuna was not finished, “Or you know what would be even better? Why don’t you tell us about the idiots who performed these ‘successful experiments’ on a dead man’s body!” her face was red with anger and her limbs trembled from the adrenaline rush.

Breaking the silence Lienne stood up, “Hey Sion, Paine I saw you two blinking a lot when the lights came on. You two are obviously sensitive to light,” commented Lienne.

“I am a little,” replied Sion.

“How good is your night vision?”

“I’m at a minus four.”

“That’s as good as a cat,” she said without expression. “But Kane’s is better. In fact he’s a lot better. His Dioptre reading is almost off the scale.”

The sudden change in conversation startled everyone. She had gone into it smoothly. They realised if they didn’t gear up fast, she was going to leave them in the dust.

“Just what exactly are we dealing with here doctor?” Yuna asked.

She handed each of them black files stamped ‘Top Secret/ Biological Warfare.’ Take a look at these everyone and you will realise that we are in a mortal situation, it is far more serious than either of these two could tell you,” she said, motioning to Nooj and Gippal.

They each studied the files, attempting to decipher the medical jargon, trying to understand what they had done to Kane, it sounded like horrific stuff, not for the faint of heart. They singled out factors that made sense, or sounded particularly disturbing: anterior spinal cord amplifiers, orthopaedic transplants, bio-polymer subcutaneous coating for Ademantosium-reinforced bones, interior Ademantosium implants and immunity acceptance levels with a break down of projected Hy-Die viral layers on a secondary stratum corneum-

“Hy-Die viral layers?” was the common thought amongst the friends. Some of it made sense, though a lot was very technical.

Their attentions were suddenly captured by a grisly colour photograph of Kane on an operating table. Large metal plates of a strange curving design were carefully positioned on an instrument tray.

A team of surgeons bent over him. His chest and arms lay open to the core as they apparently removed bones. Another surgeon worked on one of his knees, implanting what appeared to be a small metal plate over his patella, or kneecap.

“That’s a photo of the surgery where we implanted armour plating in Kane’s chest,” she announced. “We also replaced his humerus, radius and ulna, and secondary skeletal appendages with solid Ademantosium bones. Something like Nooj’s synthetic leg, only it’s made from a different, stronger metal and it is also light-years ahead in design. They have a projected use expectancy of more than a hundred years instead of ten. We also placed curving Ademantosium shields between his pectoralis major and all the internal organs, armouring him between the clavicle and the eighth rib. Ademantosium by the way is a metal that we can extract from the Ademantoise fiend, hence the name Ademantosium.”

“The process sounds complicated,” Sion said, studying her eyes.

“That’s nothing,” she said evenly. “Kane has recumbent anabolic steroid reserve cells, internal carpal and forearm Ademantosium bosses, and organic modifiers, that hyper-concentrates viral induced muscle fibres. He could punch a hole through a steel door. And to top it off, his outer stratum corneum is infected with a multi-viral factor, specifically an altered strain of the Yevon-Die virus. It’s something we call Hy-Die. And that virus, everyone, makes Kane a walking time bomb.

Unlike Yuna, Rikku, Paine and Tidus, Sion understood the ramifications because he had dealt with the theft of Al- Bhed biological weaponry prior to the coming of The Calm. What he knew was that Yevon-Die was the one that scared even the people who had created it. No one knew a cure for what they had created, all they knew was that it killed ninety nine percent of all non-Al Bhed people it touched, and it did it ugly.

“Why did you infect Kane with a strain of the Yevon-Die virus doctor?” asked Sion. Shock had almost completely removed everyone else from the conversation, they were still paying close attention, but they couldn’t say anything.

“I did it because I was given a mandate to create the ultimate soldier Sion, and the funds with which to do it.”

“And… did you do it?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “And then some.”

“How long do we have to find Kane doctor?”

“Ten days,” was her answer, and genuine fear, for the first time, entered her voice.

“And if we don’t?”

“Then,” she replied. “Spira will be a very dead planet.”

Everyone was stunned to silence.

Sion tossed his file onto the small table near his chair and breathed deeply before re engaging in the conversation.

“This doesn’t make sense; you people were keeping oxygenated blood circulating in what, in essence, was a dead man.”

“I’m not sure I follow you Sion.”

“My point,” Sion continued, “is that Kane, or whatever made Kane what he was, was no longer in that body.”

“But his brain wasn’t damaged.”

“No, his brain wasn’t damaged. Not the neurones. But a man is more than the base electrical synapse of ten billion neurones.” Sion paused, frowning. “Tell me something, where does thought come from?”

From her face they knew she had no answer. “I know where you’re going with this,” she answered. “But I don’t think a philosophical direction is going to help us.”

“Let us decide that.”

She hesitated.

“All right,” she said finally. “Nobody’s able to localize the portion of the brain that originates thought. All we know is that ‘thought’ is inserted into the electrochemical flow of ions at some point in the axon. That’s a long nerve tendril leading out of a neurone that communicates to other neurones. Are you theorizing that Kane’s mind is gone?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying. But something doesn’t add up. Because you can’t bring someone back to life. It’s impossible, and especially after they have been sent.”

“But we did it Sion.”

“You don’t know what you did Lienne.” Scolded Paine, now diving into the conversation, “all you know is that you took a dead man and made him into some sort of semi-robot killing machine. But now it’s on the loose and these morons that you work for expect us to stop him.” She shook her head. “Why won’t this Hy-Die virus kill him?” she continued. “Is Kane immune to the virus just like he’s immune to everything else?”

Lienne was affected by her criticism but recovered quickly. “Kane is only immune to the mutated Hy-Die virus that we used to alter his genetic code. He’s not immune to the original Yevon Die. The term for it is ‘Viral-Engineering Manipulation’.”

“Sounds very benign.” Sion stared at her.

She blinked. “The… the main DNA segment of the Yevon Die virus is about two thousand base pairs long. The rest of the strand is dedicated to replication, direction, anaphase and whatever. But the main two thousand base pair strand defines the characteristics of the virus. For instance, what the virus is going to do to the cells of its host. What it will give the cells. Now in the telephase stage of mitosis there is a point called specialisation, that’s where a cell says to itself, ‘I’m going to be a muscle cell.’ Or ‘I’m going to be a white blood cell that promotes healing.’ And because the mutated Yevon-Die, or Hy-Die, has human DNA buffers in it, the main strand has been redesigned and resegmented into the virus to promote healing instead of cell destruction. That’s why Kane heals up almost instantly from any wound. Hy-Die is constantly promoting to a state of hyper-mitosis.”

“That accounts for his healing factor,” Paine said. “What accounts for his strength? These guys have just said that Kane was strong before he died, but he wasn’t this strong. Nobody is this strong.”

“Kane’s strength was developed through the use of the Macalania forest virus.” Her mouth tightened as she collected her thoughts. “To truly grasp this phenomenon you have to understand that Kane was a freak of nature even before we altered his chromosomes.”

“Why?”

It’s not in his file, but he had exceedingly rare XYY coding.”

What’s that?”

“That’s what’s known in science as the ‘superman’ trait,” she said. “It’s almost impossible for a male of any species to posses two of the same chromosomes, but Kane did. That’s why he was so strong in life, and the main reason he was selected for this experiment. But with the Macalania Forest virus we managed to denature a part of the second Y chromosome and bond it strand-sight onto chromosome fourteen, which hyper concentrates muscle cells. Plus, to make him strong enough to rip a hover door off its hinges, we inserted anabolic steroid reserve cells inside his thorax and upper arms.”

Tidus looked glumly away. “Damn,” he muttered, “just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse.”

The others expressed nothing. “Alright Lienne,” spoke Sion, his tone softening a bit. “Explain to me why he’s so fast.”

She ran a hand through her hair, Sion and Paine, who were really the only ones who could bear to look at her right now, noticed beads of sweat on her forehead. “That was fundamentally a chemical alteration,” she said. “Sodium, Potassium and Magnesium regulate the speed of synapses. What we did with him is simply to increase the chemical levels until there was virtually no waiting period.”

“But you never tested him right?”

“No, we never had the chance.”

“Then give us your best guess,” Paine concentrated. “How fast is he? What’re his limitations?”

Her face froze as she looked to the side, calculating. “He doesn’t have the speed of a hover. But maybe… slightly slower than a Chocobo.” She leaned back. “It would be eyes, hands, everything. He’s probably at the level of someone when they touch a hot stove. Their hand is moving even before their nerves have identified why. It only lasts a tenth of a second in normal people, but Kane is at that speed constantly. He moves so fast even he wouldn’t know what he was doing if it we hadn’t modified his central nervous system with electrical enhancements. Of course we had to have an Ademantosium skull shield to protect his brain from the overflow of Magnesium and potassium that might have caused cerebral oedema. The skull shield also protects his brain from traumatic impacts.”

Her jaw tightened slightly and she looked serious. “Understand me you guys, Kane does have a weakness: It’s the original Yevon-die virus. If you could reinsert the missing DNA strands in the Hy-Die virus hosted in his system, it would promote him to full blown hemorrhagic fever in seconds. In other words, it would take away his power in a molecular level.”

Sion almost laughed. “Well Lienne, I don’t think Kane is just going to sit still while we give him an injection of the Yevon-Die virus. And we’re not going to take a shot at him. What happened if we miss? What happens if the original Yevon die virus is released into this ecosystem?”

She was silent, pursing her lips.

“If Yevon-Die were reinserted into this environment it would become and airborne disease a hundred times more infectious than the common cold.” Her words were slow, as if she were thinking of the very real possibility. “The virus would accomplish exactly what it was originally designed for. Within two hours it would kill any non Al Bhed who contracted it. On a geometric curve it would wipe out a city with the population of Luca within twenty four hours. Within forty eight hours it would be in another half-dozen regions of Spira and within a week there would be nothing living on the main continent of Spira. A few days after that, if it crosses the ocean on ships before the mainland is quarantined it could conceivably kill every non Al Bhed organism on the face of Spira.”

Yuna’s hands were trembling violently as she raised her hands to rub her eyes and massage her sweat-slick forehead.

Sion took a deep breath. I see. Well then let’s move on. Does Kane have any other weaknesses?”

“Yes. There’s one. And you might be able to exploit it if you’re very careful.”

Yuna let out a harsh rush of air “Lienne, we passed ‘careful’ about a thousand miles back.”

“What’s Kane’s other weakness?” Paine asked.

Pain forced her to shut her eyes before she clenched her teeth.

“It… it came out of a severe miscalculation,” she answered. “The takeover of Kane’s DNA by the Hy-Die virus led to something we didn’t want to do. And I want you to know that I consider what we did a very, very tragic mistake. It was something we did only because we thought Kane would only be turned loose in times of war. And in that scenario the enemy would be the only one… the only one… consumed.”

Everyone’s eyes narrowed. Her face was so tragic that Nooj and Gippal just bowed their heads, as if they knew that something horrible was about to be said.

“We never anticipated it,” she said more softly. “We never anticipated that Kane’s DNA would be so badly damaged by the virus. We thought there would be a back flow, a point where the damaged DNA would recover. But it never did. His ribosomal RNA went into a downward spiral that we couldn’t reverse, so we had to find a way to replace it in a battlefield situation. And we came up with a method but… but…”

“What are you saying Lienne?” asked Sion gently.

She sighed. “I’m saying that Kane has to constantly replenish his human DNA. I’m saying that he has to…” she caught her breath, grimacing. “Oh god, forgive me… but… but Kane has to have fresh… he has to have fresh human blood… everyday. And if for some reason he can’t get fresh blood, he’ll starve.” The guilt in her voice was tragic but no one revealed shock, they somehow knew.

“How does Kane get blood Lienne?” asked Tidus coldly.

“We… modified him for it.”

“How?”

She closed her eyes, bowing her head.

“With fangs.”

Lienne had to leave the room to compose herself, even after all this time; the enormity of what she had done to Kane had never truly sunk in, until now. The others all sat in the room, completely bewildered even Sion and Paine, who had managed to stay composed throughout most of the briefing.

“She needs to get back in here soon,” said Sion. “There are still a few questions that I need answered.” Without waiting for a response he gets out of his chair to speak to Lienne.

Only a few minutes pass before they return from outside, Lienne’s eyes were no longer shedding tears, but her eyes were still glazed. Sion brought up a chair for her to sit on so that she was facing everyone else.

“Now Lienne,” he said, sitting down himself. “We need to remain objective here, let’s not get emotions clouding the task at hand, and I don’t want yours clouding you right now as there are still a few things I need you to clear up. Can you do that?”

“Yes… yes I can, let’s get on with it.”

Sion’s eyes softened in respect, “Good, thank you.” He took a moment. “All right, why do we have only ten days before this Hy-die virus becomes contagious? You said it wouldn’t cause hemorrhagic fever.”

“The Hy-Die virus won’t cause the fever in Kane, Sion, but it’s still mutating. That’s what viruses do. That’s all they do. I’d hoped that I altered the DL-3 and DL-4 strands to make it non-pathogenic, but I think I failed.”

“Why do you say that?”

Sighing, she seemed to be tiring quickly.

“Because when I was completing blood work on Kane a few days ago, I noticed the virus undergoing silent mutations, or mutations that reveal no phenotypic effects. The mutagens that are still building up in the cell vacuoles are causing a concentration differential to accent pathogenesis. And very soon it’s going to achieve a threshold effect.”

Paine blinked. “What’s a threshold effect?”

“That’s the point where a virus becomes lethal. It’s… it’s like this: A snowball travelling at five miles per hour doesn’t hurt you, even if it travelling at fifty miles per hour it probably wont hurt you. But at some specific point, at maybe eighty to a hundred miles an hour, that snowball reaches a level where it can kill you. Hy-Die is the same way. There will be a level where the Hy-die cytoplasm and mutagens require enough host cells to promote the virus to a T-4 bacteriophage. And at that point it will become the most deadly organism this planet has ever seen.”

“And then?”

“And then,” she answered, eye’s flashing, “Kane will be a walking bubonic plague. Anyone who has atmosphere to atmosphere contact with him will almost instantly contract it. And the virus itself will be more resilient than any other virus ever seen, capable of surviving on a non-organic surface for as long as two months. Anyone and anything can catch it, and they will infect anyone who has atmospheric contact.”

Finally Sion shook his head and rose.

“All right, we’re too tired to deal with this now. Let’s hit the rack. We’ll start again first thing tomorrow morning, but we’ll eat chow in here because we’ve got a lot to do. We’ve got to find some means of locating this thing.”

“Yeah,” Tidus growled “Like yesterday.”

Lienne wearily wiped sweat from her forehead “Thank you, I need to collect my thoughts and information, I’m all over the place, and I’m sure the rest of you have things to discuss between you.”

Sion nodded, “Have you secured billeting for her here Nooj?”

“Yes.” replied the man, snapping to his senses.

“All right, but I want you to change her quarters,” he said. “Put Lienne on the same floor that we’ll be on in the administrative building. And I want you to double the guards for added security.”

“Why Sion, she’s already got…”

“Just trust me, Nooj. I think I’m right on this.”

Nooj’s face was emotionless; he nodded “Alright Sion, whatever you want.”

Lienne was watching carefully when Sion looked back. She stared at him in faint concern, as if her preternatural intelligence had caught something said only by his tone.

“Why should I be afraid, Sion?” she asked motionless. “Kane doesn’t know me. He’s never… he’s never even seen me.”

Whatever was hooded within Sion’s eyes would remain there. Without emotion he turned away.

“I wouldn’t bet on it Lienne.”

So now you know what Kane is. I hope your brains didn't explode from all that.