Six, Final Fantasy VII: Crystalize

Very incomplete- this kind of wants to be epic, not just detatched narrative. At the very least, I want it to get to the point where he meets Lucrecia and actually does stuff.

Hells, I don't even like Hojo- but there is something horribly fascinating about him.
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He was five years old when he first saw high level materia in use. It was the summer solstice festival, and he sat on his father's shoulders to better watch the fireworks. It wasn't the lights that filled him with awe, though- it was Leviathan, dancing upon the spires of Da Chao at Lady Kisaragi's command. His father told him then that he would be able to weild such power some day.

Magic was in their blood, his father said, passed down from generation to generation- but when he received his first piece of materia at the age of eight, all it did was sparkle prettily in his hands. His classmates called lightning and fire, or filled the air with dancing lights; whatever talents were supposed to be in his blood were curiously absent.

He wasn't the only one, of course- there were always a few late bloomers. But one by one his classmates mastered their materia and his remained dull in his hands. One day, he simply handed the glowing green stone back to his parents. He knew futility when he saw it, after all.

It was a great disappointment to his parents, who were both warriors and artists of the traditional style. He didn't care much for bringing honor to the family name; by that time, he'd found science, and was too busy studying for the entrance exams to Midgar University to pay attention to the hard look in his father's eyes.

He left Wutai when he was fourteen to study chemistry and genetics half a world away.

There was nothing magical in materia, he learned. It was simply crystalized mako, energy in a solid, stable state. "Magic" was nothing of the sort; it was merely the result of a reaction between the materia and the weilder's personal energy field.

He wrote home to his parents about the things he learned, the experiments he conducted; he told them about the machines his peers were making, that could refine raw mako into materia. He told them about his own plans, and his own work in biology and genetics; they stopped responding to his letters.

Eventually, he stopped sending them.