|
 Vincent
was born in a small town, the son of a gunsmith,
but small town life hardly suited the restless
youth. At 17 he left home with one of his father's
guns, with which he was quite proficient, and set
off fot the excitement of the nearby city of
Midgar. In spite of his skills, he spent two years
just struggling to survive on the streets before
his shooting was noticed by a recruiter for the
famous Shinra security agency, Turks. Vincent
jumped at the chance for adventure combined with a
steady paycheck and quickly rose through the ranks
of the Turks with his sharp eye and efficiency as a
security officer.
At the age of 24, already a captain, he was
requested as the head of security for a scientific
research team studying the frozen body of an alien
being. Vincent joined the team, led by Professor
Gast, who took an immediate liking to the
gregarious gunman. The other two team members were
Gast's assistants, the unstable and ambitious Hojo
and the beautiful and intelligent Lucretia. Vincent
soon fell in love with Lucretia, who returned his
interest, but clashes with Hojo became an annoyance
added to the mundane work of providing security in
a sleepy mountain village where there was nothing
to secure the team from. After Gast departed the
team on sabbatical, Lucretia became the sole object
of interest of the bored young Turk.
With Gast gone, Hojo started to change the
course of the research, using the cells of the
alien being, codenamed Jenova, to perform human
experiments. Vincent strongly objected to this on
moral grounds, but refused to leave the project
because of Lucretia. As his love for her grew, he
began to think of leaving Turks to marry her and
support her career, but when he proposed, he was
shocked and horrified to find that she was engaged
to Hojo. Undeterred, he continued to be devoted to
her and the two had an affair, a matter that hojo
seemed to care very little about. Lucretia became
pregnant, but insisted that the child was Hojo's,
not Vincent's, and quite suddenly broke off their
relationship. Heartbroken, Vincent continued to
love her from a distance, but when he learned that
Hojo and Lucretia planned to infuse the fetus with
Jenova cells, he once more intervened, arguing
violently with Hojo over the morality of human
experimentation. Hojo caught the young Turk off
guard and shot him in the heart, killing him.
Not content with merely murdering Vincent,
however, Hojo took advantage of a fresh body to
perform another Jenova experiment, injecting alien
cells into the mortal wound. To his delight,
Vincent was resurrected, although still maintaining
the appearance of a dead man, with little color to
his skin. The insanity of the scientist became
sadistically clear when he then hatched a plot to
conceal Vincent's death and resurrection from
Lucretia with a terrible plan. Surgically removing
Vincent's left arm, he threw it to one of the large
predatory lab animals to be chewed, then presented
the arm as evidence to Lucretia of a horrifying
suicide by her lover. Shocked and greiving,
Lucretia refused to enter the lab again, allowing
Hojo to keep his new specimen hidden away from
her.
Hojo continued his experiments and soon
discovered that Vincent was indeed different than
he had been before his death. Somehow, a demonic
creature from beyond had come back with him, the
Galian Beast, who would erupt whenever Vincent was
pushed to an extreme of pain or anger. Torturing
Vincent became his obsession as he sought new ways
to make Vincent turn into the Beast so that he
could study him. This obsession only faded when
Lucretia gave birth to a son, who she named
Sephiroth. She was forced to abandon him, however,
when the Jenova cells that had also been injected
into her inflicted a terrible price in disease and
disfigurement, laeving the infant in the cruel fate
of being Hojo's other favored specimen.
Told by Hojo that Lucretia had died in
childbirth, the captive Vincent devoted himself to
caring for the baby, even after Hojo presented
evidence to him that it was his son, not Vincent's.
Both Vincent and the Galian Beast became so
protective of Sephiroth that Hojo was eventually
forced to choose which experiment to continue. More
interested in the superhuman hybrid he had created
than Vincent and his monster, he decided to put
Vincent into stasis to prevent his further
interference in his plans for Sephiroth. Vincent
was sedated, fitted with a monstrous claw to
replace his missing arm, and locked into a
cryogenic coffin, then forgotten for 25 years.
During
those years, Sephiroth was raised by Hojo, becoming
a general in the Shinra military, SOLDIER. At the
age of 19, he was once more introduced to his
'mother', Jenova. The alien, still alive, took over
Sephiroth's mind, sending him on a conquest to
destroy the world. A small revolt faction,
AVALANCHE, set out to stop Sephiroth, hampered in
their efforts by the corporate govenrment of
Shinra, which wanted to perserve and use Sephiroth
for their own plans of world domination.
On the trail of Sephiroth, the AVALANCHE team
encountered Vincent's coffin and freed him, but
were shocked to see the vampiric figure that
emerged from it. Upon finding out from them that
Sephiroth was Jenova controlled and bent on
destroying all life, and that his tormentor Hojo
still lived, Vincent joined them in order to seek
his revenge. During his confinement to the coffin,
Vincent had suffered such horrific nightmares,
induced by the Jenova cells in his body, that he
had suppressed all emotion, little left other than
movement to indicate he was alive. He soon
discovered that two additional demons had awoken in
him as well, a situation that only deepened the
unease which most of AVALANCHE felt around him,
although they came to rely on the power of the
demons in battle. Only two of the members of
AVALANCHE were able to get past his cold exterior,
Cid Highwind, the worn but courageous pilot, and
Red XIII, an intelligent animal who had also been
one of Hojo's specimens. The others kept their
distance, but noted how he was the opposite of his
dark and evil appearance, in fact one of the most
loyal and protective of companions in spite of his
torment.
Still haunted by his love for Lucretia, Vincent
was shocked to find that she was still alive, but
in self-imposed exile in a small cave due to her
disfigurement. He sought her out, but her only
concerns were for the well-being of her son,
Sephiroth. Not wanting her to know of the true fate
of her beloved child, Vincent told her Sephiroth
was dead. When he later sought her out, he found
that she was gone. He found a letter from her along
with a rifle he had made before his death, the
suicide note stating that she had failed as a
mother and had thrown herself from the cliffs. The
anguish of having played a part in her death as
well as the guilt about now being on the hunt to
kill her son and her husband awoke Vincent's fourth
and final demon, the powerful soul judge,
Chaos.
Vincent continued on with AVALANCHE, eventually
crossing paths with Hojo, who far from repenting of
his evils, seemed to take delight in the fact that
his cruel science would result in the end of all
life. Enraged, Vincent killed Hojo, who had also
transformed himself with Jenova cells, then set out
to defeat the child he had once cradled in his one
good arm. Although it nearly cost them their lives,
AVALANCHE managed to catch up to the transformed
and powerful creature which Sephiroth had become as
it guarded the one thing that could save the planet
from the destruction Sephiroth had set in motion.
The intrepid fighting force destroyed the reborn
Jenova, then battled Sephiroth to free the power of
Holy, the mystical force which could save all life.
As the transformed being was defeated, the power of
Holy was released, forcing AVALANCHE to flee for
safety.
Unknown to the members of AVALANCHE, Sephiroth
split into two forms, one being the evil spirit
Jenova had created, the other being the 19 year old
general who Sephiroth was before Jenova entered his
mind and soul. As Cloud, the other surviving Jenova
recipient, battled the evil Sephiroth, Vincent fell
into the lifestream which was feeding the power of
Holy and came face to face with the boy that could
have been his son. Knowing the others would never
allow him to live, Vincent took pity on the
confused and innocent part of Sephiroth and sealed
him magically from the effects of Holy.
As
the energy of Holy was unleashed, Vincent found
himself cut off from the others and unable to
rejoin them. the powerful energy attracted the
attention of the Wave, the alien species Jenova had
belonged to, although she had been rogue and unlike
the other elemental beings, who contented
themselves with scientific observation of species.
The Wave, upon finding Vincent in Holy, and with
his unique state of existance, collected him for
further study. He was assumed by the rest of
AVALANCHE to have perished in the mystic force, but
Cid Highwind, who had come to think of him as a
worthy friend, set out to search for him. Following
the weak electromagnetic trail of the comm set
Vincent had been wearing, Cid traced Vincent to the
homeworld of the Wave and rescued him, the two
escaping on Cid's starship and crashing on the
world of Eldridge.
Vincent kept Sephiroth's survival a secret as he
and Cid made a new life for themselves on Eldridge,
until the day that the spell ended. Finally
confessing to his friend that Sephiroth lived, but
not as the evil destroyer they had hunted, Vincent
asked his help in retreiving him and bringing him
to Eldridge, where he could make a new start.
Although skeptical, Cid trusted Vincent enough to
help him, and together they travelled to their
homeworld to save the 19 year old Sephiroth.
Sephiroth soon came to trust Vincent as completely
as Cid did, seeing past his cold surface to the man
underneath. When study of Hojo's notes showed that
Vincent was in fact his biological father,
SEphiroth was more than willing to accept the
relationship, his love for his father beginning to
revive the true soul of Vincent as both struggled
to come to terms with the cruelties they had
suffered and had inflicted upon others against
their will. |
